In the years following the Pisonian conspiracy, opposition mounted to Nero's rule, until eventually his legions in Gaul rebelled against him. Though they were defeated, the rebellion spread until Nero, abandoned by his praetorian guard, committed suicide. His death was followed by the chaotic Year of the Four Emperors, which led to the reign of Emperor Vespasian, the founder of the Flavian dynasty.
We're told that, years earlier during the purge that followed the Pisonian conspiracy, when Nero's praetorian guards came for Seneca, he exclaimed:
For to whom had Nero's cruelty been unknown? Nor was anything left him, after the killing of his mother and his brother, but to add the murder of his guardian and tutor. (Annals, 15.62)
If he truly spoke these words, it was a last-minute confession. He directly contradicts the public assertions of Nero's innocence (of the death of his brother, Britannicus) that we can read for ourselves in his On Clemency. Seneca would also be contradicting the false assertion made in his speech to the senate that Nero's mother, Agrippina had chosen to kill herself. At the end of his life, Seneca can admit to his friends the truth: that Nero had murdered his mother and younger brother.
Readers often notice that Seneca's name is never mentioned in the Lectures of Musonius Rufus, the Discourses of Epictetus, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, or indeed the writings of any other Roman Stoic. That may be because his name had been deliberately suppressed by other Stoics, a practice scholars term damnatio memoriae. According to the historian Cassius Dio, after Nero murdered his mother, Thrasea told his friends:
If I were the only one that Nero was going to put to death, I could easily pardon the rest who load him with flatteries. But since even among those who praise him to excess there are many whom he has either already disposed of or will yet destroy, why should one degrade oneself to no purpose and then perish like a slave, when one may pay the debt to nature like a freeman? As for me, men will talk of me hereafter, but of them never, except only to record the fact that they were put to death. (Cassius Dio, 62.15)
Seneca, without question, was the most obvious target of this statement.
Tacitus reports that the dying Seneca made a point of emphasizing to his friends that by leaving them with ‘his sole but fairest possession – the image of his life’ he had bequeathed them something much more valuable than any writings or possessions. Yet, as we've seen, the image of Seneca's life is tainted by, among other things, being inseparably intertwined with Nero's corrupt regime. The Stoic emperor, Marcus Aurelius, writing to himself over a century after Seneca's death, refers to Nero as a cruel tyrant much like Phalaris, and compares him to a wild beast, a moral degenerate ‘drawn this way and that by the puppet-strings of impulse’ (Meditations, 3.16). Yet Seneca repeatedly portrayed Nero as a wise and virtuous ruler, almost a philosopher-king.
Nevertheless, Seneca's letters and essays, not to mention his tragedies, have inspired countless people throughout the centuries. It is not the image of his real life, therefore, that is Seneca's greatest legacy but rather the image of philosophy as a way of life that he depicted in these writings, especially the Moral Letters that he wrote in the years immediately prior to his execution.
THE MORAL LETTERS
The Moral Letters, or Letters to Lucilius, are Seneca's best-known writings today. The letters include some of Seneca's most memorable sayings, and remain one of our best sources for understanding Stoic philosophy.
There are 124 letters in total. In Letter 8, Seneca mentions his retirement from politics, which happened in 62 CE following the death of his friend Burrus, Nero's praetorian prefect. So these letters are believed to have been written during the last three years of Seneca's life.
Like his essays on Natural Questions and On Providence, which were written around the same time, they are addressed to a friend called Lucilius. Seneca describes him as an equestrian who was serving as the procurator of Sicily, and it's implied that he came originally from the ill-fated Roman city of Pompeii, in Campania. However, Lucilius is unknown except through Seneca's remarks about him, and it is therefore uncertain whether he was a real person or a character invented for use as a literary device. The consensus among modern scholars is that these letters, probably like all of Seneca's extant writings, were intended for publication.
The Moral Letters are perhaps Seneca's finest writings, written in pithy epigrammatic style and containing his most cherished philosophical reflections. Many letters begin with some reference to an everyday, mundane event, which gives him the pretext to launch into an aspect of Stoic teachings. The discussion proceeds, in an apparently unsystematic and informal way, to cover typical Stoic themes such as the goal of life, dealing with old age and death, the nature of virtue, the passions, sensory pleasures, and the dangers of attachment to external things. How Seneca handles this last theme is of particular interest, given his vast wealth.
This Capstone edition includes Letters 1–65, which are historically the most published of the three ‘books’ of letters. They provide a full impression not only of Seneca's influences and teachings, but in their details give the modern reader a sense of what it was like to be alive in mid-first-century Rome and its provinces: its climate, geography, food, festivals, government, household management, and not least the relations between the upper classes and their slaves (see Letter 47).
On this last issue, Seneca's view is comparatively enlightened: while he in no way calls for an end to the practice, he does demand that slaves be treated as human beings, and be fed well, praised, entertained, and promoted where appropriate. He includes fascinating details, such as the fact that his household includes Harpasté (see Letter 50), a blind, female clown belonging to his wife who had come to her as the result of a legacy. ‘I particularly disapprove of these freaks’, Seneca ruefully says, yet he also seems amused by the woman, and there's no mention of removing her. He sees the welfare of servants and slaves as a responsibility.
EPICUREANISM VS STOICISM
It's striking that Seneca often mentions Epicurus and his philosophy, in seemingly favourable terms, throughout the first thirty or so letters, and occasionally thereafter. Some have taken this to mean that Seneca's thought was eclectic or that he was sympathetic to Epicurean philosophy, as opposed to Stoic teachings only. I think this is mistaken. Seneca elsewhere is just as scathing about the Epicureans as Epictetus and other Stoics were. For instance, in On Benefits, he writes:
In this part of the subject we oppose the Epicureans, an effeminate and dreamy sect who philosophise in their own paradise, amongst whom virtue is the handmaid of pleasures, obeys them, is subject to them, and regards them as superior to itself. (On Benefits, 4.2)
When he praises Epicurus, it's typically an example of a clever argumentative strategy: to praise the thinker's character before attacking his opinions. (In a sense, this is the opposite of the ad hominem fallacy, which attacks the character in order to try to refute the ideas.) Although Seneca says that Epicurean philosophy contains a few good sayings, he also subtly undermines their value by claiming that they're commonly found also in the writings of other authors. It's as though he's saying, as we would put it today, what's good in Epicurus isn't original and what's original isn't good. In Letter 2, where Seneca says that he's happy to sneak over to the ‘enemy camp’ in order to steal some of their ideas, Epicureans are nevertheless ‘the enemy’. These little nuances are typical of Seneca's style of writing.
It's clear, and in fact one of Seneca's major themes, that he believes Epicurus was wrong to view the goal of life as consisting in pleasure, even when construed as the stable pleasure of total peace of mind (ataraxia). The true goal of life, for Seneca, as for all Stoics, is virtue (arete),