However, after this fiasco, Agrippina was all too well aware that her son was trying to kill her. At that stage, Nero knew that he needed more help in following through his plan. He turned, of course, to his closest and most reliable advisors, Seneca and Burrus—who may already have known about the plot. He summoned them and told them what he hoped to do. We are told that they were at first silent. As Tacitus notes, it was not clear whether they were shocked or just taking time to strategize—as if they might already have known his intentions all along. Then, we are told, “Seneca took the initiative. He looked at Burrus and asked if the military should be ordered to carry out the killing” (14.7). They did so, and Agrippina, in her bedroom, was pounced upon by a mob of soldiers. She knew, of course, that they came from her son. She told them, as they began to club and cut her to death, “Strike here!”—pointing to the womb from whence Nero came (Tacitus, Annals, 14.8). In Dio’s account, Agrippina had always suspected it might come to this: in scheming for her son’s rise to power, she declared, “Let him kill me, as long as he rules” (Dio, Roman History 61.1.2).
What are we to make of Seneca’s role in this appalling story? Agrippina was Seneca’s most important benefactor. She was the woman who had secured his recall from exile and had made him an essential member of court by appointing him as the tutor, and then primary advisor, of her son. And yet he not only colluded in her murder but took the lead in strategizing on how it should be done, and in the aftermath, it was Seneca who wrote a letter to the Senate—supposedly from Nero, who was hiding out in Naples—justifying what had happened. It suggested that Agrippina had been plotting to assassinate Nero, and that, when a concealed weapon was discovered on the person of her freedman, Agrippina had had to die. She deserved death anyway—the letter claimed—for having hoped for “partnership in the empire” and for the degrading prospect that the Guard, the Senate, and the people should all submit to the rule of a woman. All evils of the Claudian period were ascribed to Agrippina; now, the letter suggested, the nation would live under luckier stars (Tacitus 14.11–12). Nero was made to present himself as having been under threat for his life from Agrippina: the letter included the line, “Even now, I neither believe in my safety, nor am happy about it” (Quintilian, Institutes 8.18). Even in a world where dissimulation was the norm and where imperial households were commonly stained with blood, Seneca had gone too far, and the public was disgusted. People were more outraged, we are told, by Seneca than by the barbarous Nero, at whom there was no longer any point in being shocked: “Seneca wrote a confession in that letter,” they believed (Tacitus 14.11). Despite private mutterings, most people, including the Senate, went along with the official position. Celebrations were held and yearly thanksgivings established for the salvation of the emperor from danger.
Seneca’s complex, guilty, apologetic. and defensive response to what he had done can be glimpsed through one of his longest and most challenging works of prose: the treatise On Benefits, a seven-book account of social obligation.36 This work was probably composed over a fairly long period, with the earlier books being written perhaps very soon after Agrippina’s death and the last books closer in time to Seneca’s attempt at retirement. The book gives a glimpse into Seneca’s mind, in his attempt to untangle the obvious questions raised by his relationships both with Nero and with Agrippina. For instance: What, if anything, did he owe them? In bringing Seneca back from exile, in supporting his career and employing him and elevating him to the top advisory position in the land, had she put him in her debt? Had Nero himself put Seneca in his debt, by giving him money, villas, friendship, and social status? What exactly is a gift, and what kind of return does it demand from the receiver of that gift—if any? And conversely, had Seneca himself given anything to Agrippina and her son, through his intellectual and political service? How could material gifts be weighed against intellectual gifts? Or might they be incommensurable? It is unsurprising that such questions were on Seneca’s mind, although it is fascinating to see how thoroughly, indeed obsessively, he deals with them in On Benefits, which many have seen as an oddly repetitive book. He circles round the key questions over and over, as if constantly unsatisfied with the answers he insists on giving.
Seneca’s essay is very abstract, applicable to any human being in a position of giving or receiving something from another. But it is very obviously the product of long and deep meditations on Seneca’s own situation in particular. As a public document—which it certainly was—On Benefits serves as a response to those who might suspect Seneca of ingratitude towards poor murdered Agrippina. It also provides a platform for Seneca to defend himself against any suspicion that he might be serving Nero only for material advantages. And it also acts to defend Seneca against the possibility that he might never be able to pay back these benefactors for their gifts. This is, then, a subtle and effective mechanism for dealing both with the author’s own guilt and anxiety about his position and with the public suspicions of a philosopher in such a position of power.
As Emerson wrote in his famous essay “Gifts,” the “law of benefits is a dangerous channel.” On the one hand, gifts are socially obligatory; they are supposed to cement our ties to one another. On the other, the idea of sealing a relationship with a material object is inherently problematic. Either the recipient will be delighted with the object (in which case there is a risk that he or she likes the commodity more than the giver) or else the recipient does not care for the gift (in which case the process is pointless). Or it is worse than pointless: the practice that seems designed to bind us to each other may actually create hostility and reinforce our sense of inequality. We do not quite forgive a giver, because accepting gifts inevitably puts us in a position of dependence. Emerson suggests that, for precisely this reason, good gifts are those that have no obvious utility value but represent ideals of beauty (like fruits or flowers). The best gifts of all involve the gift of oneself. “There is no commensurability between a man and any gift,” and thus, the exchange of material objects has no real correlation to the element of gift-giving that actually matters, which is our relationships with one another. Emerson’s piece ends by suggesting that what really matters is not whether we give each other things, but whether we love each other. Without love, all gifts are an insult and cannot buy the one thing needful (“they eat your services like apples, and leave you out”). With love, the god of gifts, the material value of any gift is irrelevant; kingdoms and flower-leaves count for just the same.
Emerson’s approach to the complex social network created by gift exchange is not identical with Seneca’s. But Seneca, like Emerson, is interested in exploring the dilemmas involved in power, generosity, and dependence and in searching for an alternative to the kind of relationship that is always concerned with profit and status. Seneca begins by declaring that “among all the many different mistakes of those who live thoughtlessly and foolishly, almost none is as disgraceful, excellent Liberalis, as the fact that we don’t know either how to give or receive benefits.” The exaggeration is familiar from other essays (as, for instance, we were told in On Anger that anger is the most destructive of all forces in human life). The addressee, Aebutius Liberalis, is a man from a fairly old and respectable family, about whom very little is known. One may suspect that one reason Seneca chose him as addressee was for his name: “Liberalis” connotes freedom and also the behavior of a free person, as opposed to a slave. The treatise is concerned with how we might be able to deal with each other without being trapped in social obligations and exploitation.