Some scholars have argued that Seneca avoids protesting his innocence in order to protect himself from accusing Claudius of injustice. A complaint that the emperor had exiled an innocent man would make the emperor himself look bad—either deliberately unjust, or naively misled.17 But the cagey usage of subordinate clauses and balanced alternatives makes it difficult to read this as an actual proclamation of innocence, as opposed to a careful avoidance of direct confession. Many of the arguments against the idea of his guilt are notably weak. Scholars cite the fact that Seneca was clearly a moderate person all his life, temperate in alcohol and food, and probably—despite a few slurs in the gossipy history of Dio—not particularly prone to sleeping around.18 But of course not all adulterers are promiscuous. Seneca may not have made a lifelong habit of sleeping with dozens of married women (or, despite some scurrilous rumors, pretty boys); but that does not prove that he did not have at least one affair.
Political strategy and sexual desire are not incompatible possibilities. Adultery was the standard charge when a woman was involved in any kind of political misdemeanor, because, even within the elite classes of imperial Rome, in which women were increasingly prominent, they were still seen primarily as sexual objects rather than as political and moral agents. But there is likely to have been some truth in the common contemporary perception that political intrigues involving both men and women often also involved sex.19
Seneca and Julia Livilla were both charged with adultery in 41 CE and condemned. Julia Livilla was exiled first, to a different location from Seneca; Claudius ordered her death by starvation in late 41 or early 42 CE. In Seneca’s case, there may have been quite a lot of debate about sentencing before he was finally sent to Corsica, probably sometime in 42, when he would have been about forty-six years old. We are told that Messalina pressed for the death penalty, but the emperor Claudius mitigated the sentence to relegation on the island of Corsica.
Among the Rocks of the Corsican Sea
The choice to punish miscreants by exiling them to islands had become increasingly common during the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius.20 One might think that the reason for choosing this type of punishment would be that an island, with its water all around, forms a natural high-security jail. But actually islands were less secure than fortress towns; a coast is much harder to guard than a hilltop. Emperors favored island exile for its flexible symbolism. A ruler could modulate the expression of his rage by his choice of geographical location for the exile. Relegation or exile to an island sounded worse than being sent to a mainland area. He might choose a far-distant island, for the worst kind of crime, or a nearby one, for a less outrageous infraction. By these standards, Seneca’s punishment was relatively mild. He was relegated to a large, well-populated island that is very near mainland Italy, just a short journey from Rome: the voyage by sea from Rome to Olbia, the northern city of Corsica, would have taken just two days.21
Relegation was a punishment with significantly different implications under Roman law from “exile” proper.22 Exile (exilium, or deportatio) implied not merely banishment but also deprivation of civil rights and often also confiscation of property and money. Relegation, on the other hand, was usually simply a banishment from a particular place, which might well prove temporary. It was therefore important for many exiled Romans—including Ovid as well as Seneca—to insist on the fact that they were relegated, not exiled. Conceptually and perhaps legally, it was easier to return from relegation than from exile. But in Seneca’s case, relegation may well have included some confiscation of property, and Seneca likely had half his property confiscated as part of his punishment for adultery.23
In theory, Seneca’s attitude toward exile was an entirely positive one.24 In his Consolation to Marcia, composed before the time of his own exile, he treats exile as one of the usual list of disasters that may befall a person—along with other disasters like shipwreck and fire and imprisonment and slavery—which must all be treated with equanimity by the wise person. Similarly, in his works composed after the time of exile, the experience of being made to leave one’s homeland is treated as just something one ought to be able to get along with, and indeed, an opportunity to display one’s manly virtue.25 Seneca assures Lucilius in the Epistles that exile is to him, as a good Stoic, of no real importance—it is an indifferent thing, incommensurable with the true value of virtue: “I count as ‘indifferent,’ that is, neither good nor bad, these things: disease, pain, poverty, exile, death” (82.10). Seneca wrote frequently in praise of the fortitude in exile of Rutilius Rufus, who was banished by political enemies in 92 BCE, during the time of Sulla, and ended up on the island of Mytilene. Rutilius Rufus rejected any suggestion that he ought to be comforted by the possibility of returning home from exile: “‘I’d rather have my country blush at my exile than regret my return.’ It’s not really exile, if nobody is less ashamed of it than the banished man himself” (De Ben. 6.37.2). Rutulius, Seneca says admiringly, “welcomed his exile with open arms” (Epistle 79). He insists, too, that exile can be a small price to pay, to show one’s gratitude to friends: “if you want to pay back a favor, you must be willing to go into exile,” he insists (Epistle 81)—a line that resonates with his own experience, since his involvement with Julia Livilla and her family had been essential for advancing his career. The reason to have a friend at all, he declares in an earlier letter, is so that one can help them and suffer for them: he makes a friend “in order to have somebody to die for, or in order to have someone for whom to go into exile” (Epistle 9).
One might expect that Seneca in his philosophical role might have been able to see exile as a positively helpful thing—a preferable rather than nonpreferable “indifferent.” He could have responded to his own exile as the idealized character “Seneca” does, in the drama Octavia that was composed after his death. Lamenting his current constraints under the tyrannical rule of Nero, this “Seneca” cries,
It would have been better to stay hidden, far from the troubles caused by envy,
Far distant, among the rocks of the Corsican sea,
Where my mind was free and under its own control,
And always had the time for my studies.
(Octavia 381–384)
Seneca was in exile for eight years. We do not know exactly how he spent these years. Much of his time must have been spent writing and studying philosophy; it is at least possible that some of his tragedies were composed in exile, and probably part of his treatise On Anger, to which we shall return later in this chapter. We can be sure of two works he composed in exile, which are designed to appeal against his condition. These are the Consolation to Polybius and the Consolation to Helvia, his mother. They are very different in tone and content, but both are clearly designed to increase the author’s chances of getting back home. Neither of these “consolations” is primarily—or even partly—designed to cheer up the supposed addressee, and indeed, from that point of view they must be regarded as abject failures. But both are highly successful in displaying Seneca’s virtuosic command of rhetorical idiom and in making the best possible case for his recall from Corsica.