Petronius, envied by Tigellinus because Nero found him so amusing, was also condemned: he opened his veins, then partially bandaged them, to enjoy a last evening chatting with friends over dinner, before dozing into death during the meal (Tacitus 16.19). The most impressive of this series of forced deaths belong to Barea Soranus and, especially, Thrasea, who was accused of being contemptuous of the emperor. Thrasea echoed and trumped Seneca’s death: as he cut his arteries he sprinkled not bathwater but his own blood on the ground and exclaimed: “To you, Jupiter the Liberator, I pour this libation!” Whereas Seneca had carefully downplayed the political significance of his death, Thrasea did the opposite. This was the first in a series of reappropriations of the life, death, and work of Seneca.
Seneca’s former student, patron, emperor, and enemy, Nero, died less than four years later. High taxes, bad management, and poor public relations led to an inherently unstable situation for the empire. Trouble had been brewing in the provinces of Germany and Spain, and the Praetorian Guard, who were nominally on the side of the emperor, switched their allegiances over to Galba, the governor of one of the Hispanic provinces. Nero now found himself, like his old tutor before him, wandering in fear of his life. After some desperate hours of indecision, he fled Rome for his villa in the north, riding barefoot and with a cloth to cover his face, and with only a few loyal freedmen as companions. Finally despairing of safety, he ordered them to dig his grave right by the roadside, weeping at the thought of the world’s loss of himself: “What an artist dies with me!” he exclaimed. Hearing the thunder of his enemies’ horses drawing near, he stabbed his dagger into his throat, with the help of his freedman.17 Rome was then plunged into a series of conflicts over the succession: the following year is known as the Year of the Four Emperors, since no candidate as heir managed to last more than a few months. Nero’s theatrical death is like that of his old tutor Seneca in its grisly humor and in its narcissism—although unlike Seneca, Nero had no loyal wife or family members or friends to stand by his side in death, since he had killed them all.
Epilogue
In the immediate aftermath of Seneca’s death, the dead philosopher was a controversial figure. The central question was the extent to which he could be blamed for what was wrong with the Julio-Claudian dynasty—or, conversely, could be praised for having stood out against it. Some viewed him as at least partly responsible for the worst excesses of Nero’s reign; the negative assessment made its way into Dio’s Roman History. Others—including some of those who had benefited from Seneca’s patronage—saw him in much more idealized terms, as a virtuous man who tried his best to speak out against the wickedness of his times; this was presumably the picture painted by the lost work of Fabius Rusticus. Seneca would continue to be a polarizing figure throughout much of the next two thousand years.
Our earliest surviving response to Seneca’s life, character, and relationship with Nero is a play that has come down to us among Seneca’s own tragedies: the Octavia.1 This fascinating work was clearly written by somebody who knew Seneca’s dramatic and prose oeuvre very well; the author draws heavily on the De Clementia, and uses the vocabulary and tropes of Senecan tragedy—the obsessions with power, empire, death, guilt, reversals of fortune, and unnamable dread; the supernatural, exile, wealth, prophecy, murder, and revenge. But these are all applied not to a Greek mythological subject, but to Seneca’s own lifetime. The play is set during three days in 62 CE and covers Nero’s divorce of his first wife Octavia (presented as an innocent victim of the tyrant’s crazy passions), his cruel act of exiling her, and his remarriage to Poppaea. Seneca features as a character in the play, a counselor who offers all the right advice but goes unheeded by the despotic Nero. The author uses Nero and Seneca to make a larger political point: that the power of the emperor must be limited and must yield to law and the community. The “Seneca” of the Octavia is notably more optimistic about all this than the real Seneca had been. There is a scene in Seneca’s Thyestes in which the murderous, power-hungry Atreus is advised to moderate his plans by an Attendant—but the Attendant soon caves to Atreus’ unstoppable will. In the Octavia, the same motifs are replayed in a scene between “Seneca” and “Nero,” and this time around, the Attendant-figure (“Seneca”) sticks to his guns and quotes his own De Clementia to urge moderation on “Nero,” unsuccessfully but with consistency and dignity. Nero’s wickedness is revealed all the more by his refusal to yield to his old tutor, claiming, rather, “I can do what Seneca disapproves of!” (Octavia 569).
In literary terms, Seneca had a huge influence on Latin style. The great writer on rhetorical technique and education Quintilian—who lived a generation after Seneca—famously criticized Seneca’s style for being “corrupt” and a bad influence on the youth of his own time. Seneca, he insists, is a dangerous model for the young because his writing is full of unnatural turns of phrase, “faults” that are all too easy to imitate.2 Quintilian’s criticisms hint at just how popular Seneca’s style of writing became soon after his death.
As the Roman world gradually became Christianized, Seneca took on a new importance as a pagan who could, more readily than almost any other, be assimilated into the Church. A fascinating thread in the reception of Seneca after his death is the apocryphal Latin correspondence between Seneca and the apostle Paul. It is clear from their (postclassical) language that this set of letters cannot possibly be genuine; they were probably composed in the third century CE, or perhaps early in the fourth. But the fact that somebody went to the trouble of faking them suggests how desirable it seemed to find a pagan author who could be assimilated into the Christian tradition. The legend was not without a certain plausibility; Seneca’s brother Novatus was governor of Achaea and in around 52 had dismissed the charges brought against Paul by the Jews (Acts. 18.12–17).3 Novatus himself was presumably motivated by the usual Roman governor’s desire to keep the Jewish people in order, but it was possible to interpret the move as deliberate siding with the Christians, and this helped Christian readers in late antiquity and the Middle Ages interpret Seneca’s moralizing, death-oriented version of Stoic philosophy as a kind of Christianity avant la lettre. “Seneca,” in this correspondence, calls Paul his “brother” (frater) or “my dearest Paul” (Paule carissime) and is made to realize instantly that Paul is inspired by true divine spirit, articulating thoughts that “were expressed not by you, but through you” (Ep. 1.10–11). In actuality, the current of influence between Pauline Christianity and Roman Stoicism ran in the other direction. Paul was deeply influenced by Stoic philosophy, if not directly by Seneca. He borrowed the notions of indifferent things, of what is properly one’s own (oikeiosis), the ideal of freedom from passion, and the paradoxical notion of freedom through slavery, fairly directly from the Stoics.4 The affinities between Stoicism and Christianity thus ran fairly deep and were ripe for further exploitation by later Christian thinkers.
In the third and fourth centuries CE, when Christianity was only just beginning to gain widespread acceptance and when paganism still lingered, the apocryphal correspondence was useful for ecumenical relations between pagan and Christian. Seneca could be seen as the representative pagan philosopher, fit to engage in dialogue with the first proponent of the Christian worldview and ripe for conversion. It was claimed in late antiquity and the Middle Ages that Seneca converted to Christianity and was, as it were, baptized by the bath of his death. Lactantius (advisor to the first Christian emperor, Constantine) urges anyone who wants to know about justice to “take up the books of Seneca, who both described public ethics and vice very truthfully, and condemned them with the utmost spirit” (Inst. 5.9.19). Tertullian called Seneca “often ours” (saepe noster), although he also noted that his work is not always compatible with the Christian truth. Jerome went further, calling him “our Seneca” (Seneca noster) (Ad Jovinian 1.49). In his On Famous Men (De Viris Illustribus) of 393, he claims that the correspondence of Paul and Seneca, “which is read by many,” justifies including Seneca “in the company of the saints”—although he otherwise would not qualify (Chapter 12). This passage does not necessarily suggest that Jerome—who could certainly tell the difference between classical and contemporary Latin—actually believed the correspondence to be genuine; rather, it was useful to have a justification for presenting the learned pagan and the great apostle as good friends.