In defense of Seneca

We need to cut some slack to the most controversial of the ancient Stoics

Statue of Seneca the Younger at Cordoba, Spain, his birthplace. Image from cienciashumanasysociales.blogspot.com.

I spend a significant amount of time discussing all aspects of Stoicism both on and offline. One of the topics that never fails to come up is whether one should really read Seneca, considering his, shall we say mixed reputation as a politician and businessman. Seneca was indubitably sexist, unarguably ultimately failed to rein in Nero, and possibly (though not likely) triggered the bloody Boudica rebellion by suddenly calling in a vast amount of loans he had made to the Britannic aristocracy. How does that square with being a Stoic, let alone with someone at least aspiring to be a Sage?

Even what Seneca looked like has been a matter of dispute. For centuries he was portrayed as the sort of emaciated man in the left side of the image below. But in fact, we now know that he looked rather plump, as in the right side of the same image. The version on the left, known as Pseudo-Seneca, is suspected to actually represent either the playwright Aristophanes or the poet Hesiod, but it was more appealing as Seneca because it simply fit much better with the idea of the philosopher-sage lost in thought and unconcerned with worldly goods. By contrast, the Pergamon Museum version on the right smacks of a well fed patrician who may have been talking the talk but not walking the walk.

Left: Pseudo-Seneca, Roman National Museum, photo by the Author. Right: actual Seneca, from a double herm featuring also a bust of Socrates, Pergamon Museum, Berlin, image from Wikimedia.

Seneca’s figure is so fascinating that two modern biographies of him have been published, both well worth reading: The Greatest Empire, by Emily Wilson, and Dying Every Day, by James Romm. And that’s without counting the 1920 classic The Stoic, by Francis Caldwell Holland, or the (apparently awful) recent movie with John Malkovich. Clearly, there is a wealth of material to dig into for people interested in Seneca the historical figure. And you can read all of his works (plays, letters of consolation, philosophical essays, and letters to his friend Lucilius) for just $2.99. (If you prefer more modern translations, they are worth the higher price.)

The question that I wish to address here is whether a modern Stoic should read Seneca for insight and inspiration, the way nobody questions both Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius should be. Or whether, on the contrary, he should be expelled from the canon on account of the alleged massive inconsistency between his principles and the way he lived his life. Epictetus himself, after all, reminds us that Stoicism is about practice, not just theory:

“If you didn’t learn these things in order to demonstrate them in practice, what did you learn them for?” (Discourses I, 29.35).

So let us focus on that subset of the bare facts that is of direct relevance to our project. To begin with, it is the case that Seneca was very wealthy, indeed one of the wealthiest and most influential men in Rome. That in and of itself, however, does not constitute a contradiction with Stoic philosophy. It is true that Epictetus’s version of Stoicism leaned toward the rather minimalist and anti-materialist approach of the Cynics, but wealth does fall squarely under the “preferred indifferents,” i.e., the sort of externals that it is okay to pursue so long as they don’t get in the way of the only thing that truly matters for a Stoic, the practice of virtue.

Then again, Seneca repeatedly warns about the many temptations induced by wealth, almost as a reminder to himself:

“He who craves riches feels fear on their account. No man, however, enjoys a blessing that brings anxiety; he is always trying to add a little more. While he puzzles over increasing his wealth, he forgets how to use it. He collects his accounts, he wears out the pavement in the forum, he turns over his ledger—in short, he ceases to be master and becomes a steward.” (Letter XIII.17)

Let us not forget, of course, that Seneca had lost a great deal when he was exiled in 41 CE by the Senate, on likely trumped up charges of committing adultery with Julia Livilla, the sister of former emperor Caligula. The new emperor, Claudius (whose own record was rather mixed), commuted the original death penalty into exile, and the historian Cassius Dio suggests that Seneca was a victim of an attempt by Messalina, Claudius’s wife, to get rid of Julia. Seneca remained in exile on the island of Corsica (at the time not at all the resort destination that it is today) for eight years.

The empress Messalina with her son Britannicus (who was eventually killed by Nero), Louvre Museum. Image from Wikimedia.

After Claudius’ death Seneca penned the hilarious essay known as On the Pumpkinification of the Divine Claudius, a rare example of Menippean satire. In it he mocks Claudius and, more broadly, takes aim at the whole Roman custom of making emperors into gods. According to Allan Presley Ball, who translated the Pumpkinification essay: “Seneca appears to have been concerned with what he saw as an overuse of apotheosis writing as a political tool. If an Emperor as flawed as Claudius could receive such treatment, he argued elsewhere, then people would cease to believe in the gods at all.”

The satirical piece has also often been interpreted as an attempt at flattering the new kid on the block, Nero, whose mother, Agrippina, had managed to recall Seneca from exile. That would definitely not be the behavior of a good Stoic. But historians have pointed out that Seneca’s optimism over the young princeps was actually shared throughout Rome, as it really seemed, for a while, that the awful times of Caligula and the highly questionable ones of Claudius might finally be over.