Then why do you talk so much more bravely than you live? Why do you repress your words in front of a high-up person, why do you think of money as a personal necessity, why do you get upset when you lose things, why do you cry when you hear about the death of your wife or your friend, why do you think about reputation, and why are you affected by gossip? Why do you have more land in your estate than the needs of nature require? Why do your dinners not correspond to your teaching? Why do you have polished furniture? Why do you drink wine older than you are? Why this pretentious bird-house? Why do you plant trees that give nothing but shade? Why does your wife wear earrings that cost as much as a fancy house? Why is your retinue of slave footmen adorned in such expensive outfits? Why is it an art-form to be a waiter at your table, and the silver isn’t just put down any old way—there’s enormous skill involved in laying it out and serving the meal, and there has to be a special professional carver for the meat?
(17.2)
The list goes on, with more and more examples of absurd luxury: it is almost comically too long. If the list stopped after three or four instances, one would have got the point; since he continues, the reader comes to wonder whether he is only indicting wealth, or whether he actually might be enjoying contemplating his wonderful heap of possessions.
But as the passage continues, the focus on excessive quantities of material possessions gives way to even more pointed questions about why one who teaches temperate Stoic philosophy should want not only riches beyond what other people have, but even riches beyond what the possessor himself can keep track of—riches that make no possible sense, that entirely violate reason:
Why do you have property over-seas? Why more things than you’ve even seen or known? Are you so horribly spoilt that you don’t even know your few slaves, or such a fat-cat that you own more slaves than you can possibly remember?
The voicing of these reproaches suggests an attempt by Seneca to address his critics, but the confrontation is still far from direct. For instance, the critic first complains that the hypocrite-philosopher shows unbecoming grief at the death of a wife, and then objects that his wife—presumably a living woman—wears inappropriately expensive jewelry. It is quite possible that Seneca had, in fact, suffered the loss of his first wife and remarried by the time of this essay. We are told, in fact (by Dio), that he made a “brilliant marriage” in “this period,” and it is likely, as we have seen, that this was when he married Paulina. But even if the dead wife and the wife with expensive earrings are both biographical facts, it seems equally possible to take the contradiction as an attempt to keep things properly vague: this is about any philosopher who fails to live up to his ideals, whether or not his name is Lucius Annaeus Seneca.
The confusing slippage from the particular to the general, and back again, allows him to have it both ways: this both is, and is not, a confession. The unnamed critic, too, slips from accusations directed to a single person to general complaints about the hypocrisy of all philosophers. Aliter loqueris, aliter vivis, he says: “You talk one way, and live another” (18.1). But the accused are also multiple, a general category as well as an individuaclass="underline" “Philosophers don’t practice what they preach” (20.1).
There is another kind of slipperiness at play in the accusations Seneca’s unnamed critic levels against a person who both is and is not himself. There is little discussion of where all this wealth comes from: questions like “Why do you suck the provinces dry?” and “Why do you hunt for legacies?” are not included on the list. Nor does any imagined interlocutor ask, “Why do you, a so-called philosopher, serve and promote and grow rich in service of a ruler who murdered his brother?” The questions focus almost entirely on material possessions, of which slaves are only an expensive subcategory. When more difficult and important problems are mentioned at all, Seneca moves extremely fast away from them: “Why do you repress your tongue in front of a superior?” The implied answer is presumably that the “philosopher” risks exile or death if he talks back to the superior.
Different again is the question, “Why do you weep when you hear of the death of a wife or a friend?” The implied answer here is that the philosopher, who claims to have such detachment that he can bear any loss calmly, is actually subject to human affection. Seneca here acknowledges the would-be philosopher’s dependence on other people. But the gulf between these two weaknesses, avarice and love, is for Seneca less large than it might appear. The allure of material possessions, as he presents it, is precisely that they allow the owner to maintain and increase his social status. The rich man in this text does not want rich food or fancy wine or a well-dressed wife for reasons of physical greed or lust, or for purely aesthetic reasons, or even because he likes them. Nothing, in fact, is said about the actual flavor of the vintage drinks, or the beauty of the earrings. The temptation of consumerism, for Seneca, is that impressive possessions allow one to impress other people. We have an insatiable desire for more wealth, not because these objects are desirable in themselves, but because we want to seem admirable in the eyes of others. Avarice is therefore a function of false consciousness: the person who does not know how to become truly good (and therefore truly admirable), by becoming wise and virtuous in the proper Stoic mode, will grasp at these false goods, which can never nourish true self-respect.
Looked at one way, these consumerist desires seem utterly absurd: why would one want things that one never even sees and never gets to use? But Seneca’s way of framing the supposedly unanswerable question also implies an answer. These are not things that are wanted for the sake of use; we want them because they are a symbol of social power. The idea that gaining more wealth helps one up the social ladder was a particularly concrete one for any Roman, since social rank was based on a combination of political assets, inherited nobility, and wealth. There was often a tension, very visible in the case of Seneca, between the systems: a man’s rank based on his birth might be lower or higher than his financial census ranking. Seneca gained assets that put him well above the equestrian class into which he had been born.
In tragedies such as Thyestes, Seneca presents us with characters like Atreus, whose desire for dominance and outdoing others is so insatiable that even making his hated brother eat his own children is not novel or horrific enough: “Crime should have a limit when you do it for the first time, / Not when you’re taking revenge. Even this is too little for me” (1052–1053). In the prose work, Seneca reverses the tragic trope of limitless, insatiable lust for power by suggesting that he can have a limitless aspiration toward virtue, even if he never achieves the goal. His first line of defense against the accusations of hypocrisy is to acknowledge their partial truth: he admits that he does not fully practice what he preaches. But he also insists that he is, at the very least, attempting to get closer to the ideal every day. Then he tries to turn the accusation back on the accuser:
I am not a wise man, and—here’s food for your spite!—I never will be. Don’t ask me to equal the best people. I just want to be better than the worst. It’s enough for me, to reduce a bit from my faults every day, and to blame my mistakes. I haven’t reached health, and I never will get there. I’m alleviating my gout not curing it. I’m satisfied if it comes more infrequently, and causes less agony. I’m weak, but look at you; compared to your legs, I’m a racer!
It is striking that, despite the gestures toward generalization in the portrayal of the hypocrite-philosopher, the counter-attack becomes addressed to a single, utterly flawed individual. This allows the conversation to shift from point of principle to the specific behaviors of an individual. One might think that the accusation of hypocrisy ought to be addressed in itself, regardless of who brings it, but Seneca presents the problem in much more personal terms. He also shifts again away from identifying himself entirely with the voice of the philosopher, even the imperfect philosopher: “What I say is not spoken on behalf of myself—for I am in the depths of every vice—but on behalf of the man who has really done something” (17.4). He shimmies quickly from self-accusation, to self-defense, to self-accusation again.