Seneca

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

You have to face a problem before you can read Seneca at all. The man who wrote that wealth is worthless was one of the richest men in the Roman empire. The man who composed serene essays on peace of mind spent his best years as the tutor, speechwriter, and minister of Nero, steering, and at moments covering for, one of history's monsters. The man who taught that you should be ready to surrender everything at a moment's notice held on to office and fortune for decades. The easy word for this is hypocrite, and people have been reaching for it for two thousand years. But the easy word misses what makes Seneca worth reading, which is that he knew. He saw the gap between what he taught and how he lived, named it before his critics could, and made it his real subject. Seneca is the philosopher not of the sage who has arrived but of the compromised person still trying, which is to say, of very nearly everyone.

The philosopher of the compromised life. Most ancient philosophy is written from a height, by a sage who looks down on the passions he has supposedly left behind. Seneca writes from the middle of the mess. He is rich and cannot quite bring himself to be poor; he is at court and cannot quite leave; he is afraid of the very things he tells his friend not to fear. And instead of hiding this, he makes it the engine of the work. He quotes the rival Epicureans whenever they happen to say something true, "I cross into the other camp," he explains, "not as a deserter but as a scout." He admits he is a patient describing his own illness, writing about the cure because he needs it as badly as the reader does. This is why, of all the Stoics, Seneca is the one ordinary people keep coming back to. He is not lecturing from the summit. He is climbing beside you, slipping on the same loose stones, and his advice carries the particular authority of someone who is visibly straining to take it himself.

We are not short of time. His most quoted line is also his most useful. "It is not that we have a short time to live," he writes, "but that we waste much of it." We complain that life is brief, and then look at how we spend it: on other people's demands, on errands and rivalries and the endless servicing of our ambitions, in a busyness so unbroken that we never get round to the one thing we always mean to do, which is to actually live. Most people, Seneca says, are so occupied that they put off living until they are too distracted to begin. The remedy is not more time, which no one can give you; it is the reclaiming of the time you already have, by deciding, deliberately, that your own life is worth more than the uses other people keep finding for it. He aimed this argument at the official in charge of Rome's grain supply, the busiest administrator in the empire, and the choice of reader was the entire point.

Anger is a temporary madness. His longest essay takes apart a single emotion, anger, which he calls a brief insanity. Anger, he argues against Aristotle, is not a useful spur to justice; it is a false judgment that has slipped its leash, the belief that you have been wronged, that the wrong cries out for punishment, and that the punishment is worth the damage it does. And like any judgment, it can be caught and refused. Seneca's counsel is concrete and strikingly modern: watch for the first stirrings and deny them your assent before they pick up speed; remember that the person who crossed you was acting out of their own confusion, not aiming at yours; and delay, always delay, because anger feeds on speed and starves on time. In his most vivid passage he describes a man so deformed by rage that he kept a mirror near, so the furious could see what they had turned into. Two thousand years before cognitive therapy turned it into a clinical method, Seneca had already worked out the principle at its core: that you change a feeling by changing the judgment lying underneath it.

The letters, and the invention of the essay. In his last years, out of favor and at last out of office, Seneca wrote the work everyone remembers: a hundred and twenty-four letters to a younger friend named Lucilius, on everything from how to live above a noisy bathhouse to how to meet the end of a life. The letters are not lectures. Each one starts small, with a quotation or an incident or a complaint, and works its way outward to something larger, and stops when it is done. He had more or less invented the personal essay, the form in which a mind simply thinks aloud on the page, and fifteen centuries later Montaigne would pick it up and build a whole literature on it. The most famous of them is the forty-seventh, on how to treat the people you own. They are slaves, Seneca writes, no, they are human beings; they are slaves, no, they are humble friends; they are slaves, no, they are fellow-slaves, since every one of us is in bondage to Fortune. It never occurred to him, or to anyone in his world, to call for abolition. But the bare claim that the slave shares the same humanity and the same reason as the master was a live coal, and abolitionists would still be blowing on it seventeen centuries later.

Fortune's loan. The room reads Seneca in the old Bohn translations of the dialogues and the tragedies, cited by their Latin titles; the Letters, not yet held in the corpus in a public-domain version, the chat discusses from the wider record and tells you so. The thread that runs through all of it is Fortuna: the recognition that wealth, status, health, and the people we love are on loan from a power that gives and takes without consulting us, and that the only thing genuinely our own is the use we make of our reason. Seneca did not hold this doctrine from a position of safety. He held it as a fabulously rich man at a court where everything could be lost in a single morning, and that is exactly what lends it its strange authority on the page. He is not urging you to sit lightly to goods he never possessed; he is urging you to sit lightly to goods he possessed in abundance and knew he could lose at any hour. And he turns, in the late letters, to the hardest case the doctrine must cover, our own mortality, and meets it the way the Stoics always did: not as a horror to be denied but as the one certainty, to be looked at without blinking and accepted, so that the dread of it stops quietly governing the years that come before.

For a man so long suspected of hypocrisy, Seneca has had an extraordinary life in other minds. The medieval church loved him enough to forge a correspondence between him and Saint Paul and half-adopt him as a secret Christian; Dante set him among the virtuous pagans; his savage tragedies taught Renaissance Europe how to write tragedy and fed straight into Shakespeare's stages of revenge and blood; and his letters taught Montaigne how to write essays, which is to say they handed the modern world an entire way of thinking on paper. The popular Stoic revival of our own moment quotes him more than almost anyone. And the contradiction that makes him so easy to dismiss turns out, in the end, to be the thing that keeps him near. A flawless sage would have nothing to say to us. Seneca, rich and compromised and clear-eyed about both and still trying, has everything to say, because he writes from precisely where most people actually stand: in the middle of a life they cannot fully control, working to be a little better than their circumstances make easy.