Seneca: the thinker we need today?
If you’re thinking about the Roman Empire, take a deeper look at Seneca.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the Roman Empire lately… And not just because of the TikTok trend. In case you haven’t heard of it, “Over 1 billion people have viewed a TikTok video with the hashtag #RomanEmpire, encouraging women to ask the men in their lives how often they think about the subject—and it’s shockingly often,” according to Fortune magazine.
There have always been “uses” of history, and what historical periods represent to us today often has very little to do with what actually happened back then. Cue the “broicism” approach that tries to turn Stoicism into a masculinity-focused life hack, as opposed to the virtue-driven, service-oriented reality of ancient Stoic thinking. Side note here: In my family, you’d have much better luck asking the women about how often they think about the Roman Empire—over three generations of women in my family, several of us are much more interested in ancient history and philosophy! Also: for a clever look at the personal lives of the early Roman emperors and, even more importantly, the women behind the throne, check out the BBC production of I, Claudius, a dramatization of books by Robert Graves. Artfully fictionalized, the series alternates between an autobiography of Claudius and a true-crime show—you never know who may be quietly poisoned or quickly executed next.
In any case, all this thinking about the ancient past, and how we think about it today, has made me interested to learn more about Seneca, the Roman statesman and Stoic philosopher. I’ve been reading Seneca for a long time, but just recently had the chance to immerse myself into his writings in translations published by the University of Chicago.
It led me to ask: Is Seneca a hero for our time? The thinker we need today, maybe even despite ourselves? Let’s explore.
Who was Seneca?
Born in Spain to a prominent Roman family, Seneca moved to Rome and cycled in and out of Roman power structures. From the start of his life in politics, Seneca was known for his oratorical skills. That may have saved him from death at the hands of the Emperor Caligula—who was apparently annoyed with him, but didn’t act on his hostility (many people who got under his skin ended up dead, but not Seneca).
After Caligula’s assassination and Claudius’s ascent to the imperial throne, Seneca was exiled to Corsica. Why? Claudius’s wife, Messalina, accused him of adultery with Caligula’s sister Julia Lavilla, who was Claudius’s niece. This seems rather unlikely to historians, but of course even a trumped up charge could easily get you exiled, banished, or executed. Some theorize that Messalina had a grudge against Julia Lavilla, who was exiled and later executed, and somehow Seneca had also attracted her ire enough to be sent packing.
Seneca later was recalled to Rome by Claudius after his new wife Agrippina (Julia Lavilla’s sister) recommended that Seneca tutor her 12-year-old son, Nero, for whom she held high political ambitions. After Claudius’ death, Nero took control of the throne, with his mother influencing him along with Seneca, as well as the praetorian prefect, Burrus. Together, they sought to guide Nero and administer the Empire.
Seneca and others likely restrained Nero’s impulses at the beginning of the Emperor’s reign, but things got dicey quickly. Nero had his mother killed, and Seneca authored Nero’s speech excusing the death publicly. The writing was on the wall about this unstable, violent tyrant. Seneca began requesting to step down, but Nero declined twice. The philosopher was surely not pleased with this dangerous, un-quittable job.
Eventually, he did escape court. Not long later, Nero accused Seneca of plotting to kill and replace him. Nero sentenced the philosopher to die (he was probably innocent, according to historians).
His death by suicide, which took some time to achieve, became a historical legend. In fact, it was one of the few things that his Roman detractors actually admired about Seneca, because he seems to have died according to his beliefs and his Stoic principles. It’s been the subject of art, including a famous painting by Peter Paul Rubens.
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The problem with Seneca
Which leads me to the main charges against Seneca: that he was a corrupt hypocrite who wrote about how we should bear up against adversity and poverty, and value the virtues above all else, when in fact, he could not live by his own beliefs and propped up a tyrannical regime.
Is this fair? In some ways, yes. He clearly had a morally murky career in Rome, supporting a murderous dictator in the Emperor Nero, and he definitely amassed enormous wealth through his work for the imperial family. He may have charged high interest on loans in Italy and the provinces, according to a contemporary (P. Siullius). By his own implication in his essay On Leisure (if you read the “accusations” he writes in quotes as containing some truth), Seneca’s fortune was so great he couldn’t even name all the houses he owned. And he certainly benefitted from the labor of enslaved people, like all upper class Romans.
Even in ancient times, Seneca was sometimes the punching bag of historians and commentators. Seneca’s translators, in their introduction for the U of Chicago editions, put it this way:
Seneca’s own character strikes many readers as problematic. From his own time onward, he was perceived as a hypocrite who was far from practicing what he preached. Some of Seneca’s writings… are obviously self-serving. As Seneca himself suggests (Letters, 84), he has transformed the teachings he has culled, in the manner of bees, into a whole that reflects his own complex character.
The appeal of Seneca: a protagonist seeking a good life in a dark time
But in many ways, it is precisely that complex character that appeals to me as a modern reader. The more I study Stoicism and ancient philosophy and history, the more I relate to and perhaps identify with Seneca.
The man was caught in an impossible situation in life. On the one hand he was at the height of the kind of power that any non-imperial person could attain in the Roman Empire, with the capacity to make a difference in how it was run, as well as a chance to exercise his writing muscles. He probably felt he could do more good by reigning in the emperor’s worst impulses rather than just retiring to the countryside. On the other, his power and also his life were chained to an emperor, Nero, who had zero moral compass and ultimately ordered him to die.
What’s more, even before Nero became an emperor, he was a student and he was very likely already off the rails. Although Seneca counseled moderation and even wrote a whole essay on how to wield clemency and mercy for the emperor’s consumption, Seneca couldn’t mold the 12-year-old into a person who cared about the virtues or about rational or pro-social behaviors. And clearly Seneca couldn’t control Nero once he took command of all that his position gave him—absolute authority.
It’s a fear that all parents and caregivers, as well as dedicated teachers, could identify with. What if this child in my charge gets out of control, and somehow does harm to others? That is what happened with Nero, on a massive scale. It wasn’t really Seneca’s choice to begin with—outside of his control were both the temperament and character of the child he was asked to teach, and the cultural and political scene of his time.
Add to that, we should keep in mind the turmoil of the Roman empire as a place of constant violence and upheaval. We can relate to that too; deadly violence, terrorism, and conflict are all over the international news and causing fear, heartbreak, and anxiety even for those many miles away. We’re also constantly confronted with the fact that the goals of our society and our power structures do not align with the Stoic virtues of wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation. Perhaps powerful people in the US, where I live, aren’t outright trying to kill us… although, with the opioid scandal, gun violence, and the processed food industry, that’s debatable. In any case, it is difficult to deny that modern conflicts, economic structures, and power dynamics make it harder to live a good life.
Back to Seneca: can he guide us?
I think Seneca deserves our attention, despite—or, in a way, because of—his faults. Much of the wisdom in his letters and treatises reminds of how to live better, even when we’re tempted not to, or being pressured by the way folks live all around us. For example, his essay On the Shortness of Life is relevant for everyone. In that treatise, Seneca points out the types of distractions that suck away our time: vices, procrastination, and (quite literally) trivial pursuits, or “idle preoccupations,” such as arranging one’s collection of Corinthian bronzes, watching boys wrestle, going daily to the barber, or memorizing popular songs? Some of the examples may differ slightly today, but not all that much!
His analysis of people’s tendency towards busy-work and our obligation to labor in a less-than-ideal public sphere makes Seneca appealing to those who want to live more and work less (or better). Perhaps that’s one of the many reasons why the entrepreneur, podcaster, and writer Tim Ferriss made Seneca’s work the focus of his project The Tao of Seneca (available as free downloads here; Ferriss originally became well known as the author of The 4-Hour Workweek).
Seneca’s call to end work-for-status-and-recognition in favor of devoting our time to contemplating the universe or to deep reflection (in On Leisure) is a theme he circles back to in several of his writings. It’s one that resonates with many modern people caught up in dead-end jobs or multiple jobs to make ends meet. If only we could leave all that behind!
Here’s a passage from On the Shortness of Life (7.7-9) that has meaning for all the tired-of-corporate-life folks I see often on humorous Instagram accounts (“My Corporate Bestie,” anyone?):
All those who engage you in their business disengage you from yourself.
…The man who’s achieved the high office he’d prayed for longs to lay it aside and repeatedly says: ‘When will this year end?’ The man who puts on the games thought it a great privilege… Now he says: ‘When will I be free of them?’ That advocate has people competing for his attention throughout the forum… ‘When,’ he says, ‘will there be a vacation?’ Everyone sends his life racing headlong and suffers from a longing for the future, a loathing of the present.
The person who devotes every second of his time to his own needs and who organizes each day as if it were a complete life neither longs for nor is afraid of the next day. …Addition can be made to this life, but nothing taken away from it—and addition made in a way that a man who is already satisfied and full takes a portion of food which he doesn’t crave and yet has room for.
Of course, this kind of living for our “own needs” is a luxury that most of us working stiffs can only dream about… but we may just be able to inch towards it by reorganizing our priorities over time.
Where should we be putting our energy? Maybe the current “quiet quitting” concept aligns with Seneca—he would agree that giving all one’s heart and soul to a job is not a good use of one’s time. (Not that Seneca was necessarily able to follow this advice himself, however, especially once he became enmeshed with Nero.)
Even if we find ourselves in roles that don’t allow much time for contemplation, Seneca finds a clever way for us to “live” beyond our years, which is worth remembering when time is fleeting. The answer: study philosophy! (14.1)
Of all people, they alone who give their time to philosophy are at leisure, they alone really live. For it’s not just their own lifetime that they watch over carefully, but they annex every age to their own; all the years that have gone before are added to their own. …We are led by the work of others into the presence of the most beautiful treasures, which have been pulled from darkness and brought to light. From no age are we debarred, we have access to all; and if we want to transcend the narrow limitations of human weakness by our expansiveness of mind, there is a great span of time for us to range over.
Seneca knew he was often failing
When you read Seneca, you realize how many of the human concerns that we encounter today are age-old. What you also learn is how extremely self-aware Seneca was, in particular about his own wealth and status in a corrupt society.
He was struggling to find a way to live by his principles. He knew he was often failing. He knew he should be doing better. But he wasn’t afraid to show his own imperfection and even vulnerability in his writing. You may call it self-serving, but it’s also a kind of “radical candor” (to adopt the words of Kim Scott) about himself. And in that sense, because of his awareness of his faults, we can relate to him in ways that more “pure” figures like Socrates make difficult.
Seneca puts words in the mouth of a critic in On the Happy Life (17.1 - 18.2) that accuse “the philosopher” (that is, Seneca) of not living up to his own standards of conduct: “Why, then, do you speak more bravely than you live? How is it that you lower your voice for someone of higher rank and treat money as a necessary resource for you?”
He goes further:
“ …Why is your furniture so extravagant? Why is wine consumed at your house that is of an older vintage than you are? Why is there gold everywhere? … How is it that your wife wears in her ears assets equal to those of a wealthy household? …. Why do you have property overseas? Why do you have more than you are aware of?”
His response to these accusations illustrates just how conscious he is of his own failings… and resonates with modern folks who find themselves unable to live up to their ideals. Interestingly, he invokes Plato, Epicurus, and Zeno, who all had accusations leveled against them that they did not uphold all their own teachings through their lived experiences:
I will make this reply to you: I am not wise, and, just to nourish your ill will: I will not be wise. … ‘You speak in one way, and live in another,’ you say. This accusation… was made against Plato, against Epicurus, against Zeno. All of them said not how they themselves were living, but how they themselves ought to live, too. I speak about virtue, not about myself; and when I attack the vices, I attack my own vices especially. I will live as I ought as soon as I can… Not even the venom with which you spatter others, with which you kill yourselves, will hinder me from continuing to praise the life not that I live but that I know ought to be lived, or from worshipping virtue and crawling after it from a huge distance behind.
We’re all imperfect
And that’s where we often find ourselves: crawling after virtue, from a distance, humbled by our journey. And by inching along on this road together with Seneca, we do benefit: we know we’re not alone, and that we’re seeking aspects of the sage within us. That “perfect” sage’s existence, where a person can completely live by her principles, may be unattainable in practice for most of us, and in that, Seneca is our comrade… Many other passages in Seneca remind me that all humans are imperfect and have real flaws.
BUT: we can nevertheless strive to extricate ourselves from the impulses and systems that drag us away from a good life. I am an idealist at heart, and I am quite sure that Seneca was too.
And to circle back to parenting and caregiving, this is what I convey to my kids: do what you can, aim for virtue, even if you realize you won’t be able to reach the goal completely. Be the Stoic archer.
I plan to dig even further into Seneca in future posts. Share your thoughts below!
Really insightful and nuanced article! I love how you put it: Seneca was "a protagonist seeking a good life in a dark time." Thank you for sharing this.
Thank you for this inspiring perspective. So many quotes and folk wisdom comes to mind about curving that bitterness we have when we compare the person we put on a pedestal with the human being they are... Somewhere sometime I decided that I need to balance my arrogance with humility and I often end up undervaluing my achievements and thinking that this I just said is a sign of my arrogance... (confusing ).
I very much admire Seneca's approach, preaching what he admires and strives for, and lately I have realized that his is a better strategy. I've als noticed that although I am very tolerant of people's errors and irrationality, I don't like people who don't strive towards virtue.
I grew up in a Catholic culture and so much of what was taught to me is making sense when learning more about stoicism... But am I wrong if now I tolerate easier and forgive faster when I see that battle for stoic virtue in the other? Is it selfish that now I tolerate my imperfections better, can feel better in my skin, knowing of my constant internal struggle?
And are there similarities between what Christ was preaching at his time and the stoic philosophy? Or am I trying to reconcile my upbringing (based on a religion) with what makes sense to me now (stoic practice)?
So thanks again for making me think and ask questions!