Anger, Mercy, Revenge by Lucius Annaeus Seneca;

Author:Lucius Annaeus Seneca;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2010-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

On Clemency

Introduction

ROBERT A. KASTER

The Treatise

Soon after Nero succeeded his adoptive father, Claudius, in October 54, Seneca hailed him and savaged his dead predecessor in a lampoon, the Apocolocyntosis, that also appears in this volume. A year or two passed before Seneca began the next of the extant writings we can date fairly closely: On Clemency, planned in at least two books and begun between December 55 and December 56.1 We do not know the precise occasion, if any, that inspired him.2 In fact, we cannot even know whether the treatise was finished and circulated in Seneca’s lifetime; it breaks off, obviously incomplete, early in Book 2. But we know the general plan he had in mind, and we can see how the work’s main concerns speak to the general political circumstances of Nero’s early reign.

Above all there is the contrast, sometimes expressed but understood throughout, with one of the chief evils of Claudius’s reign: his cruelty and eccentricity in judicial matters.3 In the accession speech that he composed for Nero to deliver to the Senate, Seneca had made a point of stressing that Nero “rejected especially those practices that had recently inspired a blaze of indignation,” singling out Claudius’s judicial habits, and in a display of leniency Nero soon thereafter restored to the Senate a man who had been expelled for alleged adultery with the empress Messalina, “offering solemn assurances of his clemency in frequent speeches that Seneca . . . used the emperor’s voice to spread abroad.” 4 On Clemency obviously participates in this attempt to “brand” Nero as quite a different sort of emperor. At the same time, the great claims that Seneca makes for Nero’s innocence—“to be without blemish, never to have spilled a fellow citizen’s blood” (1.11.2, cf. 1.1.5)—could help counter whatever rumors might be circulating that this reign was perhaps not so different after all: for early in 55 Britannicus, Claudius’s biological son and a potential younger rival for Nero’s power, had quite unexpectedly died, very likely poisoned at Nero’s command.5

In broad terms, On Clemency is presented as an attempt to instruct Nero and cause him to reflect upon the nature of his power; much of the attempt is cast as a panegyric. As often in panegyric, what appears to be simple, laudatory description is a cover for moral exhortation: Seneca means to urge Nero toward virtue by praising him as though he were already virtuous. The technique had been used before in Roman political speech, most notably in the orations that Cicero delivered before Julius Caesar in late 46 and 45 BCE, when Caesar was sole supreme magistrate (dictator): when defending men being tried before Caesar (On Behalf of Ligarius, On Behalf of King Deiotarus), and especially when thanking Caesar for restoring a former enemy from exile (On Behalf of Marcellus), Cicero used praise—including praise for Caesar’s clemency—to outline the proper civil role that he hoped the dictator would assume. Two generations after Seneca, the younger Pliny was to use the same technique when

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