The second important fact is that the Letters to Lucilius are addressed to Lucilius, as are the Natural Questions. Their specified target readership is not Nero, nor anybody in a central position of political power. This in itself is a mark of how much Seneca’s public position had changed since the days of De Clementia, when he could write in direct address to the young prince.
The Letters to Lucilius conjure up a paradoxical relationship between writer and addressee. On one hand, Seneca sets out to give advice to his friend, suggesting that he himself is at least somewhat further along the road toward philosophical perfection. On the other, he constantly acknowledges that the real work has to be done by each person for himself: only Lucilius can teach Lucilius. He urges him in the very first epistle to “persuade yourself that what I write is the case” (1.1); it is not the writer’s job to teach, but that of the reader himself. But Seneca constantly works in the Letters to undermine the distinction between the reader and the writer; we are supposed to become so closely involved that this distinction disappears. If you can find a true friend, he suggests, you can talk to him as if to a second self (3.3). Seneca manages to invite us to think of the text as a transparent window into his thoughts, even as he carefully constructs his own image. He claims his letters have “nothing strained or artificial” (75.1): “I feel whatever I say, in fact, I don’t just feel it, I love it!” (75.3). Even if we may be skeptical of Seneca’s claims to be utterly authentic and natural in these very well-crafted pieces of prose, it is a likeable gesture. The focus on the inner life, and on the mind as a safe sphere in which one can withdraw from any kind of adversity, was both one of the most original and one of the most influential aspects of the collection.
Seneca insists that he himself is imperfect. He claims that the main focus of his life in retirement is curing his own moral ulcers: “What, then, am I myself doing with my leisure? I am trying to cure my own sores … There is no reason why you should desire to come to me for the sake of making progress. You are mistaken if you think that you will get any assistance from this quarter; it is not a doctor that dwells here, but a sick man … I prefer you to pardon rather than envy my retirement” (64.3–4). Seneca presents himself as a patient rather than a doctor, a student as much as a teacher. Whatever philosophical insights he may share, they have come only to him intermittently and only late in life. He argues that learning of moral goodness, in particular, is much slower than other kinds of learning. “Just as wool takes up certain colors right away, but others it won’t absorb unless it is soaked and steeped in them many times,” so too it takes many years truly to absorb the truths of Stoicism. But there is hope, because “the main part of progress is wanting to progress” (61.36). “Whatever my work is like, read it as if I were still seeking the truth, not as if I knew it” (45.4). This character of Seneca as seeker is used as justification also for his philosophical eclecticism. He constantly cites Epicurus, as well as other philosophers from different traditions (such as Socrates and Diogenes the Cynic): “I have sold myself to no-one; I have no master’s name” (45.4).
Moreover, his sickness is literal as well as metaphorical. Both pathos and a sense of urgency are generated from the constant reminders that the writer and his addressee are old and sick; time is running out, and there is little life left in which to learn how to live. Seneca acknowledges that being an old man without having achieved wisdom is an embarrassing position to be in: “What is more undignified than an old man who is only just beginning to live?” (13.17). There is a real possibility that each day may be the last, either for Lucilius or for Seneca himself—if not from old age, then from Nero. But there is also a repeated acknowledgment that wisdom does not come all at once, as if through a single moment of insight or inspiration; it is a product of practice, of daily, repeated, developed habit.
The structure of the text itself helps to make this point, since Seneca does not offer his readers a single, unified treatise on philosophy, which might give the impression that one could absorb it all in a single reading. Rather, the format of the Letters suggests that each day will mean making a new beginning at the attempt at moral progress. The text is framed into small chunks, tiny pieces, because that is how we experience our lives—episodically. This is not a philosophy of abstractions, but of habit formation, which happens from day to day.
The Epistles, even more than most of Seneca’s work, are deeply resistant to biographical interpretation, while at the same time inviting the reader to contemplate Seneca’s life as well as his or her own. Seneca resists the idea that a “life” is a period of some sixty or seventy years, with a narrative involving birth, childhood, youth, and maturity, and conflicts, journeys, and realizations along the way. Human life is, on the one hand, viewed from a cosmic perspective: as in the Natural Questions, viewed from above, as a mere pinpoint of time within eternity. But more commonly, the Epistles present life as something that happens not by the lifespan, but by the day. What matters, then, is not what Seneca did over his years as Nero’s advisor, but rather, what he did today: “I will keep watching myself all the time, and I’ll go back over my day—which is the most useful habit” (83.2). Moreover, even that “dailiness” is often presented in a generalized way: what Seneca realizes as he looks back on his day is that now, as always, he is dying. What we all do, every day, is begin to die—Cotidie morimur (24.20):
We die every day. You see, every day a little bit of our life is taken away from us, and even at the moment we are growing, our life is decaying. We lose our infancy, then childhood, then adolescence. Even up to yesterday, all past time is gone; even this day that we are spending now, we share with death. It’s not the last drop that empties the water-clock, but whatever has flowed out before.
The major theme of the collection is how to deal with the passage of time. Seneca’s most vivid discussions are of the way time slips away without our even being aware of it: “What man can you give me who puts any value on time, who counts a day, who understands that he dies daily? This is our big mistake: to think we look forward to death. Most of death is already gone. Whatever time has passed is owned by death” (1.2).
But there are at least hints that Seneca was also looking back rather further, to his own past life. Occasionally there is mention of his long-lost childhood: “it was just a moment ago that I sat at the feet of Sotion the philosopher as a boy; a moment ago that I began to plead in the courts, a moment ago that I stopped wanting to do so, a moment ago that I stopped being able to do so” (49.2). Seneca mostly recommends looking back only over one’s past day rather than the whole lifespan. He recommends that Lucilius should “think of each day as a separate life” (101.10). This highly episodic mode of living discourages long autobiographical reminiscences. Seneca lives not in the lifetime span, but in the day and hour of the moment, and also in the eye of eternity: “the soul looks out from the height and laughs at the succession of time” (101.9). The soul is not bounded by a single lifetime: “‘All years are mine’, says the soul” (102.21). Sometimes he suggests a longer view: in the face of loss, he argues, the best comfort is to keep one’s memories intact: “Having is taken away; having had, never” (98.11). Memory thus allows us always to maintain at least a vestige of what we have once had, forever. He recommends looking back on the good parts of your own life (78.18): “consider in your mind your own best roles.” This way, you can live without needing an audience to praise you: “Be your own spectator; praise yourself” (78.21). Even in relative solitude (apart from wife, friends, and a cartful of slaves), Seneca can find an active audience for himself, in his mind and his memory.