Carl G. Anderson Draft rev. 25 Feb 1999

Tacitean Irony and Stoic Suicide

"The more I think about history, ancient or modern, the more ironical all human affairs seem." &emdash; Tacitus, Annals III.17

Introduction

The Pisonian conspiracy of 65 against the emperor Nero, its dissolution and aftermath are just the kind of events to capture Tacitus’s sardonic historical imagination. Irony is the overriding tone of his presentation of these episodes, and nearly all the parties in this sad enterprise earn Tacitus’s scorn. The conspiracy is a story of cowardice, ineptitude, and misguided motives defeated by tyranny and vice. The deaths and exiles Nero accomplishes in the near aftermath provide similar material, though the noble character of Thrasea Paetus also provides something of a welcome contrast.

The relatively high level of detail in Tacitus’s description of these events shows that he researched them intensely. Tacitus’s motives were more personal than one might suppose, as I will show by explaining the connection between some victims of Nero and a resistance movement among Tacitus’s contemporaries.

We can discern from these episodes a great deal about Tacitus’s moral attitudes. Underneath the narrative’s ironical surface lie complex and conflicting attitudes toward the participants and the forces they represent. The paradigm example of a morally ambiguous character in this history is Tacitus’s Seneca. Nero’s tutor, advisor, apologist and friend, he is also a rival, critic and perhaps a rebellious conspirator. A collaborator in Nero’s matricide, he is also a friend and supporter of two of Nero’s main adversaries, Piso and Thrasea. A comparison with other ancient historians shows that Tacitus was relatively kind to Seneca’s memory &emdash; that itself calls out for explanation. Yet Tacitus’s attitude toward Seneca was ambivalent, as I will show through an analysis of Tacitus’s ironical representation of Seneca’s last hours. That ambivalent attitudef was a result of the fact that Seneca’s intellectual and moral outlook was a hybrid of Roman and Greek elements. The Greek element was alien to Tacitus, who stubbornly opposed all things Greek. So Tacitus found Seneca’s value system an enigma and Seneca himself a figure of inconsistent virtue. Seneca’s other philosophically inclined contemporaries, whose outlook was more purely Greek, were even less well understood by Tacitus. That is why he found their behavior under Nero somewhat absurd.

It is an interesting and worthwhile task to decode what Tacitus counted as virtue and vice in the lives of Rome’s elite subjects. I’ll do some of that, but my main goal is to assess Tacitus’s success in understanding of the events of 65 and 66. I will argue that Tacitus was not very successful despite his connection with and empathy for Nero’s victims. His own traditionalist conception of virtue and his ignorance of and hostility towards the new Hellenistic alternative prevented him from understanding the most important theme of the resistance to "bad" emperors like Nero, and the true source of the virtue of heroes such as Thrasea. Nero and his successors understood the situation better; that is why some of them rightly felt threatened by what philosophers were spreading among the Roman elite.

So I want to suggest that Tacitus’s work itself presents us with a historical irony. One part of the resistance movement in question represented the vanguard of a new philhellenic culture among the Roman elite. In both the personal and public spheres this culture would liberate the intellectual life of the Roman center, forever sweeping away the cultural power and authority of the traditionalism that Tacitus favored. Tacitus blindly opposed as excessively Greek the very influence that was destined to deliver the freedom he found so lacking in the early imperial center.

The Victims of Nero and the Victims of Domitian

The most interesting thing about Tacitus’s work on the events of 65 and 66 concerns Tacitus’s personal experience of the tyrannical suppression of resistance. Tacitus himself experienced first-hand the reign of the emperor Domitian from 81 to 96. Though Domitian was a tyrant to rival Nero, he favored Tacitus with promotion to praetor and to a priesthood, and then to a foreign post, perhaps a legionary command. It is likely that Tacitus returned to Rome in 93. If so, he would have witnessed Domitian’s murderous purge of 93 from his seat in the senate. This purge focused on a social group with a curious relation to the victims of Nero a generation earlier. Both Nero and Domitian faced resistance from a single enduring group &emdash; a group sometimes called the Stoic opposition. How best to characterize this group is a disputed question that bears some investigation. Ronald Syme and Miriam Griffin have recently argued that it was not Stoicism that grounded their resistance. To avoid prejudging the issue, I won’t call this group the Stoic opposition, but rather just the ‘group’ or the ‘resistance’. I’ll offer my own suggestion as to the grounds of their resistance in due course.

Tacitus’s remarks about his own complicity in Domitian’s suppression of this group are justly famous. In his early work known as the Agricola, Tacitus describes the unhappy arrival of Domitian’s terror as follows:

Before long we senators led Helvidius to prison, watched in shame the sufferings of Mauricus and Rusticus, and stained ourselves with Senecio’s innocent blood. Even Nero used to avert his eyes and, though he ordered abominations, forbore to witness them [Agricola XLV].

The regret expressed by Tacitus and his admission of complicity in these crimes cannot be missed [it can be over-emphasized, however; see Mellor, p. 8]. I will explain at length the significance of the men Tacitus mentions &emdash; they are intimately connected by blood, marriage and education with Nero’s victims. The importance of the connection lies in the fact that when researching the bloody events of 65 and 66 Tacitus must have been looking back through the lens of his own guilty complicity in the destruction of a later generation of the same social group. This must be one reason why Tacitus researched and recorded the purge by Nero so thoroughly. But remember that Tacitus’s representation of the resistance was not altogether flattering. Why was that so? We’ll have to see. To begin we need to examine the relations between the victims of Nero and the victims of Domitian.

In the quote above Tacitus mentions four names. [THESE NAMES AND ONE OTHER ARE LISTED ON THE HANDOUT.] Helvidius Priscus the younger was sentenced to death by Domitian. According to Suetonius, his farce about Paris was taken to be a coded mockery of the emperor [Domitian X]. He was son-in-law of one Publius Anteius, the first suicide of 66 recorded by Tacitus. He was son of Helvidius Priscus who was Thrasea’s son-in-law and who assisted in Thrasea’s suicide and was exiled at his fall.

Herennius Senecio was also executed by Domitian. The charges against him included writing a eulogy of Helvidius Priscus the elder [Tacitus, Agricola 2] and failing to stand for any office higher than the quaestorship [Dio LXVII.13]. Why failing to stand for office might have been counted a capitol offense is something I will discuss below. Arulenus Rusticus was also sentenced to death by Domitian. As a young man he was a friend and loyal supporter of Thrasea. According to Tacitus he offered as tribune to veto the Senate’s expected condemnation of Thrasea, but that Thrasea rejected the suggestion as futile [Annals XVI.26]. His death was earned by an eulogy for Thrasea [Tacitus, Agricola 2; and perhaps also Helvidius Priscus I according to Suetonius, Domitian X]. Mauricus Rusticus was exiled in 93 but returned safely in 97. He may have been exiled because of his association with his brother Arulenus, or as a part of Domitian’s general exile of all "philosophers" from Italy. It seems that this general exile of philosophers included the Stoic Epictetus, from whom we know a great deal about the philosophical doctrines of this circle.

In the existing works of Tacitus Epictetus is never mentioned. Tacitus was not very disturbed by the exile of philosophers, indeed he did not usually deem such events worthy of note. This is a telling point against those who read Tacitus as a defender of free speech as such. As I wish to emphasize, Tacitus had no special sympathy for intellectuals or philosophers. His sympathy for principled resistance to autocratic rule was due to his sympathy for traditional senatorial independence and privilege, rather than for Greek philosophy. He recorded the actions of philosophers not in light of their philosophical motives and practices, but in light of their baser political consequences.

The connections between these victims of Domitian and the victims of Nero are multifaceted. The surnames ‘Priscus’ and ‘Senecio’ seem to have been a dangerous legacy. However, a dangerous father was neither necessary nor sufficient to condemn the son. More often it was the son-in-law who suffered a similar fate as his father-in-law. But again this relation is neither necessary nor sufficient &emdash; from what we know Arulenus was tied to the group by mere friendship. The connections we know of suggest that it was involvement in a particular social circle that tied together the generations of victims. Blood and marriage ties were correlated with social ties, of course, and that is why those legal connections were also present between the generations. What was it about this social group, then, that might have periodically brought down the wrath of the emperor?

The apparently genuine threats to usurp Nero, namely Rubellius Plautus, Corbulo, Piso, perhaps even Seneca, were not the central figures tying together the social group in question. Rather, the social group appears to have either rallied behind such figures or been simply smeared by association with them. The group that produced victims for Nero and Domitian was not a collection of competitors for the throne, but at the most a collection of fellow travelers.

It is worth noting that the motives of the conspirators against Nero in 65 remained hidden to Tacitus’s himself. Tacitus’s remark about the origins of this conspiracy is telling: "[Piso’s] character lacked seriousness or self-control. He was superficial, ostentatious, and sometimes dissolute. But many people are fascinated by depravity and disinclined for austere morals on the throne. Such men found Piso’s qualities attractive. However, his ambitions were not what originated the conspiracy. Who did, who initiated this enterprise which so many joined, I could not easily say [XV.48, p. 368]." Tacitus could not reason out who initiated the conspiracy or what motivated them to this risky adventure; he had no serious explanation for why specific citizens rallied behind Piso. I’ll suggest why Tacitus was at a loss here in the course of the lecture.

A possible motive is that this group shared a desire to see the Republic restored. While it is pleasant to imagine that some Roman senators of the first century secretly agreed with our own political intuitions about the injustice of the Principate it is mere fantasy.

Yet there was surely something like a political agenda behind the tension between this group and certain emperors, perhaps even a political philosophy. The notion that a political philosophy underlay the continued hostility has a major advantage. For a broad social group such as the one in question, the source of their enduring unity was most likely to be intellectual. We know enough about the education of Roman elites to be confident that for these men both intellectual concerns and general intellectual outlook would have been largely determined by their private tutors. The choice of tutors was a family matter. And sometimes family matters were decided by the choice of tutors too; for one criterion used in arranging marriages and in-law adoptions was the source of the young man’s education. This helps explain why the son-in-law relation was as important as the blood-relation in tying the social group together: the father’s choice for a son-in-law was partly determined by common intellectual outlook, which was itself the foundation of the social group.

We get a nice picture of this social structure in the Annals through the account of the last hours of Rubellius Plautus. Tacitus mentions two stories about why Plautus did not take offensive action against Nero. Either a message from Plautus’s father-in-law denied any immediate threat, or "his philosophical friends, the Greek Coranus and the Etruscan Gaius Musonius Rufus, may have recommended an imperturbable expectation of death rather than a hazardous anxious life [XIV.59, p. 340]." Note well that it is the father-in-law and the philosophers who are supposed to have such influence on Plautus that they could persuade him whether to attempt to seize the throne or await the order to die.

Musonius Rufus, the Stoic philosopher mentioned here was later expelled at the fall of Piso. So even though he would have counciled Plautus to leave Nero be, Nero found him too dangerous to remain in Rome. Why was that? An answer to that question will help us to see the danger Nero saw in the philosophical element of the resistance. Tacitus himself offered no good explanation of why a philosopher who would have recommended an imperturbable expectation of death to Nero’s enemies was judged to be dangerous to Nero. We can do better.

Tacitus recorded that both Thrasea’s son-in-law Helvidius Priscus and Paconius Agrippinus went into exile at Thrasea’s fall [Annals, XVI.33]. After Nero’s death they returned to gain greater fame. Epictetus portrayed both as Stoic saints [Discourses I.2, I.12]. Helvidius Priscus resisted and was expelled under the moderate emperor Vespasian, earning him the honor of being recorded as a dissident by Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, Suetonius, Dio and Epictetus &emdash;making him the most famous Roman dissident of his era, except for that guy from Nazareth. Tacitus wrote of Helvidius:

From his early youth Helvidius devoted his great mental powers to intellectual studies, not as many people do, with the idea of using a philosopher’s reputation as a cloak for indolence, but rather to fortify himself against the caprice of fortune when he entered public life. He became a follower of that school of philosophy [Stoicism?] which holds that morality is the one good thing in life and vice the only evil, while power and rank and other things ... are neither good nor bad. [O]f Thrasea’s virtues he absorbed none so much as his independence [Histories IV.5].

Tacitus admired Thrasea and Helvidius primarily for their independence and their ability to further the national purpose. For example, consider his praise of Thrasea’s denunciation of the influence of rich provincials on Governors. Thrasea’s reconstructed speech is based on the principle that "We must recover the conviction that a Roman’s reputation depends on Romans only [XV.20, p. 354]." One might think this outburst of narrow-minded nationalist sentiment a very strange thing to remember a Stoic philosopher for &emdash; but that is just the kind of thing that Tacitus would have noted as a rare achievement of traditional virtue.

The cases of Thrasea and Helvidius bring us to the limits of Tacitus’s understanding of the resistance. For he characterizes both these men by their independence, but offers no understanding of the commitments that produced such independence. Miriam Griffin has tried to explain this independence by appeal to traditional senatorial motives. "The grounds of Thrasea’s opposition to Nero’s regime did not follow from his Stoicism: for one thing, Seneca had shown in his De Clementia how Stoicism could be used to justify and provide a monarchical ideology for the existing system. What Thrasea and Helvidius Priscus wanted was libertas senatoria [Griffin, p. 363]." It is undeniable that Stoicism was compatible with monarchy &emdash; indeed orthodox Stoic political philosophy demanded monarchy, just as Platonist political philosophy did. And Griffin is right about Seneca’s De Clementia. However, Griffin’s positive suggestion that the traditional notion of libertas senatoria motivated Thrasea can be disproven. By libertas senatoria Griffin means the traditional political privileges of senators, for example to initiate legislation and litigation. I believe that any such motive present in the description of these characters is an artifact of Tacitus’s representation of them, an artifact that reflects Tacitus’s own traditionalism and his interest in libertas senatoria.

Griffin’s suggestion fails to explain the particular acts of the resisters. For example, consider Thrasea’s actions after leading citizens had proposed absurd celebrations of Agrippina’s death. Tacitus wrote: "It had been the custom of Publius Clodius Thrasea Paetus to pass over flatteries in silence or with curt agreement. But this time he walked out of the senate &emdash; thereby endangering himself without bringing general freedom any nearer [XIV.12, p. 318]." Was Thrasea a hot-head or did he foolishly think that this act would bring general freedom nearer? Neither, I say. Consider the charges that bring down Thrasea. Capito, son-in-law of Tigellinus, charged, in part:

At the New Year, Thrasea evaded the regular oath. Though a member of the board of Fifteen for Religious Ceremonies, he absented himself from the national vows. He has never sacrificed for the emperor’s welfare or his divine voice. [F]or three years he has not entered the senate...This is party warfare against the government. It is secession. If many more have the same impudence it is war... Disbelief in Poppaea’s divinity shows the same spirit as refusing allegiance to the acts of the divine Augustus and divine Julius. Thrasea rejects religion, abrogates law [XVI.22, p. 391].

Surely refusing to enter the senate for three years was a poor strategy for securing the ancient political privileges of senators! So much for Griffin’s explanation. By compensating for the element of parody Tacitus included in this speech we can reconstruct the actual state of affairs. Capito conceded that Thrasea’s example was not being followed; he merely warns of the result if it were to be. In fact, the specific acts of Thrasea were not meant to be acts of political leadership. They were meant to be his alone &emdash; he wanted to stand out as conspicuously virtuous, not to stand out as a leader of a political movement.

It is in this light that we ought to understand the resisters’ many ineffective refusals to participate in group political action. Thrasea did this often, but even Seneca refused to participate in Nero’s criminal plunder of temples, which may have inspired an attempt on his life [see Annals XV.45]. These acts of resistance through refusal to participate were a result of the combination of a philosophical conception of virtue and typical Roman competitiveness. I think Epictetus brought out this element best. He wrote of the downfall of Helvidius Priscus the elder: "What good, then, did Priscus do, who was but a single individual? And what good does red [purple] do the mantle [cloak]? What else than that it stands out conspicuously in it as red, and is displayed as a goodly example to the rest [Epictetus I.2]?" Epictetus’s metaphor of the red or purple thread in the cloak is a nice one. The point of the colored thread is to stand out in contrast to the rest, to show what it is to be better than the rest, to suggest that not everything should be the same at all. So, in short, to understand the resistance we need to understand why they did not pursue practical political action, but rather often impractical, politically absurd action. Tacitus’s claim that Thrasea brought general freedom no nearer is strictly true; but it masks the fact that men like Thrasea were not interested such political results. I want to suggest that it is a failing of Tacitus that he refused to recognize this profound difference between his own priorities, which I think were well summarized as libertas senatoria, and the priorities of the resisters.

Why didn’t Tacitus understand the distinctive and peculiar actions of the resistance? The reason for this, I’ll say, is that the deepest and most dearly held values of the resisters were alien to Tacitus. So when Tacitus examined their actions and reputations in light of his own conception of virtue he failed to adequately understand them. I’d like to offer two abstract characterizations of different conceptions of morality, an old-fashioned Roman one manifested by Tacitus and a Hellenistic one manifested by the philosophers of the resistance. I’ll call Tacitus’s conception the traditionalist conception of morality, the other the philosophical conception. In order to abstract from the particular doctrinal differences manifested in different persons and schools I’ve made these characterizations extremely broad. As I hope you’ll see these broad formulae reveal deep differences. [THE FOLLOWING CHARACTERIZATIONS ARE PRINTED ON THE HANDOUT.]

The traditionalist conception is based on the authority of ancestral mores (mos maiorum). Its characteristic moral imperatives include the imperatives to strive for dominance and to develop self-mastery a means to obedience and personal loyalty. In contrast, the philosophical conception of morality is based on the authority of rational reflection. Its characteristic moral imperatives include the imperatives to strive for rationality and to develop self-mastery as a means to effective deliberation, rational criticism and autonomy. Please note that the formulations of these conceptions are my own invention. I mean to capture by them something that the subjects in question may not have been explicitly aware of, but nonetheless grounded the recognition of particular virtues by those subjects.

That said, I find that the difference between these two conceptions was well recognized by Nero’s henchman Tigellinus. When Tigellinus wanted to move Nero to destroy Rubellius Plautus, he reported that Plautus "parades an admiration for the ancient Romans, but he has the arrogance of the Stoics, who breed sedition and intrigue [XIV.57, p. 339]." The accusation that Plautus was a philosopher in traditionalist’s clothing proved effective in arousing Nero’s suspicions. Nero was right to fear such a man.

Tacitus was uninterested in the philosophical alternative to his deeply held traditionalism; he preferred to see things as simply Roman or Greek, masculine or effeminate. He found both Nero and his philosophical opponents excessively effeminate and Greek. By refusing to look deeper he failed to find the source of the tension between them.

A paradigm of traditionalist virtue can be found in Tacitus’s representation of his father-in-law Agricola under the tyrant Domitian. Note the contrast with the characters from the Annals.

[Agricola] declined to court, by a defiant and futile parade of independence, the renown that must inevitably destroy him. Let it be clear to those who insist on admiring disobedience that even under bad emperors men can be great, and that a decent regard for authority, if backed by industry and energy, can reach that peak of distinction which most men attain only by following a perilous course, winning fame, without benefiting their country, by an ostentatious martyrdom [Agricola, XLII].

The emphasis on obedience and regard for authority over defiance, independence and martyrdom is striking. This emphasis shows us much about Tacitus’s own values, and about his deep complicity in the autocratic system of politics at Rome.

Despite their differences there are states of character that both of these conceptions recognize as virtuous. For example, self-mastery is a critical feature of the virtuous person in both. But the two disagree about the ultimate purpose of this self-mastery. So, while Tacitus admired the self-mastery of many of Nero’s victims, including Seneca, he could not help but see that virtue as wasted when it was used for self-destruction. The philosophers, on the other hand, considered suicide to be the apex of autonomy, and thus a glorious achievement &emdash; a good death.

I claim that the source of the conflict between the emperor and the and the social groups of the resistance was the basic desire for autonomy inculcated through Hellenistic philosophical education. In the writings of Seneca and Epictetus one finds that it is the quest for autonomy, indeed the almost desperate desire for control over one’s own affairs, that drives their attitude toward suicide as well as other questions of morality. The real source of tension was thus the conflict between the philosophically inclined who placed ultimate authority in their own practices of reason, and those who stressed the importance of obedience and loyalty to external institutions of authority.

Because there are common virtues recommended by the different conceptions Tacitus was able to find some philosophers virtuous, even Seneca. Tacitus found Seneca to be courageous, smart, without excessive desire to live or to enjoy wealth, and to have governed well when the state was partially within his control. For all that Tacitus could not take seriously Seneca’s effort at achieving a good death, and so we see the more critical side of Tacitus’s irony manifested in his representation of Seneca’s suicide. What is most striking about this episode is its physical absurdity, a rare occurrence in Tacitus’s otherwise realistic narrative. The events described appear as something like a comedy of errors. [TRY TO IMAGINE THE ACTION AS I SUMMARIZE IT FROM THE TEXT ON PP. 376-377.]:

[To begin, Seneca cut his wrists.] But Seneca’s aged body, lean from austere living, released the blood too slowly. So he also severed the veins in his ankles and behind his knees. Exhausted by severe pain, he was afraid of weakening his wife’s endurance by betraying his agony... But even in his last moments his eloquence remained. Summoning secretaries, he dictated a dissertation... Meanwhile, Seneca’s death was slow and lingering. Poison, such as was formerly used to execute State criminals at Athens, had long been prepared... But Seneca drank it without effect. For his limbs were already cold and numbed against the poison’s action. Finally he was placed in a bath of warm water. He sprinkled a little of it on the attendant slaves, commenting that this was his libation to Jupiter. Then he was carried to a vapour-bath, where he suffocated [XV.63, p. 376].

I admit there are different ways to read this magical passage, but I find it to be dripping with irony. Can anyone think that Tacitus was so gullible as to believe that Seneca could survive cutting his wrists, ankles and knees, drinking hemlock and being placed in the warm bath, so that he still needed to be suffocated? Or again, that Seneca had achieved such mental and bodily imperturbability that he could dictate a dissertation and make jokes to his attendants in such a state of mutilation and exhaustion? Tacitus was no fool when it came to the laws of nature, hence he must have been poking fun here.

But what exactly was the target of his irony? I suggest that it is too naive to assume that Tacitus was simply mocking Seneca. Rather, we have here Tacitus’s playful exaggeration of a story that was, to his lights, itself a profound historical irony. We know that Tacitus’s historical method was to collect stories, and the surely exaggerated story he received of this episode would have provoked his sense of historical irony. Such stories represent what Tacitus found so disappointing about this seemingly pathetic period of history. The popular myths of Seneca’s great physical and mental fortitude during his suicide must have developed because it had become fashionable to pursue a reputation for strength, courage and fortitude through highly dramatized, highly stylized performances of self-destruction. Tacitus surely found that pursuit pitifully effeminate and Greek, a sad alternative to the noble example that those heroic Roman ancestors offered. Surely he thought that in better times men had pursued renown through military adventure and achieved fame through slaughter on foreign soil, rather than through eloquence in the bath.

It is useful to contrast Tacitus’s remarks about less morally ambiguous deaths. I’ll just cite one example, though there are many [AS SUMMARIZED ON P. 1 OF THE HANDOUT UNDER THE HEADING ‘SOME VICTIMS OF NERO’]. Tacitus wrote that when the soldier Subrius Flavus was asked by Nero how he could betray his military oath,

He replied: ‘Because I detested you! I was as loyal as any of your soldiers as long as you deserved affection. I began detesting you when you murdered your mother and wife and became charioteer, actor, and incendiary!’ I have given his actual words because they did not obtain the publicity of Seneca’s; yet the soldier’s blunt, forceful utterance was equally worth recording [XV.67, p.378].

I recommend for your further consideration the question of why Tacitus’s representations of particular deaths were honorific and straightforward, others sardonic.

Recall Tacitus’s own condemnation of this sorry state of affairs:

Even if I were describing foreign wars and patriotic deaths, this monotonous series of events would have become tedious both for me and for my readers. For I should expect them to feel as surfeited as myself by the tragic sequence of citizen deaths &emdash; even if they had been honourable deaths. But this slavish passivity, this torrent of wasted bloodshed far from active service, wearies, depresses, and paralyses the mind. The only indulgence I would ask the reader for the inglorious victims is that he should forebear to censure them. For the fault was not theirs. The cause was rather heaven’s anger with Rome [XVI.16, p. 388].

There are three things to note here. In this passage we find Tacitus’s direct condemnation of the dishonorable suicides of the victims, his refusal to hold the agents entirely responsible for not dying gloriously in their unfortunate historical situation, and his utter despair at the prospects for improvement of the situation by human action. The condemnation expresses his somewhat embarrassing militant nationalism, the refusal to blame his enviable moral empathy, and the despair his lack of imagination. For the situation was soon to improve, but not because of heaven’s caprice. The way out of this sorry state of affairs turned out to be waiting in the practices of those Greeks Tacitus always saw as a corrupting influence. That’s ironic, isn’t it?

I want to make a few remarks about why the influence of this philosophical conception proved to be both explosive and irresistible in the first century. First, I want to argue that it was the philosophical drive for autonomy that the "bad" emperors could not tolerate.

The emperor was often amenable to suicide among his opponents, for having one’s enemies anxious to self-destruct was a tremendous practical advantage. Yet sometimes that self-destruction was hostile to the autocrat’s interest. An offhand remark in Tacitus brings out an example. Of Silanus Torquatus Tacitus wrote: "Seeing conviction ahead, he opened his veins. Nero made the usual pronouncement indicating that, however guilty and rightly distrustful of his defence Torquatus had been, he would nevertheless &emdash; if he had awaited his judge’s mercy &emdash; have lived [XV.35, p. 361]." *[See also Tiberius’s response to Libo’s suicide II.31].] Now it may be that Nero just couldn’t pass up the opportunity for hypocrisy, and that is why there was a "usual pronouncement" that suicide before conviction was a mistake. However, it is more likely that Nero resented the effort of Torquatus to free himself from the grip of Nero’s manipulation. Nero wanted his victims destroyed according to his own desires and plans, not on their own terms. Perhaps he had planned to coerce Torquatus into altering his will, or perhaps he had planned to have others implicated in the course of the trial. If a subject was ordered to die then he was allowed to kill himself; but if a subject was ordered to stand trial and killed himself then he had thwarted the emperor’s will. Whether suicide is in truth an act of genuine autonomy &emdash; a nice question [WHICH I RECOMMEND YOU CONSIDER CAREFULLY NEXT WEEK] &emdash; it surely could be used to foil the exercise of the Princeps’s more subtle powers. That is why Nero found it in his interests to discourage it unless it was carried out at his command. The power-hungry autocrat desired that his will be the only effective one; he sought a monopoly on autonomy. The philosophers were willing to accept the Princeps’s monopoly over just about everything except that, for their tradition taught them that autonomy was the one thing most worth having. The clash between Nero and Thrasea appeared politically absurd to Tacitus because politics was not what was at issue. I suggest that Thrasea and Nero understood the situation better.

The philosophy on the rise at Rome in the first century did not oppose many of the currents of imperial politics; indeed it rather ignored political questions. For the philosophy of the period followed Socrates in emphasizing the importance of caring for one’s own soul over and above all else. That focus, and the philosophical practices associated with it, were two of the cultural innovations that prepared the Roman center for a takeover by Christianity &emdash; but that’s another story.

Now, why did this change come over the Roman center? One of the most striking problems that Tacitus uncovered but never hoped to solve was the crisis in the foundations of moral persuasion felt by the second generation of the Principate. Traditionalism merely allowed one to cite the mos maiorum, the ways of the ancestors. Besides the fact that the older virtues were often irrelevant in the new situation, arguments about how to continue the tradition could hardly be expected to tell definitively for a single course of action. A fine example is the debate spurred by Nero’s founding of a five-yearly stage-competition. Although tradition was clearly opposed to this innovation, those who favored it understood how to appropriate traditionalist rhetoric effectively in their arguments for it [see Annals XIV.20].

The path forward required a major reorientation. Nothing less than a new source of moral authority was needed. That source turned out to lie in the practices of rational reflection and deliberation that Greek philosophy had emphasized for centuries. Widespread acceptance of those practices as the legitimate source of answers about how to live was not something that could develop overnight. Nor could that acceptance go unopposed by an autocrat like Nero who strove towards the absolute power of a single will. Yet by gradual, discontinuous advances the world did change.

The deep antagonism between the presuppositions of autocracy and those of philosophy was the cause of the periodic clashes between the resistance and the emperor. This is something that Tacitus was in a position to witness, but, I have argued, not something he was able to understand. The writings of Seneca and Epictetus show how thoroughly the radical fringe had been converted to the authority of reason even in the first century. It would take just a little longer for the periphery to come to dominate the center. In 161 the upper class was so full of philosophers that one of them, Marcus Aurelius, became emperor.

Tacitus lived and wrote at one the most exciting and liberating moments in the history of ideas. The ineffective traditionalist moral system of Rome was under pressure from Greek moral philosophy. The old confidence in appeals to mos maiorum was soon to be overshadowed by the power of appeals to the practices emphasized in the growing system of Hellenistic paideia. The period known as the Second Sophistic brought happier times to the Roman elites, proving that Tacitus’s despair was unwarranted. While Tacitus’s writings impress on us why the tolerance and benevolence of future emperors was so important to the lives of their subjects, he himself was fighting on the losing side of traditionalism against the very innovation that secured tolerance.

The historian Arnoldo Momigliano has argued that although Tacitus discovered many grounds for criticisms of the empire he did not pursue any of them [Momigliano (1990) p. 114]. Tacitus was strikingly passive in his acceptance of the Principate as a form of government, as well as of traditional Roman ideology. Tacitus believed that Rome was destined to rule and receive tribute, that military conquest was the proper and glorious means to world domination, that rebellion in all its forms should be quashed and retribution exacted. These are just the kind of moral and ideological tenets consistently debated in Thucydides, to cite a relevant example. But Tacitus was not interested in foundational questions about freedom, authority, power and political legitimacy. Tacitus’s concern lay elsewhere, in the presentation of the details of the experience of autocratic tyranny. As a result we learn from him much about the experience of autocratic viciousness and the impotence of a simple traditionalism to protect individual liberty. But for those of us who can, by virtue of our privileged historical position, consider the alternatives, Tacitus teaches us something more. He teaches us how an uncritical acceptance of the dogmatic ideology of the powerful can stifle the moral, political and intellectual imagination. This is surely a lesson worth learning; it is a pity to have to learn it by example.

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