Seneca
c. 4 BCE–65 CE, Córdoba and Rome
Roman Stoicism
We don't have too little time; we waste most of what we have.
“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
The life
Seneca was born in Córdoba, in Roman Spain, to a wealthy family, and made his career in Rome as an orator and senator. It nearly killed him twice: Caligula reportedly spared him only because he seemed likely to die of illness anyway, and Claudius exiled him to Corsica for eight years on a charge of adultery.
Recalled in 49 CE, he was made tutor to the twelve-year-old Nero. When Nero became emperor, Seneca was effectively co-ruler for several years, a period Roman historians rate as the best of the reign. He also became extraordinarily rich, and was accused of profiteering.
As Nero deteriorated, Seneca tried to withdraw. In 65 CE he was implicated in the Pisonian conspiracy and ordered to kill himself. Tacitus describes a slow, botched death that Seneca stage-managed as a philosophical performance.
What shaped the ideas
Seneca is the most quotable Stoic and the most compromised, and the two facts are connected. He wrote about indifference to wealth while accumulating one of Rome's largest fortunes, and about tyranny while serving one.
His letters are consequently less serene than Epictetus and more useful for it. He is arguing with himself about how much of the world a person can touch before it costs them, and he knows he has lost that argument more than once.
Core arguments
- 01
Life is long enough
We are not given a short life; we make it short by squandering it.
People guard their money fiercely and give away their time to anyone who asks. They live as if the supply were unlimited, postponing what matters until a retirement that may never arrive. The problem is not the length of the allowance but the spending.
- 02
Premeditatio malorum
Rehearsing misfortune in advance drains it of shock.
What wounds is the unexpected. If you have already imagined exile, poverty or loss in specific detail, the event arrives as something you have considered rather than something that ambushes you. Fortune only lands full force on people who assumed it would not come.
- 03
We suffer in imagination
Most of our distress concerns things that never happen.
Anxiety runs ahead of the evidence and dwells on possibilities as if they were facts. Seneca's test is to ask what is actually present now, rather than what might be, because the mind treats a vivid forecast and a real event as roughly the same thing.
- 04
Wealth as a preferred indifferent
Money is not a good, but it is reasonable to prefer it.
The Stoics hold that only virtue is genuinely good. Wealth, health and status are neither good nor bad, though some are naturally preferable. Seneca uses this to argue he may possess a fortune provided he is prepared to lose it without distress, a defence his critics found convenient.
Commonly got wrong
- The hypocrisy charge is not a modern invention. Roman contemporaries made it, and Seneca answered it in On the Happy Life. Whether his answer works is a live question, not a settled one.
- Stoic "indifference" to externals does not mean they do not matter. The technical claim is that they are not components of the good life, which is compatible with strongly preferring some over others.
- He is often read as a gentle self-help author. The tragedies, full of infanticide and cannibalism, come from the same pen and complicate that picture considerably.
Works
Letters to Lucilius c. 63–65 CE
124 letters written near the end of his life. His best work, and readable in any order.
On the Shortness of Life c. 49 CE
A short essay on time as the only thing we own and the only thing we give away freely.
On Anger c. 45 CE
Three books arguing anger is never useful, only a temporary madness we excuse.
Thyestes, Medea and other tragedies c. 50–62 CE
Extremely violent plays. They shaped Elizabethan drama, Shakespeare included.
On the Shortness of Life, then Letters 1 and 13. Letter 1 is about time and takes three minutes.
Why they still get taught
He made philosophy portable. The letter form, addressed to one friend about one problem, is why he still reads like a contemporary and why he is the entry point for most people who arrive at Stoicism.
Chapters
- Memento Mori · The Art of Living