Seneca: A Life (2014) by Emily Wilson

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (~1 BC – 65 AD) was once one of the most celebrated and richest men in Rome. Tutor and then senior advisor to Emperor Nero, Seneca lived a life of luxury and influence highly unusual for a dramatist and Stoic philosopher. According to author Emily Wilson, “Seneca is a Socrates without a Plato to tell his story.” She takes it upon herself to be Seneca’s Plato and tells the philosopher’s amazing and tumultuous life story brilliantly in “Seneca: A Life” (2014).

Seneca was born one of three boys to a prominent Roman official of the equestrian class living in Cordoba, in the province of Lower Spain. Wilson speculates that the Annaeus family likely supported Pompey during the Civil Wars that occurred a generation before Seneca was born. She also surmises that Seneca battled pulmonary tuberculosis his entire life, a condition that would leave him frail later in life despite consistent and rigorous exercise. The future philosopher left Cordoba at a young age, perhaps just five or six, and moved to the big city of Rome to receive his education. He would stay in Rome till his mid-twenties when he moved to Egypt, likely in an attempt to cure his lung disease by breathing the hot, dry Egyptian air.

Seneca stayed in Egypt for a decade, returning to Rome in 31 when the city was a seething cauldron of political intrigue. Tiberius and then Caligula were on the throne; both were mentally unstable. Eventually accused of adultery with Julia Livilla (Claudius’s niece and Caligula’s younger sister), Seneca was exiled by the Emperor to the island of Corsica in 41. He would stew on the island for eight long years. Seneca wrote prodigiously and thus kept growing more famous throughout Italy. His extant oeuvre is far larger than most ancient authors, and yet half of Seneca’s work has been lost. He returned to Rome in 50 at the insistence of Agrippina the Younger, the fourth wife and niece of Emperor Claudius. She wanted the famous writer to serve as personal tutor to her adolescent son Nero. Between his time in Egypt and Corsica, Seneca had been absent from Rome for almost twenty years. He would never leave again.

Seneca tutored the young Nero mainly in rhetoric, Wilson says, not philosophy. The teen-aged heir apparent was never a good student. He would ascend the throne at the age of seventeen in 54. Seneca the tutor quickly became Senece the speechwriter and public relations officer; he held no specific legal or administrative position and Wilson says he never advised Nero on policy issues outside of the palace. Indeed, Wilson writes, “Few other writers in history have had quite so much political power and influence.”

Nero rewarded his former teacher lavishly for his faithful service. In an age when a common Roman legionnaire earned 900 sestertii per year, Cassius Dio tells us that Seneca was worth 300 hundred million sestertii with massive real estate holdings around Italy and possibly Egypt. Yet, Seneca consistently wrote dismissively of wealth. Luxuries, he wrote, “are shining on the outside, but miserable within.” He believed that the conspicuous consumption of the super rich was done primarily to impress other people. Expensive things were signs of social power – and social power is what animated Roman society.

Seneca is often criticized for failing to live by the virtuous terms of his Stoic philosophy. “The most interesting question is not why Seneca failed to practice what he preached,” Wilson writes, “but why he preached what he did, so adamantly and so effectively, given the life he found himself leading.” Wilson says that Seneca actually believed there was a right way and a wrong way to be rich. First, the wise man must not be dependent on his wealth for his happiness. Second, he must acquire his wealth honestly. Finally, he must be generous with his wealth. Wilson holds up a senator by the name of Thrasea Paetus as an example of simultaneously living a life of virtue and a life of wealth and power. She says Seneca often looks “shabby” in comparison. So too with Epictetus, one of the greatest Stoic philosophers, who was a slave to Nero’s secretary, a freedman named Epaphroditus.

Seneca’s favored position at court relied mainly on the support of three people: the Emperor Nero; his mother, the implacable Agrippina; and Sextus Afranius Burrus, head of the Praetorian Guard. Nero had his mother killed in 59. In 62 Burrus dropped dead, possibly of poison. Seneca desperately wanted to retire, but in the cutthroat atmosphere of the Imperial Palace retirement could look dangerously like treason. Wilson writes that the former tutor was simply “too productive, too clever, too talented” to be allowed to leave the closely guarded and closely watched inner circle of the Emperor. It was during this period of turmoil that Seneca penned his “Letters to Lucilius,” perhaps his greatest work, in which he deals with how to handle the passage of time (he recommends to only focus on the present) and the collection of wealth and profit (“All you learn from this is how to desire more stuff” and “money never makes one rich”). Also, around this time Seneca’s nephew, the poet Lucan, wrote scathing prose about the Nero regime and Petronius (who Wilson calls “the Roman Gatsby”) wrote the brutally satirical “Trimalchio’s Dinner.”

Seneca’s health steadily deteriorated. He tried to use it as a reasonable excuse to retire to the countryside. But even in his last, difficult years, Seneca was, in Wilson’s words, “a wealthy and pampered gentleman.” He lived to see the devastating fire that destroyed Rome in 64. Shortly thereafter Seneca was implicated (plausibly, in Wilson’s estimation) in a plot to assassinate Nero. “For somebody who wrote so frequently about the importance of facing death bravely and readily,” Wilson says, “Seneca was extremely good at avoiding it.” He modeled his death on Socrates’s suicide as depicted in Plato’s Phaedo. But the Roman philosopher botched his suicide – not once, but twice. First, he sliced his wrists. When that didn’t work he took a cup of hemlock. When that failed to do the trick, he suffocated himself in a sauna.

Seneca’s reputation has remained strong after this death. By the time of the Renaissance, his greatest legacy and influence was probably in prose style. According to the author: “Seneca’s punchy, aphoristic writing style had a major impact on the trend toward a snappy, polished literary style” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In closing, Wilson says, “[Seneca] was a talented, ambitious, deeply thoughtful man, who struggled to create an uneasy compromise between his ideals and the powers that were, and who meditated constantly on how to balance his goals and his realities.”