The Deaths of Seneca

Citation preview

The Deaths of Seneca

This page intentionally left blank

The Deaths of Seneca james ker

1 2009

3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2009 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ker, James, 1970– The deaths of Seneca / James Ker. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-19-538703-2 1. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, ca. 4 B.C.–65 A.D. 2. Nero, Emperor of Rome, 37–68—Friends and associates. 3. Statesmen—Rome—Biography. 4. Philosophers—Rome—Biography. I. Title. PA6675.K47 2009 878'.0109—dc22 [B] 2009000874

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

J. M. K.

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgments

Many people supported me as I worked on this book. There are two teachers and friends without whom I couldn’t have started, let alone finished. Beginning from my time as a graduate student at Berkeley, Leslie Kurke has been an outstanding mentor: she has fueled my interests, read my drafts, and offered the very best of advice. Tony Long has listened with an open mind, and inspired me with his audacious thinking and writing. Other teachers willingly shared their methods and their expertise with me, particularly Maurizio Bettini, William Fitzgerald, Mark Griffith, and Kathleen McCarthy. Thomas Rosenmeyer commented on early chapters with lightning speed; I only wish he were still here to smile at my misconceptions. I was also fortunate to have Thomas Habinek as a reader of my dissertation; his reactions frequently pointed me in better directions, which I hope I have sometimes taken. The members of a Seneca reading group, Louise Clubb, Timothy Hampton, and Victoria Kahn, opened my eyes to the Renaissance Seneca, while my fellowship group at the Townsend Center for the Humanities engaged me in a broader conversation. Before this, as an undergraduate in New Zealand, I was blessed to have, in Charles Manning, a knowing guide to Seneca. When I thought I was done, Elaine Fantham and Gareth Williams both patiently read the manuscript in full and offered the perfect combination of critique and encouragement, which led to many improvements. Several others read chapters and offered helpful suggestions: Joseph Farrell, Sheila Murnaghan, Timothy O’Sullivan, Enrica Sciarrino, and Antonia Syson. Cynthia Damon shared with me a draft of her new translation of Annals book 15, which shed new

viii

acknowledgments

light on Tacitus for me. Others listened to me, shared their own work, or at various stages lent their support: Yelena Baraz, Shadi Bartsch, Robin Bond, Susanna Braund, Shane Butler, Catharine Edwards, Denis Feeney, Giovanni Ferrari, Victoria Frede, Laura Gibbs, Cheryl Graham-Seay, Celina Gray, Gianni Guastella, Stephen Hinds, Brad Inwood, Natalie Kampen, Sean Keilen, Ann Kuttner, David Larsen, Mary LeBlanc, Zack Lesser, Mark Morehouse, Melissa Mueller, Matt Neuburg, John Oksanish, Brendon Reay, Matthew Roller, Dylan Sailor, Alessandro Schiesaro, Alan Shapiro, Steven Smith, Sarah Stroup, Hakan Tell, Katharina Volk, Amanda Wilcox, Aldo Setaioli, Marcus Wilson, Tony Woodman, David Wray, and Graham Zanker. Equally supportive were colleagues at Harvard, especially Kathleen Coleman, Betsey Robinson, Richard Tarrant, Richard Thomas, and Zeph Stewart, who is fondly remembered. I can’t imagine a more stimulating group than my Classical Studies colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania: Rita Copeland, Cynthia Damon, Joseph Farrell, Cam Grey, Jeremy McInerney, Sheila Murnaghan, Julie Nishimura-Jensen, Brian Rose, Ralph Rosen, Peter Struck, Thomas Tartaron, and Emily Wilson. The students in my Seneca seminar at Penn in the fall of 2006 may recognize some of their ideas in this book: John Paul Christy, Carrie Mowbray, Kelcy Sagstetter, Sira Schultz, Sarah Scullin, Emlen Smith, and David Turner III. Individual chapters were also shaped by the questions of audiences at Amherst, Bryn Mawr, Canterbury, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, UC San Diego, Temple, Washington (Seattle), Wellesley, and Wesleyan. The support of library and museum staff was indispensable for securing many of the images; I thank especially Marissa Hendriks and John Pollack at Penn’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library and AnnaLee Pauls and Don Skemer in Princeton’s Rare Books and Special Collections Department. A research leave from Penn, combined with a Loeb Classical Library Foundation Grant, allowed me to spend 2007–8 finishing the manuscript. My editor at Oxford, Stefan Vranka, took a spontaneous interest in the manuscript long before it existed and ensured its smooth passage into print. For their infinite love and optimism from afar, I thank my mother, Barbara, my brother, Alastair, my sisters, Christine and Dorothy, and my good friend Sam Storey. I also thank the Park family for many fun outings. This book is dedicated to the memory of my father, John Milne Ker, who taught me my first Latin words and some more important things. But I could never have completed the book, or anything at all, without the support of one person: Jo Park, who is the greatest.

Contents

Illustrations, xi Abbreviations, xiii Introduction, 3 Part I: Historical Narratives 1. Three Descriptions, 17 2. Neronian Exits: Writing Death into History, 41 Part II: Seneca the Author 3. The Man of Many Genres in His Death, 65 4. Consolations on the Departure of the Consoler, 87 5. A Closing Scene in the Theaters of Ethics, Tragedy, and History, 113 6. End of a Series: Death in Epistolary Time, 147 Part III: Receptions 7. Tracing the Tradition, 179

x

contents

Part IV: Three Themes 8. Forced Suicide and the Bodily Paths to Libertas, 247 9. Passing into Memory: Seneca’s Imago and Its Reproduction, 281 10. Places Suburban and Serious: The Ruins of Seneca and Scipio, 325 Epilogue, 359 Editions of Primary Texts, 361 Bibliography, 365 Index of Passages, 389 General Index, 399

Illustrations

0.1 0.2 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7 7.8 7.9 7.10 7.11 7.12 7.13 7.14 7.15 7.16

Luca Giordano, Seneca morente (c. 1650–53), 8 Luca Giordano, Seneca morente (c. 1684–85), 9 Double herm of Seneca and Socrates (early third century), 183 Historiated initial for Sen. Ep. 89 (thirteenth century, Waltham Abbey), 190 Illumination for Roman de la Rose (c. 1490–1500), 195 Illumination for Vincentis Bellovacensis Speculum historiale, 196 J. Zainer, wood engraving for Paulina chapter, Giovanni Boccaccio, Buch von den berühmten Frawen (Ulm, 1473), 204 Jörg Syrlin the Elder, oak bust of Seneca (1469–74), 208 Antonio Filarete (?), Nero Witnessing the Death of Seneca, reverse of medallion (late fifteenth century), 209 Peter Paul Rubens, Der sterbende Seneca (c. 1614–15), 213 Gerrit van Honthorst, De Dood van Seneca, drawing on blue paper (c. 1622–27), 217 Luca Giordano, Seneca morente (c. 1699), 219 Francesco Pittoni, Seneca (1714), 226 Barbieri, Giovanni Francesco, Sénèque dans le bain, vu à mi-corps, tourné vers la droite (1640s), 227 Giambattista Pittoni, La morte di Seneca / Il cadavere di Seneca mostrato a Nerone (c. 1712–15), 228 Jean-François Pierre Peyron, La mort de Sénèque, engraving (c. 1773), 231 Jacques-Louis David, La mort de Sénèque (1773), 232 Jean-Joseph Taillasson, Pauline, femme de Sénèque, . . . on la rend à la vie (1793), 234

xii

illustrations

7.17 Joseph Noël Sylvestre, La mort de Sénèque (1875), 236 8.1 R. Collin after J. von Sandrart, engraving from Sandrart, Sculpturae veteris admiranda (Frankfurt, 1680), 272 8.2 Anonymous, Mort de Sénèque, drawing, France (eighteenth century), 278 9.1 Theodor Galle, L. Senecae imago, engraving from J. Lipsius, ed. L. Annaei Senecae philosophi opera (Antwerp, 1605), 293 9.2 Cornelis Galle after Rubens, dying Seneca, engraving from J. Lipsius, ed. L. Annaei Senecae philosophi opera (Antwerp, 1615), 296 9.3 Cornelis Galle after Rubens, bust of Seneca, engraving from J. Lipsius, ed. L. Annaei Senecae philosophi opera (Antwerp, 1615), 297 9.4 Engraving from Thomas Lodge, trans. The Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca (London, 1620), 298 9.5 Fisherman, black marble (second-century copy of Hellenistic original), 300 9.6 So-called pseudo-Seneca bust, marble (Roman copy of Hellenistic original), 302 9.7 Peter Paul Rubens, The Four Philosophers (1611), 303 9.8 Luca Giordano, Morte di Seneca (c. 1682–83), 305 9.9 Nicolas Poussin, Le baptême du Christ (1650s), 307 9.10 “Prétendu Sénèque,” engraving for Jean Gaspard Lavater, Essai sur la physiognomie, 309 9.11 Guido Reni, Seneca, terracotta (post-1601), 311 9.12 Guido Reni, The Adoration of the Shepherds (1640–42), 313 10.1 Torregaveta, viewed from the south, 326 10.2 Villa Vazia, street entrance, 326 10.3 Engraving in Sir Roger L’Estrange, Seneca’s Morals by Way of Abstract (London, 1729), 330 10.4 Charles Le Brun, Le tombeau de Sénèque (mid to late seventeenth century), 343 10.5 Literno, sign at ancient forum excavations, 354 10.6 Literno, ancient forum excavations, modern commemorative monument, 354

Abbreviations

Most classical titles are abbreviated using the conventions of the Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed. For works attributed to Seneca I use the following: Aga. Amic. Apocol. Ben. Brev. Clem. Const. Ep. Epigr. F Helv. Herc. HO Ira Marc. Matrim. Med. NQ Oct. Oed. Ot. Pha.

Agamemnon Quomodo amicitia continenda sit Apocolocyntosis De beneficiis De brevitate vitae De clementia De constantia sapientis Epistulae morales Epigrams [fragment in Vottero 1998] Consolatio ad Helviam Hercules Hercules Oetaeus De ira Consolatio ad Marciam De matrimonio Medea Naturales quaestiones Octavia Oedipus De otio Phaedra

xiv

abbreviations

Pho. Polyb. Prov. Remed. Thy. Tranq. Tro. VB

Phoenissae Consolatio ad Polybium De providentia De remediis fortuitorum Thyestes De tranquillitate animi Troades De vita beata

I give the following abbreviations for postclassical titles: CD Cen. Chron.

Civitas dei Cenodoxus Chronicon; Chronica

Cité Comm. di Dant. Cons. Consp. Contr. quatt.

Cité des dammes Commento di Dante Consolatio philosophiae The Conspiracy Contra quattuor labyrinthos Francie

De mul. clar. De vir. ill. De vita solit. Ep. Fam. IP Leg. aur.

De mulieribus claribus De viris illustribus De vita solitaria Epistulae Rerum familiarium libri L’Incoronazione di Poppea Legenda aurea

Mand. Mort de Sen. MT Ner. Perist. QV RR Script. ill. Lat. ling.

Manductio ad Stoicam philosophiam La mort de Seneque The Monk’s Tale Nero Peristephanon Quo Vadis Roman de la Rose Scriptorum illustrium Latinae linguae libri xvii Seneca Senecas Tod Speculum historiale

Sen. Sen. Tod Spec. hist.

Augustine Bidermann Jerome; Otto of Freising Christine de Pizan Boccaccio Boethius Hersey Walter of St. Victor Boccaccio Jerome; Petrarch Petrarch [multiple authors] Petrarch Monteverdi Jacobus de Voraigne Lipsius Tristan l’Hermite Chaucer Gwinne Prudentius Sienkiewicz Jean de Meun Polenton Kleist; Hiebel Hacks; Müller Vincent de Beauvais

abbreviations Tod Sen. Vita Sen.

Der Tod des Seneca: Roman Vita Senecae

Vita Soc. et Sen.

Vita Socratis et Senecae

xv

Schönegg Jerome; Barzizza; Polenton; Pompilio Manetti

This page intentionally left blank

The Deaths of Seneca

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction

When the news broke, in late April of the year 65 CE, that Nero had forced his estranged adviser to kill himself, it was not the first time that Roman audiences had been through death with Seneca. No two words better distil Seneca’s literary voice than cotidie morimur, “we die each day” (Ep. 24.20), and throughout his writings in prose and poetry Seneca had confronted readers with repeated representations of himself and others facing death. Seneca’s death thus arrived in one sense as just the latest in a series, albeit the last and most real. In another sense, though, it was just the beginning: from the first century to the present, Seneca’s exitus has been retold through all manner of representations. Analyzing the representations together—those that preceded the death and those that followed—allows us to see how, in his own lifetime and beyond, (1) Seneca was a central force in the intellectual history of death and dying, and (2) death was the major focus in the invention of Seneca as a cultural figure. Interpreters have not overlooked the importance of Seneca’s death, or of death in Seneca. But when we examine this tradition as a whole, “Seneca” begins to appear in a new light.

Representations Seneca’s death can be approached through three forms of representation that are useful for us to distinguish: ancient historical narratives, the literary projects of Seneca, and the tradition of reception in both word and image. The ancient historical narratives, most prominently

4

introduction

the pages devoted to it in Tacitus’ Annals, are the primary form, even if they are not chronologically the first. Written some fifty years after the fact, the Annals offer a more “direct” access to the death scene than any other surviving representation. But this and the other historical narratives will require various types of literary and cultural analysis. Consider, for example, Tacitus’ description of how Seneca, bleeding already from his arms and legs, began to dictate to his scribes (Ann. 15.63.3): et novissimo quoque momento suppeditante eloquentia advocatis scriptoribus pleraque tradidit, quae in vulgus edita eius verbis invertere supersedeo. And his eloquence persisting at each final moment, he summoned scribes and dictated a considerable amount to them, which was published in his words and which I refrain from adapting. We can (and we will) pursue a close reading of this virtual eyewitness account of Seneca’s last authorial performance, as well as Tacitus’ self-conscious omission of the now lost dictated words. This will require us, however, to compare it with other details of his account such as the prior removal of Seneca’s wife Paulina from the room—herself also bleeding—and Seneca’s subsequent unsuccessful attempt to die from hemlock; and with the account by Cassius Dio, who openly mocks Seneca’s final acts as author. We will need to contextualize the death scene in the Annals more generally, where Seneca’s eloquence is a complex theme, and where vein opening and the uttering of last words are both regular exitus motifs. We must also locate the description in relation to the longer tradition of Greek and Roman death writing, including the influential model of Plato’s Phaedo. Such inquiries will advance our understanding of how the death scene was perceived and interpreted by its earliest audiences. Yet an earlier form of representation is constituted by Seneca’s own surviving writings. Although these writings are ignorant of his death’s actual details, they nevertheless help us to appreciate the interpretive lenses through which the death would have been viewed by some contemporaries. Whether or not we think the authorial Seneca is directly echoed in the narratives by Tacitus and others (as I will argue he is), Seneca’s writings are so closely identified with the theme of death that they must have entered into an intense dialectical relationship with Seneca’s death in the minds of Seneca’s readers even before the death, as they certainly did after it. We will benefit, then, from rereading Seneca. Keeping to the text quoted above, for example, we may observe that the image of Seneca dictating while bleeding resonates with Seneca’s own description, in the De tranquillitate animi, of the execution of one Julius Canus by Caligula. Seneca admires Canus’ efforts to console his assembled friends (Tranq. 14.9–10):

introduction

5

“observare” inquit Canus “proposui illo velocissimo momento an sensurus sit animus exire se.” ecce in media tempestate tranquillitas, ecce animus aeternitate dignus, qui fatum suum in argumentum veri vocat, qui in ultimo illo gradu positus exeuntem animam percontatur nec usque ad mortem tantum sed aliquid etiam ex ipsa morte discit: nemo diutius philosophatus est. “I have determined,” said Canus, “to observe at that most fleeting moment whether my mind will feel itself depart.” Behold tranquillity in the middle of a storm! Behold a mind worthy of eternity, which summons its own fate to serve as evidence of the truth—which, poised in that final step, interrogates its departing soul and learns something not only right up until death but even from death itself! No one ever philosophized longer! The phrase illo velocissimo momento is probably echoed in the phrase novissimo quoque momento used by Tacitus to describe Seneca’s dictation above. But even aside from this echo, Seneca’s text offered his contemporaries a potential interpretive apparatus for deaths such as his own. Many texts from Seneca’s prose and tragedies have a similar—and at the same time varied—potential. In this instance the emphasis is not simply on Canus’ display of tranquillitas and constantia in the face of death but on his pressing death itself to serve a heuristic function, as the frontier where new philosophical discoveries are made and communicated back to a living audience. Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis, by contrast, explores some of the ways in which a slow death may be satirized. Scrutinizing the different ways in which Seneca writes about death allows us to see better how his first readers, as well as subsequent readers, were equipped to understand the exemplary potential(s) of his death. Also, scrutinizing Seneca’s death in its own right allows us to discover how the death offered a vantage point from which his writings could themselves be seen anew. A third and final form of representation is found in the receptions that have ensued in the centuries since Tacitus and the other Roman historians. Staying with Julius Canus (or Canius as he is later known), we may note that in the sixth century Boethius in his Consolatio philosophiae clusters Canus together with Seneca: they are both among the Roman examples of those who have died for their devotion to philosophy (Cons. 1.3). Although the Boethian allusion is merely suggestive, in Matthew Gwinne’s play Nero (1603) the dying Seneca says that he aspires to die “like the excellent Canius of my own time” (qualis aevo Canius nostro optimus, Ner. 4113)—a degree of self-consciousness about his own repertoire of examples that is a hallmark of Gwinne’s Seneca character. In Gwinne’s day, in fact, all deaths and not just Seneca’s could potentially be held to this standard: the section on Canus from the De tranquillitate animi above is quoted extensively in a sixteenth-century text of the Ars moriendi tradition to illustrate how “naturall

6

introduction

men” (that is, pagans) were capable of making death a learning experience even “without the teching of God” (Lupset, Waye of Dyenge Well 71).1 Independently of Canus, we can also consider more broadly how the coextension between bleeding and dictating seen in Tacitus was refigured in the later tradition; and we can turn our eyes from text to image. In two works by the late-baroque painter Luca Giordano, a figure is located at Seneca’s feet. In the first painting, from c. 1650–53 (Fig. 0.1), the figure is recognizable as a scribe, with pen poised to take dictation from the dying man. In the later version, from c. 1684–85 (Fig. 0.2), the figure holds a scalpel and is clearly engaged in cutting the veins in Seneca’s foot.2 Giordano’s alternation draws a visual analogy between the two figures and also between the two events they signify. Beyond simply registering the temporal coextension between bleeding and dictating, the analogy hints rather at a codependency and indeed a functional equivalence between them. Without the letting of blood, Seneca’s words would be just like any other words; and without being recorded in ink, Seneca’s bloody death would disappear from memory. To this extent, bloodletting is writing and writing is bloodletting. (Elsewhere in the visual tradition, too, the scalpel used for opening Seneca’s veins is often wielded like a pen or brush.) Furthermore, if the figure of the scribe may be understood as a placeholder for all other documenters of the event—the series of authors and painters to which Giordano himself now belongs—then the painter himself is in some sense also complicit in the slow violence of Seneca’s death. Although Giordano’s paintings belong to an era that was predominantly concerned with reinforcing the authority of Seneca’s dictated words and participating in the chain of transmission, a contrast can be made with Heiner Müller’s poem SENECAS TOD (1992). Müller portrays the dictating Seneca as a mind persisting in spite of the weakening of the body (lines 32–34): Die Hand konnte den Schreibgriffel nicht mehr halten Aber das Gehirn arbeitete noch die Maschine Stellte Wörter und Sätze her notierte die Schmerzen the hand could no longer hold the stencil but the mind still worked the machine produced words and sentences noted the pain. But he undermines Seneca’s authority when he presents his failed attempt to use hemlock as a metaphorical writing failure (lines 40–42): Und das Gift das vielen geholfen hatte vor ihm Konnte nur eine Fußnote schreiben in seinen Schon beinahe blutleeren Leib keinen Klartext

1. In Atkinson (1992). 2. The same alternation already occurs in two versions by Claude Vignon (1593–1670) from the second quarter of the 17th c.

introduction

7

and the poison which had helped many before him could only write a footnote in his already nearly bloodless belly no clear-text. Müller’s poem gives the impression that there are lingering problems in the conversion of the dying body into a text—just one of several misgivings that we will encounter in Müller and others.

“Senecanizing” Seneca Although our account of Seneca’s death will be a history of the three forms of representation distinguished above, let us pause to consider the dynamics of the third category, reception. The refiguring of the death by different narrators requires us to account for the labor that each representation performed for its interpreter in his or her world, and indeed this will be the major thread of my account: the heterogeneity of the death scene’s successive receptions.3 At the same time, a fairly persistent thread of this tradition will be the specifically “Senecan” flavor of many retellings. In his manifesto on the importance of reception theory for classical studies Charles Martindale formulates a weak and a strong thesis: (1) “that numerous unexplored insights into ancient literature are locked up in imitations, translations and so forth,” and (2) “that our current interpretations of ancient texts, whether or not we are aware of it, are, in complex ways, constructed by the chain of receptions through which their continued readability has been effected” (1993, 7). Both theses are amply illustrated in the receptions of Seneca. Already in Tacitus, for example, (1) the Tacitean phrase novissimo quoque momento may unlock (or provoke) new insights both on Seneca’s De tranquillitate animi and on Tacitus’ own account, while (2) the successive references to Canus by Boethius, Gwinne, and the Ars moriendi tradition show that at some point the Canus genie had been let out of the bottle, with irreversible consequences for the associations of Seneca’s death. Thus we might ask about Seneca what Martindale asks about Virgil: “What else could . . . [Seneca] be other than what readers have made of him over the centuries?” (8). But in the case of Seneca we can often be very specific about what has been “made of ” him. For if a focus on Martindale’s thesis (2) in particular requires us to be prepared for a Seneca who is unanchored from the putative “original Seneca,” the drift has in a majority of instances been guided by currents that are themselves Senecan, in what I will refer to as a process of “senecanization.” This process has been characterized by two complementary hermeneutic pressures. On the one hand, Senecan biography (including his death) has frequently been refigured through framing contexts that derive wholly or partially from Senecan 3. For the importance of this see Hexter (2006), 26–31.

8

introduction

figure 0.1 Luca Giordano, Seneca morente (c. 1650–53). Schleissheim Palace, Germany, Inv. No. 516. Courtesy of Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, NY.

moral and literary discourse—sometimes by circuitous paths and sometimes unknowingly, and not necessarily in ways that preserve the dying Seneca’s reputation. Gwinne, for example, has his dying Seneca apply the standard of Canus to himself, though the outcome within the drama is not in the end flattering to Seneca, who falls short of the example. To the extent that we observe this tendency, we witness the well-known phenomenon of an author’s writings being

introduction

9

figure 0.2 Luca Giordano, Seneca morente (c. 1684–85). Paris, Louvre, Inv. 2578, M.I. 871. Courtesy of Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

used creatively to supplement gaps in the same author’s biography,4 while also seeking to do justice to the unusually diverse routes along which this particular author’s writings have traveled. On the other hand, Senecan moral and literary discourses, or discourses derived from these, have often exhibited an unusually strong “cannibalistic” tendency, because they are applied to the retelling of Senecan biography—a narrative that serves as their eponymous and foundational focus. Gwinne’s play, and a number of other English plays, go to great lengths to represent Seneca himself, and not as they do other characters: he is in some sense a personification of the Senecan tragic paradigm, and the dramatization of his death offers allegorical or meta-literary potentials. These two hermeneutic pressures are manifested in different forms, but they are so recognizable that the reception of Seneca’s death—in most, though not all, cases—may be 4. Cf. Lefkowitz (1981) on the lives of the Greek poets; Chitwood (2004) on the deaths of the philosophers.

10

introduction

described as the product of an internal symbiotic relationship (not always harmonious) between Seneca the man and Senecan discourse.

Why Seneca’s Death? In a modern era characterized by what Tony Walter has called “the revival of death” (1994, 26–38) and accompanied by new scholarly interest in the history of deathways (that is, culturally specific practices around death and dying), there are reasons to single out this death for attention.5 Although Seneca’s historical personality varies in the different accounts of Neronian history penned by Tacitus, Dio, and Suetonius, and in allusions by other authors, in every case the telling of his death has illustrative, not merely informational, dimensions. These authors work within specific conventions of death writing as they inscribe Seneca in the history of the Roman Principate and offer a basis for comparing or contrasting him with pagan “martyrs” (to use this term loosely for now) such as Socrates, Cato, Cicero, Lucan, Petronius, and Thrasea Paetus. As Thomas Habinek has observed, Seneca’s death was interpreted in the generation after his death, especially in the first-century historical drama Octavia, in terms of “the age-old function of foundation sacrifice for a Rome that required continuous renewal,” which in Seneca’s case was accomplished through a mastery that was cultural rather than military (2000, 266). Jerome, in turn, perhaps with his eye on his Chronicon, located Nero’s murder of Seneca “two years before Peter and Paul were crowned with martyrdom” (De vir. ill. 12.3), exploiting its proximity to the early Christian persecutions to effect a convergence of histories and a mutual assimilation of Stoic and Christian deaths. As a martyr and writer, however, Seneca belongs to the more circumscribed group of those whose deaths can be “authorial”—whose literary works come into play in the interpretation of their deaths, or whose oeuvres can themselves be reread from a posthumous vantage point. Seneca also stands apart from all other writers in the amount of attention he gives to death as a literary theme across multiple genres. Successive audiences have been inclined to test and transform these writings’ various messages about death in the crucible of the author’s death scene. Senecan tragedy, to take one example, has been the literary model for several distinct cultural forms in which human experiences of death and suffering are dramatized: not only ancient Roman drama and neoStoic tragedy but also Elizabethan tragedy, Jesuit drama, French burlesque, Venetian opera, German Trauerspiel, and the twentieth-century theaters of cruelty and the absurd. The history of this generic tradition has conspicuously

5. Note the centrality of Seneca’s death in recent discussions by Flemming (2005), in connection with ancient and modern euthanasia; Edwards (2007), on Roman death; Dollimore (1998), 26–31, on Western death; Hill (2004), on Roman suicide; and Minois (1999), on Western suicide.

introduction

11

included its being used in various forms to represent the biographic Seneca’s own downfall—a use seen already in the Octavia. Furthermore, in the history of reception, the ubiquitous narrative of Seneca’s death became a showcase in which specific attitudes to death would be distinguished and exhibited. In the narratological reconfigurations of the dying Seneca’s agency, for example, where emphasis has shifted between the decree of Nero, the role of executioners, the choices and initiative of Seneca himself, the assistance of Seneca’s freedman and friend who is also a doctor, and the complicated role of Paulina (sometimes entirely suppressed) as she voluntarily opens her veins but is subsequently revived, the Seneca scene has proven responsive to the distinct interests and values of each interpretive milieu. The narrative’s uses also extend to the more abstract notions of mortality that accompany various “renaissance” moments in the hermeneutics of reception (not confined to the Italian Renaissance), in which the figure of the bleeding Seneca is useful for emplotting the periodization of a dead, distant, historicized Roman past, or a past that must be killed off in order to be known. Conversely, the transcendental ambitions of Seneca’s death performance help to establish lines of communication and assimilation across boundaries of time. Seneca’s death is thus the locus in which a varied tradition of cultural production around the themes of death and revival has taken place.

Why Seneca’s Death? With this book I also make an argument about the study of Seneca, whom we often struggle to see whole.6 Two now indispensable works in the Anglophone scholarship, Miriam Griffin’s Seneca: A Philosopher in Politics (1976; second edition 1992) and Brad Inwood’s Reading Seneca: Stoic Philosophy at Rome (2005), produce relatively synoptic pictures of Seneca as a man of action and a man of letters, but both exclude his tragedies, and his reception, from consideration. In the Seneca that emerges from these accounts, there are perhaps still tacit echoes of the Renaissance division of Seneca into two or more separate persons. The present book may be vulnerable to the criticism that it “reduces” Seneca to the dying Seneca. But it is my contention that one remedy to the fragmentation of Seneca into statesman, philosopher, and tragedian—together with opportunities to trace Seneca’s career amid, say, his conversions into and out of Christianity, or from one iconographic makeover to the next—lies precisely in examining how the death narrative has in practice been preferred as a way to tell the Seneca story. In order to know the anatomy of Seneca the

6. Recent exceptions include Bartsch (2006); Habinek (2000); and the introduction in Fitch (2008). Many collections of essays on Seneca also exhibit a catholic approach; see esp. Volk and Williams (2006) and already Costa (1974).

12

introduction

cultural figure and to read the corpus of Senecan writings in a way that respects equally their Roman context and the contexts of their later reception, we need to acknowledge the role that the death scene has played, even since before Seneca died, in the invention and contestation of his cultural authority. A historian of ancient Egypt has recently asserted that “death is the origin and the center of culture,” on the basis of his observation that death is “a center of cultural consciousness, one that radiated out into many—we might almost say, into all—other areas of ancient Egyptian culture.”7 Similar observations have been made about other distinct cultures, from modern Mexico to ancient Rome: death in Rome was all-permeating and, in the words of Catharine Edwards, was “rooted in other aspects of Roman culture” (2007, 6). I claim, however, that death—more specifically, dying—may also be said to be the center of Senecan culture. The scene in which a person faces death and is witnessed by others (or at least by him- or herself) is a lingua franca in which most things of value for Seneca can be expressed. The interpretive frameworks employed by Roman historiographers, by Seneca in his own writings, and by successive receivers in the classical tradition, not only have produced a specifically Senecan approach to death, as discussed above, but also have defined the sense in which the dying Seneca can stand for Seneca as a whole. In historiography it is the death narrative that offers the most synoptic view: a defining (because final) scene, witnessed by internal audiences, in which the paterfamilias, husband, friend, politician, celebrity, and author attends equally to the domestic concerns of his final hours and to his sole legacy of an imago vitae suae (“image of his life,” Ann. 15.62.1) that is to persist in the minds of others. The literary aspect of the scene lies not just in the fact that Seneca is shown actively engaged in the production of a text by dictation but also in the ambiance, in Tacitus’ telling, of Seneca’s characteristic stylistic modes, such as vivid description, consolation, theatricality, and epistolography. Tacitus’ telling is just one exercise in the superimposition of different Senecan literary layers in the death scene. The scene affords an opportunity, which other readers also took up and will continue to take up (consciously or unconsciously), for seeing the different aspects of Seneca’s cultural identity integrated, if not into a logically coherent persona, at least into a singular performance that is narratologically coherent. In the classical tradition, in turn, the death narrative, realized in multiple written and visual forms, was a favored accessus to manuscripts and printed editions of Seneca’s works, where the dying Seneca is spliced together with the authorial Seneca in the body of his writings, and the reader embarking on a Senecan text is called upon to witness the death scene in a retelling, often accompanied by a visual image. If, then, we are looking for a holistic approach to Seneca, the tradition offers one in the virtual convergence of Seneca with his death—in the heuristic function of the death narrative as the gateway for learning what makes Seneca Seneca. 7. Assmann (2005), 1–2.

introduction

13

Consider for a moment the varied fates of Seneca’s name.8 Although the associations with old age (senectus) already played an important role in Seneca’s own literary engagements with personal proximity to death and in Tacitus’ portrayal of his “aged body” (senile corpus, Ann. 15.63.3), a medieval etymology sees in Seneca one who se necavit (“killed himself,” Leg. aur. 84.221).9 And in studies of twentieth-century Italian popular culture some speakers report that the colloquial phrase seneca svenato (“vein-drained Seneca”), when applied to a person, connotes not just the deathly qualities of old age, emaciation, poverty, pallor, and unburied corpses, but also miserliness, moralism, and hypocrisy—typical satirizations of the philosophical Seneca.10 In these separate instances Seneca, and the authorial voice and moral authority for which Seneca stands, are identified with or through his death and his particular manner of dying.

The Shape of This Book In part I below, I analyze the earliest versions of the death narrative through close readings of Tacitus, Suetonius, and Dio (chapter 1), and then situate these within the broader representational edifices constructed by these authors, particularly of Tacitus as he moderates the pressure of death writing upon the Annals and endows Seneca with a privileged symbolism (chapter 2). I turn in part II to Seneca’s complex literary profile, identifying the ways in which his death can be understood as a performance of authorship, and I preview Seneca’s own flexible approach to the representation of death in different genres (chapter 3). Beyond the basic descriptive form of the exitus, the three modes that inform Seneca’s death writing most precisely are the retrospective narratives of recovery from loss that he promotes during his extensive career of consolatory writing (chapter 4); the theatricalization of death events that he explores from separate angles in the prose writings and the tragedies (chapter 5); and the anticipatory and meditative approach to death that he serializes in the Epistulae morales to Lucilius (chapter 6). In each of these areas of Seneca’s authorial output it is possible to see Tacitus and other early audiences taking up the opportunity to creatively reread Seneca’s death in the light of his writings, and vice versa. Part III, consisting of a single chapter, maps out the death narrative’s reception from the third to the twenty-first century, tracing its extensive filiations through different versions and different discursive forms (chapter 7). Part IV ranges more freely over the tradition, pressing into service the synoptic view that the first three parts cumulatively make possible. Here I focus on 8. The name’s career is surveyed by Citti and Neri (2001), 165, 175–76. 9. Literal confirmation of Hampton’s (1990) comment that in the reception of classical exemplars “the name is a noun with a verb phrase (the various great deeds) condensed inside it” (25). 10. Cf. Coccia (2000).

14

introduction

three central themes of the death scene that originate in ancient representations but are subsequently redefined in the course of the tradition. First I consider the refigurations of Seneca’s “forced suicide,” both against the backdrop of his philosophical writings and in relation to the strategic and practical considerations around self-killing and its representation in narrative: the multiple agents involved, and the corporeal dynamics of blood, poison, and bath through which the event flows (chapter 8). I turn next to the question of posthumous memory, focusing on the imago vitae suae that Seneca is described as offering to his friends as a metaphorical legacy; I also show how the very identity of Seneca’s “image” has been reinvented in the iconographic tradition and in appropriations of Senecan literary style (chapter 9). The final chapter addresses the distinct question of location. Because the death takes place in Seneca’s suburban villa on the day of his return from the allusive landscape of Campania, it is informed by the symbolic languages of domestic space and geography that Seneca explores in his letters. These languages were subsequently adapted by authors such as Petrarch, who pursued his own path of self-fashioning within the itineraries of Seneca’s last years (chapter 10).

part i

Historical Narratives

This page intentionally left blank

1 Three Descriptions

Seneca’s name is frequently on the lips of Roman authors recollecting (or seeking to forget) the age of Nero, confirming that they found Seneca “good to think with.”1 As it happens, however, only glancing references to the death survive from the immediately following decades. In the anonymous Octavia, written sometime after the death of Nero in 68, a Seneca character arrives onstage lamenting that he has been seduced by Fortune to return from exile only “to fall more heavily (gravius ut ruerem) and confront so many fears” (Oct. 379–80); yet his death is left beyond the scope of the plot. Pliny the Elder alludes to it when he refers to Seneca’s “power which, in the end, excessive, crashed down on him” (potentia quae postremo nimia ruit super ipsum, HN 14.51)—words that appeal to the same logic of tragic reversal as in the Octavia. And when Juvenal wants an example of the precariousness of wealth, he points out that Nero’s troops “shut off the great gardens of super-wealthy Seneca” (magnos Senecae praedivitis hortos / clausit, 10.16–17), probably referring to the aftermath of his death. These passages offer important information on how Seneca’s death was obliquely remembered. But it is only in a trio of second- and third-century works that we can read of the death directly: the Annals of Tacitus, Suetonius’ De vita Caesarum, and the epitomated text of Cassius Dio’s third-century Roman History. These three authors diverge at more than one level of the narrative. Even at those points where they are in agreement on the “fabula” (the 1. Habinek (2000), 265. For the ancient testimonia see Trillitzsch (1971); Faider (1921), 9–107; also PIR 617.

18

historical narratives

putative sequence of events) and the “story” (the configuration of the events in terms of internal ordering, location, character, point of view, and so on), still the textual devices through which these are inflected are different in each case, and make for different impressions.2 In this chapter we will examine each version and note some of its distinctive narrative and textual features, postponing for now our consideration of their authors’ broader histories.

“Sources” As we approach the death descriptions, there are two important general qualifications to bear in mind, concerning their relationship to lost sources and their use as sources: 1. Our three historians tend not to draw upon one another, but draw independently upon three Flavian-era historians—Pliny the Elder, Cluvius Rufus, and Fabius Rusticus—whose accounts are now lost and whose impact is debated.3 Scholars have attributed the negative portrayals of Seneca in Dio’s history variously to Cluvius and to Pliny; the latter has been thought especially hostile to Seneca.4 The role of Fabius, possibly an equestrian of Spanish origin, is relatively more certain.5 Tacitus, early in his Neronian narrative, reports a statement made by Fabius that was either absent or contradicted in Pliny and Cluvius: that Sex. Afranius Burrus, the praetorian prefect, was almost expelled from the Neronian court through the agitation of Paris, the imperial freedman, and that only Seneca had prevented this from happening. But Tacitus adds the following qualification: “Of course, Fabius tends toward praise of Seneca, by whose friendship he prospered” (sane Fabius inclinat ad laudes Senecae, cuius amicitia floruit, Ann. 13.20.2).6 Fabius may, in fact, have been writing later than Cluvius and Pliny, in the late 70s, and thus may have been reacting to their histories, and his work may have been less a narrative history than an apologetic biography of Seneca.7 Tacitus also cites Fabius as a source for one detail in Seneca’s death narrative itself (15.61.3 below); this has inclined some scholars to imagine that Fabius was himself an eyewitness to the death, one of the friends whose presence is mentioned by Tacitus and implied by Dio. The consequence of this overall uncertainty about sources is that it is perilous to seek to identify any specific individual other than the primary narrator 2. On narrative systems and these levels see Bal (1997), 3–15. 3. On the Neronian historiographic tradition see Champlin (2003), 36–52; D’Anna (2003), 196–97; Griffin (1992), 420–44; Wilkes (1972), 199–203. Flavian historiography and biography are surveyed by K. Coleman (1999), 20–25. 4. On the hostile source(s) see D’Anna (2003), 195; Ramelli (2002); Koestermann (1968), 303. 5. Cf. PIR, F62. Tacitus refers to Fabius in glowing terms as the Livy of his day (Agr. 10.3). 6. On these and other references to Fabius (Ann. 13.20.2, 14.2.2) see Paratore (1962), 456–58 n. 58. 7. See Champlin (2003), 42; Questa (1960a), 151–52.

three descriptions

19

(that is, Tacitus, Suetonius, or Dio) as responsible for the form and content of a given version. The uncertainty serves as a reminder that the death was already known to each narrator in conflicting versions, that inconsistencies are to be expected, and equally that any unified representation is likely to be the product of the primary narrator’s own efforts of adaptation and/or suppression. There is also no reason to discount as “sources” the multiple models of death writing (including Seneca’s own writings) with which the historians (and writers such as Fabius) were familiar; although I exclude these from consideration in the present chapter, their imprint will ultimately be more conspicuous to us than that of specific lost histories. 2. The three surviving versions have themselves had a varied role as sources in the historical narratives constructed by later interpreters, both because of their idiosyncratic transmission and because of their particular rhetorical form. Versions disappear from view (most famously the version of Tacitus, which lay hidden in the Middle Ages), just as versions enjoy the hegemony that comes with religious authority (such as Jerome’s later sketch). Versions enjoy an aura (such as the aura of a “renaissance epiphany” since Boccaccio’s rediscovery of the Annals), just as versions are actively marginalized (such as the testimony of Dio—found now, if at all, in a footnote). Shifts are evident at every stage. It helps to notice the strategies employed for presenting Tacitus in modern scholarship. In some cases his version is cited briefly or paraphrased, with the effect of removing rhetorical color but also of elevating its story to the status of citable fact. More often, it is given verbatim, implying that its reportage needs to be understood (and enjoyed) as an utterance of Tacitus’ literary voice. In the Tacitean voice some commentators hear an ultimately negative or satirizing portrayal of the death scene,8 whereas others hear Seneca portrayed in overall positive terms, with an emphasis on his constantia.9 But most perceive a mixed tone—whether Tacitus showcases in the death a “non liquet” (Alexander 1952) or “hermeneutic vicious circle” (Schönegg 1999, 22) that he himself cannot resolve; deliberately balances light and shade to create a portrait appropriate to its complex subject; uses “realistic details” that set the death apart from the more “poetic” death of Socrates (Waltz 1909, 437); or opts for a dignified tone that is, however, “not devoid of irony,” especially given Tacitus’ later description of the parody performed by the dying Petronius (Rudich 1997, 105). All such “mixed” accounts, incidentally, are facilitated by Tacitus’ characteristic inclusion of multiple internal audiences in his narrative that offer the reader divergent colorings of a Roman death.10 It also helps that Tacitus (like Suetonius and Dio, for that matter) does not seek to give any closing summary 8. E.g., Erasmo (2008), 27–33; Henry and Walker (1963), on Seneca presented as loquacious and dull. 9. The highest encomium comes from Koestermann (1968): “Never anywhere else do we find an account of a man’s death that is so detailed and has the same degree of compassionate sympathy” (303). 10. See Levene (1997) on Tac. Hist. 3.36–86 describing the death of Vitellius.

20

historical narratives

or evaluation of Seneca’s life of the sort that other major characters sometimes receive—no consummatio totius vitae. None of the three versions, in fact, offers decisive interpretive closure— only beginnings for later readers.

Tacitus In the Annals, his final work, begun in the 110s under Trajan and completed (if it was completed) under Hadrian, Tacitus does not tell a continuous narrative about Seneca but mentions him sporadically in the course of his year-by-year history. Although we will return to the broader Seneca story told by Tacitus in the next chapter, it is useful to have an outline of the episodes in mind as we consider the death scene. They can be sketched as follows: Seneca is recalled from exile by Agrippina in 49 to serve as Nero’s teacher (Ann. 12.8.2); in 54, he joins Afranius Burrus in managing Nero and resisting Agrippina (13.2.1–2); he writes Nero’s speeches (§3.1); he prevents Agrippina from ascending the tribunal (§5.2); together with Burrus, he is perceived by some as an experienced adviser of Nero (§6.3); in 55, he is understood to be the voice behind Nero’s speeches on clemency (§11.2); he facilitates Nero’s affair with Acte by supplying Annaeus Serenus as a cover (§13.1); together with Burrus, he is accused by Agrippina of ambition and ineptitude (§14.3); he is instrumental in saving Burrus from expulsion (according to Fabius Rusticus, §20.2); he is present when Burrus delivers Nero’s ultimatum to Agrippina (§21.1); in 58, he is informally accused of hypocrisy by the professional prosecutor P. Suillius Rufus (§§42.1–43.1); in 59, he diverts Nero from incest with Agrippina by sending in Acte (14.2.1); he is summoned to advise on what to do after Agrippina escapes from the collapsing boat (§7.2–3); he suffers disrepute for having written Nero’s letter to the Senate justifying Agrippina’s murder (§11.3); with Burrus, he indulges Nero’s zeal for circus races to curb his interest in musical performance (§14.2); in 62, after the death of Burrus, he is exposed to extensive criticism and stripped of power—an episode dramatized as the interview in which Seneca pleads to be allowed to withdraw, while Nero outwardly refuses his request (§§52.1–57.1); he is accused by a certain Romanus of allegiance to C. Calpurnius Piso, but retaliates with the same accusation (§65.2); in 63, he reputedly responds to Nero’s “reconciliation” with Thrasea Paetus by congratulating him (15.23.4); and in 64, after the Great Fire at Rome, he seeks to distance himself from Nero’s despoliation of temples, is refused his request for a rural retreat, and supposedly escapes an attempt by Nero to poison him (§45.3).

The Death Is Introduced The immediate context of Seneca’s death is the catalogue of killings that continues in book 15 and continues to the death of Thrasea Paetus, where book

three descriptions

21

16 breaks off. The more immediate context is the discovery of the Pisonian conspiracy in 65, in which he is accused by one of the conspirators, Antonius Natalis—whether, Tacitus says, because Natalis really was “an intermediary (internuntius) between [Seneca] and Piso” or simply “in order to secure the goodwill of Nero, who was hostile to Seneca and was exploring every means to crush him (infensus Senecae omnes ad eum opprimendum artes conquirebat)” (15.56.2). Among those pursued for their role in the conspiracy, Tacitus dwells first on the torture and suicide of the freedwoman Epicharis (§57), then the suicide of Piso himself (§59.5) and the consul designate Plautius Lateranus (§60.1). He continues:11 (§60.2) sequitur caedes Annaei Senecae, laetissima principi, non quia coniurationis manifestum compererat, sed ut ferro grassaretur, quando venenum non processerat. Next comes the killing of Annaeus Seneca, a special joy to the emperor—not because he had found him to be implicated in the conspiracy, but to advance with the blade where poison had not succeeded. The opening word sequitur (“Next comes”) orders Seneca’s death in time, just as Tacitus elsewhere uses sequi in a formulaic way: for example, to introduce death notices for two nobles who died apparently of natural causes.12 But here, coming directly after the deaths of Piso and Lateranus, sequitur captures the momentum of Nero’s growing cruelty. Since the Great Fire of 64 had been introduced earlier in the same book with “Next comes a catastrophe (sequitur clades), though whether by chance or by the subterfuge of the emperor (dolo principis) is uncertain” (15.38.1), the present event arrives as just the latest in a nefarious pattern. Sequitur, however, being in the (historic) present tense, also signals that the death of Seneca is the next event within the time of his own developing text. As he announces the death, Tacitus establishes Nero’s point of view. Although he does not go out of his way to deny that Seneca was part of the conspiracy,13 he emphasizes the convergence of this justification with Nero’s longstanding desire to do away with him. In saying “where poison had not succeeded” (quando venenum non processerat), he implies that Nero’s present actions give retrospective verification to what he had previously mentioned only as a rumor about the attempt to poison Seneca (cf. “Some have recorded,” tradidere quidam, §45.3).

11. I draw on the commentaries of Miller (1973); Koestermann (1968); Furneaux (1891). The most helpful discussions are Edwards (2007), 110–13, 156–57; D’Anna (2003); Schönegg (1999), 19–24; Hutchinson (1993), 263–68; Griffin (1992), 369–72; Maurach (1990), 507–17; R. Fabbri (1978–79). 12. Ann. 14.19: sequuntur virorum inlustrium mortes, Domitii Afri et M. Servilii; cf. Koestermann (1968), 197. 13. Positions taken by scholars on Seneca’s guilt are summarized by Koestermann (1968), 309–10; see also the arguments of Griffin (1974), 25–27. Compare the more direct implication of Seneca by Dio 62.24.1 and Polyaenus, Strat. 8.62.

22

historical narratives

The portrayal of Nero’s viewpoint is heightened here by the fact that laetissima principi (“a special joy to the emperor”) captures the feeling of anticipation with which Nero plans “to advance with the blade” (ut ferro grassaretur). But Seneca’s death will lack the simplicity with which Nero is here shown imagining it, and the state of Seneca’s body that will make him bleed too slowly is seemingly due to the same “plain diet” (simplice victu, §45.3) that may have allowed him to evade Nero’s poison earlier. There is also a perverse correspondence between Nero’s multiple attempts and Seneca’s ultimately multistage death.

Nero’s Interrogation Tacitus next gives a painstaking account of the episodes that led up to Nero’s final command: (§60.3) solus quippe Natalis et hactenus prompsit, missum se ad aegrotum Senecam, uti viseret conquerereturque, cur Pisonem aditu arceret: melius fore, si amicitiam familiari congressu exercuissent. et respondisse Senecam sermones mutuos et crebra conloquia neutri conducere; ceterum salutem suam incolumitate Pisonis inniti. (4) haec ferre Gavius Silvanus tribunus praetoriae cohortis, et an dicta Natalis suaque responsa nosceret percontari Senecam iubetur. is forte an prudens ad eum diem ex Campania remeaverat quartumque apud lapidem suburbano rure substiterat. illo propinqua vespera tribunus venit et villam globis militum saepsit; tum ipsi cum Pompeia Paulina uxore et amicis duobus epulanti mandata imperatoris edidit. (§61.1) Seneca missum ad se Natalem conquestumque nomine Pisonis, quod a visendo eo prohiberetur, seque rationem valetudinis et amorem quietis excusavisse respondit. cur salutem privati hominis incolumitati suae anteferret, causam non habuisse; nec sibi promptum in adulationes ingenium. idque nulli magis gnarum quam Neroni, qui saepius libertatem Senecae quam servitium expertus esset. (2) ubi haec a tribuno relata sunt Poppaea et Tigellino coram, quod erat saevienti principi intimum consiliorum, interrogat an Seneca voluntariam mortem pararet. tum tribunus nulla pavoris signa, nihil triste in verbis eius aut vultu deprensum confirmavit. ergo regredi et indicere mortem iubetur. (3) tradit Fabius Rusticus non eo quo venerat itinere redi tum, sed flexisse ad Faenium praefectum et expositis Caesaris iussis an obtemperaret interrogavisse, monitumque ab eo ut exsequeretur, fatali omnium ignavia. (4) nam et Silvanus inter coniuratos erat augebatque scelera, in quorum ultionem consenserat. voci tamen et aspectui pepercit intromisitque ad Senecam unum ex centurionibus, qui necessitatem ultimam denuntiaret.

three descriptions

23

(§60.3) After all, Natalis, and he alone, divulged only this much: that he had been sent to visit the ailing Seneca and complain that he was barring Piso from access to him; that it would be better if they could conduct their friendship face to face. Seneca, [he said], had replied that shared discussions and frequent conferences were in neither’s interest, but that his own well-being depended on Piso’s safety. (4) Gavius Silvanus, tribune of the praetorian cohort, was ordered to communicate this and question Seneca on whether he acknowledged Natalis’ words and his own replies. [Seneca], whether by chance or by foresight, had come back from Campania on that day and had stopped at the fourth milestone at his suburban estate in the countryside. The tribune came to that place as evening approached and surrounded the villa with bands of soldiers. Finding him feasting with his wife Pompeia Paulina and two friends, he then made known the emperor’s commands. (§61.1) Seneca replied that Natalis had been sent to him and had complained on Piso’s behalf that he was being kept from seeing him, and that he had excused himself on the grounds of his health and his desire for rest. He hadn’t, [he said], had any reason for valuing the well-being of a private individual ahead of his own safety, nor was he liable to engage in flattery—as was known to no one better than to Nero himself, who had more often experienced the liberty of Seneca than any servility. (2) When this was reported by the tribune in the presence of Poppaea and Tigellinus, who were the inner circle of counsellors to the raging emperor, [Nero] asked whether Seneca was preparing a voluntary death. Then the tribune affirmed that no signs of fear and no sadness had been detected in his words and face. And so he was ordered to return and decree death. (3) Fabius Rusticus relates that the tribune did not return by the same path by which he had come, but detoured to Faenius the prefect, explained Caesar’s orders, and asked whether he should obey them; whereupon he was advised by him to carry them out. Inevitable cowardice was shared by all. (4) For Silvanus himself was one of the conspirators and was adding to the outrages that he had sworn to avenge. Nevertheless, he spared himself the telling and the seeing, and sent in one of the centurions to Seneca to announce the final necessity. There is a folkloristic strangeness to the repetitions and redundancies of this narrative.14 Nero’s response to the ambiguous story of Natalis the middleman is to have his own messenger, Gavius Silvanus, attempt to draw Seneca into reprising the exchange with Natalis in a way that will show him to be

14. Rudich (1997), 102 speculates that Tacitus draws on an official “white paper” (cf. Ann. 15.73.1).

24

historical narratives

complicit with Piso or at least nudge him toward suicide. Throughout these episodes, however, Seneca is presented as asserting his autonomy and keeping his distance from both Piso and Nero. In relation to Piso, Seneca repeats the characteristic excuses of health and solitude that Tacitus had attributed to him since his exclusion from Nero’s court. He conspicuously modifies the terms of the utterance Natalis had attributed to him: where Natalis had quoted him as saying “that his own well-being (salutem suam) depended on Piso’s safety (incolumitate)” (§60.3), he himself says “he hadn’t had any reason for valuing the well-being (salutem) of a private individual [that is, of Piso] ahead of his own safety (incolumitati suae)” (§61.1). Seneca’s response not only denies any special favor for Piso, but emphasizes Piso’s status as a privatus homo and reverses the terms salus and incolumitas so that the latter—which may have had a special application to an emperor’s safety in this period—is not applied to Piso.15 However we read Seneca’s politesse, the quick-thinking inversion adds to the strangeness of the repetition between Natalis’ and Silvanus’ visits. Seneca’s mind games are also intensified by his direct appeal to Nero’s knowledge of the “liberty of Seneca,” which serves as a reminder of Seneca’s now-terminated role as Nero’s adviser (exacerbated by the fact that libertas Senecae, with its thirdperson self-reference, may have the tone of a political slogan).16 And Seneca withholds what Nero really appears to be after: signs of a voluntaria mors. The problems of this preliminary episode—problems of communication and of ethics—are centered in the tribune Silvanus. He is a conspirator (as mentioned by Tacitus already at §50.3), and at least one scholar has suggested that he actively sought to portray Seneca to Nero as innocent.17 Certainly it is his divided role as Neronian proxy and conspirator that leads to the embedded episode in which he swerves to consult Faenius Rufus. The information about the path not taken, attributed explicitly to Fabius Rusticus, has the effect of inserting the two minor conspirators into the causal chain leading to Seneca’s death, and gives Tacitus the opportunity for a brief “analytical”18 moral judgment (“Inevitable cowardice was shared by all,” fatali omnium ignavia, §61.3), which applies generally to the whole conspiracy (cf. omnium) but lays blame in particular at the door of Faenius Rufus, who had originally seemed to give the plot its “core strength” (summum robur, §50.3) but will later die in cowardice (§68.1). Yet Silvanus himself is also shown to be cowardly: the proxy delegates his own proxy in the form of the centurion, to serve as Nero’s voice and eyes, and to save Silvanus’ own. Despite the tribune’s evasion, the narrator still presses the paradox that he “was adding to the outrages that he had sworn to avenge.” This paradox, however, will be resolved through a further paradox described by Tacitus some chapters later: that “Gavius Silvanus died by his own 15. 16. 17. 18.

On privati hominis, see Furneaux (1891), 551; on incolumitas, Alexander (1952), 347. See Miller (1973), 114. Koestermann (1968), 299. I borrow this term from Levene (1997).

three descriptions

25

hand even though he had been found free of guilt (quamvis absolutus sua manu cecidit)” (§71.2)—thereby, it would seem, keeping to his oath by taking revenge on himself. As Tacitus situates the scene in space and time, Seneca’s absence from the city—visiting Campania and returning only as far as the fourth milestone— is congruous with the historian’s earlier portrayal of him, after his exclusion by Nero in 62, as “seldom in the city” (rarus per urbem, 14.56.3). Although it is left uncertain whether Seneca’s return to the suburban estate is accidental or intended,19 the phrase ad eum diem (§60.4)—instead of eo die, the more usual way of saying “on that day”—seems to suggest that Seneca was aware of meeting an appointment of sorts. But an appointment with death (that final day), or with the hatching of the conspiracy? The latter fits well with one scholar’s theory that the date of Seneca’s death is in fact the same date on which the conspiracy was set to take place: April 19, the final day of the Cerealia (cf. §53.1).20 The specific time of day when Silvanus makes his first visit (“as evening approached,” propinqua vespera, §60.4) implies that the time of his second visit is well into the evening, and although no further indication of time is given, the protraction of Seneca’s bleeding puts his time of death late at night. The discovery of Seneca banqueting with friends and wife (epulanti suggests festivity) reinforces the impression that he is aware either of the impending success of the conspiracy or of imminent death. Although the two friends have been tentatively identified by scholars—the possibilities include Caesonius Maximus (cf. Sen. Ep. 87.2), Lucilius Junior (addressee of multiple Senecan works), Fabius Rusticus (the possible eyewitness source), and Statius Annaeus (whose presence is mentioned at §64.3)—it is not at all clear that the friends whom Seneca later addresses (§62.1) are meant to be still just two in number. Pompeia Paulina—probably the sister of the Pompeius Paulinus whose career had up till this point flourished under Nero (cf. Ann. 13.53.2, 15.18.3), and the daughter of Pompeius Paulinus, the prefect of the grain supply under Claudius—has usually been understood to be Seneca’s second wife, aged 30 or less.21 The presence of friends and wife will serve in the present narrative as witnesses responding in diverse ways to the news of Seneca’s death sentence, with Paulina playing a conspicuous role. The audience around Nero (“the inner circle of his counsellors,” intimum consiliorum, §61.2) makes his deliberations a parody of official procedure. It also offers implicit reminders about the symptoms and motivating forces of Nero’s cruelty. While Poppaea had displaced Octavia in 62, inciting Nero to divorce her, send her into exile, and have her killed (14.60–64), Tigellinus 19. Scholars have tended to resolve forte an prudens in favor of Seneca’s knowing; cf. R. Fabbri (1978–79), 214–15; Treves (1970), 516–17; Koestermann (1968), 297. 20. Treves (1970), tentatively followed by Griffin (1992), 367. 21. On Paulina’s identity see Mauch (1997), 67 n. 385; Griffin (1992), 84–85, 94; Bourgery (1936). Seneca’s mention of a deceased son at Helv. 2.5 (written in 41 or 42) indicates that he had at least one prior wife.

26

historical narratives

had displaced Seneca himself in that same year, immediately after the death of Burrus: “With Seneca destroyed (perculso Seneca), . . . Tigellinus grew in strength by the day (validiorque in dies Tigellinus) and, thinking that the evil ways that were his sole source of power would be more welcome if he could bind the emperor by complicity with his crimes (si principem societate scelerum obstringeret), he delved into [Nero’s] fears (metus eius rimatur) . . .” (14.57.1).

Seneca’s (and Paulina’s) Response The above-quoted section concluded with the centurion delivering the necessitas ultima to Seneca—a euphemism for compulsory death. He is, however, implicitly granted illud breve mortis arbitrium (“the standard brief freedom to decide about his death,” §60.1), which had been denied to Plautius Lateranus immediately before him. Tacitus next describes the sequence of sub-episodes in which Seneca responds and communicates with the others present: (§62.1) ille interritus poscit testamenti tabulas; ac denegante centurione conversus ad amicos, quando meritis eorum referre gratiam prohiberetur, quod unum iam et tamen pulcherrimum habeat, imaginem vitae suae relinquere testatur, cuius si memores essent, bonarum artium famam tam constantis amicitiae laturos.22 (2) simul lacrimas eorum modo sermone, modo intentior in modum coercentis ad firmitudinem revocat, rogitans ubi praecepta sapientiae, ubi tot per annos meditata ratio adversum imminentia? cui enim ignaram fuisse saevitiam Neronis? neque aliud superesse post matrem fratremque interfectos, quam ut educatoris praeceptorisque necem adiceret. (§63.1) ubi haec atque talia velut in commune disseruit, complectitur uxorem, et paululum adversus praesentem fortitudinem mollitus rogat oratque temperaret dolori aeternum susciperet, sed in contemplatione vitae per virtutem actae desiderium mariti solaciis honestis toleraret. illa contra sibi quoque destinatam mortem adseverat manumque percussoris exposcit. (2) tum Seneca gloriae eius non adversus, simul amore, ne sibi unice dilectam ad iniurias relinqueret, “vitae” inquit “delenimenta monstraveram tibi, tu mortis decus mavis: non invidebo exemplo. sit huius tam fortis exitus constantia penes utrosque par, claritudinis plus in tuo fine.” post quae eodem ictu brachia ferro exsolvunt. (3) Seneca, quoniam senile corpus et parco

22. The insertion of pretium by Nipperdey (compare fructum, Halm and Furneaux; laudem, Ritter) reflects the perceived need for an explicit object for laturos distinct from famam and modified by the genitive constantis amicitiae; see Koestermann (1968), 301–2; Furneaux (1891), 553.

three descriptions victu tenuatum lenta effugia sanguini praebebat, crurum quoque et poplitum venas abrumpit; saevisque cruciatibus defessus, ne dolore suo animum uxoris infringeret atque ipse visendo eius tormenta ad inpatientiam delaberetur, suadet in aliud cubiculum abscedere. et novissimo quoque momento suppeditante eloquentia advocatis scriptoribus pleraque tradidit, quae in vulgus edita eius verbis invertere supersedeo. (§62.1) He, fearless, asked for the tablets of his will. When the centurion refused, he turned to his friends and testified that since he was being kept from recompensing them for their services to him, he was leaving the only thing he still had, and yet the finest: the image of his life. If they kept this in their memories, [he said], their reward for such steadfast friendship would be renown for moral conduct. (2) At the same time, he called their tears back to resoluteness, now conversing with them, now more intently and in a forceful manner, asking them what had happened to their philosophical precepts and their rationality rehearsed for so many years against impending misfortunes. Who, after all, hadn’t known about Nero’s cruelty? Surely after killing his mother and brother, there was nothing left except the murder of his teacher and adviser? (§63.1) When he had set forth these and similar words to all, he embraced his wife. Despite his present courage, he softened a little, asking and beseeching her to temper her grief and not hold onto it forever, but to endure her longing for her husband by noble consolations, contemplating a life conducted through virtue. She, however, was insistent that she too had an appointment with death, and demanded the hand of the executioner. (2) Then Seneca, unopposed to her glory and also moved by love, not wanting to leave his one and only beloved vulnerable to abuse, said: “I had shown you the means of soothing life, but you prefer the honor of death. I won’t stand in the way of your good example. Let us both be equally steadfast in this brave exit, but let there be greater renown in your ending.” After this, they opened their arms with the same stroke of the blade. (3) Since Seneca’s body was losing blood slowly, being old and thin from his frugal diet, he also broke open the veins at his shins and knees. Exhausted by the extreme afflictions of pain, he persuaded his wife to withdraw into another private room, so that he would neither break her spirit with his own suffering nor himself lose his ability to endure from seeing her torment. And his eloquence persisting at each final moment, he summoned scribes and dictated a considerable amount to them, which was published in his words and which I refrain from adapting.

27

28

historical narratives

In this opening to the death scene proper, the description becomes more vivid, presenting the point of view of a firsthand observer.23 The impression of vividness results in part from precise details, such as the centurion’s refusal of access to the will24 or Seneca’s resort to cutting his legs at the ankles and knees, but equally by the withholding of certain details such as the identity of the friends and of the “executioner” (percussoris), whose hand is to wield the blade, or the precise words uttered by Seneca. Tacitus paraphrases Seneca’s verbal interactions (“these and similar words,” haec atque talia, §63.1), using diverse speech terms to describe his demand for his will from the centurion, his transfer of the imago vitae suae (“testified,” testatur—underlining its status as a metaphorical substitute for the “will,” testamentum, §62.1), his alternations between discussion and exhortation, his strings of rhetorical questions (“asking them what had happened to their philosophical precepts”),25 and the rising tricolon with which he ends: “Surely after killing his mother and brother, there was nothing left except the murder of his teacher and adviser?”26 Only his response to Paulina’s death wish is given in direct speech. These oscillations create a chiaroscuro effect that isolates and enhances the details that are mentioned and makes them symbolic (or gestural) rather than documentary. The description is also vivid in its slowing to match the pace of events, moving in quasi-real time from one sub-episode to the next as the Seneca character is shown responding to successive interventions by different parties present (the centurion, his friends, his wife). The simple portrait of Seneca as interritus (“fearless”)—a term used earlier in book 15 to refer to Domitius Corbulo, the paradigmatic Roman soldier (cf. ille interritus, 15.12.1)—amid tearful friends is rendered more complex by the comment that, when he turned to Paulina, “despite his present courage, he softened a little” (paululum adversus praesentem fortitudinem mollitus, §63.1).27 This leads in turn to the equally complex portrait of Paulina, her participation “complicating” and “increasing” the death scene.28 She initially serves as a focus of Seneca’s more tender words of consolation, and Seneca’s initial advice for her, that she should “contemplate his life conducted through virtue” (contemplatione vitae per virtutem actae, §63.1), partly echoes the consolatory ending of the Agricola directed toward the women of the deceased’s household (the only other instance of contemplatio in Tacitus; Agr. 46.1).29 23. Maurach (1990), 507–17 sees here an impressionistic “imago mortis.” 24. On the centurion’s reasons, see Maurach (1990), 510–11. 25. On the speech motifs see Miller (1973), 115. 26. The absence of Octavia from Seneca’s list of victims led Nipperdey to read fratresque (“and his siblings”) for fratremque; cited by Furneaux (1891), 553. See also R. Fabbri (1978–79), 419. 27. An alternative ms. reading, formidinem, yields: “a little softened in view of the terrors which at the moment threatened her”; cf. Furneaux (1891), 553–54. Lipsius (1605) characteristically suggests an emendation that would have adversus praesentem formidinem mollitam, with Paulina, not Seneca, the one softened. 28. Hutchinson (1993), 265–67; quoted from 267. On Paulina’s role see also Reydams-Schils (2005), 171–75; Mauch (1997), 70–74; Plass (1995), 110; Harich (1994), 359. 29. See R. Fabbri (1978–79), 421.

three descriptions

29

But Paulina’s demand for “the hand of the executioner” (§63.1) instantly places her ahead of the friends in resoluteness, and even ahead of Seneca to the extent that she imposes on herself an entirely voluntary death. There are echoes of Epicharis, whose recent clarius exemplum set a standard for the male conspirators (§57.2). Paulina, however, is motivated by marital devotion and, as part of this, her death has the appearance of being long prepared for—if not by a pact, then by her implied status as a stellar student of her husband’s philosophy.30 Within the Annals she more closely echoes such women as Sextia, who was incitamentum mortis et particeps (“a spur to death and a participant in it”) when her husband Mamercus Scaurus committed suicide under Tiberius (6.29.4), and more generally she echoes the legendary gesture of Arria, whose dying words were “Paete, non dolet” (“Paetus, it does not hurt”; Mart. 1.13; cf. Plin. Ep. 3.16.2).31 Seneca, assenting to Paulina’s wish ostensibly out of affection and concern for her,32 also wastes no time in calculating the claritudo she will earn. In telling her that the two of them should be equally “steadfast” in their exit but that she should have “greater renown in [her] ending” (§63.2), he acknowledges precise gradations in the discourse of exemplarity.33 To begin with, when they open their veins together, Paulina’s death appears to be completely synchronized with Seneca’s in an image of marital concordia. The symmetry is soon disrupted by the distinction between the two bodies bleeding at different rates, with Seneca’s body, “old and thin from his frugal diet” (senile . . . et parco victu tenuatum), a conspicuous sign of the difference of age between them (§63.3). As Seneca becomes “exhausted from extreme afflictions of pain” (saevisque cruciatibus defessus)34 and undergoes the separate, slower, and more challenging experience that will delay Tacitus’ own description, the possibility of mutual spectation cannot be sustained, leading to the splitting of the scene into two separate rooms. This conveniently allows Seneca to call for his scribes, suggesting an ultimate incompatibility between the fragile dynamics of the matrimonial death and his ambitions as a philosopher.

Paulina’s Survival, Seneca’s Death The next chapter continues the now separate tales of wife and husband, in successive passages of almost identical length: (§64.1) at Nero nullo in Paulinam proprio odio, ac ne glisceret invidia crudelitatis, inhiberi mortem. hortantibus militibus 30. On Bickel’s theory of a pactum mortis see Mauch (1997), 72 n. 420; but compare Griffin (1992), 371 n. 3. 31. See Veyne (2003), 186 n. 24; Griffin (1992), 371, (1986), 200; Musurillo (1979), 242 n. 1. 32. Tacitus’ language is marked: e.g., unice is a Tacitean hapax; cf. R. Fabbri (1978–79), 421. 33. See the analysis of Habinek (2000), 273: “Paulina’s glory would seem to derive from a freely chosen suicide, the heightened distinction from the rarity of such an act.” 34. The “afflictions” are explained as convulsions due to blood loss by Furneaux (1891), 554; but Miller (1973), 116 suggests that they are due to pain from the cuts.

30

historical narratives servi libertique obligant brachia, premunt sanguinem, incertum an ignarae. (2) nam, ut est vulgus ad deteriora promptum, non defuere qui crederent, donec inplacabilem Neronem timuerit, famam sociatae cum marito mortis petivisse, deinde oblata mitiore spe blandimentis vitae evictam; cui addidit paucos postea annos, laudabili in maritum memoria et ore ac membris in eum pallorem albentibus, ut ostentui esset multum vitalis spiritus egestum. (3) Seneca interim, durante tractu et lentitudine mortis, Statium Annaeum, diu sibi amicitiae fide et arte medicina probatum, orat provisum pridem venenum, quo nati publico Atheniensium iudicio exstinguerentur, promeret; adlatumque hausit frustra, frigidus iam artus et cluso corpore adversum vim veneni. (4) postremo stagnum calidae aquae introiit, respergens proximos servorum addita voce libare se liquorem illum Iovi liberatori. exim balneo inlatus et vapore eius exanimatus, sine ullo funeris sollemni crematur. ita codicillis praescripserat, cum etiam tum praedives et praepotens supremis suis consuleret. (§64.1) But Nero had no personal animosity toward Paulina, and to avoid inflating the outrage over his cruelty, he ordered her death to be interrupted. With the soldiers urging them on, her slaves and freedmen bound up her arms and constricted the flow of blood. Whether they did so without her knowledge is uncertain. (2) Since the mob is ready to assume what is more disreputable, there were those who believed that for as long as she feared that Nero was implacable she had sought the fame of sharing death with her husband, but that after she was given reason to hope for a milder outcome, she was won over by the enticements of life. To her life she added a few further years, earning praise for her fidelity to her husband’s memory and with face and limbs blanched to a pallor that showed that much of her vital spirit had drained out. (3) Seneca meanwhile, the length and slowness of his death being protracted, requested Statius Annaeus, long trusted as a friend and tried and tested in medical skill, to produce the poison which he had long ago prepared, used [he said] for executing those condemned by the Athenians in public trial. When it was brought to him he drained it without result: his limbs were cold and his body was cut off from the effect of the poison. (4) Finally he entered a pool of hot water. Sprinkling the nearest of his slaves, he explained that he was giving the water as a libation to Jupiter the Liberator. Then being carried into a [steam] bath and choked by its steam, he was cremated without any funeral ceremony. This was as he had stipulated in his will, when he was giving thought to his last rites even while still supremely wealthy and powerful.

three descriptions

31

Tacitus’ remarkable insertion of Paulina’s afterlife into the middle of Seneca’s own death scene—since he next resumes with “Meanwhile, Seneca . . .” (Seneca interim, §64.3)—helps also to signal the sense in which Paulina’s surviving image, the pallor of her face and limbs, is a monument on which the continuing recollection of Seneca’s death is to be inscribed.35 But the digression on Paulina’s revival is complicated. Nero makes a surprising reappearance, with an act of clemency that is ironic given that Seneca had once sought to teach him this virtue36 and he recently had his own wife Octavia put to death. The plausibility of Nero’s intervening so decisively from a distance of four miles is questionable: a return journey by messengers would surely have taken an hour at the very least. The soldiers play an encouraging role: whether or not they have orders, they soon act.37 The mention of both soldiers and household staff (servi libertique) also gives explicit presence to a larger ensemble than has previously been mentioned by Tacitus (though Seneca already has his scribes)—an audience that greets the change of plan. The digression, moreover, offers a broad vista on Paulina’s survival and its perception in popular tradition. Tacitus’ position is that “whether they [revived her] without her knowledge is uncertain” (incertum an ignarae),38 and he rejects the contention of the “mob” (vulgus) that she knew, and that she desired it (§64.2). But he lingers over the rumor long enough for us to glimpse an ironic parallel between the blandimenta vitae to which Paulina supposedly succumbs (§64.2) and the delenimenta vitae with which Seneca had sought to persuade her to console her widowhood (§63.2). Indeed, Tacitus’ mention of the rumor must infuse some ambiguity into our reading of his following statements about Paulina’s afterlife, in which the pallor of her face and limbs serves to “show” (ostentui)39 her loss of “much of her vital spirit” (multum vitalis spiritus) and her “fidelity to her husband’s memory” (in maritum memoria, §64.2), whereas some might also read her face as connoting her own possible lack of resolve and her indebtedness to Nero’s reprieve.40 On the negative reading, Paulina recalls such figures as Plancina, the wife of Cn. Calpurnius Piso, who, “so long as there was some measure of hope for Piso, promised . . ., if the need should arise, to be his companion in death (comitem exitii),” but after receiving a pardon “began bit by bit to distance herself from her husband” (paulatim segregari a marito, Ann. 3.15.1).41 But in more positive terms, Paulina is comparable to another widow 35. On the insertion see Hutchinson (1993), 266 n. 18. An insightful negative reading, with Paulina as “living corpse” and Nero as deus ex machina, is offered by Erasmo (2008), 27. 36. See Plass (1995), 110. 37. R. Fabbri (1978–79), 422 suggests a spontaneous intervention by the soldiers, or that Paulina was saved by an embolism. 38. Furneaux (1891) translates: “when she was perhaps unconscious” (555). 39. An “ostentatious” aspect in the present context is suggested by Miller (1973), 117; Furneaux (1891), 555 compares an evocative application of the term to corpses at Ann. 1.29.4: corpora extra vallum abiecta ostentui. 40. Habinek (2000), 273 stresses the relatively slight prestige granted Paulina even by Tacitus’ phrase laudabili in maritum memoria (15.64.2). 41. I thank Cynthia Damon for the Plancina comparison.

32

historical narratives

of the Annaean household from the same period: Polla, the wife of Lucan, of whom Statius says, “She both cultivates and frequently honors the man himself, deeply embedded as he is in her innermost marrow” (ipsum . . . colit et frequentat ipsum / imis altius insitum medullis, Silv. 2.7.126–27). Paulina’s own brush with death and its tangible signs on her body make her more specifically a persisting reminder of the death scene itself; her pallid face is described by Roland Barthes as “the very sign of a communication with the void” (1972, 102). She resembles the wife in a Controversia recorded by Seneca the Elder: hearing of her husband’s death and making good on their death pact by jumping off a cliff, the wife by chance survives her fall and yet is celebrated for joining the ranks of women who die with or for their husbands: “O you happy wife, to be numbered among these women, though you still live” (o te felicem, uxor! inter has viva numeraris, Contr. 2.2.1). In Tacitus, however, “overliving” characters hover somewhere between vindicating the deceased and embodying a survivor’s guilt.42 The digression makes for a jarring return to Seneca’s slow death with Seneca interim (§64.3). In Tacitus’ portrayal of these end stages, however, as Seneca has recourse to poison, hot water, and steam, the appearance of clumsy desperation is balanced by elements of foresight, ritual process, and rhetorical composure.43 The bleeding process is measured out in language conveying tardiness (“the length and slowness of his death being protracted,” durante tractu et lentitudine mortis),44 and an equally poeticized description of the body’s resistance to dying (for example, adlatumque hausit frustra, frigidus iam artus et cluso corpore adversum vim veneni, §64.3). But the hemlock is “long ago prepared” (provisum pridem), and the grandeur it acquires through its Athenian associations (though Tacitus leaves it for the reader to make the connection with Socrates) is not undermined by the poison’s failure to circulate through Seneca’s body.45 This failure, in turn, is remedied by immersion in the pool of hot water (implicitly to speed circulation, whether to aid bleeding or the effect of the poison) followed by entry into the steam bath (to induce fainting or choking). Seneca’s redoubled efforts to die also entail a widening of the circle of characters involved in conveying him to death: it becomes a domestic team effort. Statius Annaeus is otherwise unknown, but his cognomen (likely indicating that he is a freedman of Seneca)46 marks him as not just a friend, 42. E.g., Agr. 3.2: non modo aliorum sed etiam nostri superstites sumus. On “overliving” see E. R. Wilson (2004), esp. 89. 43. See Edwards (2007), 111; Hutchinson (1993), 267–68. 44. Hutchinson (1993), 267 emphasizes the sluggishness of this (entirely nominal) phrase. Note also that (inter)ı̄m dūrāntē trāct(u) ēt lēntı̌tūdı̌ně mōrtı̄s is a tortured near hexameter (reading the final syllable of durante as long by position, and forcing the second syllable of lentitudine). 45. Hutchinson (1993) notes that a mention of Socrates by name here “would be alien to [Tacitus’] ethos” (264). The subjunctive in quo . . . exstinguerentur “indicat[es] that Seneca’s own words are being imagined as quoted,” observes Woodman (2004), 336 n. 90. 46. See Furneaux (1891), 556. His status as a doctor also suggests low status and/or Greek origin; cf. Miller (1973), 117.

three descriptions

33

but a surrogate. The slaves who accompany Seneca when he enters the hot pool lend physical labor and are sprinkled with his makeshift libation of water, presumably mixed with blood, accompanied by the explanation “that he was giving the water as a libation to Jupiter the Liberator” (libare se liquorem illum Iovi liberatori, §64.4)—note the quasi-ritual alliteration. Later in Tacitus’ narrative, the libation to Jupiter Liberator will be repeated by the dying Thrasea Paetus (16.35.1). Tacitus’ anticlimactic portrayal of the death (given in a participle: exanimatus), and of the cremation without funeral, might seem to convey the dissolution of Seneca’s agency. But the historian counteracts this impression by explaining that the lack of a funeral was itself a product of foresight (he had realized, after all, that after Britannicus and Agrippina he might be next)—something Seneca had “stipulated” ahead of time (praescripserat) even while super-wealthy (praedives) and super-powerful (praepotens). This explanation places the death within the teleological structure of a life spent anticipating death, and is the closest that Tacitus comes to giving Seneca a consummatio totius vitae.

The Rumor of a Senecan Conspiracy Having narrated Seneca’s death, however, Tacitus appends some further information about a planned second conspiracy involving Seneca: (§65) fama fuit Subrium Flavum cum centurionibus occulto consilio, neque tamen ignorante Seneca, destinavisse, ut post occisum opera Pisonis Neronem Piso quoque interficeretur tradereturque imperium Senecae, quasi insonti et claritudine virtutum ad summum fastigium delecto. quin et verba Flavi vulgabantur, non referre dedecori, si citharoedus demoveretur et tragoedus succederet (quia ut Nero cithara, ita Piso tragico ornatu canebat). (§65) There was a rumor that Subrius Flavus had secretly planned together with the centurions, but not without Seneca’s knowledge, that after the slaying of Nero by Piso’s handiwork Piso also should be killed and power given to Seneca, on the reasoning that he was without blame and that his renown for his virtues made him a welcome choice for the highest power. Flavus was even quoted as saying that there was no difference in the disgrace if the citharasinger should be ousted and the tragedy-singer take his place (for just as Nero used to sing to the cithara, Piso did so in tragic costume). Tacitus here sketches some public perceptions of Seneca around the time of his death. Even if the suggestion that Seneca knew about the plan to kill Piso is somewhat incriminating, Subrius and his accomplices are shown as confident that Seneca would have been perceived as suitable for the position of

34

historical narratives

emperor on account of his being “without blame” (insonti) and having “renown for his virtues” (claritudine virtutum). But Seneca’s suitability is also established negatively here through contrast with the perceived unsuitability of both Nero and Piso; their satirization as musical performers, respectively citharoedus and tragoedus, not only yields the unsettling image of the Pisonian revolution as a progression (or decline) from lyric to tragedy, but also helps to cast Seneca as the only one of the three who possesses authenticity and moral authority.47 Tacitus’ placement of this passage here helps to portray Seneca’s death as symbolizing the loss of the superior political revolution that might have been.

Suetonius In the briefest of the three versions, Suetonius mentions Seneca’s death in the course of his Nero biography in the De vita Caesarum, written (most probably) soon after Tacitus’ Annals, in the early 120s.48 It is one of three anecdotes about Seneca that arise in the course of the Nero:49 earlier, Suetonius reports that Nero was adopted by Claudius and entrusted “for teaching” (in disciplinam) to Seneca the senator, whereupon Seneca supposedly dreamt that he was teaching Caligula (Ner. 7.1); and later, Suetonius mentions that Nero was diverted from philosophy by Agrippina, and from older orators by Seneca, who wanted to monopolize Nero’s admiration (52). Suetonius narrates the death (or, more accurately, categorizes it) as one item among many in a catalogue of Nero’s parricidia et caedes, his killings of family members and of others more generally (33.1–38). This catalogue is presented in accordance with Suetonius’ analytic arrangement throughout the biographies. He has been listing various types of kin who were Nero’s victims, proceeding from stepfather (Claudius) to stepbrother (Britannicus), mother (Agrippina), aunt (Domitia), wives (Octavia, Poppaea), stepsister (Antonia), a young man whom he had defiled (Aulus Plautius), stepson (Rufrius Crispinus), and nurse’s son (Tuscus), until he comes to “Seneca his adviser” (Senecam praeceptorem, Ner. 35.5). Seneca will be followed by the praetorian prefect Burrus and by wealthy older freedmen, and then a series of other groups: persons outside Nero’s household such as supposed conspirators (exteros; coniurati, 36.1–2), then “anyone for any reason that pleased him, indiscriminately” (quoscumque libuisset quacumque de causa, 37.1), and finally the people and the city of Rome itself (populo; moenibus patriae, 38.1).

47. On the negative resonances of citharoedus and tragoedus see Miller (1973), 118. Subrius is closely associated with criticisms of Nero as actor (cf. Ann. 15.50.4, 67.2). 48. For commentary on the Nero see Warmington (1977); Trillitzsch (1971), 1.98–104. 49. Outside of the Nero, Seneca is mentioned as the victim of Caligula’s stylistic criticisms (Calig. 53.2) and is identified (unless Seneca refers to Seneca the Elder) as a source of information concerning Tiberius’ death (Tib. 73.2). Suetonius presumably dealt more extensively with Seneca’s life (and death) in the lost De viris illustribus, usually assumed to be the source for Jerome.

three descriptions

35

Here is Suetonius’ report on Seneca: (35.5) Senecam praeceptorem ad necem compulit, quamvis saepe commeatum petenti bonisque cedenti persancte iurasset suspectum se frustra periturumque potius quam nociturum ei. (35.5) He forced his adviser Seneca to death, even though he had solemnly sworn, when Seneca repeatedly asked for a leave of absence and was yielding his wealth to him, that his suspicions of him were misguided and that he would sooner die than do him any harm. Even in its compressed form, this version gives its own distinct coloring to Seneca’s death. The analytical list to which it belongs does not entirely lack a chronological dimension, to the extent that Seneca’s death arrives after the murders of Nero’s main kin have been mentioned in chronological order (Claudius in 54, Britannicus in 55, Agrippina in 59, and Octavia in 62). But the emphasis is on the various nonchronological classifications, with Seneca arriving, for example, before Burrus (who had died earlier, in 62) and also before the Great Fire of Rome (in 64). Two principles of the list are simultaneously at work: decreasing degrees of kinship to Nero and a general intensification in the number of victims and in the indiscriminacy of the motives. Note that the killing of Seneca is here detached from association with the Pisonian conspiracy, which Suetonius mentions under the separate category of exteri, those outside Nero’s household (Ner. 36.1). Instead, it is portrayed as the conclusion of Seneca and Nero’s quasi-familial, advisorial relationship. The event itself is introduced without specific details on the method of killing, although the phrase ad necem compulit (which appears, incidentally, to include a gentle wordplay on Senecam) indicates that the death was a forced suicide. Suetonius juxtaposes the event with a flashback to earlier encounters between Seneca and Nero centering on a repeated oath. The oath is given here in solemn spondaic language, pērsānctē iūrāssēt sūspēctūm sē frūstrā—which gives the killing a strongly transgressive aspect. Indeed, its content ironically prefigures Nero’s death by suicide (described at Ner. 49), as if in killing Seneca he has cursed himself to the self-harm that formed part of the terms on which he had sworn.

Cassius Dio The Neronian years of Dio’s Roman History (begun in 202 and written over the next two to three decades) now survive mostly in the form passed on by epitomators of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Like Tacitus and Suetonius, Dio tells only a sporadic story about Seneca, though this story includes two

36

historical narratives

critical episodes from the reigns of Caligula and Claudius that are not extant in Tacitus. Dio’s Senecan episodes can be sketched as follows: (in Dio’s unepitomated books) in 39, after hearing a senatorial speech by the talented Seneca, Caligula nearly puts him to death but is told that he is sick and can be expected to die anyway (59.19.7–8); in 41, Seneca is exiled by Messalina and Claudius on the charge of adultery with Julia Livilla (also banished) (60.8.5); (in the epitomated books) in 49, he is entrusted by Agrippina with Nero’s education (60.32.3); in the account of the year 54, he is mentioned as the author of the work on Claudius titled Apocolocyntosis (our only source for this title, 60.35.2–3); he is the composer of Nero’s early speeches to soldiers and Senate (61.3.1); along with Burrus, he initially succeeds in resisting Agrippina and Paris, intercepts Agrippina at the tribunal, and takes hold of the reigns of government, but indulges Nero with ill effect, especially after Nero is persuaded to throw off his advisers (61.3.3–5.1); in 55, after the murder of Britannicus, he (along with Burrus) resorts to sheer survival tactics (61.7.5); in 58, he is accused of hypocrisy, including intimacy with Agrippina and being teacher of a tyrant and having sexual relations with mature males, among other things, but eludes being formally accused (61.10.1–6); in 59, he incites Nero to conspire against Agrippina (62.12.1); he is reported to have told Nero, “You cannot kill your successor” (62.18.3); along with Burrus, at Nero’s performance in the theater, he prompts Nero and signals for the audience to applaud (62.20.3); and in 61, he is mentioned as partial cause for the uprising in Britain, having loaned the Britons forty million sesterces on extortionate terms (62.2.1). The immediate context of the death narrative (62.25.1–3) is Dio’s account of the year 65, which in the (sometimes jumbled) epitomated text is in somewhat loose chronological order.50 In the chapter preceding Seneca’s death Dio has described the plan by Seneca, Faenius Rufus, and other prominent men (Piso is not named) to kill Nero in order to free themselves, and free Nero himself, from Nero’s outrages (§24.1). The plot, however, is discovered, and multiple suspects are put to death (§24.4). Turning to these deaths, Dio (or his epitomator, Xiphilinus) writes:51 (§25.1) peq≠ lçm ot῏m sx ῀m kkxm sx ῀ m pokxkæsxm pokÀ ìqcom eÆpeπm· ¡ dç dó Remåja| òhåkgre lçm ja≠ sóm ctmaπja Patkπmam pojseπmai, kåcxm pepeijåmai aÃsóm so‹ se hamsot jasafiqomrai ja≠ s| rÀm aÃs{ ῀ lesakkac| épihtlrai, ja≠ ìrvare ja≠ s| éje¨mg| fikåba|, (2) dtrhamasñra| dç dó ja≠ pqø| søm √kehqom Õpø sx ῀m rsqasixsx ῀m épeivhe≠| pqoapgkkcg aÃs|, ja≠ olsx| ô Patkπma peqiecåmeso. 50. For discussions of Dio’s death narrative see Griffin (1992), 369–72; Trillitzsch (1971), 1.107–19; Marchesi (1944), 170–87 passim. On Dio’s career and writings, see Millar (1964). 51. Caution in using the epitomated passages is counseled by Champlin (2003), 37–38. But as Millar (1964) notes, the epitomator tends to give “not so much a précis of Dio as a rather erratic selection from his material, . . . often keeping very close to Dio’s wording” (2).

three descriptions

37

(§25.1) It would be a lengthy task to tell of the others who perished. Seneca, however, wished to kill his wife Paulina as well, saying that he had persuaded her to scorn death and to desire departure with him. And he opened her veins also. (2) But his death turned out to be difficult and he was assisted toward death by the soldiers and died before her, with the result that Paulina survived. In keeping with his general hostility to Seneca, Dio (or Xiphilinus) includes Seneca’s death only because of its seemingly most perverse element. Although the Seneca character is presented as “saying” (kåcxm)—presumably to an audience of some kind—that “he had persuaded” (pepeijåmai) Paulina to wish to die with him, it is exposed by the narrator as a form of duress, in which there is no ambiguity in the agency: “Seneca . . . wished to kill his wife Paulina as well” (òhåkgre lçm ja≠ sóm ctmaπja Patkπmam pojseπmai); and “he opened her veins also” (ìrvare ja≠ s| éje¨mg| fikåba|).52 Gretchen Reydams-Schils has suggested that Dio’s account exposes Paulina’s case as one in which “the distinction between freedom and social pressure becomes blurred” (2005, 174)—a concern that might also be raised retrospectively for the seemingly less forceful scene described by Tacitus. Even the idea that Paulina had been successfully “persuaded” has a strongly negative aspect in Dio’s narrative, given that he had earlier criticized both Seneca’s hypocritical pedagogy and his homosexual infidelity toward his new wife of distinguished family, that is, Paulina (cf. 61.10.3). In Dio’s account the specifics of Seneca’s own suicide are left implicit: the historian says only, for example, that “he opened her veins also,” without describing Seneca’s vein opening directly. The slowness of Seneca’s death is compressed into a single word with unflattering connotations, dtrhamasñra| (“his death turned out to be difficult”),53 and the intervention of the soldiers turns a suicide into an execution combined with mercy killing. In this version, then, the salvation of Paulina is facilitated by the fact that Seneca “died before her” (pqoapgkkcg aÃs|); the soldiers are here implied to intervene in Paulina’s fate just by their dispatching of Seneca. Dio elaborates on the death scene by focusing on one final act of Seneca and the more general context of his relationship with Nero: (§25.2) oà låmsoi pqæseqom èatso‹ úwaso pq≠m sæ se bibk¨om ƒ rtmåcqafiem épamoqhx ῏kka (éded¨ei cq ló ja≠ é| søm Måqxma ékhæmsa fihaqͺ ) ῀rai ja≠ sa paqajasahårhai sir¨m. (3) ja≠ ¡ lçm olsx| éseke sgre, ja¨peq sñm se rtmotr¨am sóm pqø| aÃsøm „| ja≠ rhemx ῀ ῀m pqoeilåmo|, ja≠ pãram aÃsH 52. Two significant details here are different in other readings from the mss.: “he had made Paulina wish to die” (pepoigjåmai in V, for pepeijåmai in C) and “he split her veins” (ìrvire in VC, for ìrvare in Bk). Alain Gowing suggests to me that the appearance of duress may be an artifact of minor but consequential changes made by Xiphilinus. 53. Marchesi (1944), 183 n. 42 reads the term as implying a fear of dying.

38

historical narratives sóm oÃr¨am ép≠ sͺ sx ῀m oÆjodolotlåmxm pqofirei jevaqirlåmo|, ja≠ oØ dekuo≠ lrseqom épap›komso. (§25.2) But he did not lay hands on himself before amending the book he had been writing and depositing the rest with certain persons (since he feared that they might come into Nero’s hands and be destroyed). (3) This, then, is how he died, despite having given up contact with him on the grounds of ill health and having given him all his wealth ostensibly for his buildings. His brothers later perished in addition.

The disruption of temporal sequence here, in which Dio twice follows a statement of Seneca’s death with reference to the time prior to it (“But he did not lay hands on himself before revising . . . ,” oà låmsoi pqæseqom èatso‹ úwaso pq≠m . . . épamoqhx ῀rai; “This, then, is how he died, despite having given up . . . ,” ja≠ ¡ lçm olsx| éseke sgre, ja¨peq . . . pqoeilåmo|) is similar to the “interim” moment in Tacitus’ version (Ann. 15.64.3) in its undoing of an apparent closure. Dio’s added description of Seneca’s earlier attempts to give up contact with Nero and to lavish his wealth on him (marked by a wordplay emphasizing exhaustiveness: sñm se rtmotr¨am . . . ja≠ pãram . . . sóm oÃr¨am, “all contact with him . . . and all his wealth”) adds a note of urgent desperation to the portrayal, especially because there had been no earlier mention of these measures by Dio, at least in the extant narrative. Dio’s analepsis portrays Seneca as willing to contribute to Nero’s rebuilding program after the Great Fire (a difference from Tacitus, who mentions Seneca’s reluctance to be associated with this, because Nero had been despoiling temples to pay for it, Ann. 15.45.1–3) and uses a final flashback to show Seneca desperately seeking to avert death. The final, premature mention of Seneca’s brothers’ deaths (compare Tac. Ann. 15.73.3; 16.17) hints strongly at Seneca’s direct and negative impact on the lives of others in addition to Paulina. In Dio’s account of Seneca’s hurried authorial activities, some elements seen in Tacitus’ version are absent, such as the dictation to scribes. But there are also some details not found elsewhere. Because the book that Seneca is here represented as amending prior to his death appears to have been begun previously (cf. “which he was writing,” ƒ rtmåcqafiem, §25.2), it may be understood to be distinct from the posthumous published work mentioned by Tacitus (Ann. 15.63.3), or Dio may be understood here to elucidate the nature of that work, which Tacitus appears to present as if it were dictated entirely during the death scene.54 Seneca’s act of depositing “the rest” (sa ῏kka) of his books with 54. See Trillitzsch (1971), 1.117. But Griffin (1992), 370 observes: “Dio probably alludes, however inaccurately, to these same [dictated] words [mentioned by Tacitus] when he says that Seneca took time to revise a bibk¨om he was writing and, by adding that he entrusted others to his friends, Dio implies that the last words were similar to Seneca’s other books, hence philosophical.”

three descriptions

39

“certain persons” (sir¨m, §25.2) is a form of transferral with no corresponding term in Tacitus’ account, except perhaps the giving of the imago vitae suae. The act is motivated by specific concerns about the material survival of his writings, and as such it portrays Seneca as an author anxiously seeking to protect his own literary transmission. The implied audience who attend (“certain persons,” sir¨m) are not the recipients of consolatory discourse or exhortations to virtue, but must witness a botched showcasing of philosophical pedagogy in the bleeding body of Paulina and themselves serve as the repositories for Seneca’s written works.

Toward Further Contexts Each version, then, establishes its own set of conditions and constraints for the interpretation of Seneca’s death. These result from the authors’ own exercises in narrative technique dominated by specific discursive modes: vivid description (Tacitus), analytic catalogue (Suetonius), and polemical anecdote (Dio)—though such labels oversimplify. Each of these versions has had its own interpretive career, offering a frame, as well as sets of thematic concerns, around which new versions have been organized in the long tradition of refiguration. But our analysis of both the context and the content of these versions with regard to Roman antiquity has scarcely begun: we must now consider how they functioned within their authors’ broader historiographic projects.

This page intentionally left blank

2 Neronian Exits: Writing Death into History

Let us now consider Seneca’s death as part of a story of broader scope— in fact, as part of three stories. The first story is the arc of Seneca’s life and career as it is sketched in Tacitus and Dio. The second is the more self-consciously literary story of how Tacitus adapts existing models of death writing. The third and most precise story is the catalogue of executions and suicides in books 15 and 16 of the Annals. Seneca’s death plays an equally prominent role in each of these stories; taken together they illustrate his symbolic proportions as a subject of Julio-Claudian history, and as a focus in historians’ reflections on their craft. Anyone who reads the Annals and arrives at Seneca’s death is likely to recognize familiar motifs from the historian’s growing repertoire. Take, for example, Tacitus’ accounts of the deaths of Nero’s major family members: Britannicus, surprised while banqueting (Ann. 13.16.1), Agrippina, killed on the second try, her villa surrounded (14.8.2), and Octavia, her veins opened, finished off in a steam bath (14.64.2).1 Even fleeting resemblances to these in Seneca’s death may leave the reader with the feeling that assimilative processes are at work both in the reproduction of death upon death in the Julio-Claudian universe and in the cataloguing of deaths in the Tacitean text. Tacitus offers the reader a useful perspective on the above pattern when he has the dying Seneca say to his friends: “Who, after all, hadn’t known about Nero’s cruelty? Surely after killing his mother and brother, there was nothing left except the murder of his teacher and 1. The mention of the bath in Octavia’s case seemed so implausible to Questa (1960a), 209 that he suggested that the historian retrospectively modeled it on Seneca’s death.

42

historical narratives

adviser?” (15.62.2). Although Seneca here is heard rationalizing that his death is the inevitable sequel to Nero’s spiral of parricide, there is more than one way to understand this inevitability. On the one hand, it seems, there was nothing Seneca or anyone else could do to prevent it. This is an impression that Tacitus occasionally allows, although a scholiast to Juvenal gives a more conspicuous version of it in reporting that Seneca, at the outset, “quickly discerned that [Nero] had been born cruel and monstrous (saevum immanemque natum . . . sensit cito), and he tamed him, though repeatedly saying to his friends that inevitably that cruel lion’s innate cruelty would return (ingenita redeat saevitia) as soon as he had a single taste of human blood” (schol. ad Juv. 5.109). On the other hand, we may also have the sense that in referring to himself conspicuously as “teacher and adviser” (educatoris praeceptorisque) the Tacitean Seneca exposes his own associations with the regime and his responsibility for the lessons Nero had and hadn’t learned. Tacitus himself, although he does not call Seneca stqammodidrjako| (“tyrant teacher”) as Dio does (61.10.2), had earlier given the reader every opportunity to surmise that Seneca profited financially from the death of Britannicus (Ann. 13.18.1),2 and to learn that Seneca was recognized as having written Nero’s scandalous letter to the Senate justifying Agrippina’s death (14.11.3). In other words, it is easy for the reader of Tacitus to understand the dying Seneca’s rhetorical question, “Surely after killing his mother and brother, there was nothing left except the murder of his teacher and adviser?” as infused with guilty self-recognition.3 By presenting this self-perception in the dying Seneca, Tacitus gets to tell a deeper and darker story about the patterns of Neronian killing: in this case, that the victims of violence were themselves often ironically complicit in the larger series of violent acts from which their own suffering derived. But this is only one of a whole repertoire of stories to which Seneca’s death scene has something to contribute.

Telling the Seneca Story The passage from the scholia to Juvenal quoted above, tentatively dated to the fourth century, is one of the only texts surviving from antiquity that resembles a continuous biographic sketch of Seneca.4 Commenting on a line in which Juvenal mentions Seneca’s liberality as a patron, the scholiast writes (ad 5.109): 2. See Martin (1981), 165. 3. This reading may be supported by the Tacitean Seneca’s exclusion of Octavia from the pattern (cf. matrem fratremque, 15.62.2): hers was the only death of the three that Seneca had not been in a position to prevent or been required to try to justify, because it came in late 62 after his removal (pace the Octavia, where Seneca seeks to prevent Octavia’s banishment). Octavia’s fate would thus have made a less ironic comparison for his own death. See also R. Fabbri (1978–79), 419. 4. Also explicitly biographic (and possibly deriving from the Seneca biography in Suetonius’ lost De viris illustribus) is Jerome’s De viris illustribus §12, which would become known as the Vita Senecae.

writing death into history

43

hic . . . sub Claudio quasi conscius adulteriorum Iuliae, Germanici filiae, in Corsicam relegatus post triennium revocatus est. qui etsi magno desiderio Athenas intenderet, ab Agrippina tamen erudiendo Neroni in Palatium adductus saevum immanemque natum et sensit cito et mitigavit, inter familiares solitus dicere non fore saevo illi leoni quin gustato semel hominis cruore ingenita redeat saevitia. This man . . . after being banished to Corsica under Claudius as guilty of adultery with Julia, the daughter of Germanicus, was recalled after a three-year period.5 Although he longed greatly to go to Athens, he was, however, introduced to the imperial palace by Agrippina for the purpose of educating Nero. He quickly discerned that Nero had been born cruel and monstrous, and he tamed him, though repeatedly saying to his friends that there was no way that cruel lion’s innate cruelty would not return as soon as he had his first taste of human blood. In the 1486 Venice edition of this text by Giorgio Valla, there follows a compressed version of Tacitus’ Annals 15.61–64, which may perhaps have been part of the original scholion (the manuscript used by Valla is now lost), though it is more likely to be an addition by Valla himself.6 With or without the death narrative, this text is obviously not a biography in any real sense, and it is silent on Seneca’s writings. But even in its meager attempt to put together a biographic cursus, referring, for example, to Seneca’s thwarted ambition to visit Athens (for philosophical study?), the text is a striking illustration of what we do not find in the works of Tacitus or Dio. What, then, do we find there?

Julio-Claudian Gestures In the Annals and the Roman History, the death of Seneca is the last in a series of passing mentions in the year-by-year narrative of the Julio-Claudian dynasty.7 (For a survey of these mentions see above, pp. 20, 36.) Although Tacitus and Dio both seem interested in Seneca as a recognizable personality, virtually all of their anecdotes about him illustrate something about the imperial court in general, and how specific types of people function, survive, and decline within it. Both authors tend to disregard coherent biographic portraits in favor of “trans-regnal” features that are relevant to the Principate as a

5. On this apparently erroneous period of time see Trillitzsch (1971), 1.104. 6. For the text see Wessner (1931), 73, 252–53, and discussion by Bartalucci (1973), 340–41. 7. My approach below is in tune with the comment by Leach (1989) that “[Seneca’s] historical personality may appear less as a monolithic structure of fixed attributes than as a series of interactive responses to personas and circumstances” (199). For relatively “coherent” (but subtly shaded) readings of Tacitus’ presentation of Seneca, see D’Anna (2003), 193–95; Schönegg (1999), 19, 25; Dyson (1970). For “incoherent” readings emphasizing the absence of any analytical passages, see Treves (1970), 521–22; Paratore (1962), 456–68; Alexander (1952).

44

historical narratives

system of recurring scenarios.8 Neither author abandons a distinctive sense of Seneca as a unique individual, but what makes him interesting is the unusually broad variety of paradigmatic motifs or gestures that arise in the episodes of his life (and death).9 These, in turn, cohere with the perception of Seneca (emphasized in recent scholarship) as the first Roman observer to recognize, and to conspicuously exploit, the nature of the Augustan Principate as an irreversibly monarchic structure and as an institution founded on dissimulation.10 The recurring motifs and gestures, I suggest, can be assigned to three main categories: 1. The historians frequently use the insider-outsider Seneca to highlight tensions around the court as a social space.11 The charge of adultery with Julia Livilla by which Messalina secured Seneca’s banishment in 42 (cf. Dio 60.8.5) was recollected by later detractors such as P. Suillius Rufus in 58, whom Tacitus shows asserting that Seneca’s excessive intimacy had met with a iustissimum exilium (Ann. 13.42.2). But Dio, himself taking up the voice of the detractor, portrays a recidivist pattern: “It was not enough for [Seneca] to have committed adultery with Julia, nor did he improve from his exile, but he became close (épkgr¨afem) with Agrippina” (61.10.1).12 Although Dio reports that Seneca escaped punishment, he adds that “later he did not get away so lightly” (Œrseqom dç oà jakx ~| pñkkanem, 61.10.6)—a comment that establishes Seneca’s death as the outer and concluding limit in the cycle of centripetal and centrifugal movements in relation to the court. A separate spatial motif is the recalling of Seneca, which Tacitus describes both on the occasion of the recall by Agrippina in 49, “judging that it would be a cause for public celebration on account of the renown of his studies (ob claritudinem studiorum eius)” (Ann. 12.8.2), and—in strikingly similar terms— in the rumored plan in 65 to kill Piso after the conspiracy and bring Seneca back to be emperor, “on the reasoning that he was without blame and that his renown for his virtues (claritudine virtutum) made him a welcome choice for the highest power” (15.65). Here claritudo denotes the independently generated legitimacy that Seneca was supposedly able to confer on an imperial regime,13 though his death marks the removal of this legitimating potential once and for all.

8. For “trans-regnal” features and limited “biostructuring” in Dio’s Imperial books, see Pelling (1997). 9. The exemplary potential of Seneca’s career is discussed by Habinek (2000), who observes that its episodes “contain within them an implicit analysis of the paths to power in the Roman world” (281). On the exemplary function of Seneca (and Thrasea Paetus) in the Annals see Turpin (2008), esp. 378–92. 10. See Gowing (2005), 69; Haynes (2003), 3. On the theme of Seneca and dissimulation see Rudich (1997), 17–106. 11. On the notion of a Julio-Claudian “court” see Wallace-Hadrill (1996). For other aspects of Seneca as insider-outsider see Ker (2009). 12. An adulterous relationship with Agrippina is explored by Giancotti (1953). 13. On this legitimizing function of Seneca’s renown, see Habinek (2000), 280.

writing death into history

45

Alongside the motifs of intimacy, banishment, and recall, there is also the motif of prevented withdrawal which prevails during the end stages of Seneca’s career. Dio portrays Seneca’s death as resulting from a failure to detach himself (62.25.3): he cannot be extricated by any ordinary path. Tacitus explores the same motif in his detailed dramatization of the interview between Seneca and Nero, to which I return below. 2. During the insider years of 49–62, the historians typically mention Seneca in contexts that illustrate the Neronian regime’s internal mechanisms. The salient gesture is Seneca’s writing of speeches, edicts, and letters for Nero— the mixed agency of aliena facundia (“another’s eloquence,” Ann. 13.3.2) that at once fuses the emperor with his teacher-adviser and complicates the pragmatics of imperial communication. The speeches communicate a Senecan style, policy, or pedagogy (Ann. 13.3.1; 11.2; Dio 61.3.1) and conversely implicate Seneca in Nero’s actions such as the matricide (cf. Ann. 14.11.3).14 The ghostwriting role inevitably complicates the later attempts of Seneca and Nero at mutual separation. Another element is the frequent mention of “Burrus and Seneca” together by Tacitus and Dio. The duo is, for Tacitus, the symbol of two allied forces:15 “These men, regents of the emperor’s youth and (a rare thing in the sharing of power) in concord with one another, held equal strength through their contrasting skills (diversa arte ex aequo pollebant): Burrus, through care for military matters and the sternness of his character, Seneca, through instruction in rhetoric and social tact” (Ann. 13.2.1).16 Tacitus shows this dual personification of equilibrium being mocked by Agrippina through the revealing metonyms of “mutilated hand and professorial tongue” (trunca . . . manu et professoria lingua, 13.14.3). Their concord is resilient in the face of attack but, as Tacitus presents it: “The death of Burrus [in 62] shattered Seneca’s power (mors Burri infregit Senecae potentiam), because good conduct did not have the same sway with one of the two ‘guides’ removed (altero velut duce amoto), and Nero was declining toward the less reputable party (ad deteriores inclinabat)” (14.52.1). The pairing, I suggest, also represents a telling substitute for the traditional annalistic language on consuls as paired leaders; Seneca’s suffect consulship in 55 or 56, by contrast, goes unmentioned. In Seneca’s regency several more specific motifs emerge. There is the early gesture of repeated deflection (Ann. 13.2.1, 5.2): ibaturque in caedes, nisi Afranius Burrus et Annaeus Seneca obviam issent.

14. On Seneca’s “ghostwriting” see O’Gorman (2000), 147–153: Nero is “an absence (of voice)” (151). 15. On this “duality of the soldier and sage” see Habinek (2000), 299, 297–300. 16. I take the translation “social tact” (for comitate honesta) from Syme (1958a), 551.

46

historical narratives Killing was on the cards, had not Afranius Burrus and Annaeus Seneca headed it off. escendere suggestum imperatoris et praesidere simul parabat, nisi ceteris pavore defixis Seneca admonuisset, venienti matri occurrere. ita . . . obviam itum dedecori. [Agrippina] was getting ready to ascend the emperor’s tribunal and preside alongside him, except that Seneca, while the others were transfixed by fear, advised [Nero] to go to meet his mother as she approached. Thus . . . was disgrace headed off.

Closely tied to this is the pedagogy of substitution, by which Acte is used to divert Nero from incest with Agrippina (Ann. 14.2.1) and by which, when Nero could not be prevented from his twin loves of chariot racing and singing, “Seneca and Burrus decided to concede the one, so that he wouldn’t win out on both (ne utraque pervinceret, alterum concedere)” (14.14.2; cf. 13.2.1). The latter policy plays a prominent role in Dio’s more polemical account: he faults Burrus and Seneca’s pedagogical technique, “as if they did not know” (Árpeq oÃj eÆdæse|) that Nero would be corrupted by the activities they had conceded to him (61.4.2). To this extent Seneca’s death arrives as an effect of Seneca’s pedagogy. In Tacitus the critics of Seneca—both Suillius in 58 (Ann. 13.42.2–4; cf. Dio. 61.10.1–6) and others after Burrus’ death (Ann. 14.52.2–4)—also seek to challenge his cultural power. This power’s diversity allows critics to emphasize arbitrariness (poetry written just because Nero liked poetry), inconsistencies (for example, between philosophy and luxury), and a monopolization of audiences and of fields: “He was diverting the enthusiasm of the citizens toward himself . . . When, finally, would it not be the case that there was nothing renowned in the city that was not thought to be his invention?” (studia civium in se verteret . . . quem ad finem nihil in re publica clarum fore, quod non ab illo reperiri credatur? 14.52.2, 4). The monopolization in turn serves as an opportunity to present Seneca as a threat to the scale of Nero’s own popularity and wealth, “as if surpassing the emperor” (quasi principem supergrederetur, 14.52.2). Seen in this light, the killing of Seneca arrives as a solution resembling Nero’s elimination of, among others, Britannicus as a rival performer and potential successor. 3. There is also a mapping of Julio-Claudian chronology—both the periodization of a single reign and the delineation of trans-regnal patterns. Seneca, after all, born under Augustus in around 5 BCE,17 lived to see the reigns of all five

17. On the chronology of Seneca’s birth see Setaioli (2000), 378–83.

writing death into history

47

Julio-Claudian emperors. The scope of Seneca’s renown under Caligula, when he is already described by Dio as “the one preeminent in expertise beyond all the Romans of his time as well as many others” (¡ pmsa| lçm soÀ| jah\ èatsøm < Qxla¨ot| pokkoÀ| dç ja≠ kkot| rou¨y Õpeqqa|, 59.19.7), serves as the model for his growing renown in the ages of Claudius and Nero. But Dio’s successive accounts of Seneca’s near-death punishments by Caligula and Claudius in turn (59.19.8; 60.8.5), as well as the statement that Nero, as time went by, “began tending toward Gaius” (pqø| søm Ciom ìseimem, 61.5.1; cf. Suet. Ner. 7.1), makes Seneca’s eventual death under Nero just the final and most successful instance in a recurring Julio-Claudian cycle of jealousy and persecution. The phrase Tacitus uses for describing Burrus and Seneca, rectores imperatoriae iuventae (“regents of the emperor’s youth,” Ann. 13.2.1), echoes his characterization of Sejanus as rector iuveni [sc. Tiberio] (“regent to the young Tiberius,” 1.24.2)18—an echo that does not augur well for Rome, or for Burrus and Seneca. Conversely, in Tacitus’ brief digression on the history of imperial oratory, which mentions that “older observers (seniores) who had the leisure to compare past with present” recall that all the earlier emperors had produced their own speeches (Ann. 13.3.2), Seneca’s role as ghostwriter marks the unique decadence of the Neronian age. Other scenes from Seneca’s career reflect smaller sub-periodizations: his banishment emblematizes the Messalina period of Claudius’ reign, his recall the period dominated by Agrippina; his collaborations with Burrus, in turn, are the characteristic motif of the quinquennium Neronis (if this poorly understood label can be used for the five years prior to 59),19 whereas the collapse of his power after Burrus’ death ushers in the Tigellinus period. The latter is accompanied, in Tacitus’ account, by detractors seeking to present the end of Seneca’s influence (quem ad finem . . . ? Ann. 14.52.4) as a rite of passage for Nero: “Surely Nero’s childhood was at an end and his adulthood was solid: he should remove his teacher . . .” (certe finitam Neronis pueritiam et robur iuventae adesse: exueret magistrum . . . , 15.52.4; cf. Dio 61.4.5). This closural rhetoric provokes the interview between Seneca and Nero, and Seneca’s removal.

The Estrangement In the climactic interview scene (Ann. 14.53–56) Tacitus stages the contradiction between, on the one hand, Nero’s ostensible refusal to grant Seneca leave to retire and, on the other, Tacitus’ own two words of summary: perculso Seneca

18. See O’Gorman (2000), 148. 19. See Murray (1965).

48

historical narratives

(“Seneca destroyed,” §57.1).20 This makes the interview a dramatization of dissimulated violence, encapsulated in the comment that “Seneca gave thanks, as all conversations with a despot end” (Seneca, qui finis omnium cum dominante sermonum, grates agit, §56.3).21 The rhetorical transaction of the paired speeches, even if it is immediately overridden by a real expulsion, is interesting for the terms in which Seneca’s “failure” to secure permission is posed. Seneca argues (and then, in his speech, Nero systematically denies) that his retirement would be in line with the examples of Agrippa and Maecenas, who were granted leave by Augustus;22 that his modest (equestrian, provincial) origins and his services to Nero do not entitle him to keep the gifts he has received from him; that his old age and Nero’s maturation make this the appropriate time for him to retire; and that his retirement can be made to accrue to Nero’s glory (§§53.2–54.3). Their brazen dissimulations make this a case study in the troubled agency of aristocrats (not to mention, of emperors) negotiating a life course in the Principate. Nero’s reply self-consciously advertises his Senecan rhetorical training: “The fact that I can match your rehearsed speech on the spot I consider the first sign of your gift to me (quod meditatae orationi tuae statim occurram, id primum tui muneris habeo): you have taught me to address surprise situations as well as foreseen ones . . .” (§55.1). With this ploy Nero seeks to refute Seneca’s claim that his gifts to Nero have been mere “studies conducted, as it were, in the shade of learning” (studia, ut sic dixerim, in umbra educata, §53.4). Like the corresponding scenario in the Octavia by which it may partly have been inspired (Oct. 437– 589), the Tacitean interview confronts Seneca with a rhetorical doppelgänger and confronts the reader with the image of “two Senecas arguing.”23 Here the imperial court’s boundary is rendered more impermeable by the indelibility of past pedagogical transfers. The argument even extends to a contestation of the senectus that Seneca asserts as the basis for his rite of passage (cf. “we older friends,” seniores amici, §54.2, 3) and that Nero emphatically contradicts, saying, “But your age is still strong” (verum et tibi valida aetas, §56.1). In the end, however, the multiple levels of dissimulation prevent any outright victory on either side. If Nero ostensibly wins the rhetorical transaction, this is also a victory for Seneca’s prior rhetorical lessons, albeit misapplied by Nero. And although Seneca wins the retirement he sought, Nero succeeds in forcing the expulsion—even if some scholars, in turn, see Seneca as having deliberately provoked Nero into effectively confessing that he is unjustified in 20. For commentary see Koestermann (1968), 126–37; for recent discussions, Woodman (forthcoming); O’Gorman (2000), 151–54; Habinek (2000), 264; Shumate (1997), 403. Some have imagined an official transcript as Tacitus’ source; cf. Vottero (1998), 12–13. Most have approached the passage primarily through its echoes of Senecan writing: e.g., Syme (1958a), 334–35. 21. O’Gorman (2000), 153–54 sees this moment as echoed in Tacitus’ exasperated remarks on the thanksgivings after Nero’s murders and exiles at Ann. 14.64.3. 22. On the “irony and pathos” of these problematic exempla, see Bastomsky (1972), 178. 23. The phrase of Alexander (1952), 331–32.

writing death into history

49

removing Seneca and that this will earn him infamy (“Fear of my cruelty will be on everyone’s lips,” meae crudelitatis metus in ore omnium versabitur, §56.2)—a moral victory for Seneca.24 The lack of an outright victor may on one level illustrate the intractable struggle between political power and moral authority. But Tacitus’ presentation particularly highlights Seneca’s inescapable history of entanglement with the production of Nero’s autocracy in the first place, or at least with its self-legitimating devices. The ambiguities persist in the remaining episodes of Seneca’s life. Tacitus writes that immediately following the interview Seneca “changed the habits of his former power, kept crowds of greeters away, avoided followers, was scarce in the city, as if detained at home by poor health or philosophical studies (quasi valetudine infensa aut sapientiae studiis domi attineretur)” (14.56.3)—pretexts inviting public speculation. He later reports that in 64 “it was said that Seneca, in order to deflect ill will from himself over the sacrilege [of Nero’s temple robbing], had asked for a distant retreat in the countryside, and after it was not granted, that he had feigned poor health, as if with a muscular disease, and not left his bedroom (longinqui ruris secessum oravisse, et postquam non concedebatur, ficta valetudine, quasi aeger nervis, cubiculum non egressus)” (15.45.3). This revisits the Nero of the interview who refused to grant Seneca any autonomy in defining an outsider status for himself, except that this time Nero (reputedly) seeks to “remove” Seneca more fully—by secretly poisoning him (§45.3). These ambiguous anecdotes have even sown disagreement among scholars about whether Seneca really was removed at all in 62, as the interview suggests.25 After all this ambiguity, one might expect the death to bring a decisive closure. Yet the protraction and difficulties of Seneca’s death as Tacitus and Dio describe it, not to mention Nero’s ironic exercise of clemency in the revival of Paulina (Ann. 15.64.1), partly recall the earlier ambiguities, perpetuating Seneca’s difficult exit from the court. In chapter 10 we will return to consider the alternative, “Scipionic” approach that the authorial Seneca adopts for inventing the space of his withdrawal and death.

Exit Writing Tacitus’ longest series of death descriptions in the Annals (and all of his writings) begins in the aftermath of the Pisonian conspiracy in book 15, rising to a climax only in book 16 with the announcement that “after butchering so many distinguished men, Nero finally desired to tear out virtue itself, by killing Thrasea Paetus and Barea Soranus” (trucidatis tot insignibus viris ad postremum 24. Seneca’s tactics of entrapment are charted by O’Gorman (2000), 152. 25. E.g., Griffin (1992) argues that even after 62 “the public was meant to think that [Seneca] . . . was still amicus principis” (94); conversely, Gercke (1895), 272–73, 280, 282 saw the interview as decisive, and Ann. 15.45 as merely a doublet of that earlier scene (Tacitus being confused).

50

historical narratives

Nero virtutem ipsam exscindere concupivit interfecto Thrasea Paeto et Barea Sorano, Ann. 16.21.1). Scholars have long suspected that in these books Tacitus comes to rely on the now lost collections loosely known as Exitus illustrium virorum, in which multiple death scenes were described in succession.26 Tacitus certainly acknowledges that his readers (and he himself) may grow bored from so many “exits of citizens, however noble”27 (quamvis honestos civium exitus, 16.16.1), though he persists (§16.2): detur hoc inlustrium virorum posteritati, ut, quo modo exsequiis a promisca sepultura separantur, ita in traditione supremorum accipiant habeantque propriam memoriam. Let the following be given to the posterity of illustrious men: just as in their funerals they are kept apart so as not to have indiscriminate burial together, so, too, let them receive and retain their own commemoration in the transmission of their last moments. Whether or not this statement was inspired already by the proem to an exit collection as some have suggested,28 Tacitus’ decision to give each man his due has two distinct effects for his work:29 (1) It shows the annalistic structure of his text disrupted by the increasing frequency of the emperor’s killings (and, to some extent, of ambitious martyrdoms by aristocrats). (2) It commemorates each man with a dignity that is in many ways compatible with annalistic writing. Tacitus’ representation of the career and death of Seneca is closely aligned with these simultaneous developments in his text.

Death Enters the Annals Tacitus gives the most explicit characterizations of his annalistic project at moments when he is excluding material. Declining, for example, to give the structural statistics of Nero’s wooden amphitheater in book 13, he explains that such information does not count as “worthy of memory” (memoria digna) and is better suited to the diurna urbis acta than to annales (Ann. 13.31.1).30 His choice to write in the annalistic tradition is to this extent a traditional move grounded in a selectivity attentive to dignitas. It also in theory entails “relating each thing in its own year” (suum quaeque in annum referre, 4.71.1) and ordering events within the year according to a traditional Republican structure.31 As Judith 26. See D’Anna (2003), 204–10; Ronconi (1968), 206–36; Questa (1960a), 203–10. 27. I often use “exit” to translate exitus, the Latin term variously denoting “departure,” “exit (from stage or arena),” “close,” “death,” “death description.” 28. E.g., Ronconi (1968), 225. 29. Both effects are addressed, in slightly different terms, by O’Gorman (2000), 145–46. 30. Tacitus may be thinking specifically of Pliny the Elder; see Wilkes (1972), 201. 31. On the annalistic tradition see Frier (1979).

writing death into history

51

Ginsburg shows, however, Tacitus took up the annalistic genre only “to deny its application to the present,” because his character- and episode-driven narrative of Julio-Claudian history plays fast and loose with the traditional structures (1981, 100).32 At the same time, however, Tacitus still retains the ideal of giving due commemoration to whatever events are worthy of memory. It is thus no surprise that early in the Annals Tacitus explicitly acknowledges the tension between serialized exits and annalistic rhythm. During the narrative on Tiberius he holds himself back and writes, “Had it not been my policy to relate each thing in its own year, I would have been enthusiastic to preempt, and to recall immediately the exits (avebat animus antire statimque memorare exitus)” that several of the villains met with in later years; but, he says, “I will give this and other punishments of the guilty in their due time (in tempore trademus)” (Ann. 4.71.1).33 He generates some literary suspense here through keeping at bay the temptation to simply catalogue deaths. This type of suspense will be relieved explosively, and indeed in a way that tests his and his readers’ endurance, when he gives free rein to death descriptions in the final Neronian books. At the same time, however, death writing is in accord with the commemorative focus of annalistic style and of Tacitean history more generally. Although Tacitus’ dislike of ambitiosa mors prevents him from being sympathetic to an exit that seems of no use to the res publica (Agr. 42.4), he begins the Histories with the promise that the good examples of his age included “exits equal to the glorious deaths of the ancients” (laudatis antiquorum mortibus pares exitus, Hist. 1.3).34 In the Annals, an obituary for L. Piso in the year 32 restores dignity to the narrative amid the demise of Sejanus and his associates (Ann. 6.10.3–11.3), and the death notices for two senators at the end of 59 serve as a momentary reminder of the structure of the annalistic year and the acta senatus (14.19).35 But this is precisely the kind of material that sometimes runs thin in the later books of the Annals.36 Tacitus directly acknowledges the contrast between Republican and Imperial history already in his account of the year 24: in the former, “the illustrious exits of generals hold readers’ minds and energize them” (clari ducum exitus retinent ac redintegrant legentium animum), whereas Tacitus feels forced “[to] string together the ruin of innocent persons and the same causes of destruction, with a conspicuous general resemblance and excess” (easdem exitii causas coniungimus, obvia rerum similitudine et satietate, 4.33.3). His sense of his responsibility to give each death its due commemoration—a goal in tune with annalistic writing, though probably also shared by the exit writers—grows great

32. The model is updated by Feeney (2007), 190–93. 33. See Ash (2003), 215–16; Martin and Woodman (1989), 254. 34. His description of the death of Otho in particular (Hist. 2.47–51) is compared with his description of Seneca’s death by Schönegg (1999), 20 n. 15. 35. See Pomeroy (1991), 192. 36. See Syme (1958b), 20.

52

historical narratives

in the course of books 15 and 16, and may be responsible for the “slowness” of many individual descriptions in these books.37 Tacitus’ portrayal of Seneca’s career exhibits some interesting parallels with the growing role of the exit genre in his text. Tacitus describes Seneca’s death itself, of course, with a vividness and depth that (even if many readers detect ambivalence) helps to distinguish it from others and to make it an object of memory. This extends to quoting Seneca’s own words when he addresses Paulina and refers self-consciously to “this brave exit [of ours]” (huius tam fortis exitus, 15.63.2). At the same time, the death arrives in the middle of a whole series of deaths, and the words with which Tacitus introduces it, sequitur caedes Annaei Senecae (15.60.2), can be understood to acknowledge its position within this series. Although many of the death descriptions in books 15 and 16 exhibit commemorative and serial aspects like Seneca’s, the exit of Seneca stands out, I suggest, because of his longer, complex history in relation to Nero. We may recall that Tacitus mentions Seneca in the narrative of Nero’s early reign precisely as an impediment to killing: “Killing was on the cards, had not Afranius Burrus and Annaeus Seneca headed it off ” (ibaturque in caedes, nisi Afranius Burrus et Annaeus Seneca obviam issent, Ann. 13.2.1). This aligns Seneca closely with the literary suspense that Tacitus exploits in the buildup to Nero’s later years. But by the year 59, Seneca becomes more entangled in Nero’s entry into caedes: he is depicted as conferring about what to do after Agrippina escapes her collapsing boat, asking Burrus “whether her killing should be assigned to the soldiers” (an militi imperanda caedes esset, 14.7.3), as well as seeking to justify her killing in the letter to the Senate (14.11.3). His eventual (ironic) assimilation to Agrippina as a victim of caedes—no longer an inhibitor or a perpetrator—occurs in tandem with the generic development we have noted above, from annalistic writing toward exit description. Moreover, the same transition can be traced between the moment at the beginning of 55 when Tacitus implies that Senecan clemency was responsible for Nero’s leniency toward Plautius Lateranus (secutaque lenitas in Plautium Lateranum, 13.11.2) and the fact that the merciless execution of the same Plautius Lateranus immediately precedes Tacitus’ account of the death of Seneca (15.60.1).38 In other words, Seneca’s career from Neronian insider to Neronian outsider closely accompanies the historian’s eventual yielding to the pressure to give serial death descriptions, necessitated by Nero’s crescendo of cruelty in the Tigellinus period. Seneca’s shifting role symbolizes, and indeed helps to explain, the shift to which the historian himself must adapt.

37. On this “slowness” see Hutchinson (1993), 267 n. 19. 38. Noted by Koestermann (1968), 197.

writing death into history

53

Exitus illustrium virorum At this point it will be useful, as far as the evidence allows, to consider the models of death literature that were available to Tacitus in writing Seneca’s death—both the Exitus illustrium virorum and the longer tradition from which they grew. The Exitus illustrium virorum, as such, are known only through two letters by Pliny the Younger.39 In one letter, Pliny notes the death of C. Fannius: “[H]e was writing . . . the exits of men killed or banished by Nero (exitus occisorum aut relegatorum a Nerone), and had already completed three books, which are plain, careful, in good Latin, and balanced between speech and history (inter sermonem historiamque medios). His desire to finish the remaining books was fueled by the popularity with which the existing books were read (quanto frequentius hi lectitabantur)” (Ep. 5.5.3).40 Pliny’s characterization of Fannius’ books as inter sermonem historiamque medios, which I have translated “between speech and history,” likely suggests that his death descriptions combined historical narrative with lively presentations of direct speech.41 In the other letter Pliny mentions Titinius Capito,42 whose recitations he enjoys attending: “He is writing the exits of famous men (exitus inlustrium virorum), including certain men very dear to me. Thus I feel as though I am fulfilling a pious duty in being present for the funeral eulogies, as it were (quasi funebribus laudationibus), of those whose wakes I wasn’t permitted to attend—and all that much more truthful for being after the fact” (Ep. 8.12.4–5). Although there is a good chance that Pliny is partly acknowledging that there is greater scope for praising victims more frankly and accurately after a tyrant (here, Domitian) is dead, the comparison to laudatio funebris implies exaggerated praise. In any case, Pliny’s broad characterization of the exit genre offers background for his contemporary Tacitus’ incorporation of exits in his own historical work. It is almost certain that Seneca’s death was included in the works of Fannius and others, and equally likely that Tacitus’ account of the death, with its vivid narrative and sermo, drew to some extent on the Exitus version(s) as a model for the commemoration of Seneca as a vir illustris. But in the Fannius letter in particular, something else leaps out: the work’s seriality. Until Fannius himself died, the books of Exitus had been increasing in number and had continued to be read (and reread: cf. lectitabantur, Ep. 5.5.3). In Pliny’s portrayal of author and audience reliving the reign of Nero through the rhythm of successive descriptions and books, we can see a model for the reader’s experience of the last books of the Annals.43 In Pliny’s letter the role of 39. On the Exitus in general see Musurillo (1979), 236–46; Ronconi (1968), 206–36, (1966); Marx (1937). 40. On Fannius see PIR F116; also K. Coleman (1999), 24. He most probably published his works after the death of Domitian in 96, in the spirit of Plin. Ep. 9.13.2; see Musurillo (1979), 241. 41. On the sense of sermo here, see Questa (1960a), 203–4; Sherwin-White (1966), 320–21, 460. 42. Capito also wrote commemorative poems and erected statues (cf. Plin. Ep. 1.17.1, 3); see Ash (2003), 218–19. 43. Not to mention of Pliny’s own epistolary death notices; see Ash (2003), 215–24.

54

historical narratives

Nero is fascinating: Fannius already long ago had dreamt that he was lying on his couch writing and that Nero came and sat on the couch and began to read, but gave up after the third book and departed (§5). After this dream, Fannius “was afraid and interpreted it to mean that he would have the same end in writing as Nero had had in reading. And the end was the same” (expavit et sic interpretatus est, tamquam idem sibi futurus esset scribendi finis, qui fuisset illi legendi: et fuit idem, §6). The dream-Nero’s role as a reader who has the power of life and death over Fannius serves to illustrate how, even as Fannius’ text comes to an end and can offer no further commemoration of Nero’s victims, the series of victims itself continues to grow—with Fannius the latest addition. The dream, then, dramatizes (in its own elusive logic) a tension around the twin serialities of authorial production and imperial killing and their respective capacities to preserve and destroy memory. Fannius is the figure whose authorial endeavors in the end prove incapable of controlling (through fully chronicling) Nero’s spree of killing, and who himself falls victim. There is a significant analogue here, too, for Seneca’s role in the Annals: in Tacitus, Seneca’s pedagogical endeavors prove incapable of restraining Nero from pursuing caedes without limit, and his power to impede caedes is annihilated once and for all by his own exit. Seneca and Fannius thus belong to an identical category: monitors of Neronian killing who themselves became victims of it. This makes them useful figures for both Tacitus and Pliny to think with, as each constructs his own literary work.

Writing Death from Plato to Cato The Exitus illustrium virorum, and indeed Tacitus’ careful depiction of the exit of Seneca, are just local instances in a tradition that goes back at least as far as the death of Socrates.44 As collections, the Exitus resemble Pliny the Elder’s selected examples of “sudden deaths” (repentinae mortes) in the Natural History (HN 7.180–86) and Valerius Maximus’ section “On extraordinary deaths” (De mortibus non vulgaribus) in his encyclopedia of exempla (9.12).45 The potential for death to serve as a metonymic point of comparison between lives is illustrated by Valerius’ statement that “the first and last day in particular encapsulate the conditions of a human life” (humanae . . . vitae condicionem praecipue primus et ultimus dies continet 9.12.praef.).46 In biographic and historical writing, the death serves as a privileged signifier of character, as we find in Suetonius where the death description tends to be the most elaborate rubric under which the emperor’s life and times are revealed. Seneca the Elder charts the genealogy of the consummatio totius vitae topos and describes how, after sporadic 44. On the Phaedo as model for the Exitus see Ronconi (1968), 210–15. 45. Cicero, too, collected clarissimorum hominum nostrae civitatis gravissimos exitus in his Consolatio (cf. Div. 2.22). 46. On the character-revealing potential of Roman deaths see Edwards (2007), 5–9.

writing death into history

55

occurrences in Thucydides and Sallust, Livy “generously provided one for every great man (benignus omnibus magnis viris praestitit); subsequent historians did it much more copiously (multo effusius)” (Suas. §21; cf. §§21–25). Much license is afforded the historian in the area of death description: Cicero, for example, maintains the historian’s right, when describing a death in particular, to “adorn it rhetorically and tragically” (rhetorice et tragice ornare, Brut. 11.42).47 Variations on the formula hic (vitae) exitus fuit, which was used for the first time in surviving Latin literature by Cornelius Nepos (talem habuit exitum vitae, Eum. 13.1), constitute one of the threads by which Roman death writing has been associated with the model of Plato’s Phaedo, with its closural formula, “This was the end, Echecrates, of our companion” (úde ô seketsñ, x ῏ $ Evåjqase|, so‹ èsa¨qot ôlπm écåmeso, Phd. 118a) and, more significantly, its focus on the ethical signification of “the death itself” (aÃsøm søm hmasom, Phd. 58c).48 The Phaedo is an obvious model, in any case, for the lost Teleutai (“Endings”) by Hermippus of Smyrna (third century BCE), which is known through citations in Plutarch and Diogenes Laertius. In Diogenes, the deaths of philosophers turn out to be “illustrative” in both positive and negative ways.49 These deaths also tend to come as the ending of a philosophical career whose topoi include (as in Seneca’s life) the mid-career exile and the final conflict with a tyrant. The Phaedo’s presence in the Roman tradition is advertised most directly in the death of Cato, who is said to have read “Plato’s dialogue on the soul” on the night of his suicide at Utica in 46 BCE (Plut. Cat. Min. 68.2). Different accounts are given of Cato’s act of reading: it is variously implied to help him to motivate himself (Plutarch has him reading the work twice, 68.2; 70.2) or to give him an excuse to be alone. This variety is symptomatic of the prolific representations of Cato’s death in Roman literature, beginning with Cicero’s lost pamphlet Cato and Caesar’s response in his Anticato, and extending to versions by Plutarch, Appian, and Dio, as well as by Seneca and Thrasea Paetus.50 The tradition on Cato’s death offers points of partial resemblance to Tacitus’ narrative of Seneca’s: the evening setting; the presence of companions and a family member (Cato’s son); a preparatory bath; an after-dinner philosophical disputation; a multistage death; and an emphasis on libertas in confrontation with Caesar—even if the death of Thrasea, Cato’s biographer, resembles Cato’s even more closely than does that of Seneca.51 Both Seneca and Thrasea, with their imitations of Socrates in the taking of hemlock (Seneca, Ann. 15.64.3) and the discussion of the nature of the soul (Thrasea, 16.34.1), also follow a more general pattern established by Cato’s death, namely, the free assimilation to Socrates despite significant differences. This assimilative framework is present 47. On this passage, referring to Atticus’ portrayal of the death of Coriolanus, see Ronconi (1968), 235. 48. See Currie (1989). 49. See Chitwood (2004), 1–11, 48–58. 50. See Goar (1987); also Edwards (2007), 1–5, 9–10. 51. See Edwards (2007), 156–58.

56

historical narratives

from the beginnings of the Catonian tradition in Cicero’s formulations, such as ut tunc Socrati, nunc Catoni (“as then for Socrates, now also for Cato,” Tusc. 1.74), where discrepancies between the conditions of the two men’s deaths are suppressed in favor of licensing Cato’s (or Seneca’s, or Thrasea’s) appearance as a Roman Socrates. The model of the Phaedo is relevant to Seneca’s death far beyond Seneca’s use of hemlock.52 The Tacitean death narrative responds implicitly to adapted versions of Echecrates’ questions about “what [Socrates] said” ( ssa ei῏pem) and “how he died” (px ~ | éseke sa, Phd. 57a), and both narratives tap the same repertoire in representing the event in the evening (ödg éccÀ| ôk¨ot derlx ῀ m, Phd. 116b; propinqua vespera, Ann. 15.60.4) and in mentioning the arrival of an official announcing the time for death, followed by the condemned man’s taking the initiative and calling for the hemlock himself (116c–d; 15.64.3); a contrast between the fearless condemned man (cf. dex ῀ |, 58e; interritus, 15.63.1) and his tearful audience (dajq omse|, 59a; lacrimas, 15.62.2); the disinterest in funereal grandeur (115c; 15.64.4); and so on. But such similarities make the contrasts between the two death scenes all the more striking. Compare, for example, Xanthippe and Paulina.53 Although both women will ultimately become monuments of their husbands’ deaths,54 in the Phaedo Xanthippe is present mostly as a foil, crying out with excessive grief and being excluded so that the philosophical discussion may resume;55 this partly echoes her reputation as a shrew who tests Socrates’ calm.56 Although Paulina also is excluded so that Seneca may dictate to his scribes, her resoluteness and participation (while it lasts) indicate that Xanthippe’s role has been overwritten by several centuries of cultural and philosophical history. Paulina may be the most conspicuous trace of Seneca’s effort to surpass, rather than simply emulate, the Socratic paradigm; Tacitus certainly embraces her involvement as an opportunity to depart from the Platonic model. Phaedo’s first-person point of view also gives a more detailed emotional characterization than that conveyed by Tacitus, seen in his description of his “curious feeling” of pleasure and pain (sopæm si . . . pho|, 59a). At various points the model of tragedy is invoked as a foil for the interpretation of Socrates’ death (115a)57—something not explored so explicitly by Tacitus. The Tacitean narrative also conspicuously excludes the formula of superlative encapsulation by which Phaedo describes Socrates as “the best and also the most wise and most 52. For close comparison see Edwards (2007), 156–58; E. R. Wilson (2007), 130–34; Staley (2002); Ronconi (1968), 216–18, (1966), 1258–61. 53. See Hutchinson (1993), 266 n. 17; Mayer (1991), 142. 54. For Xanthippe’s association with Socrates’ memory see the Cynic Epistles (edited by Malherbe 1977), esp. Ep. 21.3. Cf. Reydams-Schils (2005), 144–45. 55. Cf. Pl. Phd. 60a–b, 116b, 117d–e. For commentary see Rowe (1993), 118. 56. E.g., Xen. Symp. 2.10. She appears in this role in Seneca, De matrimonio F31, Ep. 104.27. Cf. ReydamsSchils (2005), 48, 144. 57. See Rowe (1993), 1, 200, 290–91.

writing death into history

57

just of all the men we knew in our time” (sx ῟m épeiqhglem q¨rsot, ja≠ ῀ m sæse x kkx| fiqomilxssot ja≠ dijaoiossot, 118a); this formula recurs in the tradition on Cato, and may in fact be alluded to in Tacitus’ portrayal of Thrasea—not Seneca!—as virtus ipsa (16.21.1). We will return to the Phaedo as we focus on individual details of Seneca’s death in later chapters.

Death Reproduction As Tacitus follows death with death in books 15 and 16, Seneca stands in varied relations of resemblance and difference to the other dying Romans.58 These patterns change in tandem with the reader’s experience of a rapid succession of episodes, gaining ever new vistas on the agency of the emperor and of those who die. If we wish to make any claims about the paradigmatic status of Seneca’s death, we need also to recognize the other paradigms that emerge in the course of this series.

System in Neronian Killing The deaths that follow the discovery of the Pisonian conspiracy are foreshadowed in the degraded annalistic framing with which Tacitus begins the year 65: “Next to enter the consulship were Silius Nerva and Atticus Vestinus, whereupon a conspiracy at once began and grew (coepta simul et aucta coniuratione)” (Ann. 15.48.1).59 I say “degraded” not simply because the conspiracy is mentioned, but because the consul Vestinus himself, tenuously accused of complicity, will himself be put to death (§§68.2–69.3). During the initial stages of what Victoria Pagán calls the most “detailed” and “convoluted” account of any event in the Annals, (2004, 74), Tacitus mentions over a dozen of the conspirators by name and repeatedly emphasizes their varied identities (“senators, equestrians, soldiers, even women,” §48.1) and varied motives (“both out of hatred for Nero and out of favor for C. Piso,” §48.1). Particular attention is given to Epicharis, the freedwoman involved with the conspiracy who refuses to give information even under torture (15.51, 57). Indeed, hers is the first death to be described.60 Tacitus describes how, whereas others such as Lucan would freely divulge what they knew, Epicharis forestalled the second day of her interrogation through suicide (§57.1–2): She defied the first day of questioning. On the next day, as she was being conveyed back for more of the same tortures by means of a litter (for she was unable to walk, with her limbs dislocated),

58. On all these deaths see Plass (1995), 92–115; Martin (1981), 183–88. 59. On the conspiracy narrative see Pagán (2004), 68–90; Rutledge (2001), 166–70; Woodman (1993). 60. See Pagán (2004), 76–83.

58

historical narratives removing her breast-band from her breast and tying it to the roof of the litter to serve as a noose, she put her neck into it, put all her weight on her body, and squeezed out what little breath she had left (indidit cervicem et corporis pondere conisa tenuem iam spiritum expressit)—a freedwoman even in such circumstances protecting strangers whom she scarcely even knew, in a more glorious exemplary act (clariore exemplo), whereas freeborn male equestrians and senators, untouched by torture, all betrayed their nearest and dearest.

In the catalogue that follows, all of the deaths described by Tacitus have Epicharis as an explicit standard of comparison. The subsequent deaths of Calpurnius Piso himself (rumored next emperor), Plautius Lateranus (consul designate), and Seneca (thorn in side; rumored next emperor), have the appearance of a series, with Nero killing off three potential successors in a row (15.59–64). In the rhetoric of killing this is a rising tricolon, because Seneca’s death stands apart in length, and in other ways. Piso’s rapid suicide (“he perished by breaking open the veins in his arms,” obiit abruptis brachiorum venis, §59.5) contrasts with Seneca’s protracted process (§63.3). Piso’s overtures to Nero in his will, seeking to protect his disreputable wife (§59.5), are inverted in Seneca’s allowing the virtuous Paulina to join him in death (§63.2). The fate of Plautius, butchered “so quickly that [Nero] did not allow him to embrace his children or to have that brief freedom to choose his death (ut non conplecti liberos, non illud breve mortis arbitrium permitteret),” throws into relief the fact that Seneca is allowed time, a choice of method, freedom of speech, and an embrace of Paulina (cf. complectitur uxorem, §63.1). Yet Plautius shows constantia no less than Seneca: he submits to the tribune Statius Proxumus’ sword, “maintaining steadfast silence and not seeking to expose the tribune’s own identical guilt” (plenus constantis silentii nec tribuno obiciens eandem conscientiam, §60.1). It would be misleading to privilege Seneca’s death. Better to see it as one of the more elaborate paradigms in a representational system whose center shifts as the reader progresses. Even brief mentions by Tacitus amount to privileging, given that he expressly excludes the many who died “without doing or saying anything worth remembering” (nullo facto dictove memorando, 15.70.2). But his descriptions include bad examples, such as the death of Statius Proxumus, who “spoiled the pardon he had received from the emperor by the vanity of his exit (vanitate exitus)” (§71.2), and polar opposites, such as the juxtaposition of the centurion Sulpicius Asper’s constantiae exemplum with the cowardice of his superior, Faenius Rufus (§68.1). Distinctive commemorations are given to Subrius Flavus, whose last words Tacitus repeats “because unlike Seneca’s they were not published” (§67.3), to Petronius, whose role as Nero’s arbiter elegantiae recalls Seneca’s own cultural hegemony in the court and whose whimsical

writing death into history

59

suicide turns philosophical constantia on its head (16.19.2), and to Thrasea Paetus (16.21.1, 34–35). Each unique death complicates the overall network of resemblances. In a brief but profound essay on Tacitus’ “funerary baroque,” Roland Barthes (1972) identifies some of the peculiarities of this representational system. Assuming that the average reader’s impression is of a Tacitus full of deaths, Barthes points out that the deaths in the Annals are in fact “few enough (some fifty for three principates),” but that the impression of multiplicity— what he encapsulates in his notion of a Tacitean baroque—is produced by “a growing contradiction between unit and totality, an art in which extent is not additive but multiplicative, the density of an acceleration” (99). Barthes notes the relative insignificance of rational causation in Nero’s murders, in which “it is because death is a raw fact, and not the element of a reason, that it is contagious: the wife follows her husband into suicide without being obliged to do so, relatives die in clusters as soon as one of them is condemned” (100–101). He also emphasizes that the internal resemblances do not preclude heterogeneity: “[I]t is the vegetable image which substantiates the baroque: the deaths correspond, but their symmetry is false, spread out in time, subject to a movement, like that of sprouts on the same stalk; the regularity is a delusion, life directs the funerary system, terrorism is not bookkeeping but vegetation: everything is reproduced and yet nothing is repeated; such is perhaps the meaning of this Tacitean universe . . .” (102). Within this organic system of the death catalogue, the narrative of Seneca’s death may be perceived by the reader as reproducible in some elements and yet sui generis. The death of the consul Vestinus is a sped-up version of Seneca’s vein opening followed by bath, without the delaying effect of a final speech (15.69.2–3). In the following book, P. Anteius combines vein opening with poison, as Seneca did, but in the opposite order and with a desire for haste: “Having drunk poison he objected to its slowness, and sped up death by cutting into his veins” (hausto veneno, tarditatem eius perosus intercisis venis mortem adproperavit, 16.14.3). L. Vetus and his mother-in-law and daughter together “open their veins with one and the same weapon” (eodem ferro abscindunt venas), but persist in mutual gazes as they bleed to death in baths next to one another “in one and the same room . . . with father looking at his daughter, the grandmother her granddaughter, and she both of them” (eodem in cubiculo . . . pater filiam, avia neptem, illa utrosque intuens, 16.11.2). In this death tableau there is a contrast with Seneca and Paulina, who had cut their veins together but then broke off their mutual gaze (15.63.3). Within this reproductive economy, the eventual fates of Seneca’s brothers Junius Gallio (intimidated, though his death is not described, 15.73.3) and Annaeus Mela (forced to suicide, 16.17.5–6) echo and reenact Nero’s original act of killing Seneca himself—though without repeating it, because Mela shows conspicuous cowardice. The senator who attacks Gallio in the Senate is persuaded to desist, “in order that he not draw

60

historical narratives

[the emperor] back into a new rage” (ne . . . novam ad saevitiam retraheret)—as if the killing of yet another Annaeus would induce a new (or the same) cycle (15.73.3).

Thrasea Paetus and Seneca Imitatio Senecae might be more obviously at play in the suicide of Thrasea Paetus (16.34–35),61 which has the appearance of being “an intertextual reenactment of Seneca’s death scene,”62 though any conclusions must be qualified by the fact that Plato’s Phaedo and Thrasea’s own biography of Cato existed as prior models for Tacitus and his sources,63 and already for the dying men. In any case, the scene is set vesperascente iam die (16.34.1; cf. 15.60.4), and there is a meeting with mournful friends that is followed by encouraging words, an exhortation to a wife who insists on joining him, withdrawal “into a private room” (in cubiculum), an opening of veins, and a libation to Jupiter Liberator, along with “the slowness of his departure causing convulsions of extreme pain” (lentitudine exitus graves cruciatus adferente, 16.35.1–2; cf. 15.63.3, 64.3). Thrasea’s wife Arria, in volunteering to die, may have in mind not only the examples of Thrasea and her mother Arria (temptantem mariti suprema et exemplum Arriae matris sequi, Ann. 16.34.2), but also of Paulina.64 But the differences are revealing. Thrasea succeeds in persuading Arria to live on, since they have a daughter (16.34.2). Thrasea’s philosophical credentials are established by other means than Seneca’s: Tacitus depicts him in conversation with the Cynic philosopher Demetrius, “with whom, to guess from the attention in his face and from overhearing whatever words of their conversation were distinguishable, he was inquiring about the nature of the soul and the separation of spirit and body (de natura animae et dissociatione spiritus corporisque inquirebat)” (§34.2; cf. §35.2). The spatial setting also—Thrasea begins “in the gardens” (in hortis) and proceeds “into the porch” (in porticum, §34.1, §35.1)—adds precise Epicurean and Stoic philosophical resonances. The libation to Jupiter Liberator, in turn, although directly echoing Seneca’s libation, is given by Tacitus in direct speech this time (“libamus” inquit “Iovi liberatori,” §35.1) and is made with blood sprinkled on soil (cf. cruorem effudit, humum super spargens, §35.1).65 Thrasea also self-consciously offers an exemplum for Helvidius Priscus and advises him: “Watch, young man (specta, iuvenis), and indeed let the gods prevent it, but you have been born into times when it is profitable to bolster your mind with examples of steadfastness (in ea tempora

61. On Thrasea see Wirszubski (1968), 138–43; Edwards (2007), 157–58. 62. Connors (1994), 228; cf. 231. 63. Tacitus’ sources for Thrasea must have included Arulenus Rusticus (cf. Agr. 2.1). 64. See Mayer (1991), 142. 65. Dio conspicuously credits Thrasea with the same libation (måseime sóm veπqa, ja≠ ìug “ro≠ so‹so sø ai῟la, x ῏ Fe‹ $ Ekethåqie, rpåmdx,” 62.26.4), whereas he omits the libation in Seneca’s case.

writing death into history

61

natus es quibus firmare animum expediat constantibus exemplis)” (§35.1). These words evince an historian’s perspective upon the end stages of the Neronian era and Helvidius’ eventual death under Domitian. Thrasea’s death, then, is something different from the death of Seneca, reproducing it but not repeating it, and recycling it more explicitly for a following generation.

Epicharis and Seneca Although in the present chapter we have turned a blind eye to manifestations of Seneca’s authorial identity in Tacitus (the topic of the next chapter), there is one manifestation that is so relevant to the dynamics of Tacitus’ catalogue as whole that we cannot pass over it. This concerns Tacitus’ portrayal of Epicharis. A. J. Woodman has heard here some echoes of Senecan tragedy. Among these, the statement that Epicharis tenuem iam spiritum expressit (“squeezed out what little breath she had left,” Ann. 15.57.2) recalls a scene from the Oedipus in which Manto, daughter of Teiresias, describes the death of a sacrificial bull that animam . . . fessus vix reluctantem exprimit (“exhausted, can barely force out its last resisting breath,” Oed. 344, translations mine).66 It is easy to see, I would add, that the echo of the Oedipus might lend Epicharis the aura of a sacrificial figure and might license analogies between Nero, as he unravels the conspiracy, and Oedipus, who tries to get to the bottom of the plague for which he himself unwittingly bears blame.67 But I would also point out a parallel for Epicharis’ suicide in a passage not from the tragedies but from the Epistulae morales (Ep. 70.19–27). There is a close structural resemblance between, on the one hand, Epicharis’ death sought with the breast-band noose en route to her second day of torture and, on the other, Seneca’s examples of captives who preempted an impending death in the amphitheater by engineering some way to die in the morning before they arrive in the arena: one suffocated himself on a toilet brush in the latrines (“blocking his airways, he stifled his breath,” interclusis faucibus spiritum elisit), while another shoved his head in the spokes of the wagon that was ferrying him to the spectacle (Ep. 70.20, 23).68 The purpose of Seneca’s examples in this letter is to serve both as inspirations and as ex maiore proofs: that is, to shame Lucilius with the realization that because “persons of the lowest station” (vilissimae sortis homines, 70.19) are capable of inventively finding a path to libertas, so should he.69 Seneca the author, then, has a role to play in Tacitus’ construction of a dramatic and exemplary ambiance for the death catalogue, even before he arrives

66. Woodman (1993), 119 n. 56; he also notes the parallel of Pha. 882–85, where Phaedra’s nurse keeps silent in the face of impending torture. For declamatory themes in the torture scene see Pagán (2004), 80–81. 67. For the Oedipal shading of Nero’s decline, cf. Suet. Ner. 46.3. 68. The examples are discussed by Leigh (1997), 259–60. 69. See Turpin (2008), 393. On exempla ex maiore, see Quint. Inst. 5.11.9–10.

62

historical narratives

at his description of Seneca’s own death. As each successive death either meets or, more often, fails to meet, the high standards of Epicharis’ clarius exemplum, the mimetic relationship is framed already by Senecan discourse. This is not to deny the darker implications in the politics of exemplary appropriation by which Epicharis’ death can become an inspiring spectacle, particularly when we are informed by a later source that Epicharis was the mistress of Seneca’s brother, Mela70—a fact that raises questions about Seneca’s own relationship to the conspiracy. But it indicates the degree to which Tacitus depends on Senecan literary modes, from more than one genre, as a resource. All the more reason, then, to look to his (and Dio’s) account of Seneca’s own death for more Senecan literary echoes.

Beyond Historiography A scene of “historic” value then, Seneca’s death. And in more stories than one. It is the last, telling gesture in a paradigmatic career spent close (too close) to the Julio-Claudian household, a pivotal and emblematic moment in Tacitus’ appropriation of exit writing, and one of many models for an organic and contagious form of exemplary reproduction. Yet Seneca dies not only as a subject of history and historiography. Or, at least, the special appeal of his death to the historian, and to his audiences, included a conception of his death scene as part and parcel of his literary career. We turn, then, to Seneca the author.

70. Polyaenus, Strat. 8.62 (written c. 162 CE), with Woodman (1993), 114; Griffin (1974), 25.

part ii

Seneca the Author

This page intentionally left blank

3 The Man of Many Genres in His Death

Our first step, as we consider the dying Seneca as an author, will be to recognize more fully the ways in which his authorship is registered in Tacitus. But although the historian’s text serves as a useful initial guide, it is also essential to survey Seneca’s literary roles more broadly and to gauge their likely influence on how contemporaries perceived his death. Quintilian’s posthumous criticisms of Seneca are particularly instructive. We will then turn more directly to Seneca’s own written representations of death. Cato’s exit in the De providentia is a good example to consider; but it also prompts us to look at the author’s very flexible approach to death writing across multiple genres. If we peruse the surviving accounts of Cicero’s death collected by Seneca the Elder, we will find that the historians and declaimers who describe it are invested in having Cicero die in a way that fully symbolizes his profile as an orator and writer.1 All the versions agree that Cicero’s severed head was brought back to Rome and placed on the Rostra with his right hand (or both hands) mounted beside it—a visible undoing of his oratorical authority and revenge for the writing of the Philippics (Suas. 6.17).2 But as the historian Bruttedius Niger tells it, the display in fact prompted a unique form of laudatio funebris: “Nor did the crowd, as it usually does, listen to the biography of a dead body placed on the Rostra: [the crowd] itself told it (nec, ut solet, vitam depositi in rostris corporis contio

1. On the shaping of Cicero’s death with declamatory colores see Roller (1997). For this death’s central role in early Imperial thought about writing and authorship see Sailor (2008), 282–91; Degl’Innocenti Pierini (2003a). 2. On the hand see Butler (2002).

66

seneca the author

audivit, sed ipsa narravit). There was no part of the Forum that was not marked by some trace of a distinguished action [by him] (nulla non pars fori aliquo actionis inclutae signata vestigio erat), no one who didn’t recount some service of his to himself” (Suas. 6.21). Cicero’s death, then, appeals one more time to the people’s personal and collective memories of his authorial performances. The historians who describe the death of Seneca, however, are not inclined to map its significance in public space beyond the publication of his dictated words, or the mob’s rumors (Ann. 15.63.3, 64.2). In an earlier book, Tacitus explicitly draws attention to Seneca’s “pleasing style suited to the ears of his age” (ingenium amoenum et temporis eius auribus accommodatum, 13.3.1), and the structure of Seneca’s career as a novus homo who became the preeminent orator of his age, wrote in multiple genres of poetry and prose (including dialogues, consolations, letters), suffered a mid-career exile, and rose to power at more than one stage of his career, before dying at the hands of an autocratic regime, is nothing if not Ciceronian. But Seneca’s public appearances during his authorial career, as far as we can tell, came mostly in the form of textual circulation and small-scale literary recitation, or were manifested in Nero’s aliena facundia (13.3.2)—symptoms of the disappearance of political oratory from the Forum in the Principate.3 Indeed, the absence of public commemoration in Seneca’s case to some extent follows from the periodizing significance of Cicero’s death as the moment when “the sad eloquence of the Latin tongue fell silent” (conticuit Latiae tristis facundia linguae, Cornelius Severus quoted by Sen. Suas. 6.26–27). Robert Kaster has tentatively suggested that the declaimers, in giving disproportionate emphasis to Cicero’s death, chose an icon of their own “condition” (1998, 262–63). Certainly, Seneca’s near-death at the hands of the emperor Caligula, as the consequence of a senatorial speech (Dio 59.19.7–8), suggests the dangers of eloquence in this era.4 If, then, Seneca’s death has an authorial dimension, it will necessarily register the changed discursive contexts of the Imperial age in which his career took shape.

When an Author Says His Last Seneca dies writing. Dio depicts him anxious, “amending the book he had been writing and depositing the rest with certain persons (since he feared that they might come into Nero’s hands and be destroyed)” (62.25.2). Tacitus presents him bleeding and dictating (Ann. 15.63.3), in a certain sense authoring his own, and Paulina’s, exitus (cf. huius tam fortis exitus, §63.2).5 What difference do the authorial dimensions of Seneca’s death make? 3. On this shift see Dupont (1997). 4. A political career is charted for Seneca by his father (Contr. 2.praef.4), but the central theme of Contr. 1.praef. is the periodizing gulf between the age of Cicero and that of Seneca the Elder’s sons; cf. Gunderson (2003), 33. Seneca the Younger himself mentions Cicero’s death as a frequent literary topic (Ira 2.2.3; Tranq. 16.1). 5. See Griffin (1986), 65; Marx (1937), 86–87.

the man of many genres in his death

67

The Discourse on Authorship and Death Seneca’s death is defined in part by its relationship to other “writerly” deaths catalogued by Tacitus—other “utterances,” as it were, in the “discourse on authorship and death” that Catherine Connors (1994) sees at work in Neronian literature.6 Seneca’s brother Annaeus Mela (whose renown, Tacitus explains, derives from that of his poet son Lucan) does not die before writing codicilli that accuse and flatter (Ann. 16.17).7 Mela’s act serves as a foil to Seneca’s metaphorical will—the imago vitae suae—and to his codicilli stipulating private cremation (15.62.1, 64.4). Lucan himself, implicated in the conspiracy and condemned to death, remains conscious as he bleeds (15.70.1): recordatus carmen a se compositum, quo vulneratum militem per eius modi mortis imaginem obisse tradiderat, versus ipsos rettulit, eaque illi suprema vox fuit. Remembering a poem he had composed in which he had related how a wounded soldier died through an image of that kind of death, he recited the actual verses, and that was his final utterance. The recitation creates a double position for Lucan as both narrator and bleeding soldier, aestheticizing the scene through one of his poetic fictions.8 Ellen O’Gorman has noted that mortis imago here may recall Virgil’s account of Troy in flames (and Nero’s singing while Rome burned), as well as Tacitus’ own accounts of civil war in the Histories.9 Coming so soon after the account of Seneca’s death, mortis imago may also echo and contrast with Seneca’s imago vitae suae (§62.1). The starkest authorial comparison for Seneca, however, is the dying Petronius, who binds and unbinds his wounds in an apparent parody of Seneca’s death scene and Paulina’s revival.10 Petronius “listened to [readers] reciting nothing about the immortality of the soul or the doctrines of the philosophers, but light poems and easy verses (nihil de immortalitate animae et sapientium placitis, sed levia carmina et faciles versus)” (16.19.2). The scene accords with both the prosimetric form and the satirizing approach to death (including mock deaths) that we find in the Satyricon—some of which was

6. Her observations are developed by O’Gorman (2000), 157–59; Edwards (2007), 111–12, 158–59. 7. On Mela’s codicilli as an “utterance,” see Connors (1994), 227. See also Sullivan (1985a), 34 n. 35 on the codicilli of A. Fabricius Veiento (Ann. 14.50.1) and the list of Petronius (16.19.3). 8. See Connors (1994), 229. For the poem, possible passages from Lucan’s Bellum civile are listed by Faider (1921), 307 n. 1; Koestermann (1968), 320 compares BC 3.635–46 on the death of Lycidas. But Tacitus’ wording may suggest a stand-alone poem. 9. O’Gorman (2000), 158–59, citing Aen. 2.369 (plurima mortis imago); Tac. Hist. 3.28.1 (omni imagine mortium). 10. On Petronius’ death see Edwards (2007), 158–59, 176–78; Bertrand-Dagenbach (1992), 604–5.

68

seneca the author

already a literary parody of Senecan writing.11 Tacitus thus builds upon an existing history of rivalry between the two authors. In the discourse on authorship and death, the relationship between death and authorship is strongly reciprocal:12 (1) The death scene may be read as repeating, adding to, or in some way issuing from (even contradicting) the writing career and its genres.13 (2) The author’s writings may subsequently be read in new ways in the wake of his death: the death may punctuate the corpus, confer new authority on it, dissolve its coherency, or be read back into it in a way that offers new referential possibilities, and changes how it exists or is perceived.14 Seneca’s dictation, for example, both continues his writing career into the death scene and produces a text that “will have been received as a composition whose end coincided with the death of its author” (Connors 1994, 231). The potential for this double effect—of writings on death, and of death on writings—means that if the reader of Tacitus’ phrase novissimo quoque momento (Ann. 15.63.3) hears an echo of Seneca’s own illo velocissimo momento in the De tranquillitate animi (Tranq. 14.9), discussed in the introduction to this book,15 then this echo (1) presents Seneca dying like his literary character, Julius Canus, and (2) has consequences for future readings of Seneca’s authorial voice, whether in the published version of the dictated last words or in any of his works—not least, the De tranquillitate animi.

Listening for Seneca’s Authorial Voice in Tacitus Let us observe the remarkably creative role played by Tacitus in mediating Seneca the author, beginning with the varying degrees of mimesis he employs in his representation of Seneca’s last speeches. Having first used indirect speech and paraphrase, saying that Seneca spoke in “these words and words like them, as if for all” (haec atque talia velut in commune, Ann. 15.63.1), he uses direct speech to give Seneca’s exhortation to Paulina (§63.2): “vitae” inquit “delenimenta monstraveram tibi, tu mortis decus mavis: non invidebo exemplo. sit huius tam fortis exitus constantia penes utrosque par, claritudinis plus in tuo fine.” “I had shown you,” he said, “the means of soothing life, but you prefer the honor of death. I won’t stand in the way of your good example. Let us both be equally steadfast in this brave exit, but let there be greater renown in your ending.” 11. On the prosimetric form see Connors (1994), 229–30. On the Satyricon’s allusions to Seneca see Courtney (2001), 216–18; Sullivan (1985b); Amat (1992). 12. I build on Connors (1994), 228–31. 13. “Generic” death, in the formulation of O’Gorman (2000), 158. 14. Crucial is the observation of Edwards (2007), 111: “Tacitus’ account of Seneca’s death has inevitably had a significant bearing, not always explicitly acknowledged, on the way readers have responded to Seneca’s own voluminous writings on death.” 15. See also Cancik (1967), 108.

the man of many genres in his death

69

Putting aside the unanswerable questions about the speech’s authenticity,16 we may observe that Tacitus’ choice to use direct speech may respond to the fact that, as Dio’s version clearly demonstrates (62.25.1), Seneca’s enthusiasm for Paulina’s decision was potentially controversial. In Tacitus Paulina’s act is licensed by Seneca’s stylized voice, with the sense of a finely calibrated pedagogical relationship. The direct voice here may be meant to offer a taste of the affectionate relationship with Paulina that Seneca characterizes in one of his letters (Ep. 104.1–5), although in that instance the focus was on Seneca’s selfpreservation out of concern for her. It may also recall the exempla collected in his De matrimonio, which included faithful widows and suicidal wives, not least the Indian satı¯.17 But when Tacitus describes the scene of dictation, he goes to the opposite mimetic extreme: Seneca, he writes, “summoned scribes and dictated a considerable amount to them, which was published in his words and which I refrain from adapting” (advocatis scriptoribus pleraque tradidit, quae in vulgus edita eius verbis invertere supersedeo, 15.63.3).18 And some chapters later he refers back to this same act of suppression. After relating the final utterance of the tribune Subrius Flavus, with its harsh direct accusations of Nero (§67.1–2), he explains: “I have related the exact words because they were not published, as Seneca’s were (quia non, ut Senecae, vulgata erant), nor did it seem less fitting for the unpolished and staunch expressions of a military man (militaris viri sensus incomptos et validos) to be known” (§67.3).19 This alludes (once again) to the publication of Seneca’s words, but also hints that Subrius’ style offers a corrective or counterweight to Seneca’s polished and nonconfrontational style.20 Scholars have seen Tacitus’ suppression of Seneca’s words variously as respecting the autonomy of Seneca’s published text and establishing the narrator’s emotional detachment (Hutchinson 1993, 264–65); maintaining the dignity of the death through protecting Seneca from the appearance of loquacity (R. Fabbri 1978–79, 420–21) or from the mob’s mockery (Dyson 1970, 77); and even ironically echoing Seneca’s portrayal of a similar suppression in the Apocolocyntosis (Apocol. 9.2; Woodman forthcoming). However we understand it, the implication is the same: Tacitus presupposes his reader’s independent access to Seneca’s published words. 16. A Tacitean paraphrase is suggested by Miller (1973), 116 and by Abel (1991), 3162, who notes that Seneca uses claritas, never claritudo. The utterance is read as Senecan by Syme (1958a), 336, noting Senecan rhythms. Note, in any case, the multiple synonyms for death (mortis, exitus, fine) and the iconic word order beginning with vitae and ending with fine. 17. For the De matrimonio fragments see Vottero (1998), 22–31, 134–67, 237–88. That work’s relevance to Paulina is discussed by Mauch (1997), 70; Griffin (1992), 371–72 n. 3. On the satı¯ in Matrim. F52 see Vottero (1998), 278; more generally, Heckel and Yardley (1981). 18. Koestermann (1968), 305 paraphrases invertere with mutatis verbis reddere. Miller (1973), 116 observes that “adapting” is precisely what Tacitus has been doing to Seneca’s words earlier in the death scene itself. For lucid discussion of Tacitus’ approach to Seneca’s ipsa verba see Laird (1999), 127–30, 141–42. 19. On Subrius’ words see W. Schmidt (1914), 33–34; also Champlin (2003), 186; Woodman (1993), 125. 20. In sensus incomptos et validos the contrast may be pointed by a reminiscence of Caligula’s critique of Seneca’s “more mild and polished style” (lenius comptiusque genus, Suet. Calig. 53.2); cf. Lausberg (1989), 1952.

70

seneca the author

Tacitus’ omission has long been lamented, and Seneca’s words have been the subject of speculation.21 When did the text circulate? And in what form?22 The term pleraque and the presence of more than one scribe suggest a fairly extensive discourse, and the term eloquentia indicates a relatively formal utterance—albeit under conditions of extreme pain. Some have surmised that it was like the last discussion of Socrates, or of Thrasea Paetus, “investigating the nature of the soul and the separation of spirit and body” (Ann. 16.34.1).23 Understandably, the reader may seek to fill the gap in Tacitus’ account by using Seneca’s own works,24 such as his comment in the De providentia that Socrates “inquired about death right up until he reached it” (de morte disputavit usque ad ipsam, Prov. 3.12), or in the De tranquillitate animi that Julius Canus died telling his friends that he was going to inquire “whether [his] mind would feel itself depart” (an sensurus sit animus exire se, Tranq. 14.9). The account of Dio, however, suggests that a specific work of Seneca—not a “last words” dictation as such—was being amended in these moments (62.25.2). This has variously been taken to be the seventh and final book of the De beneficiis, which addresses how to deal with tyrants, or the Libri moralis philosophiae, which Seneca mentions working on in his final years.25 There have also been fantastical attempts either to locate the words in the byways of the manuscript tradition or to compose the lost words anew.26 An influential, though implausible, candidate for Seneca’s last words is the so-called Epitaphium Senecae (Anth. Lat. 667 = Epigr. 71 Prato) that is reproduced in medieval manuscripts of the Epistulae morales and in Renaissance biographies of Seneca, where it is repeatedly presented as the dictated words suppressed by Tacitus. But if Tacitus invites the reader to supplement the scene from readings of Seneca, he also leads by example in his own narration. In the previous chapter, we noted that Tacitus portrays the death of Epicharis in terms that echo Seneca’s tragedies and letters. There is much more: Tacitus’ historical voice frequently echoes Seneca’s writing in such a way that historical events involving Seneca himself frequently seem to obey a Senecan logic.27 A sampling of such events can lead us all the way from the interview in book 14 to the conclusion of the death narrative in book 15.

21. Lipsius (1600), ad loc. exclaims: verba viri ultima utinam ipsa! 22. Inclusion in an exit description is suggested by Ronconi (1968), 230–21; in the work of Fabius Rusticus, by Vottero (1998), 85. W. Schmidt (1914), 54 argues that Seneca’s last words were unique in antiquity for being published “statim,” although immediacy is not indicated by Tacitus; Koestermann (1968), 305 suggests publication after Nero’s death. 23. See Griffin (1992), 369; (1986), 65. 24. Gnilka (1979), 7 contrasts with this the Christian tradition of the Holy Spirit speaking through the martyr. 25. Ben. 7 is suggested by Préchac (1926–27), 1.xvi–xxvii; the Libri moralis philosophiae by Vottero (1998), 83 n. 395. 26. See Vottero (1998), 81–82. Woelfflin (1878) boldly claimed to have located these words in additions made to the Senecan florilegium Monitorum liber. 27. Echoes are noted by Schönegg (1999), 25 n. 30; Syme (1958a), 126, 141, 199–200, 336; and already M. Zimmermann (1889).

the man of many genres in his death

71

During the interview scene, for example,28 Tacitus represents Seneca asking egone, equestri et provinciali loco ortus, proceribus civitatis adnumeror? (“Am I, arisen from equestrian and provincial origins, counted among the foremost citizens?” Ann. 14.53.5), which seems to echo the question that Seneca invites Nero to ask himself at the beginning of the De clementia: egone ex omnibus mortalibus placui electusque sum qui in terris deorum vice fungerer? (“Have I, of all mortals, found favor and been chosen to take the place of the gods on earth?” Clem. 1.1.2).29 Tacitus thus portrays Seneca using the same rhetorical device—an incredulous questioning of the arbitrary distributions of dynastic power—now ostensibly to detach himself from power, whereas he had formerly used it (in his guise as mirror for the prince, Clem. 1.1.1) to have Nero embrace his own universal power and the moral responsibilities that came with it. In this way the De clementia becomes an echo chamber for establishing ironic resonances between the contrasting insider and outsider moments of Seneca’s career. A second and complementary example can be taken from the interview’s end. Tacitus’ description of how “Seneca gave thanks, as all conversations with a despot end” (Seneca, qui finis omnium cum dominante sermonum, grates agit, 14.56.3), closely echoes an anecdote given by Seneca in the De ira (2.33.2):30 notissima vox est eius qui in cultu regum consenuerat: cum illum quidam interrogaret quomodo rarissimam rem in aula consecutus est, senectutem, “iniurias” inquit “accipiendo et gratias agendo.” Everyone knows what was said by the man who had grown old in the company of kings: when someone asked him how he had come by that rarest of things in a court, old age, he replied: “By accepting injuries and saying thank you.” The Tacitean Seneca’s dissimulative behavior after the interview is allowed to instantiate the De ira’s recommended strategy for surviving in the Roman imperial household (which was, in that text, newly imagined as a “court”).31 But the De ira was a work that had been shaped by the tyrannical world of Caligula and the early Claudius, which Seneca had been lucky to survive, but whose obsolescence had been announced by his positive program in the De clementia. Tacitus’ description of Seneca here, however, specifically signals a return to that nightmare and places Seneca’s death on the horizon again as it had been under Caligula. 28. Pace Woodman (forthcoming), who argues that Tacitus here (unlike in the death scene) “declines” to write like Seneca. 29. The echo is noted by Braund (2008), 160. 30. The echo is noted by many, e.g., O’Gorman (2000), 153; already Gercke (1895), 279. The sense of Seneca’s literary dominance here is deepened by the multiple concealed meanings that Seneca at Tranq. 14.4–5 offers for the phrase “gratias . . . ago, optime princeps” uttered by Julius Canus to Caligula; on the latter passage, see Roller (2001), 120–24; also Edwards (2007), 113; Motto and Clark (1955). See also Electra’s defiant grates ago at Aga. 1010. 31. As O’Gorman (2000), 153 n. 51 notes, the senex anecdote evokes the name of Seneca himself. For aula at Ira 2.33.2 as a turning point in Roman political terminology, see Wallace-Hadrill (1996), 283.

72

seneca the author

Tacitus’ death narrative, too, is infused with Senecan allusions.32 In the prelude he reports that Gavius Silvanus “affirmed that no signs of fear and no sadness had been detected in [Seneca’s] words and face (nihil triste in verbis eius aut vultu)” (Ann. 15.61.2). This recalls Senecan assertions such as “Nothing will ever befall me that I receive sadly or with unhappy face” (nihil umquam mihi incidet, quod tristis excipiam, quod malo vultu, Ep. 96.2), in keeping with the ideal of Socratic aequalitas (Ep. 104.28). In the following stage the centurion conveys to Seneca necessitatem ultimam (“the final necessity,” 15.61.4). As Philippe Bruggisser (2004) has noted, the term ultima necessitas, which generally refers to various dire circumstances, in Seneca’s writings had sometimes become more simply “a euphemism for death”—or, we might say, a euphemism for circumstances that make death inescapable (cf. Ep. 70.5).33 Tacitus, Bruggisser observes, tends to use the variants suprema and extrema; only here, in the context of Seneca’s death, does he use the Senecan formulation with ultima, an instance of Tacitean “finesse littéraire” that makes Seneca die in his own words (“de ses propres paroles,” 491). The specific intertext Tacitus has in mind probably is, in fact, letter 70, to which we will return in chapter 8. In a final, intriguing example, Tacitus writes that Seneca “was cremated without any funeral ceremony. This was as he had stipulated in his will, when he was giving thought to his last rites even while still supremely wealthy and powerful (ita codicillis praescripserat, cum etiam tum praedives et praepotens supremis suis consuleret)” (15.64.4). The term praescripserat arguably hints at Seneca’s characteristic interest in a technique of advance preparation, the praemeditatio futurorum malorum. In fact, the wordplay by which Tacitus registers the simultaneity between Seneca’s act of praescribere (prae- in a temporal sense) and his being still praedives et praepotens (prae- as an intensifier) closely parallels a figura etymologica that Seneca puts into the mouth of Socrates in the De vita beata: sapiens tunc maxime paupertatem meditatur cum in mediis divitiis constitit (“The wise man practices for poverty precisely when he stands in the middle of wealth,” VB 26.1).34 In both instances, wordplay is used to emphasize the simultaneity of the wise man’s prosperity and his anticipations. The praemeditatio structure suits Tacitus’ needs as a historian here, providing a broader temporal perspective that juxtaposes the dying Seneca with Seneca at the height of his success—the closest thing Seneca gets to an obituary. As G. O. Hutchinson remarks on this passage, “[h]ere the philosopher’s and the historian’s sense of time richly blend” (1993, 268). Taken together, these examples add to our understanding of how one reader—Tacitus—rewrote Seneca’s death in dialogue with Seneca’s literary career 32. In addition to the allusions discussed below, note also Ann. 15.61.1: nec sibi promptum in adulationes ingenium, which echoes Clem. 2.2.2: non ut blandum auribus tuis (nec enim hic mihi mos est: maluerim veris offendere quam placere adulando); see Trillitzsch (1971), 1.91–92. 33. Cf. Woodman (forthcoming), noting echoes of Ep. 70. 34. See also Ker (forthcoming b).

the man of many genres in his death

73

conducted in the un-Ciceronian sphere of the Imperial court. Yet Tacitus, as noted above, assumes that his reader is also undertaking the more open-ended process of supplementing the death narrative from his or her own readings of Seneca.

End of a Polygeneric Career There is no single sense in which Seneca can be said to die in accord with his authorial identity: he dies as he lived, a man of many studia. For example, the early allusions made in the Octavia (“to fall more heavily,” gravius ut ruerem, 379–80) and in Pliny the Elder (“having the power which, in the end, excessive, crashed down on him,” potentia quae postremo nimia ruit super ipsum, 14.51), present Seneca’s demise through the precise motifs of a regretful return from exile or a self-ruining excess, both familiar from Senecan tragedy.35 This angle differs sharply from the Senecan discourse of praemeditatio through which we saw Tacitus portraying Seneca preparing for his death already when wealthy (Ann. 15.64.4)—though Tacitus also draws on Senecan tragedy elsewhere. How Seneca’s contemporaries could have perceived and portrayed his death is therefore an open question.

Seneca’s Oeuvre and the Recurrence of Death Foucault observes that “the function of the author is to characterize the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourses within a society” (1977, 124). My goal in the present section is to draw attention to the unusual breadth of discourse types associated with Seneca, and to consider how his death may have served as an epistemological opportunity—a moment in which to stage one’s knowledge of (or attitudes to) this author and his distinctive function. In Julio-Claudian literary culture Seneca had been an innovator, applying sententious and figurative rhetoric to literary scenarios in both prose and verse36 and emphasizing the ethical aspects of style.37 He had written works in many genres, some now known only by title or through fragments preserved by other authors or in palimpsest. In no particular chronological order, as their dates are in many cases unknown, we may note the following:38 epigrams,39

35. For this association in the Pliny passage see Ramelli (2002), 503–4. 36. For surveys and studies of, e.g., the prose style see G. D. Williams (2003), 25–32; Setaioli (2000); Traina (1974); Currie (1968); Trillitzsch (1962); Guillemin (1957); and Summers (1910), xlii–liv, with the qualifications of Hine (2005). 37. E.g., Seneca promoted the nexus of ideas associated with talis oratio qualis vita (Ep. 114.1). See Dominik (1997). 38. On the chronology see Griffin (1992), 395–411; prior hypotheses in Giancotti (1957). For the fragmentary and lost works see Vottero (1998). The textual transmissions are surveyed in Reynolds (1983), 357–81. On florilegia and spurious works, see Ross (1974); Faider (1921), 117–22. 39. Some epigrams attributed to Seneca in Prato (1964) (though in the Latin Anthology only a few are explicitly attributed to him) are likely to be authentic, pace Holzberg (2002). See Dingel (2007), 12–20, 33–35; Degl’Innocenti Pierini (1999), 109–37.

74

seneca the author

frivolous verses,40 tragedies on Greek myths (transmitted in this order: Hercules, Troades, Phoenissae, Medea, Phaedra, Oedipus, Agamemnon, Thyestes), a biography of his father (De vita patris),41 a work from exile flattering Messalina and Claudius’ freedmen (cf. Dio 60.8.5), a prosimetric satire on the apotheosis of Claudius (Ludus de morte Claudii, that is, the Apocolocyntosis; cf. Dio 60.35.2–3), a work of political advice for Nero (De clementia),42 twelve books of Dialogi on various moral topics (transmitted in this order: De providentia ad Lucilium, De constantia sapientis ad Serenum, De ira ad Novatum [in three books], Consolatio ad Marciam, De vita beata ad Gallionem, De otio ad Serenum, De tranquillitate animi ad Serenum, De brevitate vitae ad Paulinum, Consolatio ad Polybium, Consolatio ad Helviam matrem),43 letters (Epistulae morales ad Lucilium; possibly also Epistulae ad Maximum), a seven-book guide to gift giving (De beneficiis ad Aebutium Liberalem), a work on meditatio (De remediis fortuitorum),44 other works on moral topics (De matrimonio, De officiis, Quomodo amicitia continenda sit, De inmatura morte, De superstitione, Libri moralis philosophiae, Exhortationes), works of ethnography (De situ et sacris Aegyptiorum) and geography (on India), and an eight-book discussion of natural science (Natural Questions), as well as some smaller treatises (De terrae motu [cf. NQ 6.4.2]; De forma mundi). Death is a privileged concern throughout, but especially in the genres of consolation and tragedy and in individual works such as the De brevitate vitae, De inmatura morte, De remediis fortuitorum, De providentia, and Epistulae morales.45 Even more extensively than his contemporaries Lucan and Petronius,46 Seneca had engaged creatively with influential treatments of death in the literary tradition, such as Lucretius’ De rerum natura book 3, Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis and Tusculan Disputations book 1, and Virgil’s Aeneid book 6.47 Taking up these texts’ philosophic and poetic approaches to the representation of death and the afterlife, Seneca had developed his own distinctive rhetorical emphases within each of his genres, but in every case had foregrounded people’s subjective experience of time and temporality, and the place of death within this. He had also given death a special structural and stylistic prominence. Hence his characteristic framing of individual prose books or choral odes as meditatio mortis or cogitatio mortalitatis, his use of the ghost prologue and mid-play katabasis as

40. Cf. Plin. Ep. 5.3.2–5, listing Seneca among famous authors of versiculi; Sen. Helv. 20.1 on his own leviora studia (with Vottero 1998, 13–14); Tac. Ann. 14.52.3 on Seneca’s production of carmina catering to Nero’s tastes. For overview see Dingel (2007), 11–12. 41. See Vottero (1998), 75–81; Griffin (1992), 33. 42. On the historical-literary scenario of the Apocolocyntosis and the De clementia, see Leach (1989). 43. On the Dialogi as a group see Abel (1967). 44. On its authenticity, though it survives only in epitomated form, see Newman (1988). 45. Just as Inwood (2005), 241 observes that the lex mortalitatis is “a basic principle of ethics” for Seneca, so, too, death may be said to be a basic principle of his writings more generally. See also Inwood (2007a), 303 on death in the Epistulae morales. 46. The general culture is evoked by Hutchinson (1993), 256–87, 288–326, on death in Imperial prose and high poetry. 47. E.g., Inwood (2005), 184 on Lucretius; Setaioli (1997), 321–22 on Cicero, 361–63 on Virgil.

the man of many genres in his death

75

devices for shaping dramatic space and time in the tragedies, and his use of a memento mori in his rhetorical theory: if you wish your sermo and vita to be in harmony, he advises, simply “Look to death!” (respice ad mortem, Ep. 114.27). We will consider individual literary approaches to death below and in the following chapters. Although each of Seneca’s literary explorations of death offered its own distinct lens on his death, it is worth emphasizing that contemporaries would likely have expected the dying Seneca to embody, in one way or another, his polygeneric profile. In positive terms, the death might have been an occasion for a “mega-performance” of his polymathic rofi¨a (Dio 59.19.8),48 the master role of princeps eruditorum (Plin. HN 14.51), or an expert instantiation of the mythic triad of “philosophy-oratory-song” that subtends Roman literature, and especially Seneca’s oeuvre.49 In negative terms, it might have brought to light the inherent contradictions of his diverse endeavors, from the writing of tragedies to the tending of vineyards. Even if the reactions of Seneca’s contemporaries are mostly irrecoverable, we must try to keep these broader positive and negative possibilities in mind.50

Quintilian on the Dead Author We can bring ourselves closer to contemporary perceptions if we look at Quintilian’s discussion of Seneca’s style in book 10 of his Institutio oratoria, written some twenty to thirty years after Seneca’s death.51 Turning to Seneca at the end of his survey of Greek and Latin authors whom the orator-in-training should imitate (Inst. 10.1.125–131), Quintilian emphasizes how imperfectly Seneca was imitated in the days when “virtually he alone was in the hands of the young men” (solus hic fere in manibus adulescentium fuit, §126)—a period during which he himself had published a harsher critique of Senecan style (§125).52 Although Quintilian now praises some aspects of Senecan style, his ultimate assessment is that Seneca has a complex value as a model: he is to be read “because he can exercise one’s judgment on either side” (quod exercere potest utrimque iudicium, §131). Quintilian explains how specific aspects of Senecan style had been selected for imitation, but the wrong ones: “Only for his faults did he find favor” (placebat propter sola vitia, §127). The rhetorician has many vitia in mind, though the one he defines most explicitly is Seneca’s 48. On rofi¨a and “mega-performers” see Martin (1993). 49. On the triad in Seneca see Habinek (2005), 104; see also (1998), 212 on Seneca’s master role as exhortator. 50. On the diversity of Seneca’s oeuvre and studia see further Ker (2006). 51. See Dominik (1997), 50–59 and bibliography in Vottero (1998), 9 n. 24. In addition to the passages discussed here, note Quintilian’s quotations from Seneca’s letter to the Senate on Agrippina (Inst. 8.5.18) and the Medea (9.2.8). 52. I.e., the lost work De causis corruptae eloquentiae; cf. Russell (2001), 5.319 n. 163. It is easy to read Quintilian’s description of Seneca’s monopoly at §126 as referring specifically to his jealous shielding of Nero from other models in Suet. Ner. 52.

76

seneca the author

fragmentation of his themes through pointed style (cf. si rerum pondera minutissimis sententiis non fregisset, §130).53 Such selective imitation, he says, produced a distorted caricature: “In claiming to speak in the same manner, [the imitator] maligned Seneca” (cum se iactaret eodem modo dicere, Senecam infamabat, §127). Quintilian’s response, vindicating Seneca as a model, is to explain which features of his style would be chosen by a better or more mature judge. He seems to have in mind Seneca’s “many distinguished sententiae, and much also that is worth reading for its moral value” (multae . . . claraeque sententiae, multa etiam morum gratia legenda, §129)—the things that defined him as “an outstanding persecutor of vices” (egregius . . . vitiorum insectator, §129). Here we may note Quintilian’s strategy of selecting specific stylistic modes or specific discursive roles in which Seneca variously appears as a bad or good model. At the same time, Quintilian’s emphasis is on Senecan multiplicity. He explains that the present discussion has been delayed to the end of his genreby-genre survey because he wanted to give special attention to Seneca’s style as containing both good and bad elements (stylistic multiplicity) and because Seneca could have been mentioned under many different literary rubrics (cf. in omni genere eloquentiae, §125).54 The polygeneric Seneca is validated as a master writer of great power and flexibility (§§128–29): cuius et multae alioqui et magnae virtutes fuerunt, ingenium facile et copiosum, plurimum studii, multa rerum cognitio. . . . tractavit etiam omnem fere studiorum materiam: nam et orationes eius et poemata et epistulae et dialogi feruntur. Otherwise he had many great virtues: a flexible and abundant style, much research, a great knowledge of things. . . . He also pursued almost every potential endeavor, for we have speeches of his, poems, letters, and discourses. But Quintilian also reacts sharply to Seneca’s monopolization. He explains his earlier criticisms, for example, by saying, “I wasn’t going to allow him to be ranked ahead of other better ones, whom he had not ceased from detracting because, being conscious of the difference of his style, he doubted that his style could please those whom they pleased (diversi sibi conscius generis placere se in dicendo posse quibus illi placerent diffideret)” (§126). He also identifies weaknesses in Seneca’s overall profile, portraying his oeuvre as the imperfect product of more than one man: in his knowledge, for example, Seneca “was sometimes put wrong by those to whom he had entrusted certain things to investigate”

53. As Calboli (1999), 25–26 notes, Quintilian here criticizes Seneca (si . . . contempsisset, si non . . . amasset, si . . . non fregisset, . . . comprobaretur, 130) in terms that echo Seneca’s criticism of Maecenas at Ep. 114.4: magni vir ingenii fuerat si illud egisset via rectiore, si non vitasset intellegi, si non etiam in oratione difflueret. 54. Cf. Dominik (1997), 56: Seneca “does not really conform to Quintilian’s generic expectations of a writer.”

the man of many genres in his death

77

(aliquando ab iis quibus inquirenda quaedam mandabat deceptus est, §128).55 Seneca would have been better, Quintilian laments, “if he had not loved everything of his own” (si non omnia sua amasset): “You wish he had spoken with his own style, but another’s judgment” (velles eum suo ingenio dixisse, alieno iudicio, §130). Quintilian does not refer to Seneca’s death explicitly. Yet the death is an implicit factor in the succession of snapshots we receive of: (1) Quintilian’s having heard Seneca in person during his own lifetime (for example, giving prefatory comments with Pomponius Secundus at a tragic recitatio, 8.3.31; cf. 12.10.11),56 (2) his earlier criticisms of Seneca, reacting at the height of his influence (10.1.125– 26), and (3) the present portrait in which Seneca no longer dominates the field and his status as a model is characterized in hindsight and from a distance.57 There may also be, I suggest, an implicit gesturing toward Seneca’s death in Quintilian’s final words: “For there are many things to approve of in him, as I have said, and many even to admire, as long as you take care in selecting. If only he had. For his nature was one worthy of better intentions; what he intended, he accomplished (quod voluit effecit)” (§131). Here we see Quintilian condensing his assessment of Seneca into the closing phrase, quod voluit effecit, which juxtaposes Seneca’s misguided exercise of judgment (voluit) with his rhetorical capabilities (effecit), both touting and tainting Seneca’s accomplishment. Quod voluit effecit is a phrase used by Seneca himself in the De beneficiis when emphasizing that a giver whose gift is willingly received by the recipient has already “accomplished what he intended” (quod voluit effecit), regardless of whether a counter-gift is given (Ben. 2.31.2; 2.32.4). Here Quintilian, with a heavy touch of irony, adapts the phrase to describe Seneca’s rhetorical performance in which his style is efficacious, but his judgment is off mark: he got what he (foolishly) wanted. It is easy to read Quintilian’s comment, in addition, as pointing to the judgments that led to Seneca’s ultimate undoing. The phrase hints either that Seneca reaped what he sowed or even that he “succeeded” in meeting with the end he wanted, however misguided the judgments that put him there.

A Script for Mortality: De Providentia How might contemporary expectations have been shaped by specific whole works or groups of works by Seneca? A useful place to begin is the dialogus known as De providentia,58 in which Seneca examines human mortality with his eyes fixed primarily on the example of Cato the Younger. Erich Koestermann in fact suggested

55. Compare Seneca’s own criticism of the freedman Calvisius Sabinus, who relied on his slaves to know literature for him (Ep. 27.7). 56. On the nature of these prefatory discussions see Lausberg (1989), 1952–53, who dates them to c. 51–57. 57. Laureys (1991) emphasizes Quintilian’s active shaping of Seneca’s posthumous reception. 58. The date is uncertain, though some have placed it in Seneca’s final years; see Griffin (1992), 396, 400– 401. For discussions of the work see Inwood (2005), 307–8; Biondi (2001), 31–32; Mazzoli (2000), 254–60.

78

seneca the author

that the De providentia may be a close approximation of the themes that Seneca touched on in the dictated text mentioned by Tacitus (1968, 305). The work responds to a question Lucilius has asked, namely: “Why, if the world is governed by Providence, do many bad things happen to good men (multa bonis viris mala acciderent)” (Prov. 1.1). Seneca’s solution is to explain that apparent misfortunes are not in fact bad for men who are good: they are in their interest (pro ipsis, 3.1), because they give them “a chance to exhibit their virtue” (4.2); they are also in the interest of all humankind (pro universis, 3.1), not least because they “teach others to endure” (6.3). Seneca lays particular emphasis on the perspective of the gods. Early in the text he suggests, “It is in fact no surprise to me if occasionally the gods get the urge to watch (impetum capiunt spectandi) great men wrestling with some catastrophe” (2.7). The text effectively concretizes pro-videntia’s visual metaphor, in conjunction with the beneficial aspect implied in pro-, and invites the reader to share the providential view.

Three Textual Strategies of Senecan Exit Writing Without necessarily subscribing to Koestermann’s theory, we can benefit from considering how Seneca uses writing to address death’s spectatorial and experiential aspects in the De providentia and in some other works that exhibit both overlaps and variations. Three strategies stand out: 1. Seneca explores the different things that an exitus can become. Arriving at the death of Cato in the second chapter, he invokes the analogy of beast hunts watched by men in the amphitheater, suggesting that the gods might take pleasure in a similar, though more noble, duel: “Behold the spectacle, a pairing worthy of God (ecce spectaculum, par deo dignum): a brave man matched with a bad fortune, all the more so if he actually incited it. I do not see, I tell you, what Jupiter has on earth that is more beautiful—if he is willing to turn his attention to it—than to watch Cato, his party now shattered more than once (quam ut spectet Catonem iam partibus non semel fractis), standing no less upright amid the ruins of the Republic” (2.9). The scene of Cato dying is then sketched out in vivid and dramatic detail, with a prosopopoeia in Cato’s own voice rationalizing his death as a victory over Caesar’s dictatorship: “Cato has a way out (Cato qua exeat habet): with one hand he will make a wide road for freedom (una manu latam libertati viam faciet). This weapon will give to Cato the freedom that it was unable to give to the fatherland. Go to it, spirit, take up the long-practiced task: tear yourself out of the human world (aggredere, anime, diu meditatum opus, eripe te rebus humanis)” (2.10). Every aspect of Cato’s speech implies a quasidivine and providential perspective toward his body and its sufferings.59 59. On Cato’s self-apostrophe see Star (2006), 219. Mazzoli (2000), 256 notes the third-person perspective and compares the scene to a fabula praetexta (cf. Tac. Dial. 2).

the man of many genres in his death

79

But it is the gods’ own point of view that dominates Seneca’s presentation: “It is clear to me that the gods watched with great pleasure (cum magno spectasse gaudio deos) while (dum) that man, that fierce self-liberator (acerrimus sui vindex), looked to the safety of others and prepared a means for their escape, while (dum) he worked at his studia even on that final night, while (dum) he stuck the sword into his sacred breast, while (dum) he splayed his intestines and extracted with his hand (manu educit) that soul too sacred to be sullied by steel” (2.11). Seneca’s correlation between his drawn-out description and the gods’ aesthetic pleasure is used implicitly to explain the well-known details of Cato’s death, such as his reading and rereading of the Phaedo (studia . . . tractat, Prov. 2.11; cf. Ep. 24.6) and the double-wounding that amounts to an iteration of Cato’s exit: “It was not enough for the immortal gods to watch Cato once (spectare Catonem semel): he held onto his virtue and summoned it to show itself in a greater challenge. For a great spirit is shown not in the entry into but in the repeating of death (non enim tam magno animo mors initur quam repetitur)” (2.12). “Repeating” (repetitur) captures the paradoxical notion of entering into an exit, without yet exiting life. Thus, the gods’ observation of “their foster-son going out in such a distinguished and memorable exit” (alumnum suum tam claro ac memorabili exitu evadentem, 2.12) suggests a kind of repetitioncompulsion on their part.60 Seneca’s writing reveals much about the death-writing tradition as it was developing under (and in response to) the early emperors—what would later become the Exitus illustrium virorum. His writing of Cato’s death in particular may have contributed to the repertoire that was sketched in the previous chapter; certainly his description of the dying Cato as spectaculum, par deo dignum (Prov. 2.9) became central to early Christian martyrology. But Seneca’s exit writing is not restricted to Cato, and comparison with other instances can illustrate its flexibility in theme and tone—and in the meaning of exitus itself. For example, in the death of Julius Canus in the De tranquillitate animi, which we have touched on before, the dying man says to his philosopher: “I have determined to observe at that most fleeting moment whether my mind will feel itself depart (an sensurus sit animus exire se)” (14.9; cf. Plut. fr. 211 Sandbach). As Seneca explains, Canus’ mind (animus) “interrogates its departing soul” (exeuntem animam percontatur, 14.10). In this heuristic death, the exit is converted from being simply a departure of the person watched by others into being a moment observed by the dying man himself, exploiting the special epistemological potential of the soul’s exit from the body (cf. ex ipsa morte discit, 14.10).

60. This is characterized as an encore performance by Star (2006), 218.

80

seneca the author

In the Apocolocyntosis, by contrast, and in keeping with that text’s transmitted title as a Ludus de morte Claudii, Seneca precedes his mockery of the emperor’s deification with a kind of anti-exitus—a popular subgenre?61 When the narrator begins to describe how Claudius started to die, he explains that “he began to give up the ghost and could not find an ending” (animam agere coepit nec invenire exitum poterat, Apocol. 2.4). The culmination of the death narrative, after seemingly endless protraction and double description, notoriously converts Claudius’ “exit” into an excretion of the soul (“and he indeed bubbled out his last breath,” et ille quidem animam ebulliit; cf. expiravit, Apocol. 4.2) and of excrement itself, in a perversion of the exit genre’s last-words topos:62 “His final utterance among mortals was heard when had emitted a rather loud sound from the part from which he spoke more easily: ‘Oh no, I think I’ve shit myself ’ ” (ultima vox eius inter homines audita est, cum maiorem sonitum emisisset illa parte, qua facilius loquebatur: “vae me, puto, concacavi me,” 4.2–3). Claudius’ exit from life and from power becomes a purely bodily evacuation. 2. In addition to its exercise in the flexible-exit form, the De providentia also approaches death and suffering through the rhetoric of cataloguing. Developing his argument that adversity is in fact good for the good man, Seneca compares Fortune to a gladiator who picks out only worthy opponents (Prov. 3.4) and proceeds to list historical exempla in a set of stylized phrases: “She tries out fire in Mucius, poverty in Fabricius, exile in Rutilius, torture in Regulus, poison in Socrates, death in Cato” (3.5).63 Cato thus now reappears as part of a larger list, and Seneca elaborates each of the exempla in the same anaphoric frame: “[This man] is unhappy because he . . . because he . . . because he . . .? Well? Would he have been happier, if he . . .?” (infelix est . . . quod . . . quod . . . quod? . . . quid ergo? felicior esset, si . . .? with minor modulations, 3.5–14). Seneca develops each individual anecdote, in sometimes shocking images, through the role of a distinct body part and a fanciful set of contrasts centering on other uses of the same body part. Socrates is described as drinking the poison that makes his veins congeal, in contrast with people who quaff luxurious drinks, vomit, and redrink their own bile (3.12–13). The hand of Mucius Scaevola, the stomach of C. Fabricius Luscinus, the refusal of P. Rutilius Rufus to look upon the heads of dead senators, and the forced-open eyes of M. Atilius Regulus (his eyelids having been removed) are all developed with equal inventiveness. The

61. For commentary see Eden (1984). Martin and Woodman (1989) extrapolate from Tac. Ann. 4.11.2 (atrociore semper fama erga dominantium exitus) to suggest that “the deaths of other dominantes may have been given similar treatment [to that given to Claudius in the Apocol.] in works which are now lost” (128). 62. Cf. Ronconi (1966), 1258–63. 63. For variations on the same basic list compare Marc. 22.3; Tranq. 16.1; Epp. 24.4–8 (with similar privileging of Cato); 67.7; 79.14; 98.12.

the man of many genres in his death

81

repeated frame invites comparison with the gods’ desire for iteration described by Seneca earlier in the Cato scene. It also serves to habituate the reader to every possible spectacle of adversity, and of endurance, in a kind of moral anatomy of the human body. This exhaustiveness also has a revealing monotony: each successive trial is simply another version of corporeal suffering, each equally irrelevant to the animus of the good man. This rhetoric of cataloguing is central to the De providentia’s goal of teaching the reader to adopt the perspective of providentia. Although the catalogue is a regular component of Seneca’s rhetoric on multiple topics,64 he applies it to death and destruction with unique intensity. Sometimes he uses the catalogue to habituate the reader to actual deaths of varying type, sometimes to convey the ease of self-killing. In the Epistulae morales, Seneca depicts the choosing of one’s exit by asking first, “Why do you ask the gods for what they gave you when you were born (nascenti)?” (Ep. 117.22), and then proceeding to explain: “No one is holding you back. Go out wherever it occurs to you. Pick out any part of the nature of the world (quamlibet rerum naturae partem): you can command it to give you an exit (praebere exitum). These are in fact the very elements (et elementa) by which the world is governed. Water, earth, breath—all of these are equally bases of living and paths to death (aqua, terra, spiritus, omnia ista tam causae vivendi sunt quam viae mortis)” (117.23). But the ultimate rhetorical goal of such catalogues varies with context. Early in the Phoenissae, Antigone describes to her blinded father, Oedipus, the different features of the surrounding wilderness by which they might seek death together (Pho. 67–73): Here a lofty cliff (hic alta rupes) projects with a steep ridge and looks long and wide over the stretches of sea below. Would you like us to seek this? Here there is a hard overhanging rock (nudus hic pendet silex) while here the ground is split (hic scissa tellus) and gapes open in an abyss. Would you like us to seek this? Here a greedy torrent plunges down (hic rapax torrens cadit) and rolls the boulders it has eaten from a subsiding mountainside. Would you like us to hurl ourselves into this? Antigone’s deictic catalogue of the landscape suggests death by implied use of three elements—earth, air, and water—in various lethal combinations. It is only her use of the first-person plural, thereby threatening her own life, that piques Oedipus’ pietas and convinces him to avoid these all, and live.

64. On anaphoric repetition in the prose works see G. D. Williams (2003), 29–31; on catalogues in the tragedies, Rosenmeyer (1989), 160–203.

82

seneca the author

3. Seneca’s third main strategy for representing death in the De providentia is to end the text in an intensive focus on the conditions of mortal existence. Already before the end, Seneca suggests that “we should give thought” (cogitemus) to mortality and to the irrelevance of bodily adversities. This thought process is guided by no less than God himself, in a prosopopoeia exhorting “you” mortals, which will finish out the text (Prov. 6.3–6.9). God explains that the “dismissal” (contemnere) of adversities is always possible through the unique remedy of death: “The way out is wide open (patet exitus): if you do not wish to fight, you are allowed to flee. This is why, of all the things that I wanted to be necessary for you, I made nothing easier than dying (nihil feci facilius quam mori)” (6.7). To make this point, God invites mortals to share in a final lesson: “Just look closely and you will see how brief and unencumbered the path is that leads to freedom” (adtendite modo et videbitis quam brevis ad libertatem et quam expedita ducat via, 6.7). The divine point of view here recalls the spectaculum of Cato dying earlier in the work, except that the future tense, “you will see,” points toward everyday spectacula and animal sacrifices from which we must “learn” (cf. mortem condiscite, 6.9) and practice for our own deaths that the gods will watch (cf. 2.9). The lesson that “death is near at hand” (in proximo mors est, 6.9) is to be brought home by the sudden way in which the text itself comes to an end (yet another sense of exitus teased out by Seneca): “Whether a knot has strangled the throat (sive . . . nodus), water has blocked off the air passage (sive . . . aqua), you fall on your head and the hardness of the ground beneath has broken you (sive . . . soli duritia), or an inhalation of fire has cut off the passage of your life breath from returning (sive haustus ignis . . .)—whatever it is, it comes fast” (6.9). Seneca, still in the voice of God, resorts to his tactic of splicing a catalogue of body parts ( fauces, spiramentum, caput, anima) together with a catalogue of the four elements (nodus [implying suspension in the air], aqua, solum, ignis). But coming at the end of the text, the catalogue takes on a closural function. God’s very last words that follow, “Do you blush? You have spent a long time fearing something that happens so quickly!” (ecquid erubescitis? quod tam cito fit timetis diu! 6.9), turn the reader back upon his or her experience of the text’s own limit, which is to serve as an icon of life’s finitude. This effect is enhanced by the forms of death alluded to in the catalogue, which are mostly forms of suffocation and therefore parallel the expiration of the text as an utterance. There is, then, a convergence between the cogitatio mortalitatis and the literary-rhetorical enactment of closure. Cogitatio mortalitatis is common in the ends of Seneca’s prose books. The third and final book of the De ira ends with the assertion that “nothing will be more beneficial than the contemplation of death” (nec ulla res magis proderit quam cogitatio mortalitatis, Ira 3.42.2), and illustrates this cogitatio with a sample of self-directed discourse that concludes: “Just as we are looking back, as they say, and turning ourselves around, already mortality will be there” (“. . . dum

the man of many genres in his death

83

respicimus, quod aiunt, versamusque nos, iam mortalitas aderit,” 3.43.5). An elaborate, inverted form of the cogitatio comes in the De brevitate vitae, where it acts out the text’s central theme: the brevitas of most people’s so-called lives. Seneca does not spend much time on death until the final pages, where he exploits the dynamics of rhetorical closure to revisit the opening image of mortals whose lives end just when they thought they were getting started (cf. Brev. 1.1).65 He now explains how “some persons, before they can work their way up to the peak of their ambition, have been abandoned by life as they struggled amid the very beginnings” (quosdam, antequam in summum ambitionis eniterentur, inter prima luctantes aetas reliquit, 20.1), and this begins a series of similar sentences each concluded by mention of death (20.1–2). He turns finally to consider the ambitious funerals and death monuments planned by the occupati and then, as a corrective to this, a different type of funeral, lacking any public proportions: “But by Hercules, their funerals, in keeping with how little they have lived, should be conducted by torch- and taper-light” (at mehercules istorum funera, tamquam minimum vixerint, ad faces et cereos ducenda sunt, 20.5). The torches and tapers are the tokens of the acerbum funus, the Roman funeral conducted at night, out of the public eye, for a death that is premature or especially regretful.66 The interrupted trochaic rhythm of the final clause, a¯d faˇce¯s ¯et | ce¯reˇ¯os du ¯- | ce¯ndaˇ su ¯ nt, infuses it with solemn pathos. There the text ends, in a dramatization of premature closure—of brevitas vitae.

Scripts for Seneca’s Exit Each of the individual textual strategies at work in the De providentia helps us to see how contemporaries might have been inclined to view Seneca’s authorial death, promoting that work’s overall program of convincing the reader both to watch and to experience human mortality from a providential perspective, with Cato’s death the paradigm. There are, for example, potential affinities between the iterative aspect of Cato’s death that caters to the tastes of divine spectators (including Jupiter) who enjoy watching the “most fierce self-liberator” (acerrimus sui vindex, Prov. 2.11), and the Tacitean Seneca’s multistage death that culminates in the libation to Jupiter Liberator (Ann. 15.64.4). The two other strategies discussed above—the catalogue and the finale in cogitatio mortalitatis—might also be integrated into a reading of Seneca’s death, and especially of his dictated text. Yet we have also seen that Seneca’s strategies for representing death in different texts are as flexible as Seneca’s ingenium. His varied exercises in death description multiply the potential resonances of his death—and not all in the direction of the De providentia. His contemporaries might have interpreted Seneca’s death through a providential discourse, but might alternatively have

65. For commentary see G. D. Williams (2003), 248–54. 66. For the acerbum funus, a favorite topos of Seneca’s, cf. Ep. 122.10; Tranq. 11.7.

84

seneca the author

seen there a stronger emphasis on death as an exercise in tranquillitas animi or philosophical inquiry, as in the death of Julius Canus. The comparison with Canus, in turn, is ripe with possibilities not considered above: for example, in the De tranquillitate animi, Canus arguably serves already as a double of Seneca—both lexically, with canus (“white, old”) corresponding to the senex element in Seneca’s name, and historically, because both men were Stoics condemned to death by Caligula. Such a reading transforms the appearance of Seneca’s death and of the De tranquillitate animi as a text. But what if the reader instead draws on Seneca’s satirization of Claudius’ awkward death in the Apocolocyntosis? The account of Dio, who apparently knew the work (cf. 60.35.3), perhaps gestures toward such a reading in his evocation of Seneca’s messy, botched death that the soldiers had to bring to an end: “His death turned out to be difficult” (dtrhamasñra|, 62.25.3). Dio’s word even has a mock-heroic rhythm (dactyl-spondee) that parallels the use of verse in the prosimetric satire. If the Apocolocyntosis becomes a privileged point of reference, neither Seneca’s death nor the Apocolocyntosis can continue to look the same.

From the Dialogi to Other Genres The De providentia is far from being the only text in which Seneca deals with death, or even the death of Cato. What can we learn, in closing, from briefly comparing his representations of Cato’s death elsewhere?67 In the Epistulae morales, Seneca uses Cato to address Lucilius’ anxieties, as in the De tranquillitate. This time, however, it is the specific anxiety that he knows Lucilius feels about a pending legal case (cf. sollicitum esse te scribis de iudici eventu, Ep. 24.1) and that arises within the day-to-day rhythm of the epistolary series. As he describes Cato on his final night and quotes his words before tearing open his wound (24.6–9), Seneca distinguishes his present use of Cato from a declamatory exercise: “I am not heaping up examples to show off my abilities, but in order to encourage you” (non in hoc exempla congero ut ingenium exerceam, sed ut te . . . exhorter, 24.9).68 And throughout the letters, the death of Cato (often combined with the death of Socrates, but sometimes also with anonymous and low-class suicides) recurs in Seneca’s exhortations of Lucilius toward meditatio mortis. Cato’s death is developed differently in the epigrams that Seneca may have written, where it is progressively reviewed in a cycle of three poems of increasing length (Epigr. 7–9 Prato).69 The cycle begins with an epitaphic

67. On Seneca’s varying portrayals of Cato see Isnardi Parenti (2000); Hutchinson (1993), 273. 68. On the portrayal of Cato in this letter see Hutchinson (1993), 273–79. 69. On this cycle see Dingel (2007), 26–29. For commentary see Dingel (2007), 124–29; Prato (1964), 124–27.

the man of many genres in his death

85

apostrophe addressed to the dead Cato: “Caesar, who had the power to conquer everything, was not able, Cato, to defeat you, unconquered on the conquered side” (invictum victis in partibus, omnia Caesar / vincere qui potuit, te, Cato, non potuit, 7.1–2). In the next poem this is expanded to a description of his tearing of the wound, culminating thus: “Fortune . . . wanted us to know that Cato’s hand was more powerful than steel” (Fortuna . . . voluit . . .Catonis / sciremus ferro plus valuisse manum, 8.5–6). The third poem concludes in an exhortation addressed by Cato to his own now reluctant hand (“Right hand, you hesitate?” “dextera . . . dubitas . . .?” 9.5) that explains, in language prefiguring the epitaphic first poem, what it will mean for Cato to die: “Now Cato wins, in dying” (“. . . vincit nunc Cato, si moritur,” 9.8). The sequence of poems, moving backward in time, shows how the event of Cato’s reopening of his wound can be progressively expanded and scrutinized through epigrammatic devices. Like the letters and the epigrams, the De providentia and the De tranquillitate animi (where Cato’s death also arises, separately from that of Canus; cf. Tranq. 16.1–4) have a generic identity of their own. They illustrate some of the conventions that recur in the collection and seem to define the dialogus as it is employed by Seneca. These include a personalized exordium addressed to the work’s dedicatee, which introduces a quasi-forensic structure (exordium, propositio, divisio, . . . peroratio) couched in judicial language (for example, “I will argue the case of the gods,” causam deorum agam, Prov. 1.1), and a polyvocalic aspect that incorporates interjections with inquit/inquis and inventive prosopopoeiai.70 There are, however, three genres that are still more tightly bound to Seneca’s literary treatment of death and that defined the main interpretive frameworks available to Seneca’s readers: consolation, tragedy, and epistolography. We consider these genres in the next three chapters.

70. On these and other features of the Dialogi see Wright (1974); on polyvocality, Mazzoli (2000); on exordia, Habinek (1998); on the “crisis” of the addressee, Mazzoli (1997a). On the meaning of the label dialogus see G. D. Williams (2003), 3–4.

This page intentionally left blank

4 Consolations on the Departure of the Consoler

As Seneca gets ready to depart from life, Tacitus portrays him rendering therapy to others. In this chapter we track the development of Seneca’s career as a consoler—a career that extends from his earliest surviving work to his last.1 We will first briefly consider the relationship of his consolations to the prior consolatory tradition, but the focus of our inquiry will be the successive “mediating narratives” that Seneca offered to the readers of his consolations, already under Caligula, then during his exile under Claudius, and after his exclusion from the court of Nero. This personalized literary history will include the changing self-representations that Seneca incorporates into his therapies for others and that defined the backdrop of memories against which contemporaries would view his death. It will also, at the chapter’s end, provide a context for interpreting Tacitus’ version of the death scene— where consolation appears variously as a powerful form of therapy and as an enterprise vulnerable to its own inner contradictions. The dying Seneca elicits a sense of déjà vu, because the profile of the “departed” as consoler is one that Seneca had sketched over 20 years earlier in the consolation from exile addressed to his mother Helvia (Helv. 1.2–4):2 When, too, I was unrolling all the monuments of the most renowned writers composed for the suppression

1. There have been few surveys of Seneca’s consolatory career as a whole; but see Scourfield (1993), 20 n. 93 for bibliography. 2. Cf. R. Fabbri (1978–79), 419; Abel (1967), 53.

88

seneca the author and tempering of grief, I did not find any instance of one who had consoled his own [family and friends] when he himself was being mourned by them (non inveniebam exemplum eius qui consolatus suos esset, cum ipse ab illis comploraretur). Thus, I hesitated over the novelty of it and was afraid that this might not be a consolation but an exacerbation of the wound. There is also the fact that a person who raises his head from the very funeral pyre to console his own needs new words that have not been taken from popular and everyday commiseration. And the overall magnitude of a grief that surpasses all measure surely tears away our ability to choose words, since it frequently even interrupts the voice itself. Even so, let me make the attempt, not relying on any talent of mine but because by myself being the consoler I may offer the most effective image of consolation (sed quia possum instar efficacissimae consolationis esse ipse consolator).

In adopting the role of departed consoler, Seneca was not the first author to blur some of the boundaries between the three distinct roles of departed, consoler, and consolee. It was conventional, for example, for a consoler to present himself as also in need of consolation. And Cicero, describing his Consolatio ad se, tells Atticus, “I was also doing what absolutely no one before me [had done], in consoling myself personally through writing (ut ipse me per litteras consolarem). There is, I tell you, no consolation like it (nullam consolationem esse talem)” (Att. 12.14.3).3 But Cicero’s self-consoling consoler had only conflated two roles, whereas Seneca’s self-consoling departed was effectively a conflation of all three. The Ad Helviam both echoes and outdoes Cicero’s pose of originality. The exiled Seneca’s novel role of departed consoler4 stretched the limits of the consolatory scenario in distinctive ways, as he is at pains to emphasize: (1) Although insisting on the special authority of the departed consoler, he admits that he may serve as too vivid a reminder, and his “premature medicine” (inmatura medicina, Helv. 1.2) may exacerbate the wound. (2) It is not easy for the departed consoler to summon up the necessary language, given the novel situation and his own incapacitation. In comparing himself to “a person who raises his head from the very funeral pyre to console his own” (homini ad consolandos suos ex ipso rogo caput adlevanti, 1.3), Seneca seizes upon the familiar Roman notion of exile as a virtual death to glorify his feat.5 Twenty years later, the idea of Seneca consoling others as he faces death stretches the limits of the consolatory scenario yet further: (1) Seneca is now

3. See Setaioli (2003), 63–64; Degl’Innocenti Pierini (1990), 118–19. 4. Or not so novel: on the topos of the actual deceased as (imagined) consoler, see Pecere (1975), 96. Socrates in the Phaedo is the paradigmatic departing consoler; in Seneca’s later works see Julius Canus (Tranq. 14.8: “quid maesti” inquit “estis?”) and Tullius Marcellinus (Ep. 77.6: illos ultro consolatus est). 5. Cf. Wistrand (1968), 9–25.

consolations on the departure of the consoler

89

at even greater risk of being premature and exacerbating the wound. (2) The linguistic challenges to the man who is literally dying (no longer just metaphorically) can only be more extreme. Only by overcoming these greater challenges can Seneca hope to offer his friends a “most effective image of consolation” (instar efficacissimae consolationis, Helv. 1.4) such as he had once offered to his mother from exile. But this time around, Seneca has a longer history to draw upon—indeed a whole imago vitae suae. When he asks his weeping friends, “What had happened to their philosophical precepts and their rationality rehearsed for so many years against impending misfortunes?” (ubi praecepta sapientiae, ubi tot per annos meditata ratio adversum imminentia? Ann. 15.62.2), he effectively asks, hadn’t they read his writings? This will be our task, too, reviewing Seneca’s consolatory career before returning to the death scene.

Post-Republican Therapies “The age,” writes Arnaldo Momigliano of the early first century, “asked consolation from a professional philosopher” (1969, 244). And as Seneca himself writes, “For a time (interim) we wish to suppress [our grief] and to swallow our laments, yet even through the composed expressions on our face the tears well forth. For a time (interim) we busy our mind with games and gladiators, but even amid the spectacles meant to distract it, some slight sign of our longing eats away at it” (Helv. 17.1). What particular remedies, then, did Senecan consolation offer that would allow him and his contemporaries to make a full recovery from grief and to restore their public composure? When Seneca describes himself as “unrolling all the monuments . . . composed for the suppression and tempering of grief (ad compescendos moderandosque luctus)” (Helv. 1.2), he is acknowledging the extensive Greek and Roman history of consolatory writing, as well as subtle distinctions within Hellenistic philosophy that we know about through Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations between, say, the approach of Cleanthes (suppression) and other, less aggressive approaches (tempering) (Tusc. 3.75–79).6 Our most instructive comparison for Seneca as a Roman consoler is Cicero himself. In the several consolatory letters that survive in his correspondence, Cicero gives and receives consolation on events in his friends’ and his own life, including his exile and the death of Tullia in 45 BCE.7 The Tusculan Disputations are not simply a survey of Hellenistic arguments but also (like most of the philosophica of the difficult years 45–43) “a sustained consolatio composed in the aftermath of grave personal loss.”8 The Consolatio ad se 6. On the tradition see Scourfield (1993), 15–33; Johann (1968); Kassel (1958); Summers (1910), 243–45. For commentary and discussion on Cicero, see Graver (2002), esp. 121–24; 187–94. 7. On the letters of consolation in the Ciceronian corpus, see Wilcox (2005); Hutchinson (1998), 25–77; Beard (2002), 126–29. 8. White (1995), 221–26; quoted from 221.

90

seneca the author

(lost) was written just one month after Tullia’s death.9 Cicero concedes that the work, despite its eclectic combination of “all types of consolation” (Tusc. 3.76), ultimately failed to cure him. But he still expected that it “could be beneficial to others (ceteris . . . profuturam)” (Div. 2.3), and there is every reason to envisage it as a work of contemporary appeal. The section in which he elaborated on the theme “This life is in fact death” (haec quidem vita mors est, Tusc. 1.75) had probably made reference to powerful recent examples such as the death of Cato the Younger and the associated decline of the Republic (1.74–76, 83). With Cicero as a model for Roman consolation, what might Seneca have understood consolation to be about? Cicero admits to favoring the Chrysippean goal of “dislodging the belief of the griever (detrahere illam opinionem maerentis) that leads him to think he is fulfilling a duty that is both just and obligatory” (Tusc. 3.76). Within the consolatory text itself, he urges the addressee to end his grieving (and his grief ) more quickly than he would have done with the passage of time: “Let reason accomplish what the passage of time is going to accomplish” (impetret ratio quod dies impetratura est, Att. 12.10.1; cf. Sen. Marc. 8.1–3). In practice, “reason” (elsewhere paraphrased with consilium, prudentia, or virtus with masculine connotations) implies the array of therapeutic devices that the consoler makes available in the course of the text. These are primarily (1) arguments (praecepta, rationes, medicinae, consolationes), supplemented by (2) examples (exempla) and (3) comforts or compensations (solacia). Although the praecepta, exempla, and solacia are sometimes introduced explicitly and in this order, many modifications arise. Seneca, for example, will mention a traditional ordering of praecepta before exempla only to invert it, telling Marcia, “Reason leads some, while others need famous names (nomina clara) to be waved in front of them, and an authority which can take hold of their mind while they are struck dumb by its brilliance (auctoritas quae liberum non relinquat animum ad speciosa stupentibus)” (Marc. 2.1).10 And in the area of exempla, both Cicero and Seneca frequently focus on the example of the addressee’s own past behavior, appealing to his or her sense of self-consistency (constantia).11 The tailoring of this advice to suit the addressee makes the consolation an exercise in the rhetoric of occasion, and also in the offering of “mediating narratives” (my phrase). Cicero urges, “Just as in [forensic or declamatory] cases we do not always adopt the same pose . . . but adapt it to the time, the nature of the dispute, the person (ad tempus, ad controversiae naturam, ad personam accommodamus), so too in soothing distress, we must consider what remedy each is capable of accepting (quam quisque curationem recipere possit)” (Tusc. 3.79). This will often entail changes in the text’s most basic features, such as the delicate matter of its timing, the representation of the addressee’s persona, and 9. The fragments are collected in Baiter and Kayser (1860–69), vol. 11; cf. Graver (2002), xxxi–xxxii, with n. 10. 10. See Shelton (1995), 168–69. 11. See Degl’Innocenti Pierini (1990), 220–32; Hutchinson (1998), 58–59.

consolations on the departure of the consoler

91

the construction of the consoler’s own authority. But although at one level this rhetoric of occasion (or of persona) is only significant to the extent that it accomplishes the basic therapeutic goal of ending a given person’s grief more quickly, at another level the therapy comes to be mediated through cultural and literary representations with their own tales to tell, thereby amplifying the therapy’s signifying potential. In the handbook written by Menander Rhetor around 300 CE, the section on consolation explains that the “everyone dies” argument “offers you an opportunity for giving narratives (digcñlasa)”—for example, tales of heroes.12 Once such mediating narratives are brought into play, their circumstantial associations do not disappear. They are the means and the residue of the persuasive process, as the ending of grief is presented to the addressee as a matter of conforming to a certain timetable, of becoming (or returning to being) a certain kind of person, or of succumbing to a certain kind of authority.13 One recurrent mediating narrative in the letters sent by and to Cicero is the fall of the Republic.14 Cicero draws upon “the very condition of our city and the confusion of these hopeless times” (status ipse nostrae civitatis et haec perturbatio temporum perditorum) to support the assertion that T. Titius’ sons have died a timely death (Fam. 5.16.3).15 Titius’ recovery, then, is a matter of his recognizing and embracing a particular point of view on a particular kind of world. Another version of the same narrative, however, helps us to recognize a fundamental tension in the consolatory enterprise. Sulpicius Rufus recycles the fall of the Republic when consoling Cicero on the death of Tullia (Fam. 4.5.3), but Cicero proves uniquely resistant to his own remedy.16 In Cicero’s mind the fall of the Republic, although it curtails Tullia’s unhappiness, is precisely what removes all solace from him as Rome’s statesman par excellence: “I am lacking those comforts (solatia) that were not lacking when those others, whose examples I have been placing before me, were in a similar misfortune” (Fam. 4.6.1). Cicero, then, uses the narrative of the Republic’s decline to undermine the consoler’s potential to appeal to solacia—a characteristic instance of Ciceronian exceptionalism and its premise of “la république, c’est moi.” This rare window on an addressee contesting grief therapy reveals to us the genre’s delicate balancing act between two distinct aims: (1) to have the addressee accept that the departed suffers no harm from dying, and may even be better off; (2) to reintegrate the addressee into society. Although (1) normally facilitates (2), in

~ ja≠ jaiqøm ìvei| heπmai digcñlasa. For the translation “narratives” see Russell 12. De cons. 414, 6–7: ém Ó and Wilson (1981), 163. 13. Here I develop further the approach of M. Wilson (1997): in Seneca’s consolations “[t]he means of quelling passion are more important than the end” (62). See also Wilcox (2006), 76 on the recovery as a “textual construction.” 14. On the multiple consolatory functions of the fallen Republic, see Kassel (1958), 99; for the overall theme of “woes escaped,” Men. Rhet. De cons. 414, 8–12. 15. See Hutchinson (1998), 50–59. 16. This letter and Cicero’s response to it (Fam. 4.5, 6) are discussed at length by Hutchinson (1998), 65–77; see also Kassel (1958), 98–103.

92

seneca the author

Sulpicius’ letter the argument for (1) happens to be an argument against (2)—at least for Cicero. This contradiction, I suggest, is ubiquitous in the consolatory enterprise, but usually suppressed; Cicero’s response brings it to a head. When Seneca adapts the tradition of Roman consolation, the fall of the Republic plays a parallel, if more intense, role. Whereas Ciceronian consolation had used the falling Republic to argue for the lack of harm (and even the benefit) in departing from life, Senecan consolation, at least in the inaugural Ad Marciam, will treat the now long-fallen Republic as an argument in favor of joining deceased Roman heroes in death or beyond death, in an immortalized Republic. These parallel approaches have similar implications for both Cicero and Seneca, to the extent that both authors tend to mention the Republic to facilitate an acceptance of the fact that the deceased may be better off, even though this argument stands in tension with the goal of reintegrating the addressee into society. Indeed both authors are, at their more extreme moments, inclined to question the possibility or desirability of existing at all in a world from which the Republic has disappeared (witness their respective glorifications of Cato). At these moments there is a striking coincidence between the consolatory rhetoric of imposing an end on one’s grief and the rhetoric, seen in works dealing with suicide, of imposing an end on one’s life. Or, if one is to be reintegrated, it is into the now compromised conditions of “this life,” which, in the Ciceronian formulation mentioned above, “is in fact death” (haec quidem vita mors est, Tusc. 1.75). Thus are consolation’s reintegrative ambitions short-circuited by consolation’s own arguments for accepting mortality.17 But to the extent that both authors are invested in the task of reintegration into the worlds of the living, Cicero has only the ruins of the Republic to present as a space into which he and his readers must be reintegrated, whereas Seneca has the structures of the Julio-Claudian world. Seneca’s career of consolation is in many ways the story of his changing perspectives on the complex and sometimes problematic methods of reintegration that he offers to himself and his age as he adapts to ever new conditions of life in the Principate. Reviewing some of the highlights of this story will bring us closer to the perspectives accumulated by Seneca’s contemporary readers by the time of his demise.18

First Therapies: Ad Marciam Senecan consolation as we know it begins around 40 CE with the work addressed to Marcia, who is grieving for her adult son Metilius, who died three years

17. Cf. Sen. Ira 3.15.4 (with ref. to Harpagus): non consolabimur tam triste ergastulum, non adhortabimur ferre imperia carnificum: ostendemus in omni servitute apertam libertati viam [sc. suicide]. 18. Other stories: Seneca’s expansion of the language of death, explored by Ficca (2001); his supposed softening of strict Stoic doctrine, detailed by Grollios (1956).

consolations on the departure of the consoler

93

before.19 The work’s opening draws attention to Marcia’s identity as a woman, but not just any woman (Marc. 1.1): If I didn’t know, Marcia, that you have escaped as far from the weakness of the feminine mind (infirmitate muliebris animi) as from other vices, and that your character is looked upon as if it is some ancient exemplar, I would not have dared to confront your grief. . . . What has given me confidence is the now fully tested mettle of your mind and your virtue proven by a great challenge (exploratum iam robur animi et magno experimento adprobata virtus tua). Seneca intimates that the therapy of Marcia’s grief is to be mediated through her exercising that aspect of her identity that sets her apart: her virtus, implying both masculinity and moral excellence.20 In the course of the work Marcia will be asked to conform to the normative and “natural” behavior of the educated Greco-Roman male—in metaphorical terms, to ignore the female-specific “wound” (cf. 1.5, 8; 7.3; 8.2) that is inscribed on her body by what are merely the dictates of identity, belief, and custom (persona, 7.4; opinio, 7.1; consuetudo, 7.4).21 As Seneca puts it in his following consolation, “the excuse of being a woman (muliebris excusatio) cannot be used by one from whom women’s faults (muliebria vitia) have all been absent” (Helv. 16.1).22 The Ad Marciam, however, is interesting not only for asking Marcia to embrace a masculinized virtue, but also for the mediating narratives of varying type that Seneca asks Marcia to embrace at the same time—narratives about herself and about Seneca: 1. Marcia must return to her Republican self and the behavior she exhibited after the death of her father, Cremutius Cordus.23 The historian had committed suicide in 25, after being prosecuted by associates of Sejanus, and his works were posthumously burned. Recalling how Marcia conducted herself “in the matter of [her] father” (in persona patris tui, 1.2), Seneca focuses on Marcia’s act of republishing his works.24 In preserving his memory for when posterity will seek to know “what it is to be a Roman man (quid sit vir Romanus), what it is to be unconquered when all men have bent their necks and have subjected them to Sejanus’ yoke, what it is to be a human being free in speech, mind,

19. For commentary see Manning (1981); for discussion, Abel (1967), 17–46. 20. On the two aspects of virtus here see Langlands (2004), 119–21. 21. On Seneca’s approach to women’s potential for virtue and/or philosophical activity, with reference to Marc., see Wilcox (2006), esp. 75; Reydams-Schils (2005), 134–41; Langlands (2004); Hemelrijk (1999), 89–92. 22. For qualification of Seneca’s supposedly equal treatment of women’s capacity for virtue, see ReydamsSchils (2005), 134–41; Asmis (1996), 80. 23. See Shelton (1995), 185–88. 24. In abridged form; cf. Suet. Calig. 16.1; Dio 57.24.4.

94

seneca the author

hand (quid sit homo ingenio animo manu liber)” (1.3), there is the sense that Marcia is a living vessel not only for her father the Republican historian but also for Cassius, whom he had provocatively praised as “last of the Romans” (Romanorum ultimum; cf. Tac. Ann. 4.34.1). The Republican theme is expanded further toward the end of the work, through Seneca’s appeal for Marcia to use her acceptance of her father’s self-starvation (vividly recalled at Marc. 22.4– 8) as a model for accepting her son’s death now, and there is a shift toward the solacium of death and the afterlife as the space where the Republic lives on.25 The spectacle of the final two chapters culminating in Cremutius’ speech from the “sacred company” (coetus sacer) in which he resides in heaven (25.2, 26.2–7) offers Marcia an eschatological vision fused from several literary models, including the Somnium Scipionis, the pageant of heroes in Aeneid 6, and Cremutius’ own annalistic history, which is now sublimated to take in whole saecula rather than just anni (26.5).26 Seneca’s focus on Marcia’s relationship to her father and son also implicates him in specific narratives of his own. Marcia’s exercise of pietas, for example, closely parallels Seneca’s plan to republish Seneca the Elder’s Historiae (indicated in the De vita patris F97) after his death sometime in the years 37–41—close in time to the Ad Marciam.27 There may also be an image of Seneca in the deceased son Metilius, whose premature demise curtailed a public career scarcely begun. Metilius’ death is here a mors opportuna, because he had already lived a full life, acquiring “though young, an old man’s wisdom” (senilem in iuvene prudentiam, 23.3). Seneca may be giving coherence to his own brief career, which, after the quaestorship in 37, had come close to being terminated by Caligula’s near-execution of him in 39. Thus the cluster of narratives that Seneca discovers in the household of Cremutius Cordus, at the same time as they mediate the therapy of Marcia’s grief, play host to his own self-representations.28 2. Seneca also mediates Marcia’s therapy through an appeal to her memories of the early Julio-Claudian household.29 This is the sequence in chapters 2–6 in which Seneca breaks with tradition in preceding his praecepta with a pair, he tells Marcia, of “great examples from your sex and your age”

25. An exceptional moment in Seneca’s usually more ambivalent eschatology; cf. Fantham (1982), 78–82; Setaioli (2000), 275–323; (1997). 26. For the models see Manning (1981), 133–35; on Aen. 6, Dunn (1989). 27. On the plan to publish, and qualified parallels with Marcia’s act, see Griffin (1992), 33; on the De vita patris, Vottero (1998), 76–81, 355–56. 28. Additional political motives (esp. Seneca’s desire to conceal earlier ties to Sejanus) are suggested by Stewart (1953), with critique by Griffin (1992), 48–56. Cf. Rudich (1997), 22–27. 29. See Shelton (1995), 166–88; Wilcox (2006), 81–87. On Octavia and Livia as representative Julian and Claudian women, and their two sons as representing internal succession (Marcellus) and adoptive succession (Drusus), see Balasa (2002), 376–77; Corbier (1995), 192.

consolations on the departure of the consoler

95

(maxima et sexus et saeculi tui exempla, 2.2). The negative case is Octavia, the sister of Augustus, who after the death of her son Marcellus in 23 BCE would not let herself be reminded of him in any shape or form, including “poetry composed for celebrating the memory of Marcellus” (carmina celebrandae Marcelli memoriae composita, 2.5); this may allude, among other things, to Virgil’s recitation of Aeneid 6, with its quasi-consolatory mention of Marcellus and his death, which Suetonius tells us that Octavia reacted to by fainting.30 The positive example is Livia, Augustus’ wife, who eventually recovered from the death of her son Drusus in 9 BCE to the point that “finally she did not cease from celebrating (celebrare) the name of Drusus, representing him to herself everywhere both in private and in public (ubique illum sibi privatim publiceque repraesentare), most willingly speaking about him, hearing about him” (3.2).31 And although the figure of Drusus may have a special appeal given his Republican sympathies (cf. Suet. Claud. 1.4), Seneca’s main emphasis is on the particular form of dynastic identity that Drusus represents, because he became something of a prototype for future imperial successors (Claud. 1.5).32 This section of the work culminates in an account of how Livia recovered through the intervention of Areus, philosopher of Augustus.33 Seneca rehearses Areus’ speech and then says to Marcia: “Change the person, and it is you he has consoled” (muta personam; te consolatus est, 6.1). Marcia, then, is invited to imagine herself in the role of Livia. The figure of Areus, in turn, allows Seneca to play at the role of court philosopher. This lends authority to his consolatory discourse, but it also advertises his consolatory voice to the Julio-Claudian household of his own age, as being of special value for the perpetuation of the dynasty—this, some years before Agrippina would choose him as an adviser.34 3. More briefly, we may recognize that Seneca appeals to Marcia as a reader of Augustan literature, and in particular of the Aeneid. An extensive pattern of references throughout the text shows Seneca to be figuring Marcia’s therapy through that poem’s central narratological conflict. Consider, for example, how

30. Suet. Virg. 32, referring to Aen. 6.883, tu Marcellus eris; Manning (1981), 38 also suggests Propertius 3.18. A letter to Octavia from the philosopher Athenodorus, possibly consolatory, is mentioned by Plut. Poplic. 17; cf. Rawson (1989), 245; Griffin (1989), 7; Kassel (1958), 26–27. 31. On the public monuments see Rose (1997), 17; Kuttner (1995), 198. 32. See also the Consolatio ad Liviam; Schoonhoven (1992) hypothesizes a Neronian date, but Fraschetti (1996) persuasively dates it in the Augustan period. 33. On Areus (usually identified with the doxographer Arius Didymus) and Augustus, see Suet. Aug. 89.1; Rawson (1989), 243–44; on the Areus speech, Shelton (1995) 178–82; Abel (1967), 17–19. 34. Pace Letta (1998), 62, who sees Seneca’s role as would-be “consigliere del principe” beginning only in the De ira.

96

seneca the author

Seneca’s early question to Marcia, “For what end will there be?” (quis enim erit finis? Marc. 1.6), evokes the voice of Jupiter upbraiding Juno for her inconsolable passion that threatens the success of Aeneas’ mission: “What end will there be, my wife?” (quae iam finis erit, coniunx? Aen. 12.793).35 Marcia’s recovery thus becomes predicated on an optimistic reading of Rome’s Augustan narrative par excellence.36 For Seneca personally, it means that his role as consoler is in some ways a refinement or reinvention of Virgil’s role as court poet, not just the role of Areus as court philosopher.

The Costs of Reintegration Even as he seeks to persuade Marcia, Seneca takes upon himself the risks and compromises that come with mediating her (and his) reintegration into contemporary society. Examples from the household of the Caesars are a persistent element in the Ad Marciam, and Seneca seeks to explain that “the reason why Fortune from time to time does violence to [the Caesars]” is “to show that not even those (ne eos quidem) who are descended from the gods, and are going to have gods as their descendants” are immune to loss (15.2).37 But although these examples are used to illustrate that death is ubiquitous and a law of nature, and also to humanize the Caesars, they have the side effect of normalizing the world of the Principate. A darker side of consolation is repeatedly hinted at in Seneca’s ambiguous language. He remarks how Julius Caesar, after his daughter Julia’s death, “overcame/conquered grief as quickly as he used to [conquer] everything” (tam cito dolorem vicit quam omnia solebat, 14.3). Of the deified Augustus he says that he bore the deaths of his many heirs bravely to prevent popular lament/ complaint (queri, 15.3). Tiberius, at the funeral of his own son Drusus, “allowed Sejanus, standing by his side, to discover how much endurance he could show when it came to losing/destroying his own” (experiendum se dedit Seiano ad latus stanti quam patienter posset suos perdere, 15.3).38 The series of examples is a Julio-Claudian history lesson: Julius Caesar’s imperial conquests, Augustus’ establishment of hegemony, and Tiberius’ callous cruelty. It exposes an unsettling alliance between the expediencies of the autocrat and the ideals of the consoler. Senecan consolation is thus cognizant of its own acceptance of, even complicity in, the moral violence required for the social reintegration of the bereaved.

35. The question also recalls Aen. 1.198–99 (Aeneas to his men): o socii—neque enim ignari sumus ante malorum—/ o passi graviora, dabit deus his quoque finem. These verses are echoed further at Marc. 12.4: occurrent tibi passi ubique maiora; and 20.1: o ignaros malorum suorum. 36. On tensions around closure in the Aeneid see esp. Hardie (1997). 37. A consolatory topos on the mortality of hex ~m paπde|; cf. Men. Rhet. De cons. 414, 2–6. 38. For the double edge of perdere here see Letta (1998), 56; for the event, Suet. Tib. 52.1; Tac. Ann. 4.8.2–3.

consolations on the departure of the consoler

97

Therapies from Exile Our image of Seneca’s exile (41–49 CE) derives most directly from the consolations Ad Helviam and Ad Polybium, though other works (some or all of the De ira, some of the epigrams, possibly some of the tragedies) may also belong to the same period.39 The two consolations share some affinities with Ovid’s exile poetry40 and belong to the broader history of exile writing in the Roman world, in which exile could serve as a rite of passage in the construction of a public profile, and exile consolations served as “public dramatizations of the therapeutic process.”41 Seneca, in his exile consolations, mediates (or dramatizes) the therapy of his exile through two successive narratives.

Restoring Self-Sufficiency to the Annaean Household: Ad Helviam Written in Seneca’s first year on Corsica, the Ad Helviam deals not with the temporal divide of death (like the Ad Marciam) but with exile, however deathlike, as a spatial removal.42 Although the central chapters present a range of philosophical arguments against perceiving exile as an inconvenience (Helv. 5–13),43 the work both begins and ends with a focus on Helvia in her maternal role, seeking to remedy geographic dislocation above all through characterizing the household as a secure relational space. It is around this theme that the departed consoler Seneca develops the work’s most specific mediating narratives. Simply by highlighting the experience of Helvia, who had in fact left Rome for Spain three days prior to his banishment (cf. 15.2–4), Seneca contrives a coincidence between his absence from Rome and his removal from his mother. He focuses on the figure of Helvia’s maternal body with the goal of ensuring “that a mind that has been the conqueror of so many misfortunes should feel shame to bear badly just one wound, in a body with so many scars (aegre ferre unum vulnus in corpore tam cicatroso)” (2.2). Helvia’s past losses are catalogued with a strong maternal aspect (2.4–5) right up to her latest and “most serious wound” (gravissimum . . . vulnus, 3.1), namely Seneca’s banishment: “Within twenty days . . . [of the death of my son], you heard that I had been seized; this was something you still hadn’t had to do: to mourn the living (raptum me audisti: hoc adhuc defuerat tibi, lugere vivos)” (2.5).

39. On Seneca’s exile writings see Claassen (1999), 89–98, 241–44; on the exile itself, Griffin (1992), 59–66. 40. See Hinds (forthcoming); Degl’Innocenti Pierini (1990), 105–59. 41. Whitmarsh (2001), 141–55; quoted from 140 (emphasis original). Whitmarsh’s account of Seneca is refined by G. D. Williams (2006a), 171–73. 42. On Helv. see G. D. Williams (2006a); Wilcox (2006); Abel (1967), 47–69. 43. See G. D. Williams (2006a), esp. 161; O’Sullivan (2006), 141–43.

98

seneca the author

After chapters 5–13, which present the arguments against exile per se, the final part of the work (14.2–20) offers a cluster of narratives that center on specific family members and family ideals. Seneca begins by holding Helvia to the example of her own behavior as a selfless mother in her diligent yet detached management of her sons’ patrimony (14.3)—a convenient manifestation of the philosopher’s ideal of detachment from material conditions. In these sections Seneca echoes voices from the declamations preserved by Seneca the Elder, for example on pudicitia (16.3; cf. Contr. 2.7.9).44 He also exhorts Helvia to “return” (revertere!) to liberalia studia (Helv. 17.3–4) and expresses the following wish: “Would that that most excellent of men, my father, had been less devoted to ancestral custom (minus maiorum consuetudini deditus) and had wished you to be educated in the precepts of wisdom rather than just to be briefly dipped (praeceptis sapientiae erudiri potius quam inbui)” (17.4). Although this wish suggests a gentle criticism of the father, in that it is left to Seneca the Younger to turn his mother into a matrona docta, it mostly serves as a renewal and redoubling of the household’s existing values.45 An additional family narrative emerges when Seneca, presenting solacia (18–20), urges Helvia, “Look to my brothers” (respice fratres meos)—referring to Novatus and Mela. He locates the brothers at symbolic poles based on their lifestyles (18.2–3): I know my brothers’ close affections: one is cultivating his social standing so as to be your pride (alter in hoc dignitatem excolit ut tibi ornamento sit), the other has withdrawn into the tranquil and peaceful life so that he can be available for you (alter in hoc se ad tranquillam quietamque vitam recepit ut tibi vacet). . . . They will compete in their dutifulness to you and your longing for one will be compensated by the devotions of two (unius desiderium duorum pietate supplebitur). Once again Seneca the Younger updates the Elder, this time reconfiguring the preface to the second book of Controversiae, in which the father had celebrated Mela as having the best ingenium but also as being content with his equestrian rank and free from public life: “With two sons sailing the seas, I keep you in the harbor” (duobus filiis navigantibus te in portu retineo, Contr. 2.praef.3–4).46 In the present context Seneca promotes himself to the privileged position among the three in setting himself, not Mela, apart from the others, as well as in appropriating his father’s published voice. But here Seneca expresses his hope that

44. See Degl’Innocenti Pierini (2003b), 343, 349–50; Torre (2000), 54–59. 45. See Degl’Innocenti Pierini (2003b), 342–43; Hemelrijk (1999), 40–41. As G. D. Williams (2006a), 167 notes, Helvia’s embrace of studia is to be “a homecoming of sorts . . . a release or recall into territory regained.” 46. Degl’Innocenti Pierini (2003b), 351–54 suggests also a reworking of the myth of Antiope, consoled by her two sons. On Contr. 2.praef. more generally, see Inwood (2005), 9–10.

consolations on the departure of the consoler

99

in his banishment he can serve as the “atonement for the household” (domus piamentum) whose punishment will save his other family members from harm (Helv. 18.6):47 Let all the weary cruelty of the fates fall upon me (in me . . . consistat). Whatever source of grief my mother had, let it pass to me (in me transierit), whatever my grandmother had, [let it pass] to me (in me). Let the crowd that remains flourish in its present condition (floreat reliqua in suo statu turba). I will make no complaint about my bereavement or my situation, so long as I can be the atonement for a household that will experience no more grief (fuerim tantum nihil amplius doliturae domus piamentum). With these words, Seneca mediates the therapy of Helvia’s loss through constructing his exile as a devotio, a self-sacrifice serving a unique protective function for the family as a whole. In addition, the phrasing of the wish, in me . . . in me . . . , turns Seneca into the figure of the self-cursing hero seen in his tragedies.48 Seneca’s “greatest comfort” (maximum solacium) for Helvia is her (half-) sister, whom he describes as “that mind maternal to us all” (illum animum omnibus nobis maternum, 19.1).49 He spends the first part of the chapter explicating the meaning of maternum: it is not simply that the sister stands in loco parentis to Helvia, having been the one who raised her (19.2), but that she has been a mother figure to Seneca, too, because, he says, “It was by her hands that I was conveyed into the city (illius manibus in urbem perlatus sum), it was through her devoted and maternal nursing (pio maternoque nutricio) that I recovered after being sick over a long time; it was she who exercised her favor for my quaestorship and . . . most generously overcame her shyness on my behalf ” (19.2). Helvia and her sister are respectively the biological and cultural “mother” of the same Seneca—with overtones of a contest of maternal behavior, as Seneca puts it, in mea . . . persona (“in my situation,” 19.2). Indeed, the sister has just as much incentive to mourn Seneca’s loss, or perhaps even more: his expulsion from Rome reverses the public career into which she, not Helvia, had delivered him. Seneca predicts the sister’s response to his loss by delving into her past and singling out the courage she showed in securing a burial for her late husband after his death in a shipwreck. This is an event of which Seneca himself claims to have been a spectator (19.4), and we may assume that it occurred en route back from Egypt, where the uncle—C. Galerius—had been governor for the

47. On Seneca as piamentum see Degl’Innocenti Pierini (2003b), 339, 354. 48. E.g., Pha. 1159–63 (Phaedra): me me, profundi saeve dominator freti, / invade. . . . On the topos here, see Dingel (1974), 119. 49. See Torre (2000), 51–54.

100

seneca the author

years 16–31, and where Seneca had gone probably for convalescence. Seneca’s account of the selfless wife braving rough seas to carry out the corpse of her husband, in which “she endured . . . both mourning and terror and, winning out over the storms, shipwrecked she carried his body out” (tulit . . . et luctum et metum evictisque tempestatibus corpus eius naufraga evexit, 19.4), offers an evocative analogy for the present task that she (and Helvia) face in Seneca’s exile.

Renewing Clemency in the Julio-Claudian Household: Ad Polybium There is an obvious implicit goal for the Ad Polybium (written in 43),50 namely, securing Seneca’s recall. Because this goal, however, is pursued through a consolation directed at Polybius, the freedman secretary (a studiis) of Claudius, concerning his grief over the death of his brother,51 the text stands in an interesting relationship to what came before. It resembles the Ad Marciam in being a consolation on death, and it is also like the Ad Helviam in being concerned with Seneca’s exile, though Seneca now contradicts his previous self-portrait of one content to live on Corsica. Scholars have felt required to draw extreme conclusions from Seneca’s about-face in the Ad Polybium, whether arguing that the work would have been a source of embarrassment for Seneca, that it must be (like the Apocolocyntosis) a work of satire, or that it was not written by Seneca at all.52 But although it is true that the discontent with exile expressed in the Ad Polybium is inconsistent with Seneca’s idealizing portrayal of contentment in the Ad Helviam, there is also much continuity between the two works, as Seneca expands the narrative potential of his exile.53 Exile from Rome was an event that under optimal conditions would encompass the trajectory of return, whether it happened in fact (as for Cicero) or just in imagination (as for Ovid). Claudius, in anticipation of the triumph to be celebrated in early 44 after his conquest of Britain, rewarded “even some exiles” (etiam exulibus quibusdam) with permission to return to witness the procession (Suet. Claud. 17.3). As the Ad Polybium seeks to give a similar festive end to Seneca’s exile, hatching Seneca’s wish “that [he] also will be a spectator” (me quoque spectatorem futurum, Polyb. 13.2) at the triumph, it is scarcely unusual in employing the established code of imperial panegyric.54 The work’s central innovation, as in Seneca’s earlier consolatory writings, is in the specific narratives through which it seeks to effect reintegration into Roman society.

50. On Polyb. see Abel (1967), 70–96; Degl’Innocenti Pierini (1990), 213–48. 51. Polybius had lost his brother, an adulescens, inter prima incrementa (Polyb. 3.1). Because the beginning of the work is lost, it is not clear how Seneca first broached the question of his recall. 52. For overview and critique see Degl’Innocenti Pierini (1990), 213–17; Giardina (2000), 59–61, 76–90; also Griffin (1992), 415–16. Seneca’s changing representation of his guilt between Helv. (innocent) and Polyb. (guilty) is discussed by Abel (1967), 71–73 n. 61, 91–92. 53. Helv. has been read by Ferrill (1966) as already a plea for recall; Polyb. involves simply “a bolder method” (255). 54. Cf. Ovid Trist. 4.2 on the desire to watch the German triumph of Tiberius.

consolations on the departure of the consoler

101

Seneca’s approach to Polybius as antistes et cultor [sc. studiorum] (“high priest and cultivator of literary studies,” Polyb. 8.1) resembles the exiled Ovid’s appeal to Hyginus, the librarian of Augustus on the Palatine, in his attempt to effect his return (or his books’ return) to the heart of Roman literary life.55 In encouraging Polybius to apply his mind to studia, Seneca explains that he is not urging the grieving man to undertake “more cheerful or relaxed studies” (hilariora/solutiora studia) such as the translation of Aesopic fables (Aesopeos logos, Polyb. 8.3–4) into Latin—an implicit contrast with the moral courage of Socrates (Pl. Phd. 60d, 61b) and of Seneca himself, who had concluded the Ad Helviam by claiming to amuse himself sometimes with “lighter studies” (leviora studia, Helv. 20.1). Polybius is being asked, rather, to use studia to commemorate his brother (cf. Polyb. 18.1–2), or to consult epic poetry for moral self-instruction (8.2). But as a cultivator of studia, Polybius is also able to cast both positive and negative light on the studia of the exiled Seneca. On the one hand, Seneca celebrates Polybius’ ambidextrous translations (of Homer into Latin and Virgil into Greek) in terms that evoke his own successful preservation of virtue in exile. “You have,” he says, “transported (transtulisti) them from one language into the other in such a way that—no mean feat—all of their virtues have followed you into the other’s language (omnes virtutes in alienam te orationem secutae sint)” (11.5; cf. duo quae pulcherrima sunt quocumque nos moverimus sequentur, natura communis et propria virtus, Helv. 8.2). On the other hand, Polybius’ studia stand in contrast to the image of an isolated Seneca to whom “Latin words do not easily suggest themselves” (non facile . . . Latina verba succurrant, Polyb. 18.9) with which the Ad Polybium closes. Most of all, however, Seneca urges Polybius to become an in-house historian for Claudius (8.2): “He himself will most capably give you both the material for the shaping and composing of history, and a model (et materiam dabit et exemplum)” (8.2). And Claudius, as it turns out, is at the heart of all the narratives through which Seneca both mediates Polybius’ recovery and figures his own reintegration into Rome. By chapter 14 Seneca has subtly (or not so subtly) insinuated Claudius into every component of consolatory discourse, referring to him in quick succession as “the public comfort of all men” (publicum omnium hominum solacium), as one who “with his keen memory has recalled all of the examples (omnia exempla) by which you could be pressed to be calm in your mind,” and as one who “with his characteristic eloquence has set forth the precepts of all the wise men (omnium praecepta sapientium)” (14.1). This complete fusion of consolatory discourse with panegyric is followed by Seneca’s daring consolation-within-a-consolation, given in the voice of the living emperor (14.2–16.3) and recounting to Polybius examples of those who overcame their fraternal grief: illustres viri of the Republic are followed by men of his own household, from his grandfather M. Antonius to his uncle Tiberius 55. Trist. 3.14.1: cultor et antistes doctorum sancte virorum. See Degl’Innocenti Pierini (1990), 115–16.

102

seneca the author

(14.4–16.3). As in the Ad Marciam, we glimpse the darker side of consolation as an expediency of power: Augustus and Tiberius are again portrayed as conquerors (of nations and of griefs, 15.3) and as commanders (of military discipline and of grieving, 15.5), and Antonius is said to have “mourned” (lugere) by “making sacrifice to his dead brother with the blood of twenty legions” (viginti legionum sanguine fratri parentare, 16.2)!56 But Seneca allows Claudius to describe his own response to the death of his brother Germanicus in more noble terms: “I ruled my emotions (adfectum meum rexi) in such a way that I neither neglected anything which ought to have been transacted by a good brother, nor did anything that could be criticized in a princeps (quod reprehendi posset in principe)” (16.3). In the course of Claudius’ own speech, then, the therapy of grief is shown to be hovering between two distinct discourses of power: one founded in cruelty or expediency, the other a function of good rule (cf. rexi). Seneca next elaborates the wiser role of the princeps/king in his own voice, interweaving the role that Claudius plays for Polybius (practitioner of consolation) with that which he might play for Seneca (practitioner of clemency), thereby making Seneca and Polybius interchangeable as recipients of Claudian generosity (16.4–17.6). Here Seneca prays, in panegyric mode, for Fortune to “learn clemency from [Claudius]” (discat ab illo clementiam, 16.6). But Seneca also chooses to define Claudius’ role dialectically through the example of Caligula,57 who after the death of his sister Drusilla (in 38) “could no more grieve than rejoice in the way that a princeps should” (is homo qui non magis dolere quam gaudere principaliter posset, 17.4)—where Seneca possibly coins a new adverb.58 The concept of principaliter is defined in contrast with failed civilitas—Caligula “fled the sight and the company of his own citizens” (conspectum conversationemque civium suorum profugit, 17.4). Claudius’ uses of both consolation and clemency will thus help him to effect a major dynastic shift. As Seneca explains, “The empire charred and turned on its head [by Caligula] is renewed by the clemency of the mildest of emperors (principis mitissimi recreat clementia)” (17.3). Caligula had once violently executed all current exiles around the islands (cf. Suet. Calig. 28). Claudius, by contrast, is here urged to include Seneca (himself once nearly a victim of Caligula) among the exiles he restores to Rome. Thus the reintegration of the grieving Polybius and the reintegration of the exiled Seneca are mediated through the narrative of the Julio-Claudian dynasty’s transformation and renewal. Moreover, the Ad Polybium offers a prehistory of Seneca’s more specific role as the imperial adviser of the De clementia. The closing lines of the work, however, return to the task of presenting Seneca’s exile as a central problem in the life of Roman studia, with studia, though elsewhere constituting a form of therapy, here revealed to be vulnerable

56. I.e., at Philippi. I doubt that the reference to Antony is positive or neutral, as Letta (1998), 65 assumes. 57. Cf. Suet. Calig. 24.2–3. On Caligula as an exemplum in Seneca more generally, see Wilcox (2008). 58. The term is taken up by Pliny at Paneg. 47.1: mores iuventutis quam principaliter formas!

consolations on the departure of the consoler

103

in their own right. In contrast to the opening of the Ad Helviam, the Ad Polybium concludes with an elegiac consolator consolandus. After asking Polybius to “think about” (cogita) his deceased brother (Polyb. 18.8), Seneca asks him also to think about the departed Seneca: “Think about how one who is in the grasp of his own troubles is not free to console others . . .” (cogita quam non possit is alienae vacare consolationi quem sua mala occupatum tenent, 18.9). This is partly a formulaic apology for the shortcomings of the present work, but it also asserts that Seneca’s ability to offer aliena consolatio—the main basis of his literary reputation at this time—is in danger of ceasing. The message becomes more vivid in the work’s closing words (18.9): et quam non facile Latina ei homini verba succurrant quem barbarorum inconditus et barbaris quoque humanioribus gravis fremitus circumsonat. . . . and [think about] how Latin words do not suggest themselves easily for a man when the uncultivated noises of foreigners resound around him—distressing even to the ears of the more cultivated locals. Echoing Ovid’s motifs of exilic deprivation,59 Seneca effaces the Ad Helviam’s images of the dying man finding words of consolation even on the pyre, and of the wise man’s exile as more Roman than Rome (cf. Helv. 1.3; 9.4–6). He also partly explains his succumbing to his own grief: he is coming to resemble the barbari who, as he had pointed out in the Ad Marciam, grieve even longer than women (Marc. 7.3). In contrast with his self-sacrificial profile in the Ad Helviam (Helv. 18.6), his absence now comes as a loss, not as a benefit, to those left behind. Thus the survival of consolation as a genre available for Roman audiences becomes a matter of the audience’s rendering consolation to the master consoler himself, by seeking his recall from a barbarous land.

Epigrams Motifs from the exile consolations are elaborated in the Senecan epigrams.60 Two poems echo the portrayal of the Annaean household in the Ad Helviam. The poet ends one of these by expressing the hope that he will be outlived by his two brothers ( frater uterque) after a quiet life and death from old age (senectus, Epigr. 72.13–14 Prato). He begins the other with the same idea (Epigr. 49.1–2):

59. Degl’Innocenti Pierini (1990), 115, 120–21 notes multiple echoes of Trist. 3.14. 60. For commentary see Dingel (2007), Prato (1964). For discussion, see Degl’Innocenti Pierini (2003b); (1990), esp. 161–66; Claassen (1999), 241–44. As Degl’Innocenti Pierini (2003b), 353 notes, the existence of these poems demonstrates the renown of the Annaei among their contemporaries—even and especially if Seneca didn’t write them.

104

seneca the author sic mihi sit frater maiorque minorque superstes et de me doleant nil nisi morte mea. Just so, let my elder and younger brother survive me, and let them have no grief from me except at my death.

The same poem ends with a focus on the young Lucan (49.5–6): sic dulci Marcus qui nunc sermone fritinnit, facundo patruos provocet ore duos. Just so, let Marcus, who now chirps with sweet speech, challenge his two uncles with eloquent mouth. The poem thus echoes the Ad Helviam’s references both to Novatus and Mela and to Marcum blandissimum puerum (“Marcus, sweetest of boys,” Helv. 18.1–6), with the poet recycling both the presentation of himself as the sacrificed brother among the three and the privileging of Mela in Seneca the Elder’s Controversiae— Mela here being celebrated metonymically through the eloquent Lucan. Several other poems (Epigr. 2, 3, 4, 18) present an elegiac view of Corsica’s (or exile’s) harsh conditions, using epigrammatic conventions to develop the conceit of exile as death. One poem, addressing Corsica directly, concludes as follows (Epigr. 2.7–8):61 parce relegatis, hoc est: iam parce solutis [sepultis, in some mss.]. vivorum cineri sit tua terra levis! Go easy on the banished—that is, go easy on the finished [the buried]. May your earth rest lightly on the ashes of the living. Another calls upon Seneca’s hometown of Corduba to lament, shifting attention from the household (and Helvia) to the patria of which he is, he says, “your glory and great citizen” (magnus, tua gloria, civis, Epigr. 18.13). Here also the poet (a self-proclaimed vates, 18.3) exclaims, “I am impaled on the rock” (infigor scopulo, 18.14), in which the profile of Seneca as an atonement of his household (cf. Helv. 18.6) takes on the aspect, as it were, of a shipwrecked Prometheus.62 In a third group of poems (Epigr. 28–34) celebrating Claudius’ conquest over Britain and his imminent triumph,63 epigrammatic novelty allows the poet to refer to Britain as a land that “fell down, Caesar, struck by your thunderbolt” (icta tuo, Caesar, fulmine procubuit, Epigr. 28.2). With fulmen the standard metaphor for the ira of the banishing emperor in both Ovid and Seneca,64 Britain

61. Cf. Epigr. 3. On exile as “death,” and defense of the reading sepultis, see Degl’Innocenti Pierini (1990), 161–63; Wistrand (1968), 17–18. 62. Degl’Innocenti (1990), 135–42 traces the Promethean associations. 63. See Tandoi (1962) on this cycle, though skeptical about Senecan authorship. 64. Cf. Degl’Innocenti Pierini (1990), 157–58.

consolations on the departure of the consoler

105

is cast in the role of the exile’s fellow victim, and the discourse of empire (conquest, incorporation of periphery) is paired with the topic of exile and recall.

The Exile Recalled The subsequent tradition around the post-exile Seneca is suggestive for how contemporaries may have perceived the costs of the reintegration that Seneca the consoler had ultimately pursued. Tacitus describes Agrippina as having recalled Seneca not only “on account of the renown of his studies” (ob claritudinem studiorum eius) but also “so that [she and Nero] might use his advice to further their hopes for supreme power” (ut . . . consiliis eiusdem ad spem dominationis uterentur, Ann. 12.8.2)—hopes fostered already by Seneca’s advisorial savvy in both the Ad Marciam and Ad Polybium.65 During the time of Seneca’s ascendancy under Nero, his survival of exile is held against him, both in the accounts of Tacitus and Dio (Ann. 13.14.3, 42.2; Dio 61.10.2) and in Seneca’s own rehearsal of his critics’ views in the De vita beata: “Yet, if he can, he grows old in the fatherland (si licet, senescit in patria)? And he holds that there is no difference between a longer and a shorter span of time, yet, if nothing prevents him, he extends his life and calmly flourishes well into old age (extendit aetatem et in multa senectute placidus viret)?” (VB 21.1). This complaint about his exile survival, which Seneca is happy to parody, uses the terms senescere and senectus to make Seneca’s own name stand for a paradox: this is the same man who had offered consolations for banishment and for a life cut short! Although Seneca offers an immediate rebuttal in the De vita beata, many years later the poet of the Octavia represents Seneca, in the period of Nero’s growing cruelty, expressing regrets about the consequences of reintegration (Oct. 381–88):66 melius latebam procul ab invidiae malis remotus inter Corsici rupes maris, ubi liber animus et sui iuris mihi semper vacabat studia recolenti mea. o quam iuvabat, quo nihil maius parens Natura genuit, operis immensi artifex, caelum intueri, solis et cursus sacros mundique motus, noctis alternas vices . . . I would have been better to remain hidden far from the evils of resentment remote among the rocks of the Corsican sea, where my mind was free and had its own authority and was always available for me as I renewed my studies. 65. See Balasa (2002), 380 on Agrippina’s exploitation of Seneca. 66. For commentary, including echoes from Helv., Polyb., and the tragedies, see Boyle (2008), 168–73; Ferri (2003a), 226–34.

106

seneca the author How pleasant it was, greater than anything else produced by mother Nature, designer of a measureless work, to contemplate the heavens, the sacred courses of the sun and motions of the world, the alternations of the night . . .

The image here of Seneca’s contemplative solitude on Corsica echoes and elaborates that sketched in the Ad Helviam (especially Helv. 20), but presents that lifestyle as a path not fully taken. “Seneca” learns his own consolatory lessons too late. In the Octavia more generally, Seneca’s regrets about having returned from exile offer a framework for tragic lament over Britannicus, Agrippina, and now the soon-to-be-exiled Octavia.67 For its Flavian audience, the play demonstrates the cost of the consoler’s self-reintegration into the structures of Julio-Claudian society.

Therapies from a Second Exile When Seneca is excluded from Nero’s court in 62, Tacitus presents it as a second exile of sorts. His phrase perculso Seneca (“with Seneca destroyed,” Ann. 14.57.1) echoes the exiled Seneca’s own description of his banishment (perculsus sum, “I was destroyed,” Helv. 15.2). In the interview with Nero, Seneca is portrayed withdrawing to focus on his animus, much as he had done on Corsica (Ann. 14.54.3; cf. Helv. 20.1). Even the unfulfilled plan for the recall of Seneca after the Pisonian conspiracy (Ann. 15.65) corresponds to the pattern of the Senecan exile followed by return seen first in Agrippina’s earlier recall of him (12.8.2). But the consolatory writings from Seneca’s final years, presented to Lucilius in the course of the Natural Questions and Epistulae morales, are different from his earlier exercises in the genre. They do not mediate the addressee’s (or Seneca’s) grief through narratives of sociopolitical identity—no memories of the Republic, no Annaean household, no Julio-Claudian dynasty.68 They pursue methods of reintegration that reflect the new political and literary conditions.

Consoling the Public in Pompeii, Lyons, Rome In Seneca’s consolations on two major public disasters, he assumes a collective audience yet avoids any direct reference to contemporary Rome. The earlier instance comes in book 6 of the Natural Questions, where he broaches

67. Note that “Senecan” consolation is also present, in Octavia’s self-consolation through allusions to Aen. 1. 198–99 (Oct. 652–53) and in the chorus’ appeal to domestica exempla of Julio-Claudian women (e.g., Oct. 929–30). 68. Seneca’s shift away from historical exempla to negations of memory is emphasized by Gowing (2005), 75–76.

consolations on the departure of the consoler

107

the book’s topic—earthquakes—by describing the quake that took place very recently in Campania (February 5, 63 or 62) (NQ 6.1.1):69 We have heard, Lucilius best of men, that Pompeii, the celebrated city of Campania, on which the Sorrentine and Stabian coast and the coast of Herculaneum converge from either side, encircling the sea in a pleasing bay and sheltering it from the open water, has collapsed after an earthquake (consedisse terrae motu), along with a shaking up of the adjacent regions—and this in the days of winter, which our ancestors were accustomed to promise us were immune from such a danger. Seneca uses this sentence to reenact the serenity of Campania shattered by calamity (the phrase consedisse terrae motu is at its exact syllabic center) and then to portray the survivors struggling to reconcile it with their science. This allows him to present the scientific arguments of the book as a way to mediate the recovery of the Campanians, and of the Pompeian Lucilius, to whom the earthquake is no doubt of special interest. The causes of earthquakes need to be explained, writes Seneca, in part because “comforts must be found for those who are afraid, and their great terror needs to be removed” (quaerenda sunt trepidis solacia, et demendus ingens timor, §1.3–4). Thus, in the course of the book, Seneca fuses scientific content (on terrae motus) with the movere function of his consolatory rhetoric. The text seeks to reintegrate its audience into the world, returning them to normal behavior through having them embrace a healthy “scorn for life” (contemptus animae, §32.4–12) and the notion of death as a “law of Nature” (cf. mors naturae lex est, §32.12) with which Seneca ends the book. This is, of course, fully in keeping with the emphasis of the Natural Questions as a text: the natural science framework itself offers a sphere for consolation in which recovery is mediated exclusively in terms of nature. Or nearly. Occasionally a political motif, such as the description of the aftershocks as shaking Campania “with greater clemency” (clementius, 6.31.1), hints at the possibility that the natural incidents for which he is offering therapy could be analogous to tremors in the social and political world of Rome. The other public disaster comes in Epistulae morales 91, in which Seneca discusses the recent devastation of the colony of Lyons by fire in August of 64 and focuses on the experience of his friend Aebutius Liberalis: “I am offering these and similar comforts to our Liberalis, who burns with a remarkable passion for his fatherland” (haec ergo atque eiusmodi solacia admoveo Liberali nostro incredibili quodam patriae suae amore flagranti . . . , Ep. 91.8). The letter’s real purpose may be partly to present the disaster as an opportunity for Liberalis

69. On NQ book 6, see G. D. Williams (2006b); Inwood (2005), 178–85; for commentary, Parroni (2002). On the date of the earthquake (62 in Tac. Ann. 15.22.2; 63 in Seneca), see Wallace-Hadrill (2003).

108

seneca the author

to live up to his name and contribute beneficia for the rebuilding of his native city,70 though there is some satire in his depiction (note, for example, the fire imagery of flagranti). It also has the more general purpose of using the case of Lyons to prepare “us” for all types of disaster, even if it prefaces this with an acknowledgement of the uniqueness (or near uniqueness) of the present catastrophe: “Scarcely . . . was any earthquake ever so serious and destructive that it leveled whole cities” (terrarum . . . vix umquam tam gravis et perniciosus fuit motus ut tota oppida everteret, §1). Yet here the parallel of the recent earthquake that destroyed Pompeii is implicit but unmistakable. It gives us every reason, I suggest, to see the present letter as part of the same project of collective consolation as Natural Questions 6. A further resonance not made explicit, however, is Rome’s very recent Great Fire, which took place in July of the same year.71 Although Seneca keeps silent about the Rome fire, as he does about Rome more generally throughout the letters, the letter presents his Roman audience with much-needed perspective on their seemingly singular event. A major subtext here, however, is Nero’s rebuilding program after the Rome fire, which, as we know from the historians, he did either with the aid of Seneca’s beneficia (cf. Dio 62.25.3) or with Seneca seeking to distance himself from Nero’s robbing of temples in Asia and Greece to raise funds (Tac. Ann. 15.45.3).72 Interestingly, Tacitus later reports that sometime in the year 65 “the emperor consoled (solatus est) the disaster at Lyons with four million sesterces, to allow them to replace what the city had lost—the same money that the people of Lyons had previously offered for the misfortunes of the city [of Rome]” (Ann. 16.13.3). This both reinforces the perception of an historical reciprocity between the two fires and casts Nero more specifically as Seneca’s rival in the role of consoler.

Epistolary Consolation Another noticeable difference in Seneca’s late consolations concerns their shaping by the genre of epistolography as it is developed in the Epistulae morales.73 In letter 63 the subject of grief arises as just the latest topic on which Seneca needs to offer instruction to his friend: “Seneca to Lucilius, greetings. I bear it hard that your friend Flaccus has passed away, but I do not wish you to grieve more than is reasonable” (Seneca Lucilio suo salutem. moleste fero decessisse Flaccum, amicum tuum, plus tamen aequo dolere te nolo, Ep. 63.1). As Seneca proceeds to console Lucilius, there is no systematic presentation of exempla or solacia, and in an exercise of epistolary brevitas Seneca moves quickly through a 70. On Liberalis, dedicatee of the De beneficiis, see Griffin (1992), 455–56. 71. Bedon (1991), 53–57 argues that the Lyons fire is exaggerated by Seneca to a scale that is more accurate of the Rome fire. 72. Allusions to Nero’s constructions are detected by André (2002), 174–77 in the letters around Ep. 91. 73. On consolation in the Epistulae morales, see M. Wilson (1997), emphasizing generic flexibility and epistolarity; also Op het Veld (2000); Summers (1910), 243–50.

consolations on the departure of the consoler

109

series of relevant praecepta, molding them into first- and second-person exhortations. The epistolary framework is flexible enough, however, to allow Seneca to have Lucilius eavesdrop on his consolation of another addressee, Marullus (a probably fictional friend), in letter 99. Seneca’s epistolary therapy is mediated through a reintegration of the addressee not into broader society, but (as often in Cicero; cf. Fam. 5.16.6) into the community of amicitia. Letters 63 and 99 are lessons about grief over friends (not over kin, as in the situations of Marcia, Helvia, and Polybius) and are dispensed by friend to friend. Marullus is criticized for excessive grief over the death of his young son, who was “a boy still known better to his nurse than to his father” (99.14), because in Seneca’s mind only the loss of a friend— which is “the worst of all losses” (damnorum omnium maximum, 99.3)—could conceivably have justified such an extreme reaction. This may help to explain Seneca’s sternness throughout the letter: Marullus’ grief amounts to a betrayal of amicitia. In letter 63, Seneca’s philosophy of friendship is encapsulated in this epigrammatic statement: “It is preferable to replace a friend than to mourn a friend” (satius est amicum reparare quam flere, 63.11). The consoler, in other words, mediates the therapy of a grieving friend through reintegrating him into the amicitia of new friends, or other existing friends. In the closing section of letter 63, however, Seneca applies this philosophy of friendship and loss to his own experience, with results that are symptomatic of his consolations written during this “second exile” phase. In a confessional moment he admits, “I write this to you—I who wept for Annaeus Serenus, so dear to me (carissimum mihi), so uncontrollably that I am an example of those whom grief has conquered (tam inmodice flevi ut . . . inter exempla sim eorum quos dolor vicit)—what I least wanted to happen” (63.14). Serenus’ death could symbolize Seneca’s more recent exclusion from Nero’s court, though the date of his death is uncertain.74 In any case, one therapy implied here is that Seneca has “replaced” (cf. reparare, 63.11) his Serenum carissimum (“dearest Serenus,” 63.14) with Lucilius, whom he in fact now addresses as Lucili carissime (63.16).75 This is certainly the impression conveyed by Seneca’s literary dedications: after addressing works to Serenus prior to his death (De tranquillitate animi; De otio; De constantia sapientis), he addressed his final works to Lucilius (Natural Questions; Epistulae morales; also De providentia, though its date is less certain).76 Seneca thus mediates his grief therapy through the narrative of a new literary friendship. 74. Serenus had died after eating a mushroom; cf. Pliny, HN 22.96. On Serenus, see Griffin (1992), 447–48. Seneca’s now terminated relationship with Nero had also been technically an amicitia (cf. Ann. 13.42.4: regiae amicitiae; 14.54.3: seniores amici). 75. This echo was pointed out to me by Tony Long. 76. Seneca’s friendship with Serenus is celebrated by Martial: Caesonius Maximus is facundi Senecae potens amicus, / caro proximus aut prior Sereno (7.45.1–2). On Martial’s portrayals, see Galán Vioque (2002), 285. On Serenus as dedicatee, see G. D. Williams (2003), 13; Griffin (1992), esp. 353–55, emphasizing his function as a “literary persona.”

110

seneca the author

A second, more explicit, therapy comes with Seneca’s realization that, as he puts it, “I had never considered that he could die before me (mori eum ante me posse)” (63.14). The remedy, he explains, is to enlarge our own cogitatio mortalitatis, the major theme of the Epistulae: “Let us ceaselessly give thought both to our own mortality and [to the mortality] of all those whom we love” (adsidue cogitemus tam de nostra quam omnium quos diligimus mortalitate, 63.15). The expanded cogitatio serves to prepare us before the deaths of friends and helps to comfort us after the loss of a friend by invoking the following thought: “It may be the case that, if the rumor of the wise is true and some place receives us, the one you think has died, has been sent ahead. Farewell” ( fortasse, si modo vera sapientium fama est recipitque nos locus aliquis, quem putamus perisse praemissus est. vale, 63.16). Seneca repeats the same thought in letter 99 (quem putas perisse praemissus est, 99.7), making it a leitmotif of his late consolatory discourse. It shows him to be mediating the therapy of grief through a narrative that would integrate us not into any society of the contemporary world, but proleptically into the community of friends that lies beyond death.

Final Therapy—and Travesty The above survey allows us to see the broader fabric of memories against which Seneca’s contemporaries must have viewed his final consolation. Although their ultimate judgments in most cases remain unknown, the Tacitean version of the death scene offers us enough evidence to conclude that conflicting attitudes arose in reaction to his consolatory writings. Tacitus shows Seneca urging his friends to be courageous and to remember him and his advice as part of a posthumous exercise in amicitia (Ann. 15.62.1).77 He is shown appealing to the “everyone dies” argument as particularly relevant to Romans close to Nero (cf. §62.2)! In addition to Seneca’s overall resemblance here to the departed consoler figure of the Ad Helviam, which we considered at the beginning of this chapter, the most specific echoes come as he turns to Paulina alone, like one of his literary addressees, “asking and beseeching her to temper her grief and not hold onto it forever, but to endure her longing for her husband by noble consolations, contemplating a life conducted through virtue” (rogat oratque temperaret dolori aeternum susciperet, sed in contemplatione vitae per virtutem actae desiderium mariti solaciis honestis toleraret, §63.1). Seneca’s reduced expectations of the female addressee—his simple hope that she won’t grieve forever—echo the relatively lenient timetables he had ultimately allowed for Marcia and Helvia to get over their grief.78 The exhortation to contemplatio 77. On both amicitia and consolatory motifs in Tacitus’ death description, see Schönegg (1999), 19–31 passim. 78. E.g., Helv. 16.1 (mentioning a Roman tradition of ten months for widows); cf. Ep. 63.13 (one year for women; no time allowance for men). Cf. Summers (1910), 249. The phrase solaciis honestis echoes Ep. 78.3: in remedium cedunt honesta solacia; cf. Woodman (forthcoming).

consolations on the departure of the consoler

111

recalls Seneca’s advice to Marcia to engage in “contemplation of the virtues [of her deceased son]” (contemplatione virtutum, Marc. 24.4). Yet Paulina, initially seeking to join Seneca in death, proves that his consolations are in fact redundant: there is no need for him to reconcile her to the widow’s life through “the means of soothing life” (delenimenta vitae, Ann. 15.63.2), because she recognizes “that she too had an appointment with death” (sibi quoque destinatam mortem, §63.1)—that she, along with everyone else, is mortal. Paulina, it would seem, is part of Seneca’s instar efficacissimae consolationis (Helv. 1.4). So fully does she accept mortality that she is prepared to use mortality to preempt grief. But if Paulina is the focus of the most powerful consolatory allusions in the death scene, her revival from death is the point on which the consolatory enterprise appears most liable to be embarrassed. The popular rumor that Paulina was recalled to life with blandimenta vitae (§64.2) suggests not only an undoing of her self-consolation through suicide but also, more specifically, a travesty of the consolatory delenimenta vitae by which Seneca had initially sought to persuade her that her life as a widow could be made tolerable. Whether the implied “consoler” who restores Paulina to life is understood to have been Nero or simply her own fickle self, the restoration of Paulina to the society of the living is perceived as a perverse, alternative form of consolation, reintegrating her into society for the wrong reasons. Senecan consolation is subject to a parody of precisely this sort in Petronius’ version of the matron of Ephesus in the Satyricon. In the retelling of this tale by Eumolpus, who seeks to illustrate the levitas of women, the techniques employed by the soldier to persuade the matron not to waste away with the corpse of her husband, but instead to rejoin the living, are explicitly consolatory (Sat. 111.8–9): And [the soldier] began to exhort the mourning woman not to continue in a superfluous grief and not to rend her breast with groaning that served no purpose: all people had the same end and resided in the same place—and other words by which wounded minds are recalled to health (et cetera quibus exulceratae mentes ad sanitatem revocantur). But she, greatly shaken by the unfamiliar consolation (at illa ignota consolatione percussa), tore her breast all the more violently and placed her torn-out hair over the body of the deceased. Scholars agree that Petronius, both here and when he has the soldier use life’s blanditiae such as food, drink, and sex as successful instruments of consolation, is here satirizing the rhetoric of the age’s most famous consoler, Seneca.79 But the parody, we should note, centers upon an unmasking of consolation’s 79. See Courtney (2001), 169–70, 217; Pecere (1975), 76–102.

112

seneca the author

often ulterior motives. The self-interest of the soldier resembles the self-interest of Seneca in his early and most famous consolations, with their mediation of therapy through narratives that benefit him personally. In the end, the surviving Paulina, “with face and limbs blanched to a pallor that signified that much of her vital spirit had drained out” (15.64.2), appears for some audiences to have been either a matron of Ephesus or, in more specifically Senecan terms, an echo of the consoler who had initially embraced exile but ultimately returned “[to] grow old in the fatherland” (senescit in patria, VB 21.1). She recalls the Seneca portrayed in the Octavia, seduced back by Fortune. As we noted in our readings of Seneca’s early consolations, Seneca frequently acknowledged the expediency of consolatory therapy in the hands of violent autocrats such as Julius Caesar and Tiberius. Seen from this perspective, an event such as Seneca’s death can itself be “consoled” to the autocrat’s advantage. Nero may be understood to have offered Romans an expedient consolation over Seneca’s death through his seeming exercise of clemency in reviving Paulina. Moreover, an event such as Seneca’s death could even be therapy for a grieving party. In the world of Seneca’s tragedies, the primary narrative through which therapy of “grief/grievance” (dolor) is mediated is a narrative of violence or nefas. Whether it is Medea seeking a bloody “compensation” (solamen) for her banishment (Med. 539) or Clytemnestra using murderous “reasoning” (ratio) to overcome a grief that time has not healed (Aga. 130), the structure of consolatory discourse survives even when the plots by which it brings an end to grief will inflict their own lethal damage.

5 A Closing Scene in the Theaters of Ethics, Tragedy, and History

Even to ancient observers familiar with dramatic exits, Seneca’s death would have stood out as especially theatrical. The precise nature of the “theater,” however, is open to exploration. This is because Seneca himself had developed two largely separate theatrical modes in his philosophical prose and his tragedies, both equally familiar to his contemporaries. In the first two sections of this chapter we will examine these two modes and the dramatic functions that death serves in each. In the third and final section we will look at how both these Senecan modes were taken up in early literary portrayals of Julio-Claudian society and of Seneca’s death, from first-century drama (Hercules Oetaeus; Octavia) to Tacitus. The passage from Seneca’s writings most frequently cited in connection with his death is one in which the author imagines the day of death as the time when theatrical illusion is put aside.1 In Epistulae morales 26, Seneca tells Lucilius how, as he gets older, he frequently advises himself on facing up to death (Ep. 26.4–5): I, for my part, as if a test were approaching and that day has come that will give a verdict on all my years, examine myself and address myself and say: “What we have shown in action or in word up till now is nothing. Those things are insubstantial and deceptive guarantees of our state of mind, and wrapped up in ornamentation. The measuring of my progress I leave

1. In addition to the scholars discussed below, see Cancik (1967), 107–13; Marchesi (1944), 186–87. For commentary on Ep. 26 see Laudizi (2003), 171–93.

114

seneca the author to death. And so without cowardice I compose myself for that day on which I will remove all tricks and cosmetics and give judgment about myself (non timide itaque componor ad illum diem quo remotis strophis ac fucis de me iudicaturus sum): Do I speak brave things or actually feel them (utrum loquar fortia an sentiam)? Were the scornful words I uttered against Fortune just pretend and a mime (numquid simulatio fuerit et mimus quidquid contra fortunam iactavi verborum contumacium)?. . . . ”

Seneca uses the theatrical comparisons of mime and costume to characterize brave words uttered in advance that may be falsified when death arrives and passes judgment.2 What he means by brave words becomes clearer when he next tells himself to remove from his mind such considerations as the notoriously polarized “judgment of men” (existimatio hominum) and his own “studies pursued for a lifetime” (studia tota vita tractata, §§5–6). He does not necessarily mean that these were misrepresentations—just that none of them guarantees how he will act in the face of death. By contrast, he characterizes the day of death through the anti-theatrical procedures of self-judgment (cf. de me iudicaturus sum, §5) and judgment by death itself (cf. mors de te pronuntiatura est, §6). On this occasion, it would seem, the person’s true relationship to whatever quasi-theatrical role he had been playing can finally be determined. It is obvious why scholars should have cited this passage in connection with Seneca’s death: it seems to define the special epistemological status of death as the test of character. But the passage can be used in radically different ways. C. J. Herington elides the element of self-testing3 and emphasizes letter 26’s apologetic function: it prefigures the “physical action taken one day in 65 A.D.,” in other words Seneca’s suicide, in which his deeds and words were in fact found to correspond, disarming any labeling of his words as mere “rhetorical commonplace” (1966, 431, 435). In the account of Elisabeth Henry, however, the letter is vulnerable to the objection that “[t]o detach philosophical attitudes from rhetorical, or theatrical, attitudinising might be an impossibility for any observer,” even when the observer is oneself (Henry and Henry 1985, 135–36). “Could one possibly know,” she asks with reference to deaths such as Seneca’s, “whether the motives and manner of such a death—one’s own, or another’s—were truly virtuous, or self-deceiving?” (136). When Henry refers to “attitudinising,” she may have in mind the fact that in letter 26, even as Seneca holds out the prospect of transparent revelation, he describes it with overtones of self-preparation (cf. “I compose myself for that day,” componor ad illum diem, 26.5),4 which he will refer to later in the letter with the language of rehearsal

2. Hijmans (1966), 246 cites the passage as illustrating Seneca’s appeal to the customary “Roman contempt for the theatre.” 3. Contrast Hill (2004), 156. 4. For the cosmetological aspect of componere see esp. Helv. 17.1: per ipsum tamen compositum fictumque vultum lacrimae profunduntur; cf. Laudizi (2003), 185–89.

theaters of ethics, tragedy, and history

115

(cf. meditare mortem, 26.8–9). When she contrasts the “virtuous” death and the “self-deceiving” death, she is evidently also registering the misguided selfperceptions that are frequent in the tragedies. What we learn from both these readings is that Seneca’s death is repeatedly evaluated through its relationship to theatrical illusion, whether as its opposite or as an instance of it.5 Seneca being the author he is, and given his contributions to the overall theatricalization of his era,6 his death cannot easily be viewed apart from the theatrical modes of his prose and his plays. It is no surprise that scholars have read Tacitus as evoking “a piece of theater” (Santoro L’Hoir 2006, 215) whose details are deliberately “stylized, almost histrionic” (for example, the libation to Jupiter Liberator; Martin 1981, 184) or have “a suggestion of comedy” (the failure of the hemlock, Henry and Walker 1963, 105).7 Seneca’s “theatrical suicide” serves as a countermove in Imperial Rome’s “game of death” (Plass 1995, 102), or the “abrupt tragicomic peripeties” of Seneca’s biography culminate in “its ultimate catastrophe” (Herington 1966, 429). Our task is to consider the theatrical models by which some of the most salient “dramatic” readings of his death were inspired.

The Prose Theater In his prose writings Seneca frequently exploits theatrical concepts both for criticizing misguided ethical behavior and for idealizing the way in which the Stoic student or wise man will act—not least, how he will die. We may distinguish at least three paradigms of this prose theater: dramaturgic, spectatorial, and tragic-heroic (distinct from the tragedies themselves). In each of these paradigms, however, Stoic idealization is not without its own performative aspects and its own vulnerabilities.

A Dramaturgic Paradigm If life is like a drama,8 then to value any object other than virtue is like succumbing to the machinery of theatrical illusion. Such, anyway, is the Stoic account. In letter 80 Seneca illustrates “this mime of human life, which assigns parts for us to act badly” (hic humanae vitae mimus, qui nobis partes quas male agamus adsignat) through pointing out that “he who walks broadly on the stage and

5. See especially the vivid and negative formulation by Norden (1958), 1.306: “[W]ie sein Leben ein merkwürdiges Widerspiel zwischen Wahrheit und Schein war, so auch sein Ende. . . .” 6. See Edwards (2007), 144–60; Santoro L’Hoir (2006), 204–220; Habinek (2000), 285–86. 7. See also Griffin (1992), 368; Mayer (1991), 141; Dollimore (1998), 31: Seneca is “in thrall to his reputation and his audiences.” On Seneca’s Socratic imitation as theater, see Edwards (2007), 157–58; Cancik (1967), 111–13, with summary of 19th–c. debates. 8. On the analogy see Edwards (2007), 144–60, with particular reference to death scenes; Bartsch (2006), 183–229, esp. 208 for the term “ethical theater”; Solimano (1991), 64–91; Rosenmeyer (1989), 37–62.

116

seneca the author

bends back and says ‘Look, I am the king of Argos . . . ,’ is a slave (servus est)” (Ep. 80.7–8). He then turns from the stage to the social pageant and asserts that the wealthy, like actors, possess only a “masked happiness” (personata felicitas, 80.8).9 In a slightly earlier letter he had offered Lucilius an imaginary “scenario” (imaginem): “Fortune holds games (ludos facere fortunam) and tosses out honors, riches, and gifts into this gathering of mortals (in hunc mortalium coetum). . . . And so any smart man, as soon as he sees these little gifts/games (munuscula) being brought out, flees from the theater (a theatro fugit). . . . No one raises a hand against him as he withdraws, no one hits him as he exits (exeuntem): the quarrel is over the prize” (Ep. 74.7–8). The image of the exiting wise man here both echoes a popular anecdote about Cato the Younger’s outraged exit from the theater10 and applauds his unfettered departure from the mortalium coetus—a reference to self-killing (cf. exeuntem). The analogy between life and drama also supplies a language for describing inconsistent and inauthentic personal behavior. “No one,” as Seneca tells Nero in the De clementia, “can keep on a mask for long; fictions quickly return to their own nature” (nemo . . . potest personam diu ferre, ficta cito in naturam suam recidunt, Clem. 1.1.5)—a passage that, read in retrospect, allows us to view Nero’s killing of Seneca as a symptom of the tyrant’s unmasking. In letter 120 Seneca criticizes the repeated changing of masks (Ep. 120.22):11 You should know that it is a great thing to play a single man (unum hominem agere). Apart from the wise man, however, no one plays one: the rest of us take many forms (multiformes sumus). At one moment we will seem to you to be frugal and serious, the next moment wasteful and frivolous. We change our mask in turn, putting on the opposite of the one that we removed (mutamus subinde personam et contrariam ei sumimus quam exuimus). So demand of yourself that, whatever kind of man you began by showing yourself to be, you keep yourself as that kind of man until the end (ut qualem institueris praestare te, talem usque ad exitum serves). Try to make it so that you can be praised, but if not, that you can be recognized (adgnosci). This emphasis on consistency up until the exitus—both dramatic and existential—builds upon an earlier theme of the letter: that the wise man is capable of remaining consistent and intrepid because he recognizes his status as a mere “traveler” (peregrinus) in this life (§18). Although the letter spells out a philosophy of aequalitas and constantia, Catharine Edwards has noted the possibility of

9. See Hijmans (1966), 246. Compare Lucretius, DRN 3.58: eripitur persona, manet res; with Edwards (2002), 381. Seneca applies this to death at Ep. 24.13–14: non hominibus tantum sed rebus persona demenda est et reddenda facies sua. . . . mors es, quam nuper servus meus, quam ancilla contempsit. 10. E.g., Val. Max. 2.10.8. 11. On the subtleties of the letter see Star (2006), 211–15.

theaters of ethics, tragedy, and history

117

applying Seneca’s critiques of inconsistency and inauthenticity in this letter to his own imitative death: “Can he really become ‘Seneca’ in playing ‘Socrates’ or ‘Cato’?” “When the Stoic becomes his own playwright, aesthetics may undermine philosophy” (2007, 158). This registers the slippage between Seneca’s varying emphases on (1) being one’s natural self rather than playing a role, (2) playing one role rather than many, and (3) emulating an exemplary character. Interestingly, Shadi Bartsch has argued that Seneca himself was the one who had actively revived the theatrical implications of persona (2006, 216–29). As letter 120 itself shows, the theatrical analogy also offers Seneca a language with which to characterize a life lived out well. If life is like a drama, to live well is partly a matter of being conscious of the shaping hand of the dramaturge, whether Fortune, Nature, or the gods—or even of taking on the dramaturge’s role oneself, especially in the choice of an ending. The dying Cato, for example, made his path to liberty by means of dramaturgic ingenuity: “His virtue was detained and called back so that it could show itself in a more challenging role” (retenta ac revocata virtus est ut in difficiliore parte se ostenderet, Prov. 2.12).12 The background to Seneca’s ethics of persona comes principally from the theory of Panaetius outlined by Cicero in the De officiis, distinguishing the four personae that each of us wears: the first and second given us by Nature (our common rationality and our individual characteristics), the third by circumstance (such as our degree of wealth or power), and the fourth by our own choice (such as our pursuits: philosophy, law, oratory, etc.; Off. 1.107–116).13 Cicero emphasizes that the moral goal of decorum can be met only through our being conscious of all the roles we inhabit and exhibiting “consistency in the whole way of life and in single actions” (aequabilitas universae vitae, tum singularum actionum, §111), which can best be ensured through “care” (cura), “practice” (meditatio), and “diligence” (diligentia, §114). Anything else, after all, would be a betrayal of the first and most important persona that itself enables us to identify our duties (ex qua ratio inveniendi officii exquiritur, §107). The dramaturgic analogy is most explicit when he observes that actors (scaenici) “do not choose the best plays, but the ones best suited to them (non optumas, sed sibi accommodatissimas fabulas). . . . Will an actor (histrio), then, see this on the stage (in scaena), but a wise man not see it in life? (§114).14 Cicero is drawn to the recent event of Cato’s self-killing as an illustration of adherence to one’s second persona. Whereas “for others it would have been counted as a fault if they had killed themselves (si se interemissent), because of the fact that their way of life was gentler and their character was more flexible,” Cato’s natural habit of constantia meant that “it was necessary to die rather than look upon the face 12. For theatrical terms here see Hijmans (1966), 237–38. Cato is called back “for an encore,” observes Star (2006), 218. See also Bartsch (2006), 217–21; Reydams-Schils (2005), 217–28. 13. See Edwards (2007), 147–52; Brunt (1975), 10–16; for commentary, Dyck (1996), 269–71. 14. On the analogy here see Goldberg (2000b), 53–54.

118

seneca the author

of the tyrant” (moriendum potius quam tyranni vultus aspiciendus fuit, §112). As P. A. Brunt has noted, precisely this theory seems to underlie the conspicuous divergence in the paths pursued by various Imperial Stoics, with some opposing the Neronian regime even at the cost of their lives, and others working within it (1975, 7, 32). The most frequently discussed example of Seneca’s dramaturgic approach to self-killing is the conclusion of letter 77: “Just make sure to put a good ending on it” (tantum bonam clausulam impone, Ep. 77.20). But the context of this passage has not always been fully appreciated. Signing off, Seneca explains to Lucilius (§20):15 quomodo fabula, sic vita: non quam diu, sed quam bene acta sit, refert. nihil ad rem pertinet quo loco desinas. quocumque voles desine: tantum bonam clausulam inpone. vale. As in a story, so too in life: it is not how long, but how well it was acted, that matters. It is irrelevant in what place you cease. Cease wherever you want: just make sure to put a good end on it. Farewell. He asserts both the potential to be one’s own dramaturge and the ultimate importance of the “good ending” (an ethical but also aesthetic notion, here neatly underlined by the clausula of the letter itself ), rendering irrelevant the number of one’s years. Giannina Solimano has taken this comparison of vita to fabula fairly directly as a guide to reading the performativity of Seneca’s own death, albeit before the more intimate audience of his friends (1991, 73). But it is also useful to note that in the letter’s opening pages Seneca had given a brief narrative ( fabella, §10), about the death of Tullius Marcellinus, a man both he and Lucilius had known who had suffered from chronic illness. Seneca’s account is remarkable for its detail, from Marcellinus’ summoning of “a number of friends” (complures amicos) to help him deliberate about taking his own life to his self-starvation for three days and his entry into a bathtub (§§5–9). A central role in the fabella is played by the “Stoic friend of ours” (amicus noster Stoicus) who emerges as the only one willing to exhort Marcellinus to scorn life.16 Seneca gives the friend a speaking part, having him utter such (recognizably Senecan) words as, “It is nothing great to be alive: all your slaves and all your animals are alive. What is great is to die virtuously, wisely, bravely” (“non est res magna vivere: omnes servi tui vivunt, omnia animalia: magnum est honeste mori, prudenter, fortiter,”§6). Even if we are not tempted to identify this friend with Seneca himself, the friend clearly emerges as a dramaturge who helps Marcellinus to act out the successful death scene. The fabella turns out to have 15. On this ending, see E. R. Wilson (2004), 96–98, contrasting it with “the Aristotelian idea that a play needs to be of a certain length in order to have dignity” (97); also Connors (1994), 127; Mazzoli (1970), 123–24. 16. On the friend’s conspicuous frankness see Roller (2001), 117–19.

theaters of ethics, tragedy, and history

119

served an important role vis-à-vis the ending of the letter with its vita/fabula analogy: it has already allowed the letter’s reader to watch a “playlet”17 within the letter itself, illustrating what a good clausula—the one choreographed by the Stoic friend—actually looks like.

A Spectacular Paradigm Seneca treats the relationship between actor and spectator as an important ethical question in its own right.18 He urges Lucilius to withdraw from the city: “Solitude is not on its own a teacher of innocence, nor does the countryside teach frugality, but when witness and spectator (testis ac spectator) have departed, the vices settle down, because their goal is to be shown and seen (monstrari et conspici)”; they like an “admirer” (admirator), “witness” (conscius), and “stage” (scaena; Ep. 94.69–71). This is relevant to the agent, but also to the spectator addicted to specific kinds of spectacle: in the De ira, Seneca recounts how Hannibal “supposedly said, upon seeing a ditch full of human blood, ‘O beautiful sight!’ (‘o formosum spectaculum!’)” (Ira 2.5.4). In letter 7 Seneca famously describes his own recent visit to the amphitheater and then, at the letter’s end, offers Lucilius an interesting alternative.19 The anecdote centers upon the surprise Seneca received when he had “chanced upon a noontime spectacle” (casu in meridianum spectaculum incidi)—a show at which he suggests he was expecting “games . . . and jests and some form of relaxation by which the eyes can get a rest from human bloodshed” (lusus . . . et sales et aliquid laxamenti quo hominum oculi ab humano cruore adquiescant, Ep. 7.3). The noontime show, however, turned out to be more, not less, violent than the beast hunts of the morning show.20 This intensification of violence is presented by way of proving the following basic moral observation about spectacle crowds: “Nothing is so injurious to good character as to lounge at some spectacle. For that is when the vices creep up on us more easily, through pleasure (tunc enim per voluptatem facilius vitia subrepunt). What do you think I am saying: that I come home more greedy, ambitious, extravagant? Yes, and more cruel and less human—having been among human beings (inhumanior, quia inter homines fui)” (§§2–3). In his vivid account of the show itself, in which criminals are forced to fight each other to the death, Seneca inventively recasts the spectators in various roles, comparing them to lions and bears and treating them as connoisseurs of killing and dying, suggesting that their spectatorship punishes them, not the victims, and emphasizing the didactic implications of their spectatorial demands upon the fighters themselves: 17. For the term “playlet” of the Marcellinus fabella, see Hijmans (1966). 18. See Edwards (1998); Solimano (1991), esp. 30–63. 19. For commentary see Scarpat (1975), 126–57; Summers (1910), 156–63. For discussion see Shelton (2000), 99–100; Abel (1981), 478–82. 20. On the matutinum and meridianum spectaculum see Scarpat (1975), 126–27; K. Coleman (1990), 55–56. Note the emperor Claudius as a possible precedent for noontime cruelty at Suet. Claud. 34.2.

120

seneca the author

“Thank the immortal gods that you are teaching to be cruel one who cannot learn” (agite dis immortalibus gratias quod eum docetis esse crudelem qui non potest discere, §§4–5).21 But Seneca concludes the letter by urging Lucilius to consider sayings by different philosophers on the superiority of a small but appropriate audience—for example, from Epicurus, who wrote to one of his students: “I don’t [write] these for the many, but for you. For we are a big enough theater for one another (satis enim magnum alter alteri theatrum sumus)” (§11). The quotation hints that the epistolary correspondence itself is an intimate substitute for the amphitheater, perhaps with echoes of Cicero, who states that “there is no greater theater for virtue than conscience” (nullum theatrum virtuti conscientia maius est, Tusc. 2.64).22 Seneca, then, characterizes the life of virtue not by turning away from spectacle per se but by appealing to spectacles of a different kind. On more than one occasion he alludes to a nearby spectacle event as an incentive to his own contemplative activity (for example, Ep. 80.2). But if vice is responsive to a popular audience, the aspiring philosopher is to imagine himself as subject to the witnessing of the gods (as in the spectacle of Cato versus Fortune, Prov. 2.9), the public, an idealized wise man or moral exemplar, or himself.23 In his exhortations Seneca effectively gives conscientia, however much it is cast as a form of self-appraisal that stands in opposition to fama and opinio,24 its own status as a form of spectacle. He is not quite content with the basic truth that virtue is its own reward, but, as he says to Nero at the beginning of the De clementia, “it is pleasing to look upon and to inspect one’s good conscience” (iuvat inspicere et circumire bonam conscientiam, Clem. 1.1.1). In a displacement of the De ira’s tyrant feasting his eyes on cruelty, the young emperor is to enjoy looking at the conscience that signifies his being witnessed by an imagined viewer, whether this is himself, Seneca (his “mirror”), or, as Seneca goes on to suggest, the Roman people more generally.25 Seneca thus charts the ways in which the value of virtue can be authenticated, communicated, or enjoyed, through visual transactions whether literal or metaphorical. Thomas Rosenmeyer describes Seneca as espousing a “Stoic heroism” in which virtue can scarcely be conceived of without an audience (1989, 38; cf. 37–62). The philosopher is also the spectator par excellence, and in the detached observation of the world and the contemplation of universal Nature and one’s

21. Since Lipsius, some interpreters have taken eum to be Seneca’s one direct reference to Nero in the letters. On this interpretation, see Scarpat (1975), 128–29; Abel (1981), 473, 477. But Griffin (1992), 360 n. 1 is skeptical, while Summers (1910), 160 takes it to refer to an imagined fighter who shows restraint. 22. On the interiorized theater here, see Edwards (2007), 152; Scarpat (1975), 155; Summers (1910), 163, citing Senecan parallels. 23. On Prov. 2.9, see Leigh (1997), 262–63; Cancik (1967), 108–9. On the internalized audience as a central conceit of Senecan philosophy, see Edwards (2007), 151–52, (1997); Bartsch (2006), 194–208; Roller (2001), 64–126. 24. E.g., VB 20.4. On conscientia in Seneca, and this contrast, see Roller (2001), 82–83; Grimal (1992), 157–59. 25. On the specular dynamics of Clem. 1.1.1, see Ker (2009).

theaters of ethics, tragedy, and history

121

own personal nature, Seneca privileges the recognition of our mortality. “No one,” he complains, “keeps death in view” (nemo in conspicuo mortem habet, Brev. 20.5). But to premeditate death requires (or helps to ensure) that we are able to respond rationally or dispassionately to whatever we see—and hear. In the De ira Seneca emphasizes the difference between, on the one hand, “that first sting of the mind” (primus ille ictus animi)—the unavoidable impact (the socalled pqopheia) that is caused even in wise men by such things as “theatrical stage shows and readings of history” (ludicra scaenae spectacula et lectiones rerum vetustarum; subjects include the execution of Cicero)—and, on the other, the subsequent emotions that reason allows us to resist (Ira 2.2.2–6).26 This form of viewing takes seriously the Stoic categorization of externals as indifferent. Detachment is integral to watching one’s own pain in progress—an ongoing emphasis in Seneca’s writings with special relevance to our topic. In letter 30 Seneca describes how he has recently visited the aged Aufidius Bassus. He begins by saying, “I saw Bassus Aufidius, an excellent man, tattered and struggling with his age” (Bassum Aufidium, virum optimum, vidi quassum, aetati obluctantem), casting the old man in the role of a gladiator (Ep. 30.1).27 He goes on to describe Bassus with the simile of “a crumbling building” (tamquam in putri aedificio, §2), echoing the “crumbling stones” (putria saxa) of Seneca’s own villa mentioned in an earlier letter (Ep. 12.1) and thus identifying Bassus’ old age with the senectus of Seneca himself. But Seneca focuses on Bassus as a spectator (§§3, 5):28 eo animo vultuque finem suum spectat quo alienum spectare nimis securi putares. . . . Bassus noster videbatur mihi prosequi se et componere et vivere tamquam superstes sibi et sapienter ferre desiderium sui. He watches his own end with a state of mind and an expression that you might think were too detached even if he were looking on someone else’s end. . . . Our Bassus seemed to me to be seeing himself off, and composing himself, and living as if he were a survivor of himself, and enduring grief over himself wisely. Bassus’ postmortem perspective puts him in the role of a messenger, as one of those “who have stood alongside [death], and have seen it and accepted it as it came” (qui secundum illam [sc. mortem] steterunt, qui venientem et viderunt et receperunt) and is therefore specially placed to give information about “what disturbance the approach of death brings” (accessus mortis quam perturbationem

26. See Littlewood (2004), 173; Leigh (1997), 30; Mazzoli (1997b), 83, (1970), 125–27. 27. See Solimano (1991), 69. 28. On Bassus’ self-spectation see Hill (2004), 178–79. For looking at one’s own wounds, compare Helv. 3.2 (of veteran soldiers): velut aliena corpora exsaniari patiuntur. The motif is discussed by Leigh (1997), 280.

122

seneca the author

adferat, §9). Toward the end of the letter, however, Seneca contextualizes his own spectation of Bassus watching himself die, asking, “Have I not watched many breaking off their lives (non multos spectavi abrumpentes vitam)? I have indeed seen this, but I am much more moved by those who come to death without hatred for life and allow it in, rather than bringing it on (admittunt illam, non adtrahunt)” (§15). While Bassus has been looking on his own death as calmly as if it were someone else’s, Seneca has in turn been looking on Bassus’ measured death as if it were a rehearsal of his own patiently awaited end.

A Tragic-Heroic Paradigm (in the Prose Works) Seneca also uses tragic heroes as the basis both for criticisms of problematic behavior and for idealizations of Stoic ethics, just as in the dramaturgic and spectatorial paradigms. Two repeated “tragic” scenarios (though, strictly speaking, Seneca quotes them via epic poetry) involve the essentially self-destructive characters Dido and Phaethon. Both these characters, for example, are cited in the later chapters of the De vita beata where Seneca celebrates the philosophical way of death: 1. Dido comes up in connection with the Epicurean Diodorus, who very recently committed suicide but, because he cut his own throat, was accused (apparently by Epicurean objectors) of having violated Epicurean doctrine: “Some want us to see this act of his as madness, others as rashness” (alii dementiam videri volunt factum hoc eius, alii temeritatem, VB 19.1).29 Seneca, however, does not go in for such pedantry and confidently asserts Diodorus’ sanity and rationality. He depicts Diodorus in the moment of death, quoting Dido: “He, meanwhile, happy and full of good conscience, bore witness to himself as he departed from life (beatus ac plenus bona conscientia reddidit sibi testimonium vita excedens), and praised his quiet life spent in harbor and at anchor, and said what you [detractors] did not want to hear, as if you also would need to say it: ‘I have lived and have run to its end the course which Fortune had given me’ (‘vixi et quem dederat cursum fortuna peregi’)” (19.1). In using this verse, which comes from Dido’s final speech before she kills herself with Aeneas’ sword (Aen. 4.653), Seneca capitalizes on the heroic qualities of the utterance, with its assertive embracing of limits. But he also suppresses obvious incongruities. Virgil’s Dido, for example, goes on to portray herself as “happy, alas, all too happy, if only Trojan ships had never touched our shores” ( felix, heu nimium felix, si litora tantum / numquam Dardaniae tetigissent nostra carinae, 4.657–58), whereas Seneca describes Diodorus as “happy” (beatus) without qualification; Virgil describes Dido as having died “miserable, before her time, and aflame with sudden madness” (misera ante diem

29. On aspects of Epicurean theory in Seneca’s discussion of Diodorus, see Warren (2004), 207–8.

theaters of ethics, tragedy, and history

123

subitoque accensa furore, 4.696–97), whereas Seneca emphasizes that Diodorus did not die out of “madness” or “rashness.” Seneca thus shores up his defense of Diodorus through appropriating the tragic scenario selectively. A selective use of the same Dido quotation is elsewhere justified by Seneca through a more explicit dichotomy between the mala conscientia of the passionate or melancholy suicide (or mock funeral) and the bona conscientia of the philosopher.30 The exercise of bona conscientia seems to entail the ability to say what a tragic character might say but without succumbing to a tragic scenario—in which the act of selective quotation itself may serve as a test and a proof. 2. Phaethon arises in the De vita beata’s sketch of the Stoic philosopher who dies before he can attain perfected virtue. Seneca responds to his objectors that at least the philosopher aims high, and he presents an imaginary philosopher saying, “When Nature calls our life back or reason dismisses it, I will exit bearing witness that I loved a good conscience” (“quandoque aut natura spiritum repetet aut ratio dimittet, testatus exibo bonam me conscientiam amasse,” VB 20.5). Applauding such sentiments (which again strikingly invoke the dying testimony of a bona conscientia), Seneca quotes from Ovid’s description of Phaethon: “The man who makes plans such as these, and wants them, and attempts them, will make his journey to the gods—indeed, even if he does not attain them, ‘he still fell having dared great things’ (etiam si non tenuerit, ‘magnis tamen excidit ausis’ [= Met. 2.328])” (20.5). Seneca capitalizes on the heroic associations of Ovid’s portrayal and even deploys the solar imagery of the myth to criticize his objectors as “nocturnal animals” (nocturna animalia) whose “eyes are weak and afraid of the sun” (solem lumina aegra formidant, 20.6). In the De providentia also, Seneca exploits the tale of Phaethon’s rite of passage as a charioteer, and his becoming a real vir, to characterize the Stoic quest for virtus (Prov. 5.9–11; quoting Met. 2.63–69, 79–81). At the same time, however, Seneca suppresses the features of the original context that would undermine the comparison—just as in his quotation of Dido. Elsewhere, for example, Seneca uses elements precisely from Ovid’s Phaethon narrative—the description of the golden chariot, the reckless ambition (Ep. 115.12–13)—to evoke the desire for wealth that poets are capable of inflaming in us. It is not that Seneca in the De vita beata and De providentia tries to hide the fact of Phaethon’s failure. He appeals rather to the grandiosity of Phaethon’s celestial ambitions, however unfulfilled, to glorify the philosopher’s discerning quest for virtue. The “failed” philosopher, then, is tragic only in the structure of his situation; he is not ethically tragic. Of course, Seneca’s use of tragic-heroic scenarios to glorify the philosopher’s death within the theater of ethics represents one of two uses that Seneca makes 30. Ep. 12.8–9, on which see Mann (2006); Görler (1996), 163–69; Neumeister (1995), 76–77.

124

seneca the author

of such material in his writings more generally—the other being in the tragedies proper. There, Dido becomes a model for the passionate subjectivity of Seneca’s tragic women, and especially for Phaedra’s unrequited amorous passion and suicide by lover’s sword. Or, when Phaethon is mentioned in a choral ode of the Medea as a comparison for the uncontrollable flames of Medea’s wrath, the same daring that is celebrated in the De vita beata (cf. “he fell having dared great things,” “magnis tamen excidit ausis,” VB 20.5; Met. 2.328) is now presented as the origin of the young hero’s irrational and self-destructive violation of natural boundaries (Med. 599–602):31 Having dared (ausus) to drive the eternal chariot, the young man, unmindful of his father’s limit, himself received the fires which he in his madness spread over the sky. The uses of Dido and Phaethon in the De vita beata, however, belong within the Stoic tradition of using fictional (especially tragic) characters both to illustrate misplaced values and as analogies for ideal behavior. Epictetus, for example, acknowledges that Medea can be criticized for being deceived by her passions, but at the same time appropriates her heroic exclusion of externals: “She had . . . the right impression, namely, what it means not to yield one’s will to anyone” (ei῏ve . . . ùm deπ fiamsar¨am, o῟iæm érsi sø  håkei sim≠ ló pqovoqeπm, 2.17.19; cf. 1.28.8–9).32 This is the procedure we have seen Senecan prose apply to the tragic scenarios of Dido and Phaethon. The procedure is partly a means to heroize the philosopher through the connotations of the original scenario, but it also heroizes him through testing and proving his ability as a discerning reader, identifying what is internal and valuable while suppressing that which, in the original context, is external and guided by wrong values. It is, in other words, a peculiarly Stoic method of intertextual appropriation.

The Fragility of the Death Theater The ethical theater, as we have seen, relies for its authority on the delicate dynamics of performance. Tacitus conveys something of its vulnerability in his portrayal of the moment when Seneca, after opening the veins in his legs, persuades Paulina to withdraw, “so that he would neither break her spirit with his own suffering nor himself lose his ability to endure from seeing her torment” (ne dolore suo animum uxoris infringeret atque ipse visendo eius tormenta ad inpatientiam delaberetur, Ann. 15.63.3). Here Seneca’s anxiety about “losing the ability to endure” suggests a concern for protecting the ethical theater—the dramaturgic, spectatorial, and tragic-heroizing conditions that are optimal for

31. Cf. Med. 605–6: Phaethon (like the Argo) violated sancta / foedera mundi. 32. On Medea especially in Epictetus and Chrysippus see Dillon (1997).

theaters of ethics, tragedy, and history

125

exhibiting the constantia for which he expects his and Paulina’s deaths will become famous. It is not that a squeamish response by Seneca would necessarily have reflected a flaw in his virtue: elsewhere Seneca writes that “certain brave persons, fully prepared to shed their own blood, cannot look upon another’s [blood]” ( fortes quidam et paratissimi fundere suum sanguinem, alienum videre non possunt), and he excuses such a reaction as “a natural affection that cannot be combated by reason” (Ep. 57.5).33 But in the theater of Stoic heroism, looks do matter.

The Tragedies Why and how is death so present in Seneca’s plays?34 Yes, Seneca chose to retell myths in which deaths are a major part of the story—most often, infanticide, suicide, or the death of a spouse—and he presents them as the products of irrational psychological forces (dolor, furor, ira, amor) and malevolent actions (nefas, scelus, malum).35 But it is also significant that Seneca’s is the first tragic theater we know of—Sophocles’ Aiax being the exception that proves the rule—whose conventions allow for homicides and suicides to occur on the (real or implied) stage, such as Hercules’ and Medea’s killings of their children, and Phaedra’s and Jocasta’s killings of themselves.36 Even if this were not the case, the death descriptions in messenger speeches, such as the novel pairing of the deaths of Astyanax and Polyxena in the Troades and the extended account of Hippolytus’ dismemberment in the Phaedra, bring the death event on stage in exaggerated verbal form.37 And even if this were not the case, death is always present as a kind of lingua franca through which the characters speak about virtually everything else, and also as something that can itself be continually reinvented through language. Although tragedy had long functioned as “a fundamental part of the Romans’ cultural education and experience,”38 the audience of Senecan tragedy was habituated to witnessing the crisis event of character and chorus facing death “in the immediate foreground of an emotional present”39

33. Cited in this context by R. Fabbri (1978–79), 422. 34. On death in the tragedies see Hutchinson (1993), 306–14; Henry and Henry (1985), 116–49; Opelt (1984), 29–35; Herington (1966), 434–45; Regenbogen (1961), 442–50. On suicide in particular, see Palmieri (1999); Tadic-Gilloteaux (1963), 550–51. 35. On the psychological world of the tragedies see Schiesaro (2003), (1997); Guastella (2001); Dupont (1995). On the centrality of nefas see Opelt (1972). 36. See Coffey and Mayer (1990), 190, commenting on the onstage suicide of Phaedra. Seneca’s Medea goes against the preference of Horace at AP 185: ne puros coram populo Medea trucidet. 37. On the verbalization of violence see Aygon (2004), 120–27; Goldberg (2000a), (1997); Dupont (1995), 118–22, on the “spectacle des mots.” 38. Goldberg (2000b), 54. On Seneca and prior Roman dramatic tradition see Boyle (2006); Erasmo (2004); Tarrant (1978). 39. Segal (1986), 4.

126

seneca the author

and speaking about it at length and from different points of view both rational and irrational. As we will see, several dramatic functions of death can be identified: death is a marked form of agency and object of spectation, and it is manifested in particular thematic “localizations” such as in Troy or the underworld. Surveying these functions will bring us closer to the perspectives of Seneca’s contemporaries and of the dramatists of the following generation who alluded to Seneca’s death in a tragic framework.

The “Authority” of Senecan Tragedy As we approach the functions of death in the tragedies, however, we need first to recognize how scholars have differed in their assessment of Senecan tragedy’s literary authority, focusing on four major areas: (1) literary history, (2) performance, (3) Julio-Claudian history, and (4) philosophy. Each of these questions introduces complexity to our task: 1. The literary historical status of Senecan tragedy has in the past been defined in heavily diachronic terms, of which T. S. Eliot’s account is a virtual caricature: “[I]f we imagine this unacted drama,” he writes, “we see at once that it is at one remove from reality, compared with the Greek” (1932, 53). Though Eliot is kind to Senecan tragedy, negative assessments of Seneca within the history of the tragic genre are not hard to come by—at least, they weren’t. The recent focus on such topics as Seneca’s intertextual engagement with Republican drama and Augustan poetry, characters who are declamatory self-fashioners and revel in meta-theatricality, appropriations of other genres such as epic or Horatian lyric, and a thematization of diachrony within the plays themselves (iteration, amplification, fragmentation of time, belatedness), have turned what might have been an objective narrative of literary decline—the destruction or dilution of the tragic—into a historicizing portrait of Seneca engaging with the concerns of Julio-Claudian audiences who were self-conscious about their lateness in literary history.40 The work communicates partly through its inherently diachronic perspective upon the tragic tradition. This historical self-consciousness, in turn, has implications for the function of death in the tragedies. Among other things, it signals that death, beyond its literal reference, at the same time potentially has a meta-literary comment to make on a genre that is conscious of its own mortality or, alternatively, of its own “overliving”—the term used by Emily Wilson (2004, 88–112). Death, in other words, as a literary-historical dynamic.

40. Among recent approaches see Littlewood (2004); Schiesaro (2003); Boyle (1997); Goldberg (1997). Liebermann (2004) reviews changes in the scholarly assessment, with emphasis (1–6) on the pivotal article of Regenbogen (1961, originally published in 1930), which historicized the works’ focus on emotion, suffering, and death within the Lebenswelt and Lebensgefühl of the Neronian age. Important 19th- and 20th-c. evaluations are sampled in Lefèvre (1972).

theaters of ethics, tragedy, and history

127

2. As the above statement by Eliot also illustrates, Senecan tragedy’s decadence—its distancing from the Greek original—has tended to be characterized as coinciding with a trajectory in which the (literary-rhetorical) “word” becomes distanced from (dramatic) “action.”41 A spectrum of different positions has been adopted concerning the event status of Senecan drama in its ancient contexts, with the plays variously treated as performable (and performed) in full-scale theatrical production; as catering to recitation in part or in full with different degrees of staging; or as enacting a textual theatricality for the private reader.42 The stakes for us can be illustrated by asking, for a recurrent Senecan motif such as the representation of killing in the language of ritual sacrifice (which is, in turn, closely bound up with Seneca’s use of the altar as a recurring point of spatial reference),43 how its impact might change relative to the conditions of spectation or reading. Conclusions about event status are of special importance in the case of death. The plays’ performed “reality” of characters facing death might elicit different reactions in the implied audience, ranging from psychological engagement to various degrees of detachment or irony. 3. The plays’ status as events has often come to turn upon their referentiality within the age of the Julio-Claudians.44 This approach depends to some extent on where and how the plays are situated inside the chronology of Seneca’s career, using the blurry outlines that can be established by the fact that the Apocolocyntosis, written in 54, makes satirizing references to Seneca’s own Hercules, and by Fitch’s (2002–4, 1.12) ordering of the plays in three groups based on stylometric principles: (1) Agamemnon, Oedipus, Phaedra; (2) Hercules, Medea, Troades; (3) Thyestes, Phoenissae—the last of these plays perhaps left unfinished due to the author’s death? Modern readers frequently discern mutual resonances between the plays and Seneca’s biography, psychological profile, or historical milieu. For a sampling of instances involving death, we can note a suggestion that “Roman listeners might have been reminded of Tiberius or Gaius” in Atreus’ assertion that “in my kingdom death is given as a favor” (in regno meo / mors impetratur, Thy. 247–48),45 or the theory that Amphitryon’s dissuasion of Hercules from suicide (Herc. 1317) resembles Seneca the Elder’s deterrence of his son from the same (cf. Ep. 78.2), or a possible allusion to Seneca’s Jocasta by the dying Agrippina (Oed. 1032–39; Ann.

41. See also Herington (1966), 456. 42. For an overview see Fitch (2000); on stagecraft, Sutton (1986); on literary theatricality engaging with nondramatic models such as Augustan poetry and declamation, see Littlewood (2004), 3–4; Goldberg (2000a); Tietze (1989). 43. On the theme of perverted ritual see Dupont (1995), 189–222; on the altar, Sutton (1986), 19–20. 44. Crucial here is Nisbet (2008), esp. on Seneca’s likely avoidance of specific volatile references. On changing relationships between onstage action and historical events in Roman drama see Erasmo (2004), 81–121. 45. Tarrant (1985), 125–26.

128

seneca the author

14.8.5).46 In other words, death events and death attitudes within the plays have been squeezed to reveal mimetic relationships to the much-noted culture of death in Julio-Claudian society.47 We will return to the relationship between tragedy and Julio-Claudian history in the final section of this chapter. 4. In relation to philosophy,48 the tragedies have been seen, variously, as teaching it (or at least illustrating it) through negative and, in some cases, positive exemplary characters or through the moralizing voices of the choral odes, perhaps testing and training the spectator’s self-restraint through exposure to the passions in an extreme form;49 as exploring philosophy’s limit cases in characters who have deceptive surface similarities to the wise man, thereby exposing, even parodying, the illusory representations on which the wise man’s ethical theater is built;50 as pursuing philosophy by a heterogeneous, possibly more profound, path;51 as rewriting tragic myths on the universal scale defined by Stoic heroism or cosmological theory;52 as unleashing a poetic unconscious or visions of sociopolitical reality that are fundamentally in conflict with Stoic providentialism or virtue ethics;53 or as having no specific philosophical message, except through readings imposed by later interpreters.54 The choice of answer has major consequences for how an audience should interpret the much-expanded function of death in the tragic world. As I observed earlier in this chapter, there is a form of Stoic reading in which the spectation of tragic death (of Dido or Phaethon, for example) might serve as a proof or test of the power to perform one’s detachment from externals—to appropriate the tragic hero’s utterance as a model for death in bona conscientia.55 Yet it is clear that the expanded signification of death and suffering in the tragedies cannot be treated as merely a philosophical case study. The fundamental reason for such varied positions, however, is the pervasive polysemy of Seneca’s tragic register. Mireille Armisen-Marchetti has illustrated the “overdetermined” (“surdeterminé”) nature of specific elements (1992, 386)

46. See also Herington (1966), 458–60, on the life lessons Seneca supposedly drew from Hippolytus and Thyestes. 47. On the culture of death see Boyle (1994), 19. 48. For a survey see Rosenmeyer (1989), 3–11; Dingel (1974), 11–14. 49. See Gill (2006), 421–35; Mazzoli (1997b); Nussbaum (1994). 50. See Littlewood (2004), on “the fragility of Stoic self-representation” (8); also Bartsch (2006), 230–81; Star (2006). 51. See Goldberg (2000b), esp. 57; Nussbaum (1997), 247; Putnam (1995), 279–80. 52. See Rosenmeyer (1989), 62 and already Pratt (1948), 11. 53. See Schiesaro (2003). The argument was pursued furthest by Dingel (1974): the tragedies are “die poetische Negation stoischer Vorstellungen” (17), and Seneca’s poetic voice is more authentic, because “wenn Seneca eine Maske trägt, er sie als Philosoph trägt.” 54. See Hine (2004); Mayer (1994). 55. E.g., the tragedies were read as a meditatio mortis by Hadas (1939), 230.

theaters of ethics, tragedy, and history

129

such as the Nurse’s advice at Phaedra 130–35, that “whoever resists passion at the outset and drives it out, is safe and wins” (quisquis in primo obstitit / pepulitque amorem, tutus ac victor fuit, 132–33). The utterance may variously be read as echoing director-of-conscience discourse, popular moral therapy, and/ or poetic and humorous erotic literature (for example, Ovid). Glenn Most, in turn, has illustrated how the description of Hippolytus’ death and dismemberment (Pha. 1068–1114) participates simultaneously in a popular discourse (on the amphitheater), a Stoic discourse (on the body and the self), and a metaliterary discourse (on texts as bodies)—even if Most, for his part, privileges the last option (1992, 408). Ultimately, we cannot second-guess the purpose and impact of specific representations of death in the tragedies. Even with these considerations in mind, however, it is still possible to distinguish basic forms and functions of death as it is brought before the eyes (and ears) of the audience.

Death Multiplied by Forms of Agency In the tragedies death expands to accommodate the multiple, often contradictory, forms of agency taken up by Seneca’s characters as the plot unfolds. In the Phaedra, departing from the Euripidean version of the Hippolytus myth in which Phaedra’s suicide precedes Theseus’ return, Seneca makes Phaedra’s death and last words the vehicle by which the climactic truth of Hippolytus’ innocence is made known to Theseus (Pha. 1191–98). But this comes as just the last in a long series of suicidal gestures by Phaedra throughout her time on the stage.56 Her initial dialogue with the Nurse culminates in the declaration, “I will preempt the forbidden act with death” (morte praevertam nefas, 254) and “I am decided on death, and am only looking for a way to die” (decreta mors est: quaeritur fati genus, 256–57), echoing Virgil’s Dido.57 In her encounter with Hippolytus, “a death-like color clouded her face” (ora morti similis obduxit color, 585–86). When Hippolytus discovers her desire and threatens her with his sword, she deters him with her enthusiasm: “To die in your hands with my chastity intact, surpasses my prayers” (maius hoc voto meo est, / salvo ut pudore manibus immoriar tuis, 711–12). When Theseus returns to find Phaedra with Hippolytus’ abandoned sword in hand and considering suicide once again, she pleads for death (permitte mortem, 871), both appealing to the philosophical commonplace that “when someone wants to die, death can never elude them” (mori volenti desse mors numquam potest, 878) and alluding to the historical exemplum of Lucretia: “Our blood will wash away this stain on our chastity” (labem hanc pudoris eluet noster cruor, 893). After the death of Hippolytus Phaedra reappears in the final act with the sword still in hand, which allows her to characterize her

56. For discussion see Hill (2004), 159–75; Palmieri (1999), 47–82; also Gill (2006), 425–27. 57. Aen. 4.475–76: decrevitque mori, tempus secum ipsa modumque / exigit. Cf. Coffey and Mayer (1990), 116.

130

seneca the author

death in part as a penetration by Hippolytus (1197) at the same time as it echoes Dido’s use of Aeneas’ abandoned sword.58 Her death itself aspires to multiple meanings (1184–85, 1188–89): morere, si casta es, viro; si incesta, amori . . . o mors amoris una sedamen mali, o mors pudoris maximum laesi decus. If you are chaste, die for your husband; if unchaste, for your love . . . O death, sole sedative for illicit love, o death, great badge for wounded chastity. The event thus both consummates incestuous desire and delivers moral penance or even purification (1176–90).59 The entire plot of the play, then, has been carried forward and concluded through Phaedra’s rhetoric of self-killing. The result: a tragedy centered upon the heroine’s irreconcilable perceptions of her own death’s status and meaning. The focus on suicide is seldom limited to the single character. This may be said of the Phaedra, in which the Nurse, Hippolytus, and Theseus all express a willingness to die, and even more so of the Agamemnon, in which the plot is told through the successive death gestures of a whole ensemble of characters and choral voices. “Destroy your husband,” Clytemnestra exhorts herself, “yourself perishing: to die together with one with whom you wish to die is no unhappy death” (perde pereundo virum: / mors misera non est commori cum quo velis, Aga. 201–2), and Aegisthus proves himself to her by saying he would happily “open with the sword [his] breast laden with troubles” (aperire ferro pectus aerumnis grave, 305). The chorus of Trojan women console themselves by praising “the freedom of death . . . , a harbor tranquil with eternal calm” (libera mors . . . / portus aeterna placidus quiete, 591–92), and at the center of an ode that catalogues their autopsy of Troy’s destruction, they sing, “O how unhappy it is to not know how to die!” (o quam miserum est nescire mori! 604–10). This attitude serves as the backdrop to the courage of Cassandra, who greets Agamemnon’s attempts to soothe her (“Live free of anxiety,” secura vive) by countering, “For me freedom from anxiety is to die” (mihi mori est securitas, 796). Electra, in turn, escapes death precisely by replying to her mother’s threat, “You will die today” (morieris hodie), by insisting, “So long as I can die by this hand” (dummodo hac moriar manu, 971). The only characters in the play who do not espouse a willingness to die are Agamemnon and the chorus of Argives—those who are ignorant of the plot and erroneously see “that

58. Cf. Aen. 4.507, 4.664. For detailed analysis of the intertextual associations of the sword see Hinds (forthcoming). 59. See Segal (1986), 195.

theaters of ethics, tragedy, and history

131

longed-for harbor from troubles” (optatus ille portus aerumnis; Agamemnon speaking, 790) in a more literal form than the Trojan chorus did: in Argos itself.

Death Multiplied by Spectation Seneca also multiplies death through an accumulation of distinct visual perspectives.60 The overarching environment of Nature within which the play’s action takes place is the visual-temporal dies (“daylight”; “day”) dominated by the witnessing figure of Titan or “the witnessing sun” (sol conscius, Oed. 1001), whose climatological reactions write large the cosmic proportions of nefas. A perverse desire for precisely this form of witnessing is what distinguishes the brazen malice of Medea and Atreus, as they seek out the gods to watch, along with the victims themselves (Med. 992–93; Thy. 895)—a disturbing model for the audience’s spectatorial pleasure, as Alessandro Schiesaro has emphasized (2003, 45). But spectators in the tragedies are more often reluctant. Theseus, viewing Phaedra’s suicide and Hippolytus’ unrecognizable bodily remains (Pha. 1199–1200; 1247–79), expresses regret that he had come back from the underworld “to see twin deaths and funerals” (bina ut viderem funera et geminam necem) and longs for the underworld’s “black light” (atrae lucis, 1213–19). Spectatorial dynamics are at work most fully in the final act of the Troades, in which the messenger’s speech overlays several points of view.61 There are the victims themselves, who face death more dispassionately than does the audience: “Of the entire crowd, the one wept for [that is, Astyanax] does not weep” (non flet e turba omnium / qui fletur, Tro. 1099–1100); “All are moved by [Polyxena’s] courageous spirit, standing in death’s path” (movet animus omnes fortis et leto obvius, 1146). There are the Greeks, whose viewing positions are qualified by the history of the landscape: when “some brutish spectator sits on Hector’s tomb—unspeakable!” (atque aliquis (nefas) / tumulo ferus spectator Hectoreo sedet), the act of viewing is signaled as itself an act of violence (1086– 87). Their object of vision—Astyanax plummeting from the tower—reverses the tower’s earlier visual function as the site from which “the old man [Priam] used to point out to the boy his father’s battles” (paterna puero bella monstrabat senex, 1074). The Greeks do not respond univocally but, in awaiting Polyxena’s death (1126–29), hi classis moram hac morte solvi rentur, hi stirpem hostium gaudent recidi. magna pars vulgi levis odit scelus spectatque . . .

60. See Littlewood (2004), 12–13, 172–75; also Erasmo (2004), 122–39, emphasizing spectators on the stage. On spectatorial engagement and detachment see Leigh (1997). 61. For commentary see Fantham (1982); Boyle (1994). The theme is discussed by Littlewood (2004), 90–102; Shelton (2000); Owen (1970), 134–37.

132

seneca the author Some think the fleet’s delay is being released by this death, others rejoice in the extirpation of the enemy’s race. A great share of the people hate the crime and yet, capricious, watch it . . .

When she is about to be stabbed, “they show wonder and pity” (mirantur ac miserantur, 1148), and these tragic emotions are accompanied by descriptions of the scene in meta-dramatic terms: “The field rises up in the form of a theater” (campus . . . crescit theatri more, 1125), and here the Trojans “see the final act of the ruin of Troy” ( partem ruentis ultimam Troiae vident, 1131). The Trojans, who “flock no less to their own funeral” (nec . . . minus / suum frequentant funus, 1129–30), enter into a fleeting communion of viewing with the Greeks, as “terror holds both populations stunned” (terror attonitos tenet / utrosque populos, 1136–37). Greater emphasis, however, is placed on the angst of the perpetrators, especially the ambivalent Helen, “her mournful head downcast” (maestum caput / demissa, 1133–34). The messenger’s speech describing this spectacle has in turn been delivered to satisfy the needs of Andromache, who observes, “Great grief finds joy in reviewing its troubles in full” ( gaudet magnus aerumnas dolor / tractare totas, 1066–67), even if she must recognize that the mutilated Astyanax “resembles his father” (est similis patri, 1117). The whole event is summed up by Hecuba in terms that echo the completion of a gladiatorial spectacle: bellum peractum est (“The battle is done,” 1168).62 Then, finally, there is the literary audience, whose perspective is further refined through intertextual resonances.63

Death “Trojanized” In both the Agamemnon and the Troades Seneca dramatizes death through the psychological perspectives of Trojans and Greeks just after Troy’s fall, far beyond the emphasis inherent in the mythic plots. In the Agamemnon Clytemnestra approaches her deed as a maius nefas (“greater crime”) in which she will compete with her sister Helen by bringing on “wars” (bella) of her own (Aga. 123–24; 192) and, as the Nurse points out, will be seeking to kill one “whom not Achilles, not the superior Ajax, not Hector . . . ” (quem non Achilles . . . non melior Aiax . . . non . . . Hector, 208–19) succeeded in killing. For the chorus of Trojan women, the narrative of Troy lives on as a sequence of vivid firsthand accounts (“We saw . . . I saw,” vidimus . . . vidi) centering on their festivities and joy at the Trojan horse followed by the fall of the fatherland and murder of Priam (611–58). In Act 4 these memories are transposed to the house of Atreus by Cassandra, who answers her own question, “Where am I?” (ubi sum? 725), by asserting, “I see the groves of Mt. Ida” (Idaea cerno nemora, 730), and drawing comparisons between Paris and Aegisthus:

62. Peractum est recurs at Med. 1019; Aga. 901; the latter discussed by Erasmo (2004), 129. 63. See, e.g., Fantham (1982), 380 on Tro. 1146 (movet animus omnes fortis et leto obvius) as an echo of the death of Democritus at Lucr. DRN 3.1041: sponte sua leto caput obvius obtulit ipse.

theaters of ethics, tragedy, and history

133

“That rustic son will overturn the household” (agrestis iste alumnus evertet domum, 733). She invokes the Trojans in the underworld as observers, in which the verse spectate, miseri: fata se vertunt retro! (“Watch, unhappy ones: the fates are turning themselves back!” 758) frames the new scelus as both a reversal (because justice is done through the Furies’ revenge against Troy’s conqueror, Agamemnon) and a repetition (another Troy). This intriguingly makes the perspective of the dead Trojans resemble that of the ghost of Thyestes, who has seen the action already during the play’s prologue (“I can see,” video, 46): both parties see their distinct vengeful agendas played out in one and the same plot. In the Troades, a piece whose dramatic scenario immediately precedes that of the Agamemnon though it was probably written later, the fall of Troy has in principle already taken place but is repeated over and over again through the eyes of different characters. The primary viewpoint is that of Hecuba, whose initial statement, Pergamum incubuit sibi (“Pergamum has imploded on itself,” Tro. 14) is followed by unravelings of this closure: she describes how “burning Troy is torn apart” (diripitur ardens Troia, 19) and emphasizes the continuation of suffering for “protracted Ilium” (lentum Ilium, 22) over ten years and into the future. The Troades is a study both in the singularity of Troy’s fall—the Trojans’ special monopoly on extreme grief—and in the endless and evocative mutation of the forms that this fall can take.64 Andromache, for example, sees Troy falling at specific moments in both the past and the future. She tells the chorus first, “For you, Troy fell just now, for me a long time ago (Ilium vobis modo, / mihi cecidit olim), when the savage wheel of Peleus’ son . . . tore my limbs apart . . .” (412–15). But she then repeats the words of Hector in her dream, “You cry because Troy has fallen? I only wish it was completely down” (“ . . . Troia quod cecidit gemis? / utinam iaceret tota!” 454–55), and later describes Astyanax’s death as something that the city itself lives on to witness (784–85). The deaths of the two children in the final act are both elaborately trojanized, both in the Iliadic landscape of Astyanax’s death discussed above, and in a special function of Troy’s flames: “Troy extends the torch for a new wedding” (thalamis Troia praelucet novis, 899–900). Although the children’s deaths have a closural and redemptive force through the replacement of Trojan grief by the intrepid animus exhibited in the good death, diverse exiles await each of the surviving Trojan women, and Troy is transposed for future repetition elsewhere. Indeed, within Seneca’s tragedic career, a question posed already in the fourth ode of Troades seems to look forward to the post-Trojan states of mind in the prewritten sequel, the Agamemnon, discussed above: “What state of mind will we wretches have (quis status mentis miseris), when the whole land shrinks and the sea grows, when lofty Mt. Ida lies hidden far in the distance?” (Tro. 1047–49). Although the post-Troy experience had been the recurring scenario of Greek tragedy and of Roman Republican drama (ever since the versions of 64. See Henry and Henry (1985), 152–55.

134

seneca the author

Equos Troianus by Livius Andronicus and Naevius), Seneca’s interest in it must be seen within the more local Julio-Claudian, post-Virgilian context.65 Given the Aeneid’s epic emplotment of a Julian teleology from Troy to Rome, Seneca’s trojanized tragedies amount to a troubling revisitation of Roman origins in which there is no trace of Aeneas, and Trojan survivors are not consoled with any hint of Rome’s foundation.66 If elements of the Aeneid’s post-Trojan world are present in Senecan tragedy, they take the form, as Michael Putnam has shown, of the negative “inner realm” of the passions (ira, furiae, saevitia, dolor, etc.) that are manifested as temporary interruptions in the Aeneid but become, in Seneca, an entire state of being, characterized by reiteration (1995, 277–278). The Trojan ambiance of Rome had grown and transformed in the Neronian renaissance, whether we look to Nero’s own interests in developing selected Trojan themes, to the poetry of Seneca, Lucan, and Petronius, or to contemporary wall painting.67 Within this milieu, Senecan tragedy sought to link the Trojan epic scenario almost exclusively with a grand vision of death and mortality. But the most interesting Trojan reception for our purposes is the Pompeian graffito of a half-line fragment of Seneca’s Agamemnon—Cassandra’s assertion, quoted above, Idaea cerno nemora (“I see the groves of Mt. Ida,” Aga. 730).68 The graffito, from a house wall in Pompeii, evokes Cassandra’s feeling that Troy’s story has been moved from Troy to Argos—only now it has been moved one extra step, from Argos to Julio-Claudian Italy.

Death Localized and Subdivided Death is reshaped to fit each new tragic scenario. Just as the Trojan women who have endured the storm en route to Argos view death, fittingly, as a “harbor” (portus, Aga. 592), the self-banishing king Oedipus sees self-killing as an exercise in “kingship over [himself ]” (regnum mei, Pho. 105). One death can surpass another by its method, as when the chorus of the Oedipus, recounting the plague, exclaims, “O horrible new form of death, harder to bear than death itself!” (o dira novi facies leti / gravior leto, Oed. 180–81). More than once a Medea or Andromache will calculate that the worst form of punishment in a certain situation is in fact life (cf. “Let [Jason] live,” vivat, Med. 20; cf. Tro. 577). In the Troades the ambiguity between life and death also licenses Andromache’s strategy of concealing Astyanax in the death mound (tumulus) of Hector—a variation on the themes of both Scheintod and katabasis (Tro. 519–21). This burial is sufficiently death-like to license her deception of Ulysses through such statements as, “He lies among the dead” (inter extinctos iacet, 603).69 65. Boyle (1994), 15–18 sketches the tradition on Trojan themes prior to Seneca. 66. On the Troades as a “controcanto” to the Aeneid see Biondi (2001), 25–26; contra, Fantham (1982), vii. 67. On the topic in Julio-Claudian culture see Boyle (1994); O’Gorman (2000), 162–75. On Trojan themes in Senecan tragedy and Neronian visual culture see Varner (2000), 123. 68. On the graffito see Gigante (2001), 91–93; Tarrant (1976), 307. 69. On the “dramatic conundrum” of the tumulus scene see Owen (1970), 119, 129.

theaters of ethics, tragedy, and history

135

The two Oedipus plays map out Senecan tragedy’s most protracted death, a “death” that begins with the self-blinding at the end of the Oedipus and carries over to the Phoenissae, where it is never in fact completed.70 Oedipus initially regards blindness as an ingenious substitute for actual death, since the messenger quotes him as saying to himself (Oed. 945–49): “ . . . iterum vivere atque iterum mori liceat, renasci semper ut totiens nova supplicia pendas—utere ingenio, miser: quod saepe fieri non potest fiat diu; mors eligatur longa. . . .” “ . . . May it be permitted to live and die repeatedly, always to be reborn, so that you [Oedipus] can pay new punishments just as repeatedly. Use your brain, you wretch: If it can’t happen repeatedly, let it happen protractedly. Choose a long death. . . .” Yet the mors longa that would separate him from his father in the underworld (949–51) also requires him to be vigilant against future encounters with Jocasta (1014–18). The wandering Oedipus of the Phoenissae in fact enjoys separation from Jocasta (who in this play lives on, but never appears with Oedipus), and he now strives after death. Although he will reluctantly concede to Antigone, “If you demand it, this Oedipus will even live” (hic Oedipus . . . iubente te vel vivet, Pho. 313–19), the same scene has already charted out his desired death in excruciating detail. He has yielded to the summons of Laius from the underworld (39–40) and regards his blindness as inadequate: “I want to be buried in Tartarus, and whatever lies beyond Tartarus” (Tartaro condi iuvat, / et si quid ultra Tartarum est, 144–45). He also embraces Mt. Cithaeron as an apt venue “for dying as an old man where [he] should have died as an infant” (ut expirem senex / ubi debui infans, 32–33), and he ponders both the different features of the landscape and his body through which his death might be enacted (110–39; 151–65). The possible separation of the (early?) Oedipus and (late?) Phoenissae in the chronology of Seneca’s career may add to the effect: the protracted death not only creeps slowly across Oedipus’ body, but spans the length of Seneca’s tragic corpus.

Death in the Form of the Underworld The underworld is Seneca’s dominant motif for localizing death.71 It functions as a locus of past time in the form of ghosts or exemplary ancestors

70. On the diu mori of Oed. and Pho., see Palmieri (1999), 149–82. For commentary on the Phoenissae see Frank (1994). 71. On the underworld as a “semanticized space” in the tragedies see E. A. Schmidt (2004), 349–51; more generally, Schiesaro (2003), 177–220; Henry and Henry (1985), 143–45; Owen (1968).

136

seneca the author

who watch (and often cause) the present events, and of the future to be faced after death. This future, in turn, is previewed and reversed through ritual or through the hero’s katabasis and triumphal return, just as the already dead can be visited there.72 Seneca multiplies the ways in which the underworld (or its infernal powers) are accessed: it is discovered at the heart of the storm in the Agamemnon, in the burial mound in the Troades, and in the palace in the Thyestes—specifically, the “innermost region of the kingdom” (penetrale regni, Thy. 652) where a domestic museum of Tantalid artifacts hanging on the wall (“trophies of each of the family’s deeds,” omne gentis facinus, 662) mirrors the underworld’s capacity to hold the past within it (641–82). In the surprising second ode of the Troades the underworld’s existence is fundamentally questioned. The chorus, self-consciously framing the underworld as a product of poetic invention in the manner of Seneca’s mocking references to the underworld in his prose works,73 conclude, “You wish to know in what place you lie after death? Where the unborn lie” (quaeris quo iaceas post obitum loco? / quo non nata iacent, Tro. 371–72, 407–8).74 They map out an alternative space for death—a nowhere space—and thereby expose the characters’ beliefs (for example, in ghosts) as the products of a deceptive fabula (371).75 The logic of the underworld is most on show in the Phaedra and the Hercules, which feature the returns of Theseus and Hercules from their katabases. It is the absence of Theseus that initially gives license to Phaedra’s desire to use Hippolytus as a substitute: “The father of Hippolytus,” she announces, “is pursuing rapes and forbidden unions in the depths of Acheron” (stupra et illicitos toros / Acheronte in imo quaerit Hippolyti pater, Pha. 97–98; cf. 646–60).76 Later, Theseus’ point of view on the realm that he has just visited leads him to respond to the charge of incest by condemning Hippolytus to a katabasis of his own (946–47). But after he discovers the truth about Phaedra and Hippolytus, Theseus’ attitude leads him to demand a second katabasis for himself, following his son (1239–40). The katabasis in the Hercules is more fully articulated as a medium for thinking about death.77 Although most characters’ points of view on Hercules’ journey are cautiously celebratory, Juno sees Hercules’ return as a threat, because it is both a victory over her personally (“He drags me in triumph,” de me triumphat, 58) and it prefigures his upwardly mobile ambitions for apotheosis: “He seeks a path to the gods above” (quaerit ad superos viam, 74). When she 72. Note also the katabasis as a perversion of apotheosis, and a god’s descent from heaven as a “katabasis,” discussed by Owen (1968), 297, 303. 73. E.g., Marc. 19.4; Ep. 24.18; Ep. 82.15–17; Ep. 104.24 (on Aen. 6.277); cited and discussed by Aygon (2004), 198–207; McGuiness (1956), 87–88. 74. On this passage see Littlewood (2004), 95; Biondi (2001), 27–31, comparing Polyb. 9.2: in eum restitutus est locum in quo fuerat antequam nasceretur. 75. For Lawall (1982), 244–46, this counters the Virgilian underworld with a Lucretian ontology. 76. On the psychological symbolism of Theseus’ katabasis see Segal (1986), 180–201. 77. For a close reading see Shelton (1978), 50–57; also E. R. Wilson (2004), 100–104.

theaters of ethics, tragedy, and history

137

makes him insane, Juno says, “I will show him the underworld here [on earth]” (hic tibi ostendam inferos, 91) and commands, “Let him conquer himself, and having returned from the underworld let him wish to die” (et se vincat, et cupiat mori / ab inferis reversus, 116–17). A vivid account of the katabasis is offered by Hercules’ accomplice, Theseus: he observes that “the place of death is worse than death itself” (ipsaque morte peior est mortis locus, 706), and his narrative of the journey—an element largely absent in the Phaedra—develops the space of the underworld both as a dramatic presence and as a locus classicus in which Seneca engages creatively with the epic, especially Virgilian, tradition. Hercules is initially triumphant, boasting, “I carried off the secrets of the world . . . I saw . . . I conquered” (extuli / arcana mundi . . . vidi . . . vici, 596–97, 606, 612), and joking about the freshly killed tyrant: “Let Lycus be the messenger who tells Dis that I have already made it back [to earth]” (nuntiet Diti Lycus / me iam redisse, 639–40). But when he recovers from his insanity, he questions the reality of his return: “Or has my mind not yet shed the phantoms infernal?” (an nondum exuit / simulacra mens inferna? 1144–45). Like Theseus in the Phaedra he soon desires to kill himself and thereby undo his return: “I will give Hercules back to the underworld, . . . I will go to the furthermost end of Tartarus to stay” (inferis reddam Herculem . . . Tartari ad finem ultimum / mansurus ibo, 1218, 1225–26). Yet he decides not to die in part because even the underworld, where he is already known, can’t offer him a place to hide. Throughout the Hercules, the underworld also serves as a shifting point of reference in successive choral odes. The first ode offers an ambivalent moralizing perspective on his katabasis: “Alcides, you hurry too much with courage in your breast to see the mournful spirits of the dead” (nimium, Alcide, pectore forti / properas maestos visere manes, Herc. 186–88). The second ode expresses hope for Hercules’ safe return, taking heart from the prior example of Orpheus: “The palace that could be overcome by poetry will be able to be overcome by force” (quae vinci potuit regia carmine, / haec vinci poterit regia viribus, 589–90). (Orpheus’ unhappy ending is passed over in foreboding silence.) The third responds to Theseus’ katabasis description with an apostrophe to the human beings crowding into the underworld (858–59). This ode ends by once again celebrating Hercules’ latest labor, concluding from it that “there is now nothing further to be afraid of: nothing lies beyond the underworld” (iam nullus superest timor: / nil ultra iacet inferos, 891–92). But the fourth and final ode invokes the underworld in new ways that correspond to the development of the plot, observing that even the underworld should grieve for Hercules’ sorrows—“Let three kingdoms resound with one lamentation!” (uno planctu tria regna sonent, 1114)—and ushering his murdered children into death: “Go, innocent shadows, go to the Stygian harbors” (ite ad Stygios, umbrae, portus, / ite, innocuae, 1131– 32). These choral perspectives include a hint of the meta-poetic implications of the katabasis, with Orpheus’ song illustrating the power of poetry to overcome the forces of darkness, as well as a more specifically meta-theatrical aspect: the

138

seneca the author

numbers of the dead are compared to “the size of a crowd which moves through the city eager for the games at a new theater” (quantus incedit populus per urbes / ad novi ludos avidus theatri, 838–39).78 This evokes the power of Senecan drama to engage with its audience’s perceptions of their shared mortality.

Theatricalized History We can mostly only speculate on how Seneca’s tragedies were read in connection with specific historical and biographic events.79 What we can say is that the anatomy of Senecan tragedy soon served as a reservoir for the formation of narratives about Seneca and the Senecan tradition. We have noted above that Pliny the Elder drew on the tragic lexicon to portray Seneca’s own “power which, in the end, excessive, crashed down on him” (HN 14.51),80 and also the echo of Seneca’s Oedipus in Tacitus’ account of the death of Epicharis (Ann. 15.57.2; cf. Oed. 344). These are not the only traces of early reception. Tacitus was preceded by the dramatic tradition to which the Hercules Oetaeus and the Octavia belong. Both of these plays allude to Seneca’s death within literary frameworks that draw upon Seneca’s writings in both verse and prose.

Hercules Oetaeus Centering on Hercules’ protracted death and apotheosis, the Hercules Oetaeus is of unknown authorship but has tentatively been dated to the very end of the first century or beginning of the second. Although it is in theory possible that this 2,000-line play was awaiting a last stage of editing and compression, in its present state it is a kind of meta-text of the Senecan tragic corpus, compiling scenarios and utterances from Seneca’s dramatic representations of death.81 Deianira, for example, says, “Death alone will be given as a harbor for my troubles” (mors sola portus dabitur aerumnis meis, HO 1021), which resembles the attitude of the Trojan chorus from the Agamemnon (cf. Aga. 591–92), and the response of the audience to Hercules’ self-immolation, “The people are all stunned” (stupet omne vulgus, HO 1745), is a verbatim echo of the messenger in the Troades (Tro. 1143). The imperative uttered by Deianira, “Let the sword be thrust through my limbs; this, this is how it must be done” (eat per artus ensis exactus meos. / sic, sic agendum est, HO 845–46), may not simply be a matter of

78. On underworldly aspects of poetic inspiration in the tragedies see Schiesaro (1997), 90–98. 79. E.g., Dingel (1974), 119 speculates that the image of Oedipus departing into exile taking all evils with him (mecum ite, mecum . . . , Oed. 1061) casts Seneca as a scapegoat along the lines of Helv. 18.6 (in me omnis fatorum crudelitas lassata consistat). 80. Ramelli (2002), 503–4 compares, e.g., Thy. 336–403. See also Tro. 14: Pergamum incubuit sibi. 81. Cf. Henry and Henry (1985), 139: the Hercules Oetaeus’ “vision of death . . . transcends all the others” seen in Senecan tragedy. Marti (1945) once read the Senecan tragedies, in the order in which they are found in the Codex Etruscus, as “a sort of glorified Essay on Man” (223) bracketed at either end by the two Hercules plays.

theaters of ethics, tragedy, and history

139

what she ought to do morally, but what she ought to do as a Senecan heroine, given the Dido-like sword suicides of Phaedra and Jocasta. The focus on Hercules serves in part as a return to Seneca’s repeated interest in Hercules as a mostly positive hero not only in his Hercules but also in all the other plays, in which roles ranging from ill-fated Argonaut (Med. 634–42) to parricidal katabasis veteran (Pha. 843–49) make him the ubiquitous inhabitant of Seneca’s mythic world. But the description and enactment of the stages of Hercules’ ultimately self-controlled death (HO 751–1755!) and his appearance post-apotheosis (1940–96) steer the drama toward a more explicitly triumphal event than is seen in the Senecan corpus, even the Troades. In the eyes of the chorus, a “great tamer of beasts and at the same time pacifier of the world” (domitor magne ferarum / orbisque simul pacator, 1989–90) is embodied in the risen Hercules. As Victoria Larson has shown, the chorus’ portrayal of Hercules’ robustness in the face of death serves to concretize the numerous images—a soldier’s invulnerability, upturned eyes, oak-like endurance, and so forth—that are used to characterize virtus or the sapiens in Seneca’s prose works (1991, 41, 45). The play’s fusion of tragic and Stoic modes in the figure of the dying Hercules may have been encouraged by knowledge of Seneca’s death. Scholars have long been intrigued by the resonances between Seneca’s statement that long ago his father’s old age had disinclined him from committing suicide (Ep. 78.2) and the plot of Seneca’s Hercules in which Amphitryon succeeds in dissuading his son.82 In the Hercules Oetaeus, in turn, Hercules, now confronting certain death, resembles Seneca in following through with his own self-killing. More specifically, John Fitch briefly observes that “Hercules’ self-immolation as a conscious exhibition of courage (in his case, to a double audience, divine and human) resembles Seneca’s own enforced suicide as described by the historian Tacitus in his Annals (15.62–64), with its display of calmness, absence of haste, concern for friends rather than self” (2002–4, 2.330, emphasis original). This makes other parallels all the more intriguing. The presence of Alcmene as Hercules dies, for example, makes her the primary audience of his amazing persistence in consoling others from the funeral pyre. Hercules is reported to have encouraged his mother, “This is how it befits you, mother, to stand at the pyre, this is how it is fitting for Hercules to be mourned” (sic stare ad rogum / te, mater . . . / . . . sic decet fleri Herculem, HO 1736–39). She thus resembles the grieving mother of the Ad Helviam (Helv. 1.3) and balances the role of Amphitryo in Seneca’s Hercules. And like Seneca, the ambivalent hero Hercules dies a death that is tragic in the sense that it comes either too late or too soon (cf. 1192–1206) and partly as a consequence of his own mistakes. But the mythologized paralleling of Seneca’s fate with that of Hercules is perhaps driven most immediately by a literary ambition: the Hercules Oetaeus’ author seeks to become a kind of 82. The history of this observation is reviewed by Palmieri (1999), 131–32; see also E. R. Wilson (2004), 98, 108; Biondi (2001), 19–24; Herington (1966), 429.

140

seneca the author

apotheosis of Seneca, his play a posthumous sublimation of the Senecan tragic mode that feeds upon historical and literary moments of Seneca’s career.

Octavia At some point in the generation after Seneca’s death, the Octavia (author also unknown) drew on the modes of Senecan tragedy and prose when dramatizing events from the year 62.83 Because the play derives some key aspects of its form from Senecan tragedy 84 while portraying events that involve Seneca as a character facing misfortune, its basic conceit resembles the use of Senecan language to represent Seneca that we have seen in such authors as Quintilian, Pliny the Elder, and Tacitus. One favorable implication of this conceit in the Octavia is that the author Seneca is shown to have been in command of a literary form—Senecan drama— that is capable of representing the tragedy of Neronian history.85 Even if Seneca’s philosophical and advisorial endeavors fell victim to political developments, Senecan tragic discourse persists so as to bear witness, portraying the irresistible forces of irrational behavior or tyranny by which Rome and its people—including the Seneca character himself—were assaulted. To this extent, the Octavia vindicates Seneca as an author who has anticipated the reversals of his own career, as if allowing Seneca to say, “I told you so.” The author Seneca is thus also implied not to care about his misfortune: his knowledge of tragic reversal is implicitly informed by praemeditatio and tranquil acceptance. Another, less favorable implication is that Seneca (especially when we consider the character represented in the play) fell victim to reversals that, given his control of tragic discourse, he should have been able to prevent from happening, or at least from mattering to him—as if to say that he “should have known better” than to let this happen, or at least should have known not to let it worry him if it did. Moreover, the fact that the suffering character Seneca is also the tragedian and should have known better, makes Seneca’s reversals that more ironic. Seneca’s decline from tragedian to tragic character—his subjection to his own dramatic plots—is a tragic reversal in its own right. More specific ironies can be traced in the portrayal of the Seneca character’s downfall. His first appearance is prefaced by the chorus’ extended recollection of the murder of Agrippina (Oct. 309–76). This may simply signal what Seneca has to look forward to at Nero’s hands, but its placement is especially fitting given that Agrippina was the one who had recalled Seneca from exile, and the return from exile is the first thing that Seneca laments, though he blames not Agrippina directly but the seductions of “Fortune” (377–80): 83. On the Octavia’s date and authorship, see esp. Boyle (2008), xiii-xvi; Ferri (2003a), 6–30. Senecan authorship is defended by only a few, such as Giancotti (1983); Whitman (1978). The immediacy of Seneca’s “tragic and philosophical imago vitae suae” in Oct. is noted by J. A. Smith (2003), 401. See also Erasmo (2004), 52–80, esp. 63–65; and the essays in M. Wilson (2003), esp. Goldberg. 84. On the author’s appropriations of, and divergences from, Senecan language and dramatic technique see Ferri (2003a), 31–54, (2003b). 85. Compare Ferri (2003a), 70 on Oct. as a witness to early political interpretations of Senecan tragedy.

theaters of ethics, tragedy, and history

141

quid, impotens Fortuna, fallaci mihi blandita vultu, sorte contentum mea alte extulisti, gravius ut ruerem edita receptus arce totque prospicerem metus? Why, intemperate Fortune, fawning on me with deceitful face, when I was happy with my lot, did you raise me on high, so that being welcomed into the lofty citadel, I might fall more heavily and confront so many fears? These lines uttered by an untranquil Seneca cast his career as a series of reversals—from exile to recall to imminent downfall—in which his greatest regret is his reckless exchange of secure philosophical contemplation for an anxious political life. Seneca’s regrets here are in the mold of Theseus’ regrets on his return from the underworld to see the twin deaths of his son and his wife, or of Thyestes on his return to Argos to take up his brother’s offer of shared power.86 Next Seneca changes to the register of a tragic ode. He combines a decadent myth of the ages with a stoicizing cosmological history that foretells universal destruction followed by a day of redemption and renewal (391–96): If the sky grows old (senescit), and being so great, will fall again into unseen chaos, then that final day is present for the world, which will crush the impious race with ruin of the heavens, so that once more being born again better, it will bring into existence a new stock, just as once the young one did (ut quondam tulit iuvenis), when Saturn held the kingship of the skies. But if the vision of redemption and renewal suggests an ultimately positive sequel to the world’s (and the city’s) ruin, this is an outcome that the play leaves in the future. The play itself depicts Nero’s initiative toward a city-destroying fire, and other short-term trajectories. In Seneca’s monologue the term senescere (“grow old”) establishes a striking correlation between cosmic decline (from Saturnian age to present iron age) and Seneca’s autobiographic narrative (from principled exile to compromised return)—a correlation that connects the vision of a selfdestroying Rome to the Seneca character’s tragic distress concerning his own misguided life path.87 The final and major reversal comes in Seneca’s dialogue with Nero (Oct. 435–592) which results in Nero’s rejection of his adviser (“Let it be permitted

86. For the echo of Thyestes, see Ferri (2003a), 227, citing Thy. 405–90; also Boyle (2008), 169. For the Theseus echo, see esp. Herington (1966), 459 on Pha. 1213–19: in hoc redimus? 87. For senescere in a strikingly similar context to that of the Seneca character here, see Ep. 19.5 (addressing Lucilius): utinam quidem tibi senescere contigisset intra natalium tuorum modum, nec te in altum fortuna misisset!; also VB 21.1: senescit in patria, where post-exile life is also the focus. On senectus in Senecan prose and tragedy see Degl’Innocenti Pierini (1996).

142

seneca the author

to do what Seneca disapproves of,” liceat facere quod Seneca improbat, 589) followed by Seneca’s exit and disappearance and his replacement by the prefect.88 Overall, the reversal fits the mold of a Senecan passion-restraint scene, with Seneca occupying the role of the ineffective adviser.89 The reversal is played out through Nero’s pursuit of his own rite of passage as he breaks free of the “old man” (senem, 445), and through his meticulous inversion of structures learned from the De clementia, such as the image of the sheathed sword (“The drawn sword will accomplish,” destrictus ensis faciet, 461; versus Clem. 1.1.4) and the domesticum exemplum in which the violent Octavian was succeeded by the clement Augustus (504–7; versus Clem. 1.9–11). Seneca’s pedagogy and philosophical writing are here subjected to the inverting logic of his own tragic mode and a perverse reading by a typical Senecan tyrant. Even after the scene is over, Agrippina’s vengeful ghost ushers in the new sunrise and dooms Nero’s wedding day and the rest of his life, through the unique type scene of a Senecan tragic prologue (593–645). The logic of Neronian history is thus revealed to be a recurrence of the whole Senecan tragic form (itself already inherently iterative), over and over. The question of whether Seneca (the tragedian) is thereby vindicated on the basis of his literary insights, or the same Seneca (as character) is revealed to have fallen victim to his own misjudgments, his own anxieties, and the problematic flexibility of his own rhetorical devices—all this remains unresolved, a consequence of Seneca’s complex literary and historical profile. But there is nothing ambiguous about Seneca’s inhabitation of his own play as a character: where the Hercules Oetaeus had taken up Hercules as Senecan tragedy’s iconic hero, the Octavia puts the author’s own self at the vortex of the tragic representation.

Tacitus and “Senecan” Theatricality The Octavia is almost certainly part of the background for Tacitus’ approach to representing the events of 62 in book 14 of the Annals.90 His last dozen chapters present the following sequence of events: the interview between Seneca and Nero that is followed by Seneca’s expulsion from the court (Ann. 14.53–57.1); the banishment and execution of Rubellius Plautus and Faustus Cornelius Sulla (§§57–59); and the banishment and execution of Octavia (§§60–64). Scholars have noted resemblances between Tacitus’ description of the crowd who watched Octavia sailing into exile (“Some still remembered that Agrippina had been banished by Tiberius, and the memory of Julia banished by Claudius was fresher in their minds,” 14.63.2) and the final ode of the Octavia in which 88. For general analysis of the interview scene see J. A. Smith (2003), 411–12; Manuwald (2001), 317–23. 89. See G. W. M. Harrison (2003), 121; Goldberg (2003), 23; Ferri (2003a), 75. G. D. Williams (1994), 191 points out that the Octavia does not offer any simple vindication of Seneca or of Stoic ideology. 90. See Ferri (1998); also Billot (2003) and Wiseman (1998), 53. Not all scholars are persuaded.

theaters of ethics, tragedy, and history

143

the chorus rehearse examples of banished imperial women that include the same Agrippina Minor and Julia (Oct. 929–57). As for the interview scenes, they are different in important ways.91 Yet Tacitus’ interview matches the Octavia in its agonistic emplotment of a double rite of passage (Nero’s maturation, Seneca’s retirement) and both scenes center upon Nero’s twisting of Senecan rhetoric against itself (especially the rhetoric of the De clementia), an appeal to the bloody accomplishments of the young Augustus (Ann. 14.55.2–3; Oct. 503–13), and even the use of a quin command in which Nero, feigning an amicable parting, invites Seneca to remain involved in his projects (Ann. 14.56.1; Oct. 592). The question is only to what degree Tacitean writing had absorbed postSenecan tragedy, and Senecan tragedy itself. Francesca Santoro L’Hoir has recently argued that Greek tragic motifs (for example, binding; reversal; feminine lack of self-control) are pervasive in the Annals (2006, 8). Some of these tragic motifs, together with Tacitus’ “progressive and persistent utilization of clustered words drawn from specific lexical fields” (102), enter the Annals “perhaps by way of Seneca” (50; cf. 101–8), even if they will have been evident to readers “only on a subliminal level” (255). Santoro L’Hoir’s theory is attractive, even if she omits consideration of the Octavia, which, as we have already seen, may have played a bridging function between Senecan tragedy and Tacitean history. But the resonances of Senecan tragedy are sometimes more than merely subliminal. Agrippina’s last utterance, for example, is described by Tacitus as follows: “When the centurion was now drawing his sword to kill her, she exposed to him her belly and cried, ‘Strike my womb’ (protendens uterum ‘ventrem feri’ exclamavit), and was finished off with many wounds” (Ann. 14.8.5; cf. Dio 61.13.5). The motif here of the suicide’s aggression against the womb cannot be paralleled in tragedy before Seneca’s Oedipus, where Jocasta exhorts her right hand as follows: “Come, lend a hand to a mother, . . . right hand, attack this capacious womb (agedum, commoda matri manum, / . . . hunc, dextra, hunc pete / uterum capacem), which has borne both husband and children” (Oed. 1032, 1038–39). Although it is uncertain what precise relationship should be understood here between tragic text, historical fact, and historical narrative, Tacitus’ text upholds a mimetic relationship between Julio-Claudian history and Senecan tragedy.92 When we turn to Tacitus’ account of Seneca more specifically, how is Senecan theatricality manifested? Santoro L’Hoir argues for tragic effects in numerous episodes: for example, Nero’s concealment of his intentions behind blanditiae in the interview with Seneca (Ann. 14.56.3), which she takes 91. See Ferri (2003a), 228: “there is no apparent link”; “[u]nlike the Seneca of Ann. 14, this Seneca [in Oct.] speaks his true mind, as good counsellors are wont to do in tragedy.” But Billot (2003), 132 sees Tacitus offering a creative contrast. 92. The range of possibilities is discussed by Hind (1966); cf. Woodman (1993), 108–9. Agripina’s last words at Oct. 370–72 are similar.

144

seneca the author

to be a spellbinding motif from tragedy (blandimenta/hekjsñqia, 2006, 154). Also, Tacitus’ portrayal of Seneca’s death as “a piece of theater” is “a fitting last act in the life of a man who was himself both a playwright and a principal actor” (215). But Santoro L’Hoir’s sketch could be filled in with more specific theatrical dynamics. The central motif of Tacitus’ exit descriptions is the performance of constantia (versus impatientia), which as we have seen is a concern of Seneca’s ethical theater, and which is central to the conduct of Seneca and Paulina. There are also specific tragic elements at play: the scene-by-scene progression of Seneca’s interrogation and death in a real-time temporal framework, the entries and exits, the dialogues and monologues, the high emotions, the messengers, the courageous heroine, the internal audiences and “choruses” who collaborate or react, the invocation of divine witnesses (Jupiter Liberator), the contestation between rival actors and rival spectators who seek outcomes and interpretations that aren’t necessarily to be reconciled. Tacitus lays particular emphasis on Nero’s point of view as spectator and director, which is mediated by Silvanus and other proxies (cf. Ann. 15.60.2). Nero’s role throughout the scene can be fleshed out by comparison with the death of the consul Vestinus a few chapters later, where Tacitus portrays the actor-emperor “visualizing and mocking” (imaginatus et inridens) the consul and his guests from afar (§69.3). The theatricality of Seneca’s death can also be defined through comparison with two other episodes in the historical narrative: (1) the Pisonian conspiracy as a whole and (2) the death of Nero. First, A. J. Woodman has argued that Tacitus portrays the Pisonian conspirators as a cast of amateur dramatists. As the conspiracy’s planned date of April 19 is the last day of the Cerealia (April 12–19), when theater games (ludi scaenici) typically gave way to circus races, and would make the assassination of Nero a supplementary ludus scaenicus for the entertainment of the people (1993, 107), so the conspirators’ failure is correspondingly couched in terms of bad theater. Only Epicharis and Subrius Flavus merit more dignified characterization, with the former described in an echo of Senecan tragedy yet “without histrionics” (119) and the latter speaking truth to Nero’s power (Ann. 15.67.2) and evoking a “late recognition of true identity” of the sort seen in tragedy (125). Within the conspiracy episode, Woodman argues, the death of Seneca is a more successful alternative, a “roleplaying performance” that builds upon the already theatrical status of Socrates in the quasi-theatrical versions of Plato’s Crito and Phaedo (118 n. 53).93 The contrast amounts not simply to the fact that Seneca accomplishes what he set out to achieve—he dies—but that he does so in a way “calculated to infuriate the theatrical Nero” (121). And contrasted with Nero the cithara-singer

93. The “upstaging” argument is strengthened if we accept the argument of Treves (1970) that Seneca’s death itself occurred on April 19.

theaters of ethics, tragedy, and history

145

(citharoedus) and Piso the tragedy-singer (tragoedus, Ann. 15.65), Seneca stands out as a less amateurish political actor. The death is further framed in retrospect by the death of Nero himself.94 The loss of Tacitus’ account leaves it unclear exactly what form of theatricality he might have presented in relating the event, but Dio offers these words: “This was the sort of drama that Fortune then prepared for him (soio‹som cq dqãla sæse sø dailæmiom aÃs{ ~ paqerje arem), so that he could act (Õpojq¨mgsai) the parts no longer of others—matricides, beggars—but of himself. And then he began to repent for his outrages, as if he were able to undo any of them. Such was the tragic part that Nero now played (soia‹sa ésqacÎdei), and he repeatedly recalled this verse: ‘Wife and father urge me cruelly to die’ ” (63.28.4–5).95 Dio’s account depicts the close link that had been established in Nero’s mind (and in the popular imagination) between his bloody deeds of parricide and his stage roles—an act of mistaken self-recognition that recalls the negative examples from the ethical theater of Seneca’s prose writings. It also shows how Nero’s death could be read as an ending straight out of tragedy—a self-recognition and a self-directed revenge for the series of parricides that we know the Tacitean Seneca had cited as precedents for his own death (cf. Ann. 15.62.2). In addition, however, as Catharine Edwards has noted, the multiple attempts of Nero’s suicide (poison, drowning in the Tiber, dagger; cf. Suet. Ner. 47–49) “could be read as an echo of the death of Seneca, who also had to use a variety of means to squeeze the life from his aged body”—except that it converts the “tragedy” of Seneca’s death scene into “farce” for Nero (2007, 160). This retrospective comparison, I would point out, does not necessarily dignify Seneca: Nero’s death potentially serves as much as a parody that exposes flaws in the original, such as the fumbling multiplicity of Seneca’s methods. It also writes large Seneca’s ultimate failure as Nero’s teacher: the dying Nero appears not to have learned from Seneca’s ethical theater or his mirror for the prince. Seneca’s death may come across as nobly tragic, but it may equally be undermined, or its tragic aspect may be turned against him, given its thin separation from the problematic life and death of his pupil.

Beyond the Roman Theater Of the elements that Seneca’s prose and tragedies made available for the theatricalization of history, the elements adopted by Tacitus and the authors of the Hercules Oetaeus and the Octavia represent only an early selection. In

94. On Nero’s death see O’Gorman (2000), 160–61; Connors (1994), 230. 95. Dio quotes from a version of “Oedipus in exile” by an unknown Greek author; the same quotation is given at Suet. Ner. 46.3.

146

seneca the author

subsequent representations of the death, both in drama and in other genres and media, the ethical and tragic modes would offer continuing opportunities for the scene to be characterized through varying forms of action and knowledge—whether through the self-recognition that comes with the day of moral transparency and vindication or through the self-recognition that results from the full manifestation of one’s entanglement, and even complicity, in the world’s irrational forces.

6 End of a Series: Death in Epistolary Time

In this chapter we take up the Epistulae morales, where meditatio mortis (“death rehearsal”) becomes a serialized habit. We will begin by surveying Seneca’s innovative use of the epistolary collection as a literary form, and then we will turn to the programmatic first letter, where the paradox of cotidie mori (“dying each day”) is identified as a central focus. In the course of the correspondence cotidie mori is mapped out across two dimensions: (1) the sequence of letters, with its momentum and multiplicity, and (2) the internal structure of the single letter, with its singularity and closure. Seneca builds a text that is defined by repetition yet may end at any point, and together these features equip the reader with a useful framework for thinking not only about his or her own death, but also about Seneca’s death, and Paulina’s attempt. In his eighty-seventh letter Seneca describes a recent journey he and his friend Maximus had taken in the countryside, conducting themselves with great frugality (Ep. 87.2–3):1 My Maximus and I have been spending two days now most happily (ego et Maximus meus biduum iam beatissimum agimus), with a very few slaves whom a single wagon was able to hold, and without any things except those that were carried on our bodies. . . . We are nowhere without figs, never without our writing tablets. The figs serve as a relish if I have bread, but if I don’t have bread they serve as bread. Each day

1. For commentary on Ep. 87 see Inwood (2007a), 240–42; also Allegri (2004) and (1981).

148

seneca the author they make for me a New Year, which I make auspicious and happy with good thoughts and greatness of mind . . .

In this anecdote Seneca evidently carries out his own advice to Lucilius in a much earlier letter: “Set aside some days on which you can withdraw from your things and put yourself on familiar terms with little (minimoque te facias familiarem)” (Ep. 18.8).2 The term beatissimum may also echo the letter of the dying Epicurus that Seneca mentions twice elsewhere: “This is the happiest day that I have spent, and my last” (beatissimum . . . hunc et ultimum diem ago, 92.25; cf. 66.47).3 But in this instance Seneca connects their frugal diet of food with their constant use of pugillaria, implying that every day is rendered auspicious not only by repeating the New Year’s ritual of eating figs, but also by thinking the good thoughts that are facilitated through regular writing.4 This letter, then, presents a festive day-to-day routine characterized by literary activity, in which the two men test their response to diminished resources. To this extent it is representative of Seneca’s letters to Lucilius as a whole. The mention of Maximus, although it is here embedded in a letter to Lucilius, probably also reminds Seneca’s readers of the separate letters that Seneca had apparently written to Maximus. These letters are now lost, but they are vividly recalled by Martial in a pair of epigrams where he congratulates a friend, Ovidius, for his loyalty in having followed his friend Caesonius Maximus when the latter, banished by Nero, fled to Sicily (Epigr. 7.44, 45).5 In the first poem, Martial declares: “You [will be celebrated] for having been to [Maximus] what he was to his Seneca” ( fuisse / illi te, Senecae quod fuit ille suo, 44.10)— which reveals that Maximus had once accompanied Seneca into exile, or at least that their friendship was a well-known exemplum.6 In the second poem, Maximus is described as “powerful friend of eloquent Seneca, . . . he whom the happy letter7 greets on frequent page” ( facundi Senecae potens amicus, / . . . ille, quem frequenti / felix littera pagina salutat, 45.1, 3–4). This seems to imply that a series of letters from Seneca to Maximus was in circulation, familiar to Martial and his readers, though we can only speculate about the details.8 Long after the death of Seneca, and long after the death of Maximus, the poet can still

2. See Henderson (2004), 49, who also notes wordplay in Maximus’ name—both with minimo and with his status as Seneca’s “Greatest” friend. 3. Cf. D.L. 10.22 (= fr. 138 Use. = Long and Sedley (1987), 24D): sóm lajaq¨am comse| ja≠ la seketsx ~ mse| ôlåqam so‹ b¨ot écqfiolem Õlπm sats¨. On the letters of Epicurus as a model for Seneca see Inwood (2007b), 142–48. 4. See Allegri (1981), 23–24 on faustum et felicem echoing an augural formula. 5. For the banishment of Caesennius Maximus (evidently the same person as Caesonius Maximus) soon after Seneca’s death see Tac. Ann. 15.71.5. 6. If Maximus went into “exile” with Seneca, there are two possibilities: (1) Seneca’s banishment to Corsica; (2) precisely the retreat referred to in Ep. 87. On the possibility of friendship without exile, see Galán Vioque (2002), 283; Griffin (1992), 62 n. 7. 7. Galán Vioque (2002), 286 plausibly suggests a reference to S, the initial letter of the salutatio formula. 8. On these lost letters see Lausberg (1989), 1954; Vottero (1998), 15; Cugusi (1983), 195. Their existence is hypothetical: some have understood Martial to be referring to his own mentions of Maximus; see Galán Vioque (2002), 286.

death in epistolary time

149

appeal to the reader’s sense of pleasure in witnessing an epistolary friendship conducted over many pages and on many different occasions, viewing it as a standard against which to measure later long-term friendships. Martial’s sketch of the Maximus letters offers a useful external view of Roman readers’ impressions of reading a serial Senecan text. But the internal features that correspond to such impressions, including Seneca’s epistolary preoccupation with death, can be more fully discerned through looking further at the Lucilius letters.9

The Serial World of the Epistulae Morales We lack details about the degree of the letters’ fictionality and the form in which they first circulated.10 Were the first dozen letters (book 1), or perhaps some bigger cluster, published first and then added to? Whatever the answer, we can assume that Roman readers experienced the correspondence as an unfolding portrait of Seneca and Lucilius’ friendship, as letter follows letter and book follows book. We cannot say of Seneca’s letters what Cornelius Nepos asserts of the letters sent by Cicero to Atticus, namely that “whoever reads them would not have much [further] need for a connected history of those times (historiam contextam eorum temporum)” (Att. 16.3). Scholars are in basic agreement in distributing Seneca’s surviving 124 letters (in twenty books) between his withdrawal in 62 (or 63) and late 64.11 As Giancarlo Mazzoli observes, the end point of the series sometime after the lost twenty-second book quoted by Aulus Gellius (NA 12.2.3) may have come with Seneca’s death itself (1989, 1850). Yet the dates have been deduced in spite of the letters, since Seneca only occasionally makes reference to changes in the seasons and just once refers to an identifiable historical event, the fire of Lyons (August 64; Ep. 91). There are, certainly, general correspondences between themes of the letters and the portrayal of Seneca’s withdrawal and death in books 14 and 15 of Tacitus’ Annals12—for example, between Seneca and Maximus’ diet of figs (Ep. 87.2–3) and Tacitus’ description of the diet of “wild fruits” (agrestibus pomis, Ann. 15.45.3) by which Seneca supposedly escaped Nero’s poisoning attempt. But such resonances may simply 9. On Seneca’s letters in general see Inwood (2007a); Henderson (2004); M. Wilson (2001), (1987); Schönegg (1999); Hachmann (1995); Cugusi (1983), 195–206; Russell (1974); Cancik (1967); Faider (1921), 251–63. Useful overviews of statistics and scholarship are given by Lana (1991); Mazzoli (1989). On their place within ancient epistolography see Trapp (2003), 25–26; Maurach (1970), 181–95. 10. For fictionality see Griffin (1992), 416–19; Abel (1981), esp. 473–77. For the view that the letters are polished editions of genuine letters, see Lana (1991), 261; Cugusi (1983), 202. The division into books is ancient (cf. Gell. NA 12.2.2–13; with Cugusi 195, 200), but the bifurcation into Epp. 1–88 and 89–124 is medieval; cf. Reynolds (1965), 17. As Inwood (2007b), 134 notes, the likely loss of letters between 88 and 89 leaves the correspondence “maimed.” 11. See Mazzoli (1989), 1850–53. Griffin (1992), 353 opts for the short chronology beginning in 63. 12. See esp. Schönegg (1999), 25–26, with n. 30; 27, with n. 35; Abel (1985), 694–98.

150

seneca the author

reflect Tacitus’ own attempt to characterize Seneca in accord with his epistolary image. And this is an image defined precisely by a turning away from the historical world: as Marisa Squillante puts it, the letters define their own “closed universe” (2003, 170–71). What experience, then, is the reader drawn into? One in which, among other things, Seneca strives (1) to redefine epistolography, (2) to emplot the end stages of his own career, and (3) to meditate on death.

Redefining Epistolography The term epistulae morales is probably Seneca’s.13 The closest that he comes to defining this project is when he responds to Lucilius’ demand for “more frequent letters” ( frequentiores epistulas, Ep. 118.1). Though he agrees to the demand, he insists on the following: “I will not do what Cicero, the most eloquent of men, orders Atticus to do: that even “if he has nothing, he should write whatever comes to his lips” [= Att. 1.12.4]. I can never run out of things to write, and so I can pass by the things that fill Cicero’s letters—who is having trouble as a candidate, . . . how harsh Caecilius is as a money-lender. . . . It is enough to deal with one’s own troubles without dealing with someone else’s, and to scrutinize oneself (sua satius est mala quam aliena tractare, se excutere) . . .” (118.1–2).14 Turning away from Ciceronian bulletins on commerce and politics, Seneca aligns his letters exclusively with the philosophic life. Within the implied tripartite model of “lives,” epistulae morales are “theoretic,” associated with the life of detached spectation and self-scrutiny rather than with the lives of striving for money or honor.15 For Seneca, frequent letters can have pedagogical potential. He applauds an earlier request from Lucilius: “You rightly demand that we make the traffic of letters between us more frequent. Conversation is highly beneficial, because it makes inroads on the mind bit by bit” (merito exigis ut inter nos epistularum commercium frequentemus. plurimum proficit sermo, quia minutatim inrepit animo, Ep. 38.1).16 Sermo, Seneca explains in this briefest of letters, is more personal and informal than prepared disputation, and more effective.17 Besides, an adviser’s words “should be sprinkled around like seeds” (seminis modo spargenda sunt, §2), because reason (ratio) “is not widely evident if you look: it grows with the work” (non late patet, si aspicias: in opere crescit, §2).18 The

13. See Cugusi (1983), 196, citing the early testimony in Gell. NA praef.9, 12.2.3. 14. On this passage see Inwood (2007a), 307–9, with useful explication of Cic. Att. 1.12, 1.13; Ker (2006), 35–36; Thraede (1970), 65–68. On Cicero as an “antimodello” for Seneca’s letters see Lana (1991), 260–61; Cugusi (1983), 201–5. See also Brev. 4–6 criticizing the letters of Cicero and others. On the circulation and “publication” of Att., see Beard (2002), 116–19; Setaioli (1970). 15. For the tripartite model of b¨oi see Cic. Tusc. 5.3.9; Iambl. VP 58–59. But Inwood (2007a), 309 is skeptical. 16. For commentary see Trapp (2003), 249–51; discussion in Schönegg (1999), 53–59. 17. Cf. Ep. 75.1 on sermo inlaboratus et facilis. Sermo is understood primarily in terms of dialogue by Inwood (2007b), 147–48. 18. Schönegg (1999), 53–56 compares Stoic rpeqlasijo≠ kæcoi.

death in epistolary time

151

last phrase here evokes the growth of both the serial text and Lucilius himself, to whom Seneca had earlier written these evocative words: “I claim you for myself. You are my work” (adsero te mihi; meum opus es, 34.2). Seneca, however, has also recently encouraged Lucilius to move away from the Epicurean flosculi (“plucked flowers”) that he had included as closural quotations in letters 1–29, toward the totus contextus (“broad fabric”) of Stoic writers, figuring this contrast as tree versus forest and single limb versus body (Ep. 33.1–6).19 If his correspondence does not, like Cicero’s, offer a historia contexta of its times, Seneca still incorporates individual letters into multiple overlapping patterns and sequences, as any Latin author would, to give an organic structure to the collection as a whole—even if its limbs have their own distinct areas of focus.20 At various moments in the letters, Seneca charts the basic elements of Lucilius’ education (book 1 = Epp. 1–12), hones the concept of bona mens (books 3–6 = Epp. 23.1–56.6, passim), tours the moral landscape of Campania (Epp. 49–87, passim), trains Lucilius in the proper use of literary texts, and engages with specific authors such as Epicurus, Virgil, Horace, and Petronius.21 Lucilius, for his part, tends to ask the right questions at the right time, exhibiting signs of progress or regression. Seneca’s contextus is defined by the consistency of his responses to events that are themselves inconsistent or accidental.22 There is no predicting the “situational openings” with which some of the letters begin:23 Seneca has spoken with an easily embarrassed young friend of Lucilius (11.1), or has swum ashore prematurely after feeling seasick during a brief voyage from Naples to Puteoli (53.1–4). What is predictable is that after a situational opening Seneca will turn not to another topic but instead to a moral theme that is a metaphorical version of the original situation, as Catharine Edwards has observed (1997, 24, 29).24 Mikhail Bakhtin saw in Seneca’s letters (as contrasted with Cicero’s) the intensely private and internalized chronotope of “Stoic autobiography” (1981, 145). The development of each situational opening bears this out: Seneca harnesses the notion of embarrassment (verecundia) as a basis for revering (vereri) one’s internalized moral guardian (11.1, 9), or moves from describing the sensation of seasickness (nausia) to a discussion of moral illnesses (morbi) and how to cure them (53.3, 7). Senecan seriality is defined less by worldly narratives than by a repeated pattern of introversion toward the path of philosophical progress. 19. On the opposition see Graver (1998), 624–29. 20. See Hachmann (1995), 1–18; Maurach (1970), 17–24; Cancik (1967), 138–51. 21. On Seneca’s engagement with the poets see Mazzoli (1970), Tarrant (2006); on Horace in particular, Berthet (1979); on the Georgics, Henderson (2004), 50–52; on responses to Petronius, Sullivan (1985b). 22. See Inwood (2005), 341–47; M. Wilson (2001), 167. Still useful is Misch (1951), 417–35. 23. See Mazzoli (1991), who classifies the openings as “effetti di cornice” and emphasizes their “autoironic” aspects (supplemented in Mazzoli 2005, 130–32); Minarini (1997), 269 n. 17; Russell (1974), 79–84. 24. See Ep. 55.3: ex consuetudine tamen mea circumspicere coepi an aliquid illic invenirem quod mihi posset bono esse; also Ep. 62.1, with Cancik (1967), 90.

152

seneca the author

Emplotting senectus Seneca also uses the epistolary series to play out the end stages of his life and the beginnings of a posthumous identity. “Wherever I turn,” he writes, “I see signs of my old age” (quocumque me verti, argumenta senectutis meae video, 12.1). “Just now,” he soon announces, “I was saying to you that I have old age in my view, but now I fear that I may have left old age behind me” (modo dicebam tibi in conspectu esse me senectutis: iam vereor ne senectutem post me reliquerim, 26.1).25 This intensification of senectus is accompanied by many of the features to be expected in an author’s late style, such as a more self-consciously lyrical first-person voice, a retrospective vista on one’s own life, and pretensions to writing a “summa”—as well as a sense that it is now too late to begin anything new.26 Politically, Seneca scripts a cautious withdrawal from Nero: “The wise man . . . avoids power that is potentially harmful, while making sure that he is not obvious in avoiding it (ne vitare videatur). For part of being free from care involves not seeking this: when someone flees something he condemns it (quae quis fugit damnat)” (Ep. 14.8). In some instances Seneca adopts the position of an independent philosophical witness to Neronian crises—even if Nero (and, for the most part, Rome itself ) is unmentioned throughout.27 Seneca closely associates his senectus with a radical shift away from other epistolary rhythms. In the situational opening of letter 77, he describes the scene at Puteoli when the latest fleet of ships from Alexandria (Alexandrinae naves) arrived in the bay of Naples, causing great excitement for those awaiting goods or news from Egypt (77.1–3). But, he explains, “amid everyone’s scurrying and hurrying to the shore I felt great pleasure from my sluggishness, because in getting ready to receive my people’s letters I did not hurry to find out what the situation was with my things there, or what they brought (epistulas meorum accepturus non properavi scire quis illic esset rerum mearum status). For some time I have had nothing to lose or gain (olim iam nec perit quicquam mihi nec adquiritur)” (§3).28 With “my things” (rerum mearum) Seneca probably refers to the many properties that we know (from papyri) he owned in Egypt, but either lost or gave away after his estrangement from Nero.29 Seneca presents his shift of interests as especially appropriate to this stage in his life: “Even if I were not old, I should have felt this, but now all the more so: however little I had, I would still have more road-toll than road (plus iam mihi superesset viatici quam viae). After all, we have set out upon that road which it is not necessary to follow to the end 25. On a possible correlation with senectus in the technical sense (the 63rd year) see Griffin (1992), 36. 26. For the status of the letters as a final artwork see Schönegg (1999), esp. 41–44; see also Ker (2006), 25–30. 27. For “oppositional” notes see Veyne (2003), 163–65. Political navigation and survival strategies are discussed by Gowing (2005), 96–97; Reydams-Schils (2005), 86. Champlin (2003), 127–29 reads Ep. 115.12–13 as criticism of Nero’s “new solar ideology.” 28. The translation of the final sentence is taken from Summers (1910), 255. 29. See Browne (1968), 18–19, adducing a papyrus dated Oct. 62 CE that reflects dispossession.

death in epistolary time

153

(eam viam simus ingressi quam peragere non est necesse)” (§3). There is, I suggest, an implied contrast here not just between materialism and moralism but also between the two epistolary economies that are implied by each. In Seneca’s end-stage epistolarity multiple roles are played by Lucilius.30 This imperial procurator in Sicily mediates Seneca’s relationship with his audience, allowing him to address spiritual advice to someone both far away and ensconced in worldly responsibilities.31 Addressing Lucilius may also allow Seneca to revisit his earlier didactic dealings with the recently deceased friend Annaeus Serenus and, as Yun Lee Too has suggested, the now recalcitrant Nero (1994, 213). The focus on Lucilius also enhances Seneca’s recognition of his own age. If the name “Lucilius” hints at a diminutive status compared with Lucius Annaeus Seneca, as a iuvenis still immersed in public life, Lucilius’ role is rendered more transparent by his cognomen “Iunior” (cf. NQ 3.1.1; 4a.praef.9).32 In keeping with this image, Seneca uses an infantilizing metaphor to encourage Lucilius to look forward to the time when he will assume philosophy’s toga virilis (Ep. 4.2). As a proxy figure, however, Lucilius sometimes has the power to confer a vicarious rejuvenation on Seneca, who exclaims, “I grow, I rejoice, and I shake off my old age and grow warm again (cresco et exulto et discussa senectute recalesco) every time I realize from what you do and what you write how much you have surpassed—not the pack, for you have long since left them behind, but yourself” (Ep. 34.1). Seneca’s sketch of Lucilius’ life course and its luminous qualities sometimes displays remarkable similarities to his own career (Ep. 19.3–4): You were thrust into the limelight by the force of your mind, the elegance of your writings, and your famous and noble friendships (in medium te protulit ingenii vigor, scriptorum elegantia, clarae et nobiles amicitiae). Fame has already overtaken you (iam notitia te invasit). However deeply you bury yourself at the ends of the earth and hide yourself away, your earlier life will still show you off. There is no way you can be in the shadows. Wherever you flee, much of your earlier light will follow (sequetur quocumque fugeris multum pristinae lucis). Seneca’s identification with Lucilius, enhanced by common interests in such fields as natural science and poetry,33 is also accompanied by intertwined memories, so that that when Seneca visits Lucilius’ home city of Pompeii, he 30. On Lucilius see L. Delatte (1935); also Henderson (2004), 31–32; Griffin (1992), esp. 91, 347–53; Russell (1974), 75. Further symbolism of Lucilius is considered by Schönegg (1999), 91–98. 31. See R. Coleman (1974), 288. On the role of the spiritual guide in ancient philosophy see I. Hadot (1986) and esp. (1969) on Seneca’s letters. 32. The diminutive “Lucilius” is noted by Habinek (2005), 277 n. 71 (crediting Anthony Corbeill); cf. Berno (2006), 14. Delpeyroux (2002), 208 describes Lucilius as an alter ego twenty years younger. But his age is still mysterious: see Mazzoli (1989), 1853–55. 33. Lucilius’ poetry is discussed by Mazzoli (1970), 258–64, including possible associations with Lucilius the satirist; cf. Henderson (2004), 42.

154

seneca the author

remarks, “I was drawn back into a view of my youth” (in conspectum adulescentiae meae reductus sum, 70.1; cf. 49.1–4). If the letters chart an intensification of senectus, they are also unique among Seneca’s works in negotiating a relationship with posterity (posteri): “I concealed myself and closed my doors so that I could be more useful to a greater number (ut prodesse pluribus possem). . . . I have withdrawn not only from people but from things, especially my things. I am doing the work of posterity (posterorum negotium ago). . . . I show to others the right path, which I have learned too late and exhausted by error (rectum iter, quod sero cognovi et lassus errando, aliis monstro)” (Ep. 8.1–2).34 The implicit sense of obligation generated here is capitalized on in letter 21, where Seneca seeks to divert Lucilius from the “dazzle” (fulgor) of public life to the fame he can acquire through his “studies” (studia). Epicurus had promised to Idomeneus, “My letters will make you more well known than all of those things which you revere and for which you are revered” (“notiorem te epistulae meae facient quam omnia ista quae colis et propter quae coleris,” Ep. 21.3 = fr. 132 Use.), and “Cicero’s letters do not allow the name of Atticus to perish. . . . Though associated with such great names, [Atticus] would have disappeared from people’s lips if Cicero had not taken him to himself ” (nomen Attici perire Ciceronis epistulae non sinunt. . . . inter tam magna nomina taceretur nisi Cicero illum adplicuisset, §4). With these analogies in mind, Seneca encourages Lucilius to see the letters as his ticket to future fame (§5):35 profunda super nos altitudo temporis veniet, pauca ingenia caput exerent et in idem quandoque silentium abitura oblivioni resistent ac se diu vindicabunt. quod Epicurus amico suo potuit promittere, hoc tibi promitto, Lucili: habebo apud posteros gratiam, possum mecum duratura nomina educere. A profound depth of time will come over us. Just a few authors will raise their heads and, though they will eventually disappear into the same silence, they will put up a fight against oblivion and will for a long time assert themselves. What Epicurus was able to promise to his friend, I promise to you, Lucilius: I will enjoy the gratitude of posterity, I can bring out with me names that will endure. He formalizes the promise through quoting Virgil’s promise to the freshly dead Nisus and Euryalus: “Fortunate pair! If my poetry has any sway, no day will ever remove you from the memory of eternity” ( fortunati ambo! si quid mea carmina possunt, / nulla dies umquam memori vos eximet aevo), for as long

34. On posteri see Lana (1991), 268–71; on Ep. 8, Ker (2004), 229–32. 35. For the passage’s associations see Schönegg (1999), 171–78. Martial (7.44.7–10) may borrow from the language of Ep. 21 when characterizing the fame of Seneca and Maximus.

death in epistolary time

155

as the house of Aeneas inhabits the unmovable rock of the Capitolium and the Roman father holds power” (§5 = Aen. 9.446–49). The Virgil quotation establishes a third-person, posthumous perspective on Seneca and Lucilius, validated by the teleology of the gens Iulia—albeit with the tragic overtones of Nisus and Euryalus’ curtailed mission.36 Seneca’s promise, however, self-consciously engages posteri as eavesdroppers, signaling that in reading Seneca’s letters they are acquiring a debt to the deceased author and his friend.

Death from Day One: The First Letter A third way in which Seneca exploits seriality, and a more specific instance both of his philosophical contextus and of his emplotment of his career’s end stage, comes with the serialized reflection on death and the paradox of “dying each day,” with which we will be concerned for the remainder of this chapter. This project is already under way in the first letter, which offers the reader an abrupt entry into the epistolary series:37 SENECA LVCILIO SVO SALVTEM. (1) ita fac, mi Lucili: vindica te tibi, et tempus quod adhuc aut auferebatur aut subripiebatur aut excidebat collige et serva. persuade tibi hoc sic esse ut scribo: quaedam tempora eripiuntur nobis, quaedam subducuntur, quaedam effluunt. turpissima tamen est iactura quae per neglegentiam fit. et si volueris adtendere, magna pars vitae elabitur male agentibus, maxima nihil agentibus, tota vita aliud agentibus.38 (2) quem mihi dabis qui aliquod pretium tempori ponat, qui diem aestimet, qui intellegat se cotidie mori? in hoc enim fallimur, quod mortem prospicimus: magna pars eius iam praeterît; quidquid aetatis retro est mors tenet. fac ergo, mi Lucili, quod facere te scribis, omnes horas conplectere; sic fiet ut minus ex crastino pendeas, si hodierno manum inieceris. (3) omnia, Lucili, aliena sunt, tempus tantum nostrum est; in huius rei unius fugacis ac lubricae possessionem natura nos misit, ex qua expellit quicumque vult. et tanta stultitia mortalium est ut quae minima et vilissima sunt, certe reparabilia, inputari sibi cum inpetravere patiantur, nemo se iudicet 36. On the failure overtones see Henderson (2004), 31. A tricolon of philosopher (Epicurus), politician (Cicero), and poet (Virgil) is noted by Schönegg (1999), 175; the role of poetry as vehicle of historical memory, by Gowing (2005), 71–72. See also Mazzoli (1970), 227–28. 37. For commentary see Scarpat (1975), 25–57. For analysis, see D. Gagliardi (1998), 51–68; Blänsdorf (1991), 83–87; Blänsdorf and Breckel (1983), 8, 18–24; von Albrecht (1989), 112–24; Maurach (1970), 25–29; Guillemin (1957), 280–81, describing the letter as an “entire drama” conducted in metaphor. Its programmatic importance was asserted already in the Renaissance; see Panizza (1983). 38. The reading magna pars . . . maxima . . . tota vita is adopted by Reynolds, following Erasmus (1529); on earlier readings see Panizza (1983), 42.

156

seneca the author quicquam debere qui tempus accepit, cum interim hoc unum est quod ne gratus quidem potest reddere. (4) interrogabis fortasse quid ego faciam qui tibi ista praecipio. fatebor ingenue: quod apud luxuriosum sed diligentem evenit, ratio mihi constat inpensae. non possum dicere nihil perdere, sed quid perdam et quare et quemadmodum dicam; causas paupertatis meae reddam. sed evenit mihi quod plerisque non suo vitio ad inopiam redactis: omnes ignoscunt, nemo succurrit. (5) quid ergo est? non puto pauperem cui quantulumcumque superest sat est; tu tamen malo serves tua, et bono tempore incipies. nam ut visum est maioribus nostris, “sera parsimonia in fundo est”; non enim tantum minimum in imo sed pessimum remanet. vale. Seneca to Lucilius, greetings. (1) Do this, my Lucilius. Reclaim possession of yourself for yourself, and whatever time was up till now taken away, was siphoned off, or fell away—gather it up and save it. Persuade yourself that this is just as I write: some times are torn from us, some are spirited away, others flow away. But the most disgraceful loss is that which comes from neglect. And if you wish to pay attention, a great part of our life glides away while we are doing something wrong, the greatest part while we are doing nothing, the whole of life while we are doing something other [than living]. (2) Who will you give me who puts a price on his time, who values the day, who understands that he dies each day? For we are deceived when we look ahead to death: a great part of it has already passed. Whatever of our life is behind us is held by death. So, my Lucilius, do what you write you are doing: embrace every hour. This way you will be made less dependent on tomorrow, if you throw your hand on today. (3) All things, Lucilius, are external: only time is ours. This is the sole thing, slippery and fleeting, that Nature has put us in possession of, and anyone who wants to can dispossess us of it. And the stupidity of mortal human beings is that when they have acquired the smallest and most worthless of things, certainly things that can be gotten back, they allow these to be charged to their account, whereas no one judges that he owes something when he has received time, when in fact this is the one thing that not even a grateful person can actually pay back. (4) You will ask, perhaps, what I do—I who give you this advice. I will frankly confess that, as happens in the case of someone who is extravagant but careful, I have a balanced account of my expenditure. I can’t say that I don’t lose anything, but I can tell what I lose and why and how: I can [or will] give the reasons for my poverty. But I face what is faced by most who are reduced to poverty by a fault not their own: everyone forgives, no one comes to help. (5) What conclusion to draw?

death in epistolary time

157

I do not think that someone is poor if what is left is enough, no matter how little. But in your case, I would prefer that you preserve what is yours, and you will be beginning [or do begin] in good time. For as our ancestors saw it, “Economy at the bottom is too late.” After all, not only the smallest amount is left at the bottom, but the worst. Farewell. An ongoing cycle of advising and practicing is already in progress. The first words, ita fac (“Do this”),39 refer forward to the advice that follows, but also backward to what Lucilius had written in a previous letter. The same cycle recurs later in the letter with “Do what you write you are doing: embrace every hour” (§2), which indicates that the advice is not new, but a reinforcement. In letter 2 also, which begins by praising Lucilius’ avoidance of disruptive travel (2.1), Seneca will assert that reiteration is necessary for ensuring that Lucilius is consistent over time and will apply it to every instance of “travel,” including his itineraries in reading (2.2)—a goal that is clearly served by Seneca’s own epistolary cycle of readings, which are thus an ideal use of the reader’s time.40 In letter 1 the cycle of advising and practicing is also characterized in terms of a cycle of exchangeable relationships, shifting between Seneca advising Lucilius and Lucilius advising himself : “Persuade yourself that this is just as I write” (1.1). In subsequent letters these relationships will be variously transformed into the following: Lucilius advising Seneca reciprocally (e.g., 6.6, 34.2), Seneca advising Seneca (27.1), Seneca advising posteri (8.6), and Seneca reminding Lucilius of something that Lucilius had written in his own poetry (8.10, 24.21). The repetitions and reconfigurations will define the letters’ day-to-day pedagogical routine. Seneca’s first piece of advice for Lucilius is vindica te tibi, and the letters themselves are to be an instrument for enabling his vindicatio of himself by himself for himself. As a term in Roman law, vindicare denotes an owner’s reclaiming of an object that he owns but that is in another’s possession; in broader usage it is also applied to various acts of liberation, protection, and revenge.41 Seneca puts many of these aspects to work both here and elsewhere.42 Here a proliferation in Seneca’s use of the term in letters 1–33, with variations in its direct object, will help tie together multiple components of the epistolary transaction:43 39. In ita fac Traina (1974), §§1.3, 2.12.4 sees Seneca deploying a quasi-oracular authority. 40. On conflations of spatial and reading itineraries see Garbarino (1996), 271–72, 284–85. Maurach (1970), 32 suggests that Epp. 1 and 2 together form a proem. 41. The archaic juridical procedure (cf. Gai. Inst. 4.16) is discussed by Crook (1967) 144–45; Gernet (1981). Phrases such as libertatis vindex and vindicare in libertatem had a well-worn political history; see Wirszubski (1968), 100–6. 42. On Seneca’s use of vindicare see Maso (1999), 102, 107–23: it is a mechanism for “distancing from others and construction of one’s own personality” (112); also von Albrecht (1989), 120; Ingrosso (1988), 111; Blänsdorf and Breckel (1983), 19, 57 n. 27; Traina (1974), §1.3. Compare the role of “vendetta” in Seneca’s revenge tragedies, in Guastella (2001), 9–30. 43. For other instances of vindicare see Epp. 45.4; 65.1; 88.24; 97.14; 113.23; also the significant instance at Brev. 2.4: nemo se sibi vindicat. Metaphors from the “law and courts” are listed by C. S. Smith (1910), 137–43.

158

seneca the author None of my days disappears in leisure. I reclaim part of the nights for my studies (partem noctium studiis vindico). (8.1) You can claim back your peace and quiet (quietem potes vindicare) without incurring anyone’s hatred, without any grief or anxiety in your mind. (19.4) Just a few authors . . . will put up a fight against oblivion and will for a long time assert themselves (se diu vindicabunt). (21.5) We [Stoics] are not under a king: each takes possession of himself for himself (sibi quisque se vindicat). (33.4)

These passages together suggest a sense of codependency between the distinct moments at which, respectively, Seneca writes, Lucilius withdraws, Seneca (and with him Lucilius) lives on in memory, and Lucilius takes on his own authoritative philosophical voice. In addition to this programmatic use of vindicare, the emphatic reflexivity of vindica te tibi signals the continuing importance of the language of self-examination and self-care that was prominent already in Seneca’s earlier works and that caught the attention of Foucault.44 In the present configuration at Ep. 1.1, te would seem to denote the self that has hitherto been alienated through time loss but is potentially recoverable. The first letter is more specifically concerned with changing Lucilius’ relationship to time. The sequence vindica te tibi et tempus . . . momentarily gives the impression that time is itself an object of vindica, until tempus becomes more specifically the object of . . . collige et serva (“gather up and save,” §1).45 Seneca next conveys the urgency of the task through rhetorically enacting Lucilius’ loss of time. Lucilius reads, first, that “whatever time was up till now taken away, was siphoned off, or fell away” (quod adhuc aut auferebatur aut subripiebatur aut excidebat), and then, that “some times are torn from us, some are spirited away, others flow away” (quaedam tempora eripiuntur nobis, quaedam subducuntur, quaedam effluunt §1). Each of these tricola iconically sketches the consumption of time, and the anticlimactic third member within each (excidebat; effluunt) is used to home in on the real problem: not the violence of others, but the neglectful self.46 This is Seneca’s characteristically “subjective” approach, reifying time within rhetoric and presenting time experience and time use (or abuse) from the perspective of the person embedded in a finite human life span.47 Here the notion of time’s loss (iactura, 44. On this topic see Bartsch (2006), 191–208, 230–55; Ker (forthcoming a). 45. Here self-possession comes through time-possession, but the order is reversed at Ep. 71.36: id agamus ut nostrum omne tempus sit; non erit autem, nisi prius nos nostri esse coeperimus. The relationship between the two passages is described as “dialectical” by Maurach (1970), 27; cf. Blänsdorf and Breckel (1983), 20. 46. On conversion through rhetoric here, see von Albrecht (1989), 120–22. For finer analysis of the compound verbs and tricola, see Panizza (1983), 41. Berthet (1979), 940 hears an echo of Hor. C 2.14.1–2: eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume, / labuntur anni. 47. My discussion of time in Seneca, both in the letters and in Brev., draws on the recent flourishing of scholarship on the topic. For a selection see Viparelli (2000); D. Gagliardi (1998); Armisen-Marchetti (1995); Neumeister (1995). See further Ker (2002), ch. 1.

death in epistolary time

159

§1) ushers in Seneca’s extensive portrayal of time in economic terms emphasizing its special value: its possession by each of us as a kind of patrimony, its easy alienation by others, its unidirectionality and thus nonfungibility as contrasted with other commodities, and so on.48 This economics of time had already been characterized in the De brevitate vitae, where the common complaint that human life is too brief was traced back to the fact that people are “most profligate in that thing [that is, time] for which alone it is honorable to be greedy” ( profusissimi in eo cuius unius honesta avaritia est, Brev. 3.1).49 Now, however, Seneca will explore notions of time and value through the structure of his epistolary economy. At the exact center of the letter is the gnomic pronouncement, “All things, Lucilius, are external: only time is ours” (omnia, Lucili, aliena sunt, tempus tantum nostrum est, §3). The formulas used for describing time here are analogous to the Stoic (and Senecan) characterization of moral choice as the only thing that is “in our power” or “one’s own” (in potestate nostra / suum; éfi\ ôlπm /oÆjeπom), and to the equally Stoic (and Senecan) characterization of virtue as a uniquely valuable and inalienable possession.50 It is not a coincidence that within Stoic physics, a similar formula captures the unique “belonging” (Õpqveim) of present time, whereas the past and future parts of time do not “belong.”51 There is, then, an implicit but strongly motivated connection between Lucilius’ recognition of time’s value and his recognition of Stoic value distinctions more generally. The way he is urged to use time now is a model of how he will soon need to regard virtue—the only difference being that time is alienable in a way that virtue will not be. There is a carefully controlled tension in Seneca’s approach to time here that is central to the temporality of the letters. Although encouraging Lucilius to repossess a maximum of time to serve as a pedagogical resource (life is short, the art of philosophy long),52 he also declares toward the end of the letter, “I do not think that someone is poor if what is left is enough, no matter how little (quantulumcumque)” (1.5). From the latter perspective a wise user’s ability to endow time with a certain quality is more valuable than its quantity, however small or great.53 Seneca had already developed this concept in the De brevitate 48. On Seneca’s economic imagery for time see Armisen-Marchetti (1995), 552–53. 49. Time lacks this tangibility in the usual Stoic analysis; cf. Ep. 58.22: sextum genus eorum quae quasi sunt, tamquam inane, tamquam tempus. On its concretization, see Armisen-Marchetti (1995), 546–49. 50. E.g., Ep. 71.4: unum bonum est quod honestum est, cetera falsa et adulterina bona sunt; Const. 5.5: unius . . . in possessione virtutis est, ex qua depelli numquam potest, ceteris precario utitur. On the analogy between virtue and time here, see Viparelli (2000), 19–20; Sangalli (1988), 57–58. 51. Cf. SVF 2.509 (= Stob. 1.106, 5–23; Long and Sedley 1987, 51B): læmom Õpqveim søm émersËsa, attributed to Chrysippus (cf. SVF 2.518). On the term Õpqveim see Schofield (1986), 357–58; Pesce (1992), 61–62. On Stoic theories of time see also Viparelli (2000), 157–82; Goldschmidt (1969). But the Stoics are not unique in privileging the present (cf. P. Hadot 1995, 217–37), and Seneca draws from the Epicurean psychology of time; see D. Gagliardi (1998), 95–115. 52. Cf. Ot. 5.7: ad haec quaerenda natus, aestima quam non multum acceperit temporis, etiam si illud totum sibi vindicat. 53. See Görler (1996), 160–62; Armisen-Marchetti (1995), 566; Neumeister (1995), 74 n. 18, adding sources outside Seneca.

160

seneca the author

vitae, countering the supposed brevity of life with an image of the sage’s ability to expand even brief spans of time through the use of ratio (cf. Brev. 6.4: ratio dilatat) and to master the past, present, and future of his own life, and of eternity more broadly, through “gathering of all times into one” (omnium temporum in unum conlatio, Brev. 15.5).54 This ideal corresponds in part to the Stoic analysis of the wise man’s relationship to time, which is characterized by “opportuneness” (opportunitas / eÃjaiq¨a)—a notion of action, or even a state of the reasoning faculty without action, whose value does not depend on its extension in time.55 Indeed, although one Stoic analysis of time, mentioned above, is that “only the present belongs,” in fact the present is always, in Malcolm Schofield’s term, “retrenchable” (1986, 340), and a stricter analysis holds that “no time is wholly present”; time itself (even present time) is ultimately classified as one of the indifferents.56 Hence temporal extension cannot be guaranteed even to the wise man. As stated above, however, the wise man has no need for such a guarantee, and Seneca will reiterate the idea: “The happy life does not become more happy by being made longer” ([sc. vita beata] beatior non fit si longior, 32.3); the wise man “always thinks about the quality, not the quantity, of his life” (cogitat semper qualis vita, non quanta sit, 70.5); and “virtuous things do not grow with time” (tempore honesta non crescere, 78.27).57 Yet this focus on qualitative time does not simply displace Seneca’s initial emphasis on Lucilius’ need for a larger quantity of time to serve as a pedagogical resource. Rather, the letters will give Seneca a chance to explore both aspects of time, pursuing long-term goals through the epistolary series at the same time as he adopts postures of self-sufficiency within the present time of a single letter. In his focus on time in letter 1, Seneca privileges our nature as mortal beings (cf. mortalium, 1.3), and especially manifestations of death’s finality during our life. In his rhetorical enactments of time-loss, he reorients Lucilius by zeroing in on each single day and discovering death there: “Who will you give me . . . who understands that he dies each day?” (qui intellegat se cotidie mori, §2).58 His first attempt at explicating the phrase cotidie mori involves changing where death is looked for: we are wrong to “look ahead” (prospicimus), because “whatever of our life is behind us (retro est) is held by death” (§2). In the De brevitate vitae Seneca had sometimes made the idea of the past’s irretrievability more positive, finding security in the fact that actions or pleasures in our past are an inalienable possession and remain available through mental recollection 54. Such uses of ratio are a traditional feature distinguishing humans from animals; cf. Sen. Ep. 124.16– 17; Cic. Off. 1.11, with Neumeister (1995), 67–68; Goldschmidt (1969), 47–49. 55. On opportunitas/eÃjaiq¨a see SVF 3.54 with Pesce (1992), 62–64; Blänsdorf (1983), 13–18. 56. Cf. SVF 2.509 (= Stob. 1.106, 5–23 = Long and Sedley 1987, 51B): oÃde≠| ≈kx| ém¨rsasai vqæmo|, attributed to Chrysippus; cf. SVF 2.517, 519. Armisen-Marchetti (1995), 561–62 sees this alluded to at Brev. 10.6: praesens tempus brevissimum est, adeo quidem ut quibusdam nullum videatur. 57. Cf. Chrysippus in SVF 3.54 (= Plut. Comm. not. 8, 1061f ): cahøm ¡ vqæmo| oÃj a–nei pqorcimælemo|. 58. The phrase cotidie mori is clearly “meant to startle,” observes Hutchinson (1993), 277, n. 38; cf. Grimal (1968), 93.

death in epistolary time

161

(Brev. 10.2–4).59 Here in the letters the past slips away irresistibly into oblivion and death. Yet this notion of time’s mortality does not exhaust the potential associations of cotidie mori, especially because the singularity inherent in mori is combined with the repetitive notion of cotidie. As we will see below, Seneca sets the stage for the serial correspondence to work out the meaning of cotidie mori as both a singular and a serial notion, at the level of conceptual interpretation and in the to-and-fro of the correspondence. The reader of letter 1 is led to expect that the letters themselves will offer an account of the way in which Seneca spends his own time. Although he presents himself as an imperfect example, Seneca asserts, “I have a balanced account of my expenditure (ratio mihi constat impensae). I can’t say that I don’t lose anything, but I can [or will] tell what I lose and why and how: I can give the reasons for my poverty” (1.4). Seneca’s willingness to describe his uses of time will occasionally be illustrated in the letters themselves. The emphasis on a ratio impensae that records the time devoted to self-care is familiar already from the De brevitate vitae, where Paulinus was urged to turn his attention away from the ratio publici frumenti (“account of the public grain supply”), which was his concern as prefect of the grain supply, toward a ratio vitae suae (“account of his own life,” Brev. 18.3). In the letters, the day-to-day practice of a ratio impensae will be played out most explicitly in the economic terminology Seneca uses for registering his daily payments of wisdom to Lucilius in letters 1–29, and in the notion of preparing for death through balancing his account with life.60 In the last lines of letter 1 we see Lucilius being bid good-bye in a closural formula that immediately illustrates the letters’ economic principles: “For as our ancestors saw it, ‘Economy at the bottom is too late (sera parsimonia in fundo est).’ After all, not only the smallest amount is left at the bottom, but the worst. Farewell” (1.5). The saying derives ultimately from Hesiod’s Works and Days (deikó d\ ém pthlåmi fieid›, Op. 369). For Seneca, the implied storage vessel is a metaphor for thinking about time, and allows him to suggest both the poor quantity (minimum) and the poor quality (pessimum) of time at the “bottom.”61 For the reader of letter 1 trying to conceptualize what the letters are about, the storage-vessel image is evocative for the totality of Lucilius’ time as it will be measured out both by the correspondence and by the space of the single letter. The reader, then, is shown Lucilius being primed with basic advice that will be more fully fleshed out, and qualified, as letter follows letter. In particular, the letter’s central message, that we “die each day” (cotidie mori), is to be elaborated along two distinct axes of the serial text.

59. An Epicurean theme; see Armisen-Marchetti (1995), 549; Bertini Malgarini (1983–84), 87–89. 60. There may also be an anti-Neronian resonance, given Suet. Ner. 30 (reporting an opinion of Nero): sordidos ac deparcos esse quibus impensarum ratio constaret. See Mantovanelli (2003), 132–33. 61. For comparison and contrast with Hesiod see Longo (2000), 134–35. See also Ep. 108.26, comparing life time to the contents of an amphora.

162

seneca the author

First Axis: Momentum and Multiplicity As the collection begins to grow, Seneca cultivates a sense of momentum through his repetition and elaboration of certain themes and, more broadly, exploits the multiplication of topics. These aspects have their own respective implications for the central focus on “dying each day.”

Momentum The rhythm of the letters keeps pace with Lucilius’ philosophical regimen as a proficiens (“progressing student”) whose principal goal is to become cotidie melior (“better each day,” Ep. 5.1; cf. 50.1).62 In one letter Seneca celebrates the fact that, as he says to Lucilius, “You have surpassed yourself ” (cf. te ipse . . . superieceris, 34.1). But he is less concerned with such sudden bursts than with the goal of consistency (aequabilitas, constantia, concordia) from one day to the next: “It does not matter what one says but what one feels, nor does it matter what one feels on one day (uno die), but what one feels repeatedly (adsidue)” (9.22). This amounts to a cultivation of wisdom, the only state of mind characterized by total rational consistency. But even if wisdom itself recedes from his grasp, Lucilius must still display as much consistency as possible as he prepares for the tests of character that lie in the future—above all, the test that is death. After all, as we have seen before, “wherever you cease, so long as you cease well, [life] is whole” (ubicumque desines, si bene desines, tota est, 77.4). The path that Seneca sketches out for Lucilius leads ultimately to the perfection of wisdom but, if not, at least to making life “whole” through a good death. Daily letters are not simply a monitoring device: they also serve as the medium by which cotidiana meditatio (“daily training/rehearsal”) can be conducted.63 The Roman concern with cotidiana meditatio or exerci(ta)tio is seen in military, rhetorical, and other forms of training. Seneca’s conception of meditatio is partly encapsulated in the figura etymologica he appeals to in the De vita beata, saying that “the wise man practices for poverty precisely when he stands in the middle of wealth” (sapiens tunc maxime paupertatem meditatur cum in mediis divitiis constitit, VB 26.1).64 But the repetitive aspect of meditatio, and its associations with the theater, look to a gradual progression from theory to practice, from rehearsal to performance, as we saw in our discussion of Seneca’s theater of Stoic ethics in the previous chapter. Thus, Seneca begins letter 16 by asserting that “this obvious thing” (hoc quod liquet)—namely, the proposition that the blessed life can be accomplished only by the perfection of wisdom, but 62. On profectus in the letters see Delpeyroux (2002); Bellincioni (1978). 63. On meditatio see Newman (1989), esp. 1483–96 on Seneca. See also Bartsch (2006), esp. 192–94; Reydams-Schils (2005), 9–10; and Graver (1996), 147–62, on meditatio in the form of “therapeutic reading.” 64. Note also a familiar etymology based on mederi, discussed by Scarpat (2007), 94.

death in epistolary time

163

life can already be rendered “tolerable” if philosophy is merely begun—“must be reaffirmed and fixed deeper through daily training” ( firmandum et altius cotidiana meditatione figendum est, 16.1). Daily meditatio is essential, in this case, for turning a “good will” into a “good mind.” Although Seneca often seeks this result through repetition and variation within a single letter, the cotidiana meditatio is demonstrated more fully through the epistolary series. The daily meditatio is first and foremost a meditatio mortis.65 This, after all, is identified by Plato’s Socrates as the defining act of the philosopher (lekåsg hamsot)66—as Seneca recalled already at the beginning of his career (Marc. 23.2). His first mention of meditatio in the letters coincides with his first discussion of death, in letter 4: “Practice each day to be able to leave life with a calm mind” (hoc cotidie meditare, ut possis aequo animo vitam relinquere, Ep. 4.5). The ability “to depart with a calm mind” (aequo animo abire) is later characterized as “a major thing that needs to be learned over a long time” (magna res . . . et diu discenda, 30.4)—a task for which the long-term correspondence is well suited. A personal angle comes later with Seneca’s description of asthma, whose attacks, he explains, are referred to by doctors precisely as “meditatio mortis” (54.2).67 The asthma has trained him in readiness for death: “You should,” he writes, “know this about me: I will not quaver in the final stages, I am already prepared. I do not make any assumptions about the completion of the day (nihil cogito de die toto)” (54.7). The same idea is still being repeated in letter 70, where he asserts: “Of no thing is practice so essential [as it is of death]; . . . This is the one thing for which a day will come that will demand its use” (nullius rei meditatio tam necessaria est; . . . huius unius rei usum qui exigat dies veniet, 70.18). Death’s unique certainty—if from no other cause, then from old age, which “alone [among the forms of death] cannot be averted” (huic uni intercedi non potest, 30.4)—is accompanied by a temporal singularity: you die only once. Hence Seneca concludes letter 26 by explicating Epicurus’ advice “meditare mortem” (26.8) as follows: “Perhaps you think that it is redundant to learn something which only needs to be used once. This is precisely why we need to practice . . .” (supervacuum forsitan putas id discere quod semel utendum est. hoc est ipsum quare meditari debeamus, 26.9). But because meditatio mortis centers upon the anticipation of events that the novice might find it alarming to consider, Seneca uses the epistolary series to introduce Lucilius to it gradually.68 In one early letter, attentive to the perils of hope and fear, he points out that “many of our goods harm us. For memory retrieves the torment of fear, and foresight anticipates it (timoris . . . tormentum memoria reducit, providentia anticipat). No one is unhappy on the basis of present conditions alone

65. Or cogitatio mort(alitat)is (cf. Ep. 30.17). For death as the meditatio theme par excellence see Newman (1989), 1481. On meditatio mortis in Seneca see Schönegg (1999), 13–17, esp. 15 n. 6, 19; Cancik (1967), 110 n. 214. 66. Pl. Phd. 81a; cf. 67e; with Warren (2001), 102–5. See also Cic. Tusc. 1.74–75. 67. See Gourévitch (1984), 115–16; Leeman (1971), 327–28. 68. On Seneca’s gradual development of praemeditatio futurorum malorum see Armisen-Marchetti (1995), 559–61, (1986), 191–94; Manning (1976).

164

seneca the author

(nemo tantum praesentibus miser est)” (5.9). Just before this point in the letter he appealed to the carefree, exclusively presentist attention of animals (5.9). As a first line of therapy for Lucilius, then, he actively suppresses the human capacity to use ratio to survey nonpresent parts of time. He acknowledges his gradualist pedagogical technique in letter 13: “I do not speak to you in a Stoic register, but in this more restrained one (lingua . . . summissiore). . . . This is my advice to you: not to be unhappy before the time (ne sis miser ante tempus), since those things that you feared as if they were imminent will perhaps never come—certainly have not [yet] come” (13.4). Meditatio is left unmentioned, because Seneca’s immediate concern is the anxiety Lucilius may feel about the future, given that “the mind invents false images for itself” (animus sibi falsas imagines fingit, §12). Toward the end of the letter, however, Lucilius is led to expect that Seneca’s pedagogy is leading toward a point at which he will confront future possibilities head-on: “Let someone else say, ‘Perhaps it will not come’: you should say, ‘What if it does come (quid porro, si veniet)? We’ll see which of us comes out on top. Perhaps its coming is to my advantage, and this death will make my life virtuous (mors ista vitam honestabit)’ ” (§14). More complex meditative practices are introduced soon enough, in letter 24.69 At first Seneca treats Lucilius’ concern about the outcome of his pending legal case in the same way he had previously: “For why is it necessary to summon evils, to anticipate (praesumere) things which are to be endured soon enough when they arrive, and to waste the present time in fear of the future (praesens tempus futuri metu perdere)?” (24.1). Now, however, it is time for him to initiate Lucilius into the technique of praemeditatio futurorum malorum: “But I will lead you to freedom from care by another path. If you wish to strip off all anxiety, imagine that whatever you fear will happen really is going to happen (quidquid vereris ne eveniat eventurum utique propone), and whatever that evil is, measure it to yourself and take stock of your fear. You will immediately understand that what you fear is either not great or not long-lasting (aut non magnum aut non longum esse quod metuis)” (§2). He follows with a series of exempla of those who have scorned hardship, especially death, across the ages. This is the letter in which Seneca trains Lucilius to unmask death and downplay it, by saying, “You are death, which recently my slave and my servant-girl scorned” (mors es, quam nuper servus meus, quam ancilla contempsit, §13). The discussion also features a systematic pairing of future hardships and appropriate responses (§17): pauper fiam: inter plures ero. exul fiam: ibi me natum putabo quo mittar. alligabor: quid enim? non solutus sum? . . . moriar: hoc dicis, desinam aegrotare posse, desinam alligari posse, desinam mori posse. I will become poor: I will be in company. I will become an exile: I will imagine that I was born in the place to which I am sent. I will be

69. Note also Epp. 78, 99; on 78, see Edwards (1998).

death in epistolary time

165

bound: so what? Have I not [rather] been released? . . . I will die: what you’re saying is, I will cease to be able to be sick, I will cease to be able to be bound, I will cease to be able to die. The rhetoricized repetitions and their crescendo in the topic of death (with final triple anaphora of desinam, “I will cease”) illustrate the meditatio as internal dialogue.70 Later letters will add depth, and further momentum, to Lucilius’ practice.

Multiplicity Seneca uses the sheer multiplication of epistolary topics to tease out distinct daily perspectives on death that illustrate the meaning of “dying each day” yet more directly.71 Successive letters illustrate the equal possibility of death by natural causes, accident, murder, and if necessary suicide, at any time or place. “What time,” Seneca asks, “is immune to death?” (quod . . . morti tempus exemptum est? 30.17). Letter 101 serves as just such a memento mori: “Seneca to Lucilius, greetings. Every day, every hour (omnis dies, omnis hora) shows how we are nothing and, when we have forgotten about our fragility, reminds us with some fresh sign. Then, when we are practicing for eternity, it forces us to look back to death (aeterna meditatos respicere cogit ad mortem)” (101.1). His surprisingly morbid opening—it is more typical for Seneca to end a letter with death than to begin with it—is explained by a recent surprise incident (§§2–3): Senecio Cornelius, a distinguished and dutiful Roman knight, was known to you (Senecionem Cornelium, equitem Romanum splendidum et officiosum, noveras). . . . This man of the utmost frugality, equally careful with his patrimony and his body, after seeing me in the morning as usual, after he had sat for the whole day, and into the night, with a friend who was in a very bad way and lying without hope, after he had cheerfully dined, was seized by a sudden form of illness, angina [= an acute condition causing suffocation]. He scarcely kept breathing to the morning, his breath constricted by a tightening of the throat. And so he died, only a very few hours after he had served all the duties of a sound and healthy man (intra paucissimas ergo horas quam omnibus erat sani ac valentis officiis functus decessit). Senecio’s unexpected death is brought close to home for Seneca by the similarity of their wealth and social position, by the fact that Seneca, Senecio, and his friend are joined by ties of friendship and patronage, by the acute respiratory symptoms that preceded his death (cf. Ep. 54)—and, of course, by the similarity of their names, which Seneca emphasizes with the inverted word order of

70. The passage is analyzed in these terms by Newman (1989), 1480 n. 17; (1988), 104. 71. Seneca’s exploration of death from shifting angles is emphasized by E. R. Wilson (2004), 88–98.

166

seneca the author

Senecionem Cornelium.72 An example such as this serves to illustrate that “whatever can happen ever can happen today” (hodie fieri potest quidquid umquam potest, 63.15) and that there but for the grace of God go I. When Seneca considers deaths resulting from suicide or homicide—“Each day brings danger to man from man” (ab homine homini cotidianum periculum, 103.1)—the frequency of such examples lends them a “quotidian” aspect that should deflate our self-important fear of death. In one letter he asks, “Do you not see for what trivial reasons life is scorned (quam ex frivolis causis contemnatur [sc. vita])? One hangs by a noose before the doors of his beloved, another throws himself from the roof so that he won’t have to listen to his screaming master any longer, another plunges a sword into his guts so that he won’t be taken back after escaping” (4.4). Later he urges, “Review the examples of those who have died by treachery at home (recognosce exempla eorum qui domesticis insidiis perierunt), whether by some open means or by duplicity: you will understand that no fewer people have died from the anger of slaves than [from the anger] of kings” (4.8). Rendering death still more quotidian in a later letter, Seneca conjures a community of living creatures leveled by death in one and the same moment (77.13): fortior, ut opinor, esses, si multa milia tibi commorerentur; atqui multa milia et hominum et animalium hoc ipso momento quo tu mori dubitas animam variis generibus emittunt. You would, I believe, be braver if many thousands were to die with you. But many thousands of human beings and animals are, at this very moment when you hesitate to die, casting out their life-breath in various ways! He also embraces, however, the most literal and shocking implication of cotidie mori: not the everyday potential of our dying, but our actually dying a little bit each day. In letter 24, as part of the discussion in which he helps Lucilius to premeditate death and to unmask it, he returns explicitly to the theme of cotidie mori (24.20):73 memini te illum locum aliquando tractasse, non repente nos in mortem incidere sed minutatim procedere. cotidie morimur; cotidie enim demitur aliqua pars vitae, et tunc quoque cum crescimus vita decrescit. infantiam amisimus, deinde pueritiam, deinde adulescentiam. usque ad hesternum quidquid transît temporis perît; hunc ipsum quem agimus diem cum morte dividimus. 72. Henderson (2004), 43 draws attention to the name by italicizing it in his translation. 73. On this letter as elaborating Ep. 1.2 (se cotidie mori) see D. Gagliardi (1998), 72. For commentary on cotidie mori at 24.20 see Laudizi (2003), 141–44, who compares Ep. 120.17; Marc. 21.7; Remed. 2.2: huc me singuli dies ducunt. See also Ep. 93.3–4: quid illum octoginta anni iuvant per inertiam exacti? non vixit iste sed in vita moratus est, nec sero mortuus est, sed diu; cited by Viparelli (2000), 27.

death in epistolary time

167

I remember that you once dealt with this topic: that we do not suddenly fall into death but progress toward it bit by bit. We die each day, since each day a part of life is taken away, and even as we are growing, our life decreases. We lose our infancy, our childhood, then our youth. Whatever time has passed up until yesterday has perished. This very day which we are living—we divide it with death. Seneca will go on to recall Lucilius’ actual verse, “Not just one death comes, but the death that takes us is simply the final one” (“mors non una venit, sed quae rapit ultima mors est”), in other words, “that this death which we fear is the last one, not the only one” (hanc quam timemus mortem extremam esse, non solam, §21). This has two distinct implications: (1) In keeping with the logic of the praemeditatio it serves to deflate the importance of final death by revealing it to be little different from the steady passage of time throughout all of our life stages, and thus already familiar. (2) Conversely, in keeping with the exhortation to make good use of the present time, it invites us to feel now the same urgency as final death will possess. These separate implications also capture the logic of the epistolary series, as the letters oscillate between (1) deflating death through daily repetition and (2) infusing the present day with urgency and solemnity. The connection between cotidie mori and the epistolary series is also mediated by an exploration of liquid metaphors for time. Seneca’s exegesis in letter 24 includes the image of the water-clock (24.20): quemadmodum clepsydram non extremum stilicidium exhaurit sed quidquid ante defluxit, sic ultima hora qua esse desinimus non sola mortem facit sed sola consummat; tunc ad illam pervenimus, sed diu venimus. Just as it is not the final drop that empties the water-clock, but whatever has flowed out before, so the final hour in which we cease to exist is not the only one that produces death, but just the one that completes it. We arrive at death then, but we have long been coming to it. Even more than the Hesiodic storage vessel of letter 1, the clepsydra is an evocative metaphor in its transformation of life time, and the sensation of time in the letters themselves, into the dripping of liquid from a container. Seneca figures cotidie mori in a slightly different liquid image in letter 58.74 He has been discussing Plato on flux (58.22) and turns to the well-known river example of Heraclitus for reinforcement (§23):75

74. Seneca also plays on the images of punctum (a point of time or space, at 49.3, but also a suicidal pinprick releasing blood, at 70.16); and stilicidium (a small amount, at 70.5, but also a drop from life’s water-clock, as at 24.20). 75. For philosophical commentary see Inwood (2007a), 129–30; Reydams-Schils (2005), 30.

168

seneca the author This is what Heraclitus says: “We step, and do not step, into the same river twice.” For the name of the river persists, while the water has shifted. This is more obvious in a river than in a person (hoc in amne manifestius est quam in homine), but a no less rapid course passes us by also, and I am amazed at our madness in loving so greatly a most fleeting thing, the body, and in fearing that we will one day die, when every moment is a death of our previous state (timemusque ne quando moriamur, cum omne momentum mors prioris habitus sit). You should not be afraid of something’s happening one day, if it happens each day (vis tu non timere ne semel fiat quod cotidie fit)!

As in Seneca’s other sketches of death as a daily experience, there is both a deflation of final death and a hint of advice about coming to terms with the immediacy of death in the present—in this case, at every moment (cf. omne momentum) and as an experience of the body’s changing “state” (habitus). To illustrate this in the case of his own first-person self, Seneca says, “I myself have changed in the process of speaking about these things changing!” (ego ipse, dum loquor mutari ista, mutatus sum, §22). The river-like body that changes through dying at each successive moment is also a little like the correspondence itself. Edwards has emphasized the continual fluctuations in Seneca’s authorial persona in the letters (1997, 34), especially the passage in letter 120 where he observes how “we change our mask in turn, putting on the opposite of the one that we removed” (mutamus subinde personam et contrariam ei sumimus quam exuimus, 120.22). What letter 58 shows is that Seneca understands the continual fluctuations of the corpus and of the person, including the epistolary speaker, in terms of moment-to-moment instantiations of death. The inconsistent self in the corpus of the letters noted by Edwards is, in this sense, a realization of the cotidie mori experience at the level of literary form. This illustration of temporal discontinuity also serves as a clue to the importance of the breaks between individual letters.

Second Axis: Singularity and Closure The letters’ momentum and multiplicity have an additional effect: they place increasing pressure on each successive letter to approximate the conditions of death for the reader and the writer. This puts the focus on the single letter form, which has its own contribution to make to the idea, and the practice, of cotidie mori.

death in epistolary time

169

Unpacking Letter 61 This can best be illustrated by letter 61, which engages with finality from beginning to end:76 SENECA LVCILIO SVO SALVTEM. (1) desinamus quod voluimus velle. ego certe id ago senex eadem velim quae puer volui. in hoc unum eunt dies, in hoc noctes, hoc opus meum est, haec cogitatio, inponere veteribus malis finem. id ago ut mihi instar totius vitae dies sit; nec mehercules tamquam ultimum rapio, sed sic illum aspicio tamquam esse vel ultimus possit. (2) hoc animo tibi hanc epistulam scribo, tamquam me cum maxime scribentem mors evocatura sit; paratus exire sum, et ideo fruar vita quia quam diu futurum hoc sit non nimis pendeo. ante senectutem curavi ut bene viverem, in senectute ut bene moriar; bene autem mori est libenter mori. (3) da operam ne quid umquam invitus facias: quidquid necesse futurum est repugnanti, id volenti necessitas non est. ita dico: qui imperia libens excipit partem acerbissimam servitutis effugit, facere quod nolit; non qui iussus aliquid facit miser est, sed qui invitus facit. itaque sic animum componamus ut quidquid res exiget, id velimus, et in primis ut finem nostri sine tristitia cogitemus. (4) ante ad mortem quam ad vitam praeparandi sumus; deesse aliquid nobis videtur et semper videbitur: ut satis vixerimus, nec anni nec dies faciunt sed animus. vixi, Lucili carissime, quantum satis erat; mortem plenus expecto. vale. Seneca to Lucilius, greetings. (1) Let us cease to want what we have wanted. I myself certainly make sure that I do not want the same things as an old man that I wanted as a boy. This is where my days go and my nights, this is my work, the subject of my thought: to impose an end on my old evils. I make sure that the day is an image of my whole life for me. I do not, by Hercules, seize it as if it were the last, but I look on it as if it could well be the last. (2) This is the state of mind in which I write this letter to you, as if death were going to call me out in the very process of writing. I am ready to exit, and I enjoy life because I am not too anxious about how long it is going to continue. Prior to old age, I took care to live well, in old age, to die well; and to die well is to die willingly. (3) Make an effort to ensure that you never do anything unwillingly. Anything that will be necessary for someone who puts up resistance [that is, even though he or she puts up resistance] is not a necessity for one who is willing. Here is what I say: whoever welcomes domination 76. For commentary see Trapp (2003), 251–52.

170

seneca the author willingly has escaped the most bitter part of servitude, namely, to do what one is unwilling to do. It is not someone who does a thing on command that is unhappy, but someone who does it unwillingly. So let us compose our mind in such a way that whatever the situation demands, we wish it, and especially that we think about our own end without sadness. (4) We need to prepare ourselves for death even ahead of preparing ourselves for life. Something seems to us to be lacking, and will always seem so. It is not years or days that determine that we have lived enough, but our mind. I have lived, dearest Lucilius, as much as was enough. I await death, full. Farewell.

In addition to teaching that we should conform our will (cf. velle, libenter, etc.) to whatever arises, and especially to death, the letter also shows Seneca to be living the lesson. In the previous letter he had confronted Lucilius: “Even now do you desire (optas) that which your nurse desired for you (tibi optavit), or your slave-attendant, or your mother? How harmful to us are our loved ones’ wishes (vota nostrorum)!” (60.1).77 Now he performs a repudiation in his own person: “This is the state of mind (hoc animo) in which I write this letter (hanc epistulam) to you, as if death were going to call me in the very process of writing. I am ready to exit . . .” (61.2). The two deictics in hoc animo . . . hanc epistulam seek to effect a convergence between state of mind and letter, just as phrases used elsewhere in the letter, such as “This is my work” (hoc opus meum est, §1) or “Let us compose our mind” (animum componamus, §3), portray Seneca’s psychological self-care in terms that suggest a textual project. The coincidence between a presentist state of mind and the present space and time of the letter is registered vividly in the phrase, “as if death were going to call me out in the very process of writing” (tamquam me cum maxime scribentem mors evocatura sit, §2). Here we see both the conceit of the writer interrupted by death and Seneca’s characteristic use of the future participle capturing the philosopher’s premeditative stance. The sense of presence here—Seneca’s intimate apostrophe to Lucilius combined with his awareness of death’s proximity—owes something to ancient epistolary theory and practice in which the letter was a medium of co-presence between the correspondents.78 Seneca also uses the letter to suggest how the horizons of one’s life can be confined within one’s present state of mind: “I make sure,” he says, “that the day is an image of my whole life for me. I do not, by Hercules, seize it as if it were the last, but I look on it as if it could well be the last” (id ago ut mihi instar totius vitae dies sit; nec mehercules tamquam ultimum rapio, sed sic illum aspicio tamquam esse vel ultimus possit, 61.1). The statement brings together two closely related, but distinct, themes of the Epistulae morales:79 77. On the relationship between Epp. 60 and 61 see Maurach (1970), 14–15. 78. On this and other epistolary topoi see Trapp (2003), 42–46. In Seneca, see Ep. 40.1: numquam epistulam tuam accipio ut non protinus una simus. 79. For discussion see Viparelli (2000), 42–51; also Foucault (2005), 477–80.

death in epistolary time

171

1. The day is to be an image of one’s whole life. This builds partly upon the idea that the wise man can use even a short amount of time as if it were long, which Seneca sketches out in letter 78 as a way to imagine his and Lucilius’ reunion: “There will come a time which will join us again and mingle us together. However brief it is, our knowing how to use it will make it long. As Posidonius says, ‘For educated men a single day is more expansive than the longest life is for the ignorant (unus dies hominum eruditorum plus patet quam inperitis longissima aetas)’ ” (78.28).80 Similar language arises in letter 101, but with a more direct reference to “life time” rather than eternity: “So hurry to live, my Lucilius, and think of single days as single lives” (ideo propera, Lucili mi, vivere, et singulos dies singulas vitas puta, 101.10). Within a single day Lucilius must both set to work on his life and already come to see it as complete. This is the same letter that begins with the last day of Cornelius Senecio’s life (101.1–3). Echoes here of the language of accounting (for example, “Let us settle our balance with life each day,” cotidie cum vita paria faciamus, §8) recall letter 1’s ideal of a ratio impensae of one’s own biographic time. 2. The metaphor of today-as-lifetime is usually combined with the exercise of thinking of today as if it were our life’s final day (as it appears to be in both letters 61 and 101).81 A key to the combination of these two distinct notions may come in Seneca’s characterization of one’s last day as “that day which will give a verdict on all my years” (ille laturus sententiam de omnibus annis meis, 26.4). The focus on the final day, however, involves a number of distinct emphases. It is a hypothetical exercise only: as Seneca explains in letter 61, “I do not, by Hercules, seize (rapio) it as if it were the last, but I look on it (aspicio) as if it could well be the last” (61.1). The denial of “seizing” is important for differentiating between the Stoic perspective, in which the exercise is centered on demonstrating the autonomy of reason, and the Horatian carpe diem, which suggests a goal of maximizing pleasure.82 Seneca is also careful to exclude morbidity. In letter 12 he urges us to go to bed each night saying vixi “happily and cheerfully” (laeti hilaresque), because “that man is supremely happy and a carefree possessor of himself (securus sui possessor) who awaits tomorrow without anxiety. Whoever says ‘I have lived (vixi)’ awakes each day to a profit” (12.9).83 In letter 61 Seneca alludes to both (1) and (2) in conjunction with the letter’s curtailing of life narratives. When he writes, “I myself certainly make sure that 80. Cf. Cic. Tusc. 5.5 (in the hymn to Philosophy): est autem unus dies bene et ex praeceptis tuis actus peccanti immortalitati anteponendus. The parallel is discussed by Görler (1996), 161 n. 2; its provenance, by Schmid (1976). 81. In addition to the passages discussed below see Sen. Epp. 15.11; 93.6. 82. On these contrasting Senecan and Horatian approaches see Dionigi (1995); Görler (1995); Traina (1973). But Seneca still plays with the concept of carpere; see Epp. 26.4: carpimur, singuli dies aliquid subtrahunt viribus; 120.18: carpit nos illa [sc. mors], non corripit. 83. Note parallels with Horace, C 3.29.41–43: ille potens sui / laetusque deget cui licet in diem / dixisse “vixi”; cf. C 1.9.13–18. The Horatian echo is superficial only, in the view of Mazzoli (1970), 233–36; or far reaching, in the view of Görler (1996), 163–69; see also Neumeister (1995), 75–76.

172

seneca the author

I do not want the same things as an old man that I wanted as a boy” (61.1) and “Prior to old age, I took care to live well, in old age, to die well; and dying well is dying willingly” (§2), he is organizing his life course into a simple biographic schema in which senectus is both the end stage of life and the stage in which he adopts a synoptic view of his life. Although life encapsulation is illustrated here only briefly and is not especially frequent in the letters, a significant instance arises in letter 49 in response to Seneca’s arrival in Pompeii (49.2): I feel as though I have lost you just now. For what is not “just now,” if you should recall it (quid enim non “modo” est, si recorderis)? Just now (modo) as a boy I sat at the feet of Sotion the philosopher, just now (modo) I began to plead cases, just now (modo) I ceased to want to plead them, just now (modo) I ceased to be able to. The speed of time has no limit, and is more evident to those who are looking back (infinita est velocitas temporis, quae magis apparet respicientibus). This passage would seem to suggest that the retrospective synopsis of one’s own life is involuntary and possibly traumatizing, but Seneca explains in letter 83 that respicere is in fact an often neglected procedure that is useful for giving an account of one’s life: “You order,” he says to Lucilius, “that single days of mine be revealed to you, and these in their entirety” (singulos dies tibi meos et quidem totos indicari iubes, 83.1). The form of daily-round narrative requested by Lucilius is a standard discourse of personal representation of the sort that we see in Roman biography, epistolography, and rhetorical exercises.84 Seneca readily complies: “I will observe myself (observabo me) immediately and—a thing most useful—will review my day (diem meum recognoscam). It is our undoing that no one looks back at his life (nemo vitam suam respicit)” (§2). Although the purpose of doing this is partly that “planning for the future comes from the past” (consilium futuri ex praeterito venit, §2), Seneca’s account quickly turns into a meditation on his old age, as he contrasts himself with the puer against whom he has been competing in his exercises on the racetrack, and then reflects on his different bathing practices through his life, from the chill of the Aqua Virgo to the (warmer) Tiber and now a sun-warmed tub (§5). He thus inserts a life narrative (not to mention a Roman topographic tour) into the account of his daily round, giving a sense of the increasing fragility of his body that looks backward and forward: “I’m not far from [taking] an [artificially heated] bath” (non multum mihi ad balneum superest, §5). Seneca’s self-irony, as he makes fun of the rising temperature and his fading austerity, helps him to establish a detached perspective both on the totality of his life and on his life’s potential completion. To articulate his central epistolary theme of circumscribing life’s horizons, Seneca draws on examples and comparisons from various kinds of narrative.

84. For references see Bloomer (1997).

death in epistolary time

173

In letter 93, stressing the need to accept death whenever it arrives, he appeals to the notion of alienum, explaining that “a life can be perfected in a small measure of time. Life time is among the externals. How long I exist is external: how long I will exist, in the sense of truly existing, is mine” (et in minore temporis modo potest vita esse perfecta. aetas inter externa est. quamdiu sim alienum est: quamdiu ero, ut sim, meum est, 93.7). “Do you think,” he asks, “that someone slain at the end of the day of a spectacle is happier than someone slain in the middle of the day (qui summo die muneris quam eum qui medio occiditur)?” (93.12). But he then shifts from the arena to the realm of literature: “[Someone] did not live for as many years as he was able? A book of even a few verses is a book (paucorum versuum liber est), and indeed praiseworthy and useful. You know how heavy the Annals of Tanusius are, and what people say about them. This is how it is that certain men’s lives are long, and go the way of Tanusius’ Annals (hoc est vita quorundam longa, et quod Tanusii sequitur annales)” (§11). In the contrast of brief but valuable books with bad and seemingly endless annalistic chronicles, Seneca not only asserts the importance of animus over anni (to use his wordplay from 61.4), but also implicitly elevates his (brief, finite) epistulae morales in the hierarchy of literary forms.

Ending Letter and Life There is, finally, one other formal feature of the Senecan letter that contributes repeatedly to this narrowing of horizons: the signing off. Desinamus is the first word of letter 61, but it looks to the ending—the ending of desires (61.1), the willingness for life to end (§3), and, as a culmination, the use of the letter ending to practice this state of mind: “I have lived, dearest Lucilius, as much as was enough. I await death, full. Farewell” (§4). In a fusion of time, text, and self, Seneca expresses his moral fullness just as the letter becomes full (again, the hint of a vessel, or a satisfied dinner guest),85 and uses the routine of epistolary closure as a practice for life closure. This is the sort of effect that Barbara Herrnstein-Smith has described as “temporal punctuation” (1968, 128), except that Seneca does not import a finalistic concept to give the sense of closure to his literary form, but rather exploits the closure of the literary form (the vale) to lend greater weight to the death-rehearsing utterance.86 As in Seneca’s other characterizations of “dying each day,” however, there are really two distinct functions for this device: (1) To say goodbye at the end of life should be no different from casually saying goodbye at the end of the day or the end of the letter. (2) Conversely, the letter’s ending should be infused with the same urgency and solemnity as life’s ending. The second of these functions may 85. On resonances with a banquet here see Trapp (2003), 252; Maurach (1970), 15 with n. 19. 86. For the convention of epistolary brevity (Ærvmæsg|), see Demetrius Peri herm. 235 and Sen. Ep. 45.13: ne epistulae modum excedam, quae non debet sinistram manum legentis implere (referring to the gradual unrolling of the volumen from one hand to the other); with Cugusi (1983), 34–35.

174

seneca the author

seem uppermost in letter 61 with its particularly intense and intimate tone, but the letter also belongs to the habit-forming rhythm of daily death closures. The conceit of the letter ending as death rehearsal is introduced only gradually in the course of the correspondence. Seneca first introduces Lucilius to the power of the letter ending in conjunction with economic, temporal, or moral limits: Sufficient is at hand (ad manum est quod sat est): he who lives on good terms with poverty is rich. Farewell. (4.3) No one is unhappy on the basis of present conditions alone (nemo tantum praesentibus miser est). Farewell. (5.7) Natural desires are finite (naturalia desideria finita sunt); . . . you see, what is false has no limit. If someone is traveling by a road, there is an end; wandering has no measure. . . . If you have gone far and something further still remains, recognize that this is not natural. Farewell. (16.9) Letter 24, however—the letter in which Seneca gives the first full-fledged praemeditatio mortis—ends on a more “mortal” note: “There are many who view living not only as bitter but as redundant. Farewell” (multi sunt qui non acerbum iudicent vivere sed supervacuum. vale, 24.26). His most explicit acknowledgment of this formalistic play comes just a few letters prior to letter 61, where he cuts short a discussion about ending old age by suicide (58.37):87 sed in longum exeo; est praeterea materia quae ducere diem possit: et quomodo finem imponere vitae poterit qui epistulae non potest? vale ergo: quod libentius quam mortes meras lecturus es. vale. But I am going on. There is, besides, enough material to draw out the day, and how will someone be able to impose an ending on life if he cannot do so for a letter? Farewell then—which you will read more willingly than pure death. Farewell. The repetition shows self-consciousness about the vale utterance, and Seneca’s comment plays on the distinction between the epistolary end and life’s end—a distinction that he is otherwise eager to blur.88

Death at the End of the Series, and the Case of Paulina Seneca’s death arrived at the end of the epistolary series—even, perhaps, as its final interruption. The discussion above puts us in a position to notice how 87. For analysis see Spina (1999), 16–17. 88. Additional instances include Epp. 32.5; 48.12; 69.6 (on which, see Mann 2006, 103–4); 91.21; 114.27.

death in epistolary time

175

his death was framed by the collection’s serial syntax and its defining tensions. Although the daily letters’ momentum and multiplicity were crucial for supporting Seneca and Lucilius’ progress toward a full embracing of cotidie mori, each sharply punctuated letter had taught the difficult lesson of discontinuation. And to the extent that Seneca died in his identity as the epistolographer, he faced the present moment—his genuinely final day—with an equal sense of the quotidian aspect of an occasion for which he had long been preparing himself, and of its solemn singularity as the last act and encapsulation of his life. In the final part of this book we will return to look more closely at the framing function of specific letters, such as Ep. 70 on suicide (Ch. 8) and Epp. 12, 55, and 86 on location (Ch. 10). Emanuela Sangalli has emphasized the discontinuity of Seneca’s letters as the key to their appropriateness as a medium for conveying the Stoic focus on present time, much like Marcus Aurelius’ use of radically discontinuous atoms of discourse in the Meditations (1988, 53). Such literary forms facilitate the circumscription of the present time that is sufficient for the philosopher. They shatter the notion that life has a narrative form, that continuity is essential to the structure of the good life, or that a sufficient narrative structure for life cannot be found in the single day, or even the single moment, with its own internal arc of mortality. Yet this aspect should not be taken to drown out the sense of continuity that is an obvious theme of the correspondence, however fragmentary. The letters are both discontinuous and continuous: they embody the posture of wisdom’s self-sufficiency while traveling the long pedagogical path toward wisdom.89 Yes, Seneca reinforces the ideas that the beginning of philosophical study already makes life tolerable (16.1) and also that “wherever you cease, so long as you cease well, it is whole” (77.4), through the closure of the individual letter as if it were enough for the ending of life. But the procedure gains in meaning through the dynamics of repetition and the process of shifting bit by bit from rehearsal to reality.90 We may conclude, however, by considering the case of Paulina, because her involvement in Seneca’s death scene offers perhaps the strongest sense of both connection and contrast between the death scene and the epistolary series. At Ep. 104.1–5, her only surviving mention from Seneca’s works, Seneca had described how Paulina’s affection for him led him to take better care of himself (§2):91

89. See M. Wilson (2001), emphasizing the appeal of the letters’ “surreptitious narrative” (186). 90. See Schönegg (1999), 69–72 on the “double” character of the letters as both call to action and the action itself—as both practice and product. 91. On Ep. 104 and Paulina see Reydams-Schils (2005), 47–51, 171; Pociña (2003), 336; Mauch (1997), 67–70; Harich (1994); Marchesi (1944), 177–78. Although this is the only mention of Paulina in Seneca, versions of Epp. 53, 86, 87 were dressed up as letters from Seneca to Paulina in an ancient manuscript from Oulx; cf. Lausberg (1989), 1954 n. 284.

176

seneca the author mihi valetudinem meam commendat. nam cum sciam spiritum illius in meo verti, incipio, ut illi consulam, mihi consulere. She causes my wellbeing to be a concern for me. For recognizing that her spirit turns upon mine, I begin to take care of myself in order to take care of her.

He adds to this a striking observation, namely that he forfeits the freedom from care that most old men can enjoy: “I realize,” he says, “that there is a young one in this old man who needs looking after” (venit enim mihi in mentem in hoc sene et adulescentem esse cui parcitur, §2). The denotation of adulescentem here has been debated, but the implication is clear: Seneca’s relationship to his old self is reassessed in light of Paulina’s youth.92 This example goes against the letters’ more general momentum toward death, but its sentiment recalls the passage where Seneca had recalled how, when he was a sickly young man contemplating suicide, “the old age of [his] affectionate father” (patris . . . indulgentissimi senectus) had detained him and kept him alive (Ep. 78.2).93 In Tacitus, however, Paulina’s appearance in the death scene helps to measure the transformation in circumstances, it being no longer possible for Seneca or Paulina attend to such concerns. The reader of Tacitus who also knows the Epistulae morales may surmise (as we will see Montaigne did) that the same relationship of affection between Seneca and Paulina that had once been the motive of Seneca’s self-preservation is now the motive of Paulina’s suicide, and the reason for Seneca’s consent. Conditions now dictate that the married couple must together make good on their meditatio mortis. The death scene is thus explicable through the epistolary economy, though it lies one fateful step beyond it.

92. Most interpreters take adulescentem here as feminine, referring to Paulina; cf. Harich (1994), 358–59. See also Mauch (1997), 68; Bourgery (1936), 90. 93. Epp. 78 and 104 are clustered together by Reydams-Schils (2005), 47–50.

part iii

Receptions

This page intentionally left blank

7 Tracing the Tradition

A thumbnail account of the refigurations of Seneca’s death would look something like this:1 In Late Antiquity his death was situated simultaneously in the worlds of pagan philosophical exempla and Christian historiography. In the Middle Ages the death was represented anew, both in word and in image, in manuscripts of Seneca’s texts and in scholastic and historical literature. Next Seneca and his death became a focus in the humanists’ engagement with exempla from the recovered past: lost details began to be restored to Seneca’s biography once his works were read more intensively and Tacitus’ Annals were rediscovered—although new possibilities also arose for confusion and invention, as seen in the retelling of the death scene in the form of a christianizing ritual. From the sixteenth century onward, Seneca’s writings and life were subjected to greater philological scrutiny, resulting in a reassessment of the death scene’s evidentiary function and of its compatibility with Christian thought. Somewhat at odds with this, Seneca’s death also came to be represented in new genres, such as historical painting and drama, conditioned by baroque and neoclassical aesthetics. After a virtual disappearance in the nineteenth century and for much of the twentieth, the death has more recently returned to the foreground both in academia and in creative literature.

1. For surveys of Seneca’s reception overall see von Albrecht (2004), 130–72; Ross (1974); Faider (1921), 108–52. See also essays in Baier, Manuwald, and Zimmermann (2005); Dionigi (1999); Chevallier and Poignault (1991).

180

receptions

What significance is attached to a retelling of Seneca’s death? Each reception will offer its own answer to this question, but there are some revealing moments. The English Renaissance critic Thomas Nashe celebrated the waning of Seneca’s influence in English tragedy of the late-sixteenth century by asserting, “Seneca, let blood line by line and page by page, at length must needes die to our Stage.”2 Nashe’s metaphor writes large Seneca’s literary Nachleben as a single protracted death scene shaped by the dynamics of a body whose slow bleeding will one day exhaust it. This indicates that for at least some interpreters the death of Seneca might serve as an allegory for the passing away of Senecan discourse—though perhaps a slow passing away, and indeed for some interpreters (pace Nashe) a persistence or even a regeneration, especially if the revived Paulina became a focus. In other ways, too, the death of Seneca has had a habit of folding out into the world in which it is reproduced. In his Silva topográfica (1637) the Portuguese poet Mañuel de Gallegos responded to Rubens’ vivid portrayal of the dying Seneca (c. 1614–15; Fig. 7.8) by accusing the painter of complicity in Nero’s violence, a typical baroque conceit: “If the brush (el pinzel), either pious or content, / had withheld its purple colors (las purpureas colores suspendiera), / Seneca would be alive today (Seneca aun oy viuiera).”3 The act of reception, then, is subsumed by the internal dynamics of the scene being received—a killing—though in this instance it also displaces it: only Rubens, not Nero at all, killed Seneca. In the mid-eighteenth century the German playwright Friedrich von Creutz can be found justifying his own Seneca play in the following terms: “That Seneca died once is certain. As to whether he has died a second time (zum zweiten Mal), on a stage, I cannot with certainty say.”4 Creutz does not claim to be displacing the original event: it is enough for him to be producing a reenactment that is, as far as he knows, the very first in the theater. These examples each in their own way illustrate how Seneca’s death scene has supplied not only content, but also formal features and a quasi-ritual intensity, to numerous artistic and literary endeavors concerned with it. Still more frequent than this assimilation of the act of reception to the death scene itself is the “senecanization” of Seneca outlined in the introduction to this book: the tendency for later writers and artists to elaborate Seneca’s death using discursive forms that derive directly or indirectly from Seneca, and the corresponding tendency in users of Senecan discursive forms to focus on Seneca’s death as a privileged subject of representation. Senecanization will be at play in many of the receptions of the death scene we consider, though 2. From his introductory note to R. Greene’s play Menaphon (first published 1589), in the edition of McKerrow (1910), 3.315–16. The passage and its polemics are discussed by Hunter (1974), 182–84. 3. Quoted also by McGrath (1997), 2.295. 4. Quoted by Hess (1981), 214.

tracing the tradition

181

not all. Below I will not seek to announce instances of “senecanization,” but we will encounter many, in which either a given version of the death scene draws on Senecan works (for example, the De tranquillitate animi; the Thyestes) and Seneca-influenced discursive forms (martyrology; epistolography) or specific discursive forms associated with Seneca (most notably, manifestations of historical tragedy inspired by the Octavia) are preoccupied with representing Seneca’s death. In all such instances, the retelling of the death scene serves as an opportunity for writers and artists to excavate and scrutinize Seneca, and the discourses connected with his name. Our primary goal, however, will be to examine how the death was shaped in new ways for new audiences.

Late Roman and Early Christian The receptions of the death surviving from the first millennium must be viewed against a background of uneven familiarity with Seneca.5 Although Martial, mentioning “two Senecas” (duosque Senecas, 1.61.7–8), obviously meant the Elder and the Younger, Sidonius Apollinaris speaks of one Seneca who “cultivates shaggy Plato and advises his Nero without success” (colit hispidum Platona / incassumque suum monet Neronem) and another who “rocks Euripides’ stage with dancing . . .” (orchestram quatit / . . . Euripidis . . . , Carm. 9. 232–36).6 Passing critiques of Senecan style by Aulus Gellius (NA 12.2) and Fronto (Ep. de orat. 2–3), as well as unattributed topoi from Seneca’s prose in Apuleius and Macrobius, are indicative of his muffled influence.7 The early Christian writers, however, show a persistent familiarity with his prose works (including some now lost), and occasionally the tragedies. Seneca’s moral philosophy found praise with Lactantius (“the keenest mind of all the Stoics,” omnium Stoicorum acutissimus, Div inst. 2.8.23) and Tertullian (“Seneca often ours,” Seneca saepe noster, De anim. 20).8 Yet Augustine, although using Seneca’s De superstitione to attack pagan religious practices, saw a contradictory persona (CD 6.10):9 “Annaeus Seneca, . . . whom we find from various evidence to have flourished in the times of the apostles, did not lack freedom entirely, but partially. For he possessed it in his writing, but lacked it in his life (libertas . . . adfuit scribenti, viventi defuit).” 5. On receptions in this period see esp. Ross (1974), 122–31; Trillitzsch (1971), 1.120–221, 2.362–419. On Christian receptions in particular see Mastandrea (1988); Momigliano (1955). 6. On this early manifestation of the “two Senecas” problem, not resolved till the 16th c., see Bocciolini Palagi (1978b), 217–18, 220–22. 7. See Ross (1974), 121–22. On Apuleius see S. J. Harrison (2000), 166–67. 8. For discussion of Tertullian’s label see Ross (1974), 131. On Lactantius’ Seneca see Ogilvie (1978), 73–77. 9. See Ramelli (2002), 512–13; Momigliano (1955), 14–15.

182

receptions

The Seneca-Socrates Herm During this period the tradition reflects little or nothing of Tacitus and Dio. But roughly contemporary with Dio (that is, from the early third century) is the double herm of Seneca and Socrates (Fig. 7.1) unearthed on the Caelian hill in 1813, probably once displayed in a private garden or patio. As Paul Zanker has argued, the less-than-life-size image labeled SENECA may derive ultimately from a public honorific statue commissioned at the pinnacle of his career, in the veristic style of its period, emphasizing both aristocratic status and political activity—for example, in the fullness of his lips and face and in the energetic twist of his neck (2000, 54–58).10 Although its discovery initially shocked interpreters accustomed to the familiar iconography of a bearded and emaciated senex, the portrait is understandable both in terms of Seneca’s characteristic rejection of an outwardly “philosophical” look (Ep. 5.1–4) and given that the “mask of Socrates” was not donned by Roman philosophers till after Seneca’s time (cf. Zanker 1995, 258). It is worth noting, also, that it is remarkably similar to a well-known portrait bust of Cicero. The subsequent juxtaposition of Seneca with Socrates in the double herm, however, serves to make explicit the emulation of Socrates that is implicit in the death’s details. This does not entail a complete assimilation of the two men: the visible differences allow for a dialectical relationship between Greek and Roman, Socratic and Stoic.11 But it implies their common membership in the catalogues of exemplary philosophical deaths, including as busts for veneration—a practice alluded to already in Seneca’s writings.12

Jerome: Insertion into Christian History The fullest mentions of the death were in Jerome and Boethius. Jerome mentions the death in two separate contexts, possibly drawing on a lost account from Suetonius’ De viris illustribus. In Jerome’s De viris illustribus (written 392–93) there is a brief entry on Seneca—one of the few non-Christians—that would later be excerpted in countless manuscripts of Seneca’s writings as a Vita Senecae (De vir ill. 12):13 Lucius Annaeus Seneca of Corduba, pupil of Sotion the Stoic and uncle of the poet Lucan, lived a very moderate life (continentissimae vitae fuit). I would not have placed him in my catalogue of the holy

10. On the herm see also Kamp (1935); Faider (1921), 1–3. It was a lonely survivor of the Neronian damnatio memoriae, argues dell’Orto (1999), 29, 39–40. 11. See Reydams-Schils (2005), 113. Dionigi (1999), vii–xxi uses the double herm to reinforce the sense of Seneca himself as an “erma bifronte,” riven by dichotomies. 12. See Staley (2002), 282–83, citing Ep. 64.9. 13. For commentary see Halton (1999). On Jerome’s Vita Senecae and its centrality, see Albanese (2004).

tracing the tradition

183

figure 7.1 Double herm of Seneca and Socrates (early third century). Berlin, Staatliche Museen, Antikensammlung, Inv. Sk 391. Courtesy of Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, NY.

(in catalogo sanctorum), had I not been moved by those letters of Paul to Seneca and of Seneca to Paul, which many have read (nisi me epistolae illae provocarent, quae leguntur a plurimis, Pauli ad Senecam et Senecae ad Paulum). In these, when he was the teacher of Nero and the most powerful man of that time, he says that he wishes to occupy the position among his own that Paul occupies among Christians. Two years before Peter and Paul were crowned with martyrdom, he was killed by Nero (hic ante biennium quam Petrus et Paulus martyrio coronarentur, a Nerone interfectus est). Jerome justifies Seneca’s inclusion by appealing to the Seneca-Paul correspondence—the earliest reference to this surviving text, whose status as a forgery would be fully recognized only in the fifteenth century.14 The paraphrase given here by Jerome, that Seneca “says he wishes to occupy the position among his own that Paul occupies among Christians” (optare se dicit eius loci apud suos,

14. See Bocciolini Palagi (1985), (1978a), 11, dating it between 324 and 392; Momigliano (1955); Faider (1921), 128–29. Its authenticity is revisited by Ramelli (2004).

184

receptions

cuius sit Paulus apud Christianos), is indicative of the correspondence’s significance in the minds of Christian readers.15 The historical proximity of the two famous letter writers (especially because Seneca’s brother Gallio, as proconsul in Achaia, listened to the charges against Paul; cf. Acts 18.12–17) offered the possibility of an epistolary meeting of minds. In the correspondence itself, each party endows the other with authoritative roles: Paul greets Seneca as “most faithful teacher” (devotissime magister, Ep. 10.9), and Seneca describes Paul as “a man so great and loved by God” (vir tantus et a Deo dilectus, Ep. 12.2). The reader is enticed with a quasi-pedagogical relationship unfolding amid successive historical events, in which Seneca nurtures Paul’s Latin style (cf. Ep. 9.9) and Seneca, together with the imperial household and Nero himself, is exposed to Pauline doctrine. The imagined outcome—Rome’s open friendship with Christianity—is prevented by the persecution of Christians and Jews after the Great Fire (Ep. 11.16–17), and by the apparent termination of the correspondence in 64 or soon thereafter, no doubt adhering to the facts of Seneca’s demise. As Jerome presents it, Seneca did not live long enough to convert Nero and prevent the deaths of Paul and Peter, or to be crowned with martyrdom himself. Jerome’s placement of Seneca’s death in the vicinity of Christian martyrdoms, however, is implicitly in keeping with the general homologies between pagan and Christian discourses on the welcoming of death, and indeed with Seneca’s far-reaching influence on martyrological writings, most evident in the poems of Prudentius.16 One of the central topoi of martyrdom, the notion of the spectaculum Deo, came from the account of Cato’s death in the De providentia (Prov. 2.9).17 In locating Seneca’s death close to the deaths of Peter and Paul, Jerome probably had one eye on his earlier written Chronicon (c. 380–81). Under the twelfth year of Nero’s reign, we read: “L. Annaeus Seneca of Corduba, adviser of Nero and uncle of the poet Lucan, perished by cutting of veins and drinking of poison” (L. Annaeus Seneca Cordubensis, praeceptor Neronis et patruus Lucani poetae, incisione venarum et veneni haustu perit, Chron. 184.13–16).18 Later, under the fourteenth year, we read that Nero undertook the first persecution of Christians at Rome, “in which Peter and Paul gloriously died” (185.9–10). This is a somewhat drier presentation of the chronological relationship between the deaths of Seneca and the two saints than in the De viris illustribus. But the more detailed description of Seneca’s death in the elegant chiastic phrase incisione

15. On Jerome’s (mis)quotation of Ep. 12.11–12 see Momigliano (1955), 14. 16. On the influence (including from Senecan tragedy) see von Albrecht (2004), 161–62; Deproost (1999); Roberts (1993), 155, 167; Palmer (1989), 188–93. On pagan models for martyrdom more generally see Edwards (2007), 209–20; Bowersock (1995); Perkins (1995), 15–40. 17. E.g., Lactant. De mort pers. 16.6–7: quam iucundum illud spectaculum Deo fuit. See also Deproost (1999), 169; Cancik (1967), 108–9. 18. For commentary see Donaldson (1996). On Jerome’s synchronizing project see Feeney (2007), 28–32.

tracing the tradition

185

venarum et veneni haustu (“by cutting of veins and drinking of poison”) recalls the death in more detail, though without mention of the bath. Nero’s exact motive for killing Seneca, also, is not made explicit anywhere in Jerome—for example, he locates the Pisonian conspiracy two years prior, and this is connected only with Lucan’s death (Chron. 183.14–17). The vacuum of motive left by Jerome’s text would be filled by later interpreters in interesting ways.

Diverse Responses in Christian Poetry Seneca’s death also offers us a chance to see how Christian authors responded to a pagan philosophical embrace of death that seemingly lacked the assurance of an afterlife. At some point before the ninth century, an otherwise unknown writer by the name of Honorius Scholasticus wrote a twenty-eight-line poem in elegiac couplets, Contra epistolas Senecae (Anth. Lat. 666). Comparing Seneca’s teaching of “Lucillus” unfavorably with the teaching he himself has received from his addressee, the bishop Jordanes, Honorius alludes to Seneca’s death (lines 17–20): ille mihi commenta dedit te vera docente; nec dedit infida quae sibi mente tulit. nam cum †de pretio mortis regnante perenni† Lucillum inbueret, hac sine morte perit. He gave me falsehoods where you taught me the truth, nor did he give what he took for himself with his faithless mind. For while he was instructing Lucillus about the eternal reigning prize of death[?], he perished without this death. Although scholars have puzzled over this difficult text,19 the dichotomy appears to be that Seneca teaches a misguided doctrine concerning death, whereas Jordanes teaches a death in imitation of Christ that is followed by everlasting life. Here perit (“perished”) hints at annihilation or damnation. Yet Christians seeking a less alienating image of Seneca’s death may have been responsible for the survival of an epigram of uncertain date (again, first attested in the ninth century) that purports to be Seneca’s dying words and came to be known as the Epitaphium Senecae (Anth. Lat. 667):20 cura, labor, meritum, sumpti pro munere honores, ite, alias posthac sollicitate animas. me procul a vobis deus evocat: ilicet actis rebus terrenis hospita terra vale! corpus avara tamen sollemnibus accipe saxis, namque animam caelo reddimus, ossa tibi. 19. See Mastandrea (1988), 59–77, esp. 70–73. 20. On the varying attributions see Flammini (2000), 103–6; Romano (1983).

186

receptions Worry, toil, reward, and honors received for service, be gone, henceforth wrack other souls with care. I am called by the god far away from you: that’s it, my things on earth are done, farewell to earth, my host! But receive my body, greedily, amid your solemn stones, since I confer my soul to the sky, my bones to you.

The speaker combines a philosophical detachment from worldly goods with an optimistic view of the afterlife. Resonances with Seneca’s writings have been taken by some to indicate Senecan authorship,21 but the poem may be the work of a writer with a Christian eschatological doctrine in mind. It would later be included together with Jerome’s Vita Senecae and the Seneca-Paul correspondence as part of the prefatory material in Senecan manuscripts.

Boethius and the Flexible Example If Jerome and other Christians made the best they could of imperfect correspondences between Seneca and themselves, in the sixth century Boethius identified Seneca’s fate as both a positive and a negative example from the pagan philosophical tradition. Although conspicuously silent on Seneca as a source for his Consolatio philosophiae,22 Boethius twice has Philosophy invoke Seneca’s death. In book 1 she reminds Boethius that he is not the first to have been persecuted for her sake: “But if you are unaware of the flight of Anaxagoras, the poison of Socrates, or the tortures of Zeno on the grounds that they are foreign, still you should have been aware of Canius, Seneca, Soranus and their like, who are neither old in the tradition nor lacking in fame (at Canios, at Senecas, at Soranos quorum nec pervetusta nec incelebris memoria est, scire potuisti)” (Cons. 1.3). In this catalogue, with its echoes of Roman exemplary discourse as seen in Seneca and others, the mention of Canios here evidently summons up Julius Canus, whose death is known to us principally through the De tranquillitate animi (14.4–6).23 In book 3, however, Seneca’s death is part of a cautionary tale. Setting out to refute the claim that “kingship and friendship with kings can make a person powerful” (3.5.1), Philosophy recalls (Cons. 3.5.25–26): Nero forced Seneca, a member of his household and his adviser, to exercise his freedom in choosing his death (Nero Senecam familiarem praeceptoremque suum ad eligendae mortis coegit arbitrium). . . . But both [Seneca and a second exemplary figure, Papirianus] could have abdicated their own power—Seneca even attempted to give back to Nero his riches and to take himself into retirement. But while power 21. Romano’s (1983) arguments are greeted with skepticism by Vottero (1998), 83 n. 397. 22. See Ross (1974), 130. For commentary on Boethius see Gruber (1978), 105–7, 257–58. 23. Gruber (1978) ad loc. suggests that Boethius may also have known of Canus from the lost Caligula books of Tacitus’ Annals. As Roller (2001), 107 n. 75 notes, Canus’ death is also mentioned in Plut. fr. 211 Sandbach.

tracing the tradition

187

itself was dragging his character to ruin, neither accomplished what he wanted (neuter quod voluit effecit). Here the speaker deflates Seneca’s prestige by pointing to the coercion of his suicide (cf. “forced,” coegit) and, more subtly, by closing with the remark, neuter quod voluit effecit. Although the latter phrase technically applies both to Seneca and Papirianus, it has a special connection with Seneca, given the phrase’s use by Quintilian at the conclusion of his account of Seneca’s style: “His nature was one worthy of better intentions; what he intended, he accomplished (quod voluit effecit)” (Inst. 10.1.131).24 In using the phrase to characterize Seneca’s quandary Boethius may have been aware of Quintilian’s use of the phrase, but possibly also of its provenance in Seneca’s De beneficiis (2.31.2; 32.4): even Seneca, the master gift giver, could not succeed in giving back Nero’s gifts. Later references to Seneca’s death, sometimes drawing on the tradition of commentary that grew around Boethius, would seek new but essentially parallel ways to portray it as a cautionary tale.

Medieval After a virtual hiatus in the ninth and tenth centuries, the tradition on Seneca’s life and writings reappears in the scholastic renaissance of the twelfth century, in tandem with a more frequent copying of his texts.25 During this period Seneca was a beneficiary of his own oft-quoted advice: probatos . . . semper lege (“Always read approved/proven [authors],” Ep. 2.4). As works by Seneca were reproduced, excerpted, and forged, his authorial reputation was burnished by the biographic information and colorful illuminations that appeared in his manuscripts, often emphasizing his death. At the same time, his death maintained a regular place in christianized chronicles of world history, where its connections with the history of martyrdoms were explored inventively in word and image.

Manuscript Materials: The Death as Preface From at least the eleventh century, numerous manuscripts of Seneca’s works, typically containing one or both halves of the corpus of Epistulae morales (Epp. 1–88 and 89–124) together with the De clementia and De beneficiis and increasingly the Natural Questions or Apocolocyntosis (but not yet the Dialogi and tragedies),26 were accompanied by some combination of the following: 24. The parallel from Quintilian (but not from Ben.) is noted by Gruber (1978), 258; Winterbottom (1967), 83. 25. On receptions in this period overall see Reynolds (1965); also Ross (1974), 131–39. On the 12th c. in particular see Nothdurft (1963). 26. On the textual transmissions see Reynolds (1983), s.v. “The Younger Seneca.” On the Dialogi see Nothdurft (1963), 21–28.

188

receptions

the Seneca-Paul correspondence, Jerome’s Vita Senecae, and the Epitaphium Senecae.27 Each of these items had offered its own independent angle on Seneca, but now they were used as ancillaries to the reading of his texts. The intended function of such front matter happens to be explicitly stated in some of the medieval manuscripts of the pseudo-Senecan work De moribus. As Cesare Questa has documented, in one ninth-century version (probably from the British Isles) the Vita Senecae is immediately followed by a theoretical account of the types of information to be given in the accessus itself:28 . . . in what ways the truth of each particular writing is validated (quibus modis commendatur veritas uniuscuiusque scriptionis) and what names it is known by, . . . and if he had faith or lacked faith, and if he was baptized or not; if he did not have faith, the reason why his writing is received among the men of the Church; if he was not baptized, the reasons why he was not baptized; and what end he had, and if his work was famous at the time when he ended his life (et quem finem habuit, et si fuerit opus clarum in tempore in quo finivit vitam). This template (whose terms are seen already in non-Senecan contexts already in Late Antiquity) is then worked out for the example of Seneca. About the death, our medieval scholar, who is a rather disorganized storyteller, writes the following: [Seneca] was killed together with Nero’s mother and Nero’s kin, since Seneca was the teacher of Nero (quia Seneca magister fuit Neronis). Then Nero, wishing to set fire to Rome for the reason that he did not see Troy when Troy was burned—Seneca and Nero’s mother and kin forbade him (vetuit eum Seneca atque mater Neronis et cognati eius). For that reason they were killed around the time when the passion of Peter and Paul took place (ab illa causa interfecti sunt ab eo tempore in quo passio Petri et Pauli fuit). The narrator’s solution to the vacuum of information left by Jerome concerning Nero’s motive is to draw the deaths of Seneca and Agrippina (and other kin) into the aftermath of the Great Fire in 64, and to make Nero resist their criticisms of his fire starting, as well as to assimilate them to the persecuted Christians. As front matter to the De moribus, this sketch bolsters the moral authority, and the veritas, of the unbaptized Seneca.

27. Also, several versions of a De morte Senecae are recorded by Fohlen (2002), 10 in mss. from the 12th to the 15th c. 28. Bernensis bibl. vivicae 178, ff. 110v–111r. As Questa (1960b), 188 notes, the Seneca biographic material draws from Jerome’s De viris illustribus and his Chronicon.

tracing the tradition

189

By the thirteenth century, Senecan manuscripts were sometimes accompanied by illuminations. In all of the three distinct portrait types, Seneca is visualized with a white beard, like a saint or pagan intellectual.29 In one type, he is depicted studying alone. A second type, giving Seneca with Paul and Nero, and a third, giving Seneca’s death, more directly reflect the Seneca-Paul correspondence and the Vita Senecae. These images go far beyond illustration, shaping the reader’s view through their own visual language. In the death type, the regular compositional elements are a crowned Nero gesturing with his hand,30 a naked Seneca standing in a barrel bath, with arms outstretched in cruciform pose, and one or more attendants cutting the veins of his arms— never his feet. (The element of the bath, not directly mentioned by Jerome, may be known at this time from the lost Suetonian narrative or from a commentary on Boethius; on the associations of the bath in particular, see chapter 8.) One fourteenth-century version of the image is entwined in the initial “L” of Lucius Annaeus Seneca at the beginning of Jerome’s Vita, where the blood spurting from Seneca’s arms matches the rubrication of the text beside it and below it; the elements of both vein opening and (I suggest) a vessel for the hemlock flesh out the Vita’s fairly general phrase interfectus est (De vir. ill. 12), incorporating details known from other versions.31 In another manuscript the initial “S” of the first word, scribere, in the De clementia encloses Seneca, Nero, and the attendant, visibly contradicting that work’s lessons.32 A subtle dialogue between images and textual content can be seen in a thirteenth-century manuscript produced at Waltham Abbey now at Princeton University (Fig. 7.2).33 It is inserted at the beginning of the first epistle in this partial collection (= Epp. 89–124), in the “R” of the word rem with which letter 89 begins. The gaze of the dying Seneca appears to be directed toward the unidentified face in the upright stem of the “R,” whose forward gaze invokes the reader as witness—whether the face actually represents the reader; Seneca’s anima;34 or, as I suggest, Lucilius. This illumination is the last in a sequence of four in the Senecan portion of this manuscript, which represent (1) an allegorical figure of Religion trampling Ignorance underfoot (at the beginning of the De beneficiis), (2) a Wheel of Fortune with a king placed alongside more humble personages (the De remediis fortuitorum), (3) a king throwing three dice (the Ludus de morte Claudii), and (4) the image just discussed.35 In addition to 29. See dell’Orto (1999), 30–36; also Lazzi (2004). 30. Stok’s (1996), 309 suggestion that the crowned figure above is an angel is greeted with skepticism by dell’Orto (1999), 31 n. 21. In Nero’s gestures, dell’Orto, 29 sees an elocutio combined with a negative message communicated by the left hand. 31. Pal. Lat. 1538, f. 1 = dell’Orto (1999), 29–30, fig. 2; Stok (1996), 309, fig. 267. 32. Vat. Lat. 2218, f. 2 = Villa (1996), 65, fig. 30. 33. See dell’Orto (1999), 29–30; Hoffman (1970), 255–57; Reynolds (1965), 110. The ms. also contains works by Cassiodorus. On its provenance see Thompson (1907–18), 9–10; de Ricci and Wilson (1935), 887. 34. Suggested by Hoffman (1970), 257. 35. Fols. 88r, 97r, 99r, 104r.

figure 7.2 Historiated initial for Sen. Ep. 89 (thirteenth century, Waltham Abbey). Garrett Collection of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, No. 114, f. 104r. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Courtesy of Princeton University Library.

tracing the tradition

191

their resonances with the topics of their respective texts, the images establish an overarching frame of reference: the fragility of kingship. Nero’s hierarchical placement above Seneca in the fourth image has already been visually undermined by the earlier images, not only by the placement of Religion above Ignorance with which it chiastically corresponds, but also by the inversional image of the Wheel of Fortune and the implicit location of the dice-playing emperor Claudius—in the underworld (cf. Apocol. 14–15). Seneca’s moral authority as he dies is thus fortified by his authority as satirist of kings.

Catalogues and Chronicles: Revenge against the Pedagogue Seneca also inhabited a regular place in medieval texts recounting examples or narratives from the classical past. Drawing mostly on Jerome and Boethius but again deriving some details, such as the bath, from the lost Suetonius and the Boethius commentaries, a variety of authors customized the story to suit their needs. The consolatory aspect of Boethius’ version is sustained in the Elegia sive De miseria (c. 1192–93) by Henricus de Settimello, who was himself enduring hardships after his expulsion from the position of cancellarius at Arnostadt.36 The personification of Philosophy advises him on endurance (patientia) by asking (book 3, lines 547–48), nonne recordaris veluti, stimulante tyranno, moriger innocua Seneca morte perit? Do you not recall how, when the tyrant was provoking, the moralist Seneca perished by a death that did no harm? By contrast, however, a contemporary attack on Seneca’s doctrine in the Contra quattuor labyrinthos Francie of Walter of St. Victor (d. post-1180) presents the death scene as a crowning negative illustration, in which the bath indicates Seneca’s outright hedonistic reveling in death (Contr. quatt. 4.2). We will examine Walter’s version in chapter 8. But in most instances the death illustrates the complex badness of Nero. Otto of Freising in his Chronica (or Historia de duabus civitatibus; written 1143– 45) presents the death as the culmination of a quasi-Suetonian catalogue of Nero’s crimes, asking, “What is more outrageous than the one who did not refrain from the death of Seneca, his own teacher?” (quid eo sceleratius, qui magistro suo Senecae a morte non pepercit? Chron. 3.15, 153). In Otto’s mind, however, the deed is made worse by the fact that Nero was killing one who “showed that he was going to be a friend of the Christian religion” (Christianae religionis amicum se fore ostendit) and whom Jerome placed “among our citizens” (inter cives nostros). Nero’s motive is more directly anti-Christian in the thirteenth-century Chronicon mundi by Lucas of Tuy, who writes that Paul, while imprisoned 36. See Marigo (1926); also Ricklin (1997), 268–69 and Mastandrea (1988), 55–56.

192

receptions

in Rome, “converted many from the household of Nero and obtained friendship with Seneca, Nero’s teacher; for which Nero had Seneca and Lucan put to death (unde Nero Senecam & Lucanum fecit occidi).”37 A separate thread of the tradition, making no reference to Christianity, focused more closely on Nero’s mistreatment of Seneca as teacher. Already in a ninth-century commentary on Boethius we read: “Nero, however, upon becoming emperor, pretended that he was afraid of his teacher in childhood (fingebat se quasi magistrum timeret in pueritia). So when the opportunity presented itself he commanded him to choose a manner of death for himself (nacta occasione mandavit ei, ut sibi genus mortis eligeret). He, having his fill of food and drink, entered the bath and had the vein of each arm cut, and drinking poison from his ring (de anulo venenum bibens), died.”38 This differs in several ways from versions we have seen before, and most conspicuously in the pretended revenge against the teacher. The motive is further elaborated by Vincent de Beauvais (d. c. 1260) in his Speculum historiale: “A report is given that Nero himself, on one occasion looking back at Seneca and recalling in his memory the blows that he had inflicted on him since childhood, gave a roar and, as if desiring to seek revenge from him for his injuries, yet still entirely deferential to his adviser (tanquam iniuriarum ultionem expetere de illo cupiens, sed tanquam preceptori utcumque deferens), allowed him the choice of selecting whatever manner of death for himself he wanted” (Spec. hist. 9.9/10.9).39 Nero now has a heartfelt (rather than pretended) desire to take revenge for the stripes that are still visible on his body, though this is also balanced by his lingering courtesy—a detail that helps for explaining Seneca’s freedom to choose. This configuration of the death scene goes beyond the focus on Seneca’s pedagogical profile seen already in the ancient historians, heightening the symmetries—as well as the ultimate asymmetry—between didactic discipline and political violence. From this background emerged two especially prominent thirteenth-century versions. Jacobus de Voraigne, in his collection of hagiographies in the Legenda aurea (c. 1260), retells Seneca’s death as a sequel to the death of Peter (Leg. aur. 84) and dramatizes the scene with exchanges of direct speech and multiple creative details (84.212–20): It is read in a certain history, however apocryphal, that when Seneca, his teacher, was hoping for a worthy payment for his labors (condignam mercedem laboris sui speraret), Nero ordered him to select for himself the tree from whose branch he wished to be hanged (ipsum eligere in cuius arboris ramo suspendium affectaret), saying that this was the reward he would be receiving from him for his labors.

37. Quoted from Blüher (1969), 58. 38. Quoted from Blüher (1969), 56 with n. 6. 39. See Mastandrea (1988), 55; Langlois (1973), 130; Faider (1921), 130.

tracing the tradition

193

And when Seneca sought to know how he had come to deserve the punishment of death, [Nero] had a sharp sword slashed about above his head (acutum gladium super eius verticem crebro vibrari fecit). Seneca, however, avoided the threatening sword by ducking his head, intensely afraid of undergoing the danger of death (nutu capitis minanti cedebat gladio, vehementer metuens periclitari mortis periculo). Nero said to him: “Teacher, why do you avoid the threatening sword with a duck of your head?” To which Seneca replied: “I am a human being and for this reason I fear death and die unwillingly (homo sum et ideo mortem vereor et invitus morior).” To which Nero replied: “I fear you still, just as I grew accustomed to fear you as a boy; thus while you live I will not be able to live in peace (sic adhuc ego te metuo ut puer metuere consuevi, quare te vivente quiete non potero vivere).” And Seneca replied: “If it is necessary for me to die, at least grant me that I may choose the manner of death which I wish.” To whom Nero [said]: “You may quickly choose, provided that you do not postpone dying (festinus eligas, tantum mori ne differas).” Then Seneca, making a bath of water, had himself chopped on each arm, and in this way, from the flow of very much blood, he ended his life in the same place. Seneca’s freedom to choose which tree to hang from,40 his near death from the slashing of the sword, and Nero’s impatience in awaiting Seneca’s choice all seem to expose Nero’s act of murder for what it is. (At the same time, the somewhat pathetic Seneca character, uncharacteristically greedy for payment and fearful of death, is faced with a Nero who feels justified—the swinging of the sword appears to be an implicit reciprocation of the pedagogue’s use of corporal punishment.) But if Jacobus lingers over the details of Nero’s coercion, this does not stand in the way of his imposing an interpretive closure that appeals to the death’s status as technically a suicide (Leg. aur. 84.221): et sic quodam presagio Seneca nomen habuit, quasi se necans, quia quodammodo licet coactus manu propria se necavit. And thus Seneca had his name as a sort of prophecy, as if killing himself (se necans), since in a sense at least, although under coercion, he killed himself (se necavit) with his own hand. Seneca’s name comes true, even though his death was initiated by someone else.41

40. On the tree as one of several medieval additions, see Graf (1923), 591–93. 41. On the etymology’s wide circulation see Mastandrea (1988), 55; Panizza (1984), 73–74. On the function of etymologies in Leg. aur. see Ryan (1993), xvii.

194

receptions

Within just a few years of the Legenda the death was also retold as part of the Roman de la Rose. In the discourse of Reason—a portion composed by Jean de Meun (c. 1275)—the speaker seeks to illustrate the proposition that Fortune destroys the good and keeps the evil in power (RR 6175–77). After briefly mentioning Socrates (just as in Boethius), she describes Nero’s parricides (6185–250) and, in explicitly Christian terms, states that Nero “made a martyr of Seneca” (Seneque mist il a martire, 6211), and that Seneca explained his choice of the bath by saying, “Let me die in the warm water and let my cheery and joyful soul return to God its maker (E que m’ame joieuse e baude / A Deu qui la fourma se rende), and let him defend it from other torments” (6219–22). The suicidal aspect of the death is actively suppressed: “Nero had the bath made ready (Fist Nerons le baing aprester), and had the good man put in it, and then made to bleed” (6224–26). At the end of this narrative Reason proceeds to give a unique characterization of Nero’s desire for revenge against his teacher (6234–38): “Mais ce ne deit,” dist il, “pas estre, Ne n’est pas bel en nule place Que reverence a ome face Nus on, puis qu’il est empereres, Tant seit ses maistres ne ses peres.” “But,” [Nero] said, “this should not be, and it is no way fine to show reverence to another man after one has become emperor, not even to one’s teacher or one’s father.” Nero grapples with his habitual reflexes of rising to his feet “whenever he saw his teacher approaching” (Quant son maistre voait venir, 6241) and explicitly abhors his conflicted identity as emperor-pupil. The death also found a place in the rich illumination tradition that accompanied manuscripts and early printed editions of such works as the Roman and the Speculum historiale.42 The iconography of the Seneca manuscripts discussed above was only partially replicated, as the scene was presented taking place within vividly realized architectural and social spaces of the court. In one manuscript of the Roman from the end of the fifteenth century (Fig. 7.3), Nero’s all-powerful gaze is communicated in the image of a curtain drawn back from the bath, marking the political intrusion on Seneca’s private existence. The image of the beardless and feminized Seneca here, resembling contemporary portraits of Paulina more than himself (cf. Fig. 7.5), and with his hand across his heart in prayer, represents a shift in his basic physiognomy, in which contemporary cultural conventions—Seneca’s identity as preudome (RR 6245) and 42. On the Roman visual tradition in general see Fleming (1969), esp. 29–36.

tracing the tradition

195

figure 7.3 Illumination for Roman de la Rose (c. 1490–1500). British Library, Harley 4425, fol. 59v. © British Library Board. All rights reserved.

the return of his soul to God—override any concern to establish either his old age or his profile as a philosopher. This version is also distinctive for its selfconscious realization of the scalpel in a form resembling a pen, with the wielder of the scalpel adopting a pose that directly mimics the implied gesture of the manuscript’s own rubricator. The scene is incorporated into a more synoptic image of Neronian history in an illumination of Vincent’s Speculum historiale (Fig. 7.4), where Seneca bleeding in the tub is juxtaposed with the examination of Agrippina’s corpse and womb (a rich tradition in its own right)43 and a 43. See Bergdolt (2002), esp. 269–73.

figure 7.4 Illumination for Vincentis Bellovacensis Speculum historiale, trans. Jean de Vignay (Paris, 1463), BnF MS Français 50, f. 349. Courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France.

tracing the tradition

197

backdrop of Rome in flames. The image’s continuous narration depicts Nero at three successive stages, culminating in his suicide at top left.

Italian Renaissance Over the next two centuries, from Dante to Erasmus, Seneca’s profile was dramatically reshaped by commentators, biographers, and emulators.44 Amid the more general revaluation of the classical past and reengagement with it on its own terms, the possibility of using Seneca as a stylistic and moral exemplar was fueled by, and fueled, a deeper and broader intimacy with his oeuvre, now encompassing the Dialogi and tragedies, not to mention the rediscovery of Tacitus’ Annals, which supplied more precise historical detail. But because humanism also gave rein to the creative imagination to explore resemblances and encounters between past and present and between pagan, secular, and Christian, in some cases Seneca’s longstanding image as a friend of Paul, while it lasted, provided the point of departure for a more extensive christianization— including conversion.45

How Many Senecas? During this period Seneca’s identity itself became a topic of investigation. Dante’s reference to Tullio e Seneca morale amid the spiriti magni in Limbo (Inf. 4.141) raised big questions, and not just about whether Dante ranked Cicero or Seneca higher. Different explanations were offered for morale in the exegetical tradition: some saw Seneca being identified as the supreme moralist, whereas others saw the moralist being distinguished from another Seneca, the tragedian.46 Recent scholarship has elucidated how the separate existence of (1) a prose Seneca (responsible for the philosophical works and the declamations) and (2) a tragedian Seneca, was “established” by Coluccio Salutati in 1371, citing Sidonius Apollinaris, though it had already been suggested by Boccaccio on the basis of Martial.47 This division of labor was also in keeping with Salutati’s skepticism about the authorship of the Octavia as a work seemingly depicting its own author (not to mention alluding to details of Nero’s death; cf. Oct. 733); this could be solved by invoking a second author—that is, (2) above—although some assigned the Octavia to yet a third author.48

44. On this period overall see Panizza (1984); Ross (1974), 140–43. 45. See Momigliano (1955), 23–26. 46. See Panizza (1984), 59–61. But Mezzadroli (1990), 3–29 sees Dante’s Seneca morale subsuming both philosopher and tragedian. 47. On these bifurcations of Seneca see Panizza (1984), 52–53; Bocciolini Palagi (1978b), 228–30; Martellotti (1972); Billanovich (1947), 109–16. 48. On these doubts about the Octavia see Goldberg (2003), 14–17; Ferri (2003a), 6 n. 15; Martellotti (1972), 160–65.

198

receptions

Within the terrain established by the two-Seneca distinction, different names and identities were assigned to the tragedian: Boccaccio refers to him as Marcus Annaeus Seneca (on the basis of Helv. 18.4), whereas others referred to him as Mella [sic]; his relationship to Seneca (son? brother?) was debated.49 Ironically, the preface to book 2 of Seneca (the Elder)’s Controversiae, with its references to the author’s three sons, could be used to show that “Seneca” had progeny. Although new light was cast on the problem during the fifteenth century, when the biographer Paolo Pompilio was the first to openly suspect that the declamations may have had a different author than the other prose works, humanists and scholars as late as the seventeenth century would persist in assigning only some, not all, of the tragedies to our “Lucius.”50 This saga had ramifications for how the death should be understood. The image of a “single super-Seneca,” as Stephen Hinds terms him (2004, 162), comprising the Elder and the Younger rolled into one, entailed that Seneca must have been well over a hundred years old at the time of his death (Sicco Polenton calculates 108, Gasparino Barzizza 114), because the author of the Controversiae had mentioned that only the civil wars had prevented him from being “present in [Cicero’s] famous atrium” (in illo atriolo . . . adesse, Contr. 1.praef.11). The idea of a super-Seneca lasting till Nero killed him surely intensified his potential to serve as a symbolic conduit of memory between Republic and Principate—or, in the case of the Seneca-Cicero missed connection, a tantalizing gap in that memory.51 The notion of a tragedian son, in turn, belonged to a fantasy, voiced by Sicco Polenton (who wrote a separate biography of him) among others, concerning the motive for the writing of the tragedies and the Octavia: “In order to avenge his injury (uliciscendam ad iniuriam), he wrote the tragedies which I have mentioned as soon as he was able to do so freely and safely (quam primum potuit libere ac tute), against the deceased Nero” (Script. ill. Lat. ling. 116). The “injury” being avenged would have included the father Seneca’s death.

Contrasting Views in the Age of Petrarch Boccaccio communicated the two-Seneca distinction to Petrarch at a pivotal stage in his career. In the De vita solitaria, written c. 1351 when he still believed Seneca to be the author of the tragedies, Petrarch had lamented Seneca’s admission “in a certain tragedy” (in quadam tragoedia)—obviously the Octavia—that he made a mistake in giving up his solitude on Corsica in order to return to power; indeed, Petrarch argues, “he himself saw so far ahead his own fate and heavy ruin, and entrusted it to writing” (casum ipse suum et ruinam gravem, tanto

49. See Mayer (1994), 152; Martellotti (1972), 155–60. 50. On Pompilio’s distinction see Panizza (1977), 319. Father and son were fully disambiguated only by Raffaele Volterrano in 1559; cf. Bocciolini Palagi (1978b), 231 n. 3. On the carving up of the tragic corpus, see Mayer (1994); also Ferri (2003a), 6 n. 15. 51. Petrarch alludes to Contr. 1.praef.11 at Fam. 24.4.6 (addressed to Cicero); on which, see Hinds (2004), 163.

tracing the tradition

199

ante praeviderit literisque mandavit, De vita solit. 2.8.3).52 Also in 1351, Petrarch had passed on to Boccaccio an early version of the famous letter (Fam. 24.5) in which he takes his beloved Seneca to task for having been Nero’s teacher and, hypocritically, having attacked him through the most serious genre of tragedy: “It is well known (notum est),” he reminds Seneca, “how bitingly, how poisonously, how sharply, you wrote this play against him” (Fam. 24.5.16). (Petrarch elsewhere [Fam. 1.1.43] admits that he had written this letter to Seneca precisely after reading the Octavia.) As a consequence Petrarch shows little sympathy for Seneca over his death; in a striking echo of the Senecan quod voluit effecit topos that we have already seen turned against Seneca’s death by Quintilian and Boethius, he says of Seneca’s perilous relationship with Nero, “This certainly was the wish of your judgment (votum hoc utique iudicii tui fuit). You cannot accuse Fortune: you found what you had wished for (quod optaveras invenisti)” (Fam. 24.5.14). Boccaccio, however, writing to Petrarch some years after this early version, had drawn attention to the Martial passage. Thus, in a later redaction of Fam. 24.5 from 1365, now under the sway of the two-Senecas model, Petrarch inserted a qualification (§§16–17):53 —unless perhaps the belief is true that the author of those tragedies is not you but another of your name (tui nominis alterum . . . auctorem). For the Spaniards actually attest that Corduba had two Senecas (nam et duos Senecas Cordubam habuisse hispani etiam testes sunt), and one passage in the Octavia (for that is the tragedy’s name) supports this suspicion. If we agree, which would help in the present case, you are free from this blame. As for [the Octavia author’s] style, he is in no way your inferior, whoever he is, even if he is second to you in age and in name (quod ad stilum, nichil ille te inferior, quisquis est, evo licet secundus ac nomine). As this addition makes clear, Petrarch did not doubt the quality of the Octavia. He was relieved, however, that Seneca could exhibit less moral inconsistency. The discovery also led him to reassess his own literary preferences. In the list of favorite books that Petrarch had sketched as early as 1335, Seneca is second only to Cicero, and the tragedies (Traged(ie)) are listed along with various prose titles, whereas in a later version the list is revised to Ad Lucillu(m) (et) c(etera) p(re)t(er) trag(edias).54 The removal of the tragedies may have helped to simplify

52. See Martellotti (1972), 153–54, who notes the direct echo of Oct. 379: gravius ut ruerem. Petrarch’s reading of the Octavia probably also informs his use of Seneca’s death as a negative example (along the lines of Boethius) in De remediis fortuitorum 1.86 and Rerum memorandorum libri 3.3, 3.42. 53. On the 1365 redaction of Fam. see Martellotti (1972), 151; on changes in Petrarch’s knowledge, Bocciolini Palagi (1978b), 228–30. 54. See Ullman (1973), 118–19.

200

receptions

and sustain Seneca’s value, despite Petrarch’s persisting reservations about his life. We will return to his tempestuous relationship with Seneca in chapters 9 and 10. Petrarch’s perspective on Seneca is not particularly representative of the age. Early in the same century, Alberto Mussato (d. 1329), unencumbered by the two-Senecas model, had written commentaries on the tragedies that treated them as moral and Christian allegories, and he also imitated them in his own play, Ecerinis.55 Mussato’s portrayal of Seneca as Christianorum fautor tacitus (“a silent fan of the Christians”) was extended by Giovanni Colonna, who in his Vita Senecae (c. 1330–1338) declares, “I have often believed that this man was a Christian” (hunc sepe credidi Christianum fuisse)—where Seneca’s Christianity is presented not as a demonstrable fact but as a matter of faith on the part of the interpreter.56 Toward the end of the century, Seneca’s assumed Christianity was mapped onto the retelling of his death by Domenico de’Peccioli. In the introduction to his commentary on the Epistulae morales, Peccioli seeks a “spiritual sense” in the etymology of Seneca’s name from se necare.57 He quotes scripture to explain that Seneca comes “from killing his very self, obviously in the cutting off of pleasures, desires, and worldly passions (a necando se ipsum scilicet in voluptatibus et cupiditatibus et mundanis affectibus resecatis); for thus had he learned from the teaching of Paul given from the heavenly teacher: ‘Who follows me, let him deny his very self (qui sequitur me abneget semetipsum [Matt. 16.24]).’ ” Peccioli also quotes Galatians 5.24: “Those who are of Christ, have crucified their flesh with its vices and desires (carnem suam crucifixerunt cum vitiis et concupiscentiis).”58 Italian receptions of Seneca can be compared with contemporary representations elsewhere, such as in Chaucer. A version of Seneca’s life and death arises in the Monk’s Tale De casibus virorum illustrium as part of the account of Nero’s reign and decline (MT 3292–3315). Although the Monk cites Suetonius as a source for Nero, the version closely resembles the version in the Roman de la Rose, presenting the emperor as irked by his obligation, in youth, to rise in the presence of “his maister” (3308–11).59 But the most distinctive aspect is the description of Seneca’s lessons with which the anecdote begins (3292–99): In yowthe a maister hadde this emperour To teche hym letterure and curteisye, For of moralitee he was the flour, As in his tyme, but if bookes lye; And whil this maister hadde of hum maistrye, 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 387–89.

On Mussato see Sottili (2004), 676–78; Mayer (1994), 155–56; Panizza (1984), 55–59. Quoted from Panizza (1984), 63–65. See also Sottili (2004), 667–78; Mastandrea (1988), 54 n. 11. See Panizza (1984), 73. See Panizza (1984), 74 n. 90. For subtle tracing of Chaucer’s sources (particularly the Alphabetum narrationum) see DiMarco (1994),

tracing the tradition

201

He maked hym so konnyng and so sowple That longe tyme it was er tirannye Or any vice dorste on hum uncowple. This emphasis on Seneca’s teachings resonates with other allusions to “Senec” throughout the Canterbury Tales, in which characters often incriminate themselves through patently hypocritical moralisms. Here in the death scene, the description of Seneca as the “flour, / As in his tyme” has the tone of a backhanded compliment, and the terms “konnyng” and “sowple” do not entail that Seneca has taught Nero a genuinely moral lesson, and may imply a tyrannical strategy.60 Chaucer’s Seneca, in his own way, is no less morally problematic than the Seneca portrayed by Petrarch, even if Petrarch’s highly personal engagement with the model of Seneca differs from Chaucer’s insertion of Seneca into his characters’ world of knowledge. A more positive approach to Seneca is seen in a thirty-five-line hexameter poem, Laus Pauli et Senecae, written by the Carmelite prior Johannes von Hildesheim (d. 1375).61 Characterizing Seneca and Paul as having two bodies but “one mind” (unica mens, line 5) conjoined through epistolography and then persecuted and destroyed by an Antichrist Nero, Johannes laments what might have been and concludes (23–25), sed Nero tantorum vitam rapiendo virorum eripuit nobis, heu! dogmata multa salutis, aurea dulcia grata salubria prospera cuncta. But Nero, alas, in seizing the life of such great men, snatched from us many tenets of salvation, golden, sweet, welcome, wholesome, beneficial one and all. Johannes charts a contrafactual history of good Roman rule and Christian prosperity that Nero, “like the image of Satan” (ut sathane simulacrum, 19), alone prevented—a simplicity of vision with regard to Seneca that echoes the Italian christianizers, not the ambivalent portraits in Petrarch and Chaucer.

Boccaccio: Tacitus Rediscovered and Reinterpreted A potential boost to knowledge about Seneca had come when Boccaccio, in his secretive explorations of the library at Montecassino in 1370, unearthed a manuscript containing the later Annals of Tacitus.62 Boccaccio made use of Tacitus in his Commento di Dante (c. 1374), where he gives virtually the entire Tacitean account of Seneca’s death in Italian translation followed by Jerome’s

60. On this aspect of Seneca here and elsewhere in Chaucer see G. G. Wilson (1993), 138. 61. See P. G. Schmidt (2005). 62. On Boccaccio’s use of the Senecan material in particular, see Panizza (1984), 49, 67–69.

202

receptions

Vita Senecae, and then questions Dante’s classification of Seneca among the damned (Comm. di Dant. 403): I am driven somewhat to have good hope for his salvation (mi sospinge alquanto a sperar bene della sua salute), by almost the final act of his life: entering into the very hot water, he said that he was sacrificing that water to Jove the Liberator. It seems to me that these words could be understood in this sense: that although he had received the baptism in the faith which our saints call Flaminis [“of the spirit”] (quantunque il battesimo della fede avesse, il quale i nostri santi chiamano Flaminis), not having been reborn according to the common usage of Christians in baptism by water and in the Holy Spirit (non essendo rigenerato secondo il comune uso de’cristiani nel battesimo dell’acqua e dello Spirito Santo), he consecrated that water in a baptismal font to Jove the Liberator—that is, to Jesus Christ, he who was truly the liberator of the human race in his death and in his resurrection (quell’acqua in fonte battesimale consegrasse a Giove liberatore, cioè a Gesù Cristo, il quale veramente fu liberatore dell’umana generazione nella sua morte, e nella resurrezione). The name “Jove” is no obstacle to this, since elsewhere it has been shown splendidly to fit God: indeed, to fit God and no other creature. And so [it seems to me] that he consecrated [the water] in this way, and bathed in this, and became a Christian in a visible sacrament corresponding to how he was [already] in his mind (divenuto cristiano col sacramento visibile, come con la mente era). Now, it is permitted to each to believe of this what he wishes (Ora di questo è ciascuno licito quello crederne che gli pare). Boccaccio thus pores over the Tacitean account to discover Christian gestures, the bath providing a visible baptism in water (fluminis) to correspond to the de facto baptism in spirit ( flaminis) that Seneca had already undergone in light of his tacit faith.63 Yet the decoding of the allegory, with Jove as a cryptic reference to Christ, is still not a question of objective proof but of the interpreter’s own faith: Boccaccio’s statement, “I am driven somewhat to have good hope for his salvation” (mi sospinge alquanto a sperar bene della sua salute), retains the deeply personal aspect of Colonna’s avowal, “I have often believed that this man was a Christian” (hunc sepe credidi Christianum fuisse). At the same time, Boccaccio exploits the aura of revelation that accompanies his rediscovery of Tacitus to promote a progression in knowledge from suspicion to visible confirmation, just as the death scene is implied to make manifest what was previously invisible in Seneca’s life. The humanist effects a coincidence 63. On the latter form of baptism, supposedly applied by Dante to Cato and Statius, see Panizza (1984), 65, 69.

tracing the tradition

203

between philological and religious procedures for the incarnation of truth. This was the most influential use of the death scene to stage Seneca’s Christian conversion. In a distinct but parallel adaptation of Tacitus, Boccaccio also took up the story of Paulina, unmentioned for over a thousand years, in his De mulieribus claris (1361–62). Boccaccio adapts Paulina’s story to emphasize her status as a virtuous univira. His Paulina, for example, consciously “puts up a fight” (renitens) as she is revived (De mul. clar. 94.5). She also explicitly rejects a second marriage, and her fidelity to her husband’s memory allows her die in Seneca’s name if not in his actual moment of death (cf. “at least in name, Seneca’s wife,” nomine saltem Senece coniunx, §6). This makes her, among other things, an evocative model for the humanist who seeks to emulate a tradition in which he is prevented from participating at first hand. Boccaccio’s focus on Paulina introduced new ways of imagining the Seneca death scene as a whole. A 1473 German translation of his work is accompanied by a woodblock print (Fig. 7.5) in which Seneca and Paulina recline in separate, parallel tubs.64 Seneca already spurts blood from multiple wounds, while the standing figure is not cutting, but bandaging, Paulina’s wrists and arms. The duplication of the tubs, although it offers a strong visual reminder of the conjugal bed, also underlines the bifurcation of the death scene into Seneca’s death and Paulina’s revival—just as the resemblance between the bandages and the blood spurts, and the doctor’s position in the ambiguous role of killer/ healer, maximize the narrative’s inherent reversals. Paulina’s example was also taken up and creatively reworked by Christine de Pizan, in her Cité des dammes (1405), where Paulina appears alongside Xanthippe as proof that young women can be faithful even to older, self-killing philosopher-husbands, and dies very quickly from grief (Cité 2.22).65

The Industry of Biographers After Boccaccio, the Tacitean narrative soon played a central—though not the only—role in biographies that were produced variously to accompany commentaries on Seneca’s writings, as part of biographic collections, or as stand-alone works. The authors included Gasparino Barzizza of Padua (Vita Senecae, pre1408), Sicco Polenton also of Padua (Vita Senecae, editions in c. 1420, 1437), Canon Niccolino of Novara (Vita Senecae, 1423), the Florentine Giannozzo Manetti (Vita Socratis et Senecae, editions in c. 1440, 1456), and Paolo Pompilio of Rome (Vita Senecae, 1490). These biographies, each adapting the death in its

64. Cf. Hess (1981), 198. 65. See Reydams-Schils (2005), 175. Others include Antoine Dufour, Les vies des femmes célèbres (1504); Thomas Elyot, Defence of good women (1530); and Pierre Le Moyne, La gallerie des femmes fortes (1663); see Minois (1999), 65, 124–25.

204

receptions

figure 7.5 J. Zainer, wood engraving for Paulina chapter, Giovanni Boccaccio, Buch von den berühmten Frawen, trans. H. Steinhöwel (Ulm, 1473). Courtesy of The Scheide Library at Princeton University Library.

own way, are compared in detail by Letizia Panizza (1984),66 but several aspects integral to our story are worth outlining here. The biographers made Seneca’s death a conspectus of their broader reading in Tacitus, in other historians, and in Seneca himself. Barzizza, taking a Tacitean sentence as his frame, inserts a more extensive catalogue: “For [Seneca, addressing his friends,] said that this was the one thing remaining to complete Nero’s cruelty—that after killing his wife, mother, brother, and the Senate, and having burned the city, finally he should advance to the murder of his teacher (ut occisa uxore matre germano atque senatu urbeque incensa, novissime in necem magistri sui crassaretur)” (Vita Sen. §11; cf. Ann. 15.62.2). Crassaretur appears to be borrowed from earlier in the Tacitean narrative (cf. grassaretur, Ann. 15.60.2), and the catalogue has the analytic breadth of Suetonius’ Nero (33.1–38). Polenton, in describing how Seneca, faced with his emotional friends, “exhorted (exhortatur) individuals to courage, endurance, and constancy, and consoled (consolatur) them with great seriousness and spirit” (Vita Sen. 491), uses the same terms that Seneca uses to describe how Socrates, under the Thirty Tyrants, “consoled (consolabatur) the fathers mourning, and exhorted

66. See also Albanese (2004), 49–52, esp. on the formative role of Jerome’s Vita Senecae.

tracing the tradition

205

(exhortabatur) them in their despair for their country” (Tranq. 5.2). This method of elaboration, making Seneca die in Senecan (or Senecan-Socratic) terms, is just a more extensive version of what Tacitus had already done in the Senecan allusions that we considered in chapter 3, though the biographers take the Tacitean method to a new extreme. They also devoted special attention to Seneca’s last words, enlivening the narrative with direct speech and even incorporating the Epitaphium. “Some say,” reports Polenton, “that at this time the epigram by him (epigramma suum) was composed, ‘Worry, toil, . . . (cura, labor, . . . )’ ” (Vita Sen. 492). The allusion is to Barzizza, who had written, “He composed, while he was still in the bath, the epitaph for his tomb, it is believed” (composuit autem cum adhuc in balneo esset, sepulcri sui ut creditur epitaphium, Vita Sen. §15). Polenton, however, points out that “people in that sort of tight spot (eo in articulo) are far from having dactyls and spondees on their minds” (492–93), and Pompilio intensifies the pain endured by Seneca as he dictates—compare his novissimo quoque tormento, “at each final torment” (Vita Sen. §14), with novissimo quoque momento, “at each final moment” (Tac. Ann. 15.63.3)—and argues that the Epitaphium must thus have been the work of another writer. These writers privileged Seneca over other biographic subjects, finding his constellation of traits most definitive of their ideals. Polenton had initially published his Vita Senecae as a stand-alone sample, and in his Scriptorum illustrium Latinae linguae libri xvii (c. 1437) the Seneca life, though juxtaposed with the life of Cicero, occupied the entirety of the final, climactic book. Barzizza pits Seneca against a trio of Greeks: “I scarcely judge him to be inferior to Socrates either in his life or in his death (quem ego minime Socrate inferiorem neque vita neque morte iudico). As for Plato and Aristotle, I will not hesitate to put this man ahead (hunc hominem anteferre) of them. In their case, it is disputations (disputationes) that are praised; in his, it is advice and deeds (consilia et facta).”67 The biographers also felt the influence of a much-quoted statement of “Plutarch” in his (lost and probably pseudonymous) Institutio Traiani, that Seneca lacked a parallel among the Greeks.68 Even in Manetti’s Vita Socratis et Senecae, Seneca receives six books (4–9) to Socrates’ three (1–3). This exceptionalism was partly tied to Seneca’s Spanish identity and his ideology of clementia; indeed, Manetti was secretary to King Alfonso V of Aragon, the Spaniard who had recently captured Naples (1442), and he dedicated the second edition (1456) of his work to him. Seneca’s life and works, which Alfonso himself read and translated habitually, had become a way to advertise Spanish presences in Renaissance Italy, and Seneca’s death made him a martyr to the cause of idealized (antiNeronian) kingship.69 67. Panizza (1977), App. III.6–7. 68. E.g., Petrarch, Fam. 24.5.5; cf. Panizza (1984), 63, 70, 87. The work survived in a Latin translation by John of Salisbury, Epistola Plutarchi instruentis Traianum; cf. Blüher (1969), 62 n. 20. 69. See Stacey (2007), 174–96; Abulafia (2005), 31.

206

receptions

The biographers also took up the motif of Paulina, though unlike Boccaccio they used her not as a positive example but as a Xanthippe-like foil, or worse.70 When Barzizza describes Seneca turning from his friends to console Paulina, her tears are so copious that, he explains, “she gave to those who stood around no small material for grieving” (non parvam circumstantibus meroris materiam adiiceret); it was through consoling her that Seneca “removed a great part of grief for all those who were present” (magnam doloris partem omnibus qui ibi aderant detraxit, Vita Sen. §12). Polenton’s Seneca scarcely assents to Paulina’s death wish at all, no doubt due to Christian unease about suicide, and Paulina “did not remain brave in mind and steadfast as she had seemed to be, but as women’s wills are fragile and flexible especially in the face of danger (uti sunt mulierum praesertim in periculis fragiles ac flexibiles voluntates), when she was offered the hope of living she easily went along with the slaves and soldiers binding up her wounds” (Vita Sen. 493). Polenton thus converts the popular rumor into a reliable account, so that his subsequent report that “those who saw her were inspired to admiration” (in admirationem verterentur qui viderent) serves only to prove his point that she was a successful dissimulator. Most of all, the biographers used the death scene to calibrate their christianizations of Seneca, responding to Boccaccio’s interpretation of the libation as a baptism. Barzizza, in addition to baptizing Seneca, espouses a firmer credo than Boccaccio, saying, “I, however, have always persuaded myself thus as concerns this man . . .” (ego vero semper ita mihi de hoc homine persuasi, Vita Sen. §16; vs. Bocc. Comm. di Dant. 403). He asserts that Seneca was “one of the secret disciples” (ex occultis discipulis), comparing him to Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus (Vita Sen. §16).71 But although Seneca’s christianization in the death scene was repeated by Niccolino (much more strongly) and Polenton (less strongly), it was avoided by Manetti. Pompilio wrote his biography in full knowledge of the demonstration (by Lorenzo Valla and Leonello d’Este) that the Seneca-Paul correspondence was a forgery, and for him Seneca reverted to being a philosopher who was “almost” (prope) a Christian.72 This tendency toward de-christianization of Seneca at the end of the fifteenth century occurred in parallel with, or even helped to motivate, a shift in favor from Seneca to Cicero as a preferred exemplar for Latin prose style and moralism.73 The eventual rediscovery of Cassius Dio, whose editio princeps was not till 1548, allowed Seneca’s hegemony to fade further.

70. See Panizza (1984), 86. 71. See Panizza (1984), 75. 72. See Panizza (1984), 92–93; Momigliano (1955), 26–32. Others would posit a second, lost, real correspondence between Seneca and Paul; see Panizza, 95. 73. See Panizza (1984), 91–92; (1977), 304–5.

tracing the tradition

207

Fifteenth-Century Visual Culture During the same period, receptions continued to flourish in the visual arts, with an expansion of media. The manuscript illuminations that we considered above were followed by illuminations in early printed books, and also by woodblock prints, bringing Seneca before the eyes of a greater audience. Beyond book culture, in Jörg Syrlin the Elder’s choir stall at the Ulm Cathedral (1469– 1474), a carved oak-wood bust of Seneca (Fig. 7.6) appears alongside busts of Cicero, Virgil, Quintilian, and others, each accompanied by an inscription.74 The image of the solitary Seneca in contemporary dress cutting his own hand with a scalpel stands out in the iconographic tradition for its appropriation of the scalpel-holding gesture for Seneca himself, thereby visually conflating the dying Seneca with the writing Seneca, each of which had its own distinct medieval portrait type. The image is closely connected with the inscription below, which reads, Seneca corduensis [sic] philos neronis preceptor. ceteri timores habent aliquem post se locum, mors autem omnia abscindit (“Seneca of Corduba, philosopher, adviser of Nero. ‘The other fears have a place after themselves; but death cuts off all’ ”). The quotation adjusts a popular proverbial formulation of Seneca’s thinking on death (“After death, all things are ended—even death,” post mortem omnia finiuntur, etiam ipsa, De inmatura morte F63) to play again on the image of the scalpel (cf. abscindit). The overall impression is of Seneca living (dying) in elegant accord with his own writing. The further resemblance of the scalpel to a wood chisel may, in the viewer’s mind, invite a mutual assimilation between the sculptor and his self-carving subject. Also from the late fifteenth century is a medal by the “Roman emperors medallist,” probably Antonio Filarete, existing in several different versions. The medal fancifully adapts the death scene to suit the basic iconographic framework of a Roman coin—complete with S(ENATVS) C(ONSVLTO) inscription.75 On the obverse is Nero’s head in profile. On the reverse (Fig. 7.7) is a seated Nero, in military garb and with laurel crown, his hand extended toward a naked, youthful (in most versions) Seneca, who stands in an ornate vase and spurts blood from his outstretched arm. The composition in fact resembles that of the same artist’s separate relief sculpture depicting the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul; martyrdom (together with virtue) is also suggested by the (date) palm in the background, which Seneca’s blood appears to irrigate, though in some versions Nero appears to catch Seneca’s blood in a patera.76

74. See Vöge (1950), vol. 2, 20, 61, figs. 22–24; also Canfora (1999), 11; Prinz (1973), 410. 75. For versions and discussion, see Cunnally (1986); Möbius (1976). Cunnally, 316 notes that the prototype must be earlier than the Borghese “fisherman” Seneca, and may be modeled on a Senecae statua tota veneranda recorded at the Palazzo Massimi c. 1512. 76. See Cunnally (1986), 315–16.

figure 7.6 Jörg Syrlin the Elder, oak bust of Seneca (1469–74); Ulm Cathedral, Choir Stall. Courtesy of Foto Marburg / Art Resource, NY.

tracing the tradition

209

figure 7.7 Antonio Filarete (?), Nero Witnessing the Death of Seneca, reverse of medallion (late fifteenth century). Washington, National Gallery of Art, Samuel H. Kress Collection. © 2008 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington.

The image subverts the iconography of Neronian coinage to retell history from the perspective of a victim.

Early Modern From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries the tradition developed in four main ways at once:77 (1) Seneca’s writings were collected in printed editions and translations, and the prose works and the tragedies each became known 77. On receptions of Seneca in this period overall see Ross (1974), 143–52; on the death in particular, von Stackelberg (1992), 3–17.

210

receptions

to wider audiences. (2) The prose works were central to revivals of ancient philosophy as a guide to living and self-fashioning. (3) The tragedies, including the Octavia, were influential in new dramatic forms across Europe. (4) Seneca became a popular subject of historical painting, in a tradition begun by Rubens and taken up by successive generations of artists.

From Erasmus to Lipsius: The Dying Author Newly Edited In Erasmus’ introductory epistle and preface in his 1529 edition of Seneca’s collected prose works, we find a radical shift in the death’s capacity to serve as “evidence.” The 1529 edition in particular (as contrasted with the imperfect 1515 edition) was a watershed in the philological clarification of the text through comparison of manuscripts, but in his epistle Erasmus seeks also to clarify Seneca’s biography, countering the Christians who “have exercised a certain zeal in claiming this writer (sibi studio quodam vindicarunt), virtually embracing him as orthodox.”78 He appeals to the spuriousness of the Seneca-Paul correspondence, but the keystone of his refutation is the death scene: “Not even as he died (ne moriens quidem) did he dare to name Christ.” Where several of the Italian biographers had seen an opportunity to creatively adapt the death narrative so as to recognize, among other things, their faith in Seneca’s Christianity, Erasmus upholds fidelity to the text.79 Although the Erasman edition still retained an “anonymous” biography of Seneca (an imperfectly de-christianized version of Barzizza’s Vita Senecae),80 as a whole the edition established a new philological basis on which to read Seneca’s works and a new secular framework within which to approach him as a philosophical model. One copy of Erasmus’ edition was used by the young John Calvin as he prepared his commentary on the De clementia (1532).81 Another was owned by Montaigne, who frequently quotes or translates passages from Seneca’s prose writings in his Essais and also recounts the death scene focusing on Paulina’s role and comparing Seneca’s mention of Paulina at Ep. 104.1–5, in the essay “Of three good women” (Essais 2.35; first published 1580). In chapter 9 we will examine Montaigne’s account in connection with his qualified reception of Senecan exemplarity and Stoic values. Later in the same century this secular, philological engagement grew more intense due to the prodigious efforts of Erasmus’ countryman Justus Lipsius.82 Recent writers had embraced Seneca as a stylistic and moral model only in qualified terms, with even Erasmus ultimately coming to prefer Cicero, and Montaigne distancing himself from Stoic extremes. Lipsius, however, sought 78. On Erasmus’ argumentation see esp. Ramelli (2004); Sottili (2004), 665–67; Panizza (1987). 79. Erasmus was also conscious, however, of the flexibility of exempla: Lyons (1989), 17–19 notes his remark on the death of Socrates in De copia, p. 639: “This same incident can be turned to Socrates’ praise or blame.” 80. See Panizza (1987), 331. 81. On Calvin’s brief account of the death scene see the edition of Battles and Hugo (1969), 14–17. 82. On Lipsius and Seneca see esp. Morford (1991), 158–77; Ross (1974), 147–48; Saunders (1955).

tracing the tradition

211

wholeheartedly to revive Seneca’s prose style and ideals of intellectual community, and to systematize neo-Stoic principles for everyday life.83 In the introduction to his great folio volume of Seneca’s prose Opera published by Plantin in 1605, a year before his death, Lipsius presented himself as having tackled head-on a “tangled and multifarious Seneca and—one must freely admit—not sufficiently organized or arranged” (intricatus . . . & multiplex Seneca, & parum saepe (libere dicendum est) compositus aut digestus; Introductio lectoris). In the course of his career Lipsius was responsible for clarifying the distinction between the collector of declamations and the philosopher,84 for publishing separate editions of the declamations and the tragedies (although he attributed only the Medea to the philosopher),85 and finally for collecting the prose works in the 1605 volume, which was brought to fruition by his friends Jan van de Wouwer and Balthasar Moretus, the publisher. For Lipsius, Seneca was also more than a philological challenge. Amid the turmoil of the Eighty Years’ War (1566–1648), in which the Netherlands was riven by conflict between Spanish Catholic rule and militant Calvinist resistance, Lipsian Senecanism was hugely influential,86 though Lipsius’ attempts to reconcile neo-Stoicism with Christianity were especially controversial on the topics of self-sufficiency and voluntary death. The Seneca of Lipsius belonged squarely within the historical world of Tacitus, whose works he also edited in a major edition and commentary (1574). Lipsius viewed the Tacitean political world as a theatrum vitae hodiernae, and from it he initially extracted Thrasea Paetus as the crowning model of constantia.87 His developing interest in Seneca, however, is reflected in the form and content of his neo-Stoic works De constantia (1584) and Manductio ad Stoicam philosophiam (1604), whose treatments of the Stoic position on voluntary death we will consider in chapter 8. For Lipsius the precise words of Tacitus, themselves the product of his labors as an editor, were not to be interfered with (as they had been by the Italian biographers), but only commented on. Lipsius’ commentaries, however, offer strong opinions. Thus, for example, in the marginal remarks of his 1600 edition of Tacitus, we read comments such as SAPIENTIAE, id est, SENECAE, caedes (“The killing of WISDOM, that is, of SENECA”), inviting an allegorical reading; Constantia in verbis & vultu (“Constancy in word and face”), superimposing an analytic rubric on the narrative; Senex noster lentè aegrè moritur (“Our Old Man dies slowly, with difficulty”), soliciting the reader’s empathy; and Rumor de Imperio ad Senecam transferendo. Sed non tam felix Roma (“A rumor concerning

83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

On the style see Williamson (1951), 121–49; on neo-Senecan contubernium, Morford (1991), 15–33. See Grafton (2001), 229–32. See Mayer (1994), 153. See Morford (1991), 179, 185. See Morford (1991), 147–153.

212

receptions

the transferral of the Empire to Seneca. But Rome is not so lucky”), reading the death as a watershed that prevented a better historical path. In the Vita Senecae accompanying his 1605 Seneca edition, Lipsius devotes a chapter to Mors ejus, fortis, constans, è Tacito narrata (“His death, brave and constant, told from Tacitus”), and after giving verbatim Tacitus’ account he adds, “This [writes] Tacitus. But it will not hurt to push a little further, and to scrutinize or illuminate (examinare, aut illustrare) [his words].” Concerning the detail of Seneca’s age, for example, he explains the phrase senile corpus by offering his own reasoned account of Seneca’s age of 63 or 64 years. Lipsius laments Tacitus’ omission of Seneca’s dictated words, and conjectures what they might have been like: What a great man, what strength of mind (O virum, ô animi robur)! To dictate, even in death itself, what would help posterity (In ipsâ etiam morte dictare, quod posteros iuvaret). For there can be no doubting that his words were of this sort, and that they were pure precepts of constancy and wisdom. The proof is that they were “published,” which would never have happened if they had not been something distinguished (nisi praeclara aliqua essent). And because they were published, Tacitus left them out. An act lacking in foresight (ô improvide factum)! This emphasis on the last words directed to posterity is reflected also in the visual representation of the dying Seneca that accompanies his poem Invitatio ad Senecam, whose caption emphasizes that he is “dying away in his golden words and advice” (in verbis monitisque aureis deficientis—a hexameter; cf. Fig. 9.1). But if Lipsius laments the omission, his focus on it serves all the more intensely to frame the words that do survive: the works that Lipsius has collected in the volume itself. We return to Lipsius’ editions in chapter 9.

The Paradigm Painting by Rubens Lipsius’ focus on the dictating Seneca serves as our point of departure for considering the death’s most famous visual representation: its debut as a subject of historical painting88 in the Dying Seneca (c. 1614–15) (Fig. 7.8) by Peter Paul Rubens.89 The painter was himself a member of Lipsius’ circle and a contributor to the visual materials accompanying the second edition of Lipsius’

88. Rubens’ painting is the earliest except, perhaps, a version by Guido Reni (1575–1642). A partial list is in Pigler (1974), 430–31. On Reni’s Seneca bust (soon after 1601) see chapter 9. 89. The fullest basic description is McGrath (1997), 2.282–96; she dates it to 1614–15 (289). For interpretations, with varying emphasis on neo-Stoic and humanistic-martyrological aspects, but consistent attention to narrative “concentration,” see Noll (2001); Zanker (2000), 48–49; Morford (1991), 185–86; Maurach (1991), 48–54, (1990), 517–25; Hess (1981).

tracing the tradition

213

figure 7.8 Peter Paul Rubens, Der sterbende Seneca (c. 1614–15). Munich, Alte Pinakothek, Inv. 305. Courtesy of Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek Munich.

Senecae opera (1615). Rubens’ painting established a full-fledged compositional type that adapted some motifs from the earlier visual tradition on Seneca but also included entirely new elements, several of which reflect the influence of Lipsius. Chief among the new elements is the scribe. Although Rubens was following earlier versions when he compressed into a single tableau the death decree (albeit here acknowledged with the soldiers rather than with Nero directly),

214

receptions

the vein opening, and the bath, the scribe was newly introduced from the Tacitean narrative. Kneeling here in a pose that recalls the pose of John the Evangelist from Raffael’s Disputà del Sacramento (1508–9)90 and hovering over a pile of books that suggests Seneca’s oeuvre, the scribe alludes proleptically to the posthumous transmission of which the Lipsian edition is the most recent manifestation, and thereby opens the death scene to “participation” by the contemporary viewer. Another conspicuous feature is the absence of Nero, which shifts attention entirely to Seneca’s actions and to the empathy of the internal audience. The commanding position Nero had occupied in the illumination tradition is now inhabited by the two soldiers (the centurion at the front?) who appear ambivalent, caught between their orders and the moral cogency of the dying man.91 The whole group is varied, comprising a youth (scribe), adults (vein opener, soldiers), and an old man (Seneca)—the Ages of Man motif that was ubiquitous in contemporary painting.92 In characterizing this group, however, Rubens has opted not to introduce servants or the matrimonial theme associated with the death attempt of Paulina, but to give both the vein opener and the scribe the appearance of friends, suggestive of Lipsius’ neo-Stoic community. Rubens was, in fact, the first to represent any outrightly sympathetic figures among those present. Other avenues of interpretation are also ruled out by exclusion: the absence of hemlock, for example, means there is no explicit comparison to Socrates.93 The composition is appropriated from the Christian tradition, exploiting the fact that Seneca—unlike Socrates94—had died in ways that allowed for an assimilation to Christ’s agonies. By reducing the size of the bath but leaving Seneca as a standing figure with cruciform arms and zigzag body, bathed in light, mouth open, eyes upward, Rubens assimilates him to the dread figure of the Christus patiens and to the ecstatic martyr seen in the St. Sebastian type. Yet within this typology there is room for Senecan themes, such as the Roman ideal of dying on one’s feet, the facing of death with constantia and tranquillitas, the use of death as an opportunity for instruction, and the Senecan tragic theme of foregrounding a single death.95 In the asymmetries of Seneca’s body—of right and left hands, eyes, and legs—Gregor Maurach sees “the dialectic of death” being played out, as Seneca hovers, resisting Fortune, between dying and immortalization (1991, 53). Scholars have also drawn attention to Rubens’ ongoing alterations of the painting over a series of several years, during which

90. See Hess (1981), 224. 91. As Noll (2001), 91–92 observes, Rubens differentiates the two soldiers to give a broader range of responses. 92. See Noll (2001), 93. 93. On these and other elisions see Zanker (2000), 48–49; Maurach (1991), 51–53. 94. For this contrast between Socrates and Christ see E. R. Wilson (2007), 141–69. 95. The last point is made by Fitch (2008), 4.

tracing the tradition

215

it was displayed in his own home, and its function as a form of personal consolation after the deaths of several loved ones, especially his brother Philip Rubens.96 It might also be understood as an epitaph to Lipsius: the painting meditates on the image of the dying Seneca both through the lens of Tacitean history and as the embodiment of Senecan philosophy—neither of which had been known in such textual intimacy prior to Lipsius’ labors. In chapter 9, however, we will return to the false prototypes that lay behind the painting and that also appeared in Rubens’ drawings for the second Lipsian edition of 1615.

A Play for Lipsius’ Eyes: Gwinne’s Nero Rubens’ painting was only one among many responses to the Lipsian revival of Seneca. Before his death, Lipsius was the dedicatee of Nero, a Latin play in iambic trimeters by Matthew Gwinne, an Oxford-educated physician.97 First printed in 1603 (but apparently never performed), the play was accompanied by a dedicatory poem from John Sandsbury: “Lipsius, now have a Nero worthy of your wishes and your eyes” (Lipsi, Neronem nunc habe; votis tuis / Oculisque dignum, lines 1–2).98 Lipsius had attributed the Octavia to an unnamed immature writer, but the poem presents Gwinne as a revived Seneca who can “give in his own voice” (lingua referre propria) his complaints about Nero, after “an epochal cycle of reincarnation” (L's'lw vxrim . . . millenam, 6–8). Although it is uncertain whether Lipsius ever read it (he died a year later), the play represents a significant development in Seneca’s reception. Lipsius’ impact across Europe and in England was due mostly to his popularization of neo-Stoicism and Senecan prose style, but Gwinne further taps into the thriving reception of Seneca in English drama generally, as well as in the scholarly milieu of Oxford, where the Octavia had received its own performance at Christ Church College in 1558.99 Gwinne’s play itself is some 6,000(!) lines long, in five acts, each following a characteristically Senecan cycle: the main character who dies in each act (respectively: Claudius; Britannicus; Agrippina; Octavia) appears as a ghost in the prologue to the next. Seneca’s death occurs in the final act, being approached first through Seneca’s discovery of Nero’s attempt to poison him and Paulina’s dissuasion of him from killing himself (V.iii; cf. Sen. Ep. 104); then through an interview with Rufus, in which Seneca refuses to join the Pisonian conspiracy (V.iv); and finally in the death scene itself (here seen in drama for the first time), which is presented with virtually all the detail of Tacitus but with a surprisingly strong emphasis on Seneca’s near lapse into impatientia (cf. Ann. 15.63.3), which Paulina here partly prompts, but is also instrumental in helping him to overcome (V.v). 96. 97. 98. 99.

See Noll (2001), 122. See Binns (1974), 215–24. Quoted from Binns (1974), 220. See Binns (1974), 206.

216

receptions

Although Gwinne claims simply to have “versified” Suetonius and Tacitus, his drama includes allusions from right across Seneca’s oeuvre. The Seneca character responds to Nero’s poison attempt by exclaiming, hic amor? haec fides? (“This is love? This is loyalty?” Ner. 3346), alluding to the betrayal of the fraternal bond in Seneca’s Thyestes (“Is this our pact? Is this a brother’s gratitude, and loyalty?” hoc foedus? haec est gratia, haec fratris fides? Thy. 1024).100 When Gwinne seeks to amplify the exemplary resonances of Seneca’s death, he has Seneca call for hemlock in these terms: “I will fall where Socrates once fell, or like Cato, the living image of virtue (imago viva virtutis Cato), or like the excellent Canius of my own time (qualis aevo Canius nostro optimus)” (4111– 13)—words that, in the lines on Cato and Canus, allude to specific moments in the De tranquillitate animi (cf. Tranq. 16.1: Cato ille, virtutium viva imago; 14.4–10: on Julius Canus). Much of this was new: no interpreter since antiquity had alluded to the death in terms so precisely borrowed from Seneca’s writings, and certainly not from the tragedies. Moreover, Gwinne inventively deploys the character of Paulina as the mouthpiece for different intertextual citations, both Senecan and other. In her first appearance (V.iii) she actively argues against self-killing, drawing both on Ep. 104.1–5 (“Live for me, if not for yourself,” vive mihi, si non tibi, Ner. 3384) and on the nomen/omen implications of the etymology from the Legenda aurea: “Surely Seneca is not named forebodingly—as if he will kill himself ?” (num Seneca, quod se necet, / male ominando dictus? 3382–83). In the death scene, her assertion “You are able to die with me, without me you are unable” (mecum potes perire, sine me non potes, 4047) echoes Antigone from Seneca’s Phoenissae insisting that if Oedipus is to die, she will follow him (perire sine me non potes, mecum potes, Pho. 66).101 Gwinne thus uses the relationship of Seneca and Paulina as a space of interpersonal persuasion in which both characters variously deploy Senecan discourse to help one another overcome explicit vulnerabilities.

New Paintings and New Paradigms after Rubens Rubens’ painting and Gwinne’s play stand at the beginning of fertile seventeenth-century traditions on the death in pictorial and dramatic form. The pictorial tradition developed dialectically in relation to the compositional type established by Rubens, as can be seen already in a version from Utrecht in the 1620s, by Gerrit van Honthorst.102 In Honthorst’s preparatory drawing (Fig. 7.9) and a surviving painting attributed to his studio, the Rubensian model is alluded to mostly in the physiognomy of the bearded Seneca (more visible in 100. See the hypertext edition of Sutton (1997), ad 3347. 101. See Sutton (1997), ad 4047. 102. On this version see Judson (1959), 103–4, with figs. 45, 50. For additional paintings not discussed below see Pigler (1974), 430–31.

tracing the tradition

217

figure 7.9 Gerrit van Honthorst, De Dood van Seneca, drawing on blue paper (c. 1622–27). Utrecht, Centraal Museum, Inv. 7395 b. Courtesy of Centraal Museum, Utrecht.

the painting), the sympathetic onlookers, and the basin at his feet. Other elements are reinvented. The soldier restrains Seneca physically. The clothing of all the surrouding figures is conspicuously contemporary. Honthorst also had a reputation for painting nocturnal scenes illuminated by artificial light, and his inclusion of the foregrounded figure in silhouette, bent over Seneca’s body, was to be a favorite element for later interpreters conveying the encroachment of death. Seneca’s seated posture—another feature with a long future—is motivated by the artist’s new focus on the moment of the foot cutting (cf. Tac. Ann. 15.63.3), which displaces Rubens’ focus on the bleeding arm and Seneca’s dictation: no scribe is visible here. The composition is informed by two particular types.103 One is the familiar theme of Christ washing the feet of his disciples (no longer the Christus patiens), which Honthorst himself painted using a similar composition. The other is the medical paradigm in the same painter’s Dentist (1622), in which the light and the gazes are focused on the procedure

103. See Judson (1959), 103–4.

218

receptions

itself—a contrast with Rubens’ upward gaze and lighting from above. The medical aspect of Seneca’s death is enhanced by the precision of the foot cutter and the presence of a cup, presumably containing the hemlock.104 The most prolific painter of the theme was the Neapolitan Luca Giordano, who painted at least half a dozen distinct versions at different points between 1650 and 1699 (including Figs. 0.1, 0.2, 7.10, and 9.8).105 In all of his versions we find an essentially stable focus on a seated or partly recumbent Seneca, naked, beardless, and bald, with his foot in the bath, surrounded by a sizable group of male onlookers, of whom two or more are scribes; all of which takes place in a neoclassical architectural setting. Although some of these elements were present in Rubens (for example, the scribe) or in Honthorst (the footrevealing pose), some, such as the presence of architecture, are new on canvas. Also, Seneca’s head posture and facial physiognomy have come not from Rubens but from the Seneca bust by Guido Reni (Fig. 9.11), which Giordano would have found in many artists’ studios of his day.106 Giordano’s most daring typological innovation is in a very late version from c. 1699 (Fig. 7.10) in which one of Seneca’s hands clutches at his abdomen. The gesture finds a close parallel in Giordano’s Death of Cato from the same year, in which Cato’s hand actively reaches into the wound in his torso.107

Historical Tragedy and the “Agony of Influence” The contemporary dramatic tradition, somewhat like Gwinne’s play, had a selfconscious obsession with the precedent of the Octavia.108 Virtually every form of European drama of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—among others, Elizabethan tragedy, Jesuit drama, French burlesque, Venetian opera, and (in the following century) German Trauerspiel—adapted the model of Senecan tragedy, even as the Senecan tragic corpus itself was being reassessed and reattributed. Scholars have traced the varied legacy of specific “Senecan” elements, from the five-act structure to the opposing dynamics of interiorization and cosmic sympathy.109 They have traced also the contemporary theories of tragedy’s functions, such as the neo-Stoic understanding of tragedy as exposing the viewer to a spectacle of extreme suffering and (sometimes) of endurance that will serve as a training in constantia; or, by contrast, the resistance of some theorists, especially Jesuits, to the Lipsian theme of personal self-sufficiency.110

104. Noted by McGrath (1997), 290 n. 9. 105. For the full oeuvre of Giordano see Ferrari and Scavizzi (1992), supplemented by (2003). 106. For Reni’s bust as Giordano’s model see Pestilli (1993), 128 n. 6; Kurz (1942), 223. 107. For the Cato painting see Ferrari and Scavizzi (1992), A648, fig. 845. 108. The Nero theme popular in baroque drama is charted by Frenzel (1992), 575–78. On the Octavia’s influence, see Boyle (2008), lxxv–lxxix. 109. See Braden (1985); Hunter (1974). For cosmic sympathy and death, Braden, 5 notes the seminal lines at Thy. 803–4: vitae est avidus quisquis non vult / mundo secum pereunte mori. 110. See Noll (2001); Hess (1981).

figure 7.10 Luca Giordano, Seneca morente (c. 1699). Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, N. 487. Courtesy of SLUB Dresden / Deutsche Fotothek.

220

receptions

Gwinne’s play, however, and the many subsequent dramatic works in which Seneca appears as a character reflect a more specialized tendency: historical drama represents its supposed “originator,” building on the self-representational aspect of “Seneca’s” Octavia. The Octavia’s influence in general involves borrowings of the fabula praetexta form to retell Neronian history, in some instances incorporating Seneca’s death (as the Octavia had not done, but Gwinne’s Nero had) and ascribing to it a pivotal importance. In Nathaniel Lee’s Nero, Emperor of Rome: A Tragedy (1675), after Seneca has attempted early in the play to dissuade Nero from his egomaniacal plans, he is quickly dispensed with and his death in prison is reported by a Roman everyman, lamenting for his “Poor City” (II.i): I saw the best and wisest of Mankind, The Pilot of the Will, the Guide o’th’ Mind, Dying and pale, from every gen’rous Vein Base Executioners his Life did drein: By Nero kill’d, by Nero whom he lov’d, Whose Youth by painful Studies he improv’d, . . . Along with its pedagogical emphasis recalling Chaucer and the Roman de la Rose (though notably without the bath), the death here serves as an unexpectedly early stage in Nero’s education in cruelty: the killings of Britannicus and Octavia, for example, have yet to happen. By contrast, a Jesuit drama on Nero (1721) saves the death till long after the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul and makes it the final stage before Nero’s suicide and the entry of Galba. Seneca’s end serves both as a symptom of Nero’s imminent self-destruction and as the midwife to the play’s happy allegorical ending, in which “through divine Nemesis, Religion and Innocence triumph victorious over Tyranny and Idolatry” (Per Divinam Nemesin victrix de Tryannide & Idolomania Religio cum Innocentia triumphat).111 Seneca’s de facto status as historical tragedy’s “originator” gave the dramatization of his death a meta-literary dimension. In the anonymous Jacobean Tragedy of Nero (1624), the Seneca character, in the presence of two friends, prays to the “great Soul” of the world as follows: “Aid me in this strife, / And combat of my flesh, that ending, I / May still shew Seneca, and myselfe die” (IV.vi, 45–47). As Gordon Braden notes, the notion of “shewing Seneca” here illustrates contemporary interest in “the power of the proper name” and the radical independence of the self, frequently explored, as here, through the Senecan tragic rhetoric of the Medea superest motif (cf. Sen. Med. 166) (1985, 68). It is widely recognized that the Medea superest motif already has a significant meta-literary aspect, because it shows the character Medea to be conscious of her own previous literary incarnations. The proper name “Seneca,” however, 111. Szarota (1979-87), no. 1294. On Seneca in 17th- and 18th-c. Jesuit literature see Noll (2001), 127–29.

tracing the tradition

221

not only evokes an inherited identity that he is to live up to, but also stands metonymically for a whole style of dramatic representation. To present a Seneca character who seeks to “shew Seneca” through an onstage suicide is to exploit symbolic resonances between the figure of the dying author and the reception of his art form—an “agony of influence,” as it were. This belongs to the same conceptual world as Nashe’s 1610 remark considered in the introduction to this chapter, comparing Senecan tragedy’s waning influence to blood being shed from a dying body.

The Year 1643: Tristan L’Hermite and Monteverdi Sixteen-forty-three was a good year for dramatizations of Seneca’s death. In Paris a burlesque tragedy, La mort de Seneque, was written by Tristan L’Hermite, while in Venice Claudio Monteverdi’s opera L’incoronazione di Poppea received its first performances. The two works share an emphasis on the high baroque theme of erotic love, even if Seneca’s death ultimately takes on a different function in each case. Tristan wrote his play to inaugurate Paris’ Illustre Théâtre, which opened in January 1644, and the opening cast included a twenty-one-year-old Molière in one of the leading male roles (possibly that of Seneca!).112 The dramatic scenario picks up where the Octavia left off: Octavia is dead, and Poppaea is pressing Nero to do away with his additional enemies. In the course of the play Seneca requests permission to retire (I.ii), refuses the invitation of Lucan to join the conspiracy, citing his quasi-parental relationship to Nero and his imminent nocturnal meeting with a certain “old Cilician” (vieux Cilicien, II.iv, 704)—obviously St. Paul. Absent from the stage while the conspiracy unravels in Acts III and IV, Seneca is served with Nero’s death decree while in the presence of Paulina (V.i), and his offstage death is described to Nero in a messenger speech by the centurion (V.iv). The counterweight to Seneca’s noninvolvement in the conspiracy is the activism of Epicharis (here Lucan’s lover), whose embrace of death under torture challenges Seneca in turn to try to live up to the precepts he had given her (V.iii, 1754–56). Tristan’s debts to the Octavia were relatively slight, seen mostly in the use of iambic trimeters and the rough dramatic framework of Poppaea’s ascendancy. He combines the Tacitean historical narrative with numerous passages from Senecan prose, the latter usually not quoted verbatim, but paraphrased and synthesized within a sublime and figurative poetic register. When Seneca is discovered alone in Act V, just before the arrival of Paulina, he prepares for death by telling his soul, “Prepare yourself to depart entirely from this delicate matter whose confused mixture is a veil before your eyes” (V.i, 1419–21), then

112. For details of production see the excellent edition of Madeleine (1984). For discussion see von Stackelberg (1992), 11–12.

222

receptions

paints a vision of return to Nature that evokes multiple passages from the prose works.113 His speech gives the impression that Seneca’s doctrine had posited a christianized afterlife. Tristan’s portrayal shows the influence of two specific recent sources. One is a work by the author “Mascaron” entitled La mort & les dernieres paroles de Seneque (1637), which spends 102 pages(!) seeking to remedy the loss of the dictated words by free improvisation (imaginer); this includes a reaffirmation of the authenticity of the Seneca-Paul correspondence and a dogmatic espousal of belief in the soul’s immortality.114 Another is La cour sainte (1624) by Nicolas Caussin, a Jesuit, who gave a creative historical account of the encounter between Seneca and Paul. Whether from the influence of these works and perhaps also others such as Barzizza’s Vita Senecae, Tristan’s play presents Seneca’s death as an event with blatant Christian dimensions—both at the personal level and cosmically. The centurion recounts how Seneca, after sprinkling the blood and water in his last moments, said, “This is what I offer you, o God Liberator! (ô Dieu Liberateur) . . . God of the man of Tarsus, in whom I place my hope: My soul comes from you, please receive it” (V.iv, 1834, 1837–38). Presented to Nero in the form of a messenger speech, the death appears as a personal conversion of Seneca, but also as an event in cosmic history, anticipating the cataclysmic ending of Nero’s reign. Upon hearing it Nero appears “utterly transformed” (tout changé, 1845) and is, like a Senecan tragic character, disturbed by visions of an avenging Fury (1852–53). In witnessing Seneca’s death conversion, Nero perhaps recognizes his own conversion into a persecutor of Christians, and ultimately the Antichrist. L’incoronazione di Poppea, Monteverdi’s final opera, was premiered in the Venice carnival of early 1643.115 Its librettist, Gian Francesco Busenello, had creatively reworked the plot of the Octavia into a three-act structure that at its midpoint includes, among other innovations, the (anachronistic) element of Seneca’s death. Already in the Octavia, Nero’s rejection of Seneca helps to enable his divorce of Octavia, but in the opera Seneca’s role is intensified.116 In the first act, Seneca seeks in vain to console Octavia and have her come to terms with the rumor of her impending divorce (I.vi); he next appears alone pondering his position (as in the Octavia) and premeditating his fate, being warned by Pallas Athene that he will soon die (I.viii); and he meets with Nero and seeks to reason with him (as in the Octavia; I.ix). The second act begins with Seneca being warned again, this time by Mercury (II.i), whereupon the death decree is delivered by the Liberto character (II.ii); Seneca, surrounded by

113. E.g., Ep. 79.11–12; Ep. 102.23–24; NQ 1.praef.; see Madeleine (1984), ad loc. 114. On Mascaron, see von Stackelberg (1992), 8–11. I regret that I was unable to obtain a copy of Mascaron’s work. 115. For discussion see esp. Schubert (2004), 392–97; P. Fabbri (1994), 259–69; Rosand (1985). 116. For comparison with the Octavia see Boyle (2008), lxxxiv–lxxxvi; Manuwald (2005). On structural symmetries in the libretto see Bérard (1991).

tracing the tradition

223

a group of Famigliari, calls for his bath to be prepared, and exits (II.iii). Even though the death itself takes place offstage, this allusion to suicide was virtually unprecedented in opera, and outside of Venice it appears to have been controversial: in the Naples performances of 1651, Seneca’s final scene was entirely omitted.117 Although Seneca exits at approximately the same point as he does in the Octavia, in the opera his death carries more dramatic weight. The duet between Nero and Lucan that soon follows (II.v), and Poppaea’s renewed attempt to have Octavia expelled (II.xii), both begin with the line, Hor che Seneca è morto (“Now that Seneca is dead”),118 and the death implicitly removes moral restraint from other characters. A general structural comparison can also be assumed between the opera’s two choral sequences: one sung by the Famigliari who witness Seneca’s last words, the other by the Cupids who celebrate Poppaea’s coronation, in the finale. Indeed, the opera resembles Tristan’s play of the same year in making the murder of Seneca a kind of love gift from Nero to Poppaea. But where the death in Tristan’s play instantly unleashes Nero’s tyranny and self-destruction, the opera’s ending in the splendid coronation—a definitive celebration absent from the Octavia—allows Nero and Poppaea some joy, however temporary. This trajectory is doubled at the level of the allegorical characters who at various points intervene in the plot: the conflict between Fortuna and Virtù is superseded by the victory of Amore. As a whole the opera invites ambivalence, concerning both the temporary victory of Amore and the embodiment of Virtù in Seneca. Of course, the concluding joy of Nero and Poppaea is ironic: the emperor’s unhappy demise could be anticipated by anyone who knew the story, and would have brought pleasure to a Venetian audience proud of its republican governance and fierce independence from contemporary Rome. As in the Octavia watched by a post-Flavian audience, Seneca is ultimately a martyr to the good cause. Yet Busenello himself belonged to the Accademia degl’Incogniti, a group of Venetian intellectuals and writers who, often through retellings of Tacitean history, keenly debated the place of political pragmatism versus morality, or participation versus withdrawal, and challenged such tenets of Christian philosophy as the immortality of the soul.119 In keeping with this iconoclasm, Busenello produced a Seneca whose authority was open to question. Thus in the death scene, the group of Famigliari, although addressed by Seneca as Amici, are distinctly different from the customary group of friends and pupils (II.iii). Their refrain, Non morir, non morir, Seneca (“Do not die, do not die, Seneca,” II.iii), implies that Seneca has made a decision with which they disagree, and they distinguish his embrace of death from their own hedonistic philosophy of life: “I for my part do not wish to 117. See Rosand (1985), 45. The impact of the scene is emphasized by Hutcheon and Hutcheon (2004), 127–28. 118. See Bérard (1991), 63–65; Rosand (1985), 40. 119. See Heller (1999); P. Fabbri (1994), 263; Rosand (1985), 36–40, 50–52.

224

receptions

die (Io per me morir non vo’). . . . If I fall into light sleep, I awake in the morning, but a tomb of pure marble never gives back what it receives.” Seneca encourages them with contempt for death, and alludes to an afterlife: “The distress of death is brief (Breve angoscia è la morte). A visiting breath departs from the heart, where it has been for many years, like a guest in a lodging, and flies from there to Olympus, the true sojourn of happiness.” These words seem to help his resolve, but not their state of mind. Moreover, the exclusion of Paulina from the libretto, who in Tristan’s play is receptive to Seneca’s reasoning, and a foil to Poppaea’s erotic greed, here leaves Seneca in conspicuous solitude, a stranger to Amore. This is not to deny that Seneca’s death ultimately commands moral authority in the opera. Monteverdi counteracted some of the negative aspects of the libretto by writing Seneca’s part for a true bass with a wider pitch range than he had used anywhere else, and by repeating and enhancing specific lines of text. Ellen Rosand notes how the line in which Seneca responds positively to Pallas Athene’s warning, “Death is the dawn of an infinite day” (è di giorno infinito alba la morte, I.viii), is set by Monteverdi “with a beautiful triple curve, twice descending, then gently ascending as it moves gradually through Seneca’s whole range, in an imitation of the sunrise following the darkness” (1985, 58). But any device that served to establish Seneca’s moral authority might also have the reverse effect of removing him from the world of love and everyday enjoyment. If the Seneca character espouses his convictions in a cogent way, multiple characters maintain a qualified view of him and his death, and make these points of view available to the audience.

Solitude and Crowd in Two Venetian Paintings To see how the pictorial tradition developed in the years after Giordano, we may stay in Venice and consider versions by Francesco Pittoni and his nephew Giambattista Pittoni. Francesco’s version (1714) presents a strikingly young and muscular Seneca, seated alone and surrounded by drapery and books, his head veiled, with his feet in a basin, and spurting arcs of blood into the basin from both arms (Fig. 7.11).120 The painting’s study in solitude and interiority is reinforced by its oval shape. The ultimate inspiration for this type may have come from Rubens’ drawing of Seneca for the 1615 Lipsius edition (= Fig. 9.2) and Theodor Galle’s earlier drawing for the 1605 edition (= Fig. 9.1), in both of which Seneca appears alone, with circular framing; in the Rubens drawing, the bath has the same lion motif as here. But the intense downward gaze of Francesco’s Seneca, contrasting with the upturned head in Rubens and Galle, indicates a major shift in tone. Francesco likely picks up on developments in the solitude theme especially from the 1640s, when visual artists and dramatists alike (such as Tristan and Monteverdi) explored the dynamics of Seneca’s

120. See Rizzi (1968).

tracing the tradition

225

contemplating death alone. A drawing from that period by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (“Il Guercino”) (Fig. 7.12) includes strikingly similar compositional features to those adopted by Francesco Pittoni, including not only a drawn circular frame but also a downward gaze.121 Giambattista Pittoni’s version, whose chronological relationship to Francesco’s is uncertain (c. 1712–15), probes the opposite extreme, presenting Seneca in a busy scene that includes soldiers and, among other onlookers, an enthroned Nero (Fig. 7.13).122 The scene has strong theatrical overtones, being framed by an arch (with erotic motif), columns, and curtains, all realized in the billowing lines of Venetian Rococo. The subject of representation is clearly Nero—otherwise not depicted in any historical paintings of Seneca’s death I have seen—viewing Seneca’s body. (The bathtub being shoved by the soldier is usually taken to be a visual reminder of the already completed death.) This version is unique in depicting Seneca unconscious and entirely passive, in a pose that recalls Christ’s Deposition. Giambattista adds new variety to the group of those present, including not only the Ages of Man but also two female figures. Yet apart from Nero not one of the persons in this assembled court looks directly at Seneca or shows outward signs of being upset by his death. In a departure from Rubens’ infusion of empathy, the whole scene subserves the avid gaze of the tyrant. This impression is intensified when we take account of the fact that the painting was part of a pair, commissioned and purchased by a Saxon king, Frederick-Augustus I, for his palace in Dresden—the other depicting the killing of Agrippina, or more specifically, the stabbing of her womb. The diptych thus revisits, within its own theatricalized aesthetics, the pairing of these two episodes in the medieval tradition on the crimes of Nero.

A Sacrifice for the Vaterland: Kleist’s Seneca Seneca was a frequent focus of positive and negative interest in the Enlightenment culture of the eighteenth century. In German dramatic circles, for example, Senecan tragic poetry was scorned for its rhetoricism and associated with the influence of French tragedy, against which G. E. Lessing led the charge. Yet Lessing himself was from the 1750s engaged in his own “productive reception” of Senecan tragic furor and the isolated hero, which he evidently planned to employ in a Seneca.123 In his review of the Seneca (1754) by Creutz, who (as noted in the introduction to this chapter) had seen himself as attempting to have Seneca perish “for a second time,” Lessing observed, “A dying philosopher is no everyday spectacle (kein gemeines Schauspiel), and the undertaking of a German poet to bring him onto the stage is no everyday undertaking (kein 121. Il Guercino’s drawing may correspond to a lost Morte di Seneca painting, a partner to his Suicidio di Catone l’Uticense (1641); see Boccardo (1992), 70–71. 122. See Boccazzi (1979), no. 26; also Coggiola Pittoni (1928), 670–75. 123. Barner (1973), 15.

226

receptions

figure 7.11 Francesco Pittoni, Seneca (1714). Udine, Collection of Walter Mio. Courtesy of Tipografia Doretti.

gemeines Unternehmen).”124 Lessing also encouraged the endeavors of Ewald Christian von Kleist, who had begun work on his own Seneca already in 1745 and published a prose draft with Lessing’s approval in 1758.125 Kleist was an established poet but also an officer in the Prussian cavalry during the Seven

124. Creutz quoted from Hess (1981), 214; Lessing quoted from Barner (1973), 57. 125. See Barner (1973), 58–59. On the publications of Creutz (1754) and Kleist (1758; versified in 1767), as well as a small tragedy by Spurer from 1782, see Hess (1981), 214–18 and the listings in Meyer (1977).

tracing the tradition

227

figure 7.12 Barbieri, Giovanni Francesco, Sénèque dans le bain, vu à mi-corps, tourné vers la droite (1640s). Paris, Louvre, Ronds des dessins et miniatures, Petit format, Inv. 6891. Courtesy of Département des Arts Graphiques, Musée du Louvre.

Years’ War, and his own contemplation of death in service of his country—he in fact died after battle in 1759126—had shaped his portrayal of Seneca. Kleist’s play begins with Seneca and Paulina in Campania debating the merits of withdrawal versus action, then reacting to the news of Octavia’s death and deciding to return and establish ties with the Pisonians (Act I). In the subsequent two acts, the centurion delivers the death decree to Seneca at his estate, and Seneca welcomes it readily (II); then, after a convoluted dying process in which Seneca’s wounds are bound up and he faints, and Paulina (thinking Seneca is dead) kills herself, Seneca revives once more, only to die in the play’s final moment: Ich——sterbe!, followed by the fall of the curtain (III.iii). The audience’s perspective on Seneca’s death is partly shaped by Kleist’s Paulina, who is initially opposed to self-killing but in the first act responds to 126. Hess (1981), 217 records that Kleist’s own death was modeled on Seneca’s: he died for the Vaterland, bleeding slowly and writing in a book.

figure 7.13 Giambattista Pittoni, La morte di Seneca / Il cadavere di Seneca mostrato a Nerone (c. 1712–15). Dresden, destr. Courtesy of Dedalo.

tracing the tradition

229

the news of Octavia’s recent death as follows: “I will be the first to follow you, godlike woman!” (Ich werde dir am Ersten folgen, o Göttliche, I.ii, 278). Paulina apostrophizes Octavia as a symbol of inviolate Nature and of country, so that even while she persists in her fear that Seneca’s death will be a meaningless sacrifice (280), she follows him to death with an eloquent espousal of its political aspirations. Our view is shaped also by the major character Polybius, a friend who at one point seeks to die in Seneca’s place, telling the centurion, “I am the one you are looking for . . . I die willingly” (Ich bin Der, den Du suchst . . . Ich sterbe gern, II.ii), and asserting, “The death of the virtuous Seneca is fearful to me (furchtbar ist mir der Tod des tugendhaften Seneca). Spare this upright man, this friend of Caesar, who has sacrificed (aufgeopfert) his whole life and his whole happiness for the wellbeing of Nero and the Fatherland, and is going to continue doing so!” (II.iii). Polybius’ masquerade nearly works, until Seneca arrives and embraces death through a dramatic self-assertion: Ich bin Seneca! (II.iii). When Seneca dies, the impact of the death is writ large by cosmic disturbances reported in a messenger speech (III.ii), as well as by the words of conspirators such as Faenius, who calls Seneca “the greatest and most virtuous man of all mortals (der größte und der tugendhafteste Mann unter allen Sterblichen), the friend of Heaven and the ornament of Nature” (III.ii). The superlative epithets suggest an implicit comparison of Seneca to Cato, as does the binding up of his wounds and Seneca’s forceful removal of the bandages after Paulina’s death (III.i). Although Kleist portrays Seneca’s death as the loss of something irrecoverable, he also imposes the logic of sacrifice, so that the death leaves a moral legacy behind for the survivor who, Piso tells Seneca, “will see your portrait, and a sacred shiver will run through him deep inside” (wird Dein Bildniß sehen, und ein heiliger Schauer wird sein Innerstes durchdringen, III.i). In fact, one of the play’s more remarkable reorderings of chronology is Piso’s apparent survival. Seneca dies as a lone and exceptional hero, but the cause of the patriots only gains in momentum.

Contestations in Eighteenth-Century France In the resurgence of classical exemplarity in the French Enlightenment, Seneca and Socrates were models for the philosophes.127 Both figures were controversial, however, and literature of this period typically takes the form of polemical or apologetic works, such as the Anti-Sénèque by Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1750) on one side and a Vie de Sénèque by Ansquer de Ponçol (1776) on the other. La Mettrie approves of Seneca’s death, observing that “Seneca, in all other things so inconsistent, knew how to die when he had to (quand il l’a fallu)” (190). The problem was his life: “If he had been a man during his life . . . , he would have 127. On this milieu see von Stackelberg (1992), 13–17; Conroy (1975); Faider (1921), 145–51. On the French Socrates see E. R. Wilson (2007), 170–88.

230

receptions

known [among other things] how to . . . break his chains like another Samson, to die as the hero of his sect (pour périr en héros de sa secte)” (190). The dominant positive assessment of Seneca’s life, death, and writings was the Essai sur la vie de Séneque le philosophe, sur ses écrits, et sur les regnes de Claude et de Néron (1778/1782) by Denis Diderot, for whom Seneca’s life, not just his death, was a relatively unambiguous example. Diderot justified his focus on Seneca by arguing that writers who fail to appreciate such illustrious men “will be insulting the nation” (insulteront la nation, Essai, 153). As we will see in chapter 9, Diderot scrutinized Seneca’s death for the lessons it could offer about confronting tyranny, and presented himself not only as a modern-day imitator of Seneca, but as his avenger. At the same time, the deaths of Seneca and, increasingly, Socrates, were favorite themes for French painters.128 In 1773 the Académie Royale de la Peinture had announced Tacitus’ description of Seneca’s death as the theme for its Grand Prix. Of the six artists approved to compete, first prize was awarded to Pierre Peyron, whose painting has been lost, though drawings survive (Fig. 7.14); but no second prize was awarded, not even for the painting by Jacques-Louis David, whose painting is now housed at the Petit Palais (Fig. 7.15).129 Peyron and David both presented a recumbent Seneca amid a crowded group, depicting the emotional responses of each member of the group with highly theatrical gestures, and both amplified the scene by including Paulina. Peyron’s approach to the scene has been described as Poussinian: among other things, many figures are seen in profile as if in a sculptural relief, and the classical architecture is austere. In his version Seneca does not give dictation: the motifs of scribe and books are here replaced with a visual representation of Nero’s decree in the form of a scroll held by the soldier, and Seneca’s primary gesture is one of consolation. David’s Seneca painting, with its undulating lines and insubstantial shapes, has been used to illustrate a contrast with the same painter’s mature phase in which the body became “a powerful instrument of communication,” most fully on view in his well-known Death of Socrates (1787).130 Without denying this significant contrast, we may also use the Socrates painting to notice things about the Seneca. In the Socrates painting, for example, multiple stages are depicted: the imprisonment indicated by the shackles, the disputation with the friends, the upheld cup of the hemlock, the bidding farewell from the stairs, with eschatological overtones. In the Seneca painting, David gives what might be the most detailed visual account that we possess of the scene’s narrative complexities. In addition to alluding to the distinct moments in the vein cutting (Seneca and Paulina’s arms; then Seneca’s legs), together with Paulina’s revival (bandages 128. For the visual tradition on Socrates, see E. R. Wilson (2007): paintings were “rare before the eighteenth century” (173). Von Stackelberg (1992), 10–11 argues for a back influence from Seneca to Socrates. 129. On both versions see von Stackelberg (1992), 10–11; Chevallier (1991), 99–100; Rosenblum (1967), 70; on Peyron in particular, Rosenberg and van de Sandt (1983), 71–73. 130. Johnson (1993), 60; cf. 31.

tracing the tradition

231

figure 7.14 Jean-François Pierre Peyron, La mort de Sénèque, engraving (c. 1773). Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France. Courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France.

applied by her attendant), the artist depicts the death decree wielded by the soldier, the scribe (far right) who cranes his neck to listen while Seneca dictates, the hemlock cup on a tray (center), and, I suggest, a dish from which Seneca will perhaps make his libation (located next to the basin). The viewer, then, is allowed to enter into the death scene without necessarily being located at one definitive moment between Seneca’s living and dying. David’s Death of Seneca also bears similarities to his Marat (1793), which different viewers have understood to depict different moments during and after the moment of death. This prompts Didier Maleuvre to observe that, in a typically baroque warping of time across space, Seneca’s body is “[s]tretched asunder between right and left” and “straddles the passing of the death-event,” while “[t]he walls, the colonnade, the circle of witnesses, the dramatic staging—all seem to lean toward the invisible groove where death is to come, somewhere between the philosopher’s hand and his wife’s” (2000, 17).

figure 7.15 Jacques-Louis David, La mort de Sénèque (1773). Paris, Musée du Petit Palais. Courtesy of Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY.

tracing the tradition

233

The versions by Peyron and David, with their respective emphases on the consolation of Paulina and on the bandaging of her wounds, show that Paulina had become a regular element of the scene. Paulina appears in a painting by Noël Hallé that appeared in the Salon of 1750, and an earlier instance, from Italy, is the Morte di Seneca by Giordano’s pupil Sebastiano Conca (1735), in which Paulina is glimpsed in the background—a visual approximation, perhaps, of the embedded digression in Tacitus (Ann. 15.64.1–2).131 The special interest in Paulina in France, perhaps due in part to the influence of Christine de Pizan and Montaigne, is sustained by Diderot, who expands on Tacitus’ digression about Paulina to discuss Seneca’s wives more broadly and to defend him against charges of impropriety, given Paulina’s youth (Essai, 154–55). The fascination with Paulina lasted at least until the Salon of 1793, where exhibits included a sketch by either Roland Lefebvre or J.-C. N. Perrin, entitled La Mort de Sénèque. L’instant où Pauline, sa femme, se fait ouvrir les veines (lost). The painting by Jean-Jacques Taillasson has a yet more elaborate title: “Paulina, wife of Seneca, not wanting to survive her husband, opened her veins; Nero, learning of her resolve, sent orders for her to be saved; she had lost consciousness, her bleeding is stopped, she is returned to life” (Fig. 7.16).132 Taillasson’s version is unique in focusing on Paulina to the exclusion of Seneca altogether, and the same essential composition that had previously captured the slow momentum of Seneca’s bleeding is now transformed to convey the concerted effort to bandage Paulina’s wounds and revive her, an image of resurrection. Taillasson’s innovative approach to the Senecan tradition implicitly raises the question of what political resonances its theme of revival must have elicited, being produced at the height of the Revolution and after the dissolution of the Académie de la Peinture.133

Nineteenth-Century Painting: Demise? If Seneca’s reputation waned during the nineteenth century, paintings by Eugène Delacroix and Joseph Noël Sylvestre allow us to see that the tradition was not entirely forgotten, but was now shaped by different cultural forces.134 The Delacroix painting, Sénèque se fait ouvrir ses veines (1840s), belongs to the series of pendentive paintings in the vaulted ceiling of the Library of the Chamber of Deputies in the Palais Bourbon.135 Its composition with Seneca standing in a vase-like tub is likely to have reflected the “fisherman” sculpture that had

131. For Conca’s painting see Sestieri (1926), 129. 132. See Mouilleseaux (1989), esp. 308–9, pl. xxvii; Schnapper (1974), 107–8. 133. Mouilleseaux (1989) speculates that the painting makes a discreet allusion to “angoisses des arrêts suprêmes qui décident alors du sort des suspects (le Tribunal révolutionnaire est crée en Mars 1793)” (308)—a situation in which Nero’s clement reversal of Paulina’s death might, for once, offer an example to be followed. On the dissolution of the Académie and the challenge to its aesthetic principles see Schnapper (1974), 101–117. 134. On these versions see Chevallier (1991), 100–101; Rosenblum (1967), 104. 135. The complex is presented at http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/histoire/bibliotheque-delacroix-plafond.asp.

figure 7.16 Jean-Joseph Taillasson, Pauline, femme de Sénèque, ne voulant pas survivre à son mari, s’était ouvrir les veines; Néron apprenant sa résolution, envoie des ordres pour la sauver; elle avait perdu connaissance, on arrête le sang, on la rend à la vie (1793). Paris, Louvre, Inv. 8081. Courtesy of Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY.

tracing the tradition

235

once inspired Rubens’ painting but had also been brought to the Louvre by Napoleon sometime after 1807. The painting also needs to be interpreted in its more immediate context, where it is one of four facing paintings in a cupola whose theme is history and philosophy. Although one scholar has argued that in Delacroix’s hands subjects such as Seneca’s death had become “vehicles for a scene of murky Romantic drama or mere enumerations in an encyclopedic compendium of history,”136 the Chamber of Deputies was a forum distinguished by its controversies, and the various images of violence may be seen as engaging with this culture.137 In the context of a legislative house the visible conflict between the historical force of the death decree and the philosophical force of Seneca’s writing, like adjacent images of Cicero prosecuting Verres and Socrates being advised by his daimôn, may have seemed quite relevant. The version by Sylvestre (1875) (Fig. 7.17) likewise has been described as typical of a nineteenth-century detachment from the real moral power of Seneca’s death and other historical subjects. In the account of the scholar quoted above, the painting has “as little moral content as a photograph of a display in Mme. Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors.”138 Whatever we make of this judgment, the painting’s documentary style and its alteration of standard details contribute to a major reconfiguring of the event. On one level, the painting is something of a pastiche: the hand gesture recalls David’s Death of Socrates, and is here combined with a head of Seneca that is an especially close replica of the pseudo-Seneca bust made famous by Rubens (= Fig. 9.6). But familiar elements are pressed to greater extremes: Seneca is more naked, the soldier more implacable, the scribes more active, the doctor more involved, and one friend standing to the right seems to mimic Seneca’s otherworldly gaze, except with an expression of terror rather than triumph. The remarkable absence of the bathtub has more than one effect: in addition to heightening the impression of nudity, whether vulnerable or heroic, it combines with the presence of the white sheet to increase the messiness of Seneca’s uncontained bleeding. None of this can compare with the impact of the figure whose outstretched hand and contorted breast and face are visible behind Seneca to the viewer’s left—surely Paulina. This shadowy, anamorphic presence stands in an oblique reflective relation to the doctor who clings to Seneca’s arm, as if in a distorted mirror. As a whole, Sylvestre’s painting explores greater extremes of expression around the event of death than are seen in most other versions. This is closely in keeping with nineteenth- and twentieth-century conceptions of death as “so terrifying that we no longer dare say its name.”139 If Seneca’s triumph is more

136. 137. 138. 139.

Rosenblum (1967), 104. See Ribner (1993), 131. Rosenblum (1967), 104. Ariès (1981), 28.

236

receptions

figure 7.17 Joseph Noël Sylvestre, La mort de Sénèque (1875). Béziers, Musée des Beaux-Arts. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

exaggerated, this is because death, in contrast with its portrayal in Senecan discourse as familiar, had itself become untamed.

More Recent Times In Henry Sienkiewicz’s vastly influential novel Quo Vadis (1890), Seneca makes only brief appearances—despite the fact that the novel’s main story, Nero’s

tracing the tradition

237

persecution of the Christians and the first conversions of pagan Romans to Christianity, was one in which Seneca had frequently featured. The Seneca of Quo Vadis, to the extent that he is mentioned at all, is the tyrant-teacher and hypocrite, and his name is simply listed alongside the names of other conspirators put to death. Motifs of the Seneca story are reassigned to the central character Petronius, who dies in a protracted suicide scene in the climactic last chapter in which his slave-wife Eunice insists on participating: “ ‘Master,’ she murmured, bowing over him, ‘did you think I’d let you go alone?’ . . . ‘Come with me then,’ he said” (QV 572–73, trans. Kuniczak). And it is the soldierly Marcus Vinicius, not Seneca, whose liaisons with Christianity lead him toward conversion. Clearly this made sense for Sienkiewicz: a sympathetic Seneca might have exposed the overlapping ethical terrain of the pagan and Christian worlds that his novel differentiates so sharply. But a negative portrayal of Seneca was also in keeping with the times. For in the nineteenth century, and for much of the twentieth, Seneca’s tragedies and philosophical writings were dismissed as bombast and commonplace, and this allowed the ambivalent personality portrayed by the Roman historians to be taken in a more strongly negative direction—crudely, the direction of Dio. The death drifted toward theatricality and hypocrisy, or at least toward cliché. Mention Seneca to a friend today, as I have often done, and you may be greeted with an exaggerated vein-opening gesture. Comparable reactions are implied in the pejorative Italian idiom seneca svenato (“vein-drained Seneca”) mentioned in the introduction to this book; its appeal in central and southern Italy for most of the twentieth century has been traced by some to the familiarity of the pseudo-Seneca busts in several Italian museums or to the memory of a stock character in Italian popular theater who dispensed moralizing sententiae.140 Other allusions in popular and intellectual culture, which are not universally negative, are surveyed in Citti and Neri’s book on Seneca’s twentieth-century receptions (2001). The more recent scholarly revival of Seneca’s image began on several fronts at once:141 (1) a new literary-historical approach to Seneca’s tragedies, as well as actual performances, within the modernist and postmodernist ambiance of a violent century; (2) new attention to the schools of Hellenistic philosophy and to the literary forms through which philosophy as an art of living was communicated and practiced in the ancient world; and, more broadly, (3) fresh histories of Julio-Claudian culture and politics. Throughout this book I have cited recent scholarship in which Seneca’s death is revisited from numerous interesting angles. During this revival, one celebrated reception of Seneca’s death was the partly academic but also deeply personal engagement by Foucault as he neared 140. See Coccia (2000), 120; Sciava (1921), 252. 141. See, e.g., Citti and Neri (2001), 15–39, noting receptions in which Seneca’s style and precepts (together with his death) have been important for 20th-c. thinkers and writers. See also the comparison of Seneca’s and Heidegger’s views on being toward death in Perelli (1994), esp. 54–57.

238

receptions

death, rejecting its performative aspects but otherwise embracing it, saying, “Let us rather try to give meaning and beauty to death-as-effacement.”142 Below, however, I focus on the reception of Seneca’s death outside of academia, looking in particular at how it has been used as a lens through which to review one paradigmatic twentieth-century topic: the varied experiences of Germans living after the Second World War.

Contemporary German Literature In his essay, “Seneca: A New German Icon?” (2004), Theodore Ziolkowski observes that Seneca’s death has been a favorite topic in German drama, novels, and poetry, especially since its nineteen-hundredth anniversary in 1965. Successive generations have taken up the death as an opportunity to think about the phases of Germany’s turbulent recent history, infusing the scene with new, fine-grained allusions to Seneca’s writings, the field of classical philology, and the earlier reception tradition. The first German formulations of the Seneca story worked for the most part within the general frameworks of the Octavia as a dramatization of Neronian history and of Quo Vadis as a novelistic and speculative portrayal of Christians in Rome. Ziolkowski describes Hermann Gressieke’s three-act tragedy, Seneca und die goldenen Jahre (1951), in which German memories of the fleeting Weimar Republic are engaged symbolically through a portrayal of the quinquennium shattered by tyranny: “The final scene is a grand synchronization in which Seneca commits suicide in freedom as Nero watches with astonishment while the Christians he is burning on crosses sing hymns in praise of God the Father and the Son of Man. As the stage darkens, Seneca steps forward to address the modern audience—the audience with fresh memories of twelve years of Nazism—with words of enormous poignancy and savage irony” (2004, 137–38). The “irony” consists in the expectation expressed by this time-traveling Seneca that the audience’s experience of life will surely have been different and happier. The “synchronization,” in turn, although it includes the encounter between ancient and modern, also brings Seneca’s death and the martyrdoms of the Christians together into the same historical moment. Christianizing historiography played an even more explicit role in Friedrich Hiebel’s Seneca. Dramatische Dichtung um Paulus in Neros Rom (1974). The poem’s prologue presents a scene at Tiberius’ villa on Capri on April 3, 33, simultaneous with the hour of Christ’s crucifixion; after scenes depicting pivotal moments through the next decades, the finale presents events from April 30, 65, the day that culminated in Seneca’s death. In a seeming parallel of Tristan’s Mort de Seneque, this is also the day when Seneca (here with his brother Gallio in tow) had arranged to meet with Paul in Rome (Sen. VII, 124). The insertion 142. Veyne (1997), 233.

tracing the tradition

239

of Seneca’s death into the time schemes of Christian history is explicated in the words of the dying Seneca himself: “The death of Socrates no longer holds (Der Tod des Sokrates gilt nicht mehr länger). A new destiny pushes us to separate ourselves. . . . Nero’s Rome is still my grave, but my conscience will awaken me for the new birth (mein Gewissen / wird mich erwecken zu der Neugeburt)” (Sen. VII, 130). Seneca thus pivots from Socratic and Roman models of death to a new Christian awakening. This is also registered in the treatment of Paulina, whose declaration to Seneca, “I am going to your death with you” (Ich geh mit dir in deinen Tod), is thwarted when Natalis replies “Forbidden!” (Verbot!) and points to a precise stipulation against this in Nero’s decree (Sen. VII, 129). This conjuring of a strangely prescient Nero (he has clearly read his Tacitus!) is helpful for the christianizing portrayal, since it preempts the messiness of Paulina’s suicide attempt and makes way for the focus identified in the poem’s subtitle: Dramatische Dichtung um Paulus in Neros Rom. Hiebel makes a remarkable innovation in his deployment of Natalis, who now inhabits the role of Gavius Silvanus as well as being a onetime friend of Seneca’s. Not only does this make Natalis into a Judas, as his arrival at Seneca’s house is foreseen and awaited (126), but as the agent of the death that Seneca describes as a Neugeburt (“new birth”), Natalis unwittingly lives up to his name. For, I would point out, the Neugeburt concept corresponds to a Senecan letter in which the term natalis is explicit: dies iste quem tamquam extremum reformidas aeterni natalis est (“That day which you fear as if it were your last is the birthday of eternity,” Ep. 102.26).143 The Natalis character thereby becomes the midwife to Seneca’s immortalization, helping Seneca to benefit from Christ’s “death which revokes all deaths” (der Tod, der alle Tode widerruft, 128). But another dramatic text, Peter Hacks’ seriocomic play Senecas Tod (1977) written in the DDR, does not resolve so easily into a simple conflict between the righteous citizen and the forces of Neronian evil.144 In this play Seneca is a victim of arbitrary power imposed from above, yet the author seems equally interested in exploring behaviors of the dying Seneca that exhibit arbitrary and totalitarian aspects in their own right. In the opening act, Nero’s death decree is passed from hand to hand (Silvanus → centurion → the secretary of Seneca) and comes to Seneca’s attention only after Seneca and his secretary (Nikodrom) have almost finished composing a Tagesplan (“Day-Schedule,” Sen. Tod 245). Seneca’s response is exceedingly rational. He explains, in the stilted iambic style that characterizes the whole play: “Upon my life each day I put the final touch . . . I knew full well before today that I must die” (Ich legte an mein Leben täglich letzte Hand / . . . / Auch gestern war mir, daß ich sterben muß, bekannt, 143. On this already remarkable passage in Seneca, see Dionigi (1999), xviii; Setaioli (1997), 356–58. 144. First performed in Dresden and East Berlin in 1980. On Hacks’ play, though underestimating its literary merits, see von Albrecht (2004), 213–18; Hess (1981), 226–27. My analysis below differs from that of Ziolkowski (2004), who sees in the portrayal of Seneca’s death “a poignant statement of the means through which the individual can retain his dignity and freedom in a repressive society” (69; cf. 66–69).

240

receptions

246). He simply adds a doctor’s appointment to his Tagesplan and reduces the number of guests he is inviting for dinner that evening, taking in his stride the prospect of Death as an uninvited guest (250): NIKODROM SENECA

Und wenn er ungeladen eintritt? Gehe ich.

NIKODROM SENECA

And when death shows up uninvited? I will go.

In the remaining two acts, Seneca has a scheduled meeting with Paulina (II) and then entertains his dinner guests while seated in a bathtub (III), all the while denying that anything is amiss, and explaining away the bath with a series of fictional excuses—including venereal disease—until he is found to have died. Here rationalism grows into an absurd spectacle of fabrication. In his dealings with every kind of person, from the laborers and secretaries of his household to his wife and circle of friends, Seneca emerges as a petty tyrant. In the Tagesplan he had made room for “intimate intercourse” with his wife at three o’clock (Vertrauten Umgang, I, 243), but even the prospect of a meaningful sexual union is undermined: Paulina cannot get Seneca to admit that a kiss is truly “happy” (glücklich), only “pleasant” (angenehm), and she draws attention to the contrast between their amorous exchange and Seneca’s exchange with his literary audiences: “They read you, I kiss you” (Sie lesen dich, ich küsse dich, II, 267). As the agon continues, their relationship is reinvented successively in terms of the irreconcilable pairs of husband/helper, master/slave, mind/body, adult/child, age/beauty. She never learns that Seneca is about to die, and she seeks, along with the other friends at the dinner party, to secure from Seneca an answer to the “question of highest importance” (höchste Frage, 280), namely, why he is in the bath. Seneca’s insistence that he was given his venereal disease by “some young man” (Irgendein Junge, 282) redeploys the statements of Cassius Dio about Seneca’s high-class marriage betrayed by love of young men (61.10.3) to serve as an unlikely consolation of the anxious wife. In his dealings with Maximus, also, who is here his publisher, Hacks’ Seneca surpasses the anxious author portrayed by Dio, repeatedly asking about his “royalties” (das Honorar, III, 287). And by way of defending the splendor of his villa, Seneca echoes a saying of Suetonius’ Nero, asserting, “Without doubt, in it one can virtually live like a human being”’ (Unstreitig, fast drin leben kann man wie ein Mensch, III, 288; cf. Suet. Ner. 31.2). Seneca’s dying words, “How can one live? (Dies)” (Wie kann man leben? Stirbt, III, 296), point toward death as a liberation from life’s farce, yet the most extreme moments of farce have been generated by Seneca himself. Although the play makes scant reference to Nero, the viewer might easily feel that Nero’s regime has been replicated in the Senecan household, with all the violence it has done to truth. Seneca’s acceptance of death seems not only to tolerate the ideology of arbitrary death imposed by the State, but even to be complicit in it.

tracing the tradition

241

In parallel with these dramatic versions of the death, there have been novels (and films) in various languages following in the tradition of Quo Vadis, though the more recent instances have adapted it to pursue different goals of social or historical commentary.145 Among the Anglo-American instances is John Hersey’s The Conspiracy (1972), which we will briefly consider in chapter 8.146 One recent German novel, Beat Schönegg’s Der Tod des Seneca (2001), offers a continuous third-person narrative culminating in the death scene in which details are freely invented but are generally informed by Schönegg the scholar’s hypothesis about the death’s relationship to Seneca’s writings (in his Senecas Epistulae morales als philosophisches Kunstwerk, 1999). In the novel, we witness Seneca recognizing the potential of the Pisonian conspiracy to serve as a “theatrical background” for completing his poetic oeuvre and authenticating the suicide he has always been planning (Tod Sen. 152). The narrator recounts Seneca’s final discourses to his friends, including his rehearsal of an Indian eschatological theory (156) and the dictation in which he describes the conditions around him and his state of mind: “Beside me on the table lie my will, my works, Plato’s Phaedo, a sword, poison. My beloved wife Paulina is dying with me. I am calm and feel no fear. My life is full and ripe. I formed my death as a work of art (Ich gestalte meinen Tod als Kunstwerk)” (159). The novel’s final scene, in turn, presents Lucilius arriving on horseback from Rhegium, too late to see Seneca alive, but promptly presented with a stack of letter rolls, which he reads by torchlight—that is, the Epistulae morales, which it seems were not previously sent and are read here for the first time (161–62). We may note that this placement of the letters as a posthumously read text intensifies Seneca’s own orientation of the Epistulae morales toward posteri (cf. Ep. 8.2). It also opens up new possibilities for the deictic ita in ita fac, mi Lucili: vindica te tibi (“Do this [that is, face death as I have just done], my Lucilius. Reclaim possession of yourself for yourself,” Ep. 1.1), which Schönegg describes Lucilius reading: So mach es, Lucilius, befreie dich für dich! (162). A new version of the death in a 123-line poem by Durs Grünbein entitled “Seneca oder die zweite Geburt” (“Seneca or the Second Birth”; 2002) also alludes to the scholarly tradition in the course of seeking to define the death’s artistic dimensions. The poem is the last in a group of five “Seneca-Studien”—a title that may evoke Alfred Gercke’s 1895 scholarly monograph of the same name, as well as indicating the status of the poems as a set of artistic exercises or sketches, and capturing in turn Seneca’s peculiar connections with studia. The poems, which accompany Grünbein’s translation of the Thyestes, represent an exploration of various aspects of Seneca’s literary and biographic identity 145. E.g., the television miniseries Imperium: Nerone (2004), in which Nero scoffs at Seneca’s question, “Why did you betray our work?” and throws him a dagger to use. 146. For a survey of the historical and religious novels see Citti and Neri (2001), 150–57. In Walter Wangerin Jr.’s Paul: A Novel (2000) the death is reported by Paul himself: “Here’s a story: Seneca is dead. . . . That great and famous man who scorned us, the Jews, for what he called our ‘Superstitions’ . . . ” (487–88)—a reference to Seneca’s De superstitione (on which see Bocciolini Palagi 1981).

242

receptions

(“In Ägypten,” “Julia Livilla,” and so forth) in a poetic genre that is itself at odds with the priorities expressed by “Seneca” in the first poem: “To what end elaboration in verse (Wozu sich in Verse vertiefen)? There isn’t enough time to read all of lyric poetry, all the works of the philosophers” (Sen.-Stud. 168, lines 30–31; cf. Sen. Ep. 49.5). As the zweite Geburt of its title suggests, Grünbein’s poem on Seneca’s death follows the immortalizing trajectory of Hiebel’s play in treating Natalis as a Judas-like figure with an assigned role: “Today is a birthday, friends. What are we celebrating? Eternity” (Heut is Geburtstage, Freunde. Was wir feiern? Ewigkeit, 173, line 24). Here this is done in a Socratic rather than a Christian paradigm. But a major emphasis in the poem is the contradiction that undermines Seneca’s ambitions to serve as a moral authority. His final dictated text is a work entitled “On the Enemy Within” (Vom Feind in uns), and the relevance to Seneca’s career is clear. Although the dying Seneca character taunts Nero, “Tell your fat master: it is over” (Sag deinem dicken Herrn, es ist vorbei, 176, line 106), and condemns “you who feast on others’ suffering” (ihr Genießer fremden Leids),147 he nevertheless admits that he would never have condemned a spectacle “in the noontime break” (in der Mittagspause, 175, line 84). In so doing, he reveals that the moralizing voice of Epistulae morales 7 (“I chanced upon a noontime spectacle . . . ,” casu in meridianum spectaculum incidi, Ep. 7.3) was a private voice only, not one used for expressing formal opposition. Grünbein also paints a future of moral decay against which Seneca deploys a powerful moralist’s voice as he dies: “Tell [Nero]: Nothing went badly for me, and I was happy to flee his sad company” (Sag ihm, mir fehlte nichts, / Und ich war froh, der traurigen Gesellschaft zu entfliehn, 176, line 109–10). But these words hint that at least up till now he had belonged to Nero’s company—a company that he was at best powerless to refuse, and at worst complicit in creating.

Coda: The Seneca Machine As we reach the end of our 2,000-year survey, and before we turn back to explore several themes more closely in part IV, it is worth taking the measure of the most profound and, for the philologist, potentially the most unsettling recent reception. In his essay on the recent German receptions, Ziolkowski (2004, 75) persuasively suggests that some versions such as Grünbein’s have implicitly sought to answer the question that is the refrain of Heiner Müller’s 1992 poem SENECAS TOD, namely: “What Seneca thought (and did not say)” (was dachte Seneca (und sagte es nicht) ). But what to make of Müller’s question itself, which recurs five times in the course of his fifty-line poem and opens gaps for renewed speculation and creative supplementation, pointing to an interior 147. Echoing Polyb. 18.6 on Caligula’s inappropriate mourning: luctum suum . . . alienis malis oblectare.

tracing the tradition

243

subjectivity that lies hidden beneath the surface, even as Seneca speaks to his friends in full voice and dictates to his scribes in a fully theatricalized death?148 Müller’s poem raises familiar doubts about Seneca’s illusions of power and literary accomplishment. Nero’s death decree, for example, is explained by pointing out that “[Nero] had learnt writing and sealing and the despising of all deaths except his own” (Schreiben und Siegeln hatte er gelernt / Und die Verachtung aller Tode statt / Des eignen, lines 5–7)—the distorted outcomes of Seneca’s lessons. And Müller’s Seneca, his spoken words given in capital letters, embraces death greedily and imperiously: “MY PAINS ARE MY PROPERTY MY WIFE INTO THE NEXT ROOM SCRIBES TO ME” (MEINE SCHMERZEN SIND MEIN EIGENTUM / DIE FRAU INS NEBENZIMMER SCHREIBER ZU MIR, 30–31). Meanwhile, the refrain question is never given a formal answer, and Seneca remains “finally speechless” (sprachlos endlich, 43), giving us the impression that the private and authentic Seneca is fundamentally irretrievable. Yet the silencing of Seneca’s dictation frees Müller, in his final lines, effectively to offer an answer about what Seneca thought. He imagines Seneca experiencing “a renewed encounter with the first blade of grass that he had seen in a meadow in Cordoba higher than any tree” (Wiedersehn / Mit dem ersten Grashalm den er gesehen hatte / Auf einer Wiese bei Cordoba hoch wie kein Baum, 48–50). The bathos in these lines reflects Müller’s own interest in the Romans’ silence on an afterlife, but also more specifically serves to bring the Roman Seneca full circle to the Spanish child, in a highly literal interior glimpse of an existential imago vitae suae. Even if Seneca’s infantile mental image is taken to be humanizing and redemptive, the poem’s overall vision is pessimistic regarding the ideologies that Müller sees reproduced in Seneca’s death—and that he sees reproduced also, perhaps, in this death’s being privileged throughout the tradition. At the center of Müller’s portrait is Seneca’s act of dictation noted in the introduction to this book (32–34): the hand could no longer hold the stencil but the mind still worked the machine (die Maschine) produced words and sentences noted the pain. In Müller’s oeuvre, no metaphor is more central than that of the machine: enshrined in the title of his famous Die Hamletmaschine (1979), it evokes a dark nexus of modern industry, warfare, mass production, and the alienation of the subject.149 We may here see Müller expressing misgivings about a Seneca “industry” sustained by philology. In a dialogue with Alexander Kluge that served as a preface to a recitation of SENECAS TOD and was broadcast on German television in April 1993, Müller makes several explanatory points.150 One is 148. For brief readings see Ziolkowski (2004), 69–71; Lehmann and Primavesi (2003), 180–81, 316–17. 149. See Lehmann and Primavesi (2003), 104–8. 150. A transcript is given in the anthology of Weber (2001), 161–69; an excellent archival video with transcript is given at http://muller-kluge.library.cornell.edu/en/video_record.php?f=103.

244

receptions

the recurrence of the Seneca-Nero dyad in German thought. He notes that Seneca was “always a topos of German literature of the eighteenth century, when the illusion of an education of princes (die Illusion der Fürstenerziehung) still existed but was now breaking up” (167). He also points to the illusions of Theodor Mommsen and Martin Heidegger concerning their potential to educate, respectively, Bismarck and Hitler. The recurrence, Müller comments, is “very much a German illusion” (eine sehr deutsche Illusion) and “obviously also a DDR illusion” (167). A separate point, provocative for our study of the reception tradition, emerges in Müller’s recollection of an anecdote about the destruction by fire of Mommsen’s house and library (recalled also in his piece “Mommsen’s Block”), during which Mommsen repeatedly ran back into the flames in a vain attempt to retrieve his books and manuscripts. Müller offers the Mommsen anecdote as a tangential parallel to Seneca’s death: he sees the same general sense of greed and illusion subtending, on the one hand, Mommsen’s “greed for the old” (Altgier) and, on the other, Seneca’s desire to own his death and its pleasures as a kind of property. Müller does not ultimately reject Seneca: he identifies with him as an artist (witness his dramatic adaptation of Seneca’s Medea), and he regards Senecan greed as a precondition of art. But he uses Seneca’s death as an opportunity to air misgivings about the illusions it embodies. The addition of Mommsen to the mix seems intended to unsettle the philologist’s sense that everything can be recovered, or that recovering all the transcripts of Seneca’s death will reveal an authentic subject. Antonin Artaud once concluded that Nero’s “precepteur” and Seneca the tragedian could only be the same person if the former had “grown old” (vielli) or “been bewitched” (desésperé de la magie).151 But Müller, perhaps conscious of Artaud’s formulation, clarifies a more haunting truth: that Seneca was “the teacher of Nero, the author of stage plays, it is the same thing (es ist der gleiche).” Müller’s poem, with its recurring demand for supplementation, questions the intellectual’s tranquil conscience, suggesting that the thing that is most important remains unconscious, or at least unsaid, even in death’s defining moment.

151. In a 1932 letter; see Artaud (1978), 286–87.

part iv

Three Themes

This page intentionally left blank

8 Forced Suicide and the Bodily Paths to Libertas

What thinking lay behind the death of Seneca, accounting for its agency and its methods? In this chapter we look for answers in the different versions and receptions. But the question requires us first to fathom Seneca’s own approach to suicide—including his partial opposition to it—by examining his most sustained treatment of the topic in Epistulae morales 70, which Tacitus repeatedly echoes. We will then turn, in the remainder of the chapter, to consider what Ron Brown has called “the grammar of suicide: its flow, its punctuation, its subject and object” (2001, 9). The nature of Seneca’s killing has been repeatedly transformed by a shifting of agency among Nero, Seneca, and the minor players, and by reconfigurations of the several methods, or “deathways,” by which he dies. Consider what Walter of St. Victor, writing in the mid-twelfth century, made of the fact that Seneca died not only by his own hand, but in the bath. In the fourth and final book of his Contra quattuor labyrinthos Francie, a work attacking contemporary heretics, Walter presents a chapter “On the alluring and thus lethal doctrine of Seneca” (De blanda et ideo mortifera Senecae doctrina), seeking to demonstrate that a philosopher can be close to Christianity and still be alien to its teachings.1 Most lethal of all is Seneca’s exhortation to suicide. “With all his ingenuity and examples,” asserts Walter, Seneca “urges men who are placed in straitened circumstances to kill themselves (compellit ut semetipsos interficiant), and he places them in the heavens like 1. See Mastandrea (1988), 79–83; also Ross (1974), 138–39; Nothdurft (1963), 4–5, 40, 78–80; Smalley (1960), 294.

248

three themes

gods” (Contr. quatt. 4.2)—offenses against Christian doctrine. Walter compiles and interrogates multiple passages of the Epistulae morales, such as Seneca’s observation, “There is no need to rend your breast with a vast wound: the path to freedom can be opened with a scalpel” (non est opus vasto vulnere dividi praecordia: scalpello aperitur ad libertatem via, Ep. 70.16). But rather than treat Seneca’s endorsement of suicide as a sign of excessive sternness, Walter feminizes Seneca and his seductions: “Behold with what sweet-sounding doctrines (qualibus doctrinis dulcisonis) this nightingale, both persuasive and audacious, entices her listeners (allicit auditores) to become more credulous and more villainous . . .” Seduction is central in Walter’s account of the author’s own death, which includes the detail of the bath for the first time in surviving Christian texts: By contrast, when that man was required to die, softer than any woman he retreated to the bath-house (omni femina mollior . . . confugit ad balneas), and there, like a little child, he had the waters perfumed and made warm, and buried himself as if in the softest feathers, all the way up to the neck (ac si in mollissimis plumis se sepelivit usque ad collum). Then he softly touched the veins of both arms (utriusque brachii venis molliter tactis) and, in the height of luxury, as though he were sleeping, spewed out his effeminate soul (effeminatum animum ac si dormiendo evomuit). The ease and pleasantness of Seneca’s bath death, later presented more positively in the Roman de la Rose (RR 6219–21), are here cowardly and indulgent. “In a remarkable display of ingenuity,” Walter observes, Seneca “transformed his very death, and death’s pain, into great pleasure for himself ” (miro scilicet ingenio ipsam mortem mortisque dolorem vertit sibi in magnam voluptatem). Seneca even succumbed to a partial philosophical conversion, being now exposed as “Stoic in his school, Epicurean in his death” (stoicus professione epicurius morte), and at the same time is a “self-murderer” (suicida) to be grouped “with Nero and Socrates and Cato.” For all these suicides are equally damned. Walter is not alone, however, in seizing on the details of Seneca’s death— both its suicidal aspect and its precise method—as illustrating specific modes of thought. Others are equally interested, if not in satirizing Seneca’s death, then at least in reviewing Seneca’s thought on the topic of suicide in relation to the death with which he met.

Choices around Suicide: Epistulae Morales 70 No one can deny that Seneca the author, even by Roman standards, was conspicuously fascinated by suicide.2 But this fascination assumed different 2. On suicide in Seneca see esp. Griffin (1992), 367–88; Tadic-Gilloteaux (1963). On the Roman culture of suicide see esp. Hill (2004), including 142–82 on Seneca; also van Hooff (1990); Griffin (1986); Grisé (1982).

forced suicide and the bodily paths to libertas

249

forms. In the prose works, for example, he takes up existing traditions on suicide and articulates them vividly through exhortation and example—not least, in the recurring case of Cato the Younger, whose suicide embodies specific Roman and Stoic ideals, including the complex notion of libertas.3 Yet he is equally interested in the factors (often still tightly connected with libertas) that can make it preferable to survive, whether because of one’s personal relationships to friends and family or for some other reason.4 He also criticizes misguided motives for suicide such as “desire for death” (libido mortis), “hatred for life” (odium vitae), and “bad conscience” (mala conscientia), among others.5 Similar problematic motives are at play in the tragedies, where impassioned characters’ embrace of death as libertas has at best a superficial overlap with the factors that can lead a philosopher to choose death. When Seneca’s Hercules agrees not to kill himself, it is a seemingly positive moment, but a rare one. We might more accurately describe Seneca as being interested in decisions made about suicide in individual cases, both in favor and—as often—against.6 When we review his autobiographic self-representations we find earlier suicidal paths not taken. Plagued by ill health in his youth, he had aborted a decision to commit suicide out of concern for his father (“For sometimes simply to live is to act courageously,” aliquando enim et vivere fortiter facere est, Ep. 78.2), and more recently his concern for Paulina led to a similar outcome (Ep. 104.1–5). Tacitus tells us that Seneca had cunningly refused to let himself be poisoned by Nero (Ann. 15.45.3), and in the end Nero imposed the necessitas ultima (“final necessity,” §61.4) precisely because he heard that Seneca was not ostensibly considering a voluntaria mors (“voluntary death,” §61.2). Miriam Griffin, commenting on Seneca’s death as described by Tacitus, notes among other things that Seneca’s patience and rational decision making are in keeping with “the casuistical acumen we see displayed in Letter 70” (1992, 383). Indeed it is clear that when Tacitus looked for Senecan language with which to portray the event of the author’s death, as well as several other deaths from the same period, Epistulae morales 70 was the text from which he drew most. But if Tacitus saw Seneca’s letter as a reservoir of motifs, we need first to consider the letter’s reasoning in its own right and the perspectives it offered to Seneca’s contemporaries. In the subsections below we will do just that, looking in turn at (1) the letter as a whole, (2) its lessons, and (3) its social and doctrinal contexts, before considering (4) its reworking in Tacitus.

3. Seneca’s different uses of the term libertas are surveyed by Viansino (1979), 174–86; his specifically moral-psychological uses are discussed by Inwood (2005), 302–321. 4. On this focus among Roman Stoics see Reydams-Schils (2005), 45–52. 5. See Ep. 24.22–25; cf. Warren (2004), 207–8; Hill (2004), 175–78; Leeman (1971), 325–27. 6. Pace Rist (1969), 249: “Fundamentally Seneca’s wise man is in love with death”; also G. Williams (1978), 178. For critique see Palmieri (1999), 15–16; Griffin (1992), 374–75.

250

three themes

The Letter Epistulae morales 70 begins with Seneca mentioning his return to Campania after a long interval of time (echoing Ep. 49.1).7 The visit has stirred up memories of Seneca’s youth (Ep. 70.1), and he is inspired to compare life to a sea voyage, remarking, “We have sailed past our life, Lucilius” (praenavigavimus, Lucili, vitam), and observing how, after we have left the other stages of our life behind, “finally there begins to appear on the horizon the common end of the human race (publicus finis generis humani)” (§2). “In our insanity,” he laments, “we think [death] is a rock (scopulum)” (§3). But then six words of wisdom: portus est, aliquando petendus, numquam recusandus (“it is a haven, sometimes to be sought, never to be refused,” §3). These carefully chosen words define the argumentative scope of the whole letter. Although he next compares life to winds that determine our course for us, by the end of the preface Seneca hints at the possibility of determining our own course: “[Life], as you know, is not always to be held on to. For it is not living that is good, but living well” (quae [sc. vita], ut scis, non semper retinenda est; non enim vivere bonum est, sed bene vivere, §4). He describes the criteria that the sapiens will use to determine whether to end his life, and how. For example, he won’t always wait for the necessitas ultima, but will sometimes exit “as soon as Fortune has begun to be suspicious to him” (cum primum illi coepit suspecta esse fortuna, §5), because he recognizes that “it is irrelevant whether we die swiftly or slowly: what is relevant is whether we die well or badly; and dying well means escaping the danger of living badly” (citius mori aut tardius ad rem non pertinet, bene mori aut male ad rem pertinet; bene autem mori est effugere male vivendi periculum, §6). To illustrate what is meant by “living badly” and “dying badly,” Seneca contrasts the sapiens with a certain Rhodian who stupidly held onto life despite being imprisoned like an animal (§§6–7), yet he also asserts that “it is stupidity to die out of fear of death” (stultitia est timore mortis mori, §8). As an example of avoiding the latter, he gives the case of Socrates who “could have ended his life by abstaining and [thus] could have died from starvation rather than from poison” (potuit abstinentia finire vitam et inedia potius quam veneno mori, §9), but instead continued eating and fearlessly awaited the time scheduled for his execution. Then, somewhat surprisingly, Seneca compares with Socrates the converse yet equally laudable case of Drusus Libo, who (in 16 CE) opted to end his life before his trial in the Senate (on the charge of planning revolution) could be completed (§10)—evidently feeling that to wait would have exposed him to the danger of living badly. At this point Seneca acknowledges the different outcomes in his examples, and he points out the following: “You would not, then, be able to make a 7. For commentary on Ep. 70 see Scarpat (2007).

forced suicide and the bodily paths to libertas

251

blanket pronouncement (in universum pronuntiare) on the topic—on whether death should be anticipated or awaited (occupanda sit an expectanda), in situations where some external force decrees death. For there are many things that can pull you in either direction (quae in utramque partem trahere possunt)” (§11). As he goes on to identify factors that will make a difference to our deliberations, there are some that he rejects as stupid: “Someone will say that I didn’t act bravely enough (parum fortiter fecisse), someone will say that I acted too rashly (nimis temere), someone will say that some [other] type of death would have been more gutsy (aliquod genus mortis animosius)” (§13). This culminates in an explicit polemic against those philosophers who prohibit suicide altogether (§14): You will find self-proclaimed philosophers who deny that any force should be applied to one’s life and judge it an unspeakable wrong to become one’s own killer (professos sapientiam qui vim adferendam vitae suae negent et nefas iudicent ipsum interemptorem sui fieri): we must await the exit that Nature has determined. Whoever says this does not see that he is closing the path to freedom (libertatis viam cludere). The eternal law has done nothing better for us than this: it has given us one entrance to life, but many exits. Seneca spends the remainder of the letter stressing how easy it is to be “free in relation to this body” (adversus hoc corpus liber, §17), pointing out that “there is no need to rend your breast with a vast wound: the path to freedom can be opened with a scalpel, and freedom from care costs a pin-prick” (§16)— words that, as we have seen, would later be singled out by Walter of St. Victor. As an aid to welcoming death when we need to, Seneca then invokes meditatio mortis, identifying it as “the one thing for which a day will come that will demand its use” (huius unius rei usum qui exigat dies veniet, §§18–19). He presents a series of exempla—not, he announces, the death of Cato, but the three captives destined for the Roman amphitheater whose mention by Seneca we considered in chapter 2: “persons of the lowest station” (vilissimae sortis homines) who “seized whatever was nearby (obvia quaeque rapuerunt) and by their force made weapons out of things that were not by nature harmful” (§§19, 20–26). After his precise description of each of the three suicides, Seneca sums up the examples by asking, “Well? The courage shown by men who are desperate and guilty—will this not also be shown by those who have been prepared for such events by long practice and that teacher of all things, reason (quos adversus hos casus instruxit longa meditatio et magistra rerum omnium ratio)?” (§28). He concludes the letter with a sententia: “It is wrongful to live by snatching and grabbing, but by contrast, to die by snatching and grabbing is most beautiful. Farewell” (iniuriosum est rapto vivere, at contra pulcherrimum mori rapto. vale, §28).

252

three themes

The Lessons In one sense letter 70 is not primarily about teaching Lucilius how to die, but concerns a more basic point: recognizing that virtue is the sole and highest good and defines “living well,” whereas all things external to virtue have no value and should not influence our behavior. To embrace the liberation provided by death (“that great freedom,” illam magnam libertatem, §16) is to this extent to acknowledge the value of the mind, becoming “free in relation to this body” (adversus hoc corpus liber, §17).8 As Timothy Hill has observed, Seneca’s focus on suicide often appears to exploit the special potential that the topic has to serve as an exercise in “cognitive exemplarity,” because it involves the fullest possible detachment from one’s social roles and other externals (2004, 151–57).9 But to the extent that it is about death, there are two distinct lessons being conducted by the letter: 1. Seneca wants to break down our fear of death—to have us recognize the truth of his opening assertions that death is a “haven” (portus) and that this haven is “never to be refused” (numquam recusandus, §3). The wise man “does not reckon it a concern for him whether he makes an end or receives it, whether it comes about slowly or swiftly” (nihil existimat sua referre, faciat finem an accipiat, tardius fiat an citius). Because virtue is always already complete, death itself (like time) is among the indifferents, just as the specific circumstances of death are also indifferent, so long as we die “well” and not “badly”—that is, so long as we do not die in a way that shows we ascribe value to externals rather than to virtue alone. Rejecting externals includes rejecting the opinions that other people will have about our death: “A man should make his life praiseworthy to others, but his death praiseworthy to himself (vitam et aliis adprobare quisque debet, mortem sibi): the best [death] is the one he chooses (optima est quae placet). Bear in mind that the decision you have in hand is one to which fame is irrelevant! See only to this: that you pluck yourself from Fortune’s grasp as quickly as possible (ut te fortunae quam celerrime eripias)” (70.12–13; cf. 66.42–44). This special immunity of one’s way of dying from external evaluation adds to the distinctive securitas (“freedom from care,” §16) that is offered by death and that makes it, in the maritime metaphor, truly a “haven.” 2. At the same time, and more emphatically, Seneca would have us recognize the sense in which the haven is “sometimes to be sought” (aliquando petendus,

8. On suicide as primarily concerned with freedom see Griffin (1992), 382–88. Compare Ep. 26.10: “meditare mortem”: qui hoc dicit meditari libertatem iubet; also 51.9; cf. Isnardi Parenti (2000), 216; Setaioli (1997), 323–24. Seneca may equivocate on the nature of death (e.g., Ep. 65.24: mors quid est? aut finis aut transitus) but never equivocates on its liberatory effect. 9. Compare Inwood’s (2005), 312 observation that Seneca’s discussion of suicide is less about death-desire than about maintaining personal “agency” (versus “passivity”).

forced suicide and the bodily paths to libertas

253

70.3). If overcoming the fear of death was primarily an exercise in the basic value distinction between the mind and externals, the active deliberation about suicide—concerning whether and how—involves further calibrations of value, preferring certain things (for example, freedom from pain) over others (their opposites).10 The doctrine of preferred indifferents, as Seneca makes clear in the letter, will sometimes lead the Stoic to prefer death because the alternative would be, say, to be treated like a caged animal: “If many troublesome things arise, things that disturb tranquillity, he frees11 himself ” (si multa occurrunt molesta et tranquillitatem turbantia, emittit se, §5). It will also lead him to prefer to die in a particular manner: “If one death is accompanied by torment (cum tormento), and the other is simple and easy (simplex et facilis), why shouldn’t we reach for the latter?” (§11). This lesson includes considering factors more specific to the person involved. Libertas in this letter subsumes not only the forms of freedom already mentioned above—the freedom offered by death, the freedom of the mind from the body and other externals—but also our inalienable freedom to choose (or to resist) death whenever we wish, and to choose between whatever methods are available: “Nature guards us out in the open. . . . If someone has several things at hand that he might use to liberate himself, let him make a decision and consider by which path he might most preferably be freed (dilectum agat et qua potissimum liberetur consideret). If someone has difficulty in finding an opportunity, let him seize the closest one as the best one, even if it is unheard of and novel” (§24).12 Exercise of choice is the salient manifestation of libertas in the letter, manifested in such terms as consilium (§§10, 13), arbitrium (10, 19), placet (12, 15, 28), and eligere/electio (11, 19, 21)—all contrasted with apparent necessitas (5, 17, 24) or servitus (12, 19, 21). Further, the threats on the horizon tend not to be those of old age or illness, but some vis externa (§11) such as the laws of Athens, the Rhodian tyrant, the schedule of the amphitheater, or (more abstractly) Fortune. A choice about suicide is here characterized as a wresting of power from this killing agent. Seneca repeatedly asserts personal agency with exhortatory rhetorical questions in ego: “Why am I waiting for death when I have weapons?” (quare ego mortem armatus expecto? §26; cf. §§7, 15). The formula with ego evokes the Stoic ethical theater and the theory of personae. What sort of person am I? Given what sort of person I have been or aspire to be, what would be most consistent with this?13 10. On this theory in Seneca see VB 22.3–5, 24.5–25.8; cf. Ker (forthcoming b). 11. For emittere as a technical term referring to manumission, see Scarpat (2007), 63. 12. Stoic psychology is alluded to in Seneca’s use of the term impetus (= ¡qlñ) at 70.12: exeat qua impetum cepit. This alludes to the Stoic’s inalienable power to assent to impressions. Even if there were no choice between methods, Seneca elsewhere emphasizes the choice implicit in dying willingly or unwillingly; e.g., bene autem mori est libenter mori (Ep. 61.2). Cf. Leeman (1971), 330–32. 13. For the relevance of persona theory to suicide choices in the Imperial period, see Griffin (1992), 381–82; Brunt (1975).

254

three themes

If someone choosing whether and how to end his life is concerned with being a particular kind of person, we may discern different narratives being pursued in Seneca’s different anecdotes. The choice of Socrates, for example, in not seeking to preempt his execution by self-starvation, is partly a matter of not giving in to the fear of death. More specifically, though, Seneca explains that Socrates waited out the thirty days “to offer himself to the laws and give his friends the final Socrates to enjoy” (ut praeberet se legibus et fruendum amicis extremum Socraten daret, §9). The determining factor is evidently Socrates’ sense of his responsibilities to his friends, partly so that they can enjoy his company and his example for a longer time, and partly also, it seems, to uphold the role that he knows is expected of him—somewhat presciently and selfconsciously, as if he had already read the Crito and the Phaedo.14 Yet the case of Drusus Libo involves different factors. Drusus’ aunt Scribonia maintained that for him to kill himself would be to perform “another’s work” (alienum negotium), whereas Seneca summarizes Drusus’ own reasoning as follows: “If someone who is set to die by another’s decision (inimici moriturus arbitrio) still lives after the third or fourth day, he is doing another’s work (alienum negotium agit)” (§10). Unlike Socrates, Drusus appears to have thought that if he had preserved himself, no greater purpose would have been served— no special exemplary role—and indeed he would have surrendered his own agency to the executioner without any advantage to himself or others. Although the differences between the cases of Socrates and Drusus are not in the end fully articulated, Seneca’s point is evidently that each individual exercised his freedom of choice in a way that was consistent with his own self-perception.

The Contexts The background for Seneca’s thinking in letter 70, and especially for the case of Drusus Libo, includes what Paul Plass has referred to as “the game of death” in first-century Rome, in which voluntary death and forced suicide often arose through a series of moves and countermoves between the emperor and his opponents (1995, 92–115).15 Although the outcome of the process was a reaffirmation of specific social values, each of the parties involved could gain or lose in status (93–94). From the perspective of the victim, a wellchosen suicide served as one of the most powerful tactics for attaining glory within the compromised conditions of the Principate, where the traditional avenues for accumulating glory were mostly cut off.16 A well-chosen suicide might be one that drew its authority from philosophy, or in some other way could be understood as a mors opportuna or as a fortis exitus characterized by

14. On anachronistic self-perception in Seneca’s portrayal of Socrates see Ker (forthcoming b). On the reference to the laws here as an allusion to the Crito see Inwood (2005), 241–43. 15. Additional background, together with critique of Plass, is given by Hill (2004), 183–212. 16. On suicide as an aristocratic class marker in this period see Murphy (2004), 123–24.

forced suicide and the bodily paths to libertas

255

constantia17—though not “an ambitious death of no use to one’s country” (in nullum rei publicae usum ambitiosa morte, Agr. 42.4)18 or a death proceeding, on the other hand, “without any memorable action or word” (nullo facto dictove memorando, Ann. 15.70.2). The potential symbolism of elite suicide during this period can be seen most clearly in retellings of Cato’s decision to die rather than live under the tyrant Caesar. In the vivid formulations of declamatory rhetoric and exemplary history, Cato’s death represented the restriction of libertas to “modes of personal conduct rather than expressions of political rights or rightlessness.”19 Seneca’s approach to Cato as an exemplum for suicide often alludes to the death-inprogress of the Republic (for example, “that last and most courageous wound of Cato’s, through which freedom breathed its last breath,” Catonis illud ultimum ac fortissimum vulnus per quod libertas emisit animam, Ep. 95.72) in combination with a new restricting of freedom to the individual person (“This weapon . . . will give to Cato the freedom that it was unable to give to the fatherland,” ferrum istud . . . libertatem quam patriae non potuit Catoni dabit, Prov. 2.10).20 In some seventeen instances, Seneca pairs Cato with the example of Socrates. In letter 70, however, Socrates is paired not with Cato but with the more recent Drusus Libo, whose persecution and suicide Tacitus later presented as symptomatic of the sickness of the whole Tiberian age (Ann. 2.27–31). Seneca refers to Cato only briefly in letter 70, en route to describing the amphitheater captives:21 “There is no call for you to think that this cannot be done by anyone but Cato (hoc fieri nisi a Catone non posse), who extracted by hand whatever life-breath he had not [already] ejected with his weapon (qui quam ferro non emiserat animam manu extraxit): people of the lowest station (vilissimae sortis homines) have made a massive attack and made it through to safety” (70.19). In fact, the “game of death” culture described by Plass is also exhibited in the “lethal games” of the amphitheater, especially by the routinized aspect of death (1995, 8–10), and Seneca’s examples may reflect the logic of this game, as the captives not only abort the beast show for which each was destined, but also produce a spectacle of their own (§26). At the same time as he intervenes in this social culture, Seneca uses the letter to set out his position on suicide in opposition to philosophers who prohibit it outright.22 Among philosophers, of course, the most influential, but 17. On the “philosophical overtones” of Imperial suicides see Griffin (1986), 66–67. On mors opportuna see Ficca (1999). 18. On ambitiosa mors see Hill (2004), 8–10; Musurillo (1979), 240. 19. Wirszubski (1968), 160–67, with reference to Thrasea and Seneca in Tacitus (Ann. 14.49.1, 15.61.3); quoted from 164, emphasis added. 20. On Cato’s combination of political and personal libertas see Leeman (1971), 331. On Cato’s suicide and libertas in Seneca see Isnardi Parenti (2000), 218, 223; Goar (1987), 36–41. On Cato as a focus of Seneca’s political realism about the present see Gowing (2005), 76–79; Griffin (1992), 182–94. 21. For similar juxtaposition of Cato with examples of lowly or unlikely suicides see Ep. 24.9, 14; cf. Hutchinson (1993), 277. On Seneca’s exploitation of lowly examples see van Hooff (1990), 20. 22. The classic catalogue of arguments against self-killing, as råbeia, is Joseph. BJ 3.376–79. As Griffin (1992), 375 notes, Cato’s suicide had been criticized by some as unholy. On suicide in ancient philosophy in general see Cooper (1999); Griffin (1986), 70–75; and, on Epicurean arguments against curtailing life, Warren (2004), 199–212.

256

three themes

malleable, statement, was that of Socrates in the Phaedo that “they say that it is not permitted to kill oneself ” (o– fiari helisøm ei῏mai aÕsøm pojseim mai, 61e) and his mention of a prohibition against “using force on oneself ” (èatsøm biferhai, 61d). Socrates mentions the esoteric doctrine that “we human beings are, as it were, in a sort of guard-post” („| ìm simi fiqotqãi érlem oØ mhqxpoi, 62b), so that “one must not kill oneself before the god sends some necessity, such as the one that actually confronts us now” (ló pqæseqom aÕsøm pojseim mai deπm, pq≠m mcjgm sim heø| épipålwz, Árpeq ja≠ sóm m‹m ôlπm paqo‹ram, 62c).23 Seneca’s letter seems to portray his opponents as relying on the words of Socrates as a basis for their opposition to suicide (cf. qui vim adferendam vitae suae negent et nefas iudicent ipsum interemptorem sui fieri, Ep. 70.14). Seneca’s own repeated use of Socrates’ death as an example suggests that he did not read the Socratic pronouncement as incompatible with his own views on suicide; and indeed, Griffin has suggested that Seneca and the Stoics simply amplified Socrates by emphasizing a person’s ability to anticipate the divine signal through the exercise of reason, which is itself divine (1992, 374; cf. 1986, 72). Although Seneca tends to characterize Socrates as waiting patiently for his own execution rather than as taking things into his own hands (in condensing the death he still refers to “prison and poison,” carcer et venenum, Ep. 104.27), he regularly pairs him with the dying Cato.24 This partly involves an assimilation of Cato to Socrates of the sort first licensed by Cicero (cf. Tusc. 1.74), but conversely it also assimilates Socrates to Cato, whose outright suicide was openly sanctioned by Stoic doctrine. Diogenes Laertius explains, for example, that for the Stoics a suicide counts as a “well-reasoned departure” (e–koco| énacxcñ) if it is done “on behalf of one’s fatherland or one’s friends and family (fi¨koi), or when in chronic pain, disability, or incurable sickness” (D.L. 7.130 = SVF 3.757).25 This Stoic systematization of the Socratic position, I suggest, may have been facilitated by the fact that the fiqotq referred to by Socrates can be read as describing a prison-like situation that one needs to be freed from, rather than simply a post to abandon26—a reading that would have allowed virtually any of the difficult life conditions named by the Stoics to be identified with “necessity” (mcjg), and would have made suicide an obvious way of restoring libertas. Hence those who prohibit suicide are, in Seneca’s view, freedom’s enemies: “We must await the exit that Nature has determined. Whoever says this does not see that he is closing the path to freedom (non videt se libertatis viam cludere)” (Ep. 70.14). Seneca’s reference to the prohibitionists as “self-proclaimed philosophers” (professos sapientiam) suggests that he is calling into question their very 23. See Warren (2001); Cooper (1999), 520–23; Griffin (1986), 70. 24. For the Senecan passages on Socrates’ death, see Griffin (1992), 273; Döring (1979), 26–27. On Seneca and Socrates more generally see E. R. Wilson (2007), 127–30; Staley (2002). 25. See SVF 3.757–68; for explication, Cooper (1999), 531–36; Griffin (1992), 376–83. 26. For this interpretation of fiqotq see Warren (2001), 97 n. 15; Cooper (1999), 522.

forced suicide and the bodily paths to libertas

257

credentials as philosophers. For in prohibiting suicide, the freedoms they foreclose include the freedom of the philosopher to exhibit his value judgments through suicide. By the second century if not earlier, the philosopher’s right to iactatio, “demonstrating a point,” as a motive for suicide was included in a law that exempted certain suicides from the customary confiscation of goods.27 Seneca, too, emphasizes the pedagogical potential of philosopher suicides: “Spend time with Socrates, spend time with Zeno: the one will teach you to die if it is necessary, the other before it is necessary” (cum Socrate, cum Zenone versare: alter te docebit mori si necesse erit, alter antequam necesse erit, Ep. 104.21).28

The Reworking in Tacitus When Tacitus takes up motifs from letter 70, each does its own novel work in his text.29 As we noted in chapter 2, the amphitheater captives (Ep. 70.19, 20–26) are echoed in the inventive and exemplary suicide of Epicharis (Ann. 15.57.1–2). In addition, Tacitus has the conspirators echo Seneca when they exhort Piso to be brave and attack Nero: “The army and the people could desert their cause—so long as, if his life were cut short, he would be making his death approved to the ancestors and to posterity (dum ipse maioribus, dum posteris, si vita praeriperetur, mortem adprobaret)” (§59.3). That exhortation is only partly in the spirit of Seneca, who makes the self, not ancestors or posterity, the validating audience for death (cf. vitam et aliis adprobare quisque debet, mortem sibi, 70.13). Tacitus’ portrayal of Seneca dying only after the necessitas ultima was imposed (§61.4) may draw attention to the fact that Seneca says, in the letter, that the wise man will not always wait for the necessitas ultima (70.5). In yet another echo, the dying Seneca’s question to his friends, “What had happened to their philosophical precepts and their rationality rehearsed for so many years against impending misfortunes?” (ubi praecepta sapientiae, ubi tot per annos meditata ratio adversum imminentia, §62.2), recalls the epistolary Seneca’s appeal to Lucilius to surpass the noble but unpracticed actions of the amphitheater captives (70.27). But Tacitus’ later description of Mela’s perception of vein opening as “the most efficient path to death” (promptissima mortis via, 16.17.5), although it echoes the letter’s characterization of vein opening as a brief path to freedom (70.16), is deeply ironic in light of the slowness of Seneca’s own bleeding. Despite these complications, the death scene described by Tacitus still accords in general ways with the principles established by Seneca’s letter. The fact that Seneca does not undertake a voluntaria mors (Ann. 15.61.2) may

27. Cf. Dig. 28.3.6.7; discussed by Hill (2004), 2, 254; van Hooff (1990), 37; Griffin (1992), 386; (1986), 68, 197; Gourévitch (1984), 214–15. 28. The Stoic founder Zeno tripped and broke his toe and, already suffering in old age, chose to suffocate himself; cf. D. L. 7.28. On Seneca’s approval for Zeno’s suicide here, see Griffin (1992), 374. 29. For several of the echoes see Woodman (forthcoming).

258

three themes

be regarded as an assertive refusal “to administer another’s cruelty” (alienae crudelitatis procuratio) or “to die out of fear of death” (timore mortis mori, Ep. 70.8). The letter also gives a basis for viewing Seneca’s final encounter with his friends as an act resembling that of Socrates, whose aim was “to offer himself to the laws and give his friends the final Socrates to enjoy” (ut praeberet se legibus et fruendum amicis extremum Socraten daret, §9). Seneca, as it were, presents his friends with an extremus Seneca who is an evocation of the wise man who waits, and whose exercise of choice in the arranging of his death has something to teach in its own right.

Agents of Death It has been persuasively argued by Rebecca Flemming that in Roman culture “[t]he question of agency, narrowly construed, had no bearing on the ethical, juridical or political quality of [a] death” (2005, 316).30 And Griffin draws attention to a revealing passage in Marcus Aurelius (Med. 11.4) in which the deaths of Cato (suicide), Thrasea Paetus (forced suicide), and Helvidius Priscus (execution) are grouped together—where differences of agency or motive are relatively trivial (1986, 69–70). But if the agency of a death was not per se decisive, the precise division of labor between the parties to a death could certainly influence perceptions of the death event, and with this the death’s most fundamental qualities. In addition, in the case with which we are concerned, the parties included not only Nero and Seneca, but also their surrogates and guests. The already complex roles played by these parties in the ancient accounts of Seneca’s death were also, in the course of the tradition, further renegotiated.

Surrogates and Guests Among the minor players, the figure of Gavius Silvanus is portrayed by Tacitus as subject to the moral agonies of the conspirator-messenger, discussed already in chapter 1 (cf. Ann. 15.61.3-4). This is intensified later by Polenton, who claims more explicitly that Nero sent Silvanus with the secret intention “that Seneca, scared by this messenger (hoc nuncio territus), would, as the guilty leader of the conspiracy, spontaneously commit suicide (mortem sibi ultro conscisceret)” (Vita Sen. 490). Hacks reveals Silvanus’ internal conflict by having him hand Nero’s letter to the centurion with a self-conscious warning: “If some day there is talk of this letter among posterity or people who write (bei Enkeln oder Schreibervolk), let my name never be mentioned (mein Name sei / Nimmer genannt)” (Tod Sen. I, 235). The figure of the centurion is a more direct stand-in for imperial authority than Silvanus in that he originally announces the necessitas ultima firsthand 30. See also Hill (2004), passim.

forced suicide and the bodily paths to libertas

259

and serves as an eyewitness and enforcer (Ann. 15.61.4). This role is revisited by Rubens when he inserts the centurion and a companion soldier into the scene (Fig. 7.8). In Tristan’s play (Mort de Sen. V.iv) the centurion becomes the obvious choice to deliver the messenger’s speech reporting the whole death scene to Nero. Who opens the veins? The “executioner” (percussor) called upon by Paulina may be simply an abstraction (Ann. 15.63.1).31 It is uncertain whether she and Seneca took things into their own hands or were assisted by one of the “doctors” (medici) whom Nero, according to Suetonius, used to send “to ‘cure’ those who were delaying—for this was the term used for cutting the veins for the purpose of death” (qui cunctantes “curarent”: ita enim vocabatur venas mortis gratia incidere, Ner. 37.2). The medieval illuminators depict one or two cutters who could be servants of Nero (for example, Fig. 7.2). Rubens’ arm cutter, however, both uses a scientifically accurate tourniquet (a late addition by Rubens to his painting) and shows on his face the concern of the doctor-friend (Fig. 7.8). Statius Annaeus, given his name, is not just a friend but possibly a freedman (and thus a proxy) of Seneca, and his possession of the hemlock identifies him as having played an intimate role in Seneca’s preparations for a Socratic death. Manetti, however, makes Statius “present by accident” ( forte ibi assistentem), and Seneca must plead with him “insistently” (impensius) before he will give him poison (Vita Soc. et Sen. 8.13). The involvement of Statius and any other doctors raises questions of medical ethics: although it appears to have been allowed by Roman law, and acceptable in practice, for doctors to facilitate a good death, there was always a potential conflict with the Hippocratic oath’s prohibitions on causing harm, and indeed doctors’ assistance in suicide was later banned.32 Slaves and freedmen are also present, being explicitly mentioned in connection with Paulina’s revival and also Seneca’s libation. They can be assumed, like the doctors, to be anxious about being held culpable. Seneca himself describes how the slaves of Tullius Marcellinus “refused to obey” (parere nolebant) until the Stoic friend pointed out “that the slaves only faced danger when it was uncertain whether the master’s death had been voluntary (cum incertum esset an mors domini voluntaria fuisset); otherwise, to prevent a master [from dying] was as bad an example as to kill him” (Ep. 77.7).33 As for their revival of Paulina, Klaus Bergdolt notes that “in ancient tradition this kind of life rescue was an act open to ethical objections” (2002, 277). In later receptions, however, the slaves and freedmen often fade into invisibility, whether this facilitates an image of Seneca in solitude or puts the focus on friends and pupils. Kleist has the freedman Polybius almost die in Seneca’s place (Sen. II.ii–iii, 281–83), 31. Cf. Miller (1973), 116. Tacitus uses the same term at Ann. 2.31.1 when he describes the desperate Drusus Libo calling for someone (anyone) to kill him: vocare percussorem. 32. See Flemming (2005), esp. 305; Bergdolt (2002), 273–77, 281–83; Gourévitch, (1984), 202–10. 33. The legal background is reviewed by Gourévitch (1984), 210–13.

260

three themes

and in Hacks’ play the freedman-secretary Nikodrom helps Seneca to keep his death a secret to the end. A more specialized group of personnel are the scribes; as we noted in chapter 7, Rubens reintroduced a scribe figure and thereby emphasized the death’s authorial technology. The friends of Seneca are an all-important audience, given the social dimension of death in antiquity.34 Like the friends of Socrates, they are foils to Seneca’s calm acceptance of death—a role verging on dissent in the chorus of Famigliari in L’incoronazione di Poppea. The additional detail provided by Tacitus, that Seneca and the others were dining together, is evocative of other situations in the Annals in which suicide or execution concludes a banquet (for example, Ann. 2.31.1; 15.69.2–3). Such scenes exploit the general associations between banqueting, life, and funeral ritual, though in the case of Seneca the dinner also recalls the more specific comparison in the Epistulae morales between readiness for death and the repleteness of a dinner guest, as well as the analogy between life and banquet in a Stoic fragment explaining the acceptable conditions for taking one’s leave.35 But in the dramatization by Hacks, Seneca’s dinner party becomes a comedy of manners as he ludicrously conceals his death; the presence of the bathtub throughout the proceedings recalls the Cena Trimalchionis with its unexpected mid-dinner bath (Sat. 72–73) and induces a similar degree of bafflement and awkwardness in the guests. The role of Paulina is the most varied of all. As we have noted in earlier discussions of Tacitus and Dio, she is variously an onlooker, a future mourner, a participant, an enabler, and a survivor. And as we have noted in our survey of both texts and images in the classical tradition, she serves sometimes as a weak emotive foil to Seneca’s masculine courage, sometimes as an example of outstanding marital fidelity, and sometimes as a reverser of the death, whether through weakness of resolve or through a determination to keep Seneca’s memory alive. For many, the suicidal aspect of her death attempt could not be ignored. Erasmus characteristically reads her involvement as evidence of Seneca’s identity as a non-Christian, asking, “What Christian ever . . . gave approval for his wife to commit suicide without necessity?” (quis unquam Christianus . . . in uxore sua probavit, ut citra necessitatem sibi mortem conscisceret?).36 But a proverbial expression found in William Alger’s The Friendships of Women (1868), “as pale as Seneca’s Paulina” (90), suppresses any concern about her suicidal agency to focus on the memorial function of her blood-drained face in the years of her widowhood, together with gentle wordplay on her name. Some have gone searching for additional minor players. One such instance concerns the figure Cleonicus, who features in Hersey’s The Conspiracy. Known only from Tacitus’ account of Nero’s supposed earlier attempt to poison Seneca, 34. On this aspect see Hill (2004), 1–21, 183–212; van Hooff (1990), 131; Griffin (1986), 66; Gourévitch (1984), 194. 35. See SVF 3.768; discussed by Griffin (1986), 73–74. 36. Noted by Ramelli (2004), 236.

forced suicide and the bodily paths to libertas

261

in which his divided loyalties are suggested by the rumor that he was responsible for administering the poison and was the one who tipped Seneca off (Ann. 15.45.3), Cleonicus is now introduced to the death scene and is the one sent to fetch the hemlock (Consp. 255). In this adapted scenario, Hersey’s narrator also invokes Senecan passages on slavery, such as Seneca’s espousals of shared humanity between free and slaves in Epistulae morales 47, saying, “We have lived together, talked together, planned together” (252; cf. Sen. Ep. 47.13).37 The narrator Paenus juxtaposes this with the observation that Seneca didn’t really know Cleonicus: “The tears of Cleonicus seemed to be, and may have been, perfectly sincere, but I was in a position to know that there was surely irony in them. And I remembered, against the background of Seneca’s sentimental writings on slaves, his not knowing even of the existence of the scullery slave who might have poisoned him” (252). This observation is colored by its allusion to Seneca’s own topos concerning the ease with which masters can be killed by their slaves: “[T]here is no slave,” Seneca wrote to Lucilius, “who does not have the power of life and death over you” (nemo non servus habet in te vitae necisque arbitrium, Ep. 4.8). Hersey thus plays on the tensions between Seneca’s humanism and the realities of his status as a slave owner who relies on an elaborate domestic apparatus even for the act of suicide.

Murderous Nero The emperor’s actions vary according to the different emphases being given to specific moral and cultural factors. In the protracted “game of death” represented by Tacitus, Plass observes that Seneca’s death is a “compromise between imperial and private prerogatives” in which “Seneca in a sense has both committed suicide and been executed, while Nero has not executed anyone and yet has asserted authority” (1995, 102). Yet despite his accommodating his victims’ agency and his use of surrogates, Nero has always remained the killer. Whereas Tacitus describes the death of the consul Atticus Vestinus by describing how “he was shut in a private room, the doctor was ready (praesto est medicus), his veins were cut open (abscinduntur venae), and while still strong he was carried into a bath (balneo infertur), and was immersed in hot water and uttered no word of self-pity” (Ann. 15.69.2), Suetonius simply remarks that Nero “slaughtered Vestinus” (Vestinum . . . trucidavit, Ner. 35.1).38 Conversely, Tacitus’ encapsulation of Seneca’s forced suicide with caedes Annaei Senecae (“the killing of Annaeus Seneca,” Ann. 15.60.2) concisely excludes the qualifying details that will be given later, and is even more direct than Suetonius’ report that Nero “forced his adviser Seneca to death” (Senecam praeceptorem ad necem compulit, Ner. 35.5). In Jerome’s references to the death, the statement that Seneca “perished by cutting of veins and drinking 37. On Seneca’s supposedly humanitarian views in Ep. 47 see Bradley (2008). 38. Cf. Plass (1995), 94.

262

three themes

of poison” (incisione venarum et veneni haustu perit, Chron. 184.15–16) does not preclude Jerome from summarizing the death elsewhere in these words: a Nerone interfectus est (“was killed by Nero,” De vir. ill. 12). Christian interpreters were especially inclined to demonize Nero as persecutor and also to deemphasize the suicidal aspect of Seneca’s death.39 In the illuminations (Figs. 7.2, 7.3, and 7.4), Nero is conspicuously present and acts with his gaze or his hand gestures, and the figures cutting Seneca’s arms are directly enforcing his decree. In the same period the very notion of “choice” that was reemphasized in Boethius’ formulation that Nero “forced Seneca . . . to exercise his freedom in choosing his death” (Senecam . . . ad eligendae mortis coegit arbitrium, Cons. 3.5) soon enough became Seneca’s absurdly trivial freedom to choose the tree he would hang from (Leg. aur. 84.212).

Seneca Se Necans Even given Nero’s sometimes overwhelming role, at the tradition’s core is Seneca’s agency, beginning in his choice to play a waiting game. Plass suggests that the tribune’s report that “no signs of fear and no sadness had been detected in [Seneca’s] words and face” (nulla pavoris signa, nihil triste in verbis eius aut vultu, Ann. 15.61.2)40 is effectively a countermove denying Nero’s power, with the result that “[i]n Tacitus’ account, Seneca manages to take, rather than to be granted, the right of suicide” (1995, 102). Even Nero’s prior desire to kill Seneca could appear to be the outcome of Seneca’s own actions, whether as a comeuppance or as a goal. Among the reasons Seneca might have for letting himself die is his principled opposition to assassination spelled out in the De Beneficiis (Ben. 2.20.2), which has sometimes been seen as grounds for his not joining the Pisonian conspiracy. In Tristan’s play Seneca shows squeamishness about tyrannicide and tells Lucan: “To destroy with the sword the one whom I was seen nourishing (ce qu’on m’a veu nourrir), oh I feel too much horror—I would rather die (i’aymerois mieux mourir)” (Mort de Sen. II.iv, 675–76). Once Nero finally decrees death, Seneca does not wait passively for the executioner’s blow but takes up the mortis arbitrium and becomes more directly involved in his death’s causation. Even if he depends on the agency of others, Tacitus and Dio both make Seneca the grammatical subject of several of the actions that lead to his death: “[Seneca and Paulina] opened (exsolvunt) their arms” (Ann. 15.63.2); he “broke open” his leg veins (abrumpit, 15.63.3); he “drained” the poison (hausit, 15.64.3); he “laid hands on himself ” after amending the book he had been writing (èatso‹ úwaso, Dio 62.25.2). What were the implications for a historical narrative that framed a death as suicidal? We have already seen, in our discussion of letter 70, how the social 39. See Mastandrea (1988), 51–56, esp. 54–55 n. 12. 40. A possible echo of Sen. Ep. 104.28: haec . . . ne vultum quidem moverint. . . . usque ad extremum nec hilariorem quisquam nec tristiorem Socraten vidit.

forced suicide and the bodily paths to libertas

263

and doctrinal contexts of first-century Rome could allow some suicides to be conceived of as displays of personal autonomy.41 Tacitus strikingly seizes on several of the same suicides celebrated in Seneca’s writings to serve as moral reference points within his own portrait of Julio-Claudian society—notably, the (somewhat desperate) self-stabbing by Drusus Libo in 16 CE (Ann. 2.27–31; cf. Sen. Ep. 70.10) and the self-starvation of Cremutius Cordus in 25 (Ann. 4.34–35; cf. Sen. Marc. 22.6–7). Yet specific motives and methods could ultimately prevent a sympathetic reception. One of the more extreme illustrations comes in Tacitus’ account of the year 37: “In these same days Sex. Papinius, from a consular household, chose a sudden and indecorous exit, hurling his body from a precipice (repentinum et informem exitum delegit, iacto in praeceps corpore). The reason was traced to his mother, whom he had long ago rebuffed (pridem repudiata) but who had used flattery and luxury to push the young man to do things from which he could not find an escape except by death (ad ea, quorum effugium non nisi morte inveniret)” (Ann. 6.49.1). Although Papinius achieves respite from a nefarious and possibly incestuous mother, multiple factors combine to make his exit “indecorous” (informis): his own implicit state of mind, the degradation of his nobility, and the method used. This makes the death a perfect symptom of the Tiberian age, which concludes in the next chapter with the death of Tiberius himself.42 The historians, then, could deploy distinct literary paradigms focusing on the ethically coherent suicide and, in contrast, self-ruin. Either or both of these paradigms might be present in the narrative of Seneca’s own self-killing, and indeed Seneca’s authority as he takes his life remains somewhat indeterminate. Although Tacitus portrays Seneca and (especially) Paulina seeking to perform master transactions in the economies of gloria and claritudo before a validating audience of insiders, the narrative of Dio undercuts such aspirations. In addition, Thomas Habinek has noted that in the view of the vulgus alluded to by Tacitus, Paulina could never have expected anything more than fama even if she had completed her suicide (Ann. 15.64.2) (2000, 273). Misgivings about the moral authority of Seneca’s death found additional footholds in the botched attempts that delay his death, to which we will return below. The suicidal aspect of Seneca’s death was not actively elided by Christian audiences, but it was also not something that could be straightforwardly accepted. In the early centuries of Christian culture martyrdom and the Crucifixion itself had sometimes been perceived as self-sacrificial suicides,43 but pagan models of death were already modified by Prudentius and others 41. See Hill (2004), 207–212, 193–97, including on mortis arbitrium involving “the right to choose a death worthy of a free man” (197). 42. Seneca targets the same Papinius in his satirization of hedonists in the age of Tiberius (Ep. 122.15). Griffin (1986) calls Papinius’ death “a solitary act expressive of despair and misery” (66), though see the proviso of Hill (2004), 263 n. 7. 43. See Minois (1999), 25–26; Bowersock (1995), 59–74, esp. 63–64 citing Seneca’s suicide as a model for Tertullian’s characterization of martyrdom as principled suicide.

264

three themes

to play down the appearance of self-determination. The full prohibition of suicide beginning from the Council of Carthage in 34844 helps to explain why Christian writers needed to cultivate a blind spot concerning the suicidal aspect of Seneca’s death. In the etymology given by the narrator of the Legenda aurea, Jacobus only ventures to say that it was “in a manner of speaking” (quodammodo) that Seneca “killed himself with his own hand” (manu propria se necavit, Leg. aur. 84.221). Peccioli’s later allegorical explanation of se necavit invoked mortification of the flesh, not of the self. Polenton, however, rejected the etymology both for linguistic reasons and “because [Seneca] in no way killed himself, as they think, but rather, when forced by the order of Nero, he chose his manner of death” (quod haudquaquam se necavit, ut arbitrantur illi, sed Neronis iussu coactus mortis genus elegerit, Vita Sen. 467). Conversely, the suicidal aspect of the death was retrieved by Erasmus in his systematic denial of Seneca’s Christianity, asking, “What Christian was ever the agent of his own execution?” (quis unquam Christianus sibi fuit supplicii minister?).45 A major difficulty thus confronted Lipsius when he sought to explain the Stoic doctrine on voluntary death. Lipsius simply conceded that “even [Seneca] himself, when ordered to die by Nero, did so” (& ipse a Nerone mori iussus, fecit, Mand. 3.23)—a formulation, however, that limits the blame for Seneca. Lipsius is forced to admit both that “in some cases it is possible, fitting, obligatory for the wise man to seek death—at least, by Stoic decree” (sapientem sumere aliquando mortem posse, decere, debere: ex Stoico quidem decreto, Mand. 3.22), and that he, as a Christian, must reject this in the terms of St. Augustine (3.23):46 God, I say, forbids us to depart without his command—God (Deus, Deus inquam vetat iniussu suo abire)! Why do we dispute, or deal with trivialities? His word brought forth to us in our Scripture: You shall not kill. Whom? Not yourself, not another. You must know that the master of life is he alone who gave it. Thus we have endless examples of patience, and life lived amid troubles, and tortures endured, and death itself met on account of duty—but met, not taken (mors ipsa ob pietatem obita, sed obita, non sumpta). Here it is possible that the term obita (“met”) might have given Lipsius a way to differentiate Seneca’s death from a suicide. Even if Lipsius concedes differences from the Stoics, when it comes to Seneca he is at pains to express admiration and even to map out common ground. He advertises Seneca’s criticisms of “dying out of fear of death” (timore mortis mori) at Ep. 70.8 and remarks, “Here he seems closer to one saying no to [suicide]” (propior neganti hic videtur, Mand. 3.23). In cataloguing the Stoic evocations of the “wide path to freedom” (lata via

44. See Minois (1999), 24–41. 45. Quoted by Ramelli (2004), 236. 46. Cf. August. CD 1.20.

forced suicide and the bodily paths to libertas

265

ad libertatem), he applauds Seneca’s pronouncement in letter 58: “If [old age] leaves me not with a life but with [mere] breath, I will leap from the crumbling and collapsing building” (si mihi non vitam reliquerit sed animam, prosiliam ex aedificio putri ac ruenti, Ep. 58.35). Lipsius exclaims, “You see the mind of our little old man (for he was already thus when he wrote these words) . . . ” (animum senecionis nostri vides (talis iam erat, cum haec scripsit), 3.22).47 But the Stoic doctrine on suicide, and on self-sufficiency more generally, was a stumbling block for many Christian writers to whom Senecan discourse was in other ways very useful when dealing with death. In the play Cenodoxus by the Jesuit Jacob Bidermann (first performed in Augsburg in 1602), the protagonist faces his death from sickness with a recognizably Senecan attitude, asserting that “it is a beautiful spectacle for God to see a man amid pain and death, composed” (pulchrum est DEO spectaculum, / hominem videre, cum doloribus & nece / compositum, Cen. IV.iii, lines 1379–81; cf. Sen. Prov. 2.9). He also confidently enacts a meditatio mortis torn tacitly from the pages of Seneca (1385–87; cf. Sen. Ep. 24.17). But these turn out to be symptoms of Cenodoxus’ defining sin, namely pride (especially cenodoxia, “vain-glory”), and when Christ renders judgment at the end of the play, he blames Cenodoxus for not following his example of humility (V.vi, 2007–56). Moreover, the resources that Bidermann summons for satirizing Cenodoxus’ self-assertive death have an equally Senecan origin, echoing the chorus of Romans lamenting the death of Claudius in the Apocolocyntosis (IV.iv, 1445),48 and the vengeful ghost of Thyestes (Cen. I.ii, 139–41; cf. Sen. Aga. 1–4). Bidermann thus constructs a sharp polemic against Lipsian neo-Stoicism,49 even as he makes more elaborate and creative use of Senecan discourse than Lipsius. In the time since Seneca’s general de-christianization in the sixteenth century, several factors have made it possible for interpreters to deal more comfortably with Seneca’s suicide as such: 1. As suicide became a standard topic of literary and artistic representation, associated with utopian expressions of individualism, ancient exempla were good to think with, however much actual imitation was rejected.50 This factor is particularly clear in Montaigne (Essais 2.35), who explores the suicidal subjectivity of Seneca’s death more intensely than any other writer (especially given his focus on Paulina’s voluntary death), but is also the most clear on the difficulties of incorporating Senecan values into one’s own life. A similar detachment accompanies Seneca’s death as a subject of baroque painting, and in Monteverdi’s portrayal of Seneca, which ushered in a long tradition of suicidal subjectivities on the operatic stage. 47. 48. 49. 50.

See further Morford (1991), 169–70; Saunders (1955), 111–16. Cf. Apocol. 12.3, noted in the edition of Dyer (1974), 201–2. On the anti-Lipsian polemic see Dyer (1974), 16–17. For a fuller picture see the surveys by Minois (1999); Brown (2001).

266

three themes

2. National cultures have occasionally arisen in which ideals of honor or patriotism served to license actual “Senecan” suicide. Especially in the wake of Lipsius, the reading or interpretation of Seneca might have tangible effects in the life of the interpreter. In addition to Kleist’s death mimicking the Seneca of his play, we find a recurring pattern of anecdotes: a seventeenth-century French aristocrat named Lioterais, “[o]ne fine morning, while reading Seneca, . . . took out his razor and slit his throat”; and “[o]n 5 April 1804, Seneca’s book [on Cato’s suicide, that is, the De providentia] was found next to the hanged man [named Pichegu] in his cell, open at the relevant page.”51 Accurate or not, such anecdotes explore fantasies about the possibility of reviving the ethical golden age of Rome in actions of the present age. 3. Seneca’s theory and practice, along with understandings of death in the “Roman world” or “ancient world” more generally, are now often invoked as qualified comparanda in a heterogeneous historical tradition. The distinction between the modern pathologized suicide of the individual and the Romana mors motivated by concerns about social status allows us to perceive clear historical divides.52 With respect to Western conceptions of death more generally, historians have offered models that contrast the modern “denial of death” with the publicity and tameness of ancient death.53 Indeed, Flemming (2005) has argued that Roman conceptions of the “good death” are especially relevant to the “new order of death” that she sees emerging in contemporary discourses on physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia. To the extent that such comparisons portray ancient deathways as worth examining, the theory and practice of Seneca’s suicide serves a useful illustrative function. But rather than serving as a model for suicide, Seneca’s death serves more often as an encyclopedic repository for ideas and motifs about death experience more generally, which can be reflected upon and borrowed from, again without direct mimesis.54

Deathways In Roman suicide, choices about the method of death defined both the act and the person.55 Hanging, jumping, drowning, or other methods that involved abandoning oneself to nature were typically perceived as low class and desperate compared with the more honorable method of a metal weapon. Yet a lowly

51. For these anecdotes see Minois (1999), 199; van Hooff (1990), 53. 52. On this distinction, including comparison with the approach of Durkheim, see Hill (2004), esp. 1–21. 53. See Walter (1994), esp. 23; Ariès (1981). 54. E.g., Noyes (1973) uses Seneca to reorient modern medical ethics toward recognition of mortal experience. 55. See van Hooff (1990), 77–78, 243–50; Grisé (1982), 93–123.

forced suicide and the bodily paths to libertas

267

method could be nobly used—for example, in the makeshift self-hanging of Epicharis. Methods could also be interestingly combined. The multiplicity of deaths reported for the philosopher Empedocles, who is variously said to have died by falling to the ground, by drowning, by jumping into the fiery crater of Mt. Etna, and by vanishing into thin air—was appropriate for the one who first formalized the theory of four elements.56 In Lucan’s narrative of Cato and his soldiers crossing the Libyan desert (BC 9.619–889), the crescendo of deaths induced by different varieties of serpent, using bites, strangulation, poison, and other methods, presents a taxonomic test of the soldiers’ (and the reader’s) endurance. In the Annals the combination of different methods in a single person might involve a botching of the first try (for example, Octavia: veins then bath, followed by decapitation, Ann. 14.64.2), an attempt to render the technology of death more efficacious (P. Anteius: poison then veins, 16.14.3), or some other basis of combination. In Seneca’s writings the method of suicide does not ultimately matter, yet it has “stylistic” implications. In both the prose works and the tragedies, he frequently presents the various death methods as “paths to freedom” (ad libertatem viae, Ep. 12.10) whose multiplicity proves that if there is a will, there is a way—itself a confirmation of freedom.57 In the De ira, he offers advice for someone oppressed by a tyrant, describing a varied landscape of suicide methods (Ira 3.15.3–4):58 We will show him, in any servitude, a path open to freedom (ostendemus in omni servitute apertam libertati viam). . . . “Why do you grumble, madman? Why do you wait either for some enemy to liberate you through killing your family, or some king with farreaching power to fly at you? Wherever you look, there is an end to woes (ibi malorum finis est). You see that precipice? From there you can descend to freedom (illac ad libertatem descenditur). You see that sea, river, well? Freedom lies there at its bottom (libertas illic in imo sedet). You see that tree, short, emaciated, and sad? Freedom hangs from it (pendet inde libertas). You see your neck, your throat, your heart? They are escape routes from servitude (effugia servitutis sunt). Are the exits I am showing you too labor-intensive, requiring too much courage and mettle? Do you ask which road leads to freedom (quaeris quod sit ad libertatem iter)? Any vein in your body (quaelibet in corpore tuo vena).”

56. See Chitwood (2004), 56. 57. Cf. Pho. 151–53: ubique mors est. . . . mille ad hanc aditus patent. On the topos see Inwood (2005), 309–12; van Hooff (1990), 41. Examples are surveyed by Armisen-Marchetti (1989), 88; Viansino (1979), 186–87. See also, in a farcical context, Petron. Sat. 94.11. 58. See Inwood (2005), 308–10; G. Williams (1978), 177–80; Rist (1969), 248.

268

three themes

The final method, vein opening, is reinforced here with Seneca’s favorite rhythmical clausula (resolved cretic-spondee: (cor)pǒrě tǔō vēnā)—a convergence of death style with rhetorical style.59 Indeed, whenever he focuses on individual famous suicides, Seneca focuses rhetorically on the methods that can serve as metonyms for each story: “Many men have overcome individual things: Mucius overcame fire, Regulus the rack, Socrates poison, Rutilius exile, Cato death inflicted by the sword” (singula vicere iam multi, ignem Mucius, crucem Regulus, venenum Socrates, exilium Rutilius, mortem ferro adactum Cato, Ep. 98.12).60 And we face the same challenge: “Let us, too,” he urges, “overcome something” (et nos vincamus aliquid, Ep. 98.13). Narrators of Seneca’s death exploited the signifying possibilities of the methods used, both singly and in combination. At the beginning of this tradition Tacitus establishes the progression from one method to the next (veins, hemlock, and bath) as a central dynamic of the narrative, though it has been understood in strikingly different ways. Some have seen only failure and lack of control, just as Dio describes Seneca as “dying with difficulty” (dtrhamasñra|, 62.25.1). Stephen Dyson concludes that the tricolon of methods is clumsy and that “each stage captures symbolically a part of [Seneca’s] failure or hypocrisy”: his ineffective vein opening shows that he is no Cato, the hemlock shows that he is no Socrates, and his libation is “a gesture that Thrasea Paetus will carry off with much more dignity and effect” (1970, 78). Others, however, view the farcical unfolding of events as a set of trials that Seneca endures through constantia. G. O. Hutchinson argues that Tacitus shows Seneca preserving his dignity by imposing his will “in defiance of events” and in accord with his “austere and noble plan” (1993, 268). Multiplicity may also add to the potential of Seneca’s death as a iactatio: he adopts an essentially iterative approach to his death in the manner of Cato;61 he conquers multiple types of suffering, not just singula; he turns Nero’s death decree into a spectacle of different death methods and “moves,” each alluding to earlier deaths initiated by Nero.62 Seen in this light, Seneca’s death scene is a tour de force in the rhetoric of deathways. For reasons of emphasis or expediency, successive narrators have simplified the series of methods—for example, to vein opening followed by poisoning, without explicit mention of bath (already in Jerome); or to vein opening already in the bath, without mention of poison (already in Walter of St. Victor). In some cases, even, new methods are introduced. In the Legenda aurea, Seneca is still described as cutting his arms in the bath, but Nero’s threat of hanging or decapitation (Leg. aur. 84.218) reflects the hagiographer’s concern with exploring

59. See also the same clausula in (pes) lěvı̌těr ōffēnsūs (a metonym for Zeno’s suicide?), concluding a catalogue of bodily ailments curable by suicide at NQ 6.32.3; discussion by Hutchinson (1993), 284–85. 60. See further, e.g., on Socrates’ poison cup, Ep. 67.7; Prov. 3.12–13. A Hellenistic relief sculpture depicting Socrates drinking the hemlock is mentioned by Brown (2001), 225 n. 28 (no location given). 61. Cf. Hill (2004), 179: Cato also “ended up, in effect, killing himself twice.” 62. See Plass (1995), 100.

forced suicide and the bodily paths to libertas

269

the “morphology of martyrdom” through a saturation of different methods.63 Likewise, the exploration of Seneca’s similarities to Cato both in Giordano (Fig. 7.10) and in Kleist’s play (Sen. III.i) require the reopening of a wound. Below we consider the main methods of Seneca’s death: veins, poison, and bath, followed by libation. Each of these had its own signifying potentials in Roman culture and Senecan discourse, and beyond.

Vein-Opening Style Death by opening of veins was relatively exclusive to early first-century Rome, where it was both a preferred method of suicide among the elite and a method of execution favored by Nero. It is uncertain from the surviving accounts whether Seneca chose vein opening or it was chosen for him, with the emperor perhaps sending in one of his “doctors.” There is similar uncertainty in the case of others whom Tacitus describes as opening their veins such as Lucan and Thrasea Paetus, though in the case of Lucan we discover from Suetonius that “he offered his arms to a doctor for the veins to be cut” (bracchia ad secandas venas praebuit medico, Vita Luc. 1.9).64 Tacitus represents unambiguous cases at both extremes: Seneca’s brother Mela apparently chose “the most efficient path to death” (Ann. 16.17.5), whereas Octavia “was ordered to die” (mori iubetur), and her veins were opened only after she “was bound in chains” (restringitur vinclis, 14.64.1–2). If we inquire into the meaning of vein opening, recent scholarship has observed a plethora of possibilities. To the extent that it was forced, this method might have evoked the public humiliation seen in missio sanguinis as an archaic Roman military punishment.65 But to the extent that it was freely chosen, Yolande Grisé argues that vein opening occupied a special place in the hierarchy of methods, owing to its controlled and quasi-therapeutic qualities, and a certain pleasurable feeling of faintness (1982, 105).66 In addition, Anton van Hooff has suggested that the feeling of faintness may have approximated the feeling of a transition to the afterlife, though its use of a weapon also lent dignity and perhaps permitted the death to be “stylized as a sacrificial ceremony” (1990, 51; cf. 77). In an essay on Roman conceptions of blood, Francesca Menacci observes that cruor is more typical of blood shed in a violent death, but that Tacitus’ predominant use of sanguis rather than cruor in describing suicides in the Annals is meant to capture its controlled aspect and the equanimity of the philosopher (1986, 25, 60, 83–84), while the sheer variety and inventiveness of the Greek and Latin terms for vein opening (venas abrumpere, 63. On this program in Leg. aur. see Boureau (1984), 116–26; also Lupton (1996), 40–84. 64. See Gourévitch (1984), 203 n. 76. Flemming (2005), 319 n. 13 sees here domestic doctors, not Nero’s agents. 65. See Menacci (1986), 74–80, discussing Gell. NA 10.8. 66. For medical usage see Flemming (2005), 304–5; Scarpat (2007), 75; Gourévitch (1984), 202–10. Note the quasi-therapeutic suicide of the aged Caninius Rebilus at Ann. 13.30.2: cruciatus aegrae senectae misso per venas sanguine effugit; cited by Gourévitch, 186.

270

three themes

abscindere, intercidere, porrigere, praebere exsolvendas, resolvere, and so forth) is seen by van Hooff as reflecting a need “to come to grips verbally with the horrifying self liquidation of the Roman aristocracy during the first century AD” (1990, 51; cf. 260 nn. 23–24). Nero’s own preference for vein opening as a method of execution may have been intended to co-opt some of its rhetoric for strategic purposes, refining his profile within the game of death. We have already seen that the author Seneca sometimes singles out vein opening as a preferred method of suicide, asserting that “freedom from care costs a (scalpel) prick” (puncto securitas constat, Ep. 70.16). He emphasizes the supposed brevity of the path that vein opening provides—an aesthetics of the punctum that matches the already minuscule temporal and spatial dimensions of human life (cf. Ep. 49.3; NQ 1.praef.11). Seneca also reminds Lucilius, “You have often let blood to relieve a headache, and veins are opened to slim the body” (ut dolorem capitis levares, sanguinem saepe misisti; ad extenuandum corpus vena percutitur, Ep. 70.16), inviting him to see suicide by vein opening as simply an extension, or continuation, of an everyday therapeutic practice. The natural process involved in vein opening also has a particularly close affinity with cosmic processes such as the emergence of water from the earth, as Seneca makes clear in a scientific analogy: “And so, just as in our bodies, when a vein has been cut (ut in corporibus nostris . . . cum vena percussa est), the blood streams until it has all flowed out or until the tear in the vein has subsided and closed off the path or some other factor has reversed the blood, so too in the earth, when veins have been released and opened up (ita in terra, solutis ac patefactis venis), a stream or river flows out” (NQ 3.15.5).67 Against this backdrop Seneca and Paulina’s vein opening in the Tacitean narrative exhibits additional and sometimes surprising dynamics. In the statement that eodem ictu brachia ferro exsolvunt (“they opened their arms with the same stroke of the blade,” Ann. 15.63.2), it is not entirely clear whether eodem indicates the cutting of both persons at once, or the cutting of both arms at once in each case.68 But either way, the description establishes the sense of concordia and shared spiritus that is more explicitly signaled in Paulina’s later pallor, which revealed “that much of her vital spirit had drained out” (multum vitalis spiritus egestum, 15.64.2), and which may reflect medical theories about blood as the locus of vis vitalis.69 At the same time, Seneca’s distinctive body, “old and thin from his frugal diet” (senile corpus et parco victu tenuatum, 15.63.3)70 entails that his bleeding will be anything 67. Van Hooff (1990) here sees evidence of Seneca’s interest in a “medical doctrine of pneumatism according to which life-giving ‘bloodgas’ in the veins is regarded as bearing the universal breath (pneuma)” (51). 68. For the latter see Edwards (2007), following the translation by Grant: “Each with one incision of the blade, the two of them cut their arms” (111). 69. On Paulina’s pallor and Hippocratic and Galenic medical theories, see Bergdolt (2002), 277; also Menacci (1986), 51 n. 49, 52 n. 51, on the bloodless pallor of the dead. 70. The portrayal coheres with Seneca’s lexicon for characterizing the body (tenuatus being a term introduced to Latin prose by Seneca; cf. Furneaux 1891, 554) and with his portrayal of Priam’s death (cf. exiguo / sanguine, Aga. 657–58); also, with his body’s function as a showcase for moral askesis, discussed by Edwards (1998). Seneca’s personal medical history is constructed by Gourévitch (1984), 111–19.

forced suicide and the bodily paths to libertas

271

but brief—a contradiction of his own assertion that this method is the quickest path to death. By necessity, or possibly by design, his death will be an extended spectacle of the body in pain.71 From the aesthetics of brevity, then, we shift to Seneca’s aesthetics of amplification and endurance. His slow bleeding facilitates a kind of “post mortem” during the dying process, as Plass puts it (1995, 105), and his self-observations resemble those of Julius Canus (Tranq. 14.8), Aufidius Bassus (Ep. 30.9), and Cato (Ep. 14.6). This opportunity for “agony as ethical inquiry,” to use the phrase of Hill (2004, 178–82), is played out most specifically in Seneca’s act of dictation, with its association between blood flow and word flow (Ann. 15.63.3). The binding of Paulina’s wounds shows, in turn, that the entire procedure is so slow as to remain for a long while reversible—an element that is later exploited by Petronius for the purpose of parody (16.19.2) and by Sex. Vistilius, who bound up his wounds and sent codicilli to Tiberius in the hope of being forgiven, but received a negative reply and reopened his wounds (6.9.2).72 The full range of effects is sketched by Barthes: “To die, in Tacitus, is to perceive life. Whence ‘the fashionable manner’: to open the veins or have them opened, to make death liquid, in other words, to convert it to duration and purification: one sprinkles the gods and the bystanders with blood, death is a libation; it is suspended, procrastinated, and one exerts a capricious freedom over it at the very heart of its final fatality . . .” (1972, 102). In later refigurations Seneca’s bleeding is less encumbered by delay. In visual versions, in which a synchronic tableau is to be expected, but also in many literary versions not based on Tacitus, Seneca is presented as opening his veins when already in the bath. This makes the scene less clumsy and episodic, and in these versions Seneca often bleeds out vigorously. The dynamics of suspension and release are exploited for narrative effect by Polenton when, after describing the slowness of the bleeding and the resort to the bath, he announces climactically that “the poison began to race through [Seneca’s] veins more forcefully and the blood began to flow from his body in great abundance (venenum per venas violentius discurrebat et sanguis e corpore uberius effluebat)” (Vita Sen. 492). In a drawing by Joachim von Sandrart (1676; Fig. 8.1) Seneca resembles a human fountain, spurting blood. But although the therapeutic function of bloodletting is often emphasized (especially in Rubens and Honthorst), Diderot paused to emphasize the strangeness of vein opening in the first place: “Why didn’t tyrants order a wound to the heart or the cutting of the arteries, from which death is swift? Why were the victims obliged to choose it? . . . Is man afraid to die too quickly, and does he place such a great price on one instant more (L’homme craint-il de mourir trop vite, & met-il tant de prix à un instant de plus)?” (Essai, 152–53).73

71. Maurach (1990), 511–12 suggests deliberately small cuts to facilitate imitation of Socrates. 72. Cf. Bertrand-Dagenbach (1992), 604. 73. Briefly discussed by von Stackelberg (1992), 15.

figure 8.1 R. Collin after J. von Sandrart, engraving from Sandrart, Sculpturae veteris admiranda (Frankfurt, 1680). Princeton University, Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology. Courtesy of Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University.

forced suicide and the bodily paths to libertas

273

The Flirtation with Hemlock Nero had used poison against several of his enemies in the past, such as Britannicus and supposedly Seneca himself (cf. Ann. 15.45.3); other JulioClaudian characters, too, succumb to the proverbial mushroom. Although poison was relatively rare in Roman suicide, Pliny the Elder—at least in his discussion of the earth’s wonders—touts its superiority over all other methods: “taking pity, the earth brought forth that which allowed us to extinguish ourselves by a very easy drink, keeping the body intact and keeping all of our blood—with no effort, similar to the experience of thirst (genuit id, cuius facillimo haustu inlibato corpore et cum toto sanguine exstingueremur, nullo labore, sitientibus similes), and such that when we were dead, no birds or beasts would touch us and the person who had died to himself would be saved to be the earth’s” (HN 2.156).74 In Seneca’s case, however, some of these particular benefits have already been lost, because blood has already been shed. Although Seneca is not alone among Nero’s victims in having procured poison for his own use (compare Anteius at Ann. 16.14.3), the poison dispensed to him by Statius Annaeus is distinctive both for having been “long ago prepared” (provisum pridem) and in being the same method used in Athens (15.64.3).75 The parallel with Socrates is qualified but significant: just as Plato selectively described Socrates’ symptoms from hemlock in a way that was most suggestive of the soul’s liberation from the body (Phd. 117c–118a), so too in Tacitus does Seneca’s immunity to the poison capture his body’s virtual death prior to his actual loss of life.76 As an author, also, Seneca had offered his own complex characterization of Socrates’ “medicine” (Prov. 3.12): Do you think Socrates was badly done by because he drank down that potion mixed by the people exactly as if it were a medicine conferring immortality (non aliter quam medicamentum immortalitatis), and inquired about death right up until he reached it? Was it a bad thing for him that his blood was congealed and the force of his circulation came to a standstill as the chill gradually took hold (quod gelatus est sanguis ac paulatim frigore inducto venarum vigor constitit)? Although Alessandro Ronconi argues that the poison was a detail added by Tacitus (1968, 217), its mention in Jerome, who pairs it with the vein opening (cf. incisione venarum et veneni haustu, Chron. 184.15–16), suggests that Suetonius had also referred to it in his De viris illustribus. But despite its grand associations, the hemlock is a remarkably minor detail in later versions, and is sometimes

74. Cf. Gourévitch (1984), 185. 75. Note that Seneca resembles Socrates also in the fact that he himself calls for it (cf. Phd. 116d). 76. On Plato’s Socrates see Gill (1973); also E. R. Wilson (2007), 111–13. On Seneca’s poison as imitatio see Döring (1979), 37–42.

274

three themes

dispensed with altogether. It persists in versions based on Tacitus or Jerome, and in versions of a medieval De morte Senecae, which (like Jerome’s version in the Chronicon) apparently ended with poisoning.77 It may be present in one of the illuminations,78 and in the versions by Honthorst (Fig. 7.9) and David (Fig. 7.15). But perhaps because the poison cup is so closely associated with Socrates (as Emily Wilson has underlined, 2007, 8–16, 111–13), the metonym for Seneca’s death becomes not the hemlock, but the flow of blood into the bath.

Bath Time In Tacitus Seneca’s “bath” involves two stages: (1) “Finally he entered a pool of hot water (postremo stagnum calidae aquae introiit). Sprinkling the nearest of his slaves, he explained that he was giving the water as a libation to Jupiter the Liberator” (Ann. 15.64.4). Here Seneca appears to be descending into a pool that may be in the open air, though it was probably supplied with artificially heated water.79 The purpose of entering the water appears to have been to warm (and thin) the blood and thereby speed the circulation, though its purificatory associations also cannot be ignored.80 (2) “Then [or thence] being carried into a balneum and choked by its steam (exim balneo inlatus et vapore eius exanimatus), he was cremated without any funeral ceremony” (§64.4). Most likely, balneum here denotes a room (not just a pool) into which he is introduced, such as a caldarium containing a heated pool81 or a designated sweat room.82 Although Seneca may conceivably have died from blood loss, it is the steam (or dry heat) that either asphyxiates him or induces a blackout.83 The movement from hot water to steam bath, in addition to its practical effect, here echoes the sequence within the Roman bathing routine from warm to hot and from water to steam.84 The natural elements that conspire to finish Seneca off—water, air (vapor), followed by the fire of cremation—may also serve as a meaningful sequel to the hemlock, a gift of the earth. Seneca’s bath, furthermore, recalls the bath that Socrates took prior to his death in order

77. This is my inference from the two explicits given by Fohlen (2002), 10: vt nunquam carens annona veneni; and ad fauces pollicitus toxicum misit. 78. In Seneca’s left hand, in Pal. Lat. 1538, f. 1 = dell’Orto (1999), 29–30, fig. 2; Stok (1996), 309, fig. 267. 79. On the technical use of stagnum see Yegül (1992): “A pool or pond; any enclosed stretch of water” (493). Although such pools often tapped into natural hot springs, there is no evidence of this here. 80. See van Hooff (1990), 52; Grisé (1982), 105. 81. Compare the death of Vestinus at Ann. 15.69.2: praesto est medicus, abscinduntur venae, vigens adhuc balneo infertur, calda aqua mersatur, nulla edita voce, qua semet miseraretur. Here the balneo clearly denotes the room as distinct from the hot water itself. Because Tacitus mentions only that Seneca was carried into the balneum and choked by its vapor, there is no reason to assume that Seneca was there immersed in water at all. For sweating in caldaria without immersion, see Yegül (1992), 354. 82. “Vapour-bath” is the translation used by Griffin (1986a), 65. There were two types of sweat-room: sudatorium and laconicum, the latter supposedly using dry heat. But the two are hard to distinguish, esp. in light of Seneca’s reference to siccus vapor in a sudatorium at Ep. 51.6; see Yegül (1992), 384. 83. On the steam’s effect see Koestermann (1968), 308; Furneaux (1891), 556. 84. On this movement see Yegül (1992), 38. Seneca dies before the final step: the frigidarium.

forced suicide and the bodily paths to libertas

275

to save the women the trouble of washing his corpse (Phd. 115a–116a), where Christopher Rowe has seen associations with the ritual cleansing undertaken by a tragic hero;85 Cato the Younger had also bathed before suicide (Plut. Cat. Min. 66.3–4). It is difficult, in addition, to ignore the therapeutic bathing practices alluded to in Seneca’s own writings, such as his gentle mocking of himself for having once been “the great taker of cold baths” (ille tantus psychrolutes) but now, in old age, as he says, being “not far from [taking] an [artificially heated] bath” (non multum mihi ad balneum superest, Ep. 83.5; cf. 53.3).86 Seneca’s balneology is closely tied to his regimen of moral frugality and bodily self-care—a regimen that Seneca sees enshrined most fully in the diminutive bathhouse of Scipio Africanus at Liternum, which we will consider in chapter 10 (Sen. Ep. 86.4–5).87 Yet Seneca’s use of the bath as a death device itself potentially draws upon some of its associated hedonistic qualities, which he normally satirizes.88 His most specific portrayal of death in the bath—the suicide of the chronically ill Tullius Marcellinus—gently plays upon the pleasantness of the sensation (Ep. 77.9):89 He had no need of weapon, no need of blood. He fasted for three days and ordered a tent to be erected in his bedroom (in ipso cubiculo poni tabernaculum iussit). A tub was then brought in, and he lay in it, and when hot water was subsequently added, he gradually passed away, as he reported, not without a certain pleasure (solium deinde illatum est, in quo diu iacuit, et calda subinde suffusa, paulatim defecit, ut aiebat, non sine quadam voluptate), which tends to be produced by a gentle dissolution—not unknown to us who sometimes faint. A clear paradigm for death in the bath had been established by the suicide of Epicurus. Although Seneca himself does not refer to the bath when he refers to Epicurus’ death, Diogenes Laertius reports the account preserved in Hermippus’ Teleutai that Epicurus, after two weeks of intense pain from a kidney stone, “went into a bronze bath mixed with hot water and asked for some unmixed wine and gulped it down (élbmsa . . . eÆ| p ekom vakjm jejqalåmgm ldasi heql{͂ ja≠ aÆsñramsa jqasom ˜ofirai), and having exhorted his friends to remember his doctrines, in this way he died” (D.L. 10.15–16).90 Although Seneca’s own final bath (like the bath of Marcellinus) bears only a latent resemblance to the bath of Epicurus, this has been enough to invite comparisons.91 85. Cf. Rowe (1993), 290. For negative possibilities here, with Seneca’s living corpse undergoing a premature lustratio, see Erasmo (2008), 33. 86. The potential association between Ep. 83.5 and the death bath is exploited by Lipsius, who remarks on Tacitus’ mention of the bath: Solium. & tunc primùm calidâ usus, cum non ultrâ vsurus. 87. On Seneca’s balneology see Chambert (2002), 68–69. Pliny at HN 29.10 notes Seneca’s approval of cold-water therapy; cf. Ramelli (2002), 504. 88. See Fagan (1998), 51–52; Yegül (1992), 31–32, 41–43. 89. Note also Cremutius Cordus’ use of a balineum as a preliminary to his self-starvation, at Marc. 22.6. 90. For commentary see Laks (1976), esp. 78–79; on the tradition, Warren (2004), 9. 91. On Seneca’s bath as an echo of Epicurus’, see Cancik (1967), 111.

276

three themes

The bath was the detail most frequently satirized in the later tradition. Barzizza reports that “there are those who say that [Seneca’s bath] was of warm milk (ex lacte tepido), which in such a situation as this beggars belief, and I cannot find any famous author vouching for it” (Vita Sen. §13)—a story that perhaps alludes to the cosmetic milk baths of Poppaea (cf. Plin. HN 11.238). In Tristan’s play the centurion describes watching Seneca die in a setting that recalls Seneca’s own hostile portrayal of the most luxurious bathhouses of his own day (Mort de Sen. V.iii, 1795–78; cf. Ep. 86.6–13): Vn vaste Bassin d’or, où des eaux odorantes Ornoient de leur parfum mille pierres brillantes, N’y faisoit éclater vne valeur sans prix Que pour y receuoir son sang & ses esprits. A huge golden basin, from which the scented waters were adorning with their perfumes a thousand sparkling stones, showed off its priceless value, but only to receive his blood and humors. As we saw in the introduction to this chapter, the hostile portrayal of the scene by Walter of St. Victor already in the twelfth century made much of the bath and explicitly advertised its Epicurean associations (Contr. quatt. 4.2). But Walter is equally disturbed by what Seneca had missed out on by dying in the bath, namely, baptism: “That despiser of the world, falsely thought to be brave, could very easily have become not only a Christian but a martyr, in the two years when Paul was detained in Rome, if he had not preferred his bath to baptism in Christ or instruction from Paul (si non magis elegisset suum balneum quam Christi baptismum uel Pauli magisterium).” Walter will likely have been familiar with numerous symbolic bath images in Christian visual culture, both negative and positive. In the twelfth-century manuscript known as the Stuttgart Passionale, a bathing figure in one image represents the one among the Forty Martyrs who has succumbed to the temptation to wash away his Christianity in a tub of warm (but deadly) water.92 Elsewhere in the same manuscript, however, the bathing figure variously represents St. John being martyred in boiling oil, with Domitian’s surrogates standing beside him; and the emperor Constantine being baptized by St. Sylvester.93 Indeed, in contrast with Walter’s account, many of the visual and textual representations of Seneca’s bath exploited the positive parallels. Boccaccio’s suggestion that Seneca consecrated the water and bathed in it, in a rite of baptism by water (Comm. di Dant. 403), gave direct fulfillment to Walter’s contrafactual fantasy of a baptized Seneca. The details of Seneca’s baptismal rite were, however, 92. Boeckler (1923), Abb. 2. 93. Boeckler (1923), Abb. 57, 8. For Seneca’s resemblance to John in particular, see Hoffman (1970), 257; Sauerländer (1982), 708.

forced suicide and the bodily paths to libertas

277

modified in various ways, for example in Barzizza’s report that Seneca “took that water mixed with blood and sprinkled it over himself ” (aquam illam accepit sanguine mixtam et super se respersit, Vita Sen. §14)—thereby elevating Seneca’s death to the level of baptism by blood, in a death for Christ’s sake.94 Here self-sprinkling displaces the sprinkling of slaves reported by Tacitus (Ann. 15.64.4), although the image of water mixed with blood makes explicit what is only implicit in the Tacitean text. Montaigne, though, eliding any Christian reference, describes how Seneca, “when he sensed the final stages of death, taking the bath water all bloodied (prenant de l’eau du being toute sanglante), sprinkled it on his head, saying: ‘I dedicate this water to Jupiter the Liberator’ ” (Essais 2.35, 411). But the blood-water mix obviously gave christianizing interpreters an opportunity to draw comparisons to the crucified Christ, from whose side “blood and water came forth” (énkhem . . . ai῟la ja≠ ldxq, John 19.34).95 For Rubens, the image of the bathtub had its own independent underpinnings, and he devoted much energy to historical reconstruction.96 His drawings and painting of Seneca standing in a small tub (Figs. 7.8 and 9.2) may partly have been inspired by the mounting of the Borghese “Seneca” statue in the relatively small marble tub (assuming that this mounting in fact preceded his acquaintance with the statue) (Fig. 9.5), but the standing pose is also consistent with Roman ideals: as Seneca himself tells Lucilius, “you must die upright and unbeaten” (recto tibi invictoque moriendum est, Ep. 37.2).97 The tub’s diminutive size serves as a concentrating feature, but more specifically evokes the modest aesthetics of clusisse totum in exiguo (“concise encapsulation,” Sen. Ep. 55.11) and, as Elizabeth McGrath notes, Scipio’s balneoloum angustum (Sen. Ep. 86.4; 1997, 2.287). Rubens may in turn have been influenced by Lipsius’ gloss of Tacitus’ stagnum with the term solium, denoting a smaller, movable tub for one person. The specific model for the lion-faced tub presented by Rubens in his drawings (Fig. 9.2) is in fact to be found in engravings from Jean Jacques Boissard’s Antiquitates romanae seu topographia romanae urbis (1597).98 But if Rubens’ painting invested the bath with a new visual authority, the portrayal of Seneca’s bath in the play by Hacks (Tod Sen. III, 272–97) signals something of a return to the satirizing potential of the bath seen in Walter. In addition to its resonances with the dinner bath of Trimalchio (Petron. Sat. 72–73), the bronze tub of Hacks’ Seneca is accompanied by allusions to the barrel of Diogenes (Tod Sen. 276) and to the death of Petronius, as Seneca secretly has his wounds bound up again (287–88). But Hacks’ image of the

94. See Panizza (1984), 65, 77, 79–80; (1977), 323. 95. Cf. von Stackelberg (1992), 7. 96. For full background on the iconography see McGrath (1997), 2.287. 97. Cited by McGrath (1997), 2.285. See also Zanker (2000) 50, citing Suet. Vesp. 24: imperatorem stantem mori oportere. For the image of standing in martyrological discourse, see Deproost (1999), 169; for its associations in paintings of the Crucifixion, Elkins (1999), 95. 98. Cf. Noll (2001), 101–2; McGrath (1997), fig. 191.

278

three themes

great man holding court in his last hours while supposedly soothing his skin disease in the bathtub is perhaps most evocative of the bath of Jean-Paul Marat immortalized in the painting by David (1793).99 Indeed, a drawing by an unknown French artist of the eighteenth century (Fig. 8.2), possibly predating the Marat, had shown Seneca in exactly the same pose, supine in a sheet-draped tub, his right arm dangling to the floor.

Libation With his libation to Jupiter Liberator the dying Seneca adds a ritual dimension.100 Christian interpreters understood Seneca to be referring allegorically to Jesus or God,101 but the gesture has its own distinctive resonances in preChristian discourse. It occupies the same place in the scene, for example, as Socrates’ enigmatic last words demanding the sacrifice of a cock to Asclepius.102

figure 8.2 Anonymous, Mort de Sénèque, drawing, France (eighteenth century). Louvre, Petit format, RF 29316 Recto. Courtesy of Département des Arts Graphiques, Musée du Louvre. 99. On Marat’s skin complaint and David’s representation see Vaughn and Weston (2000), 3. 100. See R. Fabbri (1978–79), 423. 101. See Panizza (1984), 85; (1977), 320–21. E.g., Boccaccio (Comm. di Dant. 403) draws on the etymology given by Cic. Nat. deor. 2.64: ipse Iuppiter, id est iuvans pater. . . . 102. See Gnilka (1979), 10–11. Erasmus (1529) describes Seneca’s words as Socraticum quiddam.

forced suicide and the bodily paths to libertas

279

Seneca’s libation, however, is partly the act of a paterfamilias, as he makes his death the occasion on which his slaves are manumitted—they are the ones he sprinkles.103 The libation is also suggestive of the liberation that Seneca will receive in death, as he becomes “free in relation to this body” (cf. Ep. 70.17), and of libertas Senecae (cf. Ann. 15.61.1).104 Dylan Sailor has noted, in turn, that the deaths of Seneca and Thrasea Paetus could at one level be presented as selfsacrificial and altruistic through their resemblance to a devotio whose returns would benefit those who survived (2008, 14–16). Within the Tacitean narrative, the figure of Jupiter Liberator takes on additional significance given the repetition of the same phrase in Thrasea’s dying words (Ann. 16.35.1). Although Jupiter/Zeus has obvious relevance to both Seneca and Thrasea as Stoics,105 scholars have been uncertain how exactly to understand the associations of Liberator, a rare epithet for Jupiter. Some have been inclined to emphasize connections with the hellenic model of FeÀ| \Ekethåqio|,106 or of the deity honored at the end of a banquet, FeÀ| Rxsñq.107 There are in fact Neronian coins inscribed with IVPPITER LIBERATOR; the earliest comes from a special issue of 67 commemorating Nero’s visit to Greece, in which he liberated the province.108 It is interesting to see Neronian coins using an epithet that had supposedly been a catch cry of Nero’s opponents, even if for Greek audiences it would primarily have recalled FeÀ| \Ekethåqio|. Griffin, on the basis of their later date, has dismissed the coins as irrelevant to the interpretation of Seneca and Thrasea’s libations,109 but I agree with Harold Mattingly that Tacitus, in choosing to recount the libations of Seneca and Thrasea, implicitly alludes to Nero’s later use of the phrase.110 From the perspective of Tacitus, his sources, and their audiences, all looking with the benefit of hindsight, the libations of Seneca and Thrasea would have come across as either countermoves or initial moves (we can’t be sure) in the contestation of authority between elite and emperor. It is worth noting, finally, a further resonance for the libation that arises in the course of the Tacitean narrative. A. J. Woodman has described Nero’s dedication of the conspirators’ dagger to Jupiter Vindex (Iovi Vindici, Ann. 15.74.2) as “a reversal of Seneca’s dying libation to Iuppiter Liberator” (1993, 126). Nero’s move, Tacitus himself notes, was later understood to have unwittingly presaged the revolt by Julius Vindex against him three years later. 103. For rewarding of slaves during a death scene see Sen. Ep. 77.9 (of the Stoic friend): non esse inhumanum . . . peracta vita aliquid porrigi iis qui totius vitae ministri fuissent. 104. For the self-liberating aspect see Schönegg (1999), 17; Griffin (1992), 371. 105. See B. Zimmermann (2005), 267. 106. E.g., G. Williams (1978), 144. On the history of this epithet, attested as early as 479 BCE, see Mattingly (1920), 38. 107. E.g., Griffin (1992), 370. 108. For the details see Mattingly (1923), 1.214, pl. 40.15; 1.295, pl. 50.9; (1920). 109. Griffin (1992), 371, n. 1. Similar skepticism about Roman resonances (e.g., Liber, Libertas) is expressed by G. Williams (1978), 144 n. 161. 110. Cf. Mattingly (1923), 1.clxxxiv; (1920), 38.

This page intentionally left blank

9 Passing into Memory: Seneca’s Imago and Its Reproduction

Seneca claimed to be leaving behind an imago vitae suae for his friends. But what, exactly, does that mean? We begin the chapter by unpacking the phrase in a Roman and Senecan context, and by then surveying how it came to be understood by later interpreters. The next step is to consider Seneca’s “image” more broadly construed. This includes, first, the fashioning of his visual portrait in the early seventeenth century, especially among Lipsius and friends. It also includes stylistic emulations of Seneca: most notably, those by Petrarch, Montaigne, and Diderot. In all of these receptions, both visual and stylistic, the fate of Seneca’s image has been conjoined with the reimagining of his death. How did Seneca wish to be remembered? In a fragment of his lost work Quomodo amicitia continenda sit (which I will henceforth refer to with the simpler title De amicitia), Seneca notes that if a friend of ours goes on a journey, we can be at risk of losing our grasp of the friendship and even basic recognition (notitia). So he offers a remedy (F59.5–6):1 As our memory recedes let us call it back. As I said in the first part [of the present work], we should use the swiftness of our mind and not allow any of our friends to be absent from us—let them return to our mind repeatedly. Let us project for ourselves what is going to happen, and recall what is past:

1. See Vottero (1998), 37–41, 291–93. The passage is briefly cited with reference to the dying Seneca by M. Zimmermann (1889), 37–39.

282

three themes Thus did he move his hands and thus his lips (sic ille manus, sic ora ferebat [= Aen. 3.490] ). Let an image be fashioned in our mind—a memorable one taken from the living person, not faint and mute (imago effingatur animo notabilis et e vivo petita, non evanida et muta): Thus did he move his hands, and thus his lips. Let us add to it the more relevant things: Thus (sic) did he speak, thus (sic) did he give encouragement, thus (sic) did he dissuade, thus (sic) did he give advice without constraint, receive it readily, and change it, without stubbornness. Thus (sic) was his habit of giving benefits willingly, of enduring when they were given without profit—thus (sic) was the speed of his generosity. Thus (sic) did he grow angry, this was the expression on his face when he yielded to a friend—the expression men usually have when they get their way. Let us survey his other virtues and occupy ourselves with how he used and managed them.

The invented imago we use to bridge between our friend’s departure and his return is like a portrait bust, except that it is a reminder of the living man and itself appears to live and breathe. In constructing it, we proceed cumulatively from the friend’s basic gestures to more complex mannerisms and behaviors, but we accentuate the friend’s virtues in particular. This technique seems relevant to Seneca’s statement to his friends in the death scene described by Tacitus: “He was leaving the only thing he still had, and yet the finest: the image of his life (imaginem vitae suae). If they kept this in their memories, their reward for such steadfast friendship (tam constantis amicitiae ) would be renown for moral conduct” (Ann. 15.62.1).2 There is, of course, the obvious difference that the De amicitia fragment anticipates a reunion between the friends: death precludes that. But this difference aside, we see that the use of a mental image plays a central role in both instances. A closer look at the De amicitia fragment reveals more about Seneca’s conception of the memorial process. Note, for example, the repeated half-line from Virgil, sic ille manus, sic ora ferebat (“Thus did he move his hands, and thus his lips”). As Dionigi Vottero points out in his commentary (1998, 292) the text comes from the parva Troia episode of Aeneid book 3, in which Andromache addresses the young Ascanius as “the only image left for me of Astyanax” (o mihi sola mei super Astyanactis imago, Aen. 3.489). Within the context of the poem, this substitution of Ascanius for the deceased Astyanax coheres both with Andromache’s psychological habit of seeking replicas of Troy and with

2. For echoes here of Seneca’s writing on amicitia (in the letters) see Schönegg (1999), 27 n. 35.

seneca’s imago and its reproduction

283

the narrative momentum of the Aeneid, as Rome is substituted for the Trojans’ fallen city.3 The quotation belongs to a larger pattern in Seneca’s discussions of how he would like his friends and readers to think about memory. Recall Epistulae morales 21, where Seneca promises Lucilius that the two of them will be remembered in the way that Virgil promises to Nisus and Euryalus: “Fortunate pair! If my poetry has any sway, no day will ever remove you from the memory of eternity (nulla dies umquam memori vos eximet aevo)” (Ep. 21.5 = Aen. 9.446–47). In letter 102, he invokes Dido’s passionate obsession with Aeneas as a model for how a great man is remembered: “For although he has been taken away from her eyes, still ‘much does the man’s virtue return to her mind, and much the prestige of his race (multa viri virtus animo multusque recursat / gentis honos)’ ” (Ep. 102.30 = Aen. 4.3–4). As Seneca seeks to build a memory practice in his friends and readers, their existing memory base—in this case, their memory of how memory works in Virgil—serves as a point of departure. Still, the construction of an imago and the structures of memory, both in Seneca and in epic narrative, are not about total mimesis: they are about selective memory, misremembering, outright forgetting, and invention.4 In the De amicitia fragment the imago may aid recognition when (if ) the friend returns, but in the meantime it is a selective caricature. In the comparisons from epic, the imago facilitates memories that are not necessarily precise, and not necessarily healthy. If Seneca wants his friends to remember him in the way that Andromache or Dido remember their loved ones, he also wants them to leave behind these women’s melancholy dispositions. Similar qualifications attended Seneca’s posthumous career as he became a subject of memory. For the reception tradition is crowded with instances in which Seneca was essentially the subject of an imago that encompassed how he looked, how he spoke, how he exhorted—also how he died. Yet the commemoration and imitation of Seneca, like any memory process, was never exact and total. Individual images brought their own complications.

The Imago in Tacitus and Beyond One of the defining characteristics of Roman exemplarity is that the agent aspires, in the act of imitating prior exempla, to become exemplary in his own right, in what Matthew Roller has termed “an endless loop of social reproduction” (2004, 6).5 Seneca exhibits this ambition himself, both in his writings 3. Seneca elsewhere shows an interest in the psychology of Andromache (in the Troades); also, the parva Troia episode, as noted by Garbarino (1987), 16 on Ep. 32.3–5. 4. Selectivity is emphasized in Gowing’s (2005), 69–81 discussion of historical memory in Seneca; see also Maso (1999), 43–81, on “Maiores in Seneca.” 5. On Roman and ancient exemplarity see also Chaplin (2000), 1–31; Bloomer (1992), 1–10; Lyons (1989), 6–12.

284

three themes

(cf. simus inter exempla, Ep. 93.13)6 and, as Tacitus represents it, in his words to Paulina during the death scene (cf. non invidebo exemplo, Ann. 15.63.2). This does not necessarily guarantee him control over what his death will be an example of : indeed, Seneca’s death was to become as susceptible to rhetorical reworking as any other exemplum. We see this in Boethius, where the death illustrates positive and negative points (Cons. 1.3, 3.5). We can, however, gauge the initial coloring that Seneca sought to give to the example of his death, and how he intended it to be used, by examining the precise terms in which Tacitus describes him transmitting his legacy to his friends.

The Gift Even as Seneca imitates the dying Socrates, he differs from Socrates sharply in giving consideration to his own influence in the world after he is gone.7 This begins with a worldly gesture: his request for “the tablets of his will” (testamenti tabulas, Ann. 15.62.1). Seneca evidently intended to “repay the favor to [his friends] for their services to him” (meritis eorum referre gratiam, §62.1).8 In his writings Seneca characterizes the “ordering of the will” (cum testamentum ordinamus) as the ultimate occasion for selfless generosity: “At no other time do we give so carefully, at no other time do we scrutinize our judgments more, than when we remove any sense of utility and before our eyes stands alone what is virtuous (remotis utilitatibus solum ante oculos honestum stetit)” (Ben. 4.11.4–5). In Roman culture more broadly, as Catharine Edwards has noted, the “revelatory” aspect of death is echoed in the conception of the will as “mirror of character” (speculum . . . morum, Plin. Ep. 8.18.1; Edwards 2007, 8). But as Tacitus explains, Seneca’s attempt is thwarted by the centurion, and he turns to make his most famous gesture, as we have read above (Ann. 15.62.1): When the centurion refused, he turned to his friends and testified that since he was being kept from recompensing them for their services to him, he was leaving the only thing he still had, and yet the finest: the image of his life (quod unum iam et tamen pulcherrimum habeat, imaginem vitae suae relinquere testatur). If they kept this in their memories, [he said], their reward for such steadfast friendship would be renown for moral conduct (cuius si memores essent, bonarum artium famam tam constantis amicitiae laturos).

6. On exemplarity in Seneca see Mayer (1991), esp. 141–47; also Aricò (2001), 94–101; Maso (1999), 43–81; Shelton (1995), esp. 158–66; Trillitzsch (1962), 35–36, 95–109. 7. On this difference see Cancik (1967), 111; Reydams-Schils (2005), 80. 8. Compare Sen. Ep. 81.31: referendam bene merentibus gratiam; cited by R. Fabbri (1978–79), 417–18; M. Zimmermann (1889), 37–38.

seneca’s imago and its reproduction

285

The term testatur figures Seneca’s imago vitae suae as a nonmonetary (and superior) legacy9 that substitutes for the material legacy (itself potentially vast) that he is prevented from giving to show his gratitude to his friends, but will serve all the more, it seems, as a mirror of his character. Seneca’s writings are useful for helping us to articulate the overall nature of this “legacy.” In the letters he characterizes the ongoing efficacy of great men even after their souls have been detached from their bodies and dissolved, urging Lucilius, “Consider how beneficial good examples are for us: you will understand that the memory of great men is just as useful as their presence (non minus praesentiam esse utilem quam memoriam” (Ep. 102.30).10 In a separate letter he asserts that “virtue’s shadow is glory” (gloria umbra virtutis est) and that “just as a shadow sometimes precedes and sometimes follows from behind, so glory sometimes is ahead of us and offers itself to be seen, sometimes is in the rear and is greater for being later, after ill-will has receded (gloria aliquando ante nos est visendamque se praebet, aliquando in averso est maiorque quo serior, ubi invidia secessit)” (Ep. 79.13). As he goes on to say, “[t]he conversations of posterity will certainly be of no relevance to us; yet even without our feeling it they will cultivate us and honor us frequently” (ad nos quidem nihil pertinebit posterorum sermo; tamen etiam non sentientes colet ac frequentabit, 79.17). In the De beneficiis he describes the obligations that posterity has toward the memory of a deceased great man in quasi-economic terms, as if the memory is preserved by contractual obligation: “The memory of great virtues is sacred (sacra est magnarum virtutum memoria). . . . We owe it to the virtues to cultivate them not only when they are present but also when they have been removed from view. Just as they succeeded not only in being useful for a single lifetime, but in leaving their benefits behind afterwards too, so we should remain grateful for longer than one lifetime (nos non una aetate grati simus)” (Ben. 4.30.1, 3). This passage is interesting not simply for the sense of obligation that it establishes toward the dead, but also because Seneca uses it to justify the extension of generosity toward the dead man’s descendants: the son of Cicero, for example, was rightly given the consulship for no other reason than because he was the son of Cicero (4.30.2). This helps us to recognize how the benefit to Seneca’s friends after his death may come in part from their being thought of, as it were, as Senecan “descendants”—the closest thing he has to sons. The friends’ envisaged commemorative procedure, as Tacitus presents it, is to be an exercise in constans amicitia (“steadfast friendship,” Ann. 15.62.1)—no doubt along the lines of the fragment from Seneca’s De amicitia discussed above. They will, at the same time, be earning themselves a reputation for bonae artes (“moral conduct”), which will in turn give them fame. But 9. See Reydams-Schils (2005), 80. Seneca explains at Ben. 1.12.1–2 that argentum factum (i.e., a statue) makes for a more memorable gift than argentum signatum (i.e., money). 10. On the conception of immortality through memory in Ep. 102 see Newman (2008); Setaioli (1997), 356–58; Leeman (1951).

286

three themes

a comparison with letter 21, where Seneca tells Lucilius in the same breath, “Your studies will make you renowned and noble” (studia te tua clarum et nobilem efficient) and “I will enjoy the gratitude of posterity, I can bring out with me names that will endure” (habebo apud posteros gratiam, possum mecum duratura nomina educere, Ep. 21.2, 5), suggests that the promise to the friends that they will be famous for their morality is inseparable from the reputation they acquire simply through being associated with the celebrated Seneca. Furthermore, Seneca himself relies on his friends to mediate his posthumous image.11 Reminiscing about his contemplation of suicide as a sickly young man, he explains (Ep. 78.4): Nothing, Lucilius, best of men, restores a sick man and helps him so well as the feelings of his friends—nothing so well removes his expectation of death, and his fear of it. In my judgment I was not dying, if I was leaving them as survivors (non iudicabam me, cum illos superstites relinquerem, mori). What I mean is that I thought I was going to live, not with them but through them (me victurum non cum illis, sed per illos). I saw myself not as pouring out my life-breath, but as passing it on (non effundere mihi spiritum videbar, sed tradere).

“Imago vitae suae” What, precisely, is being remembered? The phrase imago vitae suae evokes not one but several possible conceptions.12 As “the only thing he still had, and yet the finest” (quod unum iam et tamen pulcherrimum habeat, Ann. 15.62.1), the imago resembles Seneca’s own portrayals of virtue. The wise man, he writes, “is in possession . . . of virtue alone (unius . . . in possessione virtutis est), from which he can never be expelled, whereas his use of other things is precarious” (Const. 5.5). In a letter he hypothesizes that “if it were possible for us to look upon the mind of a good man, what a beautiful appearance (o quam pulchram faciem), how sacred, how bright from its grandeur and tranquillity, we would see!” (Ep. 115.3, cf. 3–6). In another letter this vision of beauty is outwardly embodied in acts of physical exertion or suffering (Ep. 67.12–13):13 Don the mind of a great man and withdraw for a while from the opinions of the crowd. Take up, as much as you are able, the appearance of virtue most grand and most beautiful (cape, quantam debes, virtutis pulcherrimae ac magnificentissimae speciem), which must 11. See Schönegg (1999), 26. 12. See Hutchinson (1993), 265 (“example,” “memory”); Mayer (1991), 142 (“model”), 168; Griffin (1986), 65 (“the pattern of his life”). On its associations with Roman ancestral masks, see Schönegg (1999), 25–32 and Mayer. For “artistic and literary associations,” see Staley (2002), 282; also Santoro L’Hoir (2006), 215. 13. Staley (2002), 283 compares Plato, Laws 817b4 for the truest tragedy or “a representation of the fairest and best life” (l¨lgri| so‹ jakk¨rsot ja≠ q¨rsot b¨ot).

seneca’s imago and its reproduction

287

be cultivated not with incense and garlands but with sweat and blood (quae nobis non ture nec sertis, sed sudore et sanguine colenda est). Look upon M. Cato (aspice M. Catonem) applying his purest of hands to that sacred breast and expanding the wounds not inflicted deeply enough. The self-killing Cato is also singled out elsewhere as follows: “the famous Cato, living image of the virtues (virtutium viva imago), leaning into his sword” (Tranq. 16.1).14 At face value imago vitae suae puts an emphasis on Seneca’s biography, and Tacitus describes how Seneca urged Paulina to contemplate “his life conducted through virtue” (vitae per virtutem actae, Ann. 15.63.1).15 It is understandable why some scholars see in the phrase a reference to Seneca’s most autobiographical-seeming work, the Epistulae morales.16 There are close parallels also with his emphasis on the notions of instar totius vitae (“image of one’s whole life,” Ep. 61.1) and ratio vitae suae (“account of his life,” Brev. 18.3). The closest Senecan verbal parallel for imago vitae suae, in the De beneficiis, arises in a thought experiment concerning the ingratitude of all human beings and our common failure to remember the beneficia we have received (Ben. 7.27.1–2):17 If a true image of our whole life comes before you (si tibi vitae nostrae vera imago succurret), you will seem to see the appearance of a city just now captured ([sc.videre] videberis tibi captae cum maxime civitatis faciem): . . . one man seizes from private, another from public, another from profane, another from sacred. One smashes, another leaps over. . . . There is no one who doesn’t take something from another. Although this draws in part on imago in the sense of “simile,”18 characterizing human life in general through the analogy of a sacked city, Seneca soon focuses on biographic memory, telling his reader such things as (§28.1): You will see that the things given you as a child had passed away before you were a youth, that the things that were conferred on you as a young man did not last into your old age. Some things we have lost, others we have cast forth; some have gradually passed out of our view, from others we have averted our eyes.

14. The use of viva seems intended to distinguish the imago from a death portrait, as at Amic. F59.6; also Ep. 84.8: imago res mortua est. On the liveliness of imagines see Staley (2002), 285 n. 9; Flower (1996), 32–48. 15. The sense of literary portrayal of peoples’ lives or ways of life is clear in the non-Senecan parallels for imago vitae cited by Woodman (forthcoming): e.g., Quint. Inst. 10.1.69 (extolling the realism of Menander): omnem vitae imaginem expressit; also Cic. Rosc. Am. 47; Nep. Epam. 1.3. 16. E.g., Edwards (2007), 111–12; Faider (1921), 256, with ref. to Ep. 8.1–2. 17. Cited by Woodman (forthcoming); R. Fabbri (1978–79), 417–18; M. Zimmermann (1889), 37–38. 18. Cf. OLD s.v. imago 7b.

288

three themes

By this point in the discussion imago has come to imply a synoptic view of one’s own life course. Its special truth as vitae nostrae vera imago, however, derives from its encompassing all the parts of a person’s life and exposing the inconsistencies that lapses in memory had masked. The sense allows that Seneca’s own imago vitae suae might encompass the facts and flaws of his life’s history, with all of its object lessons—not just a simple, positive model. Yet for all of its biographic implications, Seneca’s imago vitae suae is implicitly informed by context: the life it encapsulates ends thus, in Seneca’s death scene, and the imago itself is presented during, or by means of, the death event.19 It can potentially be equated with an imago mortis—though Tacitus reserves the phrase mortis imago to refer, a few chapters later, to the poetic representation of a soldier’s death that Lucan recites as a comparison for his own (Ann. 15.70.1). As we have seen, the imago is characterized in terms that evoke Cato in his dying moments: this is where his moral life is most visible. The potential correlation between the imago vitae suae and the death scene itself is one to which later interpreters would sometimes gravitate. Imago is also inseparable from Seneca’s use of the term in several technical applications, where it refers to such things as aristocratic ancestor masks, rhetorical comparisons or similes, and mental representations.20 Although each of these senses involves its own distinct area of cultural practice, in Seneca all are subtended by the dichotomy between the values of cultural convention and the values of philosophy: 1. “An atrium filled with smoke-covered portraits,” Seneca warns, “does not make us noble; . . . what makes us noble is the mind” (non facit nobilem atrium plenum fumosis imaginibus; . . . animus facit nobilem, Ep. 44.5).21 But even as he rejects imagines, he substitutes for them an “aristocracy of virtue,” to use the phrase of Thomas Habinek (1998, 137–50). He speaks of “households of the most noble minds” (nobilissimorum ingeniorum familiae, Brev. 14.5–15.3) where we must pay daily visits, and asks, “Why should I not have images of great men (magnorum virorum . . . imagines) to serve as inspirations to my mind (incitamenta animi), and why should I not celebrate their birthdays?” (Ep. 64.9).22 2. Although he tends not to use the rhetorical term imago (simile, comparison) when he is criticizing rhetorical excess, Seneca often employs near-synonyms

19. Cancik (1967), 110 sees primarily an imago of death, and Schönegg (1999) sees the dying Seneca removing all his masks (cf. Ep. 26.5), “um seines Lebens Totenmaske abzubilden” (23). 20. On all of these associations of imagines in Seneca see Armisen-Marchetti (1989), 9–60. 21. See Schönegg (1999), 30. For background on the “social, gentilicial, and moral” aspects of the term imago see Flower (1996), 32–48; quoted from 34. 22. Cited by Zanker (1995), 201.

seneca’s imago and its reproduction

289

such as translatio (metaphor). Yet as Mireille Armisen-Marchetti has shown, Seneca is not always critical, and somewhat provocatively exercises his own “right to imagery” (1989, 37) in the use of figurative language. He mentions, for example, how in the writings of Roman philosopher Sextius “I was moved by an image” (movit me imago) comparing the wise man to a military column (Ep. 59.7), and he argues that such devices are often essential. 3. Seneca criticizes people’s mistaken attachment to conventionally valuable objects by pointing out that such attachment “is not industriousness, making them restless, [rather it is] false images of things, stirring them into insanity (insanos falsae rerum imagines agitant)” (Tranq. 12.5); and the greed of moneylenders “is made falsely happy and hallucinates riches” ( falso laeta divitias imaginatur, Const. 6.7). At the same time, he urges the importance of “inserting a few days on which we may train ourselves for real poverty by means of imaginary poverty” (aliquos dies interponere quibus nos imaginaria paupertate exerceamus ad veram, Ep. 20.13), and we have already seen how he recommends fashioning a mental imago as a way to remember an absent friend (Amic. F59.5–6; cf. Ep. 40.1). This use of imagines belongs within the broader set of Senecan spiritual exercises that involve one or another kind of image (cf. Marc. 2.3). In sum, the Tacitean Seneca’s transfer of an imago vitae suae is surprisingly evocative. It brings with it a whole set of cultural and philosophical practices of which Seneca (in life and in death) will himself now be the focus, just as he had been their practitioner and propagator.

Spinning the Imago After Boccaccio’s rediscovery of Tacitus, successive authors reworked the imago vitae suae in subtle or not-so-subtle ways, thereby redefining the nature of the transaction. Among the Italian biographers, Barzizza amplified virtually every detail. His Seneca is not prevented from seeing his will: the will serves rather as a prop that he holds in his hands throughout the scene. Barzizza offers a slightly different account of the imago itself (Vita Sen. §11): He said that he wanted to bequeath to them in his will that which was more valuable and more beautiful (gratiosius et pulcrius): if they held this thing in their memory, they would keep their fame for morality and deeds deserving of praise (famam laudabilium artium atque rerum). This thing, he said, was the image of his life, which did not seem to mean anything other than that they should follow in the footsteps of his life (quod non aliud significare videbantur [sic] quam ut vestigia vite sue sequerentur). For what better or more available thing

290

three themes did he have of his own (quod enim melius habebat aut propius23) that he could bequeath to his friends?

The new motifs reveal Barzizza’s desire to define a Seneca that will inspire his fifteenth-century Paduan audience, above all the promise of fame for actual deeds (rerum) and the more concrete (and christianizing) exemplarity of following in Seneca’s footsteps. Most subsequent versions stayed closer to Tacitus, though they tended to represent Seneca’s statements in direct speech. Polenton has Seneca refer to “the only thing that I have in me that is free, and the most beautiful” (quod unum est in me liberum et pulcherrimum habeo, Vita Sen. 491), tying the imago to the theme of libertas, whereas Pompilio has Seneca refer to his exemplum et imaginem (Vita Sen. 298). Montaigne characteristically has Seneca place greater emphasis on friendship, saying that in commemorating his imago they “will receive the glory of being true and sincere friends” (acqueriez la gloire de sinceres et veritables amis, Essais 2.35, 410). Gwinne adapts the Tacitean phrase conversus ad amicos (“turning to his friends,” Ann. 15.62.1) to serve as a stage direction that immediately precedes, and therefore underlines, the following direct appeal to friendship: “He who is mindful of how my life was always spent in good moral conduct, will win fame for firm friendship” (qui memor, ut acta est artibus semper bonis / mihi vita, famam firmae amicitiae feret, Ner. 3996–97). Diderot, though he keeps close to Tacitus (Essai, 151), is an interesting case in that he himself evidently forewent a will and wished his own Essai sur Séneque to be received as his imago vitae suae.24 By far the most inventive textual reworking of the imago vitae suae, however, comes in the play by Tristan. Being refused access to his will, Seneca turns to his wife, saying, “Paulina, it is for you that I wanted to write” (Pauline, c’est pour toy que je voudrois escrire, Mort de Sen. V.i, 1551). But, he continues (1554–62), Ie ne perds pas beaucoup pour n’auoir point escrit: I’ay par mes actions tracé dans ta memoire Assez heureusement l’image de ma gloire. Ceux qui de ma vertu pourront encor douter Pour en estre esclaircis n’ont qu’à te consulter; Il te souuiendra bien qu’auec assez d’estime I’ay vescu pres de toy sans reproche & sans crime; Il te souuiendra bien de ma constante foy, Et que prest à partir ie n’eus regret qu’à toy. I do not lose much in not having written anything: by my actions I have inscribed in your memory so happily the image of my glory. 23. Although propius is transcribed by Panizza (1977), I would suggest amending to proprius, “more personalized.” 24. See Conroy (1975), 130.

seneca’s imago and its reproduction

291

Those who are still able to doubt my virtue only have to consult you to be enlightened. You will recall well that with great esteem I lived with you without reproach or blame. You will recall well my steadfast fidelity, and that as I departed I had no grief except over you. Paulina’s memory, then, is the site where the imago has already been inscribed. Moreover, rather than portray it in any way as a model for future imitation, Seneca is completely absorbed in the imago’s apologetic function—in Paulina’s potential to act as a living defender of his moral reputation in general and of his matrimonial fidelity in particular.

The Lipsian Circle and the Vera Effigies Visual receptions of Seneca’s death can in most instances be satisfactorily discussed without appealing to the concept of imago. But in the case of Lipsius and his circle, the quest to visualize Seneca was closely tied to the role of imagines in Seneca’s writings and thought. For this reason it will be helpful to look at how they went about visualizing him, and the influence their fanciful images had on the later tradition.

Lipsius’ 1605 Edition In the biographic introduction to his Senecae opera, Lipsius comments on Tacitus’ imago vitae suae passage as follows: Obsecro, si foedus Seneca, ut Dio voluit, haecene de vita sua, in clausula diceret? Amicos scilicet, & arbitros ejus cottidie, sic falleret? I beseech you, if Seneca was vile, as Dio wished, would he have said these things about his life at its end? Could he really have deceived in this way his friends, his witnesses from one day to the next? Lipsius thus appeals to the internal audience of friends as testimony to the truth of Seneca’s virtue. Although he does not here unpack imago vitae suae, the term imago resonates with various textual and visual cues in the front matter of the book.25 The first thing that confronts the reader upon opening the 1605 edition is a portrait of Lipsius himself with a couplet ascribed to Henr. d’Oultremannus: “The image of Lipsius is a veil of Timanthes (Lipsiadae,

25. On the illustrations for the 1605 and subsequent editions see Judson and Van der Velde (1978), 154–67, 299–305; Hess (1981), passim; also Santucci (1999); Morford (1991), 9.

292

three themes

velum est Timantis, imago). The sun also can only be seen from under a dense cloud.”26 Then there is the elaborate title page, which includes a cameo (drawn and engraved by Theodor [Dirk] Galle) of a clean-shaven Seneca in right threequarter profile, looking upward.27 This is followed by a page that presents a larger cameo (artist unknown) again of a beardless (or thinly bearded) Seneca in the same pose, except this time in left three-quarter profile, and with his body visible to below the chest (Fig. 9.1).28 The title L. SENECAE IMAGO is at the top of the oval frame, with a descriptive text written around it: Exstat Romae in marmore, et est effigies, vt videtur, in balneo animam iam exhalantis, et in verbis monitisque aureis deficientis. Similem insculptam reperiri in gemmis etiam aiunt. Vividum, acre, igneum aliquid refert. It survives in marble at Rome, and is, it seems, an image of him now breathing out his soul in the bath and passing away in [the process of giving] golden words and precepts. They say that a similar one can be found engraved in gems. It conveys something lively, piercing, fiery. Below the portrait is a separate, rectangular tablet containing the Invitatio ad Senecam, a twenty-three-line poem in choliambics, in Lipisius’ own voice.29 The poem begins by alluding to the portrait in Fig. 9.1 (lines 1–3): ANNAEVS iste SENECA, quem vides LECTOR, Ait fuisse magnus inter auctores, Seu tu Latinos, sive respicis Graecos. This Annaeus Seneca whom you see, Reader, can boast to have been great among authors, whether you look at Latin ones or Greek. After these opening verses, which situate the reader’s view of Seneca within an implied broader survey (cf. respicis) of antiquity, Lipsius collapses a number of additional visual experiences: he encourages the reader to “survey the writings” (scripta lustra, 5); he appeals to the reader’s desire to “look down on the false kingdoms of Fortune” ( falsa regna Fortunae / Despicere, 9–10); he explains that he is giving the reader a Seneca who is “more pure from this editing of ours” (censione puriorem ab hac nostrâ, 13); and he describes the “bright and tranquil

26. The Greek painter Timanthes was famous for intensifying a portrayal of grief by depicting Agamemnon veiled at the sacrifice of Iphigenia. The portrait of Lipsius does not (and perhaps cannot) depict wisdom directly, yet facilitates a more direct experience of wisdom. 27. Reproduced in Morford (1991), fig. 2; Judson and Van der Velde (1978), fig. 102. 28. The model for the two cameos just mentioned is uncertain. I would compare some features, including the stretched neck and upward-tilted head, to the Seneca bust by Reni (Fig. 9.11), sculpted sometime after 1601. 29. For extensive discussion of the poem, including its Catullan model, see Schäfer (2005).

figure 9.1 Theodor Galle, L. Senecae imago, engraving from J. Lipsius, ed. L. Annaei Senecae philosophi opera (Antwerp, 1605). Rare Books Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Courtesy of Princeton University Library.

294

three themes

temples/regions of wisdom” (templa . . . sophiae serena, clara) from which, he says (lines 19–21), tibi fas aspicere caelicas oras, Et fas simul suscipere caelicas curas, Despicere terram, et terrea ista. . . . it is permitted for you to look upon the heavenly domain, and permitted at the same time to take up heavenly concerns, and look down upon the earth and these earthly things. . . . On a later page of the introduction, at the end of Lipsius’ chapter on Seneca’s Corpus, morbi, forma (“Body, illnesses, appearance”), is an additional cameo of a sculpted bust of a bearded Seneca. The reader’s interest, then, is solicited through multiple forms of imago. This program reflects Lipsius’ more general thematization of imagines in his neo-Stoic celebrations of Seneca. In the Manductio ad Stoicam philosophiam (1604) Lipsius mentions allusiones, imagines, translationes crebrae et paene continuae (“frequent and virtually unceasing comparisons/allegories, similes, metaphors”) as a hallmark of Seneca’s rhetorical claritas et splendor (Mand. 1.18).30 The impact of Seneca’s vivid style is such that when we read him we seem “not to be reading his writings, but to be hearing his words; and to be dealing not with an image (imaginem) of him in books, but with the man himself (ipsum hominem), through our very eyes and senses” (Mand. 1.12)—a description in which Lipsius embraces the imago as the medium that establishes copresence even as he rejects the term as inadequate for capturing the degree to which Seneca seems present. Lipsius finishes the Manductio by quoting directly from the influential passage in Epistulae morales 11.8–10 on imagining an internal guardian (Mand. 3.24). His use of imagines is broadly parallel to that of Seneca, applying the idea variously to rhetorical devices and to mental representations, and implicitly drawing on their power to transmit a quasi-aristocratic legacy.

Moretus, Rubens, and the 1615 Edition Although the intention behind the introductory images in Lipsius’ 1605 edition is clear, subsequent editions reveal that at the time of his death in 1606, Lipsius was dissatisfied. A note to the reader from the publisher Balthasar Moretus explains that Lipsius had come to view the initial image (evidently referring here to the image accompanying the Invitatio, = Fig. 9.1) as “not entirely perfect” (haud undique perfectam), and that after Lipsius’ death Moretus had personally inquired “concerning the Philosopher’s true image” (de verâ Philosophi

30. See Williamson (1951), 110–11, 137–43.

seneca’s imago and its reproduction

295

imagine), and had enlisted the help of Peter Paul Rubens, “the Apelles of our age” (aevi nostri Apelles). Thus, two images drawn by Rubens and engraved by Cornelis Galle, both overlapping somewhat with Rubens’ depiction in his Dying Seneca painting, were substituted in the second edition of 1615 and later editions. (The title-page cameo of Seneca was also replaced by a bearded Seneca bust, though it appears not to be by Rubens.)31 The Invitatio ad Senecam was now printed without the original cameo, but was preceded and followed by the two Rubens images. The first (Fig. 9.2) depicts a bearded Seneca alone, standing in a basin adorned with a lion’s head, in a cylindrical niche; his knees are bent, his arms poised, his eyes turned upward. Moretus explains that this image is based on an original made from Lucullan (black) marble housed in the Borghese collection—a different model than that used for the 1605 edition. But Moretus adapts Lipsius’ original description of the 1605 image (est effigies, vt videtur, in balneo) to declare: vera est effigies (ut Lipsianis eam vocibus describam) in balneo . . . (“It is the true image, if I may describe it with Lipsius’ own words, in the bath . . .”). The second image (Fig. 9.3), following the Invitatio, shows a bust of a bearded Seneca in left three-quarter profile staring out of a polygonal niche with eyes turned slightly upward; his hair is longer, and both hair and beard have chiseled curls. As Moretus explains, “the second image which you see has been rendered by the same Rubens from a marble prototype (alteram quam spectas effigiem è prototypo mamoreo idem Rubenius expressit) that he brought from Rome and keeps in his most elegant museum.” The image, he adds, is included in Fulvio Orsini’s Illustrium imagines (1598), where it is identified as Seneca on the basis of coins bearing a similar image and inscribed with Seneca’s name. In his exegesis of the two images, Moretus explains that the first is better than the 1605 original, because “you see his hands and fingers stretched out in such a way that you can recognize him quite clearly as Tacitus [describes him], dictating precepts of Wisdom and Constancy to the scribes he has summoned (Sapientiae & Constantiae praecepta advocatis Scriptoribus dictantem).” Moretus notes the signs of emaciation, but also observes that the prominent veins and muscles recall Seneca’s physical exertions in his vineyards. The second image “splendidly represents a man . . . almost done in by staying awake and night-labors (vigiliis & lucubrationibus paenè confectum).” Moretus revisits the sentiment of Lipsius’ Invitatio, exhorting the reader, “You, then, refreshed by the most satisfying view of his serious expression, spur yourself on to see all the way through to the immortal monuments of his divine intellect. And in these, willingly embrace the image of a more ancient learning and superior

31. See Judson and Van der Velde (1978), fig. 103.

figure 9.2 Cornelis Galle after Rubens, dying Seneca, engraving from J. Lipsius, ed. L. Annaei Senecae philosophi opera (Antwerp, 1615). Courtesy of Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.

seneca’s imago and its reproduction

297

figure 9.3 Cornelis Galle after Rubens, bust of Seneca, engraving from J. Lipsius, ed. L. Annaei Senecae philosophi opera (Antwerp, 1615). Courtesy of Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania. wisdom, and fare well (antiquioris Doctrinae & melioris sapientiae imaginem lubens amplectere, ac vale).” The impact, and the distinctiveness, of the 1615 edition can be better appreciated through comparing it with the title page of an English translation of Seneca’s works (together with English translations of some of Lipsius’ introductory materials) by Thomas Lodge, published in 1620 (Fig. 9.4), where an image of Seneca in the bath again serves as an introduction to the text as a whole. The absence of this image in Lodge’s prior edition in 1614 strongly indicates that the Lipsian edition of 1615 was an influence. But the English book presents a somewhat different Seneca. The sequence of captioned vignettes from different life stages (for example, VERTUE BRED HIM, CONSTANCY BURIED HIM), and the visible agency of Nero, add up to an imago vitae suae in a fuller, biographic

figure 9.4 Engraving from Thomas Lodge, trans. The Workes of Lucius Annaeus Seneca (London, 1620). Rare Books Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Courtesy of Princeton University Library.

seneca’s imago and its reproduction

299

sense. In the Morientis effigies the illustrator has also used pre-Rubensian types for the bath and blood, and shunned Rubens’ focus on facial physiognomy. Seneca’s authority here consists less in the moral profile of his dictated words than in the more politically pregnant words of the libation, Iovi liberatori, just as the scenes from his life in the court offer a model for virtues exercised consistently throughout a public life.32

Two False Prototypes The veritas of Seneca’s imago in the visual receptions ultimately has more to do with moral authority than with historical authenticity. The medieval image of Seneca had been molded by the inherited typologies of saint, martyr, and pagan intellectual, but the Lipsian Seneca was supposed to be different: as is suggested by the captions quoted above, in which Lipsius and Moretus describe the location of its models in Rome as well as the basis of its identification as “Seneca,” their image was the product of a self-consciously historicizing quest.33 And yet, famously, the images of Seneca produced by Rubens for the 1615 edition incorporate not one, but two, falsely identified prototypes. The first of these false prototypes is the 1.22-meter-tall black marble statue discovered on the Esquiline in 1594 and subsequently displayed in the Borghese gardens (Fig. 9.5).34 This is now recognized to be a second-century Roman copy of a Hellenistic original probably in bronze, from a well-established genre of realist statues and statuettes (as small as 60–70 cm) representing herdsmen, farmers, and (as in this instance) fishermen.35 In other copies of the same type, the fisherman has the same stance (without anything in the right hand, though some have imagined this hand holding a net) and apron (probably for storing his catch while wading), but carries a basket in his left hand and sometimes also wears a hat and a mantle. By the time of Rubens’ second sojourn in Rome, which ended in 1608, the mutilated statue had been identified as the dying Seneca (by Flaminio Vacca?), probably in view of the subject’s old age and stance, as well as the prominence of the veins, enhanced by the unique black marble. Soon after this identification it had been given eyes, a white alabaster apron, and legs, and set in a porphyry marble tub with an alabaster rim, red stucco being added to give the effect of standing in a pool of blood.36 Rubens sketched the statue at least six times from different angles, and would eventually use it as

32. On this title page in relation to English neo-Stoic culture see Shifflet (1998), 17. 33. See Noll (2001), 110. 34. On the identification of the Borghese fisherman as Seneca, and Rubens’ use of it, see Beard and Henderson (2001), 1–3; Zanker (2000), 49–50; Morford (1991), 185–86; Haskell and Penny (1981), 303–5; Judson and Van der Velde (1978), 1.154–67. 35. On the genre see Laubscher (1982), 7, and 99–100 on the “Seneca”-type. The fisherman corresponds to Diktys, the divine fisherman-rescuer of Perseus, argues Stähler (2004). 36. See Beard and Henderson (2001): “At the most basic level, Seneca was essentially created by Renaissance restoration” (8, emphasis original).

figure 9.5 Fisherman, black marble (second-century copy of Hellenistic original). Paris, Louvre, Inv. MR 315. Courtesy of Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY.

seneca’s imago and its reproduction

301

the model both for the 1615 Lipsian edition and for his Dying Seneca painting in c. 1614–15. In the sketches, scholars have seen Rubens altering the body and face variously to minimize inappropriate moral associations (Noll 2001, 97–98); to emphasize “African” features supposedly in line with Seneca’s Corduban origins (McGrath 1997, 2.287); to realize Rubens’ own theories about the creation of living images from stone models (Noll 2001, 105–9); and to draw out similarities to images of the suffering Christ (Hess 1981, 284). The second prototype is a marble bust of the type now known as the pseudoSeneca, which exists in multiple copies in marble and bronze (for example, Fig. 9.6).37 Like the fisherman, the pseudo-Seneca bust derives from a Hellenistic type, and is equally veristic, though of an altogether different genre. Its subject remains uncertain, though Hesiod is a plausible suggestion. A copy in the possession of the Farnese librarian, Fulvio Orsini, was identified as Seneca in Orsini’s Illustrium imagines (first edition, 1598)—as we have seen Moretus mention when discussing the prototype for Theodor Galle’s 1605 drawing. Although a later edition of Orsini’s work explains that the identification had been based on resemblances to a labeled, late-antique medal (contorniato) owned by Cardinal Bernadino Maffei, it is likely that Lipsius himself had played a role in its identification already during his visit to Rome in 1568–70.38 Lipsius’ discontent with the images drawn by Theodor Galle for his 1605 edition may to some extent have been prompted by their divergence from Orsini’s bust.39 Rubens possibly saw the bust already on his first visit to Rome in 1601; on his second visit he acquired his own copy and took it with him when he returned to Antwerp in 1608. Although there has been dispute about the degree to which Rubens’ drawings of the bust, rather than the fisherman’s face, can be regarded as the primary model for his representations of Seneca in the bath,40 the bust came to serve as a metonym for the whole dying-Seneca scene. The involvement of Lipsius, Rubens, and Moretus in its identification and interpretation has made the bust (and one may say much the same of the fisherman) a celebrated chapter in the history of portraiture, an instance of willful projection in which inauthenticity is outweighed by perceived authority—by the perceived correspondence between physiognomy and idea. As Richard Brilliant has argued, the bust’s title is “both true and false”: “[t]he Pseudo-Seneca image legitimately served Lipsius’ need for a portrait in which the characteristics and activities of the great Stoic could be clustered under the name ‘Seneca’ ” (1991, 80). The symbolic role of the pseudo-Seneca bust in the Lipsian circle can be seen most fully in Rubens’ slightly earlier painting, The Four Philosophers

37. See Prinz (1973); also Zanker (2000), 51–54; Morford (1991), 6–7. The identification as Seneca may have been supported by resemblances to the head of the fisherman, argues Noll (2001), 95. The thirty-eight-plus surviving copies are analyzed by Richter (1965), 1.58–66, with figs. 131–230. 38. See Prinz (1973), 411. 39. Theodor Galle had himself illustrated the bust for Orsini’s book; reproduced by Prinz (1973), fig. 3. 40. See, e.g., McGrath (1997), 2.288; Maurach (1990), 518–19, nn. 42, 46; Prinz (1973), 418.

302

three themes

figure 9.6 So-called pseudo-Seneca bust, marble (Roman copy of Hellenistic original). Paris, Louvre. Courtesy of Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY.

(1611) (Fig. 9.7), which represents the artist himself, his brother Philip Rubens (deceased), Lipsius (deceased), and Jan van de Wouwer.41 As Mark Morford has noted, the bust of Seneca presides over the group as a whole and “connects the living with the dead” (1991, 11). The bust is echoed by the head of Lipsius, who reads either from one of his neo-Stoic texts or from his Senecae opera (in which Seneca’s imago had, as we have seen, already been placed a few pages beyond Lipsius’ own imago). It is also echoed by the head of Peter Paul Rubens, whose position hints at his own role in promoting the bust as a public icon in the years after Lipsius’ death. Because the two images produced by Rubens for the 1615 edition are so closely associated with his painting of the Dying Seneca, it is also important to acknowledge the ways in which the painting itself (Fig. 7.8) was shaped by various conceptions about image construction.42 These include contemporary 41. On the painting see Prinz (1973), 419–23; here I am also indebted to Zanker (2000), 52–53; Vuilleumier (1996); Morford (1991), 3–13. 42. See Noll (2001); Hess (1981).

seneca’s imago and its reproduction

303

figure 9.7 Peter Paul Rubens, The Four Philosophers (1611). Florence, Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti. Courtesy of Scala / Art Resource, NY.

theories about the function of the imago in the Christian and neo-Stoic psychological doctrines, and about the compression of a complex event or a whole lifetime into a single tableau. The painting might be viewed as compressing the imago vitae suae into an imago mortis.43 In the painting I would draw attention to 43. See Hess (1981), 208.

304

three themes

how the scribe’s partly written text VIR- (visible when the painting is inspected close up)44 recalls Lipsius’ promise in his Invitatio ad Senecam that Seneca through his writings would instruct the reader “to locate the highest honor in morality and virtue alone (in uno honesto . . . atque Virtute)” (lines 10–11). The constellation of pen, inkpot, and open and closed books in the Dying Seneca also recalls the similar group of objects in The Four Philosophers, where Seneca remains present in the form of the bust. Taken together, the two paintings demonstrate the successful transfer of Seneca’s imago vitae suae from the scene of death into the modern scene of the Lipsian circle.

The Image after Rubens In the prolific culture of paintings and drawings that followed over the next centuries, artists showed signs of being self-conscious about their role as reproducers of Seneca’s imago. This can be seen especially in the work of Giordano, who, though he took Seneca’s facial physiognomy not from Rubens but from Reni (as we will see below), took special interest in Rubens’ novel element of the scribe. Not only did Giordano draw parallels between scribe and vein cutter, as noted in the introduction to this book (Figs. 0.1 and 0.2), but also he multiplied the scribes in number. Although this addition simply made his death scene in one sense more faithful to the plural “scribes” of the Tacitean account (cf. scriptoribus, Ann. 15.63.3), it also seems like a reflex of the proliferation of deaths of Seneca in writing and the arts since Lipsius and Rubens, and of their particular focus on the imago. In one version (Fig. 9.8), the different form of tablet held by the figure on the left may identify him as a visual artist and may thus be a self-conscious allusion to Giordano himself.45 This version by Giordano, as it happens, was purchased by the Fifth Earl of Exeter for display in his Burghley House, where it was hung in the “Best Bedd Chamb.r” [sic].46 It was viewed in this setting by Matthew Prior, whose poem “PICTURE of SENECA dying in a Bath. By JORDAIN. At the Right Honourable the EARL of EXETER’s at Burleigh-House” (1718) celebrates the painter’s role as Seneca’s preserver. “While the cruel Nero only drains / The moral Spaniard’s ebbing Veins” (lines 1–2), Prior observes (6–14),47 He should have burnt his Tutor’s Book; And long have reign’d supream in Vice: One nobler Wretch can only rise; ’Tis he whose Fury shall deface The Stoic’s Image in this Piece. For while unhurt, divine JORDAIN, 44. 45. 46. 47.

See McGrath (1997), 2.289. This is my conjecture; Chevallier (1991), 99 makes the same suggestion for another, 18th-c. version. On the context see Ferrari and Scavizzi (1992), 78–79, 238 n. 13, 302. Quoted from Prior (1719), 6.

figure 9.8 Luca Giordano, Morte di Seneca (c. 1682–83). Stamford, U.K., Burghley House Collection, n. 406. Courtesy of Burghley House Collection.

306

three themes Thy Work and SENECA’s remain, He still has Body, still has Soul, And lives and speaks, restor’d and whole.

In a striking contrast with Mañuel de Gallegos, whose poem cast Rubens as the “real” killer of Seneca, Prior portrays Giordano as helping to restore the “Image” that Nero, by killing Seneca only in body, had failed to destroy. If there is the suggestion here of a symbiotic relationship between Giordano’s fame and Seneca’s, the poet additionally creates a position for himself in the circle of scribes, as it were, by preserving it in his book. At the same time, the poem serves to celebrate the Earl of Exeter’s patronage—which both painter and poet have enjoyed—through an implied contrast with Nero’s tyrannical cruelty. Burghley House stands as a repository of the imago and a bastion of moral and political rectitude. The two prototypes popularized by Rubens went on to their own distinguished careers over the next two centuries, both in the representation of Seneca and in the broader iconographic repertoire. The fisherman was reproduced and reinterpreted during its time in the Borghese collection and after its acquisition by Napoleon Bonaparte for his new museum, the Louvre, c. 1807–11.48 The sketch by Joachim von Sandrart in 1676 (Fig. 8.1), for example, externalizes the circulation of blood implied by the pattern of veins in the marble original.49 One visitor admired the fisherman Seneca in these terms: “If our sculptors knew how to make a comparably expressive CHRIST, it could be depended on to bring tears to all Christian eyes, for the expression alone of this dying pagan excites sorrow in all who see him.”50 An intaglio version of the statue was offered by Wedgewood in 1776, and in the same year Jean-Baptiste Pigalle completed his controversial statue of Voltaire nude (now also in the Louvre) that was partly inspired by the Seneca statue.51 But by this time, responses included disgust and eventually skepticism, culminating in Johann Winckelmann’s (1763–68) debunking of the Seneca label: the type, he asserted, represented a slave from Roman comedy; the head differed from the “Seneca” bust; and the bath base and some of the limbs were modern additions.52 The statue was removed from its base in 1896, though more recently it has been displayed without it. It is now displayed with the vase once again, together with an explanation of its history. Perhaps the most remarkable use of the fisherman-Seneca was that made by Poussin in a painting of the Baptism of Christ from the late 1650s (Fig. 9.9), in which the figure represents a kneeling witness beside the river Jordan.53 In addition to supplying a senex for Poussin’s tableau of varying ages, 48. On this afterlife see Beard and Henderson (2001), 1–3, 8; Haskell and Penny (1981), 303–5. 49. See Haskell and Penny (1981), 21. 50. Abbé Raguenet, cited by Haskell and Penny (1981), 303–5; cf. Beard and Henderson (2001), 1. 51. The commissioning body included Diderot; see von Stackelberg (1992), 16–17. 52. See Lodge (1968), vol. 2, 309–10. Cf. Brown (2001), 38–39. 53. On the adaptation see Morford (1991), 186.

figure 9.9 Nicolas Poussin, Le baptême du Christ (1650s). Philadelphia Museum of Art, John G. Johnson Collection, 1917. Courtesy of Philadelphia Museum of Art.

308

three themes

the figure suggests the authorizing presence of the ancient pagan world more generally. Moreover, Poussin’s painting both revisits the portrayal of Seneca’s death as a scene of baptism and, conversely, reinfuses Christ’s baptism with the dramatic power of the Seneca-death type. The pseudo-Seneca bust, once it had been made famous by Rubens, became a recurring icon not only of Seneca but also of intellectual culture more broadly. Rubens’ own copy was sketched by various of his contemporaries, and multiple copies were reproduced for private collections and libraries. Wolfram Prinz, in his comprehensive study of the bust’s receptions, has shown how its “blunt, realistic and at the same time baroque features,” together with the popularity of Lipsius, made the bust a popular subject of several type scenes in seventeenth-century art (1973, 411). In portraits of Dutch public servants, such as M. Merian the Younger’s 1652 portrait of Zacharias Stenglin, the Seneca bust appears behind the main subject as an intellectual exemplar—an obvious echo of The Four Philosophers.54 Charles Le Brun’s small painting Le Tombeau de Sénèque (mid to late seventeenth century) (Fig. 10.4), in which the bust is in the process of being crowned by the Virtues, was the model for an engraving by Gilles Rousselet in which the Seneca bust itself was replaced by a head of the deceased cardinal Mazarin, and the garland was replaced by a hat appropriate to his clerical rank.55 In still-life scenes, the bust as ruin resonates with the Vanitas theme, surrounded by reminders of the world’s transience.56 Most baroque painters and their audiences implicitly accepted the identification of the bust as “Seneca.” Studies of the bust by Le Brun show how the image was parsed in a manner similar to that used in his Physiognomie, as if scientifically analyzing, feature by feature, its power to communicate Seneca’s authority.57 At the same time, however, the bust’s “truth” was, like that of the fisherman, contested by Winckelmann in the 1760s.58 Noting the large number of copies, including the bronze found at Herculaneum, Wincklemann questioned “how it happened that figures of [Seneca], who was little esteemed, should have been multiplied in such a manner, even during his life” (trans. Lodge 1968, vol. 2, 309). For Winckelmann this was as much a moral question as a question of plausibility: “But he from whom the wisest have torn the mask of virtue, and who in his writings appears as a pitiful pedant, has been so fortunate that the honor conferred upon the artistic merit of his portraits has been extended also to him. The artists ought to have avenged themselves on him, since he excludes painters as well as sculptors from the followers of

54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

Prinz (1973), fig. 19. See Beauvais (2000), 583–85; Laveissière (1998). Prinz (1973), fig. 26. On the bust and the Vanitas theme see Prinz, 426–28. See Beauvais (2000), 584. See Prinz (1973), 420. Winckelmann was not the only skeptic; see Brown (2001), 226 n. 45.

seneca’s imago and its reproduction

309

the liberal arts” (309).59 Independently of Winckelmann, Jean Gaspard Lavater, in Part 3 of his Essai sur la physiognomie (1797), reproduced first an engraving of the pseudo-Seneca bust evoking the portrayal by Rubens, then overleaf a “prétendu Sénèque” (Fig. 9.10). With reference to the first image, he asserts: “This head could never be that of Seneca, if he is the author of the works that bear his name. The forehead recalls truthfully the richness of imagination (la richesse d’imagination) and the energy of the Latin philosopher, but is far from suiting his acuteness and his ingenious manner (loin de convenir à sa finesse, & à sa manière ingénieuse), and is hard, inflexible, intractable . . .” (1797, 3.261). He sees a similar rudeness in each of the other parts, and in the “totality of the features” (ensemble de la physiognomie), he says, “everything is full of force and impetuousness; everything declares violent passions, easily irritated, difficult to quell (des passions violentes, faciles à irriter, difficiles à calmer)” (261).60 Lavater does not, however, argue that the second image is especially Senecan, simply that it illustrates what is lacking in the other; for example, its profile has “ten

figure 9.10 “Prétendu Sénèque,” engraving for Jean Gaspard Lavater, Essai sur la physiognomie Pt. 3 (Paris, 1797), 262. Courtesy of Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania. 59. Cf. Sen. Ep. 88.18. 60. See Haskell (1993), 152, noting also Lavater’s curious silence on Winckelmann’s verdict.

310

three themes

times as much acuteness and subtlety” (dix fois plus de finesse & de délicatesse, 262). Lavater’s conjuring of the second, equally fictitious but more appropriate, image is telling: even as he seeks to establish the “pseudo” status of the pseudoSeneca bust, he seeks to compensate not for its lack of historical authenticity (which he does not directly dispute), but only for its lack of a full “Senecan” authority within his theory of physiognomy. The discovery of the Seneca-Socrates herm on the Caelian hill in 1813 (Fig. 7.1), with its seemingly irrefutable label of SENECA, has served to distinguish more fully the different bases of identification. The various images previously identified as Seneca had satisfied interpreters who sought to imagine Seneca’s physique by extrapolating from Seneca’s letters (for example, “I was wasting away, reduced to extreme emaciation,” destillarem, ad summam maciem deductus, Ep. 78.1)61 or from Tacitus (“his body being old and thin from his frugal diet,” senile corpus et parco victu tenuatum, Ann. 15.63.3), whereas the herm image, as we noted in chapter 7, can be explained as a plausible artifact from Roman portraiture of the Neronian period, just as its combination with Socrates puts it at home among philosophical imagines of the sort Seneca describes himself as venerating (Ep. 64.9). Yet the pseudo-Seneca is too heavily invested with meaning to be disregarded. Paul Faider began his 1921 Études sur Sénèque by observing that the bust is “consecrated by long habit” (consacrée par une longue habitude) and that “such is the Seneca whom we like to represent to ourselves” (tel est le Sénèque que nous amions à nous représenter), whereas the second is “an historical document” (un document historique) and presents a Seneca “depoeticized by history” (dépoétisé par l’histoire, 1–3). After aligning this contrast with the traditionally perceived contrasts between Seneca’s moralism and his worldly career, Faider poses the question, “Which is the real Seneca?” (Quel est le vrai Sénèque? 3), to which he answers: both.

A Third Prototype: Guido Reni’s Seneca Scholars have been so preoccupied by the Rubensian Seneca, however, that a significant thread has been left out of virtually every account of Seneca’s visual reception. This thread concerns an early seventeenth-century bust that exists in several versions, including a bronze copy in Madrid and a terracotta—apparently the original—in Rome (Fig. 9.11).62 The bust represents a bald and toothless old man whose head is contorted upward, represented in an extreme realism that depicts every crease, vein, and sinew. Remarkably, the Madrid copy, as Otto Kurz notes, was for many years understood to be “a contemporary rendering of Seneca’s death” (1942, 223, emphasis added), until it was finally acknowledged 61. On Seneca’s allusions to his own body, alongside the herm and Rubensian image, see Edwards (2005). 62. On the bust see Pestilli (1993); Spear (1997); Kurz (1942).

seneca’s imago and its reproduction

311

figure 9.11 Guido Reni, Seneca, terracotta (post-1601). Museo di Palazzo Venezia, Rome. Courtesy of Soprintendenza per il patrimonio storico, artistico ed etnoantropologico per il Polo Museale della città di Roma.

to be not ancient but modern. Kurz himself identified it as the bust known to have been sculpted by Guido Reni, the Bolognese painter, sometime after his arrival in Rome in 1601, which had soon became known as Reni’s Seneca. Reni had supposedly sculpted the head from a live model whom he encountered on the banks of the Tiber, though its portrait of agony likely also owes something to such paradigms as the Laocoon. Malvasia, Reni’s biographer, explains that copies soon became ubiquitous in artists’ studios, and indeed the image—like that of the pseudo-Seneca and fisherman-Seneca popularized by Rubens—enjoyed its own afterlife in the visual arts. In addition to its use by Giordano for the head of his dying Seneca, Livio Pestilli (1993) has shown that the bust is present in silhouette in a self-portrait by Michael Sweerts (c. 1647–48) characterizing a typically Senecan habit of lucubratio—an insertion

312

three themes

into broader culture not unlike that seen with the Rubensian pseudo-Seneca bust. The bust also served as an archetype for multiple representations of old men in Reni’s own pictorial oeuvre. A fascinating instance for our purposes is his Adoration of the Shepherds (1640–42) (Fig. 9.12), in which the “Seneca” figure’s position in relation to Christ exactly parallels that of the “Seneca” figure in Poussin’s Baptism discussed above (Fig. 9.9). Poussin may thus have been emulating Reni’s approach even as he employed Rubens’ fisherman-Seneca! The history of the Rubensian images was thus in intriguing ways mirrored in the history of Reni’s rival image.

Almost Senecas: The Image in Style An imago Senecae could also be constructed through Seneca’s characteristic textual and moral gestures—his styles of writing and living. Aside from Lipsius, three creative Senecan self-fashioners, at intervals of roughly two hundred years, were Petrarch, Montaigne, and Diderot. But given their differences of personality and context, each arrived at a radically different image of Seneca, together with a different view of his death.

The “Senecan Habit” By the end of the Middle Ages, one of the salient influences from Seneca was a set of recurrent topoi in the Epistulae morales that offered specific characterizations of textual and moral practice.63 At the general level Seneca shaped an entire epistolary culture; as L. D. Reynolds remarks, “it is noticeable how often [Seneca’s] Letters are quoted in correspondence between one scholar and another” (1965, 120). More specifically, the theme of cotidie mori at Ep. 1.2 was taken up and puzzled over by many authors in the twelfth century—a focus on this programmatic letter that would intensify in the Italian Renaissance.64 The most frequently quoted Senecan passage in the twelfth century is Ep. 11.8–10, with its advice on keeping the image of a selected bonus vir before our eyes to serve as an internal example and guardian.65 Detached from its Stoic context (just as Seneca had previously extracted it from Epicurus), this spiritual exercise came to be used for the internalization of monastic and courtly norms. In the area of textual practice, there was Seneca’s advice in letter 2 regarding selective reading of proven authors (Ep. 2.4), the extraction of salutary excerpts (§5), and cautious exploration of other authors such as Epicurus: “For it is my habit to cross over into the other camp, not like a deserter but like a scout” (soleo enim et in aliena castra transire, non tamquam transfuga, sed tamquam explorator, 63. The topoi discussed below overlap with the broader set outlined by von Albrecht (2004), 130–72. 64. On 12th-c. interpretations see Nothdurft (1963), 74–80; Italian Renaissance, Panizza (1983). 65. See von Albrecht (2004), 137–40.

figure 9.12 Guido Reni, The Adoration of the Shepherds (1640–42). London, National Gallery. Courtesy of National Gallery Picture Library.

314

three themes

§5).66 In the hands of the churchmen, this multifaceted advice was useful for characterizing the dynamic relationship between Christian readers and pagan texts. The practice of excerpting, however, was also qualified through appeal to letter 33, in which Seneca asserts, “It is disgraceful for a man who has demonstrated his progress to pick little flowers (captare flosculos) and to prop himself up with a small number of very well-known sayings and to rest on his memory: let him now lean on himself” (Ep. 33.7). This qualification was rather ineffectual as regards Seneca’s own texts: as Reynolds notes (1965, 114 n. 2), Seneca was frequently anthologized in terms closer to the advice of letter 2, with one scribe recommending that good morality could be learned precisely through “plucking the flowers of Seneca” (Senecae discerpere flores). One additional Senecan passage, from letter 84, was to prove especially influential for thinking about literary borrowing—including about borrowing from Seneca himself. In the letter Seneca explains to Lucilius that when we incorporate the fruits of our diverse reading into what we write, “we should, they say, imitate bees (apes, ut aiunt, debemus imitari), who browse around and graze flowers that are suitable for making honey” (Ep. 84.3).67 This imitation of bees—which Seneca mediates in part through verses borrowed from Virgil’s Georgics—is explained through various conceptions of appropriation, including differentiation from the original source, “so that even if it is apparent where it was taken from, it should still appear to be something other than where it was taken from” (ut etiam si apparuerit unde sumptum sit, aliud tamen esse quam unde sumptum est appareat, §5). Seneca’s passage serves already as a (fittingly) unacknowledged model in the preface of Macrobius’ Saturnalia (Sat. 1.1.5–10), providing an object lesson in self-distinction.68 Taken together, these topoi define an imitative “Senecan habit” (my term) that is qualified by strategies of self-distinction. Above all, “each asserts possession over himself for himself ” (quisque se sibi vindicat; cf. Ep. 33.4). The obvious irony is that to adopt such a habit, even when it leads to self-distinction, is always in some sense still to be playing Seneca—adopting his habit. Conversely, its strategies of self-distinction also mean that the Senecan habit can potentially be used against Seneca—that is, as a means to detach oneself from Seneca as a model. For later authors this habit generated a conspicuous tension in their attempts to engage with Seneca as a personality.

Petrarch: A Death Too Late and Too Soon We can get a first taste of Petrarch’s Senecan habit by noting the epigraph from Seneca’s letter 2 with which he heads his book list: “My favorite books. 66. On Ep. 2 see Schöpsdau (2005), 94–96; on such advice predating Seneca, Ullman (1973), 115–16; in the Middle Ages, Reynolds (1965), 112–24, esp. 117; in the Italian Renaissance, Grafton (1997), 27. 67. On letter 84 see Schöpsdau (2005), 97–102; also Ker (2006), 34; Henderson (2004), 46–48; Setaioli (2000), 206–14. 68. See Henderson (2004), 48; Ross (1974), 121, 154 n. 21.

seneca’s imago and its reproduction

315

The others I am in the habit of crossing over [into] not as a deserter but as a scout” (libri mei peculiares. reliquos non transfuga, sed explorator transire soleo; cf. Sen. Ep. 2.5).69 B. L. Ullman emphasizes the epoch-defining difference between (1) a certain Christian prior’s (c. 1150) use of the same quotation from Ep. 2.5 to characterize a routine of Christian reading that occasionally detours into pagan authors such as Cicero, and (2) the humanist’s use of it to delimit a core of frequently read books—including Cicero and other pagans—contrasted with other, less favorite items (1973, 113–33). Yet as we noted in chapter 7, Petrarch’s ranking of Seneca himself is by no means assured; and in the later version of the list, Seneca comes to be outranked by Boethius—even as the library itself is still configured by a Senecan template. Innumerable other Senecan textual gestures can be pursued through Petrarch’s works, from letter 84’s bee-like appropriation to the letters written from Campania.70 These gestures shape his profile as a recentior Seneca but do not entail a wholesale mimetic embrace. The internal tensions of Petrarch’s Senecan imitation are on vivid display in the letters to ancient authors in book 24 of the Rerum familiarium libri, whose letter to Seneca (Fam. 24.5) we briefly encountered in chapter 7.71 As Stephen Hinds has shown (2005; 2004), Petrarch’s letters to Cicero, Virgil, Seneca, and others are at once an exercise in Ciceronian familiaritas, participating in an ancient epistolary community, and an exercise in defamiliarization, signaling the temporal ruptures that separate them from him. I would also draw attention to the programmatic role played by the book’s first letter (Fam. 24.1), in which Petrarch expresses his intensified awareness of time’s passage now that he is in his old age.72 Recalling a letter he had written as a young man (= Fam. 1.3) in which, he says, “I professed that I recognized that the fleetingness and swift course of my life even then at its beginning had seized me” (professus sum cepisse me iam tunc orientis vite fugam cursumque cognoscere, Fam. 24.1.3), Petrarch expresses surprise that he had even shown such awareness at that age, but still makes a distinction: “These things which I once [merely] believed, I now know and see” (ego hec, que olim opinabar, scio et video, 24.1.16). The Senecan gestures come thick and fast in Petrarch’s retrospective sketch of his perspective adopted already in youth: “I feel single days and hours and moments pressing me toward the end. Each day I go toward death, indeed by God . . . each day I die (quotidie ad mortem eo, imo edepol . . . quotidie morior)” (§13; cf. Sen. Ep. 24.20). Yet Petrarch also aligns the letter’s central dichotomy between the nunc of youth and tunc of old age with the transition between, on the one hand, reading or listening to the lessons of docti viri accumulated in

69. It would be more accurate here to translate transire with “passing by [i.e., reading cursorily]”—a sense further removed from Sen. Ep. 2.5. 70. For his appropriations of Sen. Ep. 84 see McLaughlin (1995), 22–48. On Senecan themes in Petrarch overall, including approaches to death, see Mazzotta (1993), 14–32, 80–101. 71. On Fam. 24 see the commentaries of Neumann (1999); Cosenza (1910). 72. On time in Petrarch’s thought see Quinones (1972), 135–52.

316

three themes

flosculi (§§4–8) and, on the other, personal autopsy and self-witnessing (cf. ipse michi testis, §24)—the latter also connected with the testimony of Christ (§18). The terms of Petrarch’s distinction, of course, are themselves characteristically derived from the Senecan habit. But his tunc/nunc dichotomy, applied at once to his own life and to history, prefigures the polemical focus of the whole of book 24: his special access to the pagan authors, combined with his use of periodizing distinctions to articulate his gentle rebukes of them. The letter to Seneca (Fam. 24.5) begins courteously but ominously: “Franciscus to Annaeus Seneca, greeting. I would like to seek pardon from such a great man, and to receive it (petitam a tanto viro impetratamque veniam velim), if I am going to say anything harsher than is appropriate for the respect due your profession or than is owed to your restful tomb” (§1). He soon calls Seneca to account, in a conspicuously Senecan gesture, for his personal inconsistencies: “You, though, a venerable man in morality—an instructor without comparison, if we believe Plutarch—if it is not too bothersome, review with me the error of your life (errorem vite tue . . . mecum recognosce)” (§5).73 Petrarch’s central puzzle is the timing of Seneca’s death: it was both too late and too soon. As we saw in chapter 7, Petrarch portrays Seneca as taking the path that he wanted: “You cannot accuse Fortune: you found what you had wished for” (§14). But, he asks, “Why did you linger there, I beg you? . . . If you were seeking praise on account of the difficulty, the very height of praise would have been to emerge and to flee into some port, saving your boat (emergere et in portum aliquem salva puppe confugere)” (§§6, 9). To support his exhortation of Seneca to a self-imposed exile or perhaps an early death, Petrarch points out what Seneca should have been able to realize about his eventual death under Nero: “You could have understood that your death would lack both any profit and any glory whatever” (intelligere poteras mortem tuam et fructu quolibet et gloria carituram, §9). Indeed, Petrarch turns against Seneca the characteristically Senecan topos of the old man who has yet to learn how to live and die: “Hard old man (dure senex), the glory you desired for your studies—all too softly, not to say, again, childishly (pueriliter)—was empty” (§14; cf. Sen. Brev. 3.2–3). Petrarch also draws upon his own intimacy with Suetonius (the model for his De viris illustribus) to explain how Seneca’s overliving reflects a failure to anticipate the life of Nero as Suetonius sketches it: if the dream in which Seneca imagined that Nero was Caligula didn’t serve as warning enough (§10; cf. Suet. Ner. 7.1), then he should at least have bowed out before the division in Suetonius’ text between Nero’s good or neutral years and the years of his crimes (§21; quoting Ner. 19.3). As a consequence, Petrarch concludes, “surely these are the actions of your Nero, Seneca” (hi certe sunt actus Neronis tui, Seneca, §23).

73. Cf. Sen. Ep. 83.2: nemo vitam suam respicit.

seneca’s imago and its reproduction

317

Toward the end of the letter, however, Petrarch eases up on his characterization of Seneca’s death as too late. His knowledge of the Seneca-Paul correspondence, for example, prevents him from concluding that Seneca was complicit in Nero’s Christian persecution (§25). But this brings him to a new perspective on the death: “I wish that you had held this friendship more closely and not been torn away at the end, so that you might have died with that herald of the truth, in the service of the truth itself (ut cum illo precone veritatis pro veritate ipsa . . . morereris)” (§26). Now Seneca dies too early. Although Petrarch ends the letter by granting Seneca his permanence in the tradition (“Farewell forever,” eternum vale, §26), he appends a final word of doubt when he dates the letter to the year 1348 counting “from the birth of him whom I do not know for certain whether you properly knew” (ab ortu eius quem an tu rite noveris incertum habeo, §26). Petrarch’s literary subjectivity is itself founded on a Senecan habit, yet his meditation on Seneca’s death, diagnosing the discrepancies between Seneca’s theory and his practice, leads him to recognize uncrossable divides between him and his model.

Montaigne: A Death Inimitable Montaigne might reasonably be called a “French Seneca,” but he, too, was ambivalent about some aspects of his model. He was not as concerned as Petrarch was, however, by supposed internal conflicts in Seneca’s life.74 Dismissing Dio and other critics, Montaigne holds to Tacitus and the other historians who “speak very honorably about both [Seneca’s] life and his death” (parlent très-honorablement et de sa vie et de sa mort, Essais 2.32, 383). His ambivalence concerns a topic central to Senecan discourse: the utility of exempla.75 The entire invention of the Essais shares affinities with Seneca’s letters, which Montaigne describes as “the finest part of his writings, and the most profitable (la plus profitable). It takes me no great effort to enter them, and I leave them when I please (Il ne faut pas grande entreprinse pour m’y mettre; et les quitte où il me plait). For they do not have any continuity from one to another” (2.10, 83).76 His Senecan habit of reading is reflected in a passage of the essay “Of the Education of Children” (1.26) where he supports his argument about encouraging independent thought by adapting the bee simile from Seneca’s letter 84 and, in a later addition to the text made after 1588, by quoting from letter 33 (1.26, 199):77

74. On Montaigne’s reception of Seneca see von Albrecht (2004), 173–92; Friedrich (1991), 60–67; Grilli (1976); Cancik (1967), 91–101. Still useful also is Hill Hay (1938). 75. For Montaigne’s general ambivalence on exempla see Lyons (1989), 118–53, esp. 132; Hampton (1990), 28; also Grafton (2001), 242–43. 76. The influence of the Epistulae morales on the genre of the Essais is explored by Cancik (1967), 94–95, 97. Von Albrecht (2004), 174 notes the influence of Ep. 2 on Montaigne’s literary habits. 77. On this passage, including the revealing alteration of Seneca’s original vindicat to vindicet, see von Albrecht (2004), 185–87.

318

three themes Qui suit un autre, il ne suit rien. Il ne trouve rien, voire il ne cerche rien. “Non sumus sub rege; sibi quisque se vindicet” [= Sen. Ep. 33.4]. Qu’il sache qu’il sçait, au moins. He who follows another follows nothing. He discovers nothing, indeed he searches for nothing. “We are not under a king: let each assert possession over himself for himself.” Let him at least know what he knows.

The Senecan resonances in Montaigne’s early editions may have been what led Lipsius(!) to approach the essayist from afar as a kindred spirit, as we discover in a few fascinating letters from the late 1580s.78 “O for me to have a reader like you!” (O tui similis mihi lector sit!), wishes Lipsius, and he affirms that he knows Montaigne’s ingenium from his writings, “in which,” he says, “your image is not deceiving” (in quibus non fallax tui imago, Ep. 92). In this final phrase we see Lipsius projecting a willed imago onto Montaigne in the same way that he would later do to Seneca in his 1605 edition of Seneca’s Opera. One cost of the willed identification, however, is to miss the significant differences that Montaigne demonstrates between Seneca and himself. Montaigne’s ambivalence is especially clear in his approach to Seneca’s thinking about death.79 In the essay “That Our Happiness Must Not Be Judged until after Our Death” (1.19), he incorporates a section of Seneca’s letter 26 to support the claim (1.19, 124): à ce dernier rolle de la mort et de nous, il n’y a plus que faindre, il faut parler François, il faut montrer ce qu’il y a de bon et de net dans le fond du pot. [I]n that final scene, between death and ourselves, there is no more pretending. We must speak plain French and show what there is that is good and clean in the bottom of the pot.80 Yet he follows this discussion, in the 1588 edition, by mentioning “three of the most odious and infamous persons” of his own acquaintance whose deaths were “orderly and in all their circumstances composed to perfection” (reglées et en toutes circonstances composées jusques à la perfection, 1.19, 125). In Montaigne’s meditations on death there is a shift away from glorious examples of the past toward an unpredictable and individualized encounter with death, in which Nature, rather than example, will guide him. This is central to his qualified exploration of the proposition “That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die” (1.20) and to his essay “Of Practice” (2.6), where he goes so far as to assert that “for 78. The letters are discussed by Hill Hay (1938), 44–48. 79. See Friedrich (1991), 258–300; also Leeman (1971), 322–24 and Hill Hay (1938), 59–61, 89–97—both noting the motif of cotidie morimur. 80. An echo also of Sen. Ep. 1.5.

seneca’s imago and its reproduction

319

dying, which is the greatest task that we have to undertake, practice cannot help us” (à mourir, qui est la plus grande besoigne que nous ayons à faire, l’excercitation ne nous y peut ayder, 2.6, 41)—an apparent devaluation of meditatio mortis. And although he proceeds to give both Seneca’s account of Julius Canus’ death (cf. Tranq. 14.2–10) and his own near-death experience after his fall from his horse, he does not expect this to be of any use to anyone else except “by accident” (48), and presents it more as an illustration of his own epistemology of self-study than as a form of ethical preparation.81 Montaigne adopts a similar attitude in his only partial embrace of the exemplary value of Seneca’s death. Drawing sometimes on Barzizza (whose Vita Senecae was partly reproduced in the Erasmus edition used by Montaigne), he exaggerates Seneca’s exhibition of Stoic values, writing, for example, that Seneca announced “that the hour had come when he had to show no longer by discourse and disputation, but by results, the profit he had taken from his studies (à montrer non plus par discours et par disputes, mais par effect, le fruict qu’il avoit tiré de ses estudes), and that without doubt he would embrace death not only without grief, but with alacrity” (Essais 2.35, 410). The exemplary aspect of the death is foregrounded above all because it is embedded in the essay “De trois bonnes femmes” (2.35, 406–13), as the context for Paulina’s decision to join her husband in dying.82 Paulina is offered as the climactic example in a trio of Roman women whose rare virtue as wives was evidenced in their self-sacrificial behavior on the occasion of their husbands’ deaths, the others being a certain woman of low station (derived from Plin. Ep. 6.24) and Arria, wife of Caecina Paetus (from Plin. Ep. 3.16).83 In recounting Paulina’s actions, Montaigne first describes Seneca and Paulina’s opening of veins, his taking of hemlock, his bath, his last words, and his death, and then recounts the afterlife of Paulina— thereby departing from the order of Tacitus to reserve the digression on Paulina for the final position (411–12).84 Predictably for the context, Montaigne removes any mention of the rumors about Paulina’s complicity in her revival; indeed, he emphasizes that she was brought back to life “without any feeling” (sans aucun sentiment) and “contrary to her plan” (contre son dessein, 412). The surprise in Montaigne’s ending, however, is that even after he has summed up his three examples as a whole, he finishes the essay by quoting Epistulae morales 104, giving (in translation) the whole section on Paulina (Ep. 104.1–5)—apparently the earliest juxtaposition of this text with the death scene, soon to be taken up by Gwinne and others. In his mind the death scene and the letter stand in an obvious quasi-symmetrical relationship to one another.

81. See Friedrich (1991), 276–80. 82. See Harich (1994), 362–64; also Reydams-Schils (2005), 173; von Stackelberg (1992), 5–8. Montaigne diverges from the misogyny of Barzizza, and is perhaps influenced by Boccaccio or Christine de Pizan. 83. The comparison of the lowly woman and Arria is suggested already at Plin. Ep. 6.24.5. 84. Noted also by Hutchinson (1993), 266 n. 18.

320

three themes

As he explains by way of preface to the quotation, “Paulina willingly offers to depart from life out of love for her husband, and . . . her husband had conversely departed from death out of love for her” (Paulina offre volontiers à quiter la vie pour l’amour de son mary, et . . . son mary avoit autrefois quitté aussi la mort pour l’amour d’elle, 412). Yet Montaigne is critical of this supposed symmetry (412): Il n’y a pas pour nous grand contre-pois en cet eschange; mais, selon son humeur Stoïque, je croy qu’il pensoit avoir autant faict pour elle, d’alonger sa vie en sa faveur, comme s’il fut mort pour elle. There is not a great equivalence for us in this exchange. But I believe that, according to his Stoic humor, he thought that he had done as much for her in prolonging his life for her sake, as [he would have done] if he had died for her. Montaigne, then, exposes a self-delusion in Seneca’s Stoic values, which treat self-killing and self-preservation as relatively equivalent feats.85 Although this articulation of Seneca’s values is made possible by juxtaposition of the death scene with letter 104, Montaigne conveys the contrast more vividly, yet also more sympathetically, by a characteristic sleight of hand. Editors of Montaigne’s essay appear not to have noticed that the last lines of his quotation come not from Ep. 104 at all, but from Ep. 78.2 describing the young Seneca’s decision not to kill himself, out of consideration for his father (413): [Ep. 104.5:] Ainsi ma Pauline m’a chargé non seulement sa crainte, mais encore la mienne. [Ep. 78.2:] Ce ne m’a pas esté essez de considerer combien resoluement je pourrois mourir, mais j’ay aussi consideré combien irresoluement elle le pourroit souffrir. Je me suis contrainct à vivre, et c’est quelquefois magnaminité que vivre. [Ep. 104.5:] And so my Paulina has given me not only her own fear, but also my own. [Ep. 78.2:] This was not so much a matter of considering how capable I was of dying courageously, but I considered how incapable she was of grieving courageously. I required of myself to live, and sometimes simply to live is to act courageously. By inserting the pronoun elle, Montaigne elides the original subject of these lines in Seneca, namely, Seneca’s father, and allows this postclassical Seneca to make the best case for his own heroism, borrowing simultaneously from the two separate moments in his life when he had saved himself for a loved one. This amplification, which adds “courage” (magnanimité) to Seneca’s 85. Reydams-Schils (2005) reasserts the asymmetry. See also Minois (1999), 91, 124–25.

seneca’s imago and its reproduction

321

virtues, implicitly helps the reader to understand how Paulina might have been persuaded that the exchange was fair, even if Montaigne himself still thinks it harsh.

Diderot: A Death in Need of Modern Avenging Ambivalence is cast aside by Diderot.86 His Essai sur la vie & les écrits de Séneque was written to accompany a translation of Seneca’s complete (prose) works by La Grange, first published in 1778, but was expanded for separate publication in 1782, incorporating a fuller historical sketch, with the title Essai sur la vie de Séneque le philosophe, sur ses écrits, et sur les regnes de Claude et de Néron.87 In its final form, over 500 pages in length, the Essai comprises an account of Seneca’s life and death interspersed with liberal translation from Tacitus, followed by a discursive commentary on each of Seneca’s works. Its flavor is defined, however, by its frequent digressions in which Diderot responds to critics of Seneca ancient and modern, and to critics of the first edition of the Essai itself. Presenting his work as “L’apologie d’un Séneque!” (Essai, vol. 1, 5), Diderot makes stronger overtures to Seneca than either Petrarch or Montaigne. In the preface he locates himself in the countryside, alone with his conscience and a few friends, reading Seneca, and proceeds to establish lines of contact and resemblance between Seneca and himself. His autobiographic goal at this late point in his life is a self-examination in the manner of Seneca. He asks, “When the little that I have done and the little that remains for me to do have perished with me, what is it that the human race will lose? What will I myself lose?” (2). This is interwoven with his apologetic goal, namely (2), d’examiner sans partialité la vie & les ouvrages de Séneque, de venger un grand homme, s’il était calomnié; ou s’il me paraissait coupable, de gémir de ses faiblesses, & de profiter de ses sages & fortes leçons. to examine without partiality the life and works of Seneca, to avenge a great man, if he has been wrongfully charged; or if he seems to me culpable, to bemoan his weaknesses and to profit from his wise and courageous lessons. Although he briefly acknowledges Seneca’s own moral imperfections, the emphasis on “profiting” (profiter) shows Diderot to be adopting Seneca’s own

86. My account necessarily simplifies Diderot’s relationship to classical exempla; see, e.g., E. R. Wilson (2007), 180–81 on his self-acknowledged failure to stay in prison and thus follow the example of Socrates. 87. On the Essai see Bell (1979), esp. 372–76; Conroy (1975); also André (1991): “En Sénèque, le philosophe découvre un double” (23).

322

three themes

attitude in the Epistulae morales of observing the moral weaknesses of oneself or of others, and—far from attacking them—seeking to overcome them through philosophical self-improvement. The reader, he claims, has much to gain “if he casts his eyes alternatingly over Seneca’s page and mine . . . by which he may more reliably put himself in my place, and may receive more or less of an analogy between the philosopher and myself (qu’on aura plus ou moins d’analogie avec le philosophe & avec moi)” (3). He also imagines Seneca questioning him in surprise, across a boundary of eighteen centuries: “You would be one of my descendants? And what does it matter to you that I am thought vicious or virtuous?” (serais-tu quelqu’un de mes descendants? Et que t’importe qu’on me croie ou vicieux ou vertueux? 6). To this he replies by invoking a characteristically Senecan concept of trans-historical friendship: “O Seneca! You are and will always be, together with Socrates, together with all the famous men who have met misfortune, together with all the great men of antiquity, one of the sweetest lines between myself and my friends, between learned men of all the ages, and their friends (un des plus doux liens entre mes amis & moi, entre les hommes instruits, de tous les âges, & leurs amis)” (6). Diderot’s most conspicuous template comes from the historical scenario in which Suillius Rufus, in the year 56, had made charges of self-contradiction (cf. Ann. 13.42–43; Dio, 61.10), which Seneca then rebutted in the De vita beata. In rehearsing the Suillius episode, Diderot pauses to note that some readers of the earlier version of his Essai had taken his own colorful attack on Suillius to be an allegorical criticism of the recently deceased Jean-Jacques Rousseau (d. 1778) (Essai, vol. 1, 93–104). Although protesting that this was not his intention, he rehearses Rousseau’s rupture with the philosophes—he had, by the end, become an anti-philosophe (100)—and points out that “each of us has his saint. Jean-Jacques is the saint of the censor (censeur ), Seneca is mine” (96). Rousseau’s defenders, whom Diderot addresses directly as “censors,” appear to have seen the supposed attack as in especially bad taste “because he is dead” (parce qu’il est mort, 97). Diderot’s response, however, is to remind them that they, in attacking Seneca, have also been attacking a dead man: “On the basis of this one may ask whether Seneca is any less dead than Rousseau (si Séneque est moins mort que Rousseau), and above all whether it is any easier for [Seneca] to reply” (97). The deceased Seneca, then, is entitled to his own advocate. The Suillius scenario informs Diderot’s pose in relation to Seneca’s death. He rehearses the Tacitean death narrative, emphasizing multiple details that portray Seneca as a positive exemplar (Essai, vol. 1, 149–57). Moreover, responding to the charge that “Seneca wanted to die theatrically” (Séneque veut mourir théatralement), he asserts, “Censors, you do not hear yourselves, and Suillius is nothing but a child compared with you (le Suilius n’est qu’un enfant timide en comparaison de vous)” (244 n. 153). The Suillius scenario, in other words, is portrayed as recurring both through the classical tradition, as modern antiphilosophers seek to outdo Suillius, and within the structure of Seneca’s own

seneca’s imago and its reproduction

323

life, as his death results from just a more extreme form of persecution than the charges from the year 56. It may be that Diderot’s assimilation of the death scenario to the Suillius scenario was inspired by the fact that Seneca’s De vita beata, which ends with the prosopopoeia of Socrates speaking from the historical context of his last days, implicitly likened Seneca’s critics (that is, Suillius & co.) to the accusers and killers of Socrates (VB 25–28). Diderot’s response is encapsulated in an apostrophe to Seneca in the preface: “If your honor was dearer to you than your life, tell me, were not those cowards who stained your memory (les làches qui ont flétri ta mémoire) more cruel than he who made you cut your veins (celui qui te fit couper les veines)? I will console myself by avenging you from the one and the others (en te vengeant de l’un & des autres)” (2). The enemies of Seneca’s memory are equivalent to the tyrant, whom Diderot will go on to savage repeatedly for “soaking his hands in the blood of his teacher” (plonger ses mains dans le sang de son instituteur, 150; cf. 151, etc.). Diderot, then, at the level of his public profile, embraced Seneca’s image more closely than did Petrarch and Montaigne. Petrarch was alienated from Seneca not by any impossibility of imitation, but by a moral problem in the model. Montaigne was alienated by Seneca’s ultimate inimitability, deriving from the fundamental dissimilarity of any two scenarios (Montaigne’s individualism) and from the inaccessibility of a world in which Stoic ideals guide behavior (Montaigne’s realism). For Diderot, such differences were minor in comparison with the differences between himself and Seneca on the one side, and their detractors, on the other.

P.S. to Seneca Seneca’s advice on memorial practices thus played a remarkably powerful role in setting the terms by which he and his death were to be remembered, even when the medium and the purpose of the commemoration both changed. The interpretation of Seneca’s imago vitae suae, the visual image of “Seneca,” and the stylistic gestures of Senecan self-fashioners, all derived their structures in one way or another from Senecan writing. Even the distinctions that arose between the original and the copy, as the copy came to take on an independent identity, were predicted and indeed prescribed by the Senecan habit and its advice on self-distinction. Transfiguration was integral to the image’s vitality. Consider, most recently, Durs Grünbein’s “An Seneca: Postskriptum” (2004), a six-page poem in iambic verse that pays homage to Seneca, addressing to him such lines as, “I live only briefly, a little while longer. You live for ever” (Ich leb nur kurz, ein Weilchen nur. Doch du lebst immer, p. 15). The seeming admiration expressed in this line is appropriate to the context, because the poem prefaces a new German translation of the De brevitate vitae. But it is scarcely meant as praise. The poem’s recurring refrain, “Forgive me, dead

324

three themes

man” (Verzeih mir, Toter), seems to identify the poem as a reprise of Petrarch’s letter (cf. veniam velim, Fam. 24.5.1), begging Seneca’s pardon for the string of criticisms that are to be addressed to him—even if Grünbein replaces some of Petrarch’s remarks, such as those on the Octavia, with new criticisms. Grünbein’s address, “dead man” (Toter), is a significant innovation, drawing attention to the fact that Seneca is now strongly defined by his death, and being shorthand for the inherent paradox of his whole poem that is summed up in the question: “How does one speak to someone whom nothing more concerns?” (Wie spricht man einen an, den nichts mehr trifft? 9). Yet Grünbein finds easy answers to this question, embracing a Senecan habit and making himself, in his own way, another almost Seneca.

10 Places Suburban and Serious: The Ruins of Seneca and Scipio

Location, location, location. In the course of the tradition Seneca dies, and his body is disposed of, in a variety of places, with their own associations. But two sites mentioned in Tacitus’ narrative are especially resonant: the suburban estate (suburbanum) where the death itself took place, and the Campania region from which Seneca had just returned (Ann. 15.60.4). Below we will focus on how these relate to places evoked in Seneca’s Epistulae morales. These include the suburban estate mentioned in letter 12, which serves as the starting point for an extensive meditatio mortis; and his itinerary through Campania culminating in letter 86, in which Seneca tells how he contemplated the ruined villa where Scipio Africanus long ago had lived out his exile.1 These loci, together with Seneca’s discourse on space more generally, remained influential in the subsequent refigurations of his exit. A mile or two south of the ruins at Cumae, in a spot now known as Torregaveta, a rocky outcrop rises up from the seashore like a fortress (Fig. 10.1). The modern “Villa Vazia” restaurant complex (Fig. 10.2)2 includes in its perimeter the ruins of the first-century villa belonging probably to Servilius Vatia, a wealthy aristocrat and ex-praetor who lived out his days there in the 30s under Tiberius. A disco club is built into the ancient villa’s massive cistern, and in numerous other ways the new inhabits the old.3 1. The symbolic potential of Epp. 12 and 86, together with that of Ep. 55 below on Vatia’s villa, is nicely mapped out by Henderson (2004); see also Ker (2002), 89–231. 2. For a closer look, see http://www.villavazia.com. 3. For description of the site and region see McKay (1972), 1–6; also Hönscheid (2004), 120– 22; Maiuri (1957), 79–83; Beloch (1890), 188–89. On earlier ruins see Blake (1947), 245. On the prosopography of Vatia and his family see Berno (2006), 180; D’Arms (1970), 122, 224–25; Münzer (1999), 374–75.

figure 10.1 Torregaveta, viewed from the south. Villa Vazia Restaurant is the modern building at the center. Photo by author.

figure 10.2 Villa Vazia, street entrance. Photo by author.

the ruins of seneca and scipio

327

Seneca’s letter 55 contains the only testimony of this Vatia’s existence and of his family’s connection with the place (Ep. 55.3):4 I directed my eyes toward the villa that was once Vatia’s. In this [house] that wealthy ex-praetor grew old, famous for no other thing than his leisure, and for this alone he was regarded as happy (nulla alia re quam otio notus, consenuit, et ob hoc unum felix habebatur). For whenever people had been sunk by their friendship with Asinius Gallus or by the hostility or, later, the favor, of Sejanus . . . , men exclaimed: “O Vatia, you alone know how to live (solus scis vivere).” The villa had, it seems, become a sign of Vatia’s (Tiberius-like) exit from politics under Tiberius, and it embodied “living”—whether in the qualitative sense or even just existentially. The aloofness of Vatia’s house is suggested by Seneca’s comment, “I cannot write to you anything certain about the villa itself, as I only know its face and the exposed parts that it shows even to passersby (frontem enim eius tantum novi et exposita, quae ostendit etiam transeuntibus)” (§6). But this does not prevent him from appreciating some of its best-known attributes, from its underworldly grottoes to its proximity to Baiae, “lack[ing] [Baiae’s] inconveniences but enjoy[ing] its pleasures” (incommodis illarum caret, voluptatibus fruitur, §6). To this extent, Seneca concludes, “Vatia does not seem to have been stupid in choosing this place as the destination for his already inactive and aged leisure (in quem otium suum pigrum iam et senile conferret)” (§7). Although Seneca lists pleasurable features that have since shaped the modern reception of the villa as a locus amoenus and a privatized Baiae-awayfrom-Baiae, his overwhelmingly negative conclusions establish the villa as the dialectical opposite of what he is looking for as he pursues his own withdrawal from Neronian Rome. Reprising the popular cry, “O Vatia, you alone know how to live,” he observes, “But he knew how to hide, not how to live” (at ille latere sciebat, non vivere), thereby undermining the Epicurean maxim khe bi›ra| (“Live unnoticed”).5 “During Vatia’s lifetime,” Seneca recalls, “I never used to pass this villa without saying, ‘Here lies Vatia (Vatia hic situs est)’” (§4). Another goal in the letter is to show that Vatia’s seclusion may have deceptive resemblances to the life of philosophy, but the philosopher’s seclusion has “something sacred and deserving of veneration” (sacrum quiddam . . . et venerabile), whereas Vatia’s is like the solitude of an animal who hides away (§5) or is no solitude at all: “I have seen men in total isolation who were just like busy men” (vidi in media solitudine occupatis similes, §8). At the letter’s end, Seneca contrasts the seclusion of Vatia with the intimate epistolary presence

4. For commentary on the letter see Berno (2006), 159–231; Hönscheid (2004), 96–139. For discussion see Citroni Marchetti (2006); Henderson (2004), 62–92; Saylor (2002); Motto and Clark (1993), 91–93, 115–24; Tosi (1974–75), 222–24. 5. See esp. Citroni Marchetti (2006), 395–96; Hönscheid (2004), 115–16; André (1974) 126–27.

328

three themes

that Seneca and Lucilius share with one another, no matter how far apart they are: “I see you, my Lucilius, at this very moment I hear you” (§11).6 On one level the villa of Vatia serves to illustrate the absolute irrelevance of location for happiness: “Place does not contribute much to tranquillity: it is the mind that makes all things agreeable to itself ” (non multum ad tranquillitatem locus confert: animus est qui sibi commendet omnia, §8). This resonates with passages elsewhere in which Seneca marshals the arguments of philosophy against the positive or negative perceptions of specific places that are provoked by travel or exile.7 On another level, however, Seneca exploits almost every detail of his ekphrasis to suggest how Vatia’s villa and its environment present a problematic set of corruptive influences. And indeed Seneca sometimes uses places to embody whole moral paradigms, whether negative or positive. Vatia’s place is an aberration on Seneca’s itinerary, because he had asserted several letters earlier that “one should choose places that are sacred and serious” (loca seria sanctaque eligere oportet, 51.10). To illustrate this, he had given pride of place to the villa of Scipio Africanus in the swampy region of Liternum several miles up the coast (55.11): “Scipio lived a more virtuous exile at Liternum than in Baiae. A ruin of that sort should not be situated so softly” (Literni honestius Scipio quam Bais exulabat: ruina eiusmodi non est tam molliter conlocanda, 55.11). Although the exact location of Scipio’s villa is now unknown, below we will see how it emerges as a counterpoint to the villa of Vatia, and a definitive site for the final phase of Seneca’s life—his own “ruin.”

Death Place Tacitus writes that Seneca, on the day he died, “had stopped at the fourth milestone at his suburban estate in the countryside” (quartum . . . apud lapidem suburbano rure substiterat, Ann. 15.60.4). Although the majority of interpreters follow Tacitus, it is worth noting first some striking deviations. Tristan conspicuously sets Seneca’s death in his apartment inside the imperial palace, here described by the centurion (Mort de Sen. 1787–93): Nous sommes auec luy passez dans vne Chambre Où l’air qu’on respiroit n’estoit rien qu’esprit d’ambre; Ce n’estoient en ce lieu qu’ornemens precieux Dont l’éclat magnifique esbloüissoit les yeux; Que meubles d’Orient, Chefs-d’oeuure d’vne adresse Ou l’Art debat le prix auecque la richesse, Que Miroirs enrichis & d’extréme grandeur. 6. For echoes also of Cic. Fam. 7.1, see Citroni Marchetti (2006), 397–98. 7. On travel in Seneca see in general Montiglio (2006); Garbarino (1996).

the ruins of seneca and scipio

329

We passed with him into a room where the air we breathed was nothing but ambergris. This place was full of precious ornaments whose magnificent brightness dazzled the eyes, oriental furniture, masterpieces of great skill in which art competed with wealth for the prize, and splendid mirrors of great size. The image not only creates a contrast between Seneca’s present desperate state and his sumptuous former life, but also exploits the potential irony of that former life itself, because the image recalls Seneca’s own polemics against luxury—especially against mirrors (for example, Ep. 86.6; NQ 1.16). Equal inventiveness was exercised by the medieval illuminators who located the death in the anachronistic setting of a royal court (for example, Fig. 7.3), and by later painters who sought to reinvent the setting in their own neoclassical register (Figs. 7.13, 7.14, and 7.15). Giordano changed the backdrop every time he returned to the Seneca theme: most of his versions are decidedly urban, backed by a dark skyline of multiple Roman, or romanesque, buildings and monuments (Figs. 0.1, 0.2, and 7.10), but one from 1660 gives the same composition against a spare skyline interrupted only by an overgrown ruin with broken railings.8 These versions can be contrasted, in turn, with those depicting an abstract space of solitude (Figs. 7.11, 7.12, and 9.2).

Suburban Style Most versions follow Tacitus’ mention of a “suburban estate” (suburbanum) four miles outside of Rome. The Italian biographers, however, characteristically supplemented Tacitus’ imprecision (which estate?) with information gleaned from Seneca’s writings. A representative instance is Polenton, who explains that the villa was the one “in the countryside around Nomentum” (Nomentano in agro, Vita Sen. 489)—alluding to a prominent villa from the letters (cf. Epp. 104, 110). The most specific visual realization of the villa location, in an eighteenth-century engraving in a reprint of Roger L’Estrange’s Seneca’s Morals by Way of Abstract (1729; Fig. 10.3) explores the associations of rustic life, where Seneca’s supine pose makes him a relaxed observer of nature, while the basin into which he bleeds evokes a farmer’s storage vat. If the image “trivializ[es]” Rubens, as Günter Hess has argued (1984, 199), it also taps into Seneca’s rustic self-fashioning. Within the Tacitean narrative itself, it makes sense that Seneca happened to have stopped at a suburban estate. This accords with Tacitus’ general portrait of Seneca in his final years appearing “seldom in the city” (rarus per urbem, Ann. 14.56.3), while multiple suburbana and horti are part of the wealth that he had 8. Ferrari and Scavizzi (1992), A85, fig. 160.

figure 10.3 Engraving in Sir Roger L’Estrange, Seneca’s Morals by Way of Abstract (London, 1729). Courtesy of Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.

the ruins of seneca and scipio

331

tried in vain to give back to Nero at the time of his withdrawal.9 In the letters, Seneca includes himself among those whose “departures for the suburbs” (suburbanae profectiones) sometimes make it hard to maintain day-to-day contact with friends (Ep. 55.10). As Edward Champlin has shown, the Roman suburbium is “a place of ambiguity, a border region” in which the Roman elite sought leisure, privacy, and other advantages, yet without detaching themselves fully (or at all) from urban affairs.10 It is worth noting that Seneca unsuccessfully petitioned Nero for “a distant retreat in the countryside” (longinqui ruris secessum, Ann. 15.45.3), implying a fuller detachment than the suburbium. As it is, Tacitus relates how Seneca sought to enhance his suburban privacy, “as if detained at home by poor health or philosophical studies” (14.56.3). This is the general context for understanding Seneca’s stopping short of the city (cf. substiterat, “had stopped,” 15.60.4) on his way back from Campania just before his death. It put him very close to Rome, at the fourth milestone, but kept him in an in-between position.11 It is unknown at which of his suburban estates Seneca died (if, indeed, it was his at all), and the assumption of the Italian biographers that it was his Nomentanum is dubious.12 But it is still instructive to briefly review what we hear about Seneca’s various estates. Seneca’s acquisition of one particular suburban estate is sketched by Pliny the Elder, in the same passage in which he mentions Seneca’s ruin. Listing Italy’s recent accomplishments in viticulture, Pliny mentions a farm at Nomentum ten miles out of Rome (cf. “in the same region of Nomentum at the turning from the tenth milestone from the city,” in eodem Nomentano decimi lapidis ab urbe deverticulo, HN 14.49) owned by the freedman and grammarian Remmius Palaemon, which had been made immensely productive with the assistance of one Acilius Sthenelus, a freedman who possessed great viticultural skill (§§48–51). Pliny portrays Palaemon as a “pseudo-farmer” (cf. agricolam imitatur), and his subsequent mention of Seneca is also not flattering (§51):13 There was no one who didn’t run to see the piles of grapes on that vineyard, while the lazy neighborhood defended itself against it by pointing to [Palaemon’s] very deep studies, and last of all Annaeus Seneca (et novissime Annaeo Seneca)—the foremost man of learning at that time and having the power which, in the end, excessive, fell over him, certainly not one to be amazed at empty things (minime utique miratore inanium)—was captivated with such a desire for this farm 9. Cf. Ann. 14.53.5: tales hortos . . . haec suburbana; also Juv. 10.15–17. 10. Champlin (1982), 97, 110. On suburban trips to avoid the health risks of the city, see Chambert (2002), 71–76. 11. Compare Nero’s suicide after fleeing to his suburbanum (also around four miles from the city) in Suet. Ner. 48.1. 12. The death is even located at the Nomentanum by R. Fabbri (1978–79), 414. But as Griffin (1992), 287 notes, the Nomentanum must have been ten, not four, miles from Rome, and was “not on the way from Campania.” 13. See Henderson (2004), 159 n. 4.

332

three themes that he was not ashamed to give the palm of victory to one whom he otherwise hated and who would flaunt it, buying that vineyard for quadruple the price after scarcely ten years of [Palaemon’s] tending it (tanto praedii huius amore capto ut non puderet inviso alias et ostentaturo tradere palmam eam, emptis quadriplicato vineis illis intra decimum fere curae annum).

Here, then, we discover that Seneca, apparently already a neighbor of Palaemon in Nomentum, recently (probably in the last ten years of Seneca’s life) purchased Palaemon’s farm, at around the tenth milestone from Rome.14 We also discover that Seneca was immersed in competitive viticulture—at least as a purchaser of productive properties. Seneca describes himself as “a careful tender of vines” (vinearum diligens fossor, NQ 3.7.1).15 Columella, mentioning the superlative fame of Seneca’s farm at Nomentum (the one bought from Palaemon?), ties its productivity more directly to Seneca himself, whom he describes as “a man of outstanding talent and learning (vir excellentis ingenii atque doctrinae), on whose farms (praediis) it has been ascertained that single iugera of vine-groves have usually returned eight sacks each” (Rust. 3.3). Moreover, there is a second Senecan connection in Pliny’s other major example of celebrity viticulturalists. Pliny, without mentioning Seneca, reports (HN 14.49): magna fama et Vetuleno Aegialo perinde libertino fuit in Campania rure Liternino, maiorque etiam favore hominum quoniam ipsum Africani colebat exilium. Great fame went equally to the freedman Vetulenus Aegialus in the countryside at Liternum in Campania, and greater still given people’s enthusiasm for the fact that he was cultivating the actual exile of Africanus. Although Pliny does not mention Seneca here, Seneca’s letter 86, to which we return below, also exhibits a special interest in Aegialus as the Scipionic estate’s present possessor (Ep. 86.14–21). Seneca’s direct allusions to his suburban estates in the letters play a significant role in the moral discourse of his end stages. In letter 104, he describes his forced “exit” to his Nomentanum against the wishes of Paulina (cf. Paulina mea retinente, exire perseveravi, Ep. 104.1) in terms that lead to a discussion of forced exits from life itself (§3). He soon moves on to discuss the vineyard there, which turns out to play an important role in his self-care: “How much do

14. On the chronology see Kaster (1995), 228–30; Griffin (1992), 289 n. 4. 15. At Ep. 112.2–3 also Seneca compares insitio vitis (which he introduces with volo tibi ex nostro artificio exemplum referre) and moral education. On Seneca’s interests in viticulture see Griffin (1992), 288, 290–91.

the ruins of seneca and scipio

333

you think was added to my strength once I touched my vines (postquam vineas attigi)? Set loose on the pastures I seized my sustenance (in pascuum emissus cibum meum invasi). I have, then, recovered myself (repetivi ergo iam me). That physical weakness of one who is indecisive and thinking badly did not persist. I am beginning to study with my whole mind (incipio toto animo studere)” (§6). Seneca does declare that “place does not contribute much to this unless the mind gives itself to itself ” (non multum ad hoc locus confert nisi se sibi praestat animus (§7; cf. Ep. 55.8), and he launches a discussion of the fact that when we travel we cannot leave ourselves or our habits behind (§§7–20). Yet he also portrays the Nomentanum and its vineyards—much like the farm that Horace describes as “returning me to myself ” (mihi me reddentis agelli, Ep. 1.14.1), or like the vines that Cicero’s Cato tends in his old age (Sen. 52–53)—as conducive to restoring the mind to itself, and to focusing it on things that need to be prepared for, such as exile and death (cf. Ep. 104.33).16

Epistulae morales 12: Circles of Mortal Existence If Seneca’s suburban estates help in various ways to inspire self-knowledge and self-care, the most elaborate lesson comes in letter 12, where he describes his recent visit to his crumbling suburban villa.17 Which one is not specified, though it appears to have been in Seneca’s possession for all or most of his life (cf. Ep. 12.1). We cannot know for certain whether this is the suburban estate at which Seneca died,18 but the letter offers a unique angle on the death scene. It shows Seneca using different spatialized images of time—domestic, abstract, corporeal—to think about the dimensions of human life, and facing up to mortality. The letter’s well-known opening episode is shaped by the ring composition that begins, “Whichever way I turn, I see signs of my old age. I had come to my suburban estate . . . ” (quocumque me verti, argumenta senectutis meae video. veneram in suburbanum meum . . . , §1), and ends, “I owe this to my suburban estate, that whichever way I turned my old age appeared to me” (debeo hoc suburbano meo, quod mihi senectus mea quocumque adverteram apparuit, §4). Within this frame, Seneca proceeds through a series of three specific argumenta (“signs,” or perhaps “dramas”) embedded in what Michele Ronnick has called “a ‘landscape’ of himself, past, present, and future” (1999, 222): the decrepit condition of the villa (§1), of the plane-trees (§2), and of the ageing home-born slave Felicio, whom Seneca at first does not even recognize (§3). The sequence 16. See also Ep. 123 on Seneca’s arrival at his Albanum; on the latter estate, possibly a gift of Nero, see Griffin (1992), 291 n. 5. 17. For commentary see Scarpat (1975), 284–303; Summers (1910), 168–75. For readings, see Henderson (2004), 1–27; Ronnick (1999); D. Gagliardi (1998), 70–71; Hachmann (1995), 99–116; Blänsdorf and Breckel (1983), 24–26, 58–59, 92; Habinek (1982). 18. But Faider (1921) is confident: “C’est celle où il mourut” (258); likewise Griffin (1992), 287, who also differentiates the suburbanum of Ep. 12 from the more recently acquired Nomentanum mentioned by Pliny.

334

three themes

of signs is an implicit scala naturae, proceeding from stone to tree to human being.19 When Cicero gives a more explicit account of the hierarchy of beings in the final book of the Tusculan Disputations (5.37–39), his next step is to celebrate the human capacity for reason. Seneca, without saying so, effectively does the same thing as he proceeds to offer his philosophical remedy in the rest of the letter. But if Seneca ultimately arrives at a rational perspective, the Seneca narrated at the beginning of the letter only proceeds gradually, through the awkward epistemology of the paterfamilias who in delegating the care of his suburban estate to others has also compromised his self-knowledge: “I was complaining about the expenses of the collapsing building. My overseer said to me that it was not the fault of any negligence on his part: he was doing everything, but the villa was old (omnia se facere, sed villam veterem esse). This villa grew up in my hands. What is going to come of me, if rocks of the same age as me are crumbling so (quid mihi futurum est, si tam putria sunt aetatis meae saxa)?” (§1). The narrated Seneca seemingly follows the advice of Cato the Elder in the De agricultura, who explains that the absentee farmer, after a circuit of the farm (cf. circumeat, Agr. 2.1), should be stern toward an overseer who replies “that he has done everything diligently (sedulo se fecisse), [but] that the slaves were not well,” and other excuses (Agr. 2.2). In this case, however, the excuse “the villa is old” has biographic implications, because Lucilius is told that the villa “grew up in [Seneca’s] hands” (inter manus meas crevit, §1). In one sense this brings the greatest shock of all (note the emphatic position of saxa): as John Bodel remarks on this passage, villas ordinarily outlive their masters rather than vice versa (1997, 13)!20 After a similar episode with the plane-trees, whose form is more poignantly anthropomorphic (“How knotty and emaciated their branches are, how sad and filthy their trunks!,” §2), the signs reach a climax with Felicio (§3): conversus ad ianuam “quis est iste?” inquam, “iste decrepitus et merito ad ostium admotus? foras enim spectat. unde istunc nanctus es? quid te delectavit alienum mortuum tollere?” at ille “non cognoscis me?” inquit: “ego sum Felicio, cui solebas sigillaria adferre; ego sum Philositi vilici filius, deliciolum tuum.” “perfecte” inquam “iste delirat: pupulus, etiam delicium meum factus est? prorsus potest fieri: dentes illi cum maxime cadunt.” Turning toward the door, I say: “Who is this?—this broken-down man. You’re right to have moved him toward the door, as he’s on his way out. Where did you find him? What entertainment did you get 19. On the signs’ increasingly anthropomorphic form see Devallet (2003); Blänsdorf and Breckel (1983), 92. 20. Seneca returns to the figure of the ruined house to portray the ageing body at Epp. 30.2; 58.35; cf. Reydams-Schils (2005), 47.

the ruins of seneca and scipio

335

from making off with someone else’s corpse?” But he says: “Don’t you recognize me? I’m Felicio, to whom you used to bring statuettes. I’m the son of Philositus the overseer—your darling.” “This man is absolutely mad,” I say. “He has become a little boy, my darling even? It’s certainly possible: his teeth are just now falling out.” Here the shock of recognition is prepared for by the various ways in which the narrated Seneca initially abjects the slave. He already likens Felicio to a corpse placed with its feet to the door in keeping with custom;21 by referring to him with istunc, he has dated him, as it were, to the archaic period;22 he has treated him as “someone else’s” rather than as his own, let alone as his “darling.” The shock is intensified by the fact that Felicio is younger than Seneca. (There is also the darker implication that the slave, his body depleted by labor, has aged at a faster rate than his master.)23 Amid recollections of the figurines given to children on the Saturnalia that serve here as a kind of memory token24 and the perception that Felicio, now losing his teeth, has rapidly come full circle from young child to old man,25 the process of recognition is dizzying. Moreover, when Seneca introduces the Felicio episode with conversus ad ianuam “quis est iste?” inquam, “iste decrepitus et merito ad ostium admotus?” (§3), the chiastic word order emplots the recognition in both circular and specular forms. Seneca is, in a sense, confronted with an admonitory reflection of the sort implied by his discussion of mirrors in the Natural Questions: their original function included “that the old man be reminded to put aside things unbecoming to his grey hair—to give some thought to death” (senex [sc. admoneretur] ut indecora canis deponeret, ut de morte aliquid cogitaret, NQ 1.17.4).26 By this point in the letter, the signs of age greet Seneca from all directions—with the distinct and normally incommensurate life cycles of villa, tree, and slave all somehow reaching their end simultaneously, heralding the ruin of the master. This distressing experience, however, is to be remedied in the next section of the letter, with its alternative way of thinking about time’s dimensions. The letter-writer Seneca now expresses gratefulness to his villa and declares his positive attitude to old age: “Let us embrace it and cherish it” (conplectamur illam et amemus, §4). Echoing Cicero’s De senectute on the pleasures of 21. For the custom see Pers. 2.105 (of a corpse): in portam rigidas calces extendit; noted by De Filippis Cappai (1997), 56; cf. Summers (1910), 169. 22. One of several linguistic echoes of Plautus and Terence noted in the passage by P. Gagliardi (1988), 166–67; see also Grant (2000), 320, emphasizing the comedic implications. 23. I thank Joseph Farrell for this observation. On the fashion of home-born slaves named Felicio, see Setaioli (2000), 331–33. On Ep. 12 as it relates to Seneca’s humanitarian views on slavery, see Griffin (1992), 277. 24. See Summers (1910), 169. 25. Compare Ep. 83.4 (of Seneca and a puer): utrique dentes cadunt. 26. On the NQ passage see Bartsch (2006), 33–34; G. D. Williams (2005), 160; Berno (2003), 41–44. For the mirror as life-clock, cf. Hor. C. 4.10.2–6: dices “heu” quotiens te speculo videris alterum.

336

three themes

old age (for example, Sen. 48), Seneca extols the special delights of ending in all spheres of human experience and brushes aside Lucilius’ squeamishness about “hav[ing] death before one’s eyes” (mortem ante oculos habere, §5), countering that death “ought to be before the eyes of the old man and young man alike” (tam seni ante oculos debet esse quam iuveni, §6). At the same time, he adapts the remark of Cicero’s Cato, “Nobody is so old that he might not think he can live another year” (nemo . . . est tam senex, qui se annum non putet posse vivere, Sen. 24), to refer to a smaller unit: “Nobody is so old that he would be wrong to expect another day” (nemo tam senex est ut inprobe unum diem speret, Ep. 12.6). “And yet,” he asserts, “one day is a span27 of life” (unus autem dies gradus vitae est, §6). To explain why this should be a consoling thought, Seneca then proceeds to describe the relationship between dies and vita in terms of concentric circles (§6):28 The whole of life consists of parts and has larger circles encompassing smaller circles (tota aetas partibus constat et orbes habet circumductos maiores minoribus). There is one that embraces and rings them all (this extends from the day of birth to the final day [hic pertinet a natali ad diem extremum]). There is another that closes off the years of youth. There is one that binds all of childhood in its ambit. Up to this point, the circles correspond to the whole of a human life and its stages. But the following circles correspond to general time units, of which the day is the smallest (§6): Then there is the year on its own, containing in itself all the times that are multiplied to make up life. The month is hemmed by a tighter circle. The narrowest rotation is that of the day, but even this goes from the beginning to the end, from rising to setting (angustissimum habet dies gyrum, sed et hic ab initio ad exitum venit, ab ortu ad occasum). In this temporal application of the aesthetic that he elsewhere describes as clusisse totum in exiguo (“concise encapsulation,” Ep. 55.11), Seneca deflates the pretensions to totality exhibited by the larger spans of time such as life and year, identifying a certain beginning-to-end totality in the day.

27. I render gradus with “span” (not “step”) to suggest the analogy between day structure and life structure that emerges; pace Lévy (2003), 495, who sees here a ladder’s “rung.” 28. For interpretation see Habinek (1982), 66–67; also Ronnick (1999). A (not to scale) diagram is given in Summers (1910), 172. There is useful discussion by Reydams-Schils (2005), 30–32; Lévy (2003), 494–96; Viparelli (2000), 34–36; but these three scholars unnecessarily complicate the passage by arguing for a conical interpretation, whereas its emphasis seems to me only two-dimensional.

the ruins of seneca and scipio

337

Although the point about the day’s microcosmic structure emerges from the description fairly clearly, Seneca supports it by quoting a statement of Heraclitus that he admits is difficult (§7):29 ideo Heraclitus, cui cognomen fecit orationis obscuritas, “unus” inquit “dies par omni est.” hoc alius aliter excepit. For this reason Heraclitus, whose obscurity gave him his nickname, said: “One day is equal to all.” This has been understood differently by different people. A corrupt text has added to the difficulties of interpreting Seneca’s summary of two distinct exegeses:30 (1) that each day “is equal in hours” (parem esse horis), because despite seasonal variations the total number of hours shared by day and night is twenty-four; and (2) that “one day is equal to all [that is, to the total sum of days] by likeness” (parem esse unum diem omnibus similitudine), because “the longest span of time has nothing that you cannot find also in a single day: light and night . . .” (nihil . . . habet longissimi temporis spatium quod non et in uno die invenias, lucem et noctem . . . ). Since (1) supports the idea that the day is a reliably consistent unit whose essential features do not in fact fluctuate with seasonal variation (a day is a day is a day), it seems to serve as an argument against procrastinating, given that no day is longer or shorter than the present one, or different in any important way. This is consistent with Seneca’s reasoning in the letter. But (2) appears more directly relevant to the diagramming of time with different-sized circles: it captures the same isomorphic relationship between day and life that is registered in the fact that both are represented by the same (circular) shape, which corresponds in turn to the fact that although the life cycle “extends from the day of birth to the final day” (pertinet a natali ad diem extremum), the day cycle also “goes from the beginning to the end, from rising to setting” (ab initio ad exitum venit, ab ortu ad occasum, §6).31 Although the concentric-circles model is an abstract spatialization of time, Seneca intends it to have practical effects, and he proceeds to extract a piece of advice for Lucilius: “Thus every day should be ordered as if it were bringing up the rear and finishing and completing our lives” (itaque sic ordinandus est dies omnis tamquam cogat agmen et consummet atque expleat vitam, §8).32 As we 29. Compare Plut. Camill. 19.1, fi rim ôlåqa| l¨am o῏tram. Heraclitus was originally criticizing Hesiod (Heracl. fr. 106 DK, cf. Hes. Op. 765–68); see Blänsdorf and Breckel (1983), 25. See also Setaioli (1988), 95–96. 30. In addition to the emendations listed in Reynolds’ app. crit., see Schönegg (2001); Habinek (1982), 67–68 n. 9; Scarpat (1975), 296–97; Stégen (1972). 31. Setaioli (1988), 94–95 sees Seneca as adopting (2) and compares Ep. 101.9: nihil interesse inter diem et saeculum. But as Habinek (1982) notes, both (1) and (2) are relevant: “If one day is like the next [i.e., (1)], . . . then there is no reason to want another. And if one day is, in its directionality, like the sum of all days [i.e., (2)], that too means that one should live each day as if it were one’s last” (68). 32. This evokes calendrical reform; cf. Suet. De gramm. et rhet. 17.4: fastos a se ordinatos; Aug. 13.2: annum a divo Iulio ordinatum.

338

three themes

saw in chapter 6, this advice is repeated often in the letters. Here, however, it functions more precisely as a corrective to the behaviors that earlier in the letter had allowed the narrated Seneca to be shocked by the material signs of his mortality. Being derived from Seneca’s verbal diagram of concentric circles, it exploits several of the dynamics that attend concentric-circles models in Greek and Roman literature. Each such model combines several different dynamics in its own way, but the set of possible dynamics includes the following: differentiation (each circle stands for something different); inclusion (broader circles include all smaller circles as subsets); and hierarchization (circles of different circumference have different relative value). The dynamic of hierarchization, however, can be realized variously through a dynamic of breadth (circles of broader circumference are of greater value), or of centrality (circles of narrower circumference, and most of all the center itself, are of greater value).33 In moral philosophy, centrality is implicit in the gesture of “circumscription” (peqicqfieim) that Stoic writers (for example, Marcus Aurelius, Med. 7.29) recommend as a way to differentiate between what is in our power and what is not. Seneca in letter 74 uses the image of the circle to explain why virtue is enough, even when it lacks external objects in which to manifest itself (Ep. 74.27–28): Whether you draw a larger or a smaller circle is relevant to its size, not its shape (utrum maiorem an minorem circulum scribas ad spatium eius pertinet, non ad formam). . . . Virtue is sometimes spread around more broadly, and it governs kingdoms, cities, provinces, it passes laws, it cultivates friendships, it dispenses its duties among its relatives and children; sometimes it is encircled by the tight boundary (arto fine circumdatur) of poverty, exile, or deprivation. Yet it is not lesser if it contracts from a lofty seat of far-reaching power to the tight constraints of a house or a corner (non tamen minor est si ex altiore fastigio in spatioso iure in angustias domus vel anguli coit). Here breadth, which would typically assign value to spatial, material, and social expanse, is counteracted by a dynamic of isomorphism, which emphasizes the similarities rather than the differences between different circles. This is the same dynamic by which Seneca, in letter 12, elides the difference of extent between a whole lifetime and a single day. But in letter 74, Seneca also goes on to apply centrality for characterizing moral value, arguing that “this happiness . . . is located in one place: the mind itself ” (beatum . . . illud uno loco positum est, in ipsa mente, 74.29)—an effect that is reinforced by the privileged aesthetics

33. In addition to the examples discussed below, note the concentric walls of Ecbatana in Hdt. 1.98 (dynamics of differentiation, centrality) and the cosmic spheres in Cic. Somn. 17 (dynamics of breadth, also verticality); some language from the latter is echoed in Sen. Ep. 12.6. A possible influence on Emerson’s “Circles” essay is discussed by Ronnick (1996).

the ruins of seneca and scipio

339

of the angulus (“corner”).34 And indeed, Seneca to some extent applies this same dynamic to time in letter 12, portraying the day as a unit whose concision the unwieldy longer spans of time lack. Yet the advice that Seneca gives to Lucilius, “Every day should be ordered as if it were bringing up the rear and finishing and completing our lives” (12.8), implies yet one more dynamic of the concentric-circles model as it is played out in Stoicism. For the exercise requires us to rethink the relative sizes of the circles, whether in imagining (if today could be our last day) that the circle of life is smaller than it appears, or in imagining (via the closely associated idea that the day is an image of a whole life, cf. Ep. 61.1) that the circle of the day is in a sense greater and more capacious. This is a dynamic of assimilation, which goes against the spirit of the differentiated concentric circles, pushing isomorphism to its logical conclusion. It is applied systematically in the fragment from the (probably later) Stoic writer Hierocles in his concentric-circles model representing a person’s relationship to his or her self and to other persons (Long and Sedley 1987, 57G = Stob. 4.671–673.11), in which the assimilation of broader circles to the smaller circles is to be effected through the technique of metaphorical utterances analogous to that which Seneca uses to assimilate day and life.35 Seneca caps the advice about daily closure by recommending the following (Ep. 12.9): in somnum ituri laeti hilaresque dicamus, “vixi et quem dederat cursum fortuna peregi” . . . quisquis dixit “vixi” cotidie ad lucrum surgit. When we are going off to sleep, let us say happily and cheerily: “I have lived and have run to its end the course which Fortune had given me [= Aen. 4.653].” . . . Whoever says “I have lived” awakes each day to a profit. We have already considered some of the theatricality and psychology of this passage in chapter 5. But it is worth considering Seneca’s negative example of the orientalizer Pacuvius. As Seneca recalls (§8),36 Pacuvius, qui Syriam usu suam fecit, cum vino et illis funebribus epulis sibi parentaverat, sic in cubiculum ferebatur a cena ut inter plausus exoletorum hoc ad symphoniam caneretur: beb¨xsai, beb¨xsai. nullo non se die extulit.

34. On Seneca’s frequent use of the term angulus, with possible Horatian influence, see Minarini (1997), 272 n. 29. 35. The conceptual overlap between the models of Seneca and Hierocles is captured by Reydams-Schils (2005), 20–32 in the context of her broader discussion of the “mediating self ” in Roman Stoicism. On Hierocles and oikeiôsis see Long and Sedley (1987), 1.352–53; Inwood (1984). 36. On the “case of Pacuvius” see A. Delatte (1950); also Erasmo (2008), 14–15, 21–23.

340

three themes Pacuvius, who took possession of Syria through habit, whenever he had made sacrifice to himself with wine and those funereal banquets, had himself carried from dinner into his bedchamber amid the applause of his eunuchs,37 and the following was sung to the accompaniment of his orchestra: “He has lived! He has lived!” On no day did he not have himself carried out for burial.

Pacuvius’ mock funeral closely resembles the scene from the Satyricon in which Trimalchio, at the conclusion of the banquet, demands to be decked out as if for burial (Sat. 77.7–78.6).38 We read that Trimalchio, like Pacuvius, “called for wine to be poured” (vinum . . . iussit infundi), compared the ritual to the Parentalia, and arranged for a musical accompaniment. It is tempting to think, with Jacqueline Amat (1992), that Petronius portrays Trimalchio as a misreader of Senecan philosophy—here wrong-headedly imitating Pacuvius. Although Trimalchio and Pacuvius ultimately use their slaves (and, in Trimalchio’s case, many other elements in the house) to orchestrate an autobiographic drama demonstrating their melancholy relationship to death, Seneca’s last-day ritual emerges through detaching himself from the personnel of his household and meditating on the abstract concentric circles. When Trimalchio turns his attention to abstract schematizations of life and time, such as his zodiac calendar and zodiac dish, they give him a false sense of security about the extent of his life (he has, he says, thirty years, four months, and two days left to live, 77.2) and simultaneously provoke the outbursts of lament that recur in the Cena with great frequency. In the letter’s conclusion, Seneca invokes several more images of spatiotemporal closure. One image comes in the customary closure of the letter itself (“But now I ought to close the letter,” sed iam debeo epistulam includere, 12.10), which here coincides with the end of a longer cycle: the first whole book of letters (= Epp. 1–12). A final spatiotemporal image comes as Seneca escalates the letter’s confrontation with death. Quoting Epicurus’ saying, “It is bad to live in necessity, but there is no necessity to live in necessity” (“malum est in necessitate vivere, sed in necessitate vivere necessitas nulla est,” §10), Seneca raises the possibility of a death not from old age, but actively undertaken. The image through which he explains why “there is no necessity” is this: “To freedom there are many paths, short and easy ones, open from every angle” (patent undique ad libertatem viae multae, breves faciles, §10). This new “road map” to death resonates with the more elaborate Senecan passages on bodily methods of suicide that we considered in chapter 8. In brief, Seneca progresses in the course of letter 12 from exploring the projection of the elite Roman self in the space and time of his suburban estate, 37. For exoleti as eunuchs here, see Butrica (2002), 512 n. 23. 38. On these and other mock funerals see Bodel (1999), 262.

the ruins of seneca and scipio

341

to presenting the abstract model of the concentric circles centering on the single day, and finally to the even more immediate space of the biological body, from which we can be liberated in an instant. This literary construction makes the suburban villa a particularly evocative space in which to imagine Seneca spending his final hours.

Afterlife and Burial of the Suburban Seneca Letter 12’s potential to serve as a frame for the death scene was taken up in a rather direct way in the play by Hacks. Not only does Hacks’ satirized Seneca, charging around his Landhaus an der Appischen Straße, evoke the complaining paterfamilias of Ep. 12.1–3, but during the dictation of the Tagesplan in the first act, just before Nikodrom gives him the fatal letter from Nero, Seneca remarks (Tod Sen. I, 242), SENECA Ich bin sehr alt. Ach, allzu jung für, was geschieht. NIKODROM SENECA Da sah ich neulich einen häßlich morschen Baum Und sprach zum Gärtner: weshalb steht der Leichnam noch? Ihr Baum ists, Herr, Sie pflanzten, sprach er, ihn als Kind. Dies Haus, da sommers wirs bezogen, baufällig Erfand ichs, eher abrißreif. Es ist von mir Gebaut in meinen Jünglingsjahren. SENECA I am very old. No, all too young for what is happening. NIKODROM SENECA For recently I saw a horribly dilapidated tree and said to the gardener: “Why is the corpse still standing?” “It is your tree, Master,” he said. “You planted it as a child.” When we moved into this house for the summer, I found it falling down—no, ripe for tearing down. It was built by me as a young man. Here the recognition scene is condensed slightly (no Felicio, but a corpse-like tree), while the gardener himself delivers openly the memory about Seneca’s having planted the tree. At this early stage in the play, Nikodrom and the audience participate in the irony that Seneca himself, though he doesn’t yet know it, is actually about to be torn down, just like his tear-down house. But the potential of this moment to lead into a philosophical meditatio mortis is diffused by Seneca’s persistence in the role of paterfamilias, especially in his lambasting of the Maurer (“wall-contractor”) who spends most of the second act dismantling a wall that Seneca had built but can’t remember why (implicit echoes here of the Berlin Wall). This Seneca is a Trimalchio: the sundial that is present in Seneca’s dining room (cf. 232), and that Seneca acknowledges in his first words of the play (I, 240), echoes the prominent placement of the horologium

342

three themes

(probably a water-clock) in Trimalchio’s dining room (Sat. 26.9); and the episode of the Tagesplan has a parallel in the daily gazette, resembling the acta urbis, that is read out to Trimalchio during his dinner party (Sat. 53.1–13). The play amplifies precisely the domestic identity from which Seneca in letter 12 had sought to circumscribe himself, re-entangling him in the space and time of the suburban estate. Beyond the location of Seneca’s dying, is there a tomb of Seneca? Tacitus does not indicate any location, writing simply that “he was cremated without any funeral ceremony” (sine ullo funeris sollemni crematur, Ann. 15.64.4). The Italian biographers, prompted by the question of whether the so-called Epitaphium Senecae was composed by Seneca and was subsequently inscribed in marble on a tomb, also speculate on whether Seneca could really have been deprived of a funeral, even under Nero (cf. Polenton, Vita Sen. 492–93). Barzizza, for example, reports, “But his funeral was performed by his people with the greatest honor” ( funus autem maximo cum honore a suis peractum fuit, Vita Sen. §15). Charles Le Brun reimagines Seneca’s death through painting the monumental space of a pyramidal tomb (seemingly in the countryside), though without any epitaph beyond SENECA PHILOSO (Fig. 10.4).39 Few others seek to give Seneca a tomb, choosing instead to immortalize the scene of death itself. Yet the author Seneca, however much he privileges the survival of his ingenium or his imago vitae suae over the survival of his ashes or corpse, does not entirely neglect the matter of a tomb. As we noted at the beginning of this chapter, Seneca in letter 55 recalls having passed by the house of Vatia frequently and mocked it with the words, “Here lies Vatia” (“Vatia hic situs est”), even while Vatia was still alive (Ep. 55.4). Seneca, in turn, explores Scipio’s house as a more venerable tomb, not only for the deceased Scipio but in a sense also for himself.

Epistulae Ex Campania In a Proustian moment, Seneca describes how he arrived in Campania and was reminded of Lucilius’ setting sail for Sicily: “Behold Campania (ecce Campania), and in particular the sight of Naples and your Pompeii—it is hard to believe how freshly they make me long for you! You are in my eyes completely (totus mihi in oculis es). I am leaving you at this very moment (cum maxime a te discedo). I see you gulping back your tears and trying in vain to resist the emotions which well up even as you suppress them” (Ep. 49.1).40 Seneca in effect confesses to the weakness he had already criticized in the

39. See Beauvais (2000), 583–85; Laveissière (1998). 40. On Ep. 49 see Blänsdorf and Breckel (1983), 28–30; Delpeyroux (2002), 221.

the ruins of seneca and scipio

343

figure 10.4 Charles Le Brun, Le tombeau de Sénèque (mid to late seventeenth century). Paris, Louvre, Département des Peintures, Inv. RF 1998–2. Courtesy of Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

letter’s opening line: “A man is certainly too laid-back and lazy if he is drawn back into remembering a friend when reminded by some location (in amici memoriam ab aliqua regione admonitus reducitur)” (§1).41 His Campanian letters, which begin here, are partly a case study in epistolary separation and the practice of friendship; after several more letters, as noted above, he finds a way to overcome the trauma that his and Lucilius’ difference of location has induced, asserting: “I see you, my Lucilius, at this very moment I hear you (video te, mi Lucili; cum maxime audio). I am so much with you that I think I may be beginning to write you not letters, but notes” (55.11). But the cultural landscape of Campania offers Seneca opportunities for moral exploration that go far beyond the region’s associations with Lucilius and include meditation on his own exit from Roman life.

41. For the same memorial aspect of specific places see Cic. Leg. 2.4 and Fin. 5.2, with Vasaly (1995), 29–30.

344

three themes

Moral Itineraries As briefly noted in the introduction to this chapter, travel is a complex topic for Seneca.42 Depending on the place visited and the traveler’s state of mind, a change in location can be a symptom of moral unease, even disease; it can reignite old problems that had supposedly been put to rest; it can serve as a test or challenge for the mind to overcome; it can discover circumstances optimal for self-care; it can provide a metaphor for understanding the mind as a “place” in its own right, or the world of reading as a set of metaphorical “journeys.”43 The historical strata of the Campanian landscape are a match for this complexity. Campania had been at one time or another the gateway for Greek culture in Italy; a site of contention in the second Punic war; the main expansion zone for Roman otium and withdrawal; a region of celebrated fertility and prosperity (Campania felix); the go-to place for Sibylline prophecy or katabasis; a stopping place for Aeneas en route to founding Rome.44 The region had also collected more recent associations. Some areas had suffered in the great earthquake of February, 62 or 63. Campania was frequented by Nero: in Tacitus the killings of Agrippina in 59 and Petronius in 66 are both played out on a Campanian stage (Ann. 14.3–13; 16.19.1), whereas the “Greek city” (quasi Graecam urbem) of Naples serves more literally as a licensing venue for Nero’s theatrical debut in 64 (15.33.2). Scholars have suggested that Seneca’s letters from Campania—at least, the earlier ones—may be explained by his presence there as part of Nero’s “imperial retinue,”45 though the letters dating from 64, if not earlier ones also, belong to the period when he was an outsider from the court. Seneca, it appears, enjoyed an audience of his own in Campania: apart from his response to the earthquake in Natural Questions book 6, and the Pompeian graffito quoting a half line from his Agamemnon, we may note another Pompeian graffito in the House of the Gladiators, where Seneca’s name is inscribed amid gladiatorial titles:46 LVCIVS AE

ANNUS SENECAS[sic] Seneca likely owned houses in the area.47 His adoption of Campania as a literary topic is also very much in keeping with contemporary literary culture. 42. See Montiglio (2006); Henderson (2004); André (2002), 170–71; Garbarino (1996), esp. 277–80 on the epistolary travels; D’Arms (1970), 133–34. Chambert (2002), 63–66 describes the letters, with their triptych of travel, health, and study, as “une véritable problématique du voyage et de la santé” (63). 43. E.g., Ep. 28 proceeds from the advice animum debes mutare, non caelum (28.1; cf. Hor. Ep. 1.11.27) to the admission: sapiens . . . malet in pace [i.e., in a peaceful place] esse quam in pugna (28.7). For journeys of reading see Ep. 2.1–2; 84.1–2. 44. On Campania in the Roman imagination see D’Arms (1970). 45. Griffin (1992), 93 n. 2, mentioning Epp. 49 and 77. 46. CIL 4.4418, Reg. V, Ins. 5, no. 3. See Gigante (2001), 91. 47. See Griffin (1992), 291–92 n. 5

the ruins of seneca and scipio

345

The area features in Lucan’s Bellum civile (especially BC 2.397–438), and was even more central in Lucan’s lost (presumably poetic) Epistulae ex Campania (cf. Vacc. Vita Luc. 63–67). Many of the surviving episodes of the Satyricon take place in Campanian locations such as (probably) Puteoli, and in the crypta Neapolitana, with its shortcut from Baiae to Naples (Sat. fr. 16).48 Seneca’s epistolary tour through Campania is an occasional series.49 After announcing his arrival in letter 49 and describing the effect that the sight of Naples and Pompeii had on him, in various letters he explains why he left Baiae after only one day (Ep. 51); tells how he swam ashore during a brief sea journey from Naples to Puteoli (53); describes his visit to the villa of Vatia (55); shares his experiences of living “above [or up the road from] an actual bathhouse” (supra ipsum balneum), which some scholars have located in Baiae (56.1);50 and describes his experience of passing through the crypta Neapolitana (57). Seneca’s announcement in letter 70, “After a long interval I saw your Pompeii” (post longum intervallum Pompeios tuos vidi, 70.1), with its close echoes of letter 49, initiates a second, briefer flurry. Thus, he mentions how his daily attendance at the home of the philosopher Metronax in Naples requires him to pass right outside the packed theater (76); describes the arrival of the mail-carrying ships from Alexandria into the harbor at Puteoli (77); reflects upon his visit to the villa of Scipio (86); and describes his two days spent in the countryside with Maximus carrying minimal baggage (usually assumed to be somewhere in Campania; 87).51 Often Campania is mentioned only as part of a “situational opening,” as Seneca’s encounter with a specific place leads him to consider a given moral question. The journey through the darkness of the crypta Neapolitana, for example, inspires a transformation (mutatio) in Seneca’s thought about our unnecessary fears and about the soul’s power to penetrate through bodies rather than be dissolved after death (57.3–9)—in which the landscape evokes metaphors (darkness, flame, etc.) for philosophical ideas.52 But the letters also portray more extensive historical explorations. The first and formative instance is letter 51, briefly mentioned in the introduction to this chapter. After explaining that he had left Baiae, a “place to be avoided” (locum . . . devitandum) because “luxury has commandeered it to serve as its

48. See Courtney (2001), esp. 45. 49. See Henderson (2006), (2004), 32–39 et passim; also Hurka (2005), on Epp. 49–57; Minarini (1997), 267–74, on Epp. 51, 55, 86; Mazzoli (1991); D’Arms (1970), passim; Summers (1910), 217. For commentary on Epp. 51, 55, 56, see Hönscheid (2004); and on the series of “Reisebriefe” with which book 6 begins (Epp. 53–57), Berno (2006). Most scholars assume two trips to Campania, spanning Epp. 49–57 (spring of 63?) and 70–87 (spring of 64?); cf. André (2002), 174; Faider (1921), 257–58. Note that Griffin (1992), 358 n. 1 sees Epp. 104, 110, and 123 as still prior to the time when Seneca “took to his room.” 50. Ep. 56 is located in Baiae by, e.g., Fagan (1999), 12–13 with n. 3, and already by Lipsius; cf. Hönscheid (2004), 142; Abel (1981), 488. For location in Rome, see Berno (2006), 252; André (2002), 171; Faider (1921), 258 n. 11. 51. Mention of a stadium at Ep. 80.2 also suggests Naples; and in Ep. 84 (cf. itinera, 84.1) Seneca is “still on tour,” suggests Summers (1910), 217. 52. For commentary see Berno (2006), 323–64; for discussion, Henderson (2006); Schönegg (1999), 73–76; Edwards (1997), 33–34; D’Arms (1970), 134–35 with n. 87.

346

three themes

hub” (illum sibi celebrandum luxuria desumpsit, 51.1), Seneca proceeds to explain that although the wise man won’t actually hate any specific place, “we should choose a place that is healthy not only for our body but also for our character” (non tantum corpori sed etiam moribus salubrem locum eligere debemus, §4). His chief negative example is Hannibal’s undoing by the fomenta Campaniae: “With arms he conquered, but vices conquered him” (armis vicit, vitiis victus est, §5; cf. Val. Max. 9.1.ext.1). The theme of war, oscillating between military and moral battles, informs Seneca’s transition toward discussing Campania’s few “sacred and serious places” (loca seria sanctaque, §10).53 For he points out that it is possible to build, even in the region of Baiae, in a way that is “more soldier-like” (magis militare, §11), while his most prominent example is the house of Scipio Africanus, who here, as we have seen, receives his first specific mention in the letters: “The sterner discipline of our location firms up the mind and makes it fit for great undertakings. Scipio was more virtuous in spending his exile in Liternum rather than in Baiae (Literni honestius Scipio quam Bais exulabat). A ruin of that sort should not be situated so softly (ruina eiusmodi non est tam molliter conlocanda)” (§11).54 The example establishes a clean contrast between Hannibal’s Baiae and Scipio’s Liternum, building on traditional oppositions between the two commanders (cf. Val. Max. 9.2.1) and the two places.55 But the allusion to Scipio’s “ruin” signals that Seneca is less interested in Scipio as the opponent of Hannibal than in Scipio of the exile years, after 184 BCE—an emphasis that continues when Seneca visits the villa itself.

Epistulae Morales 86: A Ruin Preserving Rome In recounting his visit to Scipio’s house Seneca focuses first on Scipio’s tomb (Ep. 86.1), then on the legend of his exile (§§1–3), his villa and lifestyle (§§4–13), and the villa’s new owner Aegialus (§§14–21). In the course of these discussions he appropriates a Scipionic ethos for his letters, fashioning an example both for his own exit from Roman life and for the transmission of culture between past, present, and future.56 At the outset Seneca embarks on what John Henderson has called “the most sustained stretch of mimetic habitus in the entire collection” (2004, 54) (§1): in ipsa Scipionis Africani villa iacens haec tibi scribo, adoratis manibus eius et ara [arca],57 quam sepulchrum esse tanti viri

53. See Henderson (2004): this moment is “a milestone in the evolution of the world of the collection” (33). 54. On the prefigurations of Scipio’s importance in earlier letters see Henderson (2004), 16–18. 55. For Liternum as a miserable locale, see, e.g., Liv. 22.16: Literni arenas, stagnaque perhorrida situ; further testimonia and background in Beloch (1890), 377–79. 56. On Ep. 86, in addition to Henderson (2004), 53–61, 93–170, see Gowing (2005), 80–81; Minarini (1997), 270–72; Tosi (1974–75), 220–22; Maiuri (1957), 92–98. 57. Bodel (1997) prefers the 9th-c. ms. correction or conjecture arca (“sarcophagus”), because it “better accords with the burial practices of the Cornelii Scipiones” (5 n. 2).

the ruins of seneca and scipio

347

suspicor. animum quidem eius in caelum ex quo erat redisse persuadeo mihi . . . I am writing these words to you while lying in the actual villa of Scipio Africanus, having worshipped his departed spirits and the altar [or sarcophagus] which I suspect is the tomb of this great man. Indeed I persuade myself that his mind has returned to heaven from whence it came . . . Seneca’s presence in Scipio’s house establishes an immediate contrast with his conspicuous nonentry into Vatia’s house (cf. 55.6). He has, it seems, joined the ranks of visitors that began already in Scipio’s lifetime—most famously, the pirates who came not to plunder but to venerate the great man.58 The term iacens (“lying”), however, suggests a lingering visit; although it may mean simply that he is staying over or, in an echo of Cicero’s famous work, that he is lying and dreaming of Scipio, it also evokes the epitaphic hic iacet (“here lies”) and establishes a fleeting resemblance between Seneca and the deceased Scipio, whose corpse may lie here.59 Seneca’s tentative assertion that Scipio is buried here amounts to a taking of sides in a famously unresolved question. Livy reports a tradition that Scipio, “as he was dying, commanded that he should be buried in the countryside in that very spot and that a monument should be built there so that no funeral should take place for him in his ungrateful fatherland (ne funus sibi in ingrata patria fieret)” (38.53.8). But although Livy says that he himself recently saw at Liternum both a “monument” (monumentum) and a storm-toppled “statue” (statua, §56.2), he also reports that “some write that Scipio both died and was buried at Rome, others at Liternum; monuments and statues are displayed in both places (utrobique monumenta ostenduntur et statuae)” (§56.2).60 As Alain Gowing has noted, Seneca, in choosing Liternum, privileges the narrative of Scipio’s voluntarily imposed exile over the narrative of his career at Rome (2005, 80–81).61 And indeed, most of Seneca’s discussion here, including his reference to Scipio’s posthumous return to his legendary divine origins (cf. ex quo erat redisse, Ep. 86.1),62 is motivated by what he sees as the special heroism of the exile. 58. On Scipio’s house among Roman “monumental villas and villa monuments” see Bodel (1997), 5–6, 13. For the pirate visit see Val. Max. 2.10.2, foregrounded by D’Arms (1970), 2. 59. On the Somnium as a model here see Henderson (2004), 103, 168–69; and 53 n. 1 on further associations of iacens. 60. On Livy’s equivocal account see Jaeger (1997), 161–72. The ara mentioned by Seneca may correspond to the monumentum mentioned by Livy and/or to a lmla of Scipio that Strabo (5.4.4) says is located at Liternum; and Pliny mentions a serpent-guarded grotto (specus, HN 16.234). On the grotto see Henderson (2004), 163–65. 61. The Scipio presented here thus “breaks the bounds of the ordinary exemplum,” observes Mayer (1991), 159–60. See Maso (1999), 69–70 with n. 71, listing all twenty mentions of Scipio by Seneca. Compare esp. Brev. 17.6: even in his exile, iam senem [sc. Scipionem] contumacis exili delectabit ambitio. 62. For his conception by a serpent (i.e., Jupiter) see Liv. 26.19.6–7; on the Scipionic legend, Walbank (1967).

348

three themes

Although the exemplary tradition celebrated a slew of Scipionic virtues, this Scipio is a hero of pietas. His soul has returned to heaven, explains Seneca, “not because he led great armies (after all, Cambyses had these—a madman who prospered from his madness), but on account of his exceptional moderation and sense of duty (ob egregiam moderationem pietatemque), which I judge to [have been] more admirable in him when he left his country than when he defended it (magis in illo admirabilem . . . cum reliquit patriam quam cum defendit)” (86.1). Gowing observes that Seneca seems here to be “consciously rebutting” (2005, 80) Livy’s ultimate verdict on Scipio as “a man to be remembered, but more for his skills in war than in peace” (vir memorabilis, bellicis tamen quam pacis artibus, 38.53.9). Livy’s account of the trials of the Scipios in 184 BCE, in which the charges against Publius Scipio and his brother Lucius included their having offered favorable terms to Antiochus III in the Syrian war and having taken an excessive share of the booty, is packed with heated exchanges and bitter words, leading up to Publius Scipio’s exit from Rome on the day when he had been set to stand trial.63 As Livy recounts, Scipio “personally imposed a voluntary exile not only on himself but even on his own funeral” (voluntarium non sibimet ipse solum sed etiam funeri suo exilium indixit, Livy, 39.52.9). Scipio’s detractors, on the other hand, justified their actions against him by appealing to the principle that “it is not unjust to use force against one who cannot endure equal justice (ius aequum)” (38.50.9). Yet Seneca, lying in the villa at Liternum, conjures a conciliatory Scipio who addresses his fatherland at the moment of his departure (86.1–2): “I do not wish,” he said, “to take anything away from the laws or the regulations (nihil volo derogare legibus, nihil institutis). Let there be equal justice among all the citizens (aequum inter omnes cives ius sit). Use my gift without me, my country. I was the cause of freedom for you, and will also be its proof. I depart, if I have grown more than is advantageous for you (exeo, si plus quam tibi expedit crevi).” Seneca’s Scipio thus exits gracefully, endowing his departure with maximum authority. He casts himself partly in the role of an archaic lawgiver whose departure and absence serve to validate the unchangeability and equality of the city’s laws.64 His mention of his “gift” (beneficio meo) recalls Ennius’ epitaph of Scipio, partially quoted by Seneca in a later letter (Ep. 108.33 = Enn. Epigr. 1):65 hic est ille situs cui nemo civis neque hostis quivit pro factis reddere opis pretium.

63. See Jaeger (1997), 132–76. 64. On this motif see Szegedy-Maszak (1978), 207–8; also Ker (2000). 65. On the epitaph see Henderson (2004), 102; Walbank (1967), 57.

the ruins of seneca and scipio

349

Here lies the man to whom no citizen or enemy could pay back a price that would match his deeds. In asserting a correlation between his former role as commander and his new role as exile (cf. “cause and proof of freedom,” causa libertatis . . . et argumentum), Seneca’s Scipio revisits in a condensed form the dramatic events of his final day in Rome, when Scipio had announced, “O Romans, . . . my memory tells me that today is the day on which (diem esse hodiernum quo) I defeated Hannibal of Carthage” (Gell. NA 4.18.3), and proceeded to reenact his triumphal procession to the Capitolium (cf. Liv. 38.51.5–14)—celebrating his earlier salvation, eighteen years prior, of “all the laws” (omnes leges, Val. Max. 3.7.1d). Scipio had departed in a storm of controversy, being accused by some of having “celebrated a triumph over the Roman people” (triumphum de populo Romano egisset), and having taken away, at least from the tribunes, their libertas (Liv. 38.52.5). But in Seneca’s formulation Scipio’s triumph over Hannibal, originally invoked by Scipio to characterize his earlier service, subsequently offered an analogy for his latest great deed in defense of Roman libertas, namely his final withdrawal from Rome. A concluding statement by Seneca captures this symmetry in a vivid parallel: “And so he gave a place for the laws and withdrew himself to Liternum, putting the republic in his debt for his own exile as much as for Hannibal’s [exile]” (itaque locum dedit legibus et se Liternum recepit tam suum exilium rei publicae inputaturus quam Hannibalis, 86.2). This statement shows Seneca establishing a special significance for the site of Liternum as a kind of ersatz Capitolium: it is the place that, when it is occupied by Scipio Africanus, guarantees a locus for the laws in Rome. Scipio was famously the first Roman to build a villa in Campania. He had done this not at the time of his exile, but probably sometime between the battle of Zama and the establishment of a Roman colony at Liternum in 194.66 It is certain, then, that Scipio had spent time there intermittently prior to this exile in 184 and that it was associated in many ways with his years of public service and, in particular, with his status as a recent triumphator.67 Yet Seneca, by casting the house most conspicuously as the locus of Scipio’s exile, amplifies its status as a record of public service surpassing that of the military triumphator. Scipio is thus radically different from the reclusive Servilius Vatia: although Vatia’s house is so private that he “lives . . . for nobody” (vivit . . . nemini, Ep. 55.5), Scipio’s house plays a beneficial role for the fatherland. Seneca’s focus on the exile also gives new meaning to the pair of concepts that recurs frequently in portrayals of Scipio at different times in his life: otium et solitudo (“leisure and solitude”). Cicero introduces the final book of 66. See D’Arms (1970), 1–2, 9. 67. This association may be reflected in the episode in Sil. Pun. 6 in which Hannibal (proleptically?) views paintings of the first Punic war on the walls of a temple in, of all places, Liternum (Pun. 6.653–97). See Marks (2003), 144.

350

three themes

the De officiis by recalling a paradoxical statement attributed to Scipio by Cato, namely, “that he was never less at leisure than when in leisure, and never less alone than when alone” (numquam se minus otiosum esse quam cum otiosus, nec minus solum quam cum solus esset, Off. 3.1 = Cat. Hist. fr. 127 Leo).68 The saying is taken up by many authors, including Seneca.69 Scipionic otium and solitude are usually connected with the routines of private thought (and even writing) conducted by Scipio in his prime,70 including his regular visits to the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol where “he sat and, usually alone, spent time there in secret” (consideret et plerumque solus in secreto ibi tempus tereret, Liv. 26.19.5)— Scipio as a heπo| mñq (cf. Polyb. 10.2.6–7). When Cicero mentions Scipionic otium in the De officiis, he portrays it in the form of regular withdrawals: “For he, taking a break from his most fine services to the republic, sometimes took up otium for himself (otium sibi sumebat aliquando) and in a group and crowd of people he would sometimes withdraw himself (interdum . . . se . . . recipiebat) into solitude as if into port” (Off. 3.2).71 But Seneca, in letter 86, writes large the logic of the Scipionic saying about otium and solitude, in the singular historical event of Scipio’s exile: Scipio is, as it were, never less absent from Rome than when in exile, since he is even more involved in defending Rome in his exile than he had been when he was fighting off Hannibal. When Seneca proceeds to describe his contemplation of the villa itself, he has a certain amount to say about its grandeur, but his ekphrasis is dominated by the “narrow little bathhouse, dark in keeping with ancient custom” (balneoloum angustum, tenebricosum ex consuetudine antiqua, 86.4). Being a reminder of ancient ways, the bathhouse invites Seneca to draw comparisons with the present, and most of this section of the letter will be devoted to a convicium saeculi (§§6–13) highlighting the various ways in which modern bathing practices have lapsed from older standards: the use of colored marble, water features, windows with views of fields and sea, warmer and even scalding water, perfumes, and baths every day or worse.72 Seneca’s contemplation is most distinctive, however, for the vividness with which Scipio’s presence is evoked (§5): Great pleasure came over me, then, as I contemplated Scipio’s ways and ours (magna ergo me voluptas subiit contemplantem mores Scipionis ac nostros). In this corner the “terror of Carthage” (in hoc angulo ille “Carthaginis horror”), to whom Rome owes the fact that she has only been captured once, would wash his body tired out by 68. On the long career of this saying see Gross (1980). 69. On Seneca’s cultivation of specifically Scipionic solitude see Gross (1980), 127–28; also ReydamsSchils (2005), 20 with n. 12. 70. E.g., Cic. Off. 3.1, 4; and, for Scipio’s writing, Plut. Apophth. reg. et imp. 1.196B. 71. For commentary see Dyck (1996), 496–502. 72. On Seneca’s comparison see Fagan (1999), 17, 19 n. 23, 51–52; Edwards (1993), 154–55; Yegül (1992), 40.

the ruins of seneca and scipio

351

farm work. For he used to train himself by labor and, as was the way among the ancients, worked his land himself. Beneath this roof did he (sub hoc ille tecto), so filthy, stand, and him this floor (hoc illum pavimentum), so rough, supported. But who is there now who could bear to wash so? The ekphrasis, with its use of deictic language to communicate the epiphany of the great man in a humble place, is in keeping with general characteristics of the Roman imitation of “sacred” ancestors often mediated by imagines.73 The ekphrasis is very similar to a discourse associated with Cato the Elder.74 For in the De senectute, Cicero has Cato explain how he came to borrow his rustic pastimes from the habits of the hero Manius Curius as he lived out his days on his farm after triumphing (triumphavisset) over several of Rome’s enemies (Sen. 55). As Cato explains, “I myself, in contemplating his villa (for it is not far from me), cannot admire enough either the man’s own moderation or the discipline of his times” (cuius . . . ego villam contemplans (abest enim non longe a me) admirari satis non possum vel hominis ipsius continentiam vel temporum disciplinam, Sen. 55). A fuller version of the same anecdote in Plutarch’s Life of Cato the Elder (2.1–2), characterizing it as something that Cato undertook “habitually” (rtmevx˜ |), has arresting verbal similarities to Seneca’s letter. Curius’ “little farm” is denoted, like the balneolum, with a diminutive (vxq¨diom), and there is the same juxtaposition of sizes in the farm’s “smallness” (lijqæsg|) and Curius’ status as “greatest of the Romans” (< Qxla¨xm låcirso|, Cat. Mai. 2.1). Curius’ presence is evoked with a similar sequence of deictic expressions: “He himself used to work this little farm (so‹so sø vxq¨diom aSsæ|) and this is the dwelling (sa sgm sóm Opatkim) he used to live in after his three triumphs. Here (Rmsa‹ha), seated by the hearth . . .” (2.1–2). The conclusion of Cato’s habit, as Plutarch describes it, is a form of personal emulation: “Cato would return home with his mind full of these reflections (sa‹h’ ¡ Jsxm Rmhtlo lemo| p°ei); then he would look afresh at his own house and servants and review his mode of life, and would undertake still more work with his own hands and cut down any sign of extravagance (peqiåjopse sóm poktsåkeiam)” (2.2). The discourse of Catonian contemplation suits Seneca’s needs in more than one way. To the extent that Roman readers detected the parallel, the analogy of Manius Curius helps Seneca to cast Scipio very much in his guise as a triumphator, even as Seneca redeploys the metaphor of triumph to characterize Scipio’s new victory in exile. But in adopting the Catonian discourse, Seneca himself emulates Cato at the same time as he venerates Scipio—two archaic exempla for the price of one. Here, as elsewhere, Cato turns out to be 73. The unearthing of a basalt bust of Scipio at Liternum in the 16th c. (cf. Maiuri 1957, 95–97) suggests that Scipio’s imago had once been available for observation. Note also that the contemplation of imagines was itself characteristically Scipionic; cf. Sall. Iug. 4.5. 74. Briefly noted by Litchfield (1914), 1–2.

352

three themes

a privileged model for senectus and rustic culture; if Seneca’s focus on Scipio echoes in part Cicero’s Somnium, Seneca fuses this with the Catonian self of the De senectute. When Seneca moves on from Scipio’s villa in the next letter to describe himself and Maximus traveling in the Campanian countryside, the vehiculum rusticum with just a few slaves in tow seems the perfect proof that he has done what Cato did after contemplating a villa: he has downsized his own household (Ep. 87.2–4; 9).75 Scipio’s exile space offers a useful narrative for Seneca’s own exit from Roman life. Through its associations with public service, it turns what could easily be construed as a failure into a narrative making Seneca’s present withdrawal a superior analogue for his earlier public activities; as Seneca says of his own withdrawal, in an echo of Scipionic otium and solitude, “Believe me, those who seem to be doing nothing are doing greater things (qui nihil agere videntur maiora agunt): they deal with human and divine matters at once” (Ep. 8.6). It also allows for a gracious, albeit self-aggrandizing, acknowledgment of the problems posed by his earlier successes at Rome: Seneca can say, with Scipio, “I depart (exeo), if I have grown more than is beneficial for you” (86.2). Yet on another level the narrative of Scipio’s exile seems an obsolete (and ironic) message in the years of the Principate, given that libertas has long since been compromised, and one man is now in fact dominant in precisely the way that Scipio’s self-sacrifice had sought to avert. Thus, if the space of Scipio’s villa can still guarantee a space for the laws at Rome, this must be not only through the spatial equivalence between Liternum and Rome but also through a temporal equivalence between the ruined villa’s present and Rome’s Republican past. This temporal equivalence is indeed partly established by Seneca’s various time-crossing interactions with Scipio: the veneration of the tomb, the prosopopoeia, the contemplative epiphany. The temporal bridge is also partly maintained through the practices of the villa’s present possessor. As Seneca reaches for a conclusion, he apologizes somewhat for his archaic digression and returns to the present: “If these words seem too gloomy to you, you’ll chalk it up to the villa—in which I learned from Aegialus, a most responsible paterfamilias (ab Aegialo, diligentissimo patre familiae) (for he is now the possessor of this farm [is enim nunc huius agri possessor est]), that trees can be transplanted, no matter how old” (§14). Seneca’s admiration reflects the prestige that we know from Pliny the Elder had been acquired by Aegialus through his skills in viticulture.76 Aegialus had transformed himself, as it were, from libertinus to Literninus: “Great fame went equally to the freedman (libertino) Vetulenus Aegialus in the countryside at Liternum (rure Liternino) in Campania, and greater still given people’s enthusiasm for the fact that he was cultivating the actual exile of Africanus (ipsum 75. On Ep. 87 as Catonian sequel to 86 see Henderson (2004), 49–50. 76. On Aegialus and his lesson see the extensive discussion by Henderson (2004), 119–38, 160.

the ruins of seneca and scipio

353

Africani colebat exilium)” (HN 14.49). “Cultivating the actual exile” suggests not just the tending of the farm but the perpetuation of the memory of Scipio’s last years. In a separate passage, Pliny also mentions that “there survive, on the farm at Liternum, olive trees planted by the hand of the elder Africanus (Africani prioris manu satae olivae) and likewise, in the same place, myrtle trees of conspicuous size” (HN 16.234). This shows that Aegialus, an expert in viticulture and arboriculture, was involved in perpetuating contact with the labors of Scipio’s own hand. Symbolic arboriculture is the basis of the lesson in which Aegialus teaches Seneca “that trees can be transplanted, no matter how old” (quamvis vetus arbustum posse transferri, 86.14). The lesson itself, which presents two different methods for transplanting olive trees (one through stripping the tree trunk and transplanting it whole, the other through severing strong branches and planting them in the ground, §§14–21), is blatantly allegorical.77 Aegialus appears to have taught the processes by which an ancient legacy such as Scipio’s might be renewed and passed on to future generations. But Seneca cuts the letter short: “I do not dare to teach you more, in case, just as Aegialus made me his rival, I may make you mine. Farewell” (plura te docere non cogito, ne quemadmodum Aegialus me sibi adversarium paravit, sic ego parem te mihi. vale, §21). This closing comment alludes to a culture of competitive farming like that sketched by Pliny in his description of Aegialus, and in Pliny’s mention of Remmius Palaemon, from whom Seneca had bought the farm at Nomentum. Seneca’s visit to the villa thus shows him capable of inhabiting Scipio’s ruin in several ways. If Aegialus appears strictly speaking to be the possessor and cultivator of the Scipionic exile, in other ways Seneca has appropriated it for his letters and himself, as a paradigm for his own present and afterlife, and a way of preserving Rome.

Afterlives of the Senecan Scipio Though Scipio’s house is now lost, a willed identification has been imposed on the archaeological landscape: at the excavated ruins of the forum at Liternum a recently erected official sign refers to “this villa” and quotes from Seneca’s letter (Fig. 10.5).78 The sign conjures an imaginary counterpart to the Villa Vazia down the coast. An earlier manifestation of the same commemorative impulse is the monument erected by Mussolini at the same site (Fig. 10.6), recalling the one mentioned by Livy and Seneca and giving modern audiences something to contemplate.79 77. See Henderson (2004), 122–24; also D. Gagliardi (1978) and Mazzoli (1970), 221–22. 78. For theories on the villa’s location see McKay (1972), 204–12. 79. On the excavation of the (probably 2nd-c.) forum in 1933–36 and the erection of the monument, see McKay (1972), 210–11: the monument is “an altar-shaped tomb of local stone in the Forum area with Ennius’ distich on the celebrated generalissimo on one face, and a record of the excavations under another Duce on the other” (210).

figure 10.5 Literno, sign at ancient forum excavations. Photo by author.

figure 10.6 Literno, ancient forum excavations, modern commemorative monument. Photo by author.

the ruins of seneca and scipio

355

Seneca’s pilgrimage to the villa of Scipio described in letter 86 made it easy for the two men’s lives to become intertwined at various points in the classical tradition. In one fifteenth-century manuscript of the Epistulae morales, where each book of letters is accompanied by a miniature illustration relating in some way to that book’s letters, the Campanian cycle offered the illuminator an especially vivid set of scenarios.80 In one image placed above the initial letter of letter 86, Fabio Stok has argued that the two naked figures (whose faces and genitals have been defaced in the manuscript) are in fact standing before a bathtub, inspired by Seneca’s account of Scipio’s bathhouse (Ep. 86.4–13) (1996, 349, fig. 331). This would have resonated with the depictions of Seneca’s dying bath elsewhere in the manuscript tradition. Although Scipio was a privileged figure in the Senecan tradition, conversely Seneca’s letter 86 made him a privileged witness in the historical tradition on Scipio. When Otto of Freising chronicles the role of Scipio in Roman history of the second century BCE, he quotes both from Cicero’s preface to book 3 of the De officiis and from Seneca’s letter. He prefaces the Seneca passage by remarking: “[Scipio’s] virtue and admirable restraint (virtutem et admirabilem pacientiam) are likewise praised by L. Seneca (who should not so much be called a philosopher as virtually a Christian); in the letters to Lucilius he says: ‘I am writing these words to you while lying in the actual villa of Scipio Africanus . . .’ ” (Chron. 2.40, 114–15).81 Otto’s comment is interesting in its emphasis on the pietas motif of Seneca’s letter, here paraphrased with pacientia. Given Otto’s celebration of Seneca’s friendship with Christianity both here and later, in his account of his death (Chron. 3.15, 153), it is fair to conclude that he sees the selfsacrificing heroisms of Scipio and Seneca as sharing a close affinity not just with Christianity, but with one another. In the Africa and other writings of Petrarch, as Aldo Bernardo has shown (1962), Scipio becomes a humanistic culture hero, and Seneca’s writings often play a mediating role. But by now we have learned to expect Petrarch, even as he appropriates a vast array of Senecan stylistic motifs, to air his ambivalence about Seneca’s death. His dealings with Seneca as a witness to Scipio are no exception. In Petrarch’s De vita solitaria, Scipio is the fundamental representative of ideals of otium and solitude.82 Petrarch gently rebukes Ambrose for giving the appearance that he is the originator of the paradoxical saying (that is, numquam minus solus sum quam cum solus esse videor . . . ), and he traces this saying back to Scipio (De vita solit. 2.1.10).83 Seneca, on the other hand, is invoked as an

80. Vat. Lat. 7319, discussed by Stok (1996), 343–49. 81. Otto continues his quotation to the end of Ep. 86.3. See Reynolds (1965), 114–15. 82. Liternum appears in this context as the destination of occasional withdrawals, not exile (De vita solit. 2.9.5). 83. On Petrarch’s treatment of the saying see Gross (1980), 133.

356

three themes

advocate for Scipionic solitude, and Petrarch quotes Epistulae morales 11, where Seneca exhorts Lucilius to imagine an interior guardian: “Let us select some good man and have him always before our eyes, . . .” (“aliquis . . . vir bonus nobis eligendus est, ac semper ante oculos habendus . . . ,” De vita solit. 1.5.3 = Sen. Ep. 11.8). He puts this together with Seneca’s later mention of Scipio as a possible focus of such exercises: “Let him be Cato, or Scipio, or Laelius” (aut Cato ille sit, aut Scipio, aut Laelius, 1.5.3 = Sen. Ep. 25.6). But Petrarch expresses two major disappointments with Seneca in the course of the work. One centers on Seneca’s advice that Lucilius should “Flee even one!” ( fuge et unum, 1.7.3 = fuge etiam unum, Sen. Ep. 10.1)—advice that Petrarch, despite his passion for solitude, regards as excessively demanding, at least for a mere student. Another disappointment, conversely, which we briefly touched on in chapter 7, concerns the passage in the Octavia where (as Petrarch still thinks) the author Seneca represents the character Seneca admitting that he has lapsed in giving up his solitude on Corsica in order to return to power. Although Petrarch in principle credits Seneca with great authority given the manner of his death, writing that “this man’s exit prevents all doubt in the matter” (viri huius exitus, in re dubium esse non sinat), he continues as follows (De vita solit. 2.8.3): Even so, that tragic passage which I mentioned elicits astonishment, in that this man—whose freedom was pristine in his isolated solitude, whose study of philosophy lacked any disturbance (cui deserta in solitudine libertas integra, et imperturbatum philosophiae studium), but when he was in the city under a king, not even his life was safe from men’s lack of clemency (in urbe autem regia, ne vita quidem ab inclementia hominum salva fuit)—this man himself saw so far ahead his own fate and heavy ruin, and entrusted it to writing. Seen by Petrarch through the lens of the Octavia, Seneca’s death itself is simply the result of a failure of which Seneca was acutely conscious, revealing how he had fallen short of the ideals of otium and solitude that he himself espoused and that he himself showed to be manifest in the example of Scipio. Petrarch, however, remains thoroughly in love with Seneca’s portrayal of Scipio’s ruin in Liternum. The celebrated feature of the Petrarchan Scipio singled out by Bernardo is pietas, and Petrarch obsessively revisits the Senecan epistolary moment from which this characterization derives.84 A sampling of these occasions can illustrate the humanist’s approach.85 In book 5 of his Libri familiarium rerum, Petrarch embarks on his own cycle of Campanian letters

84. See Bernardo (1962), 188. In the Africa, the exile in Liternum is prefigured, in a prophecy by Scipio’s father at 2.694–708, as an exercise of virtue, though the curse of Sophonisba at 5.977–92 casts the exile in more bitter terms. 85. See also Petrarch’s annotation on the death of Laura: “I have no doubt that her soul, as Seneca says of Scipio Africanus, has returned to heaven whence it came”; quoted by Bernardo (1962), 49; cf. 51; and De vir. ill. 12.28–29, 40–46, adapting Sen. Epp. 86 and 51.

the ruins of seneca and scipio

357

(Fam. 5.3–6) whose points of contact with Seneca’s cycle are frequently signaled by Petrarch himself. The humanist’s account of his travels in the vicinity of Baiae in 1343 includes a visit to Giovanni Colonna’s father just outside of Naples, whom he likens to Africanus (Fam. 5.3.6), and a view of the crypta Neapolitana “of which Annaeus Seneca makes mention when writing to Lucilius” (cuius ad Lucilium scribens meminit Anneus Seneca, 5.4.6). Then, after giving his impressions of Baiae, he explains (5.4.9):86 But Scipio Africanus, a man without comparison, fully equipped in virtue, having no dealings with pleasure, in a decision that was in keeping with the rest of his life, decided not to look down on this place from on high [as had Marius, Pompey, and Caesar], but not to look on it at all (non tam ex alto despicere, quam prorsus non aspicere decrevit hunc locum), because it was opposed to his morals. So he withdrew beyond view (extra prospectum . . . secessit) and preferred to live at Liternum rather than in Baiae. I know that this little villa is not far from here (quam villulam hinc non abesse scio), and there is nothing that I would more avidly have looked upon, if I had been able, with the help of a guide, to probe into places made noble by such a great inhabitant (nilque avidius spectassem, si quo duce in loca tanto habitatore nobilia penetrare potuissem). Here Petrarch creatively expands a visual metaphor that Seneca had used only briefly in his letter 51 (Ep. 51.11) to characterize Scipio’s complete aversion to Baiae (cf. prorsus non aspicere; extra prospectum) and to characterize his own desire to lay eyes on Scipio’s house (spectassem). His desire went unfulfilled— an outcome hinting at the irrecoverability of a superior and incomparable past. Yet Petrarch doesn’t show a hint of doubt about the possibility of finding it— given more time—and in his biography of Scipio in the De viris illustribus he claims (De vir. ill. 12.29): villulam asperam solitariam et incultam, . . . ipse olim, dum loca illa peregrinus inviserem, ab amicis ostensam non sine quadam animi voluptate prospexi. I myself once, while I was exploring that area as a visitor, looked upon the little villa which was pointed out to me by my friends— rough, solitary, and uncultivated. Although it is unlikely that the house pointed out by Petrarch’s friends really was Scipio’s, his reaction is a good match for Seneca’s, because Seneca had written,

86. On this letter see Bernardo (1962), 52 n. 7, 82.

358

three themes

“Great pleasure came over me, then, as I contemplated Scipio’s ways and ours” (magna ergo me voluptas subiit contemplantem mores Scipionis ac nostros, Ep. 86.5). If Petrarch thus showed himself capable of using Seneca’s encounter with Scipio as a template for his own encounter with Scipio, and with the classical world as a whole,87 he also found more than one way to modulate it, rethinking the positions of both the contemplator (Seneca) and the object of contemplation (Scipio and his villa). In one letter Petrarch describes his reaction to seeing the city of Rome by recalling Seneca’s “exultation” in letter 86 at having seen the site of Scipio’s exile and burial (Fam. 2.9.25):88 If this could happen to a Spaniard, what do you think I, an Italian, felt (quod si contigit hispano homini, quid me hominem italicum sentire putas)— and not about the villa at Liternum or the tomb of Scipio, but about the city of Rome (non de villa Literni aut de Scipionis sepulcro, sed de urbe Roma), where Scipio was born, where he was raised, where he triumphed with equal glory both when he was a conqueror and when he was a defendant? He manages, in other words, to fashion himself as a fuller contemplator of Scipio and of Rome, treating both the Spanish Seneca and the provincial Liternum as inferior points of access to Rome, even as he borrows the Senecan habit. A letter in book 16, in turn, treats Seneca’s contemplation of Scipio’s tomb as an analogy for his contemplation of the tomb of St. Ambrose (Fam. 16.11.12):89 But I would say that the most pleasing sight of all was the fact that I know (scio) that the altar [was the burial place of Ambrose], whereas Seneca, speaking about Africanus, [says], ‘I suspect (suspicor) that it was the burial place of this great man’ . . . Petrarch’s transposition of the pagan contemplative mode into a Christian context is part of his more general appropriation of Scipionic solitude as a basis for Christian spiritual practice. At the same time, however, he habitually draws a fundamental epistemological distinction, in this case associating the pagan Seneca and Scipio with doubt (cf. suspicor) and his own Christianity with certainty (cf. scio). Ultimately the value of the ancient pagan world to which both Seneca and Scipio belong can be realized only in retrospect, as an unconscious set of structures whose most meaningful content will be supplied by the superior, Christian era. As Petrarch noted in his famous letter (Fam. 24.5.26), Seneca had died too soon.

87. Petrarch privileges both the “mediated” and “regressive” forms of classicism charted by Porter (2006), 53–65. A crucial ingredient is Petrarch’s characteristic ability “[to] distinguish between different periods within ancient history,” discussed by Smalley (1960), 295. 88. Cf. Bernardo (1962), 76. 89. Cf. Bernardo (1962), 78.

Epilogue

This book’s aim has been to show what Seneca contributed to Western discourses on death and dying, and also how the conversation about Seneca himself has more often than not become a conversation about his death. In order to see this fully, we needed to cast our net widely— to take in the ancient historical descriptions, the writings of Seneca himself, and the long tradition of reception that even now shows no sign of ceasing. It would be a mistake to try to impose a final word on this story, but I hope that the book has succeeded in elucidating the story’s logic. The reader will perhaps wonder whether all the book’s topics (from diverse ages and diverse forms) belonged between the same covers, whether its digressions (especially on Seneca’s own writings) were always pertinent to the death scene itself, and whether we needed to analyze quite so many retellings of the death scene, some of them by a single prolific author (such as Petrarch) or artist (such as Giordano). And yet this is the reality that the book was intended to capture: A common interest in Seneca’s death brought unlikely partners, and unlikely representations, into the same space. In other words, the scope of this book was shaped by what I hold to be the distinctive features of the Senecan tradition. But what lies beyond? For even after casting the net widely, I make no claims to exhaustiveness. No doubt there are significant angles on the theme of Seneca’s death that remain undreamed of here. Yet to the extent that this study can itself serve as a predictor of further discovery, let me sketch out three principal ways in which the cultural history of

360

epilogue

Seneca’s death—and of Seneca more generally—seems most likely to change in the minds of modern interpreters, myself included. First, there are the other studies of Seneca, both those that will be published in the future and those that already exist but to which I gave too little heed. In these studies we may expect scholars, even if they have not unearthed lost ancient texts, to have found in Tacitus, Suetonius, and Dio—not to mention other significant texts such as the Octavia, or other ancient works not touched on here—previously neglected information or emphases, or to have placed them in a new context. Scholars may still reasonably hope to locate fragments of Seneca’s writings that we thought had been lost forever, but even if they don’t, they will look at the existing corpus from new angles and reconsider its dynamic interrelationship with Seneca’s life and death. Inspiration for these discoveries may well come from studies of the later classical tradition, where scholars will bring to light ever more receptions of Seneca that shake our prior assumptions; in the process, new themes may emerge as central to the death scene, distinct from those that receive emphasis in this book. I sincerely hope that there will be more cross-fertilization between these different spheres of study. It has been an ambition of the present work to demonstrate not only the prominence of the death scene and its related themes but also the methodological advantages of considering the ancient historical narratives, Seneca’s writings, and the reception tradition together. Second, there are the unstudied retellings of Seneca’s death in word and image—again, those that will be produced in the future and those from the past that are presently neglected. If the present study can serve as a guide, we may expect most of these versions to adapt prior paradigmatic versions (those by Tacitus, Jerome, Boccaccio, Rubens, . . .) to suit contemporary concerns, and we may also expect to find certain more specific tendencies. But will we see a continuation of the tendency toward senecanization, as the death scene is retold through discursive forms that derive in one way or another from Seneca, and as Seneca-derived discursive forms are drawn toward representing Seneca’s death scene as a privileged subject? Will we see the scene of reception assimilated once again to the scene of death, as the receiver becomes implicated in the complex agency of the forced self-killing, or the activities of the scribes? Perhaps, instead, new representations of Seneca’s death, when compared with what has gone before, will be relatively heterogeneous in their form, meaning, and function. Third and finally, there is—without being too dramatic about it—the reader’s own experience of death and dying, which would promise to offer the most decisive culmination of our conversation with Seneca about death if it did not also promise to render Seneca obsolete. One’s own death, after all, is the focus of Senecan discourse. No matter how well we collectively take up the lesson that “we die each day” (cotidie morimur, Ep. 24.20), it is our own death’s futurity, uncertainty, and singularity that leave the cultural history of death unfinished—indeed unbegun—until we ourselves are ceasing.

Editions of Primary Texts

Translations are mine unless indicated otherwise. For Seneca and other classical authors, the Oxford Classical Text or Teubner has generally been used. For Seneca’s fragments, see Vottero (1998); the epigrams, Prato (1964); and the Seneca–Paul correspondence, Bocciolini Palagi (1978a). For Dio, Tacitus, and Suetonius I have used the following: Boissevain, U. P., ed. Cassii Dionis Cocceiani Historiarum Romanarum quae supersunt. 5 vols. Berlin, 1895–1931. Heubner, H., ed. P. Cornelius Tacitus: Ab excessu divi Augusti. 2nd ed. Stuttgart, 1994. Ihm, M., ed. C. Suetoni Tranquilli Opera: De vita Caesarum. Vol. 1. Stuttgart, 1908.

Below I list the editions used for postclassical works: Alger, William R. The Friendships of Women. Boston, 1868. Altamura, Antonio, ed. Francesco Petrarca, De vita solitaria. Naples, 1943. Appel, Carl, ed. Die Triumphe Francesco Petrarcas. Halle, 1901. Artaud, Antonin. Oeuvres complètes. Vol. 3. Paris, 1978. Atkinson, David William, ed. The English Ars Moriendi. New York, 1992. Battles, Ford Lewis, and André Malan Hugo, eds. Calvin’s Commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia. Leiden, 1969. Bergin, Thomas G., and Alice S. Wilson, eds. Petrarch’s Africa. New Haven, 1977. Brown, Virginia, ed. and trans. Giovanni Boccaccio: Famous Women. Cambridge, Mass., 2001. Cawley, A. C., ed. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales. London, 1975. Curtis, Alan. Claudio Monteverdi: L’incoronazione di Poppea. London, 1989.

362

editions of primary texts

De Petris, Alfonso, ed. Giannozzo Manetti, Vita Socratis et Senecae. Florence, 1979. Diderot, Denis. Essai sur la vie de Séneque le philosophe, sur ses écrits, et sur les regnes de Claude et de Néron. 2 vols. Paris, 1782. Dyer, D. G., ed. and trans. Jacob Bidermann, Cenodoxus. Austin, 1974. Erasmus, Desiderius. L. Annei Senecae opera, et ad dicendi facultatem et ad bene vivendum utilissima. Brussels, 1529. Faider, Paul, ed. “Paulus Pompilius, Vita Senecae.” In Faider 1921: 269–323. Gallegos, Mañuel de. “Silva topográfica.” In Obras varias al real palacio del Buen Retiro, 6–7. Madrid, 1637. Grünbein, Durs. “Seneca-Studien.” In Seneca, Thyestes, 165–76. Frankfurt, 2002. ——— . An Seneca: Postskriptum. Published with Seneca, Die Kürze des Lebens, trans. Gerhard Fink. Frankfurt, 2004. Hacks, Peter. “Senecas Tod.” In Ausgewählte Dramen 3, 231–97. Berlin, 1981. Helm, Rudolf, ed. Eusebius, Werke, Vol. 7. Die Chronik des Hieronymus / Hieronymi Chronicon. Berlin, 1984. Hersey, John. The Conspiracy: A Novel. New York, 1972. Hicks, Éric, and Thérèse Moreau, eds. Christine de Pizan, Le livre de la cité des dammes. Paris, 1986. Hiebel, Friedrich. Seneca. Dramatische Dichtung um Paulus in Neros Rom. Stuttgart, 1974. Hofmeister, A., ed. Ottonis episcopi Frisingensis Chronica sive Historia de duabus civitatibus. 2nd ed. Leipzig, 1912. La Mettrie, Julien Offray de. Anti-Sénèque, ou Discours sur le bonheur. In Oeuvres philosophiques. Paris, 1796. Langlois, Ernest, ed. Le roman de la Rose. Paris, 1920. Lavater, Jean Gaspard. Essai sur la physiognomie, destiné à faire connoître l’homme & à le faire aimer. 4 vols. La Haye, 1781–1803. Lee, Nathaniel. Nero, Emperor of Rome: A Tragedy, As It Is Acted at the Theatres. London, 1735. Lipsius, Justus. Epistolarum selectarum iii centuriae. Antwerp, 1601. ——— , ed. C. Cornelii Taciti opera quae exstant. 5th ed. Leiden, 1600. ——— , ed. L. Annaei Senecae philosophi opera, quae exstant omnia, a Iusto Lipsio emendata, et scholiis illustrata. Antwerp, 1605. ——— , ed. L. Annaei Senecae philosophi opera, quae exstant omnia, a Iusto Lipsio emendata, et scholiis illustrata. Antwerp, 1615. Madeleine, Jacques, ed. Tristan, La mort de Sénèque, Tragédie. Paris, 1984. Maggioni, Giovanni Paolo, ed. Iacopo da Varazze: Legenda aurea. 2 vols. Florence, 1998. Malherbe, Abraham J., ed. The Cynic Epistles: A Study Edition. Missoula, Mont., 1977. Marigo, Aristides, ed. Henrici Septimellensis Elegia sive De miseria. Padua, 1926. Martellotti, Guido. Francesco Petrarca, De viris illustribus. [Originally published 1926.] Vol. 1, Florence, 1964. Mastandrea, Paolo, ed. [Walter of St. Victor, De blanda et ideo mortifera Senecae doctrina.] In Mastandrea 1988: 79–83. McDonnell, Sharon, ed. The Tragedy of Nero. Retrieved October 28, 2008, from http:// extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/iemls/renplays/ctneroindex.html McKerrow, Ronald B., ed. Works of Thomas Nashe. 5 vols. London, 1910.

editions of primary texts

363

Montaigne, Michel de. Essais. 3 vols. [Flammarion edition] Paris, 1969. Müller, Heiner. Die Gedichte. Frankfurt, 1998. Panizza, Lutezia, ed. “Giovanni Barzizza, Vita Senecae.” In Panizza 1977: App. II. Prior, Matthew. Poems on Several Occasions. Dublin, 1719. Riese, Alexander, ed. Anthologia Latina. Vol. 1.2. Leipzig, 1906. Rilla, Paul, ed. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Gesammelte Werke. 10 vols. Berlin, 1954–58. Rossi, Vittorio, ed. Francesco Petrarca, Le familiari. 4 vols. Florence, 1926. Russell, D. A., and N. G. Wilson, eds. Menander Rhetor. Oxford, 1981. Salvini, A. M., ed. Il comento di Giovanni Boccacci sopra La commedia. 2 vols. Florence, 1863. Sauer, August, ed. Ewald von Kleists Werke. 3 vols. Berlin, 1881–82. Schönegg, Beat. Der Tod des Seneca: Roman. Stuttgart, 2001. Schoonhoven, Henk, ed. Consolatio ad Liviam: The Pseudo-Ovidian Ad Liviam de morte Drusi. Groningen, 1992. Sienkiewicz, Henryk. Quo Vadis [Originally published 1896]. Trans. W. S. Kuniczak. New York, 1997. Sutton, Dana F., ed. Matthew Gwinne, Nero [Hypertext edition]. Retrieved October 28, 2008, from http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/Nero/ Szarota, Elida Maria. Das Jesuitendrama im deutschen Sprachgebiet: Eine PeriochenEdition. 4 vols. Munich, 1979–87. Ullman, B. L. Sicconis Polentoni Scriptorum illustrium Latinae linguae libri xviii. Rome, 1928. Wangerin, Walter, Jr. Paul: A Novel. Grand Rapids, 2000. Weber, Carl, ed. A Heiner Müller Reader. Baltimore, 2001.

This page intentionally left blank

Bibliography

abbreviations of journal titles AA AJAH AJPh ANRW CA CJ CPh CQ CW G&R HSCPh JRS MD REL SIFC TAPA

Antike und Abendland American Journal of Ancient History American Journal of Philology Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt Classical Antiquity Classical Journal Classical Philology Classical Quarterly Classical World Greece & Rome Harvard Studies in Classical Philology Journal of Roman Studies Materiali e discussioni Révue des études latines Studi italiani di filologia classica Transactions of the American Philological Association

Abel, Karlhans. Bauformen in Senecas Dialogen: Fünf Strukturanalysen; Dial. 6, 11, 12, 1 und 2. Heidelberg, 1967. ——— . “Das Problem der Faktizität der senecanischen Korrespondenz.” Hermes 109 (1981): 472–99. ——— . “Seneca. Leben und Leistung.” ANRW ii.32.2 (1985): 653–775. ——— . “Die taciteische Seneca-Rezeption.” ANRW ii.33.4 (1991): 3155–81.

366

bibliography

Abulafia, David. “The Diffusion of the Italian Renaissance: Southern Italy and Beyond.” In Palgrave Advances in Renaissance Historiography, ed. Jonathan Woolfson, 27–51. New York, 2005. Albanese, Gabriella. “La Vita Senecae.” In De Robertis and Resta 2004: 47–54. Albrecht, Michael von. Masters of Roman Prose from Cato to Apuleius. Trans. Neil Adkin. Leeds, 1989. ——— . Wort und Wandlung. Senecas Lebenskunst. Leiden, 2004. Alexander, W. H. “The Tacitean ‘Non Liquet’ on Seneca.” University of California Publications in Classical Antiquity 14 (1952): 265–386. Allegri, Giuseppina. “Note alla Lettera 87 di Seneca.” In Quattro studi latini, 9–35. Parma, 1981. ——— . Progresso verso la virtus. Il programma della Lettera 87 di Seneca. Cesena, 2004. Amat, Jacqueline. “Trimalchion et Sénèque.” In Au miroir de la culture antique: Mélanges offerts au Président René Marache, 11–30. Rennes, 1992. André, J.-M. “Otium et vie contemplative dans les Lettres à Lucilius.” REL 40 (1974): 125–28. ——— . “Diderot, lecteur de Sénèque.” In Chevallier and Poignault 1991: 7–30. ——— . “Sénèque et la topographie de Rome.” In Croiselle and Perrin 2002: 170–77. Aricò, Giuseppe. “La morale della fabula. Su alcuni problemi del teatro di Seneca.” In Fedeli 2001: 87–113. Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death. Trans. H. Weaver. Oxford, 1981. Armisen-Marchetti, Mireille. “Imagination et méditation chez Sénèque: L’exemple de la praemeditatio.” REL 64 (1986): 185–95. ——— . Sapientiae facies. Étude sur les images de Sénèque. Paris, 1989. ——— . “Pour une lecture plurielle des tragédies de Sénèque: L’exemple de Phèdre, v.130–135.” Pallas 38 (1992): 379–90. ——— . “Sénèque et l’appropriation du temps.” Latomus 54 (1995): 545–67. Ash, Rhiannon. “ ‘Aliud est enim epistulam, aliud historiam . . . scribere’ (Epistles 6.16.22): Pliny the Historian?” Arethusa 36 (2003): 211–25. Asmis, Elizabeth. “The Stoics on Women.” In Feminism and Ancient Philosophy, ed. Julie K. Ward, 68–92. New York, 1996. Assmann, Jan. Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt. Trans. David Lorton. Ithaca, 2005. Aygon, J.-P. Pictor in fabula. L’ecphrasis-descriptio dans les tragédies de Sénèque. Collections Latomus no. 280. Brussels, 2004. Baier, Thomas, Gesine Manuwald, and Bernhard Zimmermann, eds. Seneca: Philosophus et magister. Freiburg, 2005. Baiter, J. G., and C. L. Kayser, eds. M. Tullii Ciceronis opera quae supersunt omnia. 11 vols. Vol. 11. Leipzig, 1860–69. Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, 1981. Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 2nd ed. Toronto, 1997. Balasa, Paula. “Sénèque et la femme de la dynastie julio-claudienne.” In Croiselle and Perrin 2002: 375–83.

bibliography

367

Barner, Wilfried. Produktive Rezeption. Lessing und die Tragödien Senecas. Munich, 1973. Bartalucci, Aldo. “Il ‘Probus’ di Giorgio Valla e il ‘Commentum vetustum’ a Giovenale.” SIFC 45 (1973): 233–57. Barthes, Roland. “Tacitus and the Funerary Baroque.” In Critical Essays. Trans. Richard Howard. [Originally published 1959.] Evanston, Ill., 1972. Bartsch, Shadi. The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire. Chicago, 2006. Bastomsky, S. J. “Tacitus, Annals, XIV, 53, 2. The Pathos of the Tacitean Seneca’s Request to Nero.” Latomus 31 (1972): 174–78. Beard, Mary. “Ciceronian Correspondences: Making a Book out of Letters.” In Classics in Progress: Essays on Ancient Greece and Rome, ed. T. P. Wiseman, 103–44. Oxford, 2002. Beard, Mary, and John Henderson. Classical Art from Greece to Rome. Oxford, 2001. Beauvais, Lydia. Inventaire général des dessins, École française. Charles Le Brun 1619– 1690. 2 vols. Paris, 2000. Bedon, Robert. “Sénèque, ad Lucilium 91: L’incendie de 64 à Lyon: exploitation littéraire et realité.” In Chevallier and Poignault 1991: 45–61. Bell, David F. “Death, Ambiguity, and Diderot’s Seneca.” Stanford French Review 3 (1979): 369–81. Bellincioni, Maria. Educazione alla sapientia in Seneca. Brescia, 1978. Beloch, Julius. Campanien. Geschichte und Topographie des antiken Neapel und seiner Umgebung. Breslau, 1890. Bérard, S. “Sénèque dans Le couronnement de Poppée de Monteverdi.” In Chevallier and Poignault 1991: 63–80. Bergdolt, Klaus. “Nero, Seneca und die medizinische Ethik.” In Pervertere: Ästhetik der Verkehrung. Literatur und Kultur der neronischer Zeit und ihre Rezeption, ed. Luigi Castagna and Gregor Vogt-Spira, 269–88. Leipzig, 2002. Bernardo, Aldo S. Petrarch, Scipio, and the “Africa”: The Birth of Humanism’s Dream. Westport, Conn., 1962. Berno, Francesca Romana. Lo specchio, il vizio e la virtù. Studio sulle Naturales quaestiones di Seneca. Bologna, 2003. ——— . L. Anneo Seneca. Lettere a Lucilio, Libro VI: Le Lettere 53–57. Bologna, 2006. Berthet, Jean-François. “Sénèque lecteur d’Horace d’après les Lettres à Lucilius.” Latomus 38 (1979): 940–54. Bertini Malgarini, Alessandra. “Seneca e il tempo nel ‘De brevitate vitae’ e nelle ‘Epistulae ad Lucilium’.” Annali dell’istituto italiano per gli studi storici (1983–84): 75–92. Bertrand-Dagenbach, Cécile. “La mort de Pétrone et l’art de Tacite.” Latomus 51 (1992): 601–5. Bickel, Ernst. “Seneca und Seneca-Mythus.” Das Altertum 5 (1959): 90–100. Billanovich, Giuseppe. Petrarca letterato. Lo scrittoio del Petrarca. Vol. 1. Rome, 1947. Billerbeck, Margarethe, and Ernst A. Schmidt, eds. Sénèque le tragique. Entrétiens Hardt no. 50. Geneva, 2004. Billot, Frances. “Tacitus Responds: Annals 14 and the Octavia.” In M. Wilson 2003: 126–41. Binns, J. W. “Seneca and Neo-Latin Tragedy in England.” In Costa 1974: 205–34.

368

bibliography

Biondi, Giuseppe Gilberto. “Il filosofo e il poeta. Seneca contro Seneca? (Con una postilla sul monologo di Amleto e il De providentia).” In Fedeli 2001: 17–34. Blake, M. E. Roman Construction in Italy from Tiberius through the Flavians. Washington, D. C. 1959. Blänsdorf, J. “L’interpretation psychologique de l’autarkeia stoïcienne chez Sénèque.” In Chevallier and Poignault 1991: 81–96. Blänsdorf, J., and E. Breckel. Das Paradoxon der Zeit: Zeitbesitz und Zeitverlust in Senecas Epistulae morales und De brevitate vitae. Freiburg, 1983. Bloomer, W. Martin. Valerius Maximus and the Rhetoric of the New Nobility. Chapel Hill, 1992. ——— . “Schooling in Persona: Imagination and Subordination in Roman Education.” CA 16 (1997): 57–78 Blüher, Karl. Seneca in Spanien: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Seneca-Rezeption in Spanien vom 13.–17. Jahrhundert. Munich, 1969. Blunt, Anthony. Poussin. London, 1995. Boccardo, Piero. Genova e Guercino: Dipinti e disegni delle civiche collezioni. Genova, 1992. Boccazzi, Franca Zava. Pittoni. L’opera completa. Venice, 1979. Bocciolini Palagi, Laura. Il carteggio apocrifo di Seneca e San Paolo. Florence, 1978a. ——— . “Genesi e sviluppo della questione dei due Seneca nella tarda latinità.” SIFC 50 (1978b): 215–31. ——— . “La polemica antigiudaica di Seneca: Temi e problemi.” In Cultura e ideologia da Cicerone a Seneca, ed. Alessandro Ronconi et al., 149–75. Florence, 1981. ——— . Epistolario apocrifo di Seneca e San Paolo. Florence, 1985. Bodel, John. “Monumental Villas and Villa Monuments.” Journal of Roman Archaeology 10 (1997): 5–35. ——— . “Death on Display: Looking at Roman Funerals.” In The Art of Ancient Spectacle, ed. Bettina Bergmann and Christine Kondoleon, 259–81. New Haven, 1999. Boeckler, Albert. Das Stuttgarter Passionale. Augsburg, 1923. Boureau, Alain. La légende dorée. Le système narratif de Jacques de Voragine. Paris, 1984. Bourgery, A. “Le mariage de Sénèque.” REL 14 (1936): 90–94. Bowersock, G. W. Martyrdom and Rome. Cambridge, 1995. Boyle, A. J. Seneca’s Troades. Leeds, 1994. ——— . Tragic Seneca: An Essay in the Theatrical Tradition. New York, 1997. ——— . An Introduction to Roman Tragedy. New York, 2006. ——— . Octavia, Attributed to Seneca. Oxford, 2008. Braden, Gordon. Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition. New Haven, 1985. Bradley, K. R. “Seneca and Slavery.” [Originally published 1986.] In Fitch 2008: 335–47. Braund, Susanna Morton. Seneca: De Clementia. Oxford, 2008. Braund, Susanna Morton, and Christopher Gill, eds. The Passions in Roman Thought. Cambridge, 1997. Brilliant, Richard. Portraiture. Cambridge, Mass., 1991. Brown, Ron M. The Art of Suicide. London, 2001. Browne, Gerald M. “Withdrawal from Lease.” Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 5 (1968): 17–24.

bibliography

369

Bruggisser, Philippe. “Ultima necessitas. Tacite e la mort de Sénèque: La formule qui tue.” Mnemosyne 57 (2004): 489–91. Brunt, P. A. “Stoicism and the Principate.” Papers of the British School at Rome 43 (1975): 7–35. Buonocore, Marco, ed. Vedere i classici. L’illustrazione libraria dei testi antichi all’età romana al tardo medioevo. Rome, 1996. Butler, Shane. The Hand of Cicero. New York, 2002. Butrica, J. L. “Clodius the Pulcher in Catullus and Cicero.” CQ 52 (2002): 507–16. Calboli, Gualtiero. “Il giudizio di Quintiliano su Seneca.” In Dionigi 1999: 19–57. Cancik, Hildegard. Untersuchungen zu Senecas Epistulae morales. Hildesheim, 1967. Canfora, Luciano. “Seneca e il principe.” In Niutta and Santucci 1999: 11–13. Chambert, Régine. “Voyage et santé dans les Lettres de Sénèque.” Bulletin de l’association Guillaume Budé 61 (2002): 63–82. Champlin, Edward. “The Suburbium of Rome.” AJAH 7 (1982): 97–117. ——— . Nero. Cambridge, Mass., 2003. Chaplin, Jane D. Livy’s Exemplary History. Oxford, 2000. Chevallier, R. “La mort de Sénèque: Du texte à l’image.” In Chevallier and Poignault 1991: 97–107. Chevallier, R., and R. Poignault, eds. Présence de Sénèque. Paris, 1991. Chitwood, Ava. Death by Philosophy. Ann Arbor, 2004. Citroni Marchetti, Sandra. “L’assenza degli amici e l’otium nelle ville (Cicerone, Fam. 7.1; Seneca, Epist. 55).” Athenaeum 94 (2006): 385–414. Citti, Francesco, and Camillo Neri. Seneca nel novecento. Sondaggi sulla fortuna di un “classico.” Bologna, 2001. Claassen, Jo-Marie. Displaced Persons: The Literature of Exile from Cicero to Boethius. Madison, Wisc., 1999. Coccia, Michele. “La sopravvivenza del nome Seneca nella lingua e nei dialetti italiani.” In Parroni 2000: 111–21. Coffey, Michael and Roland Mayer. Seneca, Phaedra. Cambridge, 1990. Coggiola Pittoni, Laura. “Opere inedite di Giambattista Pittoni.” Dedalo 8 (1928): 671–95. Coleman, Kathleen. “Fatal Charades: Roman Executions Staged as Mythological Enactments.” JRS 80 (1990): 44–73. ——— . “Latin Literature after AD 96. Change or Continuity?” AJAH 15 (1999): 19–39. Coleman, Robert. “The Artful Moralist: A Study of Seneca’s Epistolary Style.” CQ 24 (1974): 276–89. Connors, Catherine. “Famous Last Words: Authorship and Death in the Satyricon and Neronian Rome.” In Elsner and Masters 1994: 225–35. Conroy, William Thomas, Jr. “Diderot’s Essai sur Sénèque.” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century. Vol. 131. Bambury, Oxfordshire, 1975. Cooper, John M. “Greek Philosophers on Euthanasia and Suicide.” In Reason and Emotion. Essays on Ancient Moral Psychology and Ethical Theory, 515–41. Princeton, 1999. Corbier, Mireille. “Male Power and Legitimacy through Women: The Domus Augusta under the Julio-Claudians.” In Women in Antiquity: New Assessments, ed. Richard Hawley and Barbara Levick, 178–93. New York, 1995. Cosenza, Mario Emilio. Petrarch’s Letters to Classical Authors. Chicago, 1910.

370

bibliography

Costa, C. D. N., ed. Seneca. London, 1974. Courtney, Edward. A Companion to Petronius. Oxford, 2001. Croiselle, Jean-Michel, and Yves Perrin, eds. Neronia VI. Rome à l’époque néronienne. Brussels, 2002. Crook, J. A. Law and Life of Rome, 90 B.C.–A.D. 212. Ithaca, 1967. Cugusi, Paolo. Evoluzione e forme dell’epistolografia latina nella tarda repubblica e nei primi due secoli dell’impero. Rome, 1983. Cunnally, John. “Nero, Seneca, and the Medallist of the Roman Emperors.” Art Bulletin 68 (1986): 314–17. Currie, H. MacL. “The Younger Seneca’s Style: Some Observations.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 13 (1968): 76–87. ——— . “An Obituary Formula in the Historians (with a Platonic Connection?).” Latomus 48 (1989): 346–53. D’Anna, Giovanni. “Seneca uomo politico nel giudizio di Tacito.” In De Vivo and Lo Cascio 2003: 193–210. D’Arms, John. Romans on the Bay of Naples: A Social and Cultural Study of the Villas and Their Owners from 150 B.C. to A.D. 400. Cambridge, Mass., 1970. De Filippis Cappai, Chiara. Imago mortis. L’uomo romano e la morte. Naples, 1997. Degl’Innocenti Pierini, Rita. Tra Ovidio e Seneca. Bologna, 1990. ——— . “Venit ad pigros cana senectus (Sen. Herc. F. 198). Un motivo dei cori senecani tra filosofia ed attualità.” In Nove studi sui cori tragici di Seneca, ed. Luigi Castagna, 37–56. Milan, 1996. ——— . Tra filosofia e poesia. Studi su Seneca a dintorni. Bologna, 1999. ——— . “Cicerone nella prima età imperiale: Luci ed ombre su un martire della repubblica.” In Aspetti della fortuna di Cicerone nella cultura latina, ed. Emanuele Narducci, 3–54. Florence, 2003a. ——— . “ ‘Ritratto di famiglia.’ Seneca e i suoi nella Consolatio ad Helviam.” In Gualandri and Mazzoli 2003: 339–56. [= Degl’Innocenti Pierini 2003b.] Delatte, A. “Le cas de Pacuvius (Sénèque, Lettres à Lucilius XII,8).” Bulletin de la classe des lettres et des sciences morales et politiques, Académie royale de Belgique 36 (1950): 95–119. Delatte, Louis. “Lucilius, l’ami de Sénèque.” Les études classiques 4 (1935): 367–85, 546–90. Delpeyroux, Marie-Françoise. “Temps, philosophie et amitié dans les Lettres à Lucilius.” Epistulae antiquae 2 (2002): 203–21. Deproost, P.-A. “Le martyre chez Prudence: Sagesse et tragédie.” Philologus 143 (1999): 161–80. De Robertis, Teresa, and Gianvito Resta, eds. Seneca: Una vicenda testuale. Florence, 2004. Devallet, Georges. “Sénèque et la vieillesse: Realia et animalia devant la fuite du temps (Lettres à Lucilius, I 12).” In Ancienneté chez les anciens, 511–17, 2003. De Vivo, Arturo, and Elio Lo Cascio, eds. Seneca uomo politico e l’età di Claudio e Nerone. Bari, 2003. Dillon, John M. “Medea among the Philosophers.” In Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy, and Art, ed. James J. Clauss and Sarah Iles Johnson, 211–18. Princeton, 1997. DiMarco, Vincent. “Nero’s Nets and Seneca’s Veins: A New Source for the Monk’s Tale?” The Chaucer Review 28 (1994): 384–92.

bibliography

371

Dingel, Joachim. Seneca und die Dichtung. Heidelberg, 1974. ——— . Senecas Epigramme und andere Gedichte aus der Anthologia Latina. Heidelberg, 2007. Dionigi, Ivano. “Il ‘Carpe diem’ di uno Stoico.” In Protinus vive: Colloquio sul De brevitate vitae di Seneca, 15–26. Bologna, 1995. ——— , ed. Seneca nella coscienza dell’Europa. Milan, 1999. Dollimore, Jonathan. Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture. New York, 1998. Dominik, William J. “The Style Is the Man: Seneca, Tacitus and Quintilian’s Canon.” In Roman Eloquence: Rhetoric and Society in Literature, ed. William J. Dominik, 50–68. London, 1997. Donaldson, Malcolm Drew. A Translation of Jerome’s Chronicon with Historical Commentary. Lewiston, 1996. Döring, Klaus. Exemplum Socratis. Wiesbaden, 1979. Dunn, Francis. “A Prose Hexameter in Seneca?” AJPh 110 (1989): 488–91. Dupont, Florence. Les monstres de Sénèque. Pour une dramaturgie de la tragédie romaine. Paris, 1995. ——— . “Recitatio and the Reorganization of the Space of Public Discourse.” In The Roman Cultural Revolution, eds. Thomas Habinek and Alessandro Schiesaro, 44–59. Cambridge, 1997. Dürr, Karl. “Seneca bei Tacitus.” Gymnasium 51 (1940): 42–61. Dyck, Andrew R. A Commentary on Cicero, De Officiis. Ann Arbor, 1996. Dyson, Stephen L. “The Portrait of Seneca in Tacitus.” Arethusa 3 (1970): 71–84. Eden, P. T. Seneca, Apocolocyntosis. Cambridge, 1984. Edwards, Catharine. The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome. Cambridge, 1993. ——— . “Self-Scrutiny and Self-Transformation in Seneca’s Letters.” G&R 44 (1997): 23–38. ——— . “The Suffering Body: Philosophy and Pain in Seneca’s Letters.” In Constructions of the Classical Body, ed. James I. Porter, 252–68. Ann Arbor, 1998. ——— . “Acting and Self-Actualisation in Imperial Rome.” In Greek and Roman Actors: Aspects of an Ancient Profession, ed. Pat Easterling and Edith Hall, 377–94. Cambridge, 2002. ——— . “Archetypally Roman? Representing Seneca’s Ageing Body.” In Roman Bodies: Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century, ed. M. Wyke and A. Hopkins, 13–22. Cambridge, 2005. ——— . Death in Ancient Rome. New Haven, 2007. Eliot, T. S. “Seneca in Elizabethan Translation.” In Selected Essays, 51–88. [Originally published 1927.] New York, 1932. Elkins, James. Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis. Stanford, 1999. Elsner, Jas, and Jamie Masters, eds. Reflections of Nero: Culture, History, and Representation. Chapel Hill, 1994. Erasmo, Mario. Roman Tragedy: Theatre to Theatricality. Austin, 2004. ——— . Reading Death in Ancient Rome. Columbus, Ohio, 2008. Fabbri, Paolo. Monteverdi. Trans. Tim Carter. Cambridge, 1994. Fabbri, Renata. “La pagina ‘senecana’ di Tacito.” Atti dell’istituto Veneto di scienze, lettere, ed arti 137 (1978–79): 409–27. Fagan, Garrett. G. Bathing in Public in the Roman World. Ann Arbor, 1999. Faider, Paul. Études sur Sénèque. Gand, 1921.

372

bibliography

Fantham, Elaine. Seneca’s Troades: A Literary Introduction with Text, Translation, and Commentary. Princeton, 1982. Fedeli, Paolo, ed. Scienza, cultura, morale in Seneca. Bari, 2001. Feeney, Denis. Caesar’s Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History. Berkeley, 2007. Ferrari, Oreste, and Giuseppe Scavizzi. Luca Giordano. L’opera completa. Naples, 1992. ——— . Luca Giordano: nuove ricerche e inediti. Naples, 2003. Ferri, Rolando. “Octavia’s Heroines: Tacitus Annales 14.63–64 and the praetexta Octavia.” HSCPh 98 (1998): 339–56. ——— . Octavia: A Play Attributed to Seneca. Cambridge, 2003a. ——— . “Octavia and the Roman Dramatic Tradition.” In M. Wilson 2003: 89–111. [= Ferri 2003b.] Ferrill, Arther. “Seneca’s Exile and the Ad Helviam: A Reinterpretation.” CPh 61 (1966): 253–57. Ficca, Flaviana. “Seneca e il concetto di ‘mors opportuna.’ ” Bolletino di studi latini 29 (1999): 103–18. ——— . Remedia doloris. La parola come terapia nelle “Consolazioni” di Seneca. Naples, 2001. Fitch, John G. “Playing Seneca.” In G. W. M. Harrison 2000: 1–12. ——— . Seneca, Tragedies. 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass. 2002–4. ——— , ed. Seneca. Oxford, 2008. Fitch, John G., and Siobhan McElduff. “Construction of the Self in Seneca Drama.” Mnemosyne 55 (2002): 18–40. Flammini, Giuseppe. “L’Epitaphium Senecae (667 R) nella tradizione del genere epigrammatica.” Giornale italiano di filologia 52 (2000): 101–12. Fleming, John V. The Roman de la Rose: A Study in Allegory and Iconography. Princeton, 1969. Flemming, Rebecca. “Suicide, Euthanasia and Medicine: Reflections Ancient and Modern.” Economy and Society 34 (2005): 295–321. Flower, Harriet. Ancestor Masks and Aristocratic Power in Roman Culture. Oxford, 1996. Fohlen, Jeannine. “Biographies de Sénèque et commentaires des Epistulae morales (Ve–Xve s.).” Italia medioevale e umanistica 43 (2002): 1–90. Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, 113–38. Ithaca, 1977. ——— . The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1981–82. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York, 2005. Frank, Marica. Seneca’s Phoenissae: Introduction and Commentary. Leiden, 1994. Fraschetti, Augusto. “Indice analitico della Consolatio ad Liviam.” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome 108 (1996): 191–239. Frenzel, Elisabeth. Stoffe der Weltliteratur. Ein Lexikon dichtungsgeschichtlicher Längsschnitte. Stuttgart, 1992. Friedrich, Hugo. Montaigne. Trans. Dawn Eng. [Originally published 1949.] Berkeley, 1991. Frier, Bruce W. Libri Annales Pontificum Maximorum: The Origins of the Annalistic Tradition. Ann Arbor, 1979. Furneaux, Henry, ed. The Annals of Tacitus. Oxford, 1891.

bibliography

373

Gagliardi, Donato. “Seneca e Virgilio (Ancora a proposito di Ep. 86,15).” In Scritti in onore di Salvatore Pugliatti, 313–15. Milan, 1978. ——— . Il tempo in Seneca filosofo. Naples, 1998. Gagliardi, Paola. “Lingua e stile nell’epistola 12 di Seneca.” Vichiana 17 (1988): 163–73. Galán Vioque, Guillermo. Martial, Book VII: A Commentary. Leiden, 2002. Garbarino, Giovanna. “Il tempo in Seneca.” Quaderni del dipartimento di lingue e letterature neolatine, Bergamo, Istituto universitario 2 (1987): 9–19. ——— . “Secum peregrinari: il tema del viaggio in Seneca.” In De tuo tibi, omaggio degli allievi a Italo Lana, 263–85. Bologna, 1996. Gay, Peter. The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. New York, 1967. Gercke, Alfred. Seneca-Studien. Jahrbuch für classische Philologie, suppl. 22. Leipzig, 1895. Gernet, Louis. “The Concept of Time in the Earliest Forms of Law.” In The Anthropology of Greece, eds. John Hamilton, S. J. and Blaise Nagy, 216–39. [Originally published 1968.] Baltimore, 1981. Giancotti, Francesco. “Seneca amante d’Agrippina?” Parola del passato 28 (1953): 53–62. ——— . Cronologia dei “Dialoghi” di Seneca. Turin, 1957. ——— . “Seneca personaggio dell’‘Octavia.’ ” Orpheus n.s. 4 (1983): 215–52. Giardina, Andrea. “Storie riflesse: Claudio e Seneca.” In Parroni 2000: 59–90. Gigante, Marcello. “Seneca tragico da Pompeio all’Egitto.” SIFC 19 (2001): 89–104. Gill, Christopher. “The Death of Socrates.” CQ 23 (1973): 25–28. ——— . The Structured Self in Hellenistic and Roman Thought. Oxford, 2006. Ginsburg, Judith. Tradition and Theme in the Annals of Tacitus. New York, 1981. Gnilka, Christian. “Ultima verba.” Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 22 (1979): 5–21. Goar, Robert J. The Legend of Cato Uticensis from the First Century B.C. to the Fifth Century A.D. with an Appendix on Dante and Cato. Collection Latomus no. 197. Brussels, 1987. Goldberg, Sander M. “Melpomene’s Declamation (Rhetoric and Tragedy).” In Roman Eloquence: Rhetoric in Society and Literature, ed. W. J. Dominik, 166–81. New York, 1997. ——— . “Going for Baroque: Seneca and the English.” In G. W. M. Harrison 2000: 209–32. [= Goldberg 2000a.] ——— . “Cicero and the Work of Tragedy.” In Identität und Alterität in der frührömischen Tragödie, ed. Gesine Manuwald, 49–59. Wurzburg, 2000b. ——— . “Authorizing Octavia.” In M. Wilson 2003: 13–36. Goldschmidt, Victor. Le système stoïcien et l’idée de temps. Paris, 1969. Görler, Woldemar. “Carpere, capere, rapere. Lexicalisches und philosophisches zum Lob der Gegenwart bei lateinischen Dichtern.” In Römische Lebenskunst, ed. Géza Alföldy, 47–56. Heidelberg, 1995. ——— . “Seneca über Glück und Vollendung.” Museum Helveticum 53 (1996): 160–69. Gourévitch, Danielle. Le triangle hippocratique dans le monde gréco-romain. Le malade, sa maladie et son médicin. Rome, 1984. Gowing, Alain. Empire and Memory: The Representation of the Roman Republic in Imperial Culture. Cambridge, 2005.

374

bibliography

Graf, A. Roma nella memoria e nell’immaginazione del medio evo. [Originally published 1882.] Turin, 1923. Grafton, Anthony. Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers. Ann Arbor, 1997. ——— . Bring Out Your Dead: The Past as Revelation. Cambridge, Mass., 2001. Grant, Mark. “Humor in Seneca’s ‘Letters to Lucilius.’ ” Ancient Society 30 (2000): 319–29. Graver, Margaret. “Therapeutic Reading and Seneca’s Moral Epistles.” Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1996. ——— . “The Manhandling of Maecenas: Senecan Abstractions of Masculinity.” AJPh 119 (1998): 607–32. ——— . Cicero on the Emotions: Tusculan Disputations 3 and 4. Chicago, 2002. Griffin, Miriam T. “Imago Vitae Suae.” In Costa 1974: 1–38. ——— . “Philosophy, Cato, and Roman Suicide: I,” “Philosophy, Cato, and Roman Suicide: II.” G&R 33 (1986): 64–77, 192–202. ——— . “Philosophy, Politics, and Politicians at Rome.” In Philosophia Togata, eds. Jonathan Barnes and Miriam Griffin, 1–37. Oxford, 1989. ——— . Seneca: A Philosopher in Politics. 2nd ed. [1st ed. 1976.] Oxford, 1992. Grilli, A. “Su Montaigne e Seneca.” In Seneca. Letture critiche, ed. A. Traina, 127–36. Milan, 1976. Grimal, Pierre. “Place et rôle du temps dans la philosophie de Sénèque.” Revue des études anciennes 70 (1968): 92–109. ——— . “Le vocabulaire de l’intériorité dans l’oeuvre philosophique de Sénèque.” In La langue Latine, langue de la philosophie, ed. Pierre Grimal, 141–59. Paris, 1992. ——— , ed. Sénèque et la prose latine: neuf exposés suivis de discussions. Entrétiens Hardt no. 36. Geneva, 1991. Grisé, Yolande. Le suicide dans la Rome antique. Paris, 1982. Grollios, Constantine. Seneca’s Ad Marciam: Tradition and Originality. Athens, 1956. Gross, K. “Numquam minus otiosus, quam cum otiosus. Das Weiterleben eines antiken Sprichwortes im Abendland.” AA 26 (1980): 122–37. Gruber, Joachim. Kommentar zu Boethius De consolatione philosophiae. Berlin, 1978. Gualandri, Isabella, and Giancarlo Mazzoli, eds. Gli Annei. Una famiglia nella storia e nella cultura di Roma imperiale. Como, 2003. Guastella, Gianni. L’ira e l’onore. Forme della vendetta nel teatro senecano e nella sua tradizione. Palermo, 2001. Guillemin, A. “Sénèque, second fondateur de la prose latine.” REL 45 (1957): 265–84. Gummere, R. M. “Seneca the Philosopher in the Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance.” TAPA 41 (1910): xxxviii–xl. Gunderson, Erik. Declamation, Paternity, and Roman Identity: Authority and the Rhetorical Self. Cambridge, 2003. Habinek, Thomas N. “Seneca’s Circles: Ep. 12.6–9.” CA 1 (1982): 66–69. ——— . “An Aristocracy of Virtue.” In The Politics of Latin Literature: Writing, Identity, and Empire in Ancient Rome, 137–50. Princeton, 1998. ——— . “Seneca’s Renown.” CA 19 (2000): 264–303. ——— . The World of Roman Song: From Ritualized Speech to Social Order. Baltimore, 2005. Hachmann, Erwin. Die Führung des Lesers in Senecas Epistulae morales. Münster, 1995.

bibliography

375

Hadas, Moses. “The Roman Stamp of Seneca’s Tragedies.” AJPh 60 (1939): 220–31. Hadot, Isletraut. Seneca und die griechisch-römische Tradition der Seelenleitung. Berlin, 1969. ——— . “The Spiritual Guide.” In Classical Mediterranean Spirituality, ed. A. H. Armstrong, 436–55. London, 1986. Hadot, Pierre. Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Trans. Michael Chase. Oxford, 1995. Halton, Thomas P. Saint Jerome, On Illustrious Men. Washington, 1999. Hampton, Timothy. Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature. Ithaca, 1990. Hardwick, Lorna. Reception Studies. Oxford, 2003. Hardie, Philip R. “Closure in Latin Epic.” In Classical Closure, eds. Deborah H. Roberts et al., 139–62. Princeton, 1997. Harich, Henriette. “Zu Seneca, Ep. 104, Tacitus, Ann. XV, 60, 2–64 und Montaigne, Essay II, 35.” Latomus 53 (1994): 354–65. Harrison, George W. M., ed. Seneca in Performance. London, 2000. ——— . “Forms of Intertextuality in the Octavia.” In M. Wilson 2003: 112–25. Harrison, S. J. Apuleius: A Latin Sophist. Oxford, 2000. Haskell, Francis, and Nicholas Penny. Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900. New Haven, 1981. Haynes, Holly. The History of Make-Believe: Tacitus on Imperial Rome. Berkeley, 2003. Heckel, Waldemar, and John C. Yardley. “Roman Writers and the Indian Practice of Suttee.” Philologus 125 (1981): 305–11. Heller, Wendy. “Tacitus Incognito: Opera as History in L’incoronazione di Poppea.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 52 (1999): 39–96. Hemelrijk, Emily A. Matrona Docta: Educated Women in the Roman Elite from Cornelia to Julia Domna. New York, 1999. Henderson, John. Morals and Villas in Seneca’s Letters: Places to Dwell. Cambridge, 2004. ——— . “Journey of a Lifetime: Seneca, Epistle 57 in Book VI of EM.” In Volk and Williams 2006: 123–46. Henry, Denis, and B. Walker. “Tacitus and Seneca.” G&R 10 (1963): 98–110. Henry, Denis, and Elisabeth Henry. The Mask of Power: Seneca’s Tragedies and Imperial Rome. Wauconda, Ill., 1985. Herington, C. J. “Seneca Tragedy.” Arion 5 (1966): 422–71. Herrnstein-Smith, Barbara. Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End. Chicago, 1968. Hess, Günter. “Der Tod des Seneca. Ikonographie—Biographie—Tragödientheorie.” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 25 (1981): 196–228. Hexter, Ralph. “Literary History as a Provocation to Reception Studies.” In Classics and the Uses of Reception, ed. Charles Martindale, 23–31. Oxford, 2006. Hijmans, B. L. “Drama in Seneca’s Stoicism.” In TAPA 97 (1966): 237–51. Hill, Timothy D. Ambitiosa Mors: Suicide and the Self in Roman Thought and Literature. New York, 2004. Hill Hay, Camilla. Montaigne, lecteur et imitateur de Sénèque. Poitiers, 1938. Hind, J. G. F. “The Death of Agrippina and the Finale of the ‘Oedipus’ of Seneca.” Journal of the Australasian Universities Modern Language Association 23 (1966): 204–11.

376

bibliography

Hinds, Stephen. “Petrarch, Cicero, Virgil: Virtual Commentary in Familiares 24,4.” MD 52 (2004): 157–75. ——— . “Defamiliarizing Latin Literature, from Petrarch to Pulp Fiction.” TAPA 135 (2005): 49–81. ——— . “Seneca’s Ovidian Loci.” In Dramatic and Performance Space in Greek Tragedy and Seneca, ed. Michael Paschalis (forthcoming). Hine, Harry M. “Interpretatio Stoica of Senecan Tragedy.” In Billerbeck and Schmidt 2004: 173–220. ——— . “Poetic Influence on Prose: The Case of the Younger Seneca.” In Aspects of the Language of Latin Prose, ed. Tobias Reinhardt et al., 211–37. Oxford, 2005. Hoffman, Konrad. The Year 1200: A Centennial Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 2 vols. Vol. 1, 1970. Holzberg, Niklas. “Ovidius exul in Corsica: Il liber epigrammaton dello pseudo-Seneca.” In Fecunda licentia. Tradizione e innovazione in Ovidio elegiaco, ed. Roberto Gazich, 151–72. Brescia, 2002. Hönscheid, Christoph. Fomenta Campaniae. Ein Kommentar zu Senecas 51., 55. und 56. Brief. Munich, 2004. van Hooff, A. J. L. From Autothanasia to Suicide: Self-Killing in Classical Antiquity. New York, 1990. Hunter, G. K. “Seneca and English Tragedy.” In Costa 1974: 166–204. Hurka, Florian. “Seneca und die Didaktik des Lachens: Spiel und Ernst in der Briefgruppe Epist. 49–57.” In Baier, Manuwald, and Zimmermann 2005: 117–38. Hutcheon, Linda, and Michael Hutcheon. Opera: The Art of Dying. Cambridge, Mass., 2004. Hutchinson, G. O. Latin Literature from Seneca to Juvenal: A Critical Study. Oxford, 1993. ——— . Cicero’s Correspondence: A Literary Study. Oxford, 1998. Ingrosso, M. T. “Connotazioni politiche del linguaggio senecano (Dial. VIII).” Rudiae 1 (1988): 105–14. Inwood, Brad. “Hierocles: Theory and Argument in the Second Century AD.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 2 (1984): 151–83. ——— . Reading Seneca: Stoic Philosophy at Rome. Oxford, 2005. ——— . Seneca. Selected Philosophical Letters. Oxford, 2007a. ——— . “The Importance of Form in Seneca’s Philosophical Letters.” In Ancient Letters: Classical and Late Antique Epistolography, eds. Ruth Morello and A. D. Morrison, 133–48. Oxford, 2007b. Isnardi Parenti, Margherita. “Socrate e Catone in Seneca: Il filosofo e il politico.” In Parroni 2000: 215–25. Jaeger, Mary. Livy’s Written Rome. Ann Arbor, 1997. Johann, H. T. Trauer und Trost. Munich, 1968. Johnson, Dorothy. Jacques-Louis David: Art in Metamorphosis. Princeton, 1993. Judson, J. Richard. Gerrit van Honthurst: A Discussion of His Position in Dutch Art. The Hague, 1959. Judson, J. Richard, and Carl Van der Velde. Book Illustrations and Title Pages. 2 vols. London, 1978. Kamp, H. W. “Seneca’s Appearance.” CW 29 (1935): 49–51.

bibliography

377

Kassel, Rudolf. Undersuchungen zur griechischen und römischen Konsolationsliteratur. Munich, 1958. Kaster, Robert A. C. Suetonius Tranquillus, De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus. Oxford, 1995. ——— . “Becoming ‘Cicero’.” In Style and Tradition: Studies in Honor of Wendell Clausen, eds. Peter Knox and Clive Foss, 248–63. Stuttgart, 1998. Ker, James. “Solon’s Theôria and the End of the City,” Classical Antiquity 19 (2000): 304–329. ——— . “Nocturnal Letters: Roman Temporal Practices and Seneca’s Epistulae Morales.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2002. ——— . “Nocturnal Writers in Imperial Rome: The Culture of Lucubratio,” CPh 99 (2004): 209–42. ——— . “Seneca, Man of Many Genres.” In Volk and Williams 2006: 19–41. ——— . “Outside and Inside: Senecan Strategies.” In Writing Politics, ed. J. Garthwaite, W. Dominik, and P.A. Roche 249–271. Leiden, 2009. ——— . “Seneca on Self-Examination: Rereading On Anger 3.36.” In Seneca and the Self, eds. Shadi Bartsch and David Wray. Cambridge, forthcoming a. ——— . “Socrates Speaks in Seneca, De Vita Beata 24–28.” In Ancient Models of Mind: Studies in Greco-Roman Moral and Cognitive Psychology, in Honour of A. A. Long, eds. Andrea Nightingale and David Sedley. Cambridge, forthcoming b. Koestermann, Erich. Cornelius Tacitus, Annalen. Vol. 4. Heidelberg, 1968. Kurz, Otto. “A Sculpture by Guido Reni.” The Burlington Magazine 81 (1942): 222–26. Kuttner, Ann L. Dynasty and Empire in the Age of Augustus: The Case of the Boscoreale Cups. Berkeley, 1995. Laird, Andrew. Powers of Expression, Expressions of Power. Speech Presentation and Latin Literature. Oxford, 1999. Laks, André. “Édition critique et commentée de la ‘Vie d’Épicure’ dans Diogène Laërce (X, 1–34).” In Etudes sur l’épicureisme antique, eds. Jean Bollack and André Laks, 1–118. Lille, 1976. Lana, Italo. “Le ‘Lettere a Lucilio’ nella letteratura epistolare.” In Grimal 1991: 253–311. Langlands, Rebecca. “A Woman’s Influence on a Roman Text: Marcia and Seneca.” In Women’s Influence on Classical Civilization, eds. Fiona McHardy and Eireann Marshall, 115–26. New York, 2004. Langlois, Ernest. Origines et sources du Roman de la Rose. Geneva, 1973. Larson, Victoria Tietze. “The ‘Hercules Oetaeus’ and the Picture of the ‘Sapiens’ in Senecan Prose.” Phoenix 45 (1991): 39–49. Laubscher, H. P. Fischer und Landleute. Studien zur hellenistischen Genreplastik. Mainz, 1982. Laudizi, Giovanni. Lettere a Lucilio. Libro terzo (Epp. XXII–XXIX). Naples, 2003. Laureys, Marc. “Quintilian’s Judgment of Seneca and the Scope and Purpose of Inst., 10, 1.” AA 37 (1991): 100–25. Lausberg, Marion. “Senecae operum fragmenta: Ueberblick und Forschungsbericht.” ANRW ii.36.3 (1989): 1879–961. Laveissière, Sylvain. “Paris, Musée du Louvre, Département des peintures. Charles Le Brun (Paris 1619–Paris 1690), Le tombeau de Sénèque.” Révue du Louvre (1998): 87–88. Lawall, Gilbert. “Death and Perspective in Seneca’s Troades.” CJ 77 (1982): 244–52. Lazzi, Giovanna. “Per ritrarre Seneca.” In De Robertis and Resta 2004: 55–58.

378

bibliography

Leach, Eleanor Winsor. “The Implied Reader and the Political Argument in Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis and De Clementia.” Arethusa 22 (1989): 197–230. Leeman, A. D. “The Epistolary Form of Sen. Ep. 102.” Mnemosyne 4 (1951): 175–81. ——— . “Das Todeserlebnis im Denken Senecas.” Gymnasium 78 (1971): 322–33. Lefèvre, Eckard, ed. Senecas Tragödien. Darmstadt, 1972. Lefkowitz, Mary R. The Lives of the Greek Poets. Baltimore, 1981. Lehmann, Hans-Thies, and Patrick Primavesi, eds. Heiner Müller Handbuch. LebenWerk-Wirkung. Stuttgart, 2003. Leigh, Matthew. Lucan: Spectacle and Engagement. Oxford, 1997. Letta, Cesare. “Seneca tra politica e potere: l’evoluzione del pensiero di Seneca sul principato nelle opere in prosa anteriore al De clementia.” In Seneca nel bimillenario della nascita, ed. S. Audano, 51–75. Pisa, 1998. Levene, D. S. “Pity, Fear and the Historical Audience: Tacitus on the Fall of Vitellius.” In Braund and Gill 1997: 128–49. Lévy, Carlos. “Sénèque et la circularité du temps.” in Ancienneté chez les anciens, ed. Béatrice Bakhouche, 491–509. Montpellier, 2003. Liebermann, Wolf-Lüder. “Seneca’s Tragödien: Forschungsüberblick und Methodik.” In Billerbeck and Schmidt 2004: 1–61. Litchfield, Henry Wheatland. “National Exempla Virtutis in Roman Literature.” HSCPh 25 (1914): 1–71. Littlewood, C. J. Self-Representation and Illusion in Senecan Tragedy. Oxford, 2004. Lodge, G. Henry, trans. J. J. Winckelmann, History of Ancient Art. 2 vols. [Translation orginally published 1849–73. Original German edition 1763–68.] New York, 1968. Long, Anthony A. “Seneca on the Self: Why Now?” In From Epicurus to Epictetus: Studies in Hellenistic and Roman Philosophy, Cambridge, 2009: 360–76. Long, Anthony A., and David N. Sedley. The Hellenistic Philosophers. 2 vols. Cambridge, 1987. Longo, Oddone. “ ‘Parsimonia in fundo.’ Variazioni su un tema esiodeo.” In L’universo dei Greci. Attualità e distanze, 125–36. Venice, 2000. Lupton, Julia Reinhard. Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature. Stanford, 1996. Lyons, John D. Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy. Princeton, 1989. Maiuri, Amadeo. Passeggiate campane. 3rd ed. Florence, 1957. Maleuvre, Didier. “David Painting Death.” Diacritics 30 (2000): 13–22, 24–27. Mann, Wolfgang-Rainer. “Learning How to Die: Seneca’s Use of Aeneid 4.653 at Epistulae Morales 12.9.” In Volk and Williams 2006: 103–22. Manning, C. E. “Seneca’s 98th Letter and the Praemeditatio Futuri Mali.” Mnemosyne 29 (1976): 301–4. ——— . On Seneca’s Ad Marciam. Leiden, 1981. Mantovanelli, Paolo. “Lo spreco della morte (un percorse anneano).” In Gualandri and Mazzoli 2003: 125–39. Manuwald, Gesine. Fabulae praetextae. Zetemata no. 108. Munich, 2001. ——— . “Der Stoiker Seneca in Monteverdis L’incoronazione di Poppea.” In Baier, Manuwald, and Zimmermann 2005: 149–85. Marchesi, Concetto. Seneca. 3rd ed. Milan, 1944.

bibliography

379

Marks, Raymond. “Hannibal in Liternum.” In Being There Together: Essays in Honor of Michael C. J. Putnam, eds. Philip Thibodeau and Harry Haskell, 128–44. Afton, Minn., 2003. Martellotti, Guido. “La questione dei due Seneca da Petrarca a Benvenuto.” Italia medioevale e umanistica 15 (1972): 149–69. Marti, Berthe. “Seneca’s Tragedies: A New Interpretation.” TAPA 76 (1945): 216–45. Martin, Richard P. “The Seven Sages as Performers of Wisdom.” In Cultural Poetics in Archaic Greece: Cult, Performance, Politics, eds. Carol Dougherty and Leslie Kurke, 108–28. Cambridge, 1993. Martin, Ronald H. Tacitus. London, 1981. Martin, Ronald H., and A. J. Woodman. Tacitus, Annals Book IV. Cambridge, 1989. Martindale, Charles. Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception. Cambridge, 1993. Marx, F. A. “Tacitus und die Literatur der Exitus illustrium virorum.” Philologus N.F. 92 (1937): 83–103. Maso, Stefano. Lo sguardo della verità. Padua, 1999. Mastandrea, Paolo. Lettori cristiani di Seneca filosofo. Brescia, 1988. Mattingly, Harold. “Some Historical Roman Coins of the First Century A.D.” JRS 10 (1920): 37–41. ——— . Coins of the Roman Empire in the British Museum. Vol. 1. London, 1923. Mauch, Mercedes. Senecas Frauenbild in den philosophischen Schriften. Frankfurt, 1997. Maurach, Gregor. Der Bau von Senecas Epistulae morales. Heidelberg, 1970. ——— . “Tacitus und Rubens: Zwei Bilder von Senecas Tod.” Gymnasium 97 (1990): 507–25. ——— . Seneca. Leben und Werk. Darmstadt, 1991. Mayer, Roland. “Roman Historical Exempla in Seneca.” In Grimal 1991: 141–76. ——— . “Personata Stoa: Neostoicism and Senecan Tragedy.” Journal of the Warburg and Cortauld Institutes 57 (1994): 151–74. Mazzoli, Giancarlo. Seneca e la poesia. Milan, 1970. ——— . “Le ‘Epistulae morales ad Lucilium’ di Seneca. Valore letterario e filosofico.” ANRW ii.36.3 (1989): 1823–77. ——— . “Effetti di cornice nell’epistolario di Seneca a Lucilio.” In Seneca e la cultura, ed. Aldo Setaioli, 67–87. Perugia, 1991. ——— . “Seneca, Dialogi: La ‘forma’ della crisi.” In Séneca dos mil años después, ed. Miguel Rodriguez-Pantoja, 343–53. Cordoba, 1997a. ——— . “Il tragico in Seneca.” Lexis 15 (1997b): 79–91. ——— . “Le ‘voci’ dei dialoghi di Seneca.” In Parroni 2000: 249–60. ——— . “La Roma di Seneca.” In Politica e cultura in Roma antica, eds. Federica Bessone and Ermanno Malaspina, 123–33. Bologna, 2005. Mazzotta, Giuseppe. The Worlds of Petrarch. Durham, N.C. 1993. McGrath, Elizabeth. Rubens: Subjects from History. 2 vols. Corpus Rubenianum, no. 13. London, 1997. McGuiness, W. “Seneca and the Poets.” Hermathena 88 (1956): 81–98. McKay, Alexander G. Ancient Campania. 2 vols. Vol. 1. Hamilton, Ont., 1972. McLaughlin, Martin L. Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Literary Imitation in Italy from Dante to Bembo. Oxford, 1995.

380

bibliography

Menacci, Francesca. “Sanguis/cruor. Designazioni linguistiche e classificazione antropologica del sangue nella cultura romana.” MD 17 (1986): 25–91. Meyer, Reinhart. Das deutsche Trauerspiel des 18. Jahrhunderts. Eine Bibliographie. Munich, 1977. Mezzadroli, Giuseppina. Seneca in Dante. Dalla tradizione medievale all’officina dell’autore. Florence, 1990. Millar, Fergus. A Study of Cassius Dio. Oxford, 1964. Miller, N. P. Tacitus, Annals XV. London, 1973. Minarini, Alessandra. “Una epistola perduta di Seneca e una reminiscenza oraziana.” Paideia 52 (1997): 263–74. Minois, Georges. History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Baltimore, 1999. Misch, Georg. A History of Autobiography in Antiquity. Trans. E. W. Dickes. 2 vols. [Original German edition published 1907.] Cambridge, Mass., 1951. Möbius, Hans. “Zur Nero-medaille des quattrocento.” In Festschrift für Gerhard Kleiner, eds. H. Keller and J. Kleine, 197–204. Tübingen, 1976. Momigliano, Arnaldo. “Note sulla leggenda del cristianesimo di Seneca.” In Contributo alla storia degli studi classici, 12–32. Rome, 1955. ——— . “Seneca between Political and Contemplative Life.” Quarto contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico (1969): 239–56. Montigilio, Silvia. “Should the Aspiring Wise Man Travel?” AJPh 127 (2006): 553–86. Morford, Mark. Stoics and Neostoics: Rubens and the Circle of Lipsius. Princeton, 1991. Most, Glenn W. “Disiecti Membra Poetae: The Rhetoric of Dismemberment in Neronian Poetry.” In Innovations of Antiquity, eds. Ralph Hexter and Daniel Selden, 391–419. New York, 1992. Motto, Anna Lydia, and John R. Clark. “Seneca on Death and Immortality.” CJ 50 (1955): 187–89. ——— . Essays on Seneca. Frankfurt, 1993. Mouilleseaux, Jean-Pierre. “Taillasson.” In La port des lumières 1. La peinture à Bordeaux 1750–1800, 251–331. Bordeaux, 1989. Münzer, Friedrich. Roman Aristocratic Parties and Families [Originally published 1920]. Trans. Thérèse Ridley. Baltimore, 1999. Murphy, Trevor. Pliny the Elder’s Natural History: The Empire in the Encyclopedia. Oxford, 2004. Murray, Oswyn. “The Quinquennium Neronis and the Stoics.” Historia 14 (1965): 41–61. Musurillo, H. A. The Acts of the Pagan Martyrs [Originally published 1954]. Oxford, 1979. Neumann, Florian, ed. Francesco Petrarca, Epistolae familiares XXIV. Vertrauliche Briefe. Mainz, 1999. Neumeister, Christoff. “Gedanken über den rechten Gebrauch der Zeit in Senecas Epistulae ad Lucilium.” In Römische Lebenskunst, ed. G. Alföldi et al., 67–78. Heidelberg, 1995. Newman, Robert J. “Rediscovering the De Remediis Fortuitorum.” AJPh 109 (1988): 92–107. ——— . “Cotidie Meditari: Theory and Practice of the Meditatio in Imperial Stoicism.” ANRW ii.36.3 (1989): 1473–1517.

bibliography

381

——— . “In Umbra Virtutis: Gloria in the Thought of Seneca the Younger.” [Originally published 1988.] In Fitch 2008: 316–34. Nisbet, R. G. M. “The Dating of Seneca’s Tragedies, with Special Reference to the Thyestes.” [Originally published 1990.] In Fitch 2008: 348–71. Niutta, Francesca, and Carmela Santucci, eds. Seneca. Mostra bibliografica e iconografica. Rome, 1999. Noll, Thomas. “Der sterbende Seneca.” Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst 52 (2001): 89–157. Norden, Eduard. Die antike Kunstprosa. 5th ed. 2 vols. Stuttgart, 1958. Nothdurft, Klaus-Dieter. Studien zum Einfluss Seneca auf die Philosophie und Theologie des zwölften Jahrhunderts. Leiden, 1963. Noyes, R. “Seneca on Death.” Journal of Religion and Health 12 (1973): 223–40. Nussbaum, Martha. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. Princeton, 1994. ——— . “Serpents in the Soul: A Reading of Seneca’s Medea.” In Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy, and Art, eds. James J. Clauss and Sarah Iles Johnson, 219–47. Princeton, 1997. Ogilvie, R. M. The Library of Lactantius. Oxford, 1978. O’Gorman, Ellen. Irony and Misreading in the Annals of Tacitus. Cambridge, 2000. Opelt, Ilona. “Senecas Konzeption des Tragischen.” In Lefèvre, 1972: 92–128. ——— . “Senecas Tod.” In Der Mensch in Grenzsituationen, ed. E. Olshausen, 29–48. Stuttgart, 1984. Op het Veld, Christoph. Quem putas perisse praemissus est. Ein Kommentar zu Senecas 93. und 99. Brief. Aachen, 2000. dell’Orto, Luisa Franchi. “Sull’iconographia di Seneca.” In Niutta and Santucci 1999: 27–41. O’Sullivan, Timothy. “The Mind in Motion: Walking and Metaphorical Travel in the Roman Villa.” CPh 101 (2006): 133–52. Owen, William H. “Commonplace and Dramatic Symbol in Seneca’s Tragedies.” TAPA 99 (1968): 291–313. ——— . “Time and Event in Seneca’s Troades.” Wiener Studien 4 (1970): 118–37. Pagán, Victoria. Conspiracy Narratives in Roman History. Austin, 2004. Palmer, Anne-Marie. Prudentius on the Martyrs. Oxford, 1989. Palmieri, Nicoletta. L’eroe al bivio: Modelli di “mors voluntaria” in Seneca tragico. Pisa, 1999. Panizza, Letizia A. “Gasparino Barzizza’s Commentaries on Seneca’s Letters.” Traditio 33 (1977): 297–358. ——— . “Textual Interpretation in Italy, 1350–1450: Seneca’s Letter 1 to Lucilius.” Journal of the Warburg and Cortauld Institutes 46 (1983): 40–62. ——— . “Biography in Italy from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance: Seneca, Pagan or Christian?” Nouvelles de la république des lettres 2 (1984): 47–98. ——— . “Erasmus’ 1515 and 1529 Editions of Seneca, and Gasparino Barzizza.” Classical and Modern Literature 7 (1987): 319–32. Paratore, Ettore. Tacito. 2nd ed. Rome, 1962. Parroni, Piergiorgio, ed. Seneca e il suo tempo. Rome, 2000. ——— . Seneca. Ricerche sulla natura. Rome, 2002.

382

bibliography

Pecere, Oronzo. Petronio, La novella della matrona di Efeso. Padua, 1975. Pelling, Christopher. “Biographical History? Cassius Dio on the Early Principate.” In Portraits: Biographical Representation in the Greek and Latin Literature of the Roman Empire, eds. M. J. Edwards and Simon Swain, 117–44. Oxford, 1997. Perelli, Luciano. “Seneca e Heidegger.” Bollettino di studi latini 24 (1994): 45–61. Perkins, Judith. The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era. New York, 1995. Pesce, D. “La concezione stoica del tempo.” Paideia 96 (1992): 83–95. Pestilli, Livio. “ ‘The Burner of the Midnight Oil’: A Carravaggesque Rendition of a Classic ‘Exemplum.’ An Unrecognized Self-Portrait by Michael Sweerts?” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 56 (1993): 119–33. Pigler, A. Barockthemen. Eine Auswahl von Verzeichnissen zur Ikonographie des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts. Budapest, 1974. Plass, Paul. The Game of Death in Ancient Rome. Madison, 1995. Pociña, Andrés. “La donna secondo Seneca e le donne degli Annei.” In Gualandri and Mazzoli 2003: 327–37. Pomeroy, Arthur. The Appropriate Comment: Death Notices in the Ancient Historians. Frankfurt, 1991. Porter, James I., ed. Classical Pasts: The Classical Traditions of Greece and Rome. Princeton, 2006. Prato, Carlo. Gli epigrammi attributi a L. Anneo Seneca. Rome, 1964. Pratt, Norman T. “The Stoic Base of Senecan Drama.” TAPA 79 (1948): 1–11. Préchac, François. Sénèque, Des bienfaits. Paris, 1926–27. Prinz, Wolfram. “The Four Philosophers by Rubens and the Pseudo-Seneca in Seventeenth-Century Painting.” Art Bulletin 55 (1973): 410–28. Putnam, Michael. “Virgil’s Tragic Future: Senecan Drama and the Aeneid.” In Virgil’s Aeneid: Interpretation and Influence, 246–85. Chapel Hill, 1995. Questa, Cesare. Studi sulle fonti degli Annales di Tacito. Rome, 1960a. ——— . “Accessus medioevali al De moribus dello pseudo-Seneca.” Rivista di cultura classica e medioevale 2 (1960b): 183–94. Quinones, Ricardo J. The Renaissance Discovery of Time. Cambridge, Mass. 1972. Ramelli, Ilaria. “Seneca in Plinio, Dione, S. Agostino.” In Croiselle and Perrin 2002: 503–16. ——— . “Note sull’epistolario tra Seneca e S. Paolo.” Invigilata lucernis 26 (2004): 225–37. Rawson, Elizabeth. “Roman Rulers and the Philosophic Adviser.” In Philosophia Togata, eds. Jonathan Barnes and Miriam Griffin, 233–58. Oxford, 1989. Regenbogen, Otto. “Schmerz und Tod in den Tragödien Senecas.” In Kleine Schriften, 409–62. [Originally published 1930.] Munich, 1961. Reydams-Schils, Gretchen. The Roman Stoics: Self, Responsibility, and Affection. Chicago, 2005. Reynolds, L. D. The Medieval Tradition of Seneca’s Letters. Oxford, 1965. ——— , ed. Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics. Oxford, 1983. Ribner, Jonathan P. Broken Tablets: The Cult of the Law in French Art from David to Delacroix. Berkeley, 1993. de Ricci, Seymour, and W. J. Wilson. Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada. 3 vols. New York, 1935.

bibliography

383

Richter, G. M. A. The Portraits of the Greeks. 3 vols. London, 1965. Ricklin, Thomas. “Quello non conosciuto da molti libri di Boezio. Hinweise zur Consolatio philosophiae in Norditalien.” In Boethius in the Middle Ages, eds. Maarten J. F. M. Hoenen and Lodi Nauta, 267–86. Leiden, 1997. Rist, J. M. Stoic Philosophy. Cambridge, 1969. Rizzi, Aldo. Mostra della pittura veneta del seicento in Friuli. 2nd ed. Udine, 1968. Roberts, Michael. Poetry and the Cult of the Martyrs: The Liber Peristephanon of Prudentius. Ann Arbor, 1993. Roller, Matthew. “Color-Blindness: Cicero’s Death, Declamation, and the Production of History.” CPh 92 (1997): 109–30. ——— . Constructing Autocracy: Aristocrats and Emperors in Julio-Claudian Rome. Princeton, 2001. ——— . “Exemplarity in Roman Culture: The Cases of Horatius Cocles and Cloelia.” CPh 99 (2004): 1–56. Romano, Domenico. “L’‘Epitaphium Senecae’ (Anth. Lat. 667 Riese) e l’ultimo Seneca.” Orpheus n.s. 4 (1983): 384–90. Ronconi, Alessandro. “Exitus illustrium virorum.” Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum 6 (1966): 1258–68. ——— . Da Lucrezio a Tacito. Letture critiche. Florence, 1968. Ronnick, Michele Valerie. “Seneca’s Epistle 12 and Emerson’s ‘Circles.’ ” Emerson Society Papers 7 (1996): 7–8. ——— . “Concerning the Plane Trees in Seneca’s Twelfth Epistle.” In Veritatis Amicitiaeque Causa: Essays in Honor of Anna Lydia Motto and John R. Clark, 219–29. Wauconda, Ill., 1999. Rosand, Ellen. “Seneca and the Interpretation of L’incoronazione di Poppea.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 38 (1985): 34–71. Rose, C. B. Dynastic Commemoration and Imperial Portraiture in the Julio-Claudian Period. Cambridge, 1997. Rosenberg, Pierre, and Udolpho van de Sandt. Pierre Peyron, 1744–1814. Neuilly-surSeine, 1983. Rosenblum, Robert. Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art. Princeton, 1967. Rosenmeyer, Thomas G. Senecan Tragedy and Stoic Cosmology. Berkeley, 1989. Ross, G. M. “Seneca’s Philosophical Influence.” In Costa 1974: 116–65. Rowe, C. J. Plato, Phaedo. Cambridge, 1993. Rudich, Vasily. Dissidence and Literature under Nero: The Price of Rhetoricization. New York, 1997. Russell, D. A. “Letters to Lucilius.” In Costa 1974: 70–95. ——— . Quintilian: The Orator’s Education. 5 vols. Cambridge, Mass., 2001. Rutledge, Steven H. Imperial Inquisitions: Prosecutors and Informants from Tiberius to Domitian. London, 2001. Ryan, William Granger. Jacobus de Voraigne, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints. Princeton, 1993. Sailor, Dylan. Writing and Empire in Tacitus. Cambridge, 2008. Sangalli, Emanuela. “Tempo narrato e tempo vissuto nelle Epistulae ad Lucilium di Seneca.” Athenaeum 78 (1988): 53–67. Santoro L’Hoir, Francesca. Tragedy, Rhetoric, and the Historiography of Tacitus’ Annales. Ann Arbor, 2006.

384

bibliography

Santucci, Carmela. “Lipsio e le edizioni di Seneca fra seicento e settecento.” In Niutta and Santucci 1999: 99–125. Sauerländer, Willibald. “Achitecture and the Figurative Arts: The North.” In Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, eds. Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable, 671–710. Cambridge, 1982. Saunders, Jason Lewis. Justus Lipsius: The Philosophy of Renaissance Stoicism. New York, 1955. Saylor, Charles. “Thinking About Friends: Seneca, Epist. 55.” Latomus 61 (2002): 102–5. Scarpat, Giovanni. Lettere a Lucilio, Libro primo. Brescia, 1975. ——— . Anticipare la morte o attenderla. La lettera 70 a Lucilio. Brescia, 2007. Schäfer, Eckart. “Justus Lipsius: Einladung zu Seneca.” In Baier, Manuwald, and Zimmermann 2005: 195–224. Schiesaro, Alessandro. “Passion, Reason and Knowledge in Seneca’s Tragedies.” In Braund and Gill 1997: 89–111. ——— . The Passions in Play: Thyestes and the Dynamics of Senecan Drama. Cambridge, 2003. Schmid, W. “Ein Tag und der Aion.” In Römische Philosophie, ed. Gregor Maurach, 142–68. [Originally published 1963.] Darmstadt, 1976. Schmidt, Ernst A. “Zeit und Raum in Senecas Tragödien. Ein Beitrag zu seiner dramatischen Technik.” In Billerbeck and Schmidt 2004: 321–68. Schmidt, Paul Gerhard. “Ein Verehre Senecas: Der Karmeliterprior Johannes von Hildesheim.” In Baier, Manuwald, and Zimmermann 2005: 255–60. Schmidt, Willibaldus. De ultimis morientium verbis. Marburg, 1914. Schnapper, Antoine. “La peinture française sous la Révolution, 1789–1800.” In De David à Delacroix: La peinture française de 1774 à 1850, 101–17. Paris, 1974. Schofield, Malcolm. “The Retrenchable Present.” In Matter and Metaphysics, eds. J. Barnes and M. Mignucci, 329–74. London, 1986. Schönegg, Beat. Senecas Epistulae morales als philosophisches Kunstwerk. Bern, 1999. ——— . “Ein Textkritisches Problem in Senecas 12. Brief.” Museum Helveticum 58 (2001): 212–22. Schöpsdau, Klaus. “Seneca über den rechten Umgang mit Büchern.” Rheinisches Museum 148 (2005): 94–102. Schubert, Werner. “Seneca in der Musik der Neuzeit.” In Billerbeck and Schmidt 2004: 369–425. Sciava, R. “Seneca in un modo di dire popolare.” Atene e Roma n.s. 2 (1921): 251–54. Scourfield, J. H. D. Consoling Heliodorus: A Commentary on Jerome, Letter 60. Oxford, 1993. Segal, Charles. Language and Desire in Seneca’s Phaedra. Princeton, 1986. Sestieri, Giancarlo. “Contributi a Sebstiano Conca. II.” Commentari 21 (1926): 122–38. Setaioli, Aldo. “On the Date of Publication of Cicero’s Letters to Atticus.” Symbolae Osloenses 51 (1970): 105–20. ——— . Seneca e i Greci: Citazioni e traduzioni nelle opere filosofiche. Bologna, 1988. ——— . “Seneca e l’oltretomba.” Paideia 52 (1997): 321–67. ——— . Facundus Seneca. Aspetti della lingua e dell’ideologia senecana. Bologna, 2000. ——— . “Seneca e Cicerone.” In Aspetti della fortuna di Cicerone nella cultura latina, ed. Emanuele Narducci, 55–77. Florence, 2003.

bibliography

385

Shelton, Jo-Ann. Seneca’s Hercules Furens: Theme, Structure and Style. Göttingen, 1978. ——— . “Persuasion and Paradigm in Seneca’s Consolatio ad Marciam 1–6.” Classica et Mediaevalia 46 (1995): 157–88. ——— . “The Spectacle of Death in Seneca’s Troades.” In G. W. M. Harrison 2000: 87–118. Sherwin-White, A. N. The Letters of Pliny: A Historical and Social Commentary. Oxford, 1966. Shifflet, Andrew Eric. Stoicism, Politics, and Literature in the Age of Milton: Peace Reconciled. Cambridge, 1998. Shumate, Nancy. “ ‘Theatricalization of Experience’ in Tacitus.” Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History 8 (1997): 364–403. Smalley, Beryl. English Friars and Antiquity in the Early Fourteenth Century. New York, 1960. Smith, Charles Sidney. Metaphor and Comparison in the Epistulae ad Lucilium of L. Annaeus Seneca. Baltimore, 1910. Smith, Joseph A. “Flavian Drama: Looking Back with Octavia.” In Flavian Rome: Culture, Image, Text, ed. A. J. Boyle and W. J. Dominik, 391–430. Leiden, 2003. Solimano, Giannina. La prepotenza dell’occhio. Reflessioni sull’opera di Seneca. Genoa, 1991. Sottili, Agostino. “Albertino Mussato, Erasmo, l’epistolario di Seneca con San Paolo.” In Nova de veteribus: Mittel- und neulateinische Studien für Paul Gerhard Schmidt, eds. Andreas Bihrer and Elisabeth Stein, 647–78. Leipzig, 2004. Spear, Richard E. The “Divine” Guido: Religion, Sex, Money and Art in the World of Guido Reni. New Haven, 1997. Spina, Luigi. “Il tempo di una lettera: incipit ed explicit nell’epistolario senecano.” In La fine dell’inizio, ed. Luigi Spina, 9–30. Naples, 1999. Squillante, Marisa. “Il tempo della politica.” In De Vivo and Lo Cascio 2003: 159–75. Stacey, Peter. Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince. Cambridge, 2007. Stackelberg, Jürgen von. Senecas Tod und andere Rezeptionsfolgen in den romanischen Literaturen der frühen Neuzeit. Tübingen, 1992. Stähler, Klaus. “Bildthema und Bildbedeutung: Zum sog. alten Fischer (‘Seneca’Typus).” Hephaistos 23 (2004): 179–202. Staley, Gregory. “Seneca and Socrates.” In Noctes Atticae: 34 Articles on Graeco-Roman Antiquity and Its Nachleben, ed. Bettina Amden, 281–85. Copenhagen, 2002. Star, Christopher. “Commanding Constantia in Senecan Tragedy.” TAPA 126 (2006): 207–44. Stégen, Guillaume. “Vnus dies par omni est (Héraclite, Fr. 1063 Diels dans Sén., Epist., 12, 7).” Latomus 31 (1972): 829–32. Stewart, Zeph. “Sejanus, Gaetulicus, and Seneca.” AJPh 74 (1953): 70–85. Stok, Fabio. “No. 67. Seneca, Opere filosofiche” and “No. 82. Seneca, Tragedie, Epistolae Ad Lucilium.” In Buonocore 1996: 309–13, 341–49. Sullivan, John P. Literature and Politics in the Age of Nero. Ithaca, 1985a. ——— . “Petronius’ ‘Satyricon’ in Its Neronian Context.” ANRW ii.32.3 (1985b): 1666–86. Summers, Walter C. Select Letters of Seneca. London, 1910. Sutton, Dana Ferrin. Seneca on the Stage. Leiden, 1986. Syme, Ronald. Tacitus. Oxford, 1958a.

386

bibliography

——— . “Obituaries in Tacitus.” AJPh 79 (1958b): 18–31. Szegedy-Maszak, Andrew. “Legends of the Greek Lawgivers.” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 19 (1978): 199–209. Tadic-Gilloteaux, Nicole. “Sénèque face au suicide.” L’antiquité classique 32 (1963): 541–51. Tandoi, Vincenzo. “Il trionfo di Claudio sulla Britannia e il suo cantore (Anth. Lat. 419–426 Riese).” SIFC 34 (1962): 83–129. Tarrant, R. J. Seneca, Agamemnon. Cambridge, 1976. ——— . “Senecan Drama and Its Antecedents.” HSCPh 82 (1978): 213–63. ——— . Seneca’s Thyestes. Atlanta, 1985. ——— . “Seeing Seneca Whole?” In Volk and Williams 2006: 1–17. Thompson, Henry Yates. Illustrations from One Hundred Manuscripts in the Library of Henry Yates Thompson. Vol. 4. London, 1907–18. Thraede, Klaus. Grundzüge griechisch-römischer Brieftopik. Zetemata no. 48. Munich, 1970. Tietze, Victoria S. “Seneca’s Epic Theatre.” Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History 5 (1989): 279–304. Too, Yun Lee. 1994. “Educating Nero: A Reading of Seneca’s Moral Epistles.” In Elsner and Masters 1994: 211–24. Torre, Chiara. Il matrimonio del sapiens. Ricerche sul De matrimonio di Seneca. Genoa, 2000. Tosi, Giovanna. “La villa romana nelle Epistulae ad Lucilium di L. Anneo Seneca.” Aquileia nostra 45–46 (1974–75): 217–26. Traina, Alfonso. “Semantica del ‘Carpe diem.’ ” Rivista di filologia e di istruzione classica 101 (1973): 5–21. ——— . Lo stile “drammatico” del filosofo Seneca. Bologna, 1974. ——— . La brevità della vita. 3rd ed. Milan, 1994. Trapp, Michael. Greek and Latin Letters: An Anthology with Translation. Cambridge, 2003. Treves, Piero. “Il giorno della morte di Seneca.” In Studia florentina Alexandro Ronconi sexagenario oblata, 507–24. Rome, 1970. Trillitzsch, Winfried. Senecas Beweisführung. Berlin, 1962. ——— . Seneca im literarischen Urteil der Antike. 2 vols. Amsterdam, 1971. Turpin, William. “Tacitus, Stoic Exempla, and the Praecipuum Munus Annalium.” CA 27 (2008): 359–404. Ullman, B. L. Studies in the Italian Renaissance. 2nd ed. Rome, 1973. Varner, Eric R. “Grotesque Vision: Seneca’s Tragedies and Neronian Art.” In G. W. M. Harrison 2000: 119–36. Vasaly, Ann. Representations. Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory. Berkeley, 1995. Vaughn, William, and Helen Weston, eds. Jacques-Louis David’s Marat. Cambridge, 2000. Veyne, Paul. “The Final Foucault and His Ethics.” In Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, 225–33. Chicago, 1997. ——— . Seneca: The Life of a Stoic. Trans. David Sullivan. New York, 2003. Viansino, Giovanni. “Studia Annaeana II.” Vichiana 8 (1979): 168–96. Villa, Claudia. “Commentare per immagini. Dalla rinascita carolingia al trecento.” In Buonocore 1996: 51–68.

bibliography

387

Viparelli, Valeria. Il senso e il non senso del tempo in Seneca. Naples, 2000. Vöge, Wilhelm. Jörg Syrlin der Ältere und seine Bildwerke. Vol. 2. Berlin, 1950. Volk, Katharina, and Gareth D. Williams, eds. Seeing Seneca Whole: Perspectives on Philosophy, Poetry and Politics. Leiden, 2006. Vottero, Dionigi. Lucio Anneo Seneca. I frammenti. Bologna, 1998. Vuilleumier, F. “Sous l’oeil de Sénèque: Les quatre philosophes en miroir de la Galerie Palatine de Florence.” In Juste Lipse (1547–1606) en son temps, ed. Christian Mouchel, 295–344. Paris, 1996. Walbank, Frank. “The Scipionic Legend.” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 13 (1967): 54–60. Wallace-Hadrill, Andrew. “The Imperial Court.” In Cambridge Ancient History 10 (1996): 283–308. ——— . “Seneca and the Pompeian Earthquake.” In De Vivo and Lo Cascio 2003: 177–91. Walter, Tony. The Revival of Death. London, 1994. Waltz, René. Sénèque. Paris, 1909. Warren, James. “Socratic Suicide.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 121 (2001): 91–106. ——— . Facing Death: Epicurus and His Critics. Oxford, 2004. Wessner, Paul. Scholia in Iuvenalem vetustiora. Leipzig, 1931. White, Stephen A. “Cicero and the Therapists.” In Cicero the Philosopher, ed. J. G. F. Powell, 219–46. Oxford, 1995. Whitman, Lucile Yow. The Octavia. Bern, 1978. Whitmarsh, Tim. Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation. Oxford, 2001. Wilcox, Amanda. “The Epistolary Habit: Representation, Participation, and Exchange among the Roman Elite.” Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2002. ——— . “Sympathetic Rivals: Consolation in Cicero’s Letters.” AJPh 26 (2005): 237–55. ——— . “Exemplary Grief: Gender and Virtue in Seneca’s Consolations to Women.” Helios 33 (2006): 73–100. ——— . “Nature’s Monster: Caligula as Exemplum in Seneca’s Dialogues.” In KAKOS: Badness and Anti-Value in Classical Antiquity, eds. Ralph Rosen and Ineke Sluiter, 451–75. Leiden, 2008. Wilkes, John. “Julio-Claudian Historians.” CW 65 (1972): 177–203. Williams, Gareth D. “Nero, Seneca and Stoicism in the Octavia.” In Elsner and Masters 1994: 178–95. ——— . Seneca: De Otio, De Brevitate Vitae. Cambridge, 2003. ——— . “Interactions: Physics, Morality, and Narrative in Seneca, Natural Questions 1.” CPh 100 (2005): 142–65. ——— . “States of Exile, States of Mind: Paradox and Reversal in Seneca’s Consolatio Ad Helviam Matrem.” In Volk and Williams 2006: 147–73. [= Williams 2006a.] ——— . “Greco-Roman Seismology and Seneca on Earthquakes in Natural Questions 6.” In JRS 96 (2006b): 124–46. Williams, Gordon. Change and Decline: Roman Literature in the Early Empire. Berkeley, 1978. Williamson, G. The Senecan Amble: A Study in Prose Form from Bacon to Collier. Chicago, 1951.

388

bibliography

Wilson, Emily R. Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton. Baltimore, 2004. ——— . The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint. London, 2007. Wilson, Grace G. “ ‘Amonges Othere Wordes Wyse’: The Medieval Seneca and the Canterbury Tales.” Chaucer Review 28 (1993): 135–45. Wilson, Marcus. “Seneca’s Epistles to Lucilius: A Revaluation.” Ramus 16 (1987): 102–21. ——— . “The Subjugation of Grief in Seneca’s Epistles.” In Braund and Gill 1997: 48–67. ——— . “Seneca’s Epistles Reclassified.” In Texts, Ideas, and the Classics: Scholarship, Theory, and Classical Literature, ed. S. J. Harrison, 165–87. Oxford, 2001. ——— , ed. The Tragedy of Nero’s Wife: Studies on the Octavia Praetexta. Auckland, 2003. Winterbottom, M. “Quintilian and Boethius.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 14 (1967): 83. Wirszubski, C. Libertas as a Political Idea at Rome During the Late Republic and Early Principate [First edition published 1950]. 2nd ed. Cambridge, 1968. Wiseman, T. P. Roman Drama and Roman History. Exeter, 1998. Wistrand, Erik. Sallust on Judicial Murders in Rome: A Philological and Historical Study. Stockholm, 1968. Woelfflin, Eduardus. L. Annaei Senecae Monita, et eiusdem morientis extremae voces ex codicibus Parisinis seculi vii. et ix. Erlangen, 1878. Woodman, A. J. “Amateur Dramatics at the Court of Nero: Annals 15.48–74.” In Tacitus and the Tacitean Tradition, eds. T. J. Luce and A. J. Woodman, 104–28. Princeton, 1993. ——— , trans. Tacitus, the Annals. Indianapolis, 2004. ——— . “Aliena Facundia: Seneca in Tacitus.” In Form and Function in Roman Oratory, eds. D. H. Berry and A. Erskine. Cambridge, forthcoming. Wright, J. R. G. “Form and Content in the Moral Essays.” In Costa 1974: 39–69. Yegül, Fikret K. “Baths and Bathing in Classical Antiquity.” New York, 1992. Zanker, Paul. The Mask of Socrates. The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity. Trans. Alan Shapiro. Berkeley, 1995. ——— . “I ritratti di Seneca.” In Parroni 2000: 47–58. Zimmermann, Bernhard. “Tacitus und Seneca.” In Baier, Manuwald, and Zimmermann 2005: 261–72. Zimmermann, Maximilian. De Tacito Senecae philosophi imitatore. Breslau, 1889. Ziolkowski, Theodore. “Seneca: A New German Icon?” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 11 (2004): 47–77.

Index of Passages

Acts 18.12–17

184

Augustine CD 1.20 264 n. 46 6.10 181 Barzizza, Gasparino Vita Sen. §11 204, 289–90 §12 206 §13 276 §14 205, 277 §15 205, 342 §16 206 [introduction to Epistulae morales commentary] 6–7 205 Bidermann, Jacob Cen. 139–2056 passim 265 Boccaccio Comm. di Dant. 403 201–3, 206, 276, 278 n. 101 De mul. clar. 94.5–6 203

Boethius Cons. 1.3 5, 186, 284 3.5 186–87, 262, 284

5.16.6 109 7.1 328 n. 6

Cato the Elder Agr. 2.1–2 334

Leg. 2.4 343 n. 41

Hist. fr. 127 Leo

350

Chaucer MT 3292–3315

200–1

Nat. deor. 2.64 278 n. 101 Off. 1.11 160 n. 54 1.107–116 117–18 3.1–2 350, 355 Rosc. Am. 47 287 n. 15

Christine de Pizan Cité 2.22 203 Cicero Att. 1.12, 13 150, 150 n. 14 12.10.1 90 12.14.3 88 Brut. 11.42

55

Div. 2.3 90 2.22 54 n. 45 Fam. 4.5.3, 4.6.1, 5.16.3

Fin. 5.2 343 n. 41

91

Sen. 48 335–36 52–53 333 55 351 Somn. 17 338 n. 33 Tusc. 1.74 56, 256 1.74–76 90, 92, 163 n. 66 1.83 90 2.64 120 3.75–79 89–90 5.3.9 150 n. 15 5.5 171 n. 80 5.37–39 334

390

index of passages

CIL 4.4418

344 n. 46

Colonna, Giovanni Vita Senecae 200

Diogenes Laertius 7.28 257 n. 28 7.130 256 10.15–16 275 10.22 148 n. 3

Durs Grünbein “An Seneca: Postskriptum”

“Seneca oder die zweite Geburt” 242

Columella Rust. 3.3 332

Ennius Epigr. 1 348–49

Commentary on Boethius 192

Epictetus Diss. 1.28.8–9, 2.17.19

Dante Inf. 4.141 197

Epicurus fr. 132 Use. 154 fr. 138 Use. 148 n. 3

Demetrius Peri herm. 235 173 n. 86 Diderot, Denis Essai (vol. 1) 2, 3, 5, 6, 93–104, 149–57 321–23 151 290 152–53 230, 271 244 n. 153 322 Dio, Cassius 57.24.4 93 n. 24 59.19.7–8 36, 47, 66, 75 60.8.5 36, 44, 47, 74 60.32.3 36 60.35.2–3 36, 74, 84 61.3.1 36, 45 61.3.3–5.1 36 61.4 46, 47 61.5.1 47 61.7.5 36 61.10 322 61.10.1 44 61.10.1–6 36, 46 61.10.2 42, 105 61.10.3 37, 240 61.10.6 44 61.13.5 143 62.2.1, 12.1, 18.3, 20.3 36 62.24 21 n. 13, 36 62.25.1 69, 268 62.25.1–3 36–39 62.25.2 66, 70, 262 62.25.3 45, 84, 108 62.26.4 60 n. 65 63.28.4–5 145

323, 324

124

Erasmus Senecae opera (1529), introductory epistle 210, 260, 264, 278 n. 102 De copia p. 639 210 n. 79 L’Estrange, Roger Seneca’s Morals by Way of Abstract [title page of 1729 edition] 329 Fronto Ep. de orat. 2–3 181 Gaius Inst. 4.16 157 n. 41 Galatians 5.24 200 Gallegos, Mañuel de Silva topográfica 180 Gellius, Aulus NA praef.9 150 n. 13 4.18.3 349 10.8 269 n. 65 12.2 149, 149 n. 10, 150 n. 13, 181 Gressieke, Hermann Seneca und die goldenen Jahre 238

Gwinne, Matthew Ner. [dedication] 215 3346, 3382–84 216 3996–97 290 4047, 4111–13 216 4113 5 Hacks, Peter Sen. Tod 232 341 235 258 240, 242 341 243, 245, 246 239–40 250, 267 240 272–97 277 280, 282, 287 240 287–88 277 288, 296 240 Henricus de Settimello Elegia sive De miseria 3.547–48 191 Heraclitus fr. 106 DK

337 n. 29

Herodotus 1.98 338 n. 33 Hersey, John Consp. 252, 255 261 Hesiod Op. 369 161 765–68 337 n. 29 Hiebel, Friedrich Sen. 124 238 126, 128–30 239 Honorius Scholasticus Contra epistolas Senecae (Anth. Lat. 666) lines 17–20 185

index of passages Horace AP 185 125 n. 36 C 1.9.13–18 171 n. 83 2.14.1–2 158 n. 46 3.29.41–43 171 n. 83 4.10.2–6 335 n. 26 Ep. 1.11.27 344 n. 43 1.14.1 331 Iamblichus VP 58–59 150 n. 15 Jacobus de Voraigne Leg. aur. 84.212 262 84.212–20 192–93 84.218 268 84.221 13, 193, 264 Jean de Meun RR 6175–77, 6185–250 194–95 6219–21 248 Jerome Chron. 183.14–17 185 184.13–16 184–85, 262, 273–74 185.9–10 184 De vir. ill. 12 [= Vita Sen.] 10, 42 n. 4, 182–84, 189, 262 Jesuit drama on Nero (Szarota 1979–87, no. 1294) 220 Johannes von Hildesheim Laus Pauli et Senecae lines 19, 23–25 201

Juvenal 10.15–17

17, 331

Kleist, Christian Ewald von Sen. 227, 229, 259, 269 Lactantius Div. inst. 2.8.23 181 De mort pers. 16.6–7 184 n. 17 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de Anti-Sénèque 190 229–30 Lavater, Jean Gaspard Essai sur la physiognomie Pt. 3, 261–62 309–10 Lee, Nathaniel Nero, Emperor of Rome: A Tragedy II.i 220

John 19.34

277

Josephus BJ 3.376–79

255 n. 22

Lodge, Thomas The Workes of Lucius Annaeus Seneca [title page of 1620 edition] 297–99 Lucan BC 2.397–438 345 3.635–46 67 n. 8 9.619–889 267 Lucas of Tuy Chronicon mundi

191

Lucretius DRN 3.58 116 n. 9 3.1041 132 n. 63 Lupset, Thomas Waye of Dyenge Well 71 6 Macrobius Sat. 1.1.5–10 314

Lipsius, Justus Epistolarum selectarum iii centuriae 92 318

Manetti, Giannozzo Vita Soc. et Sen. 8.13 259

Mand. 1.12, 18 294 3.22–23 264–65 3.24 294

Marcus Aurelius Med. 7.29 338 11.4 258

Senecae opera (1605) “Introductio lectoris” 211 “Invitatio ad Senecam” 292–94, 304 “Vita Senecae” 212, 291–92

Martial 1.13 29 1.61.7–8 7.44.10 7.45.1–2 7.45.1–4

Senecae opera (1615) [Moretus’ introduction] 294–97

Matthew 16.24 200

Taciti opera

211–12

Livy 22.16 346 n. 55 26.19 347 n. 62, 350 38.50–56 347–49 39.52.9 348

391

181 148 109 n. 76 148

Menander Rhetor De cons. 414 91 nn. 12, 14; 96 n. 37 Montaigne Essais 1.19, 20 319 1.26 317–18

392

index of passages

2.6 318–19 2.10, 32 317 2.35 210, 265, 277, 290, 319–21 Monteverdi, Claudio IP 223–24 Müller, Heiner Sen. Tod 6–7, 243 De morte Senecae [anon.] 188 n. 27, 274 Mussato, Alberto [commentaries on Seneca] 200 Cornelius Nepos Att. 16.3 149 Epam. 1.3 287 n. 15 Eum. 13.1 55 Otto of Freising Chron. 2.40 355 3.15 191 Ovid Met. 2.63–69, 79–81, 328 123 Trist. 3.14 101 n. 55, 103 n. 59 4.2 100 n. 54 Domenico de’Peccioli [introduction to Epistulae morales commentary] 200 Persius 2.105 335 n. 21 Petrarch Africa 2.694–708, 5.977–92 356 n. 84 Fam. 1.1.43 199 2.9.25 358 5.3–6 356–57

16.11.12 358 24.1 315–16 24.4.6 198 24.5 199, 315, 316–17 24.5.1 324 24.5.5 205 n. 68 24.5.14, 16–17 199 24.5.26 358 De remediis fortuitorum 1.86 199 n. 52 Rerum memorandorum libri 3.3, 3.42 199 n. 52 De vir. ill. 12.28–29, 40–46 85, 357

356 n.

De vita solit. 1.5.3 356 1.7.3 356 2.1.10 355 2.8.3 198–99, 356 2.9.5 355 n. 82 Petronius Sat. 26.9, 53.1–13 342 72–73 260, 277 77.7–78.6 340 94.11 267 n. 57 111.8–9 111–12 fr. 16 345 Plato Laws 817b4

286 n. 13

Phd. 57–60b 55–56, 56 n. 55 60d, 61b 101 61e, 62b–c 256 67e, 81a 163 n. 66 115a, c 56 115a–116a 275 116b–d 56, 56 n. 55 116d, 117c–118a 273, 273 n. 75 117d–e 56 n. 55 118a 55, 56–57 Pliny the Elder HN 2.156 273 7.180–86 54 11.238 276

14.48–51 331–32 14.49 352–53 14.51 17, 73, 75, 138 16.234 347 n. 60, 353 22.96 109 n. 74 29.10 275 n. 87 Pliny the Younger Ep. 1.17.1–3 52 n. 42 3.16.2 29 5.3.2–6 53–54, 74 n. 40 6.24.5 319 n. 83 8.12.4–5 53 8.18.1 284 9.13.2 53 n. 40 Paneg. 47.1 102 n. 58 Plutarch Apophth. reg. et imp. 1.196B 350 n. 70 Camill. 19.1 337 n. 29 Cat. Mai. 2.1–2 351 Cat. Min. 66.3–4 275 68.2, 70.2 55 Comm. not. 8, 1061f 160 n. 57 Poplic. 17 95 n. 30 fr. 211 Sandbach 186 n. 23

79,

Polenton, Sicco Script. ill. Lat. ling. 116 198 467 264 489 329 490 258 491 204, 290 492 271 492–93 205–6, 342 Polyaenus Strat. 8.62 21 n. 13, 62 n. 70 Polybius 10.2.6–7

350

index of passages Pompilio, Paolo Vita Sen. 298 290 Matthew Prior “Picture of Seneca dying in a Bath” 304–6 Propertius 3.18 95 n. 30 Quintilian Inst. 5.11.9–10 61 n. 69 8.3.31 77 8.5.18, 9.2.8 75 n. 51 10.1.69 287 n. 15 10.1.125–31 75–77 10.1.131 77, 187, 199 12.10.11 77 Sallust Iug. 4.5 351 n. 73 Scholiast to Juvenal ad 5.109 42–43 Schönegg, Beat Tod Sen. 241 Seneca the Elder Contr. 1.praef.11 198 2.praef. 66 n. 4, 98–99, 198 2.2.1 32 2.7.9 98 Suas. 6.17 65 6.21–25 54–55, 65–66 6.26–27 66 Seneca the Younger Aga. 1–4 265 46 133 123–24 132 130 112 192 132 201–2 130 208–19 132 305 130 591–92 130, 138 592 134 604–10 130

611–58 132 657–58 270 n. 70 725 132 730 132, 134 733, 758 133 790, 796 130 901 132 n. 62 971 130 1010 71 n. 30 Amic. F59.5–6 281–82, 287 n. 14, 289 Apocol. 2.4, 4.2–3 80 9.2 69 12.3 265 n. 48 14–15 191 Ben. 1.12.1–2 285 n. 9 2.20.2 262 2.31–32 77, 187 4.11.4–5 284 4.30.1–3 285 7.27–28 287–88 Brev. 1.1 83 2.4 157 n. 43 3.1 159 3.2–3 316 4–6 150 n. 14 6.4 160 10 160 n. 56, 160–61 14.5–15.3 288 15.5 160 17.6 347 n. 61 18.3 161, 287 20.1–5 83, 121 Clem. 1.1 71, 116, 120, 142, 189 1.9–11 142 2.2.2 72 n. 32 Const. 5.5 159 n. 50, 286 6.7 289 Ep. 1 155–61 1.1 157–59, 241 1.2 160–61, 166 n. 73, 312 1.3–4 159–61 1.5 159–61, 319 n. 80 2 157, 187, 317 n. 76, 312–15, 344 n. 43

393

4 153, 163, 166, 174, 261 5 162, 174, 182, 163–64 6.6 157 7 119–20, 242 8 154, 157, 158, 241, 287 n. 16, 352 9.22 162 10.1 354 11 151, 294, 312, 356 12 333–41 12.1–3 121, 152, 333–35, 341 12.4–5 335–36 12.6–8 336–39 12.8–9 123 n. 30, 171, 339–40 12.10 267, 340–41 13 164 14 152, 271 15.11 171 n. 81 16 162–63, 174, 175 18.8 148 19.3–5 141 n. 87, 153, 158 20.13 289 21.2–5 154–55, 158, 283, 286 24.1–2 84, 164 24.6–9 79, 84, 255 n. 21 24.13–14 116 n. 9, 164, 255 n. 21 24.17 164–65, 265 24.18 136 n. 73 24.20 3, 166–67, 167 n. 74, 315, 360 24.21 157, 167 24.22–25 249 24.26 174 25.6 356 26 113–15, 152, 163, 171, 171 n. 82, 252 n. 8 27 77, 157 28 344 n. 43 30 121–22, 163, 163 n. 65, 165, 271, 334 n. 20 32.3–5 160, 174 n. 88, 283 n. 3 33 151, 158, 314, 317–18 34 151, 153, 157, 162 37.2 277 38.1 150 40.1 170 n. 78, 289 44.5 288 45 157 n. 43, 173 n. 86 47.13 261 48.12 174 n. 88 49.1–4 154, 167 n. 74, 172, 250, 270, 342–43 50.1 162

394 51

index of passages

252 n. 8, 274 n. 82, 328, 345–46, 356 n. 85, 357 53 151, 275, 345 54 163, 165 55.3–8 151 n. 24, 327–28, 333, 342, 345, 347, 349 55.10 331 55.11 277, 328, 336, 343 56.1 345 57 125, 345 58 159 n. 49, 167–68, 174, 265, 334 n. 20 59.7 289 60.1 170 61 169–74, 253 n. 12, 287, 339 62.1 151 n. 24 63.1 108 63 109–10, 110 n. 78, 166 64.9 182 n. 12, 288, 310 65 157 n. 43, 252 n. 8 66.47 148 67 268 n. 60, 286–87 69.6 174 n. 88 70 250–54 70.1 153–54, 250, 345 70.3 252–53 70.5 72, 160, 167 n. 74, 253, 257 70.7 253 70.8–9 254, 258, 264 70.10 253, 254, 263 70.11 253 70.12–13 252, 253 70.13 257 70.14 256 70.15 253 70.16 167 n. 74, 248, 252, 257, 270 70.17 252, 253, 279 70.18 163 70.19 253, 255, 257 70.19–27 61–62 70.20–26 257 70.21, 24 253 70.26 253, 255 70.27 257 71 158 n. 45, 159 n. 50 74 116, 338–39 75.1 150 n. 17 76 345 77 345 77.1–3 152–53 77.2 340 77.4 162, 175 77.5–10 118–19

77.6 88 n. 4 77.7 259 77.9 275, 279 n. 103 77.13 166 77.20 118 78 164 n. 69 78.1 310 78.2 127, 139, 176, 320–21 78.3 110 n. 78 78.4 286 78.27 160 78.28 171 79.13, 17 285 80 115–16, 120, 345 n. 51 81.31 284 n. 8 83 172, 275, 316 n. 73, 335 n. 25 84 287 n. 14, 314–15, 344 n. 43, 345 n. 51 86 345, 346–53, 356 n. 85 86.1–2 346–50 86.2 352 86.3 355 86.4–5 275, 277, 350–51 86.4–13 346, 355 86.5 358 86.6 329 86.6–13 276, 350 86.14–21 332, 346, 352–53 87 25, 147–48, 149, 345, 352 88 157 n. 43, 309 n. 59 89.1 189 91 107, 108, 149, 174 n. 88 92.25 148 93 166 n. 73, 171 n. 81, 173, 283–84 94.69–71 119 95.72 255 96.2 72 97.14 157 n. 43 98.12–13 268 99 109, 110, 164 n. 69 101 165–66, 171, 337 n. 31 102 239, 283, 285 103.1 166 104 329, 345 n. 49 104.1–5 69, 175–76, 210, 215–16, 319–20, 332 104.6–20 332–33 104.21 257 104.27 56 n. 56, 256 104.28 72, 262 n. 40 104.33 331 108 161 n. 61, 348–49 110 329, 345 n. 49 112.2–3 332 n. 15

113.23 157 n. 43 114 73 n. 37, 75, 76 n. 53, 174 n. 88 115 123, 152 n. 27, 286 117.22–23 81 118.1–2 150 120 116–17, 166 n. 73, 168, 171 n. 82 122 83 n. 66, 263 123 333 n. 16, 345 n. 49 124.16–17 160 n. 54 Helv. 1 87–89, 103, 111 2 25 n. 21, 97 3 97, 121 n. 28 5–13 97–98 8.2 101 9.4–6 103 14.2–3 98 15 97, 106 16 93, 98, 110 n. 78 17 89, 98, 114 n. 4 18 103, 104, 128 n. 79, 198 18–20 98–100 20 74 n. 40, 101, 106 Herc. 58–1226 passim 1317 127

136–38

De inmatura morte F63 207 Ira 2.2 66 n. 4, 71, 121 2.5.4 119 3.15.3–4 92 n. 17, 267–68 3.42.2, 43.5 82–83 Marc. 1 93–94, 96 2 90, 289 2–6 94–95 7.1–4 93, 103 8.1–3 90, 93 12.4 96 n. 35 14.3, 15.2–3 96 19.4 136 n. 73 20.1 96 n. 35 21.7 166 n. 73 22 94, 263, 275 n. 89 23 94, 163 24.4 111 25.2, 26.2–7 94 Matrim. F31 56 n. 56 F52 69 n. 17

index of passages Med. 20 134 166 220 539 112 599–602 124 605–6 124 n. 31 634–42 139 992–93 131 1019 132 n. 62 NQ 1.praef.11 270 1.16 329 1.17.4 335 3.1.1 153 3.7.1 332 3.15.5 270 4a.praef.9 153 6.1.1–4 107 6.4.2 74 6.31.1 107 6.32 107, 268 n. 59 Oed. 180–81 134 344 61, 138 945–51 135 1001 131 1014–18 135 1032–39 128, 143 1061 138 n. 79 Ot. 5.7 159 n. 52 Pha. 97–98 136 130–586 passim 129 646–60 136 711–12 129 843–49 139 871, 878 129 882–85 61 n. 66 893 129 946–47 136 1068–1114 129 1159–63 99 n. 48 1176–200 129–30 1213–19 131, 141 n. 86 1239–40 136 1247–79 131 Pho. 32–33, 39–40 135 66 216 67–73 81 105 134 110–39, 144–45 135

151–53 267 n. 57 151–65, 313–19 135 Polyb. 3.1 100 n. 51 8.1–4, 11.5 101 13.2 100 14.1–17.6 101–2 18 101, 103, 242 n. 147 Prov. 1.1 78, 85 2.7 78 2.9 82, 120, 184, 265 2.9–12 78–79 2.10 255 2.11 83 2.12 117 3 70, 78, 80–81, 268 n. 60, 273 4.2 78 5.9–11 123 6.3–6.9 78, 82

21.1 105, 112, 141 n. 87 22.3–5, 24.5–25.8 253 n. 10 25–28 323 26.1 72, 162 De vita patris F97 94 [Seneca] Epigr. 2, 3, 4 Prato 104 7, 8, 9 84–85 18, 28–34, 49 103–5 72.13–14 103 Epistulae Pauli ad Senecam et Senecae ad Paulum 9.9, 10.9, 11.16–17, 12.2 184 12.11–12 184 n. 15 Epitaphium Senecae (Anth. Lat. 667 = Sen. Epigr. 71 Prato) 70, 185–86 De moribus, Accessus

Remed. 2.2 166 n. 73 Thy. 247–48 127 336–403 138 n. 80 405–90 141 n. 86 641–82 136 803–4 218 n. 109 895 131 1024 216 Tranq. 5.2 204–5 11.7 83 n. 66 12.5 289 14.2–10 319 14.4–6 71 n. 30, 186 14.4–10 4–5, 68, 70, 79, 88 n. 3, 216, 271 16 66 n. 4, 84, 216, 287 Tro. 14 133, 138 n. 80 19, 22 133 371–72, 407–8 136 412–1049 passim 133–34 1066–1137 passim 131–32 1143 138 1146 131, 132 n. 63 1148, 1168 132 VB 19.1 122–23 20 120 n. 24, 123–24

395

HO 751–1996 passim

188

138–139

Oct. 309–76 140 370–72 143 n. 92 377–80 17, 73, 140–41, 199 n. 52 381–88 105–6 391–96, 435–592 141–42 437–589 48 503–13, 592 143 593–645 142 652–53 106 n. 67 733 197 929–30 106 n. 67 929–57 143 Sidonius Apollinaris Carm. 9.232–36 181 Sienkiewicz, Henry QV 572–73 237 Silius Italicus Pun. 6.653–97 349 n. 67 Statius Silv. 2.7.126–27

32

396

index of passages

Stobaeus 1.106, 5–23 159 n. 51, 160 n. 56 4.671–673.11 339 Stoicorum veterum fragmenta 2.509 159 n. 51, 160 n. 56 2.517 160 n. 56 2.518 159 n. 51 2.519 160 n. 56 3.54 160 n. 55, 160 n. 57 3.757 256 3.768 260 n. 35 Strabo 5.4.4 347 n. 60 Suetonius Aug. 13.2 337 n. 32 89.1 95 n. 33 Calig. 16.1 93 n. 24 24.2–3 102 n. 57 28 102 53.2 34 n. 49, 69 n. 20 Claud. 1.4–5 95 17.3 100 34.2 119 n. 20 De gramm. et rhet. 17.4 337 n. 32 Ner. 7.1 34, 47, 316 19.3 316 30 161 n. 60 31.2 240 33.1–38 34–35, 204 35 34–35, 261 37.2 259 46.3 61 n. 67, 145 n. 95 47–49 145 48.1 331 n. 11 49 35 52 34, 75 n. 52 Tib. 52.1 96 n. 38 73.2 34 n. 49 Vesp. 24 277 n. 97

Vita Luc. 1.9 269 Tacitus Agr. 3.2 32 n. 42 10.3 18 n. 5 42.4 51, 255 46.1 28 Ann. 1.24.2 47 1.29.4 31 n. 39 2.27–31 255, 263 2.31.1 259 n. 31, 260 3.15.1 31 4.8.2–3 96 n. 38 4.33.3 51 4.34.1 94 4.34–35 263 4.71.1 50–51 6.9.2 271 6.10.3–11.3 51 6.29.4 29 6.49.1 263 12.8.2 20, 44, 105–6 13.2 20, 45–46, 47, 52 13.3 20, 45, 47, 66 13.5.2 20, 45–46 13.6.3 20 13.11.2 20, 45, 52 13.13.1 20 13.14.3 20, 45, 105 13.16.1 41 13.18.1 42 13.20.2 18, 18 n. 6, 20 13.21.1 20 13.30.2 269 n. 66 13.31.1 50 13.42 44, 46, 105, 109 n. 74 13.42–43 20, 322 13.53.2 25 14.2 18 n. 6, 20, 46 14.3–13 344 14.7 20, 52 14.8 41, 129, 143 14.11.3 20, 42, 45, 52 14.14.2 20, 46 14.19 21 n. 12, 51 14.49.1 255 n. 19 14.50.1 67 n. 7 14.52 45, 46, 47, 74 n. 40 14.52.1–57.1 20, 47–49, 142–43 14.53 48, 71, 331 n. 9 14.54 48, 106, 109 n. 74

14.55.1 48 14.56 25, 48, 49, 71, 143, 329, 331 14.57–59 142 14.57.1 26, 48, 106 14.60–64 25, 142 14.64 41, 267, 269 14.65.2 20 15.12.1 28 15.18.3 25 15.23.4 20 15.33.2 344 15.45 37, 49 n. 25 15.45.3 20, 21–22, 48, 108, 149, 249, 261, 273, 331 15.48.1 57 15.50 24, 34 n. 47 15.51 57 15.53.1 25 15.56.2 21 15.57 21, 29, 57–58, 61–62, 138, 257 15.59 21, 58, 257 15.59–64 58 15.60.1 21, 26, 52, 58 15.60.2 21–22, 52, 144, 204, 261 15.60.3 24 15.60.3–61.4 22–26 15.60.4 25, 56, 60, 326, 328, 331 15.61.1 24, 72 n. 32, 279 15.61.2 25, 72, 249, 257, 262 15.61.3 18, 24, 255 n. 19, 258 15.61.4 72, 249, 257, 258, 259 15.62–64 139 15.62.1 12, 25, 28, 67, 110–11, 182, 284–86, 290 15.62.1–63.3 26–29 15.62.2 41–42, 42 n. 3, 52, 56, 89, 110, 145, 204, 257 15.63.1 28–29, 56, 58, 68, 110–11, 259, 287 15.63.2 29, 31, 58, 66, 68–69, 262, 270, 284 15.63.3 4–5, 13, 29, 37, 58, 59, 60, 66, 68, 69, 124–25, 205, 215, 217, 262, 270, 271, 304, 310 15.64.1 48 15.64.1–4 29–33 15.64.2 31–32, 66, 111–12, 263, 270

index of passages 15.64.3 25, 31, 32, 37, 55, 56, 60, 262, 273 15.64.4 33, 56, 67, 72, 73, 83, 274, 277, 342 15.65 33–34, 44, 106, 144–45 15.67 34 n. 47, 58 69, 144 15.68.1 24, 58 15.68.2–69.3 56 15.69.2 261, 274 15.69.2–3 59, 144, 260 15.70 58, 67, 255, 288 15.71 24–25, 58, 148 n. 5 15.73.3 37, 59–60 15.74.2 279 16.11.2 59 16.13.3 108 16.14.3 59, 267, 273 16.16.1–2 50 16.17 37, 59, 67, 257, 269 16.19 58–59, 67, 67 n. 7, 271, 344 16.21.1 49–50 16.34–35 60–61 16.34.1 55, 70 16.35.1 33, 279 Dial. 2 79 n. 59 Hist. 1.3 51 2.47–51

51 n. 34

397

3.28.1 67 n. 9 3.36–86 19 n. 10

9.1.ext.1, 9.2.1 9.12 54

Tertullian De anim. 20 181

Vincent de Beauvais Spec. hist. 9.9/10.9 192

Tragedy of Nero, The [anon.] IV.vi, 45–47 220

Virgil Aen. 1.198–99 96 n. 35, 106 n. 67 2.369 67 n. 9 3.489–90 282 4.3–4 283 4.475–76 129 n. 57 4.653–97 passim 122–23 6.883 95 n. 30 9.446–49 155, 283 12.793 96

Tristan l’Hermite Mort de Sen. 675–76 262 704, 1419–21 221 1551, 1554–62 290–91 1754–56 221 1787–93 328–29 1795–78 276 1834–53 passim 222 V.iv 259 Ulpian Dig. 28.3.6.7

257 n. 27

346

Walter of St. Victor Contr. quatt. 4.2 191, 247–48, 276 Wangerin, Walter, Jr. Paul: A Novel 487–88 241 n. 146

Vacca Vita Luc. 63–67 345

Winckelmann, Joachim History of Ancient Art 308–9

Valerius Maximus 2.10 116 n. 10, 347 n. 58 3.7.1d 349

Xenophon Symp. 2.10 56 n. 56

This page intentionally left blank

General Index

Aegialus, Vetulenus, 332, 346, 352–53 Aeneas, 95–96, 122, 130, 283, 344 agency. See also suicide of death, in Seneca’s writings, 129–31, 253 in Seneca’s death scene, 11, 14, 32–33, 247, 258–66 Agrippina death of, 20, 28, 33, 34–35, 41–42, 127, 140, 143, 188, 215, 344 corpse inspected by Nero, 195, 225 and Nero, 34, 45–46, 52 in Octavia, 106, 140, 142–43 and Seneca, 20, 36, 43–47, 52, 105–6, 140–41, 195 allegory, 10, 180, 189, 200, 278, 353 Amat, Jacqueline, 340 Ambrose, Saint, 355, 357 Andromache, 132–33, 134, 282–83 animus (the mind), 5, 70, 79, 81, 106, 133, 173, 331. See also soul Annaean household, the, 32, 97–100, 103–4, 106 anti-Senecanism. See Seneca the Younger, criticized apotheosis, 137, 140. See also death, and the afterlife; Seneca the Younger, Apocolocyntosis Apuleius, 181 Areus (philosopher of Augustus), 95–96 Armisen-Marchetti, Mireille, 128–29, 289 Ars moriendi, 5–6, 7

Artaud, Antonin, 244 audience ancient, 3–5, 14, 75, 103, 106, 112, 125, 126, 279, 342 (see also Seneca the Younger, readers of ) of receptions, 11, 181, 207, 210, 214, 223, 224, 227, 238, 290, 292, 306 present at Seneca’s death, 12, 19, 31, 38–39, 55–56, 118, 214, 217, 223–24, 225, 260, 281–86, 289–91 Augustine, Saint, 181, 264 Augustus, the Emperor, 44, 46, 48, 95–96, 102, 142–43 authorship, death and, 4, 11, 13, 67–68. See also dictation of Seneca; Seneca the Younger, last words Baiae, 326–28, 345–46, 357 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 151 banquet, 25, 41, 240, 260 baptism, 188, 202–3, 276–77, 306–8, 312 Barbieri, Giovanni Francesco (“Il Guercino”), 225 baroque, 6, 179–80, 231, 265 funerary, in Tacitus, 59 Barthes, Roland, 32, 59, 271 Bartsch, Shadi, 117 Barzizza, Gasparino, 203–6, 210, 222, 276, 289–90, 319, 342 Bassus, Aufidius, 121–22, 271 bath ancient associations, 55–56, 274–75 and baptism (see baptism)

400

general index

bath (continued) hedonistic aspect, 260, 275–76 and libation (see libation) in reception, 185, 189, 202, 203, 220, 224–25, 240, 248, 268, 278, 292, 295, 355 in Seneca’s writings, 172, 275, 277, 350, 355 steam, 41, 274 in Tacitus, 14, 32–33, 59, 274–78 beard motif, 182, 189, 194, 217–18, 292, 294, 295, 309, 310–12 Bergdolt, Klaus, 259 Bernardo, Aldo, 355–56 biographic portraits of Seneca, 7–10, 42–44, 182–85, 203–6, 212, 230, 287–88, 321–23 blood. See also vein opening associations of, in Roman culture, 269–70 aversion to, 124–25 and binding up of Seneca’s wounds, 227, 269, 277 collected by Nero, 207 in libation or baptism, 202, 277 and rubrication of manuscript, 189, 195 slowness of, in Seneca’s death, 29, 32, 37, 257, 268, 270–71 on soil, 60 thinned by heat of bath, 274 and words, 4–7, 66, 67, 180, 271 Boccaccio, 19, 197–98, 201, 203, 206, 276 Bodel, John, 334 body, the. See also death, multiple methods of; soul, the in death or pain, 65, 78–83, 97, 121, 129, 135, 168, 270 (see also pain) freedom from, 251–52, 273, 279 pleasure and (see pleasure) of Seneca, 6–7, 13, 22, 29, 145, 172, 180, 270–71, 273, 310 and Seneca’s posture, 214, 217, 225, 230–31, 277, 299 Boethius commentaries on, 191 on Julius Canus, 5, 7, 186 on Seneca, 182, 186–87, 191, 194, 199, 262, 284, 315 Braden, Gordon, 220–21 Brilliant, Richard, 301 Britannicus, 28, 33, 34–35, 36, 41–42, 106, 215, 273 Brown, Ron, 247 Bruggisser, Philippe, 72 Brunt, P. A., 118 Burghley House, 302–4 Burrus, Sex. Afranius, 18, 20, 26, 34–35, 36, 45–47, 52 Busenello, Gian Francesco, 222–23

Caesar, Julius, 55, 85, 96, 112, 357 Caligula and Seneca, 34, 36, 47, 66, 69 n. 20, 84, 87, 94, 316 in Seneca’s writings, 4, 71, 84, 102, 127 Calvin, John, 210 Campania historical associations of, 107–8, 344–46 Lucilius and, 107, 153–54, 342–43 Petrarch on, 14, 315, 356–58 Scipio’s exile in, 332, 346–53 Seneca in, and on, 14, 25, 106–8, 151, 153–54, 227, 250, 325–28, 331, 342–53, 355 Canus, Julius in reception, 5–6, 7–9, 186, 216, 319 in Seneca’s writings, 4–5, 68, 79, 84–85, 271 Cato the Elder, 334, 336, 350–52 Cato the Younger and Roman suicides, 55, 60, 117–18, 249, 255–56 and Seneca’s death, 55–56, 202 n. 63, 216, 218, 229, 248, 268–69, 275 in Seneca’s writings, 78–85, 116–17, 120, 184, 255–56, 266, 271, 286–87 suicide of, 10, 55–56, 90, 258 Caussin, Nicolas, 222 centurion, 22–24, 28, 221–22, 239, 258–59, 284. See also soldiers Champlin, Edward, 331 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 200–1, 220 Christ death of, 185, 189, 200, 214, 225, 238–39, 263, 277, 278 other episodes from life of, 217, 306–8, 312 christianization of Seneca. See also Paul, Seneca’s correspondence with asserted, 12, 179, 191, 194–95, 197, 200–1, 206, 278, 290, 355 denied, 206, 210, 237, 242, 247–48, 264–65, 316–17 Christians, 10, 184, 188, 238, 262, 263–65, 304, 317. See also martyrs and martyrology Cicero on consolation and death writing, 55, 74, 88–92, 100 death of, 10, 65–66, 121 on Cato the Elder and old age, 333, 335–36, 351–52 on Cato the Younger, 55–56, 117–18, 256 letters of, 66, 149, 150–51, 154, 315 on personae, 117–18 on Scipio, 347, 349–50, 352, 355 and Seneca, 66, 88, 150, 154, 182, 197, 199, 205, 207, 210, 235, 285

general index Claudius, the Emperor, 34, 36, 47, 71, 80, 87, 100–5, 142–43, 191, 215. See also Seneca the Younger, Apocolocyntosis clemency, 52, 102, 107, 142, 205, 356. See also Nero, clemency toward Paulina; Seneca, De clementia Cleonicus (freedman of Seneca), 260–61 Clytemnestra, 112, 130–31, 132 cogitatio mortalitatis, 74, 82–83, 110. See also meditatio, mortis coins and medals, 207–9, 295, 301 Colonna, Giovanni, 200, 202, 357 comedy, 115, 239 Conca, Sebastiano, 231 Connors, Catherine, 67 conscientia, 120, 122–23, 128, 249 consolation before Seneca, 87–92 components of (praecepta, exempla, solacia), 90–92, 94–95, 99–100, 101, 107–12 darker side of, 87, 96, 111–12 by the departed or the bereaved, 87–89, 103 and “mediating narratives,” 87, 90–91, 93, 94, 96, 97, 99, 101, 102, 106, 107, 109, 110, 112 in reception, 204, 206, 222, 230 and “reintegration” of consolee, 92, 96, 100, 105–6, 109–10, 111 Seneca’s career of, 12, 14, 74, 87–112 in Seneca’s death scene, 12, 28, 31, 87–89, 110–12 -within-consolation, 95, 101–2 constantia. See also impatientia; tranquillity as moral ideal, 5, 58–59, 90, 117–18, 162, 211, 214, 218, 285 of Seneca in death scene, 19, 28, 72, 125, 144, 193, 204, 255, 268, 295, 297 contemplation, 28, 106, 110–11, 120–21, 350–52 Corduba, 104, 182, 184, 199, 207, 243, 301 Corsica, 43, 97, 104, 105–6, 356 cotidie mori (“dying daily”). See also cogitatio mortalitatis; meditatio, mortis concept of, 3, 147, 160–61, 360 and the epistolary text, 147, 155, 161, 162, 165–68, 173–74, 175 in reception, 312, 315 Cremutius Cordus, 93–94, 263 Creutz, Friedrich von, 180, 225–26 Dante, 197, 201–2 David, Jacques-Louis, 230–31, 235, 274, 278 day. See cotidie mori; life, last day of; time death. See also suicide and afterlife, underworld, 94, 135–38, 185–86, 221–24, 269

401

ambitiosa mors, 51, 255 and authorship (see authorship, death and) cataloguing, reproduction, and writing of, 41, 49–62, 80–81 (see also exitus; obituary) as clausula, 118–19, 162 conduct in (see constantia; impatientia; tranquillity) and “deathways,” 10, 266 and “dying daily” (see cotidie mori) and “everyone dies” argument, 91, 110 “game of,” 115, 254–55 good, “Roman,” 12, 266 as “harbor, haven,” 134, 138, 250, 252 heuristic function of, 5, 79 iterable or reversible, 79, 81, 268, 271 and landscape, 81, 107, 345 as libertas, 252, 279 as lingua franca, 12, 125 modern “denial of,” “revival of,” 10, 235–36, 266 mors opportuna, 94, 254 multiple methods of, 32, 59, 81–82, 166, 192–93, 247, 262, 266–79, 340 (see also bath; hemlock; poison; vein opening) multiplied and reinvented in Seneca’s writings, 78–80, 125, 130, 134–35, 165–68 and necessitas (ultima), 26, 72, 249–50, 257, 258, 340 as obedience to, or preservation of, “laws,” 107, 254, 348–49, 352 preparation for (see Ars moriendi; cotidie mori; cogitatio mortalitatis; meditatio, mortis) protracted, slow, 5, 6–7, 29, 32, 37, 55, 60, 135, 227, 268, 270–71 and ritual, 32–33, 127, 179–80, 275 sacrificial (see sacrifices) in Seneca in general, 5, 12, 74–75, 77–85 in Senecan tragedy (see tragedies of Seneca, on death) and signs of mortality, 333–36 (see also senectus) as spectacle (see spectation) as test, 114, 162 (see also constantia) and “thank you” motif, 48, 71 declamation, 32, 65–66, 84, 90, 98, 211, 255 Delacroix, Eugène, 232–34 devotio, 99, 279. See also sacrifices dictation of Seneca. See also authorship, death and; Epitaphium Senecae; Seneca the Younger, last words; scribes in reception, 5–7, 205, 212, 243, 292, 295, 299 in Tacitus, 4–7, 12, 38, 66, 68–70, 78

402

general index

Diderot, Denis, 230–31, 271, 281, 290, 306 n. 51, 312, 321–23 Dido, 122–24, 128, 129–30, 139, 283 Dio, Cassius on Cato’s death, 55 on Nero’s death, 145 in reception, 182, 206, 240, 291, 317 on Seneca’s death, 4, 13, 17–20, 36–39, 49, 66, 84, 263, 268, 291 on Seneca’s life and career, 10, 35–36, 41, 43–47, 105 Diogenes Laertius, 55, 256, 275 doctors, 11, 259–62 Domitian, the Emperor, 53, 61, 276 drama. See also comedy; opera; theatricality; tragedies of Seneca European, 10, 11, 179–81, 210, 218–22, 225–29, 265 Roman, 11, 113, 125–26, 133–34, 138–42 drawings, 216, 224, 225, 230, 271, 277, 278, 295, 299, 302 Drusus Libo, 250, 254–55, 263 Dutch and Flemish regions, 210–15, 216–18, 291–304 Dyson, Stephen, 268 early modern era, 209–36, 264–66, 276–78, 290–312, 317–24, 328–29 Edwards, Catharine, 12, 116–17, 145, 151, 168, 284 Egypt, 12, 99–100, 152, 242, 345 Eliot, T. S., 126–27 England, 10, 180, 188, 189–91, 200–1, 215–16, 220–21, 297–99, 304–6 engravings, 203, 207–9, 230, 271, 277, 292, 297, 306, 329 Epicharis in reception, 221–22 in Tacitus, 21, 29, 57–58, 61–62, 70, 144, 267 Epicureanism, 60, 122–23, 248, 276, 327 Epicurus death of, 148, 275 writings of, 120, 148, 151, 154, 312 epigrams. See Seneca the Younger, epigrams attributed to Epistulae morales alluded to by Tacitus, 61–62, 72, 149–50, 176, 257–58 basic program of, 13–14, 74, 147–61 from Campania, 325–29, 342–53, 355 and Cicero, 149–51, 154 closural formulae of, 151, 161, 173–74, 312, 314, 340–41 consolation in, 106, 108–10 and epistolary presence, 170, 327–28, 343 as imago vitae suae, 287

on the Lyons fire, 107–8, 149 on old age (see senectus, in Seneca’s writings) on Paulina, 174–76, 319–21, 332 and posterity, 154–55, 157, 210, 241 and progress toward wisdom, 151, 153, 157–59, 162–65, 175 and the reader, 149, 155, 161, 283 on reading and writing, 151, 157, 312–314 reception and transmission of, 181, 187, 241, 312–14, 317, 355 and Seneca’s end stages, 149–55 seriality in, 147, 149, 149–55, 162–68, 174–76 (see also cotidie mori; meditatio, mortis) and the single letter, 168–74 “situational openings” in, 151, 345 on suburban estates, 332–41 on suicide, 61, 81, 84, 248–57, 260 on time (see time, and Seneca’s epistolary project) on travel, 157, 325–28, 333, 344–46 and vindicatio, 157–58 (see also vindicatio) Epitaphium Senecae, 70, 185–86, 188, 205, 342 Erasmus, 197, 210, 260, 264, 319 L’Estrange, Roger, 329 executioner (percussor), 11, 28, 259 exemplarity of Augustus for Nero, 48, 142 of Cato the Elder (see Cato the Elder) of Cato the Younger, 255 (see also Cato the Younger, and Roman suicides) “cognitive,” in Seneca, 252 in consolation, 90, 93, 101–102, 108–9 and constantia, 58, 60–61 of Epicharis, 29, 57–58, 61–62 and imago vitae suae, 286 n. 12, 290 and internalized guardian, 120, 312, 356 Montaigne on, 210, 317–21 and Paulina, 29, 31–32, 203, 260 of Roman deaths, 80, 116–17, 166, 251, 265–66, 283–84 of Seneca and Maximus’ friendship, 148 in Senecan tragedy, 128, 129 of Seneca’s death, 13, 57, 179, 186–87, 265–66 of Seneca’s style, 75–77, 197, 312–14 of suicides by amphitheater captives, 61, 251, 255, 257 exile. See Scipio, self-exile; Seneca the Younger, exile and recall; Seneca the Younger, final years as “second exile” exitus, 4, 12, 13, 50 n. 27, 52, 66, 254 flexibility of, in Seneca’s writings, 78–80 Exitus illustrium virorum, 49–54, 57, 79. See also Teleutai

general index Fabius Rusticus, 18–19, 20, 22–24, 25 Faenius Rufus, 22–24, 36, 58, 215, 229 Faider, Paul, 310 Fannius, C., 53–54 Felicio (Seneca’s slave), 333–35, 341 Filarete, Antonio, 207–8 Fire of Rome, the Great, 20, 21, 35, 38, 49, 67, 108 in reception, 188, 197, 204 fisherman “Seneca” statue, 235, 277, 295, 299–301, 306–8, 311–12 Fitch, John, 127, 139 Flemming, Rebecca, 258, 266 Fortune as dramaturge, 145, 117, 223 Seneca in confrontation with, 112, 140–41, 199, 214, 316 in Seneca’s writings, 96, 102, 116–17, 120, 122, 252–53, 292 Foucault, Michel, 73, 158, 237–38 France, 191–97, 203, 210, 221–22, 229–36, 237–38, 276, 290–91, 306–10, 317–23, 342 freedom (libertas). See also Jupiter Liberator; vindicatio and agency, 253 from the body, 251–52, 273, 279 and Cato’s suicide, 55, 79, 249, 255 death as, 61, 79, 279 paths to, 82, 251–52, 264–65, 267–68, 340 Scipio’s gift of, 348–49, 352 and self-liberation, 79, 83 “of Seneca,” 24 friends. See audience, present at Seneca’s death; friendship; Lucilius; Maximus; Serenus friendship (amicitia), 109–10, 148–49, 153–55, 281–86, 290, 322 funerals, 56, 83, 123, 205, 340 Galle, Cornelius, 295 Galle, Theodor (Dirk), 224, 292, 301 Gallegos, Mañuel de, 180, 306 Gallio (Seneca’s brother, formerly Novatus), 38, 59, 98, 184, 238 Germany, 180, 191, 201, 203, 207, 225–29, 238–44, 265, 323–24, 341–42, 355 Ginsburg, Judith, 50–51 Giordano, Luca, 6, 8–9, 218, 224, 269, 304–6, 311, 329 gladiator(s), 80, 89, 119–20, 121, 344 God, 82, 194–95, 264–65, 278 gods, the, 78–79, 81, 83, 117, 120 Gowing, Alain, 347 Gressieker, Hermann, 238 Griffin, Miriam, 12, 249, 256, 258, 279

403

Grisé, Yolande, 269 Grünbein, Durs, 241–42, 323–24 Gwinne, Matthew, 5, 7, 8–10, 215–16, 220, 290, 319 Habinek, Thomas, 10, 17 n. 1, 263, 288 Hacks, Peter, 239–40, 258, 260, 277–78, 341–42 Hallé, Noël, 231 Heidegger, Martin, 244 Helvia (Seneca’s mother), 87–89, 97–100, 109, 110 Helvidius Priscus, 60–61, 258 hemlock. See also poison in reception, 185, 189, 192, 214, 218, 241, 259, 261, 268, 271, 273–74 Seneca on, 80, 273 Socrates and, 32, 250, 256, 268 in Tacitus, 4, 6–7, 32, 55–56, 115, 259, 273 Henderson, John, 346 Henricus de Settimello, 191 Henry, Elisabeth, 114–15 Hercules, 125, 136–37, 138–40 dissuaded from suicide, 127, 139, 249 Hercules Oetaeus, 113, 138–40, 142, 145 Herington, C. J., 114 herm of Seneca and Socrates, 182, 310 Hermippus of Smyrna, 55, 275 Herrnstein-Smith, Barbara, 173 Hersey, John, 241, 260–61 Hess, Günter, 329 Hiebel, Friedrich, 238–39, 242 Hill, Timothy, 252 Hinds, Stephen, 198, 315 historiography, Christian, 179, 187, 238–39 Julio-Claudian, 10, 17–20, 43–44, 51, 55, 96, 101, 142, 237, 262–63 Republican, 94 and the subject of Seneca, 3–4, 12, 39, 41, 62 Hitler, 244 Honthorst, Gerrit van, 216–18, 271, 274 Hooff, Anton van, 269 Horace, 126, 151, 333 humanists, 179, 197, 203 Hutchinson, G. O., 72, 268 hypocrisy. See Seneca the Younger, criticized iconography. See visual tradition illuminations, 187, 189–91, 194–97, 207, 262, 276, 329, 355 imagines, veneration of, 182, 288, 310, 351 imago vitae suae, background in Seneca, 14, 281–83, 286–89, 321 and imago mortis, 67, 288, 303

404

general index

imago vitae suae (continued) Paulina as, 290–91 in reception, 201, 243, 289–91, 304–12 Seneca’s writings as, 39, 287 in Tacitus, 12, 28, 67, 89, 282, 291, 342 imitation, Senecan theory of, 314, 315, 317–18. See also exemplarity impatientia, 124–25, 144, 215. See also constantia; tranquillity Inwood, Brad, 12 Italy, 13, 181–87, 189, 197–209, 218, 222–25, 237, 289–90, 299–301, 310–12, 314–17, 325–28, 353–58 Jacobus de Voraigne, 192–93, 268–69 Jean de Meun. See Roman de la Rose Jerome, 10, 19, 182–85, 186, 188–89, 191, 201–2, 261–62, 268, 273–74 Jesuits, 218, 220, 222, 265 Jews, 184 Jocasta, 125, 127, 139, 143 Johannes von Hildesheim, 201 John, Saint, 214, 276 Julia Livilla, 36, 43, 142–43, 241 Julio-Claudian household, the, 44–45, 71, 94–96, 100–103, 106, 143, 155 Julio-Claudian society, 92, 113–15, 127–28, 263 Jupiter Liberator, 33, 60, 115, 202, 222, 278–79. See also freedom; libation Kaster, Robert, 66 kingship, 102, 186, 191, 205. See also Seneca the Younger, De clementia; tyranny and tyrants Kleist, Ewald Christian von, 225–29, 259, 266, 269 Koestermann, Erich, 78 Kurz, Otto, 310–11 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 229–30 Larson, Victoria, 139 Late Antiquity, 179, 181–87, 263–64 Lateranus, Plautius, 21, 26, 52, 58 laudatio funebris, 53, 65 Lavater, Jean Gaspard, 309–10 Le Brun, Charles, 308, 342 Lee, Nathaniel, 220 Legenda aurea. See Jacobus de Voraigne Lessing, Gotthold E., 225–26 libation, 33, 60, 115, 202, 206, 259, 268, 278–79, 299. See also baptism libertas. See freedom life. See also senectus; time brevity of, 83, 158–61, 172, 332 (see also Seneca the Younger, De brevitate vitae)

and concentric-circles image, 336–41 as drama, 115–19 as “guard post,” 256 and imago vitae suae (see imago vitae suae) last day of / in single day, 169–72, 239, 287, 336–41 and ratio vitae suae, 161, 287 Lipsius, Justus. See also neo-Stoicism and his 1605 edition of Seneca, 210–12, 293–94 and his 1615 edition of Seneca, 294–99 influence on Rubens and others, 212–15, 277, 281, 294–304 letters to Montaigne, 318 on self-sufficiency and suicide, 218, 264–66 and Tacitus, 211–12, 215, 291 Liternum, 275, 328, 332, 346–58 Livy, 55, 347–49, 353 Lodge, Thomas, 297–98 Louvre, the, 235, 306 Lucan Bellum civile, 134, 267, 345 on death, 74 death of, 10, 57, 67, 184–85, 192, 269, 288 Epistulae ex Campania, 345 in reception, 221, 223, 262 as Seneca’s nephew, 104, 182 Lucas of Tuy, 191–92 Lucilius Junior as addressee of Seneca’s letters, 14, 84, 108–9, 118, 148–49, 150–55, 157, 162–65, 285, 328 as addressee of other works, 78 and Campania, 107, 153–54, 172, 342–43 name of, and relationship to Seneca, 153 present at Seneca’s death, 25 in reception, 189, 241 Lucretia, 129 Lucretius, 74 luxury, 46, 248, 276, 329, 345–46. See also Baiae Manetti, Giannozzo, 203–6, 259 manuscripts, 179, 187–91. See also illuminations Marat, 231, 278 Marcellinus, Tullius, 118–19, 259, 275 Marcia (addressee of Seneca), 90, 92–96, 109, 110–11 Marcus Aurelius, 175, 258, 338 Martial, 109 n. 76, 148, 181, 197, 199 Martindale, Charles, 7 martyrs and martyrology Christian, 79, 187, 188, 238, 263–64 (see also suicide, Christian doctrine on) pagan, 10

general index and Seneca, 181, 184, 194, 214, 268–69, 276–77, 299 “Mascaron,” 222 Mattingly, Harold, 279 Maurach, Gregor, 214 Maximus, Caesonius/Caesennius (friend of Seneca), 25, 147–49, 345, 352 Mazzoli, Giancarlo, 149 McGrath, Elizabeth, 277 Medea, 112, 124, 125, 131, 134, 220–21, 244 meditatio etymologized, 72, 162 mortis, 14, 74, 78, 82, 84, 114–15, 121, 147, 163–65, 176, 251, 257, 265, 325, 341 (see also cogitatio mortalitatis; cotidie mori; praemeditatio futurorum malorum) and De remediis fortuitorum, 74 as rehearsal and training, 117, 162–65 Mela, Annaeus (Seneca’s brother), 38, 59, 62, 67, 98, 104, 257, 269 memory in death writing, 50–52, 58, 255 Seneca’s final appeal to, 87–89, 282 practices of, in Seneca’s writings, 93, 163, 281–83, 285–88, 323, 342–43, 352–53 Menacci, Francesca, 269 Messalina, 36, 44, 47, 74 meta-literary dynamics, 10, 128, 129, 137–38 Middle Ages, the, 13, 19, 70, 179, 187–97, 225, 247–48, 259, 274, 299, 312–14 mirrors, 329, 335 modern era, 13, 236–44, 341–42 Momigliano, Arnaldo, 89 Mommsen, Theodor, 244 Montaigne, 176, 210, 231, 265, 277, 281, 290, 312, 317–21, 323 Monteverdi, Claudio, 222–24, 260, 265 Moretus, Balthasar, 211, 294–97, 299 Morford, Mark, 302 Most, Glenn, 129 Müller, Heiner, 6–7, 242–44 Mussato, Alberto, 200 Mussolini, 353 Naples, 152, 223, 342, 344–45 Nashe, Thomas, 180, 221 Natalis, Antonius, 21–25, 239, 242 Nature/nature, 81, 105–7, 117, 120–21, 334 neo-Stoicism, 211, 214–15, 264–65, 294, 297–98, 303 Nero and Agrippina (see Agrippina) as Antichrist, 201, 222 and Britannicus (see Britannicus) clemency toward Paulina, 29–32, 49, 112 as “consoler,” 108, 111–12

405

cruelty and killings of, in ancient writers, 20, 21, 34–35, 41–42, 43, 47, 52, 54, 57–62, 105, 110, 141–42 (see also poison, used by Nero against Seneca) cruelty and killings of, in reception, 191–97, 204, 214, 225, 261–62, 316 death of, 35, 144–45, 197, 218 n. 108, 220, 248 and estrangement from Seneca (see Seneca the Younger, estrangement from Nero) and final interview with Seneca (see Seneca the Younger, final interview with Nero) and Fire of Rome (see Fire of Rome) interrogation of Seneca, and death decree, 11, 22–26, 213, 222, 230–31, 268, 341 killing of Seneca surpassed or undone by act of reception, 180, 306 as musician and stage performer, 20, 34, 46, 67, 144–45, 223 and Octavia (see Octavia) and Oedipus, 61, 145 as pupil and advisee of Seneca, in ancient writers, 20, 34, 36, 42–49, 116, 120, 153 as pupil and advisee of Seneca, in reception, 183–84, 188, 191–97, 316 and Seneca’s letters, 152, 153 surrogates of, 24, 31, 144, 189, 214, 217, 258–59 and vein opening, 259, 269–70 Niccolino of Novara, Canon, 203–6 Nomentum, 329, 331–32, 353 Novatus. See Gallio novels, 236–37, 241, 260–61 obituary (consummatio totius vitae), 20, 33, 54 Octavia death of, 25, 31, 34–35, 41–42, 42 n. 3, 267, 269 divorce and exile of, 25, 106, 142–43, 215 Octavia, the in antiquity, 10, 17, 48, 73, 105–6, 112, 113, 138, 140–43, 145 in reception, 11, 181, 197–99, 210, 215, 218–23, 238, 324, 356 Oedipus and Nero, 61, 145 in Senecan tragedy and its receptions, 61, 81, 134–35, 216 O’Gorman, Ellen, 67 old age. See senectus opera, 11, 218, 222–24, 260, 265 Orsini, Fulvio, 295, 301 otium, 327, 344, 349–50, 352, 355–56 Otto of Freising, 191, 355 Ovid, 97, 100–103, 123, 129

406

general index

Pagán, Victoria, 57 pain, 56, 60, 205, 218, 253, 286 paintings, historical, 6, 179–80, 210, 212–15, 216–18, 224–25, 230–36, 329, 342 Palaemon, Remmius, 331–32, 353 Panizza, Letizia, 204 passions, the, 122–23, 128, 134, 200 and propatheiai, 121, 125 Paul, Saint death of, 10, 183–84, 188, 207, 220 Seneca’s correspondence with, 183–84, 186, 188, 191–92, 197, 201, 276, 317 and Seneca’s reception, 189, 221–22, 238 Paulina, Pompeia age and family of, 25 complex roles of, in death scene, 260 consoled, 28, 110–12, 206, 230 criticized, parodied, satirized, 67, 111–12, 206, 263, 271 death attempt of, 11, 26–29, 37, 58, 68–69, 206, 260, 319 Dio on forced involvement of, 36–37, 39 and exemplary women, 29, 31–32, 60, 203, 319 excluded, forgotten, or substituted in reception, 194, 214, 224, 237 and marital concordia, 29, 270 in Montaigne, 176, 210, 265, 319–21 other notable receptions of, 203, 210, 215–16, 221, 227–29, 230–31, 235, 239, 240 pallor of, 31–32, 112, 260, 270 removal to another room, 4, 29, 124–25 renown of, 29, 263 revival from death, 11, 31–32, 37, 49, 180, 203, 230–31, 259, 271, 319 as Seneca’s imago vitae suae, 290–91 and Seneca’s letters, 69, 174–76, 210 in Tacitus, 25, 26–32, 52, 176 and Xanthippe, 56, 203, 206 Paulinus, Pompeius (father of Paulina and addressee of Seneca), 25, 161 Peccioli, Domenico de’, 200, 264 persona, 90–91, 95, 99, 116–17, 168, 253 Pestilli, Livio, 311 Peter, Saint, 10, 183–84, 188, 192, 207, 220 Petrarch on Seneca, 198–201, 312, 314–17, 321, 323, 324 on Seneca and Scipio, 14, 356–58 Petronius, death of, 10, 58, 67–68, 237, 271, 277, 344 Satyricon, 67–68, 74, 111–12, 134, 151, 260, 277–78, 340–42, 345 Peyron, Pierre, 230 Phaedra, 124, 125, 129–30, 131, 136, 139

Phaethon, 122–24, 128 philology, 179, 210, 243 philosophy. See also individual schools (e.g., Stoics) and consolation on death, 28, 74–75, 89, 95, 186–87, 191, 257 and contemplation of suicide, 5, 28, 60, 118–19, 251, 248–57 and doctrine revealed in death or suicide, 55–57, 67, 79, 113–25, 248, 257, 268, 275 (see also constantia; virtue; wise man) personified or revered, 186, 191, 327, 347 receptions of ancient, 210–12, 229, 237–38, 266 Seneca’s studies in, 43, 49, 172, 345 and Senecan tragedy, 128 students of, 120, 123 (see also Epistulae morales, and progress toward wisdom) physiognomic theory, 308–10 Piso, C. Calpurnius, 22–24, 33–34, 36, 57–58, 229 Pisonian conspiracy, the in reception, 185, 215, 221, 227–29 Seneca’s knowledge of, 21 n. 13, 25, 33–34 as represented by Tacitus, 21–25, 29, 49, 57–60, 106, 279 Pittoni, Francesco, 224–25 Pittoni, Giambattista, 224–25 Plass, Paul, 254, 261, 262, 271 Plato on flux, 167 inferior to Seneca, 205 on Socrates in Phaedo (and Crito), 4, 55–57, 60, 79, 163, 241, 254, 257 (see also Socrates) pleasure, 56, 79, 191, 247–48, 275 Pliny the Elder on poison as death method, 273 on Seneca’s demise, 17, 73, 138, 140 as source for Neronian history, 18 on sudden deaths, 54 on viticulture, 331–32, 352–53 Pliny the Younger, 53–54, 319 Plutarch, 55, 205, 316, 351 poison. See also hemlock as death method, 14, 59 used by Nero against Seneca, 20–22, 49, 149, 249, 260–61, 273 Polenton, Sicco, 198, 203–6, 258, 263, 271, 290, 329 Polybius (freedman of Claudius), 100–103, 109, 229, 259 Pompeii, 106–8, 134, 153–54, 172, 342, 344–45 Pompilio, Paolo, 198, 203–6, 290 Poppaea, 25, 34, 221–24, 276 Poussin, Nicolas, 230, 306–8, 312

general index praemeditatio futurorum malorum, 72–73, 121, 164–65, 174, 222. See also spiritual exercises Principate, the, 10, 43–47, 66, 92, 96, 102, 198, 254, 352. See also Julio-Claudian household Prinz, Wolfram, 308 Prior, Matthew, 304–6 prosopopoeia, 78, 82, 85, 348, 352 Prudentius, 184, 263–64 Pseudo-Seneca bust, 235, 237, 295, 301–311 Putnam, Michael, 134 Questa, Cesare, 188 Quintilian, 65, 75–77, 140, 187, 199, 207 Quo Vadis, 236–38, 241 reception of Seneca, in overview, 7–10, 14, 179–81, 187, 197, 209–10, 236–38 theories of, and “senecanization,” 7–10, 180–81 visual (see visual tradition) See also individual fields (e.g., drama, European), periods (e.g., early modern era), persons (e.g., Petrarch), regions (e.g., Dutch and Flemish regions), and subjects (dictation of Seneca, in reception). Religion (personified), 189, 220 Renaissance English, 180 Italian, 11, 197–209, 289–90, 312, 314–17 twelfth-century, 187, 276, 312 Reni, Guido, 218, 310–12 Republic, fall of the, 78, 90–92 recollection of the, 92–94, 101, 106, 198, 352–53 Reydams-Schils, Gretchen, 37 Reynolds, L. D., 312–14 Roller, Matthew, 283 Roman de la Rose, 194–95, 220, 248 Rome, 11, 65, 331, 344, 348–49, 352, 358. See also Fire of Rome Ronconi, Alessandro, 273 Ronnick, Michele, 333 Rosand, Ellen, 224 Rosenmeyer, Thomas, 120 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 322 Rowe, Christopher, 275 Rubens, Peter Paul and drawings for Lipsius editions, 224, 277, 295–304, 309, 310, 312 Dying Seneca painting, 180, 212–15, 216, 218, 259–60, 271, 277, 295, 301, 302–4

407

Four Philosophers painting, 301–304, 308 influence of, 304, 311, 329 Rubens, Philip, 215, 302 sacrifices Seneca’s exile and death as, 99, 104, 225, 229, 269, 279, 355 in Seneca’s writings, 61, 82, 127 Sailor, Dylan, 279 Salutati, Coluccio, 197 Sandrart, Joachim von, 271–72, 306 Sangalli, Emanuela, 175 Santoro L’Hoir, Francesca, 143–44 scalpel, 6, 195, 207, 248, 251, 270. See also vein opening Schofield, Malcolm, 160 Schönegg, Beat, 241 Schiesaro, Alessandro, 131 Scipio Africanus, P. bath of, 275, 277, 350, 355 otium and solitude of, 349–50, 352, 355–56 self-exile and pietas of, in antiquity, 325, 328, 332, 342, 345–53 self-exile and pietas of, in reception, 353–58 scribes. See also authorship, death and; dictation of Seneca; Seneca the Younger, last words in reception, 6, 213–14, 217, 218, 243, 260, 304 in Tacitus, 4, 29, 31, 69 sculptures, 182, 207, 299–304, 306, 310–12 Sejanus, 47, 51, 93, 96 self-examination, 158, 172, 289, 312, 322, 333. See also spiritual exercises “Senecan habit,” 312–14, 317, 323–24, 358 “senecanization,” 7–10, 180–81 Seneca saepe noster, 181 seneca svenato, 13, 237 Seneca the Elder. See also two Senecas, the advice to his sons, 66 n. 4, 98, 104, 198 alluded to in Ad Helviam, 98 on his contemporaneity with Cicero, 198 on death writing, 54–55, 65–66 declamations of, 32, 98, 211 Histories and biography published by Seneca the Younger, 74, 94 and Seneca the Younger’s contemplation of suicide when young, 127, 176, 249, 320 Seneca the Younger. See also two Senecas, the accused of adultery and homosexuality, 36, 43–44, 240 Agamemnon, 127, 130–31, 132–34, 136, 138, 344 age of, 13, 198 De amicitia (= Quomodo amicitia continenda sit), 74, 281–83, 285

408

general index

Seneca the Younger (continued) Apocolocyntosis, 5, 36, 69, 80, 84, 100, 127, 187, 189–91, 265 arrival in Rome as child, 99–100 and Athens, 43 as author in multiple genres, 4–5, 11–13, 62, 65–77, 84–85, 211, 216 bearded (see beard motif) De beneficiis, 70, 77, 107 n. 70, 187, 262, 285, 287–88 biographies of (see biographic portraits of Seneca) birth of, 46 body of (see body, of Seneca) books entrusted to friends, 38–39 De brevitate vitae, 74, 83, 159–61, 323 brothers of, 38, 59, 98, 103 (see also Gallio; Mela) chronology of writings of, 73 n. 38, 127 De clementia, 71, 74, 102, 116, 120, 142–43, 187, 189, 210 consolations of (see consolation) De constantia sapientis, 109 consulship of, 45 contemplation of suicide when young, 127, 176, 249, 320 correspondence with Paul (see Paul, Seneca’s correspondence with) cremation and burial of, 33, 205, 274, 342 criticized, parodied, satirized, in antiquity, 5, 42, 67–68, 111–12, 115, 263, 268 criticized, parodied, satirized, in reception, 6–7, 13, 191, 229–30, 237, 239–40, 247–48, 277–78, 328–29, 341–42, 355–58 death (actual expiration) of, 33, 274 death date, occasion, time, 25, 55–56, 60, 144 n. 93 death location, 14, 25, 218, 325, 328–42 Dialogi, 74, 85, 187, 197 diet of, 22, 29, 147–49 and Egypt, 74, 99–100, 152 epigrams attributed to, 73, 84–85, 103–5 Epistulae ad Maximum, 74, 148 Epistulae morales (see Epistulae morales) exile and recall of, 20, 43, 44–45, 87–89, 97–106, 112, 140–41 father of (see Seneca the Elder) final estrangement from Nero, in antiquity, 35, 44–49, 87, 141–43, 149, 152–53, 327–28, 331, 344 final estrangement from Nero, in reception, 188, 191–97, 207–9, 215, 220–24, 227–29, 239, 242, 316, 352 final interview with Nero, in antiquity, 20, 47–49, 71, 106, 141–43

final interview with Nero, in reception, 192–93, 221, 222 final years as “second exile” or “exit,” 49, 106–10, 325, 344, 352 fragmentary and lost works of, 73 n. 38 friends of (see audience, present at Seneca’s death; friendship) gardens of, 17, 329–30 health of, 49, 100, 163, 176, 240, 278, 331 Ad Helviam, 87–89, 97–100, 103–4, 106, 110–11, 139 Hercules, 127, 136–38, 139 Hercules Oetaeus (see Hercules Oetaeus) household and surrogates (freedmen, slaves, etc.) of, 11, 12, 31, 32, 239–40, 259–61, 279, 333, 334, 340–42, 352 (see also scribes; slaves) De inmatura morte, 74, 207 De ira, 71, 82–83, 120, 267 and the Julio-Claudian “court” and the Principate, 42, 44–45, 71 last words of, 28, 66, 68–70, 78 (see also dictation of Seneca; Epitaphium Senecae) Libri moralis philosophiae, 70, 74 lighter or frivolous studies of, 74, 101 Ad Marciam, 92–96, 100, 102, 103, 105 De matrimonio, 69, 74 Medea, 127, 211 mother of (see Helvia) name etymologized, 13, 35, 84, 105, 153, 193, 200, 216, 264 Natural Questions, 74, 106–8, 109, 187, 335, 344 Octavia (see Octavia) Oedipus, 61, 127, 134–35, 138, 143 De otio, 109 Phaedra, 125, 127, 129–30, 136–37 Phoenissae, 81, 127, 135, 216 and poetry, 46, 74, 134 Ad Polybium, 97, 100–103, 105 in Pompeian graffiti, 134, 344 De providentia, 65, 77–85, 109, 123, 184, 266 pseudeponymous and spurious works of, 73 n. 38, 185–86, 188 quaestorship of, 99 and readers, in antiquity, 4–5, 14, 73, 78, 81, 83, 87, 103, 107, 108, 125–29, 131–32, 138, 149 De remediis fortuitorum, 74 renown of, 29, 44, 46, 105, 154–55, 263, 286 and rhetoric, 48–49, 73, 75–77, 114, 268, 288–89 (see also prosopopoeia) self-preservation for Paulina’s sake, 175–76, 249, 332 son(s) of, 97, 198

general index as speechwriter for Nero, 20, 36, 45, 48, 66 and studia, 46–47, 75, 101–3, 105, 114, 241, 286, 331 and style, 12, 14, 45, 66, 73–77, 197, 268, 312 (see also “Senecan habit”) suburban estates and villas, 25, 325, 329–42 De superstitione, 74, 181, 241 n. 146 as teacher and adviser of Nero, in antiquity, 12, 20, 34–35, 42–43, 45–49, 102 as teacher and adviser of Nero, in reception, 183, 188, 191–97, 199, 221, 316 theatrical modes (see theatricality) Thyestes, 127, 136, 181, 216, 241 tragedies of (see tragedies of Seneca) De tranquillitate animi, 4–5, 7, 68, 70, 79, 84–85, 109, 181, 186, 216 transmission and circulation of writings of, 187–91, 197, 209–10 and travel (see Epistulae morales, on travel; Campania, Seneca in) Troades, 125, 127, 131–32, 132–33, 134, 136, 138–39 De vita beata, 105, 122–24, 322–23 De vita patris, 74, 94 and viticulture, 75, 331–33, 352–53 wealth of, 33, 38, 42, 46, 72, 329 will of, 28, 67, 271, 289 wives of, 25 (see also Paulina) se necavit. See Seneca the Younger, name etymologized Senecio, Cornelius, 165–66, 171 senectus and Ages of Man motif, 214, 225, 306–7 of Seneca in the Octavia, 141 in Seneca’s writings, 121, 141 n. 87, 152–54, 163, 177, 265, 333–36, 352 and Seneca’s name, 13 and life structure (see life) Serenus, Annaeus, 20, 109–10 Sienkiewicz, Henry. See Quo Vadis Silvanus, Gavius, 23–25, 72, 144, 239, 258 slaves, 31–33, 118, 147, 259–61, 279, 333–36, 352. See also scribes; Seneca the Younger, household and surrogates of Socrates. See also Plato and Seneca, in antiquity, 10, 32, 54–57, 70, 72, 117, 268, 274–75, 278, 284 and Seneca, in literary reception, 186, 194, 204–5, 216, 239, 242, 248 and Seneca, in visual reception, 182, 214, 230, 235 in Seneca’s writings and in Stoicism, 80, 101, 250, 254–58, 273–74 and Xanthippe, 56, 203, 206 soldiers, 31, 213–14, 217. See also centurion

409

Solimano, Giannina, 118 solitude, 119, 224–25, 259, 327, 329, 349–50, 352, 355–58 Sotion (the philosopher), 172, 182 soul, the, 5, 55, 60, 67, 70, 79–80, 221, 223, 273, 292, 345, 348. See also animus; body, the Spain, 191–92, 205, 211, 243 spectation. See also contemplation as consolation, 89 of cruelty, 119–20, 225, 242 the fragility of mutual, 29, 59, 124–25 and internalized guardian, 120, 312, 356 and multiplied points of view, 131–32 and providentia, 78, 81 of self suffering or dying, 3, 5, 121–22, 271 in Senecan tragedy, 129, 131–32 and spectaculum deo motif, 78–79, 83, 184, 265 in the Stoic ethical theater, 113–15, 119–22 of virtuous men dying, 78–79, 81, 82, 120, 255, 268, 286–87 (see also suicide, of amphitheater captives) spiritual exercises, 289. See also cogitatio mortalitatis; contemplation; imagines; meditatio, mortis; praemeditatio futurorum malorum; self-examination; solitude; spectation Squillante, Marisa, 150 Statius, Annaeus (Seneca’s doctor and friend), 11, 25, 32, 259, 273 Stoics on appropriation (oikeiôsis), 339 and “ethical theater,” 115–25, 128, 253 in Imperial Rome, 60, 118 on indifferents, 121, 253 and literature, 123, 128, 151 neo- (see neo-Stoicism) and suicide, 10, 256–57, 260, 264–65, 319–21, 323 on time, 159–60 on virtue (see virtue) on wisdom (see wise man, the) Stok, Fabio, 355 Subrius Flavus, 33–34, 58, 69, 144 suburban estates and villas, 25, 325, 329–42 Suetonius on deaths of emperors, 54 on Nero and Seneca in De vita Caesarum, 10, 13, 17–20, 34–35, 35, 39, 204, 216, 240, 259, 261, 269, 316 on Seneca in lost De viris illustribus, 182, 191, 273 suicide. See also agency; death, multiple methods of; freedom, paths to

410

general index

suicide (continued) of amphitheater captives, 61, 251, 255, 257 assisted, 259–61, 266 and Christian doctrine, 206, 262, 263–65 and Epicurus and Epicureans, 122–23, 148, 275 in European thought, 263–66 and exit-from-banquet analogy, 173, 240, 279 forced, 14, 187, 192–93, 261–65 and freedom of choice (arbitrium mortis), 26, 58, 253, 262, 268, 340 “grammar of,” 247 misguided motives, and dissuasion from, 127, 216, 249 Paulina’s death attempt as, 206, 260 philosophical doctrines for and against, 251, 254–57 for purpose of iactatio, 257, 268 Roman, 248–49, 262–63 in Seneca’s writings, 92, 117, 118–19, 122–23, 125, 129–31, 166, 174, 247–58, 264–66 and social status, 255, 266–67 by starvation, 94, 254, 118–19, 250 by sword, 129–30, 139, 266, 268, 287 as voluntaria mors, 24, 249, 257 as work of art, 241 Suillius Rufus, P., 20, 44, 322–23 Sylvestre, Joseph Noël, 232–36 Syrlin, Jörg, the Elder, 207 Tacitus Agricola, 28 allusions to Seneca’s writings, 7, 61–62, 68–73, 110 n. 78, 89, 110–12, 140, 149–50, 247, 249, 257–58 ambiguity in description of Seneca’s death, 19–20, 115 and annalistic tradition, 50–52 Annals lost and rediscovered, 19, 179, 182, 201 and death writing, 41, 49–62 Histories, 51, 67 on the Pisonian conspiracy and aftermath, 21–25, 41, 144–45 and the reader’s experience, 19, 51, 53, 57–58 in reception, 203–4, 211–12, 216 and Roman drama, 138, 142–45 on Seneca and Nero’s estrangement and final interview, 20, 47–49, 71, 106, 142–43, 242, 331, 344 on Seneca’s death, 4–5, 13–14, 20–34, 66, 68–73, 87–89, 110–12, 115, 144, 201–3,

211–12, 249, 257–58, 281–82, 284–86, 289–90, 291, 317, 329 on Seneca’s life and career, 10, 17–20, 35–36, 41–49, 105 Taillasson, Jean-Jacques, 231 Teleutai, 55, 275. See also Exitus illustrium virorum theatricality. See also comedy; drama; tragedies of Seneca and the dramaturgic paradigm (life as drama) in Seneca, 115–19, 124–25 and Julio-Claudian society, 115, 142–45, 134, 145–6 meta-, 137–38 in Pisonian conspiracy, 144–45 in Seneca in general, 14, 113–15 of Seneca’s death, 12, 113–15, 124–25, 142–45, 225, 237 and Seneca’s “ethical theater,” 113–25, 128, 146 and the spectacular paradigm in Seneca, 119–22, 124–25 and the tragic paradigm in Senecan prose, 122–25 Thrasea Paetus, 10, 20, 33, 49, 55, 59, 60–61, 70, 211, 258, 268–69, 279 Tiberius, the Emperor, 29, 96, 101–2, 112, 127, 238, 255, 263, 325–26 Tigellinus, 22–23, 25–26, 47, 52 time. See also life Petrarch on, 315–16 in Senecan tragedy, 126 and Seneca’s epistolary project, 158–61, 163–64, 167–68, 170–73, 175, 333–42 tragedies of Seneca in ancient literary history, 77, 125–26, 133–34, 138–42 and the audience, 126–29, 138 the chorus in, 130, 132, 134, 136, 137–38 on death agency, 129–31 on death and spectation, 131–32 on death in general, 74–75, 112, 125–40 and death localized and subdivided, 134–35 and death “trojanized,” 132–34 European receptions of, 10–12, 138, 146, 209–10, 216, 218–21, 225, 237–38, 241, 244 and Julio-Claudian historiography, 61, 115, 138, 142–46 nefas in, 125, 131, 132 and philosophy, 128 reassigned to different authors, 197, 198, 199, 211, 218 and Senecan biography, 99, 127, 138 and Seneca’s death, 10–11, 113–15, 112, 138–46, 220–21

general index and tragic heroes in Senecan prose, 122–24 transmission and circulation of, 187, 197, 209–10 the underworld in (see underworld) Tragedy of Nero, The, 220–21 tranquillity (tranquillitas), 5, 84–85, 214, 253, 286, 328. See also constantia; impatientia travel. See Campania; Epistulae morales, on travel Tristan l’Hermite, 221–24, 238, 259, 262, 290, 328–29 two Senecas, the, 12, 181, 197, 197–200, 211 tyranny and tyrants, 42, 48, 70, 71, 116, 118, 220, 240, 262, 323. See also kingship; Nero, cruelty and killings of Ullman, B. L., 315 underworld, the, 74, 133, 134, 135–38 Valerius Maximus, 54 Valla, Giorgio, 43 Vatia, Servilius, 325–28, 342, 345, 347, 349 vein opening. See also blood; scalpel in reception, 4–7, 14, 184–85, 189, 195, 230, 259, 268–69, 271 in Seneca’s writings and Roman culture, 217–18, 248, 251, 257, 259, 269–71 in Tacitus, 4, 28–29, 58–59, 60, 124, 267–71 Vestinus, Atticus, 57, 59, 144, 261 villa. See Epistulae morales, on suburban estates; Scipio, villa at Liternum; Vatia, Servilius Vincent de Beauvais, 192, 194–97 vindicatio, 76, 83, 157–58, 241, 314, 318 Virgil on Aeneas (see Aeneas) and consolation, 95–96, 101 on Dido (see Dido) receptions of, 7, 207, 315 and Seneca’s letters, 151, 154–55, 283, 314 on Troy, 67, 134, 282–83 on the underworld, 74, 94, 137

411

virtue as highest good, 120, 123, 128, 159–60, 252–53, 285, 288 and imago vitae suae, 286–87 and Seneca’s death, 139, 297, 304, 308 wise man, the education of (see Epistulae morales, and progress toward wisdom) readiness for death, 115, 159–60, 164, 250, 252 spectacle of, in death, 139, 286–87, 294–95 visual tradition, the, 6, 179–80, 182, 187, 189–91, 194–97, 203, 207–9, 210, 212–15, 216–18, 224–25, 230–36, 262, 271, 276, 277, 278, 291–12, 329, 342, 355. See also individual artists (e.g., Giordano), media (e.g., engravings), motifs (blood, and rubrication of manuscript), subjects (e.g., soldiers) or works (e.g., fisherman “Seneca” statue) Vita Senecae. See biographic portraits of Seneca; Jerome Voltaire, 306 Vottero, Dionigi, 282 Walter, Tony, 10 Walter of St. Victor, 191, 247–48, 251, 268, 276–77 Wangerin, Walter, Jr., 241 n. 146 wills, 28, 284–85. See also Seneca the Younger, will of Wilson, Emily, 126, 274 Winckelmann, Johann, 306–9 woodblock prints, 203, 207 Woodman, A. J., 61, 144, 279 Wouwer, Jan de (friend of Rubens), 211, 302 Xanthippe, 56, 203, 206 Xiphilinus, 35–37 Zanker, Paul, 182 Zeno, suicide of, 257 Ziolkowski, Theodore, 238, 242