Seneca wanted to be the most popular, most powerful man in Rome, and also to live in perfect calm, at peace with himself, away from the gnawings of fear and guilt that were also constant features of his adult life. Seneca was exceptional in his intelligence and in his literary and political prominence, but his apparently contradictory desires were in many ways characteristic of the high pressures facing the Roman elite at this period. After a long and exhausting period of civil wars, the Roman Republic had ended at the Battle of Actium (31 BCE) with the victory and accession of Octavian, later Augustus, as one-man ruler of the empire. But Augustus claimed to be not a monarch (a rex—always a problematic word in Roman culture) but the “first among equals” (princeps, hence principate, the name given to his and his successors’ reign); not the sole ruler of the empire, but the “restorer of the republic.” It became increasingly clear, under Augustus and his successors in the Julio-Claudian family (Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero), that the old power of the Senate, the ruling body under the Republic, was in fact much diminished, and power had shifted toward the emperor himself, his court, and the military—without whom the empire would collapse. But the old families of the Roman elite still paid lip-service to the concept of republicanism and still wanted to believe that they held on to real political power. The conflict between the institutions of government and the political imagination put the upper-class Romans of this period in a deeply problematic position. There was a disconnect between political realities and acceptable forms of speech, which led to a culture characterized by dissimulation; being fake was a prerequisite for social success.8 Elite Roman men were eager to assert their masculinity (or virtus—“virtue” or “manhood”) in a political system that robbed them of the old kinds of power. They constantly spoke and wrote in a kind of double-speak, making verbal gestures that could always be interpreted more than one way. The fashionable style of speech and writing piled up aphoristic polished witticisms, a bombardment of the most “truth-y” kind of sentence, as if to compensate for an underlying fear of falsehood. Rhetoric was not only a style but a way of being in the world. Seneca was the master of this style, which was one of his most important literary legacies. Any list of the most referenced Latin quotes will include a great deal of Seneca’s aphorisms—lines like “Necessity is usually more powerful than duty” (Trojan Women 581), or “Nature takes revenge on everybody” (Phaedra 352), or “Crime must be hidden by crime” (Medea 721). The aphorisms often speak to recurrent preoccupations of Seneca’s, with fortune and its many reversals (“A man that dawn sees proud, dusk sees laid low,” Thyestes 613–614); with the dangers or emptiness of wealth and material greed (“Wealth doesn’t make a king,” Thyestes 344); with kingship and authority (“A king is one who fears nothing,” Thyestes 388); with the mechanisms of ambition and power (“One who asks fearfully teaches us to say no,” Phaedra 593–594); with virtue and willpower (“It’s never too late to choose the path towards goodness,” Agamemnon 242); and with death (“If you can be forced, you don’t know how to die,” Hercules 426).
All these concerns, and the punchy, mannered mode that Seneca uses to articulate them, were very much of his time, although nobody formulated them better. We can get a good glimpse of the ways that times had changed by glancing back to an earlier Roman writer whose life and work bear comparison with that of Seneca, namely Cicero.9 Both were voluminous authors, deeply influenced by rhetorical training, who composed both poetry and prose, including philosophical works, and both were also key figures on the political stage in their times. Both were controversial figures who were accused of various forms of duplicity (indecision and flip-flopping in Cicero’s case, or a failure to practice what he preached in the case of Seneca) and who aroused deep enmity as well as deep friendship. Both were exiled but succeeded in making a comeback. Both died by force when the political tide turned against them. Seneca was forced to kill himself by Nero, while Cicero was assassinated in 43 BCE thanks to the enmity of Mark Antony. Cicero’s death could be seen as marking the beginning of the end for the Republic, while Seneca’s marked the end of the dream that an intellectual could guide Roman politics.
The similarities and differences between these two life stories provide a good way of seeing how much Rome had changed, and also of seeing what was distinctive about Seneca’s intellectual and political allegiances. Both rose from a relatively modest equestrian background (knight’s class, the second tier within the upper class), trained in rhetoric and philosophy, and eventually became consul (the highest office in the land, held for a single year by a pair of men who were, thereafter, in the highest possible social rank). But their early years were spent very differently. Cicero worked as a hugely successful lawyer and also zoomed up the official career-ladder (the cursus honorum), taking up each office at almost the youngest possible age. Seneca had a very late start, due both to illness and (probably) lack of commitment to the political career, especially, perhaps, in the uncongenial atmosphere of the reign of Tiberius; he wanted to spend more time on philosophy. Cicero delivered his own speeches, both in the law-courts and the Senate, and saw himself as an orator, not merely a rhetorician. Seneca was, as we shall see, Nero’s speechwriter and never showed any particular interest in delivering speeches himself. This difference can be connected to the so-called “death of oratory,” much lamented in the ancient sources, whereby oratory lost its power to enact political change after Cicero and the death of the Roman Republic.10
Moreover, Cicero and Seneca were on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Cicero (despite repeated acts of hedging and compromise) struggled to stand up for the old ways of the Republic. Seneca, by contrast, belonged both to the empire and to the emperor. Despite deep hostility to particular emperors (such as Caligula and Claudius—at least after his death) and a degree of covert resistance to his ward and patron, Nero, Seneca had no interest in restoring the Republic and no particular hostility toward the institutional structure of the Principate.
Not coincidentally, Cicero and Seneca had different visions of the relative importance of philosophy and politics. Cicero turned to the writing of his works of philosophy only in the interludes between his political engagements; philosophy was, for him, a means to an end, the primary end being the renewal of the Republic. For Seneca, philosophy was an end in itself. His rhetoric aims to achieve a change in the reader’s individual psyche, not in the institutions of government. In Cicero’s time, there was still a sense that political action could make a difference: Cicero hoped that he really could bring down Caesar and Mark Antony. Seneca, by contrast, had no hope that he could achieve anything by direct opposition to any of the emperors under whom he lived. His best hope was to moderate some of Nero’s worst tendencies and to maximize his own sense of autonomy.