‘Dying Every Day,’ by James Romm
ByBETTANY HUGHES JULY 11, 2014 The New York Times
The name Seneca brings a particular image to mind: a gaunt, half-naked old man, glaring wildly, his veins open, his lifeblood seeping into the small bath beneath him after he was forced to commit suicide. Painted by Rubens, memorialized by Dante in his first circle of hell, gilded into medieval manuscripts alongside Plato and Aristotle, Seneca has come to represent the perils of proximity to absolute power. The central question of James Romm’s “Dying Every Day” is this: When we confront this tragic Roman wordsmith, tutor to the emperor Nero (and, some argue, the power behind that terrible throne), who stares back at us? Is it atyrannodidaskalos, a tyrant-teacher? Is he the ultimate exemplar of Stoicism, a would-be philosopher king? Or is Seneca simply an accretion of history, a phantom constructed to fit our ravening for heroes, for antiheroes and for the sensational in the stories of antiquity?
Teasing out these conundrums, Romm, the James H. Ottaway Jr. professor of classics at Bard College, gives us a fresh and empathetic exploration of a man who, tantalizingly, seems destined to stay just out of reach. Born circa 4 B.C., Seneca was witness to what the Chinese call “interesting times”; the emperors Caligula and Claudius, the Apostle Paul, the British freedom fighters Caratacus and Boudicca were all his contemporaries. And yet, infuriatingly, although Seneca writes glancingly about many of the characters of his day, much hard detail of the history of Nero’s reign, including the apocalyptic fire of A.D. 64 that burned an estimated two-thirds of Rome to the ground, stays firmly off limits.
Romm gives us a robust framework for his quest about the “truth” of Seneca by cataloging what is certain. After moving to Rome from Corduba (modern-day Córdoba) in southern Spain, the teenage Seneca flirted with Pythagorean vegetarianism, engaged in Socratic dialogues and embraced Stoic ideals. We know that as aneques(a knight), Seneca achieved what his father had not, elevation to the rank of senator, and eventually consul. On the eve of Seneca’s exile to Corsica in A.D. 41 — on a trumped-up charge of adultery with Caligula’s sister — his only child, an infant boy, died. He appears to have “anger-managed” by sitting with his wife at the end of each day analyzing what he had done well and badly, strategizing for the time ahead. Like his hero Socrates, Seneca believed that without praxis, ideas were sterile: that the practical application of great philosophy can lead to truly great lives.
Word of his wit spread, and Seneca was recalled to Rome from exile by Nero’s mother, Agrippina. His was a beguiling brilliance. He could formulate strings of seductive words that convinced without conviction — a perfect candidate to ripen the young boy Nero in readiness for global omnipotence. Education was critical. Nero’s stepbrother, Britannicus, was an inheritance inconvenience. In A.D. 55, Britannicus was poisoned (some suppose, with Seneca’s collusion). Now Agrippina, Nero and his tutor-counselor were in charge of the Roman world.
All was in play. The exquisite archaeological remains of the Campanian towns Herculaneum and Pompeii show that even beyond Rome, this was an aspirational, feel-good epoch. (Seneca himself has in fact turned up in the ruins there — his words painted on a wall, his name graffitied as if he were some modern-day celebrity.) As Romm points out, evidence from the ruins tallies with one of Seneca’s preoccupations. A portentous earthquake of A.D. 62, prefiguring the enormous eruption of Vesuvius, is recorded on a frieze found in Pompeii. Seneca drew on the ominous earth movements to illuminate a favorite theme of his: We are “dying every day.”
Seneca as depicted on a third-century marble portrait bust.CreditAntikensammlung Berlin
Romm avoids a common trap; he does not judge Seneca with hindsight, but inhabits his life as it plays out. There are subtle and sympathetic observations. A self-confessed philhellene, Romm is alive to the fact that the Romans lived with the Greeks, whispering in their ears, sometimes breathing down their necks. Roman streets were populated with Greek slaves; their temples with Greek gods; their minds with Greek ideas. In many ways Seneca’s life was an incarnation of the tension between Greek idealism and Roman realpolitik. His “Phaedra” and “Medea” were reworked from earlier tragedies by Euripides as therapy, a way of dealing with the uniquely Roman catalog of fratricides, regicides, matricides, incest and holocausts with which he had to tangle.
A third-century sculpture discovered in 1813 shows Seneca as a jowly bald man (quite unlike the “false Seneca” bust that gave rise to the stereotype of Seneca as drawn and tortured), and cephalically linked to Socrates. Was Seneca, then, a self-styled Roman Socrates? Socrates claimed the one thing he knew was that he knew nothing, and Seneca opined in one of his apologias that he was not equal to the best, but better than the bad. Yet Stoic and Socratic ideals are quite different. Conveniently for Seneca, who grew fat on the fruits of an ever expanding empire (investing heavily, for example, in the newly conquered province of Britannia), the Stoics classified material wealth as what was called an “indifferent.” Barefoot, bath-allergic Socrates would, I’m sure, have taken a dimmer view.
Seneca, we must remember, lived through the horrors as well as the glories of antiquity, when bullies and psychopaths held both the living of your life and the manner of your dying in their hands. Whereas Socrates had only once been crucially involved in the political apparatus of fifth-century-B.C. Athens, Seneca was there at Rome’s dark heart. So did he detest himself toward the end of his life? Did he feel his mind and morals were mildewed by the miasma of Nero’s, and Rome’s, mania? He certainly favored a Stoical solution. In his “De Ira” Seneca writes: “You ask what is the path to freedom? Any vein in your body.”
It is easy to be seduced by the stellar lineup of characters who graze Seneca’s life, particularly Nero — that autocratic, crazed, incestuous, debt-ridden dictator — dead at 30, but a man who had ruled a fifth of the world’s population for half his short life. From the first sentence it is clear that this book is going to be a pacey, breezy ride. Arguably there could be an iota less narrative brio: The breathless enthusiasm to fit all in can occasionally result in inconsistencies and an overreliance on ancient historical sources as hard fact. But when there is analysis, it brings real clarity. Indeed there are moments of brilliance. The philosophical torment of the later years and the drama of Seneca’s tripartite death once Nero turns against him (vein opening, hemlock draft and then asphyxiation in a hot bath) are dealt with masterfully.
Romm reminds us that we need to care about Seneca — he is a touchstone for the modern world. Christopher Columbus cherished his works and quoted his dream of “new worlds.” Seneca kick-started our tradition of premiers’ employing professional speechwriters. Above all, he embodies the central conflict of human life: Can we be good while engaging with the imperfect world around us? That is one of the questions Romm leaves open.
“It is the mind that makes us rich,” Seneca once wrote to his mother. Is it possible that the answer to the Seneca enigma may yet turn up, in his own wily words, on a long-lost papyrus or inscribed fragment? Alternatively, the secrets of Seneca’s stellar, flawed, all too human mind may stay where he took them, in the rich Italian earth and a premature grave.