The plot was unfortunately vague in its practicalities, and the conspirators failed to keep their intentions secret. A woman called Epicharis, Tacitus tells us, got wind of it, and in an attempt to get things moving, she tried to enlist various members of the navy; one of these, Proculus, told Nero of the conspiracy. He had no witnesses, but Epicharis was detained in custody, and Nero’s suspicions were now aroused. The conspirators hoped to waylay Nero on the day of the Circus, where one of them would fall at his knees, then tussle him to the ground, at which point the others would leap upon him and stab him to death. But the night before, Scavinus, one of the plotters, had his freedman sharpen the knife he planned to use for the assassination, and—either because the master had let slip the secret, or because the man guessed—the next day, the freedman told Nero, and Scavinus was brought in for questioning. Under threat of torture, he gave the whole plot away, naming his fellow-plotters. Epicharis, too, was tortured and questioned, although she stood up against it far better than he had done and died rather than give the secret away.
Everyone suspected of involvement in the plot—rightly or wrong—was either condemned to death or forced to commit suicide. Seneca was also convicted. He certainly knew many of the conspirators and may well have known of the plot. Piso, like Seneca, had been exiled and then recalled under Claudius, and the two men would have shared many friends and associates. Dio asserts, implausibly, that Seneca was a “ringleader” in the group, “publicly making great talk about the glory of tyrannicides, and full of threats, even going to the length of offering Caesar's head to all his friends.” He and Rufus together were motivated, Dio says, by Nero’s “disgraceful behavior, his licentiousness, and his cruelty” (62.24.1). Tacitus also reports the rumor that some of the conspirators had plans to kill Piso also, once Nero was dead, and then put Seneca in charge of the empire, as a way of giving the coup more moral legitimacy—he would seem to have been “chosen for supreme power by innocent men, for the sake of the outstanding nature of his virtues” (Tacitus 15.65.1). All this may be mere gossip; but it is fascinating to consider the alternative history of the Roman empire that might have taken place had Seneca actually become emperor, and gained the greatest imperium in the world, as opposed to the great imperium of the self. Would he have done any better than Nero himself ?
But the evidence that Seneca was directly involved in the plot is fairly circumstantial. Only one of the conspirators, Natalis, denounced him, and his sole piece of proof was a brief exchange when he went to visit Seneca’s house when he was sick (or claiming to be sick). Natalis asked, “Why do you close your door on Piso?” Seneca replied, “Frequent conversations with him are not to his advantage or mine; but my own health depends on that of Piso” (Tacitus 15.60.1). This could mean that Seneca was involved in Piso’s plot, and that was the way that Nero chose to interpret it. But it could equally have been a vague piece of politeness, or a failed attempt to distance himself from the plotters.
Seneca was tracked down on the journey back from Campania to Rome. He was staying at his lovely, well-tended estate at Nomentum, with his wife, various close friends, and his household of slaves and freedmen. He was there cross-examined by a tribune about his remark about Piso. Seneca insisted that he never said his health depended on Piso’s: such a thing would have been entirely false, and Seneca claimed that he never uttered empty words of politeness. “Nobody,” he said, “knew that better than Nero, who had more often experienced Seneca’s freedom of speech, than his servility.” If this claim of total sincerity was intended to convince Nero to spare his life, it was futile. When the tribunes reported back to Nero, the emperor asked if Seneca was preparing to kill himself. Since they said he looked perfectly calm and cheerful, Nero instructed them to go back and pronounce the death sentence on his old tutor.
Our sources for the death of Seneca give rather different depictions of how honorably he died. Dio, using a source hostile to the philosopher, tells us this:
It was his wish to end the life of his wife Paulina at the same time as his own, since he said that he had taught her both to despise death and to desire to leave the world with him. So he opened her veins as well as his own. But as he had a hard time dying, the soldiers hastened his end; she was still alive when he died, and so she survived. He did not kill himself, however, until he had revised the book he was writing, and had deposited his other books with some friends, fearing that they would otherwise fall into the hands of Nero, and be destroyed.
(62.25.1–3)
If a person’s death is, as Seneca insisted, the image of his life, this version of the death gives a particularly unflattering reflection of the man. He was, on Dio’s telling, even willing to kill his own wife in order to enhance the reputation of his own teaching. Moreover, he was obsessed to the end with his own reputation and with the survival of his own works. Narcissism, rather than philosophical calm, is the keynote of this death scene.
Tacitus’ account of the same event seems to follow a much more sympathetic source: a (lost) narrative written by a friend of Seneca’s named Fabius Rusticus, possibly within a larger history, or as part of a complete biography of Seneca. He tells much the same story but gives it a more positive interpretation, although he still points very clearly to the egotism and showiness of the performance.16
A crucial difference between the two accounts is that in Tacitus’s version, Paulina herself is the one who wants to die with her husband. Seneca embraces her and begs her not to grieve for him forever; Paulina answers that she chooses to die with him. Seneca, “not hostile to her glory, and also out of love, to avoid leaving her, his only-beloved, to be harmed,” then falls in line with her wishes. He declares to her, “I showed you how to make life go easy, but you prefer the glory of death; I will not begrudge you the example. May we both have the same steadfastness for this courageous death, but may your end be more famous” (15.63). Thereupon, they cut their wrists with a single cut. Tacitus presumably intends his readers to see these words as self-important and at least partially fake: for most of the death scene, his Seneca is far too concerned with managing his own postmortem reputation to be concerned about that of his wife. Moreover, the notion that Paulina would inevitably have faced “harm” or “outrage” after her husband’s death is belied by the care with which Nero looks out for her. Tacitus does not explain how the emperor—who was presumably at Rome rather than actually in the villa—knew that she planned to kill herself. But he tells the story that Nero gave orders for the suicide to be stopped, since he had no grudge against her and did not wish to make himself look too cruel (15.64). The soldiers then bandaged up her arms, and she lived on for several years, “admirably faithful to her husband, and pale in face and limbs, showing how much life-blood she had lost.” Tacitus also reports, without entirely giving it credence, another rumor: that she offered to kill herself with Seneca only when she thought herself doomed under Nero anyway. She was happy to have her life saved as soon she realized it was an option. So much for philosophical teaching.
Seneca himself had been preparing for his death for many, many years, in practical, spiritual, and rhetorical ways. He had a will that was prepared long ago, when he was “still super-rich and super-powerful” (praedives and praepotens). He hoped to read it out loud to his friends, to impress them with his generosity and gratitude toward them; when the soldiers refuse to let him do so, he offers them instead, as his last gift, “the image of his life” (imago vitae suae). This is “both his only remaining possession, and the most beautiful one of all.” Such sentiments, one might think, would be rather more fitting from the mouth of a friend than from the man himself. But it is clear that the purpose of these “friends”—none of whom are named, and none of whom speak—is to act as an audience for Seneca’s final drama and to ensure that his words and actions are preserved for an even wider public to enjoy and admire. As well as “friends”—many were presumably old clients or other dependents—Seneca was surrounded by a large apparatus of household slaves, including secretaries to note down whatever he said, as well as a doctor and bath attendants. Obviously modeling himself on the dying Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo, he urges the friends not to cry but to be brave, inspired by his own philosophy: “Where,” he asks, “are your philosophical maxims? Where is the rationality, cultivated over so many years, as a counter to imminent dangers?”