So far, so Socratic; but then Seneca shifts abruptly but characteristically from philosophy to common sense, and suggests that the real reason his friends ought not to cry for him is simply that they could easily have seen it coming: “Who didn’t know about Nero’s cruelty? There was nothing left after killing his mother and brother, than to add the murder of his guardian and tutor” (15.62). Seneca had worked hard to whitewash the murders of Britannicus and Agrippina at the time, but he must always have known that Nero’s aggression would likely one day turn to himself. Seneca’s death scene is thus a moment when the veil is stripped away, when the philosopher can finally, at last, speak truth to power (Fig. 4.5).
But even now, Seneca’s attitude toward Nero’s rule is conciliatory rather than revolutionary: he presents the emperor’s murderousness as inevitable and does nothing to suggest that he, or his followers, either could or should stop him. The philosopher is concerned with creating an impression for a large audience and for his admiring readers in years to come, rather than influencing the political future. Tacitus wryly remarks that his words about Nero “seemed to be meant for the general public,” even though he was supposedly addressing only a small group of friends. Similarly, even after he and Paulina have slashed their wrists, Seneca manages to keep talking to the public: “he called his secretaries and dictated a long speech, which has already been published in his own words, so I will hold back from summarizing it.” Tacitus is quietly mocking Seneca’s attempt to control the script of his own death, implying that there is something a little unseemly about this master of rhetoric making a public relations exercise even from his own dying hour.
Figure 4.5 Seneca was forced to commit suicide by Nero and finally died by suffocating in a steam bath. This painting, evocative of the muscular effort Seneca put into the attempt to die, is based on two ancient sculptures, neither of which is now believed to represent Seneca.
The vein slashing did not work for Seneca. Perhaps he had suspected that this method might not be successful when his time came: he wrote in the Natural Questions that when veins are cut, “the blood continues to ooze either until it all flows out, or until the cut in the vein closes and shuts off the bleeding, or some other reason keeps the blood back” (3.15.5). In his own case, the blood failed to flow out because his body was too old and skinny, emaciated from long years of fasting. He cut behind his knees as well, but to no avail. Fearing that the sight of his suffering might upset his wife, “and he himself might slip from his purpose at seeing her agonies,” he sent her off to the bedroom, where the soldiers bandaged her arms and saved her life. It is telling that Seneca feared being distracted from his purpose by his wife’s pain, a detail that marks the difference from Socrates’ death scene as clearly as anything. Seneca was not blessed with perfect philosophical calm and resolution at all times: he had a constant struggle to abide by his moral purpose.
When even the legs would not bleed enough, Seneca again emulated Socrates by calling for hemlock. His hemlock, however, was not administered by the public executioner, but by his own private doctor, Statius Annaeus (whose name suggests he may have been a relative but was more likely a freedman who had perhaps begun serving Seneca as a slave but had been manumitted). He had bought it long ago, presumably at some expense, in readiness for a death he knew was likely to come in this forced manner. However, even the hemlock did not work on his cold, feeble body. He stepped into a dish of hot water, spattering the poor slaves standing nearby: this spill was, he said, a libation to Jupiter the Liberator. Finally he had his slaves lift him into a hot bath, and he suffocated in the steam. They cremated him immediately, according to his wish.
The death Seneca had anticipated for so long had finally arrived. It was, like his life, a highly theatrical moment, composed of a series of compromises. The failure of each successive method of death is both terrible (he could not even kill himself successfully) and blackly funny, as Tacitus surely intended. Seneca’s wish to control his final moments was highly visible here, but so too was the impossibility for him of achieving the Stoic ideal of perfect constancy and calm within the pressures and violence of Neronian Rome, and given Seneca’s own frailties. One can sneer at a death that took so long and that was so difficult to achieve; Seneca failed repeatedly at something that everybody manages, in the end. But one can also admire the ways that he kept trying, despite his failures—just as he had done in life, in his constant attempts to continue along the path of philosophical virtue.
We might also note that the repeated attempts to die each required a new set of props, all of which cost money. This death was also an appropriate end for one who had lived the life of a rich man and who had become Rome’s most perceptive analyst of consumerism and the psychology of luxury. It may be remembered that Seneca in old age complained of feeling constantly cold and enjoyed warm baths. The bath in which he died was an instrument of pain and loss; but also it was a luxury item, heated and administered by slaves, offering this elite man his final path to freedom. Seneca’s death, despite and because of his own best efforts, can be seen as a vivid image of his life. It was a slow, painful, highly theatrical and rhetorical confrontation between philosophical idealism and human weakness in the face of political power.
After Seneca’s death, Nero rounded up everybody associated with the conspiracy: the year 65 was devoted to a long series of executions and forced suicides, of which Seneca’s was in many ways the least impressive. The tribune, Subrius Flavus, died a less dramatic but no less brave death than that of Seneca, and Tacitus does him the honor (which he denied to Seneca) of recording his last words, in which he explains why he came to hate Nero: for being the murderer of his wife and mother, and a charioteer, an arsonist, and an actor (15.67). In the same year Nero also killed his latest wife, Poppaea, probably accidentally, by kicking her in the belly during pregnancy. Numerous other exiles and deaths followed. Musonius Rufus was exiled. Lucan, Seneca’s nephew, and later, in 66 CE, Mela, his father, were denounced on more charges of conspiracy. Lucan, Suetonius tells us, was “easily forced to confess, and descended to the most abject pleas, even naming his own mother as one of his companions despite her innocence. He hoped this unfilial behavior would benefit him with the parricidal emperor. But when he was allowed free choice of the manner of his death, he wrote a letter to his father with edits for some of his verses, and after a large meal, offered his arms to a doctor, for cutting his veins” (Life of Lucan).