There were some significant differences within Stoicism on how exactly we should view the “preferred indifferents.”14 The issue became increasingly important in the school’s thinking, as more Stoics took an active part in public and political life: it is an essential issue in Seneca’s life story. Panaetius of Rhodes, writing in the second century BCE, had made certain essential adjustments to traditional Greek Stoicism, making it more flexible, more eclectic, and more focused on the practicalities of ethical behavior, with less focus on logical and metaphysical abstractions. He spent time teaching in Rome and became a major influence on Roman Stoicism (including the work of Cicero and Seneca). Roman Stoicism is often considered to be different from earlier forms of the movement in its (Panaetian) interest in pragmatic choices, psychology, and natural human impulses.
Seneca clearly saw Stoicism not as an abstract intellectual interest but as a practical guide to the big decisions and small daily habits of his life. He made a series of choices between preferred and nonpreferred indifferent things: he chose Rome over exile, vast wealth over modest means, and enormously high social status at court over a humble life in the provinces. His work is haunted by the question of whether indulging in the “preferred indifferents,” like money and honor, may get in the way of the journey toward the true value of virtue. Stoicism allowed him to justify choosing, or preferring, things like health, wealth, and luxury—and not preferring exile or torture or death. But he remained strikingly anxious about the fact that indifferent things may muddle one’s thinking, since they are all too easy to confuse with real goods.
When considering why Seneca identified primarily as a Stoic, we should be aware that Stoicism was not the only philosophical option for an elite man in Rome at Seneca’s time period, and not even necessarily the most obvious choice. There were the Peripatetics (followers of Aristotle); the Academy (founded by Plato); the Cynics (whom Seneca quotes with admiration); the Pythagoreans; and the home-grown Roman school of the Sextians, with whom Seneca felt a particular affinity. An especially influential movement was Epicureanism (named for its founder, Epicurus). The Epicureans believed that not virtue, but pleasure, was the most important value for human beings. But unlike the Hedonists (also called Cyrenaics, from Aristippus of Cyrene)—with whom they were often unfairly conflated—the Epicureans did not advocate a life of sensual physical indulgence. Rather, Epicurus taught that physical pleasure is best attained by a life of moderation (since, for example, eating and drinking too much will ultimately cause more pain than pleasure). He also argued that the most important pleasures and pains are mental, rather than physical. One can achieve maximal mental pleasure and freedom from mental pain only by ridding oneself of the fear of death, by acting with kindness and justice toward others, and by avoiding the turbulence of public, political life. Instead, the Epicurean ideal is to live quietly with one’s close friends and contemplate the random movements of the atomic universe.
Seneca’s choice of Stoicism as his major intellectual framework has important political implications, since the Stoics, unlike the Epicureans, had a strong tradition of political engagement. Epicurus, in contrast, had advocated a life of withdrawaclass="underline" “Hide away while you live your life.” Seneca chose, rather, a life of political involvement. But he read Epicurus and other Epicureans and took their views seriously, often quoting Epicurus favorably in the Letters to Epistles (at a time when he was particularly concerned with the attempt to withdraw from politics).
Seneca’s presentation of Stoicism is distinctive in a number of ways. He writes constantly about suicide, death, and the briefness of life—apparently much more than the Greek Stoics had done. He is also focused on practical, as opposed to theoretical, advantages of the Stoic way of life. Seneca made a number of original contributions to the Stoic analysis of psychology, for instance in his careful distinction between involuntary impulses and actual emotions. Seneca’s philosophical writings are important for being composed in Latin—as opposed to Greek, which was traditionally the language of philosophy—and for the virtuosic literary and rhetorical skill with which he explores philosophical and quasi-philosophical ideas. Seneca was at least as much a writer as a philosopher.
The Writer, The Man
Seneca would be an important figure in cultural and intellectual history even if he had not become so closely attached to the court of Nero. He was exceptional in his ability to compose in a highly original manner, in a far wider range of genres than most ancient authors. He developed a distinctive, hugely influential literary style, full of wit and paradox, and flexible enough to accommodate multiple turns and points of view. His pragmatic, psychologically acute version of Stoicism had a huge influence on later Western culture, as did his tragic depictions of ambition and revenge.
But Seneca would also have been famous as a historical figure, the tutor and advisor to Nero, even if he had never written a word. Few other writers in history have had quite so much political power and influence. The relationship of Seneca’s literary output and his philosophical life to his dizzying, fragile rise to the pinnacle of social success is one of the most fascinating aspects of his story. Seneca struggled to combine the life of the mind with the life of active political and social engagement and was always deeply aware of the dangers, paradoxes, and compromises that the combination might involve.
This book teases out the relationship of his literary output to the events and actions of his life. I am highly conscious of the dangers of circularity, both in deducing life from art and using the art to illustrate or investigate the life. But I hope to show how each side of this binary illuminates the other. Seneca’s writing constantly resonates with the events of his biography, without ever providing a perfect mirror for it. We can read these texts more richly by understanding the social, historical, and personal contexts in which they were produced. Conversely, Seneca’s literary work makes us see more clearly what it was like to live through these interesting times—to suffer through illness, exile, and social exclusion, to rise to the very top of Roman imperial society, and to grapple with the constant dangers and challenges of life in the court of the emperors.
My first chapter traces Seneca’s origins in provincial Spain; his journey, at a young age, to the capital city of Rome; and his parentage, son of an elite and educated mother and a father whose work on rhetoric and education still survives. I look at the work of Seneca the Elder here, which provides valuable insight into the relationship of this dominating father to his young sons—our Seneca and his brothers—and into the education Seneca the Younger received. He was trained both in literary and rhetorical technique and in philosophy, and I discuss the early influences of his philosophical teachers. We also glimpse Seneca’s bad health from a lung ailment, which haunted his early years. In the second chapter, we encounter a series of journeys: first a long trip to Egypt for a period of convalescence from his bronchial problems; then back to Rome for the beginnings of his political career, under Tiberius, Caligula, and Claudius; then the scandal in which Seneca was accused of a high-profile adulterous affair, and consequently his exile to the island of Corsica. In Chapter III, we move back to Rome: Seneca, now a middle-aged man of about fifty, was recalled from exile thanks to the emperor’s new wife Agrippina and became tutor to her son Nero. I focus on the fascinating tensions and contradictions created by Seneca’s position as the educator of the young prince, including the paradoxes of being an ascetic philosopher who achieved vast wealth in the imperial court. In Chapter IV, we turn to the life and work of Seneca’s last years, his repeated attempts to disentangle himself from Nero’s service, and eventually his long-awaited death. The Epilogue traces some key moments in the reception of Seneca’s life and work in the later Western tradition. I point to the ways that Seneca’s yearnings for wealth and wisdom, for death and time, for power and kindness, for flexibility and constancy, even in the most terrifying and tempestuous of circumstances, have provoked both shocked resistance and desire to emulate him, in the early Christian period, in the Renaissance, and into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.