Читать книгу Letters from a Stoic - Donald Robertson - Страница 18

By 59 CE, Seneca's influence over Nero was waning. The emperor sidelined his powerful mother and plotted to have her murdered. He employed the bizarrely elaborate method of having Agrippina set sail in a boat rigged to collapse, with the intention of crushing and/or drowning her. However, she narrowly escaped and swam back to shore. Seneca and Burrus may have known of this entire scheme. In any case, Nero was forced to seek their help when it failed. Tacitus reports that ‘Seneca took the initiative. He looked at Burrus and asked if the military should be ordered to carry out the killing’ (Annals, 14.7). Burrus agreed and sent a group of praetorians to clean up Nero's mess by completing the assassination.

Tacitus adds that when the soldiers cornered Agrippina, in her bedroom, she pointed at her womb and yelled ‘Strike here!’, knowing that they had been sent to kill her by her own child. Cassius Dio, on the other hand, claims that her last words were the power-crazed ‘Let him kill me, as long as he rules!’ Nero was now infamous as the murderer not only of his own brother, but also his mother – and Seneca and Burrus were both thoroughly entangled in his crimes. Nero's tyranny only grew worse from this point on.

Seneca composed a letter to be read before the senate, which claimed that Agrippina, having been discovered plotting against her son, had voluntarily taken her own life. Upon hearing it, Thrasea Pateus, the leader of a faction of scholars and senators referred to as the ‘Stoic Opposition’, stood up and silently walked out in protest, thereby risking his own life. Nero became increasingly suspicious that those Stoics who saw him as a tyrant were planning to overthrow him. The following year, Nero sent Rubellius Plautus, a relative of his and perceived as a rival to the throne, into exile. Plautus was accompanied by his mentor, the famous Stoic teacher, Musonius Rufus. However, Nero was still too afraid to lift a finger against Thrasea, his staunchest opponent in the senate.

Around this time, Nero instigated a festival called Juvenalia, or Games of Youth, in commemoration of the day he reached manhood and began shaving his beard. It was an enormous, grossly extravagant festival, sinister insofar as Nero used the opportunity to humiliate his political opponents by forcing them to engage in indecent performances on stage before huge audiences. ‘Now, more than ever’, says Tacitus, ‘not only these performers but the rest as well regarded the dead as fortunate.’ At the climax, we're told that Gallio, Seneca's elder brother, would introduce Nero himself, who craved celebrity, as the headline act. He would sing, accompanying himself on the lyre, although apparently his vocals weren't very good and he ‘moved his whole audience to laughter and tears at once’.

Nero created a special corps of 5000 soldiers, the size of an entire legion, called ‘Augustans’, who surrounded the crowd and led the cheering and applause, forcing compliance under threat of execution. Tacitus says that while Nero sang, Seneca and Burrus, the latter presumably in command of the guards, were on the stage beside him, continually prompting the audience to wave their arms and togas in appreciation of their emperor's performance. The crowd were forced to call out: ‘Glorious Caesar! Our Apollo, our Augustus, another Pythian! By thyself we swear, O Caesar, none surpasses thee.’ One man in the audience refused to participate, though – Thrasea Pateus, the leader of the Stoic Opposition.