Seneca several times seems to fantasize about the possibility of rejecting the patronage of the emperor. He evokes the possibility that one might want to reject a benefit: “Take it back! I don’t want it! I am happy with what I have!” … “Sometimes it is a pleasure not just to give back what you’ve received, but hurl it away!”
But he also gives an implicit defense of his own choices in accepting the favors of Claudius, Agrippina, and Nero in the first place. For instance, he discusses the possibility that one might be offered favors from somebody one did not entirely respect. He notes that Crispus Passienus—a powerful and intellectual man who was briefly married to Agrippina but then was poisoned, possibly by her—used to say that one ought to gain the respect of people one respects (rather than their material favors) but take material favors from people one does not respect. The examples he gave of the two categories were the admirable Augustus and the despicable Claudius. Seneca challenges this view, suggesting that “one should never seek a favor from one whose respect you despise” (1.15.6).
How, then, could Seneca justify accepting a favor from the despised Claudius—such as recall from exile? He has an ingenious answer: one can accept a benefit “as if from Fortune, whom you realize might next minute become unkind.” This is a clever psychological move: whenever you are in the shameful position of being under an obligation to a person you do not admire, simply imagine that the gift comes from Fortune, not the human donor. Conveniently enough, it also implies that Seneca need feel no particular obligation to those—like Agrippina—who might seem to have been his benefactors, if they should turn out to be less-than-admirable people. “The gift of a huge sum of money is no more a benefit than a treasure trove, unless it was given with reason and proper intention. There are many gifts that should be accepted, but impose no obligation” (1.15.6). From this point of view, far from being trapped by the duty to be grateful to his despicable benefactors, Seneca was entirely free from any obligation toward them. There was no need, therefore, to feel even the slightest twinge of guilt over his benefactress’ death.
The question still arises of whether one might be in a humiliating position through being too dependent on somebody else’s material and social support. Seneca repeatedly returns to this question: he is highly conscious of the ways that receiving favors can make the recipient feel vulnerable and hurt: “The repeated reminder of our services wounds and crushes the spirit” (2.1.11). Some gifts harm the recipient (2.1.14): one may say, “That man killed me by love” (2.14.5). At times, he suggests that one is always free to say no. He discusses the philosophical hypocrisy of a Cynic who had a “declared hatred of money” and yet asked a king for a handout (2.14.2). But he also suggests that sometimes one can be made an offer one can’t refuse. Seneca imagines an interlocutor asking, “But I’m not always allowed to say, `I don’t want it’; sometimes I have to accept a benefit, even if I don’t want to” (2.18.6). In that case, he suggests, we can reimagine what is happening: you are not accepting, but obeying. In cases where one is unable to refuse a gift one does not want, one must either imagine that the favor comes from Fortune, not the despicable donor, or else define it as something other than a favor: “The benefit is none at all, if it is coerced.” He still acknowledges that “it is absolute torture to be obliged to somebody you don’t like” (2.18.3). But the mental torture can be reduced if you can deny that you are really so obliged.
Milton’s Satan memorably articulates the rage and horror aroused by the obligation of gratitude for one who wants to feel fully autonomous. Satan hates “the debt immense of endless gratitude, / So burdensome: still paying, still to owe” (Paradise Lost 4.52–53). This is in many ways a very Senecan sentiment (and Satan a very Stoic kind of hero). But Seneca, in his philosophical rather than tragic mode, finds a solution: one need not feel trapped by gifts that seem too munificent, because gratitude itself is repayment of the debt of gratitude. In itself, it fulfills the spiritual debt: “you may pay with what you have” (2.35.5).
What of the problem with which the treatise begins: ingratitude? We are told that it has three causes: pride, greed, and jealousy (2.26.1). Seneca’s discussion of these vices is highly reminiscent of his depiction of various tragic figures who are overwhelmed by their overweening ambitions and desires, such as Atreus in Thyestes. “Desire goes beyond itself and does not understand its own happiness, because it looks not to where it came from but to where it goes.” By contrast, true gratitude begins with an awareness of nature and the gods, from whom we come. In taking seriously the issue of ingratitude, Seneca implicitly defends himself against it; he defines himself not as one who has covered up the murder of his benefactress, but rather as a man who understands how to be truly grateful—although only where gratitude is genuinely appropriate. Plato in the first book of the Republic had raised a philosophical problem that recurs in later ancient discussions of justice, namely whether one must always pay back what one owes—even if the lender changes. Plato’s example is of a man who lends you a knife: should you give it back if he goes mad? Seneca turns to this problem in Book 7 of the Benefits and gives it a political twist, imagining that the lender might turn “as savage and dangerous as Apollodorus or Phalaris”—notorious tyrants (7.19.5). The problem thus takes on an obvious relevance for Seneca’s own relationships with Claudius, Agrippina, and Nero. If one of these supposed benefactors turned bad, would Seneca still be under an obligation to pay him or her back? Seneca’s response is startlingly optimistic: he argues that such a thing could never happen. “Nobody who has ever adhered to wisdom could fall into the utmost evil; he is too deeply-dyed for the color to wash out entirely and take on a wicked shade” (7.19.6). Seneca is here reassuring himself as much as the reading public that his training of the young emperor has been so effective that it can never be erased.
But the issue of whether he has been ungrateful to Agrippina seems still to lurk in the background. He tells the story of a Pythagorean philosopher who bought some shoes without paying for them and came back later to give the money. In the meantime, the shoemaker died. The philosopher was at first happy to get away without paying, but in the end, overwhelmed by conscience, he returned to the store and dropped the money into the locked door of the dead man’s house, as a lesson to himself to avoid being in debt (7. 21.1–2). Seneca tells the story with sympathy and suggests that it makes no difference whether the donor is alive or dead, nor whether the donor is good or bad: one still has a duty to remember the act of generosity and to repay it. “First pay, then accuse.”
The attempt in De Beneficiis to create an ideal picture of social relationships, in the always-generous donor and the ever-grateful but never-humiliated recipient, constantly comes up against the issue of profit—both metaphorical and literal profit. Seneca inveighs against the notion that one should aim only for profit, or even at all for profit; yet he also suggests that gratitude is, at least metaphorically, the profit reaped by the donor from the recipient, and the fulfillment of a debt. Benefits should not be loans and should not be associated with “shameful usury” (1.2.4).