Seneca, Our Son of A Bitch

A History of Mankind (251)

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The poisonous landscape of early Imperial Rome was only navigable for people with solid connections: people like the Tauri, Roman descendants of Augustus’ general Statili Tauri who recovered their previously lost Taurian Gardens (“Horti Tauri,” just outside of Rome) under Nero.

The Tauri busied themselves adding up levels and burial chambers to a great funerary monument to house the remains of the family’s many slaves and freed slaves – so that, by the time the state again took the Gardens following Nero’s downfall, it had space for well over 700 corpses¹.

Seneca, who had a dim view of urban slaves — he complained that they enjoyed too many holidays² — amassed a huge amount of properties thanks to his connections, including villas and land (with much preferred rural slaves) in at least two continents, probably three. Cassius Dio reports that Boudicca's uprising in Britannia in 60-61, retroactively engineered into the founding event of English nationalism, was caused by Seneca forcing large loans with onerous payment terms on an indigenous British aristocracy that was never as enthusiastic about the Romans as their counterparts in the continent³.

Never one to miss opportunities for literary inspiration, Seneca’s tract De Vita Beata ("On the Happy Life") dates from around the British uprising he caused and includes a defense of wealth along Stoic lines, arguing that it's appropriate for a philosopher to enjoy properly-gained spoils.