We might feel disappointed that Seneca does not take a broader political stance against an institution that will strike most modern people as brutal and cruel. Why did Seneca not call for an end to gladiatorial combat rather than watch it and then complain about it? Why does he show so little empathy for the non-elite people who suffered and died in the arena—as opposed to his deep attentiveness to the psychological needs of the elite who watched the torments with pleasure? But it is asking too much for any person, however philosophical, to rise far above the culture of his or her own time. As Miriam Griffin has emphasized, Seneca was very much a man of his own era, shaped by the culture in which he was born and raised. His views on gladiator fighting were not all that different from those of other philosophers and intellectuals of the period. The distinctive feature of Seneca’s writings about this practice, and the feature we ought to continue to admire and praise, is the unforgettable vigor with which he evokes the bloodlust of the audience at the games and the psychological truth of his central insight that watching acts of pain and cruelty does real harm to our souls. Seneca complains that he returns home worse from every trip to the arena (Epistle 7.3). Seneca was entangled in a world of cruelty and theatricality, but he was also willing to acknowledge that we can do ourselves real harm by our habits of cultural consumption.
Nero did not share his old tutor’s doubts about the value of the Colosseum, but he wanted to be the performer, not the spectator. He responded to the tensions and pressures of his position as emperor by transforming power into a kind of performance art. When Nero performed, either on his lyre, or reciting poetry, or as an actor on stage, everybody was forced to applaud, and everybody fell into line. Only Thrasea refused; everyone else gathered eagerly to watch and pretended to love the show (Dio 62.19). Moreover, Seneca and Burrus, we are told, would coach Nero on his performances on stage: “Beside him stood Burrus and Seneca, like teachers, prompting him; they would wave their arms and togas at everything he said, and lead others to do the same.”41
We can contrast Seneca’s willingness to engage with Nero’s theatrical performances with the strong opposition of another, somewhat younger Stoic contemporary: Epictetus. Epictetus, a Greek from the city of Hieropolis in Phrygia (modern Turkey), was from an entirely different social and economic class from Seneca or Thrasea: he was an ex-slave, who was poor all his life. He was a man with no claims to literary or rhetorical education and no political ambition, who spent the whole of the first half of his life as a slave. He was a lifelong cripple, probably the result of having his leg broken by a cruel owner in early life. But he was brought to Rome in his youth and owned by Nero’s secretary, the freedman Epaphroditus. During that time, he studied Stoic philosophy with the great Stoic teacher, Musonius Rufus. Epictetus himself became a great and influential philosophical teacher, whose lectures and teachings were recorded by a devoted pupil, Arrian, as the Discourses. Unlike Seneca—in this respect as in many others—Epictetus was not interested in crafting beautiful prose that would live through the ages.
In 1.2 of the Discourses, Epictetus raises the wonderful question—essential too for thinking about Seneca—of how a person can preserve his own proper role or “face” or “mask” in every possible circumstance, even when threatened with death, torture, slavery, amputation, or any other of the “nonpreferable” indifferents. Epictetus deals explicitly with the question of what one should do when asked to compromise with Nero—for instance, when asked to contribute to a festival by the emperor. The language is deeply theatrical and deeply concerned with a conflict between multiple different dramatic events: the drama of Nero’s literal festival; the drama of political life in general; and the more individual drama of a person’s own life, in which he or she has a responsibility to act out the proper part assigned by nature. Epictetus writes,
When a person once stoops to the consideration of such questions [as whether to contribute to a festival of Nero’s], he comes close to those who have forgotten their proper character. Come, what is this you ask me? “Is death or life preferable?” I answer, life. “Pain or pleasure?” I answer, pleasure. “But unless I take part in the tragedy I shall be beheaded.” Go, then, and take a part, but I shall not take a part.”
Epictetus thus provides a model for how it might have been possible, for Seneca or anybody, to opt out of the dissimulations and dramas of Nero’s court. His account also presumes, as in standard Stoicism, that a man’s true nature is incompatible with playing a part. He picks up the hostility to theater that is a common trope in Roman literature of this period. As Cornelius Nepos notes, “Almost everywhere in Greece, it was thought a high honor to be proclaimed victor at Olympia. Even to appear on the stage and exhibit oneself to the people was never regarded by those nations as something to be ashamed of. Among us, however, all those acts are regarded either as disgraceful or as base and inconsistent with respectability” (Nepos pr. 5).42 Epictetus often suggests a certain distance, and even hostility, toward the life of the imperial court, insisting that becoming “Caesar’s friend” is not actually the path to happiness.43
By contrast, it is quite possible that Seneca not only participated in Nero’s theatrical displays but also enjoyed them. Nero “forced” Roman noblemen on stage to “pollute themselves” by performing speeches or poems in this degrading public environment (Tacitus 14.20); one of those so polluted was Seneca’s nephew, Lucan, the poet. We do not know if Seneca himself performed on stage, although it is very likely that he did. We also do not know if Seneca’s own dramas were used in Nero’s shows. But it is easy to see that Seneca’s tragedies are dramatic meditations on cruelty, pollution, and disgust, on horrific extremes of behavior, on power, on failed attempts at teaching restraint or moderation, and on spectacle—all themes to resonate very suggestively with the world of Neronian Rome.
In writing plays, Seneca was providing Nero with his favorite art form, catering to his cultural needs, and showing himself as a kindred spirit to the great man. He was simultaneously rivaling the emperor’s art with his own and holding up an unflattering mirror to Nero’s Rome as a world of violence, naked ambition, and excess. But the mirror reflects the author as much as his student: through tragedy, Seneca was able to contemplate his own ambitions. The tragedies show how acutely aware Seneca was of emotional complexity, including the emotional toll borne by those who, through their own bad choices, destroy their own lives. One recurrent trope of these dramas is the long list of far-flung place names, tracing out the limits of the Roman Empire: even in so vast and rich a world, Seneca’s tragic characters constantly find themselves trapped inside their minds. Another repeated trope is the listing of the punishments of the underworld—Sisyphus pushing the rock uphill, Tantalus always hungry and thirsty, Ixion on his wheel. Even death, in these dramas, provides no relief from the endless sense of being trapped and frustrated.
At least one of Seneca’s tragedies, the brilliant and terrifying Thyestes, was probably written under Nero and can be read as an extensive, deeply pessimistic meditation on Seneca’s service to the emperor. It suggests his awareness of his own ambition, weakness, and fear and of how badly his attempts at educating and advising Nero had gone. The central motif of the tragedy is eating—of the most horrible, cannibalistic kind (a father eats his own children). More generally and abstractly, this is a drama about appetite and its discontents. Desire is utterly destructive and utterly inescapable. The play tells the story of two brothers, Thyestes and Atreus, the grandsons of Tantalus. Tantalus had stolen up to heaven, discovered and revealed the secrets of the gods, and topped off his blasphemies by serving up his own son, Pelops, the famous charioteer, as a sacrifice to the gods—who refused to eat it, except for Demeter, who was too distraught by grief for her abducted daughter to notice what she was eating, and nibbled a little of his shoulder. The sons of Pelops struggled for control of the throne of Olympia; Thyestes seduced Atreus’ wife and was exiled, while Atreus seized power. Seneca’s play begins with the Ghost of Tantalus, who—like the Ghost of Thyestes in Agamemnon—wishes he could return to the safety of the underworld. But this is an even darker interpretation of the motif than in the earlier play. This Ghost is driven on by a Fury and forced to become the curse to his own household. The encounter between the Ghost and the Fury is one of a series of scenes of instruction in wickedness, in which one character initially resists another’s attempts at moral perversion but then acquiesces: staying strong against evil seems to be beyond anybody in this play.