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Marcia’s grief, for Seneca, exemplifies a universal human blindness. 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.
Harpagus served as chief minister to a Persian king but offended his master by disregarding an order. The king took a gory revenge: he served Harpagus a stew of his own children’s flesh, then showed him the severed heads to reveal what he had eaten. How did Harpagus like his dinner? the king asked, with Caligulan cruelty. Harpagus’ choking reply was “At a king’s table, every meal is pleasant.”
You ask, what is the path to freedom? Any vein in your body.”
Suicide glorified
Seneca portrays suicide as an escape route, a way to gain release from the power of kings.
The ability to laugh, he suggests, is an antidote to the petulance that comes with privilege.
The paradox of a moral philosopher who was rich and getting richer raised concern in Seneca’s time, as it has in ours.
Marcus Aurelius achieved, a century after Seneca had sought it, the reconciliation of Stoic morality and Roman political authority, a development as pathbreaking as Nero’s ill-fated fusion of the roles of princeps and performing musician. The record Marcus left behind of his thoughts and musings, Meditations, still inspires countless readers today. It has appeared in no fewer than six new editions during the year this book was written. It attests to the power of ethical teachings to enlighten even an autocrat, if only he is willing to listen.
It is sort of inspiring that a philosopher king came to roam the halls of the imperial palace a 100 years after the death of a man who dreamt of the same for a pupil who eventually failed him.
The Romans had at last gained what many of them, apparently, had hoped that Seneca, despite all his flaws, might be: a philosopher king.
