Seneca received a first-rate education and as a young man became a successful politician. But in 37 ce, he came into conflict with the emperor Caligula and barely escaped a death sentence. Four years later, in 41 ce, Seneca was accused of having an improper relationship with the niece of the emperor Claudius, who consequently banished him to the island of Corsica. Seneca remained there until 49 ce, when he was summoned back to Rome to tutor the twelve-year-old Nero, who would become emperor in 54 ce after Claudius's death. Seneca became one of the young Nero's most trusted and powerful advisors, but as the emperor became more corrupt, Seneca became less powerful. He received permission to retire in 62 ce, but three years later, Nero accused Seneca of conspiring against him and ordered Seneca to commit suicide by slitting his own wrists.
Seneca was a well-known member of the Stoic school of philosophy. Stoics held that people achieved the greatest good by living a life founded on reason and in harmony with nature. Stoics also believed that wealth and social position were ultimately unimportant because reason and virtue were available to everybody. In fact, two of the most famous Roman Stoics were the slave Epictetus (55-153) and the emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180). As a Stoic, Seneca believed that excessive passions diluted the influence of reason, that the point of living is to live virtuously, and that one could be happy and virtuous in any physical or economic condition.
"On Liberal and Vocational Studies" is the eighty-eighth of 124 letters from Seneca that are collectively known as the "Moral Epistles." In this letter, Seneca attempts to define liberal studies and separate them clearly from vocational training. During Seneca's time, a "liberal" education was the kind of education appropriate for a liber, or a free person. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Seneca was unwilling to defend pursuits such as literature, music, geometry, and astronomy by arguing that they made people virtuous. This argument, Seneca believed, reduced the liberal arts to a sort of moral propaganda. They do not convert people to virtue, he insists; rather, they are the raw materials out of which a virtuous life can be built—and as such they are indispensible to the functioning of a free society.
Much of Seneca's philosophical work comes to us in the form of letters to other people. As you read Seneca's argument, consider how his use of the second-person address ("You want to know . . . ", "You teach me") creates a connection with the reader and constructs his own ethos as a writer.
Letter LXXXVIII
You want to know my attitude towards liberal studies. Well, I have no respect for any study whatsoever if its end is the making of money. Such studies are to me unworthy ones. They involve the putting out of skills to hire, and are only of value in so far as they may develop the mind without occupying it for long. Time should be spent on them only so long as one's mental abilities are not up to dealing with higher things. They are our apprenticeship, not our real work. Why "liberal studies" are so called is obvious: it is because they are the ones considered worthy of a free man.[7] But there is really only one liberal study that deserves the name—because it makes a person free—and that is the pursuit of wisdom. Its high ideals, its steadfastness and spirit make all other studies puerile and puny in comparison. Do you really think there is anything to be said for the others when you find among the people who profess to teach them quite the most reprehensible and worthless characters you could have as teachers? All right to have studied that sort of thing once, but not to be studying them now.
The question has sometimes been posed whether these liberal studies make a man a better person. But in fact they do not aspire to any knowledge of how to do this, let alone claim to do it. Literary scholarship concerns itself with research into language, or history if a rather broader field is preferred, or, extending its range to the very limit, poetry. Which of these paves the way to virtue? Attentiveness of words, analysis of syllables, accounts of myths, laying down the principles of prosody? What is there in all this that dispels fear, roots out desire, or reins in passion? Or let us take a look at music, at geometry; you will not find anything in them which tells us not to be afraid of this or desire that—and if anyone lacks this kind of knowledge all his other knowledge is valueless to him. The question is whether or not that sort of scholar is teaching virtue. For if he is not, he will not even be imparting it incidentally. If he is teaching it he is a philosopher. If you really want to know how far these persons are from the position of being moral teachers, observe the absence of connexion between all the things they study; if they were teaching one and the same thing a connexion would be evident. . . .
Turning to the musical scholar I say this. You teach me how bass and treble harmonize, or how strings producing different notes can give rise to concord. I would
rather you brought about some harmony in my mind and got my thoughts into tune. You show me which are the plaintive keys. I would rather you showed me how to avoid uttering plaintive notes when things go against me in life.
The geometrician teaches me how to work out the size of my estates—rather than how to work out how much a man needs in order to have enough. He teaches me to calculate, putting my fingers into the service of avarice, instead of teaching me that there is no point whatsoever in that sort of computation and that a person is none the happier for having properties which tire accountants out, or to put it another way, how superfluous a man's possessions are when he would be a picture of misery if you forced him to start counting up single-handed how much he possessed. What use is it to me to be able to divide a piece of land into equal areas if I'm unable to divide it with a brother? What use is the ability to measure out a portion of an acre with an accuracy extending even to the bits which elude the measuring rod if I'm upset when some high-handed neighbour encroaches slightly on my property? The geometrician teaches me how I may avoid losing any fraction of my estates, but what I really want to learn is how to lose the lot and still keep smiling. . . . Oh, the marvels of geometry! You geometers can calculate the areas of circles, can reduce any given shape to a square, can state the distances separating stars. Nothing's outside your scope when it comes to measurement. Well, if you're such an expert, measure a man's soul; tell me how large or how small that is. You can define a straight line; what use is that to you if you've no idea what straightness means in life?
I come now to the person who prides himself on his familiarity with the heavenly 5 bodies:
Towards which quarter chilly Saturn draws,
The orbits in which burning Mercury roams.2
What is to be gained from this sort of knowledge? Am I supposed to feel anxious when Saturn and Mars are in opposition or Mercury sets in the evening in full view of Saturn, instead of coming to learn that bodies like these are equally propitious wherever they are, and incapable of change in any case. They are swept on in a path from which they cannot escape, their motion governed by an uninterrupted sequence of destined events, making their reappearances in cycles that are fixed. They either actuate or signalize all that comes about in the universe. If every event is brought about by them, how is mere familiarity with a process which is unchangeable going to be of any help? If they are pointers to events, what difference does it make to be aware in advance of things you cannot escape? They are going to happen whether you know about them or not. . . .