He reports his battles with his health, especially when struggling with intense attacks of asthma, which he dubs the “little death” (54). He presents himself as old and physically weak: traveling in the bay of Naples, he gets violently ill from seasickness (53), and he reports that he is now particularly prone to the cold, far more so than in his youth. In one letter, set at the start of spring, he tells Lucilius that he is still cold: “I can hardly thaw out even in mid-summer … As a result, I spend most of the time all bundled up” (67).
In another letter (83), he gives a vivid description of his daily routine, on an ideal day in which he has managed to devote himself to reading and writing, without interruption: “Leisure without study is death; it’s burial for a living man” (82.3). Seneca was a lifelong exerciser who had always favored efficient workouts that would tire him out without taking too long—like jumping, running, or weightlifting (15.2). Now in his sixties, he tires easily, so he used a young slave as his trainer, Pharius, who is at an age when he—like his master—is starting to lose his teeth (presumably a five- or six-year-old; one wonders what the child thought of the old man). The slave functions here as a mirror for his master, who ruefully discovers his own physical vulnerability matched by that of his human property. Seneca says that he is now getting so frail that even Pharius is too fast for him, and of course, the boy gets stronger every day while the master gets weaker; soon he will have to find an even younger slave.
After the workout, Seneca would take a lukewarm bath. Again, he notes his intolerance to cold in old age, which contrasts with his earlier love of bathing in cold water:
I, such a psychrolutes in the past [Greek for “cold-water washer”], I who used to celebrate New Year by plunging in the canal … have switched over, first to the Tiber, then to this tank warmed by the sun—even when I’m at my strongest and everything is in good shape.
(83.5)
The bath was followed by a simple breakfast of dry bread, eaten with no table or plate; then a tiny power nap (the routine of an infant), just enough to “take off the yoke.” “Sometimes I know I have slept, sometimes I just suspect” (83.6). Then he would be ready to begin his day of reading and writing. He insists that the two activities must be alternated: “we should not confine ourselves to either reading or writing: continuous writing makes one depressed and exhausted, while continuous reading makes one lax and weak” (84.1).
Seneca’s daily routine was regularly interrupted by his frequent relocations. He notes the inconveniences and disruptions caused by constant switching around from place to place, and comments that there are some things he can’t research or write about while riding around in a carriage (72.2). When he is curious to look at a particular villa from a nice beach, he insists on being carried longer than usual in his litter and then complains at the jolting, which is more exhausting than a hard workout (55).
One might wonder whether it was not rather more exhausting for the slaves carrying the litter than for the elite occupant. Seneca’s “simple” peripatetic life had to be sustained by a large number of people, mostly slaves—albeit fewer slaves than he would have owned in his previous life at court. Presumably Seneca was a reasonably humane slave owner: one of his most famous works is Epistle 47, on slaves, in which he appeals to Lucilius, and other elite Romans who would be reading the collection, to treat their slaves with compassion and gentleness, and with recognition that slaves are just as human as their masters. He speaks out against cruel masters who keep their slaves standing all night at their luxurious dinner parties, forbidding them to eat or drink or say a word, or even cough or sneeze involuntarily. As so often, Seneca loves the rhetorical effect of a fictional dialogue, imagining an interlocutor objecting: “‘He is a slave!’ But maybe free at heart. ‘He is a slave!’ Will that hurt him? Show me a person who isn’t a slave! One man is slave to lust, one to greed, one to ambition, all to fear …” (47.17).
Seneca’s rhetoric is impressive, such that it is hard not to believe that he is addressing a real social problem in a new, even revolutionary way. But the views Seneca espoused were actually quite common, even normal, among the Roman elite of his time. His Spanish contemporary, the agricultural writer Columella, claims that he jokes and talks in a friendly manner with his rustic slaves and treats humanely even those who are kept imprisoned and chained up (sic; Columella 1.8). Seneca’s attitude to slavery and to his own slaves was no more enlightened than that of his contemporaries: he thinks that masters ought to treat their human property reasonably well, but—like almost everybody else in the ancient world—he takes the institution of slavery entirely for granted, and most of the time, he gives minimal consideration to the actual lives of his own slaves.11 Moreover, Seneca’s insistence, in this same letter, that all of us, even slaves, have a “free” soul is actually used, in this same letter, to justify the material conditions of slavery; being a slave does the slave no real harm, since being enslaved is merely an indifferent thing that does not touch the soul’s virtue.12
Seneca’s slaves are of interest to him insofar as they help him understand himself better. In evoking a life of hardships, and the proper philosophical attitude toward it, he always looks from the perspective of the master, never the slave: “My household slaves are sick, my income is reduced, my home is creaky; loss, wounds, labors and fears come upon me; well, it’s a normal thing” (96.1). The sickness of slaves is a test to the master’s philosophical composure, not a problem for the sick people themselves. Similarly, when he visits one of his villas and finds that the slave he remembers as a little boy is now grown old, he thinks immediately of his own old age and imminent death (12)—rather than, for example, pausing to consider the hard life that has worn this person out at such a young age. Slavery is usually treated not as a specific (and unjust) social institution affecting particular individuals, but as a useful metaphor for various philosophical tropes: for instance, we should not be slaves to the body (14), but being a slave to philosophy means real freedom (8.7). “Fearing is being a slave” (66.17). In his discussions of wealth and poverty, Seneca is focused on how a rich person can free himself from the fear of becoming poor; he has no interest in alleviating or challenging the conditions of slavery or poverty (17). By living below one’s means, one can realize that wealth is less necessary than one might otherwise think. Voluntary poverty enables the rich to stay rich, but with a greater feeling of inner peace.