We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.Įveryone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). Like any good philosopher, he only shows us the questions and leaves readers to figure out the answers. The task of determining Seneca’s true nature is daunting, but the wide body of information available to Romm enables him to give us tantalizing but ambiguous clues to the man’s mind. “As he himself implied in one of his several apologias,” writes the author, “he was not equal to the best, but better than the bad.” He was the speechwriter, spin doctor, and image maker and became a wealthy landowner thanks to Nero’s gifts. Seneca certainly failed to instill Stoic values in Nero, and he had little luck controlling him.
He was a petulant, spoiled megalomaniacal brat likely responsible for Claudius’ death and undoubtedly responsible for his brother’s and mother’s deaths and countless more.
Working with Nero must have been exceedingly unpleasant. Julia Agrippina the Younger recalled Seneca from Corsican exile to act as a tutor to her son, Nero, who she intended would succeed Emperor Claudius.
Was he a moral philosopher of the Stoic school or a greedy businessman and corrupt power monger? Are his tracts really political treatises, or were they propaganda, expounding his ideals or improving his image? The source material is vast, and the author seems to have explored it all: the Annals of Tacitus, the anonymous play Octavia and Cassius Dio’s Roman History, along with writings by Suetonius, Plutarch and many others. Romm, who teaches Greek literature and language, combed Seneca’s profuse writings in an attempt to identify the true man.
Seneca was a sage who preached a simple, studious life while amassing wealth and power in Nero’s court. Ghost on the Throne: The Death of Alexander the Great and the War for Crown and Empire, 2011) explores his contrasting, even conflicting, skills in surviving at the dangerous court of Nero. There were many sides to the great Roman philosopher and writer Seneca.
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