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The head goes back over the rim. Tacitus says he was dictating while the blood slowed; the pages were read for a century, then lost.

The villa is four miles outside Rome, and the soldiers arrive at dinnertime. April of 65: the great conspiracy against Nero, dozens of senators and officers gathered around Gaius Piso, has been betrayed on the eve of its stroke, and the city has become a machine for producing names. Against Seneca there is exactly one piece of evidence, an informer's report of one ambiguous sentence exchanged with the plot's figurehead. It is enough. A tribune rings the house with guards while Seneca eats with his wife Pompeia Paulina and two friends. The question Nero sends back across the four miles is not about guilt. He asks whether Seneca is preparing to die. For the best part of a decade Seneca ran the empire's paperwork and wrote Nero's speeches, including, near the end, the one explaining the death of Nero's mother. He asked twice to retire and offered his whole fortune back; he was refused both times with embraces. Now the answer arrives as a sentence without a court. Seneca asks for his will. The tribune refuses. So he turns to his friends and names the one bequest no order can touch: he leaves them, he says, the best thing he still owns, the pattern of his life. The dying takes all day, because philosophy inhabits an old man's body. The cuts in his arms run slow, so he has the veins of his legs and knees opened too. Paulina cuts her wrists beside him until Nero, wanting no surplus cruelty on the bill, orders her saved; soldiers bind her arms, and she lives on for years, famously white. Seneca meanwhile dictates to his secretaries, pages Tacitus says were published and read in his own day, and which are gone. He drinks hemlock his doctor has kept ready, the Athenian recipe, a citation of Socrates that his cold limbs ignore. At last he is carried into a bath of hot water, and the steam does it. On the way he flicks water at the slaves nearest him and calls it a libation to Jupiter the Liberator. The funeral had been settled years before, in a will written at the height of his wealth: no procession, no speeches. That is what he got. Domínguez Sánchez painted the moment after, in 1871, for the Prado: the friends who stayed through it, one collapsed against the marble with his face in his hands, the dictation ended, the body left where the steam left it. On the lip of the bath someone has set a crown of laurel, the kind Rome handed to winners.