T. S. Eliot’s influential essays “Seneca in Elizabethan Translation” and “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca” (both 1927) helped perpetuate a deeply hostile attitude toward, specifically, Seneca’s tragedies while claiming to buck the trend. Eliot notes the “censure” heaped on these works and comments that it is well deserved. These plays are, he argues, bombastic and “rhetorical” in all the wrong ways: “his characters all seem to speak with the same voice, and at the top of it.”33 His central claim in both essays is that Seneca was rather less influential on Elizabethan drama in general, and Shakespeare in particular, than had been believed. For Eliot, being un-Senecan was to the credit of the Elizabethans.
But by the later part of the twentieth century, a rather different picture of Seneca had begun to emerge. In Germany in particular, retellings of Seneca’s doomed relationship with Nero and forced death became a particularly popular way of trying to think through the legacy of Nazism and collaboration.34 Seneca was still sometimes seen as a mere brownnoser to Nero—as he is in the enjoyable 1956 Italian movie, “Nero’s Big Weekend,” which goes back again to the story of Poppaea. But he began to be taken rather more seriously. In Britain, Ted Hughes created a stripped-down version of his Oedipus in 1968, which emphasized the horror and bleakness of the original.35 Seneca gradually began to seem relevant again, not (as in the early modern period) as an advocate of mercy or champion of autocracy but as a writer whose concerns with empire and its discontents prefigured the experiences of globalization and totalitarianism.
Moreover, Seneca’s pragmatic model of ethics became increasingly interesting to intellectuals and philosophers, and even psychotherapists. Foucault, in The Care of the Self (1984—the third and final volume of his History of Sexuality, Foucault 1985), was particularly interested in Seneca’s account of daily self-examination and his model of selfhood as something to be practiced and brought into being by action—an “interlocutory” and “social” kind of self, which he thought was a superior alternative to the dualist self of Descartes and his heirs. Some critics, like Pierre Hadot, argued (quite plausibly) that Foucault distorted Seneca’s concept of selfhood by overidentifying with it; Hadot developed his own interesting account of Seneca’s importance as a philosopher of the “interior.”36 But for our purposes, the important thing is not whether Foucault was wrong about Seneca, but the fact that he found Seneca so useful for reimagining his own notions of individual identity. Foucault’s focus on the “care of the self” built on Seneca (and Epictetus) to recognize that the gaps between psychotherapy, political activism, identity politics, and ethical philosophy might be less wide than had once been believed.37 Seneca’s discussion of anger, and of the emotions in general, bears comparison with modern analysis of emotional disturbance and mental health, having particular affinities with the cognitive therapy movement in psychology.
There has been a rise of interest in Stoicism in American culture in recent years, as well as in British and European cultures. For those seeking ancient self-help guidance, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius tend to be the favored models.38 The possibility of guilt and pollution looms larger in Seneca and might provide rather less comforting reading. It is the Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius, not Seneca, that provides the moral center of Ridley Scott’s movie Gladiator (2000), and it is Epictetus, not Seneca, who inspires the supposedly admirable workingman character, Conrad Hensley, in Tom Wolfe’s long-winded novel A Man in Full (1995). In this book, Stoicism of a specifically Epictetan kind can act as a useful way of getting through the dark times of late capitalism—dishonor, the loss of vast wealth, and the onset of an economic recession. Seneca’s own vast wealth and largely privileged life make him less useful as a model for these purposes, and his love of dialogue and paradox undercuts his value as self-help, as do his constant harping on death and suicide and, most importantly, his insistence that he may not be the perfect wise man but may be only beginning, every day, to advance toward the goal.
But this complexity is precisely why we ought to pay close attention to Seneca, in times that resemble his own in many ways. Some of these connections are suggested in Suzanne Collins’ bestselling trilogy, The Hunger Games, whose popularity speaks to the relevance of Seneca’s age to ours. The Hunger Games is set in a dystopia that combines the United States (in an exaggerated but highly recognizable future era) with imperial Rome. Collins emphasizes the massive inequalities of wealth, status, and power and the use of violent death in the “arena” as a spectacle to entertain and subdue the populace (by providing them with “bread and circuses”—panem et circenses, Juvenal 10.81). The books meditate on Senecan themes, including the emptiness of life in the service of elite pleasure, and the central Senecan question of how to maintain integrity when trapped in horrible circumstances. One of the characters (Peeta) says before entering the arena, “I want to die as myself”—a deeply Senecan desire. The books trace a familiar set of impossible choices, between retirement, rebellion, or assassination and collaboration with an oppressive and murderous regime. The man who devises the Games in which the heroine first participates is named, not coincidentally, Seneca Crane. He plays a fairly small part in the books, but his role is much expanded in the film adaptation of the first novel in the trilogy (The Hunger Games, 2012), where his intimate but dangerous relationship with the evil President Snow is closely modeled on Seneca’s relationship with Nero. Seneca Crane is an ambassador and spokesman for the government, whose success depends on his ability to create elaborate scenarios in which teenagers can slaughter each other for entertainment. However, he has what the president calls “an unfortunate sentimental streak,” which tempts him to allow the two protagonists to survive the Games. Like his historical predecessor, he is troubled by his position as Head Gamemaker for the regime; like his predecessor again, he is forced to kill himself. In the second novel, our heroine, Katniss Everdeen, marks her resistance to the regime, and her awareness of its point of vulnerability, by writing “Seneca Crane” on a dummy she hangs from a noose.
The consumerism, the massive social inequalities, and the vast global reach and global trade of modern Western countries has obvious similarities with imperial Rome. Elite people in our societies—and even less elite ones—struggle, as did Seneca, with the psychological pressures created by an excess of material wealth, combined with a deficit in individuals’ sense of autonomy and involvement in the political process. Pride is not seen as a problematic category for contemporary U.S. or British society, as it once was for Christian Europe, but Seneca’s dark, tentative, and morbid version of Stoic self-assertion provides a useful corrective to the mindless optimism that can be passed off as self-confidence.39 Senecan Stoicism can be appropriated by monotheistic religions, but it can also be appropriated by secular cultures: Larry Becker’s “New Stoicism” attempts to strip the school of its reliance on providence and reinvent it for people with a “scientific” outlook, coping with adversity in the modern world.40