Figure 4.1 Trimalchio’s dinner.
Petronius’ jokey, snobbish, vivid description of Trimalchio’s absurd pretensions is entirely consistent with the tradition of hostility to freedmen among the Roman Senate. But there are touches of sympathy as well as mockery in the portrait of this Roman Gatsby.5 Moreover, Trimalchio’s crazy, autocratic ways, and especially his love of the arts, poetry, and the theater, are not so distant from those of Nero himself. His combination of threats and intimacy in his interactions with his slaves evokes the life of the imperial court—and in this house, too, it is easier to enter than to leave alive. It is tempting to trace a parallel between this upstart, super-rich provincial, who is deeply obsessed with death and who spouts pseudo-philosophy, and Seneca himself. If so, the portrait would have been deeply unwelcome to Seneca. The two writers must have known one another, and indeed, they were to die accused of conspiracy in the same plot against Nero; but there is no record of a friendship, and the chances are that there was no love lost between the senatorial arbiter elegantarium (“judge of tasteful things”), with his mocking, distanced attitude to the absurdities of contemporary court life, and the equestrian philosopher, once known as the magister principis (“teacher of the prince”).
Petronius’ satirical narrative, for all its absurdities, is deeply engaged with the texture of physical, material, human life in his own social milieu. He is interested in capturing the details of how people from different classes talk, and in evoking crude sexual and scatological humor—for instance, Trimalchio tries to be a generous host by assuring his guests that they can go ahead and fart at dinner, if they feel the need. The text may invite us to laugh at him, but at least it engages with his world. This level of interest in how other people live stands in sharp contrast to Seneca’s work of this period, especially the Natural Questions, which can be seen as an extensive attempt to get beyond the confines not merely of Neronian Rome but of all individual human life, to find some larger, more sublime point of view from which to understand nature, the universe, and everything.6
THE CONTEMPLATION OF HEAVENLY THINGS: NATURAL QUESTIONS
Natural science had long been a concern for the Stoics, and Seneca used earlier works on the subject in composing his own (including Aristotle as well as Stoic discussions). But he is also willing to make his own judgments between theories, including rejecting the standard Stoic view at times. The subjects of meteorology and physics are fields in which he obviously took an intense, and personal, interest. Science itself provides a vantage point from which to consider ethical and social problems from a quite different angle. One of Seneca’s major themes in this text is the relativity of vision and perspective: “mountains [like the Apennines and the Alps] are high, as long as they’re compared with us; but really, when you look at the whole world, the lowness of all of them becomes clear” (NQ 4b11.2). The problem of how to deal with social hierarchies, which Seneca had dealt with much more directly in On Benefits, recurs here through geology: looking at the mountains reveals how the illusion of rank masks an ultimate equality.
Seneca addresses the question of whether it is proper for a philosopher to ignore moral problems and focus on science. He imagines an interlocutor asking why he wastes time analyzing how snow is formed rather than inveighing against the moral aberration of rich people buying snow to cool their drinks—a practice to which Nero was notoriously addicted: “Why do you bother to devote all that effort to studying those silly things, which don’t make anybody a better person, just more ‘educated’?” (NQ 4b11.13.1). Seneca’s answer is that in fact, the examination of natural science is utterly relevant to a program of moral reform. If we investigate the natural properties of water, we will see immediately the shame of spending large sums of money on iced water or snow, which is not even composed only of water, but is “mostly air.” This passage, like several in the Natural Questions, makes a clear criticism of Nero’s luxurious habits at the time. The emperor had begun to take midnight swims in a pool chilled by ice or snow in order to increase his endurance for partying (Suetonius, Nero, 27.2). Seneca exclaims—without naming Nero directly—that, “the snow in which you are now swimming has come to take the place of water!” (NQ 4b13.11).
Actual instances of naming the emperor in this text are usually flattering, but in ways that are easy to read ironically: for instance, in discussing the source of the Nile, Seneca claims that Nero just sent two centurions to discover it, because “just as he is very devoted to other virtues, so too he is utterly committed to the truth” (NQ 6.8.3). Of course, readers would be quite aware that Nero had actually sent the soldiers to investigate the terrain while planning an attack on Ethiopia—not out of disinterested concern for scientific truth (Pliny 6.181). Seneca’s flattering remarks can be read as a covert jibe against Nero for failing to live up to his old teacher’s standards. Similarly, Seneca digresses from earthquakes to discuss Callisthenes, a philosopher who studied earthquakes and was killed by Alexander—clearly hinting that even the greatest of emperors look bad when they kill their intellectual friends (NQ 6.23.2–3). It is thus wrong to read the Natural Questions simply as a rejection of the life of politics. Metaphors of politics are used to discuss physics, and conversely, physics is described in terms that constantly revert to Seneca’s favorite moral and political themes.
The text of this work is problematic, and the traditional ordering of the books is now not thought to reflect the order in which Seneca wrote them; most scholars agree that the earliest section is the one listed in the manuscripts as Book 3, on rivers. This book begins programmatically, with a partial acknowledgment that Seneca himself, in old age, looks back with regret and repentance on his earlier existence, seeking study as way of redeeming a misspent life (NQ 3. Pref. 1). He suggests, too, that measuring out the universe in his mind may help take his mind off his anxieties (punning on the words metior, “to measure,” and metus, “fear”). He has chosen to write about science rather than history, because it teaches us what really matters: not the conquests of emperors and kings, but the contemplation of divine things, with an unconquered mind. As the book continues, it becomes clear that the study of rivers and other large bodies of water is not an abstruse pursuit, not divorced from the personal, human concerns Seneca was facing while writing, but a way of approaching them by other means. The central topic is how to deal with loss. Seneca discusses the various theories about how rivers and streams maintain their water levels and insists that this water does not come from rainfall; rather, it is kept up by a constant process of exchange between the four elements (earth, air, fire, and water), such that particles of earth and air are constantly adding to the rivers, at the same time as the rivers are constantly evaporating and flowing toward the sea. The importance of all this from an ethical and personal standpoint is that it allows Seneca to insist that gifts do not only come from above (like rain into a river) but, rather, are maintained through a nonhierarchical process of mutual exchange. Moreover, there is a deeply comforting suggestion that real change between states and between elements is always possible: “all things are in all things,” he declares (NQ 3.10.4). Rivers can find a new channel if they lose an old one; water can be replenished even without rainfall. For Seneca, having lost his position at court, his social status, and any sense he might have had of personal security, it was good to be able to see in the physical realm around him an image of change and transformation, without cost and without limits. The discussion of waterways allows him to inveigh against luxury: a vivid instance of extravagant cruelty on which he spends a lot of attention here is the current elite practice of having surmullet fish brought to the table in glass jars to die in front of the guests, so they can exclaim at the beauty of watching the fish’s color turn from red to white as it dies (NQ 3.18.1). The study of water turns into a study of the corrupt effects of empire, which challenges even the freedom of this most liberated of all elements (NQ 3.30.7–8).