Augustine was also aware of the supposed correspondence of Paul and Seneca (Letter 153), but his attitude toward Seneca was definitely critical; indeed, his critique of Stoicism in general, and of Seneca in particular, was a crucial building block in his construction of Christian theology in City of God.5 Augustine notes Seneca’s criticisms of conventional Roman religion (or rather “superstition”), although he describes him as failing to live by his true beliefs: he had freedom “as a writer, but lacked it in life” (6.10). He claims that Seneca pretended to respect the religious practices of his contemporaries while really disbelieving in them (1.10). The more substantive criticism Augustine makes is that Stoic ethics depend on human pride. The Stoics, including Seneca, claimed that the wise man can be entirely free from vice and can live in a state of total tranquility, undisturbed by false emotions. This claim, according to Augustine, is fundamentally false: since the Fall, no human being could ever achieve such a state in this world, and if anybody—like the Stoics—believes that he can live without sin, “he does not avoid sin, but rather forfeits pardon” (14). The Stoic ideal of the wise man is both empirically false (no such person could ever exist in a postlapsarian world) and morally wrong, since it suggests that fallen humans have the power, through mere will, to control their own happiness. The charge of pride is one that recurs again and again in later responses to Seneca’s work.
In the later Middle Ages, Seneca was known mostly through the Letters to Lucilius, with the longer essays and the plays being relatively underread in this period.6 He was respected as a moral teacher (dubbed “Seneca morale” by Dante), but in a rather vague way: medieval intellectuals tended to think of themselves as following the traditions of Christianized Aristotelianism developed by Aquinas rather than any Stoic author. Despite this, it has been well said that Stoicism was “everywhere and nowhere” in the Middle Ages:7 Stoic logic and Stoic ideas about God and nature actually had a large but mostly unacknowledged influence in this period. Seneca’s account in On Anger of the passions, and especially of the distinction between “first movements” in response to a stimulus (by blushing or shivering or bursting into tears) and actual emotions, was transformed into a list of eight sins based on temptations to yield to bad thoughts8—a list that was then transformed again, by Pope Gregory the Great in the seventh century, into the Seven Deadly Sins that we know today. Seneca’s careful analysis of “first movements” that were absolutely not worthy of moral blame had thus been transformed into its opposite: they were bad thoughts that revealed humanity’s fallen nature.9 The fact that Senecan Stoicism could be so wildly distorted is one mark of how little it was studied for several hundred years. Seneca’s life story was popularized in the thirteenth-century bestseller “The Golden Legend” (Legenda Aurea), which was a compilation of hagiographical accounts of famous saints—Seneca being included by virtue, again, of his association with Paul. The book includes a lurid account of the death scene involving a face-to-face showdown between Nero and Seneca, after which Seneca opens his veins in the bath—thus fulfilling his name, the author tells us, since se necans means “killing oneself.”10
In the early modern period, there was a great expansion of interest in the Stoic tradition in general, and Seneca in particular. The humanists produced new editions and commentaries on his work,11 and it began to be translated into vernacular languages, including English, by Thomas Lodge (1612). Erasmus produced one of the earliest complete editions, in 1562 (second edition) and included a preface that suggests an interestingly ambivalent attitude toward his author in literary terms: he criticizes his excessive use of “too rhetorical a style” (450) and his tendency to be long-winded and muddled, although he praises the letters, in particular, for offering “a true reflection of a real situation” (569). The combination of admiration with reservations would recur in many later assessments of our author.
Seneca was important in the time of the Renaissance in three sometimes interrelated but conceptually distinct ways.12 First, his prose work—along with the philosophical writings of Cicero, which were even more widely read—was one of the primary sources for ancient Stoicism and had a major impact both on early modern political thought and early modern metaphysics and theology. Since the Greek Stoics were lost, the Roman Stoics provided the main means of access to the whole school. Secondly, Seneca’s punchy, aphoristic writing style had a major impact on the trend toward a snappy, polished literary style adopted by some writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And thirdly, Senecan tragedy was rediscovered in this period after a long period of neglect and had a major impact on the formation of early modern drama.
The figure of Seneca as advisor to an autocratic emperor haunted the imaginations of intellectuals and courtiers who found themselves in similar positions: the life story of Thomas More, scholar, philosopher, writer, and advisor to Henry VIII, who was then beheaded by the king, has been well compared to that of Seneca.13 Seneca as a historical character (rather than as a writer or philosopher) often did come across rather badly in early modern literature and drama—moving beyond even the not-very-sympathetic portrayal in Tacitus. In Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppaea, an innovative historical opera from 1643, Seneca warns Nero not to cast off Octavia and marry Poppaea; for this reason, Nero orders Seneca to kill himself. After the philosopher’s elaborate suicide bath, Nero and the courtiers cheerfully sing: “Now that Seneca is dead, now let me sing!” (Hor che Seneca è morto, cantiam!), and later Poppaea and her maidservant pick up the melody: “Now that Seneca is dead, Love, I appeal to you!” Seneca could easily be portrayed as a spoilsport.