IV
“There’s No Easy Path from Earth to the Stars”
*
“What are you doing, Seneca? Are you abandoning your party?”1
We turn now to the last years of Seneca’s life—years in which the man himself felt he was living on borrowed time, practicing daily for death. It was in this period that Seneca produced some of his greatest prose work, including the Letters to Lucilius, a series of highly literary but also highly engaging epistles to a slightly younger friend, dealing with many different aspects of the philosophical life, and the Natural Questions, his most extensive discussion of natural, scientific phenomena.
After serving as Nero’s speechwriter and political advisor for some time, Seneca became alienated from the emperor, whose behavior had become increasingly autocratic and histrionic. Seneca engaged in an ongoing struggle to withdraw from a public life that he himself had freely embarked upon but that had become impossible to maintain except at the cost both of his integrity and personal safety.
When returning from exile, Seneca may have considered going to Athens, to be a teacher and student of philosophy, rather than coming back to Rome to teach rhetoric to the young Nero. Now again, at this much later stage of his life, he must have looked around him at the other philosophers and teachers of his time and wondered if his life in politics and as a famous writer had been a mistake. Should he, rather, have devoted himself solely to study and teaching of Stoic philosophy, as others were doing even at Rome? The most prominent of these was Musonius Rufus, a slightly younger contemporary whose life and works stand in fascinating contrast to those of Seneca. Musonius was, like Seneca, from an equestrian background, from Etruria, and he devoted himself to lecturing and writing about Stoic ethics. His most famous student was Epictetus. Musonius’ main, indeed more or less exclusive, focus was on behavior rather than the more theoretical fields of Stoicism (physics and logic). He treated philosophy as the central means by which people can liberate themselves from false beliefs and corrupt desires. Musonius’ version of Stoicism is more exclusively practical, less self-centered, and more focused on human kindness than that of Seneca. His central concerns are with recommending that people live together with affection and without cruelty and make simple, ascetic lifestyle choices (he gives instructions, for instance, on how to keep one’s hair and beard neat without wasting too much time on such frivolities). His work survives only in records of his opinions taken by a student; Musonius, like Epictetus but unlike Seneca, was not much interested in literary production or political power, and instead focused on getting across the content of his ideas in order to change his students’ behavior.
Musonius’ priorities on social issues were clearly very different from Seneca’s. He takes a genuinely original line in combatting what he presents as social abuses, such as the exposure of unwanted babies, and in arguing that women, as well as men, ought to study philosophy; their minds are no different, no worse. He seems to have taken an interest in politics and been willing to take risks for his beliefs: he supported a rival of Nero, Rubellius Plautus, who was exiled in 60 CE. Musonius followed him into exile in Asia. He came back in 62, when Plautus was dead, but Nero continued to dislike him. Musonius was thus a parallel figure to Seneca, one who showed far less willingness to make social and political compromises.
But Stoicism in itself did not imply political dissidence. In the sixties there were certainly some—like Seneca’s own nephew, Lucan—who were Stoic-sympathizers and also sympathetic to republicanism. But there were also plenty of others, like Seneca himself, whose philosophy was not necessarily identifiable with political dissidence. Stoicism was not the problem with Seneca, from Nero’s perspective; rather, the old man had outstayed his welcome and had gone from being a useful aide in Nero’s schemes to promote himself and his own pleasures, against the obstacles of public opinion, to being a killjoy and a hindrance.
Seneca’s dilemma after the death of Burrus was how to extricate himself from an untenable position as minister to an emperor who no longer trusted him and whose behavior was increasingly erratic, without arousing further suspicion or being killed. Seneca had been thinking about retirement for a long time; the dilemma was starker now, but it was by no means new. For many years, Seneca must have been wondering about his exit strategy. One way to avoid any suspicion that retirement meant treason was to adopt “philosophy” as a mask and to suggest that any person might have purely psychological, not political, reasons for wanting to be away from the rat race. In an essay On Leisure, probably composed quite a long time before he actually withdrew from Nero’s court,2 Seneca vividly evokes the benefits that come from retirement from public life—and in doing so, also evokes the psychological and moral pressure involved in being in the public eye. He tells his addressee (who may be again his old friend Serenus) that only alone, in retirement, is it possible to maintain a consistent purpose in life. The problem with contemporary society is that it creates a life that is not only immoral but, worse, fickle: people constantly change their minds and their actions, based on fashion and the influence of those around them. Only in retirement, and in solitude, can one stick consistently to whatever it is that one really wants to do with one’s time.
In another piece, On the Shortness of Life, Seneca writes to another friend, Paulinus, urging him to withdraw from the hustle of public life. Paulinus did give up one of the top administrative positions in Rome, the prefecture of the grain supply (praefectus annonae), in 55, which was probably when Seneca’s essay was composed. One could surmise that Paulinus simply took Seneca’s advice. But it is much more likely the other way round: Paulinus was forced by Agrippina to retire in order to leave room for the appointment of one of her own favorites (Faenius Rufus).3 Seneca’s essay was thus designed to save face both for Paulinus himself and for the government by presenting his retirement as a choice rather than something he was forced into. It seems likely that Seneca himself was already, even in 55, considering the fact that he might one day, perhaps soon, be forced out of Nero’s court or find himself desperate to leave. So from his own point of view also, it was a useful move to make a public statement about the value of retirement: it helped lay the groundwork for the day that was sure to come.
The writing of these treatises also allowed Seneca to articulate many of his negative feelings about the life of the palace. He vividly evokes the bustle of contemporary life and gives us a clear sense of what was he looking for in his later years:
Among the rest of our troubles, this one is the worst of all, that we even change our vices. We don’t even get to stick to a familiar vice. First this one, then that one is a favorite, and our problem is that our choices are not just bad, but also fickle. We’re tossed around, grasping at one thing and then another; we abandon the things we tried to obtain, we search out the things we’ve abandoned, in a state of constant oscillation between desire and regret.
(On Leisure 1.2–3)
His goal is not simply a state of greater moral purity (though it is that) but, above all, a place of security where he can feel that his actions and his intentions are in tune with one another—an escape from the schizophrenic jostle from one style of behavior to another.
In this same passage, Seneca goes on to hint at a third problem with public life—namely, that it is extremely dangerous. Seneca, even in the early years of service but increasingly as time went on, could hardly have been unaware that his life hung in the fickle and temperamental young emperor’s hands. He comments that “we do not consider whether the way itself is good or bad, but we just count the crowd of footsteps; but none of those footsteps come from people coming back” (On Leisure 1.3). This is an allusion to Aesop’s fable of the fox and the sick lion. The fox warily approaches the lion’s cave, and the lion encourages him to enter; after all, a sick lion could hardly hurt a lively young fox. But the fox refuses: he has noticed that many animals’ footsteps lead into the lion’s cave, and none lead back—because, of course, the lion has eaten them all.