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Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4/1 bc–ad 65)

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Roman statesman and Stoic philosopher, is the earliest Stoic of whose writings any have survived intact. Seneca wrote, in Latin, tragedies and a wide range of philosophical works. His philosophical and literary work was carried out in the intervals of an active political career. He is most important for his ethics and psychology, although natural philosophy was not neglected. Unlike many Stoics he showed little interest in logic or dialectic. His most influential work was on the psychology of the passions, the nature of the human will and techniques of moral education; he also wrote extensively on social and political issues from a distinctively Stoic perspective.

1 Life and works

Seneca was born into a wealthy family of the equestrian class at Cordoba in Spain. His father, the Elder Seneca, saw to it that his son was educated at Rome, where he rose to become a senator. Exiled and recalled by the emperor Claudius, Seneca became the teacher and advisor of the emperor Nero. His influence on Nero was considerable until ad 62; Seneca eventually withdrew from active politics, but nevertheless was compelled to commit suicide in ad 65 for his presumed support of a conspiracy against Nero.

Seneca’s Stoicism was affected by his early adherence to the Sextian school of philosophy (see Neo-Pythagoreanism), which emphasized asceticism and moral training. His Stoic education was thorough, and his works reveal the influence of Panaetius, Hecaton and Posidonius as well as the early heads of the school (see Stoicism §1). He rethought many aspects of Stoic philosophy and continued the work of Cicero in developing a Latin philosophical vocabulary. His prose writings display a balance between his personal contribution and inherited school doctrine. He was a part of contemporary literary culture, famous for his distinctive rhetorical prose style and as the author of justly admired tragedies. The relationship between his philosophical convictions and the tragedies is controversial, as is the question of the impact of his philosophical convictions on his political activity.

Many of Seneca’s works are lost, including a biography of his father, speeches, letters and a late treatise entitled Moral Philosophy. His surviving prose works include three consolatory works, To Marcia, To Polybius and To Helvia (his mother). Most of his treatises on ethics were dedicated to close friends or family members, although On Mercy was addressed to Nero. Also of political note is a viciously witty satire on the dead emperor Claudius, the Pumpkinification. Late in his career Seneca wrote a lengthy work on physics, the Natural Questions.

The other extant ethical works are: On Anger (in some ways a companion piece to On Mercy); On the Brevity of Life; On the Steadfastness of the Wise Man; On Mental Tranquillity; the fragmentary On the Private Life; On the Happy Life; the long treatise On Favours, which deals with social relations as well as personal ethics; the fragmentary On Providence; and his most influential work, the Letters to Lucilius (more correctly Letters on Ethics, henceforth Letters).

Seneca is important for the history of Stoicism because he is the earliest professed Stoic any of whose works survive in complete form. It is not his aim to report on the history of the school, and his evidence for its early period must be used with care. His treatises confirm and elaborate on what is known about early Stoicism from other sources, but divergences and changes of emphasis are not uncommon. Examples of this include the treatment of a political figure, Cato the Younger, as a sage; an emphasis on suicide as the ultimate expression of personal freedom; and a humane application of the traditional Stoic view that there are no natural slaves.

Seneca’s philosophical works have been persistently influential, first on Latin Church Fathers and again in the Renaissance; Montaigne’s Essays owe much to Seneca’s Letters (see Patristic philosophy; Montaigne, M.E. de; Renaissance philosophy).

2 Psychology

Seneca’s greatest contribution is in moral psychology. In numerous works it is apparent that personal moral decision (voluntas or ‘will’) is given greater emphasis than it received in earlier Stoicism. The treatise On Anger (especially book II) also suggests (although this is a controversial point) that he has rethought the earlier Stoic theory of assent and reassessed its role in the explanation of passions. He treats assent as a consciously made decision, a moment of personal self-assertion which shapes (rather than just reveals) our moral character. Will, for Seneca, has become the focus of individual moral freedom, much as prohairesis was to be for Epictetus (§3). It would be extreme to say that Seneca has posited a distinct faculty of ‘will’; but he certainly took some steps in that direction and inspired others, such as Augustine, to go even further.

His views on the relationship between reason and the passions are also of note. He held to the view that passions are produced by the rational mind when it makes errors about the values of things, and denied the claim of Plato (§14) and Aristotle (§§22–3) that they are rooted in a non-rational part of the soul. Seneca did, however, take an interest in the complexity of the interactions between bodily reactions to external stimuli and our mental responses to them. His psychology may sometimes seem Platonic, but if there is ‘dualism’ in his theory, it is the body–soul dualism of Plato’s Phaedo rather than the psychological dualism of the Republic (see Plato §§13–14). Hence Seneca rejected the Peripatetic view (see Peripatetics) that passions should merely be moderated; apatheia, complete freedom from passions, remained the ideal.

3 Ethics, physics, logic

Seneca emphasizes that he is not himself a wise man, but merely a prokoptōn, a person making moral progress. Like other Stoics of the first century ad and like Panaetius two centuries earlier, he focuses on the moral needs of his audience of imperfect but serious students of philosophy, rather than on the somewhat abstract deductions of earlier theorizing. The paradoxical technicalities of Stoic ethics are not unknown to Seneca, however; in the treatise On Favours he applies them effectively to serious ethical questions.

Seneca’s attitude to physics is typical of his time, and is important as background to ethics: one must grasp the basic outlines of a providentially organized cosmos held together by a divine plan with which mankind is in harmony, but detailed debate about physics and cosmology is not worth much effort. Specific phenomena, such as those explored in the Natural Questions, are dealt with out of scientific curiosity or as illustrations of the divine rationality of the world we inhabit. Logic and dialectic are almost entirely neglected by Seneca. He was aware of work in this area, but comparison with Epictetus shows Seneca’s limitations in logic (see Epictetus §2).

4 Seneca and philosophy in the first century ad

Seneca’s works provide us with an invaluable picture of philosophical life in Rome in the first century ad. His reaction to Epicureanism (which ranges from selective appreciation in the early books of the Letters to the hostile denunciations of On Favours 4) shows that the school was still to be taken seriously. Similarly, Letters 58, 65 and 89 show that Seneca was familiar with the more technical doctrines of contemporary Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, just as Letters 121 and 124 display his detailed knowledge of the technical side of Stoic ethics. Cynic philosophy was important in Rome, and Seneca anticipates Epictetus in his attitude to it: a Cynic (such as Seneca’s friend Demetrius) can be presented as a paradigm of the wise person, despite the Cynic rejection of physics and logic as areas of study.

5 The Letters

The Letters to Lucilius have proved the most influential of Seneca’s works. The dedicatee, Lucilius, was a real person, but the letters are fictitious, philosophical open letters modelled on those of Epicurus and designed to emulate the published correspondence of Cicero. Seneca plays the role of a moral advisor to Lucilius, whose progress can be followed through the sequence of letters. The tone and style of the letters also owes much to the rhetorical form known as the diatribe (see Cynics §3), and is often similar to that of his moral treatises; but there is a greater fluidity and intimacy. Although the facade of epistolary realism is often dropped, Seneca’s pretence of writing to a close personal friend draws the reader into a personal engagement with Stoicism that could not otherwise be achieved; finely judged autobiographical revelations and confessions sustain a sympathy for Seneca as a moral teacher which is not evoked by the rest of his works. The Letters, in fact, paved the way for the development of the personal philosophical essay as a genre.

The Letters as we have them culminate with an investigation of a technical problem in Stoicism: is ‘the good’ grasped by the senses or by the intellect? Beginning with a quotation from Virgil, Seneca guides the reader through the complexities which establish that the genuine good is grasped by the mind and can only be found in a rational soul. That rational virtue is the only good is a view fundamental to Stoic ethics, yet detailed physical and metaphysical argument is required to establish it. The reader is soothed by the literary grace of Seneca’s style; the strategy of personal address promotes personal conviction. Seneca goes beyond Lucretius, who claimed to mask the bitterness of philosophical technicality with the honey of his poetry. However, Seneca used the tools of his literary art not to disguise the philosophy we must swallow, but to draw us as willing participants into its inner workings. Like the best of Plato’s dialogues, Seneca’s letters exploit the illusion of personal dialogue to make us partners in his own search for wisdom.