The death of Thrasea: towards a reconstruction and interpretation

Emily Kearns

Abstract: Heraclea Pontica, on the southern Black Sea coast, held the position of political leader in the region since its emergence in the first half of the 6th century BC until of the first half of the 1st century BC. The history of Heraclea Pontica had its chance through the works of a series of local historians. Their works are reworked mythographic traditions and literary history. Naturally, this literary processing is based on fragments of reconstructed historical events. The folkloric narratives underlying that type of literary tradition have preserved the historical episodes, but in a sophisticated way, linking them with realia that were important for the tradition. It was precisely in that tradition that the sorceress Thrake, knowledgeable about both medicinal plants and poisons, appeared. Being preserved in fragments of Arrian and in a passage by Appian, Thrake is a complex emanation that was probably the product of the two “Heracleian traditions”: historical and mythographic. Keywords: Heraclea Pontica, historical and mythographic traditions, Thrace, migration.

“Structures, Events and Ritual Practice in the Rg-Veda : The Gharma and Atri’s Rescue by the Aśvins.” In: Language, Ritual and Poetics in Ancient India and Iran: Studies in honor of Shaul Migron (ed. David Shulman) : 87-135. Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. 2010. In the recent translation published by Jamison and Brereton, Jamison mentions the present study but does not adress any of the arguments (The Rigveda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of India. Vols. I-III. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). The problems in Jamison's interpretation of hymns such as RV 8.73 and in the translation of hiména in RV 8.73.3 as "with snow" rather than "during the winter" remain therefore unresolved. This paper deals with a complex problem of interpretation regarding an event referred to in various brief statements dispersed in the Rg-Veda (RV): Atri’s rescue by the twin gods, the Aśvins. What makes it so diﬃcult to resolve is the simultaneous involvement of several problem areas, each bearing a number of variables and uncertain factors. Interpretational decisions in one area have immediate implications for the others, so that if we insist on regularity and structure in one area, we must, so it seems, accept some irregularity in another, and vice versa. The ﬁrst area is language. We would like to see structure and regularity in the morphology, syntax and semantics of the relevant passages. However, we must take into account that a poet may make intentional deviations from the standard in order to achieve certain eﬀects. Next, there is myth. Here, again, we would like to see harmony and regularity in the statements found in diverse hymns in the Rg-Veda, and we would like to be able to reconstruct a relatively unitary underlying story or myth on their basis. But here, again, a poet may modify a received story or deviate from a standard myth – assuming the poet refers to an event on the basis of story or myth, and not on the basis of having been directly involved in it. These are the two areas on which interpreters of the RV have focused their attention in the last century and half or so, also with regard to Atri and the Aśvins. A third relevant area, that of ritual practice, has largely been neglected in this context. A critical reconsideration of all three areas and their interrelationships will lead to a new interpretation and evaluation of the Rg-Vedic story of Atri and the Aśvins. This article discusses critically earlier interpretations, including the one proposed by Stephanie Jamison in her well-researched and stimulating study The Ravenous Hyenas and the Wounded Sun: Myth and Ritual in Ancient India. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Within a strictly RV context this interpretation remains incoherent and it cannot be maintained unless by invoking statements from much later texts, especially the Śatapatha-brāhmaṇa.

ATHENAEUM Studi di Letteratura e Storia dell’Antichità pubblicati sotto gli auspici dell’Università di Pavia VOLUME NOVANTANOVESIMO I 2011 ———— Estratto EMILY KEARNS The Death of Thrasea. Towards a Reconstruction and Interpretation ISSN 004-6574 AMMINISTRAZIONE DI ATHENÆUM UNIVERSITÀ - PAVIA COMO - NEW PRESS EDIZIONI - 2011 ATHENAEUM Studi di Letteratura e Storia dell’Antichità pubblicati sotto gli auspici dell’Università di Pavia VOLUME NOVANTOTTESIMO I 2011 ———— Estratto EMILY KEARNS The Death of Thrasea. Towards a Reconstruction and Interpretation ISSN 004-6574 AMMINISTRAZIONE DI ATHENÆUM UNIVERSITÀ - PAVIA COMO - NEW PRESS EDIZIONI - 2011 ATHENAEUM Studi Periodici di Letteratura e Storia dell’Antichità DIRETTORI EMILIO GABBA (onorario) DARIO MANTOVANI GIANCARLO MAZZOLI (responsabile) SEGRETARI DI REDAZIONE FABIO GASTI - DONATELLA ZORODDU COMITATO SCIENTIFICO INTERNAZIONALE Michael von Albrecht (Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg); Mireille ArmisenMarchetti (Université de Toulouse II – Le Mirail); Francis Cairns (Florida State University); Carmen Codoñer Merino (Universidad de Salamanca); Michael Crawford (University College London); Jean-Michel David (Université Paris I PanthéonSorbonne); Werner Eck (Universität zu Köln); Michael Erler (Julius-MaximiliansUniversität Würzburg); Jean-Louis Ferrary (École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris); Pierre Gros (Université de Provence Aix-Marseille 1); Jeffrey Henderson (Boston University); Michel Humbert (Université Paris II Panthéon-Assas); Wolfgang Kaiser (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg); Eckard Lefèvre (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg); Matthew Leigh (St Anne’s College, Oxford); Carlos Lévy (Université Paris IV Sorbonne); Anna Morpurgo Davies (University of Oxford); Jan Opsomer (Katholieke Univeristeit Leuven); Constantinos G. Pitsakis (Democritus University of Thrace); Ignacio Rodrı́guez Alfageme (Universidad Complutense de Madrid); Alan H. Sommerstein (University of Nottingham); Pascal Thiercy (Université de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest); Theo van den Hout (University of Chicago); Juan Pablo Vita (Instituto de Estudios Islamicos y del Oriente Proximo, Zaragoza); Gregor Vogt-Spira (Philipps-Universität Marburg); Paul Zanker (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München SNS Pisa); Bernhard Zimmermann (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg) Peer-review. Articoli e note inviati per la pubblicazione alla rivista sono sottoposti – nella forma del doppio anonimato – a peer-review di due esperti, di cui uno almeno esterno al Comitato Scientifico o alla Direzione. Ogni due anni sarà pubblicato l’elenco dei revisori. INDICE DEL FASCICOLO I P. 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TOWARDS A RECONSTRUCTION AND INTERPRETATION * Tum ad Thraseam in hortis agentem quaestor consulis missus vesperascente iam die. inlustrium virorum feminarumque coetus frequentis egerat, maxime intentus Demetrio Cynicae institutionis doctori, cum quo, ut coniectare erat intentione vultus et auditis, si qua clarius proloquebantur, de natura animae et dissociatione spiritus corporisque inquirebat, donec advenit Domitius Caecilianus ex intimis amicis et ei quid senatus censuisset exposuit. igitur flentis queritantisque qui aderant facessere propere Thrasea neu pericula sua miscere cum sorte damnati hortatur, Arriamque temptantem mariti suprema et exemplum Arriae matris sequi monet retinere vitam filiaeque communi subsidium unicum non adimere. [35] Tum progressus in porticum illic a quaestore reperitur, laetitiae propior, quia Helvidium generum suum Italia tantum arceri cognoverat. accepto dehinc senatus consulto Helvidium et Demetrium in cubiculum inducit; porrectisque utriusque brachii venis, postquam cruorem effudit, humum super spargens, propius vocato quaestore «libamus» inquit «Iovi liberatori. specta, iuvenis; et omen quidem dii prohibeant, ceterum in ea tempora natus es quibus firmare animum expediat constantibus exemplis». post lentitudine exitus gravis cruciatus adferente, obversis in Demetrium... Then the consul’s quaestor was sent to Thrasea, who was at his gardens (horti ), when the day was already turning towards evening. He had gathered there a great number of distinguished men and women, but paid the most attention to Demetrius, a teacher of the Cynic school, and it could be guessed from his expression of concentration and from what could be overheard that they were discussing the nature of the soul and the uncoupling of the spirit and the body, until one of his close friends, Domitius Caecilianus, arrived and told him what the senate had decreed. Those who were present wept and protested, but Thrasea told them to leave quickly, and not to risk danger by associating with one who had been condemned. As for Arria, who intended to follow her husband’s end and the example of Arria her mother, he bade her remain alive and not deprive their daughter of her only support. Then he proceeded to the colonnade, and there the quaestor found him, in a state close to happiness, because he had learned that his son-in-law Helvidius had only been banished from Italy. When he had received the senate’s decree, he led Helvidius and Demetrius into a bedroom. Stretching out the veins of both arms, when the blood started to flow, he scattered some on the ground, and calling the quaestor to come closer, he said «We make [this] libation to Jupiter the Liberator. Watch, young man. Now may the gods avert the omen, but you have been born into times where it is useful to strengthen your resolve with examples of constancy». Afterwards, as the slow pace of death was causing him great pain, he turned to Demetrius... (Annals 16.34). * Returning unexpectedly to this subject area after more than thirty years, I should like to thank Barbara Levick, who taught me Roman history, and Miriam Griffin, who (also in those distant days) kindly lent me the text of her article on suicide (nt. 7) prior to publication; and Nicholas Purcell, for more recent encouragement. — 42 — In the whole dismal series of enforced deaths which took place in the reign of Nero, which Tacitus so regrets having to record (Annals 16.16), 1 it seems clear that the historian has reserved a place of particular emphasis for the events leading up to the deaths of Barea Soranus and, especially, Thrasea Paetus, whom he designates collectively as virtus ipsa. Not only this signalling device at 16.21, but the emotional intensity and the length and detail of what follows, indicate that the destruction of these two men and their associates is intended to mark some sort of climax. It is then exceptionally irritating that the manuscript breaks off in mid-sentence at Thrasea’s deathbed, depriving us of his last words and the conclusion of the scene. 2 This paper will suggest a partial reconstruction of the missing conclusion, as well as offering an extended commentary on the last two chapters of our text of the Annals, with the further aim of reaching beyond Tacitus to his sources and beyond the written sources to the event itself. From the allusions in Tacitus’ account to what we know to be a tradition of the heroic suicide, we can surmise that there is a complex and intimate relation between these three stages in the event and its transmission. In putting forward an interpretation of the various meanings encoded in the death narrative, I shall argue that we are justified in considering the account not only as a literary construct, whether that of Tacitus or of an earlier writer, but also as bearing a close relation to an extra-literary complex of events (in which an investigation of medical-physiological factors may help us), and indeed that we need to take this further step. The ‘meanings’ I investigate, in other words, relate as much to Thrasea’s construction of his own death as to Tacitus’ literary representation of that death. It hardly needs demonstrating that for Tacitus and his contemporaries, indeed for most of antiquity and beyond, the manner in which a person confronted death was of profound significance, being compared with the general tenor of their life and viewed as giving some sort of insight into their true nature. 3 We know, too, that around this time books were written dealing specifically with notable deaths, particularly of those who were put to death by emperors, some of which Tacitus almost certainly used, as we shall see. 4 It seems likely that this will have been a more varied genre than we can now recover, but among these exitus illustrium virorum (and indeed some feminarum) there seems to have been a particular predilection 1 Compare 4.32-33, though the earlier passage is free of the criticism of the victims which seems to be implied here (a criticism which I think Tacitus does not mean to apply across the board, below, nt. 8). 2 It seems likely that the deaths of Barea and his daughter were treated in less detail and with less intensity, the emotional climax of their episode having taken place in the trial scene (16.31-32). 3 See especially C. Edwards, Death in Ancient Rome, New Haven - London 2007, pp. 144-160. 4 On this literature and its relation to Tacitus see F.A. Marx, Tacitus und die Literatur der Exitus illustrium virorum, «Philologus» 92 (1937), pp. 83-103; A. Ronconi, Exitus illustrium virorum, «SIFC» 17 (1940), pp. 1-32; C. Questa, Studi sulle fonti degli Annales di Tacito, Roma 1963, pp. 234-249. — 43 — for the heroic suicide. 5 This type of scene, it is well established, looked back ultimately to the death of Socrates, through the medium of the suicide of the younger Cato, which had its own prominent Socratic elements (notably the reading of the Phaedo before death), 6 and thus placed its subject in a line of wise and virtuous men who were martyred by an unjust political power – for different as the deaths of Socrates and Cato were, it is this idea of martyrdom which seems to unite them. 7 And while Socrates was, so to speak, ancient history (and condemned, reassuringly for some, under a democratic regime), the figure of Cato still had potent and potentially subversive political implications. Tacitus notoriously did not altogether approve of death in this style, designating it ambitiosa mors and an action of no use to the state in Agricola 42.5 and contrasting it with Agricola’s own life as a great man under bad emperors, while producing a different critique in Annals 16.16, 8 and perhaps constructing the death of Petronius at 16.19 in opposition to the heroic, ‘ostentatious’ model. But the fierceness of his polemic in Agricola is itself 5 I use the word suicide throughout to refer to both voluntary and enforced self-killing. Plutarch, Cato Minor 68, 70; Seneca, Ep. 24.6; Cass. Dio 43.11.2. On Cato’s post mortem significance, see in general P. Pechiura, La figura di Catone Uticense nella letteratura latina, Torino 1965. 7 See above all M.T. Griffin, Philosophy, Cato, and Roman Suicide, «G&R» 33 (1986), pp. 64-77 (part I), pp. 195-202 (part II) (especially pp. 69-70, 195 f. on the element of martyrdom as uniting Socrates and Cato and underpinning the whole tradition). Related aspects and various divergences: G. Bellardi, Gli exitus illustrium virorum e il l. xvi degli Annali tacitiani, «A&R» 19 (1974), pp. 129-137; Edwards, Death in Ancient Rome cit. (above, nt. 2); J. Geiger, Munatius Rufus and Thrasea Paetus on Cato the Younger, «Athenaeum» 57 (1979), pp. 48-72; T.D. Hill, Ambitiosa Mors: Suicide and Self in Roman Thought and Literature, New York London 2004, pp. 183-212; Y. Grisé, Le suicide dans la Rome antique, Montréal 1982, pp. 193-223, esp. pp. 202-205; M.B. Trapp, Socrates, the Phaedo, and the Lives of Phocion and Cato the Younger, in A. Pérez Jiménez - J. Garcı́a López - R.M. Aguilar (eds), Plutarco, Plato´n y Aristo´teles. Actas del V Congreso Internacional de la I.P.S, Madrid-Cuenca 4-7 de Mayo de 1999, Madrid 1999, pp. 487-499. See also nt. 28. The comparison between Cato and Socrates is already in Cicero, Tusculans 1.71-75. 8 Here the suggestion is that the author might (but in fact does not) feel «hatred» for, and so pass over in silence, those tam segniter pereuntis, «who perished so apathetically». This criticism applies far better to some of the Neronian victims than others. It fits the visible impatience with which Tacitus views the aftermath of the first revelation of the Pisonian conspiracy, when in his account action was still a possibility; it would seem to suggest sympathy with the attempt of Antistius Vetus to rouse his son-in-law Rubellius Plautus to resistance (14.58-59); and it may in its context be intended to apply particularly to the immediately following deaths of Mela and Crispinus, who are presented rather unsympathetically. His views, located in a particular historical context, contrast strongly with those of Seneca, the great exponent of the heroic potential of suicide. Cf. also the interpretation of Bellardi (Gli exitus illustrium virorum cit. [nt. 7]), pp. 135-137. The Agricola passage is trickier to interpret, mainly because its strictures, as Brunt points out (Stoicism and the Principate, «PBSR» 43 [1975], pp. 31 nt. 153), seem at odds with Tacitus’ judgements elsewhere on the individual members of the «Stoic opposition», and also to strike a dissonant note with the closely following passage expressing horror at the senate’s coerced condemnation of the victims of 93 (nos... nos... nostrae manus). Any attempt to understand Tacitus’ position must surely take into account the guilt and confusion which are now well known to be commonly felt by the survivors of an oppressive regime; cf. H. Haynes, Survival and Memory in the Agricola, «Arethusa» 39 (2006), pp. 149-170. 6 — 44 — testimony to the power of the schema and its deep-seated presence in the political and moral consciousness of upper-class Romans. This schema was, however, not altogether simple. By choosing in his own death to allude to the death of Socrates, Cato had set up a double tradition, for the difference in their circumstances could not be ignored. Socrates had been put to death by being forced to drink hemlock; Cato chose to die, rather than be forced to acknowledge Caesar’s power by becoming an object of his clemency. The Phaedo, in fact, appears to forbid suicide, and the Academic Brutus for one is represented as at first thinking, presumably for this reason, that Cato had been morally wrong to kill himself. 9 But there is none the less a direct line from Socrates’ strictly defined «necessity from god» to the Stoics’ more liberal interpretation of the idea, 10 in accordance with which Cato could no doubt interpret the termination of freedom as the crucial sign to end his life. Again, where Socrates had died surrounded by grieving but helpless friends, Cato was forced to conceal his intentions from his companions, resulting in a particularly difficult death; Socrates, in Plato’s account, dies peacefully, but Cato is at odds with his slaves and his son and botches his first attempt, resulting in a partial disembowelling; Plutarch’s narrative does not spare us the grisly details, and Cato only succeeds in dying when he tears open the sutured wound once more. The model thus supplied multiple variants, both for those who enacted their own deaths and those who wrote about the deaths of others. Against this background, then, I shall try to reconstruct the truncated account of Thrasea’s death and to offer a detailed interpretation of the scene’s significance. But before we tackle these issues head on, we must first give some attention to the relationship between the three stages we have so far identified: the event itself, the pre-Tacitean written account(s), and the version of Tacitus. Despite the disclaimer in Annals 16.16, it is obvious that deaths brought about as a result of political opposition or otherwise falling foul of the regime are a subject of particular interest to Tacitus throughout his work. In the Annals, he records in detail the caedes continua (6.29) of the last years of Tiberius, and we must suppose that the many victims of Gaius and Claudius were also listed (we see some of the latter); 11 but it is noticeable that the death scenes of those who perished under Nero 9 Plut. Brutus 40.7, where Brutus states that he had previously considered Cato was «running away» (a\podidqa*rjeim), which might suggest the argument at Phaedo 62d. 10 Phaedo 62c. Stoic views: see J.M. Rist, Stoic Philosophy, Cambridge 1969, pp. 231-255, but cf. nt. 112. Cicero, Tusc. 1.74, already explicitly presents Cato’s death as a response to a proper and god-given cause, like that of Socrates. 11 Notable in the reign of Gaius must have been the ‘philosophical’ death of Julius Canus, described so vividly by Seneca, De tranquillitate 14.4-10; the earlier and missing part of Claudius will have included the suicides of Thrasea’s parents-in-law Caecina Paetus and the elder Arria in AD 42. — 45 — are given in considerably more detail. 12 This suggests that here he was able to feed his interest with fuller information than for the earlier period, and it is generally agreed that a likely source for much of the material will have been the three books completed (out of at least five projected) by C. Fannius on the exitus occisorum aut relegatorum a Nerone, which Pliny mentions at Ep. 5.6. 13 It has also been noticed that the name Fannius suggests a possible family connexion with Thrasea Paetus, whose daughter (Clodia) Fannia was, as Syme suggests, probably named after her paternal grandmother. 14 Given the bottom-heavy distribution of violent or enforced deaths across Nero’s reign, it is probable that Fannius had already reached the death of Thrasea in the completed section of his work and that this account was therefore available for Tacitus’ use. But the other likely source for the account in the Annals, and indeed a likely source for Fannius himself, must be the laudes Thraseae of Q. Iunius Arulenus Rusticus, which Domitian attempted to have destroyed along with their author in 93, but of which copies no doubt survived. Although these laudes are nowhere called a biography, they seem most likely to have followed a roughly biographical form, 15 and the work will hardly have neglected to narrate its martyred subject’s last days and hours. Tacitus’ clear interest in politically motivated attempts to suppress historical and literary writings 16 will naturally have led him to Arulenus’ work, and at 16.26 the mention of Arulenus himself and his offer to use his tribunician veto to prevent Thrasea’s condemnation is an obvious indication of his use of this source – just as, in the original work, the episode will have served as a ruqaci* | and a demonstration of the close link between laudator and laudandus. 17 Although for Thrasea’s trial the obvious source, apart from earlier historians, would have been the acta senatus, the length and detail of the ‘private’ narrative centred on Thrasea himself (16.25-26,34-35 and onwards) suggests that Tacitus’ 12 There are one or two possible exceptions among the deaths under Tiberius, such as that of L. Arruntius (6.48), who is given direct speech to justify his decision for suicide, but it is not clear that these are intended to be his last words; dictitans rather suggests not. 13 Pliny also refers to the Exitus illustrium virorum of Titinius Capito (Ep. 8.12), but his words suggest that the emphasis of this work may perhaps have been more on the Flavian period. 14 Family connexion: e.g R. Syme, Tacitus, Oxford 1958, p. 92; A.N. Sherwin-White, The Letters of Pliny: A Historical and Social Commentary, Oxford 1966, on Ep. 5.5 (p. 320). Grandmother: Syme, Verona’s Earliest Senators, in Roman Papers VII, Oxford 1991, p. 477; A Political Group, in op. cit., p. 570. 15 Apart from intrinsic probability, this is suggested by the parallel implicitly drawn by the form of the Agricola itself, which mentions the work at 2.1 as well as returning to the subject of Thrasea and his followers near the conclusion, at 42.5 and 45.1. Other references to Arulenus’ work are Suetonius, Domitian 10 and Cass. Dio 67.13.2. 16 Thus Ann. 4.34-35 (Cremutius Cordus); 14.50 (Fabricius Veiento: libros... conquisitos lectitatosque donec cum periculo parabantur; mox licentia habendi oblivionem attulit); Agr. 2.1.2. 17 Ruqaci* |: Questa, Studi sulle fonti cit. (nt. 4), p. 245. For the link between writer and subject, compare again the Agricola. — 46 — use of Arulenus Rusticus and perhaps in addition Fannius was quite extensive. It is noticeable too that the somewhat ambivalent attitude to Thrasea still discernable at some points in the Annals 18 here gives way to unqualified admiration and a presentation of an unambiguously heroic death. Evidently, whatever his residual uncertainties, Tacitus felt sufficient respect for his subject to play the death scene straight, which must also indicate a choice to represent the laudatory tradition in extenso. The essential concurrence of such other references as survive 19 also suggests a common ultimate source, surely the work of Arulenus. The recognition that ancient historiography is constantly aware of precedents, models and associated moral lessons has sometimes led scholars to a position where the attempt to relate the text to experienced fact is regarded as impossible, and completely abandoned. When we consider the topical similarities in the descriptions of enforced suicides in Tacitus, and the existence of a genre exploring variations on the theme, it is easy to see the temptations of such an approach. But a moment’s thought will show that the real situation is more complex, and that we can legitimately try to get further than this. We need to consider both how the original account (in this case the book of Arulenus Rusticus) is likely to have been composed, and also whether there are likely parameters within which we can place the original act (in this case the suicide of Thrasea Paetus). Since the factors relating to the work’s composition are closely intertwined with what we can surmise about Thrasea’s own awareness of the tradition in which he stood to gain a place, I shall consider these points first, and then move on to a different approach to the original act, the physiological factors relating to the method of suicide, which may throw some light on how the death itself has been shaped in our text. But first let us consider the origins of the work of Arulenus. While it is reasonable as an a priori assumption that laudatory biography may «embellish and reconfigure» 20 the events of its subject’s life, it is also clear that there must be something to embellish: some more or less factual source is necessary. In this case, the sources are not far to seek. One was the biographer’s personal experience, clearly attested in the account of his offer to interpose his tribunician veto. As a member of Thrasea’s circle, Arulenus may also have heard his subject talk about episodes in his earlier life, and will no doubt have taken particular note of his contributions to senatorial debate made in the years before he ceased to attend meet18 E.g. 14.12: sibi causam periculi fecit, ceteris libertatis initium non praebuit ; 14.49: sueta firmitudine animi et ne gloria intercideret. However, the first is taken e.g. by Wirszubski (C. Wirszubski, Libertas as a Political Idea in Rome in the Late Republic and Early Principate, Cambridge 1950, p. 165 nt. 1) and Brunt, (Stoicism and the Principate cit. [nt. 8], p. 31 nt. 153) as merely factual rather than censorious, and the emphasis on concern for glory has also been interpreted as uncritical: see below, nt. 81. 19 On which see below, pp. 55, 57-59. 20 Edwards, Death in Ancient Rome cit. (nt. 2), p. 157. — 47 — ings. 21 But it is very doubtful whether he can have been present at Thrasea’s horti on the day of the latter’s death; as tribune, to absent himself from the senate on the day of the trial would surely have been to court danger in a way that Thrasea had advised him against. Still, it is not very difficult to supply a source for this part of the narrative: either Helvidius Priscus, who was recalled to Rome under Galba and not exiled again until 71, or Helvidius’ wife and Thrasea’s daughter Fannia and her mother Arria. In fact, we must surely suppose that all of Thrasea’s supporters and sympathisers would have been eager to hear an account of his last moments from those who actually witnessed them; this would have been urgent news which could have been passed on even in the hours before the exiled Helvidius (and Fannia, and I would guess Arria too 22) left the city. Helvidius, according to the account in Annals 16.35, was actually present at the moment of his father-in-law’s death, and as I shall argue it is almost certain that Arria and Fannia were there as well. Information could also have been conveyed at a much later date. We know from Pliny’s account of the trial of Herennius Senecio in 93 (Ep. 7.19) that Fannia had given Senecio certain commentarii to assist in his monograph on Helvidius. Most treatments of the passage assume that these must have been Helvidius’ own notebooks, but this is not clear from what Pliny says; O’Gorman points out that they could as well have been written by Fannia. 23 Perhaps Pliny’s vagueness on the matter is deliberate, because they included both, and we should think of something like ‘family papers’ – especially since the prosecutor, Mettius Carus, continued his interrogation of Fannia by inquiring whether Arria had also been involved. (Arria’s own sentence of exile shows that Fannia’s negative did not convince.) Such family papers could also have contained material useful to Arulenus Rusticus for his project on Thrasea. We do not know the date of this work; it might have been published shortly before the trials of 93, after its author had at last acquired consular status in the preceding year, but equally it could have been an earlier work brought up against him in the 21 The concluding part of 13.49, in which Thrasea explains to his friends his stance on the matter of the Syracusan gladiatorial show, is generally and plausibly seen as deriving from this source. Another anecdote which we could reasonably attribute to Arulenus is Plutarch, Mor. 810a, where Nero ruefully praises Thrasea’s ability as judge. Plutarch had met Arulenus on one of his visits to Rome (Mor. 522d-e). 22 That Fannia accompanied her husband into exile on this occasion is demonstrated by Pliny (Ep. 7.13.4: bis maritum secuta in exsilium est). Arria would probably have had a refuge in Rome in the household of her brother C. Laecanius Bassus Caecina Paetus (PIR2 C 104), who so far as we know was in no political trouble at the time. But it might be supposed more likely that a woman who had just lost the husband whose death she had tried to share would choose to remain with her daughter and son-in-law even in exile, especially considering that the son-in-law was her husband’s clear political heir; that her husband’s injunction to her not to follow him in suicide for the sake of their daughter can easily be read as a dying wish for the members of his family to care for each other; and that mother and daughter in fact remained obviously close until Arria’s death some time after the return of the pair from (Fannia’s third) exile around 95. 23 E. O’Gorman, Irony and Misreading in the Annals of Tacitus, Cambridge 2000, pp. 125-126. — 48 — wake of the prosecution of Senecio. 24 It is possible that Arulenus reinforced the information he gathered immediately after the event by further consultations, at a later date, with those who had been present. But at whatever point he obtained his data, from the death itself to the account in Arulenus’ laudes there are at least two steps. What did Helvidius (and/or Arria, or Fannia) tell Arulenus? And how did Arulenus shape what he had heard? We were not there; we cannot know. But we can decide what is likely. If we ourselves very much admire a person, we will naturally want to represent them in a good light to others. To that end we may choose to pass over events which do not seem conducive to such a representation (we may even contrive to expunge them from our own consciousness). We may also forget or fail to record actions which strike us as neutral or unimportant, and we may even in our enthusiasm overplay the impressiveness of what we recognise to be commendable episodes. What we will not do, in the case of someone we have known personally, is to invent actions or sayings which completely lack a basis in actuality, even with the aim of locating our hero in a particular tradition. So while we could imagine that an admirer at the chronological distance, say, of Marcus Aurelius, for whom Thrasea was the first in a list of models (1.14), might, if he had wished, have created a largely fictional death scene made up of traditional elements, it is far less easy to suppose that this was the method of Thrasea’s own family and friends. Those who are personally close to someone will want to hear and tell of that individual’s own actions, not a fictional account. In the exchange of what is remembered they may in some measure recreate the experience of contact with the loved one, and they will certainly try to perpetuate his memory. That is pietas. So while Arulenus and his informants might have ‘improved’ on actuality, they are unlikely to have invented whole new elements in the death scene. One of the several advantages of enforced suicide, so-called liberum mortis arbitrium, is that it gives the subject a certain capacity to organise things which will allow him or her to make explicit or implicit statements. We would do well to remember the view of a near contemporary, the younger Pliny again, on the suicide of the elder Arria (Paete, non dolet): «When she spoke and acted thus, she had everlasting glory in sight» 25. But a degree of control is especially marked when living dangerously has made the order to die seem a possibility for some while 26. While a Petr24 Hinted at as a possibility by Syme, A Political Group cit. (nt. 14), p. 515, who observes that the mime written by the younger Helvidius (who was prosecuted at the same time) and supposed to allude to Domitian’s troubled marriage would have been topical ten years before the prosecutions of this group in 93. 25 Pliny, Ep. 3.16.6: ista facienti, ista dicenti, gloria et aeternitas ante oculos erant. 26 For Thrasea, Tacitus dates the beginning of «danger» to the point where he walked out of the senate as Nero was being congratulated after the murder of Agrippina, in 59 (Ann. 14.12), but indicates that he himself understood Nero’s prohibition of his attendance at Antium with the rest of the senate at the birth of a daughter in 63 as an insult praenuntiam imminentis caedis. — 49 — onius might plan his death to harmonise with his ‘libertine’ lifestyle and to hit back at Nero with a list of activities the emperor had supposed were private, those of a more ‘serious’ approach to life would naturally be drawn to the model supplied by the deaths of Socrates and Cato. Investigating the sources of Tacitus, Questa asked: «Non è possibile che persone come Trasea e Seneca, negli ultimi momenti della loro esistenza, non abbiano veramente e deliberatamente ricalcato il loro modello nell’agire e nel parlare, conformandosi ad un esempio che, in quegli istanti specialmente, assumeva il valore di un archetipo mitico?» 27. Yet this is surely not just a possibility; it is a certainty. The constant references to suicide in Seneca’s work can scarcely come from one who has not thought long and hard about their application to himself, 28 while Cato’s biographer, who in all probability wrote his work under the shadow of his own long-expected death, must certainly have faced the order to die with his subject’s iconic suicide in mind. 29 Elements which in a text we might label intertextual may also appear in actual fact, as the one who enacts them consciously alludes to a precedent: «the facts and their image go hand in hand, Art imitating Life and Life imitating Art... our narratives resemble each other not only because Thrasea modelled his death on Cato’s, but also because Arulenus Rusticus must have modelled his description of Thrasea’s death on Thrasea’s description of Cato’s death, and because Tacitus reflects Arulenus Rusticus and Plutarch Thrasea Paetus». 30 A complex situation then, but though we must constantly bear in mind the existence of the diadoche Cato – Thrasea – Arulenus, we must also remember the complementary point that it must be Thrasea’s own actions, done in full awareness of a historical and a literary tradition, the latter partly shaped by himself, which were the foundation for their depiction in our narrative. Thus, in his last words that are preserved for us, exhorting the young man who has brought his death sentence to watch his death as a useful example of constancy, he is presented not only as an example within the narrative – potentially to all future generations 31 – but, crucially, as aware of his own exemplarity. 27 Questa, Studi sulle fonti cit. (nt. 4), pp. 248-249, arguing against Ronconi, Exitus illustrium virorum cit. (nt. 4), among others. Compare also U. Huttner, ‘Sterben wie ein Philosoph’, in M. Zimmermann (ed.), Extreme Formen von Gewalt in Bild und Text des Altertums, München 2009, pp. 295-320, unfortunately not seen by me before completing this article. 28 See the detailed treatment of Seneca’s death and his pronouncements on death in M.T. Griffin, Seneca: A Philosopher in Politics, Oxford 1976, pp. 367-388. I regret I was not able to see J. Ker, The Deaths of Seneca, Oxford 2009, before this article was in the production process. 29 Thrasea’s Life of Cato: Plutarch, Cato Minor 25, 37; discussed in the important article of Geiger, Munatius Rufus and Thrasea Paetus cit. (nt. 7). 30 Geiger, Munatius Rufus and Thrasea Paetus cit. (nt. 7), p. 64; very closely followed by Edwards, Death in Ancient Rome cit. (nt. 2), p. 157. 31 Thus Lipsius, in the preface to his edition of Tacitus: singulis nostrum a Thrasea iam moriente dictum putemus, «Specta, iuvenis... constantibus exemplis». Cf. V. Rudich, Political Dissidence under Nero, London 1993, p. 243. — 50 — Moving to a different vantage point, the problem of reconstructing the medical details of this type of death, brought about by severing the blood vessels of the arms, also suggests a reconsideration of the narrative norms which we find displayed in the literary tradition. How much physical realism is there in Tacitus’ description of this and similar deaths? Christopher Gill and others have maintained that the real symptoms of hemlock poisoning are very different from those described by Plato when narrating the death of Socrates in the Phaedo. 32 This has now been disputed, rather convincingly, 33 but the argument should alert us to the possibility that an account of heroic death may, as Gill suggests, both «eliminate the more unattractive results» of the method used and play up its subject’s mental control over the physical symptoms or exaggerate the suffering, and consequently powers of endurance, which might be involved. At least the first of these procedures will fall into the category of ‘improvements’, which might indeed involve only a careful selection of detail rather than positive ‘embellishment’. Such selection, in fact, is likely to be practised by any witness to the death of a close friend or relative. 34 To get further than this, we need to try to establish the exact method of death which Tacitus describes in this and similar cases, and characterises as «the most obvious route to death at the time» (quae tum promptissima mortis via, Ann. 16.17). Since in non-technical Latin uenae may be applied to either veins or arteries, it is not immediately clear which were severed. In attempting to resolve this, there is of course a danger of circularity: we use the descriptions of Tacitus to decide what actually happened, which then becomes the basis for an estimation of the accuracy of Tacitus... Nonetheless, the choice is a simple alternative, and the evidence points so strongly in one direction that it would be perverse to deny it. 35 Venous and arterial bleeding are completely different. Arterial bleeding is characterised as «rapid and pulsatile», and when an artery such as the radial or ulnar artery in the forearm is severed, death will normally result within a few minutes. If this was the expected result of the promptissima mortis via, then it is hard to see how Tacitus’ death scene 32 C. Gill, The Death of Socrates, «CQ» 23 (1973), pp. 25-28; W. Ober, Did Socrates Die of Hemlock Poisoning?, «New York State Journal of Medicine» 77/1 (Feb 1977), pp. 254-258; B.M. Graves et al., Hemlock Poisoning: Twentieth Century Scientific Light Shed on the Death of Socrates, in K.J. Boudouris (ed.), The Philosophy of Socrates, Athens 1991, pp. 156-168. 33 J. Sullivan, A Note on the Death of Socrates, «CQ» 51 (2001), pp. 608-610; E. Bloch, Hemlock Poisoning and the Death of Socrates: Did Plato Tell the Truth?, in T.C. Brickhouse - N.D. Smith (eds), The Trial and Execution of Socrates: Sources and Controversies, New York - Oxford 2002, pp. 255-278. 34 Conversely, only a hostile account of a death will draw attention to – or invent – «unattractive results» (and even that not in every context or every society): thus the Claudius of the Apocolocyntosis dies exclaiming Vae me, puto concacavi me (Sen. Apocol. 4). Note how even this crude comedy conforms to the idea of death and dying words summing up a life – omnia certe concacavit. 35 For help with medical issues, I should like to acknowledge the help of Michael du Preez, Denise Lourens, Susanna Blackshaw, and especially Sanjiv Manek and Michael Purcell. — 51 — descriptions could have any credibility. Bleeding from a vein is a much slower process, and one for which it is much less easy to arrange a fatal outcome. There are other reasons, too, which make it likely that the usual practice was to cut veins rather than arteries. Veins lie much closer to the surface, and are a more obvious target – certainly for a do-it-yourself attempt. With medically assisted suicide, which seems to have been quite common, different factors come into play. Medical writers after Aristotle are well aware of the distinction between veins and arteries, without of course – before the knowledge of the circulation of the blood – understanding their difference in function. But while it was obvious to everyone that veins contain blood, and therefore that cutting them ought eventually to result in the evacuation of enough blood from the body to cause death, there was no agreement on what it was that arteries contained. Galen, indeed – over a hundred years after the events we are dealing with – maintained strongly that they carried blood, and indeed that the body’s whole blood supply would eventually drain from a severed artery, but his treatise makes it clear that some schools considered that their normal function was to contain air (pneuma), or a mixture of air and blood. 36 Thus, although Galen’s main target, the well-known hellenistic physician Erasistratos, was well aware that piercing an artery resulted in the appearance of blood (to explain which he devised an ingenious theory), it would have been a doctor either very perverse, or very confident in a controversial opinion, who would have chosen to cut an artery rather than a more accessible vein. But loss of blood through an open vein is anything but an efficient method of death. Indeed, when it is tried today, the assumption is often that there was no real wish to die, and even those making a genuine suicide attempt frequently find the method ineffective. Some of the difficulties experienced by the modern suicide could be obviated in an ancient setting. In particular, having the incisions performed by a medical practitioner would presumably result in accurate, clean cuts, and enable the veins of both arms to be severed with equal efficiency. Even so, the loss of blood would proceed relatively slowly, and therefore it would be considerably hindered by the compensatory mechanism of the vascular system by which the blood vessels constrict in response to a lowering of blood pressure. This unwelcome prolongation of the process could be sidestepped by exposure to high temperatures, which counteract the constriction – hence the role of the hot bath in several suicide accounts, and perhaps originally present in Thrasea’s death also. 37 But 36 Galen, An in arteriis natura sanguis contineatur (Kühn, IV, pp. 703-736; Albrecht, pp. 1-21); improved text in D.J. Furley - J.S. Wilkie, Galen on Respiration and the Arteries, Princeton 1984, pp. 137183, and see volume introduction, esp. pp. 3-39. Cf. also C.R.S. Harris, The Heart and the Vascular System in Ancient Greek Medicine, from Alcmaeon to Galen, Oxford 1973. 37 See S.J. Bastomsky, A Note on Some Hot Baths and Accelerated Deaths in the Principate of Nero, «Latomus» 52 (1993), pp. 612-616. — 52 — the hot bath was apparently not used from the beginning of the attempt, but rather as a last resort to shorten the victim’s ordeal. In Seneca’s case, we are told that before the bath was tried further cuts were made in the veins of his legs, when it appeared that the first cuts were not leading to death soon enough, and this method could easily have been used in other cases also, with some effect. According to a modern textbook: «The wounds may be relatively superficial, but if there are a high number of wounds, all of which are bleeding, every wound will contribute to eventual hemorrhagic shock and death». 38 Just how long death in this manner would take is extremely hard to say, since much would depend on the type and number of incisions made and the general physical state of the victim – information which, depending on the case, is either not forthcoming at all or only within the widest of parameters. But it is clear that many of the Neronian suicides were performed under the supervision of agents of the emperor or the senate, and these men were surely not prepared to wait around indefinitely. Suetonius testifies that those ordered to die in this period were given only a few hours (horarum spatium), and further that doctors were instructed to immediately «take care of» those who hesitated – «that was the phrase for the fatal incision of the veins». 39 A very, very rough estimate might place the limits of conscious survival between 15 minutes (for the very lucky) and perhaps up to 60 or even 90 minutes (in cases such as Seneca’s where the process was particularly inefficient). As we have said, deathbed descriptions are inevitably selective, and one would not expect our sources to provide a minute by minute log of the changing physical condition of the victim, any more than a record of every word spoken. Tacitus gives no indication of what constitutes a long time, but he emphasizes the length of the process in the cases of Thrasea and, in detail, of Seneca. It is worth pointing out here that even fifteen minutes will seem a long time to a person in pain – and though it is certainly possible for fatal haemorrhage to occur without causing acute pain in itself, the initial cuts will surely have been painful. Indicative is a modern case of suicide by a medical professional, who applied a local anaesthetic to his leg before severing a vein and bleeding to death. 40 Of course no local anaesthetic was available in early imperial Rome. Assuming the victim was succeeding in losing a sufficient quantity of blood, death by exsanguination, quite apart from the pain of the wounds, is not always without its problems. Young people may lose more blood than older subjects before permanent damage is done, but in all cases, eventually the body’s compensatory mechanism, together with the lack of oxygen transported by the blood, will start 38 D. Dolinak - E. Matshes - E. Lew, Forensic Pathology, Amsterdam-London 2005, p. 155. Suet. Nero 37: medicos admovebat qui cunctantes continuo curarent (ita enim vocabatur venas mortis gratia incidere). 40 P.X. Iten - U. Zollinger, «Archiv für Kriminologie» 188/1-2 (Jul-Aug 1991), pp. 47-53. 39 — 53 — to cause damage to the internal organs. At this point the victim can experience severe chest pains as the heart is affected, and mental confusion and agitation as the blood supply to the brain is reduced. In the case of venous bleeding, it is likely that considerable time will pass before this state is reached; and since modern observed cases of haemorrhagic shock are normally those of accident victims or of suicides in the grip of strong and often despairing emotions, it is not impossible that those who, like Seneca, Thrasea, and perhaps also some less philosophically inclined victims, approached their suicide in a state of calm and self-control, might even in extremis be able to lessen these undesirable mental states. But whatever the experiences, the victim would mercifully lose consciousness when around 40% of blood had been lost, and death would follow at some point after this. Despite the many variables, there is then ample confirmation from the medical evidence for Tacitus’ picture of such suicides as long drawn out, and some evidence that they could be painful. We might wonder why the method was so popular; but the range of alternatives was restricted. Seneca indeed might praise the inventiveness and courage of German prisoners in finding ways to kill themselves even while under close supervision, and might express the opinion that to be too dainty about one’s manner of death is a pointless indulgence, but given the choice, one imagines that few among either Germans or Romans would opt to break their neck in a cartwheel or asphyxiate themselves using the handle of a lavatory sponge. 41 It is natural to wish for a dignified, as well as a relatively painless, death, and for many the first desideratum may even take precedence. Death by hanging, though a popular choice in many societies, involves very clear physical indignities, and would scarcely permit a solemn exit from life surrounded by friends, in the Socratic manner. The same could be said of many types of poison – if Socrates’ hemlock did, in fact, produce a peaceful and dignified death, its identity or the proper means of administering it may have been unknown to the Romans – and in addition, poison was dangerous not merely to the person who consumed it, but to anyone suspected of procuring or administering it. 42 Those suffering from an incurable illness sometimes resorted to starvation as a means of suicide, and in a political context Cremutius Cordus had done the same under Tiberius, but this was necessarily a lengthy process and unsuitable where suicide was a substitute for judicial execution. To throw oneself from a height was usually a rather public act, and would thus squander the advantage of privacy gained either by anticipating a verdict or by the grant of the liberum arbitrium mortis. One method left was the use of use of a weapon to penetrate the vital organs – the method of Ajax falling on his sword, and in more recent times of Cato and indeed of Thrasea’s parents-in-law, Caecina Paetus 41 42 Seneca, Ep. 70.20-23. By the Sullan Lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficis. — 54 — and the elder Arria. Unlike, for instance, hanging, this type of suicide tended to be highly regarded, and indeed it no doubt takes a very particular kind of courage to thrust a sharp implement deep into one’s body; understandably, modern evidence shows that the majority of suicides of this kind exhibit ‘hesitation marks’ left by the initial tentative efforts to drive the blade home. It was then an opportunity to demonstrate a firm and courageous resolve to die, but it was not an infallible method even for the brave; Cato’s suicide stood as an awful warning of what could go wrong. Further, it was a method that suited both a military context – the suicide deals himself the same treatment as he gives the enemy, and with equal lack of hesitation – and a situation in which a sudden death is particularly desirable – the Catonian rather than the Socratic model. Ajax and Cato both died, or tried to die, alone and in secret; 43 and sudden death with the sword, anticipating her husband’s self-inflicted death blow, may have suited Arria very well because she was under surveillance to prevent her from suicide. 44 When a suicide was not carried out under these conditions, to sever the veins (an incised wound) might seem to preserve the advantages of the penetrating stab wound – the courage seen to reside in enduring the injury, yet the lack of immediately unpleasant physical effects, and the preservation, indeed to a greater degree, of the body’s integrity – while also permitting a gentler and more gradual departure from life, appropriate for one dying in the company of friends eager to participate in the event and seize upon the subject’s last words. Just how gradual and difficult this departure was likely to be may perhaps not have been fully appreciated. At least one Neronian victim (Ostorius Scapula – a military man), despairing of achieving his aim through venous exsanguination, eventually resorted to a stab wound with a sharp weapon. 45 The promptissima mortis via was a highly ritualised event, replete with generic and individual significance both when enacted and in the written accounts of a later time. But too often, the descriptions we are left with have been considered solely in terms of a symbolic reading, without regard to physical facts. All exegesis should begin with the sensus litteralis. For several reasons, we should be wary of Hill’s conclusions that the difficulties in the deaths of Seneca and Thrasea were exaggerated by their admirers because their political careers, unlike that of Cato, had been either ambivalent or unsuccessful. 46 If Tacitus concedes significance to both men’s lives, how much more so must their biographers, who form his sources for their deaths? It is certainly true that the prolonged suffering attendant on the procedure enabled both biographers and historians to showcase the virtues of those who died this way and to point up the parallel with Cato’s difficult end, but we should by no 43 44 45 46 See Trapp, Socrates, the Phaedo and the Lives of Phocion and Cato cit. (nt. 7). Pliny, Ep. 3.16.11. Tac. Ann. 16.15. Hill, Ambitiosa Mors cit. (nt. 7), pp. 210-212. — 55 — means conclude that this aspect is a convenient fiction. On the contrary, it is exactly what we should expect to find; the reason that it features more strongly in Tacitus’ accounts of the deaths of Thrasea and Seneca than in others is simply that here he has more detailed sources available to him. Physiological factors, then, coincide with psychological probabilities to suggest that the description of Thrasea’s end which Tacitus read in Arulenus is likely to have been not so very far removed from what was actually witnessed by those present at the event itself. So what I am aiming to reconstruct, to the limited extent that this is possible, is not only the written work of Tacitus, and behind that the account of Arulenus, but also the words and actions of Thrasea himself. The consequences of this will become clearer later in the argument. But for the moment let us consider how we might go about supplementing the defective account with which the manuscript of Tacitus presents us. The account of the linked trials of Thrasea and of Barea Soranus in the epitome of Dio (62.26, from Xiphilinus), though brief, agrees in most particulars with Tacitus’ version, suggesting an ultimate common source or sources (though it seems unlikely that Dio had direct acquaintance with the work of Arulenus). There, the subject is concluded, immediately after the ‘charges’ against Thrasea, as follows: e\mselx+m ot#m sg+m uke*ba a\me*seime sg+m vei& qa jai+ e>ug ‘roi+ sot&so so+ ai’la, x# Fet& \Ekethe*qie, rpe*mdx@. So, cutting into the vein, he held out (or, raised ) his arm and said «To you, Zeus Eleutherios, I pour a libation of this blood». Discounting for the moment minor discrepancies, this suggests at least two things: that the actual death scene was given a good deal of prominence in the available sources, which we have already seen to be the case, and that of his last words it was the ‘libation’ remark which seemed the most memorable and quotable. Both these points are confirmed by our third account, as we shall see. But Dio’s epitomator does not permit us to continue beyond what we already have. Therefore, we turn back to Tacitus. The final words of the Medicean manuscript are as follows: post lentitudine exitus gravis cruciatus adferente, obversis in Demetrium... The next word must obviously be oculis, leaving Thrasea as the subject of whatever verb has been lost, so that we can translate thus: «Then as the slowness of his end was causing him very great pain, he turned his gaze on Demetrius...». Clearly the verb must be one of saying, and Tacitus must have reported in direct or indirect speech what his words to Demetrius actually were. It seems a reasonable guess that the ablative absolute at the beginning of the sentence should have some bearing other than the merely temporal. Could the words then have been a request for practical action to hasten death? We have seen that one of the features which Thrasea’s suicide shares with that of Seneca is the protracted nature of the death — 56 — and the concomitant pain, and traced a remoter parallel with the suicide of Cato. If Seneca had had to ask for assistance, and did not succeed in dying until a third method had been tried (at least as Tacitus understands it), could the missing words have indicated something similar in the case of Thrasea? 47 But I think we must reject this idea. However much real time might have elapsed between the first cutting of the veins and this request, however reasonable in actuality it might be to ask one’s friends for help in shortening one’s death agonies, in the text it would sit very oddly following directly on Thrasea’s recommendation to study his own death as one among constantia exempla. Even more decisively (and this applies both to text and actuality), why should he have addressed such a request to Demetrius? We cannot even be certain, though it has often been assumed, that Demetrius had a special position as Thrasea’s favoured philosopher; no doubt he was among the wider circle of his friends, but Thrasea might have chosen him to be present at his death on the basis of the conversation they had had earlier in the day «on the nature of the soul, and the uncoupling of the spirit and the body», in which case he was simply the right person at the right time. Surely, if Thrasea had wished for help in dying quickly, it would have been more natural to address Helvidius, or whatever medical attendant had been on hand to perform the incisions. 48 If he chose to address Demetrius rather than either of them, or the company as a whole, it must have been because what he wanted to say was relevant to the discussion that they had had earlier, to the ultimate philosophical issue of the nature of death, the body and the soul. What each of them had said on that occasion is obviously beyond recovery. Stoic doctrine, to which Cynics in general tended to incline, often posited a limited survival for the human soul (conceived as a physical entity) after its departure from the body, with the souls of the virtuous surviving for a longer period, 49 but individuals had diverse and often not fully decided views on the matter; Marcus Aurelius, for instance, was uncertain, but inclined to the view that immediately on death the soul was dispersed and reconfigured within the universe. 50 Seneca states in one place that mors est non esse, and evokes the standard Epicurean point comparing our non-existence after death with that before our birth, while in another he supposes that death will be followed by another life. 51 On the other hand, the Stoic 47 Suggested by Bastomsky, Note on Some Hot Baths cit. (nt. 37), p. 613. On the medical attendant, below, pp. 58, 69. Of course, this argument does not exclude the possibility that at a later point in the narrative, perhaps even directly after the words to Demetrius, Thrasea could have requested action to hasten his death, such as a move to a bath. It is interesting to note that this also struck the Neo-Latin author Michael Virdungus as a plausible conclusion, in his 1608 tragedy Thrasea. 49 SVF 2.809; dismissed by Cicero in Tusc. 1.32-3 and alluded to as a possibility in Tac. Agr. 46.1: si, ut sapientibus placet, non cum corpore extinguuntur magnae animae... 50 Thus for instance 12.5. 51 Ep. 54.4-5; 36.10; the latter probably referring to the cyclical pattern of recreation of the universe, according to which everything recurs in exactly the same way. It was debated, however, whether the entities in 48 — 57 — Cato prepared for his suicide by reading the charter text for the immortality of the soul, the Phaedo. The philosophically inclined victim of Gaius, Julius Canus, was said to have made the best of his death with the realisation that he would soon know the answer to the question (which, if pressed, would logically seem to imply an inclination towards survival), and to have promised his friends that he would let them know what he was able to find out. 52 But whatever their views on the nature and destiny of the soul, the philosophers tend to see death (at least at the right moment) as a gain – Seneca being a particularly clear example. 53 Perhaps then Thrasea’s words were a reflexion contrasting the difficulty of the dying moment (hence the opening of the sentence) with the freedom conferred when the spirit is finally separated from the body. 54 But obviously this must remain very uncertain. Is this, then, the sum of what we can reconstruct? Help is at hand from the scholia to Juvenal. Although most of this collection is of little value (as Townend remarks, «it seems amazing that [the author of typical scholiastic blunders] should have ventured even to read Juvenal, let alone comment on him») 55, it is clear, as Townend and others have also remarked, that a minority of notes displays direct or indirect knowledge of ancient material now lost to us. Such is the case with the scholion on 5.36-37 (quale coronati Thrasea Helvidiusque bibebant | Brutorum et Cassi natalibus), derived by Giorgio Valla from «Probus». 56 one cycle were the same as in the previous, or merely similar. Ep. 71.13-14 asserts that the soul is dispersed, but then proceeds to say (16) that a magnus animus will either enjoy a better existence inter divina after death, or at least it will experience no pain. This echoes the thoughts of Socrates in Apology 40c, and the references to Cato and Socrates immediately following suggest that Seneca may have this passage in mind. In Cons. ad Marc. 25-26 he develops the theme of the survival of the individual (worthy) soul with great enthusiasm, suitable for the consolatory context. 52 Seneca, De tranq. 14.8-9. 53 On Seneca and suicide, see below, pp. 74 f. 54 Here we should consider how far Thrasea is likely to have been committed to Stoicism. The evidence is less clear than is sometimes supposed. In Tacitus, it is only the unreliable Cossutianus Capito who seems to associate Thrasea with Stoicism (ista secta, Ann. 16.22); but the point must have sounded vaguely plausible. Epictetus (1.1.26-27) represents him as conversing with the Stoic Musonius Rufus, but the anecdote has Musonius scoring an ethical-philosophical point. On the other hand, his son-in-law Helvidius is unequivocally stated by Tacitus to have imbibed Stoic teaching (Hist. 4.5), his relative by marriage Persius (Vita Persi) was also a committed Stoic, his interest in Cato suggests at least an openness to Cato’s preferred philosophy, and the overall tendency of his actions is easily interpretable in terms of Stoic moral teaching: see P.A. Brunt, Stoicism and the Principate cit. (nt. 8).The total picture that we have indicates very clearly a serious interest in philosophy and tends to suggest a Stoic or stoicising orientation. Although the allegiance of individuals to a particular philosophical school was frequently quite firm (thus D. Sedley in M.T. Griffin - J. Barnes [eds], Philosophia Togata, Oxford 1989, pp. 97-119), it is also true that Stoicism of the period might appear quite eclectic: quod verum est, meum est, says Seneca (Ep. 12.10). 55 G.B. Townend, The Earliest Scholia on Juvenal, «CQ» 22 (1972), pp. 376-387. 56 What exactly Valla had in front of him has not been conclusively shown, but it is clear that there was something of value in his source or sources. C.P. Jones (Suetonius in the Probus of Giorgio Valla, «HSCPh» — 58 — The note begins with Helvidius, in defiance of both chronology and Juvenal’s own order, and despite some garbling contains what must be genuine biographical detail not available elsewhere. On Thrasea it reads as follows: Thrasea [a] Nerone in senatu de nece matris agente cum quasi parricidam damnans e curia se prorupuisset et ex urbe discessisset, accusatus crimine maiestatis defendi se noluit secandasque venas praebuit, conversusque ad Demetrium Cynicum «nonne tibi libare videor Iovi Liberatori?» atque singulis amicis oscula offerens exanimatus est. Thrasea, when Nero was dealing with his mother’s murder in the senate, as though condemning a parricide had dashed out of the chamber and left the city, and when accused on a maiestas charge he refused a defence and offered his veins to be cut, and turning to Demetrius the Cynic [said] «Don’t you think I am making a libation to Jupiter the Liberator?», and offering kisses to each of his friends expired. This one-sentence version of Thrasea’s life and death is so telescoped as to be seriously misleading, juxtaposing as it does the reaction to Nero’s justification of Agrippina’s death (AD 59) with non-attendance at the senate (ex urbe discessisset – from about 63, if Tacitus’ Capito is to be trusted) and the trial and death (66). The breakneck speed is only slightly mitigated by the pluperfects. Nonetheless, if we compare the points mentioned with those in Dio and even more in Tacitus, we can see that somewhere behind this note lies the same material. More specifically, in regard to the trial and death, defendi se noluit reflects the Tacitean debate among Thrasea’s friends and his personal decision (16.25-26); secandasque venas praebuit corresponds to porrectisque utriusque brachii venis (16.35), implying that the fatal incisions were made by an attendant, not the victim himself; 57 the identification of Demetrius as a Cynic is made in Annals 16.34; and finally of course the last words of the manuscript of Tacitus are very closely echoed in conversusque ad Demetrium Cynicum. It is too bad that the scholiast or his source then confuses the words to Demetrius with the «libation» remark made earlier. 58 But this does serve to confirm the impression suggested by the epitomator of Dio, that it was the image of the libation in blood to Iuppiter Liberator which many found the most memorable and impressive detail in the deathbed scene. Even more than 90 [1986], pp. 245-251) suggests (p. 251 nt. 24) that part of the same scholion referring to Helvidius may derive from Suetonius’ De viris illustribus. It may be pertinent to note the verbal resemblance of our passage to the description of Lucan’s death in the probably Suetonian Vita Lucani: bracchia ad secandas venas praebuit medico. (It is surprising, incidentally, in the absence of any corroborating material, that Juvenal’s delightful picture should so often have been taken as factual). 57 Dio seems to understand this differently, but is probably mistaken; see below, pp. 73 f. 58 However, the form of the saying in this scholion is quite different from either Dio or Tacitus, and it is just possible that in slipping from one saying to another someone has confused elements of each, i.e. that ‘nonne tibi videor’ genuinely introduces what Thrasea said to Demetrius. In this case we could tentatively begin the restoration of Tacitus’ text as obversis in Demetrium <oculis, «nonne tibi» inquit «videor...>. — 59 — Tacitus, the proportion (about equal) of the brief note given to Thrasea’s death in comparison to his political career suggests the prominence given to it in the tradition. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this short notice supplies us with the otherwise missing ending to the death scene: atque singulis amicis oscula offerens exanimatus est. 59 Whether or not Tacitus included this detail, it must surely have been mentioned in Arulenus. The final embrace, the parting kiss, may seem natural enough for a deathbed. Certainly there is abundant evidence that Romans wished for such a last exchange with their friends and family, and that its absence was seen as especially pathetic: thus, for instance, Britannicus died ne tempore quidem ad complexum sororum dato. 60 A kiss was particularly significant, because the dying person’s kiss was frequently identified with their last breath, and hence their soul: the words spiritus and anima are both used in this context. The soon-to-be mourner was said to «drink in» (haurire) the kiss/breath/spirit, which was thus the dying person’s gift to his dear ones, a way perhaps in which they might feel that he had not been entirely lost to them. In accordance with this tradition, our text speaks not of an exchange of kisses, but of the dying Thrasea giving kisses to his friends. Thus, this final part of the deathbed scene may seem to be conventional enough; it presumably mirrors what every Roman would have wished to be able to do in his or her last moments. But this very fact may not be without significance, as we shall see. Still, there is some way to go before we tackle this point. Let us first recall what has previously been said about the Roman heroic suicide: these deaths, and their descriptions in literary form, are deliberately reminiscent of a whole chain of predecessors. Many writers have established that Thrasea’s death recalls in various details the death of his biographical subject the younger Cato, itself designed to recall the death of Socrates, while the libation to Iuppiter Liberator (below, p. 74) may allude to the suicide of Seneca in the previous year. But following multiple and complex traditions does not have to mean the renunciation of personal elements. Indeed, the oft-quoted point made by Cicero in connexion with Cato’s death, that suicide was appropriate for him in the circumstances, as it would not have been for others, 61 surely implies that death, as much as life, should express the specific char59 This was seen by Furneaux and Koestermann in their commentaries and by Geiger (Munatius Rufus and Thrasea Paetus cit., p. 63), but they fail to draw out its significance (considered in more detail below). The commentators muddy the waters by also adducing Arrian-Epictetus, 1.1.26-27, which cannot possibly be a deathbed saying, even if we disregard the imperfect e>kece, and even if we are willing to suppose Demetrius and Musonius have somehow become confused (Musonius had been expelled from Rome in the previous year). 60 Ann. 13.17; compare Plautius Lateranus at 15.60. For further examples and analysis, see S. Treggiari, Roman Marriage, Oxford 1991, p. 484 and nt. 6. 61 Cic. De Off. 1.112. — 60 — acter of the individual. Thrasea’s death has been much less closely examined in terms of what it tells and was intended to tell us about Thrasea. Socrates, Cato and Seneca are all present in our narrative, but none of them is followed without modification, and taken together they are far from exhausting its significance. With this established, we can now step back to look at the scene as a whole, Thrasea’s last day of life, represented in Tacitus by chapters 34-35. Tacitus’ narrative returns to Thrasea after the account of the trials in the senate, concluding with the grotesquely large amounts of money paid to the prosecutors. Barea Soranus and his daughter Servilia, also condemned to death that day but in a separate action, have been present to defend themselves and have offered the historian the opportunity for a highly pathetic scene which evokes our sympathy, but themselves have had to face harshness and humiliation at the senatorial court. Thrasea, having debated the matter with his friends, has elected for trial in absentia. The consul’s quaestor is therefore sent to announce the death sentence to him, «as the day was turning towards evening». The detail helps us to visualise the following scene, but also reflects on what has preceded. The trials of Thrasea and his associates and of Barea Soranus and his daughter began at dawn (postera luce, 16.27; the senate’s business normally began first thing) and continued until well into the afternoon – a longish session for those attending, but trials seem often to have lasted for several days, and since Tacitus records no speech for the defence, we can assume that in fact these show trials were unusually short. 62 With the despatch of the quaestor, the locus of the narrative moves from the curia to Thrasea’s horti – the same which Nero, «naming no names», nemine nominatim compellato, accused certain senators of preferring to their public duty (16.27). This then is the dramatic setting of chapters 34-35, reflecting the place where the actual events occurred. Francesca Santoro L’Hoir has suggested that gardens form a suitable backdrop for the philosophical discussion which most occupies Thrasea himself before he receives the final news. 63 But there are problems with this view. Firstly, the school which above all was associated with a Garden – indeed, sometimes synonymous with it – was that of Epicurus. And while we might not want to identify Thrasea too completely as an adherent of Stoicism, it is surely somewhat inappropriate to see him posing as an Epicurean. 64 Secondly, the fact is that horti in 62 R. Talbert, The Senate of Imperial Rome, Princeton 1984, pp. 189-195 on time and duration of sessions; 194 f., 500 f., on length of trials. 63 F. Santoro L’Hoir, Tragedy, Rhetoric and the Historiography of Tacitus’ Annales, Ann Arbor 2006, p. 224. Note, however, that her further link between gardens/horti and death (pp. 224 f.) may have more force. 64 If we wish to find philosophical symbolism in the locations of the narrative, it might be more pertinent to consider the porticus, i.e. rsoa*, where Thrasea meets the quaestor, but I should not be inclined to press the point. — 61 — this context means «suburban villa». 65 Such villas were of course constituted around gardens, in our sense, and if we wish to visualise the scene we might well picture some at least of the company outside, in a garden or peristyle courtyard. The time of year was in all probability early summer, and a shady place outdoors was doubtless comfortable on a warm afternoon. But that is not the primary significance of the word as Tacitus uses it. The point is the location outside the urbs, and therefore symbolically outside the concerns of the state, as centred in Rome. It is this that Nero is attacking, with his snide remark about amoenitas hortorum, and this that Eprius Marcellus also indicates with his final thrust (16.28): ab ea civitate cuius... nunc et aspectum exuisset. This was an exaggeration, of course, a misrepresentation from the torvus ac minax Marcellus. 66 Most horti were no more than two miles distant from the centre of Rome and few more than five or six miles. It is also likely that, if, as Cossutianus Capito claimed (16.22) – managing to make it a matter of reproach 67 – Thrasea continued to occupy himself with the interests of his clients, such business could have involved at least sporadic presence in the city. Nonetheless, this must be the point which lies also behind the favourable source reflected in the scholiast’s ab urbe discessisset. Hostile and favourable perceptions in some measure coincide, and the point is not so much that the scene takes place in a «garden», as that it is set in the place which symbolises Thrasea’s meaningful retirement from public life. His refusal to engage in politics was, of course, an intensely political act, something which his accusers and Nero understood only too well. These «gardens» are the antithesis of the garden of Epicurus; Thrasea’s retreat has nothing to do with «cultivating one’s garden» while the world goes its own way, nothing to do with ka*he bix*ra|. His «leisure» has not been the ignobile otium of the epicureanising poet who sang of Tityrus while a ‘good’ ruler thundered on the Euphrates; rather, the literary product of his self-imposed idleness has been a Life of Cato, an undertaking with a very clear ideological purpose. 68 All of this is evoked by the setting in the horti. It is entirely appropriate that Thrasea does not go to the senate, but forces the senatorial authority, in the shape of the consul’s quaestor, to acknowledge his protest by coming to him. The location of the scene is charged with political significance. 65 See N. Purcell, Dialectical Gardening (review-article on M. Cima - E. La Rocca [edd.], Horti Romani: atti del convegno internazionale, Roma, 4-6 maggio 1995, Roma 1998), «JRA» 14 (2001), pp. 546556, esp. p. 549. 66 Note also the fatal ambiguity of civitas, between the physical city and (its more usual meaning) the constitutional aspects of the state. 67 Capito is referring to specific occasions in the previous year, but these are likely to be indicative of wider activity. For the reproach, contrast Seneca’s point in De tranquillitate 4: if circumstances prevent you from taking part fully in political life, you should work out how you can still be utilis civitati. 68 Geiger, Munatius Rufus and Thrasea Paetus cit. (nt. 2), p. 71 is surely right to suppose that it was during these years that the Life was composed. — 62 — At his horti, Thrasea is hosting a rather strange farewell party, something which has multiple meanings – personal, political, philosophical. The wish to bid a last farewell to friends is an easily understandable one, but it is also a well established part of the tradition of philosophical-heroic death scenes. Socrates spends his last hours talking to his friends; Cato, too, though not revealing his plan of suicide, spends his last evening with his friends – and the magistrates of Utica. 69 Even Petronius, in what Tacitus seems to represent as a parody of the classic heroic suicide, conformed to the pattern, chatting to his friends while opening and binding up again his veins (Ann. 16.19). But «friends», of course, in a Roman context, may cover a far larger group than one’s personal intimates, and Tacitus clearly indicates this expanded sense by a different and striking phrase; it is not his «friends» that Thrasea entertains, but inlustrium virorum feminarumque frequentis coetus, a phrase surely intended to show both the quantity and quality of his support. These are his political and moral sympathisers, friends in the widest sense; the point is underscored by the contrasting mention at the end of the sentence of Domitius Caecilianus ex intimis amicis. They have come to pay their last respects and get a final glimpse of someone they admire. The word inlustris, suggesting persons of senatorial and upper equestrian rank, but not excluding those more distinguished by personal qualities and achievements (such as Demetrius the Cynic), leads Tacitus to its natural complement vir, which in turn forces him to make explicit the presence also of women. It would indeed be rather surprising if women had not been present in such a large group, given the social norms for gatherings held by a married man such as Thrasea, 70 but it marks a major difference from the settings of the ‘model’ deaths of Socrates and Cato. In the first, the women of Socrates’ household make a first brief appearance, but are explicitly dismissed from the discussion which takes up most of Socrates’ last day; women and philosophy do not mix. In the second, the setting is a quasi-military one from which women are not absolutely excluded, but in which their absence is quite normal. Thrasea’s world, by contrast, is also the world of the non-military sections of the Annals in general (and that of related literature), in which women are relatively conspicuous both as players and spectators in death scenes. Thus the model was – in reality and in record – adapted in certain respects in accordance with the conditions of the new setting to which it was applied, but in this case that setting also supplies a new ‘meaning’ to the presence or absence of women. While in Socrates’ Athens women and philosophy were incompatible, and in Cato’s Utica women and war almost equally so, in imperial Rome women were not always irre69 Plutarch, Cato Minor 67. In fact, according to polite convention, it would have fallen to Thrasea’s wife Arria to invite the women present, if invitations there were. See Treggiari, Roman Marriage cit. (nt. 60), pp. 414, 422. 70 — 63 — levant to politics – we may note, in particular, the strong political commitment of the women of Thrasea’s own family. So the women of this wider circle of friends, no less than the men, represent a testimony to Thrasea’s political influence. Both sexes may also, of course, indicate the family’s standing and popularity on a more personal level. I shall have more to say about the presence of women in the account later. So a large group is gathered at the horti, but Thrasea himself is presented as absorbed in a private conversation with the philosopher Demetrius, which the implied eye-witness of the account is not privy to and can only guess at from the air of serious concentration (intentione vultus) and a few words and phrases overheard. The philosophical discussion is absolutely central to the Socratic-Catonian model of death, but here too our version differs considerably from either of its two main predecessors. Socrates, in the Phaedo, is the one who directs the discussion, trying not altogether successfully to persuade his friends that he is merely leaving his body for a better place. Cato, concealing his intentions, can only approach the issue of death secretly and at second hand, reading the Phaedo twice over on the night of his death; his vehement approval of the Stoic paradoxes in the philosophical discussion after dinner had already alarmed his friends. 71 Seneca, in the version of Tacitus, comforted his friends by appeals to philosophy (praecepta sapientiae), and dictated a no doubt philosophical final text during his long wait for death. 72 Perhaps the most closely comparable situation is that of Caligula’s victim Julius Canus, who, although hauled off to execution rather than being given the liberum mortis arbitrium, is accompanied by «his philosopher», philosophus suus, and uses the occasion of his death for philosophical enquiry. 73 Thrasea’s discussion takes place, apparently one-to-one, with a ‘professional’ philosopher (we should also compare Cato’s debate with the Stoic Apollonides and the Peripatetic Demetrius, though here the ‘real’ issue is displaced from the discussion into the solitary reading), but in the view and partial hearing of amici who are well aware of the imminence of his death. Again, the scene recalls its models and precedents, but in a changed form. Like Cato and Canus, but unlike Socrates and Seneca, Thrasea does not dispense philosophy to the assembled company but imbibes philosophical ideas to help his own personal preparation for death. He is not a philosopher himself (although, again like Cato, he can discuss philosophy with the philosophers), 74 but a member of the Roman élite whose interest in and commitment to philosophy brings distinguished thinkers into his circle. In this he is like his almost co-defendant Barea Soranus, among whose clients was the treacherous Stoic P. Egnatius Celer. But we should not therefore assume that the philosophy is only a veneer, or ‘only’ an imitation of the mod71 72 73 74 Plutarch, Cato Minor 67-70. Tac. Ann. 15.62-63. Sen. De tranq. 14.4-10. Cum quo... inquirebat perhaps implies a meeting on near equal terms. — 64 — el. It is clearly important that Thrasea, as one might have expected from his life, chose to prepare for death by an extended consideration of the event. 75 The first news of the senate’s judgement is brought not through the official channels, but by a close friend, of whom we know nothing else, Domitius Caecilianus. 76 The friendship theme is maintained and intensified; here is introduced an intimate who has had the kindness to undertake a task which must have been deeply distressing, especially if he was actually present at the meeting of the senate. Caecilianus, we discover in the following chapter, is able to reassure Thrasea that the death sentence has not been extended to his son-in-law Helvidius Priscus; on the other hand, he must have relayed to him the news that Helvidius, along with Paconius Agrippinus and Curtius Montanus, have been implicated with him and condemned to exile or non-participation in politics (the latter decision, passed on the young Montanus, somewhat ironic given the grounds of Thrasea’s own condemnation). Much better, no doubt, to learn all this from a friend and sympathiser than from the quaestor who will officially deliver the senatus consultum. The arrival of the news through the medium of a friend introduces the last phase of this part of the action, in which political and philosophical elements recede into the background, and the focus is on the more purely personal level of Thrasea’s interaction with his friends and supporters and his concern for their safety and well-being, though the Catonian model is certainly not absent here. The party breaks up in tears as he urges those present to leave quickly to avoid the dangers of association with one now found guilty on a maiestas charge, and he asks his wife not to join him in suicide. These two injunctions need to be looked at together with the previous day’s refusal to take up the offer of Arulenus Rusticus, as tribune, to veto the senate’s expected decision, because the young man would be endangering himself to no purpose. In that passage (16.26), Thrasea then proceeds to draw a contrast between himself, at the end of his life (acta aetate, though he was probably only in his late fifties; the point may be rather that there is nothing obvious left to achieve, and death is inevitable 77), for whom it would not be proper to abandon his established 75 A philosophical orientation to his earlier expectation of forthcoming death is suggested in the saying recorded in Cass. Dio 61.15: e\le+ Me*qxm a\pojsei& mai le+m dt*masai, bka*wai de+ ot>. The form is exactly the same as the adaptation of Apology 30c-d quoted no fewer than four times in Epictetus (1.29.18; 2.2.15; 3.23.21; Enchir. 52.4) and recommended as a key important phrase that one should have always in mind: e\le+ d\ >Amtso| jai+ Le*kgso| a\pojsei& mai le+m dt*mamsai, bka*wai d\ ot>. Cf. Ronconi, Exitus illustrium virorum cit. (nt. 4), pp. 11 f., 15 f. 76 Possibly in the original this mention by name was an indication of another source, not for the events of Thrasea’s last day, but for earlier material. Caecilianus could have been an oral parallel for the role of the book of Munatius Rufus in Thrasea’s life of Cato, supplying personal anecdotes and reminiscences. 77 The Stoic idea that death should follow when it is clearly signalled was also a way of linking Cato’s suicide, which might seem to be in contradiction with Socrates’ views in Phaedo 61c-62c, with Socrates’ understanding of his own death at the conclusion of that passage and at Apol. 40 a-c. See above, p. 44 and nt. 9. — 65 — way of life in order to avoid death, and Rusticus, a young(ish) man whose career was not yet far advanced, and whom he advised to think very carefully what sort of path he wanted to follow in the circumstances of the times. Although in the end Arulenus Rusticus would choose something like Thrasea’s own path, continuing a political career up to a very much delayed consulship in 92 and in the following year falling victim to a capital charge for which his work on Thrasea supplied, it seems, the principal evidence, from the perspective of the year 66 the point still makes good sense. In all three of these injunctions, Thrasea is shown to dissuade his associates, both intimate and more distant, from sharing the danger and death that he feels is inevitable for himself. In this, of course, he is not entirely successful, since three others (not counting Barea Soranus and Servilia) were condemned along with him, though receiving lesser sentences. But though he is unable to prevent the downfall of his son-in-law Helvidius, he is pointedly said to be laetitiae propior after Caecilianus’ report, because Helvidius will not have to die (another consideration of course being that therefore his daughter will not be widowed). The three episodes are paralleled by Cato’s actions in the run-up to his death, as both Thrasea and Arulenus must have been aware. Plutarch and Seneca both lay great emphasis on Cato’s eagerness to ensure the safety of the disparate groups at Utica before putting an end to his own life. 78 The most obvious specific parallel is in Cato’s repeated efforts to ensure that all Roman citizens, both the «three hundred» resident traders and those of senatorial rank, had safely embarked from Utica before Caesar’s arrival (Plutarch, Cato Minor 65.1,4; 66.4; 67; 70.2), which finds an echo in Thrasea’s urging his guests to leave his house as soon as possible. The advice to Arulenus, it has been noted, parallels Cato’s forbidding his son to engage in politics (Plutarch, Cato 66.3, therefore very probably in Thrasea’s Life), but it also echoes, with a much closer verbal resemblance, Cato’s reported words to Cicero on an earlier occasion, contrasting his own reluctance to «desert the post he had occupied from the beginning» with the latter’s potential still to be useful to the state (Plutarch, Cicero 38). 79 Neither parallel is perfect, however; the application of 78 Plutarch, Cato 64.2: pa*kai de+ a>mhqxpo| e\atso+m e\cmxjx+| a\mekei& m deimot+| po*mot| e\po*mei jai+ uqomsi* da| jai+ x\di& ma| ei# vem t<pe+q a>kkxm, o%px| ei\| a\ruake+| jasarsg*ra| a%pamsa| a\pakka*naiso sot& fg&m, followed by the specific episodes here noted. Though it is not certain that Thrasea was Plutarch’s source for this part of the life, it is a reasonable guess; see Geiger, Munatius Rufus and Thrasea Paetus cit. (nt. 8), pp. 61-65, arguing however primarily from the similarities in the accounts of the deaths of the two men. The account clearly comes from (and endorses) an at least partially favourable source, despite the reservations of A.V. Zadorojnyi, Cato’s Suicide in Plutarch, «CQ» 57 (2007), pp. 216-230 (though he is right to draw attention to the difficulties). Seneca: De providentia 2.11: alienae saluti consulit et instruit discedentium fugam. 79 Cato to his son: Griffin, Seneca cit. (nt. 28), p. 366. If this episode in Plutarch derives from Thrasea, he must have had it consciously in mind when speaking to Arulenus. Cato to Cicero: Plutarch, Cicero 38: at<sx&i le+m ca+q ot\vi+ jakx&| e>veim e\cjasakipei& m g=m a\p\ a\qvg&| ei% keso sg&| pokisei* a| sa*nim. The verbal resemblance is very close (Ann. 16.26: sibi... tot per annos continuum vitae ordinem non deserendum), though it is — 66 — the words to Cicero is different, being a contrast not of age and career stage but one of temperament and style of politics, while the difference between the account of Thrasea’s words and Cato’s advice to his son is more instructive: Cato gives an all-out prohibition, «for it was no longer possible to transact matters in a manner worthy of Cato, and to do so otherwise was shameful», whereas Thrasea more modestly merely urges his younger friend to think very carefully and make up his own mind. Less close is the link which Geiger finds between Thrasea’s instructions to Arria and Cato’s dealings with Statyllios/Statilius. Cato indeed wishes to save the young Statilius from a fate like his, but leaves it to «the philosophers», Apollonides and Demetrius, to try to dissuade him. 80 But the general point, that the soon-to-be suicide takes great care for the wellbeing of others, is the same in both accounts. The words to Arria perhaps necessitate a little more discussion. In Tacitus’ account of Seneca’s death, occurring in the previous year, the philosopher had eventually consented to his wife’s suicide, saying tu mortis decus mavis: non invidebo exemplo. sit huius tam fortis exitus constantia penes utrosque par, claritudinis plus in tuo fine (15.63). Seneca would feel no envy of his wife’s future glory: does this suggest a less generous interpretation of Thrasea’s prohibition of Arria’s death? 81 But whereas Seneca was childless, in Arria’s responsibility to their daughter – whose husband had just been sentenced to exile – Thrasea had a very specific and credible reason for wishing her to remain alive. We should note that such a course is also consonant with Stoic teaching on the duties prescribed by an individual’s different roles; 82 Arria was mother as well as wife, and while the latter role was in most senses coming to an end, the former was not. But for her, perhaps, this was not an easy decision, given the precedent – exemplum Arriae matris. The elder Arria’s heroic suicide was a hard, if impossible to be sure whether it was Thrasea himself who formed the parallel, or Tacitus; probably not Arulenus, as the addressee. Dio’s version of Cato (43.10.5) seems to conflate these two traditions; according to this, Cato at Utica advised his son to go to Caesar, and when asked why he did not himself do so, he replied «I was brought up in freedom and with freedom of speech; I can’t change and learn slavery in my old age. But you were born and brought up in such circumstances, and so you should serve the daimon you were allotted». In none of the three anecdotes do Cato’s conclusions and advice correspond with Thrasea’s. 80 The implication of 66.4 is that Statilius does not at this stage specifically intend suicide, but only to do whatever Cato does. Cato’s reported response was to smile and say, «Well, we’ll see about that» (a\kka+ sot&so le+m at\si* ja uamei& sai). 81 Elsewhere Tacitus does seem to associate Thrasea with a concern for gloria (at 14.49), though not for begrudging it to others. Not all scholars agree that Tacitus’ notices are critical in tone: note R.H. Martin, Structure and Interpretation in the Annals of Tacitus, in ANRW II/33.2, p. 1571 and O. Devillers, Le roˆle des passages relatifs a` Thrasea Paetus dans les Annales de Tacite, in J.M. Croisille - Y. Perrin (édd.), Neronia VI. Rome a` l’e´poque ne´ronienne. Actes du VI e`me Colloque International de la Socie´te´Internationale des E´tudes Ne´roniennes, Rome 19-23 mai 1999, Bruxelles 2002, p. 308. See also Cass. Dio 61.15: e\lot& le+m ca+q pe*qi jai+ e>peisa ko*co| si| e>rsai, though in context this may be a semi-humorous addition to the main point. 82 See below, p. 77 and nt. 118. — 67 — not impossible, act to follow, but to abnegate suicide entirely, when it was forced upon a husband, might seem a step too far. To suggest another ungenerous interpretation, then, could Thrasea’s words have been an invention of Arria’s to explain why she had not joined her husband in death? After all, was this really a public conversation – might we not imagine that with condemnation seeming inevitable the couple had discussed the issue between themselves before the last minute? Against this, we might suppose that the biographer has merely rearranged and selected actual events; the issue had indeed been discussed, but that once the death sentence was actually pronounced, Arria made one last effort to persuade her husband, in the presence of (at least) Helvidius and Fannia, who as we have seen are equally likely to have been able to provide Arulenus with the information. Obviously, this must remain speculation, as must the motives of all parties involved. It is noticeable that the point has further applications to the past and to the future. To the past, in the suicide of Arria’s parents, when already Thrasea (in the account given by Fannia to Pliny, Ep. 3.16.10) had tried unsuccessfully to dissuade his mother-in-law from joining her husband in death by imagining a scenario in which her daughter might have to choose whether to die with himself. (If we too are willing to use some imagination, we might guess that on the later occasion Thrasea hoped to remind his wife what it was to lose both mother and father). 83 To the future, in that within less than a decade Fannia herself would be the widow of a political martyr, and mother and daughter would remain closely united for decades more until Arria’s death some time after 96. But these references, important to the text, do not mean that the point is not appropriate for the present also; it is surely to be expected that one who is about to die will wish to dispose everything as well as possible for those close to him or her. There is further the force of Cato’s well documented wish for the same, in very different circumstances, which will have provided a ready model for Thrasea, if one was needed; we might also conjecture that a person evidently concerned with the proper discharge of duty in a senatorial and patronal capacity – whether or not we wish to link this with Stoic ideas of officium – would be unlikely to neglect to make all possible provision for those closest to him. Finally, we should note that Tacitus in several places 84 mentions fear for family members as a motivating factor in arrangements made at death, and in Thrasea’s case, the safety of Arria and Fannia et cetera pignora eius after his death is specifically mentioned by those of his friends who counsel against his appearance in self-defence. 85 In any case, the importance of family within the broader category of «concern 83 Relevant here, perhaps, the very emotive language used by Tacitus: filiaeque communi subsidium unicum non adimere. This is particularly obvious when we compare it with Griffin’s paraphrase (in a different context): «by noting her obligations to their child» (Seneca cit. [nt. 28], p. 371). 84 E.g. 14.59; 15.59. 85 Ann. 16.26, accepting the virtually certain filiam for the MS familiam. — 68 — for others» marks a difference in our account from the two main models. Xanthippe, as we have said, is not central to the death of Socrates, nor is his concern for her a pressing issue – though he does bathe before taking the poison «to save the women the trouble afterwards» (a joke, perhaps?) 86 Cato’s somewhat unsatisfactory son is present at the time of his suicide, but no other family members, nor are we told that he thinks of them or sends a message; and his eccentric marital arrangements rather discourage us from thinking of him as a family man. But this is precisely the impression that we do get of Thrasea in these last scenes. In this indeed he is hardly unique; many if not most of the Tacitean death scenes which take place outside a military context include an indication of the closeness of family members. Since Thrasea had only one (or, one surviving) child, and his son-in-law was also his close political associate, the four-member family unit here makes a particularly effective group for the biographer to emphasize, with an eye further to the later careers of the three survivors. 87 But above all, it may be the very comprehensibility and ordinariness of family ties which is important in this part of the account. Following on this (ch. 35), the narrative performs a sleight-of-hand in seeming to separate Thrasea from his companions. However humane (or glory-seeking) his motives may have been in wishing to reserve death for himself alone, the effect has been to set him apart from those who will survive, and this is now expressed in his departure from the ‘party’ to await the arrival of the consul’s quaestor in a porticus of the house. 88 He is shown making this move on his own, in the singular (tum progressus ad porticum... illic reperitur), but the sequel shows that he is not alone, or does not remain alone; at the very least, Helvidius and Demetrius are present to be ushered into the cubiculum for the final scene. Tacitus symbolises the inner isolation of one destined to death by presenting it as physical isolation. The articulation of different areas of the house is also interesting. Thrasea goes from some inward part of the property – be it garden courtyard, triclinium or atrium – to which a large group of invited friends has access, to a more public point, where he meets the official bearer of his death notice. From here he retreats to the most private part of the house, a bedroom, 89 accompanied by only a few intimates, in order to end his life. This sequence of movements would seem to be entirely natural and realistic, but it is worth pointing out that the detail is present in our account. The ori86 Phaedo 115a. It is notable that Tacitus does not mention the younger Helvidius, Fannia’s stepson, who would have been either a teenager or a young adult at this point, and who could have been close to his ‘step-grandfather’; of course this does not prove anything about the more detailed accounts. 88 It is not quite clear where we should envisage this porticus or colonnade. It need not be at the front of the house, but it must be at some point which the quaestor will reach before the area where the party is taking place. 89 See Treggiari, Roman Marriage cit. (nt. 60), p. 415. 87 — 69 — ginal framers of the death scene may have wanted to do no more here than provide a vivid and accurate picture of their subject’s last hour, but they nonetheless succeeded in drawing attention to his differing interactions with amici, with the external political order, and with those closest to him – the various areas of his life – symbolised by the use of space. In the form given by Tacitus, the semi-public space of the porticus is underlined by the grammatical form of the sentence, which suggests that momentarily it is the quaestor, the bearer of the senatus consultum, who is the focaliser of the narrative. Thrasea «is found» there by him laetitiae propior, quia Helvidium generum suum Italia tantum arceri cognoverat ; the postponement of Thrasea’s reaction from its more natural place (immediately following the arrival of Domitius Caecilianus, before the move to the porticus) suggests the quaestor’s surprise and looks forward to his role in the final scene. 90 We may now return to consider the suicide scene itself. It is presented as immediately following on the quaestor’s arrival; not surprisingly, since Thrasea had been expecting the order to die for long enough. Tacitus leads us in one sentence from the reception of the senatusconsultum to the beginning of the process of death – a sentence which repays detailed attention. First, who is present in the bedroom which Thrasea chooses for his death? We are specifically told that he led in Helvidius and Demetrius, but we have seen that at least one other person should be there, the medical attendant who performs the fatal incisions. 91 What of Thrasea’s wife and daughter? At first sight a reading of the text that remains to us might seem to suggest that they are absent. If this is indeed the case, then there are two possibilities: either they really were absent, or they (or perhaps just Arria) were present, but Tacitus, or his source, has airbrushed them out of the picture in the interests of representing an all-male, Socratic-Catonian death. The first possibility seems unlikely when we consider the norms of Roman civilian death; if possible, friends and relatives should be present as the dying man draws his last breath, but above all the presence of a wife is desirable. 92 If Thrasea had prevented Arria from dying together with him, that is no reason to suppose that these were his last words to her, and that she was excluded from his death; that would be anomalous, not only in actuality, but in the text of Tacitus, where women frequently play a role in the death scenes of their menfolk, and where, as we have seen in the preceding chapter, the historian 90 Unexpected calm or happiness in what most would consider adversity is a common feature of the heroic death scene. Again the prototype is Socrates in Phaedo. 91 This is the natural implication of the phraseology in Tacitus and the Juvenal scholion. The version in Dio seems not to require a physician, but this may be a misunderstanding; see below, p. 73. Medically assisted suicide is well attested for the period; thus Seneca (Ann. 15.64), Vestinus Atticus (15.69), and in Suetonius’ account, Lucan (V. Lucani). For a discussion, see J.P. Wilson, The Death of Lucan: Suicide and Execution in Tacitus, «Latomus» 49 (1990), pp. 458-463. 92 Treggiari, Roman Marriage cit. (nt. 60), p. 484 and nt. 8. — 70 — has explicitly pointed out a female presence in the large group assembled to say their farewells. Tacitus must mean us to understand Arria’s presence – and if both she and Helvidius, Thrasea’s son-in-law, were present, then surely his daughter Fannia must also be supposed to have been there. This may have been made clearer in the missing conclusion of the scene. 93 But there is one more figure in attendance, the quaestor who has brought the senate’s decree. Evidently his job was not only to communicate the death sentence, but to ensure that the ‘free choice of death’ was actually carried out by the recipient, and quickly. And the quaestor will not have been without attendants: just so, in the description of the suicide of Seneca and the attempted suicide of his wife Pompeia Paulina, we hear of soldiers present who tell the household slaves and freedmen to bind up the incisions in Paulina’s arms and prevent her death. 94 Unexpectedly the quaestor – though not the attendants – becomes a participant in the scene, for to him are addressed Thrasea’s last words before the text breaks off. 95 The young man has been given the far from pleasant job of conveying the death sentence to one of 93 We might also consider the conclusion of the narrative in the ‘Probus-Valla’ scholion to Juvenal: atque singulis amicis oscula offerens exanimatus est. Singulis amicis could mean «to each of two» (thus for instance Plautus, Poen. 222), but it is a rather emphatic phrase, and makes better sense if we imagine a small group of immediate family plus Demetrius and perhaps the physician (if he, like Seneca’s equivalent, was a trusted friend) who are present and receive Thrasea’s last farewell. 94 In Seneca’s case the order to die came from Nero rather than the senate, but that does not materially affect the point. 95 As seen by Wirszubski (Libertas cit. [nt. 18], p. 142), Syme (Tacitus cit. [nt. 14], p. 745), Koestermann (ad loc.) and others, but some later scholars continue to assume that the words are addressed to Helvidius (e.g. O’Gorman, Irony and Misreading cit. [nt. 23], p. 176, M. Morford, Tacitus’ Historical Methods in the Neronian Books of the Annals, in ANRW II/33.2, p. 1623, and The Roman Philosophers, London - New York, 2002, p. 163). Against this Koestermann argued that Helvidius, who having been tribune ten years previously (Ann. 13.28) must have been pushing forty at the very least, would not have been regarded as a iuvenis. This is not quite watertight, as it appears that in at least one view men up to the age of 45 could have qualified as iuvenes (Varro ap. Cens. 14.2), but there are three further arguments. 1) Iuvenis is not at all a proper way for a father-in-law to address his son-in-law: it is «a courteous and somewhat distant formal address»; a father-inlaw normally calls his son-in-law either by name or, in a high linguistic register, as gener (E. Dickey, Latin Forms of Address from Plautus to Apuleius, Oxford 2002, pp. 197, 272 f.). 2) If addressed to Helvidius, the injunction is curiously limp. Surely Thrasea’s political heir – who had himself just received sentence of exile – could long have been expected to know that he was born into difficult times and might reasonably take his father-in-law as an exemplum? 3) Why call the quaestor to come nearer in order to address words to Helvidius? The assumption that the words are addressed to Helvidius seems to rest on two perceptions: first, that Thrasea ought to say something to Helvidius to balance what he is about to say to Demetrius when the text breaks off; and secondly, that there ought to be some sort of prophetic element in the words, especially as they are those of a dying man. The second point has some force, and is considered in the text above. The first point can be dealt with by observing the continuation of the scene. It is not Helvidius and Demetrius alone who are present, and Helvidius along with the rest of the family receives a final communication from Thrasea in the form of the dying kiss. — 71 — the senate’s most respected members, and of overseeing its accomplishment. He must be present even in the intimate space of the cubiculum, or just outside it through an open door, in order to carry out what is required of him, but we should no doubt imagine him awkwardly keeping his distance, averting his gaze and attempting to intrude as little as possible on a scene of intimacy and sorrow. Then Thrasea calls him over and addresses him directly, telling him that the sight may benefit him; he should no longer look away, but watch: specta, iuvenis; he too may some day be in need of examples of constancy to inspire him. This is a brilliant stroke, and if, as I have argued, the account we have is likely to reflect the actual scene quite faithfully, it is one which may perhaps give us a tiny glimpse of a compelling personality. 96 The quaestor, embarrassed, and unwillingly – as we may suppose – performing the duty allotted to him by an ‘authority’ coerced into enacting a condemnation, instead of being allowed his natural wish to retreat into the background, is forced to participate in the death scene, not only addressed directly by the man whose death sentence he has delivered, but actually implicated in the dying man’s defiance. For Thrasea simply sidesteps the pretence. He does not view the quaestor as the representative of a hostile authority, but as a young man at the outset of his political career, whose real views cannot possibly conform with what he has been told to do and who like any other will sooner or later face the tyranny of some arbitrary power; by calling on him to remember the scene in front of him as an exemplum for his own life, Thrasea assimilates the quaestor’s future to his own experience and co-opts him onto his own side. The scenario parallels that with Arulenus Rusticus, another young man to whom he gives advice concerning his future political career, and just as the earlier advice showed a degree of prescience, so we feel should this: the quaestor’s name and actual career should be significant. It may be that the original narrative tradition did indeed supply his name; Syme suggests that Tacitus’ failure to do so may be evidence for the unfinished nature of book 16. 97 If Thrasea’s words were in some measure prophetic, that does not argue against their authenticity, since although the prophetic powers of a person at the point of death are well established in literature from Homer onwards, 98 in fact it 96 This is one of the few places in a death scene where Tacitus allows direct speech to the dying person. He gives Seneca’s words to Paulina, above quoted, but pointedly omits the text dictated during the suicide process. The other example from the Annals occurs not in a suicide scene, but at the interrogation and execution of Subrius Flavus (15.67), which Tacitus mentions in connexion with Seneca’s last words, clearly preferring those of Flavus. 97 Syme, Tacitus cit. (nt. 14), app. 60, p. 745. 98 Thus Iliad 16.852-854 (with Janko’s note), 22.358-360; also, e.g., Pl. Apol. 39c and Cic. De Div. 1.63-64 with Wardle ad loc. The idea is accepted even by medical writers, in the context of certain types of death: see Aretaeus 2.3.4; 2.4.4-5 (CMG II, ed. C. Hude, Berlin 1958). — 72 — would not have required a preternatural degree of foresight in the latter years of Nero’s reign to surmise that examples of constantia would be useful to senators in the future. (The same applies to the advice given to Arulenus, whose later career certainly resonated with what he was told, but who could not have known when he recorded it, in his laudes Thraseae, that the whole trajectory would end in his death, at least in part because of the laudatory biography.) What is most interesting from our immediate point of view is the significance of the remark as part of the death scene – expressive of the nature and life of the dying man – and its relation to the other components of that scene. We must consider, therefore, the entirety of the episode and the problematic question of the libation: porrectisque utriusque brachii venis, postquam cruorem effudit, humum super spargens, propius vocato quaestore «libamus» inquit «Iovi liberatori. specta, iuvenis; et omen quidem dii prohibeant, ceterum in ea tempora natus es quibus firmare animum expediat constantibus exemplis». The libation to Jupiter the Liberator, as we have seen, is mentioned in both the other accounts of Thrasea’s death which survive to us, extremely truncated though they are, and this may seem odd to the reader of Tacitus, who has already encountered the idea in the suicide of Seneca (15.64). Attempts have inevitably been made to see the libation as a literary topos rather than an action and saying that was really performed, but this seems unlikely. Just as the description of Thrasea’s last hours derives from Arulenus Rusticus and therefore ultimately from Helvidius Priscus and/or Arria and Fannia, so Seneca’s suicide will have been narrated by his friend Fabius Rusticus, in any case one of Tacitus’ major sources in the Annals, who, it has been conjectured, may well have been one of the two friends mentioned as present at the philosopher’s death. 99 Was Thrasea then deliberately alluding to Seneca’s death as he faced his own? 100 The relationship between the two men has been variously estimated, and may not have remained constant. 101 Certainly they had divergent views on the correct political course during Nero’s later years, but it is not impossible that Thrasea might have wished even so to pay tribute to Seneca’s manner of leaving his life and indeed to his status as – eventual – victim of Nero. The presence of Demetrius supplies another link with Seneca, who mentions and quotes him several times in very laudatory terms. 102 Alternatively, it is 99 Griffin, Seneca cit. (nt. 27), p. 371. Op. cit., pp. 370 f. 101 A. Sizoo, Paetus Thrasea et le stoı¨cisme, «REL» 5 (1927), p. 43 supposed not implausibly that Thrasea’s consulship in 56 might have been at least in part due to the influence of Seneca. Griffin, Seneca cit. (nt. 28), pp. 102 f. suggests the relationship was one of admiration at a distance; Rudich, Political Dissidence cit. (nt. 31), pp. 79 f., of dislike. On Thrasea and Seneca in Tacitus, see Devillers, Passages relatifs a` Thrasea Paetus cit. (nt. 81), pp. 303-306. 102 Seneca, De Prov. 1.3.3; 5.5-9; De Vita Beata 18.3; De Ben. 7.1; 7.8.2; Ep. 67.14; 91.19 (a notably down-to-earth pronouncement suitable, perhaps, for a Cynic). 100 — 73 — quite possible that both men were alluding to an earlier action or saying by a third party which now escapes us. But the precedent, whatever it was, for the libation can hardly exhaust its significance. Libations were a common enough action in everyday life, one of their common settings being at feasts and parties, so that as Griffin suggests the allusion may be partly to the idea of life as a banquet. 103 We might perhaps also think of the libation offered by all senators before meetings began; 104 in this way Thrasea would be symbolically restoring the proper actions from which he had felt compelled to exclude himself. 105 But it is noticeable that our three sources present the libation in different ways. The version in the epitome of Dio (which incidentally does not mention the libation in the account of Seneca’s death, which there immediately precedes the trials of Thrasea and Barea Soranus and the death of Thrasea) contains several subtle differences from that of Tacitus. To quote once more: e\mselx+m ot#m sg+m uke*ba a\me*seime sg+m vei& qa jai+ e>ug ‘roi+ sot&so so+ ai’la, x# Fet& \Ekethe*qie, rpe*mdx@. Tacitus stresses that the veins of both arms were severed (utriusque brachii), while Dio twice uses the singular, a discrepancy which makes it unlikely that Tacitus is his source here – unless he has changed the detail to suit his interpretation. (Certainly his immediately preceding account of Seneca’s death cannot possibly be derived from Tacitus, so different is it in detail and general attitude.) In our passage, if he did not use Tacitus, he probably used a source which was verbally quite close. We have seen that porrectis utriusque brachii venis ought to indicate the exposure of the veins to a skilled attendant for incision, understood also in the version of the scholiast on Juvenal secandasque venas praebuit. Yet Dio’s version contains no such implication, and indeed e\mselx*m, unless it has a causative sense, may suggest that Thrasea opened his own veins. This can be explained if he read in his source not porrectis... venis, but porrectis brachiis, porrecto brachio, or some such. The basic meaning of porrigo, to stretch out, suggests with venis, by a sort of ellipsis, to hold out the arms so that the veins are exposed, in order that they can be cut open. But if veins are not mentioned, the implication of ‘extending his arm(s)’ will be much less clear, and it is likely that it is a phrase of this sort which Dio rendered as a\me*seime sg+m vei& qa, placing the stretching out after the incision and transforming it into a ritual gesture. 106 I think it unlikely that Dio is right as against Tacitus (as he is nor103 Griffin, Seneca cit. (nt. 28), p. 370; cf. Suicide cit. (nt. 7), p. 73. The connexion is already made in a marginale of Lipsius on the passage: abit e vita ut e convivio. 104 Cass. Dio 54.30.1; 74.13.3, 14.4, discussed by Talbert, The Senate cit. (nt. 62), pp. 224 f. 105 Unlikely, however, that there is a reference to his priestly functions which Nero and Eprius Marcellus had mentioned as going unfulfilled (Ann. 16.27,28); libations were commonly performed by all (at least all patres familias), not only by priests. 106 In this he was probably helped by the specialised use of porrigo to refer to religious offerings (Oxford Latin Dictionary 6b, especially in the past participle, which coincides with that of porricio). — 74 — mally understood) and the source of the scholiast on Juvenal, 107 and we can be fairly certain, as I suggested earlier, that as in some other cases recorded by Tacitus, an attendant was present to perform the incisions. 108 But Dio’s gesture of offering emphasizes the ritual quality of the moment and makes the incident closer to a real libation, something which is apparent also in the accompanying words, addressed not to Demetrius (as the scholiast, possibly due to a confusion) or to the quaestor (as Tacitus), but to Zeus/Jupiter himself, and thus a proper verbal accompaniment to a divine offering. 109 Although it may be based on a misunderstanding, this gives a subtly different direction to the saying, one which is suitable, perhaps, for Zeus Eleutherios, who unlike Iuppiter Liberator is a ‘real’ deity of cult. The reference of Iuppiter Liberator has been much debated. It seems certain that we can rule out a sardonic allusion to Nero, who had no reason to adopt this title before the ‘liberation’ of Greece in the following year. Neither is Iuppiter Liberator exactly equivalent to Iuppiter Libertas, who had a well-known temple on the Aventine. 110 The title does seem to correspond approximately to Zeus Eleutherios; there is no easy way to render the adjectival form from e\ketheqi* a in Latin, and the -tor suffix denoting an agent in fact corresponds neatly with Fet+| Rxsg*q, who in Athenian cult was identified with Zeus Eleutherios, and who was in Greek practice one of the classic three recipients of libations at banquets and drinking-parties (see above, p. 73). This Zeus also had strong political implications, relating at Athens to the freedom and safety conferred by victory in the Persian Wars, while at Syracuse Zeus Eleutherios was connected with the downfall of the tyranny. 111 So the connotations of the cult look important, but this is not a literal offering to the cult deity. Rather, if Jupiter is understood as a deity, it will be as the governing principle of the world, perhaps the Stoic providentia. The real question is how is the freedom which this governing principle represents to be understood? For Seneca, death is or represents freedom, and the act of dying is therefore crucially important as the way to that freedom, as well as potentially itself the supremely free act. Hence, it has been plausibly argued, the centrality of suicide in his writings depends upon its reflexion of human agency: the road to freedom is in our own 107 Another possible misunderstanding of a Latin source in Dio’s narrative on Thrasea is 62.26.4: ot>se e\pedei* naso ot\de*m, paralleling Ann. 16.21: Iuvenalium ludicro parum spectabilem operam praebuerat, where he could have been misled by the unusual operam praebeo = operam do; the clause certainly created problems for the copyists of the manuscript. Could Dio’s source then after all have been Tacitus himself? 108 See above, nt. 91. 109 There is a suggestion of the proper words accompanying a libation, naming the deity to whom the offering is made, also in Tacitus’ libamus Iovi liberatori, but the point is brought out much more clearly in Dio’s version with its actual address to Zeus. 110 The names Iuppiter Libertas, Iuppiter Liber, and Libertas seem to refer to the same cult: M. Andreussi, s.v. Iuppiter Libertas, in LTUR III, 1996, p. 144. 111 K. Raaflaub, The Discovery of Freedom in Ancient Greece, revised edn, Chicago 2004, pp. 102-117. — 75 — hands. 112 This concept might seem less applicable to enforced suicide, but arguably by accepting and embracing the call to die, both Seneca and Thrasea aimed to convert constraint into a free choice. 113 Death could also be viewed as the event which sets the soul free from its captivity in the body, a Platonic rather than a Stoic conception, but one which is relevant because of the centrality of the Phaedo in the tradition of the martyr’s death. We do not know enough about Thrasea’s philosophical orientation to guess which, if either, of these perhaps not mutually exclusive conceptions he might have favoured. 114 But these do not exhaust the possibilities. Just as Zeus Eleutherios can carry a clear political reference, so ‘freedom’ itself is also a political idea, and one at the heart of Thrasea’s conflict with Nero. In this sense it might be argued that Thrasea did not need to die in order to be free, since libertas – at least as used by Tacitus – often indicates a personal independence and refusal to recognise the constraints of a tyrannical authority. 115 But the willingness to follow such a course to death would be the final guarantee of libertas thus understood (here there is an obvious overlap with the Senecan conception), while putting the ‘freed’ person forever beyond the reach of the tyrant. So the closest model may be one which combines philosophical and political implications, the figure of the vir sapiens who can defy the tyrant because the tyrant’s ultimate threat of death is actually freedom. Hence, in one of the best known expressions of the idea, Horace reinterprets the words of Dionysos in the Bacchae, referring to the predicted godsent liberation from the tyrant Pentheus, and takes them to mean death: 116 vir bonus et sapiens audebit dicere «Pentheu, rector Thebarum, quid me perferre patique indignum coges?». «adimam bona». «nempe pecus, rem, lectos, argentum: tollas licet». «in manicis et 112 B. Inwood, Reading Seneca: Stoic Philosophy at Rome, Oxford 2005, pp. 302-312, responding to Griffin, Seneca cit. (nt. 28), pp. 372-388, who rightly shows Seneca’s ‘orthodoxy’ as against Rist, Stoic Philosophy cit. (nt. 10), pp. 247-249. 113 See P. Plass, The Game of Death in Ancient Rome: Arena Sport and Political Suicide, Madison, Wisconsin 1995, pp. 92-115, representing this as a ‘game’ strategy against the emperor. The motif is not confined to these two suicides, but present also in that of Petronius, who arranges his death so that it might appear natural (Ann. 16.19), and notable by its absence in that of Octavia, who fails completely, being so terrified that her veins have to be forcibly cut before she is «finished off» (enecatur) in a bath. In her case, we have the opposite procedure, the conversion of what is supposed to be partly a voluntary death into a killing. But Thrasea and Seneca can be presumed to be asserting not merely their independence from Nero, but also a willing acceptance of fate which is part of the Stoic concept of freedom (e.g. Sen. Ep. 61.3: quicquid necesse futurum est repugnanti, id volenti necessitas non est). We see something very like this in the depiction of the death of Astyanax in Seneca’s Troades (1103-1107); the cruelty of the Greeks ensures that the boy will die anyway, but before he can be thrown from the walls of Troy he shows his nobility by jumping of his own accord. 114 See above, pp. 56 f. and nt. 54. 115 Cf. Wirszubski, Libertas cit. (nt. 18), pp. 164-167. 116 Ep. 1.16.73-79. — 76 — compedibus saevo te sub custode tenebo». «ipse deus, simul atque volam, me solvet». opinor hoc sentit, «moriar». mors ultima linea rerum est. The good and wise man will have the courage to say «Pentheus, lord of Thebes, what shame will you compel me to stand and suffer?» «I will take away your goods». «You mean my cattle, my substance, couches, plate? You may take them». «I will keep you in handcuffs and fetters, under a cruel jailer». «God himself, the moment I choose, will set me free». This, I take it, is his meaning: «I will die». Death is the line that marks the end of all. (tr. H. Rushton Fairclough, slightly adapted) Here the tyrant’s belief in his own power, as well as his more general understanding, 117 is challenged and shown to be wanting by an appeal to wider prespectives, and the liberation is a setting free both from the jurisdiction of tyrannical power and from life itself, the final enactment of the freedom which the ‘victim’ has always possessed. In this sense, Thrasea’s already existing freedom allows him to offer his own blood, his own life as a sacrificial quid pro quo in order to obtain the greater good of a freedom which is irreversible. We are now in a position to look at the complete death description, as earlier reconstructed. The scene has been set by an account of Thrasea’s last day, which illustrated and reprised different facets of his life, which could be crudely pigeonholed as political, philosophical and personal. In Tacitus’ version, the location at the horti and the presence of the inlustres suggest primarily political points – Thrasea’s protest, and his support among those who in better times would have been influential – but also allude to the Socratic-Catonian tradition, with the death located in a marginal place (prison, the periphery of empire) and preceded by conversation with friends. Thrasea’s particular intentness on a conversation with Demetrius points more clearly to that tradition, while also underlining his personal commitment to philosophy. Finally, the arrival of Caecilianus and Thrasea’s words to the crowd of sympathisers and then to his wife, indicate various personal relationships: the strength of a close friend’s commitment to him, and his own concern for both the large group of his amici and the inmost circle of his family. These same areas of significance recur, in a similar sequence, in the death scene itself as we have reconstructed it. The libation to Iuppiter Liberator belongs in a nexus of thought which pits the vir sapiens against the tyrant, and so carries an 117 There is a nice play on bona, «goods», and the Stoic understanding of virtue as the only good. The appeal to ipse deus as the agent of release is also relevant to Iuppiter Liberator. On the similar use of the Bacchae passage in other authors, and the potential relevance to political opposition, see M.J. McGann, The Sixteenth Epistle of Horace, «CQ» 10 (1960), pp. 211. — 77 — inextricably mixed political-philosophical intention; but the address to the quaestor makes the reference to the immediate political context (and indeed future history) abundantly clear. The words spoken to Demetrius are not recoverable, but must have had some philosophical reference. But the scene ended with a very simple, personal gesture, as the dying man offered his kisses to each of those present. This final action was so much to be expected that Tacitus nowhere mentions it in the surviving portion of the Annals ; both he and other writers use its absence to increase the pathos of a death. We cannot, of course, know whether he included it here, but it seems certain that Arulenus Rusticus did. What then will he have intended when including it? And how did his account of this final scene relate to the original? I have argued throughout that Arulenus will have wished both to record accurately the real actions of his biographical subject, which in this case he will have had from the immediate family present, and to underline their significance in the depiction of Thrasea as an exemplary figure. It also seems likely that Thrasea himself, having had ample time to contemplate the prospect, would have wanted to make his own death a fitting end, not only one which looked back to Cato and Socrates, but one which rounded off in a satisfactory fashion each aspect of his life; to play properly the part of the different roles appearing in each individual’s life being a characteristically Stoic imperative. 118 I do not mean of course that he mentally ticked off boxes labelled «personal, political, philosophical»; rather that long adherence to a continuus vitae ordo (16.26) would have led him to what he considered a proper conclusion in each case. But in the course of, say, the sixty or even as few as fifteen minutes that would have elapsed from the cutting of the veins to the point where unconsciousness supervened, there would have been time for many more words than we are given. After setting up his death as an exemplum, Thrasea might have wished to say personal and specific things to each of those present, and they too would surely have wanted to say things to him. Possibly some at least in the first category could have found its way into the version of Arulenus, to be omitted in Tacitus’ abbreviated form, but obviously even Arulenus’ account cannot have been a transcript of everything that was said. Anyone who has attended a deathbed – though to be sure, none of us has witnessed an enforced suicide – will know that what seem at the time long periods may pass which are not endowed with any obvious ‘significance’, and which will be omitted in an account of the death. In this case, the record remaining to us is only a selection, just as, one supposes, a detailed physical account of the process is compressed into lentitudine exitus gravis cruciatus adferente. The words to the quaestor would obviously impress themselves on the minds of those who heard them, and were equally obvious ones to pick for a written account, as they were clearly intended by the speaker as a programmatic introduc118 Cf Brunt, Stoicism and the Principate cit. (nt. 8), pp. 12-13. — 78 — tion to his death process and as a statement of its significance. Together with the commitment to an ethical, philosophical outlook symbolised by the words to Demetrius, we can easily understand why these were chosen to represent the last moments of the life of one who had attempted to follow the same continuus vitae ordo. But the kisses? It is not at all surprising that the real Thrasea should bid farewell to friends and family in such a manner. Nor need we suppose, as the scholion seems to imply, that it was done literally with his last breath, which in any case would be preceded by a period of unconsciousness. Realistically we might assume that he made a last effort to bestow the kisses at a point when he was still just able to do so, but aware that his strength was rapidly failing. As for the account of Arulenus, to make a point of recording this traditional and usual action is to show that despite Nero’s cruelty and the injustice of the senate’s decree, Thrasea achieved the perfect death. But there might perhaps have been a more specific reason for its inclusion. In the generation after his death, to those who had not known him, Thrasea had become more a symbol than a real person, a symbol of high-minded opposition to despotic power and of a willingness to face death in the cause of this opposition. To some this might seem admirable, while others viewed this simplified picture in a more negative light. Not only the Tacitus of the Agricola, with his ambitiosa mors, saw problems here, but Martial too: «You follow great Thrasea and perfect Cato, but reject dying... I don’t choose a man who buys his fame with easy blood, but one who can be praised without his death». 119 The coincidence of viewpoint in such different contexts and authors suggests that this stereotype had gained currency, and with it the implied and actual criticism. The stern, unbending figure who unreasonably preferred a showy death to a normal and useful life has a lot in common with the travesty put about by Thrasea’s enemies: his tristior et paedagogi vultus, his rigidi et tristes imitative followers. 120 Such a picture must have been abhorrent to those who had been close to Thrasea. When Avidius Quietus recalled to Pliny (Ep. 6.29) Thrasea’s views on the types of cases an advocate should undertake, he indicated that both constantia and humanitas were required, and Arulenus, in writing his laudes, while stressing his hero’s courage and integrity, no doubt also wished to show his humanity. A similar motive may have been felt by Thrasea himself, in writing the life of Cato 121 – an altogether stranger personality, it seems, and 119 Martial 1.8: Quod magni Thraseae consummatique Catonis | dogmata sic sequeris salvus ut esse velis | pectore nec nudo strictos incurris in ensis | quod fecisse velim te, Deciane, facis. | nolo virum facili redemit redi qui sanguine famam, | hunc volo, laudari qui sine morte potest. 4.54 is less critical, referring to Thrasea’s constantia as proverbial. (Similar depreciation of Cato’s end at 1.78). 120 Suet. Nero 37; Tac. Ann.16.23 (Cossutianus Capito to Nero). 121 It seems plausible that the passages in Plutarch’s life stressing Cato’s uikamhqxpi* a – not only those from the scenes at Utica cited above (pp. 65 f. and nt. 78) but also, notably, that where Plutarch expounds on — 79 — one dead long before the lifetime of his biographer – but Arulenus’ wish to present a picture more true to life of the man he had known was perhaps more urgent. Most of the material he used to make his point is now lost to us. But in the deathbed scene, no doubt the climax of the work (conforming in this at least to the popular view), he was careful to preserve incidents which showed Thrasea not only as surpassingly brave and self-controlled, but also as someone with normal, understandable human feelings, a loving friend, husband and father. In so doing he honoured the memory not only of ‘a senator who stood for honour, dignity, freedom of speech’ 122 but also of a man who was mitissimus, et ob hoc quoque maximus. 123 Emily Kearns University of Oxford emily.kearns@st-hildas.ox.ac.uk Cato’s love of his brother, 11.3-4 – could have been inspired by Thrasea’s biography. Compare also 21.5; 46.3-5, and the curious mixture in the episode recounted in 37, which is expressly signalled as derived from Munatius via Thrasea. 122 Syme, A Political Group cit. (nt. 14), p. 587. 123 Pliny, Ep. 8.22.

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The death of Thrasea: towards a reconstruction and interpretation

The death of Thrasea: towards a reconstruction and interpretation

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