Seneca offered Nero his 300-million-sesterce fortune, was refused, and three years later was ordered to die and denied the tablets to write his will

The Stoic philosopher Seneca tutored the young Nero and then advised him as emperor. The senator Suillius, on trial, asked how Seneca had made 300 million sesterces in four years of royal favour. He said "the wills of the childless" were caught in Seneca's snare and that Italy and the provinces were drained by his lending. The historian Cassius Dio says Seneca had lent the Britons 40 million sesterces they did not want and then called it in all at once. In 62 Seneca asked Nero to take his wealth back: "Order my property to be managed by your agents and to be included in your estate." Nero refused. In 65, after the conspiracy of Piso, Nero sent the tribune Gavius Silvanus with a sentence of death. Seneca asked for tablets to write his will, and the centurion refused. Tacitus says he turned to his friends and left them "the pattern of his life." He and his wife Paulina opened their veins. Nero ordered Paulina saved, and her slaves bound her arms; she lived a few more years, very pale. Seneca took poison, which failed, and died in a steam bath. A codicil written when he was rich and powerful ordered cremation "without any of the usual funeral rites." Dio writes that Seneca had already given his entire property to Nero.