In the early years, there was an excuse. Nero was just a teenager when Seneca started tutoring him. The boy was timid and coddled. He had experienced tragedy and his childhood had been strange. Besides, for Seneca, the alternative to taking the job was going back to his unfair and lonely exile in the middle of the ocean.
But the viability of Seneca’s excuse fell apart pretty quickly. The famous Barrón González, Eduardo statue captures how disinterested Nero was in learning from Seneca. Nero wanted the perks of being emperor but none of the responsibilities. He was not competent, which was fine as long he was content to let others make the decisions. When Nero started asserting control, bad things started happening. Plus there was the fact that he kept killing people…including his own mother.
Seneca watched all this happen. He also watched the gifts and honors from Nero pile up, making Seneca incredibly rich. He tried to be a good influence but it got so absurd, so malevolent that at one point he had to remind Nero that it was literally impossible to kill all your successors (eventually someone takes your place). Why didn’t he try to stop it sooner? Why didn’t he say anything about it—even in his private writings?
“We were complicit. For monetary reasons,” an account manager at Purdue Pharmaceuticals (the creator of Oxycontin) later reflected. “We were slow to catch on. And that might have been greed.” As the fascinating book Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe reveals, it was definitely greed. Like the Seneca we see in James Romm’s equally fascinating book, Dying Everyday, we are not only easily corrupted but we can corrupt ourselves. We don’t see what we don’t want to see. We turn away from the costs of our decisions—whether it was the Sacklers and the wreckage of the opioid crisis or Seneca and the wreckage of Nero’s regime. We’re slow to catch on…because of what it says about us. We’re slow to catch on because of what it means we’ll have to do.
Unlike the Sacklers—who still seem to be in denial of the terrible things their family has done—Seneca did eventually turn on Nero. Moreover, he ended up paying the ultimate price, dying at Nero’s hand. The tragedy is not just all the people affected and the way his hypocrisy undermined his beautiful writing, but that it could have gone differently (we contrast Seneca with a fellow Roman senator named Thrasea in Lives of the Stoics). Seneca could have seen it sooner, could have done something sooner, could have been a hero instead of being complicit.
And that’s a lesson for all of us.
If you want to do more reading on these topics, we highly recommend Dying Everyday by James Romm (and we have a podcast with him on this topic). Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe is a great modern read on one of the biggest crimes of the 20th/21st centuries. And for more on the life of Seneca and Thrasea and some Stoics who did resist Nero, check out Lives of the Stoics (signed copies here).
