The second reason for the literary deception is that Seneca is keen to emphasize his suffering. If he presented himself as perfectly happy in exile, his chances of ever being recalled back to Rome would not be improved. Seneca presents himself as bravely rising above the assaults of Fortune, thanks to his common sense and his philosophical mind. He does not suggest that he actually has little to complain about at all—which would have been a much more truthful claim. The rhetorical device of putting the grief for his own exile into the mouth of his addressee, his mother, makes it possible for him to avoid explicit complaining, while also constantly implying that his own pain is an established fact. “I tell you clearly that I am not miserable: I will add, to comfort you even more, that it is not possible for me to be made miserable” (To Helvia 5). The insistence that he is not miserable, which Seneca makes again and again in the Helvia, is a way of implying, again and again, that he is experiencing troubles that would break a weaker man—a very useful fiction.
The second of the consolations from exile, the Consolation to Polybius, is addressed to a favorite in the court of Claudius, his beloved freedman advisor who worked as his private secretary. It was composed after Seneca had been in exile for about two years, around 43 or 44 CE. This text has often been seen as one of the major embarrassments of Seneca’s corpus in that it includes some abject flattery both of Claudius himself and of Polybius.31 Dio mentions a letter sent from Corsica, cringing to Messalina and the freedmen of Claudius. He reports that, “Seneca was latterly so ashamed of it that he suppressed it.”32 There has been a lot of scholarly ink spilled over whether this “letter” is identical with our text of the Consolation to Polybius; it seems most likely that it is. If so, Seneca clearly did not suppress it effectively, although it is not hard to see why he might have tried.
Polybius’ brother had died, and Seneca responds with an essay invoking the usual tropes of consolation literature. But he intersperses them with complaints about his own situation, stuck in exile on Corsica, and with some fairly revolting flattery to the emperor. In ways that will by now be familiar, he exaggerates the grimness and loneliness of his life on the island. He ends the letter by claiming that he (like Ovid …) is barely able to write Latin any more, since he is surrounded by a community of barbarians:
I have written this letter as best I could, with a mind made weak and dull by long rusting. If you think it does not properly address your intelligence or is unsuitable for curing your grief, think about how a person who is gripped by his own troubles cannot have time to comfort others, and how difficult it is to gather Latin words fluently, when one is surrounded by the wild noise of barbarian yelling—which is annoying even to the more human of the barbarians themselves.
(18.9)
Seneca mixes up the flattery with the consolation by suggesting that Polybius will surely recover from his grief immediately if only he turns his attention to the wonderful emperor whom he has the good fortune to serve. He prays that Claudius may rid the sick world of troubles caused by his mad predecessor, Caligula (12.4–5), and insists that Claudius has already shown mercy to himself by remitting his sentence to exile rather than death. He thanks his stars that he lives under an emperor who makes the lives even of exiles more peaceable than princes under Caligula—a claim that rather undercuts his description of the awfulness of life on Corsica.
It is difficult to decide how harshly we should judge Seneca for the more unfortunate passages in the Polybius. There are moments where Seneca seems to allow a subversive interpretation of his most abject flattery of the emperor. He urges Polybius not to begrudge his brother the opportunity to be, in death, at last free, peaceful, safe, and tranquil (9.7). The obvious implication is that everybody else—all elite Roman men living under the one-man rule of an emperor, however benevolent he may been—are never at rest, free, safe, or without terror. Moreover, the genre of the begging letter is always a difficult one to manage: too little distortion of the truth, and the document will not do its work in buttering up the recipient, but too much, and the recipient may feel mistrustful. The Consolation to Polybius obviously did not work; Seneca was to remain on Corsica for another six years after writing it.
The difficult question is not why Seneca stooped to flatter the emperor in order to try to be recalled from Corsica but rather why he wanted to leave the island at all. As we have seen, life on Corsica was probably not at all bad; Seneca could have lived out his life there in quasi-solitude, writing and studying, accompanied by just a small household and a few friends. The Consolation to Polybius can be seen in retrospect as a plea by an antelope, begging the lion to let him back inside his den. The fact that Seneca was so very eager to rejoin the social center of Rome can be seen as a mark of his unstoppable ambition—or, to put it another way, of his need to be at the center of things, his desire to exert benign influence on those in power, and his yearning to participate in a large social circle of friends, admirers, colleagues, students, patrons, and dependents.
If political appeals failed, he had philosophy to fall back on: a philosophy that always offered the promise of autonomy, masculinity, and total control over life, despite any of the assaults of fortune. The thought of the constancy of the wise man must have comforted Seneca in these years of exile. It is possible that it was during this period (though it may have been later) that he composed two of his most influential prose works on the topic of tranquility in adversity: On Providence and On the Constancy of the Wise Man. The first is addressed to his friend Lucilius (later the addressee of the Moral Letters) and is concerned with the classic question: “Why, if Providence rules the world, it still happens that many bad things happen to good men?” (Providence 1.1). Seneca’s answer is that God is like a good, strict father (similar to Seneca’s own father) rather than like an indulgent mother. God makes us stronger by testing us. For this reason, no bad thing can ever happen to a good man. Every apparent misfortune is an opportunity to be tested, to become stronger, and to know oneself the better: “Nobody learns what he can do, except by trying” (3.4.4). A good man may be exiled, reduced to poverty, and have his wife or children die—all events that Seneca suffered; but that good man “can be called miserable, but can never be so” (Providence 3.1). The real danger to a person’s happiness comes not from danger and adversity but from excesses of luxury: “A man who has always had glazed windows to protect him from the draught, whose feet have been kept warm by hot compresses which are regularly changed, whose dining halls are warmed by hot air under the floors and moving round the walls: that man will be in danger if he’s brushed by a gentle breeze” (Providence 4.10). The person who suffers the assaults of fortune (including exile and loneliness) can comfort himself with the thought that he is never really away from the center, and never really alone, while he can conform his will with that of the universe: “it is a great comfort, to be swept away along with the whole world” (5.8).
The essay On the Constancy of the Wise Man deals with a comparable subject and is addressed to another great friend of Seneca’s, Serenus Annaeus (possibly a relative, who later became a powerful man in Rome—probably thanks to Seneca’s intervention). The name “Serenus” means “Calm,” and his name may be partly why Seneca chose this friend as his addressee: the piece focuses on the way that a wise man can remain both calm and steadfast in the midst of any misfortune. He will be unchanging, “constant,” regardless of what happens all around him. Seneca insists particularly on the idea that Stoicism is the most masculine response to misfortune: the Stoics, unlike other philosophers, set us on the “manly” path to virtue, or rather, to virtus, which literally means “manliness.” He also insists—borrowing from Cynicism as well as Stoicism—that the wise man can lose nothing, even in the worst apparent misfortune: “his only possession is virtue, and he can never be robbed of that” (5.5). The man who pays no heed either to hope or fear will never be disappointed and will never suffer loss (9.3). Moreover, such a man is, even if he finds himself in exile, serving the good of the whole political realm of which he is a part: if you maintain the place of virtue, you are always in “the place of a man,” regardless of your apparent social position. And this in itself is political service: “it belongs to the Republic of Humanity, that there should be something unconquered, somebody against Fortune can do nothing” (19.4).