Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero – James Romm

“Romm adeptly expounds the puzzle of Seneca’s life.” —The New Yorker

“James Romm stitches this tapestry of evil together with a practiced hand.” —Buffalo News
 
“A splendid and incisive historical page-turner. . . . This is how history should be written: vivid storytelling springing to life at a master’s touch. . . . Romm’s narrative proves so compelling precisely because he concentrates on character, combining erudite scholarship with a novelist’s flair for telling detail. The result becomes an exception to the rule: When exercised with wisdom, dexterity and fervor, literary power shines as incorruptible.” —Wichita Eagle

“Thoroughly engaging and fascinating. . . . A high-stakes drama, laced with murders, madness, and despotism. . . . The highlight of the spring season.” —Hudson Valley News

“Romm’s compulsively readable account of imperial intrigues (incest, murder, suicide) brings contradictory visions of Seneca into three-dimensional focus.” —Chronogram

“Romm’s approach combines the commonly known with the fascinating, but more obscure. He makes a sustained point of showing Seneca as neither black nor white, neither totally deserving of his fate, nor so noble that all charges should drip off his well-oiled back. He shows different sides to the emperors as well and puts the women of the Caesars into their well-deserved positions of prominence. . . . The fact that Romm presents the Stoic philosopher in this novel complex light and that he shows sides of the more famous that aren’t common knowledge leaves me feeling [like] I got an awful lot out of reading it.  Have I mentioned, I really, really liked this book?” —N. S. Gill, About.com

“Historians from Seneca’s contemporaries through the present day have puzzled over his true character. Ascetic Stoic moralist or conniving courtier?  Romm doesn’t claim to settle the centuries-old mystery, but sheds light using ancient sources and occasional references to modern critics, joining his readers in marveling at a regime remembered by history for its shocking excesses.” —Julia Jenkins, Shelf Awareness (Starred Review)

“Extensively researched.  A book that will be welcomed by both scholars and those with a more casual interest in history. In addition and most important to our time is the detailed study of power politics and the inevitable consequences of weakness and corruption allowing power to be concentrated into few hands… An engrossing account of a time when rational thought was set aside in favor of passion and when good men cowed in the face of tyranny and did nothing to stem it.” —New York Journal of Books

James Romm is the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. His books on the ancient world include Ghost on the Throne, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought, Herodotus and, as editor, The Landmark Arrian: The Campaigns of Alexander.