The second and more truthful reason Nero gave for refusing to let Seneca retire was that it would look bad for himself:
Not your moderation, if you give back your money, not your retirement, if you leave your prince, but my avarice and the fear of my cruelty will be on everyone’s lips. Even if your abstinence is praised to the skies, it would not be fitting for a wise man to get glory from the bad reputation of his friend.
So saying, he kissed Seneca, “being used by nature and practice to veil his hatred under a show of affection.” Seneca expressed his gratitude, as of course he had to do if he wanted to survive. But he then, Tacitus tells us, moved into a much more retired mode of life, while still being officially under the emperor’s service. Without leaving the city, he banished callers and mostly stayed at home, reading, writing, and claiming to be too ill to go out. Illness was, again, a useful excuse to deal with an impossible social position.
It was in this period that he worked on the two great works of his old age: the Natural Questions and the Letters to Lucilius (Epistulae Morales). Neither of these deals in any direct way with Seneca’s own life, but both hint at a long meditation on issues that were deeply intertwined with Seneca’s relationship with Nero and with the political power struggles of the past years. The Letters construct a self that is both public and private. They deal with a self that is stylized, an “everyman.” But they also evoke, in appealing intimacy, the details of daily life that seems very much like Seneca’s own life. He is conscious of his slaves, his rides in his cart, carriage, or litter, his baths, the noises of the city, the daily round, the dilemmas of what to do with each hour of every day, reading habits, the problems of illness and fatigue and the annoyance of other people. Natural Questions, Seneca’s major work of natural history and science, can be read as an attempt to turn his attention away from the anxieties of political, human life toward the relative simplicity of natural phenomena. But this text, too, shows the complexity of Seneca’s political attitudes and position.
LUCAN AND PETRONIUS
Any slave leaving the house without his master’s permission will receive one hundred lashes.4
Before we turn to these works, we should note how differently Seneca positions himself as a writer from his literary contemporaries. As we have seen, Seneca had introduced his nephew, Lucan, to Nero and had presumably helped educate him and train him as a writer, as well as teaching him the fundamentals of Stoicism. Lucan and Nero were initially good friends, but at some point, presumably around this same period (the early sixties CE), the relationship soured. The ancient sources give inconsistent reasons for the falling out. Tacitus (Annals 15.49) tells us that Nero was jealous of Lucan’s poetic talent and success and had tried to suppress his poems, ordering him not to publicize them. Suetonius says that Nero just lost interest in Lucan and began ignoring him, which made Lucan begin writing satirical poems against the emperor (“Life of Lucan”).
It is likely that, whatever the literary and personal sources of the tension, there was also a strong political element: Lucan became hostile to the whole institution of imperial government. His great poem, the Pharsalia, which was begun around 60 CE (and probably left incomplete at the time of his death in 65), is an epic about the central battle of the Roman Civil War between Julius Caesar and Pompey, from an obviously anti-imperialist perspective: the world disintegrates as soon as Caesar crosses the Rubicon and destroys the Republic. The only really admirable character amid the madness and blood lust and confusion is Cato, the Stoic defender of the old Republican values, who alone sticks to principle and a life in accordance with nature, even when everyone else has descended to chaos.
Lucan’s literary work is thus far more explicitly opposed to Nero’s regime than anything written by Seneca. Cato, a highly politicized Stoic, represents a more active and more clearly dissident version of philosophy from that of Lucan’s uncle. But the Pharsalia is not without its ideological contradictions. Most obviously, the poem begins with lavish, not to say fawning, praise of Nero himself, whose presence on the throne should be more than enough compensation to the world for all the bloodshed of the civil wars, and who seems on the point of ascending to heaven as another Apollo. If only this god will turn his gaze to Rome and adopt the median position in the sky, then world peace can follow:
If you should press on either part of the enormous sky,
the universe will feel your weight; adopt the middle spot,
as weight to the well-balanced heaven; let that space
of calm air still be peaceful, let no clouds get in the way
of Caesar. Then let the human race lay down its arms and turn
to thoughtful planning; may all races love each other;
may Peace, sent through the world, shut up the iron gates of warrior Janus.
(Pharsalia 1.55–62)
It is possible that these lines were composed before the falling out between Nero and Lucan, although that does not explain why he retained them in the later version of the poem. A more plausible reading is that Lucan was struggling with a similar problem to that of his uncle: how to articulate some kind of resistance to Nero’s regime without being destroyed in the attempt. Perhaps Lucan hoped that Nero would not get through more than the first couple of pages of his poem and would therefore imagine that the whole thing was equally flattering to himself. Perhaps, too, readers with greater attunement to Lucan’s political position could be expected to read between the lines here, taking the apparent flattery as ironic dissimulation.
The most prominent other writer of the period was a very different figure, even more distant from Seneca in ethos, style, and ideology. Petronius was some thirty years younger than Seneca: he was born around 27 CE, so would have been in his thirties in the sixties. Petronius was dubbed the “arbiter of taste” (arbiter elegantium), known for his risky, witty speech and his love of parties. Unlike Seneca, Petronius rose to the senatorial class. He held a number of official positions in government, including acting as a provincial governor and then as a consul—tasks that he was said to do remarkably well, to the surprise of those who saw him only as a hedonist.
His only surviving work is a fragment from a much longer piece, the Satyricon—a proto-novel in both prose and verse, which evokes the wanderings and misadventures of a young man in pursuit of his aberrant boyfriend, and the many comic characters he meets along the way. The only section that survives more or less intact is called “Trimalchio’s Dinner,” and it gives a vivid satirical portrait of an upstart freedman’s crazily lavish banquet (Fig. 4.1). The joke is mostly against Trimalchio, who is too nouveau riche to see the absurdity of his displays of wealth and extravagance. His food is all show, a feast for the eyes and mind more than the belly: he serves dishes prepared to look like all the twelve signs of the Zodiac, eggs with birds apparently hatching from them, and sausages on pomegranate seeds, to affect the impression of meat cooking on hot coals, a pig ready-stuffed with cooked innards. The main theme of all these displays is the passage of time, of which Trimalchio is paranoically conscious: the centerpiece of his dinner is a silver skeleton, brought in to remind the diners of mortality, and after much conversation over expensive wine (brought in from estates that Trimalchio owns but never sees), Trimalchio reads out his will and creates a dramatic enactment of his own funeral, complete with mourners and a trip down to Hades.