A Life of Seneca

3,209

Emily Wilson
Seneca: A Life
Penguin Random House UK, 2014

Martin Heidegger once famously opened a lecture on Aristotle with a rather potted biography of the philosopher known as the Stagyrite: “He was born, he lived and worked, and then he died.”

Concise, although more than a little dismissive, but biographies of great men and women necessarily decline in detail the further back in time the subject of the biography lived. This is because the historian of the classical world increasingly relies on sources which in turn rely on documentation, some fragmentary and contradictory and all of which is susceptible to the ravages of time. This is why the classicist today owes so much to the Italian Renaissance. Books that had been missing or presumed lost suddenly flooded into Europe, and a classical model for society and thought came with them. As John Dewey, the great American educationalist, pronounced concerning the importance of the literary record: Litera scripta manet. “That which is written down, remains.” Fortunately for the West, there is a good deal of documentary evidence pertaining to the great Roman philosopher and politician we know as Seneca.

Lucius Annius Seneca was born in Corduba in the Roman province of Hispania, now Spain, in 4BC, and his life coincided with one of the most dramatic, corrupt, and savage periods of Roman Imperial history. A political philosopher in the Platonic mode of the Republic, Seneca shot to fame at the court of Tiberius, but was sentenced to death by Caligula and only reprieved due to his congenital and chronic respiratory illness. He was exiled to Corsica by Claudius after a sexual scandal, then recalled by Claudius’ wife, Agrippina, to tutor her son. This was a dangerous position to hold, the son being the next mad Emperor, Nero. Just as gladiators risked their lives fighting wild animals in the Coliseum, so too men such as Seneca fought for their lives in the equally vicious arena of Roman politics. After the death of the relatively benign and wise Augustus, Seneca had to keep his wits about him under Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero. It was a time, and an imperial court, ruled by fear not of external enemies, but of those of your colleagues who wanted you dead. After tutoring the boy, Seneca later became Nero’s speechwriter, although the Emperor apocryphally known for “fiddling while Rome burned” (in fact, the author claims Nero sang a song about a fire in Troy while Rome blazed) would also exile the philosopher, at least politically speaking, and eventually command that he commit suicide in 65AD.

In Rubens’ 1612 painting of the death of Seneca, the philosopher’s eyes roll heavenwards while a young scribe anxiously takes down the philosopher and consul’s last words, despite Seneca’s life-long disdain for posterity. His right hand is also gesturing towards the heavens, while the left wrist is attended to by a surgeon who is slicing it open. The blood can be seen dripping into in a brass bowl on the floor. Rubens is known as a master painter of flesh, but his rendering of metals and surfaces repays inspection. Back in Rome, however, opening Seneca’s veins failed to kill the old man, who then failed even to succumb to the hemlock which killed Socrates, on whose life Seneca had modelled his own. Finally, he stepped into a bath whose dense steam finally did the job, as it was bound to do to a man with lifelong and chronic bronchitis. In the biography I am considering here, Seneca: A Life by Emily Wilson, the author writes that Seneca wished his death to replicate that of Plato’s mentor, but the Roman proved harder to kill. Like Socrates, Seneca held that life was preparation for death, but it seemed that although the spirit was willing, the body proved more stubborn. Wilson is also of the opinion that Seneca’s very serious breathing problems were caused by what we would call today pulmonary tuberculosis, a very horrible impediment leaving the sufferer’s lungs constantly tired from coughing. What we now call “TB” was prevalent until relatively recently, and it killed D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, George Orwell, and Franz Kafka.

Rubens also depicts Seneca as a muscular, well-built man, which may have been so due to Seneca’s lifelong regimen of exercise, but he was notoriously thin due to his relatively frugal diet. In old age he ate nothing but bread and fruit (albeit partly from fear of poisoning). Seneca informs us of the details concerning his diet, particularly in his letters, and the diets of famous thinkers are an interesting piece of marginalia: Nietzsche with his love of figs, Plato and his olives (and there must have been some quality nibbles in ancient Athens), David Hume, portly and fat and rosy-cheeked, with his beef, claret, and sheep’s head broth. My point is not the dietary secrets of the great philosophers, but that anyone should write about it all. Seneca’s description of the quotidian, everyday experience of living is the most fascinating aspect of his work. This is a genuine precursor to existentialism.

One of the most charming moments in Wilson’s book is when she describes the day a young Roman boy – usually around 15 – would stop wearing the toga with the purple stripe that indicated youth, and proudly walk out wearing his all-white toga, the symbol of the transition to manhood (Seneca’s big day for stepping out all in white was rather spoiled by a rival). It’s interesting to think about this rite of passage from boy to man, and how it has changed. The Roman change of toga evolved into Dad giving Junior the keys to the car for the first time in the 1950s (although hopefully not at 15). What the hell is it now? The last time I was in London, an alarming amount of young white men seemed to be dressed as big seven-year-olds, as if they had undergone the Roman rite of passage in reverse.

Little is known of Seneca’s childhood, but Wilson reconstructs wonderfully. Little Seneca Junior (his father was also named Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Annaeus being the family name) is depicted playing with toy horses set with wheels not from any source, but because that is what all little boys of Seneca’s class played with. Seneca’s family was of the Equestrian class, with the Senatorial class as their social superiors. His father was successful and domineering, his mother well-educated. If there was no real middle class in ancient Rome – and the author explicitly states that there was not – then the Equestrians were surely a sort of superannuated middle class, what the English used to call “upper-middle class.”

Seneca spent ten years in Egypt in his twenties, having gone there on a sort of grand tour with a great aunt. She was later of much use in Seneca’s political career, nepotism being an unspoken and yet utterly accepted aspect of Roman political advancement. When Seneca was finally made Consul by Nero in 56 AD (thus making him probably one of the hundred most important men in the known world), most of Seneca’s extended family suddenly landed plum jobs in government. But nepotism didn’t make Seneca a philosopher. That was the difference between the two realms Seneca inhabited, those of politics and philosophy. Your family connections could help you succeed in the former, but were of no use to guarantee success in the latter. You have to be a good thinker for that, a good writer. But so many men were good writers then. Writing was part-hobby, part-autodidactic, and partly a duty to their fellows and to posterity.

Seneca’s trip to Egypt had a double purpose, as long sea voyages were held to be good for sufferers of bronchial disorders. Shortly after arriving in Alexandria, with its fabled library close at hand, Seneca did what all young men would do in his position, he wrote a short history of Egypt (which has not survived). This is a feature of the classical world: that its lettered men found it educative and improving to produce written work more or less ceaselessly. The library at Alexandria was as close as the ancient world had to the internet, and all patricians contributed a vast amount. This is one reason we have so much classical documentation, because despite heavy losses, a great deal was written to begin with. In ancient Rome, if you were a man of the upper classes, you didn’t just live your life and give it some philosophical thought, you wrote about it, both for your own benefit and for that of others. Philosophy was not a hobby to fill a well-off man’s idle hours, but a serious part of one’s self-understanding, something Seneca was devoted to. He would always spend an hour or so before sleep examining his day, his reaction to situations, his likely motives, or whether he might be concealing them from himself. This self-knowledge (I’ve called it “autognosis”) is a central theme of Seneca’s life, with the proviso that that life was sharply divided into two, the public and the private. Seneca cautioned against materialism in his works and yet became so fabulously rich in such a short space of time under Nero that he was the subject of lawsuits accusing him of fraud. He preached frugality but owned many properties. He extolled the medium of friendship then betrayed friends. But he knew, one suspects, what he was doing and why he was doing it, good or bad. “The greatest empire,” Seneca wrote, “is to be emperor of oneself.” That is the throne of the Stoic.

Seneca was not a philosopher as we understand the word today. Philosophy was more of a salve, and Seneca often uses medical imagery. “Just because philosophy can’t cure everything,” he wrote, “doesn’t mean that it can’t cure anything.” Compared with many classical authors, a great deal of Seneca’s work survives, despite being estimated as just half of his total output. His writings, modelled on Cicero (all classic writers had models for their work), ask no fundamental questions of life or the world, but rather suggest ways to approach that life and live in that world. This accords with Seneca’s traditional association with the school of Stoicism.

Stoicism is traditionally represented by Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus, but its roots go deeper. Founded around 301 BC by an Athenian named Zeno, Stoicism broke off from Cynicism, and took its name from the stoa, or “painted porch”, an area of the Athenian square put aside for conversation. The triumvirate named, however, were alive and writing at a politically volatile time for the Stoics, which highlights their importance, and the importance of Stoicism as a political response as well as an ideal for living:

Stoicism was increasingly seen as a politically resistant movement, and a generation after Seneca’s death, in 65 AD, the emperor Domitian expelled philosophers from Italy – a move probably directed primarily at the Stoics.

Politics was a dangerous game, and you needed to have the right philosophy as well as the right contacts. One of Aesop’s fables often cited by Seneca was the tale of the sick lion, who tries to entice the kindly fox into his cave to help tend him. The fox thanks him for the offer, but declines on the grounds that he can see the footprints of other animals going into the lion’s cave, but none coming out. The corridors of Roman power were perilous places to be. Today’s politicians still walk in fear, but for their position rather than their lives. Politicians are unlikely to be stabbed to death by their colleagues, as Caesar and Nero were, or dispatched with poisoned figs, as was Claudius’ fate. But they do share with their Roman predecessors the necessity to guard their language, and to hide their real motives and intentions by dissimulating. Wilson offers an interesting glimpse into power politics under Tiberius, as Seneca admires a Stoic philosopher named Junius Catus for his cool reply to Caligula when told of his impending execution. “Thank you, your noble Majesty,” said the Stoic, and Seneca finds him exemplary of the expedient of dissimulatio:

In a world where saying the wrong thing could get you killed, but where abject flattery might turn out to be just as offensive as defiance, it was necessary for those near the emperor to cultivate modes of not saying what they meant, or rather, of saying things that could have more than one meaning (dissimulatio).

It is nice to see that something of the classical tradition still survives in today’s politics.

Seneca’s tutorship of Nero lasted five years and was centered around the study of rhetoric. Agrippina, Nero’s mother and Claudius’ wife, did not want the boy taught philosophy, which she considered unsuitable for a future emperor, with Stoicism receiving a special mention just to warn Seneca off. He would make his feelings known in later polemical works attacking “the notion that philosophy in general, and Stoicism in particular, was incompatible with practical politics.” As well as disguising his Stoic leanings, Seneca had the additional task of attempting to keep the emperor-to-be’s mind away from hunting and chariot-racing, as well as dealing with Nero’s violent and unpredictable personality, possibly summed up by Seneca in a quote the author describes as coming from “an unreliable ancient source”:

Seneca quickly realized that Nero was born savage and cruel and tamed him, often saying to his close associates that that savage lion had only to taste human blood once for his inborn savagery to return.

Once Nero was in power, the twin poles of Seneca and Burrus, a military commander, led to a fairly stable first five years (although the author warns against exaggerating the pair’s influence). But Nero gradually slipped the leash, and became, to a degree, the monster of legend, having his opponents beheaded and the heads brought to him so he could mock a receding hairline or a big nose. Nero had already had Claudius’ son, Britannicus, poisoned to clear the way to the throne. He would later poison his mother, using the services of the wonderfully named Locusta the Poisoner.

Seneca probably married twice, but says little about his second wife, Paulina. She bore him a child, but it died in infancy, which was far more common then than now. His work indicates that he took the typical view of marriage held by those of his class. Co-operation, forming a mutually beneficial working unit to sustain household and parenthood, was more important than passion or trophy wives. He loved his wife because she was a good wife to whom he endeavored to be a good husband, often failing as many men have since. His treatise On Marriage, the author suggests, may have been an attempt to clear his name after the sexual indiscretion that got Seneca exiled. The system of exile is wryly amusing, although the exiled would not have seen it that way. There was a tiered system, with the island of exile getting further away from the mainland depending on the seriousness of the crime. Seneca’s we are told, was relatively mild, and he was sent to Corsica, eventual birthplace of Napoleon, in 42 AD. He stayed there for eight years before Agrippina hired him as the tutor to her monstrous son. Seneca most likely wrote many of his most famous books on Corsica, and he certainly wrote On Anger, for which he must have known what he was writing about. “Anger cares not for itself,” Seneca wrote on the craggy island, “it cares only to harm others.”

The twilight of Seneca’s life saw him desperately trying to retire, against the wishes of Nero. He had fallen out of favor at court, and Seneca knew, the author tells us, that he was living on borrowed time. He used both his illness and his philosophy as an excuse to stay out of Nero’s way after the death of Burrus, the other man apart from Seneca who had any control over the rampaging emperor. Then, in 65 AD, a plot to kill Nero was discovered, centered around a man named Gaius, and Rome became like one of those scenes in mafia movies where people start getting whacked. Despite the author claiming that there was only “fairly circumstantial” evidence that Seneca was involved in the planned coup, his association with some of the conspirators put him squarely in the frame. He was questioned by a tribune at one of his country retreats, and a military delegation visited him shortly afterwards for the rather difficult – but ultimately Stoical – death noted above. Seneca seemed to want his death choreographed, although Tacitus (Wilson’s main source) mentions no last words. His wife, Paulina, was more or less hauled into the bath to share his fate, and although her wrists were cut – by Seneca? – she survived her husband. “Narcissism, rather than philosophical calm,” writes Wilson, “is the keynote of this death scene.” It certainly does not have the Socratic placidity Seneca strove for.

Posterity treated Seneca kindly, after something of a false start. A supposed correspondence between Seneca and Paul even interested Augustine, but was ultimately supposed to be spurious, not a hoax, perhaps, but a fictional dialogue quite common in the classical world. The medieval world knew Seneca mostly through the Letters to Lucilius, with their wonderful, simple moral homilies and sage advice for the simple life, and Dante called him a “moral teacher”, Seneca morale. In his work, perhaps, if not always in his private life. The early moderns were in a position to translate and print editions of Seneca, Erasmus producing one of the earliest complete editions. The Renaissance favored Seneca’s prose: his short, aphoristic sentences affecting literary style, which led to “a snappy, polished literary style adopted by some writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.” Machiavelli, however, was greatly opposed not to Seneca’s style, but his belief in a magnanimous ruler. This was not Machiavelli’s point of view, as readers of The Prince will know. He would have preferred Nero. Descartes’ was a Stoic philosophy, in essence, and Senecan thought is surely present in the Enlightenment. T. S. Eliot would go on to write two essays about Seneca, Stoicism, and tradition, with a particular interest in Seneca’s strong influence on Elizabethan and Jacobean theater, Seneca also being a noted tragedian.

Finally, Wilson puts her cards on the table with regards to Seneca’s Stoicism:

Seneca’s Stoicism is the philosophical response to an elite society that has grown increasingly consumerist and materialistic as a result of the vast growth of the Roman empire.

Consumerist and materialistic. Whatever would Seneca make of modern Rome, and the West of today in general? “Don’t give a man what he wants,” he advises. “Teach him what he doesn’t need.” Wise words today, perhaps. But if philosophy, or a type or school of philosophy, is a response to such a Gomorrah, then its founders should have much to tell us, and Seneca is in many ways the epicenter of Stoicism, which he saw as both a philosophical and a political response to life. Wilson’s book is a brilliant account of a conflicted man who achieved and suffered in equal measure, and who certainly lived in interesting times. Perhaps a return of Stoicism, of the old Senecan wisdom, is long overdue in our own.