The year in which Seneca arrived back in Rome, 31 CE, was an interesting and terrible time in the city’s history. The emperor Tiberius, Augustus’ adopted son, had taken over power in 14 CE but had little active interest in governing the empire; he hoped to let the wheels of government turn without having to intervene. From 26 CE onward, he left the capital altogether and lived full-time in retirement on the island of Capri—supposedly entertaining himself with constant sex orgies. In the meantime, there were other people who very much did want to take an active part in government. The most important of these was Sejanus, who had been appointed consul in 31 and used the position as leverage in his attempt to seize complete control of the empire. But Tiberius found out about the plot and sent a letter to the Senate ordering that Sejanus be executed immediately. He and his followers were killed within days, and in the weeks that followed, the previously inactive Tiberius is said to have woken up enough to conduct a series of further executions of all those associated with the plot.
Figure 2.1 Tiberius, emperor from 14 to 37 CE, was a reclusive and bitter emperor whose court had an atmosphere of fear and suspicion.
Seneca’s life under Tiberius must have been defined by fear. The earlier years of the rule were relatively good, comparable to the good years of the Divine Augustus (On Clemency 1.1). But in his later years, the time at which Seneca was entering public life, Tiberius became paranoid and antisocial to the point almost of madness. Seneca characterizes the emperor as horribly unkind and close-fisted, the kind of man who has no notion of true generosity: even his gifts were always accompanied by reproaches, leaving such a sour taste that the beneficiaries could never be expected to feel grateful for them (On Benefits 2.7). Seneca tells the story of an old friend who made the emperor a social visit and was horribly snubbed. The friend asked Tiberius, “Do you remember … ?” and the emperor cut him off, claiming, “I don’t remember who I was,” and treating his old friend as a spy (inquisitor). The emperor wanted to insist that his life before coming to power was entirely forgotten: “He turned away from all his friends … he wished people to see, think and speak of him only as an emperor” (On Benefits 5.25). Seneca’s own life in these years would have been deeply affected by the culture of informing, spying, and suspicion—an ancient equivalent of McCarthyism. He describes how there was in the time of Tiberius “an almost universal culture of informing, which was more ruinous for Rome even than the civil wars” (On Benefits 3.26). The issue was not only that public forms of speech and writing were controlled; even the most apparently innocent actions, or inadvertent gestures, could be held against one. Seneca tells the terrifying though darkly funny story of a man in the Praetorian Guard who, wearing a ring adorned with the image of the emperor, got drunk and started to lift up a chamber pot, presumably needing to use it rather urgently—and touched the impure object while still wearing his imperial ring (De Ben. 3.26). An informant was at the party and called the guests to witness the act of desecration. The man would have been executed had it not been for the quick thinking and loyalty of his slave, who managed to slip the ring onto his own finger just in time, to “prove” his master’s innocence. All this helps to explain why Seneca may have extended his years in Egypt rather longer than his illness. It would be understandable if he were reluctant to enter this world of suspicion and fear, as well as for reasons of poor health. But the fact that he did decide to swim in these dirty waters, and that he achieved significant social success under Tiberius, is also revealing of his courage, his curiosity, and his ambition.
Seneca’s years under Tiberius gave him a good glimpse of how important it was for an emperor to be able to be generous and merciful to his subjects—topics on which he insisted in his public advice to Nero.
They also gave him a clear sense of the dangers involved in an advisor or imperial servant trying to become more powerful than the emperor, as Sejanus had done. The aftermath of the conspiracy only increased the atmosphere of paranoia, in which plots and counter-plots were constantly both created and imagined. The culture of fear among the Roman elite of this period can be seen as a function of the institutional instability of the imperial system: the emperor had to ensure that the aristocracy, the old locus of control in government, remained weak in order to ensure his own hold on the reins of power. But Seneca never suggests that he saw things in these terms. Rather, he presents Tiberius’ lack of generosity and cultivation of an atmosphere of terror as merely personal failures. Moreover, his anecdote about the slave and the chamber pot suggests, characteristically, that the best response to this world of constant political danger is constant individual vigilance, the display of personal integrity, and loyalty to one’s own social group—not explicit resistance to the regime. These lessons, learned under Tiberius, would follow through Seneca’s life under the challenges posed by subsequent emperors.
The culture of fear grew worse six years after Seneca returned to Rome, with the accession in 37 CE of Rome’s most notoriously insane emperor: Caligula (Fig. 2.2). Caligula is depicted in all the ancient sources as crazily cruel and perverted: he enjoyed killing for its own sake, he slept with his sisters, and he declared himself to be a god. Of course, all of these sources are written under later emperors, by writers who have a strong ulterior motive for denigrating the current emperor’s predecessors; modern historians tend to think that Caligula was probably less crazy than the sources suggest.2
Figure 2.2 Caligula (“little boot”) was emperor from 37 to 41 CE. We are told that he was tempted to execute Seneca but decided not to bother because he was likely to die soon in any case.
But Seneca has nothing good to say about Caligula and frequently depicts him as a monster driven mad by rage.3 He tells a horrible story in his essay On Anger of a young man whose elegant clothes and hair aroused Caligula’s ire. Caligula threw him into jail, and when the youth’s father begged for his son’s life, Caligula had the boy executed. He then invited the father to dinner and forced him to sit and drink with him—feeling all the while, as Seneca comments, “as if he were drinking his son’s blood” (On Anger 2.33). Caligula set slaves to watch the man intently and observe whether he accepted everything he was offered—perfumes, garlands, and drinks. He took it all and showed no sign on his face that he was grieving the murdered boy. Seneca comments chillingly on the reason: “You ask me why he did this? Because he had another son.”
The story was clearly in Seneca’s mind when, later, he wrote his tragedy Thyestes, in which a monstrous tyrant, Atreus, forces his brother Thyestes to eat his own children and drink wine mixed with their blood—and watches him all the while. Caligula, like Seneca’s Thyestes, was a kind of dramatic director, who forced those around him into performing roles in his own sadistic theater of cruelty. It has been well observed that the Roman court of this period—under Caligula, Claudius, and later Nero, another great lover of theatrical scenes—created a sense that everybody had to be an actor: not only the emperor himself, but also those in attendance upon him, who were watched to see if their reactions were acceptable or not.4