from public life. He appears to have been continually on the move, perhaps a precaution against assassination. He focused on writing his Moral Letters, On Providence, and Natural Questions, all dedicated to his friend Lucilius. Despite obvious concerns, Seneca still found himself praising the emperor as ‘a man passionately devoted to truth, as he is to the other virtues’. By this point, such flattery must have seemed remarkably at odds with the increasingly violent and despotic nature of Nero's rule. In any case, according to Tacitus, Nero ‘in his hatred of Seneca, grasped at all methods of suppressing him’. The perfect opportunity was about to arise.
ENDGAME: THE PISONIAN CONSPIRACY
In 65 CE, Epaphroditus, a freedman who served as secretary to the emperor, gave Nero some information: a group led by a popular senator named Gaius Calpurnius Piso was planning to overthrow him and seize power. Nero responded with swift force, carrying out a violent purge of his enemies. Many prominent individuals were implicated in the plot. Some were exiled. Piso was ordered to commit suicide, along with other ringleaders including the praetorian prefect, Faenius Rufus, and the tribune, Subrius Flavus. The same fate would be visited on Seneca and his nephew Lucan. Tacitus reports the following remarkable twist:
It was rumoured that Subrius Flavus and the centurions had decided in private conference, though not without Seneca's knowledge, that, once Nero had been struck down by the agency of Piso, Piso should be disposed of in his turn, and the empire made over to Seneca; who would thus appear to have been chosen for the supreme power by innocent men, as a consequence of his distinguished virtues. (Annals, 15.65)
It's worth pausing for a moment to imagine what history may have been like if such a plot had succeeded in replacing Nero with Seneca, a Stoic man of letters, as the emperor of Rome.
In fact, Nero engaged in a total purge of the Stoic Opposition to his rule. The philosopher, Musonius Rufus, who had returned after the death of Plautus, was sent once again into exile, and several of his Stoic followers were either killed or exiled. Thrasea was finally put on trial for treason. His crimes were mainly to have publicly abstained, in numerous ways, from expressing praise or support for Nero as emperor, including not applauding at his festivals when prompted to do so by Burrus and Seneca. Defiant until the last, Thrasea is reputed to have said at his trial: ‘Nero can kill me but he cannot harm me.’ Nero had him executed. Barea Soranus, another prominent Stoic, and distant relative of the future emperor Marcus Aurelius, was executed for alleged conspiracy against Nero. Thrasea's son-in-law Helvidius Priscus, and his friend, Paconius Agrippinus, were put on trial at the same time and exiled.
As it happens, Epaphroditus was also the owner of a slave named Epictetus, who would become famous. Epictetus was probably just reaching manhood in Roman terms, aged around fifteen, when these events unfolded. Nevertheless, it's likely that he had a ringside seat to observe the drama at Nero's court. This would shape his own attitude towards imperial power and corruption. Epictetus later gained his freedom and studied Stoic philosophy under Musonius Rufus. He went on to become arguably the most famous teacher of philosophy in Roman history. It's clear from his Discourses that he greatly admired Musonius Rufus and revered the members of the Stoic Opposition as moral heroes.
In the years following the Pisonian conspiracy, opposition mounted to Nero's rule, until eventually his legions in Gaul rebelled against him. Though they were defeated, the rebellion spread until Nero, abandoned by his praetorian guard, committed suicide. His death was followed by the chaotic Year of the Four Emperors, which led to the reign of Emperor Vespasian, the founder of the Flavian dynasty.
We're told that, years earlier during the purge that followed the Pisonian conspiracy, when Nero's praetorian guards came for Seneca, he exclaimed:
For to whom had Nero's cruelty been unknown? Nor was anything left him, after the killing of his mother and his brother, but to add the murder of his guardian and tutor. (Annals, 15.62)
If he truly spoke these words, it was a last-minute confession. He directly contradicts the public assertions of Nero's innocence (of the death of his brother, Britannicus) that we can read for ourselves in his On Clemency. Seneca would also be contradicting the false assertion made in his speech to the senate that Nero's mother, Agrippina had chosen to kill herself. At the end of his life, Seneca can admit to his friends the truth: that Nero had murdered his mother and younger brother.
Readers often notice that Seneca's name is never mentioned in the Lectures of Musonius Rufus, the Discourses of Epictetus, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, or indeed the writings of any other Roman Stoic. That may be because his name had been deliberately suppressed by other Stoics, a practice scholars term damnatio memoriae. According to the historian Cassius Dio, after Nero murdered his mother, Thrasea told his friends:
If I were the only one that Nero was going to put to death, I could easily pardon the rest who load him with flatteries. But since even among those who praise him to excess there are many whom he has either already disposed of or will yet destroy, why should one degrade oneself to no purpose and then perish like a slave, when one may pay the debt to nature like a freeman? As for me, men will talk of me hereafter, but of them never, except only to record the fact that they were put to death. (Cassius Dio, 62.15)
Seneca, without question, was the most obvious target of this statement.
Tacitus reports that the dying Seneca made a point of emphasizing to his friends that by leaving them with ‘his sole but fairest possession – the image of his life’ he had bequeathed them something much more valuable than any writings or possessions. Yet, as we've seen, the image of Seneca's life is tainted by, among other things, being inseparably intertwined with Nero's corrupt regime. The Stoic emperor, Marcus Aurelius, writing to himself over a century after Seneca's death, refers to Nero as a cruel tyrant much like Phalaris, and compares him to a wild beast, a moral degenerate ‘drawn this way and that by the puppet-strings of impulse’ (Meditations, 3.16). Yet Seneca repeatedly portrayed Nero as a wise and virtuous ruler, almost a philosopher-king.
Nevertheless, Seneca's letters and essays, not to mention his tragedies, have inspired countless people throughout the centuries. It is not the image of his real life, therefore, that is Seneca's greatest legacy but rather the image of philosophy as a way of life that he depicted in these writings, especially the Moral Letters that he wrote in the years immediately prior to his execution.
THE MORAL LETTERS
The Moral Letters, or Letters to Lucilius, are Seneca's best-known writings today. The letters include some of Seneca's most memorable sayings, and remain one of our best sources for understanding Stoic philosophy.
There are 124 letters in total. In Letter 8, Seneca mentions his retirement from politics, which happened in 62 CE following the death of his friend Burrus, Nero's praetorian prefect. So these letters are believed to have been written during the last three years of Seneca's life.
Like his essays on Natural Questions and On Providence, which were written around the same time, they are addressed to a friend called Lucilius. Seneca describes him as an equestrian who was serving as the procurator of Sicily, and it's implied that he came originally from the ill-fated Roman city of Pompeii, in Campania. However, Lucilius is unknown except through Seneca's remarks about him, and it is therefore uncertain whether he was a real person or a character invented for use as a literary device. The consensus among modern scholars is that these letters, probably like all of Seneca's extant writings, were intended for publication.
The Moral Letters are perhaps Seneca's finest writings, written in pithy epigrammatic style and containing his most cherished philosophical reflections. Many letters begin with some reference to an everyday, mundane event, which gives him the pretext
