Donald Robertson - Letters from a Stoic

Little is known about Attalus, and although he authored several works, none of them survive. Curiously, Seneca has nothing to say about the most famous Roman Stoics of his lifetime. Thrasea and his circle are ignored. The most influential Stoic of this era, Musonius Rufus, has been called the ‘Roman Socrates’ by modern scholars. He was mentor to the leaders of the Stoic Opposition against Nero's rule, and later became the teacher of Epictetus. Musonius was about forty years old when Seneca died, but he's not mentioned even once in Seneca's writings.

In 20 CE, when he was aged around twenty-five, Seneca became quite ill from a lung condition. He travelled to Alexandria in the Roman province of Egypt, where his uncle Gaius Galerius served as prefect. While there he learned that his tutor, Attalus, had been exiled by Emperor Tiberius. Either in Rome, or perhaps later in Alexandria, Seneca became a student of the School of the Sextii. Dating from around 50 BCE, it was one of the first major schools of philosophy to have originated in Rome, although they apparently wrote in Greek. Little is known of their teachings except that they were a unique hybrid of philosophical ideas, including elements of Stoicism and Pythagoreanism. Seneca held the school's founder, Quintus Sextius, in exceptionally high regard:

We then had read to us a book by Quintus Sextius the Elder. He is a great man, if you have any confidence in my opinion, and a real Stoic, though he himself denies it. ( Moral Letters , 49)

Although they were an eclectic school of philosophy, Seneca preferred to call the Sextians Stoics, thereby bolstering his own credentials as a Stoic teacher. As far as we know, Seneca had never travelled to Greece – an omission that would potentially have weakened his status as an expert on Stoic philosophy in the eyes of fellow Romans.

In addition to reading the works of Sextius, Seneca became the student of an otherwise unknown Sextian philosopher called Sotion.

It was but a moment ago that I sat, as a lad, in the school of the philosopher Sotion: but a moment ago that I began to plead in the courts, but a moment ago that I lost the desire to plead, but a moment ago that I lost the ability. ( Moral Letters , 49)

Seneca describes Sotion's views on reincarnation and vegetarianism, which are clearly influenced by those of Pythagoras – although the Sextians claimed to arrive at the same conclusions based on different arguments.

After spending about a decade convalescing in Egypt, Seneca finally returned to Rome in the year 31, during the rule of Tiberius. He soon rose to the office of quaestor, the first rung on the Roman cursus honorum , or course of offices, which earned him the right to sit in the senate. The elderly Emperor Tiberius finally passed away in 37 CE. According to some accounts, he was poisoned or smothered by Caligula, his grand-nephew and adopted grandson, who succeeded him as emperor.

Seneca appears at first to have pursued a promising legal career. However, according to the historian, Cassius Dio, he was almost executed by Caligula, merely because he ‘pleaded a case well in the senate while the emperor was present’. Presumably, Caligula didn't like the direction in which Seneca was influencing the senate and therefore saw his eloquence as a threat:

Gaius [Caligula] ordered him to be put to death, but afterwards let him off because he believed the statement of one of his female associates, to the effect that Seneca had a consumption in an advanced stage and would die before a great while. ( Cassius Dio , 59.19)

It was perhaps following this incident that Seneca ‘lost the desire to plead’ and, as he puts it, later also the ability. Around this time, shortly after his return to Rome, he became known more as a writer and rhetorician. The Consolation to Marcia , believed to be the earliest of his known works, is thought to date from around 40 CE, when he was approaching middle age. It is, like his other consolations, an open letter, although it reads more like a modern essay. Marcia was a wealthy and influential Roman noble, the daughter of Aulus Cremutius Cordus, a famous historian. She had been mourning the loss of her son for three long years. Seneca employs typical Stoic arguments, not so much to console her empathically as to persuade her to accept her loss, finish her period of mourning, and move on. We can probably infer from Seneca's continued output as a writer, and reports of his growing celebrity, that his early letters sparked public interest and were well received.

Meanwhile in the political realm, Caligula's rule was becoming increasingly tyrannical. In 39 CE, the emperor exiled his own sisters, Julia Livilla and Agrippina the Younger, for involvement in a failed plot to overthrow him. As we'll see, both of these powerful women were friends of Seneca and their stories are closely interlinked. In 41 CE, Caligula was assassinated by a faction of his own praetorian guard. Reputedly, a group of praetorians sympathetic to imperial rule found his uncle, Claudius, cowering in fear behind a curtain, where he was hiding from the assassins. They whisked him away to the safety of their camp where he was acclaimed emperor in place of his nephew. Seneca's troubles, however, were about to worsen.

After being acclaimed emperor, Claudius permitted Julia and Agrippina to return from exile to Rome. But before a year had passed, Julia was in trouble again. Claudius' wife, the Empress Messalina, accused Julia and Seneca of committing adultery with one another. They were both found guilty. Julia was exiled first, probably to a nearby island off the Italian coast, where Claudius shortly after ordered her death. Seneca, on the other hand, wasn't banished from Rome until the following year, which suggests there may have been more wrangling over his sentence. Messalina wanted the death penalty but Claudius, after some delay, sentenced Seneca to be exiled to Corsica instead. Technically he was ‘relegated’, the mildest form of exile, which meant he avoided losing any property or being stripped of his citizenship. You could, therefore, call this an act of clemency on the emperor's part as Seneca got off much more lightly than Julia.

Around 42 CE, shortly after he arrived in Corsica, Seneca wrote another open letter of consolation. This one was to his own mother, Helvia, whom he sought to console not over a bereavement, as would be the norm for the genre, but over the grief caused to her by his own exile. In it, as noted earlier, Seneca portrays himself Stoically enduring a harsh and barren environment:

What can be found barer or more precipitous on every side than this rock? What more barren in respect of food? What more uncouth in its inhabitants? More mountainous in its configuration? Or more rigorous in its climate? ( Helvia , 6)

In 44 CE, Seneca published another open letter of consolation. His fame as a writer seemed to be growing thanks to the popularity of these letters. This one was addressed to a freedman called Polybius who served as secretary to Claudius, and had considerable influence at court. Seneca urges Polybius, who had recently lost his brother, to console himself by focusing on the happiness that serving Claudius bestowed upon him. He says things like ‘raise yourself up, and fix your eyes upon Caesar whenever tears rise to them; they will become dry on beholding that greatest and most brilliant light’. He tells Polybius to write a panegyric praising Claudius' reign, which might be read ‘by all future ages’, adding ‘for he himself will afford you both the noblest subject and the noblest example for putting together and composing a history’.

The letter eventually turns from being a consolation of Polybius into a plea for mercy directed to his master, the emperor. While taking the opportunity to beg, via Polybius, for an imperial pardon, Seneca also heaps praise on Claudius for his clemency and other virtues. As we'll see, this could not be further removed from the way Seneca later chose to portray Claudius in writing. Seneca concludes by bemoaning the fact that his ‘mind is dimmed and stupefied’ by the tedium of his long exile. He writes of the difficulty in consoling another while he is steeped in his own sorrows. He complains that his Latin has suffered because around him, on Corsica, he ‘hears nothing but a rude foreign jargon, which even barbarians of the more civilised sort regard with disgust’. Once again, his real circumstances appear to have been far more comfortable than he implies.