He wrote the life of a man the emperor wanted forgotten. Domitian had him executed and his books burned in the Forum, which is the surest sign that the writing had worked.
Herennius Senecio came from Baetica in Roman Spain. He held the quaestorship and then declined to stand for any further office, which under Domitian was itself read as a statement. He belonged to the circle around the family of Thrasea Paetus, the group modern historians call the Stoic opposition.
In AD 93 he and the younger Pliny successfully prosecuted Baebius Massa for misconduct as governor of Baetica. Massa struck back with a charge against Senecio and then dropped it. Another prosecutor, Mettius Carus, did not.
The charge that stuck concerned a book. Fannia, the daughter of Thrasea Paetus and the widow of Helvidius Priscus, had asked Senecio to write her husband's life and had given him her husband's notebooks to work from. Helvidius had been executed by Domitian's father. Praising him in writing, twenty years on, was treated as treason.
Senecio was condemned and executed in AD 93. At his trial he said the book had been written at Fannia's request; asked directly, she confirmed it and confirmed that the notebooks were hers to give. Pliny records that she said nothing that would have reduced her own danger. She was exiled and got the notebooks out with her.
Tacitus, writing five years later, describes the sentence that followed the men: the officials were ordered to burn the books in the Comitium and the Forum. He adds that the authorities imagined they were burning the voice of the Roman people, and notes drily that the teachers of philosophy were expelled at the same time.
This is one of the better attested episodes of the period, since Tacitus and Pliny both knew the people involved. The book itself is lost; nothing survives of what Senecio actually wrote about Helvidius. What survives is the fact that it was written and the record of what it cost.
Senecio makes the division concrete in an unusual way. Whether the book survived was never his; the fire settled that. Whether it was written was entirely his, and it is the only reason we can still name either man. That the emperor burned the pages is what history remembers about the emperor.
Yours, Not Yours · A Stoic practice ground · All cases · Questions or suggestions