Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero

by James Romm

“the things one hopes for are also the things one must fear.”

“It seems that Nature produced him as an experiment, to show what absolute vice could accomplish when paired with absolute power,” Seneca said of Caligula’s madness.

Nature, for him as for all Stoics, was the master guide and template; it was allied with Reason and with God. Indeed these three terms, for Stoics, were close to synonymous.

We assume that we own things—family, wealth, position—whereas we have only borrowed them from Fortune. We take for granted that they will be with us forever, and we grieve at their loss; but loss is the more normal event—it is what we should have expected all along.

life, properly regarded, is only a journey toward death. We wrongly say that the old and sick are “dying,” when infants and youths are doing so just as certainly. We are dying every day, all of us.

De Ira teaches its readers to avoid anger by disregarding injuries.

“It is the mind that makes us rich,”

“The mind enjoys a wealth of its own goods, even in the harshest wilderness, so long as it finds what is enough to keep the body alive.”

true happiness comes from Reason, a force allied with Nature and with God.

“So long as I can dwell with these, and lose myself—to the degree allowed to humans—in celestial things, what does it matter where I set my feet?”

Their two ethical systems, Stoicism and Christianity, had much in common, and early Church fathers would one day consider Seneca a kind of proto-Christian, based partly on the “evidence” of his correspondence with Paul.

“for the sake of improving their talents but not their souls.”

Only those who study philosophy are truly alive, in that they move outside the prison of time into the realm of eternals. All others, those who follow worldly pursuits, are squandering their time, merely running out the ever-ticking clock of mortality.

“To fight against an equal is risky; against a higher-up, insane; against someone beneath you, degrading,”

Every night before bed, Seneca confides to his readers, he sat quietly beside his wife and took stock of his day, reviewing moments when he gave in to his passions. Perhaps he grew too hot during a dispute, or spoke more sharply to an underling than the man could handle. In each case, he tells himself: “See that you don’t do that again, but now I forgive you.”

Just as a good doctor seeks the least aggressive cure, a leader should use the gentlest methods of correction.

Make your way up, through the high expanses of heaven; Proclaim, wherever you go, that there are no gods.

They proclaim everywhere that there are gods, or God—as proved by the divine power of Reason within every soul.

impotentia—an inability to master lust, restrain envy, or tamp down the need for control and power.

all humankind is prone to err and therefore all deserve mercy.

“Apollo’s lyre is plucked by the same hands that draw his bow,”

Discomforts overwhelm the body, Seneca muses, in the same way that vice and ignorance overwhelm the soul. The sufferer may not even know he is suffering, just as a deep sleeper does not know he is asleep. Only philosophy can rouse souls from such comas.

Seneca examines himself from every angle, seeks the truth at every turn, seems willing to confide all—yet he says nothing about the most consequential part of his life, still ongoing at the time he was writing.

In the Letters, Seneca anticipates death as a great philosophic challenge, the ultimate test of character and principle.

sage should revere the ruler as a child does a parent, or a student his teacher.

Death is stalking us everywhere, he mused, playing on his favorite theme. How useless to fear or dread death, still more useless to flee it! We panic over natural disasters, though the smallest things—a gangrenous cut, an accumulation of phlegm—can do us in just as easily. We fret over oncoming floods, when a drink of water that goes down the wrong way can be every bit as lethal.

Seneca reminds Liberalis, when disaster is the common lot of humankind. Far better to practice praemeditatio malorum and imagine doom before it arrives, mentally embracing it until it ceases to terrify.

“Exile, torture, disease, war, shipwreck—think on these,” Seneca counsels. “Let us take in with our mind the worst thing that can possibly happen, if we don’t want to be mastered by it”—for it will eventually come to pass.

Earlier Stoics had theorized that flames would cause the world’s end, the fiery cosmic exhalations they called ekpyroseis.

But Seneca, in Natural Questions, imagined, as he had before in Consolation to Marcia, a universal flood.

“Nature has put moisture everywhere—so that, when she wishes, she can attack us from all sides,”

For a good man must live not as long as he wants, but as long as he ought.”

that he could thus leave them only the imago of his life, the one legacy over which he had control.

whether to wait, patiently and passively, for a death that is sure to come, or forestall it by taking one’s own life.

Any vein in one’s body, he had written in De Ira, furnished a high road to freedom.

that moral gravity was not out of place in the halls of imperial power.