Seneca tended to fudge the differences between his two major tutors in philosophy, describing the Sextian Sotion as just a kind of Stoic. In studying philosophy with these tutors, Seneca learned the importance of the philosophical life, including a respect for multiple versions of that quest. Seneca is willing to use arguments that are not Stoic, or are even anti-Stoic. Moreover, he includes arguments that come from no philosophical school at all but are simply common sense or folk wisdom.
Sotion inspired in Seneca a brief flirtation with vegetarianism, when he was a young man of around twenty-two. Sotion told the young Seneca about two earlier philosophers who practiced vegetarianism. Pythagoras forbade eating meat on the grounds that all living beings are related, and the souls of animals migrate back and forth with the souls of humans. Sextius, Sotion’s own preferred model, recommended vegetarianism on the very different (and Sextian) grounds that consuming meat encourages a “habit of cruelty,” since it trains a person to consider unimportant the suffering and death of another living thing. Sotion, ever the pragmatist, suggested that it hardly matters which of these reasons one chooses: even if Pythagoras’ theory of transmigration is false, then vegetarianism is still a good idea, because it helps one avoid brutality and cultivate purity (by not sharing the “food of lions and vultures”); anyway, it is cheaper not to eat meat. The pragmatism and the focus on cultivating psychological health by avoiding habits of cruelty were teachings that stayed with Seneca long after the vegetarianism had lapsed.
Young Seneca kept up a meat-free diet for a whole year, finding it increasingly easy and even enjoyable. But then he met an obstacle and immediately abandoned the cause:
Some foreign rites were at that time [19 CE] being inaugurated, and abstinence from certain kinds of animal food was set down as a proof of interest in the strange cult. So at the request of my father, who did not fear prosecution, but who hated philosophy, I returned to my previous habits; and it was no very hard matter to induce me to dine more comfortably.
(Epistle 108)
The “foreign rites” in question included both Jewish and Egyptian dietary customs. We learn from Tacitus that there was in the year 19 CE a resolution in the Senate to expel four thousand freedmen-class people who were “infected with superstitions and of military age” and to transport them to Sardinia “to reduce piracy in the area, or act as a cheap sacrifice if they died from the awful climate.” All other practitioners of these rites were expelled from Italy or ordered to quit the practice.23
The episode reveals how deeply intertwined were politics and philosophy in this period. Even the apparently entirely personal decision to avoid eating meat had a political dimension and carried political risks. Any cult or group that involved a loyalty perceived to be “higher” than the citizen’s loyalty to the empire was likely to be seen as a threat, and that included both religion and philosophy. Certainly, Seneca was not practicing vegetarianism through any particular sympathy with Judaism. But Seneca’s father obviously felt that his son would be in danger in the contemporary political climate if he were even imagined to be in the same category as those dangerous practitioners of foreign cults. The Annaeus family had a particularly strong motive to try their best to fit in with the customs of Rome, since they were, after all, foreigners, or at least provincials.
Seneca declares here that his father “hated philosophy,” but as we have seen, this can hardly be taken at face value. Seneca’s own attitude is hedged with irony. He is giving a somewhat self-deprecating account of the ease with which he was induced to return to his old, meat-eating ways. But he is also mildly ironic about his father: claiming to be motivated by an abstract hatred for philosophy is, of course, what any self-respecting person who actually feared prosecution would claim as his motive. Moreover, the whole notion of “dining more comfortably” has a double resonance. It is more comfortable to eat whatever one wishes, without worrying about rules. But it is also more comfortable to eat without worrying about being prosecuted and subsequently exiled, tortured, or executed.
Physical discomfort was a major theme of Seneca’s teenage years and throughout his twenties. He was a lifelong sufferer from some kind of lung condition, which he describes primarily in terms of “snuffling”: “the snuffling of catarrh and short attacks of fever which follow after long and chronic catarrhal seizures” (Epistle 78). It is likely that Seneca had pulmonary tuberculosis, which would also help explain why he became thinner and weaker as the disease advanced, and why his contemporaries did not expect him to live long. The experience of living with chronic illness must have done much to inform Seneca’s constant sense that death was always just around the corner. If he did not die at the hands of an emperor or an assassin, his lungs would finish him off. Every breath he took was a mark of his limited time on earth.
The condition was apparently bearable in childhood and early adolescence, but it became worse later, when Seneca was in his late teens and early twenties—perhaps as a result of the move from the relatively low pollution of Spain to the built-up, dusty, and dirty big city of Rome. Seneca tells us at one stage, apparently in his late teens, he felt so miserable that he contemplated suicide. Again, his story goes that it was his father who held him back from the brink:
I finally gave up, and was reduced to dripping away in snuffles, and became totally emaciated. I often had the impulse to end my life. It was the old age of my most loving father that stopped me. You see, I didn’t focus on how capable I would be of showing courage in death, but on how incapable he would be of showing courage if he lost me. So I ordered myself to live.24
(Epistle 78.1–2)
Seneca boasts of his own capacity to face death by suicide bravely, even as he assures his readers that his own courage was not his primary concern. Moreover, the relationship between father and son is deeply ambivalent. The father is “most loving,” “most kind,” “most indulgent” (indulgentissimus): the son depends on the father’s protective love. But the father protects the son only by his weakness, not his strength, and the son is not given orders by his father, but by himself, a mark of his accession to manhood: “I ordered myself to live.”
Seneca goes on to suggest that the father was not the primary factor that prevented him from suicide—despite what he just suggested. Actually, what saved his life was philosophy: “My studies were my salvation. I ascribe it to philosophy that I recovered and got stronger. It is to her that I owe my life, and that is the least of what I owe her” (78.3). Philosophy takes over from the biological father as his inspiration and cause of recovery. His old human parent’s weakness prevents him from actually dying, but it is philosophy, his foster mother, who inspires him to live.
As often in Seneca’s prose, just as we think we have reached an end point, there turns out to be another twist. Seneca then assures his reader that the abstraction of philosophy alone was not all he lived for: it was his friends who “helped me greatly towards convalescence.” He tells that it was they (not the father or other family members) who sat at his bedside while he was sick: “I was comforted by their words, by their presence at night by my side, and by their conversation” (78.4). “Nothing,” he assures Lucilius, “refreshes and helps a sick person as much as the love of his friends; nothing is so good at taking away the dread and the fear of death.” The passage veers between three quite different reasons why Seneca felt able to pull through his illness: the pressure of obligation to his old father competes with philosophical studies and the joy of spending time with loving friends. Philosophy comes back again as the final motive, when Seneca sums up the moral. The best prescription for sickness, he tells us, is to despise death. That will cure all other human ailments (78.3). If you can stop being afraid of death, nothing else need bother you. We may remember, however, that Seneca initially described his wish to kill himself rather than suffer from his sickness. It is hard to see how despising death can be much help, if death itself is longed for but unavailable.