Carl G. Anderson Draft rev. 23 Feb 2000

[5628]

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 story is one of cowardice, ineptitude, and misguided motives defeated by tyranny and vice. The deaths and exiles Nero accomplishes in the near aftermath provide similar material. The noble characters of Epicharis and Thrasea provide something of a welcome contrast, but neither achieves much of worth in Tacitus’s view.

We can discern from these episodes a great deal about Tacitus’s moral attitudes, and through this lens, something of the personal values of the historical figures Tacitus represents. Underneath the narrative’s ironical surface lie complex and conflicting attitudes toward the participants and the values they manifest. The paradigm example of a character of ambiguous virtue 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 deeply ambivalent.

I will argue that his ambivalent attitude was a result of the fact that Seneca’s intellectual and moral outlook was a hybrid of Roman and Greek elements. Seneca is a representative of Roman Stoicism &emdash; an original hybrid of the Greek philosophy and the traditional mores of Roman elites. 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, appeared even less sympathetic to Tacitus. That is why he represented their behavior under Nero as somewhat absurd, and the whole affair as a sadly ironic tale of Stoic failure in the face of Nero’s tyranny.

I want to explore the source of Tacitus’s ironical representation of the events of 65 and 66. I will argue first that Tacitus had a special connection with and empathy for Nero’s victims. However, a radical difference between Tacitus’s traditionalist conception of virtue and the Stoic alternative prevented him from sympathizing with the most important theme of the resistance to "bad" emperors like Nero, and the true source of the virtue of heroes such as Thrasea. This lack of sympathy made the whole affair appear as a heroless slaughter of Roman citizens &emdash; a time without any sign of the "fine old Roman character [Annals I.3]." Nero and his successors understood the situation in clearer terms, and that is why some of them felt violent hostility toward by what philosophers were spreading among the Roman elite.

Recall Tacitus’s own condemnation of this sorry state of affairs: (*HANDOUT #1)

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].

Three things to note in this passage. Here is Tacitus’s direct condemnation of the dishonorable deaths of these victims, (*second) his plea to the reader not to hold the agents entirely responsible for not dying gloriously in their unfortunate historical situation, and (*third) his utter despair at the prospects for improvement of the situation by human action. The condemnation expresses his militant Roman nationalism, the plea for forbearance, his enviable moral empathy for the victims, and the despair, the limits of his historical imagination. For when Tacitus says "the cause was rather heaven’s anger with Rome" he’s simply declining to explain the tragic sequence of citizen deaths. I will try to explain some of the events under Nero by an account of the new moral outlook among the members of the resistance.^Ý

The Resistance -- Victims of Domitian and of Nero

Tacitus’s investigation of the events of 65 and 66 must have been shaped by Tacitus’s personal experience of the tyrannical suppression of resistance. Tacitus himself experienced first-hand the reign of the "bad" 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 tight relations to the victims of Nero a generation earlier. It is quite clear that 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: (*HANDOUT #2)

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]. 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. But remember that Tacitus’s representation of the resistance under Nero was not very flattering. Why was that so? I try to answer that question below.

In the quote Tacitus mentions four names^Ý. (*THESE NAMES AND ONE OTHER ARE LISTED ON THE HANDOUT. SOME OF THEIR RELATIONS TO CHARACTERS IN THE ANNALS, WHOSE NAMES ARE UNDERLINED, ARE SUMMARIZED.) Three were executed; the fourth, 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 is likely that this general exile of philosophers included the Stoic Epictetus, from whom we know a great deal about the philosophical doctrines of this circle.^Ý

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 an emperor?

The apparently genuine threats to usurp Nero, namely Rubellius Plautus, Corbulo, Piso, perhaps even Seneca, were not central figures tying together the social group in question. 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. The social group might have rallied behind the competitors, or been smeared by association with them, or been condemned as part of a broad crackdown on potential resisters.

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 (*HANDOUT #3): "[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 had no serious explanation for why specific citizens rallied behind Piso. Surely fascination with depravity would have motivated keeping Nero on the throne!]

In all likelihood there was something like a political agenda behind the tension between the resistance group and certain emperors, perhaps even a political philosophy. The notion that a political philosophy underlay the continued hostility has a major advantage for an explanation. In 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 quick picture of this social structure in the Annals in the account of the last hours of Rubellius Plautus. Tacitus mentions two stories about why Plautus did not take offensive action. Either a message from his 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 against an attempt to seize the throne and instead to await death philosophically.

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 what Nero saw in the philosophical element of the resistance.

The Motives of the Resistance

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^Ý &emdash; making him the most famous Roman dissident of his era, except for that guy from Nazareth. Tacitus wrote of Helvidius in his Histories (*HANDOUT #4):

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 sympathy for 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 the motives for this independence by appeal to traditional senatorial motives, the desire for libertas senatoria. (*I’VE PLACED A QUOTE FROM GRIFFIN AT THE BOTTOM OF HANDOUT) "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]." (*By libertas senatoria Griffin means the traditional political privileges of senators, for example to initiate legislation. It can be roughly understood as the kind of liberty Livy celebrated in his history of the Roman republic, and Tacitus is openly partial to senatorial privilege, so the notion should be somewhat familiar to you.) It is undeniable that Stoicism was compatible with monarchy &emdash; indeed orthodox Stoic political philosophy demanded monarchy, just as Platonic 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 is implausible.

I will argue against Griffin 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. [Compare the actions of Livy’s Brutus, Collatinus, Lucretius and Valerius &emdash; the men who overthrew the monarchy &emdash; with any one of Tacitus resisters. Can we adequately understand Tacitus’s representation as simply a parallel of Livy’s but with incompetent liberators? I hazard the representation is more complex.]

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 (*HANDOUT # 5): "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; he walked out of the senate to make a very different kind of point.

Consider the charges that bring down Thrasea. Capito charged, in part (*HANDOUT # 6):

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, I say. 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 I suggest we understand the resisters’ many refusals to participate in effective 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. A line from Epictetus supports this suggestion. He wrote of the downfall of Helvidius Priscus the elder (*HANDOUT #7): "What good, then, did Priscus do, who was but a single individual? And what good does purple do the mantle [cloak]? What else than that it stands out conspicuously in it as purple, and is displayed as a goodly example to the rest [Epictetus I.2]?" Epictetus’s metaphor of the 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 superior to the rest, to insist that not all things are equal. In order 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 I think it masks the fact that men like Thrasea were not interested such political results.

In such episodes we see a profound difference between Tacitus’s own priorities, which I think are well summarized by libertas senatoria, and the priorities of the resisters. For this reason, the resisters were portrayed in his persistently ironic representation as incompetent or absurd. That is just the kind of reaction most likely when one is confronted with a radically alien set of priorities and values.

Traditionalist and Philosophical Conceptions of Morality

Why didn’t Tacitus sympathize with the distinctive and peculiar actions of the resistance? The reason for this, I’ll argue, is that the deepest and most dearly held values of the resisters were Greek and philosophical rather than Roman and traditionalist, hence alien to Tacitus. When Tacitus examined their actions and reputations in light of his own conception of virtue he failed to adequately sympathize with their values, goals and motives. I’ll offer two abstract characterizations of different conceptions of morality, an old-fashioned Roman one manifested by Tacitus &emdash; and Livy as well &emdash; 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 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 dominance, but also 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 caveat said, I’ll add that the difference between these two conceptions was recognized by Nero’s henchman Tigellinus. When Tigellinus wanted to move Nero to destroy Rubellius Plautus, he reported that (*HANDOUT #8) "he 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, and Plautus came to a quick end.

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, hence the conflict between the two is represented as a sad, ironic affair. [And he also attributed it to heaven’s anger with Rome. By refusing to look deeper he may have failed to understand the actual source of the tension between them.]

A paradigm of traditionalist virtue under a bad emperor can be found in Tacitus’s representation of his father-in-law Agricola under the tyrant Domitian. Note the contrast with the resistance figures from the Annals. (*HANDOUT #9)

[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. (*Let me note that I won’t question here whether suicide is in fact a genuine act of autonomy or a good death &emdash; we’ll save that for next week. The Roman Stoics saw it as such, and that’s all I need to claim here.)

Now I am ready to offer my own explanation of the conflict between emperors and the social group of the resistance. It was the strong desire for autonomy inculcated through Hellenistic philosophical education that clashed with the emperor’s will. 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 conclusions about 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, including 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. He even influenced Nero to declare that the senate should retain its traditional functions [Annals p. 286] &emdash; that’s the ultimate prize of libertas senatoria. 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. (*HANDOUT #10)

[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].

Admittedly there are different ways to read this magical passage, dripping with irony. But it cannot be taken literally. 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 is the target of his irony? Tacitus is not simply mocking Seneca. Rather, we see 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 ironical sensibility. Such stories manifest what Tacitus found so disappointing about this seemingly pathetic period of history. Recall his dismissive remarks about winning fame through ostentatious martyrdom in the Agricola quote above. Popular stories of Seneca’s great physical and mental fortitude during his suicide might 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 heroic Romans offered. Consider the paradigm of virtue in the Annals, Germanicus. He pursued renown through military adventure and achieved fame through death on foreign soil, rather than through eloquence and self-mutilation in the bath. I suggest that the target of Tacitus’s irony is the culture that would find Seneca’s performance at his suicide worthy of fame. He satirizes that fame by his playful exaggeration of the themes of the scene.

It is useful to place in contrast Tacitus’s remarks about less morally ambiguous deaths. I’ll cite one example, though there are many. When the soldier Subrius Flavus was asked by Nero how he could betray his military oath, he replied: (*HANDOUT #11)

‘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 are honorific, others contemptuous, still others ironic. A few of these are summarized on p. 1 of the handout under the heading ‘some victims of Nero’. The representation of Epicharis is particularly fun, for it allows Tacitus to exploit both class and gender stereotypes to his own sardonic purposes.)

Autocracy and Autonomy

I want to turn to a few remarks about why the influence of this new 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 great practical advantage. Yet sometimes that self-destruction was hostile to the autocrat’s interest. A pair of remarks by emperors after suicides demonstrate this point. On the suicide of Silanus Torquatus we hear: (HANDOUT #12) "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]." Tiberius made a parallel pronouncement in response to Libo’s suicide, and then Libo was in effect tried posthumously by the senate [Annals II.31]. Now it may be that Tiberius and 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 the emperors resented the effort of their intended victims to free themselves from the grip of manipulation. Tiberius and Nero wanted their victims destroyed according to their own desires and plans, not on the victims’ own terms. Perhaps Nero had planned to coerce Torquatus into altering his will, or perhaps he had planned to have others implicated in the course of the trial. In any case, it is a fact that if a subject was ordered to stand trial and he killed himself then he had thwarted the emperor’s will. Whether or not suicide is in truth an act of genuine autonomy 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 unrestrained autocrat desired that his will be the only effective one; he sought a monopoly on autonomy, if you will. 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 most valuable of all things, the one thing that must not be surrendered. ^Ý

Now, why did this change come over the Roman center? One of the most striking problems that Tacitus uncovered 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 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. 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 for absolute domination by a single will. Yet by gradual, discontinuous advances the world did change.

Conclusion

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. (*As you may have gleaned) 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 Greek innovation in Roman intellectual life that secured tolerance, if not actual liberty. And that itself is something of an historial irony.

Tacitus Bibliography

Epictetus, The Discourses as Reported by Arrian, etc., with translation by W. A. Oldfather, in two volumes, New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1926.

Griffin, Miriam, Seneca: A Philosopher in Politics, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976.

Luce, T.J. & A.J. Woodman, eds. Tacitus and the Tacitean Tradition, Princeton: PU Press, 1993.

MacMullen, Ramsey, Enemies of the Roman Order, New York: Routledge 1992.

Mellor, Ronald, Tactitus, New York: Routledge 1993.

Momigliano, Arnoldo, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography, Berkeley: UC Press, 1990.

Pliny the Younger, Letters, translated by Betty Radice, New York: Penguin, 1963.

Rudich, V., Political Dissidence under Nero, Routledge, 1993.

Syme, Ronald, Tacitus, two volumes, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958.

Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome, translated by Michael Grant, revised edition, New York: Penguin, 1989.

Tacitus, The Agricola and The Germania, translated by H. Mattingly, revised by S. A. Handford, New York: Penguin, 1970.

Tacitus, The Histories, translated by W. H. Fyfe, revised by D. S. Levene, New York: Penguin, 1997.

^Ý [The philosophy on the rise at Rome in the first century did not oppose many of the currents of imperial politics; indeed it was compatible with the imperial government. 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 &endash; but that's a somewhat later story.]