Seneca’s life and work have been a source of fascination, although not always admiration, ever since his death. Seneca’s Rome was, like modern Britain, Europe, and especially the United States, a place of vast social inequality. The inhabitants of the early Empire were—like ourselves—struggling to come to terms with huge political, cultural, and economic changes. Rome had emerged from a series of devastating civil wars and transitioned uneasily from a Republic to an Empire under the rule of one man (with the help of the army). Through Rome’s extraordinary military success, the world had quickly become more centralized. The gap between rich and poor was vast, and the elite class had gained wealth undreamed of by their ancestors, including an array of luxury products imported from the distant reaches of the empire. But these upper-class men had, at the same time, lost much of the political power they had had under the Republic and had lost much of their sense of security and identity: the display of wealth was used as an inadequate substitute for self-respect. Seneca’s work is brilliantly articulate about the psychological pressures created by consumerism. “Being poor is not having too little,” he declares: “it is wanting more” (Epistle 2). One of his great themes is the way that people surrounded by an excess of material wealth, and in a culture characterized by competition for status, may become obsessed with striving for unreal or actually damaging “goods” (like new clothes or furniture or houses, elaborate food, thrilling and violent entertainment, or titles, promotions, social power, and the admiration of others), which provide no real happiness or satisfaction. And yet our desires for these unsatisfying things remain, as Seneca also recognized, almost impossible to eliminate; and Seneca constantly suggests that complete withdrawal from the social world is not the solution to the problem. As both a Stoic and a pragmatist, he constantly sought to be engaged in the world without losing integrity. He was deeply aware of how difficult this quest is. This is one of many reasons why his work and life story remain so relevant for us.
I
“Parental Love Is Wise”
*
It is conventional to begin a biography with an account of the subject’s birthplace, parents, childhood, and early adolescence. But according to Seneca himself, none of these things are of any importance whatsoever. He insists:
As for the fact of my birth: consider what it really is, in itself. Being born is a trivial thing, uncertain, with equal chance of turning into something good or bad. It’s certainly the first step to everything else, but it’s not better than everything else just because it came first.
(On Benefits, 3.30.2)
The context here is a discussion of favors and gratitude; Seneca is challenging the conventional Greek and Roman view that parents, and especially fathers, bestow an enormous debt on their children by giving them life in the first place, such that nothing the child does in later life could ever repay the father’s first gift of life. Seneca suggests, on the contrary, that it is perfectly possible for sons to outstrip their fathers and to give their parents—and the world—far more than they were ever given by them: “Seeds are the causes of all growing things, and yet they are the tiniest parts of the things which they produce” (On Benefits 3.29.4). The father, then, need not overshadow the son. Moreover, the first part of a life is not necessarily the most important element in a person’s story: “There is a great deal of difference between what is first in time, and what is first in importance” (On Benefits 2.34.1). To take Seneca at his word, we might judge him only by his later public and professional life and cast a veil over all his early years.
But this would be a mistake, since there are discernible biographical and psychological reasons why Seneca was drawn to this particular rhetorical gesture. As the son of a rich, successful, and domineering father, a well-born and well-educated mother, and the middle child of three bright, well-loved, and well-educated brothers, he had a good reason to work hard to define himself as a self-made man, and indeed, to suggest that all humans are the products of something other than family heritage. Through philosophical training, thinking, and writing, Seneca could emerge from the shadows cast by his parents and brothers. Moreover, as somebody who rose to extraordinary prominence from a wealthy but provincial family, Seneca had a motive to downplay the importance of heredity and upbringing in a person’s life. He often challenges the conventional Roman belief in “nobility” (nobilitas), which suggested that excellence comes by inheritance from one’s fathers or forefathers. Seneca argues for a far more egalitarian model in which every person, or at least every man, is the source of his own success. His philosophical writings constantly revert to the theme of autonomy. The Stoic wise man, Seneca’s ideal, is dependent on nobody, always free, always happy, and in need of nothing and nobody.
But the very fact that he makes so much of the possibility that a son can exceed his father, both in moral and in social and financial worth, tells us a great deal about how Seneca presented himself to the Roman public in his later years, and perhaps even about his vision of himself. His meteoric rise was both an irrelevance—“being born is a trivial thing”—and also a source of both pride and anxiety.
Seneca the Younger—so called because his father’s name was also Seneca—was born around 1 BCE (or a little earlier), in Corduba, in the Roman province of Hispania, in southern Spain, a city geographically distant from the center of Roman power. The ancient accounts of his life make much of his meteoric rise from a peripheral background to the heights of Roman society, as tutor, advisor, and speechwriter to the emperor, and from an economically modest family to a position of enormous wealth. But Seneca was hardly unusual in being a Roman writer who did not come from Rome. Most of the famous Roman writers of the classical period (first century BCE to first century CE) came from places other than the capitaclass="underline" Virgil was from Mantua, Ovid from Sulmo, Horace from Venusia—all Italian towns at some distance from Rome. Cicero, in the previous generation, was born in Arpinum, a small hill town south of Rome. Other Spanish Latin writers include the main Roman authority on agricultural practices, Seneca’s contemporary Columella, and Seneca’s own nephew, the epic poet Lucan; a generation later came the Hispanic epigrammatist Martial and the Hispanic rhetorician Quintilian.