THE SOURCES
There are particular difficulties surrounding a book that focuses on the life of Seneca. Some of these are endemic to the study of any ancient or premodern person’s life. We have none of the rich fields of evidence—letters, diaries, photographs, surviving possessions, oral testimony from friends, students, enemies, lovers, spouses, publishers, or students—which are often available to biographers of the more recently deceased. In Seneca’s case, over half of his vast literary output is lost, including all his political speeches, all private letters, and much of his poetry, as well as works on India and Egypt, an early study of earthquakes, a book about his father, and a treatise on marriage. We also have very little evidence of any kind about his earlier years: this biography, inevitably, has little about its subject’s childhood and youth and focuses disproportionately on a couple of decades in his life—the years in which most of his extant work was produced, and for which we have references to Seneca from other authors, because of his involvement with the court of Nero.
But the challenge is not simply due to lack of evidence. The nature of the evidence we do have is problematic in itself. Seneca’s surviving work is voluminous, a far larger extant oeuvre than most ancient authors. We have his tragedies, his essays on a wide range of subjects, philosophical letters, one political satire, and an extensive treatise on scientific issues (the Natural Questions). Unlike most ancient writers, Seneca often uses the first person and has much to say about the details of daily life and how to live it. Yet none of these works has a direct, uncomplicated relationship to the author’s own life. None of Seneca’s works comes as close to autobiography as the private letters from Cicero to his great friend Atticus. All are carefully constructed works of public performance, even the most apparently personal (such as his letter to his mother on his own exile). Every apparent report of biographical fact is slippery and often untrustworthy. As we shall see repeatedly in this book, Seneca’s literary work plays a fascinating dance with the reader’s desire for information about his lived experience. For instance, Seneca was sent into exile and also wrote a great deal about exile, including his own. But the few details he provides about the material conditions of life in exile on Corsica are all literary fictions, modeled on the writings of that earlier famous exiled Roman writer, Ovid.5 Still more complex versions of the problem arise when we try to use Seneca’s writings to reconstruct his domestic life (with parents, wives, and children), his friendships, or even, most desirable but most difficult of all, his relationship with the emperor Nero. We can gain some access to Seneca’s perspective on his life through his writings, but it must be emphasized right from the start that the enterprise is peculiarly difficult.
We might hope, at the very least, to construct from Seneca’s writings a set of coherent, “Senecan” beliefs about abstract philosophical topics, or even about more practical issues, such as whether a person ought to participate in politics, or whether wealth contributes to human happiness. Or, on the assumption that his views may have changed over time, perhaps we could reconstruct at least what he believed about a particular question at a particular period of his life.6 But even this is often an impossible task. Many of Seneca’s extant works cannot be dated with any certainty, although some can. Many contain not only contradictions with one another, but even internal tensions and contradictions. Moreover, many of the attitudes struck in the extant works are entirely incompatible with what we know of Seneca’s life story. It is hardly surprising to find the ancient historian Dio (in the early third century CE) accusing him of downright hypocrisy.
The charge of hypocrisy against Seneca is generally dismissed fairly quickly by modern scholars, who tend to regard it as implying a simplistic and even anachronistic set of expectations about how life ought to relate to literary work, and also about what it is to be a consistent person.7 But such dismissals often go too fast and sometimes imply an even more simplistic assumption: that good writers must be nice people. The most interesting question is not why Seneca failed to practice what he preached, but why he preached what he did, so adamantly and so effectively, given the life he found himself leading. The extant works enact a fascinating, prolonged struggle for constancy, the power that implies an ability to stand still while the world revolves around one. Constantia and inconstantia are rather different from the modern, post-Romantic terms, “hypocrisy” and “integrity.” Whereas “hypocrisy” (from the Greek word for “acting”) suggests a mismatch in a single moment of time between a person’s external behavior and the internal reality, “inconstancy” suggests a failure to remain the same at every moment, across time. “What is wisdom?” Seneca asked, and answered his own question: “Always wanting the same things, and refusing the same things” (Ep. 20). The Stoic ideal of constancy (constantia, on which, as we shall see, Seneca wrote a highly influential essay) is the wise man’s ability to be firm, always the same, always stable, even as the world changes all around him. Seneca longed to find a coherent identity, whether dining in the court of the emperor or moldering in exile on a rocky island, far from the center of power. But he also knew how difficult it was to attain the ideal.
Both the life of political power and the life of philosophical counseling emerged from the same deep place in Seneca’s psyche: in a desire to be safe at home, and able to look out on the changing world around him—rather than being hurled constantly around the periphery. He was, throughout his life, very deeply both an insider and an outsider, and his life story was a series of swings toward and away from Rome and the center of Roman power: from Spain to Rome; from Rome to Egypt and back; from Rome to Corsica, and back; and finally a long, painful set of vacillations and attempts to get out from Nero’s court—if only to the safety of the grave.
This book traces the paradoxes that emerge in Seneca’s life and work through his attempt to gain “control” or “empire” (both covered by the Latin term imperium) in both the public and personal senses: to be influential over other people within his society, and also to be stable in himself. The phrase I use as my title, “the greatest empire,” comes from a passage in Epistle 113 (113.30) dealing with the problematic relationship of these two kinds of empire. Seneca insists that those who attempt to conquer the world and attain political, military, and economic power are far inferior to those who manage to achieve the empire of control over themselves: imperare sibi maximum imperium est (“The greatest empire is to be emperor of oneself ”—or, “The greatest kind of power is self-control”). Seneca’s intellectual activities as a writer and a philosopher allowed him to grasp toward an alternative to the life of politics and ambition, creating his own, distinct model of what “real” power should look like—an empire inside his own head.
But it is revealing that the image used to describe this alternative is drawn from the external political world. Philosophical control is described in terms of political control, and political control of a particular kind (an empire). Seneca’s attempts to draw a sharp contrast between the empire of Nero and the empire of philosophy were never consistently maintained, and each informed the other. Seneca’s intense awareness of, for example, the emptiness of luxury was not independent of his own experiences in luxurious living. Rather, he knew of what he wrote. He understood first hand that wealth cannot buy peace of mind; if he had not been so rich, he would have been less conscious both of the dangers and the advantages of having money. He was neither a monster nor a saint; he was a talented, ambitious, deeply thoughtful man, who struggled to create an uneasy compromise between his ideals and the powers that were, and who meditated constantly on how to balance his goals and his realities. His work is deeply preoccupied with the question of how to create and fully inhabit an authentic self, and of what it might mean to be authentic. This is one of many ways in which his work seems particularly relevant to contemporary anxieties and concerns.