But at the same time:
It is this discontent that has driven life steadily onward, out to the high seas …
We can imagine Epicurus’s response. However impressive our ventures on to the high seas, the only way to evaluate their merits is according to the pleasure they inspire:
It is to pleasure that we have recourse, using the feeling as our standard for judging every good.
And because an increase in the wealth of societies seems not to guarantee an increase in happiness, Epicurus would have suggested that the needs which expensive goods cater to cannot be those on which our happiness depends.
6
Happiness, an acquisition list
1. A hut.
2.
(Ill. 11.1)
3. To avoid superiors, patronization, infighting and competition:
(Ill. 11.2)
4. Thought.
(Ill. 11.3)
5. A reincarnation of Giovanni Bellini’s
Madonna
(from the Galleria dell’Accademia in Venice), whose melancholy expression would belie a dry sense of humour and spontaneity – and who would dress in manmade fibres from the sales racks of modest department stores.
(Ill. 11.4)
Happiness may be difficult to attain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.
III
Consolation for Frustration
1
Thirteen years before painting the Death of Socrates, Jacques-Louis David attended to another ancient philosopher who met his end with extraordinary calm, amidst the hysterical tears of friends and family.
(Ill. 12.1)
The Death of Seneca, painted in 1773 by the twenty-five-year-old David, depicted the Stoic philosopher’s last moments in a villa outside Rome in April AD 65. A centurion had arrived at the house a few hours before with instructions from the emperor that Seneca should take his own life forthwith. A conspiracy had been discovered to remove the twenty-eight-year-old Nero from the throne, and the emperor, maniacal and unbridled, was seeking indiscriminate revenge. Though there was no evidence to link Seneca to the conspiracy, though he had worked as the imperial tutor for five years and as a loyal aide for a decade, Nero ordered the death for good measure. He had by this point already murdered his half-brother Britannicus, his mother Agrippina and his wife Octavia; he had disposed of a large number of senators and equestrians by feeding them to crocodiles and lions; and he had sung while Rome burned to the ground in the great fire of 64.
When they learned of Nero’s command, Seneca’s companions blanched and began to weep, but the philosopher, in the account provided by Tacitus and read by David, remained unperturbed, and strived to check their tears and revive their courage:
Where had their philosophy gone, he asked, and that resolution against impending misfortunes which they had encouraged in each other over so many years? ‘Surely nobody was unaware that Nero was cruel!’ he added. ‘After murdering his mother and brother, it only remained for him to kill his teacher and tutor.’
He turned to his wife Paulina, embraced her tenderly (‘very different from his philosophical imperturbability’ – Tacitus) and asked her to take consolation in his well-spent life. But she could not countenance an existence without him, and asked to be allowed to cut her veins in turn. Seneca did not deny her wish:
I will not grudge your setting so fine an example. We can die with equal fortitude, though yours will be the nobler end.
But because the emperor had no desire to increase his reputation for cruelty, when his guards noticed that Paulina had taken a knife to her veins, they seized it against her will and bandaged up her wrists.
Her husband’s suicide began to falter. Blood did not flow fast enough from his aged body, even after he had cut the veins in his ankles and behind his knees. So in a self-conscious echo of the death in Athens 464 years previously, Seneca asked his doctor to prepare a cup of hemlock. He had long considered Socrates the exemplar of how one might, through philosophy, rise above external circumstance (and in a letter written a few years before Nero’s command, had explained his admiration):
He was much tried at home, whether we think of his wife, a woman of rough manners and shrewish tongue, or of the children … He lived either in time of war or under tyrants … but all these measures changed the soul of Socrates so little that they did not even change his features. What wonderful and rare distinction! He maintained this attitude up to the very end … amid all the disturbances of Fortune, he was undisturbed.
But Seneca’s desire to follow the Athenian was in vain. He drank the hemlock and it had no effect. After two fruitless attempts, he finally asked to be placed in a vapour-bath, where he suffocated to death slowly, in torment but with equanimity, undisturbed by the disturbances of Fortune.
David’s rococo version of the scene was not the first, nor the finest. Seneca appeared more like a reclining pasha than a dying philosopher. Paulina, thrusting her bared right breast forward, was dressed for grand opera rather than Imperial Rome. Yet David’s rendering of the moment fitted, however clumsily, into a lengthy history of admiration for the manner in which the Roman endured his appalling fate.
Loyset Liedet, 1462 (Ill. 12.2)
Rubens, 1608 (Ill. 12.3)
Ribera (Jusepe), 1632 (Ill. 12.4)
Luca Giordano, c. 1680
Though his wishes had come into sudden, extreme conflict with reality, Seneca had not succumbed to ordinary frailties; reality’s shocking demands had been met with dignity. Through his death, Seneca had helped to create an enduring association, together with other Stoic thinkers, between the very word ‘philosophical’ and a temperate, self-possessed approach to disaster. He had from the first conceived of philosophy as a discipline to assist human beings in overcoming conflicts between their wishes and reality. As Tacitus had reported, Seneca’s response to his weeping companions had been to ask, as though the two were essentially one, where their philosophy had gone, and where their resolution against impending misfortunes.
Throughout his life, Seneca had faced and witnessed around him exceptional disasters. Earthquakes had shattered Pompeii; Rome and Lugdunum had burnt to the ground; the people of Rome and her empire had been subjected to Nero, and before him Caligula, or as Suetonius more accurately termed him, ‘the Monster’, who had ‘on one occasion … cried angrily, “I wish all you Romans had only one neck!” ’
Seneca had suffered personal losses, too. He had trained for a career in politics, but in his early twenties had succumbed to suspected tuberculosis, which had lasted six years and led to suicidal depression. His late entry into politics had coincided with Caligula’s rise to power. Even after the Monster’s murder in 41, his position had been precarious. A plot by the Empress Messalina had, through no fault of Seneca’s, resulted in his disgrace and eight years of exile on the island of Corsica. When he had finally been recalled to Rome, it had been to take on against his will the most fateful job in the imperial administration – tutor to Agrippina’s twelve-year-old son, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, who would fifteen years later order him to kill himself in front of his wife and family.