ABSTRACT
Seneca’s view that the best way to establish oneself as a moral witness in society is the highly ratiocinative and painfully protracted suicide might seem extreme. As with Cicero’s philosophical works, however, Seneca’s conclusions appear to have arisen in large part through extrapolation from contemporary aristocratic practice, for it is within Seneca’s era and milieu that the so-called “Roman cult of suicide” 1 is born. Under the Julio-Claudian Emperors suicide appears to have slowly become endemic amongst the upper classes, being fairly rare under Augustus and steadily increasing in frequency over the years until, under Nero, it seems to have become an almost routine occurrence. So thoroughly does the act of suicide come to permeate aristocratic culture during this time that it almost assumes the status of a regulated political institution of empire, 2 and is committed virtually automatically under certain generally recognized conditions. It is also in this period that Roman suicide first comes to assume a standardized form in terms of its method of execution. Seneca’s death, with its prolonged theatrical agonies conspicuously counterbalanced by its philosophical calm and political overtones, is, despite its elaboration, hardly innovative in its elements, and conforms quite closely to what was, by his day, a stereotyped norm of self-killing. 3 Suicide was the focus of intense aristocratic interest and admiration during this era, and members of the nobility appear to have been anxious to dispose of themselves in a suitably high-minded and audience-oriented fashion through conforming to pre-established suicidal models. Under the Julio-Claudians the aristocrats of Imperial Rome are remarkable not only for the frequency with which they do away with themselves, but the zeal they bring to celebrating this fact in their praise of others’ deaths and the considered ostentation of their own.
