Sublime

ubi tu Caius, ego Caia — a formula which tells us that, if in the house there was not equal authority, there was equal dignity.

And when I do my social duty, says Marcus, I should do so quietly and efficiently. Ideally, a Stoic will be oblivious to the services he does for others, as oblivious as a grapevine is when it yields a cluster of grapes to a vintner. He will not pause to boast about the service he has performed but will move on to perform his next service, the way

The Roman commander at the siege of Pompeii in 89 BCE, where the teenaged Cicero served as a very junior officer, was Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix, meaning ‘lucky’ or, rather more imposingly, ‘the favourite of the goddess Venus’.

The play is set during three days in 62 ce and covers Nero’s divorce of his first wife Octavia (presented as an innocent victim of the tyrant’s crazy passions), his cruel act of exiling her, and his remarriage to Poppaea. Seneca features as a character in the play, a counselor who offers all the right advice but goes unheeded by the despotic Nero.

Petronius was some thirty years younger than Seneca: he was born around 27 CE, so would have been in his thirties in the sixties. Petronius was dubbed the “arbiter of taste” (arbiter elegantium), known for his risky, witty speech and his love of parties. Unlike Seneca, Petronius rose to the senatorial class.

Claudius’ daughter Octavia was one of the building blocks by which Agrippina had ensured her son’s claim to the imperial throne, but Nero was not interested in his wife and treated her badly. He embarked on a public affair with a freedwoman called Acte. Agrippina regarded this as scandalous and tried to put a stop to it—which only encouraged Nero

The message is clear. It was an axiom of the Augustan regime that the emperor paraded his generosity to the ordinary people of the city of Rome and that they in turn were to look to him as their patron, protector and benefactor.