The Consolation to Helvia is a highly original twist on the genre of the consolation essay. The conventional occasion for a consolation was to address a bereaved person on the death of a loved one—who is usually, of course, somebody other than the author himself. But Seneca tries to console his mother for the loss of himself. In doing so, he splits himself in two. On the one hand, he is the strong philosophical comforter, the one who has the power to comfort his grieving mother in her time of need. On the other, he is suffering exile—something, the treatise implies, equivalent to death. He acknowledges that he is creating a new twist on the genre: “although I unrolled all the works that the most famous writers composed for repressing and controlling sorrow, I never found an example of anyone who offered consolation to his family when he himself was the object of their grief” (1.2). The Consolation to Helvia displays Seneca’s astonishing rhetorical ingenuity.
His double role also allows Seneca to have it both ways: he can present himself as both exceptionally strong in the face of suffering and also suffering in terrible conditions—without coming across as a whiner. He insists on the truth of Stoic truisms, such as the idea that we make our own happiness, and that supposedly “bad” fortune is not bad, for the wise person (4.3–5.1; 6.1). Exile, too, is only a change of place, an indifferent thing; if we look at it the right way, he declares, exile is merely a change of place. But he emphasizes the deprivations he is suffering on the island, while at the same time presenting himself as somebody entirely capable of rising above such merely material forms of suffering. He vividly evokes the pointless luxuries of which an exile is deprived in ways that make clear their pointlessness, and he also makes clear his own strength of mind in his ability to see how little such things matter:
If [a person] longs for furniture shining with golden vases, silver plate stamped with the names of old master craftsmen, bronze which the insane fashion of a clique has made expensive, enough slaves to make even an enormous house feel cramped, animals whose bodies are deliberately fattened up, and precious stones from all over the world: let him collect those things all he likes—he’ll never satisfy his insatiable mind, any more than any amount of drink can quench a desire that does not come from need, but from the heat of one’s own burning heart. You see, that’s not thirst: it’s disease.
(To Helvia 11.3)
He goes on to declare that “it is the mind that makes a person rich.”
The notion that Seneca’s mother needed to be consoled for her son’s terrible sufferings suggests that the son was, indeed, suffering, at least in a nonphilosophical sense. He describes the natural environment of Corsica as a “barren and thorny rock” (To Helvia 7.9) and juxtaposes it with Sciathus, Seriphus, and Gyarus, all four being “wildernesses, the most rugged of islands” (6.4). He asks, “What other rock is so barren or so precipitous on every side? What place is more infertile for food? Who is more uncultured than the island’s inhabitants? What more craggy than the geography of this place? What land has worse weather?” (6.5). The idea that Seneca’s time of exile was spent in an extraordinarily harsh environment is echoed by an epigram ascribed to him but probably written by a later author, inspired by various passages from To Helvia. The poet inveighs against the island, claiming,
Corsica is a barbarian island, enclosed by precipitous cliffs,
awful, enormous, surrounded on all sides by emptiness.
The autumn there brings forth no fruit, the summer brings no harvest,
white winter does not bring the olive, gift of Athena.
No spring is joyful with its birth of rain,
no grasses grow on that unlucky soil.
No bread, no draught of water, no last fire for cremation;
Here there are only two things: an exile and his place of banishment.26
Another similar epigram reads:
Corsica is horrible, when summer first grows hot,
And even more brutal when the wild Dogstar shows its face.
Spare those suffering relegation here—that is, the dead.
May your earth lie light upon the ashes of the living!27
The poem picks up the implication of the Helvia that being exiled to Corsica is more or less the same as being dead. Modern Corsicans tend to resent Seneca, understandably enough, for presenting their pleasant island in this unattractive way: there is a local legend that he had an affair with a native girl, who then scourged him with nettles, and the place on the island where he is said to have lived is still surrounded by nettles (despite being now declared a Historic French Monument) (Fig. 2.5).28
But Seneca’s negative depiction of his material conditions on the island is largely fictional. In the same passage where he complains of Corsica as a barren rock inhabited only by barbarians, he also notes that many people, including Romans, have come to the place of their own accord. Corsica was actually the location of a vibrant Roman colony, including plenty of elite, well-educated gentlemen. He may even have been able to bring friends and family with him—probably including his older brother, Novatus, and several other friends. It is likely that his wife was also with him.
Figure 2.5 Seneca spent eight years exiled on Corsica, living in this tower. Despite his negative depiction, the island actually had a good climate and a flourishing community of Roman expatriates.
He certainly had slaves to care for him, even in exile. As he himself acknowledges, an exile like himself is allowed to have more slaves than the great writers and philosophers of old: “It is well known that Homer had one slave, Plato had three, and that Zeno, who first taught the stern and masculine doctrine of the Stoics, had none.” Life with friends and family, and at minimum four or five slaves, does not really seem like solitary confinement. Moreover, the material conditions were not nearly as bad as Seneca makes out. Corsica was just across a short strip of sea from Rome and had more or less the same mild climate as the capital; the complaints about the weather are entirely bogus (7.1). Far from being barren, the whole island was overgrown with trees: Pliny ranks Corsica’s fir trees as the best in the world, and Diodorus tells us that the whole island had excellent harbors.29
There are two main reasons for Seneca’s misleading picture of his life on Corsica. The first is that he is modeling his own exile on the most famous earlier Roman writer to suffer exile and to write home to Rome describing his situation: the poet Ovid.30 Ovid was exiled by the emperor Augustus in 8 CE for what he himself terms “a poem and a mistake.” He had apparently been involved in the adulterous affair of the emperor’s daughter, Julia (he says he saw something he should not have seen), and he also shocked the emperor with his poem giving advice on the best seduction techniques (the Ars Amatoria). Ovid was exiled to a much more distant and genuinely barren and harsh place than Corsica: to Tomis, on the Black Sea. The ways that Seneca describes Corsica are clearly modeled on Ovid’s depictions of Tomis; they fit the latter but not the former. Tomis really was cold, bleak, barren, and distant from Rome and had almost no inhabitants who could speak Latin other than Ovid himself. Corsica was very near Rome, was full of Roman colonists speaking Latin, and had a nice climate and a lush, fertile landscape; but Seneca writes about it as if it were exactly the same as Ovid’s Tomis. Seneca is careful never to mention Ovid by name, and he avoids associating himself too closely with the bad-boy poet, who was never recalled from exile despite his many pleas. But Seneca is also keen to align himself subliminally with a poet whose work he knew well and much admired.