Seneca would have spent a lot of time in early childhood with his mother. Roman fathers typically left their children in the care of the women of the house until they had survived toddlerhood and were at an age to begin their “real” education, in rhetoric and philosophy. Helvia may have breastfed him herself—a practice associated with old Roman virtues, against the newfangled trend towards using wet nurses. Seneca’s mother was an essential figure in his early years, and she continued to have an important influence on his later life.12
Helvia may have been a Roman from Italy, whom his father might have met on one of his many trips to the big city. But it is perhaps more probable that she was a member of the Corduban Hispanic-Roman elite. She was a well-born, well-educated woman from a well-connected and wealthy family. Helvia’s mother had died when the girl was born, so she had grown up under the care of a stepmother. She managed to behave so nicely that she transformed this notoriously difficult relationship, such that the stepmother became like a real mother to her. Presumably the stepmother had at least one biological daughter, a stepsister who became like a real sister to Helvia; this is the easiest way to explain the puzzle that Helvia is described by Seneca as an “only child” (unica), but he also tells us that she had a sister, Seneca’s aunt. This aunt would later become an important patroness of her nephew in his early adulthood, as we shall see. The house of Helvia’s childhood was, so her son said, “old fashioned and strict,” and she carried those traditional values with her in later life.
This was a period in which more elite Roman women were receiving a literary education. The practice was controversiaclass="underline" a generation after Seneca, the satirist Juvenal declares that women “should not know all the tales from history” and claims, “I really hate the woman who checks up and leafs through Palaemon’s grammar, always preserving the rules and laws of language, and who, with her love of archaism, remembers poetry I don’t know” (Satire 7.434–456). Like many of Juvenal’s satirical poses, this declaration rebounds to the discredit of the speaker, presented by the poet as an idiot whose complaint is only that women are capable of an intellectual rigor that he himself cannot muster. But such idiocy was not unusual.
Seneca, by contrast, expressed great respect for his mother’s intellectual capacities as well as for her good character. Throughout his life, Seneca developed friendships with strong and well-educated women (including, most importantly, Nero’s mother Agrippina and her sister Julia Livilla). His relationships with his mother and aunt prepared him to see women, if not as equals, at least as worthy of deep respect. Probably Helvia was the first to introduce him to history and poetry, sowing a lifelong love for the works of Virgil and Ovid (whom Seneca quotes constantly). He expresses regret only that she was not allowed to pursue her education further—a sentiment that involves implicit critique of his then-dead father (To Helvia 17: “If only my father, who really was the best of men, had resisted the tradition of his ancestors and let you make a thorough study of philosophy, rather than just a smattering!”). Helvia probably married very young: it was common for girls in the highest classes of Roman society to marry soon after puberty. At the time of marriage, she would have already been able to read and write, and had basic knowledge of literature and history. Helvia managed to make the most of her limited education. “Thanks to your keen intellectual appetite, you learned more than one could have expected in the time” (To Helvia 17).
Most of the evidence we have about Seneca’s mother comes from the only published work he addressed directly to her, To Helvia, composed to console the mother for the son’s own exile. It is essential to realize that this highly artificial and essentially public document is quite different from a private family letter, of the kind that might be available to a modern biographer. Seneca was engaging in this text with the long-established ancient genre of the “consolation,” a public essay in which the author is expected to set out the traditional modes of overcoming grief and other kinds of emotional disturbance—and ideally, to display his virtuosic rhetorical artistry in doing so (a task at which Seneca certainly succeeds). Moreover, Seneca had personal motives for presenting his mother herself, and his own relationship with her, in the rosiest possible light. A major purpose of the Helvia was to assure the Roman reading public of the moral and, especially, sexual integrity of the whole family, in the wake of his own adultery scandal (on which, see Chapter II). There was therefore a clear motive for presenting the addressee as a particularly upright person. In the same piece, he praises his mother to the skies, emphasizing not only her intellectual capacities but also her extraordinary chastity. She was, her son insisted, always modest in her dress, “not tempted by gems or pearls.” She never dressed to hide her pregnancy, or wore clothes that clung too tightly to her body, or wore makeup: “your greatest glory has been your modesty” (To Helvia 16). We can take all this with a pinch of salt. Seneca presents his mother in stylized terms here, as the ideal chaste Roman matron.
Despite all these caveats, there is no reason to doubt that Helvia was indeed an intelligent, educated, respectable, and well-respected woman, who may indeed have been relatively restrained in her style of dress, and who was—as Seneca’s essay also implies—devoted to her sons and eager to see them flourish. It is plausible that Seneca had a close relationship with his mother, which included intellectual conversation as well as emotional closeness. He writes—in self-promoting but perhaps also truthful fashion—of his mother’s pleasure in his company, and his in hers, painting himself as the confidant and comforter to whom she turned in times of trouble, and also suggesting that she took a serious interest in his studies and writing (Helvia 15.1–4). He emphasizes, too, his own pleasure at spending time with his mother, evoking the “boyish joy he always felt at seeing his mother” (Helvia 15)—a phrase that speaks to the continuity between boyhood and adulthood that was maintained by the close bond between mother and son.
SENECA’S FATHER AND BROTHERS
We learn not for school, but for life (Non vitae sed scholae discimus)
—Epistle 106.12
Seneca’s relationship with his father was marked less by joy (a term that does not come up in any of his references to the father) than by pressure. The father clearly hoped to see all three of his sons succeed, both in their careers (and the concomitant wealth and social status) and in adherence to traditional Roman values. Seneca’s father was the major force behind the son’s early education in both rhetorical training and philosophy.
Seneca wrote a biography of his father, which is lost. But despite this, we know quite a lot about Seneca the Elder, since much of his own work survives. He came from a wealthy family of the equestrian rank. The Roman upper class was divided between senatorial and equestrian classes, with equestrians (or “knights”) being the lower tier. The equestrian class was lower-upper-class, not middle class: the bourgeoisie did not exist in ancient Rome, and there was a vast gap between the wealth and social position even of equestrians, and that of the workers and tradespeople. The Annaei were not at the absolute top tier of Roman society, but they were rich and privileged, even before the son’s stratospheric rise to the heart of the court.