"A little throat cutting in the meantime": Seneca's Violent Imagery

Amy Olberding

Philosophy and Literature, Volume 32, Number 1, April 2008, pp. 130-144 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/phl.0.0005

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Amy Olberding

A LITTLE THRoaT CUTTING IN THE MEaNTIME: SENECas VIoLENT IMaGERY

ne of Senecas foremost concerns is proffering a distinctively therapeutic version of Stoicism that takes as its principal charge the alleviation of anxiety about death. Indeed, while Seneca treats in his work a number of psychic afflictions, such as anger and desire, death registers as a singular preoccupation and Seneca appears to conceive reconciliation to mortality a foundational cure before which many other maladies give way. My aim is not to rehearse the elements of Senecas proposed cure but to assay the images of death in Senecas writings and consider what contribution they make to Senecas therapy. While Seneca limns familiar Stoic principles regarding death, he also frequently turns his attention to particularly violent deaths and when he does, he is rarely content to offer a summary account of the event and instead colors his descriptions with raw existential details. For example, Seneca often proposes Cato as a moral exemplar. Cato, the famous Roman republican, ended his life by stabbing himself and, when his compatriots bound his injury to save his life, tore open his wound with his bare hands. In lauding Cato, Seneca is rarely content merely to cite the election of suicide rather than a life under tyranny, the reason Cato died, and frequently highlights the means of Catos death and his hands ripping open the wound in particular.1 My aim is to discover what to make of such details. Given that Senecas contemporaries, his immediate audience, were well versed in the varieties of violence, what might compel Seneca to offer them here? More generally, of what aid is it to the learner who struggles to accept mortality to consider the variety of horrifying ways in which a body may be mortally wounded? Senecas writings provide too many examples of violent death to capture here,
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so I offer but a short selection of characteristic passages. The first two appear in Senecas letter on suicide (70.2023) and the second two appear in On Anger.2 In his remarks on suicide, Seneca observes that there was lately in a training-school for wild-beast gladiators a German, who was making ready for the morning exhibition; he withdrew in order to relieve himself, the only thing which he was allowed to do in secret and without the presence of a guard. While so engaged, he seized the stick of wood, tipped with a sponge, which was devoted to the vilest uses, and stuffed it, just as it was, down his throat; thus he blocked up his windpipe, and choked the breath from his body. That was truly to insult death! A second gladiator Seneca lauds met a similarly grim end: Lately a gladiator, who had been sent forth to the morning exhibition, was being conveyed in a cart along with the other prisoners, nodding as if he were heavy with sleep, he let his head fall over so far that it was caught in the spokes; then he kept his body in position long enough to break his neck by the revolution of the wheel. So he made his escape by means of the very wagon which was carrying him to his punishment. In On Anger, Seneca describes two men, each of whom has angered his monarch to disastrous result. In the first, Cambyses advisor has delicately counseled the king against drunkenness. In response, Cambyses calls for his bow, claiming:
I shall proceed to prove to you that my eyes and my hands perform their duty in spite of wine. Thereupon taking larger cups he drank more recklessly than ever, and when at length he was heavy and besotted with wine, he ordered the son of his critic to proceed beyond the threshold and stand there with his left hand lifted above his head. Then he drew his bow and shot the youth through the very hearthe had mentioned this as his markand cutting open the breast of the victim he showed the arrow-head sticking in the heart itself, and then turning toward the father he inquired whether he had a sufficiently steady hand. But he replied that Apollo himself could not have made a more unerring shot.

The second example immediately follows and describes a strikingly similar scenario:
I doubt not that Harpagus also gave some such advice to his king, the king of the Persians, who, taking offence thereat, caused the flesh of Harpaguss own children to be set before him as a course in the banquet, and kept inquiring whether he liked the cooking; then when he saw him sated with

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his own ills, he ordered the heads of the children to be brought in, and inquired what he thought of his entertainment. The poor wretch did not lack words, his lips were not sealed. At the kings board, he said, any kind of food is delightful.

In these passages, Seneca aims to provide illustration of some more general lesson. The gladiators are presented as evidence that even in the most debased and reduced circumstances, a human being retains the power to wrest control from fortune and achieve nobility. In On Anger, Seneca wishes to demonstrate that anger is clearly subject to control: if a father can offer puling flattery to the man who murders his children, it is clear that anger is not an involuntary response. Notably, however, even where we grant that providing an example richly illuminates the lesson Seneca seeks to provide, he offers more than is strictly necessary for this purpose: we have not one, but two dead gladiators; not one, but several murdered children. Even Senecas references to Catos death have this quality, for in them Seneca offers what he acknowledges to be one of those stories not only well known, but droned to death in all the schools (24.68). The apparent redundancy of these examples invites us to consider what other purposes might be served by them. One explanation for Senecas insistent presentations of violent death resides in his relation to his Greek forebears. While the Greek Stoics treat reconciliation to death as a matter of significant interest, Seneca derides what he perceives as their misguided faith in the efficacy of reason alone to dispel fear. Recounting one of Zenos syllogisms concerning death, he skewers the vanity he perceives in these intellectual solutions: A cure, Zeno! I have been freed from fear; henceforth I shall not hesitate to bare my neck on the scaffold. Will you not utter sterner words instead of rousing a dying man to laughter? (82.9). Though Seneca agrees with Zenos conclusionthat death is not an evilhe insists that Zenos strategy is wanting in boldness. Death may not be an evil but neither is it a thing which we can easily ignore (82.16). The syllogism, Seneca avers, operates by forcing the judgment, by obliging the rational agent to assent to an indubitable conclusion. It fails, however, at winning a conviction, at providing a fierce confidence that one can face death without flinching (82.20). Where this is our aim, the abstract is not only ineffective, it may pose some peril, for it risks misleading us about what we face in our mortality and what will be required if we are to repudiate anxiety. What we face, Seneca avers, is akin to battle: we have heard

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the signal for the fight! Away with all these dummy-weapons; you need armour for a fight to the finish (117.2526). Senecas dramatic presentations of particular deaths function to arm his readers in two distinct ways. First, in highlighting the limitations of reason in eradicating fear, Seneca recognizes that the general truths yielded by abstract reasoning may be endorsed without our thereby sanctioning their import in the particular case. I may well grant that death is not an evil but never apply this insight in the case of my death. What Seneca seeks to forestall is the species of suffering so well captured by Tolstoy in The Death of Ivan Ilych. As Ivan Ilych lays dying, he recognizes that he has long accepted the apparent implications of deaths universality, learning well the syllogistic truth that Caius is mortal, for all men are mortal and Caius is a man. Yet as death approaches, the personal import of this descends with horror: That Caiusman in the abstractwas mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others.3 He thus protests, It cannot be that I ought to die. That would be too terrible (Tolstoy, p. 132). Ivan Ilychs end is not the ostensibly familiar universal and abstract death, but something terrible, new, and more important than anything before in his life (p. 125). The death reason addressed was not his own, not the oppressively personal event he anticipates with considerable horror. By providing dramatic examples of death, Seneca invites empathetic apprehension of the felt personal quality of death. He obliges the reader to apply the general to a particular and investigate her responses as she imaginatively identifies with the suffering he describes. Seneca astutely recognizes the capacity of careful reasoning to foster self-deception and guards against false comfort by proffering vividly realized images that unseat intellectual complacency. While only death itself can genuinely determine what progress I have made, imaginative engagement with individual deaths can operate against self-deception and increase prospects for meeting death well (26.5). In offering the particular, Seneca refuses his readers the comfort of treating death as a concept. It is rather an event, an event that comes for Cato, for the gladiators, and it will come for me. In addition to restoring the sense of singularity that attaches to my own death, Senecas images evoke the somatic features of death that abstract reasoning obscures. By recounting actual deaths in narratives rich with existential detailthe head heavy as though with sleep slipping

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between the spokes, the stick befouled with excrement forced into the throatSeneca cultivates horror and perhaps even the vicarious physical sensations of dying in his reader. He thrusts the physical into view and denies easy retreat from what is glimpsed there. In apprehending such scenes I am obliged to recognize not only that I will die, but that I will die in some way. I encounter in Senecas images some of the worst of the myriad ways one may die and may thereby anticipate the pain of dying. My death will not arrive as an intellectual problem but as a physical event, my body perhaps wounded or diseased in ways that assail any peace I have found. To achieve a genuine peace with death entails that I stand ready to meet it as my own and in whatever form it may take. Where I have but abstract reason as my resource, it is as though I face a lions charge armed with an awl (82.24). While this explanation of Senecas violent imagery well situates his work as an elaboration of Stoic doctrine, it is less clear how it places him in relation to his own more immediate context. Indeed, it may elide a more fundamental fact about Seneca, that he is Roman. As such, he inhabited a world in which cruel and violent death was familiar. As Florence Dupont observes, Violence was everywhere, always under control but always on display.4 In his acute attention to the more brutal ways in which life may end, Seneca may but speak in the idiom of his age or indeed even pander to his audiences taste for blood. Romans liked to fantasize about death, appalling injuries and torture and could grow drunk on grim stories of pain and blood (Dupont, p. 241). In this context, Senecas imagery may feature as but another draught of the intoxicating brew enjoyed by his contemporaries. Much has been written about the Roman taste for violent entertainments so perhaps it is enough here to observe their variety and scale. The most documented and analyzed are the gladiator contests, public combats between trained slaves and prisoners of war. These events offered spectators displays of skilled fighting, each gladiator trained in a specific style of combat. For example, some employed net and trident, others wore elaborate armor and brandished swords, and still others specialized in combat with wild beasts. While the skill of the fighters was a seductive element of these displays, the scale of combat was also a priority, for the number of fighters and beasts engaged provided testament to the generosity of the spectacles host. Though precise statistics are impossible, Romes histories provide numbers that well capture orders of magnitude. Augustus claimed to have hosted spectacles engaging 10,000 gladiators and Caligulas ascension was celebrated with 160,000 men and beasts.5

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As these figures indicate, the popularity of these spectacles and their power to accrue political capital for their host entailed that each new spectacle needed to outmatch the last. As Roland Auguet observes, the common people came to consider the games more or less a right and became captious and particular. They must be dazzled, their pride flattered by splendours.6 In addition to gladiatorial contests, Romans enjoyed criminal executions that featured neither skill nor valor. Indeed, the condemned were treated as a surplus commodity, a leisure resource whose deaths, demanded by their crimes, could provide a few moments pleasure (Kyle, p. 92). Mass executions afforded a sort of intermission diversion between gladiator contests. While the condemned were untrained and unarmed, the executions themselves were nonetheless creative. Victims were torn apart by exotic animals brought from the far corners of the empire specifically for this purpose. Some were used in elaborate mock battles aimed at dramatizing famous historical events. On a more modest scale, some were simply crucified, flailed, burned, or forced performers in what Carlin Barton deems snuff plays, dramas in which death would be real rather than simulated.7 While these violent entertainments were discrete events often enjoyed during festival days, Roman interest in them, and in displays of cruelty more generally, extended into more mundane and daily experience. The fascination of both the gladiatorial combats and executions persisted beyond the experience itself and Romans ornamented their lives with decorative arts, such as mosaics and terracotta statuary, that vividly depicted these affairs. The pleasures of violent spectacle could be renewed in viewing, for example, a statue depicting a nude female criminal attacked by a leopard while bound to a bull or a mosaic richly detailing the fatal blow dealt to one gladiator by another (Kyle, p. 93). Perhaps even more telling is Senecas own example of quotidian violence. Seneca explains that mullet was a particular delicacy because diners could enjoy the distinctive and hypnotic changes in the fishs color as it struggled in its death throes.8 In short, much of Roman entertainment entailed macabre spectacle and fantasy in which violence and brutality were seductive sources of pleasure. In this context, Senecas appeals to violent deaths cannot simply constitute an attempt to restore the somatic and felt singular quality of death to a Stoicism too wedded to abstract reasoning. Senecas audience presumably has less need of this particular lesson by virtue of their regular exposure to events more dramatic and immediate than any

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effect Senecas literary efforts can provoke. The more pressing question is whether Senecas violent imagery plausibly aims at any effect other than more of the same, some result distinct from the quick thrill of the horrific and fantastic. While Seneca attended Romes spectacles, his attitude toward them suggests that there may be some plausible alternative to this reading. Senecas most remarked comment on the spectacles of his age appears in Epistle 7, where he notably denounces not the games but their effect on the spectators (7.26). Indeed, he observes of himself that while he attended a lunch time break in the games expecting some fun, wit, and relaxation, what he found was the pure murder of the intermission executions and this awakened only misanthropy. He explains, I come home more greedy, more ambitious, more voluptuous, and even more cruel and inhuman, because I have been among human beings. What distresses Seneca most is the blood lust of spectators who greet the undefended and unarmed deaths of the condemned with relish. The thirst for violence, unslaked by the skilled combats of the morning sessions, demands satisfaction. More urgently, languor threatens and must be avoided. Thus when the games stop for the intermission, they announce: A little throat cutting in the meantime, so that there may still be something going on! While Seneca appears on occasion to endorse his contemporaries view that gladiatorial combats can operate as moral education about important virtues such as courage, here such sentiments desert him. He is instead confronted with vice that steals subtly upon one through the avenue of pleasure. While the psychology that informs the vicious pleasure of the spectator is complex, I shall focus narrowly on but one element Seneca identifies, the way in which violent spectacle requires and fosters an underestimation of death. Within the context of spectacle, death features as a pleasure to be consumed, the spectator accruing a perceived power over death by virtue of his ability to render it an object of play. The spectator, Seneca claims, is seduced by a capacity to manipulate and manage death, to render it close and familiar. The power thus accrued relies, however, on the spectators implicit denial of his own mortality, a refusal to engage the full reach of deaths sovereignty. Indeed, Seneca suggests, the impulse to find ever more novel exercises of power over death issues from a world-weariness only possible where death is never my own, where I suffer no share in the condition of those whose deaths provision my pleasure. In considering a spectacle offered by Pompey, Seneca observes that Pompey, who enjoyed high repute for the kindness

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of his heart, nonetheless conceived a desire to kill human beings after a new fashion, matching men against elephants.9 It is not enough that men die, better they be crushed by animals of monstrous bulk. Pompey enjoys this new fashion of death, an entertaining fashion of death, because his prosperity effectively insulates him from the apprehension that he is not beyond the power of Nature. As Seneca astutely observes of Pompey, one may flee death while pulling it close, by embracing it for others. Death displayed, particularly displayed in fantastical violence, achieves a distancing effect. The more fantastical it is, the less compelled the spectator will be to identify his own fate in it, for he achieves distance in his power as witness, as the one for whose pleasure death occurs. Death does not come for him; he summons it for others, and does so, moreover, so that he may be, for a moment, amused. The thrill it consequently offers consists in entertaining the intimate horror of death, while the fantasy holds at a distance the significance of mortality in his own life. Indeed, he thereby achieves a dubious species of comfort with his own death, for the surfeit of sensation yields a bathetic effect. The more frequent the deployment of death as amusing spectacle, the more death itself appears to assume the quality of the low and commonplace, the stunning effects that surround it like so much garish make-up that fails to conceal an outworn face. It is death denuded of its emotive content, reduced to a set of sensational images aimed at teasing the imagination and arousing a self-indulgent pleasure. Its consolation resides in just this reduction. Death cannot induce terror where it is so tiresome, where a supply of new fashions is required to hold my interest and amuse me. In this context, the death of the spectator may seem wholly absent but is in fact submerged as a sinister undercurrent in the flow of sensation. It is, to borrow language from D. H. Lawrence, the dirty little secret without which the pleasures of death spectacle would not be possible: This dirty little secret has become infinitely precious to the mob of people today. It is a kind of hidden sore or inflammation which, when rubbed or scratched, gives off sharp thrills that seem delicious. So the dirty little secret is rubbed and scratched more and more, till it becomes more and more secretly inflamed, and the nervous and psychic health of the individual is more and more impaired.10 While Lawrence here describes the repression that conditions the pleasure of sexual pornography, what Lawrence observes of sex seems true of death and its representations in Senecas Rome. The sharp thrills of the death spectacle ride on the dirty little secret of those who witness them.

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In his brief essay, The Pornography of Death, Geoffrey Gorer observes that the capacity to delight in violent entertainments often derives from what is at root a prudery about mortality and its significance in human life.11 The desire to craft ever more fantastical representations of violent death emerges from a reluctance to address the troubling emotive and symbolic content of death, the fears and sorrows that often accompany reflection on lifes end (Gorer, p. 196). To think forthrightly and directly of ones death is to court pains not easily assuaged. Yet death, like sex, is both a formidable motivation for much of human behavior and something of an abiding mystery in human life. One must struggle not to think of it and, even where one does so struggle, it resists complete suppression. Death demands address of some sort. Where one refuses it open and dignified entry into consciousness, it will simply arrive surreptitiously, manifesting in ways that incorporate both shame and fear (p. 199). While the target of Gorers analysis, the horror comic of 1950s Britain, is quaint compared to Romes spectacles, I contend that the dynamic is much the same. The willingness of the Roman spectator to indulge a taste for violent death entertainment reflects an underlying prudery regarding mortality. Gorer explains that prudery obtains where some aspect of human experience is treated as inherently shameful or abhorrent so that it can never be discussed or referred to openly, and experience of it tends to be clandestine and accompanied by feelings of guilt and unworthiness (p. 196). In Senecas Rome there is perhaps no greater ignominy than to admit fear of death. The individual who confesses or, worse, acts on such fear will be judged wanting in the signal virtue of courage, he will be womanish. As Senecas own writings attest, death is conceived as a singularly revelatory test of the individuals character and mettle, exposing both to wider view in ways that more ordinary experience cannot. My death will show whether I am merely declaiming brave sentiments, or whether I really feel them; whether all the bold threats I have uttered against fortune are a pretence and a farce. All I do in life counts for nothing where my death is met unworthily (26.5). One who dies badly, with fear and trepidation, disgraces not only his end, but risks casting his life into disrepute. In such a context, complex affective responses to anticipation of ones death are forbidden or, more precisely, must be assiduously concealed. Their concealment, however, creates the incentive for pornography, for the simultaneously fantastical and reductive display of that which I fear and cannot evade.

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Death entertainments operate as a substitute gratification, a way to manage fear without directly acknowledging it (p. 198). They cannot, however, answer to the needs in which they find their genesis. Moreover, their failure on this score generates escalating yearnings only assuaged through more, and more elaborate, fantasy. One both needs and cannot bear ennui. For where I can be bored by death, its threat is reduced, yet with boredom comes the risk of reflection and the awakening of submerged fear. I must have new fashions and where these are not on offer, there must still be something going on. Such is to conquer the terrifying by caricaturing it. Pornography, Lawrence insists, is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it (Lawrence, p. 74). Romes violent entertainment constitutes an attempt to do dirt on death, to degrade that which persistently shadows life, to trivialize the terrible. Where death inspires terror, the garish painted lady of death entertainments is a thrill to be consumed and quickly discarded. The pleasure she affords presents itself as an experience to be wallowed in, but despised (p. 76). As far as answering the basic need to remedy anxiety, Lawrences description of masturbation well captures the relief such surfeit offers: there can be no change, only deadening (p. 79). If Romes violent entertainments operate in the way I suggest, what of Senecas violent imagery? Do Senecas representations of brutal death promise a better effect? While it is likely unwarranted to claim that Seneca never operates as a pornographer, I suggest that the governing sensibility of his work is closer kin to erotica.12 If we understand erotica generally to feature the somatic while simultaneously evoking something of its wider felt significance, an erotica of death entails an acute attention to the sufferings of the body that embeds these in a narrative complexity regarding the subjective distress they engender. Its pleasure consists not in abandonment to the physical, but in an enriched connection between the physical and its meanings for the subject. A death erotica is not the enemy of reflection, but its spur, stimulating the imaginative powers of the reader in the direction of her own end by requiring her close regard of the body and its acute fragility. That Seneca at least sometimes aims at an erotica is evident where we consider his depictions of violent death alongside, and of a piece with, his representations of aging and illness. Seneca does not merely harness his descriptive powers to fantastical deaths but also attends to the quiet decay of natural death and the effects of disease. The latter lacks the seductive glamour of the former but is, in many ways, closer to the

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bone where fear is concerned. It is a species of dying that is temporally extended rather than decisively quick and it resists the ready consolations of dying heroically. Senecas descriptions of aging and illness notably and most often concern his own condition, his struggles with asthma and increasing physical frailty. While the autobiographical nature of these observations might initially appear to undermine the case for erotica by suggesting that here we see little more than the occasional foray into relaxed conversation about Senecas daily experiences, there are elements that work against such a reading. First, Seneca generally situates his comments on his condition in discourses on death and fortune, self-consciously tracing the implications of his condition to the consolation he seeks to provide. His observations are not idle but attempt to wed reflection and experience. Second, in writing of his own health, Seneca notably concedes his own weakness and frailty. Where fortitude and strength are prized, such confessions of delicacy are not flattering to the one who owns them. As Seneca observes, the gout of old age is more likely to be attributed to injury or over-exercise until it becomes so painful that it must be given a name (53.6). While Senecas confessions of affliction and age cannot win for him any ordinary heroic stature, however, he appears to present them in service to a more refined notion of heroism. He appears, that is, to judge his ability to entertain thoughts of his afflictions and age a mark of some courage: he feels the glancing blows of deaths approach yet does not flinch from them.13 In this, he shares an affinity with the gladiators whose suicides he so colorfully describes. Senecas accounts of his own physical decay share with his accounts of violent death an interest in depicting bodily insult with some detail. He does not merely observe that he is declining, but elaborates on what his decline entails, both physically and psychologically. He still takes exercise, but wryly notes that what he in fact does hardly merits the name, for as soon as I stir, I am tired (83.36). He is losing his teeth. A former cold-water enthusiast, he has little energy left for bathing. When he does bathe, he finds his body temperature so altered by age that his cold bath must be just short of hot. Indeed, he is typically so cold that he can scarcely thaw out in the middle of summer and must spend most of the time bundled up (67.12). Seneca finds his decay reflected in his surroundings. He exhorts his servant to tend to the disrepair of his home and a neglected grove of trees, only to realize that both home and trees are simply old (12.15). The servant he exhorts is a brokendown dotard, dropping teeth and clearly outward bound. That the

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house he built, the trees he planted, and the servant he has known from childhood could so plainly and irretrievably be declining, he perceives, is a measure of his own decline. He too will soon be outward bound. While Seneca frequently alludes to the benefits of the maturity that age brings, he recognizes with acuity that it comes at a cost. He is not crushed, but he is weary, one of the worn-out class (26.1). Senecas depictions of illness are fewer, but here too he displays a marked interest in relating their detail. This is particularly evident in his description of his asthma, the distress of which he poignantly describes. Although his spells do not endure beyond an hour, they present as a sort of continued last gasp and thus their relatively short duration is small reassurance: Who indeed could breathe his last for long? (54.14). His episodes leave him feeling tested by death and thus he agrees with the physicians who call the asthmatics desperate struggles for breath practicing how to die. As he writes of his condition, he abjures the reader not to believe that he writes with relief because the spell has passed. For he remains affected, his breath does not come and go normally, but with hesitation and delay. He concludes that provided there be no sigh from the soul, no giving way to despair, his asthma may be as it pleases. He longs for courage and exhorts himself even in the midst of his attacks to guard his tranquility. However, his self-exhortation must, he emphasizes, be conducted silently for he lacks the breath to speak. By joining Senecas accounts of his health and age to his representations of violent death, I wish to suggest that the raw details he offers in both operate to a different effect than the merely pornographic. The pornographic representation of death suffers markedly from a narrative impoverishment. Death pornography cannot, as Gorer notes, exhibit any real development, for once the protagonist has done something, he or she must proceed to do something else, with or to somebody else, more refined, more complicated, or more sensational than what had occurred before (Gorer, pp. 19798). Such is necessary to yield the dubious relief pornography promises. In contrast, Seneca attends to physical experience in ways that can stimulate little of the sharp thrill. The choking breaths of asthma and crumbling teeth of age are more likely to elicit dismay and revulsion. So too, where his depictions of violent death manipulate some of the stock elements of pornographyfor example, the gladiatortheir cumulative effect is to subvert any simple pleasure in regarding death. Where the spectacles are cruel, Senecas gladiators demonstrate

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cruelty carried to an outer limit by engaging the psychology of despair. To force a lavatory sponge down ones throat is the foulest of deaths (70.21). It is a species of death from which Seneca expects the reader to recoil. His aim, however, is to evoke the despair from which is born the courage to choose such an act. He solicits our admiration for the gladiator, much as he tacitly solicits our admiration for his struggles with asthma, and revulsion is a precondition for this admiration. The repetitive quality of Senecas violent imageshis dogged attention to Catos hands, the grotesque suicides and murdersfunction to deny the reader retreat from her own disgust, for if she is to die well and admirably, she will encounter in her end much that stimulates such a response. The body will not easily yield to even an avid desire for dignity. She must consequently learn the despair that distaste will engender and find a mechanism for rendering it a source of courage. The erotica of death declines the easy disgust that transmutes quickly into pleasure by embedding revulsion in narratives in which the protagonists responses to it are the focus of attention. It thus frustrates the readers ability to evade thinking of death by watching DEATH! instead. The narrative sensibility of Senecas work remains closely wedded to enlivening reasoning with experience, with finding the meanings of abstract truths about mortality as they register on particular bodies. In this, our fears are not teased and exploited, but they are summoned. We are obliged to consider the ways in which a body may suffer death but there is more than the body claiming our attention, more than a little throat-cutting. Death is embedded in consideration of the living moments of realized characters whose pains we may find familiar and from whose bodies we may recoil. Senecas gladiators notably die outside the arena; they demonstrate the psychic responses that are the concomitants of physical death, both feeling and acting on their despair. The fathers who witness their childrens murders are overwhelmed by their own anxieties, preferring the cowardice of obsequious flattery to risking their own lives by complaint. Seneca suffers illness and aging and his capacity for wry amusement with his decline is preceded by anger, his capacity to endure his asthma tinged with horror. In each, the vivid and raw physical elements of experience serve as notice that the insults of death to the body are an intractable force with which one must reckon. When the assaulted body becomes ones own, flight is denied and no delight will be found in its injuries. Given the context in which Seneca writes, his appeal to an erotica of death is doubly important. While the more abstract solutions to death

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anxiety proposed by his Stoic forebears may fail generally to answer the lived bodily experience of the human being, their chaste presentation is particularly impotent for one who is seduced by the pornographic pleasure of the death spectacle. Seneca observes that the spectators of Romes violent entertainments yearn to see someone who is glad to die (De Ira 1.2.4). When the gladiators decline to offer such pleasure, the spectators evince a mock anger, like that of children who, if they fall down, want the earth to be thrashed, and who often do not even know why they are angrythey are merely angry, without any reason and without being injured, though not without some semblance of injury and not without some desire of exacting punishment. The semblance of injury Seneca discerns here confesses its origin in an unanswered longing for reassurance that death is not too terrible, and the refusal of experience to afford such comfort. Senecas work cannot be said to offer this reassurance either, but unlike the spectacle, it promises close and unflinching acquaintance with the terrible as a mechanism for withstanding the inevitable blow. While I here attend to Senecas work and its relation to the violent entertainments of his day, I should perhaps note that my interest is not simply historical. To be sure, Senecas therapy issues from an age distant from our own. However, as Faulkner wryly observed, The past is never dead. Its not even past.14 Like Senecas audience, we inhabit a society in which violent entertainments exercise considerable allure. The death spectacle has passed but finds kin in the simulated death spectacles of contemporary popular entertainments, in the violent films, computerized games, and television programs that the culture regularly decries as it eagerly consumes them. The prudery surrounding death anxiety in ancient Rome finds kin where the death most in our own age will meeta prolonged decline in which physical vitality is not violently taken but gradually ebbs until we are no moreis conspicuously absent from our popular representations. The deaths we watch are not the deaths we are likely to have, and therein lies their fascination. In them, it is death and not we who are diminished. To the extent that Senecas efforts at a death erotica court deaths undiminished terror and answer to fascination while not giving way to it, they point the way toward what a therapeutic engagement with mortality must do, in his age and perhaps also in our own. University of Oklahoma

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1. See, e.g., Epistles 67.7; 70.19; 71.1617. All citations of Senecas letters are from Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, 3 vols., trans. Richard M. Gummere (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1917). These are hereafter given in the text. See also De Tranquillitate Animi in Moral Essays, vol. 2, trans. John W. Basore (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1932), 16.1.4 and De Providentia in Moral Essays, vol. 1, 2.10. 2.Lucius Annaeus Seneca, De Ira, in Moral Essays, vol. 1, trans. John W. Basore (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928), 3.14.115.3. 3.Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych, trans. Alymer Maude, in The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories (New York: Signet Classics, 1960), p. 132. 4. Florence Dupont, Daily Life in Ancient Rome (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 244. 5. Donald G. Kyle, Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 76 and p. 103. 6.Roland Auguet, Cruelty and Civilization: The Roman Games (New York: Routledge, 1972), p. 25. 7.Carlin Barton, The Sorrow of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the Monster (Prince ton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 61. 8.Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Naturales Quaestiones, vol. 1, trans. Thomas H. Corcoran (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 3.18.1. 9.Lucius Annaeus Seneca, De Brevitate Vitae, in Moral Essays, vol. 2, 13.67. 10. D. H. Lawrence, Pornography and Obscenity, in Sex, Literature, and Censorship, ed. Harry T. Moore (New York: Twayne, 1953), p. 77. 11.Geoffrey Gorer, The Pornography of Death, appendix to Death, Grief, and Mourning (New York: Anchor Books, 1965), p. 194. 12.I realize of course that the distinction between pornography and erotica generates debate. However, I leave this aside and, for the purposes of my analogy, I seek only to distinguish them as noted here. 13.It is perhaps important to clarify that Seneca did not at last meet his death naturally but committed forced suicide, condemned as a participant in an assassination plot against Nero. For details surrounding his execution, see Tacitus, The Annals, trans. John Jackson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1937), p. 15. For a discussion of the ambiguous evidence for Senecas participation in the plot, see Miriam Griffin, Imago Vitae Suae, in Seneca, ed. C. D. N. Costa (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), pp. 2528. 14. William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, in Novels, 19421954 (New York: Library of America, 1994), p. 535.