Sublime

who ruled for eighty years and lived to the ripe old age of 120. Later Roman writers, including Pliny the Elder, would extend this to an even more impressive 150 years. John thought it possible that this legend of longevity came about because ‘Arganthonios’ was an official name for a king, as the leader of a silver-trading empire, rather than a

In Seneca’s own generation there were other Stoics in the Roman government who stood up strongly against Nero and in favor of Republican principles: the most important of these was Thrasea, to whom we shall return.

Shortly before Gaius’ revolutionary reforms, in the mid 120s BCE a Roman consul was travelling through Italy with his wife and came to the small town of Teanum (modern Teano, about 100 miles south of Rome). The lady decided she wanted to use the baths there usually reserved for men, so the mayor had them prepared for her and the regular bathers

Sulla’s head was brought back to Rome, and Nero laughed at his ugly, prematurely gray hair (Tacitus 14.57). Tigellinus cited Plautus’ interest in Stoicism as a proof of his treasonous intentions—itself a marker of how far the pendulum had swung since the early days of Seneca’s tutorship of Nero.

Pliny the Elder, trying later to arrive at a headcount of Caesar’s victims, seems strikingly modern in accusing him of ‘a crime against humanity’.

Solon had maintained the republican forms; now the people still entertained a blind hatred against these forms of government under which they had seen, for four centuries, nothing but the reign of the aristocracy. After the example of many Greek cities, they wished for a tyrant.

One poem, addressed to her on the death of her son Drusus in 9 BCE, even calls her Romana princeps. It was the female equivalent of a term regularly applied to Augustus, Romanus princeps, or ‘first citizen of Rome’, and meant something close to ‘first lady’.