The Deaths of Seneca

Abstract This book traces the cultural history of Seneca's forced suicide at the command of Nero, situating it in the Roman imagination and tracing its interpretations from the first century to the present day. The earliest historical narratives of the death scene by Tacitus and others were shaped by conventions of Greco-Roman exitus description and Julio-Claudian dynastic history. Seneca's own prolific writings about death—whether anticipating death in his letters, dramatizing it in the tragedies, or offering therapy for loss in the form of consolations—offered the primary lens through which Seneca's contemporaries would view the author's death. Dozens of later interpreters, working in both literary and visual media, from St. Jerome to Heiner Müller and from medieval illuminations to Peter Paul Rubens and Jacques-Louis David, retold the death scene (and the revival of Seneca's wife Paulina) in ways that forged new and sometimes controversial views on Seneca's legacy and, more broadly, on the experience of mortality and suicide. The book presents a new, historically inclusive, approach to reading this major Roman author.