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 Staatsgemldesammlungen/bpk/Art Resource

Peter Paul Rubens: The Death of Seneca, 16121613

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though he had withdrawn into retirement when the true character of Neros reign became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 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.
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 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 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.
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 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 selfcontradictory 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 him
and 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 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.
Senecas 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 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.
It 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 oftenquoted 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 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 Hadesthere 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 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 consistencyelusive,
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.