Meanwhile, in Rome, Nero was erecting triumphal arches for his victory over the Parthians in the eastern part of the empire—despite the fact that the war was still ongoing. He was also trying to maintain public confidence in the grain supply by dumping rotten food into the Tiber. He embarked on building projects, setting up a new gymnasium in the city. Without Seneca as his public relations manager and advisor, Nero’s foreign and domestic policies tended more and more toward the theatrical. He sang in public theaters across the empire and provided public banquets in Rome. One of his most notorious performances was a “marriage” with a man dressed up as a woman. In July 64 CE came one of the most famous disasters of Nero’s rule: a great fire broke out in Rome, which burned for six days solid, killed many citizens, and destroyed whole neighborhoods around the Circus, including houses, temples, and porticos, all reduced to ash. Some muttered that Nero himself had started the blaze; others, that he capitalized on its theatrical value by appearing on stage while the fire raged to sing about the burning of Troy.
Seneca was presumably out of Rome at the time, but one of his letters, probably composed immediately after the Great Fire, discusses “our friend Liberalis,” whose town of Lyons has been devastated by fire.14 He gives a vivid description of a city of “so many beautiful buildings … ruined in just one night” (91.2). Archaeologists have searched in vain for any evidence of an actual fire at Lyons from this date, the summer of 64 CE. The obvious conclusion is that Seneca is fabricating a fire at Lyons in order to allow himself a space to discuss the fire at Rome and to suggest that the Rome from which he has withdrawn is far less solid, and far less magnificent, than his own mind. Discussing the fire at Lyons, Seneca branches out to consider the transience of all the mighty cities of the world: “time blots out even the traces of all the cities that you hear of as magnificent and grand” (91.10). He acknowledges that a vast destruction may leave room for rebuilding, as it did in Rome: “May it be built to endure, and under better auspices, founded for a longer existence!” But he also suggests that the real rebuilding work has to happen inside the mind. Seneca’s philosophical and literary creation in the Letters is more powerful and more enduring than the emperor’s burned city: “We are in the power of nothing when death is in our power” (91.21).
Nero’s response to the fire was rather different: he embarked on an even more lavish building project, a palace for himself named the Golden House (Domus Aurea), a vast complex of apartments, their walls inlaid with gold and jewels and images of lakes, rivers, and fields—which was never actually completed (Figs. 4.3 and 4.4). Nero’s comment on the palatial building, we are told, was that “he was at last beginning to be housed like a human being” (Suetonius, Nero, 31). The response of the Roman elite was predictably less positive; the Golden House was seen as the absolute nadir of imperial self-indulgence. Nero also tried to appease the gods, who must have had something to do with the fire, by proprietary ceremonies. We are told that he found a new category of human scapegoats in the Christians, who were crucified or thrown to the beasts in the arena, condemned both as arsonists and as misanthropes.15
Figure 4.3 The Domus Aurea (“golden house”) was built by Nero after the Great Fire of Rome. It was an extremely lavish palace building, of three hundred rooms, designed to accommodate huge parties; the walls were decorated with elaborate frescoes, ivory, and gold leaf.
Figure 4.4 The Domus Aurea (exterior view).
To pay for all this construction and for the expensive entertainments at the theater and the circus, Nero had to raise a lot of money from the provinces. We are told that “the provinces had been completely ruined” and that “throughout Asian and Achaea it was not simply the temple offerings but the statues of the gods that were being plundered” (Tacitus 14.45). Of the two men sent to retrieve this plunder for the emperor, one, Secundus Carrinas, was trained in Greek philosophy, and it was apparently suspected that he used his philosophical background as a justification for this sacrilegious temple robbing. In this context—or so it was rumored—Seneca came under increased suspicion, and he made yet another plea to be allowed to retire permanently to the country. We are told that he again attempted to give back his wealth to Nero, to help with the building projects after the fire (Dio). When that failed, again, Seneca claimed to be sick from a “muscular disease” (Tacitus 14.45) and locked himself in his bedroom. Some said (and again, Tacitus does not wholly endorse the rumor) that Nero gave orders for Seneca’s freedman, Cleonicus, to give him poison; but, either thanks to the freedman’s loyalty or Seneca’s own suspicions, he did not consume it. Seneca thereafter became even more careful about restricting his diet: even bread was dangerous.
For somebody who wrote so frequently about the importance of facing death bravely and readily, Seneca was extremely good at avoiding it. He himself acknowledges the difficulty, even for the most philosophical of us, in eliminating all fear of death: “Death is in the category of the things that are not evil; but it has the appearance of evil” (Epistle 82.15). Seneca’s central preoccupation is with trying to make death his own, something that belongs to him and is in his power, not something that might threaten his autonomy. He is on a constant quest to reinvent death as a sphere where he can be in control and can express himself, rather than simply at the mercy of somebody else. Death, he suggests, is a great leveler, since ownership of death is available to everybody, no matter how he or she dies: “nobody does not die his own death.” On the other hand, death is deeply personal, and Seneca clearly wanted to be able to manage his last moments for himself rather than have them come upon him suddenly by poison: “The best death is the one you like” (70.3). This kind of line makes a partial acknowledgment that one may in fact be unable to die in the manner one might have chosen; but that fantasy remains essential. He meditates obsessively on other famous philosophical deaths in history, most especially those of Socrates and of Cato the Younger (who disemboweled himself rather than survive the death of the Republic). These each give examples of how a death can be both imposed from outside, by an external political power, but also can be performed exactly as the agent himself desires. By owning death, Seneca manages to see it as a path to freedom: we have “only one way into life, but many ways out” (70.14). Death is also the ultimate test of whether we can put our moral training into practice: “for this one thing the day will come when we have to be tested” (70.18).
THIS COURAGEOUS DEATH
At the start of 65 CE, a conspiracy to kill Nero began, centered on a man called Gaius Piso, who had been exiled under Caligula but recalled by Claudius (Dio 59.8.7). Piso was a well-born and popular man, good-looking and skilled in rhetoric, although, as Tacitus snootily remarks, he indulged in frivolity, luxury, and immoderate pleasures (15.48). The roots of the conspiracy are unclear: Tacitus tells us that he does not know who the prime mover was (15.49). It seems likely that the conspirators’ motives were mixed: some, including Seneca’s nephew Lucan, joined the group because of their personal hatred for Nero, while others were driven by a sense that the empire was going downhill under Nero’s reign. A large number joined the group: Tacitus names no fewer than eleven elite men, along with several from military positions, including, most importantly, Faenius Rufus, who was joint head of the Praetorian Guard along with Tigellinus. Tigellinus, we are told, persecuted Faenius Rufus, trying to bring him down by making false accusations against him to Nero (such as that he had once been a lover of Agrippina); Rufus therefore had a strong motive to change the status quo.