Seneca

Lucius Annaeus Seneca was born around 4 BCE in Corduba (Córdoba, Spain), the son of a famous rhetorician, Seneca the Elder, and was brought to Rome as a child. Sickly — he suffered from asthma and tuberculosis, and considered suicide in his youth — he studied rhetoric and philosophy, became a celebrated orator and senator, and was exiled to Corsica in 41 CE by the emperor Claudius, on a charge of adultery with the emperor’s niece. Recalled in 49 at the request of Agrippina, he became tutor to her son, the twelve-year-old Nero.

When Nero became emperor in 54, Seneca and the praetorian prefect Burrus effectively governed the empire for five years — the quinquennium Neronis, remembered as a time of good government. But Nero grew increasingly tyrannical; he murdered his mother Agrippina in 59 (Seneca may have drafted the justification to the Senate). Seneca tried to retire, offering to return his immense fortune. In 65 he was accused of joining the Pisonian conspiracy against Nero and ordered to kill himself.

Tacitus describes his death (Annals 15.60–64): forbidden to make a will, he told his friends he left them “the one thing he still had, and the best — the pattern of his life”. He opened his veins; his wife Pompeia Paulina tried to die with him (Nero’s soldiers saved her). Old and thin, his blood flowed slowly; he took hemlock, like Socrates, without effect; finally he was carried into a hot bath and suffocated by the steam.

The paradox of Seneca

Seneca preached the indifference of wealth while being one of the richest men in Rome; preached virtue while serving a murderous emperor; preached calm while writing the most violent tragedies in Latin. Critics, from his own time (the senator Suillius) to ours, have called him a hypocrite. Seneca answered in On the Happy Life: “I am not a sage… I speak of virtue, not of myself.” His defenders see in him an honest picture of a man trying, and failing, to live up to philosophy amid power.

The Letters to Lucilius

His masterpiece is the 124 Moral Letters to Lucilius (Epistulae Morales), written in his last years to a younger friend. They are informal, vivid, personal: he writes about crowds at the games, his asthma, a visit to his old country house, the noise of a bathhouse beneath his lodgings. Each letter carries a lesson, often ending with a quotation (in the early letters, frequently from Epicurus — “I am in the habit of crossing over into the enemy’s camp, not as a deserter, but as a scout”).

Famous themes:

• Time (Letter 1): “Hold every hour in your grasp… Nothing is ours except time.”
• Crowds (7): “I come home more greedy, more cruel and inhuman, because I have been among human beings.”
• Friendship (3, 9): “Consider for a long time whether you should admit a given person to your friendship; but when you have decided, welcome him with all your heart.”
• Slaves (47): “They are slaves,” people say. No — “they are human beings… unpretentious friends… fellow slaves, if you reflect that Fortune has equal rights over slaves and free men alike.”
• Death (26, 70): “It is a great thing to learn how to die.”
• Anger and travel (28): “You need a change of soul rather than a change of climate.”

Other works

• On the Shortness of Life (De brevitate vitae): “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough… if the whole of it is well invested.”
• On Anger (De ira): anger is “temporary madness”; it should not be moderated but eliminated; delay is its best remedy.
• On Tranquillity of Mind, On Providence (why good people suffer — “fire tests gold, misfortune brave men”), On Clemency (addressed to young Nero), On Benefits, Natural Questions, and the Consolations to his mother and others.
• Tragedies: Medea, Phaedra, Thyestes, Oedipus, Agamemnon, Hercules Furens and others — full of ghosts, revenge, horror and rhetorical speeches, they were the model for Elizabethan revenge tragedy (Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and, in more transformed ways, Hamlet and Macbeth). T. S. Eliot’s essay “Seneca in Elizabethan Translation” traces the influence.

Influence

Early Christians admired him — a forged correspondence between Seneca and St Paul circulated in the Middle Ages, and Jerome counted him among Christian writers. Montaigne loved him (“Seneca is full of pointed and witty sayings”). Rousseau, Diderot, and the Renaissance Neostoics read him. His letters are now among the best-selling ancient texts.

Using Seneca in conversation

• On time: “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.”
• On travel as escape: “You need a change of soul, not a change of climate.”
• On anger: delay is the greatest remedy.
• On fear: “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality” (Letter 13).