Letters From a Stoic

by Seneca

  30. Natural History, XIV:51.

  SENECA AND PHILOSOPHY

  31. Letter LXII.

  32. The Stoics were considered by many as contumaces… ac refractarios, contemptores magistratuum aut regum eorumve per quos publica administrantur, ‘hostile to authority and resistant to discipline, disdainful of kings, magistrates or public officials’ (Letter LXXIII). There are a number of cases of Stoics whose lack of respect for emperors earned them martyrdom.

  33. Letter XLVIII.

  34. Letter LVII. Compare Letter VI.

  35. A few examples of sayings or ideas so paralleled are those of 1 Cor. iii, 16 (God’s ‘indwelling presence’ – cf. Letter XLI, init.); 1 Tim. vi, 10 (‘money the root of all evil’); Job i, 21 (we came into the world naked and go out of it naked, and ‘the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away’); Rom. xii, 5, 10 (we are members of one body, and ‘Be kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love’, etc.); Acts xvii, 29 (God is not like any gold or silver image); Heb. iv, 13 (not even thoughts are hidden from God – cf. Letter LXXXIII, init); Matt. v, 45 (the sun rises on the wicked as well); and (as translated in the New English Bible) Eph. v, 1 (imitate, try to be like God). They do not lend any real support to theories that Seneca was influenced by St Paul or by Christian slaves in his own household.

  36. Dr Basore.

  37. Letter LXXV. Cf. ‘Philosophy teaches us to act, not to talk’ (Letter XX).

  SENECA AND LITERATURE

  38. The introduction to the translation Four Tragedies and Octavia by E. F. Watling (Penguin Classics) discusses generally the faults of Senecan drama and the question whether it was performable.

  39. See, for example, Duff, Literary History of Rome in the Silver Age.

  40. There are isolated passages of magnificent writing, poetic or polemic, for example in parts of Letters XC and CIV.

  41. For instance in Letters XC, XCIV and XCV. The last two incidentally (which discuss the question whether, in order to enable them to know what is the right thing to do in a given situation, people need a general ‘doctrine’ or a sufficient number of ‘precepts’, or both) are sufficient answer in themselves to critics who have said that Seneca is incapable of setting out a sustained, continuous, consistent argument. One might quote here the opinions of Coleridge: ‘You may get a motto for every sect in religion, but nothing is ever thought out by him’, and Quintilian: ‘As a philosopher he was rather slipshod, though a magnificent censor of moral faults’ (in philosophia parum diligens, egregius tamen vitiorum insectator, Institutio Oratoria, X:1.129).

  42. In Letters CXV (e.g. quaere quid scribas, non quemadmodum, ‘consider what, not how you should write’), C and elsewhere.

  43. Duff, Literary History of Rome in the Silver Age.

  44. Institutio Oratoria, X:1.125–31 forms throughout an interesting appraisal of Seneca by a famous scholar, advocate and teacher who died only thirty years or so after him. A short, late seventeenth-century comment on Seneca’s style is that to be found in Aubrey’s Lives: ‘Dr Kettle was wont to say that “Seneca writes, as a boare does pisse”, scilicet, by jirkes.’

  45. Oratio certam regulam non habet, since fashion or usage (consuetude) is constantly altering the rules (Letter CXIV).

  46. Aulus Gellius, to give another example, described his language as ‘trite and commonplace’ (vulgaria et protrita), his learning as being ‘of a very ordinary, low-brow character’ (vernacula et plebeia).

  47. Dante quotes him frequently and ranks him (with Cicero) after Virgil only in the Inferno. Chaucer, in the Parson’s Tale, classes Seneca with St Paul, Solomon and St Augustine. Petrarch modelled his letters on Seneca’s, which he knew intimately. The University of Piacenza was actually endowed with a Professor of Seneca.

  48. Erasmus put many quotations from Seneca’s prose works into an anthology known as the Adagia which has been supposed to be the source of most of the imitations or borrowings found in Elizabethan writers.

  49. Montaigne (Essays, 1:26) says ‘I have never got to grips with a single solid book, apart from Plutarch and Seneca, from whom I draw unceasingly, for ever dipping and emptying my pitcher like the daughters of Danaus’ (who were set to fill a leaking jar as punishment in Hades).

  Muret, his teacher, was also a devoted admirer and editor of Seneca, and Montaigne’s brother-in-law, Geoffrey de la Chassaigne, made a translation of him. Lipsius, who edited (1605) and lectured on Seneca, was a correspondent of Montaigne.

  50. ‘She was wont to soothe her ruffled temper with reading every morning, when she had been stirred to passion at the Council, or other matters had overthrown her gracious disposition. She did much admire Seneca’s wholesome advisings when the soul’s quiet is fled away, and I saw much of her translating thereof.’

  51. F. L. Lucas, Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge, 1922). This book and those by T. S. Eliot and E. F. Watling mentioned below (p. 241) will carry any interested reader well into the subject.

  52. Between 1595 and 1620 his popularity rises even above Cicero’s, and his influence is seen in Lyly, Nashe, Daniel, Lodge (his first English translator), Bacon, Herrick, Donne (who calls him ‘that great moral man Seneca’), Ben Jonson, Henry Vaughan, Cowley, Burton, Rubens, Dryden, Pepys and Pope. G. Williamson’s The Senecan Amble (Chicago, 1951) and R. G. Palmer’s Seneca’s De Remediis Fortuitorum and the Elizabethans (Chicago, 1953) are full of examples of Seneca’s little known mark on English literature.

  LETTERS

  53. A lawyer’s joke. Pacuvius served there for many years as deputy to a governor who was never permitted to go to his province by the emperor Tiberius. Roman law, like ours, had a doctrine of title by prescription, that is to say, the legally recognized ownership of land notwithstanding, sometimes, evidence that the occupier or ‘squatter’ is not the true owner, after sufficiently long occupation of it.

  54. Cf. Letter LXX. ‘You must not think that only great men have possessed the strength to batter down the imprisoning walls of human servitude. You must not think that this can only be done by a man like Cato, who tore the life out of himself with his bare hands after failing to despatch it with a sword. Men of the lowliest rank have made the great effort and won deliverance; and in circumstances which did not allow them to die as and when convenient to themselves, which did not permit them any choice in the selection of the means of death, they seized on anything that came to hand and by dint of violence made weapons out of objects of a normally quite harmless nature.

  ‘There is the recent example of one of the Germans being trained to fight beasts in the arena who, during practice for the morning show, retired to relieve himself; this was the only privacy allowed him, a guard otherwise invariably being present. In the lavatory he got hold of a rod with a sponge fixed on the end of it, put there for cleaning purposes, and stuffed the whole of it down his throat and choked himself to death.… Recently, again, a man was travelling on a wagon, under escort, to the morning show. He pretended to be nodding heavily with sleep and let his head drop until he was able to thrust it in between the spokes, and then hung on to his seat just long enough for the revolving wheel to break his neck, so escaping his punishment by means of the very vehicle on which he was being carried to it.’

  55. Seneca here appears to misquote Virgil, who in our editions speaks of ‘the phases of the moon’ and not ‘the stars’. Virgil’s lines are actually part of a passage devoted to weather signs.

  56. The story that Diogenes (the famous Cynic philosopher who lived in ostentatious poverty in Athens) slept in a tub no doubt dates from a time when the size of some Greek earthenware jars had been forgotten. Daedalus, in Greek mythology, was the legendary craftsman to whom all inventions could be attributed.

  An Index is appended at p. 245 ff. which gives a little elementary information of possible use to those remaining curious about names or places appearing in the Letters.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  E. R. Bevan, Stoics and Sceptics (Heffer, 1965).

  The Cambrid
ge Ancient History, vol. X (Cambridge, 1934).

  Dio Cassius, Roman History, translated by E. Cary in the Loeb series vols. VII–VIII (Heinemann, 1924–5).

  J. Wight Duff, Literary History of Rome in the Silver Age, with relatively complete bibliographies concerning Seneca and his works (Benn, 1964).

  T. S. Eliot, ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’ in Selected Essays (Faber, 1951).

  G. Murray, Stoic, Christian and Humanist, 2nd Edn. pp. 57–64, 89–118 (Allen and Unwin, Watts, 1940).

  Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome, translated by Michael Grant (Penguin Books, 1956).

  B. H. Warmington, Nero: Reality and Legend (Chatto and Windus, 1969).

  E. F. Watling, introduction to Seneca: Four Tragedies and Octavia (Penguin Books, 1966).

  APPENDIX

  Tacitus’ account of Seneca’s death (Annals, XV: 60–64)

  NERO asked if Seneca was preparing for suicide. Gavius Silvanus replied that he had noticed no signs of fear or sadness in his words or features. So Silvanus was ordered to go back and notify the deathsentence. According to one source, he did not return by the way he had come but made a detour to visit the commander of the Guard, Faenius Rufus; he showed Faenius the emperor’s orders asking if he should obey them; and Faenius, with that ineluctable weakness which they all revealed, told him to obey. For Silvanus was himself one of the conspirators – and now he was adding to the crimes which he had conspired to avenge. But he shirked communicating or witnessing the atrocity. Instead he sent in one of his staff-officers to tell Seneca he must die.

  Unperturbed, Seneca asked for his will. But the officer refused. Then Seneca turned to his friends. ‘Being forbidden’, he said, ‘to show gratitude for your services, I leave you my one remaining possession, and my best: the pattern of my life. If you remember it, your devoted friendship will be rewarded by a name for virtuous accomplishments.’ As he talked – and sometimes in sterner and more imperative terms – he checked their tears and sought to revive their courage. Where had their philosophy gone, he asked, and that resolution against impending misfortunes which they had devised over so many years? ‘surely nobody was unaware that Nero was cruel!’ he added. ‘After murdering his mother and brother, it only remained for him to kill his teacher and tutor.’

  These words were evidently intended for public hearing. Then Seneca embraced his wife and, with a tenderness very different from his philosophical imperturbability, entreated her to moderate and set a term to her grief, and take just consolation, in her bereavement, from contemplating his well-spent life. Nevertheless, she insisted on dying with him, and demanded the executioner’s stroke. Seneca did not oppose her brave decision. Indeed, loving her wholeheartedly, he was reluctant to leave her for ill-treatment. ‘Solace in life was what I commended to you’, he said. ‘But you prefer death and glory. I will not grudge your setting so fine an example. We can die with equal fortitude. But yours will be the nobler end.’

  Then, each with one incision of the blade, he and his wife cut their arms. But Seneca’s aged body, lean from austere living, released the blood too slowly. So he also severed the veins in his ankles and behind his knees. Exhausted by severe pain, he was afraid of weakening his wife’s endurance by betraying his agony – or of losing his own self-possession at the sight of her sufferings. So he asked her to go into another bedroom. But even in his last moment his eloquence remained. Summoning secretaries, he dictated a dissertation. (It has been published in his own words, so I shall refrain from paraphrasing it.)

  Nero did not dislike Paulina personally. In order, therefore, to avoid increasing his ill-repute for cruelty, he ordered her suicide to be averted. So on instructions from the soldiers, slaves and ex-slaves bandaged her arms and stopped the bleeding. She may have been unconscious. But discreditable versions are always popular, and some took a different view – that as long as she feared there was no appeasing Nero, she coveted the distinction of dying with her husband, but when better prospects appeared life’s attractions got the better of her. She lived on for a few years, honourably loyal to her husband’s memory, with pallid features and limbs which showed how much vital blood she had lost

  Meanwhile Seneca’s death was slow and lingering. Poison, such as was formerly used to execute state criminals at Athens, had long been prepared; and Seneca now entreated his well-tried doctor, who was also an old friend, to supply it. But when it came, Seneca drank it without effect. For his limbs were already cold and numbed against the poison’s action. Finally he was placed in a bath of warm water. He sprinkled a little of it on the attendant slaves, commenting that this was his libation to Jupiter. Then he was carried into a vapourbath, where he suffocated. His cremation was without ceremony, in accordance with his own instructions about his death – written at the height of his wealth and power.

  (Translated by Michael Grant)

  INDEX OF PERSONS AND PLACES

  Achaea, the southern part of Greece, forming a separate province of the Roman Empire, a province of which Seneca’s elder brother Gallio was the governor in A.D. 50–51, 184.

  Acherusian Lake, the, in Campania, 107.

  Achilles, hero in the war of the Greeks against Priam’s Troy; his anger with Agamemnon, the son of Atreus and leader of the Greek forces, is the foundation of the plot of Homer’s Iliad, 152, 193.

  Aegialus, a celebrated vine-grower, 148–50.

  Aeneas, the hero of Virgil’s epic poem, the Aeneid, 159.

  Alba, or Alba Longa, an ancient place where Seneca had a country house, some twelve miles from Rome; the modern Castel Gandolfo, 226.

  Alexander of Macedon or Alexander the Great, famous conqueror (356–323 B.C.) who carried Greek arms and culture to the farthest parts of the Middle East and even into India, 103, 143, 182.

  Alexandria, founded by the above, important commercial city and centre of learning, capital of Egypt, 124.

  Anacharsis, who lived in the early sixth century B.C., was one of the later so-called Seven Wise Men of antiquity; he appears to have preached the simple life later advocated by the Cynics, and to have been put to death for an attempt to introduce a Greek religious ritual into his country, Scythia (in what is now Southern Russia), 171–2.

  Anacreon, a Greek lyric poet born c. 570 B.C., 159.

  Ancus (Ancus Martius), early Roman king, traditionally 642–617 B.C., 210.

  Antony, Mark, colleague of Julius Caesar, later ally of Cleopatra, defeated by Octavian (Augustus) at Actium in 31 B.C., 144.

  Appius (Appius Claudius Caecus), Roman statesman, orator and first prose writer (fl. c. 300 B.C.), 217.

  Ardea, a town in a low-lying, then malarial area of Italy not far from Rome, 182, 194.

  Aristotle, famous Greek philosopher (384–322 B.C.), tutor of Alexander the Great, of immense learning, author of standard works on many scientific subjects and on logic, ethics, politics and drama, 40, 119–21.

  Arruntius, Lucius, Augustan senator and historian, consul 22 B.C., 218–19.

  Asellius, probably Asellins Sabinus, Augustan literary figure and teacher of rhetoric, 85.

  Asia, 103, 180.

  Athens, 186.

  Attalus, a Stoic philosopher whose lectures Seneca attended, 49, 115, 201, 204, 207.

  Augustus, formerly called Octavian (63 B.C.-A.D. 14), under whom Rome changed from a republic into a principate, 142, 214.

  Baba, a clown, 62.

  Baiae, a fashionable spa on the Bay of Naples, 107–8.

  Bucillus, unknown, 148.

  Buta, Acilius, wealthy Roman, 223–4.

  Caesar, Julius, renowned Roman general and statesman, assassinated in 44 B.C., 193–4.

  Caligula, the cruel emperor Gaius, A.D. 37–41, 129–30.

  Callistus, a former slave who had become a kind of secretary of state, dealing with petitions addressed to the emperor Claudius by private individuals, 92–3.

  Cambyses, King of Persia and its empire 529–521 B.C., conqueror of Egypt, 144.

  Campania, district of Italy
around the modern Naples, 108, 142.

  Capri, 125.

  Cato (Marcus Porcius Cato), Roman statesman and stern moral figure, in his own lifetime (95–46 B.C.) and centuries following celebrated for his unbending principles; an opponent of Caesar and after civil war broke out a follower of Pompey; famous suicide after defeat of Pompeians at Thapsus (in what is now Tunisia); looked back on by later Romans as a champion of the republic, freedom and (like his famous great-grandfather who bore the same name) the old Roman morality (cf. Introduction, p. 17), 43, 56, 147, 190, 192–4, 221.

  Charinus, Athenian archon (official for 12 months, the year being dated by his name), 68.

  Charondas, Greek legislator of Catana, Sicily, about the sixth century B.C., 163.

  Chrysippus, century B.C., 163, Greek philosopher (c. 280–207 B.C.) head of the Stoic school following Cleanthes and a prolific writer; moulded Stoicism into a formal system, with a basis in logic and a theory of knowledge to him probably more important than ethics, 51, 79, 110, 190, 212.

  Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero), Roman advocate and statesman (106–43 B.C.), whose writings included works presenting, almost for the first time in Latin, the arguments of the Greek philosophers, and whose literary style became a model (cf. Introduction, pp. 22–4), 85, 199, 210–11, 217.

  Cleanthes, Greek philosopher, pupil and successor of Zeno as head (263–232 B.C.) of the Stoics; introduced a religious note into the philosophy; among his writings there was a famous hymn to Zeus, of which a Christian might almost have been the author if for ‘Zeus’ is read ‘God’; this has been preserved, 40, 79–80, 199, 203.

  Cleopatra, Macedonian queen of Egypt whose ambitions, greatly feared at Rome, led her to become mistress in turn of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, 144.