Seneca emerges in this self-presentation as preoccupied with some unspecified fear whose nature and solution are constantly shifting, even in the course of a single paragraph. Death mutates from cure to disease and back again, but the constant is fear. In Freudian terms, Seneca’s attitude toward death is a form of “neurotic fear,” in which the negative emotional affect is related only symbolically, not empirically, to the object of the fear.25 Seneca’s pathological manifestations of obscurely motivated anxiety suggest his desperate yearning for some place of safety and psychological relief in multiple locations—family, friends, and philosophy (and later, as we shall see, political power, money, and social status)—despite the fact that they offer incompatible kinds of comfort.
The feeling of unlocalized dread is powerfully expressed in a number of Seneca’s works. Perhaps its most memorable expression comes in the tragedies, the earliest of which may have been composed when Seneca was still fairly young: the sense of dread was something he carried with him all his life. Seneca’s Oedipus declares,
This fear drove me away from my father’s kingdom.
For this I fled and left the gods of my hearth.
I mistrusted myself, but kept safe your laws,
Nature! When your dread is vast, you must feel fear
even at things you think impossible.
I feel terrified at everything, and do not believe in myself.
(Oedipus 22–27)
The specific fears of Oedipus—told by an oracle that he was fated to kill his father and marry his mother—were not applicable to Seneca’s situation; despite his obvious admiration and affection for his mother and his difficult relationship with his father, there is no particular reason to think he had a classic Freudian Oedipus complex (at least, no more than for anybody else). But the psychological state of constant dread that cannot be fully articulated, involving mistrust of the self as much as of any external object, was a central component of Seneca’s experience. Like Oedipus, Seneca was constantly trying to get away, to withdraw, to find a place safe from the nameless horror. Like his own Oedipus, he seems to have repeatedly suspected that he might carry the objects of his fears away with him, however far he ran.
II
Nowhere and Everywhere
*
They stand around as judges of my words and deeds.1
Seneca’s account of his illness and recovery in the Epistles suggests that it was his anxious father, his devoted male friends, and his own intellectual interests that drew him back from the brink of death. But a quite different picture is painted in the treatise to his mother, To Helvia. Here we learn that when Seneca’s illness became crippling, his mother’s kind “sister” (presumably a half-sister) stepped in and whisked him off to Egypt, where it was hoped that the warm climate would cure his affliction. This aunt, like Seneca’s mother herself, was a highly educated and well-connected woman. The reason she herself was going to Egypt was that she was married to the Roman prefect of Egypt, Gaius Galerius.
Egypt was agreed to be the best possible cure for those afflicted by lung disease. Pliny tells us that the reason it is so beneficial is not so much for its own sake as for the length of time it took to get there: the sea voyage is good for the chest, since seawater dries out congestion from the lungs, and even seasickness can be healthy for the head, eyes, and chest. Other good cures for this kind of medical condition included leek juice (Pliny, NH, 20.22), or, even better, the blood of wild horses, or failing that, a potion made of asses’ milk mixed with leeks, with the whey mixed up with nasturtium and honey (Pliny, NH, 28.55). Also good for asthma or any kind of shortness of breath was the liver of a fox mixed in red wine, or the gall of a bear taken in water (Pliny, NH, 28.55). Seneca, who was under the care of expensive doctors all his life, presumably tried them all.
Seneca spent as much as ten years in Egypt, from the age of around twenty-five to his mid-thirties. He would have spent the time mostly in Alexandria, which was a large, multicultural metropolis that had been under the rule of the Roman empire since Octavian (later titled Augustus) defeated Cleopatra in 31 BCE. Presumably he was laid low by sickness for some of the time but recovered enough to continue his studies and his writing. A particularly appealing feature of Alexandria for Seneca would have been the presence of the famous library, which had been established in the reign of the Ptolemies (Greek-speaking Macedonian rulers of Egypt from the third century BCE onward). The library was said to have been burned by Julius Caesar, perhaps only partially, but this may be a myth; in any case, there were plenty of books available in Alexandria. Seneca studied the local culture, customs, and history and composed a treatise about Egypt, which is lost. He also had the leisure to continue in his philosophical studies, and it is quite possible that other writings date from this period; unfortunately, none can be dated with certainty, and it is impossible to say more about these formative years.
The health-cure seems to have worked, albeit rather slowly. Seneca notes that, by his aunt’s “affectionate and motherly nursing, I regained my strength after a long period of illness” (Helvia). He sailed back from Egypt to Rome in 31 CE. The voyage would have taken at least three weeks, first crossing the sea from Alexandria to Crete, then on to the north of Sicily, then sailing round the island and up the coast of Italy to Rome. It is possible that he was traveling on the same boat as his uncle, who drowned while making the crossing at this time. Or, perhaps more likely, Seneca traveled separately, on a more seaworthy vessel. In any case, Seneca and his aunt survived and reached Rome safely.
By this stage, Seneca would have been around thirty-five, rather late to begin a political career by traditional Roman standards. But Seneca was fortunate that his aunt was both able and willing to help him get ahead. As he reminds his mother,
she used her influence to get me a quaestorship, and although she was very shy of talking or greeting people in a visible way, her love for me overcame her nerves. Nothing got in the way of her even being pro-active on my behalf, despite her withdrawn mode of life, her modest country manners amid so many brazen women, her quietness and her habit of living a retiring life, far from bustle.
(To Helvia 19)
The quaestorship was the first official rank on the standard career ladder for ambitious Roman elite men, the cursus honorum (the sequence of offices). In normal circumstances, a man was expected to serve ten years in the military as a general before attaining this rank. Seneca entirely skipped this step, thanks no doubt to his aunt’s influence.
Seneca had shown no interest in entering public life until this point. Perhaps he was so disabled by sickness during his twenties that he felt unable to aspire to any future except death. Perhaps he did not even want a career in his youth; he may have hoped for a quieter life as a philosophical writer and teacher. Perhaps, too, he shrank from climbing the political ladder in fear of the particular dangers of life in the court of Tiberius (Fig. 2.1). But presumably by the time he arrived back in Rome, he was ready to begin his political career. Seneca works hard to present his aunt’s ambition on his own behalf as a becoming kind of paradox: she pushed him without being pushy, she helped him succeed in the big city despite being not at all a big-city kind of woman. The rhetoric works to dispel any suspicion the reader might otherwise have, not only about the aunt, but also about Seneca himself. He implies that he, too, was a shy country boy, devoid of all personal ambition, who just happened to find a good career landing in his lap. There is no reason to believe that this pose corresponded to reality, although it shows how fluently Seneca had already mastered the social gestures necessary for success.