Philosophy and Community in Seneca's Prose 9780190905859, 9780190493219

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Philosophy and Community in Seneca’s Prose

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Philosophy and Community in Seneca’s Prose

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CAREY SEAL

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1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2021 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Seal, Carey, 1981– author. Title: Philosophy and community in Seneca’s prose / Carey Seal. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020050079 (print) | LCCN 2020050080 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190493219 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190905859 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, approximately 4 B.C.–65 A.D.—Criticism and interpretation. | Philosophy in literature. | Communities in literature. Classification: LCC PA6675 .S29 2021 (print) | LCC PA6675 (ebook) | DDC 878/.0109—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050079 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050080 DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190493219.001.0001 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America

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For all my grandparents, in loving memory

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Contents

Abbreviations 

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Note on Texts 

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1. Introduction 

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2. Solitude and Independence 

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3. Schools 

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4. Slavery 

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5. Res Publica 

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6. Conclusion 

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Acknowledgments 

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Bibliography 

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Index 

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Abbreviations

Decleva Caizzi

Decleva Caizzi, Fernanda (ed.). 1966. Antisthenis Fragmenta. Milan. LS Long, A. A. and David Sedley (eds.). 1987. The Hellenistic Philosophers. 2 vols. Cambridge. Lutz Lutz, Cora. 1947. “Musonius Rufus ‘The Roman Socrates.’ ” Yale Classical Studies 10: 3–​147. RE Wissowa, Georg et al. (eds.). 1894–​1978. Paulys Real-​Encyclopädie der classischen Alterumswissenschaft. Stuttgart. Shackleton Bailey Shackleton Bailey, D. R. (ed.). 1977. Cicero: Epistulae ad Familiares. 2 vols. Cambridge. SVF von Arnim, Hans (ed.). 1905. Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta. 3 vols. Leipzig. Us. Usener, Hermann (ed.). 1887. Epicurea. Leipzig. Classical authors and their works are abbreviated as in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, in the case of works in Greek, or the Oxford Latin Dictionary, in the case of those in Latin. The only exception is Seneca’s Dialogi, which for ease of reference I have cited not as Dial. followed by a book number but by the following individual abbreviations: De Providentia (Dial. 1) Prov. De Constantia Sapientis (Dial. 2) C.S. De Ira (Dial. 3–​5) Ir.

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Abbreviations

Consolatio ad Marciam (Dial. 6) De Vita Beata (Dial. 7) De Otio (Dial. 8) De Tranquillitate Animi (Dial. 9) De Brevitate Vitae (Dial. 10) Consolatio ad Polybium (Dial. 11) Consolatio ad Helviam (Dial. 12)

Marc. V.B. Ot. Tr. Brev. Pol. Helv.

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Note on Texts

I have quoted Seneca from the following editions, with occasional changes in punctuation or orthography: De Beneficiis: Hosius, Carl (ed.). 1900. L. Annaei Senecae Opera Quae Supersunt, vol. 2, pt. 2. Leipzig. Dialogi: Reynolds, L. D. (ed.). 1977. L. Annaei Senecae Dialogorum Libri Duodecim. Oxford. Epistulae Morales: Reynolds, L. D. (ed.). 1965. L. Annaei Senecae Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales. Oxford. Naturales Quaestiones: Hine, Harry (ed.). 1996. L. Annaei Senecae Naturalium Quaestionum Libri. Stuttgart. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

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Introduction

The Philosophical Life Today philosophy’s promises to enhance the lives of those who study it are couched, like justifications for the humanistic disciplines more generally, in circumspect terms. In the ancient world, however, philosophy commonly claimed for itself the status of an exclusive guide to happiness. Through philosophy’s characteristic practices of argument and rational inquiry, its advocates believed, human beings could learn what was really good for themselves and free themselves from illusion. In the process, they would necessarily come to lead happier lives. This link between learning and action meant that philosophy was often regarded as an entire way of life, in which intellectual activity and practice were closely associated and mutually interdependent. Nowhere else in ancient literature is this ideal given such full and nuanced exposition as in the prose writings of Seneca, in which we can see a philosopher and literary artist of the first rank exploring in detail the dilemmas posed by the confrontation of the idea of the philosophical life with the historical and cultural specificity of the first-​century ce Rome in which he wrote. His vast prose oeuvre defends, elaborates, and aims to make appealing this ideal of a life guided by disciplined thought. He is unequivocal about the necessary centrality of philosophy to any attempt at living a good life: philosophy, he writes, “shapes and forges the mind, it puts life in order, it directs actions, it points out what is to be done and what is not to be done, it sits at the helm and steers a course through the hazards of the waves” (animum format et fabricat, vitam disponit, actiones regit, agenda et omittenda demonstrat, sedet ad gubernaculum et per ancipitia fluctuantium derigit cursum, Ep. 16.3). A successful life, for Seneca as for many other ancient philosophers, is governed by, indeed constituted by, the practice of philosophy. His rich and varied corpus, I argue, presents us with a unique opportunity to learn how one reflective and well-​informed ancient philosopher reconciled this ideal

Philosophy and Community in Seneca’s Prose. Carey Seal, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190493219.003.0001

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of philosophical living, and all the aspirations to independence and universality that come with it, to the fact that he and his readers were living in a sociopolitical setting with its own set of norms and customs. These customs, and the claims of community more generally, stand in potential contradiction with the practical guidance philosophy aims to supply. For Seneca, as we will see, this tension was a prodigiously fruitful one. Recent work has rehabilitated Seneca’s standing as a major philosopher. Through close readings of texts from across his corpus, with a focus on the Epistulae Morales, this book seeks to establish his importance as a second-​order writer about philosophy as well, a subtle and keen observer of its social foundations and its potential for collision with ambient social norms. I will argue over the course of the book that the social dimension of the philosophical life, and the problems it raises, furnish Seneca with a means of sharpening and deepening his idea of what it meant to live in accordance with reason. Careful examination of his ways of presenting and navigating these problems will, I believe, leave us with a new appreciation of his nimbleness, subtlety, and versatility as a writer and a thinker. This chapter supplies some necessary preliminaries to the book’s argument. Its first three sections aim to motivate the book’s inquiry, define its key terms, and set its argument in the context of existing scholarship on Seneca. This first section traces briefly the philosophical lineage of Seneca’s conception of the philosophical way of life. It then reviews some points of contention about what it meant to live philosophically in the ancient world and indicates the approach to that question to be taken in this book. Finally, it broaches the problem of the philosophical life’s social dimension through a short examination of some ancient thinking about the tension between philosophy and social existence. The second section narrows the focus of this problem to the relationship between philosophy and specifically Roman social life, and the third explains why the problems I have laid out are best illuminated by an approach that pays close attention to the “literary” as well as the “philosophical” dimensions of Seneca’s prose. The fourth section brings these strands together in a general formulation of the book’s aims and method, while the fifth introduces the four aspects of our topic that I have chosen to treat in detail in this book and offers an anticipatory synopsis of my treatment of them. What did it mean to live as a philosopher in the ancient world? We will return to this question repeatedly, but one concise and suggestive answer by John Cooper can serve as our starting point: [F]‌or many ancient philosophers, and in its public image, philosophy was not merely and purely a subject of study. Philosophy in antiquity was, as it

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Introduction

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has been ever since, a range of intellectually challenging topics and questions to be investigated, whether orally or in writing or both; conflicting arguments to be sorted out; conclusions to be proposed and defended via philosophical arguments that one would state and explain; alternative and competing theories to one’s own to be canvassed and rejected for reasons that one would retail, defend, and recommend to others. But ancient philosophers were not always just lecturers in an intellectual “specialty,” nor was their profession merely that of a teacher of doctrines and methods of argument, and the like. Ancient philosophers differed quite particularly from other people with regard to their way of life, even from others engaged in careers of teaching or other intellectual work—​for example, in medicine or mathematics. I don’t have in mind here trivial externals such as wearing a beard or frequenting the city’s public places in torn clothing; I mean that philosophers lived their philosophy—​and not just in that they spent their working hours engaged in philosophical pursuits. Doctors and mathematicians also spent most of their days in their own professional pursuits. A philosopher made philosophy the basis of his whole life. In fact, more even than it meant investigating, discussing, and teaching the subject, being a philosopher, for many ancient philosophers, meant living one’s whole life a certain way—​philosophically—​and encouraging others to live that way, too.1 This description prompts us to ask what distinguished philosophy from these other intellectual pursuits and gave it its life-​structuring character.2 Cooper’s answer is that beginning with Socrates philosophy claimed a direct and necessary link between its conceptual operations and human action. As he puts it, “for these thinkers [i.e., ancient philosophers], only reason, and what reason could discover and establish as the truth, could be an ultimately acceptable basis on which to live a life—​and for them philosophy is nothing more, but also nothing less, than the art or discipline that develops and perfects the human capacity of reason.”3 When we develop our reasoning faculty—​clearing away misconceptions, resolving contradictions among our beliefs, extending the range of what 1. Cooper 2007, 20–​1. 2. What follows is of course only a sketch of some complex and often highly contentious issues in ancient ethics, with a close focus on what is needed to understand Seneca’s approach to philosophical living. The brief bibliographic cues I supply are meant only to indicate convenient points of entry to these debates. 3. Cooper 2012, 6.

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we know—​the process will necessarily change the way we live, and change it for the better, since the quality of our understanding is what determines how well we can identify and pursue what is genuinely good. We can make good choices only when our understanding of the good is anchored in the truth about ourselves and the world in which we live, and philosophy is the argumentative pursuit of that truth. From his lifetime on, Socrates has been widely credited with inventing and giving currency to this way of thinking about the relationship between thinking and living. For this reason, the conception of philosophy as a way of life we are concerned with here is best thought of as starting with Socrates and his circle, despite the important connections between theory and practice that can be observed among the pre-​Socratic thinkers.4 Although no attempt to reconstruct Socrates’s views from our evidence would win universal assent, it seems safe to infer that he strongly associated, and possibly even identified, happiness with virtue and with knowledge.5 Knowledge, in turn, could be approached only through rigorous scrutiny of the beliefs held by oneself and others. It followed from these principles that a life spent in the constant effort to clarify and extend one’s understanding—​the life of philosophy—​would be the best life one could lead.6 Socrates’ intellectual descendants maintained this belief that philosophy could and should guide and structure human lives, but they varied considerably in the form they imagined this guidance to take. The mature Plato of the Republic reserved philosophy, as an activity, for the relatively small number of individuals deemed capable of exerting rational control over their irrational appetites. The rest of the citizens of the well-​ordered city would lead lives that were guided by philosophy in the important sense that they were ruled by active philosophers who acted as rulers on the basis of their philosophical activities. These citizens would not, though, themselves practice philosophy, and so it cannot be said that Plato proposed philosophical activity as the right exercise of an intrinsic and universal human rational faculty, in the way that Socrates seems to have and that the Stoics later

4. The clearest example of such connections is the Pythagorean school, in which argued-​for beliefs about the nature of reality supplied the basis for a shared way of life; see Huffman 1999, 69–​75, for an overview of this way of life, its conceptual foundations, and its differences from the Socratic ideal of the examined life. 5. For an overview of this topic, with detailed discussion of the interpretive and philosophical difficulties raised by Plato’s picture of Socrates’ views on the connections among knowledge, virtue, and happiness, see Bobonich 2011. 6. On Socratic ethics and its implications for philosophy as a way of life, see Irwin 1995, 17–​77, and Cooper 2012, 24–​69.

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would.7 It remains the case that for Plato the philosophical way of life generated by a commitment to reasoned examination of belief offered the only path to the best human life. For Aristotle, the purpose of philosophical reflection on virtue was not to supply virtue, the groundwork for which could be laid only by non-​ philosophical habituation, but rather to clarify for the already virtuous the structure of their lives.8 Alongside the life of morally virtuous action, he described a philosophical life devoted to contemplation and held that such contemplation was the most complete end for human life.9 The idea of a philosophical life thus holds for Aristotle a quite different sort of meaning than it does for Socrates under the view put forward by Cooper: philosophy is not the necessary precondition for right action, but rather is decoupled from practical reason so as to constitute a separate, theoretical way of life. Although in Aristotle’s ethics philosophy has lost its Socratic status as a practice indispensable to virtuous living, it retains the distinction of alone conducing to the best sort of human life. The Stoics put Socratic intellectualism at the heart of their moral theory, and so conceived of ongoing philosophical inquiry as generating the understanding of the good that they identified with virtue. Their emphasis on the natural basis of the good put further accent on the centrality of philosophy to the good life: as A. A. Long writes, for the Stoics “self-​reflection is demanded of us by our individual nature,” and “we can only comprehend our telos by perceiving how and where we fit within the rational organisation of nature.”10 That is, the enterprise of philosophy helps us to understand our place in a natural order and thus to grasp what actions befit our nature.11 The Stoics departed from the Socratic model in believing that philosophy properly involves the study of nature, rather than simply

7. See Irwin 1995, 169–​317, and Klosko 2006, 56–​61. The next chapter of this book will give some attention to the ways in which Plato’s and Seneca’s different conceptions of the philosophical way of life inform their respective political theory. 8. Ar. Eth. Nic. 1179b. For an argument that this life of virtuous action should indeed be described as a philosophical life, see Cooper 2012, 70–​143. 9. Eth. Nic. 1177a–​1179a. The interpretation of this passage and the relationship between these two lives remains controversial; see Cooper 1975, 144–​82; Kraut 1989, especially 15–​77; Lear 2004, especially 175–​207; and Reeve 2012, 250–​77. 10. Long 1996, 178. For the manner in which the centrality of nature in Stoic moral theory undergirds the value it places on reason, see Annas 1993, 159–​79. On the connection between rationality and happiness in Stoic ethics, with a focus on Epictetus, and its background in the eudaimonistic assumptions of Greek ethics more generally, see Long 2015, 162–​97. 11. That is, what καθήκοντα are attached to our particular station in the cosmic order. The precise sense of this term and its best rendering into English remain controversial. LS prefers “proper functions,” whereas Annas 1993 does not shy away from the association with the modern notion of duty evoked by “due actions”; see her discussion of the term at 96–​8.

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consideration of the human good, as Socrates seems to have maintained. Since the human good, and the good for each of us as individuals, is determined by the wider cosmic order, we need to study that order as comprehensively as possible in order for philosophy to fulfill its basic function of equipping us with a rational foundation on the basis of which to live.12 Philosophy, for the Stoics, thus directly conduces to virtue, not because contemplation itself defines the best sort of life, but because we need a comprehensive intellectual grasp of the good in order to be able to live according to nature.13 The Stoic revival of the Socratic ideal of the examined life thus allowed for philosophy to guide a variety of lives, from the purely contemplative to the life of political action.14 The defining feature of any such philosophical life was the commitment to inquiry exemplified by Socrates. Furthermore, the Stoic emphasis on the rarity of wisdom and on its quality as a complete and secure whole that could not be held in increments tended, in ways which became more pronounced over the life of the school, to concentrate attention on the mechanics of moral progress.15 The philosopher, in the Socratic sense of someone who strives for wisdom precisely because he or she is aware of lacking it, is thus a natural focus for the guiding concerns of Stoic moral theory.16

12. On Stoic motivations for studying nature, see Menn 1995; Inwood 2007b; Inwood 2009; and, with reference to Seneca in particular, Williams 2012, 17–​53. 13. For this reason the Aristotelian distinction between practical and theoretical wisdom is irrelevant in Stoicism. Nevertheless there is an obvious difference even in the writings of the Stoics between the pursuit of knowledge with immediate ethical application and that of knowledge with less direct bearing, or no readily discernible bearing at all, on how we live. Seal 2015 explores Seneca’s handling of this difference against the background of the Socratic and Stoic tradition. 14. Diogenes Laertius tells us (7.130) that Chrysippus distinguished three kinds of lives, the theoretical, practical, and rational (λογικóς), and held the last to be preferable, since human beings are fitted by nature for both contemplation and action. The key point for our purposes is that the Stoics held with Socrates that every worthwhile life, including the life of action, needs to be directed by disciplined philosophical activity. 15. The focus on the proficiens and the association of that focus with Panaetius may both be observed at Ep. 116.5. For the idea that the Middle Stoa, Panaetius especially, inflected Stoic ethics toward a particular interest in moral progress, see the fundamental discussion of Pohlenz 1970, 191–​207, and for a broader overview of the changes introduced by Panaetius and Posidonius, Edelstein 1966, 45–​70. Definitive judgments on the degree of Panaetius’s innovation are of course made difficult by the indirect nature of our evidence both for his writings and for those of the early Stoics with whom he is being contrasted. On moral progress in Stoicism, see especially Donini 1999, 724–​36, and on the rarity of the sage, including an argument that Zeno and the other early leaders of the Stoic school did not regard themselves as sages, see Brouwer 2014, 92–​135. Baraz 2016, 167–​71, points out the rhetorical problems encumbering any effort to discuss the somewhat inhuman figure of the sage, another likely motive behind the pivot to a concentration on moral progress. 16. For the distinction between virtue and philosophy in Seneca, and the relationship between the two, see especially Ep. 89.4–​8; cf. SVF 2.35. A concise and stimulating overview of the

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Ancient philosophy’s self-​conception, especially in the Hellenistic schools, as a craft of living has been the focus of considerable scholarly and popular attention in recent years. Pierre Hadot, drawing in part on Ilsetraut Hadot’s work on Seneca, has shown the extent to which modern assumptions about what philosophy is have hampered our understanding of ancient philosophy, which, he argues, was at all times first and foremost a set of practices.17 Its transformative ambitions were realized through disciplined engagement in exercises that aimed, depending on the school, at enhancing self-​control or at some sort of transcendence. Hadot’s work in turn helped to channel Michel Foucault’s interest in the genealogy of the modern self into close examination of Greek and Roman philosophical practice, with particular interest in Seneca.18 The prominence of Foucault’s work throughout the humanities has placed Hellenistic philosophical practice at the center of debates about selfhood and rationality. At the same time, our growing understanding of the therapeutic dimensions of Hellenistic and Roman philosophy has fed interest in its present-​day potential to supply guidance toward happiness.19 There has been concomitant concern, however, that this emphasis on philosophy as an art of self-​transformation has obscured its particular character as philosophy. Martha Nussbaum, whose writings as much as Foucault’s have made widely apprehended the possibilities for normative and historical insight offered by the study of Hellenistic ethics, has expressed her objections to Foucault’s picture of philosophical practice as follows:

Greco-​Roman conception of philosophy as a practice aimed at wisdom can be found in Frede 2000. For the general shape taken by this idea in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, see Nussbaum 1994, especially 3–​47, and Trapp 2007, 1–​27; for the specifically Stoic conception of philosophical practice, see Sellars 2009, especially 81–​4, and Sellars 2007. Cooper 2004, 309–​ 34, states the case for viewing the moral guidance Seneca supplies in his prose works as only loosely related to Stoic doctrine; for rejoinders see Inwood 2007a, particularly his discussions of Epp. 85, 87, 106, 113, and 117, and Wagoner 2014, focusing on Ep. 108. On philosophy as occupying a position between wisdom and ignorance, see especially Diotima’s words at Pl. Symp. 204a–​b, though this idea is implicit in Socrates’ philosophical practice throughout Plato’s early and middle dialogues. 17. The essays that made Pierre Hadot’s approach well-​known are collected in P. Hadot 1995, but P. Hadot 2002 is a clearer and more comprehensive statement of his position. Pierre Hadot discusses his debt to I. Hadot 1969a at P. Hadot 2002, ix. On the same page he indicates also a debt to Rabbow 1954; see Newman 1989, 1476 n. 6, for criticism of Rabbow’s Christianizing approach to the notion of a “spiritual exercise,” traces of which are detectable in Pierre Hadot’s work as well. 18. Foucault 1986; see 48–​9 for general discussion of philosophical self-​shaping in Seneca. McGushin 2007, 97–​147, reviews Foucault’s treatment of Hellenistic and Roman philosophy. For Pierre Hadot’s reflections on Foucault’s use of his work on ancient ethics, see P. Hadot 1995, 206–​13. On differences between the views of the two, see also Davidson 1995, 24–​5. 19. See, among recent books, Irvine 2009, Belliotti 2009, Evans 2012, and Pigliucci 2017.

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Certainly Foucault has brought out something very fundamental about these philosophers when he stresses the extent to which they are not just teaching lessons, but also engaging in complex processes of self-​shaping. But this the philosophers have in common with religious and magical/​ superstitious movements of various types in their culture. Many people purveyed a biou techne, an “art of life.” What is distinctive about the contribution of the philosophers is that they assert that philosophy, and not anything else, is the art we require, an art that deals in valid and sound arguments, an art that is committed to the truth. These philosophers claim that the pursuit of logical validity, intellectual coherence, and truth delivers freedom from the tyranny of custom and convention, creating a community of beings who can take charge of their own life story and their own thought . . . [Foucault’s work] fails to confront the fundamental commitment to reason that divides philosophical techniques du soi from other such techniques. Perhaps that commitment is an illusion. I believe that it is not. And I am sure that Foucault has not shown that it is.20 The question at issue between Foucault and Nussbaum is a stark and far-​ reaching one: can there really be a life governed by the commitment to reason? One’s answer to that question is closely bound up with how one reads Seneca’s philosophical writings, and the connection holds in both directions. That is, any explication of the Senecan conception of the philosophical life will be shaped by how seriously the interpreter takes the possibility of a “fundamental commitment to reason,” but at the same time the Foucault-​Nussbaum controversy shows that Hellenistic philosophical writing, because of its interest in purportedly rational self-​modification, can offer a starting point from which to draw larger conclusions about the issues in question. Indeed, in the fourth section of this introduction I offer some reasons why Seneca’s work in particular gives us an especially illuminating window on those issues. I will also argue that some of Seneca’s most acute contemporary readers fall on Foucault’s side of this debate, explicitly or implicitly denying that Seneca’s moral teaching, and the philosophical life it advocates, could indeed rest on a paramount commitment to rational self-​examination.21 They contend that Seneca’s advocacy of that commitment is

20. Nussbaum 1994, 5–​6. 21. Throughout this book I follow standard English usage in employing the terms “moral” and “ethical” interchangeably. In using the first of these words I do not intend to enforce any distinction between virtue and well-​being or between virtue and knowledge, or to suggest that Seneca is operating with anything like the Kantian notion of an autonomous domain of morality.

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generated and conditioned by extra-​philosophical forces to which philosophy is ultimately instrumental. For these interpreters, then, as for Foucault, philosophical practice as enacted and defended in Seneca’s work is aimed not at wisdom, as Seneca claims, but at the achievement of other ends altogether, which are usually not advertised. This book puts forward a different model of the relationship between Seneca’s philosophical claims and their extra-​philosophical integument. On this model, the values and practices of Seneca’s society do not drive his advocacy of the philosophical life but instead offer him the opportunity to deepen and sharpen his idea of what such a life might mean. This perspective opens up space for the Senecan life of reason as something other than an ideological mystification, not by attempting to sever it from its social roots but precisely by showing how Seneca brought the basic philosophical commitment involved in such a life into productive engagement with the social environment in which he lived. Since the Greeks and Romans believed that philosophy was at the same time an intellectual pursuit and an entire way of life, philosophers were widely regarded as living differently from those around them. This disjunction between the life of the philosopher and the lives of everyone else was taken by philosophers and non-​philosophers alike to be a fundamental characteristic of philosophy. This sense is encapsulated in the reply given by the Socratic (and perhaps proto-​Cynic) Antisthenes to the question of how he would educate his son: “if he is to live among gods, as a philosopher, but if among men, as an orator” (εἰ μὲν θεοῖς μέλλει συμβιοῦν, φιλόσοφον, εἰ δὲ ἀνθρώποις, ῥήτορα, fr. 173 Decleva Caizzi).22 This remark implies a view under which philosophy is accorded the power to set its practitioners apart, but that setting apart is recognized as making its practitioner unsuited in some basic way for life among other human beings, even as it suits him for fellowship with the gods. In the Gorgias of Antisthenes’s contemporary Plato, Callicles, who is hostile to the idea that philosophy should be a whole way of life rather than a pastime for youth, gives harsher and more explicit expression to the view that the practice of philosophy makes one unfit for life in community: it is the lot of the man who has not cast aside philosophy on attaining adulthood, Callicles says, “even though he is greatly gifted by nature, that he becomes unmanly, fleeing the middle of the city and the public assemblies, in which the poet said men become well-​known, and, having thus retreated he passes the rest of his life whispering with three or four youths in a corner, and never says anything free or great or becoming” (κἂν πάνυ εὐφυὴς ᾖ, ἀνάνδρῳ γενέσθαι φεύγοντι τὰ μέσα τῆς πόλεως καὶ τὰς ἀγοράς, ἐν αἷς ἔφη ὁ ποιητὴς τοὺς ἄνδρας ἀριπρεπεῖς γίγνεσθαι, καταδεδυκότι δὲ τὸν λοιπὸν βίον βιῶναι μετὰ μειρακίων ἐν γωνίᾳ τριῶν

22. See further discussion at Cooper 2004, 66.

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ἢ τεττάρων ψιθυρίζοντα, ἐλεύθερον δὲ καὶ μέγα καὶ ἱκανὸν μηδέποτε φθέγξασθαι, Grg. 485d–​485e). For Callicles, the philosophical way of life necessarily involves physical self-​segregation from others, in the form of the philosopher’s absence from the places that are venues for and symbols of public life. E. R. Dodds, noting that ἀγορά is used here in the Homeric sense of an assembly rather than referring to the marketplace, writes that Callicles “is thinking of politics, not trade.”23 The contrast, though, between the centrality of the public places the philosopher is held to avoid and the narrowness of those to which he confines himself with a few receptive disciples broadens Callicles’s charge against the philosophers from political abstention into a broader asociality. This quality of impaired communion with the social environment makes an appearance also in Plato’s Theaetetus, when Socrates says that the philosopher will be ignorant of the way to the agora and of the laws and customs of his city, and furthermore will abstain from banquets and be in ignorance about the social standing of those around him (Tht. 173c–​e). “He does not keep apart from these things for the sake of being thought well of,” Socrates says, “but because in reality his body alone lies and dwells in the city” (οὐδὲ γὰρ αὐτῶν ἀπέχεται τοῦ εὐδοκιμεῖν χάριν, ἀλλὰ τῷ ὄντι τὸ σῶμα μόνον ἐν τῇ πόλει κεῖται αὐτοῦ καὶ ἐπιδημεῖ, Theat. 173e).24 This idea of the philosopher’s abstraction from the life around him derives here part of its force, to be sure, from the Platonic distinction between the sensible and the real, but it also illustrates a notion with broader applicability across the entire range of ancient philosophy: the philosopher, whose overriding commitment is to caring for his or her soul through reasoning and argument, directs his or her life toward ends very different from those pursued by the non-​philosophers among whom he or she lives.25

23. Dodds 1959, ad loc. 24. We will return in the final chapter of this book to one of the questions raised by this passage, that of philosophy’s effect on its practitioners’ relation to competitively established social hierarchies. 25. Throughout this book, I adopt or abstain from gender-​neutral usage advisedly. I have used the masculine pronoun alone in settings in which it would be anachronistic to suppose that a woman might have been a referent of that pronoun. There will commonly be cause to advert in general terms to the Stoic philosopher, and I have used both pronouns to refer to that figure, despite Seneca’s vagueness on the point (Manning 1973; Lavery 1997), because it seems to have been mainstream Stoic doctrine that women were fully capable of philosophy; the same is true of Epicureanism. Of particular interest on this point is Musonius Rufus, 3 Lutz. For a concise overview of Stoic views on women, with references to the key texts, especially Seneca’s fragmentary De Matrimonio, see Elorduy 1972, 2.261–​7. For a fuller treatment, see Asmis 1996; also of interest are the remarks on women’s involvement in Hellenistic philosophy in Nussbaum 1994, particularly at 54. On the participation of women in the Epicurean school, see Gordon 2012, 72–​108.

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In the Hellenistic period, the self-​alienation of the philosopher from the social environment that produced and that surrounds him or her became more pronounced, as philosophical schools premised on the rejection of widely held beliefs gained wide influence. As Long writes, “Cynics, Epicureans, and Stoics require their adherents to treat their pre-​philosophical selves as sifted out of dominant social values to the detriment of what human nature actually requires of them.”26 That is, in contrast to Aristotle, these schools hold in their various ways that the practice of philosophy involves a decisive break with ambient beliefs and norms.27 The schools’ sharpened version of the distinction between nature and culture, developed in doctrinally different ways in each school, tends to identify the latter as the source of obstacles to happiness, and so these schools regard as crucial to philosophical progress the eradication of socially generated beliefs which are held to be rationally indefensible. This stance toward the non-​ philosophical values of the surrounding community created a climate of heightened contrast between self-​identified practicing philosophers and those around them. Since the emphasis in each of these schools was on the necessity of living a whole life structured by philosophical practice, this contrast was only partially mitigated by the gradual diffusion of many tenets of the Hellenistic schools into the broader Greco-​Roman cultural stock.28 As H. C. Baldry notes in his remarks on the passage from the Gorgias quoted earlier, this isolation was the foundation of a new sort of community: “[T]‌his conception of the seeker after wisdom, the philosopher, as outside the everyday life of the community, carried with it the idea that wisdom united its possessors everywhere, placing them above the ordinary divisions of mankind.”29 Indeed, philosophy supplied the basis for imagining two new forms of community, which in a discussion of Stoicism must be kept sharply distinct. First, there is the community existing among the wise, who by virtue of that wisdom enjoy an entire unity of interests with one another and are thus the only true friends.30 Second, those striving to make progress toward wisdom by means of philosophy are often 26. Long 2006, 13. 27. Broadie 2002, 11, on Aristotle’s method in ethics: Aristotle “taps the common culture, the works of the poets in particular, for ethical materials. He invokes customs and practices, and appeals to ‘what we say.’ ” 28. For a historical study of the social place of actual philosophers, concentrating on the High Empire but with many remarks bearing on earlier periods, see Hahn 1989. 29. Baldry 1965, 56. 30. On the Stoic ideal of the community of the wise, which formed the basis for their conception of the ideal polity, see Baldry 1959; Graver 2007, 173–​90; Daraki 2005; and K. M. Vogt 2008, 65–​110.

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tied by that pursuit into communities of their own. These philosophically defined forms of community, both among the wise and among practitioners of philosophy, pose an inherent challenge to non-​philosophical social forms, as does, more generally, the disjunction that philosophical activity is perceived to generate between philosophers and non-​philosophers. This book argues that Seneca’s notion of the philosophical life maintained this insistence on the uniqueness of philosophy as a practice radically apart from other forms of living, but was able to explain this uniqueness only through the use of social relations exterior to philosophical practice. Seneca’s deep engagement with the problems of life in community, I will argue, offers us the chance to see in detail how this divide between philosophy and non-​philosophical forms of living was premised on a subtle and persistent commerce between the two.

Philosophy and Rome Discussion of the Roman appropriation of Greek philosophy is no longer hampered by the assumption that the Romans were at bottom hard-​headed builders of roads and aqueducts, stoutly averse to the speculative fancies of the Greeks.31 Under this view, an especially hardy species of the Romantic notion that the Romans lacked the creative power and intellectual ambition of the Greeks, philosophy at Rome was a “practical” derivative of the Greek original, with an overwhelming emphasis on application over theory. The dichotomy between Greek theory and Roman practice has been undermined from both directions. On the one hand, recent work on Greek philosophy, particularly that discussed in the previous section of this introduction, has highlighted the practical and therapeutic concerns running through even the most sophisticated theorists of the Greek philosophical tradition. On the other hand, there has been fresh appreciation for the originality, subtlety, and rigor of much Roman philosophical writing.32 It remains the case, though, that Rome offered a very different context for philosophical activity than did the Greek milieu in which self-​conscious philosophizing had its origin.33 The clearing away of the caricatures about Roman

31. So, e.g., Davis 1903, 98, on the limited philosophical interests of the “practical-​minded” Romans. 32. See in particular the essays collected in Griffin and Barnes 1989 and, more recently, Williams and Volk 2016. 33. André 1977, 11–​49, and Morford 2002, 1–​33, offer overviews of the relationship between social environment and intellectual climate in the pre-​Ciceronian history of philosophy at Rome. Hine 2016 surveys the history of the Latin words philosophari, philosophia, and especially philosophus, showing how despite Cicero’s and Seneca’s (in his letters) frequent statements of

13

Introduction

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philosophy has allowed a much more interesting set of problems concerning its “practicality” to come into focus. First, there has been new attention to the deftness with which Roman philosophers presented their work as answering public needs, as those needs were refracted through the aristocratic morality that put service to the republic at the center of an elite Roman man’s obligations.34 Second, we are now in a position to see in a new way Roman responses to philosophy’s status as an art of living. On the one hand, philosophy’s claims to provide guidance in daily living and in political matters clearly provided the core of its appeal to the Roman aristocracy.35 On the other hand, those very claims threatened the position of non-​philosophical sources of authority and patterns of living. That is, it is precisely its practical concern for ethical guidance in the social world that made philosophy a rival to that world’s established scales of value. A philosophy that offered to show people how to live and that itself constituted an entire way of life set itself up as an alternative source of norms in a way that a purely theoretical discipline never could have. Recognition of this potential for conflict between practical philosophy and Roman elite morality has given rise to a way of reading Roman philosophical texts that highlights this conflict. These texts, under this interpretive framework, are characterized by the persistent tension between, on the one hand, philosophy’s imperative to submit values and commitments to rational scrutiny and, on the other, norms whose hold on the writer in question derives from his membership in, and social position within, Roman society. Much recent work along these lines has been shaped by Mary Beard’s seminal article on Cicero’s De Divinatione and De Natura Deorum, in which she “suggests that some of the tensions, problems and evasions characteristic of Cicero’s theological works are a direct consequence of the particular difficulties of integrating the traditions of Roman state religion with a Hellenizing, ‘scientific’ approach.”36 Beard sees Cicero’s philosophical writing as the pivotal moment in the history of this integration and writes that as beneficiaries of Cicero’s work in making possible a Latin, indeed Roman, philosophical discourse “Horace and Seneca, for example, deftly used an

their own devotion to and practice of philosophia, both are reluctant to designate themselves or their elite Roman peers as philosophi, probably because of that word’s usual application to professional teachers. 34. On Cicero’s efforts to show his philosophical writings as contributing to the welfare of the republic, see Baraz 2012, and on his efforts to draw a connection between the cultivation of civic virtue and an expansive and rigorous program of philosophical study, see Reydams-​ Schils 2016. 35. See especially Griffin 1988 and 1989 and Rawson 1989. 36. Beard 1986, 36.

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established discourse of Greco-​Roman philosophy to explore freely such notions as otium or divitiae.”37 Other scholars, though, have found the two countervailing forces Beard identifies in Cicero’s philosophy to be still in tension in Seneca’s. After contrasting these two sources of authority, Thomas Habinek argues that in Seneca’s writing one is firmly subordinated to the other: “Seneca seeks to subsume dogmatic philosophy in his cultural project of offering moral advice.”38 That is, philosophy is pressed into service as a technical adjunct to exhortation that bases itself on values ambient in Roman culture. This account does not explain what place, exactly, philosophy could occupy in such a project.39 If both the author and his anticipated readers are participants in a shared scheme of cultural value, what need would his exhortation have of philosophical discourse, which Habinek represents as outside of and indeed antithetical to that shared scheme?40

37. Beard 1986, 46. Beard’s examples of the topics explored by “Greco-​Roman philosophical discourse” invite comparison with André 1966, which documents the conceptual development of otium as the product of the fusion of long-​standing Roman notions with Hellenizing ethical discourse. 38. Habinek 1998, 140. The analysis throughout Habinek’s chapter on Seneca relies on the dichotomy drawn in Habinek 1989 between “scientific” philosophical discourse and “traditional” exhortation. In contrast to Beard 1986, Habinek 1989 sees the science and tradition of its title not just as constituting two different normative bases, but also as animating two different rhetorical modes, one argumentative and the other hortatory. 39. Marcus Wilson, explaining his dissatisfaction with Habinek 1992 (an earlier version of the chapter on Seneca in Habinek 1998) and Too 1994, writes that “these two articles have much in common methodologically in their theoretically charged vocabulary and bibliography; in their taking history rather than the texts as a starting point; in their emphasis on the political rather than the ethical reading of the Epistles, in other words, in their focus on issues of power; in their use of interpretative concepts (like ideology and hypocrisy) that limit the significance of Seneca’s ideas and language to the way in which they serve his interests personally or those of his particular social class; they are both extremely unsympathetic to Seneca (even hostile); they are both selective in the epistles or parts of epistles they choose to highlight as indicative of his practice” (M. Wilson 2001, 169). It will become evident that I too regard the third, fourth, and fifth of these items, and to some extent the second, as hindrances in discussion of Seneca’s work, but my debt to the conceptual framework Habinek has established in his writing on Seneca will be clear as well. As is sometimes the case with interpretations built around theories of cultural capital, though, that framework is unable to explain why one currency and not another came to instantiate that capital. Here this problem manifests as an inability to account for the distinctive place of philosophy in Seneca’s project of moral education. 40. The relationship of priority between Roman tradition and specialist discourse runs the other way around in Habinek 1987, an article that is identified in Habinek 1998 as the partial basis for the reading of Seneca in that book. Habinek writes that Quintilian “draws upon the Roman reader’s natural respect for communal traditions as a way of making more acceptable an ideal he knows is tarnished in the society in which he dwells. Quintilian’s patriotism is not an end, but a means to the promotion of his undeniably admirable goal of the active and responsible use of eloquence” (1987, 199). Here Quintilian is read as using the values of his social

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Introduction

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It is to this gap in the historicist reading of Seneca that Matthew Roller’s study addresses itself. Roller aims to show that Seneca found in Stoicism a way to address the diminution in political power the Roman aristocracy suffered under the principate. This reading assigns a specific function to philosophical discourse within the larger scheme of Seneca’s fundamental allegiance to the traditional values of the Roman aristocracy. That allegiance is taken as driving Seneca’s philosophical commitment, but the instrumental relationship between the two is described with a precision that makes it clear why Seneca needed philosophy, and specifically Stoic moral theory, to serve the ends dictated by his non-​philosophical commitments. Roller observes of Seneca’s De Providentia that “the ethical conceptions held by Seneca’s interlocutor are generally the values of traditional Roman ethics. The interlocutor’s persistent attempts to label externals as good and bad indicates that he understands moral value to be inherently community oriented, constructed ultimately under the gaze of others on the basis of observed actions, status symbols, and other visible signs.”41 Seneca, Roller argues, presents the case for Stoicism in direct engagement with this traditional Roman emphasis on public assessment, “showing (inter alia) that the latter [Stoic ethics] provides better resources than the former [traditional ethical discourse] for reasserting traditional aristocratic privileges in crucial areas, against the challenges posed to those privileges by the princeps and his regime.”42 That is, Seneca repudiates the traditional norms of the Roman aristocracy, and the collective mechanisms of evaluation that ground and enforce those norms, but this repudiation serves the larger end of maintaining the aristocracy’s prerogatives in the face of a changed and often hostile political climate. Roller does not seek to minimize the depth and even radicalism of Seneca’s philosophical commitments,43 but he puts

surroundings to advance an end not inherent in those values. I see no reason not to accord Seneca the same degree of agency. 41. Roller 2001, 73. 42. Roller 2001, 126. 43. See Roller 2001, 77 n. 22, for Roller’s rejection of P. A. Brunt’s (1975, 22; cf. 35 n. 12) implication that Seneca’s moral teaching emphasizes conformity with social expectations. Nevertheless I cannot agree with Griffin when she writes that “Roller thinks that, though Seneca sometimes enlists traditional morality and examples as a way of winning over his readers, his ultimate aim is to unseat the traditional notions upheld by his interlocutor or addressee as a representative of these readers” (Griffin 2013, 60) or that “Roller overlooks the resemblance between what Seneca teaches and the existing social ideals of Roman high society” (61). On the contrary, my objection to Roller’s thesis is to its suggestion that for Seneca philosophy serves as a second-​best substitute for traditional elite political participation, a suggestion that would make Seneca’s Socratic commitment to the supreme value of philosophical practice self-​delusion at best and self-​aggrandizing posturing at worst.

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those qualities at the service of anterior social and political imperatives. Because I regard Roller’s treatment as fundamental to any further study of Seneca’s prose, I have devoted some space in each of the two final chapters of the book to explaining where and why my view of Seneca’s aims diverges from his. For now it will be enough to say that on the reading put forward by this book Seneca’s advocacy of the philosophical life is not consequent upon the ambient values of the Roman aristocracy but rather engaged in continual dialogue with them.44 Neither Roman tradition nor commitment to Stoicism, on this interpretation, furnishes Seneca with an a priori starting point from which he selects those elements of the other complex of ideas that will serve his pre-​existing ends. Instead, this book will stress Seneca’s ability to combine what is offered to him by Roman life and by the tradition of philosophical practice in a way that does not subordinate one to the other but rather builds something new and coherent out of their interaction. While recognizing the utility of the division between these two normative standpoints made by Beard, Habinek, and Roller, the discussion here will strive to explain how Seneca drew elements from each of them into a culturally grounded but thoroughly philosophical portrait of the Roman examined life.

Philosophy and Literature Though we will often have occasion to discuss Seneca’s philosophical views and their background in some detail, our concerns here will be in the first instance literary, in that we will be occupied with the second-​order question of how Seneca represents the philosophical life, how he uses language to connect that ideal to his readers’ existing stock of experience, and how he positions philosophy in the terrain of Roman culture and society. This inquiry has to begin by recognizing the uniqueness of the literary problems Seneca’s prose corpus poses. His decision to write in Latin, Brad Inwood has observed, stands in sharp contrast to the choice of working Roman philosophers before and after him to write in Greek. “The intellectual climate which led Seneca to write in Latin,” Inwood writes, “was, in my view, a very local one, a micro-​climate if you will.”45 Inwood explains this

44. Of course Seneca was not just another Roman aristocrat but rather a close adviser to Nero and so intimately enmeshed in the workings of the court. The unique course his life took must have had a profound effect on the formation of his thought, but that effect, and the related question of the possible contradictions between the ideals he espoused and his conduct at court, have received ample attention from antiquity on (most recently in two excellent books, Romm 2014 and, with more sustained attention to Seneca’s writing, E. Wilson 2015) and are not the focus of this study. 45. Inwood 2005, 12.

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Introduction

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“micro-​climate” as the product of the space opened up for philosophical writing in Latin by Sextius and his students. “Seneca’s generation,” Inwood explains, “was the first to grow up with such committed philosophers, working in Latin, available as role models.”46 The writings of the Sextians have perished with scarcely a trace, and it is not possible to gauge directly their influence on Seneca’s philosophical writing. The key fact for this book’s purpose, though, is that Seneca operated in a literary domain in which his predecessors were few and the influence of those predecessors short-​lived. The project of creating a philosophical literature in Latin that was not at least ostensibly based on Greek models was thus in Seneca’s time a relatively novel one, and one whose appeal was localized both temporally and socially. Seneca was working out in large part for himself what it meant to be an active philosopher writing in Latin, and though he could draw on the considerable linguistic resources Cicero bequeathed to that project, his efforts are shaped by a hitherto rare conjunction of aims: that of substantive philosophical originality and that of communicating with readers of Latin.47 This book puts recurring emphasis on the ways in which this historically specific communicative agenda informs Seneca’s writing. Seneca, I will argue, gives definition to his idea of the life shaped by philosophy in the course of making such an idea comprehensible and appealing in a Roman social context. The question of audience leads into the question of form; each of Seneca’s prose works has an explicit addressee, and Senecan scholarship has given much attention to the ways in which our reading of each work is guided by the context

46. Inwood 2005, 11. Inwood’s remarks follow on the less detailed observations of Griffin 1976, 7–​8. Inwood labels the work of the Sextians “primary philosophy,” as opposed to “exegetical or missionary work” of the sort undertaken by Cicero and Lucretius (13). Even if we place in the first category the third book of De Officiis, De Amicitia, or De Senectute, Inwood writes, “the general character of Cicero’s philosophical writing is still ‘missionary’ writing and Cicero himself is no role model for the philosophical life” (11 n. 8). I do not mean, any more than I would imagine Inwood does, to minimize the creativity and philosophical independence Cicero shows in his philosophical works, only to suggest that his aims and self-​conception were fundamentally different both from Seneca’s and, as far as we can tell, from the Sextians’. On the difference between the places occupied by philosophy in the lives of Cicero and Seneca, see Griffin 1988; this is a topic to which we will return in the final chapter of this book. For the sociopolitical context that shaped Cicero’s self-​conception as a philosophical writer and his relationship to his Greek sources, see Baraz 2012, 96–​127, and for what his letters can tell us about Cicero’s personal relationship to philosophy, see McConnell 2014. For a range of approaches to Cicero’s philosophica and their literary and philosophical aims, see the essays collected in Powell 1995a. For an overview, including a judicious tempering of the reaction against Quellenforschung in the study of Cicero’s philosophy (9 n. 20), see Powell 1995b. Another concise treatment of Cicero’s position in relation to his Greek predecessors and Roman successors is Striker 1995, which addresses several of the issues raised in this section. 47. Griffin 1988, 136 n. 7 collects references documenting Seneca’s admiration for Cicero as a writer, including for his enrichment of the Latin philosophical vocabulary.

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Philosophy an d Co mmun it y in Sen eca’s Prose

of address he sets up and formal cues he provides.48 The Epistulae Morales, in particular, have been the focus of work that stresses their distinctively epistolary literary character and that situates them within a longer tradition of Latin epistolography.49 Marcus Wilson warns against treating the letters as “essays,” “as if the essay had been already an established genre in the first century ad and Seneca had gone out of his way to pretend that he was writing something else.”50 What Seneca has to say in his letters, Wilson argues, cannot be neatly decoupled from the epistolary form in which he has chosen to say it, despite a very long tradition of reading them without significant reference to that form.51 The philosophical epistle by its very nature displays the interpersonal foundations of philosophical practice, and an organized set of such letters, like Seneca’s to Lucilius, offers an opportunity to observe in detail the communal dimensions of that practice. Thus, while epistolarity itself is only intermittently at the center of my analysis of the Epistulae Morales, I have aimed to remain at all points conscious that Seneca’s depiction of philosophy in the letters is inscribed within an epistolary frame, and that this frame is related in complex and often subtle ways to the other forms of community immanent in Seneca’s picture of philosophical practice. In recent decades scholars working on ancient philosophical texts, whether beginning from a literary or a philosophical background and set of concerns, have increasingly recognized that a historically sensitive interpretation of most such texts requires an integration of these two approaches.52 Latin philosophical writing stands to benefit especially from this integration: even a philosopher of 48. There is further discussion of the epistolary qualities of the letters later in the chapter; on the form of the Dialogi, see Abel 1967; Wright 1974; and Roller 2015. 49. Cancik 1967, 46–​91; Coleman 1974; M. Wilson 1987; M. Wilson 2001; Inwood 2007b; Schafer 2011; Dietsche 2014, 13–​64; Edwards 2015. On the letter as a genre of Latin literature, see Hooper and Schwartz 1991 and Edwards 2005, and on the philosophical letter, Stowers 1986, 36–​40. Reflection on the defining characteristics of the epistolary genre in antiquity more generally can be found in Gibson and Morrison 2007. In Seneca’s case, reflection on the differences between the Dialogi and the letters can help bring out the distinctive formal features of the latter; see Roller 2015, 65–​6. For some important differences between Seneca’s epistolary practice and that of Pliny, with wider implications for the uniqueness of the philosophical letter within the epistolary genre, see Riggsby 1998, 92. 50. M. Wilson 2001, 165. 51. Examples of “essayistic” readings at M. Wilson 2001, 165–​6. Cf. the judgment of Gibson and Morrison 2007, 16: “much of the critical violence done to letters such as Seneca’s Epistulae Morales has been the result of ignoring the epistolary character both of the collection as a whole, and also the consequent epistolarity of each moral epistle.” 52. See, for example, Rutherford 1989; the essays collected in Gill and McCabe 1996; Nightingale 1996; Blondell 2002; and Rowe 2007.

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Introduction

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Seneca’s ambition and acuity derives his fundamental philosophical orientation from Greek predecessors, but attention to the form and rhetoric of his work can bring out an extra-​doctrinal originality. It is on this originality that the analytic focus of the present book is trained. Its contention is that Seneca, approaching with novel seriousness the project of integrating active philosophical practice with Roman life, used Roman politics and social life, together with the narrative background supplied by Roman literature, both to make the life of philosophy attractive to a Roman audience and to realize an enriched and deepened conception of that life.53 Seneca’s project of writing philosophy in Latin is thus one whose ends are not analytically separable from its means. The choice to write in Latin opens up the possibility of situating oneself not only in a literary tradition but also in a cultural and symbolic sphere whose boundaries are defined by the Latin language. This book aims to advance the project of showing how ably Seneca drew on the possibilities of the Latin language and literary heritage, but it is also a study in the inseparability of language and thought, where language is taken to mean the conceptual as well as the verbal resources offered by participation in a shared culture.

Philosophy and Community Each of the preceding sections has sketched out a dichotomy between philosophy and some extra-​philosophical entity or practice—​successively society, Rome, and literature. It is not the aim of this book either to collapse these distinctions or to suggest that they are entirely without foundation in Seneca’s own self-​ conception and self-​presentation. Rather, it seeks to explore the ways in which Seneca’s work actively makes philosophy and its communal context illuminate one another. Each of these dichotomies reflects the belief, widely held in antiquity as well as today, that there is something distinctive about philosophy, in its aims, its methods, and its effect on the lives of those committed to it. At the same time, the theoretical and historical problems raised by these contrasts point to the difficulty those who share this belief experience in articulating exactly what it is that sets philosophy apart. This book’s contention is that Seneca perceived not only that the philosopher’s life among other people raised questions for how that life was to be understood, but also that the problem of community offered a unique opportunity to give definition to that life. As suggested at the close of the

53. Though we will not be concerned here with Seneca’s use of metaphor as a topic in itself, this question has an obvious bearing on the ones we will be pursuing; see Bartsch 2009 and Armisen-​Marchetti 2015.

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previous section, the forms and characteristic difficulties of social life constitute a sort of language, a set of signs that Seneca combines into patterns that yield a sharper and clearer picture of what makes philosophy unique. As the metaphor of a language is meant to suggest, the idea of the philosophical life that Seneca propounds in his work could not have been articulated or even conceived without the communicative resources furnished by his social environment, but that does not entail that what he made from those resources is identical with or strongly determined by them. “Seneca cannot avoid,” Habinek writes, “the creation of a new life out of the materials of the old. A life that purports to be egalitarian, carefree, and at ease is in fact fashioned out of the political, aesthetic, and economic anxieties afflicting the very audience Seneca proposes to liberate.”54 Habinek’s emphasis on the social grounding of Seneca’s project is of course one of the starting points for the concerns to be pursued in this book, but we might wonder whether his implication that this grounding somehow invalidates or renders self-​defeating Seneca’s liberatory aims can be sustained. This book hopes to show on the contrary the depth of Seneca’s commitment to the Socratic ideal of the philosophical life, a commitment that Seneca took seriously enough to flesh out and explain in the idiom of his own social starting point. The project of explaining how Seneca makes something distinctively philosophical out of non-​philosophical materials has obvious points of contact with the larger problem of explaining the development of a distinctively philosophical approach to life, which necessarily involves a break with its non-​philosophical matrix. Andrea Nightingale, in a discussion of John Burnet’s work on the origins of Greek philosophy, writes that “the Archaic thinkers, according to Burnet, transcended their culture and miraculously produced the discipline of philosophy.”55 Among this book’s purposes is to show how Seneca non-​miraculously transcended his culture and produced for it a practice and discipline of philosophy. That is, it aims to lose sight neither of Seneca’s aspirations to universality and rationality nor of those aspirations’ grounding in the cultural milieu to which he belonged. It is by locating and describing in Seneca’s work the literary point of articulation between philosophy and its social integument that this book hopes to respect both the distinctively philosophical character of the Senecan philosophical life and its conceptual foundation in his social environment.

54. Habinek 1998, 140. 55. Nightingale 2007, 169. Certainly Burnet makes, for example, some illuminating remarks about the modeling of cosmological description on social order at Burnet 1930, 9, but Nightingale’s larger point, that Burnet and his contemporaries scanted social, political, and economic context in explaining the beginnings of philosophy, must stand.

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Introduction

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Plan of the Book In each of the four chapters that make up the rest of the book, I trace the relationship in Seneca’s writing between the idea of a philosophical life and a particular social form or institution. I aim to show in each case that Seneca uses the social relation in question both to develop a clearer conception of how such a life would be lived and to argue for the status of that life as the path to virtue. The mechanics of this operation vary from case to case, and each chapter is meant to stand on its own as an interpretive argument, but I hope that the chapters build a cumulative picture of Seneca’s engagement with the social dimensions of the life of philosophy. In my title I have paired “philosophy” with “community,” in preference to more thickly theorized terms like “society” or “culture,” in order to suggest that the book’s concern is with the whole range of ways in which the philosophical life is informed by the fact that the philosopher lives his or her life in common with others. The book discusses texts drawn from throughout Seneca’s prose corpus, though there is particular emphasis on the Epistulae Morales. Each chapter’s treatment of its topic cannot of course be comprehensive, but the texts discussed in each have been chosen so as to permit when considered together a synoptic view of the use Seneca makes of the institution or social relation in question. We begin with a general consideration of Seneca’s views on the role of cultural conditions in the development of the universal and natural capacity for philosophical self-​development. Drawing together a range of texts that bear on the moral ramifications of solitude and the philosopher’s prospects for making progress independently of the surrounding society, the chapter shows that these questions pull Seneca into a broader consideration of the importance of social and historical context for the philosophical life. It contends that Seneca’s arguments for a philosophical art of self-​transformation aim to counter a Cynicizing and minimalist conception of philosophy under which moral progress is a simple return to a state of nature, necessitating no elaborate and rigorous complex of argument and guidance. Seneca’s response complicates the distinction between nature and culture in ways that vindicate the relevance and utility of philosophy as an art founded on the exercise of reason. By integrating history and culture into his account of how philosophy works, he does not compromise but rather bolsters its status as a comprehensive art of living. The next chapter continues this investigation of Seneca’s thinking about the social conditions of philosophy’s possibility by considering the presence and function in Seneca’s writing of the philosophical schools, a set of synchronic or diachronic communities devoted to philosophical practice. These social formations and the relations of authority within them present Seneca with the opportunity to develop a conception of how one’s own philosophical practice can and

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should interlock with the philosophical efforts of others, past and present. The chapter first examines how Seneca defined the relation of the present-​day Stoic philosopher to the founders of the school. I argue that this definition turns crucially on the use of the Epicurean school as a foil, and the next portion of the chapter explains how Seneca uses the social character of the Epicurean school to explain the disjunction between philosophical and non-​philosophical ways of living outlined earlier in this introduction. Next, the chapter argues that Seneca makes Epicurus and his disciples, and the epistolary nature of their relations with one another, into a vehicle for an exposition of philosophical friendship. Finally, I examine how Seneca uses the very different transtemporal relations prevailing among poets to show that the philosophical school, however broadly conceived, can itself be an instrument for the acquisition of wisdom. With a chapter devoted to the place of slavery in Seneca’s arguments for the philosophical way of life, I turn from Seneca’s analysis of philosophy’s social dimension to the ways in which his work enacts that dimension through its literary and conceptual use of Roman social particularity. This chapter is not concerned, except incidentally, with Seneca’s normative views on slavery. Nor is its aim to discuss the entire range of ways in which Seneca uses slavery as a metaphorical vehicle for discussion of the non-​sage’s lack of genuine freedom. Rather, it concentrates on points at which this metaphorical use of slavery is joined with or illustrated by the narrative appearance in the text of literally enslaved people. It is in these passages, I argue, that we see the subtlety and variety of the argumentative uses Seneca made of slavery. Seneca relies on the unique figure of the slave, who is at the same time property and human being, to defend and elucidate his claims about the function the practice of philosophy can serve. In showing how slavery becomes a platform for Seneca’s thinking about the life of philosophy, I aim bothto illustrate the degree to which his thought and writing are grounded in their Roman context and to show how the idea of a life guided by philosophy yielded new ways of understanding the relations of domination in which he participated. The final chapter of the book traces the relationship in Seneca’s work between philosophical activity and the political context in which it is practiced. I aim to show that Seneca’s interest in thinking through the problems posed by the distinctiveness of the philosopher’s way of life gave him a powerful new perspective on some long-​standing questions of political theory. I start by examining Seneca’s presentation of the philosopher’s relationship to the Roman civil community specifically. In particular, I contrast his use of metaphors of inheritance with that of Cicero in his De Republica, suggesting that Seneca’s idea of philosophy as a means of access to virtue allows him to challenge the imperative of deference to the mos maiorum often encoded in such metaphors. The focus then widens to the more

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Introduction

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general problem of how the philosopher is supposed to fit into any political context at all. Seneca’s concern with the social conditions which make philosophy possible leads him to the conclusion that the paramount functions of political power, in a society of philosophers and non-​philosophers, is to keep that possibility open. This view of the function of politics enables Seneca to leave a clear role for sub-​universal political formations in a cosmopolitan politics. A short conclusion to the book reflects on the unifying threads that emerge in considering Seneca’s presentation of the relationship between philosophy and community.

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Solitude and Independence

In the three chapters of this book that follow this one, we will examine the role of specific social forms and relations—​the philosophical school, slavery, and the Roman res publica—​in defining Seneca’s conception of the philosophical life. This chapter poses the question of the relationship between the philosopher and society in his writings at a higher level of abstraction, asking to what extent Seneca sees the philosopher’s moral progress as dependent on those around him. Can the aspirant to wisdom advance toward virtue alone, or are his efforts necessarily limited by the social environment in which he finds himself ? This question is related to the question of political participation with which Seneca grapples more explicitly, but it is distinct in two important ways. The first is that Seneca’s discussion of political participation usually concerns what the wise man should do, what is and is not part of the suite of functions natural to the human being, rather than what the philosopher aiming to become wise should do to become so; we will return to this distinction later. Second, the question of individual moral progress is a more basic one than that of political participation in that it asks not just about the advisability of involvement with political power, a topic discussed in the final chapter of this book, but also about the role other human beings play in the individual’s moral development. Philosophy ultimately confers genuine independence on its practitioners, but can its practice be begun and continued without the involvement of others? At issue here is the extent to which philosophy can abstract its adherents from their social context, and we will find that our discussion of Seneca’s views on the moral benefits and hazards of solitude soon opens up, and gives a way into, larger questions about his conception of history and culture. Though the idea of “culture” is a modern one, as is that of “history” as a process, I will argue that Seneca’s thinking about the relationship between the philosopher and society unfolds at a level of

Philosophy and Community in Seneca’s Prose. Carey Seal, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190493219.003.0002

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conceptual generality that invites the use of these terms. I further argue that tracing his engagement with the problem of solitude helps us see the reciprocal implication of his picture of social life and his conviction that philosophy alone can show us how to live. In the course of a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of social life in his De Tranquillitate Animi, Seneca advises Serenus that “these things, solitude and company, are to be mixed together and alternated. Solitude will make us miss human beings, company will make us miss ourselves, and each will be the cure for the other: solitude will heal hatred of the crowd and the crowd the tedium of solitude” (miscenda tamen ista et alternanda sunt, solitudo et frequentia. illa nobis faciet hominum desiderium, haec nostri, et erit altera alterius remedium: odium turbae sanabit solitudo, taedium solitudinis turba, Tr. 17.3). But Seneca’s position is not always so moderate. Sometimes he suggests that contact with other people is inherently obstructive of moral progress, as when he tells Lucilius that “dealings with many people are harmful: everyone either makes some vice agreeable to us or presses it upon us or bedaubs us with it without our knowing. Certainly where the crowd with whom we mingle is larger the danger is greater” (inimica est multorum conversatio: nemo non aliquod nobis vitium aut commendat aut inprimit aut nescientibus adlinit, Ep. 7.2). This advice has a broader target than the usual condemnation of the “crowd” (turba); its generalizing language makes a moral threat of everyone we might encounter. Furthermore, it dismisses the possibility that we can distinguish safe from dangerous companions, since the latter affect us without our being aware of it (nescientibus). It can seem as though the only safe companion for Lucilius is himself, hence the counsel that he “recede into himself, inasmuch as possible” (recede in te ipse quantum potes, Ep. 7.8). Even more starkly, Seneca tells Lucilius to “flee the many, flee the few, flee even the one” (fuge multitudinem, fuge paucitatem, fuge etiam unum, Ep. 10.1). On the other hand, Seneca also advises Lucilius that “solitude urges all evils on us” (omnia nobis mala solitudo persuadet, Ep. 25.5). Indeed, directly after issuing the injunction to withdraw just quoted, Seneca tells Lucilius to “associate with those who will make you better, receive those whom you are able to improve” because “human beings learn while they teach” (cum his versare qui te meliorem facturi sunt, illos admitte quos tu potes facere meliores . . . homines dum docent discunt, Ep. 7.8). To compound the confusion, Seneca’s thoughts on solitude can be mapped onto two different developmental trajectories. The sentence mentioned earlier from the twenty-​fifth letter is part of a recommendation that Lucilius behave always as if he is under observation, and Seneca goes on to say, “When you have already progressed so far that you will have reverence even for yourself, you may send away your chaperon” (cum iam profeceris tantum ut sit tibi etiam tui reverentia, licebit dimittas

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paedagogum, Ep. 25.6).1 That is, Lucilius will in time reach a point at which he will be able to dispense with even an imagined observer and live well on his own, but he needs the real or simulated company of others until that time. On this model, solitude properly belongs only to an advanced stage of moral progress.2 The self-​ sufficiency it represents can be achieved only through participation in a social framework conducive to such progress. In other places, though, Seneca reverses this sequence. He opens the seventh letter as follows: You ask what you should consider most to be avoided? The crowd. You will not yet [emphasis mine] safely be combined with it. I will certainly confess my own weakness: I never bring back the habits I set out with; something I have settled is disturbed, something I have escaped comes back. What happens to sick people whom long weakness has enfeebled to the point that they cannot be brought forth anywhere without shock, happens to us whose minds are being healed after a long illness. quid tibi vitandum praecipue existimes quaeris? turbam. nondum illi tuto committeris. ego certe confitebor inbecillitatem meam: numquam mores quos extuli refero; aliquid ex eo quod composui turbatur, aliquid ex iis quae fugavi redit. quod aegris evenit quos longa inbecillitas usque eo adfecit ut nusquam sine offensa proferantur, hoc accidit nobis quorum animi ex longo morbo reficiuntur. (Ep. 7.1) Here Seneca implies that someone in a healthy condition could and would take part in social life without discrimination, since it is spiritual feebleness that makes such contact dangerous and in need of precautionary restriction. The generalized warnings against exposure to large numbers of people Seneca issues later in this letter, such as his claim that after a visit to the games he returns home “crueler and less humane, because I have been among human beings” (crudelior et inhumanior, quia inter homines fui, Ep. 7.3), are thus qualified by the suggestion that for someone further advanced toward wisdom unselective mingling with human beings would have no such damaging effects. We find here, then, a model

1. Seneca refers here to the strategy of imagining that one is under observation by a moral exemplar, such as Cato, Scipio, or Laelius (Ep. 25.6; cf. Ep. 11.10). On the role of imagined observation and conversation in Seneca’s writings see especially Bartsch 2006, 183–​229, and Ker 2010. 2. Cf. Ep. 10.2: vide itaque quid de te sperem, immo quid spondeam mihi (spes enim incerti boni nomen est): non invenio cum quo te malim esse quam tecum. In this letter the recommendation that Lucilius shun company, quoted earlier, is presented as a sign of Seneca’s confidence in his progress, with the suggestion that others would be harmed rather than helped were they to try this expedient.

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of development that is the inverse of the one we traced in Ep. 25. In the seventh letter, the aspirant to wisdom is envisioned as widening rather than narrowing his social scope as he approaches his goal. His nearness to the security of true wisdom is expressed not in his ability to be alone but in his ability to be with others. These two pictures of moral development might be said just to be two different ways of making the same point: wisdom equips its possessor to thrive in any social environment, and therefore even in none. But we are still left with the problem of whether the life of the individual who is trying to attain wisdom ought best to be lived in isolation or in the midst of his fellow human beings. A third option, that of like-​minded friends making a collective withdrawal from the social world, is not under active consideration in Seneca’s work, though we saw in the previous chapter how much the idea of such a community contributes to his thought or his expression. It seems to be assumed instead that the alternative to solitude is a life of contact with non-​philosophers. The practical problem of which of these alternatives is to be preferred, the problem we have seen Seneca wrestling with in the passages discussed earlier, demands that he take a position on the broader question of to what extent moral progress is itself conditioned on social life. Do we need contact with our fellow human beings, morally imperfect as they are, to make moral progress, or can each individual make such progress on his or her own? In what follows, I argue that this question of to what extent human beings can become better on their own impels Seneca to wide-​ranging reflection on the relationship of philosophy to custom, history, and society. There are two notes to be inserted before we begin to trace Seneca’s exposition of these ideas. First, it is important to bear in mind the distinction between wisdom and philosophy mentioned earlier and already emphasized several times in this book, and the corollary distinction between the life of the sage, which is in perfect accordance with nature, and the life of the philosopher, which aims at that condition. As Gretchen Reydams-​Schils has shown in detail, Seneca and the later Roman Stoics “found a way to anchor the life according to reason in a fundamental commitment to community” that “entails involvement in close, affective human relationships, of which not only friendship but also parenthood and marriage are paradigmatic cases.”3 Our concern here, though, is not with the place of sociability in the natural human life, but its place in the means by which that life is attained. Seneca holds that such attainment necessarily involves the practice of philosophy, and we will aim to tease out the implications of that claim 3. Reydams-​Schils 2005, 13. On the place of sociality in the Stoic conception of human nature, see 53–​82; on family relationships specifically, see 115–​76, and on the role of the family in Seneca’s work, Gloyn 2017.

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for the dependence of moral progress on the aspirant’s social and historical starting point. Second, we should note that the tensions in Seneca’s views of solitude identified earlier, tensions that will recur throughout our treatment of the topic, register long-​standing ambiguities in the treatment of solitude and independence both in Roman and in Stoic thought. The Roman moral tradition emphasized participation in the life of the community and the importance of securing social approval: as Matthew Roller puts it, in Roman culture “the community as a whole, not its constituent individuals, is the basic unit of social organization,” and so “it is the community as a whole that is the ultimate source and reference point of moral value.”4 But there was also a strong tendency to prize self-​sufficiency, which was often identified with physical withdrawal and seclusion.5 This identification became increasingly common especially in poetry as the traditional arenas of Roman elite social participation came to seem less hospitable in the late Republic and early Empire.6 Seneca’s Stoic predecessors, for their part, aimed to balance their doctrine of natural human sociability with their conviction both that the wise man is entirely self-​sufficient and that virtue, and thus happiness, is open through the practice of philosophy to all human beings without reference to their social integument or lack thereof.7 We can trace this tension back from the early Stoics to Socrates himself, as represented in Plato’s early dialogues. Socrates’ self-​sufficiency was a recurring preoccupation of those who wrote about

4. Roller 2001, 22. 5. See, e.g., Livy’s emphasis on Romulus’s exemplary self-​sufficiency: Miles 1995, 137–​78. 6. On aspirations to autarky and withdrawal in the poetry of the early Empire, see Roman 2014, 91–​162. 7. A related problem, also with important implications for our topic, is the tension between the Stoic belief in the naturalness of human goodness and the observable pervasiveness of vice. The Stoic response to this tension is twofold (Diog. Laert. 7.89 = SVF 3.228). First, Stoics do commonly hold that individuals can be morally warped by ambient social pressures, or in Diogenes’s words, “by the influence of associates” (διὰ τὴν κατήχηνσιν τῶν συνόντων). We have seen this claim at work in the Senecan statements on solitude. As Margaret Graver points out, though, “for one who holds that Nature’s full benevolence extends to every human being, it is of limited use to say that the potentially virtuous psyche goes astray because corrupted by others. Before there can be transmission of error, there has to be something to transmit” (2012, 114). The Stoics thus offer a psychological explanation for the distortion of perception that explains moral error in individuals without reference to their social context. This explanation is what Diogenes alludes to when he mentions “the persuasiveness of external things” (διὰ τὰς ἔξωθεν πραγμάτων πιθανότητας) in the passage cited earlier. On this second cause of error, see Graver 2007, 149–​63, and Graver 2012. Our focus here will be on the social transmission of error rather than its initial psychological genesis.

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him, and indeed his apparent belief that happiness is the product of virtue and thus of the agent’s choices seems to offer the individual great independence from circumstance and social context, an independence strikingly represented in Socrates’ calm resolve in Plato’s Apology to continue his philosophic mission in the face of widespread disapproval.8 Modern scholars disagree about whether or not Socrates did in fact believe that virtue was sufficient for happiness, and in any event, they point out, decoupling happiness from the possession of external goods does not mean detaching it from external circumstances altogether. Christopher Bobonich writes: For Socrates . . . virtue is within the person’s control only insofar as it is a state of an individual’s soul and does not additionally require that anything in particular be true of the person’s body or of the external world. If virtue is sufficient for happiness, this is also true of happiness. But if virtue requires knowledge, it is not ensured by any choice or decision open to the person at any given time: attaining knowledge will require much more than deciding to do so and, indeed, Socrates does not guarantee that it is possible for everyone.9 One reason Socrates cannot make such a guarantee is that the practice of rational inquiry and self-​scrutiny Plato shows him practicing is necessarily social. In Plato’s Apology Socrates tells the jury that “the greatest good for a human being is this, to have discussions each day concerning virtue and the other things you hear me debating as I examine both myself and others” (τυγχάνει μέγιστον ἀγαθὸν ὂν ἀνθρώπῳ τοῦτο, ἑκάστης ἡμέρας περὶ ἀρετῆς τοὺς λόγους ποιεῖσθαι καὶ τῶν ἄλλων περὶ ὧν ὑμεῖς ἐμοῦ ἀκούετε διαλεγομένου καὶ ἐμαυτὸν καὶ ἄλλους ἐξετάζοντος, Pl. Ap. 38a). For Socrates, the “practically best human life,” in John Cooper’s phrase, is given shape by constant intellectual contact with others.10 If there are no others around, or they are entirely uninterested in philosophical discussion, this life is not an option.11 Socrates’ self-​sufficiency thus turns out to involve some degree of

8. Pl. Ap. 29 d–​e. On Socrates’ self-​sufficiency in the biographical tradition and especially in the writings of Xenophon, see O’Connor 1994. 9. Bobonich 2011, 321. 10. On Socratic inquiry as a way of life, see Cooper 2012, 24–​69, quotation at 51. 11. On the dependence of Socratic philosophical practice as depicted in Plato’s early dialogues on the availability of suitable interlocutors, and on Plato’s exploration in his later work of ways to circumvent this constraint, see Long 2013.

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dependence on his environment; his life of independence would not be possible were he truly alone. As we explore Seneca’s response to this Socratic tension, we will make frequent reference to its resolution by the Cynics, through whom the Stoics traced their intellectual descent from Socrates. Cynicism took its inspiration from the Socratic link between virtue and happiness, making absolute the promise of self-​sufficiency implicit in that claim. As we have seen, Socrates’ claim in Plato’s Apology that virtue and thus happiness are best approached by participation in a collective process of rational inquiry imperils that promise by making it conditional on the agent’s social environment. The Cynics circumvented this difficulty by jettisoning the Socratic premise that it is difficult to know what is good and bad for human beings. Instead, they maintained that the human good was easy to identify and, given sufficient clarity of purpose, easy to attain. William Desmond writes that “Cynic naturalism night be characterized by three main headings: (i) simplicity of natural desire; (ii) the bounty of the natural world; and (iii) man’s natural fitness for his environment.”12 Under this doctrine, we are prevented from reaping the benefits of a natural life only by our saturation in ambient falsehoods about what the good is.13 Consequently, what we need is not immersion in philosophical inquiry but rather a means of gaining and then continually reinforcing independence from these corrupting beliefs. Cynic philosophical practice thus takes a very different form from its Socratic antecedent, with its characteristic activity being not ongoing inquiry but rather training that shapes the body and mind in accordance with principles of natural living that have already been discovered and accepted.14 Zeno of Citium, founder of the Stoic school, studied with the Cynic Crates when he first came to Athens (Diog. Laert. 7.24). Stoicism’s Cynic heritage retained an attraction for the school’s adherents throughout its history, but the doctrinal differences that set Zeno and his successors apart from Cynicism also put them at variance with the Cynic conception of philosophical practice sketched out earlier, as John Rist explains with reference to Zeno’s claim, in opposition to the Cynics, that there are correct choices to be made among those things which are morally indifferent (neither good nor bad):

12. Desmond 2008, 151. 13. Desmond 2006, 93, draws attention to the Cynic contrast between “the limitation of bodily labor to the satisfaction of necessities and the limitlessness of the philosophical ponos that prepares one for virtue.” It is easy to provide for one’s real needs and difficult, though conceptually simple, to free oneself from the social imposition of spurious and artificial “needs.” 14. On the importance of bodily and mental training to Diogenes, see Diog. Laert. 6.70–​1.

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[C]‌learly if some things are to be preferred, even if they cannot be justified as in themselves moral, and therefore good, there must be another justification for this preference. That justification is provided for Zeno by the theory that everything preferred is natural, while whatever is to be rejected is contrary to nature. And by appealing to nature, he has not appealed only to a moral law but to a law of the physical universe . . . Thus the introduction of a class of things preferred compels the philosopher to break with the Cynics and re-​introduce the study of physics into the activities of the wise man.15 The Stoics thus came to envision philosophy as the pursuit of knowledge in an even more sweeping way than did Socrates, who seems to have confined himself to ethical questions and, after some youthful interest in natural philosophy, renounced attempts to gain an understanding of the cosmos.16 For Zeno and his successors in the Stoic mainstream, ethics, physics, and logic formed an integrated whole, all three parts of which were necessary for philosophy to accomplish its task of opening a path to virtue.17 This complex and elaborate philosophical art required immersive study and the availability of philosophically engaged interlocutors. Even more fundamentally, this Stoic idea of what philosophy needed to be in order to foster moral progress implied that those people whose position in time and space exposed them to Stoic teaching stood a far better chance of attaining virtue than did those who by circumstance had no such exposure. In all of these respects Stoicism reforged a link, though a loose one, between an individual’s social and historical context and his or her prospects for happiness. Contrast the Cynic promise that, as Luis Navia puts it, “for the development of reason, the individual needs only himself.”18 It is readily apparent, then, why the question of whether and how the individual can make moral progress in isolation will lead Seneca into confrontation with Stoicism’s Cynic heritage. Sometimes this confrontation is direct; at other times, I will argue, the Cynic alternative

15. Rist 1969, 69. On Seneca’s view of nature, a key concept throughout this discussion, see Sørensen 1984, 218–​39. 16. Pl. Ap. 19b–​d, Cic. TD 5.10. Socrates’ early and abandoned interest in natural science, and in particular the ideas of Anaxagoras: Pl. Phd. 96a–​100a. 17. The Stoics used at least three different images to illustrate the integral nature of philosophy (Diog. Laert. 7.39–​41=LS 26B): the animal (logic the bones, ethics the flesh, physics the soul), the egg (logic the shell, ethics the white, physics the yolk), and the walled garden (logic the wall, ethics the fruit, physics the land and trees). See Jordan 1990, 152, for discussion of these images and their implications. 18. Navia 1996, 69.

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hovers at the edges of Seneca’s writing, pressing him to make ever more precise and vivid what the individual stands to gain from the practice of a complex and intellectually rich philosophical art. The chapter’s argument unfolds through analyses of the Consolatio ad Marciam and several of the Epistulae Morales, one of which, Ep. 95, I pair with the seventh book of De Beneficiis. The Consolatio ad Marciam prefigures the major themes we will track through this chapter in its rejection of the Cynic opposition between nature and civilization and in its insistence that a philosophical art of self-​sufficiency necessarily has social foundations. In Ep. 18, Seneca approaches the problem of the philosopher’s relationship to his or her culture from a different angle, vindicating the claims of philosophy to offer a way of life superior to that of the ambient culture. The chapter next turns to two letters, Ep. 29 and Ep. 62, which both praise and seek to limit and contain the Cynic ideal of independence from social bonds. In Ep. 90, we find a narrative of human history in which Seneca engages the question of the individual’s relationship to social and historical context on the widest possible canvas. I argue that Seneca uses this narrative to elaborate and defend his conception of philosophy as a developed and intellectually sophisticated art. This argument continues in the chapter’s reading of Ep. 95 and Ben. 7, in both of which we find Seneca using the full range of his narrative and rhetorical skill to ward off the idea that individuals have no need of such an art in making moral progress. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Ep. 120, in which Seneca accords to culture and historical location a key role in allowing the individual to form the concept of the good. In all of these texts, I argue, Seneca at the same time affirms the unique powers of philosophy and, confronted with the challenging Cynic idea that individuals can make progress in isolation, gives close attention to the social and historical preconditions for the practice of philosophy.

Consolatio ad Marciam In what is generally agreed to be his earliest surviving work, the Consolatio ad Marciam, Seneca aims to console the daughter of the distinguished historian Cremutius Cordus on the death of her son.19 He anticipates the addressee’s response to his attempts at assuaging her grief: she may well ask in reply whether grief is not natural. Seneca’s answer to this question takes him well beyond his immediate consolatory brief. His assessment of the roles played by nature and

19. The work was written between the accession of Caligula (37 ce) and Seneca’s exile (41); see Griffin 1976, 397. On the political context of the work see 22–​3.

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by custom in shaping character and emotional response becomes a subtle challenge to that opposition itself and in the process sketches out a distinctive role for philosophy, that of offering at once the moral benefits of solitude and those of immersion in social life. Seneca’s path toward this challenge begins before Marcia’s imagined objection, when he contrasts the examples offered by Augustus’s wife Livia and his sister Octavia, each of whom had also lost a son.20 Octavia was so stricken by her bereavement that she withdrew entirely from public view, rejecting all attempts to console her, and became “most familiar with shadows and solitude” (tenebris et solitudini familiarissima, Marc. 2.5). Livia, on the other hand, made her grief a means of connection with others: she never stopped “eagerly talking about him [Drusus], eagerly hearing about him” (libentissime de illo loqui, de illo audire, Marc. 3.2). Marcia is asked to choose which of these two examples she wishes to follow (Marc. 3.3), with the clear implication that Livia’s is superior.21 The core difference between the two is Octavia’s abstention from company; as Amanda Wilcox writes, the reader is led to infer that “Seneca finds Octavia blameworthy as much for her failure to participate in public commemoration of her son as for her excessively prolonged mourning.”22 Seneca believes that for Marcia to imitate Octavia’s behavior would be “most shameful and foreign to [her] character” and would show that she “does not wish to live but is unable to die” (turpissimum alienissimumque est animo tuo . . . vivere nolle, mori non posse, Marc. 3.3). One might, though, describe Octavia’s withdrawal as anticipatory compliance with the later Senecan injunction to “withdraw into yourself ” (recede in te ipsum, Ep. 7.8). What, then, is unhealthy about Octavia’s decision to grieve alone? Seneca’s discussion later in the same work of grief ’s place in human nature can show us the answer to this question, and in the process show us how his efforts to define the hazards of solitude make his presentation of the philosophical life more precise and more appealing.

20. Livia’s younger son Drusus, the father of Germanicus and of the future emperor Claudius, had died in 9 bce, while Octavia’s son Marcellus had died in 23 bce. On the literary and political resonances of Seneca’s mention of these figures, see Ker 2009, 95, and for a detailed treatment of the dynastic politics glimpsed here, Gloyn 2017, 144–​8. 21. This implication is reinforced—​relevantly for our larger topic—​by Seneca’s subsequent report that Livia’s response to grief was guided by Augustus’s house philosopher Areus (Marc. 4.2). On Areus and his relationship to the imperial family, see Rawson 1989, 243–​4. Liz Gloyn points out that Octavia’s anger at Livia in particular “would be justified if she believed that Livia was somehow involved” in Marcellus’s death, as Cassius Dio suggests she was (2017, 145 n. 32). 22. Wilcox 2006, 85.

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Appeals to nature as a guide to conduct share some recurring commonalities, across a number of ancient philosophical traditions. Stoics and Epicureans alike take the inclinations of the human infant as an index of what end nature ordains for action.23 More generally, it was common among ancient writers of all philosophical orientations to portray animals, peoples of the distant ancestral past, and contemporary peoples believed to live simply as being in closer alignment with nature than the Greeks and Romans themselves.24 All three variants of this maneuver were especially popular with the Cynics, since they offer obvious support for the Cynic claim that civilization rests on false beliefs about what human beings need.25 The use of all of these categories presumes that deviation from nature is the result of what we might call culture, that is, of the interaction of human beings rather than their natal endowment. Beings that have not yet experienced this interaction (infants) or will not ever experience it (animals) are then seen as offering a window into what life might be like if nature’s plans were unimpeded by culture. The adult human beings who are believed to live in closer accord with nature serve the different though related function of showing which particular features of the writer’s culture are inimical to that natural development. Seneca employs several of these examples in defining the natural limits of grief, but the way in which he uses them is novel and surprising. Seneca begins his argument that in grief “there is more that opinion has added than that nature has ordered” (plus est quod opinio adicit quam quod natura imperavit, Marc. 7.1) by noting that human beings are the only animals to engage in prolonged mourning for their young.26 Seneca connects this fact to the human power of reason, suggesting that in human beings alone the duration of such mourning is set by decision rather than by feeling (Marc. 7.1–​2).

23. See Brunschwig 1986. 24. See the examples collected in Lovejoy and Boas 1935, with accompanying discussion: 389–​ 420 (animals), 23–​102 (ancestors), and 287–​367 (foreign peoples). In the same volume, see the discussion of “ ‘nature’ as norm,” 103–​16. 25. Cynic and Cynicizing writers are prominently represented in the collections of passages illustrating these themes referred to in the previous note. Indeed, Romm 1996 locates the roots of Cynicism in Greek ethnographic descriptions of remote peoples and their customs. Cf. Martin 1996 on Cynic views of the Scythians. On Cynicism and animals, see Moles 1996, 112. 26. For a parallel argument, also relying on the premise that animals can help us see what natural human life would be like, see Seneca’s inference from animal behavior in discussing natural leadership at Ep. 90.4. See Ep. 99.24 for another discussion of animal grief, this one distinguishing animal behavior from what is suitable for human beings (human beings ought to cease grieving quickly, as animals do, but they should continue to remember those they have lost, unlike animals).

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So far he has drawn along the standard lines sketched out earlier an antithesis between nature and culture, with emphasis on the fact that cultural corruption acts through the distinctively human faculty to make free decisions. Since it is this same faculty to which Seneca’s appeal in this consolation is aimed, and since this passage in particular suggests that the use of that faculty can curtail the period of mourning, we have already hit upon the central tension in the philosophical critique of culture, one that Seneca is to bring into sharp focus in the following sections: when philosophers urge the adoption of a way of life grounded in nature, they implicitly rely upon a power of choice that their narrative of lost simplicity presupposes to be absent in the kind of life they claim to be best. We see this tension, and the beginnings of Seneca’s response to it, more clearly when Seneca turns to another way of demonstrating that extended grief is unnatural, the argument from variation. As Seneca puts that argument’s major premise, “those things which have drawn their force from nature keep the same force in all people: it is manifest that what is variable is not natural” (quae a natura vim acceperunt eandem in omnibus servant: apparet non esse naturale quod varium est, Marc. 7.3). This is the foundational argument of the nomos-​phusis distinction, with a pedigree stretching back at least to Herodotus’s account of the variability of burial customs (3.38).27 On the assumption that human nature is constant across societies, with elements of variation being supplied only by custom, Seneca’s observation about the non-​universality of extended grief should alone suffice to demonstrate that such emotions are not grounded in nature. Seneca does not stop at identifying simple variation, though: he furthers deploys the common refinement of the argument from variation in which the practices of some human beings are identified as more in accordance with nature than those of others. But he reverses the usual point of this line of reasoning: “[F]‌irst, so that you might know that it is not natural to be broken by grief, the same bereavement wounds women more than men, barbarians more than people of a gentle and refined breed, and the unlearned more than the learned” (ut scias autem non esse hoc naturale, luctibus frangi, primum magis feminas quam viros, magis barbaros quam placidae eruditaeque gentis homines, magis indoctos quam doctos eadem orbitas vulnerat, Marc. 7.3). Recalling Seneca’s earlier assertion that human beings grieve more than animals, we can see that in this passage Seneca is making the unusual move of grouping civilized people, rather than “barbarians,” with

27. On the relationship between nature and custom in Herodotus, see Hartog 1988 and Rosalind Thomas 2000, especially 102–​34.

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animals.28 It is the cultivated, peaceful, and educated who have the more natural response to grief, Seneca claims, just as he claimed earlier that animals have a more natural response than human beings. He directly counters the Cynic critique of civilization by asserting that the processes of acculturation and refinement associated with civilized life bring human beings closer to their natural state of being rather than estrange them from it. This point is made with special sharpness by the adjective eruditos, which literally means “brought out of a crude state.” Rawness is thus specifically disidentified with naturalness, and Seneca suggests that human beings in a pristine state are at a distance from nature rather than exemplars of its workings. An actual state of nature can be achieved only through conscious human effort and cultivation; as we will see, this way of understanding the relationship between nature and culture bulks large in Seneca’s later writings and forms the backbone of his famous ninetieth letter. Seneca next meets another objection from his interlocutor, one that directly addresses the problem of the origins of error discussed earlier in this chapter:29 if extended grief is not natural, why is it so prevalent? Seneca’s answer is that people who are thus afflicted have failed to observe and learn from the experiences of others: “[W]‌e do not anticipate anything bad for ourselves before it happens, but as though we ourselves were invulnerable and have embarked on a more peaceful journey than others, we are not alerted by their misfortunes to the fact that those are common to all” (nihil nobis mali antequam eveniat proponimus, sed ut immunes ipsi et aliis pacatius ingressi iter alienis non admonemur casibus illos esse communes, Marc. 9.1). This statement does many things at once. It argues for the value of living with others, even if those others are not themselves philosophers. It shows the necessity of careful, disciplined, and rational consideration of one’s environment.30 Most of all, it demonstrates how these two requirements for moral progress are intertwined. Someone living in isolation has no way of learning from the experiences of others what is natural to and inherent in a human

28. His accompanying claim than men grieve less than women is less surprising, given the strong associations between femininity and excessive grief in the Roman consolatory tradition, on which see Wilcox 2006, 74–​6. 29. See n. 4 above. 30. Seneca’s insistence on the value of such consideration, as we have traced it through the Consolatio ad Marciam, makes me unable to agree with Olberding 2005, 141, that “while other Stoics highlight the power of reason to contextualize human struggle within the larger world order and thereby alleviate pain, Seneca appears unpersuaded of the efficacy of such strategies” and instead “offers strategies that emphasize not reason but rigorous self-​mastery.” Indeed, the presupposition that Seneca recognized some difference between these two last terms can be sustained only by ignoring the larger doctrinal framework in which he is careful to situate his therapeutic appeals.

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life. The practice of philosophy can make us self-​sufficient, but it needs as its raw material for reflection and analysis data we derive from living with others. We have traced Seneca’s argument for the necessity of a complex and social philosophical practice through three stages. In the first, his contrast between Octavia and Livia provides a vivid, memorable, and contextually appropriate example of solitude’s power to warp moral understanding. Next, his inversion of the common assumption that less cultured peoples live in closer accord with nature suggests that life in a complex society has its moral advantages as well as its hazards. Finally, he specifies those advantages as gains in knowledge, thereby clarifying the point and necessarily social character of philosophical investigation and analysis. We will see all of these moves repeated and elaborated in his subsequent writings, as he gives a subtle account of the social foundations of the art that equips us to be alone.

Ep. 18 We turn now to a distinct but related facet of the question of solitude. In the eighteenth of his Epistulae Morales we find Seneca using the Saturnalia as an occasion for advising Lucilius on the extent to which philosophers should stand apart from the life of the community in which they live.31 The manner in which Seneca steers Lucilius and himself between isolation from and immersion in ambient social life offers an illuminating example of how Seneca builds his conception of the philosophical life from the dilemmas posed by living that life in the company of non-​philosophers. Seneca puts forward the central question of the first part of the letter, that devoted to the Saturnalia, as material for consultation with Lucilius, were he present: “If I had you here, I would gladly confer with you as to what you think should be done, whether nothing should be changed from daily habit or whether, so that we might not seem to diverge from the ways of the public, we should both dine more festively and remove the toga” (si te hic haberem, libenter tecum conferrem quid existimares esse faciendum, utrum nihil ex cotidiana consuetudine movendum an, ne dissidere videremur cum publicis moribus, et hilarius cenandum et exuendam togam, Ep. 18.2). This sentence turns on an antithesis between consuetudo cotidiana and mores publici. The contrast is achieved through the adjectives, since the nouns have heavily overlapping meanings. We are invited to notice the difference not between nature and custom, or between the regulative power

31. For this letter’s place in the larger educational scheme of the Epistulae Morales, see Hachmann 1995, 151–​4.

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of habit and that of philosophical inquiry, but between two different sorts of custom, at the level of the individual and at that of his or her social environment. Seneca’s deliberation over his participation in the Saturnalia, then, uses the terms of the sophistic and Cynic dichotomy between nature and culture but scrambles them to display the complexity of the rifts that can arise between the philosopher and society. This way of thinking about the problem is evident from the beginning of the letter, before Seneca has suggested that the extent of his personal participation in the holiday is up for discussion. “Everything is noisy with great ado,” he writes, “as though there were any difference between the Saturnalia and days of doing business” (ingenti apparatu sonant omnia, tamquam quicquam inter Saturnalia intersit et dies rerum agendarum, Ep. 18.1). He goes on to endorse the remark that “December was at one time a month; now it is a year” (olim mensem Decembrem fuisse, nunc annum, Ep. 18.1). The Saturnalia at one time was clearly marked out from the rest of the year by its inversion of social hierarchy;32 now that inversion characterizes the entire year, obliterating the distinction between the Saturnalia and normal life. We should note several ways in which this statement invites reflection on the nature of social convention. First, any mention of the Saturnalia evokes its status as “a period of exception,” a “festival of legitimate rebellion” which at the same time challenged and reinforced the regulative power of social and political norms.33 This dual effect has an obvious political function as a mechanism for containing discontent among enslaved people. Leaving that function aside, we can observe more generally that the festival highlights the arbitrariness and conventionality of the existing order, by gesturing toward a different order premised on egalitarianism or actual reversal.34 At the same time, though, by its own status as a custom, the Saturnalia draws attention to the extent to which what people around us are doing can trigger drastic if temporary changes in our own way of living, for no other reason than so that we might do what everyone else is doing. It is this last point that Seneca’s opposition between consuetudo cotidiana and mores publici brings home so sharply. The festival demonstrates the continuing hold that culture has upon us by its very suspension or inversion of cultural norms. Seneca’s view that the Saturnalia has now become indistinguishable from the rest of the year makes a similar point. Of course, we should read this sentiment

32. See Versnel 1994, 146–​50, for a summary of what happened during the Saturnalia. 33. Versnel 1994, 154 and 163. On the festival’s simultaneous operation as challenge and reinforcement, see 159. 34. Versnel 1994, 157 usefully distinguishes the “egalitarian” or role-​flattening from the “conflictive” or role-​reversing aspects of the festival.

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as grounded in disapproval of luxury, since extravagant spenders were said to celebrate the Saturnalia all year long,35 and in a general distaste for a perceived collapse of decorum and social distinctions,36 but it is also clear, once we grant his premise that the distinction between the Saturnalia and the rest of the year has been effaced, that Seneca is drawing attention to the now entirely arbitrary character of the festival, which sets off ingens apparatus despite the fact that the generalization of its spirit has evacuated it of all meaning. We can trace this interest in the ways that the field of custom generates contradictions and oppositions within itself through the rest of the letter’s discussion of the Saturnalia. “We have changed our clothing,” Seneca writes, “for the sake of pleasure and holidays, which used to be customary only when the civic community was in turmoil and difficulty” (quod fieri nisi in tumultu et tristi tempore civitatis non solebat, voluptatis causa ac festorum dierum vestem mutavimus, Ep. 18.2).37 Social convention appears in this account at two different levels of resolution: first there is the custom of wearing the toga, then the customs (solebat) that dictate when that clothing regime is to be modified. By directing attention to the shift at the second level, Seneca invites scrutiny of the proposed Saturnalia-​ triggered shift at the first and more basic level, the “shedding of the toga.” Though the contrast between the motives of pleasure and emotional involvement with the republic implicitly introduces an extra-​customary standard of evaluation, at basis this sentence is an immanent critique of Roman custom, one that seeks to undermine custom’s air of necessity through the adoption of a historical perspective that shows that matters could be and have been otherwise. It is on the foundation of the picture of custom he has been developing throughout the letter that Seneca offers his surmise about what position Lucilius would take on the question of the Saturnalia, and only on this basis can we understand the way in which Seneca ultimately formulates his solution to the question.

35. See Petronius, Sat. 44.3. 36. For another glimpse of this distaste, see Apoc. 8.2 and 12.2. Both passages imply that Claudius turned established social hierarchies upside-​down; the underlying grievance is probably connected to the widespread opinion that Claudius gave too much power to his freedmen, which further sharpens the contrast often pointed out between the view of Claudius expressed here and the admiring portrait Seneca gives in his earlier consolation to Claudius’s freedman Polybius. See further Nauta 1987, 83–​4, and, on the double political valence of associating a ruler with Saturn (Golden Age king/​whimsical and perverse tyrant), see Versnel 1994, 191–​210. 37. The first part of this sentence is a reference to the republican custom of donning mourning dress at times of perceived danger to oneself or to the civil community as a whole. In Robert Kaster’s words, the practice was “intended both to arouse pity for a person presumed to be suffering unjustly and to stir ill-​will against the person responsible for the suffering” (2006, 178). References to this practice are collected by Kaster 2006, 177–​8.

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Seneca’s discussion of the Saturnalia thus far has, as we have seen, shown social convention as a realm of flux and inconsistency. This picture of custom vindicates the practice of philosophy and its jurisdiction over questions of everyday social conduct, against the abdication of such territory to the authority of ambient custom.38 Seneca asks us to consider which custom that would be. Our own or that of those around us? Today’s or yesterday’s? How are we to handle a custom which defines itself by the dissolution of conventional bonds? To answer all of these questions, we need philosophy. Seneca here uses the material of Roman social life—​exploiting with particular ingenuity the ambiguities of the Saturnalia—​to expose the practical limits of conformity with custom and to show his readers the necessity of replacing such conformity with a commitment to living by philosophical inquiry. By the time he turns to the actual solution to this problem, then, it has largely exhausted its protreptic use, which accounts for the casual moderation of this initial response he attributes to Lucilius. He speculates that Lucilius, “exercising the functions of an arbiter, would have wished that we neither be in all respects like or in all respects unlike the pilleus-​wearing crowd” (arbitri partibus functus nec per omnia nos similes esse pilleatae turbae voluisses nec per omnia dissimiles, Ep. 18.3).39 Seneca next proposes an alternative but then reformulates and appears to endorse the suggestion he has assigned to Lucilius. The alternative proposal is to designate the Saturnalia as a time of heightened abstinence, “in order that [the mind] might alone withdraw from pleasures at the time when all the crowd has sunk into them” (ut tunc voluptatibus solus abstineat cum in illas omnis turba procubuit, Ep. 18.3). The middle road of the first proposal, by contrast, would

38. On the philosophical plane, such abdication was the defining feature of the ethics of Pyrrhonian Skepticism, the primary rival to Stoicism for later Stoics such as Epictetus; see Long 2002, 101–​4. Skepticism was of course capable of acknowledging variation in custom between and within cultures, and indeed relied on that variation as one of its ways of inducing the suspension of judgment; see Hankinson 1995, 262–​5. At the same time, however, the Skeptics’ antipathy toward the idea of a life governed by philosophy issued in a simple recommendation to follow the customs and laws of one’s own surroundings, an approach the dilemmas inherent in which Ep. 18 exposes. On Skeptic conformism, see Thorsrud 2003 and Trapp 2007, 37–​8. For Skeptic objections to the Stoic idea of a philosophical art of living, see Sellars 2009, 86–​103. Though Seneca wrote after Aenesidemus’s revival of the Pyrrhonian school in the first century bce, he shows no evidence of acquaintance with Aenesidemus and regards the school as in terminal decline (Nat. 7.32.2). Whether or not Seneca here has in view a philosophical defense of reliance on custom, it can be presumed that he also or instead has as his target deference to convention more generally. 39. The pilleus was a cap worn by freed slaves as a token of their manumission. As Versnel observes, “if the total population of Rome wears the pilleus, a complicated situation emerges: by becoming ‘freedmen’ the slaves’ status is enhanced, while the citizens’ status is devalued” (1993, 158). See 158 n. 102 for references to scholarly discussion of this practice.

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have Seneca and Lucilius “neither remove themselves nor be conspicuous nor mingle with all people, and do the same thing but not in the same way” (non excerpere se nec insignire nec misceri omnibus et eadem sed non eodem modo facere, Ep. 18.4). Of these two paths, the first is “much braver,” but the second “more temperate” (hoc multo fortius . . . illud temperantius, Ep. 18.4). Seneca has drained convention of its moral authority but at the same time found a new use for it as equipment for the refinement and display of virtues, here fortitude and temperance. The Saturnalia provides philosophers with a unique opportunity to test themselves, either in their capacity to demonstrate restraint in the face of mass self-​indulgence or, perhaps more demandingly, in their ability to minimize the public attention that conspicuously abstemious lives attract. Seneca gives the last word to temperance here, and the assignment of that description to the moderate course of action as regards the Saturnalia shows us how he uses social life to define the virtues at which philosophical practice aims. Seneca sets up as desirable here what Robert Kaster, in a discussion of verecundia, has identified as “the simplest social product” of that emotion: the quality of “not being invisible, quite, but being seen to claim the minimum amount of social space needed to carry out a given line of action.”40 To take the conspicuously abstemious approach would be an act of self-​denial, but so too, Seneca makes us recognize, would it be to take the approach of moderate participation.41 The latter course involves a containment of the self in that it mandates not attracting attention to onself. The philosopher who took this approach would give up a chance at the “proof of his own constancy” (argumentum firmitatis suae, Ep. 18.3) promised by the more superficially rigorous way. We can see now how the publici mores, though not in themselves of moral significance, offer the opportunity for Seneca to imagine and endorse a subtler and more demanding training toward virtue.

Ep. 29 The twenty-​ninth letter demonstrates most clearly the disjunction between the Cynic and Senecan models of moral guidance and the consequences of that disjunction for Seneca’s view of the philosopher’s proper relation to his or her social integument. Seneca opens the letter by telling Lucilius that their friend Marcellinus has been abstaining from their company “because he fears hearing the truth” (quod audire verum timet, Ep. 29.1). He need not worry on that score,

40. Kaster 2005, 17. 41. For a different argument that philosophy itself demands the moderation of its own claims, see Ep. 5.4–​5, with Richardson-​Hay 2006.

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Seneca says, for that truth “is not to be told to anyone who is not going to listen” (nulli enim nisi audituro dicendum est, Ep. 29.1). Seneca then contrasts this policy with that of the Cynics, Diogenes included, who freely admonish anyone they come across. This promiscuity of address appears to have been a notable feature of Cynicism from its beginnings: Diogenes Laertius’s life of Diogenes of Sinope is full of anecdotes in which the latter offers unsolicited and doubtless unwelcome criticism to those he comes across.42 This habit shaped both the behavior of later Cynics and the Cynic-​influenced literary form known as the diatribe.43 The Cynics’ practice in this regard and their concomitant emphasis on the importance of parrhesia, or free speech, to the natural life are in turn closely connected to their pursuit of autarkeia, or self-​sufficiency.44 Since the Cynics had placed themselves outside of society, they were not constrained by customary speech norms, nor did they have the opportunity or the need to avail themselves of the opportunities for philosophical discussion that would present themselves to someone who was embedded in society. Their isolation made each possible target for their harangues as approachable and amenable as any other, which is to say, not very. In Seneca’s letter, an imagined interlocutor defends the Cynic approach: after all, are not words, which cost nothing, bound to benefit at least some of their hearers (Ep. 29.2)? Seneca’s response comes in two stages, the first concerned with the practitioner of philosophy and the second with the practice itself. When the philosopher indiscriminately exhorts passersby to change their lives, “his authority is diluted” (diluitur eius auctoritas, Ep. 29.3), with the consequence that he is unable to use it to secure a hearing from those whom he might otherwise be able to assist. We should distinguish between two senses of auctoritas, both of which are relevant here but only one of which Seneca addresses explicitly as the letter continues. First, Seneca must be in part concerned with the way in which the philosopher’s extra-​philosophical standing, the evaluation made of him by society at large on its own, non-​philosophical, scale of value, impinges upon his effectiveness as an agent of moral change. To note this dimension to Seneca’s remarks here is not to minimize the centrality of inquiry and argument to his conception of philosophy. Seneca is not suggesting, that is, that potential converts to the philosophical way of life are swayed simply by the extra-​philosophical auctoritas of the philosopher through whom they learn about that life, but rather that that auctoritas helps to get the philosopher his initial hearing, to open up the space in which reasoned dialogue can take place. It is this potential to gain access to 42. See especially Diog. Laert. 6.36–​69. 43. On the diatribe, see Oltramare 1926 and, for a compact overview, Williams 2015, 139–​40. 44. See Dudley 1937, 28–​9 and 36–​7.

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those still governed by the ambient values of Roman society that the philosopher, especially the one of elite standing whose extra-​philosophical auctoritas would be of greatest use, would forfeit by engaging in behavior as obviously indecorous as haranguing people in the street in the manner of the Cynics. This is not, though, the sense of auctoritas that Seneca carries forward into the next part of his argument, that concerned with the status of philosophy itself. Instead, he suggests that the philosopher’s auctoritas is grounded in his claim to practice an art.45 By analogy with archery, Seneca suggests that an art ought, as a rule, to achieve its aim (Ep. 29.3); failures should be the exception rather than the norm, which is the reverse of what could be said of the Cynic practice of indiscriminate preaching. By taking the argument in this direction, Seneca suggests that the auctoritas a philosopher needs in order to be heard seriously is based not just in his standing according to prevailing social norms but also, and more importantly, in his ability to ground his moral interventions in a developed body of practical knowledge. Seneca’s description of this knowledge makes the philosopher’s choice of targets the outward index of his mastery of it. “Wisdom,” he writes, “is an art: let it seek that which is certain, let it choose those who will make progress, let it draw back from those of whom it has despaired” (sapientia ars est: certum petat, eligat profecturos, ab iis quos desperavit recedat, Ep. 29.3). We can see now why the Cynic mode of moral guidance corrodes the philosopher’s technical auctoritas even more potently than it does his social auctoritas. Since the philosopher, whatever his school (the Cynics not fully excepted) bases his moral guidance on the claim that human beings live better when their actions are guided by reflective knowledge of nature and humanity’s place within it, he must be especially wary of behaving in ways that show him to be deficient in that very knowledge. If he cannot, in his personal conduct, manifest an exact and discriminating understanding of those around him, how can he hope to convince any of them that the practice of philosophy will equip them with the knowledge of human nature they need to live happily? Seneca’s argument against Cynic methods of moral exhortation thus unfolds into a critique of the Cynics’ estimate of how much and what kind of knowledge human beings need to live in accordance with nature. On the Cynic view, as indicated earlier, the only knowledge that is really needed is the understanding

45. This primarily intellectual, rather than primarily social, sense of auctoritas is closest to the examples grouped by the OLD as 8d: “a claim to be considered authoritative, weight, authority, reliability, the grounds or justification (for a statement or action).” More broadly, it could also be said that these two senses, and the two different sets of criteria for epistemic trust they encapsulate, correspond to the two poles of the tension between philosophy and community we are tracing through Seneca’s corpus in this book.

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that human society is thoroughly corrupt, its values merely conventional, and its way of living antithetical to the way of life for which human beings are suited by nature. It is this simple and forceful message that the Cynics aim to impress upon all those with whom they come into contact. Seneca in this letter makes the manifest fact that very few of the Cynics’ listeners adopt their views into a suggestion that perhaps the truth about what it means to live in accordance with nature is more complicated. Philosophy can hope to win new practitioners only by showing itself to be an art of moral improvement, operating from a sophisticated and fine-​grained understanding of individual human beings, and the Cynics’ uniform and unelaborated picture of human nature necessarily precludes such an understanding. Stoicism, on the other hand, because it maintains that living in accordance with nature means living in society, has the conceptual resources not just to advance a general and abstract understanding of human nature but also to grasp individual human beings, in all the specificity of their unique histories and particular social locations. It is in the context of this polemic about knowledge of human nature that we can best answer the central interpretive problem raised by this letter: why, when Seneca opens the letter by stating that Marcellinus is not ready to hear the truth about his life, does he devote most of it (Ep. 29.4–​8) to explaining how he will “show him his own evils” (illi mala sua ostendere, Ep. 29.4) and offer him moral guidance? When we examine Seneca’s plans for his conversation with Marcellinus more closely, we can see that he has formulated them in such a way as to satisfy the strictures he puts forward in the first part of the letter. He does not give much detail about what he himself will say in his interview with Marcellinus, but he does describe with some particularity the defenses Marcellinus will employ against him (Ep. 29.4–​8). The recurrent future-​tense verbs (faciet, advocabit, iocabitur, occupabit, etc.; Ep. 29.5) strive to create the impression that Seneca is so thoroughly acquainted with Marcellinus’s character as to anticipate the exact contours of his resistance, demonstrating in a particular instance the utility of the Stoic interest in individuality sketched out in general terms in the preceding sentences. The specific shape of Marcellinus’s objections serves further to reinforce the larger point. These objections are not to any doctrinal claims Seneca might make, but rather to the lack of congruence between philosophy’s pretensions to promote virtue and the actual lives of its practitioners, which are characterized by sexual and alimentary license and the pursuit of political power: “[H]‌e will show me one philosopher in the act of adultery, another in a cookshop, another at court” (ostendet mihi alium in adulterio, alium in popina, alium in aula, Ep. 29.6). This set of charges against philosophy in general—​not against Stoicism in particular—​shows that foremost among the social phenomena of which the

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philosopher must take cognizance in his efforts to supply moral guidance is the public perception of philosophy itself. The Cynic practice of offering such guidance in broadcast fashion is ill-​equipped for subtle negotiation of the problems raised by the fact that philosophy already has a social presence and a specific history. Their wholesale rejection of historical and social nuance as irrelevant to the dictates of nature leaves the Cynics in no position to understand a world in which philosophy reflexively shapes the conditions of its own reception, for good and for ill.

Ep. 62 In the sixty-​second letter, the Cynic philosopher Demetrius becomes a vehicle for Seneca’s assertion of independence from the social ties that define his daily life, but in the process Seneca vindicates his own choice not to shake off those ties, a decision radically at variance with Demetrius’s example.46 Seneca begins the letter by dismissing as liars those who claim that the press of business keeps them from studia liberalia (i.e., philosophy).47 He contrasts his own situation: “I am free, I am free, Lucilius, and wherever I am, I am myself there” (vaco, Lucili, vaco, et ubicumque sum, ibi meus sum, Ep. 62.1). His description of how he attains this freedom is worth quoting at length: Whatever place I stand in, I pursue my thinking there and turn over something healthy in my mind. When I have given myself to my friends, I do not however withdraw from myself nor do I tarry among those with whom some period of time or a reason born of civil duty has put me together, but instead with whoever is best; to those people, in whatever place or whatever time they existed, I direct my mind. I carry Demetrius, the best of men, around with me and, with those dressed in purple left behind I speak with that half-​dressed man, I admire him. quocumque constiti loco, ibi cogitationes meas tracto et aliquid in animo salutare converso. cum me amicis dedi, non tamen mihi abduco nec cum illis moror quibus me tempus aliquod congregavit aut causa ex officio nata civili, sed cum optimo quoque sum; ad illos, in quocumque saeculo fuerunt, animum meum mitto. Demetrium, virorum optimum, mecum circumfero et relictis conchyliatis cum illo seminudo loquor, illum admiror. (Ep. 62.1–​3) 46. On Demetrius, see Dudley 1937, 125–​8; Billerbeck 1979, especially 12–​44 (Demetrius in Seneca’s writings); and Desmond 2008, 50–​2. 47. See the fourth chapter of this book on studia liberalia in Seneca’s writings.

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This passage could be said to rehearse in miniature one central dynamic of the Stoic response to Cynicism. On the one hand, it asserts the desirability of the Cynic ideal of independence from socially determined norms. This ideal rests on the possibility of the individual’s transcending his or her particular historical location and its purely contingent and conventional constraints. Seneca’s reference here to “some occasion” (aliquod tempus) casts special emphasis on this particularity and contingency; it allows us to see the Cynic project as one of emancipation from time in favor of the reassertion of an ahistorical human nature. On the other hand, Seneca makes it clear that, unlike the Cynics, he finds this project of liberation from time and convention entirely compatible with a life structured by the ordinary social obligations of a man of the Roman elite. Seneca spends time with his friends and with those to whom he is joined by civic duty, but these obligations are no obstacle to his mental communion with another set of friends, selected by merit rather than happenstance. The letter reconciles the Cynic ideal of the self-​sufficient individual with social and civic participation by taking a step further the Cynic notion that the philosopher can and should live independently: the philosopher’s independence from his environment should make it possible for him to set himself on the path to virtue in any sort of setting, including that of conventional social and political activity. I have chosen to juxtapose the twenty-​ninth and sixty-​second letters because considered together they form a complementary pair: Ep. 29 warns that viewing the philosopher as a solitary individual necessarily at odds with the surrounding society, as the Cynics tend to, leads to an indiscriminate and disordered mock-​ sociability, in which the authority and efficacy of the philosopher are lost. For someone who has the right understanding of society, though, under which its corruptions do not nullify its value as the incubator of philosophical art and as a distorted instantiation of natural human sociability, even participation in given and conventional social routines cannot impair the true independence that philosophy gives.

Ep. 90 In his sixty-​second letter, as we have seen, Seneca turns the Cynic celebration of the moral agent’s independence from society into an argument for the possibility of the philosopher’s living a normal life within society. This position requires a fuller and more systematic account of the effect a philosopher’s social and historical location can have on his or her moral development, and Seneca supplies such an account in his ninetieth letter. The letter’s expansive treatment of the history of culture and technology, as well as its tantalizing potential for helping to reconstruct the views of Posidonius on these topics, have long made it a particular focus

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of scholarly interest, often with the effect of detaching it from its context in the letter collection.48 When we ask what function Seneca intended for his history of culture to serve in the moral betterment of his readers, we can discern that in addition to denouncing luxury he is mounting a more subtle defense of philosophy as a sophisticated art. His account of human cultural development, as we are to see, indicts contemporary ways of living by reference to a vanished state of nature and at the same time upholds the necessity of a philosophical art of living that itself has no place in that state. This double purpose gives the letter a complex and, even by Senecan standards, jarring texture, for here Seneca pursues two separate lines of argument whose relation to one another is not at first glance very clear. In one strand, Seneca vigorously opposes Posidonius’s view that philosophers invented the arts that led human beings from their natural state into the civilized present. His case rests on the claim that these arts sever humanity from its natural and therefore proper condition. Seneca is effusive in his praise for the remote era in which human beings lived in that condition, and, as Sue Blundell writes, the letter is “ancient literature’s most eloquent and rapturous evocation of the primitive era.”49 In the other strand, Seneca maintains that in that condition human beings lacked true wisdom and thus true virtue. We thus find a “primitivist” and a “progressivist” understanding of human history juxtaposed in the same letter.50 How, if at all, are these two accounts of humanity’s moral trajectory to be reconciled? In the service of what larger end does Seneca combine them here? Let us begin with the moral decline Seneca traces. At the opening of the letter, he praises philosophy’s power to enable human beings to live well.51 Philosophy teaches that “there is [sc. by nature] fellowship among human beings” (inter homines consortium, Ep. 90.3). This fellowship was torn apart by greed, Seneca tells us,

48. For a full and up-​to-​date treatment of the letter’s relationship to Posidonius, with extensive further bibliography, see Zago 2012; cf. the fundamental treatment of Kidd 1988, 960–​71. 49. Blundell 1986, 217. 50. For an influential effort to distinguish several different sorts of primitivism in antiquity, see Lovejoy and Boas 1935, 1–​22. The primitivism on display in Ep. 90 is both chronological and cultural, in Lovejoy and Boas’s terms. That is, it both maintains that the past was in significant respects better than the present (chronological primitivism) and represents “the discontent of the civilized with civilization” (cultural primitivism; Lovejoy and Boas 1935, 7). The primitivist strain in Ep. 90 is, again in Lovejoy and Boas’s terms, both “hard” and “soft”: the life of the past is “at once easy and austere” (Lovejoy and Boas 1935, 263), though as is usual in Stoic (and Cynic) primitivism the “hard” strain predominates. Any discussion of Seneca’s primitivism, though, needs to be balanced by consideration of the countervailing progressivist strand in this letter. 51. The opening of the letter is discussed further later.

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before going on to discuss the system of government by the morally superior that prevailed before avarice worked its baleful effects. He mentions that Posidonius believed that wise men ruled in these long-​ago times (Ep. 90.5) and that in a more recent period, when the growth of vice made it impossible to assume any longer that peace would maintain itself spontaneously, it was wise men who drew up the laws that preserved order (Ep. 90.6).52 In all this Seneca concurs with Posidonius, but he parts company with his predecessor, as high as his regard for him is (Ep. 90.20), over the latter’s contention that “the arts which life uses every day were created by philosophy” (artes quidem a philosophia inventas quibus in cotidiano vita utitur, Ep. 90.7). Seneca’s polemic against Posidonius recurrently opposes the physical and cultural world shaped by these arts to the natural existence he holds them to have disrupted. Before examining Seneca’s picture of that natural existence, we should consider his reasons for believing that the advent of these arts marked a change for the worse and therefore they could not, by definition, be products of philosophy’s pursuit of wisdom. These reasons can be divided into two categories. One set of arguments points to the perniciousness of the arts’ products, another to the base character of their practitioners. We might be tempted to assimilate the first set of complaints, those directed against the products of the arts, to the familiar category of the Senecan tirade against luxury. Indeed, there are close parallels between the language Seneca uses here and that of arraignments of luxury both within his corpus and outside of it.53 But we should also note that this letter’s concerns about the arts of building in particular go well beyond the expected preoccupation with luxury. Seneca levels an additional and quite distinct grievance: in reshaping the physical environment, the arts of building interfere with the exercise of the inherent human capacity to learn from and draw moral inspiration from that environment. In describing the lives human beings led before there was an art of architecture, Seneca writes: 52. On these topics, see Zago 2012, 49–​138, and Wildberger 2018, 124–​33. Seneca’s detailed engagement with, and partial disagreement, with Posidonius’s view of the past should probably be connected to the fact that the latter was a historian as well as a philosopher; for an effort to reconstruct Posidonius’s understanding of the relationship between these two enterprises see Kidd 1989. For Seneca’s own, dismissive estimate of historiography’s value, see Nat. 7.16; cf. Brev. 13.3 and Nat. 3.praef.7 on the uselessness of mere information about events of the past. These slighting remarks about history as a pursuit should not be taken to mean that Seneca regards “history” in the larger sense, the human past in its entirety, as of ethical irrelevance, as I hope the readings undertaken in this book confirm. 53. To Seneca’s condemnation of luxurious building in this letter (e.g., Ep. 90.9, 90.15, 90.42–​3) compare, e.g., Ep. 86.6–​7, 89.21, and 114.9. On Roman discourse about luxury in building more generally, see Edwards 1993, 137–​72. The characteristic features of this discourse can be traced back at least to the second century bce: see Nichols 2010.

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Engraved ceilings did not hang over them, but the stars glided above as they lay in the open and the universe was driven forward, carrying out so great a labor in silence, a conspicuous spectacle of the nights . . . Why would it not delight them to wander amid such widely spread marvels? non inpendebant caelata laquearia, sed in aperto iacentis sidera superlabebantur et, insigne spectaculum noctium, mundus in praeceps agebatur, silentio tantum opus ducens . . . quidni iuvaret vagari inter tam late sparsa miracula? (Ep. 90.42) For the Stoics contemplation of the heavens is not simply an occasion for delight, as emphasized here (iuvaret) but also part of a human being’s naturally ordained suite of activities.54 Spending the night in a building not only softens one’s physical constitution but also takes away an opportunity to observe and understand the celestial phenomena that both instruct us about the nature of the world we live in, and thus help us grasp our proper place in it, and elevate us morally by lifting us out of the cramped and finite perspective to which we are ordinarily confined.55 Seneca’s criticism of civilization turns as much on its obstruction of our sensory and intellectual relationship to the world as on its direct effects on our behavior. That relationship is the central issue in his assessment of the arts’ practitioners, too. Here Seneca rehearses the common Greek and Roman suspicion of artisanal skill.56 The particular form that antipathy takes in this letter, though, bears on the questions we have been pursuing. He dismisses Posidonius’s interest in the relative priority of the hammer and tongs by remarking that “someone of quickened and sharp, but not great or elevated, intellect invented both of these, and whatever else must be sought by a bent body and a mind that regards the ground” (utraque invenit aliquis excitati ingenii acuti, non magni nec elati, et quidquid aliud corpore incurvato et animo humum spectante quaerendum est, Ep. 90.13). Seneca’s mention of bodily posture, coupled with the notion of a mind whose attention is fixed on the ground, activates the idea, especially popular with the Stoics but found in writers of other philosophical orientations as well, that the human body is so shaped as to enable and encourage study of the

54. See the discussion at Ot. 5.3–​4 of humanity’s natural fitness for observing the celestial bodies. This idea has Platonic and Aristotelian analogues, surveyed by Williams 2003. On the place of this passage in Seneca’s thinking about the availability of nature to human understanding, see Williams 2012, 268–​9. See also the discussion of posture later in this chapter. 55. The introduction to this book discusses more fully the function of natural study in Stoicism. 56. E.g., Cic. Off. 1.150, probably deriving from Panaetius.

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heavens.57 The turn toward the ground that Seneca holds to be evident in the body and mind of the inventor indicates his abdication of that natural function. It thus cannot be the case, Seneca holds, that such an inventor could be a wise man, for sages by definition live in accordance with nature. His case against the Posidonian position is thus not a simple recapitulation of the primitivist view that art and invention are inherently corrupting, or of the aristocratic view that the practitioners of the manual arts are by virtue of that practice ignoble, but rather, like his criticism of the roof ’s occlusion of the sky, an outgrowth of his conviction that the observation and study of the cosmos is an integral part of the well-​lived human life. Two further arguments concerning the inventors of these arts reinforce Seneca’s case against Posidonius. Both of these arguments challenge Posidonius’s account by putting forward a more nuanced and subtle historicization of the arts at issue. Posidonius, Seneca writes, “says that this too [here, the process of plowing fields, sowing seeds, and removing weeds] is the work of wise men, as if now also the cultivators of fields do not find many methods of increasing fertility” (hoc quoque opus ait esse sapientium, tamquam non nunc quoque plurima cultores agrorum nova inveniant per quae fertilitas augeatur, Ep. 90.21). This argument rests not on scorn for the humble arts of agriculture but rather on appreciation of the day-​to-​day inventiveness and ingenuity of farmers, coupled with the unstated premise that resourceful as they may be, they are manifestly not wise men, nor does Seneca seem to think it would be open to a defender of the Posidonian position to claim that they are. In Seneca’s eyes Posidonius stands convicted of a willingness to concede to the inventors of the past a comprehensive wisdom that he would not attribute to those engaged in identical activity in the present. Later in the letter Posidonius is quoted as making an explicit attempt to enforce the distinction that Seneca here shows him to assume. Seneca tells us that Posidonius believes that the wise man “withdrew himself from these arts” (abduxit . . . se . . . ab istis artibus, Ep. 90.30) by handing off lesser tasks to subordinates once he had invented the arts in question (Ep. 90.25). This claim divides the origin of the arts in question from their subsequent practice, and thus seeks to insulate their inventors from the moral indictment Seneca brings against them on the basis of those arts’ contemporary effects. Even if we were to accept this

57. Senecan examples: Ep. 94.56, Ot. 5.4 (see discussion in n. 49 above), Nat. 5.15.3 (especially germane to our passage since Seneca here condemns the abandonment of this natural design in mining). Cf. Cic. N.D. 2.140 and, for further Stoic and non-​Stoic comparanda, the collection of parallels at Pease 1958; see Pease’s comments both on humo excitatos (914) and deorum cognitionem . . . capere (915), the latter of which also bears on the question of sleeping indoors, discussed earlier.

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Posidonian claim, it would not vitiate the force of Seneca’s earlier observation that innovation continues in the agricultural arts: Seneca’s point is that there is no useful distinction to be made between invention and practice, since the quotidian practice of the arts in question clearly includes further invention. Instead of reiterating that point, Seneca raises a more fundamental objection to the possibility that sages developed the material arts. The sage, he writes, “would not have judged anything worthy of invention that he would not have judged worthy of perpetual pursuit; he would not take up things that must be put aside” (nihil enim dignum inventu iudicasset quod non erat dignum perpetuo usu iudicaturus; ponenda non sumeret, Ep. 90.30). The wise man’s activity is founded, by definition, on a full apprehension of the relationship between that activity and the larger cosmic order. He could not, then, set in motion a chain of events that would ultimately conduce to the estrangement of human beings from their naturally ordained roles. Seneca’s challenge to Posidonius here is thus a subtle reiteration of an idea we have already encountered several times in our exploration of this letter: the best life for human beings is founded on a maximally broad, capacious, and rigorous understanding of the world in which they live. With this pattern in mind, we are equipped to understand Seneca’s contrast between Daedalus and Diogenes, a passage that can be seen as the pivot between the primitivist and progressivist conceptions of history at work in the letter. “How, I ask you, is it possible to admire both Diogenes and Daedalus?” (quomodo, oro te, convenit ut et Diogenen mireris et Daedalum?, Ep. 90. 14), Seneca writes. He attempts to distinguish the inventor from the philosopher, against Posidonius’s attempts to amalgamate them, by appealing to well-​known examples of each. The two figures are each surrounded by a nimbus of biographical legend that makes it easy for Seneca swiftly to bring out the contrasts between them.58 Seneca asks which of the two is a more plausible candidate for sagehood, the inventor of the saw or the man who gave up a drinking cup, one of his very few possessions, when he saw a child drinking water from his own cupped hands (Ep. 90.14). Daedalus’s characteristic power, for Seneca, is that of addition, as he increases humanity’s stock of tools and technical knowledge, while Diogenes’s is of subtraction: he is always able to pare down his own repertory of such accoutrements still further. When Seneca repeats and makes general his question about the relative viability of the inventor’s and the philosopher’s candidacies for sagehood, he extrapolates this pattern into his own era. He asks whether we should consider wiser the man who contrives various ingenious mechanisms of luxury or the one who “shows

58. On the biographical tradition surrounding Diogenes, see Sayre 1938, especially 99–​129, and Navia 1998, especially 1–​44. On the Daedalus legend, see Morris 1992, 3–​70 and 215–​68.

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both himself and others how nature demands of us nothing which is hard or difficult, that we are able to live without the marble-​cutter and the artisan, that we are able to be clothed without traffic in silks, that we are able to have the things which are necessary for our purposes, if we were content with those things which nature has placed on its surface” (et aliis et sibi monstrat, quam nihil nobis natura durum ac difficile imperaverit, posse nos habitare sine marmorario ac fabro, posse nos vestitos esse sine commercio sericorum, posse nos habere usibus nostris necessaria si contenti fuerimus iis quae terra posuit in summo, Ep. 90.15).59 Here again Seneca dwells on the philosopher’s ability to render unnecessary the arts and their products,60 but unlike in the brief anecdote about Diogenes retailed earlier, he now brings out the intellectual dimension of the philosopher’s activity. The distinctive role of that figure is to demonstrate to himself and those around him the truth of certain propositions, all of which are versions of the claim that nature, modified lightly or not at all by human action, is capable of fulfilling a human being’s legitimate needs. The Diogenes we glimpsed earlier in the letter clearly lives on the basis of that belief, but now Seneca makes it plain that the philosopher, if he is truly to qualify as a sage, must not only act on the basis of an understanding of nature but also reproduce that understanding in the minds of those among whom he lives.61 Both in Seneca’s brief reference to Diogenes and in the extended picture of the philosopher’s role more generally, we are given the philosopher as, specifically, a Cynic, whose moral excellence is closely tied to powers of renunciation. In emphasizing the social role of that figure, though, Seneca reminds us of the social purpose of his renunciation, for the point of the philosopher’s rejection of the way of life of those among whom he lives is seen to be their ultimate instruction and benefit. Furthermore, we can discern in this passage traces of a further qualification of this picture of philosophy as renunciation, one that suggests a break with the Cynic model. Seneca’s personification of the contrast between the inventor and the philosopher through mention of Daedalus and Diogenes draws

59. This description of Diogenes’s teaching accords particularly closely with the remarks ascribed to him at Diog. Laert. 6.44, albeit with some upscaling of the luxuries mentioned. 60. Jula Wildberger points out (2018, 129) that Seneca’s condemnation of these products as dispensable luxuries is “framed in terms of a central theme of the Epistulae morales as a whole: his Stoic adaptation of the Epicurean distinction between easily satisfiable natural desires and insatiable unnecessary desires that propagate and escalate without end.” For an individual to draw this distinction correctly, in the context of either doctrinal framework, requires a philosophical understanding of human nature. 61. See the last section of this chapter for further discussion of the sage’s role as moral exemplar in Seneca’s writings.

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us into a long-​standing controversy among the philosophical heirs of Socrates and in the process invites us to consider how stable this polarity really is. Xenophon reports that Socrates refuted Euthydemus’s claims that sophia (wisdom or skill) is a genuine good by asking him if he had not heard that Daedalus, seized by Minos “because of his wisdom” (διὰ τὴν σοφίαν), had lost his freedom and eventually his son (Mem. 4.2.33). This telling of Daedalus’s story makes a point parallel to the ones Socrates makes in the same conversation with respect to health, strength, and beauty (Xen. Mem. 4.2.31–​2, 4.2.34–​5): none of these supposed goods is good absolutely, since in some situations they have each proven harmful to those who possess them. As A. A. Long has pointed out, Xenophon’s account, though it reports an argument that aims to disprove Euthydemus’s assertions rather than put forward a positive doctrine of its own, stands in direct contradiction to a passage in Plato’s Euthydemus in which Socrates appears to endorse the claim that sophia is in fact a genuine good, because it and it alone allows for the right use of other goods (Pl. Euthyd. 281b). This contradiction, Long suggests, bears on a dispute between the Stoics and the Academic Skeptics about whether or not we can know what the good is, in which each side traced its own views to those of Socrates.62 A Stoic reader of Xenophon’s text, then, would have two options: he could emphasize that Daedalus’s misfortunes are not genuine evils and certainly not caused by his sophia, or he could maintain that Daedalus never had that quality to begin with. It is exactly the latter tack that Seneca takes in our passage. He is unable, though, fully to dissolve the connections between Daedalus and wisdom that are deeply embedded in the Socratic tradition. In Plato’s Euthyphro, Socrates mentions his own descent from Daedalus and suggests that his interlocutor’s statements exhibit the wondrous mobility associated with Daedalus’s creations. There follows an exchange about which of the two is truly the more Daedalic, in the course of which Socrates remarks that since he seems to be sophos without intending to be so, he has surpassed his ancestor in that respect (Pl. Euthphr. 11b–​d). Socrates’ claim of descent from Daedalus, Euthyphro’s attempt to draw similarities between the activities of the two, and Socrates’ acknowledgment, however partial and ironic, of those similarities forge a link between

62. Long 1988, 171. Cf. 152 on the absence of the modern “Socratic problem” in Hellenistic debates over the legacy of Socrates: “If [Hellenistic philosophers] were aware of discrepancies between Xenophon’s accounts and Plato’s dialogues, these were not regarded as any reason to prefer one account to the other. Control of the material, we can conjecture, was determined not by preconceptions about the superiority in historicity or philosophical sophistication of Plato or Xenophon, but by the need to derive from both of them a well-​founded philosophical paradigm that would be internally coherent and consistent with the Hellenistic philosopher’s own stance.”

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the two figures that Seneca’s mention of Daedalus here activates. Furthermore, Socrates’ association of Daedalus with sophia in both Plato and Xenophon points to the strength of the link between craftsmanship and wisdom in the Socratic tradition, which we can see both in Socrates’ recurring use of the craft analogy to explain human virtue and in the comparisons Xenophon has him make between craftsmanship and the activity of the divine intelligence responsible for creating human beings.63 Seneca’s choice of Daedalus to represent the craftsman draws attention to these associations and thus to the long-​standing nexus between wisdom and craftsmanlike skill in the Socratic tradition, reinforced both by the Greek use of one word (σοφία) to denote both and by the fact that Seneca uses the same Latin word (ars) to refer to the Daedalic manual arts he deplores and the art of living he argues for and deems neglected by Diogenes’s heirs.64 The complexities evoked by the figure of Daedalus are one sign that Seneca’s glorification of the past is far from absolute or unambivalent, and they make a fitting point of transition to our discussion of the countervailing narrative of moral progress that runs through the letter. This other narrative is announced from the very first sentence of the letter. “Who is able to doubt, my Lucilius,” Seneca asks, “that it is the gift of the immortal gods that we live, of philosophy that we live well?” (quis dubitare, mi Lucili, potest quin deorum immortalium munus sit quod vivimus, philosophiae quod bene vivimus?, Ep. 90.1). Already with this sentence Seneca makes clear his view that human effort, channeled through the historically situated art of philosophy, is responsible for happiness. This statement has two opposed implications for the question we have been tracking, that of the individual’s power to make moral progress independent of his or her social environment. On the one hand, Seneca vests the power to confer virtue in human beings rather than gods and so makes that power reflexive: its agents, human beings, are the same as its objects and beneficiaries. It is this side of his position that he develops when he goes on to remark that “as it is, this is valuable and impressive about wisdom: it does not come by happenstance, each person owes it to himself, it is not sought from another” (nunc enim hoc in illa pretiosum atque magnificum est, quod non obvenit, quod illam sibi quisque debet, quod non ab alio petitur,

63. Xen. Mem. 4.3; see Sedley 2007, 78–​86, and cf. Sedley’s (93–​132) discussion of the role of the craft analogy in Plato’s Timaeus. For surveys of the complex relationship between techne, sophia, and episteme in Plato’s writings, see Roochnik 1996, 89–​177, and Angier 2010, 13–​35. The key point for our purposes here is that the manual crafts and the figure of Daedalus as their representative are not readily disentangled, in the Socratic tradition to which Seneca is heir, from the moral expertise that allows for a virtuous and happy life. On the language of the plastic arts in Seneca’s writings, see Cermatori 2014. 64. See the earlier discussion of Ep. 29.

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Ep. 90.2). On the other hand, though, Seneca ties that power to a particular set of social and historical circumstances through his conception of philosophy as a developed art. Human beings can make themselves virtuous, independently of the gods, but only human beings whose temporal and spatial position gives them access to the art of philosophy have this option. The independence that Seneca declares for humanity as a whole is thus in that very declaration qualified by a new dependence of the individual human being on his or her fellows. The moral history of humanity that Seneca presents throughout the letter is governed by the two poles of this tension: philosophy is an art that permits human beings to free themselves from the constraints of their historical and social location, but it is an art nonetheless, and thus embedded in a historical and social location of its own. This paradox complicates the story of moral decline Seneca sometimes seems to be telling into a more involved narrative with substantial space for progress. At first, it appears that philosophy’s function is merely to reverse or counteract the changes that lead humanity from its original state. Philosophy, Seneca writes, teaches that there should be “fellowship among human beings,” which “for a long time remained intact, before greed tore society apart” (. . . inter homines consortium. quod aliquamdiu inviolatum mansit, antequam societatem avaritia distraxit, Ep. 90.3). This sentence supplies the starting point for Seneca’s discussion of human cultural development, an account that first follows Posidonius’s (Ep. 90.5–​7) and then diverges from it, as discussed earlier, on the question of whether or not sages invented the manual arts. Seneca’s manner of rejecting the notion that wisdom is responsible for these advances does, as we have seen, suggest that wisdom is primarily knowledge of what can be done without, a way of paring back one’s needs into conformity with the simple life led by the human beings of long ago. But Seneca’s picture of these early human beings undermines this tendency to identify their way of life with the life according to nature. In other words, it replaces the common assumption that we can determine how human beings naturally live by reference to how they lived in the remote past with the very different idea that the life human beings are meant by nature to live is accessible only through the practice of a sophisticated and historically specific art of living. Seneca begins his exposition of this theme by denying that philosophy was practiced at all in the remote epoch he is discussing (Ep. 90.35). In a move that reflects the double evaluation of this period we have been tracing throughout the letter, he then turns to lengthy praise of the life human beings then led (Ep. 90.37–​43). But the terms in which this praise is introduced are revealing. “No one,” Seneca writes, “would have chosen any other condition of the human race, nor, if a god allowed someone to shape earthly things and give customs to peoples, would he approve anything other than that state which is remembered to have

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been among those among whom . . .” (statum quidem generis humani non alium quisquam suspexerit magis, nec si cui permittat deus terrena formare et dare gentibus mores, aliud probaverit quam quod apud illos fuisse memoratur apud quos . . . , Ep. 90.37), after which follows a quotation from Virgil’s first Georgic (125–​8) about the absence of agriculture and the earth’s spontaneous provision of food, the most direct connection Seneca supplies between his letter and the depiction of the Golden Age in Latin poetry.65 The praise Seneca here accords the Golden Age uses the language of deliberate choice: this way of living is what someone would choose, or what someone would decree for all human beings if given the opportunity to do so by the gods. As in the earlier mention of philosophy’s role in repairing the human concord ripped asunder by greed, this passage sets up the conditions of the Golden Age as the proper object of informed human choice. In a much more overt way than earlier, though, Seneca here focuses his attention on the act of choice itself. When the goodness of the Golden Age is explained by noting that someone who, unlike those who live in that age, is familiar with the full spectrum of possible ways of living would choose it as the best, the lost innocence of the Golden Age has already been subtly displaced by a quite different ideal, that of choice guided by knowledge. If we keep in view the way this standard is built into Seneca’s praise of the life of early human beings, his declaration that they were not, after all, virtuous seems less abrupt. When he writes that “they [the inhabitants of that simpler time] were innocent through ignorance of things, and it matters a great deal whether someone does not wish to do wrong, or does not know how to” (ignorantia rerum innocentes erant; multum autem interest utrum peccare aliquis nolit an nesciat, Ep. 90.46), he is simply amplifying the point he made in his endorsement of their way of life: there can be no evaluation without informed comparison, and so the very act of attempting to evaluate the simple life, even if the ultimate evaluation itself is favorable, highlights the inability of those living such a life to undertake any comparison. Seneca thus shows that any effort to arrive at a judgment on the past inevitably privileges the present, which has, if nothing else, the breadth of knowledge needed to frame the comparison. This emphasis on the conditions presupposed by comparison of the past and present is one way for Seneca to draw out the contradictions latent in the primitivist conception of human history as a story of moral decline. Seneca highlights

65. Seneca has already suggested this connection at Ep. 90.5: illo ergo saeculo quod aureum perhibent penes sapientes fuisse regnum Posidonius iudicat. On the Golden Age tradition, see Gatz 1967 and Kubusch 1986; see also further discussion in the treatment of Ep. 95 later in the chapter. Seneca appears to disapprove of the term saeculum aureum itself, which to him reflects the widespread delusion that precious metals are of genuine value (Ep. 115.13).

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these contradictions in another way as well, though. His telling of the story of human moral decline, with the Stoic doctrine of virtue as something that cannot be altered or lost hovering in the background, makes it plain that the early human beings could not have possessed true virtue.66 Seneca rehearses the fall from blessedness that is at the heart of the primitivist narrative, but in the very act of doing so he repudiates the primitivist claim that the past was morally superior to the present. He makes the defining proposition of chronological primitivism, the idea that the past is superior to the present, into an argument against it, for the genuine good is not susceptible to decline. The doctrine he sets in place of the primitivist narrative, that “nature does not give virtue: it is an art to become good” (non enim dat natura virtutem: ars est bonum fieri, Ep. 90.44), might seem to be at variance with the Stoic conception of the good life as lived in accordance with nature. The sentence should be read, though, with the emphasis on dat rather than on natura: nature does not simply bestow virtue on everyone, but properly studied it provides the pattern in accordance with which the virtuous life is lived. This sentence denies the Cynic claim that virtue can be attained merely by casting aside the trammels of civilization, but its substitution of art for natural birthright as the door to virtue preserves one facet of the Cynic doctrine: virtue is still open to everyone, but only through wide learning and disciplined study. We have thus returned to the governing idea of the letter’s opening, that philosophy rather than the gods must be counted as the source of the good life. In between these two soundings of this theme, Seneca has reinforced it with a comprehensive vision of human moral development. As we have seen, he uses this vision, with its redeployment of Golden Age myth, to show the ultimate inadequacy of that age, to spell out both what philosophy is and what it is not. His history differentiates philosophy from, on the one side, the arts that do not have virtue as their end and, on the other side, Cynic renunciation of all craft and sophistication. Against this background, it defines philosophy as the one art that elevates its practitioner and as the only means of access to the virtue of which Golden Age simplicity is only a fleeting and unstable prefiguration.

De Beneficiis 7 and Ep. 95 We have seen that in Ep. 90 Seneca offers a sketch of the human past that shows why we need philosophy today. This section of the chapter continues our exploration of Seneca’s strategies for confronting and containing the potentially destabilizing Cynic heritage within Stoicism. Cynicism holds out the attractive and yet

66. Virtue cannot be lost or altered: Ep. 50.8–​9, 76.19, 98.9; C.S. 5.3.

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dangerous prospect of a practice of self-​improvement that involves only minimal intellectual activity and thus guarantees the total independence of its practitioner from his social and cultural context. We can see how Seneca responds to this appeal by reading in tandem the speech of the Cynic philosopher Demetrius at Ben. 7 and the ninety-​fifth of the Epistulae Morales. The latter text gives voice to an interlocutor who derives from premises very different from those of the Cynics a view of moral progress that, like theirs, holds that involved philosophical formation is superfluous at best. Demetrius’s speech is quoted in De Beneficiis to advance Seneca’s argument and indeed, as discussed later, to defend the structure of the work as a whole. We will highlight the features of the speech that nevertheless pose problems for the conception of the philosophical life that Seneca embraced, and then we will survey the historical argument that Seneca uses in Ep. 95 to defend that conception from attacks actuated by the same concerns to which Demetrius gives voice in De Beneficiis. By taking these texts in conjunction with one another, we can see the double movement this book has traced through Seneca’s writings, in which he claims for philosophy unique powers to confer independence but at the same time offers a subtly reflexive account of its embeddedness in society. What emerges from Seneca’s confrontation with these concerns, I argue, is a stronger and more detailed account of what philosophy is, how it became the way it is, and how it responds to social change. Seneca presents the seventh and final book of his De Beneficiis as haphazardly structured: “[T]‌his book collects what is left over,” he writes, “and with my subject exhausted, I look around not for what I might say, but for what I have not said” (reliqua hic liber cogit, et exhausta materia circumspicio, non quid dicam, sed quid non dixerim, Ben. 7.1.1). The seventh book’s preoccupation with Cynic doctrine is formally connected to the book’s professed formlessness.67 Seneca’s statement that he has concentrated the important matter in the treatise at the beginning and left trivialities to the end marks a distinction between the simple enunciation of rules and their further elaboration: “nor indeed, if you ask me, do I think that it pertains very much to the matter at hand, once what regulates behavior has been said, to pursue other things which are thought up not for the healing of the mind but for the practice of cleverness” (nec mehercules, si me interroges, nimis ad rem existimo pertinere, ubi dicta sunt quae regunt mores, prosequi cetera non in remedium animi, sed in exercitationem ingenii inventa, Ben. 7.1.2). This claim is defended by appeal to Demetrius, who “is accustomed to say that it is more profitable if you have a few teachings of wisdom, but have those at the ready for

67. Note that Demetrius reappears later in the book (7.8.2–​7.11.2), and the Cynic Bion of Borysthenes is also quoted (7.7.2).

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yourself and in use, than if you have learned many but do not have those ready to hand” (hoc dicere . . . solet plus prodesse si pauca praecepta sapientiae teneas sed illa in promptu tibi et in usu sint, quam si multa quidem didiceris sed illa non habeas ad manum, Ben. 7.1.3). This report of Demetrius’s views emphasizes the scope of the student’s philosophical ambition as the determinant of whether or not he will have a practical command of ethical doctrine; there is an implied inverse correlation between the breadth of doctrine that the student attempts to master and his success in conforming his conduct to that doctrine. It is scale rather than character or focus of philosophical study that Demetrius is shown here to be concerned with. His opening remarks in the speech Seneca assigns him carry the same emphasis, but it is not long before this view is complicated by the introduction of a related but distinct concern: Demetrius lists some standard preoccupations of physics, then remarks, “[I]t will not harm you much to have passed over what you neither can know nor profit from knowing” (non multum tibi nocebit transisse quae nec licet scire nec prodest, Ben. 7.1.5). This fracturing of the link between physics and ethics takes on a more explicitly Cynic cast when Demetrius argues that “we are not able to complain of the ill-​will of nature, because it is not difficult to find anything except that which has the finding alone as the reward for having found it” (nec de malignitate naturae queri possumus, quia nullius rei difficilis inventio est, nisi cuius hic unus inventae fructus est, invenisse, Ben. 7.1.6). Demetrius grounds his opposition to physical inquiry in what is, as noted earlier, a standard Cynic claim about the natural order: nature is providentially organized in such a way as to make the knowledge human beings actually need in order to live well immediately accessible. Nature provides us readily with what we really need in order to live; therefore it cannot be the case that we really need knowledge that is difficult to obtain in order to live in accordance with nature. The difficulty of moral progress, then, is in the retention and constant application of precepts, not in their discovery, a claim that minimizes the part of philosophical investigation and debate in the path toward virtue. We can profitably contrast the position taken here by Demetrius with that expounded by Seneca in his ninety-​fifth letter. This letter forms part of a pair with its predecessor; together the two explain the relationship between praecepta, or direct and non-​technical moral guidance, and decreta, or technical philosophical doctrine, with Ep. 94 arguing against an interlocutor who denies the utility of praecepta and Ep. 95 attacking the inverse position, that praecepta alone are necessary for moral progress.68 The interlocutor in Ep. 94 takes inspiration from

68. These letters provide central evidence for Stoic conceptions of moral reasoning and have become the focus of intense debate. Since I. G. Kidd’s 1978 article on moral rules in Stoicism,

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the Cynicizing Stoic dissident Aristo of Chios, and so the affinities between Seneca’s argument in that letter and his response to Demetrius in De Beneficiis are clear. When we read both of these in conjunction with Seneca’s complementary defense of decreta in Ep. 95, we can see that despite the differences in the positions taken by the interlocutors in these texts, Seneca uses similar tactics against all of them, in each case aiming to show the inadequacy of any ethics that does not mandate the practice of philosophy as a comprehensive, articulated, and intellectually demanding whole. Aristo of Chios, whose views are the focus of Ep. 94, maintained that there were no degrees of value among indifferents (those things which are designated by Stoic moral theory as in themselves neither good nor bad) and therefore that the only thing worthy of choice by the virtuous man or the aspirant to virtue was virtue itself.69 This view has obvious affinities with Cynicism in its refusal not only to assign any value whatsoever to anything outside the good, a stance it shares with orthodox (Chrysippean) Stoicism, but also even to allow that the good agent would prefer some indifferents over others.70 So successful was Aristo in presenting this refusal as a necessary corollary of the Stoic doctrine that virtue was the only good that two centuries later, long after the Aristonic variant of Stoicism had vanished from the landscape of philosophical practice, Cicero used Aristo’s arguments to maintain that the Stoic concept of preferred indifferents implicitly conceded the desirability of external goods (Fin. 4.68–​73). As part of his Cynicizing project of restoring philosophy to a maximally tight focus on the acquisition of virtue, a project that Donald Dudley describes as “a protest against the additions with which Zeno had encumbered the simple Socratic ethics he had inherited from the Cynics,”71 Aristo excised logic and physics from his conception of ethics, and as we learn in Ep. 94, he demanded that philosophy cease dispensing particular moral guidance and offer only the simple principle that there

discussion of these two letters has been dominated by the question of whether Stoic deliberation is indeed structured by rules, and if so what sort of explanation these letters provide of those rules’ operation. Key interventions in this debate, of which Schafer 2009, 34–​41, provides an overview, are Annas 1993, 94–​108; Mitsis 1993; and Inwood 2005, 95–​131. Schafer (2009, 33–​65) has argued that this debate is misguided; he supplies a reading of the letters under which the distinction between praecepta and decreta reflects the different roles played in moral guidance by the two forms of instruction and is not intended as an account of moral deliberation. Though I find Schafer’s interpretation persuasive, the outcome of his debate with previous interpreters of the letter has little bearing on the interests I pursue in this discussion of Ep. 95. See also K. M. Vogt 2008, 195–​8. 69. On Aristo, see Ioppolo 1980; Striker 1991, 14–​24; Porter 1996. 70. For a summary of the issues in this debate, see Schafer 2009, 27–​30. 71. Dudley 1937, 100.

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is no good but virtue.72 As John Schafer suggests, the conflict between Aristo and Chrysippus on these points both bears on the most fundamental problems of Stoic ethics and has direct and sweeping consequences for the school’s vision of how philosophy is to be practiced: The doctrine of naturally preferred and dispreferred indifferents shifted the school’s vision of the ideal way of life away from the utter radicalism of the Cynics and closer to conventional norms. At the same time, of course, the Stoics held fast to the central claim that virtue is the only good; the complicated relationship between virtue’s transcendent goodness and the normative pull exerted by the preferred indifferents is perhaps the most distinctive and problematic feature of their ethics. And finally, their acceptance of advice-​giving as part of the philosophical life had great consequences for their practice, and for what we might call the social reality of the Stoic life.73 Unsurprisingly in light of their shared Cynic roots, Demetrius’s program for philosophical education shares Aristo’s emphasis on abstraction and on the sharp divide between the good and everything else. In his summary of Demetrius’s views, Seneca writes of the aspirant to virtue, “[L]‌et him know that nothing is bad except the base and nothing good except the honorable. Let him divide the works of life by this rule; let him perform and regulate all things according to this law” (sciat nec malum esse ullum nisi turpe nec bonum nisi honestum. hac regula vitae opera distribuat; ad hanc legem et agat cuncta et exigat, Ben. 7.2.2). Compare this statement to one of Aristo’s reported in Ep. 94: “[W]hen a man has well understood and learned [the definition of the supreme good] he himself teaches himself what is to be done in each matter . . . He who has drawn himself up for all of life does not need to be admonished about particulars” (quam qui bene intellexit ac didicit, quid in quaque re faciendum sit sibi ipse praecipit . . . qui se ad totam vitam instruxit non desiderat particulatim admoneri, Ep. 94.2–​3). Demetrius and Aristo have in common a concentration on the uniqueness of the good that translates into a consolidation of all ethical maxims into the definition of the good, and thus to a suspicion of the particularity involved in preceptive guidance. 72. See the quotation from Rist 1969 earlier for the causal connection between these two points of contention dividing Aristo and the Cynics from the orthodox Stoics. Seneca remarks on Aristo’s rejection of the logical and physical parts of philosophy at Ep. 89.13. Aristo’s arguments against the necessity of praecepta: Ep. 94.5–​17. 73. Schafer 2009, 30.

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We can perceive a connection between Demetrius and the interlocutor in Ep. 95, who maintains the apparently contrary position that precepts alone suffice for moral progress, when we note that both of them, despite the differences in their conception of how moral progress works, share a conviction that the engine of that progress should be, and as a matter of natural order is, simple and accessible without sustained and formal intellectual exertion. The question of whether or not such exertion—​“abstruse training,” institutione subtili, as the interlocutor in Ep. 95 calls it at one point (95.36)—​is necessary is the question of whether or not an aspirant to virtue can readily dispense with the social apparatus of philosophical formation, and thus the degree to which such an aspirant can make progress in entire self-​sufficiency. For both Demetrius and the interlocutor in Ep. 95, the moral guidance we need to make progress is not difficult to come by. The former proposes that we jettison any form of moral guidance other than the master principle that the good is necessary and sufficient for a happy life; the latter wants us to rely on concrete and specific moral guidance without worrying about how to anchor that guidance in any more general conception of the good. The two lines of argument thus converge on a rejection of an integrated and developed philosophical art of living. Seneca’s rebuttal of Demetrius’s claims on this point in particular can thus help us situate his handling of the views put forward by the interlocutor in Ep. 95 in the larger context of the dilemmas posed by the question of philosophical self-​sufficiency. In Ep. 95 Seneca comes to grips with that question through a historicizing argument for a philosophical practice that integrates concrete paraenetic guidance with an effort to give that guidance a defensible foundation. The interlocutor makes four arguments successively in support of his claim that philosophy can accomplish its function by precept alone: the first argument (Ep. 95.4–​6) consists of the double claim that happiness lies in right action and that precepts guide action, making any other philosophical intervention unnecessary; his second argument (Ep. 95.7–​12) draws an analogy to other arts that are so taught; the third (Ep. 95.13–​35) rests on the contention that precepts were enough to instill virtue in the morally superior past; and the fourth (Ep. 95.36–​38) points to the existence of individuals who were able to attain virtue without the aid of the integrated philosophical practice Seneca defends.74 Seneca’s responses to the second and third of these arguments together defend the necessity of philosophy in its developed Stoic conception, as opposed to the at once simpler and more stringent Cynic conception as adumbrated by Demetrius in Ben. 7, and explain how that necessity arises from social conditions.

74. Schafer 2009, 20–​2, offers a useful overview of these arguments.

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Seneca disposes of the interlocutor’s second claim, that other arts rely on precept alone, by insisting on philosophy’s hybrid status as an art with both theoretical and practical aims. “You err,” he writes, “if you think that philosophy promises you only earthly results; its aspirations are higher” (erras enim, si tibi illam putas tantum terrestres operas promittere; altius spirat, Ep. 95.10). A speech given to Philosophy personified includes this declaration: “[G]‌reat things, and things placed above you, call me” (magna me vocant supraque vos posita, Ep. 95.10). Just as Demetrius in De Beneficiis rests his defense of a circumscribed and sharply practical philosophy on a claim about natural order—​that the truths governing right action are naturally easy to discover—​so Seneca here appeals to nature in an effort to demonstrate the converse: the natural phenomena that are the objects of study in physics exert an independent and ineluctable hold on philosophy. By their nature, they command philosophical attention, regardless of the narrower, more strictly ethical interests to which philosophy’s practitioners might try to confine it. Seneca’s choice of illustrative quotation here is pointed. He offers a passage from Lucretius (1.54–​57) that indeed expresses a drive for cosmic understanding, but does so as part of an exposition of Epicurean physics that is explicitly instrumental to the practical aim of dispelling fear of death and the afterlife.75 The associations generated by this context supplement the argument for the independent benefits of natural understanding into which Seneca inserts the quotation with a reminder of the ethical benefits to be derived from physical study, though Seneca would have rejected the narrow ways in which Lucretius and his fellow Epicureans specified those benefits. The next claim, that “ancient wisdom taught nothing other than what was to be done and what avoided, and in those times men were better by far” (antiqua . . . sapientia nihil aliud quam facienda ac vitanda praecepit, et tunc longe meliores erant viri, Ep. 95.13), elicits from Seneca an entirely different sort of response, one that turns not on the inherent nature of philosophy but on the social conditions that call it into being. Schafer remarks that “judging by the length at which Seneca discusses this objection (roughly a third of the letter) this problem is particularly close to his concerns in this letter.”76 The problem of justifying a sophisticated and often technical art of living, Seneca recognizes, lies in reconciling that justification with the widespread consensus, in which

75. See Lucr. 1.146–​58. For the self-​conscious instrumentalism of Epicurean physics more generally, with specific reference to celestial phenomena, see Ad Pythoclem 85–​87=LS 18C and Kyria Doxa 11–​12=LS 25B, with discussion in Sharples 1996, 14 and 91. For comparison and contrast of this motive for physical study with those put forward by Seneca, see Schiesaro 2015, 246–​51. 76. Schafer 2009, 21.

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Seneca participated, that the time before the rise of philosophy was marked by a general level of moral excellence not matched in the present.77 This difficulty prompts Seneca to elaborate the analogy between medicine and philosophy into an explanation of why changing social circumstance has made necessary a specifically philosophical art of living. The core of Seneca’s response to the charge that at the hands of philosophers “that simple and open wisdom has been turned into a shadowy and erudite study” (simplex enim illa et aperta virtus in obscuram et sollertem scientiam versa est, Ep. 95.13) is to claim that “now it is necessary that our defenses be more elaborate to the same extent that what attacks us is fiercer” (nunc necesse est tanto operosiora esse munimenta quanto vehementiora sunt quibus petimur, Ep. 95.14). That is, the quality of laboredness and artificiality the interlocutor decries in contemporary philosophy is an indication not of the level of difficulty inherent in achieving virtue but of the historically specific conditions that have made tortuous the once open path to virtue. It is the medical analogy, though, that allows Seneca to make concrete his situation of philosophical practice in history. He offers a capsule history of medicine in which he emphasizes, first, the growing scope and complexity of the art and, second, the fact that this change is a response to changing ambient conditions rather than a dynamic inherent in the medical art itself. He begins with the statement that “medicine was formerly the knowledge of a few plants by means of which flowing blood might be stanched and wounds might heal” (medicina quondam paucarum fuit scientia herbarum quibus sisteretur fluens sanguis, vulnera coirent, Ep. 95.15). The mention of herbae accentuates not only the directness and simplicity of primitive medicine but also its wide accessibility. Further, since the plants used for healing are few, there is no barrier of technical knowledge sharply dividing the practitioner from the layman. Seneca sets up this stage of medicine’s development as its natural level by describing the problems it addresses in simple terms and giving them no specific etiology, leaving us to surmise that these wounds are inevitable concomitants of even a simple life. Medicine, then, is under natural conditions simple and open; its transformation into a radically more complex art is triggered by external social change. Seneca indicates the motor of this transition when he says of medicine’s early days, “nor is it remarkable that medicine had less to do at that time, when bodies were still firm and solid and food was simple, not yet corrupted by art and pleasure” (nec est mirum tunc illam minus negotii habuisse firmis adhuc solidisque corporibus et facili cibo nec per artem voluptatemque corrupto, Ep. 95.15). Seneca aims here to defend a doctrinally elaborate

77. See Ep. 90 and earlier discussion. Seneca’s tendency to present the past as morally superior is extensively documented in Costa 2013.

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philosophy as an art of moral progress, but that defense turns on the assignment of a morally and physically corrosive role to ars more generally. To justify philosophy’s theoretical sophistication to the advocates of a narrowly practical paraenesis, he concurs in their broader suspicion of such sophistication but uses the medical analogy to attribute philosophy’s growing complexity to the emergence of an art of sensory gratification. Seneca’s exposition of what this art entails (Ep. 95.16–​29) is, of course, a characteristic denunciatory set piece, but its content serves to make more subtle and incisive the medical analogy common throughout ancient philosophy’s efforts at self-​description.78 He embarks upon a catalogue of the physical effects of luxury and gluttony, many of them not very obviously connected to his central target, which is the use of food “not to relieve but to stimulate appetite” (non ad tollendam sed ad inritandam famem, Ep. 95.15). In drawing a causal connection between this shift in the purpose of eating on the one hand and an array of deformations, aches, and fevers on the other, Seneca himself gives a specimen of the developed medical knowledge whose origin he is describing.79 The scientific underpinnings of this harangue, then, have clear implications for the letter’s larger question, that of the utility of philosophical study that might not seem to be of immediate ethical import. This catalogue performs a triple function in the educational project of this letter: at the most explicit level, as part of the medical analogy, it helps to build Seneca’s account of philosophy’s development, but it also serves as a vivid if implicit exhortation to moderation in eating and, at the same time, through the display of biological knowledge mentioned earlier, as an example of the part physical study can play in ethical argument. This catalogue of ailments is typically Senecan not only in its outré stridency but also in its demonstration, at the level of literary practice, of the value of the conception of philosophy Seneca is defending. This recitation of the physical ills brought about by the interference of ars with the natural relationship between human beings and their environment characterizes the disruption of that relationship in terms evocative of the transition out of the Golden Age. In particular, Seneca links the collection of rare foodstuffs 78. The most useful summary account of what ancient philosophy took from the medical analogy, complete with a comprehensive description of “what philosophical arguments can be expected to be like if understood in terms of [the analogy],” is Nussbaum 1994, 45–​7; see more recently Dietsche 2014, 65–​71. For a particularly full deployment of this analogy in Roman philosophy, see Cic. TD 3.1–​6, with discussion in Graver 2002, 73–​8, and Gildenhard 2007, 167–​87. 79. On the medical sources Seneca draws on in this letter, see Bocchi 2011, 127–​9. Gazzarri 2014, 210, compares the catalogue of ailments to a “topical banquet description;” ever-​more complex menus have ever-​more complex physical effects.

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to the sea travel that allows for the indulgence of such tastes: “see,” he writes, “the quantity of things that luxury, the looter of land and sea, mingles together so that they might traverse a single throat” (vide quantum rerum per unam gulam transiturarum permisceat luxuria, terrarum marisque vastatrix, Ep. 95.19).80 The age before sophisticated medicine cannot simply be identified with the Golden Age of the poetic tradition, though, since we learn that among the reasons for pre-​medical rude health was the exercise provided by hunting and farming: “their bodies,” Seneca tells us, “became tough because of toil and real labor, tired out by running or by hunting or by turning over the earth” (corpora opere ac vero labore durabant, aut cursu defatigati aut venatu aut tellure versanda, Ep. 95.18). Hunting and agriculture have a firm place in the list of arts that mark the transition to the Iron Age across a number of authors, and as Denis Feeney notes in his discussion of Ep. 90, “in Seneca, as befits a student of Catullus, Horace, and Virgil, the artes are themselves the tipping point, irrevocably pitching humans into the fallen state.”81 Feeney also draws attention to the frequency with which Seneca in the earlier letter “quotes from the crucial Iron Age section of Virgil’s first Georgic as his master text on the subject” of the arts’ role in moral decline; in this context we should bear in mind that Virgil’s account, as Richard Thomas observes, is distinguished from the broader tradition on the subject by the fact that “the latter age, the time of Jupiter, is characterized almost solely by its emphasis on labor.”82 It is verus labor that Seneca credits with sustaining the health of human beings before medicine was needed, and indeed there are other verbal echoes of the first Georgic in the same sentence.83 The human beings of the time Seneca is describing have already fallen from primal virtue and are obliged to toil for their livelihood but, unlike their less fortunate descendants, have left portions of their lives unaffected by the corrupting artes. Seneca’s vision of social degeneration here is, unlike the one that he puts forward in Ep. 90, explicitly depicted as a gradual one, in which the descent from the Golden Age is broken into discrete stages rather than identified as a singular event. Even more striking, the stages of this descent do not

80. For sea travel as a moral turning point, see most relevantly Med. 301–​79, with discussion at Feeney 2007, 127–​8. The causal conjunction between the corrupting forces of seafaring and luxury is explicit at Med. 332–​3; cf. Tib. 1.3.39–​40: nec vagus ignotis repetens conpendia terris /​ presserat externa navita merce ratem. 81. Feeney 2007, 130. Note also that at Ep. 90.37 the quotation from the first Georgic (125–​8) suggests that there is no agriculture in the epoch Seneca is discussing. For the absence of hunting and agriculture in representations of the Golden Age more generally, see Gatz 1967, 229–​30 s.v. terra sua sponte victum ferens, terra abundantem victum ferens, and abstinentia animalium. 82. Feeney 2007, 129; Richard Thomas 1988, 87. 83. versando terram, G. 1.119; duris urgens in rebus egestas, G. 1.146.

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form a chain of causation in which the discovery of one ars leads to that of others and thus to further corruption. On the contrary, hunting and agriculture are here assigned a conservative role; the exertions they require stave off the physical deterioration that impels the development of medicine. The role assigned to agriculture is not the only way in which this account shies away from the abrupt plunge from Golden Age innocence into vice. Seneca writes that “the greatest of physicians, and the founder of this science, said that women do not lose their hair or have pain in their feet; yet they are [now] bereft of hair and sick in the feet” (maximus ille medicorum et huius scientiae conditor feminis nec capillos defluere dixit nec pedes laborare: atqui et capillis destituuntur et pedibus aegrae sunt, Ep. 95.20).84 The contrast between the physical condition of contemporary women and that envisioned as possible by the founder of medicine, Hippocrates, marks Seneca’s model of the decline of health and the concomitant rise of medicine not as a simple dichotomy between a purely healthy past and a depraved present, but rather as a continual decline, in which there are important distinctions to be made not just between Seneca’s own time and a hazily dated epoch of virtue but also between the present and a period as recent as the time of Hippocrates.85 There are then several stages in the history of medicine as traced here by Seneca: the scientia herbarum mentioned at Ep. 95.15, straightforwardly concerned with the repair of wounds, cannot be the same as the medicine practiced by the conditor Hippocrates. Even if this nonidentity were not sufficiently established by the difference between Seneca’s description of primitive medicine and what he must have known Hippocrates’s art to be, we would have a further piece of evidence. At the beginning of his defense of philosophical decreta, Seneca writes that “many arts—​and indeed the most liberal ones of all—​have their own doctrines, not just precepts, just as medicine does. Thus the school of Hippocrates is one thing, that of Asclepiades another, that of Themison yet another” (artes quoque pleraeque—​immo ex omnibus liberalissimae—​habent decreta sua, non tantum praecepta, sicut medicina; itaque alia est Hippocratis secta, alia Asclepiadis, alia Themisonis, Ep. 95.9). The scientia herbarum, the rude practicality of which is the point of its introduction into the narrative, cannot be the same as the systematic and doctrinal art Seneca here shows Hippocrates to have founded. The age of Hippocrates, then, occupies yet another intermediate point

84. The alleged change in the properties of women’s bodies, the collapse of even the most basic distinction between those bodies and those of men, is of course meant to register precipitous moral decline, driven by and in turn promoting distortion of the natural order. For disturbances in the gender system as indices of moral decay in Seneca, see especially Graver 1998 and, on this letter in particular, Gazzarri 2014. 85. For Roman references to Hippocrates as the founder of medicine, see Bellinicioni 1979.

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in Seneca’s social history of medicine. Hippocrates’s art has developed to the point of relying upon formal doctrine, presumably in response to the accelerating decline in health brought about by human manipulation of nature, but the pitch of degeneracy to be reached in later centuries is beyond not just his imagination but his scientific estimate of physical possibility. Seneca’s account of the history of medicine, then, shows an art developing in finely graded reaction to external cultural developments. He reminds us of the purpose of this account and its analogical link to his conception of philosophy with an emphatic “I say to you that the same is true concerning philosophy” (idem tibi de philosophia dico, Ep. 95.29). The historical analogy with medicine sets up philosophy as a literal counterculture, one that grows and ramifies inversely to and in tandem with the proliferation of moral corruption. It is driven by the historical process of its development to take on a sophistication that mirrors that of the technology enabling that corruption. In turning to history Seneca is able to maintain that there is intact in all human beings a natural and, given favorable social conditions, simply exercised faculty for virtue, while at the same time preserving a distinctive and indispensable role for philosophy as a developed and institutionalized set of practices. This letter, like his ninetieth, makes his account of the human social past integral to his conception of and justification for the practice of philosophy in the present.

Ep. 120 Seneca’s conception of how human beings form their idea of the good receives its fullest surviving exposition in his hundred-​twentieth letter.86 Our consideration of Seneca’s views on the moral possibilities and hazards of solitude will not be complete without an examination of the role played by social conditions in the formation of the human sense of the good. In what follows, we will trace the ways in which Seneca’s account embeds normative moral development in historically contingent social conditions and describe how that account is structured by the social and political life it seizes upon as a vehicle for the transmission of the concept of the good. The question at the core of Ep. 120 is how we can come to form an idea of what virtue is at all, when virtue is vanishingly rare. Given that a human

86. For an argument that the questions pursued in this and a number of the other late letters are inspired by Seneca’s plan to write a comprehensive treatise on ethics (alluded to at Ep. 106.2 and 108.1), in which we would presumably find fuller and more systematic treatment of these topics, see Leeman 1953. Inwood 1985, 182–​215, offers a full treatment of the early Stoa’s theory of moral development, which is of course the background for Seneca’s discussion here.

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being either is or is not virtuous, with no middle ground, and given that it is enormously unlikely that any of us is acquainted with a sage, how can an aspirant to virtue have any degree of knowledge about the object of his or her striving?87 As Brad Inwood puts the problem and Seneca’s solution, “evidently we derive our conception of moral perfection from our experience of admirable deeds. Yet, in accordance with conventional Stoic theory, Seneca recognizes that virtually no observed act is actually virtuous in the narrow Stoic sense of the term. Hence there must be a kind of extrapolation from ‘good’ deeds to perfection.”88 It is the cultural contingency of this “extrapolation” that we will be concerned with here, together with the ways in which that contingency binds an individual’s prospects of moral progress to ambient social conditions. Seneca’s claim is that even though we cannot count on observing a genuine sage, we do sometimes see or hear of people performing actions that are suggestive of virtue. The mechanism by which we exaggerate these hints of what the virtuous life might be into the consistent conformity to nature that defines such a life is, in Seneca’s conception, providential:89 it is through this natural predisposition to seize upon and generalize from isolated praiseworthy acts that our progressive comprehension of the good is built into our nature as human beings. Seneca has earlier, in line with Stoic orthodoxy, claimed that “nature could not have taught us this” (hoc nos natura docere non potuit, Ep. 120.4), but the manner in which he grounds in natural disposition, and makes universal, our tendency to inflate discrete honorable acts into imagined virtue seems to smuggle nature back into the chain of causation that gives us our idea of the good. Consequently this view has often struck commentators as an untenable middle ground between, on the one hand, the Platonic view that our apprehension of the good is innate, a contention that the Stoics cannot accept without deformation of their most fundamental epistemological claims, and, on the other, the Aristotelian model of habituation, which turns on a belief in virtue’s relatively

87. For the empiricist epistemology that gives point to this dilemma, see LS 39A-​G, with Long 1986, 123–​31; Sharples 1996, 20–​7; Hankinson 2003; and Sellars 2006, 64–​79. 88. Inwood 2007a, ad Ep. 120.5. For a challenge to Inwood’s view here and in Inwood 2005 that on Seneca’s understanding our conception of moral perfection must be experientially grounded rather than in any thick sense innate, see I. Hadot 2014. The claims I advance here about the social contingency of this knowledge are compatible with either reading of the evidence, since Hadot’s position is that the seeds of the good in each of us “enable us, unless they have been hidden away or smothered, to recognize it as it were instinctively when we encounter it” (39, emphasis mine). 89. For elaboration of this point, see Inwood 2005, 286.

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wide distribution that more exacting Stoic definitions of that quality make impossible.90 Drawing attention to “Seneca’s claim that our extrapolation is justified by Nature (who orders us to exaggerate) and by the fact that everyone does so,” Inwood concludes that “to the extent that the Stoics wish to claim a naturalistic origin for the concept of the good, based on actual experience of a world which (alas) has few or no virtuous agents, this seems a contentious (indeed, a dubious) claim.”91 It is the instability of his position between innatism and naturalism, though, that forces Seneca to offer an account of the role of culture in moral development that recognizes a place for historical contingency in a way that neither of the other two approaches is equipped to do. Seneca’s account ties moral development to culture in two distinct ways. The first of these becomes apparent in his discussion of the process by which we derive an abstract notion of the good from the conduct of those who are not wise. Seneca describes this process thus: In various ways kindly or humane or courageous deeds astounded us; we began to marvel at these things as though they were perfect. There lay beneath those many flaws which the appearance and renown of some notable deed concealed; we ignored these. Nature commands us to exalt things that should be praised; there is no one who has not taken glory beyond the truth. From these deeds we derived the appearance of great good. aliqua benigna facta, aliqua humana, aliqua fortia nos obstupefecerant: haec coepimus tamquam perfecta mirari. suberant illis multa vitia quae species conspicui alicuius facti fulgorque celabat: haec dissimulavimus. natura iubet augere laudanda, nemo non gloriam ultra verum tulit: ex his ergo speciem ingentis boni traximus. (Ep. 120.5)92 We should note the crucial role played by secondhand report here, a role reinforced by the examples—​Fabricius, Horatius Cocles—​Seneca chooses to illustrate this

90. Gill 2006, 136–​45, offers another way of situating the Stoic theory of moral development in relation to Plato and Aristotle, in which the part-​based moral psychologies of the latter two are considered together, in opposition to a monistic Socratic-​Stoic intellectualism. 91. Inwood 2007a, ad Ep. 120.5 (original emphasis). 92. Inwood 2007a, ad Ep. 120.5, emphasizes the significance of the past tenses in this passage, which show that Seneca believes that “we already have some grasp of the concept ‘good’ ” founded on “prior observational experience.” This stress on Seneca’s assumption that a conceptual acquaintance with the good is universal guides Inwood’s interpretation of the letter in Inwood 2005 as well; see K. M. Vogt 2006 for further discussion.

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point.93 The natural process by which we form an idea of the good from its likeness depends on the social machinery of praise and on what Seneca holds to be a natural tendency for glory to extend beyond the boundaries of truth. Observation, then, is only one part of this process of extrapolation; it is living with other people that supplies the conditions for its completion. The second respect in which Seneca makes our apprehension of the good dependent on social context comes to the fore when he discusses the role that an actual sage can play in that process. After explaining how we derive our notion of what the good would look like from examples of noble action (Ep. 120.5–​7) or from the vices, which often bear an affinity to the virtues of which they are misunderstandings or distortions (Ep. 120.8–​9), Seneca explains the effect of an actual moral paragon, an individual of “perfected virtue” (perfectam . . . virtutem, Ep. 120.11), upon the agent’s expanding moral imagination. This figure’s sudden introduction as “another man” (alium, Ep. 120.10) after a description of a figure whose inconstancy leads us to “praise the deed, condemn the man” (factum laudavimus, contempsimus virum, Ep. 120.9), sets up the agent’s discovery of this paragon as the culmination of a sequence that begins with the assignment of glory to such imperfect figures as Horatius and Fabricius. It is through a process of sifting through the mix of praiseworthy and deplorable behavior in which those around us, and those we know about, are engaged that we develop the moral discrimination required to recognize the sage when we encounter him.94 Though Seneca nowhere in this letter is explicit on the point, it is clear that this encounter is envisioned as taking place through the medium of tradition rather 93. For an overview of Seneca’s use of Roman historical exempla, see Mayer 1992. On Seneca’s use in Ep. 120 of the figure of Horatius, see Roller 2004, 24, and Roller 2018, 277–​9. Roller makes the important point that unlike a number of other sources for the story (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Valerius Maximus, Plutarch, the Suda; references at Roller 2004, 15 n. 31), Seneca avoids the story that Horatius acquired his cognomen as a result of losing his eye in an earlier battle and thereby “adduces Horatius as an example of an agent about whom we know only one thing, and about whom any properly moral judgments (as opposed to simply evaluating his one action) are therefore premature” (24). To this observation I would add that the story of the earlier battle may well have struck Seneca as the sort of accretion that grows up around a single virtuous deed in the process of its hypertrophy ultra verum. 94. Roller emphasizes that the second stage of this process does not necessarily follow from the first: inferences about the moral state of an agent from the agent’s actions “are well-​grounded only when many actions in different arenas have been observed, and classified as virtuous or vicious, over a period of time. The moral discourse of conventional exemplarity, with its focus on the individual deed and that deed’s relationship to the community’s values, does not automatically meet this standard for well-​groundedness” (2018, 282). This observation identifies an important respect in which Seneca deviates from the conventional Roman patterns of exemplary thinking Roller traces; my aim here is to underscore that the ambient presence of an exemplary tradition, or some analogous means, however imperfect, of relaying reports about distinguished actions, is, though indeed not sufficient for the apprehension of genuine virtue, necessary for it.

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than through unmediated contact or observation. “It is easy to suspect,” Inwood writes, “that Seneca has Socrates or some other unique historical figure in mind (although there cannot be too many candidates for this role given the rarity of sages).”95 It is the preservation of this figure in historical tradition that allows for the stage of moral growth in which the agent builds a picture of what true, that is, consistent, virtue would be. John Sellars recalls the report by Diogenes Laertius (Diog. Laert. 7.2) that “Zeno turned to philosophy after reading about Socrates in Xenophon’s Memorabilia” and reminds us that “the image of the Stoic sage was thus not a hypothetical ideal, but rather based upon an idealized image of actual individuals, an image that functioned as an exemplar or role model.”96 From the very beginnings of the Stoic school, its conception of the sage, and especially of his or her role in the ethical life of non-​sages, gave a prominent role to tradition, literary tradition especially.97 In Ep. 120 Seneca is able to convert this Stoic interest in philosophical biography into the naturalistic account of the origins of our conception of the good that Stoic moral theory needs. The interplay in this letter between tradition and the social world of the present allows Seneca to offer a sophisticated account of the place of history and culture in the agent’s moral development. It is worth quoting at some length Inwood’s remarks on the specific use to which Seneca envisions the agent putting biographical tradition: Socrates (and in this Cato is similar) is cognitively available to Seneca (and to us) as an exemplar because of the rich narrative concerning him and because of his special status in the philosophical tradition. He can be invoked by allusion, and need not be the unique character of this or that Socratic dialogue. He is, through this literary tradition, as available to us as the ordinary characters we actually do experience (either directly or through our tradition, as is the case with Horatius and Fabricius). However, his primary use in our moral epistemology is not as a direct model for imitation or analysis, but as a foil in the analytical process of concept formation. It is the idealized persona of a Socrates which we use as a point of reference in assessing our experience of the ordinary world of defective agents.98

95. Inwood 2007a, ad Ep. 120.14–​8. 96. Sellars 2009, 62. 97. On the figure of Socrates in the literature of the Old Stoa, see Alesse 2000, 153–​78. 98. Inwood 2005, 295.

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The existence of the biographical traditions thus allows Seneca to maintain at once the rarity of the sage and the widespread availability of the concept of the good that only the sage instantiates. Assigning this crucial role to tradition, though, means making the natural process of coming to understand the good contingent on social circumstance, since biographical traditions each have a specific genesis and their potential for circulation is limited by the time and place of that genesis. Seneca opens up to those who do not have the good fortune to be contemporaries of sages the prospect of learning from them, but he also specifies the historical conditions under which that prospect can be realized, conditions that circumscribe the individual’s ability to make moral progress independent of social circumstance. Since we can escape the constraints imposed on moral development by the rarity of sages only through exposure to traditions in which the unique moral properties of sages who have lived in the past are recognized, documented, and preserved, the ability of any individual to arrive at a conception of the good must be gauged with reference to his or her cultural and historical location. We can now see how the letter’s two strands of reflection on the social matrix of moral development are intertwined. The first of these is the account of how we use analogy to form an initial idea of the good from our imperfect surroundings, and the second is the account of how we continually refine this initial idea by testing it against the example of the wise man. There is a double movement at work here, in which Seneca in the first phase of his argument maximizes the range of conditions that can conduce to moral development while contracting that range in the second phase. In the first phase, as we have seen, Seneca assigns a prominent role to social environment in moral formation, but casts his description of that role in universal terms that collapse culture into nature: not only does he have nature underwrite the fortunate errors that lead us to infer virtue where there is none, but his account of glory, with its nemo non (Ep. 120.5), makes the exaggeration of noteworthy deeds a feature of social life everywhere rather than of a particular time or society. The second phase, read in conjunction with a wider body of Stoic teaching on the figure of the sage, militates against that universality. As in his response to the challenge of Cynic simplicity, Seneca here has commitments on both sides of the question of entirely natural moral potential. As in Ep. 95, his response to the challenge anchors itself in the philosophical or proto-​philosophical practices that offer a way from contingency to settled virtue: in the earlier letter the practice in question was therapeutic attention to the soul; here it is the natural human habit of telling stories about what we admire. What emerges from Seneca’s serial confrontation with these social dilemmas about natural independence, as with all of the dilemmas of that kind we have tracked through this chapter, is a clearer and firmer articulation of the power and uniqueness of philosophy itself, the mediating term between human and divine, natural and conventional.

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Schools

From the beginnings of Greek philosophy as an identifiable activity, and especially from the period in the fourth century bce when it began to take shape as a distinct way of and guide to life, its character was shaped by the aggregations into which its practitioners ranged themselves.1 Recent scholarship has been at pains to stress the extent to which these schools were often not simply notional collections of like-​minded thinkers, in our modern sense of an intellectual “school,” but rather social units whose shared vision of the ultimate good defined a collective way of life. The nature of the ties that bound together the members of the Hellenistic schools has been the focus of intense debate, some of which we will have occasion to rehearse in this chapter, but it is clear that each of the schools provided at a minimum an identity, one which shaped the way a philosopher presented himself (or, rarely, herself ) and which provided a context within which any views he might express were interpreted and responded to by others.2 This chapter explains the use Seneca made of these philosophical communities in developing his conception of what it meant to live philosophically. I argue that it was in large part through engagement with the idea of the philosophical

1. See Natali 2003 for a compact overview, with extensive references to further literature. Other helpful discussions of the philosophical school as a social formation are Lynch 1972; Glucker 1978, 159–​255; Dorandi 1999; Bénatouïl 2006; and Watts 2007. For a revisionist account of the Stoic school’s structure, see Ludlam 2003. On the ways that affiliation with a school governed self-​presentation, see Decleva Caizzi 1993. 2. Lloyd 2005, 18–​20, examines these functions of the school and argues that they promoted “the development of one distinctive feature of Greek philosophical inquiry, namely, the interest, even the preoccupation, with second-​order, that is epistemological and methodological, questions” (20). This chapter aims to suggest some other ways in which this form of organization exerted a formative influence on the shape of the philosophical life, as registered in Seneca’s writings, beyond the strictly Greek context on which Lloyd concentrates.

Philosophy and Community in Seneca’s Prose. Carey Seal, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190493219.003.0003

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school that Seneca gave depth and precision to his arguments for the necessity of philosophical practice. The schools that defined the philosophical landscape in Seneca’s time varied in the degree to which they retained the organizational structure and commitment to a common life that appear to have characterized them at their origin. On the one hand, the Epicureans seem to have maintained a formal leadership structure and a shared way of life, though they certainly had adherents whose Epicureanism did not involve close affiliation with the school.3 On the other hand, the other major schools—​Stoics, Academics, and Peripatetics—​appear to have lost much of their organizational integrity over the course of the first century bce, a process in which Sulla’s sack of Athens in 86 marked a decisive watershed. This disintegration, and rising interest in Greek philosophy among the Roman elite, shaped a new philosophical scene in which a school’s identity was maintained, and its doctrines propagated, by the writings of its founders rather than by close contact among its adherents.4 Certainly collective philosophical activity in schools continued during the period of Seneca’s literary activity, especially at Athens; according to the Acts of the Apostles, when Paul arrived there in the 50s his disputes were with groups of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers.5 Seneca himself had experience in his youth with an active philosophical school, that founded by Quintus Sextius, and this encounter left its mark in his writings even though by the time of their composition he had become an orthodox Stoic.6 The typical pattern of philosophical involvement, though, even for someone as avowedly committed to philosophy as Seneca, involved detailed study of texts and contact with a few teachers rather than immersion in the collective life of a school. In this chapter, I document Seneca’s engagement with the question of how philosophical practice is shaped by sectarian division and organization, even when that organization assumes the loosened character it had taken on by his

3. The evidence for later Epicurean organization comes chiefly from Philodemus; see DeWitt 1936 for an overview. The best example of an Epicurean whose contact with organized Epicureanism appears to have been tenuous to non-​existent is Lucretius; on his distance from contemporary Epicureanism, see Clay 1983, 24–​5, and especially Sedley 1998, 62–​93. 4. See Sedley 2003, and further discussion later. 5. See Natali 2003, 55, but note that this confrontation is described not at Acts 18:18 but at 17:18: τινὲς δὲ καὶ τῶν Ἐπικουρείων καὶ Στοϊκῶν φιλοσόφων συνέβαλλον αὐτῷ. 6. Seneca’s involvement with Sextianism is reviewed by Griffin 1976, 37–​42. See also Inwood 2005, 7–​22, on the Sextians’ role in shaping the unique intellectual environment from which Seneca’s philosophical project grew. Information about the school itself is sparse; much of the ancient evidence is collected and discussed at RE s.v. Sextius, Q. (8). The major scholarly treatment of Sextianism is still Oltramare 1926, 153–​89, which remains valuable despite its determination to fit the Sextians into the generic framework (that of the diatribe) suggested in the title.

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own day. Indeed, I aim to show that this form of the philosophical school, bound together diachronically by the textually mediated ties between the school’s latter-​ day adherents and its founders, gave Seneca a unique set of opportunities for reflection on the place of independent thought and of tradition in philosophical activity. It is in negotiating a balance between the claims of the school’s past and its contemporary adherents’ own exercise of reason, I argue, that Seneca arrives at a more general formulation of the relationship between tradition and innovation in philosophical creativity. To prove this thesis we must pay attention not only to the internal relations of the Stoic school as described or envisioned by Seneca, but also to his characterization of the other schools, above all Epicureanism, and to the connections he implicitly or explicitly draws between these two facets of sectarian self-​definition. For Seneca, the nature and potential of collective philosophical activity comes into focus through discussion of Epicureanism, whether as a model or as an example of the ways in which efforts to foster such activity can go awry. Our focus will be not on Seneca’s use of Epicurean doctrine but instead on how Epicurean social organization offered him a way of developing and presenting his views of the problems and opportunities opened up by social ties built around philosophical practice.7 The school of Epicurus is remarkable among the Hellenistic schools for its tightly coherent social character.8 Phillip Mitsis, in an article generally skeptical about the degree to which the Hellenistic schools possessed any sort of institutional structure, identifies several ways in which Epicurus and his followers showed unique interest in building and maintaining such a structure: the Epicurean school stands as “a striking exception” to his claims that the Hellenistic schools did not “lend continuity to the study and teaching of philosophy independently, in a real sense, of any particular individuals”; Epicurus was “the only one of the four [founders of the major philosophical schools] who consciously provided physical resources for the survival of his school”; and “it is only the Epicureans who maintain an easily recognizable doctrinal continuity along with their institutional

7. This emphasis responds to the distinction drawn by Margaret Graver in the widest-​ranging recent examination of Seneca’s relationship to Epicurus between Seneca’s resistance to Epicurus “at the level of philosophical doctrine” and his sympathetic appreciation of Epicurean texts “at the level of therapeutic method” (2016, 200). Other recent treatments of this topic are Wildberger 2014, which distinguishes Seneca the author from Seneca the epistolary character to trace a didactic trajectory behind his quotations of Epicurus in the Epistulae Morales, and an overview in Schiesaro 2015. 8. On this character and the veneration of Epicurus that ensured its perpetuation, see Clay 1998, 55–​102.

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continuity.”9 Randall Collins goes so far as to characterize Epicurean persistence in doctrinal orthodoxy as a “mystery,” one whose explanation must lie in an extraordinarily cohesive social structure.10 The school maintained this coherence in part through a strong doctrinal and practical emphasis on the importance of friendship, though Epicureanism’s attempts to reconcile this emphasis with, and even make it flow from, its hedonism have attracted considerable criticism from antiquity to the present.11 The Epicureans’ interest in personal ties drove their profound fascination with the mechanics of recruiting and retaining new adherents.12 These methods have struck both ancient and modern observers as manipulative and developmentally counter-​productive: Martha Nussbaum, contrasting the Garden with the dialectical vigor of the Peripatos, warns that “the passivity of the Epicurean pupil, her habits of trust and veneration, may become habitual and spoil her for the active critical task.”13 In what follows, I argue that these unique properties of the Epicurean school—​its doctrinal and institutional continuity, its close concentration on personal friendship as a vehicle for philosophical growth, its artful attention to the ways and means of philosophical conversion—​held a special fascination for Seneca, and that it is by way of spelling out his views of Epicureanism as a social phenomenon that he gives voice and substance to his own views of what role like-​minded others can play in the philosopher’s reasoned progress toward wisdom. The social character of Hellenistic philosophy has been the focus of controversy between, on the one hand, scholars such as Pierre Hadot, who emphasize the extent to which Stoicism and Epicureanism were ways of life structured and defined by self-​ascription to a community, and, on the other, scholars, for example Nussbaum, who argue that the sociological account given by Hadot elides the focus on argument that characterized these schools.14 This chapter strives for

9. Mitsis 2003, 466, 471, 475. 10. Collins 1998, 112–​3. 11. See Cicero, Fin. 1.65–​70, at which the Epicurean Torquatus tries to preempt such criticism in his exposition of Epicurean ethics. Rist 1972, 127–​39, and Mitsis 1988, 98–​128, provide surveys of the problem; the latter is especially pessimistic about the prospects of extracting coherence from the Epicurean arguments on this topic. Armstrong 2011, 123–​8, and Cooper 2012, 264–​70, offer more favorable assessments. On Epicurean friendship, see also Konstan 1997, 108–​13. 12. See Frischer 1982, 67–​86. 13. Nussbaum 1994, 139, but see Mitsis 2003, 467–​71, for a critique of Nussbaum’s characterization of Epicurean education and social life. 14. See P. Hadot 2002, 91–​145, and Nussbaum 1994, 5 and 353. (In both of these passages Nussbaum’s principal target is Foucault 1986, but she includes Hadot in the second.) For a brief but incisive review of this debate, see Sellars 2009, 116–​8.

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an approach that balances and synthesizes these two perspectives. Its contention is that in Seneca’s hands the sectarian character of the philosophical landscape becomes itself the raw material for an exposition of the place of argument in moral progress. It is through the structure of philosophical communities, his own and others’, that Seneca gives focus to his own conception of the life guided by reason, and of the role of other people and other minds in that life. I begin with an examination of the meaning the Stoic past holds for Seneca, through a reading of two letters, the thirty-​third and the sixty-​fourth, in which the relationship between past and present in philosophical activity is at the fore. The next section of the chapter examines how Seneca’s De Vita Beata uses the social character of Epicureanism to explain both what is distinctively valuable about the philosophical life and why it attracts attack. I then return to the Epistulae Morales to show how the twenty-​first of those letters draws on the characteristic properties of Epicureanism discussed earlier to explain the nature of philosophical friendship and to assert the primacy of philosophy over politics. Lastly, in an examination of the seventy-​ninth letter, I argue that Seneca there systematically contrasts poetry with philosophy and uses the Epicurean school to show philosophy’s superior ability to negotiate tensions between the present on the one hand and the past and future on the other.

Epp. 33 and 64 David Sedley writes that after Sulla’s sack of Athens in 86 bce “the metropolitan headquarters of the main schools at Athens either vanished or lost much of their importance. Relatively small local philosophical groups, of which there had already been a significant number in existence, now proliferated throughout the Greco-​Roman world. Deprived of dialectical interaction in their school’s authentic Athenian environment, but still well equipped with books, adherents turned above all to the study of the foundational texts.”15 This chapter aims to make explicit Seneca’s own conception of this philosophical landscape and to show how the separation of the philosophical schools from their institutional framework and the consequent concentration of authority in philosophical texts provided both the basis and the impetus for an exploration of the role of authority and of canonical texts in the life of philosophy. Seneca’s thirty-​third letter is the natural point of departure for this discussion, for it puts forward Seneca’s views both of the differences between the Stoic and Epicurean schools and of the proper attitude of latter-​day Stoics toward the

15. Sedley 2003, 28.

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great Stoics of the past. Indeed, these two themes are worked out in close relation to one another. The letter sets out three ways in which the Stoic school differs from the Epicurean. First, the writings of the Stoics, unlike those of Epicurus, are best appreciated as an organic whole rather than plucked apart for pithy maxims: “their entire unity is manly” (totus contextus illorum virilis est, Ep. 33.1).16 The Stoic writings, of course, could be quoted aphoristically, but to do so would represent a real loss, since true appreciation of the Stoic masters can come only when one apprehends the consistency and uniformity of their achievement: “one tree should not be admired, when the entire forest has risen to the same height” (non est admirationi una arbor, ubi in eandem altitudinem tota silva surrexit, Ep. 33.1). The writings of Epicurus, on the other hand, can be appreciated only in isolation from the whole of his system, since that system rests on a fundamental misapprehension of the highest good. The sayings that Seneca has been quoting at the end of his letters to Lucilius are, he writes, “more notable in him [Epicurus], because they come at infrequent intervals, because they are unexpected, because it is miraculous that something is said gallantly by a man professing effeminacy” (sed in illo magis annotantur, quia rarae interueniunt, quia inexpectatae, quia mirum est fortiter aliquid dici ab homine mollitiam professo, Ep. 33.2).17 Epicurus is such a fertile source of quotations because anything worthwhile stands out strikingly against the background of his philosophy as a whole. The best use of his writings, then, is to pry these gems out of that background and display them for separate admiration.18 These claims point forward to the second difference Seneca identifies between the Stoics and the Epicureans. “We do not, therefore, have those eye-​catching things, nor do we deceive the buyer who will find nothing, when he comes in, except for those things which are hung in the front,” he writes (non habemus itaque ista ocliferia nec emptorem decepimus nihil inventurum, cum intraverit, praeter illa quae in fronte suspensa sunt, Ep. 33.3). This assertion that Epicureanism

16. Usener’s lv–​lvi view that Seneca consulted Epicurus’s writings only in a gnomologion of some kind has been challenged by Mutschmann 1915 and by André 1969, 472, who rests his case on Seneca’s familiarity with some Epicurean dogmes quelque peu ésotériques. The passage from Ep. 33.2 quoted below would strike a reader as credible only if that reader believed that Seneca was familiar with Epicurus’s writings beyond the parts attractive for anthologizing. At the very least it must have seemed plausible to Seneca that it would seem plausible to Lucilius, or any other reader, that he, Seneca, did indeed enjoy direct familiarity with Epicurus’s writings. This consideration militates strongly in favor of the Mutschmann-​André thesis. 17. On the moralizing function of the gendered language used of Epicurus in this letter, see Graver 1998, 625–​8, and Schiesaro 2015, 244. 18. It is tempting to locate some irony here, in view of Seneca’s own ready and doubtless self-​ conscious quotability, on which see Dinter 2014, with remarks on Ep. 33 at 337.

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is empty beneath the aphoristic surface is best read in conjunction with the previously stated difference between that system and Stoicism. If “those things which are hung in the front,” the sayings that attract the “buyer” to Epicureanism, are the same as the Epicurean maxims discussed earlier, which presumably they are if Seneca is aiming to develop a general account of why Epicurus lends himself to quotation in a way that the Stoics do not, then the philosophical window-​ shopper must be attracted by the same things that Seneca finds praiseworthy in Epicurus. This claim, then, reconciles the evident fact of Epicureanism’s appeal with the universality of human reason by making clear that those things that draw adherents to Epicureanism are themselves morally sound; Epicureanism’s deficiencies lie not in the sources of its appeal but rather in the extent to which what is attractive in those sources is belied by Epicureanism as a whole.19 That Seneca has thus far in the letter contrasted Epicurus alone with “our leaders” (nostrorum procerum, Ep. 33.1) in the plural shows what his third point of differentiation between the two schools will be. The Stoics recognize a long sequence of philosophers as having developed their doctrine, whereas the Epicurean school invests its founder alone with authority.20 “Imagine that we were willing to separate single sayings from the crowd,” Seneca writes. “To whom will we assign them? To Zeno or Cleanthes or Chrysippus or Panaetius or Posidonius? We are not beneath a king: each one is his own liberator” (puta nos velle singulares sententias ex turba separare: cui illas assignabimus? Zenoni an Cleanthi an Chrysippo an Panaetio an Posidonio? non sumus sub rege: sibi quisque se vindicat, Ep. 33.4). The way in which Seneca celebrates this diffusion of authority offers parallels to the Roman principle of collegiality, under which the sharing of power is held to narrow the opportunity for its abuse.21 This republican

19. For another view of the relationship between interior and exterior in Epicureanism, see De Vita Beata, ­chapters 12 and 13, with discussion below. 20. On the question of Seneca’s relationship to his Stoic predecessors, Asmis 2015 provides a useful survey and orientation in the literature. 21. Furthermore, these Stoic figures were not contemporaries but are spread through the early and middle history of the school. Denis Feeney points out to me that this picture of a school formed by gradual accretion rather than from the vision of a single founder echoes a contrast in Cicero’s De Republica, assigned in the dialogue to Scipio Aemilianus with ultimate attribution to Cato the Elder, between, on the one hand, the Greek city-​states who owed their constitution to a single founder and, on the other hand, Rome, the superior political arrangements of which are attributed to the fact that “our republic was set up not by the intelligence of one man but of many, nor in the life of one man but over so many ages and lifetimes” (nostra autem res publica non unius esset ingenio sed multorum, nec una hominis uita sed aliquot constituta saeculis et aetatibus, Rep. 2.2). See also Laelius’s reiteration of this view at Rep. 2.37 and Zetzel 1995 ad Rep. 2.2. Seneca’s response to the picture of Rome’s political development given in De Republica is discussed in the final chapter of this book.

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subtext becomes explicit when Seneca likens Epicurus to a rex. If we keep in mind that Seneca draws this contrast in the context of explaining why the writings of Epicurus lend themselves to quotation, we can see more clearly some of the assumptions underlying his claims. Philosophical maxims, it would appear, must be linked both to a philosophical school and to a particular author. To identify a maxim as “Stoic” is to invite the question of which Stoic philosopher wrote it, since there is considerable variety among their views. Seneca cannot mean that one could not present maxims drawn from the work of particular Stoic authors, only that such maxims would not be genuinely representative of the views of the Stoic school as an entity. There is no such obstacle to the quotation of Epicurean maxims, though, since doctrinal authority in that school coincides exactly with the work of one author, Epicurus.22 Sedley has argued that “in the Greco-​Roman world, especially during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, what gives philosophical movements their cohesion and identity is less a disinterested common quest for the truth than a virtually religious commitment to the authority of a founder figure.”23 He rejects the “familiar contrast between the well-​regimented Epicureans, all but enslaved to their sect’s official doctrines, and the emancipated, freebooting Stoics, all of them busy disagreeing with one another,” and writes that “Seneca, Ep. 33.4, is sometimes taken to make the same contrast . . . but, as I understand it, the discussion there concerns not doctrinal authority, but the more literary question of which authors it is legitimate to plunder for quotations.”24 I hope the foregoing analysis has illustrated the difficulty of separating “literary” from “doctrinal” questions in discussion of the Hellenistic schools, particularly since, as Sedley shows, those schools were in the Roman period organized around their foundational texts rather than around any institutional framework. In such a climate, questions of

I am indebted to Andrew Feldherr for the reminder that collegiality is intended not only to protect against over-​extension of power by a single individual but also to enact the republican principle of rule by law rather than by men, identified by Livy at the opening of his second book as the characteristic feature of republican government. Again, the political echoes in this letter direct attention to the primacy of reason (identical with the natural law that the life of philosophy aims to apprehend and live out) over the authority of individuals. 22. Indeed, in other letters Seneca takes a casual attitude toward the exact provenance of such maxims, since given the unanimity of the school it is of no interpretive import whether they issue from Epicurus or one of his followers: at the end of Ep. 14, he tells Lucilius that the maxim he has just quoted is from “Epicurus or Metrodorus or someone out of that workshop” (Epicuri est aut Metrodori aut alicuius ex illa officina, Ep. 14.17). 23. Sedley 1989, 97. 24. Sedley 1989, 97 and n. 1.

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style, authorship, and rhetorical appeal are closely bound up with the character of the community regulated by the texts in question. For Seneca, this regulation can work to stimulate or to throttle the genuine philosophical activity that is the purpose of the philosophical school. In the second half of Ep. 33, he turns his attention from the Epicureans to his own school, identifying among the Stoics ways of misusing the canonical texts that replicate the failings of the Epicureans. In the process, he sketches out the proper role of these texts in philosophical education and activity. The Stoic texts, for the reasons he has given previously in the letter, must be studied entire, but quotations can be useful for those who are “still uninstructed and eavesdropping from outside” (rudibus adhuc et extrinsecus auscultantibus, Ep. 33.6).25 The metaphor strikingly echoes that of the shop used earlier to describe the Epicurean school; in each case the philosophical school is envisioned as having an inside and an outside, and those who are not yet members learn about the school through a single sense, hearing in this case and sight in the Epicurean instance, but are not fully privy to its nature until they are inside. The mature student of philosophy, though, should be able to offer his own arguments rather than simply appealing to the Stoic authorities: “ ‘Zeno said this’: what do you say? ‘Cleanthes said this’: what do you say?” (“hoc Zenon dixit”: tu quid? “hoc Cleanthes”: tu quid?, Ep. 33.7). It is from passages like this one that Sedley argues that Seneca is a “puzzling exception” to the Hellenistic pattern of reverence for the founder of one’s school, since “he makes it plain that for him Zeno’s authority is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for his acceptance of an argument or doctrine” and though “conceding that the normal practice of Stoics is to try to make even these [bad Zenonian] arguments come out true, he pointedly refuses to join in the game.”26 One might add that with his apostrophic hectoring of a Stoic epigone in the last portion of the letter he sets up his own resistance to canonical authority as normative: he lays out a model of philosophical progress under which the sayings of the early Stoics are learned only to be tested and conceivably discarded at a later stage, and his coupling of this model with his criticism of the Epicureans in the first part of the letter grounds his appeal in the Stoic school’s history of rhetorical self-​ differentiation from Epicureanism.

25. As Amanda Wilcox 2012, 113 points out, “this advice may seem like a repudiation of the method of reading Seneca endorsed earlier, when he promised to send Lucilius books with important passages already marked, and recommended that each day he pick a single thought to digest (Ep. 6.5, 2.4),” but in fact, she observes, the two different ways of reading are suited to different stages in Lucilius’s philosophical development, as it is being charted by the unfolding sequence of letters. 26. Sedley 1989, 119.

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When Seneca does discuss at length the reverence owed to philosophical predecessors, he pointedly selects as his central example a non-​Stoic, Quintus Sextius. For Sextius he expresses the sort of veneration that Sedley shows to be standardly directed toward the founder of one’s school. This veneration is couched in intensely personal terms: “[W]‌hen you read Sextius, you say, ‘he lives, he thrives, he is free, he is more than a human being, he sends me away full of great confidence’ ” (cum legeris Sextium, dices, “vivit, viget, liber est, supra hominem est, dimittit me plenum ingentis fiduciae,” Ep. 64.3). Sextius’s unique qualities, made accessible through his writings, furnish the occasion for a discussion of the philosopher’s proper relation to his predecessors. Seneca makes it clear that this relation is one of gratitude, but he also indicates that this gratitude need not be a barrier to independent inquiry. His remarks are worth quoting at length: I therefore venerate the findings of wisdom and its discoverers; it is pleasing to come into, as it were, bequests from many people. For me these things were acquired, for me they were worked upon. But let us play the good patriarch, let us make more than we have received . . . Much work still remains and much will remain, nor will the opportunity of still adding something be closed off to anyone born after a thousand centuries. veneror itaque inventa sapientiae inventoresque; adire tamquam multorum hereditatem iuuat. mihi ista adquisita, mihi laborata sunt. sed agamus bonum patrem familiae, faciamus ampliora quae accepimus . . . multum adhuc restat operis multumque restabit, nec ulli nato post mille saecula praecludetur occasio aliquid adhuc adiciendi. (Ep. 64.7) Seneca here extends the metaphor of inheritance from a simple marker for gratitude into a comprehensive account of his contemporaries’ duties to their philosophical predecessors. He relies on the sharp definition given to the role of the paterfamilias in Roman tradition to show that being an heir does not just involve passive receipt of the treasures of the past but also means taking a position in a chain of cultural continuity. Just as the norms necessary for the secure transmission of property govern the institution of the family and its apparatus of regulative custom, the value inherent in the philosophical writing of the past structures a community, one with its own norms of custodianship and obligations for active extension of the inheritance. Being entrusted with an inheritance, Seneca reminds his readers with the figure of the paterfamilias, involves fiduciary responsibility not only to the past but to the future as well. This metaphor turns a philosophical lineage into a philosophical family, and it is the image of the family that governs Seneca’s presentation of the reverence

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owed to philosophical predecessors. “Those who existed before us,” he explains, “did much, but they did not complete it. They are nevertheless to be esteemed and to be honored with the worship of the gods. Why should I not have images of great men as incitements to the spirit and celebrate their birthdays?” (multum egerunt qui ante nos fuerunt, sed non peregerunt. suspiciendi tamen sunt et ritu deorum colendi. quidni ego magnorum virorum et imagines habeam incitamenta animi et natales celebrem?, Ep. 64.9). Seneca uses established Roman ways of revering ancestors to suggest both the degree of honor that is owed to the great philosophers of the past and the sort of help that they can provide to those who give them this honor.27 Like images of illustrious ancestors, they offer “incitements to the spirit” by providing a model of excellence and, just as important, by assuring the “descendant” that such excellence is something he can and should strive for by virtue of his connection to the “ancestor.” That is, to take the family as a model for the continuity of the philosophical tradition is not simply to mandate a particular sort of reverence for the philosophers of the past but also to group them together with their latter-​day admirers in a diachronic community. In the following sentences, though, Seneca shifts from the model of the family to that of the Roman political community. “If I see a consul or a praetor,” he writes, “I do all those things by which honor is customarily offered to honor: I jump down from my horse, I uncover my head, I cede the path” (si consulem videro aut praetorem, omnia quibus honor haberi honori solet faciam: equo desiliam, caput adaperiam, semita cedam, Ep. 64.10). The same reverence, Seneca contends, should be extended to the great philosophers of the past. The character of this community is not specifically Stoic. “Would I receive either Marcus Cato and Laelius the wise and Socrates with Plato and Zeno and Cleanthes into my mind without the highest reverence?” Seneca asks (Marcum Catonem utrumque et Laelium Sapientem et Socraten cum Platone et Zenonem Cleanthenque in animum meum sine dignatione summa recipiam?, Ep. 64.10). We should note that though Socrates was claimed by the Stoics as a progenitor, Plato was not.28 When we bear in mind also that it was the writings of Sextius that ignited this chain of reflection, we can see that the philosophical community identified by this list is not exactly ecumenical—​note the absence of Epicurus, and even of Diogenes

27. Note the parallels to Epicurean uses of the image of Epicurus; see Frischer 1982, 199–​282. For the social and political significance of imagines, see Flower 1996, 9–​59. On models of philosophical succession, see Ludlam 2003, 46. 28. For the Stoics’ hostility to Plato, grounded in their rival claim to the Socratic legacy, see Long 1988, 160–​4.

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of Sinope—​but its boundaries do not coincide with those of the Stoic school either.29 We have, then, two different models of the ties between today’s philosophical practitioner and the philosophers of the past, and it is in discussion of the second model, that of the republic, that Seneca lays stress on the wide extension of this community. The remark that introduces the republican model helps expose the differences between the two. “I owe the same reverence,” Seneca writes, “to those teachers of the human race, from whom the beginnings of such great good issued, as I do to my own teachers” (quam venerationem praeceptoribus meis debeo, eandem illis praeceptoribus generis humani, a quibus tanti boni initia fluxerunt, Ep. 64.9). The starting point for Seneca’s argument, again, is a personal tie between the object of reverence and the one paying it: in the example of the hortatory power of the imagines, that tie was constituted by the inspiration a latter-​day philosopher is able to draw from the portraits of his great predecessors, and in this passage the gratitude deriving from the tie between teacher and pupil is extended into the past. Seneca does not, however, effect this extension by pointing out that one’s teachers had teachers of their own, and so on back into remote antiquity. That is, he does not condition reverence for the philosophers of the past on their position in a philosophical lineage culminating in direct and personal guidance of the contemporary who is held to owe that reverence. Instead, in describing the philosophers as teachers of the entire human race he invokes the benefits that they have provided as common property to everyone. The republican model of philosophical reverence turns on the claim that, like the magistrates of the republic, the philosophers of the past provide their benefits as public goods to a broad community. Even the familial model, though, which we might suppose to rest on a chain of obligation extending from teacher to student back into the more remote past, exerts its force in this letter through the image of ancestor masks, the inspirational power of which is likewise accessible in broadcast fashion to an audience wider than the descendants of the individual depicted.30 The notion of philosophical reverence propounded in this letter, then, uses the social institutions of the family and the republican magistracy to describe a conception of philosophical community that pushes scholastic allegiance and continuity of personal instruction into the background in favor of an ecumenically

29. As Gretchen Reydams-​Schils 2011, 301–​5 points out, the breadth of predecessors invoked here is likely connected to the Stoic notion of truth as a common human possession, the implications of which for Stoic moral guidance she explores throughout the article cited. 30. Cf. Ep. 44.3. The sole criterion for inclusion in the philosophical dynasty Seneca envisions here is the practice of philosophy, but the image of such a dynasty taps the hortatory power of ancestral glory to urge Lucilius toward that practice. See discussion at Gloyn 2017, 176.

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defined philosophical enterprise. At the same time, Seneca’s Stoic commitments give definition and point to his own relationship to this universality. He expresses his admiration for Sextius by labeling him “a Stoic, though he denies it” (licet neget Stoici, Ep. 64.2), and then goes on to identify the literary characteristics that earn Sextius this label. This letter, then, seeks at the same time to dissolve sectarian organization as a device of exclusion and to reconstitute it as a selective mode of framing and learning from the range of what philosophical tradition has to offer.

De Vita Beata De Vita Beata provides an opportunity to understand how Seneca reconciled the practice of philosophy in sectarian groups with the idea of philosophy as providing a universal means of access to wisdom. In this treatise he offers a defense of Epicureanism from its Stoic detractors, which sets up a broader defense of philosophy itself against charges of hypocrisy. Discussion of the literary character of De Vita Beata has concentrated on the problem of explaining how the two parts into which the work falls cohere with one another, if at all. These two parts deal respectively with the falsity of the Epicurean identification of pleasure with the highest good and with charges that philosophers fail to live in a manner consistent with their teachings.31 Scholars have argued that these two parts are tied together by Seneca’s desire to distinguish Stoic teaching from that of its rivals,32 by his need to defend himself from the opprobrium attracted by his wealth and power,33 by a two-​stage plan under which Seneca discusses first “the nature of happiness” and then “practical means of attaining it,”34 and by Seneca’s articulation of a broadly Panaetian “Stoic individualism.”35 Here I examine another manner in which these two portions of the work are joined together: Seneca’s partial recuperation of the Epicurean school from its Stoic critics is integral to the view of philosophy’s ameliorative role that he defends in the last part of the work.

31. See Griffin 1976, 308–​9, for formulation and discussion of, and a proposed solution to, this question. Griffin summarizes the new interlocutor’s changed line of attack in the second part of the work thus: “[I]‌t is not the Stoic theory that is attacked for implausibility and inconsistency, but Stoic philosophers who are accused of hypocrisy” (308). In fact it is philosophers at large who stand so accused; the significance of this will be explored later in the chapter. 32. Pohlenz 1941, 69. 33. Griffin 1976, 309. Cf. the reading of the work’s opening as a defensively virtuosic demonstration of Seneca’s command of Stoic moral theory in De Pietro 2014. 34. Chaumartin 1989, 1690. 35. Asmis 1990.

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The problems of sectarian philosophical activity are prominent almost from the beginning of the work. Seneca opens his definition of the happy life with the following announcement of the posture he will adopt toward his philosophical predecessors: “Lest I drag you in circles, I will pass over the opinions of others, for it is a lengthy process to both recount and refute them: take ours. When I say ours, however, I do not tie myself to one or another of the Stoic leaders: I have the right to express an opinion also” (sed ne te per circumitus traham, aliorum quidem opiniones praeteribo—​nam et ennumerare illas longum est et coarguere: nostram accipe. nostram autem cum dico, non alligo me ad unum aliquem ex Stoicis proceribus: est et mihi censendi ius, V.B. 3.2). This is an assertion of independence rather than of eclecticism. The scope Seneca claims for his free choice of opinions with which to concur encompasses only the great Stoics, not those outside the school. Even as a declaration of allegiance to Stoicism, though, his statement advertises a conception of that school as hospitable to philosophical independence. As Elizabeth Asmis writes, “in claiming the right to dissent, Seneca places himself in a long tradition of Stoic philosophical innovation. From the time of Zeno, the Stoics kept revitalizing Stoic philosophy by expanding and modifying selected views of their predecessors. Seneca proposes to follow this trend.”36 It is worth examining the two different moves by which Seneca propounds this view of the school and makes the case for the continued relevance of the precedent of independence set by the early Stoics. First, the idea that one could attach oneself to “one of the Stoic leaders,” and that such a choice could matter, itself presupposes doctrinal latitude in the school’s self-​definition. In order for there to be choice among the opinions of, for instance, Cleanthes and Chrysippus, there must be room for Chrysippus to declare disagreement with Cleanthes and still be reckoned not only a member of the school but one of its proceres.37 The contrast with the picture of Epicureanism sketched out in Ep. 33 is direct: in Stoicism it cannot be the custom to refer all doctrine to the founder, since there is considerable variation among the doctrines that pass as Stoic.38 Second, and here the claim

36. Asmis 1990, 224. 37. At Ep. 113.23 Seneca describes a disagreement between Cleanthes and Chrysippus over the nature of walking. The two also differed over whether or not alcohol or melancholy could deprive the sage of virtue: Diog. Laert. 7.121. A less stark difference, over the best therapy for grief, is recorded by Cicero (TD 3.76). 38. See Ep. 33.4, with earlier discussion. Kuen 1994, 77 n. 4, supplies a list of further comparanda from the Epistulae. References to the Stoic proceres, both in De Vita Beata and in Ep. 33, invest the great Stoics of the past with authority but at the same time temper this authority by the multiplicity of those so designated. As throughout this book, my arguments here do not depend on accepting any particular chronological ordering of Seneca’s works. In agreement

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about Stoic diversity is explicit rather than implicit, Seneca feels no need simply to shelter under the sole authority of one or another of the great Stoics of the past, accepting one such philosopher’s views as an integral whole, but can instead combine their views as he sees fit, with the supplement, we learn in the sentence after the one quoted, of his own entirely original additions. That is, Seneca does not see deviation from orthodoxy as the prerogative of Zeno’s great successors only, but as a live option into the present. This passage first tacitly suggests a picture of the Stoic past as characterized by licensed dissent, then makes this past continuous with the present. The metaphor Seneca uses to explain his process of sifting through the views of the Stoics is that of requesting that a motion be divided so that each of its parts can be voted upon separately (aliquem iubebo sententiam dividere, V.B. 3.2). As is often pointed out, he chooses the same senatorial image to describe his treatment of the teachings of Epicurus in Ep. 21: “I think that what is customarily done in the Senate should be done also in philosophy: when someone has proposed something which seems partially right to me, I bid him divide the resolution and I follow what I approve” (quod fieri in senatu solet faciendum ego in philosophia quoque existimo: cum censuit aliquis quod ex parte mihi placeat, iubeo illum dividere sententiam et sequor quod probo, Ep. 21.9). The common imagery is all the more interesting in the light of the very different rhetorical contexts in which it is embedded in each instance: in Ep. 21 Seneca is showing Lucilius that it is possible to adopt the useful features of Epicurean doctrine without being thus forced to consent to the unacceptable beliefs with which the philosophical system as a whole integrates those features. The philosopher’s independent judgment, that is, can expose the points of disjuncture in a body of doctrine. In De Vita Beata, he makes the opposite point about Stoicism: the philosopher’s faculty of judgment can show the essential unity underneath Stoic diversity by assembling a coherent view from the contributions of a number of Stoics, including himself, guided by

with Giancotti 1957, 310–​62, Griffin 1976, 399, places De Vita Beata after the accession of Nero and before Seneca’s retirement in 62 (and thus before the Epistulae Morales). The dating of De Vita Beata is the only part of her chronological appendix for which Griffin claims originality (395). Her contention is that it is possible to rescue the standard discussions of the work’s date from circularity by demonstrating, without assuming an early Neronian date a priori, that “at the time the dialogue was written, Seneca was still concerned with the difficulty of justifying his position, which had not ceased to be one of wealth and at least apparent power” (309). The only other piece of evidence about the work’s date is the address to Seneca’s brother by his adoptive name, Gallio (V.B. 1.1), rather than his birth cognomen of Novatus, which is still used in De Ira (Ir. 1.1.1, 2.1.1, 3.1.1). My discussion here makes no interpretive use of the claim that Seneca is responding to the charges of Suillius et al. that his wealth is incompatible with his philosophical pretensions.

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the imperative to follow nature, “what is agreed among all the Stoics” (quod inter omnis Stoicos conuenit, V.B. 3.3). The integrative powers of the individual Stoic philosopher thus advertised come into sharp contrast with his Epicurean counterpart’s corresponding powerlessness later in De Vita Beata. In the course of his engagement with the presumably Epicurean interlocutor of the work’s first half, Seneca shifts from a theoretical attack on the Epicurean link between pleasure and virtue (i.e., the claim that the Epicureans’ election of pleasure as the highest end is not inimical to virtue, since the pleasure they seek is gained through virtuous activity)39 to a vivid denunciation of the practical consequences of this view’s propagation: “[T]‌he man unrestrained in his pleasures, ever belching and drunk, because he knows himself to live with pleasure believes himself to live also with virtue (for he hears that virtue is not able to be separated from pleasure); then he ascribes wisdom to his vices, and openly acknowledges what ought to be concealed” (ille effusus in voluptates, ructabundus semper atque ebrius, quia scit se cum voluptate vivere, credit et cum virtute (audit enim voluptatem separari a virtute non posse); deinde vitiis suis sapientiam inscribit et abscondenda profitetur, V.B. 12.3). Epicurean teaching stands accused of making the already vicious brazen in their iniquity. Already visible in this indictment, though, are the seeds of the exculpatory judgment upon Epicureanism that Seneca is about to render. Not only are those who are made worse by Epicureanism corrupt before their exposure, but Seneca describes that exposure in a way that suggests it is idle and casual. The man in question hears an Epicurean teaching ripped from the context of the doctrinal system as a whole. Most important, his professed embrace of Epicureanism takes place entirely outside of the social context in which the real Epicureans practice their philosophy.40 De Vita Beata, like Ep. 33, sets up a contrast between the inside and the outside of Epicureanism. Whereas Ep. 33 aimed to explain how those aiming at virtue were lured into Epicureanism, and thus contrasted the school’s worthwhile maxims with the errors to which those maxims were joined by their doctrinal integument, De Vita Beata instead concentrates on those who are moved by the promise of sanctioned self-​indulgence. These too find Epicureanism appealing, but, like the seekers after virtue in Ep. 33, their conception of the school is haphazard and incomplete and would not survive actual acquaintance with Epicurean

39. See Mitsis 1988, 60. 40. It is precisely this sort of willful and self-​indulgent misunderstanding of Epicureanism that Cicero attributes to Calpurnius Piso in both the Pro Sestio and the In Pisonem: Sest. 22 (see Kaster 2006 ad loc.) and Pis. 42; cf. Pis. 69. Cicero’s presentation of Epicureanism in his philosophical works, which though critical generally aims at fairness (Stokes 1995), offers a clear contrast to the muddled and licentious pseudo-​Epicureanism he associates with Piso.

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communal life.41 Of those who “rush together wherever they hear pleasure being praised,” Seneca declares that “they do not appreciate how sober and dry that pleasure of Epicurus is—​for so I indeed think it is” (eo concurrant ubi audiant laudari voluptatem. Nec aestimant voluptas illa Epicuri—​ita enim mehercules sentio—​quam sobria ac sicca sit, V.B. 12.4). Voluptas means something vastly different inside the school and outside, and it is indeed this difference in meaning that constitutes the gap between the philosophical community of Epicureanism and the world outside. Seneca rises to the defense of Epicureanism—​“against the will of some of our countrymen [fellow Stoics]” (invitis . . . nostris popularibus, V.B. 13.1)—​by asserting that its scandalous reputation is undeserved, but asks, “Who could know this unless admitted within?” (hoc scire qui potest nisi interius admissus?, V.B. 13.3). The close organization of the Epicurean school and its tendency to self-​segregation thus become a way to explain the disjuncture between internal and external language that makes the school an unwitting sponsor of vice. This radical difference between the interior of the philosophical life and its exterior re-​emerges in the second part of the work, in which a new interlocutor, identified as “one of those who bark against philosophy” (quis . . . ex istis qui philosophiam conlatrant, V.B. 17.1), mounts a series of attacks against the gap between philosophers’ teaching and their practice. These attacks are leveled against philosophi and philosophia as such, not against a particular school, and though the interlocutor does not name names, Seneca’s defense does, and the philosophers whose conduct he undertakes to defend are chosen from across the philosophical landscape; they include Plato, Epicurus, Demetrius the Cynic, and Diodorus, an otherwise unknown Epicurean (V.B. 18.1–​19.2). Asmis suggests that this breadth represents an effort by Seneca to fortify his own position against charges of hypocrisy, assembling an ecumenical roster of co-​accused so as to enlist broad-​ based sympathy: “in the manner of a legal defendant,” she writes, “Seneca gathers friends to his side by associating himself with all who have pursued philosophy in the past.”42 The bond uniting this coalition, and thus the basis for Seneca’s definition of a trans-​sectarian philosophy qua philosophy, exhibits striking correspondence with his earlier characterization of the Epicurean school. We can see this correspondence most clearly when Seneca has Socrates offer the following reply to charges that his life does not match his principles: “I do not live in a way different from how I speak, but you hear in a different way; only the sound of my words reaches your ears; what it means you do not inquire” (“ergo non ego aliter,” inquit sapiens, “vivo quam loquor, sed vos aliter auditis; sonus tantummodo

41. Cf. Ep. 21.10, with later discussion. 42. Asmis 1990, 247.

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verborum ad aures vestras pervenit: quid significet non quaeritis,” V.B. 25.8).43 The general defense of philosophy in the second half of De Vita Beata, then, shares its account of the gulf between philosophical and unphilosophical understanding with the explanation Seneca develops earlier in the work of the gap between the understanding of pleasure on the inside of the Epicurean school and that on the outside. In both cases, Seneca’s emphasis is on the casualness and contingency of hearing, and on the consequent possibility of communication between those inside and outside the ambit of a philosophical community becoming systematically garbled. The closed nature of Epicureanism, and the readiness with which its doctrines can come to take on a perniciously altered meaning outside that social context, furnish Seneca with a model for explaining a broader range of communicative difficulties between philosophers and others. In depicting as victims of such misunderstandings both Socrates, the individual philosopher practicing outside of any collective philosophical framework, and the Epicureans, the most tightly organized of the Hellenistic schools, Seneca is able to make the larger point that philosophical practice is so sharply discontinuous with the activities of non-​philosophers as to be at times entirely incomprehensible to them. His generalization of this observation across the wider philosophical landscape in the second part of the work, though, builds upon the first part’s clearer picture of how philosophical practice opens up this gulf between its practitioners and non-​ practitioners. This picture in turn relies crucially on the model of the school to illustrate the ways in which philosophical living sets philosophers apart.

Ep. 21 In what follows, I take Seneca’s twenty-​first letter as a sustained example of the interconnected rhetorical and heuristic uses to which he puts the school of Epicurus.44 Seneca invokes the social relations of that school to show the ability of the philosophical life to compete with the life of political involvement on its own terrain, by matching the attractions of that life. Seneca then uses the formal congruence between his own epistolary practice and that of Epicurus to explain their shared self-​conception as philosophical educators. The uniqueness of Epicureanism for Seneca, here as elsewhere in his corpus, lies in the ties of friendship that bind together its members. Seneca has his objections to the communal

43. On the role of Socrates in the Dialogi more generally, see von Albrecht 2004, 64–​7, and on this exchange, see Ker 2010. 44. Setaioli 1988, 171–​256, provides a survey of Seneca’s mentions of Epicurus and his disciple Metrodorus.

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philosophical practice of the Epicureans, but in this letter, I shall argue, he mutes those objections in favor of a focus on that aspect of the rival school he regards as most praiseworthy: its skill at guiding the non-​philosopher into the practice of philosophy. Ep. 21 aims to call Lucilius away from his administrative pursuits and toward philosophical study.45 Seneca surmises that Lucilius hesitates to do as Seneca urges him because “you consider these things which you are to leave behind to be great, and when you put before yourself that security towards which you are about to move, the glow of this life from which you are about to draw away holds you back, as though you were about to fall into filth and shadow” (magna esse haec existimas quae relicturus es, et cum proposuisti tibi illam securitatem ad quam transiturus es, retinet te huius vitae a qua recessurus es fulgor tamquam in sordida et obscura casurum, Ep. 21.1).46 Lucilius can already see the true security that philosophy can yield, but he is given pause by the countervailing pull of the renown that public life can offer. Seneca’s challenge, then, is to dispel the appeal that political involvement holds relative to philosophy. The expected Stoic tactic would be to show that the fulgor Lucilius hopes for is not really a good at all, and therefore not something he should care about. Seneca, though, does something strikingly different. He offers the “example of Epicurus” (exemplum Epicuri, Ep. 21.2) in service of the opposite maneuver, investing the life of philosophy with a glamor that can equal, indeed surpass, that of politics. Seneca shows us how Epicurus went about establishing a set of parallels between Idomeneus’s political position and his potential position in a philosophical community and then using those parallels to argue for the superiority of the latter. Idomeneus, we learn, was then serving as “a minister of the royal power, handling weighty matters” (regiae tunc potentiae ministrum et magna tractantem, Ep. 21.3).47 His relation to political power, then, is mediated through the monarch he serves. Epicurus offers him a different sort of fame, one which again derives from Idomeneus’s associations rather than his personal properties. “If you are moved by glory,” Epicurus writes, “my letters will make you better known than all those things which you cherish and on account of which you are cherished” (“si gloria” inquit “tangeris, notiorem te epistulae meae facient quam omnia ista quae colis et propter quae coleris,” Ep. 21.3). Idomeneus is offered the chance to abandon

45. This letter is one of a series (Epp. 19–​22) in which Seneca urges Lucilius to give up his procuratorship in Sicily; his office is also mentioned at Nat. 4a.praef.1. See Griffin 1976, 347–​53. 46. For obscura as indicating specifically the absence of gloria, see Maurach 1970, 89 n. 51. 47. For the life of Idomeneus and discussion of the possibility that Lysimachus was the ruler whom he served, see RE s.v. Idomeneus (5).

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a political career in which he is the instrument of another’s power in favor of a place in a philosophical community. We should be clear about the differences between the sort of distinction that Epicurus is here quoted as offering Idomeneus and that ascribed to Epicurus himself, among others, in Seneca’s seventy-​ninth letter. Seneca’s claim in that letter is that “glory is the shadow of virtue, and attends it even when it is unwilling” (gloria umbra virtutis est: etiam invitam comitabitur, Ep. 79.13).48 This glory, though, may or may not attend the deserving person during his own lifetime. Adducing the case of Epicurus as an example of glory that came late, Seneca cites a letter of Epicurus’s disciple Metrodorus, in which the latter wrote “that he himself and Epicurus were not sufficiently well-​known; but that after him and Epicurus those who wished to follow in their footsteps would have a great and ready-​prepared name” (se et Epicurum non satis enotuisse; sed post se et Epicurum magnum paratumque nomen habituros qui voluissent per eadem ira vestigia, Ep. 79.16). Both Metrodorus as quoted in this letter and Epicurus as quoted in Ep. 21 are presciently aware of the fame their school will enjoy, but it is important to note the differences between the mechanism by which Idomeneus is to become famous and that by which the Epicureans of the future in Ep. 79 are to make their name. The latter are following Epicurus’s path per eadem vestigia; they are doing the same things Epicurus did, only with the aid of his example to guide them along the way. Epicurus’s promise to Idomeneus, by contrast, does not, at least explicitly, envision Idomeneus gaining fame for himself by emulating Epicurus, but rather having fame bestowed upon him through Epicurus’s own letters. It is this offer of fame by fiat that allows Epicurus in the passage Seneca quotes to give philosophical friendship an advantage over serving as the agent of monarchical power. Seneca devotes the next few sentences to expounding the advantages of the former sort of association over the latter. Idomeneus himself would be unknown if it were not for the correspondence of Epicurus. Even more striking, the potentates from whom Idomeneus derived his power are themselves now consigned to oblivion.49 That is, Seneca’s explication of Epicurus’s promise establishes

48. On Seneca’s view of glory, see Newman 2008 and Habinek 2000. See the next section of this chapter for further discussion of Ep. 79. 49. The way in which Seneca makes this point (omnes illos megistanas et satrapas et regem ipsum ex quo Idomenei titulus petebatur oblivio alta suppressit, Ep. 21.4), with the suggestion of burial in suppressit, is much closer than are the quoted remarks of Epicurus to making explicit the link those remarks imply between fame and a sort of immortality. On the ambivalence of the Epicurean attitude toward death, which struggled to make a doctrinal insistence that death is insignificant coexist with the implications of what Charles Segal calls, in the case of Lucretius, “eternizing praise” of Epicurus, see Segal 1990, 26–​45 and, on literary immortality, 180–​6 (quotation from 182).

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a hierarchy of lasting fame in which philosophy ranks entirely above politics. In ranked order, we have Epicurus (famous), then Idomeneus (contingently famous by association with Epicurus), then the rulers Idomeneus served (once famous, now unknown), then the agents of those rulers (certainly not famous now, if they ever were). This ranking places secondary philosophical figures above primary political figures. The choice offered Idomeneus, between a secondary position in each domain, thus becomes a vehicle for asserting unequivocally the primacy of philosophical over political association. What does Seneca gain by using Epicurus’s letter to Idomeneus to make his case to Lucilius? First, of course, at the distance of almost four hundred years, Epicurus’s promise to Idomeneus has proven itself warranted: Idomeneus is at this point better known than he would have been had he forgone Epicurus’s tutelage. In addition, however, the epistolary form of Epicurus’s contact with Idomeneus allows Seneca to demonstrate a basic difference between philosophical relationships and those shaped by the exercise of political power. We can understand how this is so by considering the chief interpretive difficulty raised by the letter: how are we to reconcile Seneca’s claim that Lucilius will gain true fame by his own efforts with the promise of Epicurus that he quotes in apparent reinforcement of that claim? Seneca tells Lucilius, “[Y]‌our studies will make you famous and distinguished” (studia te tua clarum et nobilem efficient, Ep. 21.2). As we have seen, though, the illustration of that claim that Seneca selects from the correspondence of Epicurus links Idomeneus’s future fame to Epicurus’s own celebrity rather than to any activity of his own. Seneca deepens this contradiction at the end of his discussion of Epicurus and Idomeneus, when he writes, “What Epicurus was able to promise to his friend, I promise to you, Lucilius: I will have favor among those who live after us, and I am able to bring with me names that will endure” (quod Epicurus amico suo potuit promittere, hoc tibi promitto, Lucili: habebo apud posteros gratiam, possum mecum duratura nomina educere, Ep. 21.5). What part do Lucilius’s own studies play here? In what sense are those studies the cause of the lasting fame Seneca promises him? These questions are made no easier to answer by the examples Seneca chooses to supplement that of Epicurus and Idomeneus. The first of these is that of Cicero and Atticus, who “would have been silent amid such great names [those of his son-​in-​law Agrippa, his grandson-​in-​law Tiberius, and his great-​grandson Drusus Caesar, Tiberius’s son] had not Cicero joined him to himself ” (inter tam magna nomina taceretur nisi sibi Cicero illum adplicuisset, Ep. 21.4).50 The fame Atticus

50. On Seneca’s use of this and subsequent examples to establish himself in this letter as both philosopher and artist, see Schönegg 1999, 171–​8.

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enjoys is the product not of any study but simply of Cicero’s choice.51 The next example, that of Virgil’s apostrophe to Nisus and Euryalus, makes even less immediate sense as an example of the power of philosophical study to confer fame on its practitioner:52 fortunati ambo! si quid mea carmina possunt, nulla dies umquam memori vos eximet aevo, dum domus Aeneae Capitoli immobile saxum accolet imperiumque pater Romanus habebit. (Virg. Aen. 9.446–​9) Fortunate pair! If my poem is able to do anything, no day will ever obliterate you from the memory of time, as long as the house of Aeneas holds the unmovable rock of the Capitol and the Roman father has command. Virgil’s exclamation links the lasting fame of Nisus and Euryalus to the activity from which they derived that fame. The temporal clause that qualifies the assertion that they will be famous sets that fame in the context of the cause for which Nisus and Euryalus gave their lives; as Philip Hardie remarks on this passage, “the Aen[eid] as a whole tells of suffering and heroism in the remote past whose fruits endure to the present (imperium Romanum).”53 The memory of their heroic acts will last as long as the future glory of Rome, for the sake of which those acts were undertaken. Seneca, by contrast, does not link the fame he promises Lucilius to any such larger project. Lucilius is to gain renown simply because of his mention in Seneca’s letters, and that mention, unlike the actions of Nisus and Euryalus in the Aeneid, is left without any organic connection to the letters’ project of philosophical education. Virgil promises Nisus and Euryalus that he will transmit a fame that is figured as growing out of their own projects, whereas both Epicurus and Seneca see the fame they bestow as a sort of grace. How, then, do Lucilius’s own activities make any contribution at all to his lasting renown? To answer this question we have to note the effect of Seneca’s transfer of the Aeneid passage into an epistolary context. Virgil’s apostrophe to Nisus and Euryalus has a number of functions in the Aeneid, but actual communication

51. The perishable fame with which Atticus’s lasting renown is contrasted is itself the product of his associations rather than his activities; note the parallel with Idomeneus’s position as an agent of monarchical power. Here again Lucilius is confronted with a choice between two different sorts of secondariness. 52. On the place of this quotation in Seneca’s self-​positioning against the background of Augustan culture, see Ker 2015, 119–​20. 53. Hardie 1994 ad loc.

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with Nisus and Euryalus is not among them. When Seneca inserts this exclamation into a letter, though, and quotes it in conjunction with a discussion of his own power to confer immortal fame, the guarantee of fame it issues takes on a new significance. Now the recipient of the proposed fame is made aware of its possibility, by the very fact of the guarantee’s incorporation into a letter to him.54 When we bear in mind the letter’s stated purpose—​to call Lucilius from public life into devotion to philosophy—​we can see the function this guarantee serves, and its relation to Lucilius’s own studies. It serves to lay out a sort of exchange: if Lucilius pursues philosophy, he will receive fame from Seneca. Epicurus’s promises to Idomeneus have a similarly contractual character. In each case, the fame that the addressee is to receive issues not from his own activity per se but from the volition of his philosophical teacher. This fame is philosophy’s answer—​explicitly so, in the cases of both Idomeneus and Lucilius—​to the power of public life to offer indirect glory by association with the powerful. Whether or not Lucilius and Idomeneus are to receive the fame of association with a noted philosopher hinges on their willingness to enter into a course of philosophical instruction under his guidance. There is, then, a connection between the studies each will undertake and the fame he is to gain, but that connection is supplied artificially by his teacher as an inducement to philosophical study. Epicurus and Seneca, then, calque the philosophical life on the public life, but with the aim, explicit in Seneca’s case at least, of exposing the emptiness of the latter, to the ultimate benefit of the addressee. The letter’s protreptic function thus itself allows its readers, Lucilius included, to understand the special character of the philosophical life for which it argues. The letter, we should recall, addresses itself to a gap between Lucilius’s perception of the good and his ability to pursue it: “you see where happiness is placed,” Seneca writes, “but you do not dare to reach it” (vides ubi sit posita felicitas sed ad illam pervenire non audes, Ep. 21.1). This formulation is an odd one in the light of Stoic intellectualism, and indeed the subsequent sentences make clear that Lucilius’s lack of daring is rooted in his inflated valuation of the fame offered by public life. Seneca’s offer of fame through mention in his letters takes this deficiency as, for the moment, not remediable. We can see this deferral of engagement with error in the opening words of Seneca’s quotation from Epicurus, “if you are moved by glory” (si gloria tangeris, Ep. 21.3). As noted, this maneuver confronts political glory on its own terms. The

54. As Ilsetraut Hadot 1969a, 170 n. 37 points out, the pledge of immortal fame extended by Epicurus and Seneca echoes that of Theognis to Cyrnus (Thgn. 237–​47). The Theognidean example also involves direct address to the recipient of the promised fame, and also implies an exchange of sorts. These congruences can help us see how remarkably different is the rhetorical context from which the Aeneid quotation is taken.

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quid pro quo involved in this promise, though, gives Lucilius the fame he wants in exchange for the philosophical commitment that will ultimately cure him of the mistaken belief that fame is valuable. This letter invites us to see philosophical protreptic in action, and the model of the relationship between philosophical guide and pupil that the letter acts out serves itself as an argument for the superiority of the philosophical life. Lucilius is offered a choice between secondary positions in political and philosophical life, and Seneca makes it clear that it is only in the latter position that his own activity will generate fame for him in posterity. That Lucilius’s commitment to philosophy generates this fame in the indirect manner described merely reinforces Seneca’s claim. The process of philosophical education depicted in the letter involves the exchange of philosophical allegiance for fame, but as we have seen, the bestowal of that fame is gratuitous on the side of Epicurus and Seneca.55 What Idomeneus and Lucilius give in return is for themselves, not for Epicurus and Seneca. The letter thus shows us how a secondary station in philosophy differs from one in politics: in philosophical friendship, unlike in politics, an asymmetrical relationship need not be instrumental in character. Indeed, as we have seen, the tie between Seneca and Lucilius is represented as existing for the sake of the latter rather than the former. It is for this reason that Seneca uses the language of alienation and dependency to describe the defects of political life: “The difference that divides flash from light—​that the latter has an origin which is fixed and its own, while the former shines because of something outside itself—​also obtains between this life and that one” (quod interest inter splendorem et lucem, cum haec certam originem habeat ac suam, ille niteat alieno, hoc inter hanc vitam et illam, Ep. 21.2). It is important to note that Seneca’s distinction here is between the life of philosophy and that of politics, not between Lucilius qua philosopher and qua politician. In each life, such glory as he may attain will be reflected from other sources, but the life of philosophy, as opposed to Lucilius himself in his capacity as philosopher and Senecan acolyte, is self-​sufficient. As we have seen, Seneca’s ascription of that property to the life of philosophy founds itself on the fact that the new recruit to philosophy, unlike the agent of another’s political power, is treated as an end in himself by the authority to which he attaches himself. 55. Throughout this chapter, I use the term “education” to describe the philosophical development at which the Epicurean school aimed. I do not mean to suggest any congruence of aims or subject matter between this process and the standard syllabus of Greco-​Roman education, to which Epicurus was notably hostile (Diog. Laert. 10.6 [Us. 163], but cf. DeWitt 1954, 44–​5, for an important qualification), but rather to indicate the comprehensiveness of Epicureanism’s formative ambitions and the centrality of argument and instruction to the realization of those ambitions.

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Seneca reinforces this point with a further anecdote drawn from Epicurus’s relationship with his disciples and with Idomeneus in particular. “If you wish to make Pythocles [another of Epicurus’s followers] rich,” Seneca quotes Epicurus as writing to Idomeneus, “you should not add to his supply of money but subtract from his desire” (“si vis” inquit “Pythoclea divitem facere, non pecuniae adiciendum sed cupiditati detrahendum est,” Ep. 21.7). Epicurus here again uses the conditional form to establish a sort of implied contract with Idomeneus, and here again the protasis of the condition is intended to answer to Idomeneus’s prereflective conception of the good. The function of the conditional injunction as a whole is to deflect Idomeneus’s efforts toward the aims that in Epicurus’s view will issue in genuine rather than spurious satisfaction. There is a crucial difference between the two iterations of this strategy, though. As noted, only the intermediary of Epicurus’s own volition connects the fulfillment of Idomeneus’s wish for fame, addressed in the protasis of the earlier condition, to the action urged upon him in the apodosis. I have argued that it is precisely by Epicurus’s overt construction of this causal connection that that connection serves its educational function. In this second condition, though, Idomeneus’s removal of Pythocles’s desire for wealth is envisioned as leading directly, without further intervention by Epicurus, toward the realization of Idomeneus’s aims. If he curbs Pythocles’s wants, the latter will, regardless of what Epicurus does or does not do, become wealthy in the true sense of the term.56 Seneca’s use of this instruction, then, dramatizes a further stage in Epicurean philosophical education, in which the pupil strives for the good guided by the master’s precepts but no longer needs to be galvanized by such hortatory mechanisms as the one set up by Epicurus’s promise of lasting fame. There was no suggestion that Idomeneus might be able to win such fame for himself, but now he can, with Epicurus’s guidance, take up the enrichment of Pythocles on his own. The form of the guidance from Epicurus to Idomeneus that Seneca reports, then, helps us to grasp Seneca’s own view of Epicurean philosophical education. The anecdotes about Epicurus and Idomeneus that Seneca retails in this letter show us an Epicurean school in which the philosophical master both actively intervenes in the development of his disciples, using his own prestige to guarantee the satisfaction of their worldly desires, and provides the precepts by which

56. The independence of the desired outcome in this instance from further action on the part of Epicurus can be seen in Horace’s adaptation of this advice (Carm. 3.16.39–​42; see Nisbet and Rudd 2004 ad loc.): contracto melius parva cupidine/​vectigalia porrigam,/​quam si Mygdoniis regnum Alyattaei/​campis continuem. The ablative absolute, in establishing the circumstances under which the speaker will become wealthier, insists upon the immediate causal link between the curtailment of desire and the speaker’s self-​enrichment.

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they can come to take action on their own behalf and on behalf of each other, even without approaching the philosophical understanding enjoyed by Epicurus himself.57 That is, Seneca gives us here a picture of how the strong organization around a founding figure typical of the Hellenistic philosophical schools serves to provide a framework for recruitment to philosophy and education in it.58 It is with this picture in view that we are to understand the moment of philosophical ecumenicalism with which Seneca begins the letter’s conclusion: “I more eagerly relate the distinguished sayings of Epicurus,” he writes, “for this reason, so that they might prove to those who are led by a wicked hope to take refuge with him, who think that they will gain a cover for their own vices, that wherever they go they must live honorably” (eo libentius Epicuri egregia dicta commemoro, ut istis qui ad illum confugiunt spe mala inducti, qui velamentum ipsos vitiorum suorum habituros existimant, probent quocumque ierint honeste esse vivendum, Ep. 21.9). He goes on to describe the reception with porridge and water one would receive in his garden, under the banner “You will remain well here, guest; here pleasure is the highest good” (hospes, hic bene manebis, hic summum bonum voluptas est, Ep. 21.10). This passage serves several interconnected functions. Most obviously, it undercuts the advantage in recruitment the Epicureans enjoyed as a result of the ambient misconception of their sect as devoted to crass self-​indulgence under a thin philosophical veneer. At the same time, though, it builds upon the rest of the letter, and indeed on the discussion of Epicureanism running through the first three books of the Epistulae Morales, to present the Stoic and Epicurean philosophical schools as sharing considerable common ground at the level of practice. The closing image of Epicurus offering his sober welcome to prospective adherents is tied to the quotation of Epicurus’s advice to Idomeneus about Pythocles not just by the content of Epicurus’s remarks in each context, which assert the attenuation of desire as the path to happiness, but also, and more significant for our purposes, by the figure of Epicurus himself (appearing at Ep. 21.10 not by name but as “the welcoming and kind guardian of that dwelling” [istius domicilii custos hospitalis, humanus]). The unifying feature of all three appearances of Epicurus in this letter is the emphasis on his close adaptation of his message to the particular circumstances of each actual or potential adherent he encounters. We see him first offering the lure of fame to inveigle Idomeneus into living philosophically, then offering Idomeneus room to take independent action in the 57. This picture answers to the sketch of Epicurean education, again based on Philodemus, offered by Asmis 2001; the novice progresses toward full philosophical competence through a carefully graded series of stages. I. Hadot 1969b traces the influence of this graded philosophical education on the portrayal of Lucilius’s development in Seneca’s letters. 58. See Sedley 1989, with earlier discussion.

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service of a fellow Epicurean, and, finally, moving firmly to dispel the popular equation of Epicureanism with license. In each case, it is the social framework of the Epicurean school that displays Epicurus’s methods of guidance, and that in turn allows Seneca in this letter to develop and, at the same time, enact his own model of philosophical education.

Ep. 79 Seneca’s seventy-​ninth letter appears to lurch abruptly from topic to topic: we hear first of his interest in some natural phenomena in Sicily, particularly those associated with Aetna, then of Lucilius’s desire to write a poem about the volcano, next of the durability of virtue, and finally of the relationship between virtue and glory. We can track through the letter, though, a persistent concern with the anxieties about the past and future that overshadow human activity, culminating in the suggestion that the philosophical school offers a uniquely powerful way of circumventing those anxieties. Seneca begins the letter by appealing to Lucilius to share with him the fruits of the tour he is making of Sicily, of which he has recently been named procurator.59 Seneca, at least, seems to regard this appointment as offering abundant leisure and opportunity for Lucilius to advance in wisdom (Nat. 4a.pref.1), and at the start of this letter he is eager to know what Lucilius has learned about Scylla and Charybdis. Already here the topic of the relationship among past, present, and future knowledge is broached, as Seneca asks to what extent the “stories” (fabulis, Ep. 79.1) about Charybdis correspond to observable reality. This interest in empirical testing of myth is unusual for Seneca: he regards questions about the details of Homeric stories, including about Odysseus’s route home, as fruitless distractions from philosophical self-​improvement (Ep. 88.6–​8); he finds Chrysippus’s interest in allegorical interpretation of myth tiresome and irrelevant to the topics it purports to illuminate (Ben. 1.3.8–​10); and, though he professes to be bored by the Epicureans’ repetitious criticism of underworld myth, he is clearly in agreement with the fundamental point of that criticism, that there is no substance behind such stories (Ep. 24.18; cf. Marc. 19.4). Why, then, does he depart from that pattern in nudging Lucilius toward an investigation of the stories about Sicilian wonders? It seems most reasonable to suppose that, by prompting the reader to think about how later generations receive and often challenge poetic claims to truth, he aims to set up the discussion of poetic inheritance and supersession we are about to explore.

59. On Lucilius’s career, see Griffin 1976, 91.

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This issue comes to the fore as Seneca pivots from geological questions about Aetna to Lucilius’s intention to describe the volcano in a poem (Ep. 79.5). He assures Lucilius that the frequency with which the mountain has been treated by earlier poets need be no barrier to Lucilius’s own attempt on the theme. For this conclusion he advances three arguments. The first is an appeal to history: Cornelius Severus was not deterred from writing about Aetna by the fact that Virgil and Ovid had treated it before him, nor was the latter stymied by the precedence of the former.60 Not satisfied with merely drawing attention to the fact that one poetic achievement has not, in the past, precluded the possibility of a later one, Seneca seeks, in the two succeeding arguments, to explain why this is so. The first argument bases itself on the specific character of Aetna, which “has given itself with happy results to all” (omnibus . . . feliciter . . . se dedit, Ep. 79.5), but language of the argument invites wider application. Seneca tells Lucilius that “those who went before seem to me not to have pre-​empted those things that are able to be said, but to have opened them up” (qui praecesserant non praeripuisse mihi videntur quae dici poterant, sed aperuisse, Ep. 79.5). The view of literary history implied here is not progressive in the sense that later products are better than earlier ones, but it does suggest that poetry is a cumulative enterprise in which the efforts of those writing later are enabled by the work of their predecessors. This suggestion becomes more explicit when Seneca tells Lucilius that “it matters a great deal whether you enter upon material that has been broken up or used up: it increases day by day, and the things which have already been discovered present no obstacle to those who would make new discoveries” (multum interest utrum ad consumptam materiam an ad subactam accedas: crescit in dies, et inventuris inventa non obstant, Ep. 79.6). As an active volcano, Aetna is in a constant state of change and regeneration, and this allows Seneca a convenient metaphor for the inexhaustibility of the poetic material in a rich topic. The suggestion of purposeful effort in subactam, from a verb often used in agricultural contexts, amplifies the idea that the poets reap the harvest, as it were, of their predecessors’ exertions. Seneca takes this idea to its logical conclusion when he 60. How we understand the capsule history of the topic Seneca provides here depends to some extent on the authorship and date of the poem about Aetna ascribed to Virgil both in the biographical (by the Donatan and Servian vitae) and manuscript traditions. Some modern scholars have maintained that Virgil did indeed write the poem; others have attributed it, on the basis of the passage of Ep. 79 under discussion, to Cornelius Severus (a poet of Augustus’s time, author of a lost poem on the war between Octavian and Sextus Pompey) or to Lucilius himself. On this question, see Ellis 1901, xxi–​lii, and Goodyear 1965, 56–​9. If the Aetna is not the work of Virgil, Seneca’s reference here is most likely to his descriptions of Aetna at G. 1.471–​3 and Aen. 3.570–​87. Ovid mentions Aetna at Met. 15.340–​1 (Pythagoras is speaking). If Cornelius Severus is not the author of the Aetna, the reference to his treatment must remain obscure. Perhaps he had occasion to describe the volcano in his narrative of the Sicilian war.

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argues that “the best position is that of he who comes last: he finds words prepared, which when arranged in another way have a new face” (condicio optima est ultimi: parata verba invenit, quae aliter instructa novam faciem habent, Ep. 79.6).61 Turning from these generalities back to the immediate topic of Lucilius’s planned poem, Seneca expresses his confidence that Lucilius is eager to write something “equal to those who have gone before” (par prioribus, Ep. 79.7). To achieve this equality is the limit of Lucilius’s amibition, though: “to hope for more,” Seneca writes, “is forbidden to you by your modesty, which is so great in you that it seems to me you will restrain the force of your talent, if there is danger of winning, so powerful is your reverence for your predecessors” (plus enim sperare modestia tibi tua non permittit, quae tanta in te est ut videaris mihi retracturus ingenii tui vires si vincendi periculum est: tanta tibi priorum reverentia est, Ep. 79.7). This discussion of Lucilius’s poetic activity raises two topics of great interest to Roman poets, and Greek poets before them: the possibility of creating worthwhile new work in the wake of distinguished predecessors and the durability of poetic distinction. To the individual poet, each of these subjects gives rise to its own set of anxieties, one concerned with the past and the other with the future. Will the poet have anything to add to an already rich literary tradition? Will his efforts be eclipsed by those who come after him? Seneca offers Lucilius reason for hope on the first score: his efforts will not be superfluous, as literary history shows, and indeed his task has been made easier rather than harder by his predecessors. But this line of argument, especially its conclusion that “the best position is that of the one who comes last,” takes on a different and less cheering aspect when the poet contemplates his place in the future instead of his relationship to the past. It is exactly this contemplation that Seneca invites when he raises the possibility of Lucilius’s vanquishing (vincendi) his predecessors. In reassuring his friend of the later poet’s ability to take his place alongside earlier ones, Seneca thus raises the possibility that Lucilius will find himself crowded aside by even later entrants. He is thereby able to maintain his encouraging tone even while adverting to the prospect of any poet, implicitly Lucilius himself, being displaced by posthumous rivals. By laying emphasis on Lucilius’s modestia as the barrier to his usurpation of the places of previous poets, Seneca makes it clear that this irenic attitude is merely personal to Lucilius. There is no inherent obstacle to other poets’ availing themselves of their optimal position in the historical sequence to seize attention from their predecessors.

61. Trinacty 2014, 11–​3, shows how the letter demonstrates, rather than simply argues for, this advantage through its use of language repurposed from Virgil, Horace, and Ovid.

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Seneca thus couches his reassurances to Lucilius in such a way as to allay only one of these two sets of poetic anxieties. Indeed, as we have seen, he draws attention to poetic anxieties about the future in a way calculated to inflame rather than soothe them. This maneuver prepares the ground for his next topics, the permanence of wisdom and the equal standing of the wise. We can see now why Seneca has chosen to introduce his discussion of these qualities of wisdom by discussing poetry. In the passage we have just surveyed, he evokes but pointedly fails to quell the poet’s fears that his work will be either redundant or easily forgotten, or both. Seneca sketches out an only very partially comforting model of how poetic tradition works: the work of earlier poets has opened up, rather than closed down, opportunities for their successors, but the posthumous fate of any poet’s work depends to a dangerous degree on the tact and modesty of those who come after him. Seneca shows that the community of the wise is exempt from exactly these deficiencies. So too, as we will see, are the transhistorical communities formed by those aiming at wisdom through philosophy. He begins this demonstration by affirming the equality of the wise, in implicit contrast to the gradations of merit among poets. He is careful to emphasize that this equality does not entail the obliteration of individuality. “Each one of these [the wise],” Seneca writes, “will have his or her own gifts: one will be more congenial, another readier for action, another easier in speech, another more eloquent; the thing under discussion, which makes one blessed, is equal in all” (habebit unusquisque ex iis proprias dotes: alius erit affabilior, alius expeditior, alius promptior in eloquendo, alius facundior: illud de quo agitur, quod beatum facit, aequalest in omnibus, Ep. 79.9). The last example of difference in particular brings home the relevance of this doctrine to the preceding discussion of poetry: if one poet is more eloquent than another, that difference, though not necessarily dispositive for an ordinal ranking of them as poets, would have obvious and strong implications for such a ranking.62 In the domain of moral excellence to which philosophy gives access, by contrast, variation in character does not issue in differences in standing relative to the domain’s fundamental constituent. The pursuit of wisdom is thus presented as able to sustain diversity and equality simultaneously, a feat poetry is inherently unable to manage.63

62. For facundus as a term of praise applied to poets and poetry, see, e.g., Mart. 12.43.1 (skill in composition does not compensate for poor choice of subject matter), 14.189.1 (Propertius’s eloquence). 63. Cf. Ep. 109.5 on how the wise continue to learn from each other, despite their perfect wisdom, since each of them has his or her particular sphere of knowledge (quarumdam . . . rerum scientiam) and ways of saving time (breviores vias rerum). Seneca again is at pains to stress that the attainment of wisdom does not leave one interchangeable with one’s fellow wise people or render superfluous the diversity of human character.

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Seneca’s second topic, the permanence of virtue, is also presented in a way that answers the concerns evoked in his earlier discussion of relations among poets. As we have seen, although Seneca raises the topic of poetic impermanence in the course of praising Lucilius, the very mention of it gestures toward an instability in the notional community of poets. He draws the reader’s attention back to this instability by contrasting the permanence of wisdom with the variability of Aetna itself: “I do not know,” he writes, “whether your Aetna is able to slip and collapse into itself, or whether the steady force of its fires could pull down this lofty peak that is visible over the open ocean,” but virtue, he goes on, is invulnerable to hazards of any kind (an Aetna tua possit sublabi et in se ruere, an hoc excelsum cacumen et conspicuum per vasti maris spatia detrahat adsidua vis ignium, nescio, Ep. 79.10). Seneca reprises his earlier reference to Aetna’s volcanic mutability, but the significance of that property has changed. The condition of flux that Seneca used to extend to the contemporary poet the hope of finding a place for himself in the poetic tradition now represents perishability, transitively suggesting that the poet’s hoped-​for renown may well prove temporary by virtue of the same instability that allowed him to attain it. Any encouragement given to the poet, Seneca has again managed to suggest, has its necessary obverse: we can think of poetry as hospitable to newcomers or as a lasting source of renown, but not both. Philosophy, as we have seen, offers access to a non-​rivalrous space of wisdom that is both at once, and Seneca elaborates the appeal of this realm in subtle but close and pointed contrast with the ambitions of the poet. In the final stretch of the letter (Ep. 79.13–​18), Seneca approaches the topic of renown from a different angle, this time showing how the practice of philosophy, even without the full attainment of the wisdom that is its goal, can provide lasting glory.64 In so doing, he draws together the threads we have traced through the letter so far, putting forward the philosophical school as a vehicle for the resolution of the worries about permanence and supersession that he insinuates into the discussion of poetry in the first part of the letter. First, he assures Lucilius that glory is invariably concomitant with virtue, though sometimes it is delayed (Ep. 79.13). He cites as examples of late but thereby magnified renown two Greek philosophers, Democritus and Socrates, and two Roman statesmen, Rutilius and Cato (the Younger).65 He then turns to an extended discussion of Epicurus and

64. On Seneca’s reconfiguration of inherited Roman ideals of glory, see Habinek 2000, Newman 2008, and Roller 2018, 265–​89. 65. P. Rutilius (RE 34) Rufus, a student of Panaetius (Cic. Off. 3.10), facing a prosecution de repetundis in 92 bce, modeled his defense on that of Socrates, was convicted, and went into exile (Cic. De Or. 1.231). For Democritus’s obscurity and late-​life rise to renown, see Diog. Laert. 9.36–​9.

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his school. Though the philosopher was unknown in his own day even in Athens, now “you see how much not only the learned but also this crowd of the unsophisticated marvel at [him]” (vides Epicurum quantopere non tantum eruditiores sed haec quoque inperitorum turba miretur, Ep. 79.15). In mentioning the judgment of the crowd Seneca presumably does not mean to suggest that its opinions carry any weight, especially since, as discussed earlier, he believes that popular interest in Epicureanism is grounded in misunderstandings about Epicurus’s life and doctrine, but rather to emphasize the ease with which the crowd’s baseless contempt can become admiration. In case the reader finds this testament to popular fickleness insufficiently reassuring, Seneca then moves to put on a firmer footing his account of how Epicurus circumvented the disdain of his contemporaries, and it is at this juncture that he invokes the social institution of the philosophical school: “When [Epicurus] had already outlived his friend Metrodorus by many years,” Seneca writes, “after celebrating his and Metrodorus’s friendship with thankful remembrance in a certain letter he added this last of all, that amid such great goods no harm could come to him and Metrodorus from the fact that noble Greece had kept them not only unknown but almost unheard” (multis itaque iam annis Metrodoro suo superstes in quadam epistula, cum amicitiam suam et Metrodori grata commemoratione cecinisset, hoc novissime adiecit, nihil sibi et Metrodoro inter bona tanta nocuisse quod ipsos illa nobilis Graecia non ignotos solum habuisset sed paene inauditos, Ep. 79.15–​16). Here Seneca subtly reminds Lucilius that the glory he is implied to be concerned with should not, in the end, be a weighty consideration, and that friendship—​considered a genuine good by Epicurus but even for the Stoics a preferred indifferent, and certainly regarded by Seneca as more choiceworthy than glory—​provides satisfactions that glory that cannot.66 But there is more to the quotation from Epicurus than that reminder of the general relative worth of glory and friendship. Seneca aims to show that the specific qualities of friendship as practiced in the Epicurean school could remedy the specific harms putatively associated with lack of glory. Epicurus characterizes those harms by describing himself and Metrodorus as “almost unheard” because they were ignored by the public. As any reader would know who has made it this far in Seneca’s collection of letters, let alone any reader who has firsthand acquaintance with Epicurean philosophical writing, Epicurus and Metrodorus certainly were heard, and their contributions valued, by one another and by their fellow members of the school. The ties formed within that school were conduits for a recognition and appreciation that compensated for the denial of those by the outside world. When we put this evocation of Epicurean friendship next to

66. The Stoics on the value of friendship: Diog. Laert. 7.124.

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Lucilius’s imagined worries earlier in the letter about finding a point and an audience for his poem on Aetna, we can see that Seneca is again inviting a contrast between poetry and philosophy. This iteration of that contrast, though, is not between poetic achievement and wisdom but rather between poetic aspiration—​ presented earlier as a zone of zero-​sum rivalry in which only Lucilius’s personal modestia will keep him from dethroning his elders—​and the philosophical pursuit of wisdom, which forms and confirms bonds among its practitioners. These bonds are of such strength and quality as to obviate any need to contend for glory. Epicurus and his friends were posthumously accorded such glory, though, despite their lack of need for it, and Seneca now returns to this fact. “Metrodorus,” he writes, “also says this in a certain letter, that he and Epicurus were not sufficiently known, but that after himself and Epicurus those who wanted to follow the same footsteps would have a great and ready name” (hoc Metrodorus quoque in quadam epistula confitetur, se et Epicurum non satis enotuisse; sed post se et Epicurum magnum paratumque nomen habituros qui voluissent per eadem ire vestigia, Ep. 79.16). At first glance, as mentioned earlier, this statement seems like a variant of the promise Seneca quotes Epicurus making to Idomeneus in the twenty-​first letter, that association with him would confer lasting fame. While Metrodorus’s claim is doubtless intended, like Epicurus’s, to induce those tempted by the prospect of glory to join the Epicurean school, it proceeds from very different premises. Metrodorus’s point is not that the fame of the school’s founder will confer secondary renown on his followers, but rather the very reverse, that later generations of the school would win fame for themselves, with the implication that this would redeem the neglect suffered by Epicurus and his immediate contemporaries. Metrodorus still manages to suggest Epicurus’s unique merit: why else would his path bring renown to those who follow it? At the same time, these later followers are accorded an indispensable role in bringing Epicurus to his due meed of glory. With the help of Epicurus and Metrodorus, Seneca has sketched a model of the philosophical school as a mechanism for the transtemporal circulation of attention and renown. This function becomes clearer with Seneca’s subsequent remarks: “Many thousands of years and of peoples will come along: look to them. Even if envy orders silence to all of those who live with you, there will come those who judge without displeasure, without favor” (multa annorum milia, multa populorum supervenient: ad illa respice. etiam si omnibus tecum viventibus silentium livor indixerit, venient qui sine offensa, sine gratia iudicent, Ep. 79.17). A single human life cannot encompass a wide enough span of time to ensure an impartial hearing, but the life of a school can. By showing how such a community, built on philosophical practice, can surmount the limitations of circumstance and historical location, Seneca shows again the ability of philosophy to assuage the concerns

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about poetry reviewed in the first part of the letter. If aspiring poets worry that their work is superfluous and established poets that theirs will be superseded, the philosophical community, in which both founders and epigones have their part to play in securing their shared glory, holds out the unique promise of transcending these worries and establishing harmony among past, present, and future. The Epicurean and Stoic schools, then, furnish Seneca with a unique means of explaining what the philosophical life is. It is important for this book’s larger argument to emphasize again that the philosophical communities we have considered in this chapter are not for Seneca communities of the wise but rather of those aiming at wisdom. Indeed, in the case of the Epicureans, Seneca thinks that pursuit has begun from flawed premises and consequently is irretrievably unsuccessful in its task. Nevertheless, in the passages we have examined he draws attention to fundamental differences between the philosophical life, of whatever sort, and other kinds of life. The institution of the philosophical school furnishes Seneca with a way of defining the distinctiveness of philosophy’s aspirations. As we have seen, his use of Epicurean friendship in Ep. 21 shows how philosophical education uses the pre-​philosophical, socially generated complex of desires with which its students begin to drive their moral development. That is, Seneca’s representation of philosophy’s transformative power depends for its illustrative potential on the interplay between, on the one hand, ambient convention and, on the other, philosophical social relations that aim at challenging that convention. The tie between teacher and student, the social building block of the philosophical school, is brought into relief here against the background of the unreflective opinion it seeks to combat, and that tie in turn allows Seneca to display the uniquely non-​manipulative character of social bonds aimed at the cultivation of wisdom. Seneca’s treatment of the Stoic school serves a distinct but complementary function. His discussion of the relations of authority within the school, and in particular his reimagination of what the collective practice of philosophy in a particular tradition might mean in an age of dispersal, point up the commitment to inquiry that distinguishes philosophy from other sorts of groupings. As we have seen, it is the social character of the Stoic school, even as refounded on textual rather than personal contact, that allows Seneca to employ political and familial metaphors in his effort to define and make intelligible the distinguishing characteristics of the philosophical life. The collective character of philosophical life in the schools, then, becomes in Seneca’s hands a way to celebrate, rather than abdicate or obscure, the personal commitment to reason that drives philosophical practice.

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Slavery

Seneca has always been a divisive author, a lightning rod for evaluative and interpretive controversy of all sorts, but the debate surrounding his views on slavery has been intense even by Senecan standards. Two chief approaches to the study of these views crystallized over the course of the twentieth century. Some scholars, of whom we might choose the otherwise very different figures of Joseph Vogt and Pierre Grimal as representative, have stressed the ways in which Seneca anticipated or even contributed to the modern consensus that slavery cannot be justified: Vogt writes that Seneca “advocates the doctrine that slaves are human beings, and draws the conclusion for slave-​owners that their behaviour towards slaves should reflect this fact.”1 Others, prominently including Keith Bradley, maintain that “Seneca’s views on slavery were in fact essentially manipulative, deeply rooted in the elite conservatism of the Roman ruling class, so that if Seneca deserves praise, it has to be for class loyalty, and nothing more.”2 Each of these perspectives carries with it an obvious danger of anachronism. On the one hand, we risk retrojecting onto Seneca a regard for the rights of the enslaved that would be utterly alien to the moral world in which he lived. On the other hand, the view that his writings on slavery aim to defend the institution is in jeopardy of exaggerating the extent to which Seneca felt slavery to be under attack. That is, both views can leave the impression that Seneca inhabited a moral landscape

1. J. Vogt 1975, 135. See Grimal 1978, 181: “For [Seneca], the slave is not to any degree an ‘instrument’: he is first a human being.” Richter 1958 also argues for Seneca’s humanitarianism and for his formative role in modern anti-​slavery thought. Cf. Westermann 1955, 116: “Seneca deserves the credit, as a man of great wealth and, therefore, a great slaveholder, of having accepted a forward-​looking movement popular in his day.” 2. Bradley 1986b, 171–​2. Bradley’s work on ancient slavery is set in context by McKeown 2007, 77–​96, who highlights the ways in which that work reacts against the views of the “Mainz school” headed by Joseph Vogt.

Philosophy and Community in Seneca’s Prose. Carey Seal, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190493219.003.0004

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riven by conflict over the legitimacy of enslavement like that of Europe and the United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when the horrors of New World slavery belatedly engaged widespread intellectual attention.3 Placing Seneca in such a landscape invites us to think of him now as an intermittently guilty, fitfully reform-​minded enslaver, like Thomas Jefferson, now as a committed apologist for the institution, in the mode of John Calhoun. But as Bradley writes in a new version of his landmark essay, “the astonishing number of comments and allusions [to slavery in Seneca’s writings] indicates above all the structural embeddedness of slavery in Roman society and culture, on which Seneca is to my mind an intriguing and frustrating source of knowledge: intriguing because he reveals so much, frustrating because despite his social perspicuity (even sensitivity), slavery never emerges in his writings as a problem.”4 That is, Seneca lived in and wrote about a society pervaded by, and to a large extent organized around, the institution of slavery without experiencing that institution as a source of the sort of moral unease that a modern reader might expect to issue in criticism or defensiveness.5 This chapter aims to look beyond the question of Seneca’s normative evaluation of slavery to assess the role it played in his project of showing how philosophy could be a guide to life. Kathleen McCarthy has shown how in the comedies of Plautus “slavery provides the language and imagery through which the broader principles of domination are explored.”6 It is my contention that a similar function can be described for slavery in Seneca’s writing, and further that analysis of the passages in Seneca’s work where slavery and the practice of philosophy are in closest contact shows that Seneca found the “language and imagery” of slavery to be indispensable tools with which to explain his vision of the philosophical life in a slave society. The question to be examined here, then, is not what Seneca thought about slavery, but rather how slavery allows him to give precision to the claim that philosophy is an indispensable means of access to happiness. My argument is that Seneca relies upon a stock of concepts and beliefs ambient in the slave society of Rome both to make his philosophical teaching persuasive to a Roman audience and, more fundamentally, to articulate what a life driven by the pursuit of wisdom might be and why living such a life is an imperative necessity. As throughout the book, I aim at a reading

3. For a description of this development, see D. B. Davis 1966, 291–​493, and D. B. Davis 1975. 4. Bradley 2008, 347. 5. Cf. Patterson 1982, 339: “enlightened Romans were more given to pragmatism and aristocratic candor than the elite members of other advanced societies.” 6. McCarthy 2002, x. For the role of the slavery metaphor in shaping descriptions of power in the imperial period, see Roller 2001, 214–​33, and Lavan 2013.

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that both takes seriously the transformative aspirations of Seneca’s philosophical project and highlights the social preconditions for that project. The idea that all men who are not sages are slaves is one of the central “paradoxes” by which the Stoics communicated their view that virtue is the only genuine good. Peter Garnsey summarizes this argument thus: “For the Stoics, people who were at the mercy of their desires and passions were eo ipso in a state of slavery—​ and most were in this state, the wise being very few. Moreover, this kind of slavery, moral slavery, was the only kind that mattered. Legal slavery affected the body, and as such it was judged to be an external condition, and of no significance.”7 Stoic writers, Seneca included, make frequent use of this doctrine in their efforts to draw attention to the urgency of philosophical self-​improvement.8 The argumentative utility of this claim lies in its ability to describe a state of radically limited freedom in terms immediately apprehensible by readers living in the slave society of Rome, in which the legal category of slavery set up a strong polarity between freedom and servitude.9 This chapter examines the ways in which the rhetorical usefulness of slavery for Seneca ramifies beyond this basic analogy between moral inadequacy and legal slavery. In particular, it documents the extent to which slavery, an institution in which human beings are, uniquely, regarded both as agents and as property, provides Seneca with a way to deepen and articulate his conception of the purpose and function of philosophical activity. Understanding this conceptual use Seneca makes of slavery can, in turn, offer a new perspective on the standard questions about Seneca and slavery: it is in his arguments for the value of philosophy, and the stories he tells to bolster those arguments, that we can see most clearly the centrality of slavery to Seneca’s conceptual world, and thus gauge the gap between that world and our own frames of reference. In what follows, I examine Seneca’s stories about enslaved people from three different perspectives. First, I show how Seneca uses a striking story of a master’s dependence on his slaves in Ep. 27 to bring into focus the unique powers of

7. Garnsey 1996, 105. I will speak throughout this chapter of “moral slavery” on the one hand and of “legal slavery” or “chattel slavery” on the other, though from a Stoic perspective only the first of these, the condition of not being virtuous, is properly called “slavery.” Similarly, when I speak of virtue as “moral freedom” I do not mean to imply that the Stoics recognized any other form of freedom, only to distinguish this quality from the Roman legal and political concept of freedom as the antithesis of legal slavery. Beyond the scope of this chapter is the complex relationship between the Stoics’ description of virtue as freedom and their causal determinism; on this topic, see Bobzien 1997 and 1998. 8. See the references collected in Joshel 2011, 233 n. 28; cf. Edwards 2009, 148–​53. The device of describing behavior one deplores as servile is of course not limited to Stoic writers; for a wider range of Roman examples, see Joshel 2011, 230 n. 24. 9. See Wirszubski 1950, 1–​3, and Arena 2012, 14–​44.

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philosophy as a guide to life. Next, I turn to the seventy-​seventh letter, arguing that in this letter we can see Seneca using the figure of the slave to make two related points, that philosophy alone can bring order and consistency to the life of the slave owner and that the free need philosophy to provide them with the awareness of life as an indifferent that slavery gives to the enslaved. Finally, I consider Seneca’s discussion of manumission in Ep. 80, aiming to show by comparison with the contemporary satirist Persius the inventiveness with which Seneca uses that practice to model the advantages of the philosophical life. What will emerge, I hope, is a picture of a writer who does not simply apply philosophical doctrine to social questions, as the old picture of the Roman Stoics as relentlessly practical-​minded moralizers had it, but instead builds from the material of social life a crisper and more compelling picture of what philosophy is and why it matters.

Ep. 27 The twenty-​seventh of Seneca’s letters illuminates vividly and specifically how he sees the relationship between owning human beings and the life of philosophy. To understand the problems Seneca is addressing in this letter, we will need to examine also his analysis in Ep. 88 of philosophy’s relation to purely instrumental arts, a relation that is itself outlined in terms that draw upon the idea of slavery. Ep. 27 seeks to identify the “good which will abide” (bonum mansurum, Ep. 27.3). Seneca holds that “there is no such good, except what the mind finds for itself out of itself ” (nullum autem est nisi quod animus ex se sibi invenit, Ep. 27.3). This proposition, of course, restates Stoic orthodoxy about the independence of genuine good from fortune and the location of the good in the agent’s mental state, but its articulation in this letter opens up an inquiry into what that self-​sufficiency entails in a slave society, in which the use of human instruments for distinctively human tasks persistently blurs the line between self and other. It is in the conceptual distinctions Seneca draws to resolve that blurring, both in this letter and in Ep. 88, that he finds the means with which to explain the kind of self-​sufficiency that the philosophical life develops. The rest of Ep. 27 argues that the philosophical life is one of unmediated personal activity and contrasts this conception of the best life with the lives of those whose most cherished ends are pursued through enslaved intermediaries. Seneca first affirms that “this matter [the pursuit of the lasting good] does not allow delegation” (delegationem res ipsa non recipit, Ep. 27.4). The letter makes its point by means of a contrast with “another variety of cultural pursuits”10 which “admits 10. I am indebted to Robert Kaster for his suggestion that “cultural pursuits” would be the best rendering of litteras here, for it is as activities that philosophy and the study of poetry are contrasted here.

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of assistance” (aliud litterarum genus adiutorium admittit, Ep. 27.5). Seneca illustrates this contrast with an anecdote about one Calvisius Sabinus, a man who “had both the inheritance and cast of mind of a freedman” (et patrimonium habebat libertini et ingenium, Ep. 27.5).11 The story that Seneca is about to tell, of a wealthy, vulgar individual possessing the characteristics of a freedman, clumsily clutching at high culture, and exhibiting his attainments to guests at dinner, has evoked comparisons between Calvisius and Petronius’s Trimalchio.12 As Miriam Griffin notes, Seneca wrote about freedmen “less often and less humanely” than he did about enslaved people themselves,13 and his contempt for Calvisius is closely linked with the latter’s conformity to the ambient image of the rich freedman. It is important to recognize, though, that Seneca’s remarks here are not simply a reflexive expression of generalized contempt. Instead, he is interested in drawing a specific contrast between the sort of life typified by that image and the life guided by the philosophical pursuit of the good. Seneca shows us both how Calvisius misidentifies the good as something accessible with the help of his slaves and how that error is made possible by the unique nature of slavery. Calvisius, Seneca tells us, “wished to seem learned” (eruditus volebat videri, Ep. 27.5) and was hindered in this desire by an extraordinarily poor memory for the names of literary characters. The solution he hit upon was to purchase a special squad of slaves “at great cost” (magna summa, Ep. 27.6) and equip each with the memorized text of a Greek poet and then keep them at his

11. Summers 1910, 190, and Smith 1975, 218, argue against the “unsafe assumption” (Smith) that this phrase means that Calvisius was himself a freedman. The readiness with which Seneca identifies Calvisius’s conduct as characteristic of freedmen needs, in any event, to be read in the context of the early imperial “obsession” (Finley 1998, 165) with badly behaved freedmen. 12. See, e.g., Summers 1910 ad loc. Sullivan 1985, 173–​5, argues that the Cena Trimalchionis is in part a parody of Seneca’s Ep. 47: “Trimalchio’s drunken invitation to his household to join the company at table (Sat. 70.10), his maudlin remarks about their common humanity despite their ill fortune, all make good literary sense as straight satire on a vulgar and pretentious freedman, but how much more point do they gain if the listener has Seneca’s letter in mind?” (174). Smith 1975, 217–​9, responding to Sullivan’s (1968, 132–​5) earlier formulation of this thesis, contends that there is no evidence that Petronius had Seneca’s writings specifically in view and concludes that “at the very least some of the collections of parallels should be drastically pruned” (219). Sullivan also discusses resemblances between Trimalchio and the Calvisius of Ep. 27, pointing out that “the unfounded erudition which both wish to display is central to their characters” and raising the possibility that “Petronius and Seneca are drawing on common gossip or a common source for such anecdotes” (1968, 129–​32, quotations from 132). Jacqueline Amat (1992) does not discuss Ep. 27. For a survey of scholarly views on the connections between the two authors, see Star 2012, 1–​11. 13. Griffin 1976, 284. For a recent overview of Seneca’s attitude toward manumission and freedmen, with attention to the contemporary legal context, see Joly 2017, 5–​8.

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feet during dinner parties, ready to supply a name when cued by his faltering. Seneca closes the anecdote by reporting some mocking remarks made about this practice to Calvisius by his hanger-​on Satellius Quadratus. We will return to the detail of these remarks, but we should note for now that their tone implies that Calvisius’s machinations failed to achieve their end, which was to make Calvisius appear learned to his associates. This ending stands in apparent contradiction to Seneca’s opening statement that this “other sort of cultural pursuit,” the study of poetry, is unlike philosophy in being amenable to outside aid. If the story of Calvisius is intended in earnest to illustrate this claim, why does his stratagem not appear to attain its intended end? If, on the other hand, the story merely mocks Calvisius’s assumption that a reputation for thorough familiarity with Greek poetry can be acquired through the exertions of his slaves, and thereby suggests that this assumption is simply wrong, why would Seneca draw an explicit contrast between philosophy and the study of poetry in their openness to assistance? One way to resolve this interpretive dilemma is to conclude, with Marcus Wilson, that “the account of Calvisius is elaborated to a length and richness of detail far beyond what is needed for the argument. It seems to be related more for its own sake than to serve as illustration.”14 If we are willing to sever or attenuate the anecdote’s instrumental relation to the rest of the letter, there is no or a greatly diminished need to explain the apparent ill fit between its moral and the letter’s larger argument. We might, though, work out an explanation that preserves that instrumental relation, if we begin by noting that Seneca has Calvisius make two distinguishable though related mistakes, and that Satellius’s remarks address only one of those mistakes. Each of these mistakes revolves around Calvisius’s inability to make for himself one of two distinctions drawn by Seneca in Ep. 88. To adopt the terminology of that letter (some of which appears in Ep. 27 as well) Calvisius confuses an adiutorium, or instrumental adjunct, with a pars, or organically integral component, and further believes that an adiutorium can have independent value. Closer examination of Satellius’s mockery shows that it targets the first of these errors but not the second. He exposes Calvisius’s confusions about the kind of assistance that instruments, including human instruments, can provide, but he mounts no challenge to a more basic mistake about the value of reading and studying poetry, the belief that that study can be valued as anything more than preparation for philosophy. Satellius’s attack presents Calvisius as having gone astray amid the confusions presented by the unique status of enslaved people as both human beings and property. Specifically, it shows that this conceptual overlap has led Calvisius

14. M. Wilson 2001, 175.

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to suppose that the human qualities of his slaves are at his unmediated disposal simply because he legally owns them. When he is informed by his host of the great expense at which the slaves were purchased and trained, Satellius replies, “[Y]‌ou could have bought as many bookcases for less” (minoris . . . totidem scrinia emisses, Ep. 27.7). The deflationary power of this remark lies in its equation of the usefulness of enslaved people, perceived as animate tools, with that of inanimate artifacts. Satellius takes aim at the special status Calvisius gives to slaves among the range of instruments at his disposal. Why does Calvisius believe himself to derive any more benefit from the text of Homer when it has been committed to memory by his slaves than when it lies unread in a bookcase he owns? While neither Satellius’s mockery nor the manner in which Seneca reports it implies any global critique of the slave system, it is important to recognize that both are drawing attention to one of the confusions that system creates. Petronius makes his Trimalchio commit the gross and obvious blunder of believing that his mere ownership of two libraries, one Greek and one Latin, gives him a claim to erudition (Sat. 48). Seneca, by contrast, traces a subtler self-​deception, one grounded in social facts peculiar to a slave society: it is indeed possible in such a society to “own” another human being, but that legal fact of ownership does not mean that the owner actually possesses all the attainments and qualities of the person he holds in slavery. Calvisius’s error can arise only in dealing with human “property,” since only when one human being is said to own another can there be the sort of conceptual slippage between various kinds of possession that misleads Calvisius. Satellius reiterates his point by encouraging the frail Calvisius to take up wrestling. When Calvisius is puzzled by this suggestion and reminds Satellius of his physical condition, Satellius responds, “Do you not see how many very strong slaves you have?” (non vides quam multos servos valentissimos habeas?, Ep. 27.8). This question, which concludes the story, draws attention again to the misapprehension in which Calvisius’s behavior has its roots, the belief that a legal claim to a human being confers directly upon the owner all of the slave’s abilities. Satellius’s mocking question depends for its force on the assumption that Calvisius recognizes in the context of physical activity the absurdity of the procedure he employs without apparent reservation in his drive to appear learned in poetry. We are thus returned to the question of why the study of poetry strikes Seneca—​and Calvisius as well, it would appear—​as a particularly inviting arena for attempts at appropriating to oneself the attainments of enslaved people. Why do the boundaries between the slave owner’s own accomplishments and those of his human property stand forth so clearly in the physical realm but become harder to discern when it comes to this study? This question moves us beyond Satellius’s criticisms of Calvisius’s expansive view of what he can achieve by means of his human instruments. We need to understand how poetry “allows for assistance”

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(adiutorium admittit, Ep. 27.5), not just how Calvisius misunderstands that opening for assistance. It is here that the eighty-​eighth letter can be of use, for it sets out in detail some of the premises underlying Seneca’s claims in Ep. 27. Ep. 88 offers a set of reflections on the relationship between philosophy and other arts; these can be read in conjunction with Ep. 27 to show why the reliance on instruments typified by Calvisius’s use of his slaves vitiates the moral possibilities of poetry and other non-​philosophical pursuits. The later epistle sets out Seneca’s reasons for considering philosophy the only truly liberal art: “[Y]‌ou see,” he writes, “why they are called ‘liberal arts’: because they are worthy of a free man. But after all, the only study which is truly liberal is that which makes someone free, that is the study of wisdom, lofty, strong, great-​spirited” (quare liberalia studia dicta sint vides: quia homine libero digna sunt. ceterum unum studium vere liberale est quod liberum facit, hoc est sapientiae, sublime, forte, magnanimum, Ep. 88.2). This definition revises the standard application of the term liberale studium:15 usually understood as designating an art that is appropriate to free status, and whose practice thus expresses and demonstrates that status, the phrase becomes in Seneca’s argument restricted to philosophy, the one art that makes its practitioners free, in the true (moral) rather than the legal sense of that word. Each definition relies on a preconceived notion of freedom to generate its criteria for liberality. It is important to note, though, that not only are two different ideas of freedom, one social and the other moral, at work here, but those ideas are put to work in two different ways. The definition against which Seneca reacts merely demands that the art in question be “worthy” (digna) of a free man, that is, that it display a perceptible coherence with the rest of his life. Seneca’s definition, on the other hand, puts the art in a causal relationship to the agent’s freedom. To qualify as liberal, it must not merely suit his position as a free man but itself give rise to that position. It is in this light that we should read Seneca’s statement, immediately subsequent to the last passage quoted, that “the other [studies] are trivial and childish. Or do you believe there to be any good in those whose teachers you recognize to be the basest and most dissolute of men?” (cetera pusilla et puerilia sunt. an tu quicquam in istis esse credis boni quorum professores turpissimos omnium ac flagitiosissimos cernis?, Ep. 88.2). Matthew Roller writes that this last sentence “explains why the first kind of study, the ‘insignificant and childish’ ones, contain nothing good in them (hence, presumably, cannot set one free): their teachers are

15. The definition Seneca cites and then improves upon is virtually identical to a description of the arts in which an orator should be accomplished offered in Cicero’s De Oratore by Crassus, reporting the views of Gaius Lucilius: “the ones which are worthy of a free man” (quae libero dignae, De Orat. 1.72).

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too degraded.”16 Under Roller’s reconstruction, the non-​philosophical arts are tainted for Seneca by the depravity of those who offer instruction in them. Roller interprets Seneca’s scornful description of the teachers in class terms, connecting it with his announcement at the opening of the letter that he “numbers among the good studies none which issues in money” (nullum in bonis numero quod ad aes exit, Ep. 88.1). “Seneca,” Roller writes, “does not directly connect this final statement [that teachers of the liberal arts are degraded] with the opening one—​ the teachers are morally degraded because they take money for their services—​but the aristocratic view that money making is shameful, unless it occurs on a massive scale, is familiar from a variety of other sources.”17 Roller cites Cicero’s De Officiis (Off. 1.150–​1) to illustrate the entrenched, and overtly class-​derived, Roman contempt for professionals of all sorts who lived off fees, a disdain which of course has deep roots in the Greco-​Roman philosophical tradition: Miriam Griffin and Margaret Atkins remind us in a note on the passage of De Officiis in question that “the stress on a life of leisure and independence conforms to standard Greek ideas shared by Plato and Aristotle,” and that this emphasis may have been reproduced in Chrysippus’s On Lives.18 We might note also a tendency throughout the imperial period to assess the moral quality and scholarly activity of the grammarian in particular as an organic whole.19 In his remarks here Seneca may well have had specifically in view the grammarian Remmius Palaemon, for whom Pliny the Elder claims he cherished a special loathing.20 However clear the antecedents for the view Roller attributes to Seneca, though, his interpretation rests on the supposition that Seneca here holds the value of the art to be determined by the moral value of the practitioner. The

16. Roller 2001, 282–​3. Seneca’s stricture against arts whose purpose is to make money should not be taken to mean that an art cannot be good if its teacher is paid, for such a view would be difficult to reconcile with Ben. 6.15.2, where Seneca explains that “you buy from a teacher of good arts liberal studies and cultivation of the mind” (emis . . . a bonarum artium praeceptore studia liberalia et animi cultum). 17. Roller 2001, 283. 18. Griffin and Atkins, 58 n. 1. 19. See Kaster 1988, 50–​70. 20. NH 14.51. On the relationship between the two men, see Griffin 1976, 434, and Kaster 1995, 232. On the scandals surrounding Palaemon, as described in the life by Suetonius (Gram. 23), see Kaster 1995 ad loc. Kaster observes that Suetonius’s portrait of Palaemon “is reminiscent of other stereotyped sketches of depraved and unworthy parvenus, including freedmen, who were thought to have risen above their station” (232). Though Calvisius Sabinus in Ep. 27 is conspicuously ungifted in literary study, by contrast with the wildly successful Remmius Palaemon, that letter’s emphasis on the moral ineffectiveness of non-​philosophical study makes these two figures’ shared participation in the parvenu stereotype of interest as well.

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argument of the letter runs the other way around, however. Seneca’s criterion for determining the liberality of a study is its power to make its practitioner free; facit is the pivotal word in his definition of liberal study (Ep. 88.2). The point he makes in his condemnation of the teachers of liberal arts is not that these arts are worthless because bad individuals have nothing worthwhile to teach, but rather that their persistent corruption signals that the art they practice is not capable of guiding and stimulating moral progress. Seneca does not here see value as flowing from teacher to art but the other way around. His argument in this passage aims to reinforce and elaborate the cumulative picture he builds of philosophy as an art of life: under the definition of liberal study he has offered, an art nominated for that designation must be assessed by different criteria than an art which produces an artifact, since the product of the truly liberal arts is the practitioner himself or herself, radically improved. The art still must be assessed by reference to the teacher, not because the teacher generates the value of the art but because the practice of the art is responsible for whatever value he possesses and can thus be measured, indirectly, by that value. The moral assessments Seneca offers here, then, are prompted by the conviction that genuine freedom must be self-​created and striven toward with the aid of a reasoned art of living. Any study that exhibits the kind of pragmatic failure Seneca diagnoses here cannot be that art. Philosophy’s unique status as an art of self-​liberation, then, governs the letter’s central antithesis between philosophy and the arts falsely designated “liberal.” The ability to produce moral liberty, not simply an appearance that conforms to an ambient conception of what a free man should be, is identified as specific to philosophy in a circular formulation that reinforces the letter’s emphasis on the practical and transformative effects of philosophy: “[I]‌f they do not teach virtue,” Seneca writes of geometers and musicians, “they do not transmit it. If they do teach it, they are philosophers” (si non docent, ne tradunt quidem; si docent, philosophi sunt, Ep. 88.4). Philosophy by definition holds a monopoly on the cultivation of wisdom simply because providing access to wisdom is its defining and essential trait. (This definition lies behind Seneca’s attack at the end of the letter, Ep. 88.42–​6, on a number of philosophical movements which he represents as denying the possibility of human access to wisdom, and thereby abdicating the task of philosophy.)21 In the discussion of Ep. 77 we

21. Some (unnamed) philosophers, Seneca complains, have taken a distracting interest in grammatical questions (Ep. 88.42), while others (Ep. 88.43–​6) create unnecessary doubt about what we can know (Protagoras, Nausiphanes, the Pyrrhonians, Megarians, Eretrians, and Academics) or propound theories about the nature of the universe Seneca regards as nihilistic (Zeno of Elea, Parmenides).

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will return to the question of what Seneca takes philosophy’s status as an auto-​ emancipatory practice to mean in a slave society. For now, we should note how Seneca’s insistence on identifying philosophy by its results gives it a uniquely privileged relationship to freedom. If philosophers and only philosophers teach virtue, and only the virtuous are free, then the practice of philosophy is the only route to true freedom. This emphasis on philosophy as the only art that conduces to virtue animates the conspectus of other disciplines Seneca offers in the remainder of the letter. The arts Seneca surveys produce various sorts of effects, but he shows in each case that transformation of the practitioner is not among them. The accomplishments of the grammaticus, among them “memory for stories” (fabularum memoria, Ep. 88.3), are enumerated by contrast with the modifications of the self of which philosophy is capable. This opposition helps to clarify its parallel in Ep. 27. Even if Calvisius had been able to remember the names and plots that he relies on his crew of enslaved people to supply, he would not have derived any real benefit from doing so, since the study of poetry is an art which, unlike philosophy, has no reflexive effect on its practitioner. Calvisius’s ploy in the twenty-​seventh letter merely makes overtly and grossly evident the point that Seneca makes in the eighty-​eighth: literary study is compromised by the alienation of its products from its practitioner. Examination of Seneca’s use of the word adiutorium in the two letters shows how he distinguishes this alienation from the reflexive integrity of philosophy. In Ep. 27, as noted, he characterizes poetry as “another sort of cultural pursuit” which “admits of assistance” (aliud litterarum genus adiutorium admittit, Ep. 27.5). Adiutorium appears in Ep. 88 in two separate distinctions Seneca makes between philosophy and other practices. In the first instance, an imagined interlocutor objects to his exclusion of the liberal arts, as commonly designated, from the sphere of philosophy; this interlocutor points out that “when it comes to questions of nature, one relies on the testimony of geometry” and claims that “consequently it [i.e., geometry] is a part of that [i.e., philosophy] which it helps” (cum ventum est ad naturales quaestiones, geometriae testimonio statur: ergo eius, quam adiuvat, pars est, Ep. 88.24).22 Seneca’s response distinguishes integral parts from external auxiliaries, arguing that the latter cannot also be the former, and employs the example of food to illustrate this distinction: “food is an aid to the body, yet it is not part of it” (cibus adiutorium corporis nec tamen pars est,

22. See Kidd 1988, 362–​4, on the question of whether or not this objection is meant to represent the views of Posidonius, whose classification of the arts is discussed earlier in the letter. Kidd’s conclusion is that it is not, contrary to the claims of earlier Posidonian scholarship.

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Ep. 88.25).23 The second use of adiutorium also appears in the context of an effort to define the boundaries of philosophy, and again the analogy employed is to food. Seneca imagines an interlocutor objecting to his claim that the liberal arts do not contribute to virtue; this interlocutor points out that by Seneca’s own admission “virtue cannot be arrived at without liberal studies” (sine liberalibus studiis ad virtutem non perveniri, Ep. 88.31), and so, the interlocutor claims, these studies must be described as fostering virtue. Seneca replies that “because virtue cannot be attained without food either, food does not for all that have any relation to virtue” (quia nec sine cibo ad virtutem pervenitur, cibus tamen ad virtutem non pervenit, Ep. 88.31). The conclusion of this argument is that “there is no reason why you should think that something comes about with the aid of that without which it could not come about” (non est . . . cur aliquid putes eius adiutorio fieri, sine quo non potest fieri, Ep. 88.31). These two arguments enforce two successive distinctions between philosophy and the liberal arts: first the latter are shown to be conceptually separable from philosophy, and then it is held that despite the crucial support they provide to the work of philosophy, they can claim no credit for the results of philosophical activity. The recurrence of cibus, which appears as an adiutorium in the first analogy and then is denied that status in the second, holds together a connected argument for the uniqueness of philosophy and the final insignificance of its auxiliaries.24 In Ep. 27, as noted, Seneca makes two conjoined points about the study of poetry in contrast to philosophy; these correspond to those made in the two discussions of adiutoria in Ep. 88. The first of these is that philosophy maintains a strict and readily apparent border between itself and those things which contribute to it, a border analogous to the easily apprehensible non-​identity of food with the body it nourishes. In the story of Calvisius, Satellius attempts to draw the same kind of border with a similar appeal to the physical, his suggestion that Calvisius take up wrestling. Just as Seneca in Ep. 88 builds upon an implied consensual view that food is not part of the body, so Satellius in Ep. 27 relies on the plainly observable fact that the physical prowess of enslaved people cannot be transferred to their owners to suggest that such transfer is illusory in the case of literary knowledge. In each case, the argument depends on an external, visible realm to illuminate relations of instrumentality and to clarify the limits of such relations, which can easily remain murky in cases that involve not bodies but minds.

23. Cf. Ep. 84.6–​7, where Seneca draws an analogy between reading and eating. Again the point of the analogy turns on the premise that food, as long as it retains its identity as such, is external to the body. 24. On Seneca’s use of food imagery more generally, see Armisen-​Marchetti 1989, 143–​4.

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The second of the cibus analogies from Ep. 88, though, is far more radical, and thinking about it in conjunction with the Calvisius story shows the importance of slavery to Seneca in developing his account of the philosophical life. The first analogy used the example of food to distinguish between an adiutorium and a pars, but here the argument aims to assert philosophy’s independence of its supporting arts, which are held not to be adiutoria at all. We have seen that for Seneca food is an adiutorium to the body, but not to virtue itself, though virtue is impossible without it. This conception of virtue as an independent and self-​sufficient supreme good is of course a Stoic commonplace; what is striking here is Seneca’s analogy between virtue and philosophy. Just as virtue would be impossible without food but cannot be said to be aided or promoted by it, so too is philosophy’s reliance on an array of preparatory instruction held not to entail its dependence on anything outside itself for its unique power. These other arts themselves, however, are so dependent, and the story of Calvisius provides an illustration of that dependence, with enslaved people as the adiutoria. Philosophy is independent of its subsidiary arts because under the definition of philosophy Seneca develops in this letter, it alone can offer access to virtue. Virtue’s status in Stoicism as the unique good confers upon the art of attaining virtue a status unique among the arts. The other arts might prepare the way for philosophy’s operations, but only philosophy itself secures directly the matchless rewards of those operations. It is because the subsidiary arts lack this unique power that their own subsidiary mechanisms are properly adiutoria; because the study of poetry does not itself conduce to virtue, it is unable to draw any real distinction of value between itself and whatever assists it. The hierarchical relationship between master and slave thus becomes one of mutual dependence, since those enslaved are, as in the example of Calvisius, full adiutoria in their masters’ non-​philosophical projects. William Fitzgerald’s characterization of the relationship between Roman slave owners and their domestic slaves as a “symbiosis”25 applies for Seneca only to the non-​philosophical master and his slaves. Since philosophy, uniquely, cannot properly be said to share the credit for its achievements with what assists it, it offers, among many other freedoms, independence for slave owners from their perceived enmeshment with those they hold in slavery. We can best grasp the import of Seneca’s insistence upon this uniqueness against the background of Catharine Edwards’s remarks about Seneca’s inability to imagine life without slaves: “For Seneca we can no more function without slaves, than the mind can without the body . . . Uses of this analogy perhaps also reflect back on

25. Fitzgerald 2000, 13. On symbiosis and parasitism as metaphors for understanding the relation of domination that defines slavery, see Patterson 1982, 334–​42.

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the perception of the body. The ‘true’ self cannot function without the degraded other. Just as we rely on, and feel contempt for, slaves, so too we rely on the body and yet feel contempt for it.”26 In the texts we have examined, Seneca asserts the independence of philosophical masters from the people they enslave by appeal to the supreme value of virtue and the unique access to virtue offered by perfected reason, the same principles the philosophical tradition uses from Socrates on to claim for the mind various degrees, depending on the philosopher in question, of independence from the body. Differences between the objects of these operations, though, have consequences for their scope and effects. Because enslaved people have minds of their own, they pose a more subtle and comprehensive threat to the effort to separate the mind from what supports and sustains it. The Calvisius story is a deliberately extreme case, but Seneca’s telling of it succeeds in dramatizing the confusions into which the slave owner can fall, confusions between his own reasoning faculty and that of the human beings he nominally possesses. As we have seen in our examination of Ep. 88, the drive to avoid these confusions prompts a sweeping reassessment of the relationship between philosophy and other kinds of intellectual pursuits. In Seneca’s hands, the problem posed by slavery is one of distinguishing philosophical activity not just from the activities of the body but also from other activities of the mind, and his response to this problem is the articulation of a sharper and more precise conception of what philosophy is.

Ep. 77 In the seventy-​seventh letter Seneca again attempts to demonstrate how philosophy properly stands in a directive relationship to other pursuits, and again he shows how it conditions established relationships of command between slave owner and the people he holds in slavery. At the same time, this letter reveals how those relationships of command supply Seneca with the conceptual building blocks for his model of philosophical practice. In the letter Seneca argues that suicide can be the best option in a range of circumstances, including those in which it is turned to “not from the greatest causes” (non ex maximis causis, Ep. 77.4). Again, it is an anecdote supplied for the purpose of illustration that shows how Seneca uses the concept of slavery to sharpen his picture of the philosophical life. Tullius Marcellinus, Seneca writes, was afflicted with a disease which was “not incurable, but long and irksome and very demanding” (non insanabili . . . sed longo et molesto et multa imperante, Ep. 77.5). He assembles his

26. Edwards 2009, 156.

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friends, who give advice dictated more by their own timidity or urge to please than by the demands of the situation. An unnamed Stoic friend, though, supplies firm guidance, telling Marcellinus that “to live is no great thing: all of your slaves live, all of your animals” (non est res magna vivere: omnes serui tui vivunt, omnia animalia, Ep. 77.6).27 The empirical assertions that make up the second half of this claim are purely tautological: if Marcellinus’s slaves were not alive, they would not be his slaves (recall Aristotle’s description of a slave as an ἔμψυχον ὄργανον [Eth. Nic. 1161b4]). That animal is a derivative of anima makes it even more obvious that the predicate of the second part of the sentence adds no information not anticipated in the subject. The Stoic’s speech, then, is not just a boilerplate attempt to minimize the value of life by highlighting its indiscriminate pervasiveness, but also a reminder that life itself is what makes slaves’ uniquely degraded status possible.28 When Marcellinus has been swayed by this argument, the Stoic has a further role to play, for “there was not need of a persuader, but of an assistant: the slaves were unwilling to obey” (non opus erat suasore illi, sed adiutore: servi parere nolebant, Ep. 77.7). The normative relationship between master and slave, at the heart of which lay the expectation of the enslaved person’s absolute obedience, has here been stretched to its breaking point, and when Marcellinus is most in need of an adiutor he finds none at hand among the enslaved people whose enforced office is to assist him however he commands.29 Their fear can best be understood by reference to a story related by Tacitus (Ann. 14.42–​5): the urban prefect Pedanius Secundus was murdered by one of the people he held in slavery in 61, and in accordance with what Tacitus describes as an “old custom” (vetere . . . more, Ann. 14.42), all of those enslaved in the household were put to death.30 Tacitus’s report

27. On the role of the friend in this letter and its connection with “Seneca’s dramaturgic approach to self-​killing,” see Ker 2009, 118–​19 (quotation from 118). 28. The observation that slaves can be such only because they are alive is intimately connected to the more commonplace idea that slaves are, or were at some foundational point, those who would be dead if they were not enslaved. On the inherent tie between slavery and death across cultures, see Patterson 1982, especially 38–​45, and on Roman slavery in particular see Roller’s 2001, 222–​4 n. 18 discussion, with reference to Ep. 77.18, of the Roman etymology that derived servus from servare: “slaves are named from the fact that commanders are accustomed to sell captives and through this circumstance to preserve rather than kill them” (servi ex eo appellati sunt, quod imperatores captivos vendere ac per hoc servare nec occidere solent, Dig. 1.5.4.8). 29. See in this connection the discussion of enslaved people as adiutoria in the previous section of this chapter. For examples of slaves dutifully killing their masters on request, see V. Max. 6.8.2–​3. 30. The history of the custom to which Cassius refers is not entirely clear. A letter from Servius Sulpicius Rufus to Cicero (Fam. 4.12 = 253 Shackleton Bailey) describes the panicked flight

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of the debate in the Senate about the execution of the sentence is instructive. He quotes the speech in favor of carrying out the sentence delivered by Gaius Cassius Longinus, whose argument rests, first, on an appeal to the antiquity of the custom and, second, on a set of prudential arguments that illustrate vividly the danger wealthy Romans felt in living surrounded and outnumbered by those they held in slavery within their households: “[M]‌any signs of wickedness come in advance: if slaves betray them we are able to live individually among many, safe among the anxious, and in the end, if we must die, not unavenged amid those who harm us” (multa sceleris indicia praeveniunt: servi si prodant possumus singuli inter pluris, tuti inter anxios, postremo, si pereundum sit, non inulti inter nocentis agere, Ann. 14.44). In Cassius’s conception of the slave society, security and peace of mind are necessarily distributed on a zero-​sum basis; tranquility for the master can be guaranteed only by working enslaved people into a state of perpetual dread.31 Fear of collective punishment restrains Marcellinus’s slaves from assisting in his suicide. The Stoic friend explains to them that “danger came to slaves when it was uncertain whether or not the master’s death had been voluntary: otherwise to kill a master and to keep him from death are just as bad” (familiam periculum of the slaves of Marcus Marcellus after the latter was murdered in Piraeus. Syme (1958, 564 n. 3) doubts the value of this letter as evidence for the practice in question, citing Seneca’s report that Augustus took no action against the slaves of the murdered Hostius Quadra (Nat. 1.16.1). The senatus consultum Silanianum of 10 ce decreed that all the slaves under the roof be killed in the event of the master’s murder. A rescript of Hadrian describes the principle underlying the law as follows: “On any occasion on which slaves are able to provide aid to their masters, they ought not to prefer their own safety to that of their masters” (servi quotiens dominis suis auxilium ferre possunt, non debent saluti eorum suam anteponere, Dig. 29.5.1.28). This law appears to have been strengthened in 57 to apply even to people manumitted in the will of their late master (Tac. Ann. 13.32; see also Furneaux 1881 ad loc.). Mommsen 1899, 630–​1, collects and discusses the evidence for these laws; see also Watson 1987, 134–​8). It is germane to the case of Marcellinus that Ulpian’s treatment of this question exempts from punishment the slaves of masters who commit suicide, but not in a way that would have spared Marcellinus’s slaves (it is also unclear how long a tradition of interpretation and practice Ulpian is drawing on here): “If a person has committed suicide the senatus consultum Silanianum does not, indeed, apply, but his death is punished, in this sense, namely, that if he did the deed in the sight of his slaves and they could have prevented his cruel attack on himself, a penalty is inflicted on them, but if they could not, they are freed” (Si sibi manus quis intulit, senatus consulto quidem Silaniano locus non est, sed mors eius vindicatur, scilicet ut, si in conspectu servorum hoc fecit potueruntque eum in se saeuientem prohibere, poena adficiantur, si vero non potuerunt, liberentur, Dig. 29.5.1.22; tr. Alan Watson in Mommsen and Krueger 1985). 31. Cassius’s identification of latent danger in all slaves exhibits obvious parallels with the proverbial saying famously deplored by Seneca in his forty-​seventh letter, “[T]‌here are as many enemies as there are slaves” (totidem hostes esse quam servos, Ep. 47.5). Seneca is aware that the vast numbers of people held in slavery at Rome pose a potential danger to their masters (Cl. 1.24.1), an awareness paralleled in the elder Pliny and elsewhere in Tacitus (see references in Braund 2009, ad loc.), but both in Ep. 77 and in Ep. 47 he seems to regard the activation of this potential as avoidable.

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adire cum incertum esset an mors domini uoluntaria fuisset: alioqui tam mali exempli esse occidere dominum quam prohibere, Ep. 77.7). This argument locates the peril faced by enslaved people after their master’s death in general uncertainty about the intentions of their late master. We can compare here what is for Seneca the paradigmatic case of virtuous suicide, that of Cato, whose death by his own hand Seneca in De Providentia has a watching deity characterize as “a long-​pondered accomplishment” (diu meditatum opus, Prov. 2.10). Cato’s death was thoroughly voluntary, the product of intense and sustained reflection. No observer could be unsure whether or not he intended to kill himself.32 The point Marcellinus’s Stoic friend is making to the people Marcellinus holds in slavery is that they would be in danger only if their master’s death were perceived to lack the Catonian quality of considered intentionality. His exhortation aims to show how the philosophical slave owner’s clarity and unity of purpose brings about the coincidence between the interests of master and slave that mainstream Roman opinion, represented by such figures as Tacitus’s Cassius, holds to be impossible. The law Cassius defends operates from a fixed set of assumptions about the permanent antagonism between master and slave and, the friend’s remarks suggest, applies that set of assumptions in any ambiguous situation. Seneca’s position in the debate over the execution of the slaves of Pedanius Secundus is unrecorded, and Griffin argues that he more likely than not expressed no disagreement with the views of Cassius.33 The speech he gives to the Stoic friend in Ep. 77 is not a repudiation of or challenge to the brutal custom of collective punishment. Rather, Seneca shows how that measure gains its purchase from the epistemic murkiness of most slave owners’ lives. The law is necessary, on Seneca’s account, because in the absence of an evident plan formulated philosophically by the slave owner for the direction of his own life, it makes sense to assume the simplest of goals for him, that of staying alive. The rational order apparent in the life of the philosophical slave owner, though, is transparent

32. Griffin 1986, 65–​6, concludes from a review of Nepos’s description of the suicide of Atticus (Att. 21–​2) and Tacitus’s of Seneca’s own suicide (Ann. 15.60–​4) that such exemplary deaths share four characteristics: “theatricality,” “social character” (“friends are present; there is argument, comfort, attempted dissuasion”), “calmness,” and “philosophical overtones.” These components of the “calm and deliberate suicide” (66) admired in Roman tradition are in Ep. 77 linked to the philosophical intervention of the Stoic friend, whose rational engagement with Marcellinus converts the latter’s misery into an edifying spectacle for several audiences, including Seneca’s readers. 33. Griffin 1976, 280–​1. See more generally Manning 1989, 1532, on the lack of evidence for any Stoic program of humanitarian slave legislation: “the record when Stoics or those influenced by Stoicism held authority in Roman government does not differ significantly from periods when they did not.”

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to observers, removes suspicion about the motives of those he holds in slavery, and thus makes possible the sort of concord between enslaved people and their purported owners that Tacitus’s Cassius considers impossible. We are now in a position to consider a further use to which Seneca puts the master-​slave distinction in this letter. He tells Lucilius the story of the Spartan boy who “when captured shouted ‘I will not serve’ in his own Doric tongue, and kept faith with his words: when he was first ordered to perform a menial and insulting task (for he was being ordered to fetch a chamber pot), he broke his head by striking it against the wall” (captus clamabat “non serviam” sua illa Dorica lingua, et verbis fidem imposuit: ut primum iussus est fungi servili et contumelioso ministerio [adferre enim vas obscenum iubebatur], inlisum parieti caput rupit, Ep. 77.14). The lesson Seneca extracts from this story is that it is unnecessary, when the remedy of death is readily available, to suffer the many kinds of servitude to which even a legally free individual is subject. Just as the Stoic friend’s appeal to Marcellinus’s slaves hinged on the ability of the philosophical slave owner to give to his life and death a clearly apparent purpose, in this part of the letter too Seneca emphasizes the importance of imposing a consciously chosen order onto the chaos of fortune. “Make your own what belongs to an external force” (fac tui iuris quod alieni est, Ep. 77.15), he urges Lucilius. Brad Inwood writes that this letter is “rich with examples of death as freedom, where the point of each example is that the suicide is thereby preserving his own agency: he acts rather than suffers.”34 Inwood argues that this emphasis is part of Seneca’s consistent focus on how suicide preserves agency by offering some choice of action in closely restricted circumstances; even when it appears that the agent has no scope for choice, he does in fact have the option of choosing to die.35 Roller has called attention to the ways in which this passage, like a number of others in which Seneca uses slavery to outline his conception of philosophical freedom, relies upon a “conflation of different domains of reference,” slipping between literal chattel slavery, which he designates as the “parent domain”36 in this system of metaphor, and the philosophical and political metaphor of slavery and its antithesis, libertas.37 Roller construes the argument of this portion of Ep. 77 as follows:

34. Inwood 2005, 312. 35. Starting from the detailed treatment of suicide in Ep. 70, Ker 2009, 247–​79, traces the connection between freedom and suicide in Seneca’s writings and in later depictions of him. 36. Roller uses this term to refer to the sphere in which a metaphorical description is literally true and from which it is extended into metaphorical use. 37. Roller 2001, 275.

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In the first sentence of this passage [Ep. 77.14–​15] all the occurrences of the language of social status refer to the parent domain, that of chattel slavery. . . But in the next few sentences, the boy’s words and deed are also given a philosophical gloss. For when Seneca writes, “you are a slave to men, a slave to your affairs, a slave to life,” he segues from the idea of chattel slavery to that of “slavery” to externals . . . Now, one commonly adduced ground for suicide (though not the only one) expressed in prior Stoic sources, and implied elsewhere by Seneca himself, is that of finding that one is now suffering, or soon will be suffering, under a preponderance of dispreferred external circumstances . . . It is from this point of view that the Spartan boy’s suicide becomes paradigmatic for Roman aristocrats. For it could be thought that the boy decided he had crossed this threshold upon being ordered to handle a chamber pot; and in the sections following this anecdote (16–​17) Seneca suggests that his aristocratic addressees themselves may be living near this threshold, if only by virtue of being sated in their pleasures (presumably a “dispreferred” state). If at any point, therefore, the aristocrat finds himself “enslaved” to these externals (servis rebus, servis vitae—​the philosophical domain of usage) then death offers liberation, just as it liberated the Spartan boy from his chattel slavery (the parent domain).38 Building upon Roller’s clarification of the multiple senses in which the language of slavery is employed here, and upon his identification of a “threshold” that marks the point at which an agent should consider suicide, we can understand in some detail the relationship Seneca envisions between these two sorts of slavery and the part played by philosophy in ameliorating the lives of those who are in either way enslaved. Roller’s “threshold” divides each sort of slavery into two stages, potential and occurrent, only the second of which Seneca seems to believe is rightly evaded by suicide. We might describe the first stage as a state of radically constrained choice; the second stage is reached only when this restriction in fact reduces the agent’s choices to two: death, or the endurance of some situation the avoidance of which ought to be more preferred than life. This distinction is consistent with a Stoic definition of slavery reported by Diogenes Laertius (7.121–​ 2): the Stoics recognize three types of slavery, he writes, of which the third, chattel slavery, is characterized by the conjunction of “possession” (ktesis) and “subordination” (hypotaxis). Andrew Erskine uses the conceptual distinction between these states to explain one of the Stoic paradoxes recorded by Plutarch: “Plutarch

38. Roller 2001, 275.

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can write that the wise man is uncaptured when sold into slavery by his enemies (Plut. Mor. 1057e). This might seem curious, but the Stoics were not denying that he could be chattel. For this third type of slavery has two elements, first that the slave should be the property of someone, secondly that he should be subordinate to that person. The one is regardless of character since anyone can be property, while the latter is the operative part of the definition.”39 Seneca’s anecdote about the Spartan boy makes much the same point as the paradox in Plutarch: physical capture need not mean true enslavement. The protagonist of Seneca’s story is not, of course, a sage, and indeed the description of him as impubis lays special emphasis on his callowness, as does the way in which Seneca introduces the story: “Do you think I am now about to give to you the examples of great men? I will give those of boys” (exempla nunc magnorum virorum me tibi iudicas relaturum? puerorum referam, Ep. 77.14). We will return to the significance of this fact, but in introducing the figure of the sage via Erskine’s discussion of Plutarch, I want to be clear about the marginality of that figure’s role in the argument under discussion. The Spartan boy, as a non-​sage, would have entered into the hypotactic state if he had performed the duties assigned to him, but the same is not true of the wise man: we should consider in particular De Constantia Sapientis 3.1, in which Serenus, in a summary, accepted by Seneca, of the Stoic position, complains that “although you deny that a wise man is a slave, you do not likewise deny that he will be sold and will carry out orders and will provide a slave’s services to his master” (cum sapientem negastis servum esse, idem non itis infitias et veniturum et imperata facturum et domino suo seruilia praestaturum ministeria, C.S. 3.1). When we recall that it was precisely a seruile et contumeliosum ministerium that provided the Spartan boy’s immediate stimulus to suicide, we can see that his story is meant not as a guide to wise behavior if enslaved, but rather as an illustration of the way in which human beings weigh indifferents when consciousness of servitude keeps them from the error of regarding life as valuable in itself. The Spartan boy entered the first stage of slavery, that characterized by possession, upon his capture. With his non serviam, though, he put his captors on notice that he would not tolerate the second stage, subordination. His exclamation cannot be taken to mean “I will not be a slave” in the legal sense, since his suicide does not follow immediately upon his enslavement. That this delay is not, for Seneca, simply a question of opportunity is made clear by the crudity of the method the boy eventually uses to kill himself, since presumably he could have 39. Erskine 1990, 56. For another example of the paradox that a sage could not be enslaved, even if he were legally so, and that he is indeed the only person who is free, see the fifth of Cicero’s Paradoxa Stoicorum (Parad. 33–​41).

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used the same means, or others equally direct, at any time.40 Seneca’s narrative also makes it plain that the trigger for the suicide was the first command that he perform a servile task.41 The Spartan boy’s suicide, then, is a response not to the condition of enslavement in general but to particular exigencies of that condition. In reconstructing the moral conclusions Seneca transfers from this story of literal enslavement into the domain of philosophical slavery, though, we should note the Spartan boy’s reaction to the first as well as the second stage of enslavement. His declaration shows him to be aware of the hazards to which his situation leaves him open. It also indicates a fixed intent to escape those hazards. Seneca reports this part of the boy’s story, rather than simply skipping directly to his suicide, because it shows the necessary precondition to that action, a firm and clear ordering of aims in which the preservation of his life is definitely and explicitly subordinated to the maintenance of his independence. In the remarks quoted earlier, Roller shows how this story’s point, that servile behavior is never one’s only option, is extended from chattel slavery to philosophically and politically defined conditions that can be metaphorically held to approximate slavery. He also points out that the “threshold” that marks for the Spartan boy the limits of what he will tolerate finds its analogy in the point at which life becomes for Seneca’s readers saturated with dispreferred indifferents that outweigh the preferred indifferent of continued life. We can ask further, then, what is equivalent in the mental servitude Seneca ascribes to the first stage of slavery, that defined by simple possession rather than occurrent subordination. Seneca provides the answer when he likens life itself to servitude: “for life is slavery, if the courage to die is lacking” (nam vita, si moriendi virtus abest, servitus est, Ep. 77.15). That is, merely by being alive we are in a condition of potential exposure 40. The ease with which anyone can do away with himself if need be is a point Seneca is inclined to stress, for it offers crucial reinforcement to his claim that someone who regards life as an indifferent can never be compelled to do anything; cf. Marc. 20.2–​3, Ir. 3.15.4, with Inwood’s 2005, 310 comments, Prov. 6.7–​9, Ep. 91.21. For a survey of the sparse evidence for actual suicide by enslaved people in the Roman world, see Bradley 2011, 377–​8. 41. Epictetus retails a similar story at Diss. 1.2.8–​11. There, though, the point of the story is to illustrate the importance of knowing one’s own character. According to Epictetus, the question of whether or not to hold a chamber pot, if one happens to be enslaved, must be answered by reference to individual character. This correlation of ethical demands with character has deep roots in Stoic tradition (see Gill 1988 and Long 2002, 231–​58), but it is important to note how the uses Seneca and Epictetus make of this anecdote diverge. I argue here that for Seneca, the point of this story is that the legal condition of enslavement and the Spartan boy’s necessary awareness that he is held therein enable an intention not to serve, which is activated by the command to fetch the chamber pot. Certainly it is suggested that the Spartan boy’s character is particularly lacking in pliancy, hence the unusualness of his behavior and his consequent selection as an example, but Seneca’s argument, on the reading put forward here, depends not on his character but on the epistemic conditions under which he makes his choices.

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to harm analogous to being legal property. Like the Spartan boy, though, we have at hand an expedient that can forestall the worst consequences of servitude, if we are able to maintain proper perspective on the value of life relative to other indifferents. It is here, for Seneca, that philosophy plays its decisive part. The Spartan boy is by no means a sapiens, but he was able to formulate a clear resolve to die rather than obey commands as a slave. As we have seen, he was given the insight into his situation necessary for this resolve by the explicit change in his legal status that followed his capture. It was his passage into the first stage of slavery that elicited his non serviam, and for Seneca it is the task of philosophical exhortation to make matters comparably clear to those who are held in a different, less obvious sort of servitude. “Will you not,” he asks Lucilius, “take up the spirit of the boy, so that you might say ‘I do not serve’?” (non sumes pueri spiritum, ut dicas “non servio”?, Ep. 77.15). Indeed, the entire letter is aimed at cultivating the philosophical ability to make an informed and dispassionate choice between life and death; the resulting self-​awareness will serve to alert the Roman aristocrat to his enslavement to externals, and thus prompt a reassessment of his life, in a manner analogous to that in which the Spartan boy’s capture made him aware of his likely fate and prodded him toward a judgment about the relative value of life and freedom. Seneca makes a related point more briefly in his fourth letter. An interlocutor objects that it is difficult to attain the detachment from life that leads to freedom from fear of death. Seneca aims to render this objection absurd by pointing to, among other examples of people parting with their lives for reasons he deems trivial, a man who “threw himself off a roof lest he hear his vexed master any longer” (se praecipitavit e tecto ne dominum stomachantem diutius audiret, Ep. 4.4). Here Seneca aims not to applaud the actions of the enslaved man, which he ascribes to “excessive fear” (nimia formido, Ep. 4.4), but rather to show that life is easier to discard than his presumably free interlocutor believes. As in the story of the Spartan boy, what makes the behavior of the enslaved person at the center of this anecdote useful to Seneca as an example is something specific to slavery, its power to make instantly apparent to the enslaved person the necessity of weighing the hardships of his condition against his desire to live. In both stories, the fact of enslavement dissipates for the protagonists the specious aura of value that otherwise surrounds the prolongation of life. When Seneca tells Lucilius in another letter that “he who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave” (qui mori didicit servire dedidicit, Ep. 26.10), he aims to import this clear-​ sightedness, the product of legal slavery, into the realm of moral slavery, and it is to this end that he endorses Epicurus’s advice to “practice death” (meditare mortem, Ep. 26.8), part of a whole complex of philosophical practice that aims to give its practitioner the same determination to evade moral slavery that the Spartan

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boy, without any such guidance, showed in freeing himself from legal slavery.42 Chattel slavery by its very nature makes the person enslaved aware of his or her plight, but the sort of enslavement to which Seneca’s audience is more likely to fall subject gives no such notice, and it is the function of philosophy to supply it. This analogy and what it tells us about Seneca’s conception of the role of philosophy can in turn refine our understanding of the audience to which he addressed himself. Bradley takes issue with the claims of Moses Finley and Griffin, respectively, that Seneca “preached obedience to the slaves” and held the view that “the slave should concentrate on his spiritual development, cultivate a willing attitude, and suppress indignation at his lot.”43 Bradley finds these remarks beside the point, since “Seneca did not address slaves directly, because he was not concerned with the palliation of the hardships of slavery for its own sake.”44 One can readily, of course, think of several reasons why Seneca would not include enslaved people among his envisioned readers,45 but Ep. 77 suggests that we might supplement these with a further reason derived from the conception of philosophy’s mission on display in that letter. Seneca explicitly states that the letter’s purpose is to free Lucilius from fear of death by means of vivid and compelling examples: “often,” he writes after concluding the Marcellinus anecdote, “necessity demands such examples” (saepe enim talia exempla necessitas exigit, Ep. 77.10). As we have seen, the need for such examples in philosophical exhortation is closely bound up with the nature of the sort of slavery into which Roman aristocrats are prone to fall, that which does not advertise itself to the enslaved. Philosophical intervention, I have argued, fills for Seneca a specific place in the process of self-​liberation from such slavery. In narratives of escape by suicide from

42. On Senecan meditatio mortis, with further bibliography, see Ker 2009, 163–​4. 43. Bradley 1986b, 170–​1, quoting Finley 1998, 121, and Griffin 1976, 260. In the same vein as these remarks by Finley and Griffin are Garnsey’s 1996, 67 comments on the Stoic belief that legal slavery and moral freedom could coincide: “These doctrines were the cheapest form of control at the disposal of the master class, and control was their primary function. There was no need to bring force into play against slaves, if they could be persuaded that virtue was of greater value than legal status and was within their grasp.” 44. Bradley 1986b, 171. 45. To mention only the most obvious of these reasons, it seems clear that the vast majority of enslaved people in the Roman Empire were unable to read; see Harris 1989, 256–​7. Of course, many slaves were in fact educated, and as such anecdotes as the story of Calvisius in Ep. 27 (discussed earlier) show, they often occupied a crucial intermediary position between their masters and the written word. Seneca was himself acquainted with learned men who had once been enslaved; see the earlier note on his loathing for Remmius Palaemon and see his remarks on Polybius’s familiarity with Homer and Virgil and accomplishments as a writer of fables (Pol. 8.2–​3), which in context are conceivably ironic but must not have strained plausibility. On the education of slaves, see Forbes 1955 and Booth 1979.

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legal slavery, that place is occupied by the moment of enslavement, in which the person enslaved is directly alerted to the loss of his freedom. Philosophy allows those subject to moral slavery to see their own situation with analogous clarity. The analogical relationship can be read the other way, though, to suggest that the kind of insight philosophy aims to supply in relation to moral slavery has already been vouchsafed to enslaved people in relation to their own condition by the very fact of their status as slaves. We will turn later to enslaved people who believe themselves to have prospects of legal freedom; we have seen already that for slaves like the Spartan boy, who cherish no such prospects, the identity of life and servitude is clear enough to put them at a radically diminished risk of making the free man’s fundamental error of regarding life as a good in itself. The boy himself was not, as noted, a wise man, nor did he require any philosophical guidance to reach his conclusions about the intolerability of enslavement and the indifferent value of life. All the information he needed to make this decision was provided by the immediately intelligible event of his capture. This letter thus at the same time relies on the analogy with chattel slavery to demonstrate non-​slaves’ need for engagement with philosophy and makes it clear that slaves qua slaves do not need such engagement to strike the right balance between death and other indifferents, though of course they would need it in order to become fully wise. Seneca, for his part, needs the institution of slavery in order to illustrate for his reader the kind of insight that philosophical inquiry can bring to its practitioner. To conclude our discussion of this letter, we can note that both of the stories we have examined in detail use the stark and public divide between freedom and slavery to develop a conception of what philosophy can do, how it does it, and why everyone should practice it. In telling of the story of Marcellinus, Seneca begins with a variation on the common Stoic tactic of drawing a connection between slavery and behavior of which the Stoics disapproved, in this case the maintenance of life past when reason dictates that its value has ceased to outweigh the dispreferred indifferents entailed by continuing to live. As we have seen, though, the anecdotal form allows Seneca to make also a far more imaginative use of slavery by showing how philosophy’s practices of self-​examination can suture together a social world riven by a fundamental antagonism between master and slave. It is this antagonism that permits Seneca, in the Marcellinus anecdote, to demonstrate the power of philosophy and of its practitioners. The Stoic friend reconciles Marcellinus to his fate and shows Marcellinus’s slaves how that reasoned reconciliation defuses the danger their master’s death might pose for them, as the conflicting interests of master and slave are subsumed under a philosophically intelligible law of nature. He does all of this by means of words, and thus the story of his intervention is able to showcase the characteristic means as well as the effects of philosophical practice.

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In the story of the Spartan boy, Seneca again begins from the metaphorical link between slavery and non-​wisdom, and again takes us someplace surprising. He does not just use the metaphor to show his aristocratic readers that they are, in a sense, slaves as well, but extends it to show these readers that enslaved people have something they themselves do not, namely, knowledge of their own enslavement. By linking the Spartan boy’s resistance to slavery directly to the moment of his explicit enslavement, Seneca turns the Stoic likening of moral and legal slavery into a demonstration of the signal difference between the two. Once again, it is the practice of philosophy that closes the circle, in this instance by alerting the morally enslaved to their condition. These stories, then, which use slavery to demonstrate the function of the sort of philosophical exhortation and education of which Seneca’s entire prose corpus is a specimen, inscribe at the very heart of Seneca’s programmatic self-​conception the social relations of slavery, the resulting dislocations, and the cruel clarity afforded by the institution of slavery. It is important to note the specific ways in which Seneca makes use of these social facts. In both of the anecdotes we have examined in Ep. 77, the institution of slavery, which relies for its own effectiveness and durability upon public knowledge of who owns whom, is deployed to highlight the role of knowledge in philosophical self-​development. The social relations of slavery, then, are a conceptual instrument particularly suited to explaining and giving narrative immediacy to the Stoic conception of moral progress, in which advancement toward wisdom turns fundamentally on the eradication of erroneous beliefs and their replacement with truth. Seneca can develop around the institution of slavery a model of moral development that can be used to discuss not only questions of freedom but also the centrality of knowledge to that development. It provides a means, that is, not only for moral exhortation in general but also for advocacy and exposition of the philosophical life in particular. These stories make it vividly clear why Seneca’s readers need the conceptual clarity that specifically philosophical practice can offer the aspirant to virtue.

Ep. 80 Seneca’s eightieth letter also turns on a comparison between enslavement and philosophical exhortation, each of which alerts an agent to a different sort of restriction on his freedom. Here again Seneca’s interest in the traditional Stoic claim that only the wise man is not a slave lies not just in the hortatory power of this image but also in the subjective difference between these two sorts of slavery: the legal slave is aware of his condition, whereas the moral slave generally is not, a gap that can be bridged only by the reasoned self-​awareness philosophy cultivates. This letter’s slavery analogy follows Seneca’s argument that by comparison

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with the exertions required for the training of the body, becoming good is easy, since all that is required is the desire to become so (velle, Ep. 80.4).46 This assertion sets up a description of the lengths to which enslaved people go to escape their condition, building up their peculium with a “defrauded stomach” (ventre fraudato, Ep. 80.4).47 The comparative simplicity and ease of the path to virtue are thus highlighted by successive contrast with two forms of self-​disciplined bodily exertion, the training of the athlete and the slave’s efforts to accumulate by abstinence the price of his freedom. Seneca invites the reader in each case to compare the ends for which these taxing exertions are undertaken with the genuine good of virtue. In the first instance, Seneca draws attention to the unworthiness of athletic goals when compared to the ends attained by philosophical self-​cultivation: “[O]‌f what feeble intellect,” he complains, “are those whose arms and shoulders we marvel at” (quam inbecilli animo sint quorum lacertos umerosque miramur, Ep. 80.2).48 When Seneca turns to the contrast with legal slaves, however, he uses their example as a model and goad. Rather than expressing disapproval of the ends sought by the non-​philosophical agents in question, he likens those ends to those he himself endorses, for the moment setting up an integrated category of freedom that is the negation of both legal and moral slavery. This category becomes fully operative when he asks, “What better thing are you able to want than to rescue yourself from this servitude, which presses upon everyone, which also slaves of the lowest condition and born in this filth try in every manner to escape?” (quid autem potes melius velle quam eripere te huic seruituti, quae omnes premit, quam mancipia quoque condicionis extremae et in his sordibus nata omni modo exuere conantur?, Ep. 80.4). The two relative pronouns in this sentence each refer to a different sort of servitude: the servitude that is universal in its reach is moral slavery, whereas that from which enslaved people are trying to escape, in ways described by the succeeding sentence, is legal slavery. The question makes the vigor with which

46. This passage has a central role in the debate over Seneca’s place in the history of the “will,” which is not our central concern here. See Inwood 2005, 140–​1, for a review of the controversy. 47. That is, by selling rather than eating some of the food allotted to them by their masters. Slave owners seem to have been under a legal obligation to supply the people they held in slavery with a prescribed minimum of food. They were also aware that “their slaves—​their rural slaves in particular—​had to be adequately fuelled if they were to labour efficiently” (Bradley 1994, 82). See Bradley 1994, 81–​4, on the provision of food to enslaved people. On the mechanics of self-​purchased freedom, see Mouritsen 2011, 159–​80. On the peculium in comparative context, see Patterson 1982, 182–​6, and on its workings and legal status at Rome, see Watson 1987, 95–​101. 48. On athletes and athletics in Seneca’s philosophical works, see Kroppen 2008.

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people try to escape from the latter sort of slavery a measure of the desirability of freedom and a basis for urging Lucilius to free himself from moral slavery. The power of this conflation lies in its ability to spur the free Roman reader into self-​improvement by contrasting his sporadic and half-​hearted efforts to escape from moral servitude with the unstinting attempts of the enslaved people he perceives as his inferiors to free themselves from the special variety of servitude by which they are oppressed. Indeed, Seneca sharpens the contrast by placing special stress on the degraded condition to which the people in question are subject. Here again, as in Ep. 77, the reader is asked to learn from the resistance enslaved people mount against domination. The exhortation again pivots on the fact that the enslaved people in question are not sages and indeed make their choices, apparently, without exposure to philosophy. The condition of legal slavery is all they need to make plain to them a choice between freedom and slavery, and they respond to that choice in ways Seneca deems worthy of emulation. Inwood points out that the earlier contrast between athletics and philosophy is not just between difficulty and ease but also between philosophical self-​ improvement as a self-​contained enterprise and the “dependence of the body on other people and external resources.”49 Seneca’s recurring emphasis on the autonomy of philosophical achievement yields here a second point of contrast between the activities of athletes and those of enslaved people aiming at freedom. People who struggle to free themselves from legal slavery are of course also dependent on external conditions for the success of their undertaking. This dependence, though, becomes in Seneca’s treatment not evidence of their project’s fundamental unsoundness, as in the case of athletics, but rather an index of the desirability of freedom. Even the “false name of freedom” (vanum . . . nomen libertatis, Ep. 80.5) offered under law is sought so eagerly as to furnish an example of the zeal by which genuine freedom ought to be pursued by means of the autonomous practice of philosophy. Like athletes, enslaved people are pursuing a goal whose value is illusory. As is also the case for athletes, their success is conditioned by forces beyond their control, and their demands upon themselves are grueling, especially by comparison with the exertions demanded by philosophy. Their efforts, though, unlike those of the athletes, are held up as a model because they are a natural and fitting response to the agents’ condition, in this case servitude.50 49. Inwood 2005, 140. 50. Like his Stoic predecessors, and unlike Aristotle, Seneca believed that there were no natural slaves; see the summary of the evidence in Griffin 1976, 257–​62. While this position does not entail the necessity of abolishing the institution of slavery, it does imply that revulsion at servitude is as natural in enslaved people as it would be in anyone else.

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Seneca’s use of slavery in this passage becomes clearer by comparison with Persius’s fifth satire, which also deals with the relationship between legal and moral slavery. The two treatments offer an example of how doctrinally identical views can be deployed in sharply different ways, and comparison between them underscores the subtlety of Seneca’s approach.51 Like Seneca, the speaker in Persius’s poem regards the freedom bestowed by manumission as illusory and insists that the only genuine freedom comes from virtue. In an exchange with a freedman interlocutor, Persius’s speaker heaps scorn on legal definitions of freedom and demands to know whether his opponent has been formed by the ars that fosters rectitude (5.105). As R. A. Harvey notes, this is a reference to philosophy, “the ars vivendi or vitae.”52 Like Seneca’s letter, Persius’s poem maintains that genuine freedom is accessible only in the practice of philosophy. Seneca, though, diverges from Persius in casting the efforts of enslaved people to gain freedom as analogous in the sphere of legal slavery to philosophical practice in the moral sphere. Whereas the freedman’s repeated claims to be free (5.83–​5, 5.88–​90, 5.124) meet only with mockery and angry rebuttal in Persius’s satire, in Seneca’s letter the aspirations that motivate such claims are used, as we have seen, as an example of the determination with which freedom is sought when it is perceived to be available. This difference in hortatory aims makes itself felt in the two authors’ descriptions of the enslaved people in question. Persius describes Dama, the man about to be freed, as “deceitful in a small matter of animal feed” (in tenui farragine mendax, Pers. 5.77), while the enslaved man of Ep. 80 builds up his peculium by cheating his own stomach. Seneca’s description participates in the common image, reflected in Persius, of enslaved people as prone to petty fraud, but in this letter that deviousness is turned upon the enslaved person’s own appetites and becomes an implement of self-​control, and indeed of self-​transformation, as this discipline makes possible the slave’s conversion into a freedman. For Seneca, then, unlike for Persius, the activities of the slave as he pursues illusory legal freedom exhibit correpondences with the ars by which the philosopher pursues genuine freedom. To turn these correspondences to educational use, Seneca emphasizes the gulf between the purported freedom and actual enslavement not of the freedman but of the freeborn citizen. “Do you not want to gain liberty at whatever price,” he asks, “you who believe yourself born into it?” (tu non concupisces quanticumque ad libertatem pervenire, qui te in illa putas natum?, Ep. 80.4).

51. On the Stoicism of Persius, see Colish 1985, 194–​203. 52. Harvey 1981, ad loc.

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This question uses the freeborn citizen’s claim to superiority, grounded in his free birth, to spur him to acquire in reality what he regards, falsely, as his birthright. Seneca employs two strategies at once here. First, he uses the putative superiority of free birth to construct an a fortiori argument, arguing that citizens must feel obliged to seek freedom when enslaved people do so with such eagerness. At the same time, though, the relative clause with which he identifies his freeborn addressee makes the latter’s claim to free birth an empty boast and, by juxtaposition with the descriptions of enslaved people ardently seeking their freedom, implicitly identifies that claim as the reason for his inaction hitherto. Unlike legal slaves, the freeborn have no inkling of their true condition, and their ignorance blocks their pursuit of freedom. Seneca’s question thus both builds upon and undermines the false sensation of freedom that distinguishes free men from slaves and keeps them from the practice of philosophy. In both Ep. 77 and Ep. 80, then, the concept of slavery is indispensable to Seneca’s exposition of what it means to live philosophically. In likening the condition of free men who are not virtuous to that of slaves, he of course aims to make the life of the non-​sage unattractive by highlighting points of similarity to the abjection of slavery. At the same time, however, these passages refuse to ascribe to legal slaves the very qualities that might be thought to give the slavery analogy much of its persuasive force in a Roman context: that is, the aspects of enslaved people’s behavior brought to the fore in these letters are not “servile” in ways that conform to the conventional elite representation of slaves’ character. Rather, their stories emphasize the scope for moral agency available even in the most constricted of external circumstances. In the most recent synoptic discussion of Seneca’s views on slavery, Emily Wilson writes that “in evoking a life of hardships, and the proper philosophical attitude towards it, [Seneca] always looks from the perspective of the master, never the slave.”53 This claim is true in the sense that Seneca’s aim is always to provide guidance that might be of use to his readers, who are assumed to be slave-​owning members of the elite like Lucilius and Seneca himself. As we have seen, though, sometimes Seneca finds that the most effective way to accomplish this goal is to see things from the vantage point of a person held in slavery. Ep. 77 and Ep. 80, in the different ways we have explored, each aim to endow Seneca’s aristocratic readers with an understanding of freedom and a clarified scale of value that, without the intervention of philosophy, is accessible only to enslaved people. Both of these letters urge slaves’ behavior as a model

53. E. Wilson 2015, 188. Wilson illustrates this statement with a reference to Ep. 96.1, where Seneca lists the illness of the people he holds in slavery among the hardships besetting him.

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upon their readers, offering philosophical understanding as moral slavery’s emancipatory analogue to the brutally enforced self-​awareness accompanying legal servitude. In so describing a function for their own therapeutic argument, these letters put the social relations of slavery at the center not just of Seneca’s project of philosophical education, but also of his programmatic literary self-​definition.

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This chapter examines the reciprocal relationship between Seneca’s treatment of Roman political life and his conviction that philosophy offers a unique means of making progress toward wisdom. That is, our discussion will concentrate not on the political role of wisdom itself, but rather on the political ramifications of the rational pursuit of wisdom, a pursuit which gives shape to an entire way of life.1 My contention is that Seneca’s claims for the value of philosophical practice involve him in a thorough rethinking of the values undergirding Roman political life, but that at the same time those values furnish him with his means of arguing for the superiority of the philosophical life. Indeed, I argue that the special moral status accorded to the res publica in Roman tradition becomes in Seneca’s hands an instrument for explaining what the life of philosophy is. As with the other topics we have examined in this book, Seneca’s handling of politics shows both a consciousness of philosophy’s embeddedness in a historical and social context and an ingenuity in using the specific features of that context to show how philosophy can transcend it. There are several ways in which one might seek to demonstrate the claim I am making here. One might be to examine those occasions on which Seneca uses the language of republican political life to describe what philosophers do and how they do it.2 When Seneca explains to Lucilius his belief that what is worthwhile in the writings of Epicurus should be regarded as divisible from what is not with the statement “I think that what is customary in the Senate ought to be so in philosophy as well” (quod fieri in senatu solet faciendum ego in philosophia quoque existimo, Ep. 21.9), he gives a striking indication of the degree to which his

1. On Stoic doctrine about the political life of the wise, and the nature of the communities they form, see Schofield 1991; Graver 2007, 173–​90; K. M. Vogt 2008; and Wildberger 2018, 94–​5. 2. For a catalogue of such language, see Armisen-​Marchetti 1989, 151–​3.

Philosophy and Community in Seneca’s Prose. Carey Seal, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190493219.003.0005

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experience of political activity at Rome informs his normative picture of philosophical practice.3 Sustained attention to passages of this sort, at which Seneca deploys an explicit analogy between philosophy and Roman politics, has much to offer the line of argument to be pursued here, but I concentrate instead on moments at which the res publica is invoked in less direct ways, not as a model for philosophical activity but as a point of reference in relation to which Seneca and his readers can understand the nature and value of that activity. In other words, this chapter’s interest is in junctures at which Seneca’s conception of philosophy, though not linked analogically to Roman politics, depends for its intelligibility and coherence on familiarity with the political realm, its narratives and its traditions. This focus on Roman politics as conceptual raw material rather than as model allows for attention to the ways in which Seneca’s use of Roman politics reconfigures that material in the process of building a picture of the life guided toward virtue by philosophy. I begin with the specific case of the Roman res publica. I briefly review Cicero’s arguments for the uniqueness of the Roman constitution in his De Republica, and then I show how Seneca takes a novel and subtle approach to the problem of reconciling this uniqueness with the idea of universal human reason and universal potential for access to virtue through philosophy. My emphasis is on Seneca’s engagement with the idea of the Roman constitution as a unique inheritance from a chain of ancestors, a heritage whose value creates an obligation to those ancestors to preserve it. I offer a reading of the final section of the third book of De Beneficiis with the goal of showing how Seneca systematically subordinates such obligations to the possibilities opened up by philosophical practice, and in the process revises narratives central to Roman literary and political self-​definition. The second and third sections address the relationship between the philosopher and the state.4 The argument of these sections proceeds via a reading of

3. This passage is discussed further, from the perspective of a different set of interests, in the second chapter of this book. On Seneca’s senatorial career, see Griffin 1976, 43–​59. 4. Seneca deliberately gives his political reflections in Ep. 73, the chief text under discussion in this section of the book, a wide and hazily defined scope of application: the letter addresses the relationship between philosophers and “magistrates or kings or those through whom public things are administered” (magistratuum aut regum eorumve per quos publica administrantur, Ep. 73.1; further discussion of this phrase below). To respect this generality of application, I use here the term “state” to refer to the locus from which political power is exercised. I do not mean to suggest any equivalence to the modern nation-​state or evoke the modern distinction between the state and society, only to avoid any specification that might obscure the breadth of Seneca’s concerns in this letter. “State” may then be regarded as a term of art here, a constitutionally non-​specific placeholder for something which Seneca himself, as the succession of alternatives he offers at Ep. 73.1 shows, struggles to name. I have translated res publica not as “state” but rather as “republic,” vel sim. “Republic,” then, is used here as Seneca uses res publica,

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Seneca’s fourteenth and seventy-​third letters, which this chapter contends are key documents for understanding how Seneca imagines the philosophical life to be integrated into a state that is less than universal in scope and ruled by non-​ philosophers. As we will see, these letters approach this problem from opposite directions but reach conclusions that are complementary. Ep. 14 mounts an argument that the art of philosophy alone offers security from a political sphere structured by dangerous competition. An analysis of this letter sets up an examination of Ep. 73, which argues that philosophers are uniquely positioned to derive benefit from their rulers’ exertions. I argue that these two letters cohere to form an argument for the superiority of the philosophical life that depends on developed notions of the political life for its effectiveness. I argue further that through the claims about the philosophical life he advances in this letter Seneca describes a function for the sub-​universal political community within the framework of Stoic cosmopolitanism. The aim of the chapter as a whole is to show how political entities, discussed in both general and specific ways, serve for Seneca as an already calibrated instrument of measurement, through use of which Seneca can communicate to his readers the value and distinctiveness of the philosophical life. The first and last parts of the chapter approach this topic through the question of gratitude and ensuing obligation: in the first part the obligation in question is to the maiores and to the political community shaped by their distinctive history; in the last part directly to the state. In both cases, I trace what happens to traditional structures of obligation when Seneca insists that those structures take into account philosophy’s unique properties, and how in turn Seneca’s insertion of philosophical practice into those structures gives it a defined form. This emphasis on benefits and obligation is guided by two Senecan dicta: “[P]‌hilosophy teaches this most of all, to owe and pay back benefits well” (hoc docet philosophia praecipue, bene debere beneficia, bene solvere, Ep. 73.9) and “[W]e must discuss benefits and set in order the thing that chiefly binds human society together” (de beneficiis dicendum est et ordinanda res, quae maxime humanam societatem alligat, Ben. 1.4.2). That is, the philosophical revision of the ties of gratitude that regulate Roman political and social life lies at the heart of Seneca’s project, and in the course of determining what obligations philosophy recognizes toward the res publica and to denote the Roman civil community, often with no distinction between the “republican” and “imperial” periods in the life of that community; on this feature of his usage, see further discussion later in the chapter. For a discussion of the problems surrounding the use of the term “state” in discussion of ancient politics, capped by an intriguing argument that Cicero in fact did operate with a concept of the state, see Wood 1988, 123–​8. On the development of the term from Roman usage, see Connolly 2007, 77 n. 1, and for a concise and thoughtful defense of the usefulness of the term despite the risk of anachronism, see Wildberger 2018, 14–​16.

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toward ancestral authority we can come to grasp both the place Seneca allotted to philosophy in the conduct of Roman politics and the part played by political life in the formation of his conception of philosophical practice. This approach involves a shift of emphasis away from the traditional priorities of scholarship on Seneca’s political theory. Discussion of his political views, including of his conception of the Roman republic, has tended to concentrate on his prominent role in the political life of his own times and on the often controversial question of his assessment of the principate and in particular of the rule of the three emperors under whom he produced his surviving writings.5 Seneca’s life as a writer and thinker under an emperor often associated with the arbitrary and cruel exercise of power has tended to evoke in his critics the twentieth-​century habit of understanding the Roman principate and its culture by reference to the repressive regimes of that century.6 Even projects that move beyond the Neronian frame to situate Seneca’s political thinking in the longer sweep of Roman cultural history make Seneca’s engagement with that history pivot upon the conditions generated by the principate. Matthew Roller posits a causal connection between the encroachment of the principate on the traditional prerogatives of the aristocracy and Seneca’s presentation of Stoic ethics: I show that Seneca puts forth Stoic ethics, which locates moral value in mental dispositions, in a way that systematically engages with traditional, received aristocratic ethics, which locates moral value primarily in observed actions. Seneca urges his audience to accept the former in place of the latter, a move that (I argue) addresses specific, concrete social and cultural dislocations experienced by elite Romans in the face of the emperor’s power . . . In addressing these issues as he does, Senecan ethics offers a way of reestablishing aristocratic power and prestige, albeit in a transfigured form, in the new order.7 Roller’s argument translates into Roman intellectual history a long-​standing and controversial claim about the development of post-​Aristotelian philosophy, namely that its pattern of interests reflects the attenuation under the Hellenistic monarchies of the civic life of the polis around which Plato and Aristotle built

5. See Griffin 1976, 182–​221, for a critical overview of these debates, and further references below. 6. See in particular Rudich 1997, 17–​106. This way of approaching the study of the principate of course has as its wellspring Syme 1939. 7. Roller 2001, 11.

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their moral and political theory. In Roller’s account, the traditional, largely non-​philosophical morality of the Roman aristocracy stands in for the Platonic-​ Aristotelian vision of a civic life guided by or conducing to philosophy as that which is frustrated and displaced by the monarchical centralization of power. The consequences in each case are held to be the same: a radical enhancement in the perceived value of an inward realm, secure from external compulsion, in which the ends of the old moral order can be achieved in a re-​imagined way. This view, as Roller indicates, has its roots in two generations of scholarly efforts to situate Hellenistic philosophy in its historical context, the first proposing a strong and direct connection between, on the one hand, the political dislocations caused by and following upon the Macedonian conquests and, on the other, the development of the post-​Aristotelian philosophical scene, and the second offering a less comprehensive version of this claim, under which Hellenistic philosophy is related in important but not determinative ways to the social milieu from which it arose.8 This chapter’s perspective does not involve rejection of this historicizing effort, but rather a widening of its concerns. Seneca’s thought, I aim to emphasize, is conditioned not only by the exigencies of the conditions under which he lived but also by problems that either stretch through the whole course of Roman political reflection or are basic to life with other human beings in societies of any complexity. In attempting to show how philosophy could answer these problems, Seneca both takes a unique opening for philosophical protreptic and, as we will see, integrates the idea of individual moral progress into political theory in subtle and far-​reaching ways. While not minimizing the importance of the Neronian, Julio-​Claudian, or imperial political context to any understanding of Seneca’s work, this chapter aims to consider questions that are important to understanding Seneca’s conception of philosophy’s social and political place but that are tethered less closely to the circumstances under which he wrote. Specifically, it seeks to draw some conclusions about Seneca’s views concerning both political

8. Among the work of the first group Roller 2001, 99 n. 2, lists Adkins 1970, 213–​6 and 232–​ 40 and Ferguson 1958, 135–​7, and the recent revival of this view by Bryant 1996, 427–​65, and among the second Foucault 1986 and Shaw 1985. (To the first list might be added as important supplementary examples Edelstein 1967, 57, and Green 1990, 602–​46.) What separates these two approaches is that the second has the benefit of historical work that has brought to light the continued centrality of the polis to Greek life throughout the period when Stoicism and its peer schools flourished. (See Shipley and Hansen 2006 for an overview of this work.) This shift in our view of the Hellenistic period has made it difficult to sustain views that turn on “the collapse of the city-​state” (Ferguson 1958, 135). Recent overviews of Hellenistic philosophy have tended to express caution about drawing too close a connection between Hellenistic philosophy and its social context but have also acknowledged that the historicist view has much to recommend it (e.g., “this picture is not entirely false” [Sharples 2006, 224]).

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power in the abstract and Roman political identity and tradition as a whole. That is, the res publica of the chapter’s title refers to the Roman commonwealth as a diachronic whole, in its republican and imperial incarnations.9 My contention is that as crucial as Seneca’s immediate circumstances are to an understanding of his politics and the role it plays in his writing, too intent a concentration on those circumstances risks obscuring the seriousness with which he grappled with problems that run longitudinally throughout the history of Roman political thinking. What follows is an attempt to show how Seneca’s conception of the philosophical life is politically situated, in the broadest sense of politics. I will argue that Seneca’s attempts to delineate the nature and value of philosophy involve him in questions of political power in its most basic and generalized form. His reflection on what it means for some human beings to be in positions of power over their fellows is, I argue, a key constituent of his notion of philosophical practice.

De Beneficiis 3 This section considers Seneca’s treatment of a particular instance of the sub-​ universal political community, that of Rome.10 It investigates Seneca’s view of the moral status of the Roman republic in particular, approaching the problem through a consideration of his views on intergenerational obligation. As we will see, those views bear closely on the models of inheritance through which claims for the uniqueness and special value of the Roman republic were often articulated. Elizabeth Asmis has argued that Cicero’s De Republica revises and amends Greek constitutional theory with the aim of “setting up the Roman ancestral constitution as a model that is far superior to any other constitution.”11 That is, Cicero portrays the Roman res publica not simply, as Polybius did, as a successful example of a mixed constitution, but rather as the unique precipitate of ancestral experience and wisdom, not typologically comparable to any other constitution and exceeding all others in stability and capacity for justice. In Asmis’s argument Cicero develops this claim as a historically specific response to the crisis of the late Republic, offering a philosophical plea for the mos maiorum in the mountingly

9. By taking this approach I do not intend to efface the extent to which Seneca recognizes a discontinuity between the republic and the principate; see Gowing 2005, 69–​81. I do, however, hope both to be sensitive to the generalizing cues Seneca gives in Ep. 73 and to suggest some ways in which he responded to a set of problems older than the principate. For Seneca’s use of res publica with clear reference to the principate, see Marc. 1.4; Cl. 1.4.1, 1.4.3. 10. For the place of philosophy in Roman political life, and its relation to some of the characteristic features of Roman politics, see Griffin 1989 and Rawson 1989. 11. Asmis 2005, 414.

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unstable political situation of the late 50s. The dialogue also stands, beyond its contemporary significance, as an example of the rationalization of patriotism in the late Republic and early Principate; traditional views about Rome’s unique destiny were given philosophical foundation and fitted into larger systems of thought and belief that were Greek in origin.12 This chapter assesses the extent to which Seneca carried forward this process of offering philosophical justification for an emotional link to Rome and what is distinctively Roman.13 Are love of wisdom and love of Rome and its past mutually reinforcing for Seneca, as they are, despite whatever tensions may emerge between them, for Cicero? A first step toward answering this question is to note an important way in which Seneca’s views on the relationship between the political and the philosophical lives, as delineated in Ep. 73 especially and as interpreted earlier, mark an entire reversal of views enunciated by Cicero in De Republica. In the preface to the first book of that work, Cicero writes of his political career: [T]‌hough it was open to me either to take greater rewards than others from leisure on account of the varied pleasantness of the studies in which I have lived from childhood, or if anything more bitter happened to everyone, to bear with the others a condition of fortune not outstanding but equal, I was not one to hesitate to approach the heaviest storms and almost the thunderbolts themselves for the sake of preserving the citizens, and by my own dangers to provide calm as a common good to the rest. is enim fueram, cui cum liceret aut maiores ex otio fructus capere quam ceteris propter variam suavitatem studiorum in quibus a pueritia vixeram, aut si quid accideret acerbius universis, non praecipuam sed parem cum ceteris fortunae condicionem subire, non dubitaverim me gravissimis tempestatibus ac paene fulminibus ipsis obvium ferre conservandorum causa, meisque propriis periculis parere commune reliquis otium. (Cic. Rep. 1.7.4) Cicero and Seneca are in agreement that philosophy, which in biographical context must be foremost among the studia to which Cicero refers, has a unique ability to bring happiness to the lives of its practitioners. From this premise, though,

12. See in particular Moatti 1997, 257–​98. On the background to these developments, see Rawson 1985, 3–​114. 13. Certainly Seneca was closely familiar with De Republica. See most notably his use of the dialogue at Ep. 108.30–​4 to demonstrate how a philosopher, a philologus, and a grammaticus will each find different points of interest in the same text.

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they draw diametrically opposed conclusions. For Seneca, as we have seen, the blessings of philosophy are such as to make the philosopher grateful for the opportunity to practice it undisturbed, whatever the deficiencies of the government to which that gratitude is directed. For Cicero, his philosophical ability to maximize the benefit derived from leisure simply adds all the more glory to his choice to enter politics, a choice that is presented here as not even a difficult one to make despite the immense allure of philosophical retirement. The special properties of philosophy as a way of life are mentioned merely to establish the attractive power of the political life. Following Asmis’s argument can help us understand the context of Ciceronian philosophical patriotism within which this argument makes sense. “Traditionally,” Asmis explains, “the Romans looked to individuals as exempla of heroic self-​sacrifice. Cicero fills out what these individuals dedicated their lives to: a state that is united by common commitment to the well-​being of all,”14 this unity of purpose being a unique feature of the Roman constitution as worked out by the historical experience of the Roman people. In the second book of the dialogue, Scipio quotes Cato the Elder as explaining the reason why “the condition of our constitution excels the other constitutions” (praestare nostrae civitatis statum ceteris civitatibus, Cic. Rep. 2.2.1): whereas other constitutions, even those as widely praised as the Lycurgan constitution of Sparta, were the product of a single inventor, “our republic on the other hand was set up by the talent not of one man but of many, not in a single human lifetime but over so many eras and ages” (nostra autem res publica non unius esset ingenio sed multorum, nec una hominis uita sed aliquot constituta saeculis et aetatibus, Cic. Rep. 2.2.1).15 Cato further explains why this lengthy and collaborative process produces a superior constitution. “All talents gathered together at one time could not,” he says, “exercise such great prescience as to embrace all things without practice or the passage of time” (neque cuncta ingenia conlata in unum tantum posse uno tempore providere, ut omnia complecterentur sine rerum usu ac vetustate, Cic. Rep. 2.2.2). As Jed Atkins has emphasized, the effect of this way of looking at the development of the Roman constitution is to attribute the purported excellence of that constitution less to reason, which is implicitly identified with the constitutions that come from a single man’s comprehensively thought-​out design, than to history, to a developmental process governed by chance and contingency that could well have turned out otherwise than it did: “After Polybius had removed chance as a factor for the scientific study of constitutional theory, Scipio, following Plato, has reintroduced

14. Asmis 2005, 378. 15. On the relationship of this passage to Cato’s Origines, see Astin 1978, 225–​6.

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it.”16 The contingent character of the excellences Cato and Scipio identify makes them all the more unique, for the historical process that produced them is by definition unreplicable. We can find a similar view articulated by Sallust in his Bellum Catilinae. In their speeches on the appropriate punishment for the Catilinarian conspirators, both Caesar (51.42) and Cato (52.19–​23) contrast Romans of the present day unfavorably with their ancestors, alleging that the superior virtues of the latter allowed them, despite their few resources, to accumulate power now enjoyed by their far inferior descendants. Sallust revisits this theme in his own voice after Cato’s speech, writing that “the outstanding excellence of a few citizens accomplished everything, and in the same way poverty overcame wealth and few people a multitude. But after the citizenry was corrupted by luxury and apathy, the republic, by contrast, through its own grandeur restrained the vices of its commanders and magistrates” (paucorum civium egregiam virtutem cuncta patravisse, eoque factum uti divitias paupertas, multitudinem paucitas superaret. Sed postquam luxu atque desidia civitas corrupta est, rursus res publica magnitudine sua imperatorum atque magistratuum vitia sustenabat, Sal. Cat. 53.4–​5). As J. T. Ramsey writes, “this view at first glance seems to be just the opposite of the one attributed by Cic[ero] (Rep. 2.2) to the Elder Cato who maintained that Rome surpassed other nations because her laws and institutions had been designed by many men over the generations rather than by a single lawgiver. S[allust], however, wishes to highlight the scarcity of such talented men in any given generation.”17 Indeed, this emphasis reinforces rather than undermines the element of contingency Cato (or Scipio or Cicero) builds into his picture of the republic’s development. Sallust’s distinction between the civitas and the res publica underscores the independence of the latter from the character of its present custodians and presents it, as Cicero does, as the salvific deposit of ancestral experience. Both Cicero and Sallust, then, view the Roman republic and its institutions as the unique product of Rome’s particular history. For Cicero and the philosophically proficient Roman statesmen he depicts in De Republica and his other dialogues, the central fact that must be kept in mind when evaluating the choice between devotion to philosophy and devotion to politics is not the particular value of the philosophical life, though as we have seen Cicero readily acknowledges this value, but rather the inherited obligation to preserve a constitution that has come to embody the collective aspirations of an entire community. As we examine Seneca’s handling of the Roman past, we should keep in mind that for

16. Atkins 2013, 99. 17. Ramsey 1984, ad loc.

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his predecessors, notably Cicero, this past is at once a source of moral normativity and the basis of Rome’s unique political character. Cicero’s exposition of the obligations to the Roman past incumbent upon his contemporaries relies on the metaphor of inheritance to explain this obligation: his Scipio declares in the conclusion to the first book of De Republica that “none of the other republics is to be compared in constitution or definition or instruction with the one which our fathers left to us, having themselves received it from their ancestors” (nullam omnium rerum publicarum aut constitutione aut discriptione aut disciplina conferendam esse cum ea, quam patres nostri nobis acceptam iam inde a maioribus reliquerunt, Cic. Rep. 1.70.3). Seneca’s discussion in De Beneficiis of the exchange of benefits between fathers and sons can offer us a window onto his views of the obligations constituted by parental benefaction. In the third book of that treatise, he takes up the topic of whether or not “sometimes children are able to give greater benefits to their parents than they receive from them” (an aliquando liberi maiora beneficia dare parentibus suis possint, quam acceperint, Ben. 3.29.1).18 This question poses the possibility of a revision of the traditional model of the Roman republic as re-​articulated by Cicero, under which the ancestral participants in the development of the Roman constitution passed on to their descendants an unmatchable benefit in the form of that constitution’s unique virtues. Seneca’s examination of this problem offers a subtle but substantial modification of this view. If Cicero in De Republica aims to trace the “limits of reason,” in Atkins’s phrase, Seneca’s treatment of relations with ancestors shows the limits of history, the point at which obligation to the past is negated by a philosophical art of living that founds itself not on cumulative contingency but on reason alone. His discussion begins with an explanation of the reasons for the ambient belief that children cannot excel their fathers in benefits. Everyone would concede, of course, that some sons turn out to be “greater and more powerful” (maiores potentioresque) than their fathers and might thus be in a position to bestow various kinds of benefit upon them (Ben. 3.29.2). In such a situation, the imagined interlocutor claims, “whatever it is that the son might give to the father, it is in any case less, because he owes to his father the faculty of giving itself. Thus he to whom the benefit itself belongs by which he is defeated is never defeated in the matter of a benefit” (quidquid . . . est, quod det patri filius, utique minus est, quia hanc ipsam dandi facultatem patri debet. ita numquam beneficio vincitur, cuius beneficium est ipsum, quod vincitur, Ben. 3.29.3). This argument, which Seneca spends the rest 18. This passage has recently received a detailed and illuminating reading in Gloyn 2017, 116–​ 32, a treatment that is especially valuable on the economic and legal resonances of Seneca’s language.

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of the book refuting, refers all creativity to the parent, since by the act of generation he is responsible for everything the offspring subsequently does. Seneca’s only response to this argument must be to identify some part of the offspring’s activity as not purely derivative of the original benefit bestowed by the parent. He must, that is, enforce some distinction between what is simply an organic outgrowth of a parental germ and what is genuinely the responsibility of the offspring. The implications of this counter-​argument for the traditional conception of the Roman republic as a legacy passed from father to son are clear: if Seneca is successful, then the “Scipionic”-​Ciceronian view of Roman political life as participation in a constitutional framework that is the unique product of ancestral wisdom becomes difficult to sustain in its strong form. The model of inheritance that underpins that view depends, as we have seen, on the assumption that whatever political good is produced by latter-​day political activity is a reflection of an original benefit, the Roman constitution, bestowed by the maiores upon their legatees. The connections between the obligations to ancestors proposed by this model and those held by Seneca’s interlocutor to follow from the simple fact of generation are all the closer in that for Cicero’s speakers the res publica is not simply a vehicle for political activity but in fact constitutes that activity, which would not exist without it. Seneca’s argument in this portion of De Beneficiis subjects this conception of Roman political community to philosophical scrutiny. Seneca offers a series of examples of ways in which children can offer benefits to their parents that outweigh the benefit of being born. The interlocutor repeatedly interjects (Ben. 3.30.1, 3.30.4, 3.34.1, 3.35.4) to restate his original point: any benefit extended by the son to his father is merely extended by the father to himself, since the son’s activity is a product of his own. This reiterated objection presses Seneca to define ever more closely the means by which sons are able to attain responsibility for their own achievements. First, using the examples of seeds, the sources of rivers, the roots of trees, and the foundations of buildings, he points out that the parts of these things which are generative, though of course causally indispensable to that which they produce, constitute the smallest and least significant part of the mature entity (Ben. 3.29.4–​6). This set of observations, though, mounts no challenge to the proposition that all of the entity is in some meaningful way simply an extension of its origin. The same is true of Seneca’s effort to wrench this principle out of its reinforcing cultural framework by uncoupling it from the associations with the authority of the paterfamilias and instead applying it to the relationship between nurse and nurseling: “[U]‌nless my nurse had fed me as an infant, I would not have been able to accomplish any of those things which I have done by counsel and hand, nor to come forth into this renown, which I have earned by civilian and military diligence; would you, though, on that account place the nurse’s duty before the greatest accomplishments?” (nisi

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me nutrix aluisset infantem, nihil eorum, quae consilio ac manu gero, facere potuissem nec in hanc emergere nominis claritatem, quam ciuili ac militari industria merui; numquid tamen ideo maximis operibus praeferes nutricis officium?, Ben. 3.29.7). This question undermines the interlocutor’s position by highlighting the ease with which the principle he enunciates can be used to defend the claim that the political and military achievements of an aristocratic Roman man are entirely due to the activities of a wet nurse, who would of course be a woman and quite likely not freeborn.19 Seneca thus shows that the interlocutor’s objection is simply a vehicle for an unexamined deference to paternal dignity, since when the principle it purports to express is put to work on a different set of data, in which that dignity is not directly involved, it produces conclusions that any culturally competent reader would immediately recognize as absurd.20 Seneca’s next argument uses the same strategy again, and this time his implicit deployment of patriarchal norms against the unreflective defender of those norms bears even more directly on our larger concerns. Pointing out that everyone’s father himself has a father, Seneca argues that if responsibility for a benefit can be assigned to the parent of the benefactor then that transfer can be repeated, and the credit for the benefit can thus be made to recede any distance into the past. “No one, though,” he claims, “will say that I owe more to ancestors placed beyond memory than to my father” (atqui nemo dicet me plus debere ignotis et ultra memoriam positis maioribus quam patri, Ben. 3.29.8). That our debts to our distant ancestors exceed those to our own parents is the clear implication of Cicero’s description, quoted earlier, of the transmission of the Roman constitution (Rep. 1.70.3) and is treated here by Seneca as obviously false. Cicero’s Scipio and his contemporaries owe that constitution to their fathers, who in turn owe it to the remoter ancestors by whom it was developed. This conception envisions a chain of obligation extending back to the remote past toward the ultimate source of that obligation in the generations responsible for the Roman constitution. Seneca, though, claims that “no one” would regard this backward deferral of obligation as justifiable. His appeal turns the profound Roman reverence for the

19. See Bradley 1986a. On Stoic views of wet nurses, see Reydams-​Schils 2005, 126–​9. 20. There is a similar argument later in the passage: Seneca writes that we eventually “leave behind” (transcendimus) those teachers who “taught us the rudiments” (prima elementa docuerunt, Ben. 3.34.1). This reference to primary education parallels the nurse example in that the pedagogues who sometimes provided such instruction were, Stanley Bonner 1977, 41, writes, “like nurses . . . often remembered with affection,” but all those responsible for basic education, whether working in the household or in a school, were of low social status even when not actually born enslaved: see Bonner 1977, 46. The social context thus provides Seneca with another opportunity to hammer home the point that “there is much difference between what is first and what is greatest” (multum inter prima ac maxima interest, Ben. 3.34.1).

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father into an intuitive argument against a principle that seeks to explain and justify that reverence.21 As we saw in the example of the nurse, Seneca’s argument is able to undercut the notion that the benefits attendant upon generation are solely responsible for later achievement by showing how that notion conflicts with the patriarchal values it strives to codify. These maneuvers fail to unnerve the interlocutor, who doggedly restates his original objection (Ben. 3.30.1). Since he does not challenge Seneca’s reasoning in the latter’s discussion of obligation to the nurse and to remote ancestors, perhaps we are to assume that he accepts the conclusions to which Seneca extends his principle, implausible as those conclusions are intended to seem. His easier options exhausted, Seneca now moves to confront the original objection more directly. “Examine,” he writes, “what sort of thing it is in itself that I have been born: notice that it is small and uncertain and material for good and evil alike, without doubt the first step to all things, but not for all that greater than all things, because it is first” (illud, quod natus sum, per se intuere, quale sit: animadvertis exiguum et incertum et boni malique communem materiam,sine dubio primum ad omnia gradum, sed non ideo maiorem omnibus, quia primus est, Ben. 3.30.2). The argument that origins are smaller than what they produce has already been tried, but the novelty in this new formulation lies in the claim that origins are morally neutral, containing the potential both for good and bad. This plasticity gives Seneca what he has not yet hit on in this discussion, a means of drawing a clear line between which activities of the agent are his own responsibility and which his father’s. It also allows him to introduce the real core of this discussion, the role played by the human practices of self-​improvement—​ philosophy—​in this distribution of responsibility. To illustrate the ability of these practices to revise our beliefs about what is owed in return for parental benefaction, Seneca imagines a scenario in which a son heaps benefit after benefit upon his father, not only saving his life but elevating him to a position of civic importance (Ben. 3.30.3). The father reminds his son that “this itself, that you are capable of these things, is the gift of your father” (hoc ipsum, quod ista potuisti, patris munus est, Ben. 3.30.4), yet another reappearance of the interlocutor’s position. The son’s response involves several linked arguments, of which the following is the most important for our purposes: “[T]‌hough I should say nothing other than that I have been busy with the good arts22 and have led a course towards the straight path of life, you have

21. Seneca makes a related but distinct argument at Ep. 44.4–​5, where he uses the same appeal to regress (here indefinite rather than, as in the passage from De Beneficiis we are examining, infinite) to challenge the idea that worth depends on ancestry. 22. This phrase is a reference to philosophy; cf. Helv. 17.3–​4.

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received in your benefit itself more than you gave” (ut nihil aliud dicam, quam bonis artibus me studuisse et cursum ad rectum iter vitae direxisse, in ipso beneficio tuo maius quam quod dederas recepisti, Ben. 3.31.5). Seneca’s point here is the same we have seen him make in greater detail in Ep. 73: philosophers are able to make more out of benefits than everyone else by virtue of the rewards that come from the philosophical pursuit of virtue. In Ep. 73, Seneca drew from philosophers’ extraordinary capacity to receive benefits the conclusion that rulers can secure outsized gratitude from their philosophical subjects in return for providing goods that are just definitionally basic to their role as rulers. Here in De Beneficiis, though, we find a benefactor with a too-​expansive sense of his own contribution repulsed with a different claim: the philosopher is indebted to a benefactor only to the extent to which the benefit is generally useful, rather than to the extent to which the philosopher makes it so. Seneca goes on to list examples of fathers who have been given the benefit of lasting fame by the sons who made their names renowned, but he still seems conscious that he has not fully met the interlocutor’s objections, “since we are inquiring not what son returned greater benefits to his father than he received from his father but whether it is possible for anyone to return greater benefits” (cum quaeramus, non quis filius patri maiora beneficia reddiderit, quam a patre acceperat, sed an aliquis possit maiora reddere, Ben. 3.32.6). He embarks on a catalogue of benefits allegedly rendered by Scipio Africanus to his father (Ben. 3.30.1–​3), a list which begins well enough with the claim that Scipio saved his father’s life at the battle of the Ticinus, but then includes an act of bravery that the former in fact performed for his brother Scipio Asiagenes and moves from there into a series of benefits that are, as François Préchac writes, “nothing but an oratorical fiction.”23 The fictional quality of this list becomes explicit when Seneca asks the reader to “imagine” (finge) a further set of benefits (Ben. 3.33.4). This catalogue thus differs little in function from the thought experiment conducted at an earlier stage of this argument (Ben. 3.30.4). What distinguishes the two passages is the posing of a question that returns us to the place of philosophy in Seneca’s conception of intergenerational benefaction: “[I]‌f someone who has attained wisdom transmits it to his father, shall we still debate, whether he has now given something greater than he received, since he has given a blessed life to his father, and has received simply life?” (si quis sapientiam consecutus hanc patri tradiderit, etiamnunc disputabimus, an maius aliquid iam dederit, quam acceperat, cum vitam beatam patri reddiderit,

23. Préchac 1926 ad loc. See Scullard 1970, 17, for the Ticinus episode and 216–​20 for Africanus’s defense of Asiagenes.

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acceperit tantum vitam?, Ben. 3.33.5). The introduction of the possibility that a wise son could provide guidance to his father throws the debate into an entirely different register by bringing the genuine good into what had hitherto been a discussion of indifferents. This turn in the argument is confirmed shortly thereafter when Seneca announces that “it is now time to put forward certain things from our [sc. the Stoics’] mint, so to speak” (iam tempus est quaedam ex nostra, ut ita dicam, moneta proferre, Ben. 3.35.1) and then asserts that “he who gives a benefit which can be exceeded is able to be defeated” (qui id beneficium dedit quo est aliquid melius potest vinci, Ben. 3.35.1). That is, since only in the case just mentioned, in which wisdom is the benefit bestowed, does the benefactor give a genuine good to the beneficiary, any other benefit, no matter how large or how capable of subsuming all reciprocal benefits within itself, must be susceptible of being exceeded. These references to wisdom and to the philosophical arts by which it can be attained rescue Seneca from his argumentative impasse and allow him to take the question as settled. As in Ep. 73, Seneca’s emphasis on the rewards of philosophical practice is at the center of his resolution of a social and political problem. Here he uses the power of that practice, dependent as it must be on the reason of the individual, to isolate a core of individual moral agency from indebtedness to progenitors. The conclusion to the book reveals the consequences of this move. Seneca explains that sons’ ability to surpass their fathers in benefits is a stimulus to moral excellence, since “virtue is glory-​loving by nature and desires to precede those ahead of it” (natura enim gloriosa uirtus est et anteire priores cupit, Ben. 3.36.1). With the benefit of existence reclassified as not a genuine good and thus able to be eclipsed by benefits from offspring, the way is open for a different model of the moral relation between generations, one in which, as Seneca writes, parents “have not won simply because they have a head start” (non ideo vicerunt, quia occupaverunt, Ben. 3.36.3). A conceptual scheme in which the proper orientation of Romans toward their past was simply gratitude for the unrepayable benefit granted to them by their maiores gives way to one in which that gratitude is supplemented by and channeled into a rivalrous zeal to surpass that benefit. The repercussions of this outcome for Seneca’s assessment of the Roman heritage become clearer when he reviews some of the most famous narratives of that history in a speech urging sons to enter into a “noble competition” (honesta contentio, Ben. 3.36.2) with their fathers. The first example of such a rivalry he cites is that of Aeneas and Anchises. Though Aeneas had been as a child only a “light and safe burden” (leve tutumque gestamen) for his father, when they fled Troy “the devout old man, holding the sacred things and the household gods,

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pressed with more than his weight itself upon [Aeneas] as he went” (complexus sacra ac penates deos religiosus senex non simplici vadentem sarcina premeret, Ben. 3.37.1). Comparison with Virgil’s narration of this episode in the Aeneid brings to light an important difference between the two accounts. In the Aeneid Aeneas’s speech to his family and followers as they prepare to flee Troy concludes with this instruction to his father: You, father, take the sacred things and the ancestral gods in your hand; it is forbidden for me to handle them, since I have come out of such great battle and recent slaughter, until I have washed myself clean in running water. tu, genitor, cape sacra manu patriosque penatis; me bello e tanto digressum et caede recenti attrectare nefas, donec me flumine vivo abluero. (Virg. Aen. 2.717–​20) Seneca’s telling of the story makes the sacred objects Anchises carries an addition to the burden he places on Aeneas; their weight thus serves to deepen Anchises’s obligation to his son. The close and particular association of the objects with Anchises is made stronger by the application of the adjective religiosus to him. In Virgil’s account, on the other hand, the preservation of the objects is a goal fully common to Aeneas and Anchises. The fact that Anchises rather than Aeneas himself carries them is given a cogent explanation, one which, if anything, makes Aeneas appear as the more religiosus of the pair. Virgil’s account shows Aeneas as himself concerned about the fate of the Trojan household gods, whereas Seneca’s shift of emphasis creates the strong impression that he values them chiefly for the sake of his father. The benefit he renders to his father is, in Seneca’s telling, made all the more praiseworthy by the fact that he shoulders the burden not only of his father’s body but also of a cultural and religious heritage here envisaged as precious to his father in a way it is not to Aeneas himself. We have several times in the passage of De Beneficiis under discussion had occasion to observe the artfulness with which Seneca grounds in traditional Roman values his revision of principles or narratives that present themselves as instantiations of those values. His retelling of the story of Aeneas and Anchises escaping from Troy is able to perform that feat once again, here at the same time celebrating Aeneas’s filial piety and using that piety to suggest a non-​identity of concerns between him and his father. Coupled with the discussion of the possibility of matching a parental benefit that has preceded it, and coming as it does in the midst of an exhortation to intergenerational rivalry in benefaction, this narrative suggests the possibility

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of locating divergence between the concerns of fathers and sons even in Rome’s legendary beginnings.24 The next Roman story retailed in Seneca’s hortatory address shows a more direct concern with the nexus of individual judgment, paternal authority, and the Roman civil community. Seneca retells the story of Manlius Torquatus, who was rusticated by his father “on account of his dull and foolish youth” (ob adulescentiam brutam et hebetam, Ben. 3.37.4) and returned to Rome to prevent by violence his father’s prosecution by a tribune. Seneca concludes the anecdote with the remark that “it has been allowed to no other to return a tribune into his place without punishment” (nulli alii licuit impune tribunum in ordinem redigere, Ben. 3.37.4). Again, the contrast between Seneca’s use of this story and that made by other writers is instructive. Cicero, Livy, and Valerius Maximus all tell the story,25 but none of them draws attention to the singularity of the impunity extended to the younger Manlius’s threat to tribunician sacrosanctity. Valerius Maximus groups the story among those demonstrating filial piety, but Cicero uses the story in De Officiis to illustrate the seriousness with which oaths were treated in the past (the tribune kept his promise, extracted at swordpoint, to drop his prosecution) rather than to praise the behavior of the younger Manlius. Seneca’s version, read in the context of the discussion that has preceded it, highlights what is innovative and exceptional about Manlius’s conduct. His daring attack, held out as a model for those who are being urged to surpass their parents in an exchange of benefits, succeeds in Seneca’s telling not only in (more than) discharging his debt to his father but also in securing for him a personal exemption from an important piece of Roman political custom. In the context of the exhortation to rivalry, his action is a challenge to one facet of paternal supremacy; Seneca’s narrative makes it a challenge to the political character of the fatherland as well.26 This portion of De Beneficiis, then, uses the superior value of the philosophical life as a pivot for a reexamination of the obligation to the maiores that is at the heart of Roman political self-​conception. We can now take a new look at the question posed at the beginning of this section: to what extent does Seneca regard the Roman republic as exhibiting particular and unique moral value? The

24. For another instance of Seneca’s reconfiguration and redeployment of the central narratives of Roman political myth, see Williams 2006 and Montiglio 2006, 576, on the Consolatio ad Helviam. 25. Liv. 7.4–​5, Cic. De Off. 3.112, V. Max. 5.4.3 and (in condensed form) 6.9.1. 26. In highlighting how Seneca’s framing of this anecdote as part of a contest in beneficia between fathers and sons emphasizes Manlius’ simultaneous challenge to the civic and familial order, I do not mean to deny that within the anecdote there is also a normative clash between these two orders, as is brought out by Gloyn’s discussion (2017, 128–​9).

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answer to this question, as I hope the discussion of De Beneficiis has shown, must be grounded in an appreciation of the central role played by the metaphors of inheritance and obligation in the Ciceronian conception of the republic’s value. The ways in which Seneca’s complication of these metaphors makes itself felt can perhaps best be seen with reference to Cicero’s statement in De Republica that “thus, because the fatherland contains more benefits and is an older parent than he who produced us, greater thankfulness is owed to it than to a parent” (sic, quoniam plura beneficia continet patria, et est antiquior parens quam is qui creauit, maior ei profecto quam parenti debetur gratia, Cic. Rep. fr. 1a Ziegler). This claim reprises an argument familiar from the speech of the Athenian Laws in Plato’s Crito (Pl. Cr. 51a–​b), but, as James Zetzel notes, “C[icero]’s concept of duty to the fatherland is much more active than Plato’s” as expressed in that speech.27 The argument for gratitude to the patria given here by Cicero rests on a firmly entrenched set of beliefs about the magnitude of the debt owed by offspring to their parents. As we have seen, Seneca does not seek to minimize the extent of this debt, but he does undercut its uniqueness through comparison with the singular benefits offered by the philosophical pursuit of wisdom. We are now in a position to assess Paul Veyne’s claim that in De Beneficiis Seneca gives an “exaggerated importance” to the circulation of benefits because “he situated himself, as though in a dream, in an ideal society, a city of sages where the social bond is love—​the love that, according to Zeno, contributes to maintain [sic] civic life.”28 The entire treatise, Veyne charges, oscillates between two incompatible answers to the question “Should the sage’s course of conduct be traced according to a society in his own image, a city of sages, or was it necessary to situate it in his role as a citizen of actual cities?”29 My discussion here proposes that Seneca takes neither of these two courses, but rather directs attention toward the life of philosophy, the activity which holds out to the unwise the possibility of progress toward wisdom. His focus on beneficence, I have argued, allows the contours of this life, its characteristic activities and its value, to emerge against the background of Roman tradition. I have argued further that it is specifically the idea of the Roman civil community and the moral weight attached to that idea by which Seneca describes a place in Roman life for the philosophical pursuit of virtue. The web of benefits Seneca describes in De Beneficiis thus offers an ethics grounded not in the community of the wise or in accommodation to imperfection, but in the philosophical art that connects one realm to the other. 27. Zetzel 1995 ad Cic. De Rep. 1.8. 28. Veyne 2003, 131. 29. Veyne 2003, 131.

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In making this illustrative use of the political virtue of gratitude, Seneca makes politics and philosophy interdepedent, with results that are transformative for both. Teresa Morgan writes of Valerius Maximus’s discussion of gratitude that “it is striking . . . that gratitude flows in all directions, particularly within the Roman state. It is not simply a matter of leaders leading and everyone else being grateful: everyone is bound to those above and below them, as well as to their friends, to make the whole stronger.”30 The binding of Romans to each other and to the republic by ties of gratitude lay at the heart of traditional Roman ethical and political teaching, and Seneca’s arguments for the importance of philosophical practice in determining the direction and intensity of the lines of force in this field of gratitude thus amount to an important set of interventions toward the philosophical reconfiguration of Roman social and political life.

Ep. 14 Seneca’s fourteenth letter, which mounts an argument for philosophical withdrawal, offers an apt starting point for a wider discussion of his politics, both because it offers a distinctive view of the relationship between philosophical and political life and because it sets up some of the key ideas Seneca will explore in his seventy-​third letter, analysis of which occupies the second part of this chapter. In particular, Ep. 14 yields some important insights into the role of the intra-​elite competition driving Roman politics in the reactive formation of Seneca’s conception of the philosophical life. The letter’s approach to the problem of the philosopher’s relation to politics begins with the fact of embodiment. “I allow,” he writes at the letter’s opening, “that affection for our body is innate to us; I allow that we bear its guardianship” (fateor insitam esse nobis corporis nostri caritatem; fateor nos huius gerere tutelam, Ep. 14.1). This inborn concern for one’s own body is under the Stoic theory of oikeiosis the basis for extension of one’s sphere of concern to encompass others, and the principle Seneca enunciates here is central to Stoic ethics.31 The line between this natural regard for one’s own body and “excessive love” (nimius amor, Ep. 14.2) for it and the pleasures it yields is a fine one, Seneca reminds Lucilius,

30. Morgan 2007, 142. Note also that the manner in which this web of gratitude articulates and sustains Roman values is the central concern of the two most important recent studies of De Beneficiis: Inwood 2005, 65–​94, and Griffin 2013. See also Griffin 2000, 545–​51. 31. See Cic. Fin. 3.17 and the texts assembled at LS 57A–​H, especially 57G (Hierocles on the relationship between physical self-​preservation and human sociability; cf. LS 53B), and for discussion of the place of this principle in Stoic ethics, see Pembroke 1971; Reydams-​Schils 2005, especially 55–​9; and Graver 2007, 151–​3.

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but he returns to the naturalness of taking heed of the body’s requirements: “nevertheless [i.e., in spite of the danger of attachment to the body] let us avoid discomforts also, not only dangers, as much as we are able, and let us lead ourselves to safety, repeatedly considering by what means things which are to be feared might be warded off ” (nihilominus quantum possumus evitemus incommoda quoque, non tantum pericula, et in tutum nos reducamus, excogitantes subinde quibus possint timenda depelli, Ep. 14.3). With this mention of incommoda Seneca cannot be here referring to the “dispreferred indifferents” (ἀποπροηγμένα) of Stoic moral theory, even though he suggests commoda as a Latin term for the opposite category of preferred indifferents in Ep. 74,32 since the incommoda are here contrasted with pericula, which must also be dispreferred indifferents.33 Rather Seneca works from the idea of a hierarchy of threats to the body, the two levels of which are that of the incommoda and that of the pericula.34 It is natural, Seneca affirms, to avoid both of these classes, not just the more severe of them. Seneca divides all of these threats into three different categories: “want is feared,” he writes, “diseases are feared, those things which come about through the force of one more powerful are feared” (timetur inopia, timentur morbi, timentur quae per vim potentioris eveniunt, Ep. 14.3). He then indicates an intention to concentrate on the last of these categories, on the grounds that this third sort of danger “comes with great noise and tumult” (magno enim strepitu et tumultu venit, Ep. 14.4). This criterion, we soon see, is a social one: “around the other sort of evil [danger from the powerful],” Seneca writes, “there is a great retinue; it has around itself iron and fires and chains and a crowd of wild beasts which it launches into human entrails” (ingens alterius mali pompa est; ferrum circa se et ignes habet et catenas et turbam ferarum quam in viscera inmittat humana, Ep. 14.4). Those more powerful than us pose a more terrifying threat than do disease and hunger because of their distinctively human characteristics: they use metal and fire, and are able to make chains.35 Even the ferae acquire their fearsomeness in this description from the human intent that trains them on a target, in this case

32. Itaque commoda vocentur et, ut nostra lingua loquar, producta (Ep. 74.17). Note that both of these translations are different from Cicero’s choice, praeposita (Fin. 3.53). 33. In Stoic moral theory, indifferents are those things among which there are virtuous choices to be made, but which are not themselves the good (virtue). For a clear exposition of this distinction, see Brennan 2005, 119–​33. 34. Cf. the similar disjunction between incommoda and pericula at Ep. 54.2. 35. The use of fire is of course a potent symbol of human beings’ uniquely dominant relationship to the natural environment, as the myth of Prometheus makes clear (cf. Med. 820–​4), while metallurgy, and in particular its applications in the making of weapons, are closely associated with the transition out of the Golden Age and the concomitant advent of complex social

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the innards of the victim. “For just as the torturer accomplishes more,” Seneca writes, “the more instruments of pain he has displayed (for those who would have withstood the suffering are vanquished by the appearance), so among those things which subdue and conquer our minds the ones which have something to show are more powerful” (nam quemadmodum plus agit tortor quo plura instrumenta doloris exposuit [specie enim vincuntur qui patientiae restitissent], ita ex iis quae animos nostros subigunt et domant plus proficiunt quae habent quod ostendant, Ep. 14.6). The comparison to the torturer, whose goal is to induce terror in his victim, suggests a parallel intention on the part of those human beings who use violence against their fellows.36 Human violence is more frightening not by happenstance, but by design: those human beings who employ violence exploit the intelligence of their victims to magnify the effect of their frightening activity.37 To live with other human beings, then, is to run the constant risk of a hazard uniquely disruptive of tranquility, the intentionally jarring and disconcerting display of menacing power by other human beings. Our physical integrity, the preservation of which Seneca has put among our important responsibilities, is in jeopardy whenever we are in the company of other human beings, in a sharper way than it would be were we exposed to natural perils alone. This line of reasoning undermines our confidence in the possibility of safety in community, and it does so in a way so general as to sweep aside considerations about the relative merits of different sorts of regimes. Indeed, Seneca follows the impetus of his argument by specifically rejecting political soundness and order as a criterion by which to measure how safe it might be to expose oneself to the anger of the powerful: “sometimes,” he writes, “it is

and political organization (see Ep. 90.12). On fire and metalworking in ancient histories of technology, see Cole 1990, 25–​46. 36. Cf. the list of Caligula’s instruments of torture at Ir. 3.19.1: torserunt per omnia quae in rerum natura tristissima sunt, fidiculis talaribus, eculeo igne vultu suo. The sight of Caligula’s face is part of the torment for his victims, presumably because of its ability to express cruelty and malign intent. The close connection Seneca draws between torture and fear is evident throughout the comprehensive survey of references to torture in Seneca’s prose works provided by Courtil 2014. 37. Cf. Ep. 5.8–​9 (on the uniquely human experiences of hope and fear): maxima autem utriusque causa est quod non ad praesentia aptamur sed cogitationes in longinqua praemittimus; itaque providentia, maximum bonum condicionis humanae, in malum versa est. ferae pericula quae vident fugiunt, cum effugere, securae sunt: nos et venturo torquemur et praeterito. Ep. 14 takes this account of fear’s foundations in our distinctively human faculties of foresight and recollection from the realm of individual moral guidance into that of social and political analysis (because our intellects make us vulnerable to fear, other human beings are able to use our fear against us) and then back into the realm of advice for the individual (so we would do well to be wary of our fellow human beings).

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the people whom we ought to fear, sometimes, if there is that degree of discipline in the regime that most matters are transacted through the Senate, the men who are favored in it; sometimes individual men in whom the power of the people and over the people is vested” (interdum populus est quem timere debeamus; interdum, si ea civitatis disciplina est ut plurima per senatum transigantur, gratiosi in eo viri; interdum singuli quibus potestas populi et in populum data est, Ep. 14.7). This statement brackets the constitutional questions at the center of ancient political theory; the three alternatives recapitulate the most basic Greek taxonomy of regimes (democratic, aristocratic or oligarchic, monarchical or tyrannical), and their equation with one another, for Seneca’s present purposes, collapses political distinctions based on who rules.38 It does not matter, we are told, whether the people, a small group, or one man exercises power, but only that there is some individual or group that does so.39 Seneca magnifies the impact of this claim by attributing to the senatorial or oligarchic regime a greater measure of “discipline” (disciplina). Grant, Seneca tells us, that such a regime is in fact better ordered than its alternatives. That greater measure of order provides no protection against the fundamental problem of intra-​human violence, as described in the earlier part of the letter. As in Ep. 73, discussed later, Seneca emphatically gives his remarks a wide scope of application and resists assigning the characteristics of political life he is deploring here to a particular sort of regime, or a regime in a particular sort of decay. Instead, drawing on the evidence he has just marshalled for the unique ability of those more powerful than us to induce terror, he mounts a sweeping indictment of political life that bases itself on the most elementary and universal facts about that life. It is this location of danger in politics itself that supplies the rationale for the advice Seneca gives in the remainder of the letter. The sage, he tells Lucilius, avoids proximity to “harmful power” (nocituram potentiam, Ep. 14.8) as to Charybdis. When Seneca turns to how this evasion can be accomplished, he moves again from specific counsel to more general social analysis. “First let us desire nothing in common,” he writes; “strife is between competitors” (primum nihil idem concupiscamus; rixa est inter competitores, Ep. 14.9). This observation integrates 38. For an overview of this taxonomy and its history, see Hahm 2005, 464–​76. 39. On indifference to the nuances of political terminology cf. Cl. 1.4.3: principes regesque et quocumque nomine sunt tutores status publici. On the specific question of the difference made by the number of rulers, cf. Ep. 28.8: quid interest quot domini sint? servitus una est; hanc qui contempsit in quantalibet turba dominantium liber est. Here again, the traditional concern with classifying regimes by the quantity of those who rule is marked as secondary to the basic fact of political power. It is the task of the aspirant to wisdom to take the correct attitude toward power per se, rather than to pay attention to the particular kind of regime that is exercising that power.

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the standard Stoic emphasis on the importance of desiring only the good into the discussion of the dangers of life in common that Seneca has pursued through the letter. Desires that arise under the influence of our social surroundings are harmful not only because they are without rational foundation, but also because by virtue of their wide distribution they enmesh us in competitive relationships with those around us, including the politically powerful individuals about whom Seneca has just warned Lucilius.40 Here a key tenet of Stoic moral theory is given a foundation in the generalized critique of politics that Seneca has been developing throughout the letter. It is not enough, though, to avoid competition. One must seem harmless, but not to such a degree as to create the impression that one can be harmed with impunity: Seneca warns that we must be careful “lest while we wish not to trample we seem to be able to be trampled” (ne dum calcare nolumus videamur posse calcari, Ep. 14.10). To abstain from using power against others is not enough, in itself, to exempt one from the dangerous rivalry of social and political life. What is needed is some way of making conspicuous one’s permanent abstention from this rivalry and a way of making clear that that abstention comes not out of weakness but out of a lack of interest in the goods that are the object of competition. It is this need that Seneca presents philosophy as addressing. The philosophical arts arouse neither envy nor contempt, but rather place their practitioners in a charmed zone that is outside of social life altogether: “therefore we should take refuge in philosophy; these letters are in the position of a mark of distinction not only, I say, among the good, but among those who are only moderately bad” (ad philosophiam ergo confugiendum est; hae litterae, non dico apud bonos sed apud mediocriter malos infularum loco sunt, Ep. 14.11).41 Seneca grounds this power of protection in philosophy’s political uselessness; “forensic eloquence and whatever else moves the people has opponents” (nam forensis eloquentia et quaecumque alia populum movet adversarios habet, Ep.

40. Cf. Ir. 3.34.2–​3: Seneca observes that men become angry over one another when they both desire the same woman, and so quod vinculum amoris esse debebat seditionis atque odi causa est, idem velle. Iter angustum rixas transeuntium concitat, diffusa et late patens via ne populos quidem conlidit: ista quae adpetitis, quia exigua sunt nec possunt ad alterum nisi alteri erepta transferri, eadem adfectantibus pugnas et iurgia excitant. If we desire the things that most people desire, we are inevitably drawn into conflict with them, because these purported goods are distributed on a zero-​sum basis and are thus inherently rivalrous. 41. On the wide-​ranging public esteem enjoyed by philosophy, cf. Ep. 55.4: adeo, mi Lucili, philosophia sacrum quiddam est et venerabile ut etiam si quid illi simile est mendacio placeat. Philosophy’s reputation is so high, Seneca maintains, that even people who cannot distinguish it from a cheap simulacrum, like Vatia’s retirement, revere it nonetheless.

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14.11).42 Philosophy’s social marginality here becomes the source of its power. To be a philosopher, on this reading, is to be visibly cut off from life in common, in ways reminiscent of Callicles’s comment in the Gorgias, quoted in the introduction to this book.43 Seneca here holds this isolation to be a benefit of philosophical practice, not simply because the rewards of power are not genuine goods but also because the contest for power is dangerous in ways that make participation incompatible with natural concern for one’s bodily integrity. Seneca’s description of the benefits to be derived from philosophical practice, then, revolves in this letter around a diagnosis of competitive political life as pervaded by the sort of uniquely human-​induced terror that he has described at Ep. 14.4–​6. Let us now see how in Ep. 73 an equally bleak view of the moral possibilities of politics, coupled with the same stress on the dangers of competition and hierarchy, issues in an explicitly different posture toward power, but one which ultimately conduces to the same result, the affirmation and protreptic redescription of philosophy’s powers.

Ep. 73 The seventy-​third of Seneca’s Epistulae Morales has often been interpreted in close connection with the philosopher’s attempts to retire from his position at Nero’s court in 62, as recounted by Tacitus (Ann. 14.52–​6). The letter, in this context, can be read as an effort to assert the necessity of leisure for a philosophical life while, for safety’s sake, heaping praise on the ruler who guarantees that leisure.44 Gretchen Reydams-​Schils writes that Seneca makes the comparison between the emperor’s regulatory function and that of Zeus “in order to get out of the bind of having his voluntary withdrawal register as criticism of the emperor”; she finds that “the tone of the letter is more than a little ominous and, in its flattery of

42. Seneca could be thinking here of the antagonism his own eloquence is reported to have attracted from Caligula (Dio Cass. 59.9); on the question of Dio’s reliability here, see Griffin 1976, 53–​6. 43. See also the first chapter of this book for a fuller treatment of philosophical isolation and solitude in Seneca. 44. See Waltz 1909, 418–​9, for an argument in favor of this biographical reading. Waltz classifies this letter among “some useful precautions” (418) he believes to have been taken by Seneca to placate Nero in conjunction with his campaign to be allowed to retire after the death of Burrus. This interpretation of the letter has entrenched itself enough to be presupposed in a recent popular account of Seneca’s life and works: “this missive [Ep. 73] amounted to an open letter to the emperor, begging him to change his mind” about the danger Seneca posed (Miller 2011, 137). Russell 1974, 71, uses Ep. 73 as an example of how Seneca in retirement offers moral guidance “as his substitute for the life of political action.”

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the emperor, reads like a supplication to let go of Seneca.”45 Certainly we cannot rule out the possibility that the letter’s genesis lies in Seneca’s difficult relationship with Nero. Whatever its origins, though, Ep. 73 offers a view of philosophical otium and its political implications that is unique among Seneca’s treatments of this topic, and in ascribing that uniqueness to the ideological contortions imposed upon Seneca by the need to evade Nero’s anger we pass by an opportunity to enrich our understanding of the ways in which Seneca thought about the relation between philosophy and power. The letter argues that although some believe that “those loyally given over to philosophy are stubborn and contentious, despisers of the magistrates or of kings or of those through whom public matters are administered” (philosophiae fideliter deditos contumaces esse ac refractarios, contemptores magistratuum aut regum eorumue, per quos publica administrantur, Ep. 73.1), the reverse is true: “none are more thankful towards those men” (nulli adversus illos gratiores sunt, Ep. 73.1). Seneca’s use of the phrase philosophiae fideliter deditos rather than, for instance, simply philosophi lays particular emphasis on philosophy’s character as a life-​encompassing pursuit, one that can be pursued with varying levels of commitment. He is discussing in this letter those whose devotion to philosophy is maintained fideliter, an expression pregnant with political overtones.46 We thus find laid out for us the conflict the letter aims to address: how can a total allegiance to philosophy be compatible with loyalty to the state?47 Do those who profess such allegiance present a danger to the political order in which they live? Seneca answers the latter question in the negative, but the answer itself has received more attention than the way in which Seneca’s argument for that answer integrates philosophy into the political order without sacrificing its claims to offer a unique and superior way of living. Indeed, he uses philosophers’ professed allegiance to their rulers as a way of augmenting those claims. What sort of state does Seneca have in mind here? The mention of kings, magistrates, and the more broadly defined set of “those through whom public things are administered” seems calculated to make the scope of application for

45. Reydams-​Schils 2005, 107. 46. On the political dimensions of fides, see Fraenkel 1916 and Heinze 1929. 47. Interpreters have often taken this question to be one of special relevance under the principate and during Nero’s reign in particular. See, for example, Martha 1881, 65, for whom Ep. 73 represents a renunciation of the “civic martyrdom” chosen by other Stoics. For Dill 1905, 15, the letter’s argument shows that it “must have been written during the Neronian terror.” For the claim that there was a “philosophical opposition” to the first-​century emperors, which attracted reciprocal hostility from those emperors, see Boissier 1905, 97–​105, and MacMullen 1966, 46–​94. For a response to and qualification of this claim, see Shaw 1985.

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the letter’s argument as general as possible. Later in the letter the word rex is used to describe the political authority toward which the philosopher is grateful, but the letter’s opening makes it clear that the rex stands in for a comprehensive list of those who under various constitutions wield that authority.48 The claim Seneca sets out to defend is that philosophers are grateful to the ruling power of their state, whatever form that power may take. Though these philosophers are portrayed as withdrawing from public life (Ep. 73.4; see below), the central arguments of the letter deal not with the choice of political participation or non-​ participation, a topic addressed by Seneca on a number of other occasions,49 but rather with the relationship that obtains between the philosopher and those who rule the state in which he lives.50 These arguments bear on the orientation toward the state both of philosophers who are citizens of states and those who are more accurately described as subjects of rulers. The letter’s argumentative scope is thus an important reason for caution in interpreting the letter in light of its composition under autocracy: whether or not a share in the ruling power is or was open to the philosopher is a secondary question as far as this letter is concerned, for the ruler’s service to the philosopher consists as much in the simple preservation of order as in the performance of public duties that might otherwise have encumbered the philosopher. The way in which the ruler provides a benefit to the philosopher is explained by the claim that “those whom public security helps attain their aim of living well necessarily honor as a parent the sponsor of this good” (ii, quibus multum ad propositum bene vivendi confert securitas publica, necesse est auctorem huius boni ut parentem colant, Ep. 73.2). The calm guaranteed by the state, while not indispensable to the practice of philosophy, helps it on its way and thereby puts philosophers in the position of receiving a benefit from those in power. The rulers do not design their rule so as to yield the best possible conditions for philosophy, a point that will receive attention later in the letter; their provision of a public good to all simply is of vastly more benefit to philosophers, for reasons that Seneca is also 48. See Griffin 1976, 206–​9, on the place of rex in Seneca’s political vocabulary. 49. See Griffin 1976, 315–​6 and Williams 2003, 10–​8, for a survey. 50. Thus the problem at issue here is not the choice between the active and the contemplative life, but rather the political place of the life guided by philosophy, which may be of either sort or combine elements of both. Note the Stoic view that virtue was both a practical and a theoretical art (SVF 3.202).. The life of the aspirant to virtue would thus include both philosophical inquiry and action guided by it, and it could involve political participation or withdrawal as circumstances warranted. For Seneca’s views on the active and contemplative lives, see Grilli 2002, 222–​1, and Vogl 2002, 135–​46; for the specifically Roman background to this problem, see André 1966. There is further discussion in the first section of this book’s introduction of the relationship between theory and practice in ancient conceptions of the philosophical life.

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to lay out. This statement lays the groundwork for those discussions by establishing that it is the basic function fulfilled by the ruler for all subjects, rather than some special service intentionally directed at the philosophers in particular, that secures him the loyalty of the philosophers. Seneca demonstrates his proposition that those devoted to philosophy are more grateful than other subjects for the benefits the ruler provides to all through two arguments: first, that philosophy equips its practitioners with a clear picture of the social world, thereby allowing them to register benefits in a way not open to others, and second, that the public good of order, though given equally to all, is of special advantage to the philosophers. Let us begin by taking up the first argument, with an eye toward discerning in what ways Seneca believes philosophy to shape the social and political senses of those who pursue it. Seneca develops his account of philosophers’ clearsightedness by contrast with another group which might be more readily supposed to claim the distinction of being the most loyal subjects, that made up of “those restless men placed in the middle of things, who owe much to rulers, but also lay much to their charge” (illi inquieti et in medio positi, qui multa principibus debent, sed multa et inputant, Ep. 73.2). These individuals are distinguished not by the debt they owe to the ruler, for as we are to see, that owed by the philosophers is substantial, but by the impossibility of their deriving satisfaction from what is given to them, a psychological fact rooted, of course, in the insatiability of their desires: “no generosity can ever come upon them so fully as to fulfill their cravings, which wax when they are satisfied” (quibus numquam tam plene occurrere ulla liberalitas potest, ut cupiditates illorum, quae crescunt, dum implentur, exsatiet, Ep. 73.2). This pleonexic striving for ever more of the favors that a ruler is equipped to bestow forecloses the possibility of gratitude, since “whoever thinks of receiving is heedless of what has been received” (quisquis autem de accipiendo cogitat, oblitus accepti est, Ep. 73.2). Here is the first reason why philosophers are better subjects than non-​philosophers: their emotional continence and finite scope of desire are the elementary precondition of any acknowledgment of gratitude, a condition that is here taken as attending the complete fulfillment of desire, not simply its temporary abatement. This analysis parallels that given in the third book of De Beneficiis of the “first and most powerful of all” causes for ingratitude (prima omnium ac potentissima, Ben. 3.3.1), the limitlessness of desire.51 Seneca then proposes a second way in which the behavior of this group of non-​philosophers renders them dangerous to the ruler, a charge that again finds a

51. See Chaumartin 1985, 89 n. 135 for further references from De Beneficiis to the same phenomenon.

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parallel in the account of ingratitude in De Beneficiis. Their habit, he charges, is to pay attention not to those whom they have surpassed but only to those who still rank ahead of them. “To those men,” he writes, “it is not as pleasant to see many behind themselves as it is painful to see someone ahead” (illis non tam iucundum est multos post se videre quam grave aliquem ante se, Ep. 73.3). As an attack on insatiable desire this claim is unremarkable, and its emphasis on the close connection between the ability to be satisfied and the quality of being a good subject echoes what has immediately preceded it, but we should note that this destructive way of assessing one’s place in a competitive environment is outlined in contrast to the behavior of philosophers. Seneca draws our attention to a characteristic of the philosophical life that is of great importance in defining the place of philosophical activity in society: philosophers are not oblivious to the workings of social hierarchy, but on the contrary maintain a sensitivity to its gradations that yields a proper estimate of their own place therein. As often, Seneca provides here an illustration of the thoroughness with which Stoic ethics and epistemology are implicated with each other, that is, of how for the Stoics passions are, in F. H. Sandbach’s formulation, “particular instances of disturbance resting on individual faulty judgments.”52 The ethical defect diagnosed in this passage is not simply contrasted with the behavior of the aspirant to wisdom but also shown to derive from a systematically distorted view of the social world. Seneca writes that “all ambition has this fault: it does not look back” (habet hoc vitium omnis ambitio: non respicit, Ep. 73.3); the visual metaphor drives home the point that self-​renewing striving grows out of a perceptual failing.53 It is this same distortion of vision that Seneca links in De Beneficiis to the ingratitude toward the state that issues in civil war. “Whoever has not stood above the republic,” he writes, “thinks that he stands in a low and degraded place” (humili se ac depresso loco putat stare, quisquis non supra rem publicam stetit, Ben. 5.15.4), and this self-​assessment leads to insurrection. In both our letter and De Beneficiis, Seneca draws a causal connection between a perceptual habit of misapprehending one’s place in a competitive society and the renunciation of ties of loyalty to the state. To overcome ambition is to be able to see without distortion in all directions, and it is this clarity of

52. Sandbach 1975, 63. For further discussion and orientation in the sources, see Annas 1992, 103–​20, and Brennan 2003. Graver 2007 offers a comprehensive discussion of the Stoic theory of emotion and Konstan 2015 a stimulating overview. 53. Ambitio is used with the same verb, affirmatively this time, in Ep. 78: omnia ex opinione suspensa sunt; non ambitio tantum ad illam respicit et luxuria et auaritia: ad opinionem dolemus (Ep. 78.13). Again here ambitio is figured as depending upon a visual estimate, and again the target of Seneca’s admonition is skewed belief, reliance upon which gives ambitio its distorted and unhealthy character.

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vision that allows philosophers to be satisfied with their position and thus to feel gratitude toward the ruling power charged with preserving the social order. This function of the ruler comes into clearer focus as the letter shifts its attention from the ambitious man back to the philosopher, and in particular to the individual who “leaves behind the curia and the forum and all service to the republic, in order that he might withdraw to grander things” (reliquit et curiam et forum et omnem administrationem rei publicae, ut ad ampliora secederet, Ep. 73.4). This description asserts positively what the previous section of the letter implied by contrast with the ambitious man: the person given over to philosophy gains by virtue of that study a deeper and truer understanding of his human environment, in this case of the relative importance of retirement and political involvement. Seneca’s description of the objects of philosophical study as ampliora than the traditional arenas for the cultivation and display of political greatness announces the reorientation of perspective achieved by the individual who arrives at a decision to abandon those arenas. The letter’s way of describing the philosophical retiree thus exhibits to the reader that individual’s non-​distorted perceptual grasp of the hierarchy of value, in contrast to the preceding examples of social vision occluded by, and generative of, moral impairment. This repeated emphasis on the ability of philosophy to supply a full understanding of social reality bears fruit when attention returns to the ties between philosophers and those who direct the state. The philosopher who recedes from public affairs has, Seneca tells us, a special affection for those who create the conditions under which it is possible for him to do so: “he loves them, through whom it is permitted to him to do this safely, and alone he gives to those men spontaneous allegiance and owes a great deal to them without their knowing it” (diligit eos, per quos hoc ei facere tuto licet, solusque illis gratuitum testimonium reddit et magnam rem nescientibus debet, Ep. 73.4). What is most remarkable about this sentence is the participle in the last clause. First the gratitude philosophers harbor toward the state is again, as in Ep. 73.2, presented as consequent upon its administrators’ provision of order and security to those under their rule. The philosophers’ special thanks, though, are directed toward rulers who are not aware of having earned those thanks. Seneca presents us, then, with a remarkable response to the Platonic model of the relationship between philosophers and state power, as expressed in the Republic: Plato wanted the philosophers to assume that power themselves as self-​conscious participants, indeed the only fully self-​conscious participants, in a political order aimed at the promotion of justice.54 The necessity

54. Socrates suggests at Resp. 414c that “at most” (μάλιστα), i.e., in a best case, the rulers themselves would believe the myth of the metals, but it is clear that since the rulers have an

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of philosophical direction to the proper functioning of the state gives rise to an often-​noted paradox in Plato’s conception of the philosophical life: as Thomas Brickhouse formulates the problem, Plato “promises supreme benefits to the just man” but “also apparently requires that the philosophers, paradigmatically just men, at least partially sacrifice their own welfare in order to enhance the welfare of the polis.”55 Seneca, by contrast, proposes a division of labor, under which the rulers perform the minimal function of keeping order and the philosophers enjoy the benefits their practice is able to provide for them without the burdens of political responsibility. The key difference between the two views lies in Seneca’s confidence that non-​philosophers can competently execute the basic tasks of rulership. Plato’s Socrates famously declares in the Republic that “until either philosophers rule in the cities or those now called kings and rulers philosophize truly and adequately, and political power and philosophy coincide, and the many natures now pursuing each one separately are hindered by force, there will be no end of evils, dear Glaucon, in the cities” (ἐὰν μή, ἦν δ’ ἐγώ, ἢ οἱ φιλόσοφοι βασιλεύσωσιν ἐν ταῖς πόλεσιν ἢ οἱ βασιλῆς τε νῦν λεγόμενοι καὶ δυνάσται φιλοσοφήσωσι γνησίως τε καὶ ἱκανῶς, καὶ τοῦτο εἰς ταὐτὸν συμπέσῃ, δύναμίς τε πολιτικὴ καὶ φιλοσοφία, τῶν δὲ νῦν πορευομένων χωρὶς ἐφ’ ἑκάτερον αἱ πολλαὶ φύσεις ἐξ ἀνάγκης ἀποκλεισθῶσιν, οὐκ ἔστι κακῶν παῦλα, ὦ φίλε Γλαύκων, ταῖς πόλεσι, Pl. Resp. 473d). Seneca’s entire discussion in this letter is premised on precisely the disjunction between political and philosophical activity that Plato regards as fatal to civic health. For Plato, non-​philosophers do not simply fail to rule in the maximally good way; they lack the fundamental political competence necessary to keep internecine strife at bay. If there is to be any prospect of tranquility for anyone, the philosophers must assume political power, despite the jeopardy this mandate poses to their ability to live the happiest possible life by virtue of their justice. Seneca’s philosophers, though, are entirely content to leave government in the hands of non-​philosophers and render them thanks for providing the conditions of safety under which they can be philosophically active.56

autonomous and independent grasp of the good, the myth’s function is to reconcile the classes that do not have such an understanding to the project of the state. Additionally, as Julia Annas 1981, 108 observes, “the rulers are surely thought of as believing the myth on a rather different level from the others.” See in this connection Annas 1981, 136–​7, on the moral autonomy of the guardians. 55. Brickhouse 1981, 1. 56. For the Stoics, of course, a ruler, or the holder of any public post, must be not simply a philosopher but a full-​fledged sage in order to exercise his office properly: Diog. Laert. 7.122. See Schofield 1991, 95–​6, for further discussion and illustration of this point, with special reference to Arius Didymus. The lack of any reference to this doctrine in this letter, coupled with

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The rulers’ lack of awareness of their role in expediting philosophical living opens up Seneca’s central thesis to attack on the grounds that a true benefit must be rendered by the conscious agency of the benefactor, and so must have its beneficiary as its specific target. Why should the philosophers be especially grateful for a benefit that is available to everyone? “Truly,” an interlocutor is imagined to interject, “the king protects others also with his powers” (uerum alios quoque rex uiribus suis protegit, Ep. 73.5). Seneca’s response to that objection lays out his second argument for regarding philosophers as the most loyal of subjects: they derive special benefit from public goods. This benefit and the resulting gratitude are explained by reference to the thanks given by sea travelers to Neptune for deliverance from danger on the sea, thanks that are given “more spiritedly” (animosius) by the merchant than by the mere traveler, and among the merchants by those whose cargoes are more valuable (Ep. 73.5). “Just so,” Seneca explains, “the benefit of this peace pertaining to all reaches more deeply those who use it well” (sic huius pacis beneficium ad omnes pertinentis altius ad eos peruentit, qui illa bene utuntur, Ep. 73.5). The aptitude of the philosophers that makes them special beneficiaries of peace is their ability to take that widely accessible public good and make of it an opportunity for living a better life than others. Seneca defers until the final portion of the letter (Ep. 73.10–​15) his account of why their life is in fact better; he contents himself at this juncture with noting that “there are many among these men in civilian dress for whom peace is more laborious than war” (multi enim sunt ex his togatis, quibus pax operosior bello est, Ep. 73.6), since their vices are allowed greater scope in peacetime. That is, there are those who, far from possessing the philosophers’ art of making the most out of peace, are in such parlous moral condition as to suffer from the provision of a benefit. This assertion is a standard Senecan reminder of the ways in which the break with nature involved in moral deficiency generates answering patterns of reversal, making what is good harmful to the corrupted agent and vice versa,57 but it is also a further sign of the distance between this letter’s picture of government and the programmatically virtuous regime outlined by Plato. Seneca’s ruler is unaware of the extent to which the peace he provides allows for the philosophical pursuit of the good life, and he is thus blind to his own highest political function. Since he enforces peace with no calculation of its moral effects, it is not necessarily beneficial and indeed is frequently destructive.

the ruler’s ignorance of his own role, suggests that the goodness or badness of the king as king, a function of his own moral standing, is not at issue, but rather the degree to which his rule permits his subjects to pursue their own projects of philosophical self-​emancipation. 57. See especially Ep. 122.

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This latter claim, like the first of Seneca’s arguments for philosophers’ superiority in gratitude to the state, traces the thanklessness of a group of non-​philosophers to their moral failings. Here, though, the problem is not that defective perception leaves such a group incapable of understanding that it has received a benefit, but rather that there is no benefit rendered at all. The flaws of the people Seneca is discussing at Ep. 73.6 are such as to render them liable to be harmed by peace, which is ordinarily to be preferred and which philosophy is able to make into a supreme good. For Plato, non-​philosophers can live worthwhile lives if and only if they are under the rule of philosophers, but in this letter Seneca insists at the same time that rulers need not be philosophers to help their subjects toward a good life and that that help might well be utterly wasted on non-​philosophers. Seneca has identified a category of people who are harmed by the good a ruler provides, but this letter does not explain fully why that good counts as a genuine benefit for philosophers, who profit from it neither exclusively nor by the intention of the alleged benefactor. To understand the problem Seneca faces here and his solution to it, we must turn to the treatment of a similar problem in De Beneficiis, at 6.18–​24. In the latter passage, Seneca discusses the possibility that an act not carried out for one’s specific benefit can lay one under obligation. The cases he treats fall into two categories. First he maintains that such obligation cannot ensue from a case in which benefits are bestowed by a ruler upon a large group of subjects. The examples given are grants of ciuitas to the Gauls and immunitas to the Spaniards. “I deny,” Seneca writes, “that I owe back that gift which is given to all, because, though it was indeed given to me, it was not given on account of me, and, though it was given to me, the giver did not know that he gave it to me” (istius muneris, quod uniuersis datur, debitorem me nego, quia mihi quidem dedit sed non propter me, et mihi quidem, sed nesciens, an mihi daret, Ben. 6.19.5). We should note that the situation described here shares a key point of congruence with that discussed in Ep. 73: just as the rulers in Ep. 73 are unaware (nescientibus) of the philosophers’ gratitude, so too is the giver in this passage nesciens of the benefit accruing to any particular recipient of his gift. Seneca draws a distinction between such a case and that presented by the sun and the moon, to whom one is obliged despite the non-​specificity of their benefactions. The distinction rests on the principle that the sun and moon are assigned their function under a natural order, and “nature thought of us before she made us, nor are we so light a work that we were able to fall away from her” (cogitauit nos ante natura, quam fecit, nec tam leve opus sumus, ut illi potuerimus excidere, Ben. 6.23.5). The cosmic order does have a claim to our gratitude, because unlike the political order it was ordained with its beneficiaries in conscious and specific view. Returning to Ep. 73, we find Seneca defending philosophers’ gratitude toward the state thus: “I owe much to the sun and moon, and they do not rise for me alone” (soli lunaeque

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plurimum debeo, et non uni mihi oriuntur, Ep. 73.6). That is, in De Beneficiis Seneca separates goods provided by a ruler from the benefactions of the celestial objects, but in Ep. 73 he amalgamates the two categories, indeed using obligation to the sun and the moon to assign to the philosopher an analogous obligation to the state. What is the difference between the two sorts of political benefaction that accounts for this variation? The best way to account for it is to note that the political example from De Beneficiis does not involve philosophers and that from Ep. 73 does. In that letter Seneca quotes (Ep. 73.10) from Virgil’s first Eclogue the following lines, spoken by the herdsman Tityrus: “O Meliboeus, a god has made for me these conditions of leisure: for to me he will always be a god” (O Meliboee, deus nobis haec otia fecit. /​ namque erit ille mihi semper deus, Virg. Ecl. 1.6–​7).58 He then uses an argument a fortiori to show the philosophers’ obligation to the ruler: “If those conditions of leisure also owe much to their author, of which this is the greatest reward [here he quotes Tityrus’s description of carefree rusticity, Virg. Ecl. 1.9–​10], at what price do we value this leisure, which is pursued among the gods, which makes gods?” (si illa quoque otia multum auctori suo debent, quorum munus hoc maximum est . . . quanti aestimamus hoc otium, quod inter deos agitur, quod deos facit?, Ep. 73.11). Christopher Trinacty calls attention to Seneca’s “wonderful inversion” of deus . . . haec otia fecit into otium . . . quod deos facit.59 This inversion rehearses in minature Seneca’s reversal of both Platonic and traditional Roman understandings of the ruler’s function, as we have traced it through this letter. Rather than using a superior grasp of ultimate reality, as Plato would have it, or a grounding in intergenerationally refined political wisdom, as Cicero’s Scipio would, to provide the goods of peace for a passively receptive populace, the Senecan ruler does something very different. He bestows upon all of his subjects an otium that a few of them, the philosophers, can use as the basis for self-​transformation into beings of godlike wisdom. Otium is not the final and autotelic product of good government, as Virgil’s Tityrus implies, but instead an intermediate one whose transformation into the ultimate good must come at the hands of non-​ruling philosophers.

58. Seneca’s choice of poetic illustration draws further attention to the philosophers’ non-​ involvement in politics, since the leisured space of bucolic poetry was conceived of as an antithesis to public life. See Quintilian 10.1.55: musa illa rustica et pastoralis non forum modo, verum ipsam etiam urbem reformidat. Of course, the first Eclogue derives its force from the collision of these two spheres, and Seneca’s quotation of the poem draws on that force to show otium as the product of political action by a ruler. On Seneca’s use of Virgil more generally, see Mazzoli 1970, 215–​32 and Henderson 2004, 129–​38. 59. Trinacty 2014, 53.

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This Virgilian quotation and Seneca’s exegesis of it might not seem to be a very compelling response to the objection posed by his interlocutor, since the otia valued by Tityrus were bestowed upon him after petition (Virg. Ecl. 1.42–​45). Seneca shows, though, that the philosophers’ especially fruitful use of leisure qualifies that leisure as a benefaction especially for them, since the advantage they derive from it so far exceeds that which non-​philosophers can take even from benefactions specifically aimed at them. This argument places philosophers under a special obligation to the ruler that surpasses even that which Tityrus proclaims himself to be under. Seneca’s argument for the obligation to the state inherent in the philosophical life allows us to understand more clearly the relationship between the two sorts of res publicae he identifies in De Otio: Let us try to hold in our mind two republics, one large and truly common to all, in which gods and human beings are contained, in which we do not look to this or that corner, but measure the boundaries of our citizenship with the sun; the other, that in which the circumstance of our birth enrolls us. This will be that of the Athenians or Carthaginians or of some other city which does not pertain to all human beings but to certain ones. Some give service at the same time to both republics, the greater and the lesser, some only to the lesser, some only to the greater. We are able to serve fully this greater republic even in leisure, indeed, we probably serve it better in leisure. duas res publicas animo complectamur, alteram magnam et vere publicam, qua di atque homines continentur, in qua non ad hunc angulum respicimus aut ad illum, sed terminos civitatis nostrae cum sole metimur; alteram, cui nos adscripsit condicio nascendi. haec aut Atheniensium erit aut Carthaginensium, aut alterius alicuius urbis quae non ad omnis pertineat homines sed ad certos. quidam eodem tempore utrique rei publicae dant operam, maiori minorique, quidam tantum minori, quidam tantum maiori. huic maiori rei publicae et in otio deservire possumus, immo vero nescio an in otio melius. (Ot. 4.1–​2) This passage is interpreted by Malcolm Schofield as marking a point of inflection in ancient political theory, as the idea of the cosmic city developed by Zeno and especially prominent in Seneca and the other Stoic writers of the imperial period “mediates the transition from republicanism to natural law theory.”60 His discussion of the way in which this transition comes about is worth quoting in full:

60. Schofield 1991, 103. The passage from De Otio is quoted and discussed at 93–​4. It is significant that Seneca lists Athens and Carthage, but not Rome, as examples of the minor res publica.

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For the doctrine of the cosmic city attempts to retain community and citizenship while removing all contingency—​such as physical proximity or mutual acquaintance—​from the notion of citizenship. What citizenship now consists in is nothing but obedience by a plurality of persons to the injunctions of right reason on the just treatment of other persons: i.e. to law as nature formulates it. Such a conception of the citizen is manifestly unstable. The thesis that social morality flows from adherence to the dictates of natural law so understood does not require for its intelligibility or acceptability any reference to citizenship at all.61 The analogy implicit in identifying humanity as a cosmic city, Seneca’s maior res publica, assigns universal scope to the obligations and freedoms that characterize membership in a city or a res publica.62 It uses the language of civic or republican community to make intellectually and emotionally apprehensible the idea of transcommunal fellowship under natural law.63 Once this maneuver is complete, Schofield asks, and the idea of a universal natural-​law regime is a familiar one, what need is there any longer for the middle term, the res publica analogy? There is a further layer to this instability, one that reinforces the tendency Schofield identifies: once the cosmic city or maior res publica, even while still spoken of in those terms, has been identified, the role of sub-​universal political formations, that is, of the minor res publica in Seneca’s scheme, becomes unclear. The second-​century ce Stoic philosopher Hierocles uses the image of concentric circles, radiating out from the individual to demarcate a succession of ever-​broader communities to which that individual belongs, to explain the nested series of

As Williams 2003 ad loc. points out, these cities are “two major centres of political opposition to free philosophical speculation,” but note also that in making a related cosmopolitan point—​that the soul is too exalted to have a mere earthly city as its true patria—​at Ep. 102.21 Seneca uses Ephesus and Alexandria as his examples. The pointed avoidance of Rome suggests that Seneca, perhaps responding to the Roman and particularly Ciceronian view of that city’s constitution as exceptional, sees it as a special case whose relationship to philosophical activity needs to be defined separately. See also the discussion of Roman exceptionalism in the first section of this chapter. 61. Schofield 1991, 103. 62. The Stoic Balbus makes a similar comparison between local political communities and the cosmic city in Cicero’s De Natura Deorum (2.154). In general on the Ciceronian background to the idea of the two res publicae, see Pesce 1957, 113–​34. 63. For the political character of life under natural law, see K. M. Vogt 2008 and Wildberger 2018, 71–​87. On Stoic cosmopolitanism more generally, see Brown 2006. Wildberger 2018, 51–​69, surveys Stoic ideas about cosmic citizenship, with a particular focus on the early Stoa, while Gueye 2006 offers a treatment of cosmopolitanism in Roman Stoicism, with a particular interest in contemporary applications.

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obligations incumbent upon him or her.64 This metaphor has proven popular with contemporary exponents of Stoic cosmopolitanism, who find appealing its suggestion that “to be a citizen of the world one does not need to give up local identifications, which can frequently be a source of great richness in life.”65 In what Stobaeus quotes for us, though, Hierocles fails to be precise about the relationship among the various circles and about what distribution of functions obtains among them. The passage from De Otio quoted earlier does not address this question either. Ep. 73, however, shows on the reading advanced here that Seneca was not insensible to the difficulties inherent in the doctrine of the two republics. By assigning a specific function to the rulers of the minor res publica, giving that function a crucial instrumental relation to the philosophical life, and showing how philosophers come to be joined to those rulers by ties of gratitude, Seneca gives sub-​universal states a defined place within a cosmopolitan political theory. The originality of Seneca’s resolution of this cosmopolitan dilemma becomes clearer if we distinguish the rationale for the state we have traced through this letter from two other such rationales to which it bears a superficial resemblance. First, Aristotle, like Seneca in this letter, separates the exercise of political power from the capacity to enjoy the greatest benefits of this power. The happiest life for a human being is that of theoretical study and contemplation (Eth. Nic. 1177a–​ 1178a), yet those engaged in such study need to live in a well-​ordered community just as others do (1178b).66 Contemplation is an end in itself, whereas politics is instrumental to other ends (1177b). The consequence is that a well-​ordered city, under the leadership of those citizens who are enjoying the second-​best life of morally virtuous action, will support and make possible the theoretical activity of some of its citizens, who are enjoying the best possible life.67 The apparent congruence with the model Seneca puts forward in Ep. 73 is reinforced by the ascription of quasi-​divinity to those living the best life in each case (Ar. Eth. Nic. 1177b; Ep. 73.11). Aristotle also, like Seneca in this letter, inverts the Platonic account of the relationship between politics and philosophy, so that the former becomes necessary for the latter rather than the other way around. There are at least two important differences, though. First, Seneca, in accordance with Stoic doctrine as

64. Stob. 4.671,7–​4.673,11 (LS 57G). See Gloyn 2017, 29, for a helpful diagram illustrating this image. 65. Martha Nussbaum in Nussbaum et al. 1996, 9. Cf. Nussbaum 2019, 77: “The Stoics stress that to be a world citizen one does not need to give up local identifications and affiliations.” 66. See further the discussion of Aristotle in the introduction to this book. 67. See the discussion of this point in Cooper 2012, 139–​40.

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outlined in the introduction to this book, does not suggest that the philosophers he mentions as the ruler’s beneficiaries are engaged primarily in contemplation for its own sake. Instead, they are to be thought of as engaged in the Socratic practice, exemplified in Seneca’s own letters and moral treatises, of reasoning about how to live. It is for being free peacefully to pursue this practice, the benefits of which are realized on the plane of action, that they are grateful to their rulers. Second, the ruler or rulers in Ep. 73 are not represented as conscious of their role in bestowing these benefits; recall Seneca’s description of them as nescientibus (Ep. 73.4). Unlike Aristotle’s well-​ordered city, the political community Seneca here describes is not organized for the sake of enabling the best life, but rather happens to provide the conditions for that life simply by maintaining order. This second point of dissimilarity with Aristotle’s account invites comparison with a theory of politics far more salient than Aristotle’s in Seneca’s intellectual climate, that of Epicurus and his followers. The Epicureans believed that the origins of political communities lay in compacts of mutual aid to forestall bodily harm.68 It is because they assign this limited if important aim to political life, rather than connecting it to their larger moral theory in some more ambitious way, as do Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, that the Epicureans advise against political participation, an attitude pithily contrasted by Seneca with that of the Stoics: “Epicurus says, ‘The wise man will not enter into public life, unless something intervenes’; Zeno says, ‘He will enter into public life, unless something obstructs him’ ” (Epicurus ait: “non accedet ad rem publicam sapiens, nisi si quid intervenerit.” Zenon ait: “accedet ad rem publicam, nisi si quid inpedierit,” Ot. 3.2).69 Political life is dangerous and unrewarding, the Epicureans hold, and if the state is performing its minimal function of keeping order, those aiming to live well in accordance with Epicurean teachings will have from it all it can give them.70 The resemblance to the relationship between philosophers and their unknowing benefactors Seneca outlines is patent, and we might wonder whether the account in Ep. 73 bears a closer affinity with Epicurean than Stoic political theory.71 Indeed, throughout much of the surviving portion of De Otio Seneca

68. E.g., Lucr. 5.1019–​27, 1143–​51; Cic. Rep. 3.23. 69. Diogenes Laertius (7.121=SVF 3.697) assigns to Chrysippus the same view Seneca here attributes to Zeno, so it may safely be taken as a Stoic commonplace. 70. On Epicureanism and political life, see Fowler 1989 and Schiesaro 2007. For a revisionist view arguing for the flexibility of Epicurean teaching on political participation, see Fish 2011. 71. Cf. McConnell 2010, 194: the Epicureans “thought that being king oneself was, generally speaking, bad for one’s ataraxia; but they also acknowledged that kingly rule could provide subjects with goods conducive to attaining ataraxia.”

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is on the defensive against his interlocutor’s charges that his advocacy of leisure and withdrawal strays away from the Stoic mainstream and into Epicurean territory. The summary just quoted of the two schools’ views on political participation is part of an argument that attempts to deflect those charges by showing that these views are in practice close to one another. Along these lines, it should be noted that the idea of political communities as existing for mutual protection does have substantial roots in the Stoic tradition, even if it is not a dominant theme in Stoic political theory as it is in that of the Epicureans. Cicero, probably following Panaetius, remarks that “it was most of all for this reason, that each may hold onto his own, that republics and citizenships were established. For, although human beings were gathered together with nature as a guide, nevertheless they sought the protection of cities out of the hope of retaining their own possessions” (hanc enim ob causam maxime, ut sua tenerentur, res publicae civitatesque constitutae sunt. nam, etsi duce natura congregabantur homines, tamen spe custodiae rerum suarum urbium praesidia quaerebant, Cic. Off. 2.73). As Modestus van Straaten points out, the double motive Cicero or Panaetius assigns to human sociability aligns conveniently with the doctrine of the two republics discussed earlier, with the larger of the two owing its origins to the promptings of nature and the smaller to practical considerations.72 Seneca himself offers a similar double explanation for human association at Ben. 4.18.2. While ascribing human fellowship to a providential design, an explanation the Epicureans would of course reject, he at the same time avers that “fellowship” (societas) has greatly reduced the vulnerability of the naturally weak human being to all sorts of dangers. As Miriam Griffin writes, by making society a providential arrangement for human safety “Seneca here reconciles the two approaches to the origin of society taken by philosophers since Plato: whether natural sociability (the Stoic view: Cic. Off. 1.12; 2.13; 2.15; 1.158) or practical necessity (Plato, Resp. 2. 369b; Epicureans: Lucr. 5.1019–​27) directed man to live in communities.”73 The view Seneca expresses in Ep. 73, then, is less jarringly at odds with Stoic tradition and with the rest of his corpus than might at first appear. What this letter adds to the tradition, though, becomes apparent if we consider again the Panaetian position on the origin and function of the sub-​universal state quoted earlier. This position gives that state the function of preserving the lives and possessions of its inhabitants, certainly a valuable role since the retention of these things is a preferred indifferent. Seneca goes far beyond that position, advancing an account of the state’s function that gives it a direct instrumental relationship

72. Straaten 1946, 209. 73. Griffin 2013, 244.

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to the practice of philosophy and thus to wisdom. This account parallels Seneca’s thinking about other aspects of life with others, as we have traced that thinking over the course of this book, in at the same time asserting the power of philosophy alone to deliver happiness and in acknowledging that philosophical practice is necessarily enmeshed in a social context. Here, this double perspective yields a political theory built around the negative aim of clearing away the obstacles to philosophy. The pursuit of the genuine good begins where the politics of the sub-​ universal state ends, but politics has a crucial role to play in enabling that pursuit. This chapter has aimed to elucidate the reciprocal connections between Seneca’s idea of the philosophical life and both the exercise of political power considered in general terms and the Roman civil community in particular. In so doing, it has sought to avoid either decoupling Seneca’s advocacy of philosophical practice from its historical context or dismissing his Socratic commitment to philosophy as the best way of life in all circumstances, rather than as a substitute for political action. Our objective has been to see how Seneca’s commitment to philosophy emerges from his historical location without making that commitment instrumental to or a sublimation of extra-​philosophical purposes. We have seen, first, how redeployment of received accounts of the value of one local political formation, the Roman republic, becomes in Seneca’s hands an indispensable device for describing and advocating for the life of philosophy. Next, we saw how the idea of philosophy as an activity, one which is of transcendent benefit to its practitioners but which has necessary social and political preconditions, allows Seneca to describe a function for sub-​universal political formations within Stoic cosmopolitanism. Seneca thus emerges as himself an important voice in the debates about the political valence of Roman philosophy outlined at the beginning of this chapter: in their literary texture and workings his writings skillfully illuminate the political foundations of philosophical practice, while always insisting on philosophy’s power to move beyond politics and, indeed, grounding that insistence in the language of power he ultimately rejects.

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Conclusion

This book ventures the hypothesis that the literary study of Seneca’s philosophical work can open a new perspective on his conception of the philosophical life. Specifically, it contends that attention to Seneca’s handling of the relationship between the philosopher’s life and that of other people, philosophers or not, brings out what Seneca takes to be the distinctive qualities of the philosophical way of living. I have aimed to show that Seneca defines that way of living precisely by working through the questions raised by its inextricability from the lives of others. Let us consider again a remark of Martha Nussbaum’s quoted in the introduction to this book: “[The Hellenistic] philosophers claim that the pursuit of logical validity, intellectual coherence, and truth delivers freedom from the tyranny of custom and convention, creating a community of beings who can take charge of their own life story and their own thought.”1 If one believes, as I do, that Nussbaum here characterizes the therapeutic aims of Hellenistic and Roman philosophy accurately, we are left with some questions that are rarely addressed frontally in work on ancient philosophical writing: What sorts of custom and convention, specifically, do these philosophers have in mind? How and to what extent does convention continue to shape the lives of those committed to philosophical liberation from it? How does the fact of the philosopher’s participation in a society impinge upon his philosophical practice? Is it possible to trace the influence upon philosophical writing of the customs from which it offers deliverance, even while taking seriously its aspirations toward a universal rationality? The energy and directness with which Seneca applies himself to the problems of Roman social life make his writing a matchless venue in which to explore these questions. Each chapter of this book has traced a strand of Seneca’s reflection on

1. Nussbaum 1994, 5.

Philosophy and Community in Seneca’s Prose. Carey Seal, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190493219.003.0006

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the social dimensions of the philosophical life, and the readings put forward in these chapters aim to show how Seneca derives a Socratic commitment to reasoned self-​examination from engagement with the problem of the philosopher’s social existence. As we have seen, this close consideration of social questions does not mean that Seneca’s work uncritically reproduces traditional or ambient values; quite often the reverse is true. It does mean, however, that even at his most introspective Seneca needs the structure of social and political life as a template for his own conception of the philosophical life. I have argued, for instance, that he depends on properties unique to the social relation of slavery in outlining the liberatory role of knowledge and self-​awareness. Furthermore, I hope to have demonstrated that Seneca’s reliance on the given features of his environment to give substance to his picture of philosophical life is often self-​conscious and, more generally, that he continually reflects on the social foundations of his own philosophical practice and of philosophy more generally. It is worth emphasizing at the close of this book two aspects of the philosophical life that Seneca describes and advocates. The first is its character as a practice of self-​transformation, one whose provision of access to virtue makes it entirely incomparable with other arts. At a number of junctures we have observed Seneca trying to define and preserve that uniqueness by tracing the boundaries separating philosophy from other arts and other ways of life. At the same time, we have had a number of chances to see how Seneca deploys what the practitioner of this art has in common with others, including non-​philosophers, to explain and demonstrate the workings of this transformation. Seneca thus balances attention to the social basis of philosophical self-​improvement with an emphasis on the radical nature of the reflexive changes it can induce in its practitioner. Seneca’s immense philosophical corpus, pervasively engaged with Roman social particularity and the Latin literary tradition, shows the depth of his conviction that the philosophical life and its attractions can be explained through the web of meaning philosophers and non-​philosophers share. It also, as we have seen, repeatedly draws attention to the fissures the transformative practice of philosophy can generate in that shared understanding. The second aspect, perhaps that which holds the greatest implications for our thinking about the relationship between philosophy and community, is its rationality. Seneca uses social life not just to show what philosophy can do, but to show how it does it, through the disciplined practice of inquiry and dialogue. This book has aimed to document the literary workings of this demonstration. Again and again, Seneca uses social language, social metaphors, or consideration of philosophy’s social place not to collapse philosophy into pre-​existing social norms but rather to vindicate its power to examine and even challenge them.

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His social perspective on philosophical practice, then, reinforces rather than retreats from the Socratic claim that we must engage in disciplined intellectual activity in order to live well. We have seen in each chapter how artfully Seneca builds the universal out of the particular, the necessary out of the contingent, to make his own writings a literary analogue to the transformative art they advocate. Just as the practice of philosophy, as he describes it, draws on communal context to open up pathways to rational transcendence, his prose writing turns a cultural, social, and literary inheritance into an invitation to the pursuit of wisdom.

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Acknowledgments

Bob Kaster, with Denis Feeney and Andrew Feldherr, supervised the dissertation from which this book grew, and all three have been generous with their encouragement in the time since the dissertation was finished. My greatest hope for the book is that it is not a totally inadequate recompense for what all of my teachers have given me. My colleagues at the University of California, Davis—​ especially Emily Albu, Tim Brelinski, the late Patricia Bulman, Mike Chin, Katie Cruz, David Driscoll, Shennan Hutton, Valentina Popescu, John Rundin, Seth Schein, the late Rex Stem, David Traill, Anna Uhlig, and Colin Webster—​have not only supported me but inspired me with their learning, their generosity, and their selfless dedication to the continued flourishing of our discipline. The campus Committee on Research has assisted my work on Seneca with a series of grants. I finished the penultimate draft of the book during an appointment as a Visiting Associate Research Scholar in Classics at Princeton University. I am very grateful to Stefan Vranka at Oxford University Press for his early interest in this project and for his great patience and helpfulness since then, to the two anonymous readers of the manuscript for their thoughtful and very useful reports, and to everyone at OUP and Newgen who coaxed this book into final form. Rex Stem read a draft of the entire manuscript and provided a tremendously helpful set of comments, one of the many acts of kindness and intellectual fellowship that make up his legacy in our field and in the department where it was my privilege to be his colleague and friend. Marden Nichols has read many drafts over a number of years and given me both insightful criticism and the sustaining encouragement that carried me through. In this as in so many other respects over more than thirty-​five years, it would be impossible to overstate my debt to her. Susannah Tahk’s acuity and generosity have enriched this book, and its author, in ways too numerous to count. I thank Loxley Nichols and Tom Miller for helping me get over the finish line. Of course, any remaining errors or eccentricities are my own responsibility.

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Without Moulie Vidas this book simply would not exist. His love and support made writing it a practical, conceptual, and emotional possibility, and I am forever grateful. I tender my deepest and most heartfelt thanks to my closest friends, some of whom have already been named, to Travis Seal and the rest of my family, and to Victor Medina, all of whom aided and lightened the task of writing in countless ways. No words could express what I owe Kenneth Seal and Sharon Seal for their steadfast love.

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201

Index

For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Academic Skepticism, 53, 75–​76 active vs. contemplative life, 163n.50 Acts of the Apostles, 75–​76 adiutorium, 113, 118–​21 Aeneas, 152–​54 Aeneid (Virgil), 94–​96, 152–​54 Aenesidemus, 40n.38 Aetna, 100, 101–​2, 101n.60, 104–​6 agriculture, 50–​51, 55–​56, 65–​68, 66n.81 Agrippa, 94–​95 ambition, 164–​66 Amis, Elizabeth, 143–​44 ancestors, 83–​84, 140–​41, 143–​44, 146–​48, 149–​50. See also family; parents Anchises, 152–​54 animals, 31n.17, 34, 34nn.25–​26, 35–​36 Antisthenes, 9–​10 Apology (Plato), 28–​30 archery analogy, 43 Areus, 33n.21 aristocracy, 12–​16, 141–​42 morality and, 12–​14 slavery and, 108–​9, 115–​16, 129, 130–​31 Aristo of Chios, 60–​61, 61n.72

Aristotle, 4–​5, 6n.13, 11, 69–​70, 70n.90, 115–​16, 121–​22, 134n.50, 141–​42, 173–​75 Arius Didymus, 167–​68n.56 arts, 47–​51, 62, 120–​21 liberal, 67–​68, 115–​19 philosophy as, 54–​55, 63 Asclepiades, 67–​68 Asmis, Elizabeth, 87–​88, 90–​91, 144–​46 Athens, sack of, 75–​76, 78 athletics, 132–​34 Atkins, Jed, 144–​46, 147 Atkins, Margaret, 115–​16 Atticus, 94–​95, 95n.51, 124n.32 audience (for Seneca’s work), 17–​18 Augustus, 33 autarkeia, 41–​43. See also self-​sufficiency Balbus, 172n.62 Baldry, H. C., 11–​12 Beard, Mary, 13–​14, 15–​16 Bellum Catilinae (Sallust), 146 Blundell, Sue, 47 Bobonich, Christopher, 28–​29

20

202

Index

bodies regard for/​preservation of, 156–​58, 156n.31, 160–​61 of women, 67–​68, 67n.84 Bradley, Keith, 108–​10, 130–​31 Brickhouse, Thomas, 166–​67 Burnet, John, 20 Caesar, 146 Calhoun, John, 109–​10 Caligula, 158n.36 Callicles, 9–​10, 160–​61 Calvisius Sabinus, 111–​15, 112nn.11–​12, 116n.20, 118, 119, 120–​21, 130n.45 Cassius Longinus, 122–​23, 122–​23nn.30–​31, 124–​25 Cato the Elder, 84–​85, 144–​46 Cato the Younger, 26n.1, 72, 104–​6, 123–​25, 146 Catullus, 65–​67 Cena Trimalchionis (Petronius), 112n.12 Charybdis, 100, 159–​60 chattel slavery. See legal/​chattel slavery choice, 55–​56 chronological primitivism, 47n.50, 56–​57 Chrysippus, 6n.14, 60–​61, 80–​81, 87–​88, 87n.37, 100, 115–​16, 174n.69 cibus, 119–​20 Cicero, 16–​17, 60–​61, 87n.37, 89n.40, 94–​95, 139–​40n.4, 170, 174–​75 De Amicitia, 17n.46 De Divinatione, 13–​14 De Natura Deorum, 13–​14, 172n.62 De Officiis, 17n.46, 115–​16, 154 De Oratore, 115n.15 De Republica (see De Republica) De Senectute, 17n.46 Paradoxa Stoicorum, 127n.39 civic martyrdom, 162n.47 civilization, 32, 34, 35–​36, 49 civitas, 146

Claudius, 33n.20, 39n.36, 142–​43 Cleanthes, 80–​81, 82, 84–​85, 87–​88, 87n.37 collegiality, 80–​81, 80–​81n.21 Collins, Randall, 76–​77 community, 9–​12, 27–​29, 84–​86, 174–​75. See also culture; society Epicureanism and, 77–​78 overview of philosophy’s relation to, 19–​20 safety in, 157–​58 Stoicism and, 77–​78, 84–​85 two new forms of, 11–​12 competition, 159–​61, 164–​66 Consolatio ad Marciam (Seneca), 32–​37 constitutions Roman, 139, 143–​48, 149–​50 Spartan (Lycurgan), 144–​46 contemplative vs. active life, 163n.50 conventionalism, 39–​41, 46 Cooper, John, 2–​5, 29–​30 Cordus, Cremutius, 32–​33 Cornelius Severus, 101–​2, 101n.60 cosmic city, 171–​73 cosmopolitanism, 22–​23, 139–​40, 172–​74, 176 craftsmanship, 53–​54, 54n.63 Crates, 30 Crito (Plato), 154–​55 crowd, 25–​26 cultural primitivism, 47n.50 culture, 11, 21, 24–​25, 32. See also community; society Consolatio ad Marciam on, 34–​37 Epistulae Morales on, 38, 46–​57 history of, 24–​25, 32, 46–​57 custom, 32–​33, 37–​38, 39–​40 Cynicism, 11, 21, 30–​32 Consolatio ad Marciam and, 35–​36 De Beneficiis and, 57–​59, 62

203

Index Epistulae Morales and, 38, 41–​46, 52–​53, 57–​58, 60–​61, 73 infant inclinations and, 34 in Stoicism’s heritage, 30–​32, 57–​58 Cyrnus, 96n.54 Daedalus, 51–​55 Dama, 135 De Amicitia (Cicero), 17n.46 death dispelling fear of, 63 Epicureanism on, 93n.49 escape from slavery via, 121–​31 De Beneficiis (Seneca) 3rd book, 139, 143–​56, 164–​66 6th book, 169–​70 7th book, 32, 57–​60, 62, 63 De Constantia Sapientis (Seneca), 127 decreta, 59–​60, 59–​60n.68, 67–​68 De Divinatione (Cicero), 13–​14 De Ira (Seneca), 87–​88n.38 De Matrimonio (Seneca), 10n.25 Demetrius the Cynic, 45, 57–​59, 61–​62, 63, 90–​91 Democritus, 104–​6, 104n.65 De Natura Deorum (Cicero), 13–​14, 172n.62 De Officiis (Cicero), 17n.46, 115–​16, 154 De Oratore (Cicero), 115n.15 De Otio (Seneca), 171–​73, 174–​75 De Providentia (Seneca), 15–​16, 123–​24 De Republica (Cicero), 22–​23, 80–​81n.21, 139, 143–​48, 149–​50, 154–​55, 166–​67 De Senectute (Cicero), 17n.46 desire, 98, 98n.56, 99–​100, 164–​66 Desmond, William, 30 De Tranquillitate Animi (Seneca), 25–​26 De Vita Beata (Seneca), 77–​78, 86–​91 diatribe, 41–​42 Diodorus, 90–​91 Diogenes, 28n.7, 51–​54

203

Diogenes Laertius, 6n.14, 41–​42, 71–​72, 126–​27, 174n.69 Diogenes of Sinope, 41–​42, 84–​85 dispreferred indifferents, 156–​57 doctrinal vs. literary questions, 81–​82 Dodds, E. R., 9–​10 Drusus, 33, 33n.20 Drusus Caesar, 94–​95 Dudley, Donald, 60–​61 Eclogues (Virgil), 170–​71, 170n.58 Edwards, Catharine, 120–​21 egg image, 31n.17 elites. See aristocracy Epictetus, 128n.41 Epicureanism, 11, 21–​22, 63, 76–​78, 107 community and, 77–​78 De Vita Beata and, 77–​78, 86–​91 Epistulae Morales and, 77–​82, 87–​89, 91–​100, 104–​7 organizational integrity of, 75–​77, 75n.3, 90–​91 pleasure and, 86, 89–​90, 99–​100 politics and, 174–​75 Stoicism compared with, 78–​82, 99–​100 Stoicism’s criticism of, 86–​89 on women, 10n.25 Epicurus, 21–​22, 76–​77, 78–​81, 79n.16, 84n.27, 84–​85, 88–​89, 90–​91, 91n.44, 92–​97, 98–​100, 104–​6, 129–​30, 138, 174–​75 epistolary genre, 17–​18 Epistulae Morales (Seneca), 1–​2, 17–​18, 21 7th letter, 25–​27 14th letter, 139–​40, 156–​61 18th letter, 32, 37–​41 21st letter, 77–​78, 88–​89, 91–​100, 106, 107 25th letter, 25–​27 27th letter, 110–​21

204

204

Index

Epistulae Morales (Seneca) (cont.) 29th letter, 32, 41–​45, 46 33rd letter, 77–​82, 87–​88, 87–​88n.38, 89–​90 62nd letter, 32, 45–​47 64th letter, 77–​78, 83–​86 73rd letter, 139–​40, 139–​40n.4, 144, 150–​51, 152, 156, 158–​59, 160–​76 77th letter, 110–​11, 117–​18, 121–​32, 134, 136–​37 79th letter, 77–​78, 93, 100–​7 80th letter, 110–​11, 132–​37 88th letter, 111, 113, 115–​20, 121 90th letter, 32, 35–​36, 46–​58, 65–​67 94th letter, 59–​61 95th letter, 32, 57–​58, 59–​68, 73 120th letter, 32, 68–​73 Erskine, Andrew, 126–​27 ethics, 31–​32. See also morality De Beneficiis on, 58–​59, 155–​56 Epistulae Morales on, 60–​61, 164–​66 usage in text, 8n.21 Euryalus, 94–​96 Euthydemus (Plato), 53 Euthyphro (Plato), 53–​54 Fabricius, 70–​72 fame, 92–​97, 96n.54, 98, 99–​100, 106, 151–​52 family, 83–​86. See also ancestors; parents Feeney, Denis, 65–​67 Finley, Moses, 130–​31 fire, 157–​58, 157–​58n.35 Fitzgerald, William, 120–​21 food, 55–​56, 65–​67, 118–​19, 119n.23, 120–​21 Foucault, Michel, 7–​9 freedom, 116–​18, 125 moral, 110n.7, 115, 130n.43 social, 115 friendship, 76–​78, 93–​94, 97, 104–​6, 107

Garnsey, Peter, 110 gender-​neutral usage, 10n.25 Georgics (Virgil), 55–​56, 65–​67 Germanicus, 33n.20 glory, 93, 93n.48, 96–​97, 100, 104–​6 Golden Age, 55–​56, 56n.65, 57, 65–​68, 66n.81 good, 3–​4, 5–​6, 30, 32, 74–​75 De Vita Beata on, 86 Epistulae Morales on, 53, 60–​61, 62, 68–​73, 169–​70, 175–​76 Gorgias (Plato), 9–​10, 160–​61 grammaticus, 118 gratitude, 140–​41, 151–​52, 154–​56, 156n.30, 162–​63, 164–​67, 168–​70, 172–​73 Greek (language), 16–​17 Greek (Hellenistic) philosophy, 7–​10, 11, 20, 177 philosophical schools of (see philosophical schools) politics and, 143–​44 Roman philosophy compared with, 12–​14 second-​order and, 74n.2 grief. See Consolatio ad Marciam Griffin, Miriam, 111–​12, 115–​16, 124–​25, 130–​31, 174–​75 Grimal, Pierre, 108–​9 Habinek, Thomas, 13–​14, 15–​16, 20 Hadot, Ilsetraut, 7 Hadot, Pierre, 7, 77–​78 happiness, 1, 3–​4, 7, 11, 28–​30, 31–​32 De Beneficiis on, 144–​46 De Vita Beata on, 86, 87–​88 Epistulae Morales on, 54–​55, 62, 175–​76 Hardie, Philip, 95 Harvey, R. A., 135 hedonism, 76–​77. See also pleasure

205

Index Hellenistic philosophy. See Greek philosophy Herodotus, 35–​36 Hierocles, 172–​73 Hippocrates, 67–​68 history, 24–​25, 32, 46–​57 Homer, 100, 113–​14 Horace, 13–​14, 65–​67, 98n.56, 102n.61 Horatius Cocles, 70–​72, 71n.93 hunting, 65–​67, 66n.81 hypocrisy, 86, 86n.31 Idomeneus, 92–​96, 92n.47, 97, 98–​100, 106 imagines, 84n.27, 85 immortality, 93n.49 independence, 24–​25, 28–​29, 32, 87–​89. See also Consolatio ad Marciam; De Beneficiis, 7th book; Epistulae Morales, 18th letter; Epistulae Morales, 29th letter; Epistulae Morales, 62nd letter; Epistulae Morales, 90th letter; Epistulae Morales, 95th letter; Epistulae Morales, 120th letter indifferents, 60–​61, 151–​52, 156–​57, 157n.33, 175–​76 infant inclinations, 34 inheritance metaphor, 22–​23, 83–​84, 143, 147–​48, 154–​55 innatism, 69–​71 inventors, 49–​53 Inwood, Brad, 16–​17, 68–​69, 71–​72, 125, 134 Iron Age, 65–​67 Jefferson, Thomas, 109–​10 Kaster, Robert, 40–​41 labor, 65–​67 Laelius, 26n.1, 84–​85

205

Latin (language), 16–​19 legal/​chattel slavery, 110, 110n.7, 125–​26, 128–​30, 132, 133–​35 liberal arts, 67–​68, 115–​19 literary vs. doctrinal questions, 81–​82 literature philosophy’s relationship with, 16–​19 study of compromised, 118–​19 Livia, 33, 33nn.20–​21, 37 Livy, 80–​81n.21, 154 logic, 31–​32, 60–​61. See also reason/​ rationality Long, A. A., 5–​6, 11, 53 Lucilius, 18, 25–​26, 26n.2, 37–​38, 39–​42, 54–​55, 78–​79, 88–​89, 92, 94, 95–​97, 100–​3, 104–​7, 125, 129–​31, 136–​37, 138, 156–​57, 159–​60 Lucretius, 17n.46, 63, 93n.49 luxury, 38–​39, 46–​47, 48, 65–​67, 66n.80 Lycurgan constitution, 144–​46 Lysimachus, 92n.47 Macedonian conquests, 141–​42 maior res publica, 172–​73 Manlius Torquatus, 154 Marcellinus, Tullius, 41–​42, 44–​45, 121–​22, 125, 130–​31 Marcellus, Marcus, 33n.20, 122–​23n.30 Marcus Cato. See Cato the Elder McCarthy, Kathleen, 109–​10 medical analogy, 63–​68, 65n.78 Memorabilia (Xenophon), 71–​72 metal, 157–​58, 157–​58n.35 Metrodorus, 91n.44, 93, 104–​7 minor res publica, 171–​72n.60, 172–​73 Minos, 53 Mitsis, Phillip, 76–​77 money, 115–​16, 116n.16 moral freedom, 110n.7, 115, 130n.43

206

206 morality, 8–​9, 21, 24–​25, 27–​28, 31–​32, 77–​78. See also ethics; virtue aristocracy and, 12–​14 Consolatio ad Marciam on, 36–​37 De Beneficiis on, 58–​59 De Tranquillitate Animi on, 25–​26 Epistulae Morales on, 47–​48, 54–​55, 56–​58, 62, 64–​65, 68–​73, 116–​17, 159–​60 Roman tradition of, 28–​29, 154–​56 usage in text, 8n.21 moral slavery, 110, 110n.7, 129–​31, 132–​35 Morgan, Teresa, 155–​56 Musonius Rufus, 10n.25 naturalism, 69–​71 natural law theory, 171–​73 nature, 11, 21 Consolatio ad Marciam on, 32–​33, 34–​37 Cynicism on, 32 De Beneficiis on, 58–​59, 169–​70 Epistulae Morales on, 37–​38, 43–​44, 49–​50, 57, 63, 67–​68, 69–​70 Stoicism on, 5–​6 Navia, Luis, 31–​32 Nepos, 124n.32 Nero, 16n.44, 87–​88n.38, 141, 142–​43, 161–​62, 161n.44, 162n.47 Nightingale, Andrea, 20 Nisus, 94–​96 nomos-​phusis distinction, 35–​36 Nussbaum, Martha, 7–​9, 76–​78, 177–​78 Octavia, 33, 33n.20, 37 Odysseus, 100 oikeiosis, 156–​57 On Lives (Chrysippus), 115–​16 otium, 170–​71, 170n.58 Ovid, 101–​2, 101–​2nn.60–​61

Index Palaemon, Remmius, 115–​16, 116n.20, 130n.45 Panaetius, 6n.15, 80–​81, 104n.65, 174–​76 Paradoxa Stoicorum (Cicero), 127n.39 parents, 147–​55. See also ancestors; family parrhesia, 41–​42 pars, 120 paterfamilias, 83, 148–​49 Paul (apostle), 75–​76 peace, 166–​69 peculium, 132–​33, 133n.47, 135 Peripatos, 75–​77 Persius, 110–​11, 135 Petronius, 111–​12, 112n.12, 113–​14 philosophical schools, 21–​22, 24–​25, 74–​107. See also Cynicism; Epicureanism; Stoicism physics, 31–​32, 58–​59, 60–​61 Plato, 53n.62, 69–​70, 70n.90, 84–​85, 84n.28, 90–​91, 115–​16, 141–​42, 144–​46, 168–​69, 170, 174–​75 Apology, 28–​30 Crito, 154–​55 Euthydemus, 53 Euthyphro, 53–​54 Gorgias, 9–​10, 160–​61 Republic, 4–​5 Theatetus, 9–​10 Timaeus, 54n.63 Plautus, 109–​10 pleasure, 86, 89–​90, 99–​100 Pliny the Elder, 115–​16 Plutarch, 126–​27 poetry, 28–​29, 55–​56, 100–​7, 112–​13, 114–​15, 118–​19, 120–​21 politics, 22, 24–​25, 138–​76 ambition and, 164–​66 competition and, 159–​61, 164–​66 De Beneficiis on, 139, 143–​56, 164–​66, 169–​70 Epicureanism on, 174–​75

207

Index Epistulae Morales on, 92–​97, 139–​40, 139–​40n.4, 144, 150–​51, 152, 156–​76 fame and, 92–​97, 151–​52 gratitude and (see gratitude) power and, 157–​61 sub-​universal, 22–​23, 139–​40, 172–​73, 175–​76 taxonomy of regimes, 158–​59 Polybius, 39n.36, 130n.45, 143–​46 Posidonius, 46–​48, 48n.52, 49–​51, 55, 80–​81, 118n.22 power, 157–​61 praecepta, 59–​60, 59–​60n.68 Préchac, François, 151–​52 primitivism, 47, 47n.50, 49–​50, 51–​52, 56–​57 principate, 143n.9, 143–​44 proficiens, 6n.15 progressivism, 47, 47n.50, 51–​52 Pythagorean school, 4n.4 Pythocles, 99–​100 Quintilian, 14–​15n.40 Ramsey, J. T., 146 reason/​rationality, 1–​2, 3–​4, 8–​9, 20, 77–​78, 121, 178. See also logic renunciation, 52–​53 Republic (Plato), 4–​5 republican model, 85–​86 res publica, 24–​25, 138–​39, 140–​41, 142–​43, 171–​73 De Republica on, 143–​44, 147–​48 maior, 172–​73 minor, 171–​72n.60, 172–​73 principate and, 143n.9 translation of, 139–​40n.4 Reydams-​Schils, Gretchen, 27–​28, 161–​62 Rist, John, 30–​31 Roller, Matthew, 15–​16, 28–​29, 115–​17, 125–​27, 128–​29, 141–​42

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Roman constitution, 139, 143–​48, 149–​50 Roman philosophy, 9–​10, 177 characteristics of, 12–​16 Greek philosophy compared with, 12–​14 morality tradition in, 28–​29, 154–​56 Rutilius Rufus, 104–​6, 104n.65 sages, 27–​28, 49–​52, 55, 68–​70, 71–​73, 110, 127n.39, 127, 136–​37, 155–​56, 159–​60 Sallust, 146 Sandbach, F. H., 164–​66 Satellius Quadratus, 112–​15, 119 Saturnalia, 37–​41 Schafer, John, 60–​61, 63–​64 Schofield, Malcolm, 171–​73 schools of philosophy. See philosophical schools scientia herbarum, 64–​65, 67–​68 Scipio, 26n.1, 144–​46, 147, 149–​50, 170 Scipio Aemilianus, 80–​81n.21 Scipio Africanus, 151–​52 Scipio Asiagenes, 151–​52 Scylla, 100 sea travel, 65–​67, 66n.80 Secundus, Pedanius, 122–​23, 124–​25 Sedley, David, 78, 81–​82 self-​sufficiency, 28–​30, 41–​43, 62 Sellers, John, 71–​72 senatorial image, 88–​89 Seneca Consolatio ad Marciam, 32–​37 De Beneficiis (see De Beneficiis) De Constantia Sapientis, 127 De Ira, 87–​88n.38 De Matrimonio, 10n.25 De Otio, 171–​73, 174–​75 De Providentia, 15–​16, 123–​24 De Tranquillitate Animi, 25–​26 De Vita Beata, 77–​78, 86–​91 Epistulae Morales (see Epistulae Morales)

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208 Serenus, 25–​26, 127 Sextius, Quintus, 8n.20, 16–​17, 75–​76, 75n.6, 83, 84–​86 Sicily, 100 Skepticism, 40n.38, 53 slavery, 22, 24–​25, 108–​37, 177–​78 humanity of slaves, 108–​9, 108n.1 legal/​chattel, 110, 110n.7, 125–​26, 128–​30, 132, 133–​35 literacy/​education and, 130n.45 manumission, 110–​11, 132–​37 master-​slave symbiosis in, 120–​21 moral, 110, 110n.7, 129–​31, 132–​35 philosophy’s relationship with, 111–​21 stages of, 126–​29 suicide and, 121–​31 threshold point in, 126–​27, 128–​29 social freedom, 115 society, 1–​2, 21. See also community; culture; independence; solitude Socrates, 3–​6, 6n.14, 9–​10, 20, 31–​32, 71–​72, 84–​85, 90–​91, 104–​6, 104n.65, 121, 166–​67, 166–​67n.54 on Daedalus, 52–​54 debates over legacy of, 53n.62 self-​sufficiency of, 28–​30 as Stoic progenitor, 84–​85 Socratic problem, 53n.62 solitude, 24–​27, 28–​29. See also Consolatio ad Marciam; De Beneficiis, 7th book; Epistulae Morales, 18th letter; Epistulae Morales, 29th letter; Epistulae Morales, 62nd letter; Epistulae Morales, 90th letter; Epistulae Morales, 95th letter; Epistulae Morales, 120th letter sophia. See wisdom Spartan constitution, 144–​46 state, 139–​41, 139–​40n.4. See also politics; res publica

Index Stobaeus, 172–​73 Stoicism, 4–​6, 11–​12, 15–​16, 21–​22, 27–​28, 43–​44, 60–​61, 62, 69–​70, 76, 107, 172–​76 Academic Skepticism vs., 53 canonical texts and, 82 community and, 77–​78, 84–​85 cosmopolitanism of, 22–​23, 139–​40, 172–​74, 176 Cynic heritage of, 30–​32, 57–​58 De Vita Beata and, 86–​89 diversity in, 87–​89 Epicureanism compared with, 78–​82, 99–​100 Epicureanism criticized by, 86–​89 Epistulae Morales and, 78–​82, 85–​86 infant inclinations and, 34 loss of organizational integrity, 75–​76 politics and, 139–​40, 141–​42 slavery and, 110, 126–​27 on women, 10n.25 sub-​universal politics, 22–​23, 139–​40, 172–​73, 175–​76 Suetonius, 116n.20 suicide of Seneca, 124n.32 in slavery, 121–​31 Sulla, 75–​76 Tacitus, 122–​23, 124–​25, 124n.32 technology, history of. See history Theatetus (Plato), 9–​10 Themison, 67–​68 Theognis, 96n.54 Thomas, Richard, 65–​67 Tiberius, 94–​95 Ticinus, battle of, 151–​52 Timaeus (Plato), 54n.63 Tityrus, 170, 171 torture, 157–​58, 158n.36 Trimalchio, 111–​12, 112n.12, 113–​14

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Index Trinacty, Christopher, 170 truth, 3–​4, 85n.29 Valerius Maximus, 154, 155–​56 van Straaten, Modestus, 174–​75 Veyne, Paul, 155–​56 violence, 157–​59 Virgil, 55–​56, 65–​67, 101–​2, 101–​2nn.60–​61 Aeneid, 94–​96, 152–​54 Eclogues, 170–​71, 170n.58 Georgics, 55–​56, 65–​67 virtue, 3–​4, 5–​6, 21, 24–​25, 28–​30, 31–​32. See also morality Aristotle on, 4–​5 De Vita Beata on, 89–​90 distinction between philosophy and, 6–​7n.16 Epicureanism and, 89–​90 Epistulae Morales on, 44–​45, 53–​55, 56–​57, 60–​61, 62, 63–​64, 67–​70, 89–​90, 93, 100, 104–​6, 117–​19, 120–​21, 132–​34, 135 glory and, 104–​6 permanence of, 104 slavery and, 117–​19, 120–​21, 132–​34, 135 Vogt, Joseph, 108–​9 walled garden image, 31n.17 well-​ordered city, 173–​75

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wet nurse example, 148–​50, 149n.20 Wilcox, Amanda, 33 Wilson, Emily, 136–​37 Wilson, Marcus, 17–​18, 113 wisdom, 8–​9, 21–​22, 24–​25, 27–​28 Aristotle on, 6n.13 community and, 11–​12, 11n.30 De Beneficiis on, 143–​44, 151–​52, 154–​56 De Vita Beata on, 86 Epistulae Morales on, 26–​27, 43, 47–​48, 53–​55, 103, 103n.63, 104–​6, 117–​18, 132–​33, 175–​76 permanence of, 103 politics and, 138, 143–​44, 151–​52, 154–​56, 175–​76 slavery and, 109–​10, 117–​18, 132–​33 Stoicism on, 5–​6, 6n.13 women Epicureanism on, 10n.25 grief and, 35–​36, 36n.28 properties of bodies, 67–​68, 67n.84 Stoicism on, 10n.25 Xenophon, 53n.62, 53–​54, 71–​72 Zeno of Citium, 6n.15, 30–​32, 60–​61, 71–​72, 80–​81, 82, 84–​85, 87–​88, 155–​56, 171, 174–​75, 174n.69 Zetzel, James, 154–​55

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