Sublime

“Nothing can satisfy greed,

When, in 410, Rome was sacked by the Goths, the pagans, not unnaturally, attributed the disaster to the abandonment of the ancient gods. So long as Jupiter was worshipped, they said, Rome remained powerful; now that the Emperors have turned away from him, he no longer protects his Romans. This pagan argument called for an answer. The City of God,

Seneca was, as we shall see, Nero’s speechwriter and never showed any particular interest in delivering speeches himself. This difference can be connected to the so-called “death of oratory,” much lamented in the ancient sources, whereby oratory lost its power to enact political change after Cicero and the death of the Roman Republic. 10

3. A ‘world full of gods’ is Keith Hopkins’s phrase in his engagingly quirky study of Roman religions, A World Full of Gods: Pagans, Jews and Christians in the Roman Empire (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999).

More concretely disturbing was the concurrent deterioration of the political and ethical situation in Athens to the point of crisis—the democracy turning fickle and corrupt, the consequent takeover by a ruthless oligarchy, the Athenian leadership of Greece becoming tyrannical, wars begun in arrogance ending in disaster.

For as long as Rome could conquer new lands with significant wealth, its soldiers and emperors could enjoy spending their loot, and emperors even decided to buy themselves popularity by mandating artificially low prices of grains and other staples, sometimes even granting them for free. Instead of working for a living in the countryside, many

By today’s standards, then, Seneca was at least a multimillionaire.