… in rope, in mica, Muscovy-stone [a kind of transparent stone used for the luxury of windows], in the charm of its paints and dyes, in the workmen’s diligence, in the slaves’ good training, in the toughness of the people’s bodies, and in the strength of their hearts.
(Pliny, Natural History 37.77 [37.203])
Pliny clearly sees Spain as a rich source of material and human capital, which can be shipped to the urban capital. Its specialty products mentioned here include a plant used to make rope and rugs, “Spanish broom”; mica, a transparent stone that was used for making windows that could actually let in light, an important item in elite houses; colorful paint to adorn the walls and statuary of the rich; and workers and slaves, with usefully strong bodies and biddable minds, who could extract and manufacture the products. As Pliny suggests, Spain was an essential component in the visible wealth of the Roman elite.
But those who lived in Hispania could also enjoy the natural wealth of the country in a more direct way, through farming and viticulture. An almost exact contemporary, Columella (4–70 CE), was born and raised in Roman Gades (modern Cadiz). After a stint in the army, he returned to the Spanish countryside and eventually produced one of the most influential Roman handbooks on agriculture, the still-extant De Re Rustica (On the countryside). Columella and Seneca probably knew each other and bonded over their shared love of viticulture; Columella praises Seneca’s erudition and his skill in estate management in his villa at Nomentum, writing that “the neighbourhood of Nomentum is very famous, especially the part owned by Seneca, a man of exceptional talent and learning, on whose estates we gather that every part-acre (iugerum) of vineyard has usually yielded eight sacks.”9 Seneca himself presumably spent his early childhood on an estate that grew both olives and vines, probably managed by his competent mother Helvia.10 He developed a lifelong love for, and interest in, gardening and viticulture, and grew vines on his own Italian estates in later years.
The people of Corduba may well have been proud at the success of Seneca and his brothers once they left Spain, were educated in Rome, and became famous. A Latin epigram laments Seneca’s exile as the worst disaster to have befallen the city in its whole history, worse even than the times when Pompey, Caesar, and others attacked the town in the various battles of the civil wars:
Corduba, loosen your hair, let your face be sad,
weep and send gifts for my ashes.
Now lament, Corduba, far at a distance, for your poet,
Corduba, this is your saddest time ever.11
The sense of loyalty (if it was indeed felt by the Cordubans to Seneca) may not have been entirely mutual. Seneca includes few references to Spain in his writings but occasionally hints at a particular nostalgia for the province of his birth. In Epistle 66, he recalls the attack of the Roman general Scipio on the Spanish city of Numantia—which he razed to the ground in 133 BCE, in the course of the Third Punic War—and comments that there was enormous courage on both sides: “Great is Scipio … but great also the spirit of the defenders” (66.13). Seneca had reason to sympathize with the provincials, who were taxed and sometimes, as in the Siege of Numantia, slaughtered by their Roman overlords. But he lived much of his life as the servant of those same Roman overlords, and there is little in Seneca’s writings to suggest more than glimmerings of such sympathy. Seneca shook the dust of Spain off his sandals fairly fast, and as we will see, he was accused of financial abuse in his economic relationship with the province of Britain, lending the natives money and calling back the loans suddenly, at a huge rate of interest. If Seneca was sympathetic to the provinces, he did not let such feelings get in the way of a profit.
MOTHER AND CHILD
Boyish joy at seeing his mother (Matre uisa semper puerilis hilaritas)
—Helvia 15.2
Nothing specific is known about Seneca’s childhood. He would have had the normal upbringing of any elite Roman of his time and place. He must have spent much of his time playing with his brothers; presumably the three were fairly close in age, although the exact age gaps are not known. The boys would have had toys to play with: dolls, blocks, figurines, beads, toy carriages, and weapons (Fig. 1.2). Seneca in old age notes how highly children value their toys, treating this fact as an illustration of the vanity of human wishes: “children regard every toy as valuable, and they reckon necklaces bought for a penny as just as important as their parents and brothers” (Epistle 115.8). He suggests, too, that all of us who have not yet reached the condition of perfect wisdom are still like little children playing with their toys:
Children are greedy for knuckle-bones, nuts and coppers, but grown-ups are greedy for gold, silver and cities; children play at being magistrates, and pretend to have bordered togas, the rods of a civil servant, and a court-house, while adults play at the same thing, in the Campus Martius and Forum and Senate.
(On Constancy, 12.2–3)
Figure 1.2 Seneca in childhood would have played with toys like this painted wooden horse.
Elsewhere, Seneca vividly evokes the heedless, innocent roughness of children to their parents:
Children hit their parents’ faces, and mess up their mother’s hair, and a baby scratches, or drools on her, or pulls her dress to expose to the family’s view parts that ought to be kept hidden; and the infant doesn’t hold back from bad language. Yet we don’t count any of their actions as an insult.
(On Constancy, 10.2)
Childhood is here figured as a time that requires indulgence—children cannot help their clumsiness and their sticky drool. But it is not sentimentalized: it is a state that one ought to try to escape as soon as possible, by studying philosophy.
Whom did Seneca scratch and curse at in his babyhood? Much of his day-to-day care and supervision would have been in the hands of slaves: babysitters, nurses, teachers, musicians, entertainers, and doctors. He would have been taught to read by a slave or freedman tutor, probably using wax tablets and perhaps blocks to trace out the alphabet. Since he had a lifelong propensity to bronchial infections and probably asthma, he is likely to have spent more time than most being tended by doctors, who would usually have been Greek slaves or freedmen. The experience of being sickly was one of many factors that made Seneca later so readily attracted to philosophy, and especially to ascetic forms of philosophy. He would have grown up accustomed to the regimens associated with chronic sickness: the constant vigilance and the close attention to diet, exercise, and daily routine that were, in antiquity even more than today, a crucial element in the practice of medicine. The habit of paying close attention to himself, and of attempting daily to make progress toward an unattainable ideal of perfect health, is one that Seneca continued his whole life long. In the writings of his adulthood, the main focus has shifted from literal, physical health to the spiritual health that is the aspiration of the Stoic philosopher. But the structures of practice are much the same, involving self-restraint, careful attention and time management, and daily practice.