The slaves were circulating, pouring more wine, and then the various courses of the dinner followed. As this was masquerading as a simple family dinner rather than an imperial banquet, there were only three courses, and one of them featured country fare—to show how down-to-earth the emperor was? But the finale was nightingale in rose petals, something that would never be found in the country.
The conversation drifted from the charioteer who was today’s darling to the problem of the Druids in Britain to poetry and even that most banal of topics, the weather. As we were nibbling the sweet figs and cakes of the final course, a senator suddenly said, “Let’s have some philosophy! We’ve got a famous—or should I say infamous?—philosopher at the table. Seneca!”
The disheveled man looked up with dignity, making one forget his wrinkled clothes. “I hardly think one can consider weighty philosophical matters while the stomach is digesting.”
“You’re a Stoic, right?” the senator persisted. “Can’t you perform in all conditions? Isn’t that what Stoicism is all about? To be indifferent to your surroundings?”
“It is a little more complex than that,” said Seneca.
“You must have mastered that ‘indifferent’ challenge, as your life has proved. We should learn from you.”
Mother took that opening to say, “Seneca is going to be the tutor of Nero. He does indeed have much to teach.”
But the senator was not to be deflected. “Much to teach, indeed!” He rolled his eyes.
“Publius, these innuendoes are an insult to our guest. S-stop at once,” said Claudius. “We have chosen him to t-teach our son, and that is all the proof anyone needs of our c-confidence in his character.”
“What about me?” Britannicus’s shrill voice rose from the other table. “Can I have him for my tutor, too?”
“No, you have your own tutors.”
“Baby tutors! Why can Lucius have him, and I can’t?”
“Nero,” said Mother, her voice icy. “His name is Nero.”
“Well, I know him as Lucius.”
“That is no longer his name.” I recognized Mother’s tone now as her most dangerous, the one that said, That’s enough. Stop or you will be sorry in a way only I can make you sorry.
Britannicus clapped his mouth closed, but when Mother’s head was turned he said, “He’ll always be Lucius to me.”
“Th-that’s enough,” said Claudius. “You are being impertinent and r-rude to your brother. Leave the t-table, go to your room, and await your punishment later.”
Britannicus threw down his napkin and ran out in tears.
“Father,” I said (how odd it felt to say that, how unnatural), “do not be harsh with him. Why, even I will have trouble remembering all my names.” I attempted to make light of it.
“That’s my dear son,” said Mother, using the beguiling voice she kept in reserve. “He is just too tenderhearted, and of course he loves his brother. But, one cannot overlook things that cross a boundary of protocol.”
Seneca chuckled and, in a movement almost imperceptible, shook his head as if in amusement at us mortals.
Finally the ordeal was over and I was back in my room. I could rest at last, drifting off to sleep and putting a close to what was the most extraordinary day I would ever have. Or so I believed.
XXI
Before I was to meet with Seneca, I assured Anicetus that nothing would displace him in my life. He just smiled and said, “That would be my hope. But now that you have been elevated”—he stood on his tiptoes—“you may see things differently.”
“No,” I said. “No!”
“I will continue to function as your instructor in everyday life, then. I daresay you will not get much of that from Seneca, although, Zeus knows, that man could tell you more than you would wish to know.”
“You tell me!” I said eagerly.
He looked around and saw there were only two slaves standing guard at the door, too far away to hear. “Oh my—where to begin? Seneca became known early for his philosophy and his rhetoric, known well enough to run afoul of Caligula.”
“Like everyone in the world,” I said.
“Caligula didn’t care for his writing style. He said it was ‘sand without lime’—a lot of nuggets but nothing to bind them together. He was about to have him executed, but, because Seneca had weak lungs, a friend convinced Caligula that he was going to die soon anyway, so why bother?”
“That must be the only time a man could be grateful for weak lungs,” I said. We walked over to a bench near a window in my still-new suite of rooms, farther from the guards, and sat down.
“If his lungs were weak, apparently other parts of him were healthy enough,” said Anicetus. “A little while later, Messalina accused him of adultery with Livilla, Caligula’s sister. Any woman of power was her enemy, as you know full well. She had Livilla, your mother, and Seneca all banished—to different islands. Seneca went to Corsica, where he stayed for seven years. Only when Messalina was dead, and your mother in her place, could Claudius bring him back.”
“I’ve never understood why my mother was included in this trio.”
“You are old enough to know all these things now. It was rumored—rumored, mind you, not proven—that Seneca was her lover, too. And that in addition she was plotting against Caligula.” He shook his head. “That’s all over now. To be forgotten.”
As if I could forget such accusations!
“There’s another rumor, spread by Seneca’s aristocratic enemies, who consider him a venal upstart—that he has made his success by sharing all the appropriate influential couches.” He laughed. “When you get a closer look at him, you will understand how preposterous such charges are. Unless . . . there’s more to him than we can see, literally.”
I wished I could believe that my mother would be dissuaded by a man’s looks, but her marriage to Claudius proved the opposite. For myself, I found that beauty of person was necessary for me to be drawn to someone. Did that make me shallow? If so, then most people who have ever been born share this shallowness. That is why our first question usually is, What does he or she look like? It was Helen’s beauty that drove thousands to their deaths. If she had been plain, would Menelaus have wanted her back or would he have said, Good riddance? And, Thank you, Paris?
I looked at Anicetus, the man who had been beside me, steadying me and guiding me, from babyhood on. I would not leave him behind.
“Thank you for this timely education,” I said. “May you always speak truth to me.”
He reached out and tousled my hair. “May you always be open to receive it.” He pulled a few tendrils up. “Too unruly for a princeps. You will have to work to tame it.”
I smoothed it down. “I know. It is not obedient but wants to go every which way.”
“Like its owner,” he said, giving it one last rumple. He stood up; he had heard a sound at the door.
The slaves stood aside as Mother and Seneca entered the room. They were holding hands. Or was she just leading him, as would be perfectly proper?
“Greetings,” she said. “I am pleased to find you already in your teaching room, Nero. See what I have made ready?” She pointed to several maps on easels, a round container of scrolls, and a table with wax tablets and styli laid out. I had only vaguely noticed them; the room was so large it swallowed them up.
“Now I do,” I said. “And, Seneca, I welcome you and look forward to our lessons.” At the dinner I had seen his bald head but not how short he was, nor how thin his legs were, sticking out from under his gown. Oddly enough, his face was fleshy, even though the rest of him wasn’t. He did not look like a woman’s dream of a lover.
“As do I,” he said. He had a slight accent, just barely noticeable.
Mother hardly acknowledged Anicetus, but he made no move to leave. “My son is brilliant, Seneca. You will see. I count on you to polish
him, to lead him on higher paths than he has climbed so far”—now she did look at Anicetus—“because there was no one suitable to teach him at that level. However, I did not engage you to teach him philosophy.”
Seneca looked startled, then said, “But that is what I have made my name in.”
“Yes, but philosophy is of no use to an emperor.”
She had actually uttered the word, the forbidden word.
“Or to anyone in a high position near the emperor,” she said, quickly catching herself, looking over her shoulder to see if the guards had heard. “Instead, you are to teach him public speaking and political strategy. Practical things, instead of abstracts.”
He lifted his chin and looked her in the eyes in a terribly familiar way. “Philosophy is not an abstract; it is a moral guide for how we live our lives. Our philosophy affects our every action. If we believe that it matters how we treat our fellows, then we behave one way; if we do not, then we behave another way.”
She smiled and touched her blue silken palla, adjusting the golden pin that held it on her shoulder. “In fact, I see little difference in how people actually behave, depending on their philosophies. I can’t tell a Stoic from an Epicurean or a Cynic, by the time it gets to an ordinary man. Take yourself, for example. Does not your Stoic philosophy tell you to be free of material things, that they don’t matter? Well, then, how do you explain your five hundred citrus-wood tables?”
“I explain it by assuring you that they don’t matter to me!” He laughed. Oh, he knew how to manage her. And how had he learned that so well? Do not think about it, Nero, I told myself. Put it out of your thoughts. Only later did I realize I had called myself Nero in my own mind for the first time.
She laughed with him, heartily.
“Shall we begin the lessons today?” Seneca asked us.
“Tomorrow,” said Mother. “This afternoon we are celebrating. Claudius is speaking to the Senate even now, announcing to them, and securing their approval for it, that he is bestowing the title Augusta on me.”
There was a dead silence. Anicetus’s mouth made an O. Seneca stared, his pale blue eyes bulging. As for me, my face felt numb.
“What an honor, my lady.” Seneca was the first to recover, not surprisingly. “Well deserved, of course, but you join two others of imperishable fame.”
He was good with words. Yes, he must teach me to be nimble on my feet like this, to always have an arsenal of the right language at hand.
“Livia, wife of Augustus, titled Julia Augusta,” he continued smoothly. “And Antonia Augusta. Now a third! But Livia was only made Augusta after her husband’s death, and Antonia only received the honor a few months before her death. You are young, receiving the immortal wreath!”
Oh, yes, he was a master. But I was grateful that he filled in the stunned silence of her son and Anicetus.
She noticed. “Does my dear son have nothing to say?”
“It seems I am elevated twice, first to be son of an emperor, and now to be son of an Augusta.”
She smiled, but it was no smile. “Ah, the selfishness of youth, thinking only of himself, not of his mother.”
“I am in such awe of her new majesty that I sought to shield myself from the direct rays of its brilliance.” Seneca almost winced. Not good, then? Too overdone?
“But a son may embrace his mother and say simply and truly, I am so proud!” I hugged her tightly, kissed her cheek. There, was that better?
“Thank you,” she said. “Only one thing is lacking today. I wish my father could have known. I wish he could have known.” A genuine, not feigned, melancholy tinged her voice.
In all the twists and turns of her life, for all the accommodations she had had to make to survive, the image of Germanicus had remained the one unspotted thing in her esteem, the person she ultimately wanted to please. We all keep one such person—or thing—sacred to us.
• • •
There were more stately ceremonies for Mother’s elevation, but nothing that I remember very well. Such ceremonies are much the same: the witnesses are of the highest rank; the setting is the most impressive to hand; the pronouncement is read in stentorian tones; afterward there is eating and drinking. In this case, the actual reading was compromised by Claudius’s diction, but no matter: the edict was what counted, not the delivery of it.
XXII
I was wary of Seneca, and the first few days I spent in his tutelage were anxious ones for me. He was a famous man, famous in a realm outside the ones I was familiar with—the court and the training ground—and I felt ignorant next to him. He also was Mother’s choice, and Mother’s creature, just one remove from her herself. But he was a soothing presence, and day by day my little knot of suspicion uncurled.
He was pleased that I could read and speak Greek; Anicetus had given me a good foundation. Although he was to concentrate on teaching me rhetoric—both argument and public declamation—I won his favor when I read his essays and asked him questions about them. There is no man so humble that he does not beam when his work is applauded. Did I do this only to win him to me? Not consciously, but perhaps by instinct. A survivor must have the skill of pleasing others, and the higher one climbs, the more survival skills are needed. Being the emperor’s son now made it imperative that I master the utmost of survival skills.
In truth, the parts of his essays “Consolation to Helvia” and “Consolation to Polybius” that interested me were not his Stoical blatherings but what it was like to live in exile.
“Not in exile,” he corrected me. “Relegation.”
There was a difference?
“Relegation,” he said, “means banishment only from one particular place. Exile is not only that, but a loss of civil rights and property and money. So yes, there is a big difference. Like the poet Ovid, I was relegated, not exiled.”
“But neither of you could come back to Rome,” I said.
He sighed. “Yes, that is true. And I couldn’t choose my place of relegation. I was ordered to Corsica.”
“You wrote that it was an unpleasant place, bare and thorny, infertile, populated by uncultured people. But Anicetus, who has been there, told me it has a good climate and a lively Roman colony, that it isn’t barren at all, but thick with trees.”
“Any place is barren when a man is kept a prisoner there.”
“Yes, in poetical terms, but in real life, what is the truth about Corsica?”
“Anicetus is right, technically. But the landscape of the mind—”
“The true landscape. What is it like?”
“Much like Rome. It is not far away, after all. It shares the same climate, the same trees, the same crops.”
“Where did you live there? How did you live?”
“I lived in a tower.”
“All alone?”
He straightened himself on his chair, twitched his robes around his feet. “No, I had my wife and five slaves.”
I burst out laughing. “A lonely life of hardship indeed.”
“As I said, it is not one’s actual situation but one’s perception of it.” He leaned closer. “The essays were polished writings, meant to make philosophical points about what is important in life. The banishment was merely the background that allowed me to develop those thoughts. I was able to examine how Stoicism could be practiced, to allow me to rise above the situation—or any situation, for that matter. For that is the purpose of Stoicism, to be beyond the reach of fate.”
“I don’t think it worked, then.”
“It is an ideal, probably not attainable in its fullest form.”
“But the untruths”—I hesitated to call him an outright liar—“you wrote about Corsica do not make sense.” I kept coming back to the facts; they were what was important to me.
“Oh, yes, they do. If I painted a picture of Corsica as a pleasant place, then Claudius would have had n
o reason to lift my banishment, would he? I write not only for future readers but to influence the present—my present.”
Now he had admitted the truth. His writings had kept his name alive in Rome, long enough that he could be fetched home in the ripeness of time. They were not a report on Corsica but a plea for recognition.
“Now, young man, if we might turn to the famous declamation of Demosthenes, the Third Philippic—” He deftly steered us away from Corsica and back to the lesson at hand.
• • •
To his credit, Seneca became a guide for other aspects of my education. In preparation for the day when I would go through the ritual of assuming the adult toga, he stressed that I must master the long roll of Roman history, and that I must know the sites in Rome relevant to that history. Every stone, every street, told a story, he said. And we would visit them together, and I would learn them.
• • •
I shall make sure you are a true son of Rome!” he said, clapping his hands on my shoulders a few weeks later. “Now that it’s good weather, we’re off to visit the sites. It’s always best to see something rather than just hear about it.”
It was a glorious spring day, and no cloak was needed. Stepping out of the palace into the warm air, I was enveloped by the luxury of it.
“Now, my young charge, let us look from the heights first.” He steered me over to the edge of the Palatine Hill and pointed north. “There’s the original Forum, right beneath us. Beyond that are the two new forums—the Forum of Julius Caesar and the Forum of Augustus.” His arm swept over the broad area, still a bit misty; the sun had not reached the lower-lying parts of the city yet.
Just then a puff of breeze scattered petals from nearby blooming trees all over us. Seneca brushed them out of his sparse hair and from the folds of his tunic. I let mine stay; I felt anointed by spring.
“Persephone is back, and the flowers rejoice,” I said.
“What nonsense—a silly story if ever there was one.” He kept flicking at his tunic. “Now, to the west, is the sacred Capitoline Hill. See the big temple there?”