Chapter 25. Seneca, Petronius, and Lucan: Neronian Victims

Of three major representatives of “Menippean” satire, Varro, Seneca, and Petronius, two met their deaths at the hand of Nero, as did Lucan, another prominent poet. In addition, it is possible that Persius was poisoned by Nero; he died of stomach sickness, always suspect in the imperial age. He was friendly with the Nero opposition party among the Stoics; some have thought that the portrait of Midas (1.119–121) was aimed at Nero. [1] Though these are not exiled or executed poets in the grand tradition, they are still case studies of poets practicing the studium fatale.

One does not immediately think of Seneca as a satirist; he is known primarily as a philosopher, tragic dramatist, and politician. [2] However, his Apocolocyntosis, the “Pumpkinification” of the emperor Claudius, puts him directly in the tradition of Menippean satire in its mixture of prose and verse; the Menippean genre also provides a link to Seneca as philosopher, for Menippus wrote from a philosophical, Cynic perspective. [3]

Though the Pumpkinification may seem a shallow, if amusing and skillful, lampoon, and very safe satire in its mockery of a dead, [4] limping, lisping, pedantic, somewhat pathetic, and eminently satirizable emperor, [5] it was yet “an implicit satire on the whole idea of apotheosis.” [6] For our purposes, we note that it is a drama of exclusion—the hero is given trial by the gods for membership in heaven, and is driven from their company as unworthy (after an influential speech by the divine Augustus). Claudius is cast out of heaven, passes by earth, and is tried again in Hades, where he is humiliated to the level of slave, and a slave moreover owned by a Greek freedman. Such themes as exclusion of the lame Thersites pharmakos, and peripety from king to slave, are familiar and striking. This is purely in the Hipponactian tradition (continued by Ovid and Phaedrus) of attacking your satirical target by assimilating him to the pharmakos.

Seneca was both exiled and executed (by Claudius and Nero, respectively); and a third emperor Gaius Caligula, jealous of his oratorical skill, had once condemned him to death. (“Seneca … who was superior in wisdom to all the Romans of his day and many others as well, came near being destroyed, though he had neither done any wrong nor had the appearance of doing so, but merely because he pleaded a case well in the senate while the emperor was present.”) [7] So the Pumpkinification is in reality retaliatory; Claudius excluded the philosopher, so he excludes the dead emperor from postmortem bliss—as it were, denies him hero cult. Actually, Claudius’ notorious wife, Messalina, was apparently the moving force in the exile, [8] though it took place under the emperor’s authority. Technically, the senate gave Seneca his sentence, the death penalty, and Claudius softened it to exile. [9] But Seneca blamed the emperor: “He was thought to hate Claudius because of the pain of the injustice done him.” [10] The orator was accused of having an adulterous affair with Julia Livilla, the sister of Gaius Caligula, and was exiled to Corsica. [11] There he wrote the two books of consolation, reflecting more or less obliquely on his plight, and epigrams describing the misery of his exile, thus adding to our long tradition of exile poetry in the classical tradition. [12] Lines from an epigram on Corsica are typical:

The exiled man is a living corpse. [13] The intensity of the philosopher’s hatred of exile is remarkable, especially considering his earlier Stoic writings on the subject. “I may become an exile,” he had written earlier. “I will act like a native of the place where I am sent.” [14] Ferguson points this out in a decidedly unsympathetic treatment of the philosopher. [15] Ferguson may be underestimating the depressive impact of exile; Cicero, earlier, had been nearly suicidal in exile. [16] Euripides wrote, “What is the loss of a country? A great ill? The greatest; and no words can do it justice.” [17]

Seneca stayed in Corsica for some eight years, until Claudius’ newer wife, Agrippina, had him recalled, and he was made tutor to Agrippina’s son, the young Nero. A period of great political influence for Seneca followed, especially when Nero, still too young to fully take the reins of government, acceded to the throne in AD 54, and Seneca acted as imperial advisor. But eventually Nero began to rule more independently, began his famous series of murders, and listened to unscrupulous advisors who disparaged the philosopher. When Seneca’s ally and protector, Burrus, the prefect of the praetorian guard, died in 62, the philosopher saw that his power had evaporated. Donating his property to Nero, he retired to read and write philosophy (Tacitus Annals 14.49). Tension between Nero and Seneca was partly artistic; Nero’s bad counselors reported to the emperor that Seneca made fun of the emperor’s singing (Tacitus Annals 14.49).

After Seneca’s retirement, Nero tried, and failed, to kill him by poison, but later implicated him, evidently unjustly, in the Pisonian conspiracy. [18] The philosopher was sentenced to death, and committed suicide at Nero’s order.

In Tacitus’ long description of Seneca’s death, parallels with Socrates’ death are plentiful. Seneca rebukes the tears of his followers; he impassively carries out the sentence, committing suicide almost willingly; he even takes hemlock when his bleeding cuts (in arms, ankles, and knees) prove ineffectual (though his lack of blood circulation blocks the poison from taking effect). [19] He finally has to suffocate in a vapor bath. At all times during the suicide he discourses eloquently and stoically, and he even dictates an extensive text (probably on the soul, Miriam Griffin surmises) after opening his veins. He offers a libation, to Jupiter Liberator (evidently a reference to the liberation of the soul in death) and exhorts his friends to live by his philosophical teachings. [20] Thus Socrates’—and Aesop’s—death continued to live on, replicated in different settings. Seneca’s death, in turn, was later copied by Thrasea. [21]

Petronius Arbiter’s death was less philosophical, but no less distinctive. After having become an intimate of Nero, an arbiter of his decadence and luxury (“to the blasé emperor nothing was smart or elegant unless Petronius had given it his approval”), [22] he incurred the jealousy of another imperial favorite, Tigellinus (because he was “a more expert hedonist,” scientia voluptatum potiorem) and received a trumped-up death sentence from the emperor not long after the Pisonian conspiracy. Like Seneca, he quickly cut his veins, but bandaged and opened them in a long, drawn-out death, during which he dined and discoursed with friends and listened to recitations of “light lyrics and frivolous poems,” [23] not Platonic dialogues on the soul. As a final will and testament to Nero, he chronicled all the emperor’s sexual indiscretions and sent the document to the tyrant: a long catalogue of sexual blame, directed against a king, in the Aesopic and Socratic tradition of just accusation at the point of death.

Thus our two Menippean satirists were executed unjustly by stark political force, and died, in their contrasting styles, quite “willingly,” once the death sentence had been given.

As we have seen in the cases of Hipponax and Aristophanes, often satirists are themselves fascinated by the pharmakos, even as they are themselves assimilated to its pattern. [24] So it is notable that the standard evidence on the scapegoat in Marseilles is Petronius fr. 1. It is likely that the narrator of the Satyricon is assimilated to the pharmakos at Marseilles, after he has committed some crime, perhaps temple robbery (133.3, lines 7–8). There may have been a plague and a public expulsion. [25]

Bremmer notes that Petronius is the only Latin writer to use the word pharmacus. [26] We also find the following in the Satyricon: “Some of the people who were walking in the colonnades threw stones at Eumolpus as he recited. But he recognized this tribute to his genius, covered his head, and fled out of the temple. I was afraid that he would also call me a poet” (Ex is, qui in porticibus spatiabantur, lapides in Eumolpum recitantem miserunt. At ille, qui plausum ingenii sui nouerat, operuit caput extraque templum profugit. Timui ego, ne me poetam uocaret, 90). Lurking behind this comic scene is the theme of the stoning of a poet. Eumolpus is also thrown out of the baths for reciting poetry, so we have the archaic Indo-European theme of poetic expulsion, in comic form (90.1; 92.6).

Lucan, on the other hand, was an actual conspirator, “almost the ringleader” [27] in the Pisonian conspiracy. But his motivations for joining the plot were artistic, not political, curiously enough. He had started his political career with a eulogy of Nero; [28] he was later recalled from Athens by the emperor and became one of his intimates. But artistic jealousy divided the poet and his poet-emperor. The envious Nero left a reading by Lucan, calling a meeting of the senate on the spur of the moment “with no other motive than to throw cold water on the performance.” From then on Lucan “did not refrain from words and hostility to the prince, which are still notorious.” [29] Tacitus (Annals 15.49) confirms this antagonism, though he speaks in more general terms: “The wrongs perpetrated against him inflamed Lucan, because Nero, vain in his competitiveness, continually repressed the fame of his [Lucan’s] poems, and had kept him from publicizing them.” [30] Though Lucan is known primarily as an epic poet, he was also a satirist, for at this juncture “he also tongue-lashed [gravissime proscidit] not only the emperor, but also his most powerful friends in a scurrilous poem [famoso carmine].” [31] The unsuccessful assassination plot followed; thus the weapon of satire was followed by the plan for using actual weapons.

The conspiracy was discovered and conspirators started implicating each other. Lucan was arrested, and sentenced to death. [32] He died, as had Seneca and Petronius, by bleeding to death. As he felt his strength leaving him, he remembered a wounded soldier in his Civil War who had died in the same way, and he recited the passage as he slowly faded into unconsciousness.

Nero, oddly enough, was also a satirist. His poetic vocation helped stoke the Pisonian conspiracy, bringing two men into it, Lucan and Afranius Quintianus, this last a notoriously dissolute character “who had been insulted by Nero in an offensive poem [probroso carmine], and desired revenge.” [33] Nero also wrote a satire, “The OneEyed Man,” directed against Claudius Pollio. [34] When Galba and the Spanish provinces rebelled against Nero, he responded by ridiculing the revolt’s leaders “in verses set to wanton music [iocularia … carmina lasciveque modulata]” (Suetonius Nero 42).

Nero was executed as a bad political leader, but J. P. Sullivan argues that one of the primary reasons that Nero became such a bad political leader was because he spent so much time in artistic pursuits. [35] His devotion to his own poetry almost amounted to an obsession. [36] His conflict with Lucan shows that his poetic ambitions helped bring about Lucan’s assassination plot. And the emphasis Nero put on his poetry and singing shows that his executions of Seneca, Petronius, and Lucan might easily have been caused in part by poetic jealousy. “The trepidation and anxiety with which he took part in the contests, his keen rivalry of his opponents and his awe of the judges, can hardly be credited … he used to show respect to them [his rivals] and try to gain their favour, while he slandered them behind their backs, sometimes assailed them with abuse when he met them, and even bribed those who were especially proficient.” [37] It is an Alexandrian intrigue of rival poets given nightmarish dimensions by the fact that one of the rival poets possesses unlimited power, and is also losing his grip on reality.

On the other hand, Nero’s response to lampoons directed at him was comparatively mild. However, he did exile an actor, Datus, for satirical allusion; a Cynic philosopher, Isidorus, who had satirized him (Suetonius Nero 29); another philosopher, L. Annaeus Cornutus, who had criticized Nero’s literary ambitions (Dio 62.29.2); and a poet, Antistius Sosianus, who had written “offensive poems” (carminibus probrosis) about the emperor (evidently, the original sentence was capital) (Tacitus Annals 16.14; 21). Antistius won his return to Rome by informing on a fellow exile. In addition, Fabricius Veiento, a minor writer who had published an offensive satire on senators and priests, was also exiled. [38]

When the military rebellion had spread and Nero’s support even at Rome had evaporated, he began to prepare for death. At this point, he delivered one of his most famous sayings: Qualis artifex pereo! (What an artist the world is losing!). [39] Soon, to avoid a threatened torturous execution, he committed suicide. So one more satirist, albeit an extraordinarily powerful, mediocre (at least according to Tacitus Annals 14.14), and mentally unbalanced satirist, met his death.