How Stoical Was Seneca?

Bayerische Staatsgemldesammlungen/bpk/Art Resource

Peter Paul Rubens: The Death of Seneca,
16121613
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
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 emperors tutor and
adviser, though he had withdrawn into
retirement when the true character of Neros
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.
The knock came from the captain of a troop
of praetorian guardsmen who had stationed
themselves around Senecas house, just
outside Rome. Ironically, the captain
himself was also involved in the planned
coup, but had decided to follow the emperors 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, Seneca was
Font Size: A A A
T
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 the Liberator.
So Tacitusprobably the most acute analyst ever of the autocratic rule of the
Roman emperorsdescribed 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 Tacituss 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 Neros 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.
hat 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 deathas the title of James Romms
new biography, Dying Every Day, hintshe 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
stoicalin the attenuated sense of stiff upper lipwould ever suggest).
But Senecas death was a frankly hubristic imitation of the death of Socrates:
with his last thoughts being dictated (as in Platos 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
T
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 of experiencing 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 Tacituss account of Senecas
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 Rubenss 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 Tacituss version of Senecas
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, Senecas 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.
he 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 shapingstill 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 everyones preconceptions of what
the elderly philosopher must have looked like that it was simply assumed to be
him. In 1813, however, a double-sided portraitshowing two male heads, back
to backwas 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 Senecas 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 Senecas 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 Rubenss day taken as an 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 bathwhich turned out to
be a modern addition anywayhas been removed).
These ambivalences about who Seneca was, what he stood for, how we
recognize himand even more, how far we admire or deplore himrun 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
Senecas Stoic philosophy. In fact, as Wilson notes, some Christians in the
S
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 and Christianity 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.
enecas 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 his distrust 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 funeralwhich
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
I
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 reconcile Senecas 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 Neros 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 mindunsophisticated as that
may bejust as it did two thousand years ago.
t was not only in the relationship of political theory to political practice that
problems were felt about Senecas 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 had used 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 Senecas 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 Romms 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 childrens games (they would play at dressing up in purple-
bordered togas, pretending to be consuls and judges), or about the difficulties
of being a governors 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 Senecas 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 Senecas 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
Neros 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 isit
T
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.
hese 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 Senecas 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 beenwas precisely
Senecas 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 didgiven 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 Senecas youth, for example,
occasionally sinks to desperate speculation about his early playmates, and is
illustrated by a painted Roman toy horsejust 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 Senecawho in
the relevant books of his Annales is almost as prominent a character in the
story of Neros 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 Orwells 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 Neros 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 Neros dead baby
daughter, although most of them knew it to be ridiculous (or at least were
chuckling at Senecas 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 emperors dinner party, poisoned on Neros orders, it was only his sister,
Octavia, who reacted correctlyshe just went on eating. It was left to the
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 Is are even more performative than is usual in autobiographical
writing. Even the most private of Senecas works are (in Wilsons words)
carefully constructed works of public performance. Senecas literary work
plays a fascinating dance with the readers desire for information about his
lived experience. And that is precisely why they are important to Tacitus. For
him Seneca was the perfect imperial courtierthe true imago, for whom
(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.
RELATED
Roman Jokers
Gregory Hays
Rome: Sex & Freedom
Peter Brown
Alexander: How Great?
Mary Beard
1963-2014 NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved.