Sublime

Cato, once it was clear that Caesar was the inevitable victor, killed himself at the town of Utica on the coast of what is now Tunisia in the most gory way imaginable. According to his biographer, writing 150 years later, he stabbed himself with his sword but survived the gash. Despite attempts by friends and family to save him, he pushed away the

Nero granted Pallas the concession that the books would not be audited, so that he was allowed to keep the riches he had acquired in office, but in political terms, he was gone. 19 Pallas was later put on trial, along with Burrus, for conspiracy; he was acquitted, but his name was further blackened (Tacitus 13.23). Agrippina retaliated at the loss

Nero’s theatrical performances with the strong opposition of another, somewhat younger Stoic contemporary: Epictetus.

He was staying at his lovely, well-tended estate at Nomentum, with his wife, various close friends, and his household of slaves and freedmen. He was there cross-examined by a tribune about his remark about Piso. Seneca insisted that he never said his health depended on Piso’s: such a thing would have been entirely false, and Seneca claimed that he

‘Hail, Caesar, those about to die salute you’, as gladiators occasionally shouted to the emperor before fights, would have been a form of address appropriate to each and every one of them.

Seneca himself likely had some of this sinking feeling when he returned from Corsica to the Rome from which he had been expelled and took up his position in the household of the emperor who had exiled him, along with his new wife Agrippina (sister of his now-dead, perhaps-erstwhile-lover, Julia Livilla) and Agrippina’s son by the dead Tiberius: Ner