It is frustrating from a biographical perspective that Seneca says so little about what, exactly, causes him most joy and most pain as he looks back on his life. When his memories bring him nothing but grief, he is never specific about what he most minds or most regrets: “I was just feeling disgusted at myself, I was despising the fragments of my broken lifetime, on the point of crossing over to that vast time and possession of eternity—when suddenly I was woken by your letter” (102.2). The letter format itself marks a series of breaks in time, as we begin each one again; it provides an ever-present opportunity to change the subject.
Seneca hints at his own life story a number of times in the Epistles, but never explicitly or with any specificity. Often Seneca applies to other people—the addressee, or people in general—stories that seem particularly applicable to himself. In Epistle 19, for example, he tells Lucilius what a shame it is that he—Lucilius—ever rose up beyond his humble provincial origins to such heights of prosperity: “If only you’d had the chance to grow old in the modest manner of the family into which you were born, and fortune had never raised you to such heights!” (19.5). The career up the Roman ladder of success is presented as a condition of permanent slavery, although not to a human master but to one’s own desires: once one starts on the path of ambition, there is no end to more wants: “from the end of one desire springs up another.” Power and prosperity are, then, vehicles of enslavement: “Take your worn-out neck from the yoke; better to have it severed once and for all, than be pressed down forever.”
Seneca makes it sound very easy to escape from prosperity and power. He imagines Lucilius asking how to extricate himself and responds: “Utcumque!” (“Any old way!”). There is some disingenuousness here: Seneca is presenting as easy something that he himself manifestly found extremely difficult. It is presumably no coincidence that the following letter takes up the central Senecan theme of inconstancy. Seneca suggests that his greatest concern is not that he might act against his true beliefs, or speak words he does not really believe, but rather that his beliefs, and thus his words and actions, might be in a constant state of flux. “The greatest proof of an evil mind is fluctuation, and constant wavering between the pretense of virtue and the love of vice” (120.20). Only a good man can be always the same as himself, and thus only a good man can be truly known. The fragmented, episodic form of these letters itself may suggest a lack of coherent, consistent selfhood—or may suggest that the speaker can be constant only for a paragraph or two, no more. A buried worry running through the text is whether their author is able to maintain a stable persona: has he changed, since the early days with Nero, or has he not? Either one is a bad answer.
There are discussions of teaching and learning, which inevitably suggest that the one-time tutor of Nero was still preoccupied with the question of whether he did any good in his position—and whether, if he failed, it was his fault or that of the pupil. He emphasizes the importance of the living teacher, who inspires his student not so much by words as by action, by the model of his own life. Useful though books may be for some purposes, they are far less important than a real-life teacher: “the living voice and the intimacy of a common life will help you more than the written word” (6.5). But what if the teacher himself is unable to live up to his own precepts? This is a recurrent anxiety in the letters. Seneca argues that it is essential that one’s life should match one’s teaching: “this is the most essential duty and proof of wisdom: that one’s actions should match one’s words, and that a person should always, everywhere, be the same, and himself” (20.2). A philosopher, Seneca insists, is not simply a purveyor of wisdom in mere words: he is also, and most importantly, a person who teaches by example. “He is not only a teacher of truth, but a witness to the truth” (20.10.) There is an unresolved tension between Seneca’s admissions that he himself is imperfect, full of moral sores, a patient rather than a doctor, and his insistence that one must live up to what one teaches.
In more positive spirit, he suggests that he is still on his way toward wisdom. He relates that he is, even in old age, going to lectures on philosophy, designed for young men embarking on their education in preparation for beginning a career; he insists that actually this is a far better use of an old man’s time than the more traditional pursuits of going to the theater or the wrestling or the gladiatorial games (76.3–4).
A repeated question in the Letters is whether philosophical teaching is worthwhile. Seneca imagines an argumentative opponent who claims that it is a waste of time; for one thing, the advisors will always fail to follow their own advice: “those who give this advice most assiduously cannot follow it themselves” (94.9). For another, nobody is ever changed by precepts: either you teach somebody who already knows how to behave well, or else you teach somebody who does not know, and precepts will not be enough to change him (94.11). But Seneca responds by redefining the goals of his writings and teachings: “Just because Philosophy can’t cure everything, doesn’t mean it can’t cure anything” (94.24). The central point is that giving advice is not the same as giving factual information, where one simply conveys a piece of knowledge to another person. Rather, the point of moral philosophy is to make its practioners feel and take to heart the premises that they may, subliminally, already know: “We sometimes know but don’t pay attention” (94.25). The point of Seneca’s own precepts and, in particular, of his aphoristic, punchy style is that it is the most effective way to make the point hit home and become memorable or noticeable: “Virtue is aroused by a touch or a shock” (94.29).
But he is conscious that sometimes teaching just won’t work. This theme sometimes emerges in surprising places. Nomentum (Fig. 4.2), where Seneca owned one of his villas, was one of the places he enjoyed growing vines—a hobby he found deeply sustaining, and also informative as a way to think about how cultivation can be achieved. The vines were his ideal pupils, the ones who responded to his attempts at grafting and shaping their growth, but even here he acknowledges that not all will be good students: “Not every vine accepts grafting; if it’s old and decayed, or weak and slim, the vine will not receive the cutting, or won’t nourish it and make it part of itself, nor accommodate itself to the qualities and nature of the grafted part” (112.2). This is as close as Seneca ever comes to discussing his failure at teaching Nero.
Figure 4.2 Nomentum (Mentana) today.
Another major theme of the collection is wealth, luxury, and profit. Seneca looks back with very mixed feelings on his life as a rich man with massive sociopolitical influence. The language of ownership recurs constantly, but Seneca insists the real way to be wealthy, to be powerful, and to make a profit that will last is to contemplate philosophy: “Everything belongs to other people, Lucilius; only time belongs to us” (1.3). The gifts of fortune are not really gifts at alclass="underline" “Do you call these things the gifts of fortune? They are traps!” (7.3–4). Seneca names the temporary, false “benefactor” fortune; he might equally well have cited the name Nero, but “fortune” makes the process sound more passive—as if wealth simply came to Seneca without his having to lift a finger for it.