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How Stoical Was Seneca? Mary Beard

October 9, 2014 Issue

Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero

by James Romm

Knopf, 290 pp., $27.95

Hardship and Happiness

by Lucius Annaeus Seneca, translated from the Latin by Elaine Fantham, Harry M. Hine,

James Ker, and Gareth D. Williams

University of Chicago Press, 318 pp., $55.00

The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca

by Emily Wilson

Oxford University Press, 253 pp., $29.95

Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen/bpk/Art Resource

Peter Paul Rubens: The Death of Seneca, 1612 – 1613

In AD 65, the elderly philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca was forced to commit suicide

on the orders of the emperor Nero. He had once been the emperor’s tutor and adviser,though he had withdrawn into retirement when the true character of Nero’s reign became

clear, and he had recently become rather too closely involved with an unsuccessful coup

(quite how closely, we shall never know). He must have been expecting the knock on the

door.

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The knock came from the captain of a troop of praetorian guardsmen who had stationed

themselves around Seneca’s house, just outside Rome. Ironically, the captain himself was

also involved in the planned coup, but had decided to follow the emperor’s orders in

order to save his own skin (―he was now adding to the crimes he had conspired to

avenge,‖ as the Roman historian Tacitus tersely put it). After a brief interrogation, Senecawas told to end his own life, which he did only with great difficulty. He severed his

arteries, but he was so old and emaciated that the blood hardly escaped; so he asked for

the hemlock that he had stashed away for just that purpose, but that had little effect either.

He died only when his slaves carried him into a hot bath and he suffocated in the steam.

While all this was going on, he had been offering words of encouragement to the friends

who happened to be dining with him when the praetorians arrived (he was bequeathing to

them, he claimed, the only thing he had left, and the best: ―the image of his own life,‖

imago vitae suae); and he had been dictating to his secretaries, for future circulation,

some last philosophical thoughts. His final words were to offer a libation to ―Jupiter theLiberator.‖

So Tacitus — probably the most acute analyst ever of the autocratic rule of the Roman

emperors — described the scene in his Annales, half a century or so later; he was no doubt

relying on some hard evidence (a few modern critics have even suggested an eyewitness

account), but inevitably recasting it in his own terms. One of Tacitus’s favorite themes in

the Annales is death and its corruption; he repeatedly stresses the idea that autocracy

disrupted not only the natural rhythms of life but the processes of dying too. People died

for the wrong reasons, in the wrong places, and in the wrong order. Children killed their

parents. Funeral pyres were prepared before the victim had even breathed his last. In fact,

Tacitus opens his narrative of Nero’s reign with the bleak, and significant, phrase: ―The

first death under the new Emperor….‖ The suicide of Seneca, as Tacitus tells it, can be

seen as a prime example of how even dying had been corrupted.

That is partly because, try as he might, applying all the usually reliable methods, death

almost defeated Seneca. For a philosopher who had devoted so much of his writing to

preparations for death —as the title of James Romm’s new biography, Dying Every Day,

hints — he made a very bad job of it when his own turn came. It is also because he made

such a histrionic display out of the act of dying. Seneca publicly embraced Stoic philosophy, which took an uncompromising view of the importance of ―virtue‖ in both

living and dying (it was, in fact, much more uncompromising than the popular modern

term ―stoical‖—in the attenuated sense of ―stiff upper lip‖— would ever suggest).

But Seneca’s death was a frankly hubristic imitation of the death of Socrates: with his last

thoughts being dictated (as in Plato’s Phaedo), the attempted resort to hemlock, and a



final offering to the gods (though in this case it was a libation to Jupiter, not, as in

Socrates’ last words, a sacrifice to Asklepios). Even so, his death ends up no more than a

very poor imitation of its model. As Emily Wilson nicely summed it up in The Death of

Socrates (2007):

It is as if trying to learn about death from Socrates has made Seneca all but incapable ofexperiencing death for himself. The academic study of the subject has desiccated his

body until it has no blood left to spill.

To be fair, over the years, not all judgments on Tacitus’s account of Seneca’s suicide

have been so negative. Some admirers of the philosopher have chosen to see the death as

an example of fortitude, and of tremendous philosophical courage amid the corruption of

Roman imperial society. Seneca, it is argued, was a man whom Tacitus saw as one of the

few potentially good influences on Nero, and who might have prevented his reign from

developing as catastrophically as it did.In his suicide, fighting against the recalcitrant frailty of his own body, he met

unwaveringly the death to which he has been cruelly sentenced; and he turned it into the

ultimate lesson in how to die (not for mere show was he dictating his last philosophical

thoughts on his long-drawn-out deathbed, but for the true edification and education of

future generations). This is presumably the message of Rubens’s famous painting, which

shows Seneca standing almost naked in his small bath, in a pose strikingly reminiscent of

the suffering Jesus in many Ecce homo scenes from medieval and later art: so suggesting

triumph over death, not defeat by it.

Yet as both Romm and Wilson in The Greatest Empire insist, it is impossible not to see

some ambivalence, at the very least, in Tacitus’s version of Seneca’s last hours, and in his

evaluation of the man more generally. Romm focuses in particular on that phrase imago

vitae suae (―the image of his own life‖), which was to be, as Tacitus put it, Seneca’s

bequest to his followers. Roland Mayer has argued that we should detect here a reference

to the kind of imago that was displayed in elite Roman houses: one of those series of

ancestor portraits intended to spur on future generations to imitate the achievements of

their great predecessors. That is very likely one resonance of the phrase: Seneca was

offering a positive example to be followed in the future. But, as Romm rightly observes,

― Imago is a multilayered word,‖ and like ―image‖ in English, it also suggests ―illusion,‖

―phantom,‖ or ―false seeming.‖

The problem about Seneca is that it was always difficult to pin him down (and so it

remains). What Tacitus is saying, in his carefully chosen words, is that in his last hours

he was ―shaping…still‖ an imago of himself that he had been working on, revising, and



adjusting for most of his life, in many different forms. Like it or not, there is something

elusive, even a whiff of ―spin,‖ about Seneca.

Romm finds a vivid symbol of that elusiveness in the surviving likenesses of the

philosopher (―images‖ in yet another sense). Before the nineteenth century, the favored

image of Seneca (now demoted to ―Pseudo-Seneca‖) was ―a gaunt, haggard, and

haunted‖ portrait sculpture that has survived in several ancient versions. It is not named,

but it so matched everyone’s pr econceptions of what the elderly philosopher must have

looked like that it was simply assumed to be him. In 1813, however, a double-sided

portrait — showing two male heads, back to back — was unearthed in Rome, probably

dating to the third century AD: one was clearly labeled, in Greek, ―Socrates,‖ the other,

in Latin, ―Seneca‖ (―the two sages joined at the back of the head like Siamese twins

sharing a single brain,‖ as Romm has it).

This Seneca is completely different: full-faced, bald, and slightly bland, looking more

like the caricature of a bourgeois businessman than of a tortured philosopher. Quite why

Romm concludes, as he seems to, that this is the ―true‖ likeness of Seneca, I fail to

understand (some not hugely talented Roman sculptor a couple of centuries after

Seneca’s death almost certainly had no better idea than we do of what he really looked

like). But the contrast is still telling, and points to Seneca’s shifting, uncertain, often self -

contradictory identities.

Perhaps an even more powerful symbol of that confusion would have been the famous

painting by Rubens. The sources for this are strikingly mixed: the pose reflects the Jesus

of Ecce homo; the face is that of the haggard ―Pseudo-Seneca,‖ in Rubens’s day taken asan authentic likeness; the rest of the body is drawn from another famous ancient

sculpture, now in the Louvre, that was traditionally believed to be the old philosopher

standing in the bath where he finally died. This has been almost universally reinterpreted

as an elderly fisherman (and in its new display in the Louvre, the bath — which turned out

to be a modern addition anyway — has been removed).

These ambivalences about who Seneca was, what he stood for, how we recognize him —

and even more, how far we admire or deplore him — run right through his life story and

the many volumes of his surviving writing, genuine and otherwise. These range from

philosophical and scientific treatises (he was a particular expert on earthquakes), through

some disturbingly bleak tragic dramas and a hilarious skit (very probably, but not

absolutely certainly, by him) about the emperor Claudius being made a god after his

death, to some flagrantly apocryphal correspondence between the philosopher and Saint

Paul.



These letters point again, like the Rubens, to his incorporation into that select Christian

group of ―good pagans,‖ and try to link the ethics of Christianity with Seneca’s Stoic

philosophy. In fact, as Wilson notes, some Christians in the Middle Ages even claimed

that Seneca had been converted to Christianity in his final moments ―and was, as it were,

baptized by the bath of his death.‖ In fact the ideological links between Stoicism andChristianity were weak at best (though both were broad churches). Hard-line Stoicism

was a deterministic, fatalist doctrine that valued a virtuous life (and death) beyond almost

everything else, with very little room for human frailty indeed.

Seneca’s career might most generously be described as ―checkered.‖ Born to a family of

Roman settlers in Spain around 4 BC, he came to Rome, along with his elder brother

Novatus, where both of them made their way up the social and political hierarchy of the

city. Novatus really did have contact with Saint Paul: his main modern claim to fame

derives from his walk-on part in the Acts of the Apostles, when as Roman governor of

Achaea he refused to prosecute Paul as the Jews demanded (probably more a sign of hisdistrust of the Jews than any fondness for Christians).

Seneca himself spent most of his life in the dangerous penumbra of the imperial court,

combining the preaching of hard-line Stoic philosophy (renowned for its commitment to

unadulterated virtue) with dynastic wheeling and dealing and a taste for the high life. He

certainly cultivated connections with the sisters of the emperor Caligula, and early in the

reign of Claudius was exiled to Corsica on the charge of adultery with one of them, Julia

Livilla (maybe trumped up, maybe not). It was not until almost eight years later (in AD

49), when another of the sisters, Agrippina, married Claudius that Seneca was recalled to

Rome and took on what in hindsight we know was the unenviable job of tutor to her son,

the future emperor Nero.



Antikensammlung, Berlin/bpk/Art Resource

Roman double herm of Seneca and Socrates, third century AD

After Nero came to the throne in AD 54, Seneca remained at first one of his closest

advisers and speechwriters. He is supposed to have written the eulogy to the dead

Claudius that the new emperor pronounced at the funeral — which generally went down

well with the assembled mourners, even though, as Tacitus remarked darkly, it was the

first time that any emperor on any such occasion had had to rely ―on borrowed

eloquence.‖

But as the standard account goes, Nero soon proved hard to handle, and it would take

more than a few elegant speeches to manage successfully his relations with the Senate

and the more upright courtiers and army officers (though it is clear that, for longer than

he might have liked to admit, Seneca did continue to ―lend‖ his eloquence to help the

emperor cover up some of his worst crimes). After he had seen Nero arrange the deaths

of his own stepbrother, Britannicus, his mother Agrippina, and his stepsister and wife,




Octavia, Seneca eventually found it more comfortable, morally and in other ways, no

doubt, to distance himself from the court. He may even have played, as the emperor

believed, a significant part in the conspiracy that led to his death sentence.

The contradictions in this career are obvious and they troubled many ancient observers,

just as they have troubled many later ones. Part of this is the question of how to reconcileSeneca’s intimate involvement in the brutal power politics of the Roman court with the

high-minded philosophical ethics he professed. That indeed is the question that Miriam

Griffin addressed in her classic study, Seneca: A Philosopher in Politics (first published

in 1976), and it is one to which both Romm and Wilson also turn.

How could the true Stoic philosopher, who wrote so strenuously of the importance of

virtue in politics, square his conscience with the role he had chosen to play at Nero’s

right hand? Or to put it another way, how could a man who denounced tyranny take on

the job of tutor to a tyrant? Sophisticated modern critics, as Wilson writes, have generally

avoided the charge of hypocrisy (it implies, she concedes, ―a simplistic and even

anachronistic set of expectations about how life ought to relate to literary work‖). But to

be honest, hypocrisy is precisely the charge that comes to mind — unsophisticated as that

may be — just as it did two thousand years ago.

It was not only in the relationship of political theory to political practice that problems

were felt about Seneca’s character; there were other tricky matters, notably wealth. Stoics

in general were supposed to be indifferent to riches, and Seneca often opted for an

especially hard line in praising poverty as a philosophical good; for Stoics virtue itself

(and certainly not cash) was the only real aim. But it was widely believed that he hadused his position at court to amass riches on an enormous scale.

Tacitus, in fact, records the accusation against Seneca of one Suillius Rufus (not a very

pleasant character himself) that he had, as Romm says, ―heaped 300 million sesterces in

four years as a palace insider.‖ This would have been a vast fortune, given that the annual

pay of a Roman legionary soldier at the time was less than a thousand sesterces. Dio

Cassius, writing in the early third century AD, adds that he owned five hundred tables of

citrus wood, with ivory legs, all identical, for serving his dinner parties; and Dio even

alleges later that the revolt of Boudica in Britain in AD 60 or 61 was sparked by Seneca

suddenly choosing to call in the loans he had outstanding in the province. If that is the

case, he was obviously exploiting the provincials too.

Seneca does sometimes attempt to address the paradoxes of wealth. In his treatise On the

Happy Life, for example (newly translated by James Ker in the collection of Senecan

essays gathered together under the title Hardship and Happiness), he suggests that riches

are acceptable, provided that they are not ill-gotten and properly used, and the



philosopher can rise above them. Nevertheless it is hard not to see this unpleasantly

plutocratic side of Seneca in the bourgeois businessman of the double portrait, and to

draw an unflattering contrast between him and the truly austere Socrates to whom he has

been attached in the sculpture.

These problems are hardly assuaged by a closer look at Seneca’s surviving writings. As

individual works they can be extremely engaging, despite some occasionally off-putting

first impressions. It is true, for example, that there is a sometimes monotonous

preoccupation with dying and the preparation for death throughout his philosophical

work, from his short essays or Letters (which include the slogan ―we are dying every

day‖ of Romm’s title) to several of the longer treatises collected in Hardship and

Happiness. These often harp on the same basic, Stoic message: one should not grieve

over death (for it is inevitable) but over having been born; the dead are not afflicted by

any suffering after death; no one dies ―too soon,‖ as they were surely fated only to live as

long as they did.

But Seneca is adept at sugaring the pill, or rather at building some of these philosophical

truisms into vivid pictures of Roman life. So we learn in passing about Roman children’s

games (they would play at dressing up in purple-bordered togas, pretending to be consuls

and judges), or about the difficulties of being a governor’s wife in a Roman province

(always liable to be the subject of gossip). And one of the most memorable and often-

quoted descriptions of the noise generated by a Roman bathhouse (the pummeling and

pumping of flesh, the screams of men having their armpits roughly plucked) comes from

one of Seneca’s Letters whose principal theme is nothing to do with bathing, but

concerns mental and philosophical concentration.

The trickier question, however, goes beyond any of the individual works, to ask what his

writing as a whole adds up to, and just how uncomfortably self-contradictory it is. It may

well be largely generic differences that explain the contrast between the restrained control

of Seneca’s philosophical Letters and treatises and the outlandish and frightening

passions on display in his tragedies. (The Thyestes, in which he replays the mythical

cannibalistic feast of King Atreus, who serves up to his brother the flesh of his own

children, is one of the most upsetting works of classical literature to survive.)

But the idea that Seneca could one minute (as Tacitus tells us) ghostwrite Nero’s funeral

eulogy for the emperor Claudius, praising his wisdom and good judgment, and the next

minute compose a devastating satire, pouring scorn on the lumbering, limping, and

stammering Claudius and his claims to divine status, has often seemed not far short of

hypocrisy. Funny as the skit is — it pictures poor old Claudius struggling up to join the

Senate of the gods on Mount Olympus, only to be instantly dismissed and sent back down



to Hades — there is something slightly distasteful about it coming from the pen of a

philosophical guru who set such store by moral probity and ethical consistency.

These are the contrasts, conflicts, and ambiguities that Romm and Wilson confront: How

do we make any consistent and coherent sense of Seneca? Both are partly successful, but

only partly. Romm seems rather too ready to shrug his shoulders and put down Seneca’s

faults, as he sees them, to some version of the human condition: ―Seneca was human, all

too human, with the flaws and shortcomings that the human condition entails.‖ At other

points he prefers to sidestep the problem, as biographers of Seneca often do, and focus

his attention on the more straightforward story of the emperor Nero instead; and a fairly

racy story it turns out to be, sprinkled with ―deluded despots,‖ ―stiff -necked Stoics,‖

―fog- bound glens,‖ and such breathless, half -accurate hyperbole as ―he had committed

the most audacious murder of the century and had gotten clean away with it.‖

Wilson has a much stronger line, in suggesting that the search for consistency — elusive,

even impossible, though it might have been — was precisely Seneca’s project, and his

problem. As she cleverly insists, ―the most interesting question is not why Seneca failed

to practice what he preached, but why he preached what he did…given the life he found

himself leading.‖ Ultimately, she claims, he was trying to assert mastery (or ―empire‖ as

her title has it, taken from one of the Letters) both over himself and over the world. It is a

bravely argued case. But even she, in a different way, finds some of the biographical

traps difficult to negotiate: her chapter on Seneca’s youth, for example, occasionally

sinks to desperate speculation about his early playmates, and is illustrated by a painted

Roman toy horse — just like baby Seneca might once have owned.

But from time to time Dying Every Day and The Greatest Empire seem to nudge us

toward some more interesting conclusions that do not sweep the issues of hypocrisy

under the carpet, but put them into a wider political setting. These take us back to

Tacitus, and to his preoccupation with Seneca — who in the relevant books of his Annales

is almost as prominent a character in the story of Nero’s reign as the emperor himself.

For Tacitus, another of the corrupting effects of Roman autocracy was on the meaning of

words and deeds. (In this respect, his Annales are an unsettling precursor of Orwell’s

1984.) In his cynical analysis of the imperial court, nobody meant what they said or said

what they meant. In fact, survival depended on dissembling and on concealing true

feelings, on acting rather than being; hence, in part, his stress on Nero’s ambitions on the

stage.

This was a world embedded in doublethink and doublespeak. Nero entertained his mother

lavishly, gave kisses, and said fond farewells on the very evening he planned to kill her.

The Senate voted to give divine honors to Nero’s dead baby daughter, although most of



them knew it to be ridiculous (or at least were chuckling at Seneca’s skit on the

deification of Claudius). The emperor held a lavish triumphal celebration for his

victories, not on the battlefield but in musical and athletic contests. And when the young

Britannicus keeled over at the emperor’s dinner party, poisoned on Nero’s orders, it was

only his sister, Octavia, who reacted ―correctly‖— she just went on eating. It was left tothe hopelessly naive, untrained in the conventions of autocracy, to give the ―natural‖

response and ask if the poor boy was all right.

It is, as both Romm and Wilson find, very hard to uncover the ―real‖ Seneca. There are

certainly plenty of first-person pronouns found throughout his work, but these ―I‖s are

even more performative than is usual in autobiographical writing. Even the most private

of Seneca’s works are (in Wilson’s words) ―carefully constructed works of public

performance…. Seneca’s literary work plays a fascinating dance with the reader’s desire

for information about his lived experience.‖ And that is precisely why they are important

to Tacitus. For him Seneca was the ―perfect‖ imperial courtier— the true imago, forwhom (like Octavia) hypocrisy and dissembling were a way of life. The irony was that in

the end it saved neither of them from a difficult death. Philosophy was like dissembling:

it turned out not to help anyone.

how stoical was seneca mary beard

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