THE DEATH OF SENECA.
The false charge which had been brought against Seneca, and in which the
name of Piso had been involved, tended to urge that nobleman and his
friends into a real and formidable conspiracy. Many men of influence and
distinction joined in it, and among others Annaeus Lucanus, the
celebrated poet-nephew of Seneca, and Fenius Rufus the colleague of
Tigellinus in the command of the imperial guards. The plot was long
discussed, and many were admitted into the secret, which was
nevertheless marvellously well kept. One of the most eager conspirators
was Subrius Flavus, an officer of the guards, who suggested the plan of
stabbing Nero as he sang upon the stage, or of attacking him as he went
about without guards at night in the galleries of his burning palace.
Flavus is even said to have cherished the design of subsequently
murdering Piso likewise, and of offering the imperial power to Seneca,
with the full cognisance of the philosopher himself.[35] However this
may have been--and the story has no probability--many schemes were
discussed and rejected, from the difficulty of finding a man
sufficiently bold and sufficiently in earnest to put his own life to
such imminent risk. While things were still under discussion, the plot
was nearly ruined by the information of Volusius Proculus, an admiral of
the fleet, to whom it had been mentioned by a freedwoman of the name of
Ephicharis. Although no sufficient evidence could be adduced against
her, the conspirators thought it advisable to hasten matters, and one of
them, a senator named Scaevinus, undertook the dangerous task of
assassination. Plautius Lateranus, the cousul-elect, was to pretend to
offer a petition, in which he was to embrace the Emperor's knees and
throw him to the ground, and then Scaevinus was to deal the fatal blow.
The theatrical conduct of Scaevinus--who took an antique dagger from the
Temple of Safety, made his will, ordered the dagger to be sharpened, sat
down to an unusually luxurious banquet, manumitted or made presents to
his slaves, showed great agitation, and finally ordered ligaments for
wounds to be prepared,--awoke the suspicions of one of his freedmen
named Milichus, who hastened to claim a reward for revealing his
suspicions. Confronted with Milichus, Scaevinus met and refuted his
accusations with the greatest firmness; but when Milichus mentioned
among other things that, the day before, Scaevinus had held a long and
secret conversation with another friend of Piso named Natalis, and when
Natalis, on being summoned, gave a very different account of the subject
of this conversation from that which Scaevinus had given, they were both
put in chains; and, unable to endure the threats and the sight of
tortures, revealed the entire conspiracy. Natalis was the first to
mentioned the name of Piso, and he added the hated name of Seneca,
either because he had been the confidential messenger between the two,
or because he knew that he could not do a greater favour to Nero than by
giving him the opportunity of injuring a man whom he had long sought
every possible opportunity to crush. Scaevinus, with equal weakness,
perhaps because he thought that Natalis had left nothing to reveal,
mentioned the names of the others, and among them of Lucan, whose
complicity in the plot would undoubtedly tend to give greater
probability to the supposed guilt of Seneca. Lucan, after long denying
all knowledge of the design, corrupted by the promise of impunity, was
guilty of the incredible baseness of making up for the slowness of his
confession by its completeness, and of naming among the conspirators his
chief friend Gallus and Pollio, and his own mother Atilla. The woman
Ephicharis, slave though she had once been, alone showed the slightest
constancy, and, by her brave unshaken reticence under the most
excruciating and varied tortures, put to shame the pusillanimous
treachery of senators and knights. On the second day, when, with limbs
too dislocated to admit of her standing, she was again brought to the
presence of her executioners, she succeeded, by a sudden movement, in
strangling herself with her own girdle.
[Footnote 35: See Juv. _Sat_. viii. 212.]
In the hurry and alarm of the moment the slightest show of resolution
would have achieved the object of the conspiracy. Fenius Rufus had not
yet been named among the conspirators, and as he sat by the side of the
Emperor, and presided over the torture of his associates, Subrius Flavus
made him a secret sign to inquire whether even then and there he should
stab Nero. Rufus not only made a sign of dissent, but actually held the
hand of Subrius as it was grasping the hilt of his sword. Perhaps it
would have been better for him if he had not done so, for it was not
likely that the numerous conspirators would long permit the same man to
be at once their accomplice and the fiercest of their judges. Shortly
afterwards, as he was urging and threatening, Scaevinus remarked, with a
quiet smile, "that nobody knew more about the matter than he did
himself, and that he had better show his gratitude to so excellent a
prince by telling all he knew." The confusion and alarm of Rufus
betrayed his consciousness of guilt; he was seized and bound on the
spot, and subsequently put to death.
Meanwhile the friends of Piso were urging to take some bold and sudden
step, which, if it did not succeed in retrieving his fortunes, would at
least shed lustre on his death. But his somewhat slothful nature,
weakened still further by a luxurious life, was not to be aroused, and
he calmly awaited the end. It was customary among the Roman Emperors at
this period to avoid the disgrace and danger of public executions by
sending a messenger to a man's house, and ordering him to put himself to
death by whatever means he preferred. Some raw recruits--for Nero dared
not intrust any veterans with the duty--brought the mandate to Piso, who
proceeded to make a will full of disgraceful adulation towards Nero,
opened his veins, and died. Plautius Lateranus was not even allowed the
poor privilege of choosing his own death, but, without time even to
embrace his children, was hurried off to a place set apart for the
punishment of slaves, and there died, without a word, by the sword of a
tribune whom he knew to be one his own accomplices.
Lucan, in the prime of his life and the full bloom of his genius, was
believed to have joined the plot from his indignation at the manner in
which Nero's jealousy had repressed his poetic fame, and forbidden him
the opportunity of public rectitations. He too opened his veins; and as
he felt the deathful chill creeping upwards from the extremities of his
limbs, he recited some verses from his own "Pharsalia," in which he had
described the similar death of the soldier Lycidas. They were his last
words. His mother Atilla, whom to his everlasting infamy, he had
betrayed, was passed over as a victim too insignificant for notice, and
was neither pardoned nor punished.
But, of all the many deaths which were brought about by this unhappy and
ill-managed conspiracy, none caused more delight to Nero than that of
Seneca, whom he was now able to dispatch by the sword, since he had been
unable to do so by secret poison. What share Seneca really had in the
conspiracy is unknown. If he were really cognisant of it, he must have
acted with consummate tact, for no particle of convincing evidence was
adduced against him. All that even Natalis could relate was, that when
Piso had sent him to complain to Seneca of his not admitting Piso to
more of his intercourse, Seneca had replied "that it was better for them
both to hold aloof from each other, but that his own safety depended on
that of Piso." A tribune was sent to ask Seneca as to the truth of this
story, and found,--which was in itself regarded as a suspicious
circumstance,--that on that very day he had returned from Campania to a
villa four miles from the city. The tribune arrived in the evening, and
surrounded the villa with soldiers. Seneca was at supper, with his wife
Paulina and two friends. He entirely denied the truth of the evidence,
and said that "the only reason which he had assigned to Piso for seeing
so little of him was his weak health and love of retirement. Nero, who
knew how little prone he was to flattery, might judge whether or no it
was likely that he, a man of consular rank, would prefer the safety of a
man of private station to his own." Such was the message which the
tribune took back to Nero, whom he found sitting with his dearest and
most detestable advisers, his wife Poppaea and his minister Tigellinus.
Nero asked "whether Seneca was preparing a voluntary death." On the
tribune replying that he showed no gloom or terror in his language or
countenance, Nero ordered that he should at once be bidden to die. The
message was taken, and Seneca, without any sign of alarm, quietly
demanded leave to revise his will. This was refused him, and he then
turned to his friends with the remark that, as he was unable to reward
their merits as they had deserved, he would bequeath to them the only,
and yet the most precious, possession left to him, namely, the example
of his life, and if they were mindful of it they would win the
reputation alike for integrity and for faithful friendship. At the same
time he checked their tears, sometimes by his conversation, and
sometimes with serious reproaches, asking them "where were their
precepts of philosophy, and where the fortitude under trials which
should have been learnt from the studies of many years? Did not every
one know the cruelty of Nero? and what was left for him to do but to
make an end of his master and tutor after the murder of his mother and
his brother?" He then embraced his wife Paulina, and, with a slight
faltering of his lofty sternness, begged and entreated her not to enter
on an endless sorrow, but to endure the loss of her husband by the aid
of those noble consolations which she must derive from the contemplation
of his virtuous life. But Paulina declared that she would die with him,
and Seneca, not opposing the deed which would win her such permanent
glory, and at the same time unwilling to leave her to future wrongs,
yielded to her wish. The veins of their arms were opened by the same
blow; but the blood of Seneca, impoverished by old age and temperate
living, flowed so slowly that it was necessary also to open the veins of
his legs. This mode of death, chosen by the Romans as comparatively
painless, is in fact under certain circumstances most agonizing. Worn
out by these cruel tortures, and unwilling to weaken his wife's
fortitude by so dreadful a spectacle, glad at the same time to spare
himself the sight of _her_ sufferings, he persuaded her to go to another
room. Even then his eloquence did not fail. It is told of Andrè Chénier,
the French poet, that on his way to execution he asked for writing
materials to record some of the strange thoughts which filled his mind.
The wish was denied him, but Seneca had ample liberty to record his last
utterances. Amanuenses were summoned, who took down those dying
admonitions, and in the time of Tacitus they still were extant. To us,
however, this interesting memorial of a Pagan deathbed is
irrevocably lost.
Nero, meanwhile, to whom the news of these circumstances was taken,
having no dislike to Paulina, and unwilling to incur the odium of too
much bloodshed, ordered her death to be prohibited and her wounds to be
bound. She was already unconscious, but her slaves and freedmen
succeeded in saving her life. She lived a few years longer, cherishing
her husband's memory, and bearing in the attenuation of her frame, and
the ghastly pallor of her countenance, the lasting proofs of that deep
affection which had characterised their married life.
Seneca was not yet dead, and, to shorten these protracted and useless
sufferings, he begged his friend and physician Statius Annaeus to give
him a draught of hemlock, the same poison by which the great philosopher
of Athens had been put to death. But his limbs were already cold, and
the draught proved fruitless. He then entered a bath of hot water,
sprinkling the slaves who stood nearest to him, with the words that he
was pouring a libation to Jupiter the Liberator.[36] Even the warm
water failed to make the blood flow more speedily, and he was finally
carried into one of those vapour baths which the Romans called
_sudatoria_, and stifled with its steam. His body was burned privately,
without any of the usual ceremonies. Such had been his own wish,
expressed, not after the fall of his fortunes, but at a time when his
thoughts had been directed to his latter end, in the zenith of his great
wealth and conspicuous power.
[Footnote 36: Sicco Polentone, an Italian, who wrote a Life of Seneca
(d. 1461), makes Seneca a secret Christian, and represents this as an
invocation of Christ, and says that he baptized himself with the water
of the bath!]
So died a Pagan philosopher, whose life must always excite our interest
and pity, although we cannot apply to him the titles of great or good.
He was a man of high genius, of great susceptibility, of an ardent and
generous temperament, of far-sighted and sincere humanity. Some of his
sentiments are so remarkable for their moral beauty and profundity that
they forcibly remind us of the expressions of St. Paul. But Seneca fell
infinitely short of his own high standard, and has contemptuously been
called "the father of all them that wear shovel hats." Inconsistency is
written on the entire history of his life, and it has earned him the
scathing contempt with which many writers have treated his memory. "The
business of a philosopher," says Lord Macaulay, in his most scornful
strain, "was to declaim in praise of poverty, with two millions sterling
out at usury; to meditate epigrammatic conceits about the evils of
luxury in gardens which moved the envy of sovereigns; to rant about
liberty while fawning on the insolent and pampered freedmen of a tyrant;
to celebrate the divine beauty of virtue with the same pen which had
just before written a defence of the murder of a mother by a son."
"Seneca," says Niebuhr, "was an accomplished man of the world, who
occupied himself very much with virtue, and may have considered himself
to be an ancient Stoic. He certainly believed that he was a most
ingenious and virtuous philosopher; but he acted on the principle that,
as far as he himself was concerned, he could dispense with the laws of
morality which he laid down for others, and that he might give way to
his natural propensities."
In Seneca's life, then, we see as clearly as in those of many professing
Christians that it is impossible to be at once worldly and righteous.
Seneca's utter failure was due to the vain attempt to combine in his own
person two opposite characters--that of a Stoic and that of a courtier.
Had he been a true philosopher, or a mere courtier, he would have been
happier, and even more respected. To be both was absurd: hence, even in
his writings, he was driven into inconsistency. He is often compelled to
abandon the lofty utterances of Stoicism, and to charge philosophers
with ignorance of life. In his treatise on a Happy Life he is obliged to
introduce a sort of indirect autobiographical apology for his wealth and
position.[37] In spite of his lofty pretensions to simplicity, in spite
of that sort of amateur asceticism which, in common with other wealthy
Romans, he occasionally practised, in spite of his final offer to
abandon his entire patrimony to the Emperor, we fear that he cannot be
acquitted of an almost insatiable avarice. We need not indeed believe
the fierce calumnies which charged him with exhausting Italy by a
boundless usury, and even stirring up a war in Britain by the severity
of his exactions; but it is quite clear that he deserved the title of
_Proedives_, "the over-wealthy," by which he has been so pointedly
signalized. It is strange that the most splendid intellects should so
often have sunk under the slavery of this meanest vice. In the Bible we
read how the "rewards of divination" seduced from his allegiance to God
the splendid enchanter of Mesopotamia:
"In outline dim and vast
Their fearful shadows cast
The giant form of Empires on their way
To ruin:--one by one
They tower and they are gone,
Yet in the prophet's soul the dreams of avarice stay.
"No sun or star so bright,
In all the world of light,
That they should draw to heaven his downward eye:
He hears the Almighty's word,
He sees the angel's sword,
Yet low upon the earth his heart and treasure lie."
[Footnote 37: See _Ad. Polyb_. 37: _Ep_. 75; _De Vit. Beat_. 17, 18,
22.]
And in Seneca we see some of the most glowing pictures of the nobility
of poverty combined with the most questionable avidity in the pursuit of
wealth. Yet how completely did he sell himself for naught. It is the
lesson which we see in every conspicuously erring life, and it was
illustrated less than three years afterwards in the terrible fate of the
tyrant who had driven him to death. For a short period of his life,
indeed, Seneca was at the summit of power; yet, courtier as he was, he
incurred the hatred, the suspicion, and the punishment of all the three
Emperors during whose reigns his manhood was passed. "Of all
unsuccessful men," says Mr. Froude, "in every shape, whether divine or
human, or devilish, there is none equal to Bunyan's Mr.
Facing-both-ways--the fellow with one eye on heaven and one on
earth--who sincerely preaches one thing and sincerely does another, and
from the intensity of his unreality is unable either to see or feel the
contradiction. He is substantially trying to cheat both God and the
devil, and is in reality only cheating himself and his neighbours. This
of all characters upon the earth appears to us to be the one of which
there is no hope at all, a character becoming in these days alarmingly
abundant; and the aboundance of which makes us find even in a Reineke an
inexpressible relief." And, in point of fact, the inconsistency of
Seneca's life was a _conscious_ inconsistency. "To the student," he
says, "who professes his wish to rise to a loftier grade of virtue, I
would answer that this is my _wish_ also, but I dare not hope it. _I am
preoccupied with vices. All I require of myself is, not to be equal to
the best_, but only _to be better than the bad_." No doubt Seneca meant
this to be understood merely for modest depreciation; but it was far
truer than he would have liked seriously to confess. He must have often
and deeply felt that he was not living in accordance with the light
which was in him.
It would indeed be cheap and easy, to attribute the general inferiority
and the many shortcomings of Seneca's life and character to the fact
that he was a Pagan, and to suppose that if he had known Christianity he
would necessarily have attained to a loftier ideal. But such a style of
reasoning and inference, commonly as it is adopted for rhetorical
purposes, might surely be refused by any intelligent child. A more
intellectual assent to the lessons of Christianity would have probably
been but of little avail to inspire in Seneca a nobler life. The fact
is, that neither the gift of genius nor the knowledge of Christianity
are adequate to the ennoblement of the human heart, nor does the grace
of God flow through the channels of surpassing intellect or of orthodox
belief. Men there have been in all ages, Pagan no less than Christian,
who with scanty mental enlightenment and spiritual knowledge have yet
lived holy and noble lives: men there have been in all ages, Christian
no less than Pagan, who with consummate gifts and profound erudition
have disgraced some of the noblest words which ever were uttered by some
of the meanest lives which were ever lived. In the twelfth century was
there any mind that shone more brightly, was there any eloquence which
flowed more mightily, than that of Peter Abelard? Yet Abelard sank
beneath the meanest of his scholastic cotemporaries in the degradation
of his career as much as he towered above the highest of them in the
grandeur of his genius. In the seventeenth century was there any
philosopher more profound, any moralist more elevated, than Francis
Bacon? Yet Bacon could flatter a tyrant, and betray a friend, and
receive a bribe, and be one of the latest of English judges to adopt the
brutal expedient of enforcing confession by the exercise of torture. If
Seneca defended the murder of Agrippina, Bacon blackened the character
of Essex. "What I would I do not; but the thing that I would not, that I
do," might be the motto for many a confession of the sins of genius; and
Seneca need not blush if we compare him with men who were his equals in
intellectual power, but whose "means of grace," whose privileges, whose
knowledge of the truth, were infinitely higher than his own. Let the
noble constancy of his death shed a light over his memory which may
dissipate something of those dark shades which rest on portions of his
history. We think of Abelard, humble, silent, patient, God-fearing,
tended by the kindly-hearted Peter in the peaceful gardens of Clugny; we
think of Bacon, neglected, broken, and despised, dying of the chill
caught in a philosophical experiment and leaving his memory to the
judgment of posterity; let us think of Seneca, quietly yielding to his
destiny without a murmur, cheering the constancy of the mourners round
him during the long agonies of his enforced suicide and dictating some
of the purest utterances of Pagan wisdom almost with his latest breath.
The language of his great contemporary, the Apostle St. Paul, will best
help us to understand his position. He was one of those who was _seeking
the Lord, if haply he might feel after Him, and find Him, though He be
not far from every one of us: for in Him we live, and move, and have
our being_.