Letters From a Stoic

by Seneca

  SENECA AND PHILOSOPHY

  Stoicism, for centuries the most influential philosophy in the Graeco-Roman world, had a long history before Seneca. Founded by Zeno (born of Phoenician descent in Cyprus c. 336/5 B.C.) who had taught or lectured in a well-known stoa (a colonnade or porch) – hence the name – in Athens, it had been developed and modified by a succession of thinkers whose opinions on various logical, ethical or cosmological questions showed some fair divergencies. As a moral creed, however, it was based throughout on the following framework of belief.

  The Stoics saw the world as a single great community in which all men are brothers, ruled by a supreme providence which could be spoken of, almost according to choice or context, under a variety of names or descriptions including the divine reason, creative reason, nature, the spirit or purpose of the universe, destiny, a personal god, even (by way of concession to traditional religion) ‘the gods’. It is man’s duty to live in conformity with the divine will, and this means, firstly, bringing his life into line with ‘nature’s laws’, and secondly, resigning himself completely and uncomplainingly to whatever fate may send him. Only by living thus, and not setting too high a value on things which can at any moment be taken away from him, can he discover that true, unshakeable peace and contentment to which ambition, luxury and above all avarice are among the greatest obstacles.

  Living ‘in accordance with nature’ means not only questioning convention and training ourselves to do without all except the necessities (plain food, water, basic clothing and shelter) but developing the inborn gift of reason which marks us off as different from the animal world. We are meant to set free or perfect this rational element, this particle of the universal reason, the ‘divine spark’ in our human make-up, so that it may campaign against and conquer pain, grief, superstition and the fear of death. It will show us that ‘there’s nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so’, discipline the pleasures and the passions, and generally subordinate the body and emotions to the mind and soul.

  In this way we shall arrive at the true end of man, happiness, through having attained the one and only good thing in life, the ideal or goal called arete in Greek and in Latin virtus – for which the English word ‘virtue’ is so unsatisfactory a translation. This, the summum bonum or ‘supreme ideal’, is usually summarized in ancient philosophy as a combination of four qualities: wisdom (or moral insight), courage, self-control and justice (or upright dealing). It enables a man to be ‘self-sufficient’, immune to suffering, superior to the wounds and upsets of life (often personalized as Fortuna, the goddess of fortune). Even a slave thus armed can be called ‘free’, or indeed titled ‘a king’ since even a king cannot touch him. Another example of these ‘paradoxes’ for which the Stoics were celebrated is one directed at the vanity of worldly possessions: ‘the shortest route to wealth is the contempt of wealth.’31

  This ethic, together with its backing in a system of physics and logic, had first been given shape in the minds of thinkers who, although Greek-speaking, were for the most part not of European descent, coming from places in Asia Minor or the Levant like Tarsus, Cyprus, and Babylon. This does not seem to have reduced the appeal it made to educated Romans when, around the middle of the second century B.C., it first came to their notice. The duties it inculcated – courage and endurance, self-control and self-reliance, upright conduct and just dealing, simple and unluxurious habits, rationality, obedience to the state – were self-evident to many Romans, corresponding quite closely to the traditional idea of virtus. The development of the jus naturae by the Roman jurists and Posidonius’ identification of the Stoic world community or cosmopolis with the Roman Empire made its acceptance even easier. At a later date the Stoic view of the ruler (this term including governors, magistrates and administrative officials)32 as a man whose actions could be criticized, and even as a minister or servant, was to be disliked by emperors, some of whom replied by expelling ‘the philosophers’. But Stoics were usually far from hostile to monarchy as such, however openly they declared that rank counted for nothing against the duty of all men, whatever their station, to play their part in life well.

  Despite its wide acceptance in educated circles, early Stoicism had a forbidding aspect which went far to explain its failure to influence the masses. There was something unreal or fictional about the sapiens, the wise man or philosopher. This ideal figure seemed, from the way the Stoic lecturers talked, to have somehow become perfect in some sudden transformation long ago; gradual self-improvement was hardly discussed. The target it set seemed too high for ordinary men. It stifled and repressed ordinary human emotions in striving after apatheia, immunity to feeling; Cato, the great Stoic saint, is reported to have expressed regret at having kissed his wife in a moment of danger. It held that in certain circumstances a man’s self-respect might invite, as an act of supreme nobility, his suicide. In pursuing the ideal of autarkeia, self-sufficiency, it seemed to make the perfect man a person detached and aloof from his fellows, superior to the world he lived in. Altogether the impression it conveyed, for all its idealism and sincerity, could be cold, dogmatic and unrealistic. Seneca’s contribution to ancient philosophy lay in the humanization of this creed, continuing a process begun long before in Rhodes and Rome by Panaetius and Posidonius.

  Although Seneca wrote for a relatively narrow circle of educated persons (usually addressing his compositions to a particular friend or relative as if he were that person’s special spiritual adviser) his letters and essays show a Stoicism more closely reconciled with the facts and frailty of human nature. The ideal of apatheia is much modified. Self-sufficient though he is, the sapiens can now have friends and can grieve, within limits, at the loss of one. It has become his duty to be kind and forgiving towards others, indeed to ‘live for the other person’.33 In his way of living he should avoid being ostentatiously different from those he tries to win from moral ignorance. He has to battle like the rest against his failings, in a long and painful progress towards perfection in which all can do with help from above or the inspiration of others’ example. Seneca himself, we observe, occasionally makes immodest statements concerning his own progress, but is capable of humility, as in one description of himself as ‘a long way from being a tolerable, let alone a perfect human being’.34

  In statements of man’s kinship with a beneficent, even loving god and of a belief in conscience as the divinely inspired ‘inner light of the spirit’, his attitudes are religious beyond anything in Roman state religion, in his day little more than a withered survival of formal worship paid to a host of ancient gods and goddesses. Christian writers have not been slow to recognize the remarkably close parallels between isolated sentences in Seneca’s writings and verses of the Bible.35 On the other hand the word ‘God’ or ‘the gods’ was used by the philosophers more as a time-honoured and convenient expression than as standing for any indispensable or even surely identifiable component of the Stoic system. And the tendency of Stoicism was always to exalt man’s importance in the universe rather than to abase him before a higher authority. The hope of immortality was occasionally held out but Seneca does not play on it. To him as to most Stoics virtue was to be looked on as its own reward and vice as its own punishment. The religious hunger of the masses of his day was to be met not by philosophy but by the cults of Isis and Mithras and Christianity.

  For the ancient world, then, apart from reviving philosophy in Latin literature, he ‘spiritualized and humanized’36 Stoicism. What of Seneca and modern philosophy? The latter, at least in the universities of the English-speaking world, has for some time been set on a course which he would certainly have condemned; he would not have understood the attention it pays to ordinary language, and some of his letters (for example letter XLVIII) make it clear that it would have come in for a share of his impatience with philosophers (not excluding Stoics) who in his eyes degraded philosophy by wasting their time on verbal puzzles or logical hairsplitting. But more than this, he would have denounced the
opinion to which most philosophers, tacitly or otherwise, have come round in the last half-century, that it is no part of the business of philosophy to turn people into better persons, as tantamount to desertion or lèse-majesté. His tremendous faith in philosophy as a mistress was grounded on a belief that her end was the practical one of curing souls, of bringing peace and order to the feverish minds of men pursuing the wrong aims in life. ‘What we say should be of use, not just entertaining.’37 Even speculation on the nature or meaning of the universe was of secondary importance, something which the philosopher might or might not, as he chose, take up in leisure moments. A philosopher’s words should (as a Quaker might put it) ‘speak to our condition’. Fielding’s observation that few people in the position of being ‘overloaded with prosperity or adversity’ could be too wise or too foolish not to gain from reading Seneca might have gratified him not merely as an indication that his writings were proving ‘of use’ to later generations, but also as showing that a philosopher could still be regarded as someone to be turned to for advice or consolation. To Seneca, as Letter XC and other letters plainly show, the philosopher and the wise man were the same person.

  Whether or not his letters may still be turned to for their pointers to the contented life, they cannot be read without noticing how far in advance of their time are many of his ideas – on the shows in the arena, for example, or the treatment of slaves. His implicit belief in the equality and brotherhood of man despite all barriers of race or class or rank, was one, resurrected from the days of the early Stoics, which led directly to great improvements in the legal position of slaves; besides explaining the then remarkable attitude towards slaves expressed in Letter XLVII, the belief was also the germ of the notion of natural law, the law which was thought to transcend national boundaries and form a basis for the validity of international law. These elements of Stoicism made their not so small or indirect contribution to the French and American revolutions.

  SENECA AND LITERATURE

  His letters and other writings

  ‘Seneca,’ Quintilian tells us, ‘turned his hand to practically everything which can be made the subject of study – speeches, poems, letters, dialogues all surviving.’ Much of this is lost, including all his speeches (political and forensic), a biography of his father, and essays or treatises on marriage, superstition and a variety of other subjects, mainly scientific.

  The works remaining to us (apart from brief poems or epigrams whose attribution to Seneca is sometimes doubtful) are of two main kinds. There are, first, the philosophical letters and essays, including treatises with such titles as The Happy Life, The Shortness of Life, Providence, Anger, Clemency, Problems in Natural Science and literary consolationes to persons in bereavement. And secondly there are the tragedies, probably never staged and intended only for reading or recitation among a relatively small circle.38

  The one hundred and twenty four letters to Lucilius comprise something entirely new in literature. For in these, which were his most conspicuous and immediate literary success, Seneca if anyone is the founder of the Essay. As Francis Bacon put it to Prince Henry in the dedication of his own Essays: ‘The word is late, but the thing is auncient. For Senecaes Epistles to Lucilius, yf one marke them well, are but Essaies, that is, dispersed Meditacions, thoughe conveyed in the forme of Epistles.’ The Epistulae Morales are essays in disguise. It has been said39 that they were real letters edited for publication. It seems most likely that they were intended from the first for publication, possibly preceded by an interval of private circulation. No replies have come down to us.

  The atmosphere varies from that of lively, not to say colloquial, conversation to that of the serious treatise; it is occasionally raised to higher levels,40 but generally remains informal. The ‘teaching’ is generously eclectic; the first thirty letters each contain some quotation from or reference to writings of the main rival philosophical school, the Epicureans. The introduction of imaginary queries or objections (often scathing in tone) from the correspondent or another interjector and the frequent and urgent exhortation of the listener to self-improvement suggest the atmosphere of the diatribe, while confidences about the writer’s own character and the not uncommon choice of consolation or friendship as a theme serve to keep up the air of the letter. Personal happenings or surroundings are regularly made the occasion of, or the preliminary to, serious reflections in the abstract. There are also biting condemnations of ways of life around the writer, particularly among the bored and pleasure-seeking Roman aristocracy. Room is found too for culture, in an assimilable form, in balanced discussions of time-honoured philosophical or ethical problems,41 or in the development of thoughts on, for example, poetry, or physical phenomena, or style.

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  His style

  Style, with Seneca, is of considerable importance. Notwithstanding his own condemnation42 of people who give less attention to what they have to say than to how they will say it, he is a signal example of a writer to whom form mattered as much as content. In writers like him (in what has commonly been called the Silver Age of Latin literature), constant striving after terseness and originality of expression gave rise to an arresting and not easily digested style.

  There were reasons for the development of this ‘pointed’ style. With the passing of the Republic and succession of a series of suspicious emperors there had been a diminution both in the range of subject-matter which was safe and in the practical value of a training in rhetoric for a career in public life. The leisured Roman (now increasingly over-leisured) turned his training to literary rather than political ends; and the means to the prime new end of stylistic brilliance were those of rhetoric. All this was encouraged by the fashion of giving public readings of one’s work, in which success almost came to be measured by the ability of each and every sentence to win applause. Carried over, too, from the schools of rhetoric was a liking for sometimes daringly poetic words, especially from Virgil, and artificial forms of expression more typical of verse than prose.

  Going with the overriding aim of pithiness or epigrammatic brevity (contrasting so greatly with the style of Cicero a century before) was an indulgence in colloquialisms. Seneca’s use of popular turns of phrase and everyday expressions (a practice rare in Roman authors not writing for the comic stage or on technical subjects) and deliberate cultivation of the easy, conversational manner are somehow reconciled with elements of style, even in the Letters, which to us seem highly wrought and polished. The exploitation of such figures as antithesis, alliteration, homeoteleuta and all manner of other plays upon words, paradox and oxymoron, apposition and asyndeton, the use of cases and prepositions in uncommon connotations, all contribute to the twin aims of brevity and sparkle.

  The result may read more naturally in Latin than it ever could in English, but is none the less apt to leave the reader ‘dazzled and fatigued’.43 All the wealth and ingenuity of epigram and illustration does not prevent us from feeling that the sentences often simply ‘repeat the same thought, clothed in constantly different guises, over and over again’, as Fronto complained in the century following. And this reluctance, as it appears, to say what one has to say and then have done with it instead of continuing the restless manufacture of yet bolder, more hard-hitting or more finished sentences or proverbs, sometimes arouses the impatience of more modern readers. There is Macaulay’s celebrated statement in a letter to a friend: ‘I cannot bear Seneca… His works are made up of mottoes. There is hardly a sentence which might not be quoted; but to read him straightforward is like dining on nothing but anchovy sauce.’ Quintilian44 considered that Seneca, whom by and large he respected and admired, weakened the force of his teaching by his manner of writing, and others have wondered whether his style is not unworthy of his subject.

  It is interesting to hear Quintilian speaking of his struggle to win his students away from such models as Seneca (who, he said, ‘practically alone among authors was to be found on the shelves of every young man at that time’). As an acade
mician who stood for orthodoxy and a return to the older or Ciceronian manner, he could not bring himself to give the seal of his approval to an author whose writing showed, in his opinion, ‘a degree of corruption all the more dangerous through the very attractiveness of the faults in which it abounds’, and who had actually voiced the heresy: ‘There are no fixed rules of style.’45

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  His influence and appeal

  While scholars and schoolmasters in the century following continued to condemn46 Seneca, early Christians were taking to this kindred spirit among pagan writers, so many of whose ideas and attitudes they felt able to adopt or share. Anthologies were made of him and he was frequently quoted by such writers as Jerome, Lactantius and Augustine. Tertullian called him saepe noster, ‘often one of us’. The extant set of letters purporting to be correspondence between Seneca and St Paul (probably composed by a Christian, but apparently believed genuine until quite modern times) led Jerome to include him in his so called Catalogue of Saints, and no doubt helps to explain his reputation in the middle ages, much as the supposed prophecy of the birth of the Messiah in Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue helped to make the latter’s name in Christendom.