Other moral issues raised by the philosopher’s wealth are given short shrift. Seneca barely touches on whether the acquisition and possession and use of wealth by an individual represents and causes significant social injustice. He mentions, briefly, that wealth should be acquired legitimately, but that is all. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is no mention in his extant work of his own activities as a moneylender or real estate agent. Nor, again unsurprisingly, is there any explicit discussion of his acquisitions from Nero and from the imperial house in general.
Seneca says far more about where wealth should go than about where it comes from. He does place a significant amount of attention on the issue of what a rich person ought to do with his (always his) money. But the focus in his most extensive treatment of this issue—On Benefits—is far more on the motivation of the giver than on any benefit accrued to the recipient, and far more focused on the horizontal relationships between peers than on the vertical relationships between people at different levels of society.33 He is not interested in whether the poor have a right to receive some of the money accrued by the rich; the idea of redistribution of wealth, for Seneca, as indeed for almost everybody in antiquity, does not arise. Seneca has little or no interest in wealth as an issue of political justice. His major concern, rather, is with the kinds of debts and social obligations that are incurred for the rich man by giving and receiving wealth.
In terms of Seneca’s everyday life, being wealthy and influential created a whole set of daily social interactions. Seneca was a patron to many lesser people and felt the thrill that came from seeing so many others dependent on him and eager to solicit his favor: a man’s dignity (dignitas) was directly correlated to the number of clients he accrued. His day began with a great crowd of morning callers, men who would show up at his house and compete for his attention, petitioning for favors, gifts, money, and recognition. Even once he left the house, he would be followed by a trail of his clients. Later in the day, he was expected to entertain them at lavish dinner parties; those five hundred ivory-legged tables had a lot of use. Clients were people who were officially and legally under the rich man’s patronage. He took care of them financially and politically, and in return, they would show deference to him, visit him and follow him around, promote him if he tried for any public office, and generally contribute to his popularity, honor, and safety. One important member of Seneca’s clientele was Fabius Rusticus, a writer who composed either a history of the period or a biography of Seneca, now lost. His favorable account of Seneca’s life and character helped shape his reputation among subsequent Roman historians who used his work as a source. The patron, in this instance as in others, benefited from the client. Seneca was a generous patron: Juvenal laments the fact that in his own generation—at the end of the first century CE—patrons are not as beneficent as Seneca was in days of yore. He tells his contemporary benefactor, “No one asks you for the kind of noble presents that Seneca, kind Piso or Cotta, used to send to their lowly friends: in the old days, the glory of giving was considered grander than titles or fasces” (Juvenal, Satire, 5).34 Seneca used his enormous wealth to maintain his social circle, creating for himself a position at the center of an alternative, parallel world to Nero’s court.35
KINDNESS AND GRATITUDE
Seneca did not stand entirely aloof from the hedonistic and theatrical antics of Nero and his court. One ancient rumor, preserved in Dio, reports that he had many affairs with “boys past their prime”—in ancient thinking, sleeping with grown men was a far more disgusting practice than sex with a young adolescent—and taught Nero to do the same (Dio 61). But this is likely to be the kind of gossip that would have accrued to any prominent intellectual; philosophers were assumed to have unpleasant Greek-style patterns of behavior. The same source also suggests that early on in Nero’s reign, Seneca tried to avoid going to the emperor’s dinner parties, giving the “excuse” that he wanted to be able to philosophize in peace. It is likely that Seneca sometimes longed for some time alone or away from the absurdities and excesses of court life, but he must also have known that too much rejection would make the emperor angry. Rather than withdraw, in fact, he took an active part in the emperor’s decisions, both personal and political, throughout the 50s.
As we have seen, Seneca had been helpful in enabling Nero’s love affair with the freedwoman Acte. But the emperor’s romantic life became even more complicated when he fell in love with a noblewoman called Poppaea Sabina and wanted not only to seduce her but to marry her. Poppaea was the wife of Nero’s party-loving friend, Otho (who would later, briefly, seize control of the empire). Various versions of the story circulate in the ancient sources; Dio tells us that Nero arranged the marriage of Otho and Poppaea in order to have ready access to her. In any case, Nero hoped to divorce Octavia and marry Poppaea.
All that stood in his way was Agrippina’s disapprovaclass="underline" she did not want her son to divorce the wife she had chosen for him. Nero was presumably motivated not only by desire for Poppaea but also (a theme that emerges even more strongly in the ancient sources) by desire to be rid of his mother’s power and influence once and for all. He had ejected her from the palace and made her move to a villa in the south of Rome, but he was still haunted by the possibility of her exerting control over him or, as Tacitus puts it, the thought that “wherever she might be, she would be a heavy burden upon him” (14.3.1). So Nero decided to kill his mother.
Even by the unscrupulous standards of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, this was a radical move and one that would be difficult to pull off. The Roman public, if they discovered the truth, were not likely to treat matricide as an acceptable type of behavior. There were hardly any precedents, and those few were not such as to inspire confidence in the would-be killer. In Egypt some hundred twenty years previously (80 CE), the new ruler, Ptolemy XI, had been instructed in his uncle’s will to marry his stepmother; he obeyed but then killed her (for reasons unknown). He was immediately lynched by the citizens. Nero must have believed that his hold on power, and on public opinion, was firm enough that he could take the risk and not suffer the same fate. The decision displays not only his extraordinary lack of moral scruple or family feeling but also his implicit faith in his advisors: without the help of Seneca, Burrus, and his other aides, Nero could never have pulled it off.
On the recommendation of a freedman called Anicetus—his childhood tutor in the days before Seneca took over—Nero decided on the elaborate scheme of putting Agrippina in a boat out at sea that would be prefabricated to fall apart in the water. He invited her for a pleasure trip in this doomed boat. Agrippina was not stupid and was quite well aware that she was not in her son’s good graces, but she may have found it hard to believe at first that her own child wanted to kill her. Moreover, to betray her suspicions would have given Nero further ammunition against her. So, despite being wary of a trick, she came and embarked in the boat. But the plot failed; the boat did not disintegrate as planned, and Agrippina escaped with only slight injuries (Tacitus 14.6).