Map 1: The Roman Empire in Seneca’s Time.
Map 2: Roman Spain.
Map 3: Roman Italy.
Map 4: The City of Rome under Nero.
Introduction: “A Rough Road to Greatness”
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Lucius Annaeus Seneca died in an extremely dramatic fashion in 65 CE.1 He was forced to kill himself, having been accused of involvement in a conspiracy to kill the emperor Nero. A generation after his death, the historian Tacitus gives a vivid account of the scene, telling us that he died surrounded by his friends and in the company of his wife, who was willing to kill herself at his side. He was a man of around sixty-five or seventy, his body strong from regular exercise but skinny from his frugal diet of bread and fruit and weakened by lifelong chronic bronchitis and asthma. Cutting his wrists failed to do the trick, as did the traditional dose of hemlock. He died only once he stepped into a hot bath and managed to suffocate in the steam.
Seneca’s death raises many of the puzzles and paradoxes that we will encounter in his life. He modeled his conduct in these last hours on that of Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo, who spends his last afternoon on earth discussing philosophy with his friends before calmly drinking the hemlock and calmly passing away.2 But Seneca’s death was harder to achieve. He failed to die by the hemlock, or from the less philosophical wrist-slashing, and had to resort to the innovative use of a steam bath to stop his breath—a more fitting end for a man who suffered from life-long breathing problems, and a mark of his distance from the Socratic model. Moreover, Seneca is a Socrates without a Plato willing to tell his story. Instead, he is surrounded by a group of nameless, undifferentiated “friends,” whose main purpose is to admire the great man and to record his words and deeds for posterity: Seneca had created for himself a mirror-image of the imperial Roman court, with the Philosopher as equivalent to the Emperor. Tacitus slyly tells us that he will not transcribe Seneca’s last words in his narrative, since they are already part of his public works. He hints that Seneca’s own self-publicizing may make him less admirable than his old Athenian model.
Socrates’ life and his death were intertwined with his philosophical activities. He invented new gods and corrupted young people by his teaching. Seneca followed Socrates in claiming that a wise man spends his whole life learning how to die (tota vita discendum est mori—On the Shortness of Life, 7.3). But he died for reasons that seem to have very little to do with his philosophy, or indeed, might seem to be antithetical to his intellectual pretensions. He was closely entangled with the intrigues of Nero’s court, having served both as his tutor and, later, his advisor and speechwriter. Nero wanted Seneca dead because he suspected, probably rightly, that Seneca wanted him dead; the details of Seneca’s philosophical views (on ethics, the gods, or anything else) had little or nothing to do with it. His death had political causes, even if he managed to give it a philosophical turn. The paradoxes of being both “a philosopher in politics” and a politician in philosophy are central to his life (Fig. I.1).3
The story of Socrates’ death, as told by Plato, gives an impression of complete calm, total control, and cohesiveness. Not a word, not a gesture, not a limb is out of place; the whole thing is beautifully choreographed and utterly harmonious. Seneca’s death, on the other hand, seems haphazard and full of mistakes. Nothing goes according to plan. He fails to die by the suicide method he had picked and fails again on his second attempt. It is a story of hesitations, reversals, and multiple changes of mind. When juxtaposed with the death of Socrates, Seneca’s death looks like a failed version of the philosophical end. This Roman philosopher cannot manage to die easily, even after a long life devoted to preparing for it; there is tension, to the last minute, in his attenuated, skinny tendons. The painter Rubens, deeply influenced by Seneca, viscerally makes this point in his famous painting of the death scene.4 Seneca died in a state of struggle against the political powers that were. The attempt to die, and to attain philosophical calm, takes every nerve and muscle in his body. “Living is fighting,” he declared (Epistle 96.5), and dying, too, involved a battle, as well as a long process of trial and error.
Figure I.1 Seneca modeled his death, and to some extent his life, on those of Socrates.
Seneca’s legacy, in both literal and metaphorical senses, is also ambiguous. He promised to leave behind, as his best achievement, the “image of his life.” But he also vowed to leave money to his friends in his will, to show his gratitude to them for their “services” to him. The image of a philosopher who has amassed enormous amounts of money to leave behind him, and one who is obviously obsessed with his own postmortem reputation (rather than, say, with the immortality of the human soul), seems to fall rather short of the Socratic ideal. Moreover, there is no particular reason to believe that Nero honored Seneca’s wilclass="underline" probably he seized the estate back for himself. His wife, who had planned to die with him, was saved by the soldiers and ended up outliving him. Seneca’s dying words are not recorded, at least by Tacitus, our only source. Seneca’s time of power and influence was necessarily brief. It was a compromised death, full of second and third guesses, that follows a life of compromises and complex negotiations, between ideal and reality, philosophy and politics, virtue and money, motivation and action.
The story of Seneca’s life raises a broader, indeed universal question, which has particular resonance in our time: What counts as success? This is an issue that runs through all Seneca’s literary output. He constantly stages conflicts between different models of the good or successful life. He rose from a provincial background and suffered exile and disgrace, but in middle age Seneca found himself suddenly one of the most powerful men in Rome, and eventually right-hand advisor to the emperor himself. He felt increasingly trapped, alienated, and terrified by his position. After begging in vain to be allowed to retire, he gave back some of the wealth Nero had given him and withdrew from court in 64 CE. But retirement was not enough to save him. His condemnation on the charge of conspiracy represents the emperor’s final word against his teacher, counselor, and one-time friend.
Seneca was deeply engaged with the philosophy of Stoicism and knew that an ideal Stoic wise person ought to be free, tranquil, and happy at all times, even while dying, even in agony, even in the depths of grief, humiliation, or loss. But Seneca was also, as we shall see, highly conscious of his own distance from the Stoic ideal. He presented himself as one who is only setting out on the philosophical journey (proficiens), not as one who has achieved it. His awareness of his own imperfection is perhaps the most likeable aspect of this endlessly fascinating character. The account of Seneca’s death-scene in Tacitus shows us a philosopher who is, at the end of his life, still straining towards calm, not one who has already found all the answers. In his writing, Seneca imagines death as the easy exit that is always available: “I have made nothing easier than dying,” declares God in Seneca’s essay On Providence (6.7). He insists that we ought always to be able to rise above fortune, both good and bad, and that we can, through our own strength of will, overcome any challenge with ease: “It is not because things are difficult that we don’t dare do them; our lack of daring makes them difficult” (Epistle 104.26). But for Seneca himself, despite his courage, both dying and living were far from easy.