(Dear readers: this three part letter
contains some vivid descriptions of suicides, as well as detailed
modern statistics on Australian suicide rates. If this is not to
your taste, you might prefer to come back to my blog in a month to
read my letter to Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden. It is a
much more beautiful letter, on walking in the wilderness.)
*
Dear Tacitus,
It's been a long time since I wrote to
you. Your Annals are such a mammoth collection of stories and
opinions and facts and myths and all the other ingredients that go
into written history, that it has taken me the better part of a year
to carefully sift through it all and, taking notes as I go, to begin
preparations for a new letter to you.
I should open by saying that the modern
opinion of your accuracy as a historian is rather critical; you are
accused of unfair bias, and of straight up lies regarding Nero, and
while I am not a historian, and thus not qualified to pass a
judgement separate from that of the scholars, I am a storyteller, and
it is in this regard that I assess, and enjoy your work. There is
still a lot of verifiable truth in your writing, but I must confess
that it is your personal reflections on the subject matter that I
find myself most interested in, rather than the hard facts of
history. I love the way you tell the story, the way you sequence
events in order to illustrate the point you are trying to make about
the terrible corruption, the loss of dignity of the senators and the
steady decline in trust between everyone connected to Nero as
accusations fly around and everyone commits suicide rather than face
punishment from the Emperor, for crimes they did, or did not commit.
You, Tacitus, describe a high society
culture of suicide that is as shocking to read now as it seems it was
for you to have to write.
Bk XVI, section 16
Even had I been
narrating campaigns abroad and lives laid down for the commonwealth,
and narrating them with the same uniformity of incident, I should
myself have lost appetite for the task, and I should expect the
tedium of others, repelled by the tale of Roman deaths, honourable
perhaps, but tragic and continuous. As it is, this slave-like
patience and the profusion of blood wasted at home weary the mind and
oppress it with melancholy. The one concession I would ask from those
who shall study these records is that they would permit me not to
hate the men who died with so little spirit. It was the anger of
Heaven against the Roman realm — an anger which you cannot, as in
the case of beaten armies or captured towns, mention once and for all
and proceed upon your way. Let us make this concession to the memory
of the nobly born: that, as in the last rites they are distinguished
from the vulgar dead, so, when history records their end, each shall
receive and keep his special mention.
Page after page you
describe the many men and women, who, in order to avoid the tortures
and execution squads sent by Nero, simply killed themselves, and
sometimes their whole families.
Book XV Sect. 69 &
70
On that day he (Vestinius)
had performed all his duties as consul, and was entertaining some
guests, fearless of danger, or perhaps by way of hiding his fears,
when the soldiers entered and announced to him the tribune's summons.
He rose without a moment's delay, and every preparation was at once
made. He shut himself into his chamber; a physician was at his side;
his veins were opened; with life still strong in him, he was carried
into a bath, and plunged into warm water, without uttering a word of
pity for himself. Meanwhile the guards surrounded those who had sat
at his table, and it was only at a late hour of the night that they
were dismissed, when Nero, having pictured to himself and laughed
over their terror at the expectation of a fatal end to their banquet,
said that they had suffered enough punishment for the consul's
entertainment.
Next he ordered the destruction of
Marcus Annaeus Lucanus. As the blood flowed freely from him, and he
felt a chill creeping through his feet and hands, and the life
gradually ebbing from his extremities, though the heart was still
warm and he retained his mental power, Lucanus recalled some poetry
he had composed in which he had told the story of a wounded soldier
dying a similar kind of death, and he recited the very lines. These
were his last words. After him, Senecio, Quintianus, and Scaevinus
perished, not in the manner expected from the past effeminacy of
their life, and then the remaining conspirators, without deed or word
deserving record.
Book XV Sect 62 &
63 Seneca's death.
A centurion came to
Seneca's home to announce the death sentence pronounced upon him as
punishment for his alleged involvement in a conspiracy to murder
Nero:
Seneca, quite unmoved, asked for
tablets on which to inscribe his will, and, on the centurion's
refusal, turned to his friends, protesting that as he was forbidden
to requite them, he bequeathed to them the only, but still the
noblest possession yet remaining to him, the pattern of his life,
which, if they remembered, they would win a name for moral worth and
steadfast friendship. At the same time he called them back from their
tears to manly resolution, now with friendly talk, and now with the
sterner language of rebuke. "Where," he asked again and
again, "are your maxims of philosophy, or the preparation of so
many years' study against evils to come? Who knew not Nero's cruelty?
After a mother's and a brother's murder, nothing remains but to add
the destruction of a guardian and a tutor."
Having spoken these and like words,
meant, so to say, for all, he embraced his wife; then softening
awhile from the stern resolution of the hour, he begged and implored
her to spare herself the burden of perpetual sorrow, and, in the
contemplation of a life virtuously spent, to endure a husband's loss
with honourable consolations. She declared, in answer, that she too
had decided to die, and claimed for herself the blow of the
executioner. There upon Seneca, not to thwart her noble ambition,
from an affection too which would not leave behind him for insult one
whom he dearly loved, replied: "I have shown you ways of
smoothing life; you prefer the glory of dying. I will not grudge you
such a noble example. Let the fortitude of so courageous an end be
alike in both of us, but let there be more in your decease to win
fame." Then by one and the same stroke they sundered with a
dagger the arteries of their arms. Seneca, as his aged frame,
attenuated by frugal diet, allowed the blood to escape but slowly,
severed also the veins of his legs and knees. Worn out by cruel
anguish, afraid too that his sufferings might break his wife's
spirit, and that, as he looked on her tortures, he might himself sink
into irresolution, he persuaded her to retire into another chamber.
Even at the last moment his eloquence failed him not; he summoned his
secretaries, and dictated much to them which, as it has been
published for all readers in his own words, I forbear to paraphrase.
Book XVI Sect. 17
Mela meanwhile, adopting the easiest
mode of death then in fashion, opened his veins, after adding a
codicil to his will bequeathing an immense amount to Tigellinus and
his son-in-law, Cossutianus Capito, in order to save the remainder.
In this codicil he is also said to have written, by way of
remonstrance against the injustice of his death, that he died without
any cause for punishment, while Rufius Crispinus and Anicius Cerialis
still enjoyed life, though bitter foes to the prince.
So, with all these
horror stories, which are terrible to relate, and with the strange
sense of nobility and pride expressed in the act of suicide itself
(as an alternative to being tortured and murdered), I turn my mind to
my own society, and to the peculiar attitudes we have towards suicide
and death.
No comments:
Post a Comment