The young Seneca was thrilled by Attalus’ lectures and greedy for more. He tells us that he used to pester Attalus with questions and demands for more and more discussion, and Attalus would respond with a mixture of encouragement and reproach, suggesting that the boy, like all students of philosophy, needed to go slowly, taking things step by step, and not try to acquire a total knowledge of everything all at once. Seneca repeats to his own addressee, Lucilius, the advice supposedly given to himself by Attalus: “Don’t absorb all you want, but all you can hold. If your mind is good, you’ll be able to take as much as you want. The more the mind takes in, the more it opens” (Epistle 108.2).
So far, so commonsensicaclass="underline" eager young learners are often urged to walk before running. But Seneca in the same epistle also suggests that Attalus inspired him, in more specific and potentially rather more challenging ways, to practice lifelong abstinence, in diet especially. “When I used to hear Attalus speaking out against various kinds of sin, errors, and the evils of life, I often felt sorry for the human race, and saw Attalus as a sublime being, existing on a super-human level. He called himself a king, but I thought he was more than a king, because he was allowed to pass judgment on kings” (Epistle 108.13). The claim that the wise man is a king was more or less a Stoic cliché, but it acquires a particular resonance in the context of Seneca’s life, since he was to find himself in the position of having to negotiate between these two quite different and apparently incompatible kinds of control or quasi-royal power (or imperium): the kind represented by Roman emperors and the kind displayed by the Stoic sage.
Seneca goes on to tell how inspiring he found Attalus’ praises of poverty and moderation and asceticism and how eager he instantly became to live his own life in defiance of the luxury-loving consumer culture that was an essential strand among the Roman elite of his time. The real key to happiness, Attalus insisted, was to be free from cravings. This was a lesson Seneca struggled with all his life and one to which he often returns. He comments, with partially self-deprecating irony, that he was so inspired that he even managed to keep some of his ambitious resolutions toward moderation, even when he moved away from philosophical study and began a political career:
I gave up oysters and mushrooms forever. Actually they are not really food; they are just relishes designed to make the sated stomach go on eating—the favorite of foodies and people who stuff themselves beyond what they can digest: quickly down, and quickly back up again! For the same reason I have also, throughout my life, avoided perfumes, because the best scent for the body is no scent at all. That is why my stomach keeps its distance from wine. That is why throughout my life I have stayed away from baths, and have believed that the practice of boiling down the body and sweating it thin is both pointless and effeminate. Other resolutions have been broken, but in such a way that, for the areas where I gave up abstinence, I have maintained a moderation that is very near abstinence; perhaps it is even a bit more difficult, because it is easier for the will to give things up completely than to use them moderately.
(Epistle 108.15–16)
The accomplishments that Seneca learned from Attalus, and that he feels the need to boast of even in old age, are all associated with the details (or trivia) of daily lifestyle choices: “Attalus used to recommend a pillow which would be hard against the body, and now that I’m an old man, I use one so hard that no pressure marks it” (108.23). Seneca prided himself, all his life, on his ascetic habits, including an avoidance of over-eating and over-drinking. Physical moderation became absolutely central to his understanding of himself. Being a philosopher was not simply a matter of theoretical understanding; it influenced, first and foremost, his daily life—including, especially, his eating habits. He returns here to the issue of whether the outside and the inside are entirely separable, and whether the physical practices of the body are mere externals, mere indifferent things, or have some real moral value. It is important not to show off by wearing a dirty toga and scraggly beard, like people who are trying to parade their “philosophy,” but Seneca himself boasts of his capacity to behave moderately, to pass on the oysters even while living at court.
Seneca characteristically combines the exalted philosophical motivation with notions that seem far more aesthetic than moral, and with the purely practical. Giving up mushrooms is presented as a real moral or “philosophical” triumph. But it is also a pragmatic choice (it helps avoid stomach upsets). Long baths and saunas are both useless and effeminate—again a characteristic conflation of practical and quasi-moralizing forms of value judgment. The evasions here are as striking as the positive claims. Seneca does not specify which “other resolutions” he has broken, preferring rather to dwell on his lifelong success in steering clear of perfume, and of mushrooms and oysters, those foods so symbolic of luxury within Roman culture. The focus on consumption allows for a comforting sidestepping of the other issue raised by Attalus’ teaching, as described by Seneca: politics. Who is the real king, and where does his authority come from? If the Stoic philosopher can call himself a “king” and become able to pass judgment on merely worldly rulers, what implications might this have for Seneca’s relationship with the emperor Nero, whose power went far beyond that of kings? Seneca’s interest in policing the boundaries of his own body springs from his implicit recognition that the relationships of power in the body politic are far more difficult to control.
Seneca picks up the theme of his own broken resolutions in the same epistle when discussing his other main teacher of philosophy, Sotion. Sotion was a Sextian, a specifically Roman sect developed from the work of Sextius and his son. Seneca was inspired by the work of Sextius throughout his life, commenting in the Epistles on how uplifting he still finds it to read him: “He is alive; he is strong; he is free; he is more than a man; he fills me with a mighty confidence before I close his book” (Epistle 114.3). The Sextians, like the Stoics, insisted that virtue and an avoidance of consumerism were essential for happiness, although the Sextians had a more practical bent than many Stoics: they mocked some of the more obscure and abstract discussions favored by Greek practitioners of Stoicism. The central difference between the Sextians and the Stoics was that unlike the Stoics, Sextians favored withdrawal from the political arena.
The Sextians rejected the consumerism and luxury of contemporary elite Roman society. They were vegetarians: they believed that eating meat was unnecessary and unhealthy. This was just one mark of the pragmatism on which the school prided itself. Seneca read Sextius with attention and admiration and followed in his practice of daily self-examination. The Sextians saw themselves as quite distinct from the Stoics, although Seneca conflates the two schools; unlike the Stoics, they favored withdrawal from political life, and unlike the (Greek) Stoics, they had no patience for logic or any abstruse abstract thinking. They rejected the Stoic idea that the perfect wise man may never really exist. It was partly from Sextians like Fabianus that Seneca drew his model of philosophy grounded in basic common sense—a notion that he also viewed as specifically Roman.22 Moreover, Sotion may have written a treatise on anger—an inspiration for Seneca’s own work on the subject.