Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero

by James Romm

“It is the mind that makes us rich,” he told his mother, to dissuade her from mourning his fate. “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.” These words might have been written by Thoreau at Walden Pond, although the terms of Seneca’s exile, which allowed him to keep half his estate, gave him access to ready cash. Corsica, as Seneca conjured it in Consolation to Helvia, was an ideal proving ground for the main Stoic tenet: true happiness comes from Reason, a force allied with Nature and with God. All that Seneca had left behind—senatorial rank, half his property, and what he called gratia, the public esteem he had won as a writer, a thinker, and a decent, fair-minded man—were “indifferents” in Stoic terms, inconsequential to the search for a good life. Of far greater consequence were the beauties that now surrounded him, especially the clear sky above—the sacred source from which, for the Stoics, the reasoning mind was sprung.