The Letters
Seneca’s philosophical letters were written during the final years of his life, after he had retired from public life. Having served as tutor and advisor to the Roman Emperor Nero for 15 years, Seneca had become extremely well known and wealthy. He had also become entangled in an increasingly corrupt and brutal political elite. In his enforced retirement, Seneca attempted to bring his life back into line with the Stoic principles that he had been advocating throughout his professional life but perhaps not always adhering to.
The letters are addressed to a Sicilian official named Lucilius, although scholars have suggested that he is a fictional rather than a genuine correspondent as no historical evidence of Lucilius’s existence has been found other than Seneca’s letters to him. In her biography of Seneca, Emily Wilson notes that, ‘His name, again suspiciously, seems reminiscent of Seneca’s own: Lucilius is like Seneca’s own smaller, younger self. At times, Seneca seems to present Lucilius as an idealised counterpart to himself.’24 Whether Lucilius was a real person or not, writing to him allowed Seneca to remain ostensibly within the private rather than public realm during his retirement and to be more personal than he had previously been in the tragedies or in the moral treatises that he had written earlier in his life.
Seneca presents himself as the older and wiser of the two friends in the majority of his letters. His explicit aim is to provide Lucilius with a set of useful guidelines which will help him to maintain a healthier mental life: ‘There are certain wholesome counsels which may be compared to prescriptions of useful drugs; these I am putting into writing.’25 In these letters Stoicism is used as a second-order preventative medicine, holding back the threat of contagion which proved to be so damaging in the tragedies:
Hold fast, then, to this sound and wholesome rule of life; that you indulge the body only so far as is needed for good health. The body should be treated more rigorously, that it may not be disobedient to the mind. Eat merely to relieve your hunger; drink merely to quench your thirst; dress merely to keep out the cold; house yourself merely as a protection against personal discomfort.26
This programme of Stoic restraint is designed to prevent the possibility of miniature versions of the tragedies taking place. The mind must remain in control and even the smallest degree of excess cannot be tolerated. The very syntax of the letter is related to its function of prevention. Rather than, ‘relieve your hunger by eating’, the instruction here is to ‘eat merely to relieve your hunger’. In each clause of both the English translation and original Latin, the preventative action precedes the effect that it aims to pre-empt: ‘Cibus famem sedet, potio sitim extinguat, vestis arceat frigus.’27 This almost back-to-front syntax disrupts the pattern of cause and effect and demands a mental readjustment from the reader. Seneca’s dynamic syntax allows concepts to be rapidly turned on their heads; false and unhelpful beliefs can be quickly replaced by or remade into new, more constructive beliefs.
The relationship between Seneca and Lucilius is not always straightforwardly that of a teacher and student or of comforter and comforted. Against hubris and against the borrowed authority of teaching a version of himself, Seneca occasionally steps down from his position of authority and repositions himself not as doctor but as his own patient, not as teacher but as his own student and not as wise philosopher but as a man struggling to meet his own demands. It is in these places that the dynamic of the letters changes. Cracks appear in the surface veneer of Stoic restraint and Seneca’s own psychological struggles can be glimpsed. In these places where the individual is revealed within the general, tensions are shown to exist between the philosophy of Stoicism and the psychology of the man attempting to comply with that philosophy.
While it is helpful to have frameworks and maps that provide a general route or strategy for healthy thinking, the really useful parts of the letters are often paradoxically where the framework doesn’t quite accommodate reality, where something bursts out from deeper within or when the strategy is derailed, and Seneca admits his contradictions, failures and struggles rather than always trying to have a solution. Without these cracks, the letters can be smoothed too easily into something like what has become the generic counsel of CBT. In Letter LXVIII Seneca deviates from the conventional pattern of him imparting advice on his struggling friend. Here he rejects the idea that he can help Lucilius and instead attempts to pause and find a place to ‘lie quiet’ and repair himself:
What, then, am I myself doing with my leisure? I am trying to cure my own sores. If I were to show you a swollen foot, or an inflamed hand, or some shrivelled sinews in a withered leg, you would permit me to lie quiet in one place and to apply lotions to the diseased member. But my trouble is greater than any of these, and I cannot show it to you. The abscess, or ulcer, is deep within my breast. […] There is no reason why you should desire to come to me for the sake of making progress. You are mistaken if you think that you will get any assistance from this quarter; it is not a physician that dwells here, but a sick man.28
Seneca is at his best when he rejects or rather transmutes the doctor/invalid dynamic and instead moves fluidly between the two roles: sometimes he is one, sometimes he is both, and at other times he is neither. Then the reader sees both the need for counsel and the underlying condition that struggles to follow it, in dialogue. So in Letter XIII Seneca again takes off his public mask and writes:
There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality. I am not speaking with you in the Stoic strain but in my milder style. For it is our Stoic fashion to speak of all those things, which provoke cries and groans, as unimportant and beneath notice; but you and I must drop such great-sounding words, although, Heaven knows, they are true enough.29
This is the shift from public philosophy to personal psychology. The ‘Stoic strain’ is a fragile and finely balanced web of preconditions, and there is always potential difficulty in bridging the gap between general solutions and personal, specific experiences. The letters exist on one ‘plane’ but beneath them, bubbling under the surface, are powers and problems akin to the dangerous forces and resistances that explode in the tragedies. The letters need to be interpreted in terms of an extra dimension of shifting relationships, and not simply taken as abstract and programmatic counsel.
Prior to writing the letters to Lucilius and during a period of forced exile in Corsica that lasted from AD 41 to AD 49, Seneca wrote a series of three ‘consolations’. Two of these texts – ‘The Consolation to Marcia’ and ‘The Consolation to Polybium’ – were addressed to members of the Roman elite whose children had died. They provide an outline of Stoic guidance on grief but were also written in the hope of gaining favour with influential figures who may have been able to help Seneca after he had been cast out of Rome, accused of committing adultery with Emperor Caligula’s sister. But the third consolation was written to Seneca’s own mother Helvia, not as with the others to give her comfort or guidance following a bereavement, but rather to ease her suffering during his own exile. In this letter, personal tragedy, individual psychology and general philosophy intersect as Seneca attempts to put Stoicism into practice. Now Seneca is both his mother’s comforter and the cause of her distress and this paradox is at the heart of the text, where Seneca is always at his best when he is two-sided:
Although I consulted all the works written by the most famous authors to control and moderate grief, I couldn’t find any example of someone who had comforted his own dear ones when he