Seneca suggests at the start of the consolation that Marcia should remember how brave a face she put on at that time and recover the same strength to deal with her current loss. At the end of the piece, he builds up an inspiring picture of the life of the dead, both father and son, who wander through “the free and boundless spaces of eternity; no seas shut them out, no height of mountains nor pathless valleys, no quicksands of the shifting Syrtes; there all is level plain, and easily, quick and unencumbered, they mingle with the stars and stars with them in turn” (25.3). Then Seneca imagines Cordus himself speaking. In Seneca’s fantasy, Cordus the historian has now moved beyond history and shows how a cosmic, philosophical awareness of the cycles in the universe is both a development of historical knowledge and goes far beyond it:
“I used to enjoy compiling the history of what happened in a single age, in a distant part of the world, among a tiny number of people. Now I can see so many ages, the succession and progression of so many ages; I can see the whole of sum of years.”
(26.6)
Cordus had written a history of the Republican period of Rome; the Senate had given orders for the work to be burned at the time of his downfall. But for Seneca, Cordus is able to rise above both his own personal losses and the city that tried to ruin him. Rome itself, in what many still saw as the glory days of the city, is seen as the “distant part of the world”—distant indeed from the viewpoint of Cordus in Heaven. Cordus turns out to be able to see not merely times past but times to come, and he sees the downfall of cities, powers, and empires, and finally, not merely the end of the human race—a small event in the long sweep of cosmic time—but vast geological change, as he predicts the conflagration of the world by fire:
“And when the time comes, that the world will be destroyed to be made new, [all the elements of the earth] will destroy themselves by their own power, stars will clash with stars, and all that now shines in orderly arrangement will burn in a single fire, as the whole matter of the universe catches flame. We too, we happy souls who have achieved immortality, when it seems good to the god to remake the world, we too, when the world falls, will be a tiny fragment of the immense destruction, and will turn again into our old components.” Marcia, how happy is your son, who knows these things!
(26.6)
This, the last passage of the dialogue, certainly tells us little or nothing about the mother’s grief; Seneca seems to have lost interest in the details of Marcia’s particular emotional state. But it is extraordinarily powerful rhetoric, designed to redirect the mind away from any earthly loss. In this early work, Seneca shows that he is already highly effective in a kind of writing that shifts effortlessly from the small-scale view to a cosmic perspective, that reveals the world to be far bigger, far vaster even than we can imagine—and that reaches beyond what any human being can possibly visualize or attain. He also, through his hagiographic praise of Cordus, implies that writing is the way to win lasting fame and recognition.
LEGITIMATE LUST
In returning to Rome from Egypt, Seneca had the opportunity to set up a more stable domestic world for himself, including a wife and child, and close relationships with brothers, mother, nieces, and nephews. He married and had a little boy, who died in infancy in 41 CE (To Helvia 2.5). Seneca makes only one brief reference to this. He implies that his baby’s death is mostly a source of sorrow for the grandmother, his mother Helvia, who had to suffer the deaths of not one but three grandchildren in quick succession (To Helvia 2.4). Presumably the other two dead grandchildren were offspring of one or both of Seneca’s brothers. Seneca expresses no emotion, here or elsewhere, about his son. The passage also gives no indication that Seneca himself had spent much time with the child. He emphasizes that the boy was buried by his mother, the child’s grandmother; he does not suggest that he himself took an interest in the event. This is the only child Seneca is known to have had in the course of his life.
The ease with which Seneca discusses the death of his infant son, his only child, is likely to strike many modern readers as extraordinarily unfeeling. We should not be too quick, however, to condemn him for callousness: infant mortality was far more common in antiquity than it is in Western Europe and the United States today. That does not mean that people did not grieve intensely for their children, of course, but the death of a little baby was less unexpected, and therefore less shocking, than it would be in a modern Westernized context.
Moreover, our only evidence for the death comes from the Helvia, which is, as we have seen, a public and highly polished literary document, not an expression of the author’s deepest feelings and emotions, but a rhetorical and philosophical set piece of a virtuosic kind. The point of the exercise is to reduce the intensity of his mother’s grief; invoking his own would hardly help achieve that goal. Seneca’s pose here is as the Stoic teacher and advisor, who is able to explain to his grieving, all-too-human mother why she must put her grief aside. From a strictly Stoic point of view, the death of a child is an “indifferent thing”: it is not preferable, but it is not something that would ever disturb the true wise man’s tranquility. Seneca is adopting the persona of a sage; there is no knowing whether the rhetoric matched reality. We may still consider it inhumane even to pretend to see other people—including one’s own children—as “indifferent things.” But either way, we cannot draw any clear conclusions about how Seneca felt about his baby son’s death. All we can say for sure is that he did have an infant son, and that he soon died.
The Helvia has two further passages suggestive of Seneca’s relationships with children. Seneca urges Helvia,
Look at your grandchildren! Look at Marcus, such a sweet boy! No sadness could last if you look at him. No crazy grief in anybody’s heart is so large or so fresh that it wouldn’t be charmed away by him. Whose tears would his cheeriness fail to dry? Whose heart is so squashed by worry that his energetic romping wouldn’t set it free? His playfulness would make anybody want to play. Could anybody ever get tired of hearing his chatter, and fail to be charmed by it and get over his bad moods? I pray the gods he may survive us!
(To Helvia 18.4–6)
The toddler with the unstoppable cheerful babbling was probably Marcus Lucanus (the future poet Lucan), son of Seneca’s brother Mela. It is hard to decide how serious Seneca is being in his account of the little fellow’s vociferous charm. But Seneca clearly took the boy under his wing once he was old enough to be taught about literature, rhetoric, politics, and philosophy, and—as we shall see—would introduce him to Nero.
The same passage of the Helvia also mentions his niece, the daughter of his older brother, Novatus, in whom Seneca had also apparently taken a strong avuncular interest (To Helvia 18.7–8). He suggests that he treated this niece like an adopted daughter, despite having her biological father, Seneca’s brother, still alive. Seneca shows an early interest here in how a young person can be given moral teaching by an older role modeclass="underline"
Now strengthen and form her behavior. The principles which are impressed upon us in early youth are the ones that sink in more deeply. Let her get used to your conversation, let her be shaped by your authority. You’ll give her a lot, even if you just give her your example.
The passage suggests a wildly optimistic notion of how easy it is to teach ethics to a teenager, an optimism that perhaps played a part in Seneca’s decision to take on the role of Nero’s tutor. We have no way of knowing how Novatilla turned out.
We come now to the question of Seneca’s wife.9 Probably he married fairly soon after returning to Rome and beginning his political career. He must have had a wife by 40 CE at latest, since he had a legitimate son in 41. Seneca mentions a wife in Book Three of On Anger, who is, we learn, “long since aware of my habit [of nightly self-examination]” and who therefore tactfully falls silent in order to let her husband go over his day without interruption. Unfortunately, we have almost no evidence about this marriage. We know a little of his wife, Paulina, at the time of his death, and some have argued that Seneca was married only once, to Paulina. But it is most likely that he had an earlier marriage, to a woman whose name and history are unknown. She probably died at some point in the 40s, perhaps in childbirth, leaving Seneca free to remarry. But again, we have no clear evidence for any of this, since neither Seneca himself nor our other sources provide any explicit account of the marriage.