Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero

by James Romm

Near the end of De Beneficiis, Seneca assigns Demetrius two long speeches, using him as a mask the way he had earlier used Socrates. The second speech mounts a harsh attack on the evils of wealth, especially on riches got by lending. “What are these things—what is ‘debt,’ ‘ledger-book,’ ‘interest,’ except names supplied to human coveting that exceeds the bounds of Nature?” the outraged Cynic demands. “What are ‘accounts’ and ‘calculations’? And time put up for sale, and a bloodsucking rate of one percent of capital? These are evils we choose for ourselves … the dreams of useless greed.” Seneca’s use of masks and personae presents problems throughout his prose works, but nowhere more so than here. Demetrius, a man widely admired for contempt of wealth, viciously attacks a practice by which Seneca had increased his riches. Yet it was Seneca who had brought Demetrius onstage and given him voice. The choice of mouthpiece seems self-punitive, like the choice of Socrates, another famous pauper, in Seneca’s defense of his wealth in De Vita Beata, or the stretch of that work that trumpets the charges of Seneca’s enemies as if through a megaphone.