Sublime

Even in a world where dissimulation was the norm and where imperial households were commonly stained with blood, Seneca had gone too far, and the public was disgusted. People were more outraged, we are told, by Seneca than by the barbarous Nero, at whom there was no longer any point in being shocked: “Seneca wrote a confession in that letter,” they

The emperor Tiberius summed up the basic ethics of Roman rule rather well when he said, in reaction to some excessive profits turned in from the provinces, ‘I want my sheep shorn, not shaven’.

The secret of the perceived success in these years lay in Seneca’s skills in public relations.

22 The De Clementia works to reassure the elite Roman public that this act of bloodshed, the murder of Britannicus, would not be characteristic of the future behavior of the Neronian rule, and that the right-hand man of the new emperor, his old tutor Seneca, was strongly opposed to any kind of cruelty and was in full control of his moral education.

Empire unchecked might be inevitable, but Darj Tarats has within him a quiet, determined, and conniving optimism that unchecked is not the only option available, and has not been for some time.

“Comrades, by an order announced yesterday by the Central Military Commission, I am now serving as commander of the Political Department of the Armed Forces. I accepted the appointment one week ago, but only now that we are seated together do I feel conflicted.

Et pourtant, le temps manque : plus l'empire grandit, plus les différents aspects de l'autorité tendent à se concentrer dans les mains du fonctionnaire-chef ; cet homme pressé doit nécessairement se décharger sur d'autres d'une partie de ses tâches ; son génie va consister de plus en plus à s'entourer d'un personnel sûr. Le grand crime de Claude ou

common sentiment is that the ruler’s power inevitably comes at the cost of being hated: “A man who fears to be hated doesn’t really want to rule,” declares Eteocles in the Phoenissae—a line that echoes the quote from Caligula that Seneca cites with disgust in the On Mercy and On Anger: “Let them hate, as long as they fear.”

But it is only a well-founded reputation that lasts permanently.