The shift to a view from above allows Seneca to present even the Roman empire itself as just a pinpoint on a far more immense canvas. In the tragedies, characters like Hercules and Medea and Juno feel cramped even in the largest world they can imagine; the biggest empire the world has ever known is still too small for their ambitions and their guilt. Now, through moving through the heavens as a scientist and astronomer, Seneca presents his mind as capable at last of rising above all the limitations of political ambition and material desire:
The mind cannot despise colonnades, and paneled ceilings gleaming with ivory, and carefully clipped topiaries and streams landscaped to flow toward the house—until it goes around the whole world, and looks down on the earth from above, and sees how tiny it is; how most of the earth is covered up by sea; how even the part above sea level is mostly wilderness, or scorched desert, or frozen ice; and the mind tells itself: “Is this that pinpoint which is divided by sword and fire among so many peoples? How absurd are the boundaries of mortals!” (NQ 1. Pref. 7)
The absurdity Seneca points to here is not merely that humans overestimate the importance of their own possessions on earth, or that they think themselves more important than they are. Nor is the problem only that humans overvalue things that are actually close to worthless, although they do that too. It is also that we waste our lives in fighting and struggling for things that are no more than anthills from the perspective of the heavens: “This army of yours is only a scurrying of ants, struggling in a tiny plot of land” (NQ 1. Pref. 10).
Seneca’s phrasing here is largely impersonaclass="underline" he speaks not of “I” and “you,” but of “the mind” and of “humans.” The speaker of the Natural Questions is aspiring to a point of view that goes beyond any mere human individual and can span the whole compass of the universe. In doing so, he transcends the messy personal struggles of a Spanish-born philosopher entangled in the Roman imperial court. Spain itself appears as an example of a place that seems like the boundary of a great empire—but that is not so far away in the long run: “After all, how great is the distance from the farthest shores of Spain all the way to India? Only a very few days’ journey, if you have a good wind for your ship” (NQ 1. Pref. 13). Seneca thus liberates himself from the perspective he was forced to adopt when fawning to Nero, of emphasizing the vast distance he has climbed from provincial obscurity to the heart of the empire; he is able to see that the distance was hardly anything, a mere instant of time.
The final book in the original order, Book 2, is concerned with thunder and lightning and provides an opportunity for an extensive discussion of a climactic topic: the divine order of the universe. Seneca insists that “there is an order in things” (NQ 2.13.3) and that everything is fated—although we still have freedom to choose our own actions. People say that lightning is sent by the gods to punish the wicked, only in order to terrify us into good behavior (NQ 2.42.3); but the real ruler of the universe, the real Jupiter, is also identifiable with nature, with fate, with fortune, with providence, and with any number of other abstractions, and is always benevolent in his exercise of power—a model for kings and emperors on earth. The study of the divine order leads Seneca to conclude, yet again, that we must reconcile ourselves to the inevitability of death, which will come when it will—if not by lightning, then by some other means. “Take courage from this very source of despair,” he declares: “That’s how it is, Lucilius: we’re all saved for death” (NQ 2.59.6). By seeing his own imminent death, constantly threatened by Nero, as part of the universal cosmic pattern and universal human destiny, Seneca could feel far less alone.
Having lost his colleague Burrus and at least one other dear friend, Serenus, to death, Seneca builds up his friendship with another friend, Lucilius, the addressee of both the Natural Questions and Letters to Lucilius. Little is known about Lucilius himself. Seneca is our only source for his life, and the letters do not give much substantial information about him. He was, we gather, of equestrian status, a native of southern Italy, a frequent visitor to Pompeii, slightly younger than Seneca himself, and working as a procurator (an imperial administrator) on Sicily. It is possible that he was the author of a poem on volcanoes (Aetna), a subject that could have been easily studied by one living near Mount Etna, and whose author seems to have a strong knowledge of Seneca’s Natural Questions. Lucilius is presented as setting out to make progress in philosophy, in search of advice from one who has progressed just a little further down the same road. He is, we learn, considering giving up his political life for philosophical retirement—a situation suspiciously like Seneca’s own recent past, such that some commentators have suspected that Lucilius may be an imaginary friend. His name, again suspiciously, seems reminiscent of Seneca’s own: Lucilius is a diminutive form of Lucius.8 Lucilius is like Seneca’s own smaller, younger self.
At times, Seneca seems to present Lucilius as an idealized counterpart to himself. He is the man who would never be tempted by ambition to turn away from his studies: “I know how distant you are from ambition, how dearly you love leisure and book-learning” (NQ 4. Pref. 1). Immediately, however, Seneca turns to a characteristic meditation on how rare this quality of self-sufficiency is. Most of “us,” he declares, are tormented by our own combination of self-love and self-hatred: “sometimes we suffer from self-love, sometimes self-disgust.” The worst result of all is that we cannot live at peace alone with ourselves: indeed, “we are never alone with ourselves.” Seneca’s narrator, as so often, occupies an ambiguous position, fluctuating between the moralist and the sinner. He seems able to analyze the torments of psychological inauthenticity but has no consistent capacity to avoid them himself. He assures Lucilius that he must, above all, avoid flattery and mistrust flatterers; but he does so in such overblown terms that one cannot help suspecting that the narrator himself is flattering Lucilius.9 The passage ends with a characteristic twist: Lucilius is urged, finally, to ask himself whether the flattering picture is true or not, and Seneca allows that it may well not be. The advantage, however, of doing this exercise alone is that “if they are false, you can be ridiculous without anybody seeing!” The benefits of living with only imaginary friends are, by the time of the Natural Questions, all too evident to Seneca.
The problem that recurs in both Natural Questions and the Letters to Lucilius is one that will be familiar to readers of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus or Milton’s Paradise Lost: Seneca knows he can withdraw from the world, but he is left with the problem of how to live with himself. “Fly—what, from myself ? / Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell,” asks Satan (Paradise Lost 4.75). Seneca suggests that this impossible fantasy is actually achievable: “Therefore one must flee and withdraw into oneself; but one must withdraw even from oneself” (NQ 4. Pref. 20). Lucilius, Seneca’s addressee in these works, is part of his solution to the problem: through evoking his friend, he is able to imagine and inhabit his best self, unencumbered by either the material world or the burden of his particular personal history. “We will be together, where we are best. We will give each other advice, independent of the face of a listener” (NQ 4. Pref. 20). It is as if the face (vultus) in itself connotes, for Seneca, the possibility of deceit: a face can always be a mask. The page is, then, the only place where he can feel or be his own best self and best friend.