CHAPTER LVIII THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF SENECA
‘Hoc inter cætera vel pessimum habet crudelitas, quod perseverandum est.’—Seneca.
The family of Spanish Romans from Cordova of which Seneca was the head had risen to strange prosperity only to be dragged through deadlier overthrow; but the fate of their greatest scion, the poet Lucan, was the most humiliating. He might seem to have been marked out from infancy as the spoiled favourite of fortune. While little more than a boy, he had gained such a reputation for ability, that Nero had summoned him from Athens before his studies were completed. For a year or two he was the Emperor’s intimate friend, and at the same time he rose to be the favourite poet and writer of the day. When he recited in the lecture-rooms he achieved an astonishing success. He was appointed augur and quæstor before the legal age, and when, as quæstor, he exhibited games to the people, he was received with thunders of applause as loud as those which had greeted Virgil in the days of Augustus. It is impossible to imagine a giddier pinnacle of temptation for a hot-blooded Spanish youth of genius, who at the age of twenty could not have been a friend and courtier of Nero without being plunged into every sort of moral temptation. Let it be remembered in Lucan’s honour, that if he did not escape from that furnace unscathed—if his hair had been singed and the smell of fire had passed upon his garments—he yet never showed himself lost to virtue. In the midst of deplorable weakness he retained his conviction that freedom, and truth, and purity, were best.
Nero’s jealousy showed itself in the most public and insulting manner, when one day he got up and went out of the room for no reason whatever, in the middle of one of Lucan’s readings. It culminated in a prohibition to Lucan to read or publish anything further. The young poet, feeling within him the true fire of genius, nursed his rage in secret, and changed the tone of the ‘Pharsalia’ from inflated Cæsarism to savage denunciation. He mocks at the sham liberty which it accorded; brands with satire its shameful flatteries; and treating its apotheoses as a sacrilegious comedy, declares that the day would come ‘when a freer and truer Rome would make a god, not of Cæsar, but of Cato.’110 Ten years earlier he had been writing of Nero as a supreme divinity; now in his writing-desk lay the fierce complaint that, as a consequence of the civil wars, men had come to worship shadows in the temples of the gods.111 He consoled his seclusion by living in virtuous union with the young wife whom he loved, and as he poured forth the epic of a soul lacerated by indignation, conscious of his future immortality, he wrote in secret—
‘Pharsalia nostra
Vivet, et a nullo tenebris damnabitur ævo.’
When Piso’s conspiracy began, Lucan became its passionate supporter. Men might ask what was the use of substituting one actor like Piso for another like Nero, but if a republic was impossible, Lucan felt that no change of a Cæsar could be for the worse, and in his burning hatred promised that he would slay the Emperor with his own hand.
Alas! when detection came; when he saw knights and senators and soldiers sinking all around him into treacherous weakness; when the grim executioner stood at his elbow pointing to the rack, Lucan had none of the inward strength or ennobling convictions which might have enabled him to retain his manhood. Sinking to an incredible depth of baseness, he betrayed the name of his own mother as an accomplice in the plot. His momentary infamy did not save his life, though it must have cost him a pang worse than that of death. Bidden to die, he opened his veins in four places, and went into a hot bath. His last thoughts at the end of a life so brief, so full of glory, so full of shame, are left unrecorded. Only as he watched the blood flow, he was reminded of the fantastic lines of the ‘Pharsalia’ in which he had described the similar death of a soldier on the field of battle. He recited them with a feeble voice, and spoke no more. That he should, at such a moment, have recalled verses so fantastic is characteristic of a soul not naturally ignoble, but distorted and, so to speak, encrimsoned by the horrors of life’s tragedies and life’s amusements in the midst of which he lived.
The death of his father, Mela, was also stained with dishonour. Avarice seems to have run in the family, and not even the death of his glorious son could check Mela’s besetting vice. A nobler man would have hid his head in shame as well as sorrow, but Mela showed a discreditable eagerness in recovering the debts due to Lucan, whose great wealth was now added to his own. Among other debtors, he pressed hard on Fabius Romanus, who had been Lucan’s intimate friend. What a picture do we see of the noble and literary society of Rome when we are told, as if it were a quite ordinary occurrence, that, in base revenge, this intimate friend of a poet who had betrayed his mother resorted to forgery in order to ruin his friend’s father! He forged a letter of Lucan to prove an imaginary complicity in the plot between him and his father. Mela knew that his wealth would be his death warrant. Nero no sooner read the forged letter than he summoned Mela to his presence, with a keen eye on his possessions. Mela saw that the game of life was over, and opened his veins, after having written a will which was doubly base. To save his estate from confiscation, he left a large donation to Tigellinus, and his worthless son-in-law, Cossutianus Capito. He added spite to his greed and baseness. ‘I am condemned to die,’ he said, ‘though I have done nothing to deserve punishment; but Crispinus and Anicius Cerealis live, though they are enemies of the Emperor.’ Anicius Cerealis was the consul-designate who, after the conspiracy, had proposed in the senate that a temple should with all speed be reared at the public expense ‘to the Divine Nero.’ His abjectness did not save him. On hearing of the sentence in Mela’s will he, too, committed suicide.
The senators seemed to take a pleasure in pusillanimous adulation. They decreed supplications to the gods, and a special honour to the Sun as the detector of the conspiracy, and a restoration of the Temple of Fortune from which Scævinus had taken his dagger. Amid these decrees, ‘the sweet Gallio’ pleaded humbly that his life might be spared, although his only crime was his relationship to Seneca and Lucan. Whereupon a senator got up and denounced him as an enemy and a parricide. The rest had the decency to interfere on behalf of their popular and distinguished colleague. They begged the accuser to let sleeping dogs lie. But Gallio felt that his career of glory and popularity was over, and he too committed suicide.
The city was full of deaths, and the streets witnessed the daily spectacle of the stately funerals of these political victims, of whom so many were judicially murdered for their wealth, or to gratify the hatred of the Emperor. Yet such was the prevalent baseness, that men whose sons, or brothers, or friends, or kinsmen had been thus slain, returned thanks to the gods, adorned their doors with laurel as at the news of a public victory, and rushed to fling themselves at the knees of Nero, and cover his hand with their kisses! Many of the people believed that the reign of terror had been enacted simply to replenish the Emperor’s treasury, and pitied the murdered aristocrats as though they had been as innocent as the murdered Christians.
No delation pleased Nero more than when Natalis coupled the name of Seneca with the name of Piso. How far Seneca was really an accomplice is doubtful. He had been cautious, but he can hardly have been ignorant that Subrius Flavus had formed a design to set Piso aside and elevate Seneca himself to the Empire. It was certainly suspicious that on the eve of the conspiracy Seneca had returned from his Campanian retreat, and stopped at one of his villas only four miles from the city. There was no evidence against him except this:—Natalis had been sent from Piso to complain that Seneca would never see him, and to ask ‘why their friendship should thus be allowed to drop.’ Seneca had replied ‘that frequent intercourse was inexpedient for them both, but that his happiness depended on Piso’s safety.’ But it was whispered among Seneca’s most intimate friends that he had, in fact, assented to the assassination of Nero ‘in order to free Rome from Nero, and Nero from himself.’ The glittering antithesis betrayed its own authorship.
Nero sent a Prætorian tribune, named Silvanus—not knowing that he too was one of the conspirators—to require an explanation from Seneca. He found the philosopher at supper with his beloved wife, Pompeia Paulina, and two friends.
Seneca gave a calm explanation. He had merely told Piso that he was in weak health, and desired perfect quiet. ‘Why,’ he said, in reply to the Emperor’s inquiry, ‘should I have preferred the fortunes of a private person to my own safety? I am no flatterer, that I should have made such a speech. No one knows this better than Nero, who has experienced my boldness more often than my servility.’
When Silvanus brought back the answer, he found Nero sitting with Poppæa and Tigellinus—a bad omen for Seneca’s safety.
‘Is he preparing to put himself to death?’ asked the Emperor.
‘No,’ said the tribune. ‘He showed no sign of panic. His look and his words were entirely cheerful.’
‘Go, bid him die,’ was Nero’s brief answer.
Silvanus was, however, unwilling to deliver such a mandate in person to a brother conspirator. He sent it in by a centurion.
On receiving it, Seneca quietly rose from table and said to a slave, ‘Bring me my will. I should like to leave a few legacies to those who love me.’
‘I am sorry,’ said the centurion, ‘that the Emperor’s commands admit of no such delay.’
‘Be it so,’ said Seneca, turning to his friends. ‘Since, then, I have nothing else to leave you, I will leave you my fairest possession, the memory of my life. Be mindful of it, and you will win the fame of honest purpose and loyal friendship. Nay, my friends, do not weep. Where is your firmness? Where is your philosophy? I forbid these tears. Have I not been long preparing myself for this crisis? Was any one of us unaware of Nero’s cruelty? After murdering his mother and his brother, what remained for him but to kill his tutor?’
Then he embraced Paulina, and, softening for a moment, entreated her not to waste her life in endless grief, but to mitigate the pang of widowhood by ever recalling that the life of her husband had been spent in virtue.
‘I will die with you,’ said Paulina. ‘Let the physician open my veins as well as yours.’
‘I will not check you,’ said Seneca, ‘if such is your glorious desire. Were I to forbid it, I should but leave you to the endurance of future wrongs. If you prefer the dignity of death to the endurance of bereavement, let us both die with courage, though the greater distinction will be yours.’
In truth it would have been strange, and far from creditable, if Seneca had shown any pusillanimity when the hour of his condemnation came. Many of the philosophers had contracted life into a contemplation of death. The constant presentment of death to the mind in days so perilous was natural, and the possibility of a violent death must have been in Seneca’s thoughts as often as though, like Trimalchio, he had possessed a little skeleton of articulated ivory, and had it passed round among his guests at every banquet with the melancholy refrain, ‘What a little nothingness is man!’ Even Lucan, in his short life, had come to the conclusion that ‘Man’s best lot is to know how to die, and the next best to be compelled to die’—
‘Scire mori sors prima viris, sed proxima cogi.’112
The veins of Seneca and Paulina were opened with the same cut, but, as Seneca was old and attenuated by asceticism, his blood flowed slowly, and the veins of his legs were also cut. The ancients were under a strange delusion in supposing that bleeding was a mild kind of death. Seneca was so convulsed with agony that, fearing to break down Paulina’s courage, he persuaded her to depart to another room. When she was gone, he began to dictate his last words. They were afterwards published and had been read by Tacitus, but they were so well known that he would not record them. They probably added little or nothing to what he has said about death so many times in his letters to Lucilius. He still lingered in agony, and bade his physician, Statius Annæus, to give him hemlock. When the poison failed to act, he stepped into a hot bath to expedite the flow of blood, and as he did so he sprinkled the slaves nearest to him, saying that it was his libation to Jupiter the Liberator. He was then carried into a bath-room and stifled with the vapour. His body was burnt, by the direction of his will, without any solemnity of funeral. Nero meanwhile had forbidden the suicide of Paulina. Her wounds were bound up, and she recovered; but during the few years of her survival the excessive pallor of her face was a memorial of those tragic hours.
That Seneca’s life was a failure is admitted even by those who justly regard him as a seeker after God. He knocked at the gates of virtue, but he scarcely entered. He lacked consistency; he lacked whole-heartedness. Charity makes us reject the dark charges made against him by the malice of Dion Cassius, but the history of his life shows that he laid himself fatally open to the accusation of hypocrisy. A Christian he certainly was not, though it is far from impossible that, through Pomponia or some other Christian, he may have seen some of the writings of St. Paul, and that this may account for the singular resemblance of tone and expression between some passages. Yet the resemblance is more superficial than real, and between the character of the Christian Apostle and that of the pagan philosopher there is an impassable chasm. In the whole course of his life and in every action and writing of it, St. Paul gave splendid evidence that his convictions swayed the whole current of his being; but Seneca’s high-wrought declamations constitute the self-condemnation of every decisive incident in his personal history. A life dominated by avarice and ambition was unworthy of a professed philosopher; it fell far below the attainments of the humblest of those true Christians whom Nero burnt and Seneca despised. Seneca did little or nothing to make his age more virtuous; the Christians were the salt of the earth. The Pagans fled from despair to suicide; the Christians, in patient submission and joyful hope, meekly accepted the martyr’s crown.
