Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC-65 AD) was a celebrated Roman author, public speaker and thinker and is at the moment seen (alongside Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius) as one of many three best historical Stoics.
This text is a part of a sequence on Stoic philosophy. Discover all of the articles on this sequence here.
The Two Senecas
Seneca (4 BC – 65 AD) is maybe probably the most complicated and complicated of the traditional Stoic philosophers. Not solely had been there two folks of the identical title, Seneca the Elder (the daddy of the thinker, himself a author and politician) and Seneca the Youthful (the one we’re speaking about); however Seneca the Youthful himself usually appears to be a composite of quite a lot of solely completely different personalities.
Have a look at these two. The primary one, on the left, is an image of what Seneca (the Youthful, the Stoic thinker) would possibly even have regarded like.
Left picture by I, Calidius, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2456052
The second picture, on the fitting, is typically thought to depict Seneca, however most likely doesn’t. It is named a picture of “pseudo-Seneca.”
I’ve at all times thought that these two busts fantastically seize the completely different faces of Seneca. The second, handsome, tortured one, because the picture he may need had of himself: the troubled thinker, struggling, however at all times preserving his eyes firmly mounted on the higher life. The primary one, a conservative and generally shifty previous man, well-fed, comfy in his privileged life: the person that others may need seen once they checked out him.
The 2 faces of the thinker. In addition they present, I believe, one thing else that’s true for all writing and artwork: that we can not choose the work by judging the creator’s life. Regardless of all of the discuss of authenticity these days, many nice and enduring artistic endeavors, lots of the best acts of charity and self-sacrifice, many political feats that crushed empires had been carried out by reasonably small-minded, mean-spirited, unwholesome women and men: folks one wouldn’t like to fulfill socially.
A ‘Stoic’ angle to life goals to realize lasting happiness by staying calm, rational and emotionally indifferent, whereas cultivating one’s virtues.
Seneca’s life
Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Youthful was born 4 BC in Cordoba, in what at the moment is Spain, however moved to Rome as a small baby and grew as much as be a mannequin Roman citizen of his time. His father was already a well-known author and trainer of rhetoric and little Seneca grew up on this rich household, himself destined to later discover his function among the many aristocracy of Rome. When Seneca developed respiratory difficulties (most likely some type of bronchial asthma) he was despatched throughout the Mediterranean to stick with an uncle who was then the Prefect of Egypt. The Senecas weren’t folks to rely pennies.
When Seneca returned to Rome after just a few years, he instantly acquired into hassle. Emperor Caligula was so offended by Seneca’s speeches within the Senate that he ordered him to commit suicide — however Seneca regarded so frail and sick already, that the Emperor didn’t insist. If Seneca died from pure causes, a lot the higher.
Seneca didn’t die. As a substitute, Caligula was assassinated and Claudius turned emperor, who was a bit of bit extra pleasant in direction of the thinker. When, quickly later, Seneca was accused of adultery with Caligula’s sister and sentenced to loss of life by the Senate, the emperor modified the sentence to exile. Seneca went for eight years to heat, sunny Corsica, the place he wrote two of his well-known letters, the Comfort to Helvia and the Comfort to Polybius. Via flattery in these works, Seneca tried to get the emperor to vary his thoughts. However his exile was solely lower brief when the brand new spouse of Claudius, Caligula’s sister, who was pleasant to Seneca, organized for him to return from Corsica.
All of a sudden, the exiled enemy of the state turned a tutor to the subsequent emperor, Agrippina’s son Nero. And right here issues flip darkish. Seneca wrote the brand new emperor’s speeches, and he defended Nero when the emperor began killing off his opponents, together with 14-year previous Britannicus, the kid of Claudius, whom Nero had poisoned. A number of years later, Nero killed his personal mom, Agrippina, the one who had used her affect to get Seneca again from exile. However the thinker now was firmly on the facet of the brand new emperor and he wrote a letter justifying the homicide to the Senate.
Seneca was attacked from many sides and he discovered himself many times in the course of allegations of corruption, of sexual relations with Agrippina, and of making an attempt to squeeze cash out of individuals he had given loans to. However he was by now past caring. Seneca had change into immensely wealthy, proudly owning estates all throughout the Mediterranean. He even lent cash to the British aristocracy and precipitated an rebellion when he out of the blue demanded that they pay again the loans.
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Slowly however inevitably, the wealthy thinker on the coronary heart of the Roman net of energy turned inconvenient to the emperor. When Nero realized of a conspiracy to kill him, he rapidly removed everybody whom he suspected of getting collaborated with the conspirators — and Seneca was a kind of Nero needed gone. In an echo of Seneca’s very first contact with Roman politics, the emperor Nero ordered the ageing thinker to take his personal life. This time, there was nobody alive to defend him, nobody to take his facet or defend him from the emperor’s wrath.
In 65 AD, Seneca took his life, which he did reasonably clumsily and with much more blood and struggling than would have been needed. And thus ended the lifetime of this most ambiguous, most glittering determine of historical philosophy: the Stoic who wrote about human affected by inside his shining banqueting halls, the tutor who could have conspired to kill his pupil, the person who was caught within the net of intercourse and betrayal that was Roman politics of the time, the exiled prison who spent a decade having fun with his riches on a sunny island, on a regular basis writing letters during which he tried to console himself for the cruelty of life.
The person and the sage
At this time we’re usually fast to guage others. Can Seneca even imply something of what he wrote? Are you able to be wealthy and a Stoic, are you able to be privileged and genuine, or is Seneca solely appropriating the tropes of struggling with a purpose to create a flattering public picture for himself and to spice up his literary profession? If there may be whitewashing and greenwashing, can we accuse Seneca of “sufferingwashing” or “Stoicwashing” his personal life, of posing and posturing reasonably than really being the person the work suggests?
Our tradition is afraid of contradictions in human personalities, it calls for simplicity and authenticity. However life just isn’t a James Bond film, during which heroes and villains sit on completely different benches. Seneca, whereas being the well-fed, complacent man within the first image above, was additionally the thinker struggling to make sense of his personal life, incessantly criticising himself with each sentence he wrote. There was at all times that different individual, the one of many second bust, hidden inside the primary. It was that second Seneca, the Stoic one, who wrote of the primary:
Vices beset us and encompass us on each facet, and they don’t allow us to rise anew and elevate up our eyes for the discernment of fact, however they hold us down when as soon as they’ve overwhelmed us and we’re chained to lust. … Have a look at these whose prosperity males flock to behold; they’re smothered by their blessings. To what number of are riches a burden! From what number of do eloquence and the every day straining to show their powers draw forth blood! What number of are pale from fixed pleasures! … Nobody is his personal grasp. (On the Shortness of Life)
Within the final years of his life, Seneca tried to withdraw to the countryside and lead a quiet life amongst his books and writings. However Nero didn’t depart him alone. Afraid maybe to rule with out the ethical help of the person who had raised and suggested him since he was a toddler, the emperor stored calling Seneca again — till that day when all of it lastly turned an excessive amount of for them each.
One feels that maybe Seneca, at that time, may need welcomed the loss of life sentence. Realising, like Socrates, that it was price sacrificing his mortal physique for his everlasting picture, or lastly fed up with having to justify his personal life and selections to himself within the elaborate Latin phrases of his work, loss of life will need to have appealed to the internal Seneca. One second of struggling and he would lastly be free to change into the thinker who he at all times had longed to be however by no means was.
It will need to have been at such a second of readability that Seneca wrote down the phrases:
Many very nice males, having laid apart all their encumbrances, having renounced riches, enterprise, and pleasures, have made it their one purpose as much as the very finish of life to know learn how to reside; but the better variety of them have departed from life confessing that they didn’t but know — nonetheless much less do these others know.
Seneca wrote this e-book, De Brevitate Vitae (“On the Shortness of Life”) in 49 AD, across the center of his life. Maybe by this level he was nonetheless hoping to search out the time, within the second half of it, to actually discover ways to reside. Realising the problem of the duty, he added:
It takes the entire of life to discover ways to reside, and — what is going to maybe make you marvel extra — it takes the entire of life to discover ways to die.
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