The court of Caligula was a particularly dangerous place for anybody with intellectual talents. Seneca tells the story of one Julius Canus, a Stoic philosopher who aroused the jealousy of Caligula.5 The emperor told him that he had given orders to have him killed. Julius Canus replied, “Thank you, most excellent ruler” (On Tranquillity 14). Seneca comments that the meaning of the utterance is unclear, but “whatever he meant, it was a spirited answer.” Canus succeeded in coming across as a man of heart and integrity, but without any outright critique of the emperor. His capacity to use ambiguity was precisely the point. In a world where saying the wrong thing could get you killed, but where abject flattery might turn out to be just as offensive as outright defiance, it was necessary for those near the emperor to cultivate modes of not saying what they meant, or rather, of saying things that could have more than one meaning (dissimulatio).6 But of course, it was quite possible that, with all the good doublespeak in the world, one might still get killed. Julius Canus was executed soon afterward—but at least, so Seneca assures us, he went out with true philosophical dignity.
All this may make one wonder how Seneca himself—also a Stoic philosopher, and also a talented speaker and writer—managed to survive the reign of Caligula, and also, it seems, flourish, gaining money, reputation, and power and moving up the career ladder in this period. Contemporaries asked the same question, and the sources give one story in answer to it. We are told that Seneca,
who was superior in wisdom to all the Romans of his day and to many others as well, was nearly destroyed, despite having done nothing wrong and not even looking as if he had. It was just because he made a good speech in the senate when the emperor was present. Gaius [Caligula] ordered him to be put to death, but then let him off because he believed what one of his women said, that Seneca had a bad case of consumption and would die soon.
(Dio 59.19.7–8)
It is possible that the story is true: Seneca’s health was certainly bad, and he might plausibly have presented himself as deathly ill, even once his chronic condition was under control. Seneca may well have spoken of himself as close to death. Perhaps he really believed it. The nearness of mortality is a constant theme of his writing at all periods of his life. It is also possible that the anecdote was a fabrication invented by people sympathetic to Seneca, who were struggling to explain how he could have flourished under Caligula. In either case, a notable feature of the story is that it is through a woman that Seneca’s life is saved: silver-tongued Seneca was clearly appealing to women.
An alternative explanation is given by Seneca himself in a self-justificatory account of his life under both Caligula and Claudius. He insists that his survival of Caligula’s reign was the result of his patience and loyalty, which led him to bide his time, not submitting to the allure of suicide but instead waiting things out, for the sake of his devotion to his friends:
I didn’t rush into an extreme course of action to escape the madness of those in power. At the court of Caligula, I saw torture and fire. I knew that under him, human life had deteriorated to such an extent that those who were killed were held up as examples of his mercy. Still, I did not fall on my sword or leap into the sea with mouth wide open. I wanted to avoid the impression that all I could do for loyalty was die.
(NQ pr. 4.17)
The passage suggests that Seneca may have been involved in plots against Caligula’s life, or at least was invited to participate. Perhaps this implication is true, or perhaps it merely looked good to imply it, once Caligula was safely dead. In any case, there was no love lost between them. Caligula, speaking in sour grapes at the popularity of Seneca’s writing, criticized his style, commenting that his writings were “Just straight-up declamations: sand without lime” (Suetonius 53.2). Sand mixed with lime was used to make bricks in antiquity. The point of the critique is to suggest that Seneca’s writing is composed only of the crunchy parts, the neat one-liners that form the sand; it has nothing to glue it together. It is possible that the criticism was leveled at Seneca’s father, but probably it is more likely that the emperor was pointing out the ways that the son’s style built on that of his father.
During these years, Seneca was becoming increasingly well known as a writer. Probably the earliest of his known works, the Consolation to Marcia, dates from around 39 or 40 CE.7 It tells us a great deal about Seneca’s literary, philosophical, and social program. The piece is addressed to a noble lady named Marcia, who was a friend of Livia, the wife of Augustus. Seneca’s ostensible purpose is to “console” Marcia for the death of one of her four children: a son, Metilius, who died some three years before. The subject matter allows Seneca to define himself as an adult, one who can offer advice for a grieving mother but not himself be caught up in the emotional turmoil—and at the same time define himself as a writer.
The Marcia establishes several key components to Seneca’s prose works in philosophy. The first and perhaps most important feature about it is that it is written in Latin. Seneca marks the fact that his ambitions are as much literary as philosophical by using his own language to convey the tropes of Greek philosophy. The text is also important in positioning the author as a well-connected man, one to whom a woman like Marcia could lean on in her grief.
Many readers have found themselves puzzled by the philosopher’s distanced stance to a devastating loss; one critic comments that Seneca “notably lacks empathy towards Marcia’s individual grief and loss.”8 This response, however, is not entirely fair. After all, the genre of the literary consolation was not supposed to be a display of “empathy.” Rather, its purpose—which was well understood by Roman readers—was to allow the writer to display his own ability to rework the clichés that are always used to cheer up mourners, in fresh and vivid ways. The piece does acknowledge (very few) individual features of the dead son, including his beauty. But mostly, Seneca works to redirect Marcia’s attention away from the son and toward her other relationships.
The emotional heart of the essay lies in the appeals to Marcia’s father at beginning and end. This man was a historian named Cremutius Cordus, who was accused of treason under Tiberius (thanks to the machinations of Tiberius’ much-hated henchman, Sejanus) and forced to kill himself in 25 CE. Through his invocation of Cordus, Seneca manages to articulate his own values, implicitly defending a life of intellectual, scientific, and philosophical inquiry, combined with resistance to the worst kinds of political corruption—although he is notably vague about Cordus’ defense of the Roman Republic. The lesson of this man’s life, for Seneca, is not that one should always fight for political change even if it means paying the ultimate price. Rather, it is that intellectuals can always find a way out of the terrors and limitations of their own age, through writing and through contemplating the vastness of the universe. Whether or not this message was helpful to Marcia (it probably was not), this lesson was one to which Seneca himself was deeply attached; it was to be a primary inspiration for his life and work.