Four Tragedies and Octavia (2 page)

The enthronement of Seneca in one particular century of European, and especially of English, culture is a phenomenon as remarkable as the chance which brought the humane philosopher himself to a position of dangerous eminence at the right hand of Rome's most notorious tyrant.

*

Annaeus Seneca the elder was a native of Corduba in Spain, born about 54
B.C
. His long life of some ninety years was devoted to the study and profession of rhetoric, and for this purpose he must have spent some time in residence
at Rome, whence he took back to his native town a profound knowledge of his subject and a respect for the traditional virtues of republican Roman family life.
Antiqua et severa
are the words used by his son Lucius Annaeus, our tragedian, of the home into which he was born, about 4
B.C
.; and he would no doubt have applied the same epithets to his father, who would be in his sixties by the time the boy was old enough to take notice of personal characteristics. The elder Seneca's extant works, known as
Controversiae
and
Suasoriae
, were written for the instruction of his sons and consist of models and exercises in rhetoric – the art which was firmly established in ancient Rome as the indispensable basis of humane education and respectable advancement in public life: the exact equivalent of a classical education in imperial England. From such an upbringing the three sons of Seneca (of whom Lucius Annaeus was the second) proceeded to various degrees of public eminence, and to their deaths all in the same year of terror
A.D
. 65. The eldest, Annaeus Novatus, had become proconsul of Achaia; he had previously been adopted by, and taken the name of, Junius Gallio, and under this name he is known to history as having preserved an aloof indifference to a petty religious squabble in Athens.
¹
The youngest son Annaeus Mela prospered mainly in financial affairs, and was the father of the poet Lucan. Both these brothers were denounced as traitors, and committed suicide, in the purge which followed the anti-Neronian conspiracy of Piso and which ended the life of L. Annaeus Seneca.

The adult education of the young Seneca began with intensive study of the Stoic and Pythagorean philosophies;
²
an early enthusiasm for the vegetarian system of Pythagoras lasted for a while, until his father pointed out the dangers
of becoming known as a ‘crank', especially when such eccentricities were popularly associated with religious heresies of various kinds. His early years also included a period of ill-health (probably tuberculosis) and of residence in Egypt, where his aunt was the wife of the Prefect. By
A.D
. 33 he was married to his first wife (whose name is not known), had held the office of quaestor, and was achieving success in his profession of advocate and teacher of rhetoric and attracting attention by his incisive style of writing. He attracted also the jealous suspicions of the emperor Caligula, whose threats he was forced to evade by temporary retirement into private life. On the accession of Claudius he was able to return to his career, but a second setback occurred when in
A.D
. 41 he was accused, at the instigation of the emperor's diabolical wife Messalina, of adultery with Julia the daughter of Germanicus, and was exiled to Corsica, where he spent eight years. He was by now the father of a son and daughter; a second son died on the eve of his exile, and his wife was dead before his return.

Out of the lonely meditations of these eight years came two of the three works known as ‘Consolations'. One had already been written ‘To Marcia', a bereaved mother,
¹
a second was addressed to Polybius, the powerful freedman of Claudius, and combined ‘consolation' on the death of a brother with advice on public administration and servile flattery of the emperor and his entourage. The third, to his mother Helvia, on the subject of his own exile, is one of his most sincere and likeable compositions.
²
He was probably also engaged at this time on the treatise
De Ira
(published about
A.D
. 49), a brilliant and eloquent plea for the stoical control of the baser emotions, and perhaps on some of his work on natural phenomena, which was to appear near
the end of his life. It is not unlikely that his experiments in the composition of tragedy began in this period of unlimited leisure.

In
A.D
. 48 Messalina was executed for her illegal and treasonable marriage to Gaius Silius, and the emperor married Agrippina. The abilities of Seneca had not been forgotten at Rome during his exile; by Agrippina's influence he was now recalled to be tutor to her twelve-year-old son Lucius Domitius, the future emperor Nero. He was also appointed to the office of praetor. By the time Nero was eighteen years old, his advancement to the position of heir-apparent had been secured by his adoption into the Claudian family and his marriage to Octavia, daughter of Claudius; it only remained for Agrippina to remove her husband, which she did, by poison, in
A.D
. 54. From that date Seneca became the emperor's principal civil adviser, in association with Burrus who commanded the praetorian guard. The first five years of the new reign surprised everyone, and became proverbial among historians as a period of wise and moderate government; for which credit must certainly be given to Seneca's ability to combine firmness and high principle with tactful indulgence in his direction of the young emperor's tastes and ambitions – an influence extending, one would imagine, more widely than is grudgingly allowed by Tacitus:
¹
‘Burrus's influence lay in soldierly efficiency and seriousness of character, Seneca's in amiable high principles and his tuition of Nero in public speaking.' It is clear, however, that it was from Seneca that Nero learnt, not only how to speak, but what to say: ‘Nero pledged himself to clemency in numerous speeches; Seneca put them into his mouth, to display his own talent or demonstrate his high-minded guidance.' It is uncertain
whether among Seneca's literary compositions should be included the ribald satire
The Pumpkinification of the Late Claudius
, a farcical fantasy on the reception of the departed emperor into everlasting life. But it is recorded that he wrote for Nero a tongue-in-cheek panegyric on Claudius, the recitation of which reduced the audience to helpless laughter.
¹
More to his credit are the works
De Vita Beata
and
De Beneficiis
, and, despite its tendency to offer flattery in the guise of instruction, the
De dementia
addressed to his royal pupil.

But it was not long before a growing feud between Agrippina and her son disturbed the security of Seneca's position; and the part played by him in Nero's atrocious matricide appears, at the best, ambiguous; he certainly failed, or had no desire, to curb the emperor's violence, and he provided him with the letter of justification which was sent to the senate.
²
There is reason to believe that he condoned, and possibly profited by, many of Nero's attacks on his enemies; and in return his own acquisition of enormous wealth brought him into disrepute. A senator prosecuted for extortion and embezzlement while governor of Asia retorted: ‘What branch of learning, what philosophical school, won Seneca three hundred million sesterces during four years of imperial friendship? In Rome, he entices into his snares the childless and their legacies. His huge rates of interest suck Italy and the provinces dry.'
³
With the death of Burrus in
A.D
. 62, his position became still more precarious, and he himself chose this moment to ask for retirement. In a dignified interview he thanked Nero for his kindness over fourteen years, and offered to surrender all his superfluous property. Nero replied that the
obligations were all on his side – adding, ambiguously, ‘Your gifts to me will endure as long as life itself; my gifts to you, gardens and mansions and revenues, are liable to circumstances' – and they parted with ceremonies of mutual affection.
¹
Before the year was out – the year of the events concentrated into the tragedy
Octavia
– Nero had removed Burrus's successor, Rufus, retaining the reliable services of his colleague Tigellinus, and had discarded his wife Octavia for his new love Poppaea. At the same time Seneca had been denounced for association with the anti-Neronian conspiracy led by Piso, for in fact Seneca's name had been put forward as a possible successor to the throne. His nominal withdrawal into private life and into the resumption of his literary pursuits could not save him from the consequences of his public career; Nero was not likely to leave for long at large a potential opponent so well acquainted with his own dark secrets. In
A.D
. 65 (the year after the fire of Rome) the Pisonian conspiracy came to a head, and Seneca was implicated, on the slender evidence of a letter expressing friendly compliments to Piso. His death was ordered, and Seneca made preparations to meet it in the manner which he had often contemplated, and advocated in his letters, as the only one befitting a man of dignity.
²
After painful attempts to end his life by incision of the veins, he had recourse to poison, which still failed to have the desired effect; finally, a hot bath hastened the loss of blood, and a steam bath brought his life to an end by suffocation. His wife Paulina attempted to share his fate, but on Nero's orders her suicide was arrested and she survived her husband by a few years.

Of the earliest assessments of Seneca's character, that of Dio Cassius is perhaps the most uncompromising, which
describes him as totally unscrupulous and inconsistent, preaching liberty and encouraging a tyrant; condemning flattery and courtship, enjoying luxury and contributing to flattery of the court; and sexually libertine. A modern critic has a more charitable view:
¹
.

Seneca, with his high brain-power and the low vitality of prolonged ill-health, with his clever, subtle mind and his lack of solid commonsense, with his amiable but not passionate temperament, is perhaps after all not so hard to understand. He desired more than most to do the right things; but he hated more than most the unpleasant things, especially unpleasantness with other people. In a perfectly desperate position, with only one path before him, he could tread it finely; but it was a desperate position indeed when that agile brain could not find a way round and justify to itself the same. Less clever he would have proved a great deal more edifying.

*

The tragedy of violence and intrigue in the real life about them, as well as in the organized spectacles of butchery in the amphitheatres (against which Seneca made his protest), seems to have blunted the taste of the Roman people for tragedy as a dramatic art. It is generally agreed that the tragedies of Seneca were intended for reading or recital at private gatherings and could never have appeared in what we should call public performance; partly because in many of their scenes the implied condemnation of autocracy would have had too dangerous a topical application; and partly because there were, so far as we know, no public opportunities for such performances. What we do know of the nearest approach to tragic acting in Nero's time suggests something between ballet and opera, with the emphasis on the individual virtuoso's art of evoking, in song and mime,
the passions and torments of a Hercules or an Oedipus – an art of which Nero fancied himself both as connoisseur and exponent. Of what passed for dramatic performance some glimpse can be gathered from scattered references such as this from Suetonius:
¹

He gave an immense variety of entertainments – coming-of-age parties, chariot races in the Circus, stage plays…. At the Great Festival, as he called the series of plays devoted to the hope of his reigning for ever, parts were taken by men and women of both Orders; and one well-known knight rode an elephant down a sloping tight-rope. When he staged ‘The Fire', a Roman play by Afranius, the actors were allowed to keep the valuable furnishings they rescued from the burning house…. In the ‘Daedalus and Icarus' ballet, the actor who played Icarus, while attempting his first flight, fell beside Nero's couch and spattered him with blood….

A generally lively programme, with amateur enthusiasm contributing, and plenty of realistic, preferably dangerous, and often unseemly, action. Even a hundred years earlier Cicero, at the festival celebrating the opening of Rome's first permanent theatre, complained
²
of the pathetic performances of old-fashioned actors past their prime, and of the spectacular ostentation which had been imposed upon the old tragedies: ‘Who wants to see six hundred mules in
Clytaemnestra
or three hundred goblets in
The Trojan Horse
, or a battle between fully equipped armies of horse and foot?' A rhetorical exaggeration, no doubt, but an indication of the way things were going. Even so, a tradition persisted for the composition of tragedy on the Greek pattern, and if such works made little impression on public audiences they were regarded as worthy employment for the pens of erudite authors or even of men of business in
their spare time. Knowing little or nothing of the public fate of most of these works, we do at least know that Cicero himself, and his brother Quintus, wrote tragedies; Julius Caesar wrote one,
Oedipus
; Ovid's
Medea
was esteemed as highly as any of the varied works for which he has become known to posterity; and there is record of a performance of a tragedy
Thyestes
, by L. Varius Rufus, at the festival in celebration of the victory of Actium. To have a play performed, for some special occasion, was an accident that none of such authors counted on, or particularly desired – if they were of the same mind as Ovid, who writes from exile:
¹
‘You tell me that my poetry is being performed to full houses and winning much applause; as far as I am concerned, I never wrote with the theatre in mind, as you very well know, and my Muse was always indifferent to applause.'