Chapter III · SENECA THE PHILOSOPHER: MISCELLANEOUS LEARNING

Widely varied problems regarding Seneca—His family—Education—His relations with Caligula, Claudius and Nero—Retirement from the imperial court—Character—Works lost and extant—Vexed questions of chronology—Brief survey of his prose writings—Style in theory—Style in practice—Seneca as essayist—The pithy sentence—Composite language—Ancient traces of his influence—The exponent of Latin Stoicism—Vitality of the Stoic creed—The human and the humorous—Bracing spirit of his philosophy.

Contemporary learning—History, jurisprudence and philosophy—Stoics of the day—Scholarship—Asconius and Probus—Orators, informers and rhetoricians.

SENECA THE PHILOSOPHER

The jungle of literature which has grown up around Seneca⁠[588] testifies to the manifold inquiries stimulated by his personality and works. The bare enumeration of representative treatises or essays on Senecan subjects becomes oppressive. In Latin and in many modern languages they have dealt with problems of his life—the cause of his exile, his moral character, his inconsistencies, his political significance and control or want of control over Nero; they have dealt with the chronology of his writings; with his theology, philosophy and cosmology, so that what he thought of God, man and the world has been scrutinized in relation to Stoicism as well as to those eclectic modifications which were always typical of the practical Roman; they have dealt, too, with his science, with aspects of his style, his characteristic prose, his gift of piquant satire, his poetic and tragic powers; with difficulties, still unsolved, in his text; with questions of his influence upon Christian literature, European drama and modern essay-writing. There is, then, no lack of Senecan themes, and his influence makes him one of the most prominent figures in the history of letters.

The Seneca family belonged to Corduba, the chief city of Baetica, which was the most civilized province of Spain. There, about 4 B.C.,⁠[589] L. Annaeus Seneca,⁠[590] second son of the so-called “rhetor,” was born. His mother Helvia, we learn in the Consolatio sent to her by her exiled son, had a philosophical bent—a contrast in this respect to her husband, whose interest lay in rhetoric. The family was well-to-do and talented. The elder Seneca and Helvia had three sons. The eldest was Novatus, to whom his brother dedicated his treatises On Anger and On A Happy Life: he became “Gallio” through adoption by L. Junius Gallio, the orator, and, when governor of Achaea in 51-52, happened to have the apostle Paul brought before his tribunal.⁠[591] The second son, called “Seneca” by his father, became, as a statesman and writer, the most famous bearer of the name. The youngest son, Mela, of whose ability his father⁠[592] held a high opinion, was of a more retiring disposition, but, without courting senatorial honours, proved himself a successful money-maker, and possesses his best title to fame as father of Lucan.

Seneca was brought when a child, in the arms of an affectionate aunt,⁠[593] to Rome, whither his parents either preceded or followed him. His preliminary training under a grammaticus left him with a memory of much barren detail and a pronounced distaste for verbal criticism or the minutiae of book learning;⁠[594] his subsequent training in rhetoric by such masters as Mamercus Scaurus, Gallio, Musa, Julius Bassus,⁠[595] and under the auspices of his father, made an indelible impress upon his genius. No doubt his true intellectual love was reserved for philosophy, and he saw the weaknesses of declamation;⁠[596] but we have his father’s evidence that all three sons were captivated by rhetorical sententiae,⁠[597] and Seneca’s own style—disconnected, pointed, antithetic, metaphorical and piquant—is the best proof of its own origin. With his philosophical studies came a fuller satisfaction for intellect and spirit. Seneca was thoroughly Roman in emphasizing the practical aspect of philosophy. “Philosophy,” he says, “consists not in words but in realities. She sits at the helm and steers the voyage through the hazards of the waves.”⁠[598] More and more Seneca was drawn to it, not merely as a guide to conduct, but as something that filled a profound need of the soul. To him it signified the divine way, truth, and life: it made, especially through the Neo-Stoicism which he accepted and developed, a religious appeal. For the elect there was a turning away from the world,⁠[599] a disdain of earthly things,⁠[600] the duty of self-examination,⁠[601] the joys of conversion,⁠[602] the apostolic call to enlighten others.⁠[603] There were ascetic privations,⁠[604] hard at first in their disciplinary stringency, although afterwards joyously welcomed: there were ecstatic possibilities of drawing close to God.⁠[605] The boy might not at once grasp all the implications of the higher teaching, and in life he may have practised very imperfectly the doctrines to which he gave eloquent and noble expression; yet it is certain that from the outset his philosophical masters exercised a deep influence upon him. They were three disciples of the Sextii—Sotion, Attalus and Fabianus. Sotion, arguing on Pythagorean principles, persuaded Seneca to become vegetarian; Attalus, the Stoic, with a contempt for luxury, induced him to renounce perfumes, wines, oysters, mushrooms and a soft bed; while Fabianus, who had given up a career as a speaker to devote himself to philosophical discussion, conveyed to him much of his own enthusiasm. Seneca was the first to arrive for a lecture, and last to leave: his abstinence and fasts were so rigorous that his health, never of the best,⁠[606] began to suffer, and his father intervened with the timely reminder that he might be mistaken for a devotee of the foreign superstitions which Tiberius had endeavoured to extirpate about A.D. 19. If Seneca sighed as a theorist, he obeyed as a son. Fits of melancholy drove him to thoughts of suicide, which Stoicism permitted in certain circumstances: only regard for his father prevented him from losing control over himself. The state of his health may have accounted for visits to Pompeii and to Egypt, where an aunt was wife of the Governor.⁠[607] One of his early works, a lost treatise on Egyptian religious practices (De Ritu et Sacris Aegyptiorum), must be put down to his stay in the country. His aunt was more than a good nurse; she could use her influence for her nephew, and on his return to Rome about A.D. 31 helped to secure the quaestorship for him. Then his career as a speaker at the bar began. Some years passed, and his oratorical performances drew upon him the jealousy of Caligula, who, not content with sneering at them as “mere competitive exercises” and “sand without lime,”⁠[608] would have put Seneca to death but for the whisper from one of the emperor’s favourites that he was in any case doomed to die soon from consumption.⁠[609] Threatened men, however, live long, and Seneca’s future fame lay in other fields than the dangerous one of oratory.

By degrees his own preference turned him to literature and philosophy.⁠[610] Some of his lost works belong to this period—collections of discourses and poems, a physical treatise De Motu Terrarum, a biography of his father, who died about A.D. 39, and perhaps the Consolation to Marcia. Most likely, too, the material for the three books On Anger was collected about the same time, and published, with its bitter allusions to Caligula,⁠[611] soon after that emperor was safely dead. Seneca was not a recluse: a measure of self-effacement may have been judicious under Caligula, but Seneca’s own choice was to make the student’s loneliness alternate with social engagements. “There should be a blend, an alternation of solitude and society: the former will cause us to want human kind, the latter to want ourselves. And the one will be a cure for the other: solitude will heal dislike for a crowd, a crowd will heal the weariness of solitude.”⁠[612] The school of the world was essential to the thinker on wisdom. He was a good business man, able to advance his financial interests; and he had gifts of elegant expression which fitted him to mix with the highest circles in Rome. At court, after Caligula’s murder, Seneca occupied a prominent position as an asset in the party of the princesses, Julia Livilla and Agrippina, daughters of Germanicus and nieces of the emperor. His happiness was short-lived. A charge was brought against him of an immoral intrigue with Julia.⁠[613] Messalina, the unscrupulous empress, is not unreasonably suspected of having for political reasons invented the accusation to weaken a rival faction. It involved Julia’s death ultimately, and Seneca’s trial before a subservient senate, where the death-sentence was at Claudius’s suggestion commuted to banishment. So for eight years, from 41 to 49, he underwent the punishment of “relegation” in Corsica.

In writing his Consolation to Helvia, probably a good many months later, he endeavours to cheer his mother by philosophical arguments that exile is quite tolerable, and very much what the exiled person makes it; but his real feelings of weary despondency are expressed in certain epigrams and in his Consolation to Polybius of A.D. 43, when his sympathy proffered to Claudius’s learned Secretary for Petitions (a libellis) and his cringing flattery of the emperor were designed, though in vain, to facilitate his recall. Certainly, he had books and literary pursuits to occupy his mind; slaves may have been in attendance; and his friend Caesonius Maximus seems to have stayed with him for a time; but there was much that was depressing. He had lost his father, his wife and a child: like other ancients, he could take little pleasure in rugged scenery: and there was a limit to his interest in the ethnology of the island. For a capitalist, diplomat and courtier, for a literary man with social instincts, banishment meant the same poignancy of suffering as Ovid knew on the shores of the Black Sea. But relief came for Seneca as it never came for Ovid. In 49 he was recalled and made praetor, through the influence of Agrippina, who realized that a man of his literary reputation would make a suitable tutor for her boy Nero.⁠[614] The young prince’s education consisted of all available subjects of culture, with two chief limitations according to Suetonius: Nero’s mother disapproved of philosophy for a future ruler, and Seneca jealously discouraged the study of the old orators, so that his own modern style might remain Nero’s ideal.⁠[615] When Claudius was done to death in 54, it fell to the imperial tutor to compose a suitable panegyric for his pupil, the new emperor, to deliver: and so began the period of five years—the quinquennium⁠[616] praised long afterwards by Trajan—during which Seneca, aided by the good sense of Burrus, prefect of the guard, kept Nero on paths of comparative decency and moderation.⁠[617] Part of Seneca’s policy was directed towards keeping Nero free from undue interference on the part of his imperious mother,⁠[618] who hotly protested against “the claim of the cripple Burrus and the exile Seneca to govern mankind with a maimed hand and a scholar’s tongue.”⁠[619] At this period Seneca’s influence as a statesman reached its zenith; and it is a reasonable conjecture that for a time he contrived to mould governmental policy in the spirit of his own broadminded cosmopolitanism. It was of some service to the world that the author of the De Clementia, addressed to Nero when he was eighteen, should now be his chief adviser. Dio himself, who is usually a hostile witness where Seneca is concerned, gives to him and Burrus credit for able and fair administration.⁠[620] There were, however, black crimes which Seneca, whether privy to them or not, had to condone. Britannicus, the true heir to the purple, had been got rid of by poison at the emperor’s table in 55; and in 59 came Agrippina’s murder by her son’s command. State policy, the historical cloak for many infamies, might argue a case on behalf of both acts: the one removed a rival and secured the throne, the other ended a woman’s ascendancy and secured the emperor’s freedom.⁠[621] It was Seneca who composed for Nero the statement to be read in the Senate respecting his mother’s death. One can only guess what acquiescence meant for a man who could both think and feel. To his credit be it said that he seems at least to have pleaded with Nero to save his cruelly maligned empress Octavia in A.D. 62.

That was the year of Burrus’s death and of Tigellinus’s elevation, when Nero had begun to lean upon worse advisers, who urged him to shake off his mentor.⁠[622] The mentor himself, recognizing that his influence was undermined, placed before Nero his request to retire.⁠[623] The wealth of a professing Stoic made an easy target for criticism,⁠[624] and a tempting lure for an avaricious emperor. Seneca’s speech, therefore, at his interview, as reported by Tacitus, took mainly the form of an apologia pro diuitiis suis. His wealth amassed in these years of service was an index surely of his Majesty’s bounty; and, now that he was old, it should return to his Majesty. Nero’s own ability to give a ready rejoinder he adroitly set to the credit of his excellent teacher, who was not nearly so old that his imperial pupil could think of dropping his pilotage and whose wealth he could not possibly accept—for what would people say?⁠[625] Fair dissembling words did not deceive Seneca. From that day he changed his mode of life: he no longer kept open house or made public appearances attended by troops of friends. He had some three years yet to devote to studious retirement: and to this period, A.D. 62-65, can be assigned with confidence his essay On Leisure (De Otio), his elaborate Moral Letters (Epistulae Morales), the seven books of the Quaestiones Naturales, and with less certainty some other works. Once again he made an offer of his substance to the emperor: it was in A.D. 64 when he proposed to help in repairing the devastation caused by the burning of Rome.⁠[626] He was not however destined to escape the despot. In 65, on an allegation of complicity in Piso’s conspiracy—and there were some who said that the next emperor was intended to be the philosopher⁠[627]⁠—the old man was ordered to put himself to death. What Tacitus records of the last hours of Seneca, his dignified calm, his reliance upon philosophy, his farewell advice to friends, his devoted wife’s desire to die with him, the too slow ebbing of life from the chill, attenuated frame, is an account few can read unmoved.⁠[628]⁠

The character of Seneca presents anomalies comparable to those which are notorious in Lord Bacon’s case. If Seneca does not merit to the full the absolute superlatives which Pope applied to Bacon, “the wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind,” still the noble grandeur of his theoretical morality was deplorably sullied by lapses in actual life. Many of the charges date from his own time; and never was the calumny of enemies more rife, more gross, more readily believed than in the days when creatures like Suillius threw their slanderous mud. Among the historians, Dio is too biased to be trusted in his enumeration of the immoralities and inconsistencies laid to Seneca’s account. The story of improper relations with Julia so obviously served Messalina’s machinations that it cannot be accepted as incontrovertible fact, while the suggestion of an amour with Agrippina is even more incredible. That Seneca was privy to the deaths of Claudius, of Britannicus and of Agrippina was whispered and repeated, but the rumours can be neither proved nor disproved. His weak condonation of such deeds very naturally subjects him to suspicion. That he advocated the contempt of wealth and yet accumulated it, is not to be gainsaid; even so, and granted that he lent money on interest, we are not bound to believe Dio’s statement that Seneca caused an insurrection in Britain by suddenly calling in the huge sum of forty million sesterces. If he was a thrifty financier all his life, he at least thereby escapes the accusation of a vicious abuse of his money in an age of luxury.

While, however, some of the blackest charges may be parried as not proven, one count in the indictment is beyond denial, even if it be capable of extenuation. Outside the study, he lacked true moral bravery. Nothing could transcend the elevation of his ethical theory; but this emphatic assertor of moral principles tamely saw them trampled upon at court. Circumstances overbore his protests, perhaps even his qualms: his wisdom failed in courage and his prudence degenerated into pusillanimity. A voluptuous court, it must be allowed, had no atmosphere of bracing discipline in which an austere philosopher could practise virtue: its extravagant opulence and titanic depravity were better calculated to stifle the moral sense with a rankly perfumed sultriness. The danger was twofold: at one time, the aesthetic taste and social charm of Nero might lull the conscience to rest; at another, his tigerish nature might unnerve any counsellor. Let it be admitted that Seneca was incapable of maintaining an impolitic opposition, and that he was, in Carlyle’s words, “so wistfully desirous to stand well with Truth and yet not ill with Nero” that he remains “our perhaps niceliest proportioned half-and-half, the plausiblest plausible on record.” Such scathing words may be glibly repeated by critics who are safe from Nero. But is no allowance to be made, if Seneca failed to transfer the dogmatism of the schools to an emperor’s acts? The philosopher’s heart at least was on the side of goodness. Nero’s court, life, policy must have often caused inexpressible pain to a believer in the Fatherhood and Providence of God, the brotherhood of man, the divine spark within all, the sovereign excellence of virtue, the vanity of worldly goods, the sin of luxury; and it must have been hard to adapt to Neronian orgies Seneca’s own ascetic preferences and practices. But a personality endowed with philosophic will, like Seneca’s, aimed sincerely at a higher life for himself and a better world for others: it could not choose but exert some influence. When one complains of Seneca’s inconsistencies, is one prepared to say that he would have served Rome better by avoiding court? To say this is to forget the good he did. To his credit stand Nero’s promising quinquennium, a policy of toleration in religion, and an endeavour to lessen cruelty in gladiatorial shows: besides, he preached clemency in life, as the author of the Octauia makes him do in the play. Nero’s deterioration after Seneca’s retirement is in itself a testimony to his previous authority.

Perhaps it is not merely fanciful to trace a dynamic evolution in Seneca’s character determined by his continuous struggle against hindrances and failures. If a worldling like Petronius came in time to feel out of touch with the vanity of court life, what of Seneca, who realized its vanity from the outset? In spite of much to disillusionize and to disgust, he persevered at court until his prospects of influencing Nero faded into nothingness, and his offered renunciation of riches had been hypocritically declined. His very faults made him in a sense a better man, and so acquired a spiritual value; for a recognition of his own backsliding and cowardice showed the force of temptation and taught indulgence towards human frailty. This is why Seneca is less bigoted, less overbearing than most of his fellow-Stoics. His habit of self-examination must have often revealed his faults to him, so that one outcome was a tolerance which might well be imitated in judging him. “We have all done wrong,” he says in the De Clementia⁠[629]⁠—peccauimus omnes. It is then, more charitable, as well as more profitable, to forget his imperfections and omissions in favour of positive qualities like his humility⁠[630] and humanity—to forget his timidities in favour of his bravery at the end. In one of his later years he wrote to Lucilius: “Before old age my aim was a good life; in old age my aim is a good death.”⁠[631] And in another letter there is an utterance of dignified courage on which the hour of trial set the final seal of validity:

Without dread, then, I am composing myself for that day on which, laying aside shifts and subtleties, I shall have to judge respecting myself whether I merely speak or really feel as brave men should, whether all my insolent words hurled against fortune were mere pretence and mumming. Discount man’s opinion: it is uncertain and partial. Discount the philosophical pursuits of a lifetime: it is death that is to pass judgement on you. ’Tis true: discussions, literary conversations, words collected from the precepts of sages, and learned discourse do not exhibit the true strength of the mind. The greatest cowards can talk big. What you have achieved will then be made plain when you come to die. I accept the terms: I do not shrink from the decision.⁠[632]⁠

Besides his tragedies, short poems and the satire on Claudius, which are to be considered in another chapter, the following prose works by Seneca are extant—twelve so-called Dialogues, two books On Clemency, seven On Benefits, seven books of Natural Problems, and 124 Moral Epistles. His works that are lost, or survive only in fragments, trenched on the provinces of geography, physics, natural history, biography and ethics. Among these were De Situ Indiae, De Ritu et Sacris Aegyptiorum, De Motu Terrarum, De Forma Mundi, De Piscium Natura, De Vita Patris, De Superstitione, De Immatura Morte, Moralis Philosophiae libri. Some of his Orationes and additional books of Letters also circulated. The twelve Dialogi collected in the Ambrosian MS. are given in the following order: De Prouidentia, De Constantia Sapientis, De Ira libri III, Ad Marciam de Consolatione, De Vita Beata, De Otio, De Tranquillitate Animi, De Breuitate Vitae, Ad Polybium de Consolatione, Ad Heluiam Matrem de Consolatione. Unfortunately, these are not in the sequence of composition; had they been so, fuller light would have been shed on the author’s intellectual development. Much labour has been spent on the chronology of the works, and respecting some of them at any rate the conclusions reached by inquirers are vain and conflicting. Several avenues of approach have been explored along the lines of internal evidence drawn from statement, expression or rhythm. But contemporary allusions (apart from those sometimes merely imagined in the searcher’s enthusiasm) are scarce in Seneca, as if to remind us that the treatises are concerned with themes which are independent of the years. Similarities of thought yield inconclusive criteria of contemporaneous composition in an author who, on some subjects, expressed himself in much the same manner from first to last throughout his career, but who conversely, on other subjects, contradicted himself within the range of the same treatise. Then, again, statistics, like M. Bourgery’s, showing relative frequency of definite metrical sentence-endings form an unsubstantial foundation on which to base theories of earliness or lateness in composition. M. Pichon⁠[633] in 1912 considered that, on the chronology of the works, Gercke in his Seneca-Studien of 1895 had to a great extent superseded Jonas’s dissertation of 1870; and now it is suggested⁠[634] that M. Albertini⁠[635] has made it almost unnecessary to consult Gercke. If one constructs a table to exhibit the dates assigned by different critics to the works, the variation of opinion is at first sight bewildering. For instance, the Consolatio Ad Marciam, which Lipsius placed after the exile, was, according to others, written during it (41-49); and, according to Albertini, before it (A.D. 40). All three books of the De Ira were, according to Jonas, published in 41, but, according to Lehmann and Rossbach, in 49 after the recall; or—to take what marks perhaps the maximum of divergence—the De Prouidentia, in which Waltz sees a similarity of tone linking it with the De Constantia, is referred by him to the first months of exile, 41-42, while Albertini, agreeing with Gercke that it is “après la disgrâce,” gives A.D. 63. Respecting dates for the tragedies, opinions are equally at variance. The general proportion of uncertainty is so great that one is tempted to fall back upon Madvig’s dictum of 1873, librorum Senecae praeter paucos tempora incerta sunt.⁠[636] Yet, after all, there are points on which we can lay firm hold. Few of the extant prose works were written before Seneca’s exile in 41, and most of the best-known ones belong to the sixteen years which he had to live after his recall, when he was well over fifty years of age. There is much to say for believing that the Consolatio Ad Marciam is the oldest of the surviving treatises (A.D. 40), and that at least two books of the De Ira were composed in 41. We can be quite certain that the other two Consolations, namely Ad Heluiam and Ad Polybium, belong to the early part of the exile, the one to 41-42, the other to 43. No other work can be, without challenge, ascribed to this Corsican period, although some authorities think that to it belong the De Breuitate Vitae as well as the De Constantia and the De Prouidentia. As to the period after Seneca’s recall in 49, there is no doubt that the De Clementia was written early in Nero’s reign, probably in 55 (Albertini thinks 56). It is generally agreed that the De Otio, Epistulae Morales, and the Quaestiones Naturales follow the retirement of A.D. 62, the composition of the last two works spreading over more than one year.

Realizing, then, that a full and exact chronology is unattainable, we proceed to a brief survey of the works.⁠[637] Of the twelve Dialogi⁠[638] it may be convenient to consider the three Consolations first, then the three books On Anger, and finally the remaining half-dozen treatises. The Consolations are not spontaneous expressions of sympathy, but literary efforts following broadly a scheme. It was a Greek invention thus to cure one of the maladies of the soul—grief; and the philosophers of different schools⁠[639] who composed such exercises were in time joined by the rhetoricians, so that two streams of influence converged in what was a kind of popular philosophy, with general features of similarity. Among these features were eclecticism in argument; insistence upon our inability to control external circumstances in contrast with the possession of our own reason and will; the employment of rhetorical loci communes and historical examples, as in a declamation; and a typical structure. Usually this structure consisted of an introduction, on the evil to be remedied; the main body of the consolation, on the cause of the affliction and the person afflicted; and a conclusion. It is evident that this species of moral pharmacy, based on an established science of consolation, possessed its time-honoured conventions alike in plan and thought. While, therefore, in Seneca the colour borrowed from Stoics and others is pronounced, it is fruitless to endeavour to trace his sources in detail. What gave a Consolation its distinctive value was very much what gives value to any work of art—the genius of its author and his power, within the limitations of an old form, to achieve a fresh result. The special circumstances deplored, the personality of the individual consoled, sometimes even digressions indulged in, and the signal mastery of style displayed, might all open up paths to an original effect.

The Ad Marciam is addressed to the brave daughter of Cremutius Cordus, who published some of the writings of her dead father, one of Sejanus’s victims. Its design is to console her in her continued mourning for her son, whom she had lost three years earlier. Between its exordium and its peroration it contains a fairly systematic reasoning based on examples of other mothers in grief and on precepts for the control of grief. Seneca’s hand, however, is not so sure as it is in the Ad Heluiam, the most regularly arranged and, at the same time, the cleverest and most readable of the three Consolations. Once he has passed the exordium and a recapitulation of the troubles which have already taught his mother, Helvia, to be courageous, he addresses himself to the immediate task of consoling her under the loss of her exiled son—himself. The situation, it will be observed, was unique; for the person whose loss is mourned comforts the mourner. His ingenuity and prevailing Stoicism are apparent in the defence of the two main positions. On the one hand, the exile himself is not really unfortunate, because he has been trained not to mind the deprivation of external blessings; banishment is but a change of place which cannot affect virtue; enforced poverty does not hurt the sage (an argument which gives a handle for invectives against luxury); and the disgrace of exile lies only in man’s opinion. On the other hand, his mother is not really unfortunate; it cannot be that she laments her son’s support, since her affection has always been disinterested; her natural pangs over the separation give her an excellent chance of displaying fortitude after the manner of other courageous women whom Seneca proceeds to cite; her melancholy can be dispelled through her favourite studies in philosophy, and through the affection of the dear ones who are left. Seneca’s recognition here of ordinary human feelings outside the chill reason of the Stoics makes the one truly touching portion of his Consolation. For himself, he is happy to have leisure both for the study of the universe and for light literary work.

In the Ad Polybium, written about the middle of A.D. 43, he is far less cheerful. Here the object is to comfort Polybius, a learned and influential freedman at court, on the death of a brother. Apart from the reasoned consolation, two features stand out—the author’s acknowledgement of his misery in a remote corner (angulo) of the world, where his very Latin might suffer,⁠[640] and his flatteries of the emperor in the hope of securing a remission of his sentence. The inconsistency with his previous fortitude and the undignified abasement in respect of Claudius have made all Seneca’s admirers wish that he had never written this treatise. Diderot’s denial of Seneca’s authorship in the eighteenth century has, however, received only slight support in modern times. The manner is Seneca’s, and there are not wanting memorable sayings; e.g. on the obligations of high rank, “great fortune is great servitude” (magna seruitus magna fortuna, vi. 5); on a dilemma for mourners, “to lament one in bliss is jealousy; to lament the non-existent, insanity” (beatum deflere inuidia est, nullum dementia, ix. 3); on life as a torture (omnis uita supplicium est, ix. 6), at the beginning of a fine passage on the troublous ocean of life whose one final haven is death; respecting the dead man, “he has not left us but gone before” (non reliquit ille nos sed antecessit, ix. 9); and on the grumbler under a reversal of fortune, “the man who gives to the close of a spell of pleasure the name of injustice has no gratitude” (ingratus est qui iniuriam uocat finem uoluptatis, x. 2).

The three books De Ira (which have certain gaps) were dedicated to Seneca’s brother, Novatus. They investigate the characteristics, uselessness and curability of anger. The plan, although the author several times indicates his line of treatment and his transitions, is not satisfactory.⁠[641] There are repetitions and contradictions,⁠[642] and the relation of Book III to the preceding couple presents difficulties. The work must be later than Caligulas’s reign; for it contains frank criticism on his mad anger, I. xx. 8-9, and on his barbarities, III. xviii. 3-4 and xix. 1-2. In the last passage Seneca indulges in the bitter climax: “Caligula tortured his victims by means of all the grimmest things in the world, with the cord, boot, rack, fire, and with that face of his (uultu suo).” Possibly the first two books were written, as Albertini suggests, in 41, just before the banishment; and Book III, which reads as if it came from Nero’s preceptor, may have been added in 49 to the work interrupted eight years before. Seneca’s handling of so unfortunately common a human frailty could not fail to possess interest. He reminds us that ungovernable rage is the one passion that seizes a nation as a whole and so leads to war.⁠[643] The gift of apt illustration which marks the Letters to Lucilius is already noticeable. Irascible men, he suggests, ought not to meddle with the more exacting sorts of task, or, if they do, should stop short of weariness: their tempers need to be softened with milder pursuits; “for who does not know that clarions and trumpets are irritants, just as some airs are lullabies to soothe the mind? Green is good for wearied eyes (confusis oculis prosunt uirentia), and some colours are restful for weak sight, while the brilliancy of some is dazzling.”⁠[644] There is the gift too of graphic description and anecdote. A reader never forgets the opening chapter, where, after citing the sage who called anger “a brief insanity,” the author gives his tellingly repulsive portrayal of the outward symptoms of mad wrath leading up to his words of dismissal, “You could not tell whether the vice is more hateful or ugly.”⁠[645] Nor does one forget the idle Sybarite who was annoyed over seeing a labourer hard at work, and who complained about the discomfort caused him by the rumpling of some of the rose-leaves on which he lay.⁠[646]⁠

Years elapsed before Seneca indited to the same brother the now imperfect De Vita Beata. Novatus had become Gallio by adoption, as the superscription Ad Gallionem shows: most likely his governorship of Achaea was over. Two main questions are propounded—what makes life happy? and what is the way to the happy life? Happiness for Seneca consists not in what the many, but in what Stoic sages, think happy. It is “to live according to nature,”⁠[647] in possession of a sound mind, true courage, true patience, and a true estimate of things, so reaping “an immense joy, unshaken and equable, along with peace and harmony of spirit, greatness of mind and gentleness; for all savagery is the outcome of weakness.”⁠[648] From another point of view, happiness is to practise virtue. Against pleasure a polemic is directed, although Seneca takes up a broadminded attitude towards the Epicurean system when properly interpreted (ch. xii). The mode of attainment to happiness is not clearly formulated, but the essay develops a spirited retort to those who yelp (conlatrant) at philosophy on the ground that philosophers do not perform what they preach.⁠[649] In particular a defence is needed for the ownership of wealth by the sage who affects to despise it. For himself Seneca can reply that he does not claim the virtuous perfection of the sage, but a wise use of wealth justifies its retention. Even in high estate a virtuous life may be led. Since the impression is given that the author is answering criticisms levelled at him as a rich man, a plausible date is 58 or 59, after Suillius’s attack upon Seneca.

The three treatises De Constantia Sapientis, De Tranquillitate Animi, and De Otio were addressed to a recipient, whose name, Serenus, fits the tenets conveyed. Annaeus Serenus died as prefect of Nero’s uigiles during one of Seneca’s later years: he had been accommodating enough to lend himself as a screen to prevent Agrippina from detecting Nero’s passion for the freedwoman Acte. Waltz,⁠[650] following Hense, has pointed out that the three treatises mark progressive stages of philosophical attitude in Seneca’s pupil. In the De Constantia Serenus is Epicurean; in the De Tranquillitate, he is already Stoic in sympathy, though restless; in the De Otio, he is a convinced disciple. The fuller title for the De Constantia, states its theme, “that the wise man can receive neither wrong nor insult” (nec iniuriam nec contumeliam accipere sapientem). Not unnaturally, considering its subject, some have referred it to the early months of exile; but a reference to a recent discussion on Cato⁠[651] implies Rome rather than Corsica as the place of writing. As the purpose is to prove a paradox—admittedly a hard saying for Serenus—Seneca begins by explaining that Stoic doctrine is too manly to aim at attractiveness. The answers to the supposed adversary’s objections involve a good deal of hair-splitting; but there is a fine confidence in the emphasis laid upon the calm of the sage amidst the storm of war; “for no siege-engines can be invented to shake the well-established mind” (nulla machinamenta posse reperiri quae bene fundatum animum agitent), and he sums up:

See, then, Serenus, that the perfect man, full of virtues human and divine, can lose nothing: his goods are girt with solid and unscalable ramparts.... You cannot compare with them the walls of Babylon which Alexander entered, nor the battlements of Carthage or Numantia.... Those which protect the sage are safe from fire and invasion: they yield no passage: they tower impregnable, equalling gods. You have no ground for saying, as you are wont to do, that this sage of ours is nowhere found. We invent no such unreal glory of human genius (vi. 9-10).

At the opening of the De Tranquillitate, Serenus confesses his uneasy vacillation in the pursuit of peace of mind. What, for instance, should be the attitude of man amidst luxury? What are the claims of leisured retirement against the worries of public life? What satisfaction comes from literary fame? The answer gives Seneca’s views on the attainment and maintenance of such an unruffled course that the mind shall take pleasure in itself and in its surroundings. An extraordinary amount of human wisdom is contained in this treatise, which seeks to provide a cure for ennui and nerves. Among the interesting topics are failures in life; the restless traveller in quest of change; the teacher who performs genuine social service (in priuato publicum negotium agit); the value of friendship (nihil aeque oblectauerit animum quam amicitia fidelis et dulcis); property as a source of anxiety (a theme illustrated with characteristic fertility); foolishness in book-collecting (multoque satius est paucis te auctoribus tradere quam errare per multos); the defiance of fortune; the vanity of human wishes; the interest in the condition of spirits beyond death; the proper estimate of human failings and sorrows; the torment of an artificial life; and the advisability of a little nonsense now and then to obviate the dullness produced by all work and no play (danda est animis remissio ... nascitur ex assiduitate laborum animorum hebetatio quaedam et languor).

The De Otio (mutilated at beginning and end) defends the moral value of leisure from affairs, in reply to Serenus’s statement of the strict Stoic position. Seneca’s plea is that at every age it is permissible to renounce action for philosophical meditation; but most of all is it permissible for those who have grown old in active service. Amid general corruption, such withdrawal is countenanced on both Stoic and Epicurean principles. We each belong to two commonwealths, and in retreat the sage may usefully serve the universal cosmopolis, the world at large, through his speculative life in accord with nature. Especially may he with profit devote himself to satisfying that inquiring disposition implanted in man by Nature herself. Nature has produced us to be spectators of her vast works: her beauty and complexity are not meant to pass unobserved. So by the right path of research, man must “discover something more ancient than the world itself” (aliquid ipso mundo inueniat antiquius); for “our thought bursts through the battlements of heaven, dissatisfied with knowing merely what is shown” (cogitatio nostra caeli munimenta perrumpit nec contenta est id quod ostenditur scire). The scientific impulse here is that which animates the Quaestiones Naturales, and the general tone befits the statesman who has resigned all responsibility for public policy.

There is a link between the De Otio and the much earlier De Breuitate Vitae; for its final advice to Paulinus, controller of the grain-supply for Rome, is that he would make the best use of life by retiring to cultivate philosophy. Such advice could hardly come with full effectiveness from an exile; while, on the other hand, a reference shows that the treatise must have been written before Claudius extended the pomerium of the city on January 24th, A.D. 50. Its date lies, therefore, presumably somewhere in 49 between the author’s recall and his acceptance of a regular appointment.⁠[652] Paulinus perhaps was related to Seneca’s second wife.

The treatise is full of good things. Nowhere in literature are there to be read pithier remarks on the value of time. The first century of our era displayed a peculiarly keen sense of the way in which days are wasted. Under Tiberius, Phaedrus, we have seen, made fun of those fussy triflers, the ardaliones; and late in the century Pliny chafes against the petty but innumerable inroads made on leisure, while Martial betrays the same nervous spirit. Here Seneca speaks for the Neronian period. Life is short: yes, but it is we who make it so: life is long enough, if well employed. The general blindness to the worth of time is amazing: men will resist encroachments on land or money, but will let people trespass freely on their time, which is in reality their life. They are spendthrifts with the one thing in which greed is honourable (profusissimi in eo cuius unius honesta auaritia est). We live, in fact, as if we were to live for ever. You hear men coolly postponing leisurely reflection till after fifty or sixty: should they not blush to reserve for the sovereign duty of reflection the mere remnants of a life no longer fit for business? Drusus once declared that he was the only person who had never had holidays even when a boy: precocity like that must have an evil end. But the really great man will not let his hours be filched away from him; and his life will be long because devoted to self-improvement. Many a wrinkled grey-haired man has merely existed, not lived, a long time (non ille diu uixit, sed diu fuit). Yet for all men’s extravagance with this most precious of things, confront them with the peril of death, and how they plead for more time! For what purpose? To learn how to live and how to die demands a lifetime; but the paramount concern is laid aside in favour of toilsome exertions for a future on which no one can count. Thus the true life suffers from that procrastination which is the thief of our to-days (expectatio quae pendet ex crastino perdit hodiernum): so old age comes as a surprise, and death as a terror, to those who have been busy (occupati) over the wrong things, and have squandered time on luxury, affectation or vice. That man has true leisure who has the sense of leisure: its secret lies with philosophy, through whose study one may master centuries that are past and commune with all the ages and all the sages. Those great thinkers—not the arrogant snobs whom some court in Rome—constitute the true society of the world; and yet, Seneca reminds us, as Ruskin did long afterwards in Sesame and Lilies, none of those great thinkers will refuse access to him. The communicable wisdom of the ages points the right path towards immortality, and what philosophy has hallowed is beyond the reach of injurious time.

The remaining dialogue is the De Prouidentia, given first in the Milan MS. It is addressed, like the Naturales Quaestiones and the Epistulae, to Seneca’s friend Lucilius, a man with literary tastes,⁠[653] who had held procuratorial offices in various parts of the Roman world, including Sicily, and in whom some have seen the author of the Aetna. The subject discussed is summarized in the fuller title—why any misfortunes befall good men, when a Providence exists (quare aliqua incommoda bonis uiris accidant, cum prouidentia sit). From the Stoic doctrine of a providential government of the universe, it follows that suffering must serve a good purpose. Discipline is one of the ends subserved: misfortune is a school for virtue, and a spectacle noble enough for the gods to witness is that of good men struggling with adversity—non miror si aliquando impetum capiunt spectandi magnos uiros conluctantis cum aliqua calamitate ... ecce par deo dignum, uir fortis cum fortuna mala, utique si et prouocauit. The last clause “especially if he has actually thrown out the challenge,” is an addition symptomatic of a rhetorical over-statement too common in this essay. The imperfect way in which some points in the argument are worked out has led certain critics to hold that a portion is lost at the end.⁠[654]⁠

Of the De Clementia, once in three books, we possess the first and a portion of the second. The idea of writing on clemency was suggested to Seneca through recollecting Nero’s words, when he reluctantly signed a death-warrant, “Would that I had never learned to write!”⁠[655] If one is tempted to jeer at Seneca’s compliments to Nero and his expectations that a better era had dawned, one must in fairness remember the high hopes reposed and realized during the earlier years of the young prince’s reign. Book I discusses the need for clemency in a ruler. The emperor, as war-lord, is urged to recognize his responsibilities. He should follow the model of the gods: things a subject might do, a monarch cannot, in the full light that beats upon a throne (multa contra te lux est, omnium in istam conuersi oculi sunt). Cruelty makes a tyrant; but the affection of subjects is a stronger defence for a prince than their fear. Book II degenerates into tedious attempts at the definition of clementia in contrast with what the Stoic condemns as weaknesses—mercy (misericordia) and pardon (uenia).

The seven books De Beneficiis addressed to Aebutius Liberalis were not issued together. An allusion towards the close of Book I⁠[656] shows that Claudius was dead, and it is likely that the first four books had appeared some years after 54; being followed by the remaining books,⁠[657] perhaps by V and VI together, as Gercke thinks, before the retirement of 62, and by VII still later.⁠[658] The praise of Demetrius in VII. viii.-xii. best suits Seneca’s closing years. Based upon Hecaton, Panaetius and other Stoics, the treatment of Benefits is marked by insight into human nature and generosity of impulse rather than by strict method. It may be too much to say that the work is incapable of analysis,⁠[659] but it is safe to say that an attempted analysis shows the absence of exact system.

There are repetitions and anticipations, apparently because the author, instead of punctiliously exhausting a particular aspect of his subject, preferred to record, as they came, in characteristically concise and striking language, his thoughts upon points which he left himself free to illuminate again as occasion might offer. He is not unaware of such repetitions.⁠[660] He is aware, too, of his digressions, on which he imposes a closure in such terms as, “Let us now return to the theme set before us,” or “My enthusiasm is carrying me away rather too far, for the subject is a tempting one.”⁠[661] Even his initial definition of a benefit is unduly deferred (I. vi. 1) until after five somewhat rambling chapters. Such traits, although they may be adjudged faults in logic, actually contribute to the easiness and readability of his work.⁠[662] Besides, some of his best thoughts are repeated in such varied form that they cannot fail to arrest the attention and impress themselves on the memory. Despite, then, a dearth of method, no man can rise from the most casual reading of a tractate by Seneca without having grasped its spirit. The redoubled beats, so keen and insistent in their staccato, ensure that effect.

The commonness of ingratitude is in Book I put down largely to the wrong mode of conferring benefits. The essence of a benefit lies in the attitude of the giver, and two points need consideration, the kind of benefits to be conferred and the mode of giving. The latter point is dealt with in Book II which turns to the mode of receiving, a topic involving that of the ungrateful disposition. Book III continues the subject of ingratitude, stating and answering problems: “Can ingratitude be prosecuted?” No. “Can a slave benefit a master?” Yes. “Can children confer on a parent more benefits than they have received?” Yes. Book IV, dealing with aspects of benefits and gratitude, puts the query, “Should one benefit the ungrateful?” The later books, from their investigation of quaestiones, are casuistic in character, but by no means uninteresting. Book V asks “Is it a shame to be surpassed in benefits?” then takes up the Stoic paradoxes “No one can be ungrateful,” “All are ungrateful”; and proceeds to find fresh puzzles, “Must a son be grateful for benefits done to his father?” “Is that a benefit which was not intended?” Among the problems in Book VI are “Do we owe gratitude to one who has benefited us against his will?”, or “without knowing it?”, or “incidentally in furthering his own interests?,” and in the last book “Can one benefit the sage who possesses all?” and “What is the position where the giver has forgotten the benefit conferred?” Although many of the problems end in unfruitful refinements, there is much to treasure in Seneca’s permanently valuable and shrewd criticism of human conduct. He is genuinely anxious to correct by his counsels one of the most detrimental and heartbreaking mistakes made in life; for he well realises how much pain is caused by ignorance in conferring or in receiving a benefit. A few citations will illustrate some aspects of his attitude:

“I should find it hard to say whether it is meaner for the recipient to repudiate a benefit, or for the giver to press for its repayment, inasmuch as a benefit is a sort of loan whose return absolutely depends on the spontaneous action of the debtor.”

“We find many people ungrateful; yet we make more people so, because at one time we are insistent and harsh in our claims for return, at another time we are fickle enough to regret our generosity. By such conduct we spoil the whole favour.... A benefit is felt to be a debt in the same spirit as that in which it is bestowed.”

“If a man does not give because he does not receive, he must have given in order to receive, and that justifies ingratitude. How many there are who are unworthy of the light of day, and nevertheless the sun rises.”

“Persevere in your generosity. Assist one with your means, another with credit, another with your favour, or your advice, or a word in season. Is he ungrateful for one benefit? After receiving a second, perhaps he will not be so. Has he forgotten two? Perhaps the third kindness will bring back the recollection of those that slipped his mind.”

“The reality of a benefit lies not in gold, nor silver, but in the goodwill of the giver.”

“What is a benefit? It is the doing of a kindness which gives pleasure and in the giving gets pleasure.... The spirit animating the act is what exalts trivial things, throws lustre on ordinary things, while it can discredit great and highly valued ones.”

The Naturales Quaestiones is in Seneca’s eyes an excursion into the highest speculation; for such physical inquiries concern God’s universe, whereas moral philosophy concerns man. The subject had occupied Seneca in Corsica,⁠[663] and for many years he must have collected material to be combined (not over methodically) in these seven books. At the opening of Book II he gives his threefold division of the knowledge of nature into astronomy, meteorology, and geography, according as the investigation is directed to phenomena in the heavens (caelestia), or between the heavens and earth (sublimia), or upon the earth (terrestria). He does not, however, treat these subjects equally or in order, as a glance at the contents of the different books will prove. Indeed, the order of these books is much disputed.⁠[664] It is possible that Seneca never finally settled their succession; for the work may have been ultimately issued by Lucilius, to whom it was dedicated. The time of composition can be determined within limits. Book III shows that it was the work of the author’s old age after his retirement in 62, and the opening of Book VI records the earthquake at Pompeii in February of 63.

The main themes are distributed among the books thus: I, Fire (meteors, rainbow, mock sun, etc.); II, Air (Thunder and Lightning); III, Water in various forms; IV, The rise of the Nile and (after a sudden break) snow, hail, and rain; V, Wind and atmospheric movement; VI, Earthquakes; VII, Comets.

The historical importance of the work is considerable. Here Seneca is in the succession to the Augustan Sextii, who had some reputation for scientific inquiry. Their influence and that of the “pneumatic” physicians, who took a Stoic view of the mechanism of physiology, contributed to keep physical speculation alive in the first century. Science, however, was still too much a literary manipulation of material bequeathed by predecessors to facilitate real advance. This in the main applies to the compiler of the Naturales Quaestiones. Although he undoubtedly developed germs of independence (e.g. in ridiculing the divination with which he could not irrevocably break), he is not possessed by his subject, as the Epicurean poet Lucretius was. For Western Europe, in default of direct access to Aristotle, the work remained during the Middle Ages the prevalent authority on cosmology; but scientific, according to modern standards, it certainly is not. The absence of the exact equipment nowadays available rendered nice experiment impossible, and with the best will in the world the observer was exposed to all the risks attendant on the inaccuracy of sense-perception. To the utmost of his ability, nevertheless, Seneca sought to secure trustworthy data; e.g. with respect to a comet (VII. ii.); he was a searcher after causes, and stated fairly the points of conflicting theories; eclectic by preference, he even rejected the explanations of his own Stoic school when he deemed them incorrect; and he realized that generations of workers might be needed to reach truth in complex subjects (VII. xxv.). On the other hand, he never learned to divorce ethics from physics, and consequently some of the most interesting parts of the Naturales Quaestiones are his unscientific digressions. Thus, lightning suggests other presages and leads to discussions on fate and religion in Book II. Closing the same book, he recognizes that some would rather be delivered from the fear of lightning than know its origin, and, conceding that a moral should attach to every study, he proceeds to reason against the dread of death. Again, the chafing of the sea, he believes, indicates that Nature will ultimately inundate the world to make a new world. Lucilius is admonished at the beginning of Book IV that he must not be arrogant, although governor of Sicily; for the island is “a province, not an empire”; and the topic of snow occasions one of his tirades against the despicable luxury of effeminate Romans who would bathe in it or use ice to cool their thirst. In such passages the physicist has reverted to the moral philosopher.

Much labour has been spent in arguing that the 124 Epistles to Lucilius were not real letters. In the last resort, the question is hardly a vital one; for supposing the form were proved to be fictitious, Seneca must at least have meant the collection to be taken for a budget of correspondence despatched by him to his friend, because he introduces references to letters received.⁠[665] Several scholars⁠[666] have followed Lipsius in his denial of the reality of the correspondence; but it is more satisfactory to accept the epistles as representing a real correspondence subjected to the author’s editorial suppression of the regular opening or closing phrases, of very intimate passages, and of certain personal names. They were written in A.D. 63 and 64, and sent, as written, to Lucilius. At different points in the collection a subject is often reopened, and there are inconsistencies in thought, so that no logical order is to be looked for, although it is possible to trace certain chronological groups⁠[667] according to Seneca’s change of reading or residence. Thus, the model of Epicurus’s letters to Idomeneus especially pervades the first twenty-nine letters, most of which close with an Epicurean maxim sent to Lucilius under some such jocular labels as “a little gift” (munusculum), “a windfall” (lucellum) or “toll” (portorium). Similarly, we note the effect of his concurrent study of Posidonius in many letters after No. 78. About forty letters (Nos. 49-87) seem to have been composed in Campania, and the subsequent letters in Rome or the neighbourhood. Some are brief notes: others treatises many pages long. Seneca remarks on the difference between Cicero’s epistolary notes⁠[668] about current politics and his own letters discussing moral and intellectual problems. Promising Lucilius a literary immortality⁠[669] through the publication of the correspondence, he keeps his eye fixed on posterity as firmly as ever the younger Pliny or Madame de Sévigné did.

The variety of interest is great, when it is remembered that the prevailing object is the consideration of philosophical points, and that, therefore, many personal details were intentionally excluded. Nothing stands out more, throughout a perusal, than Seneca’s faith in the eternal and inestimable value of philosophy, for which everything should be sacrificed. Philosophy is the guide of life (xvi.) and its joy (xxiii.): more vital than any physical exercise, it promotes the health of the mind (xv.), guarantees a pleasant old age (xii.), and teaches how to face death (a recurrent topic): it offers the glory of literary immortality (xxi.), and deserves to be made a man’s life-work (lxxii.). Hunger and poverty must be endured cheerfully in the quest after wisdom (xvii.), and social pleasures rigidly renounced to win the needful seclusion (recede in te ipse quantum potes, vii. 8). Such seclusion involves hard mental toil, not for oneself but for posterity (viii.), to increase the store of human wisdom. Philosophy must be studied earnestly in Stoic writings as a whole, not in merely convenient anthologies (flosculi, xxxiii.); for Stoics decline to practise window-dressing (ocliferia: “We don’t trick a purchaser, so that, when he has entered the shop, he’ll find nothing beyond what was hung up in front,” xxxiii. 3). The time-honoured traditions of philosophy stamp it as a gradual achievement of civilization (xc.). It is no self-regarding morality, but has duties to discharge—the reclaiming of backsliders (xxv.) and help for the wretched (xlviii.). Genuine philosophy is in touch with human kind (v.), despite the risk of debasement from mixing with the mob (vii.): truly democratic, it is no respecter of pedigrees (stemma non inspicit, xliv. 1), and it is an occupation of the heart, not a pose marked by outward peculiarities (v.).

His counsels are couched in terms of winning modesty. He is not perfect, he confesses (xxvii.); if he ventures to prescribe remedies, he is in the same infirmary (ualitudinario, xxvii. 1) talking with other moral invalids about common ailments of the soul and their cure. This note of sympathy with frailty in utter forgetfulness of dogmatic Stoicism is one of the most likeable traits in Seneca: it increases his hold over us and his power of doing us good. So he preached abstinence (xviii.) more effectively than many a temperance bigot; recommended the right behaviour for travel (i.e. learn to be at home everywhere as a citizen of the world, xxviii. 4); and pleaded the duty of kindness to slaves (“slaves?—nay, our humble friends: slaves?—nay, our fellow-slaves, for the real slavery is that of the mind, and no slavery is baser than self-imposed slavery in high rank,” xlvii. 1). He was too sensible to be misled by Stoic paradoxes about the self-sufficing sage who had no need of a friend (ix. and cix.): there had to be a uia media between contamination amidst the madding crowd (vii.) and deterioration in solitude: alone with oneself, he reminds us, one might be in bad company (x.). Thus he writes:

When friendship is made, one must trust; before it is made, one must judge. There is a topsy-turvy confusion in your folk who, in disobedience to the rule of Theophrastus, judge one after making a friend of him instead of making him their friend after judging him. Ponder long whether a given person is to be admitted to your friendship: when you have decided that he is to be so, welcome him with all your heart. Converse with him as boldly as with yourself (iii. 2).

The human appeal of the letters is intensified by the light thrown on contemporary life. They place before us the loathsome butchery at gladiatorial shows (vii.), the seductions of a seaside resort (li.), the arrival of mailboats from Alexandria (lxxvii.), the treatment of runaway slaves (cvii.), the pleasure of travelling light in contrast to the overpowering magnificence of some travellers (lxxxvii.). No less enlivening are personal details which bring the author nearer to us—even his asthma (liv.) and other ailments (lxxviii.), depressing attacks of fever, and his decision to be careful out of consideration for his wife’s solicitous feelings (civ.), sea-sickness on a trip in the Bay of Naples (liii.), an outing in a litter (lv.), trying experiences during a day of mud and dust in a tunnel near Naples (lvii.), lodgings over a noisy public bath (lvi.), feelings on the death of a friend (lxxvii. and lxiii., 1 and 4, “at a friend’s loss the eyes should be neither dry nor streaming ... let us see to it that the recollection of our lost ones is a pleasant one”), attendance at philosophy lectures when old (lxxvi.), thoughts suggested by a wrestling-school or Scipio’s villa (lxxxvi.). Here the work on Italian fields is put before us (“It’s late June ... this very day I noticed peasants harvesting beans and sowing millet,” lxxxvi. 16); and another letter gives Seneca’s own experiences in vine-grafting (cxii.). Elsewhere we find reminiscences of his teachers with entertaining anecdotes (cviii.), or a hint to Lucilius that he must climb Aetna (lxxix.). His attitude to the government of the day appears in exhortations to practise circumspection and avoid offence (xiv.). It is noteworthy that he says nothing to indicate whether he looked back with satisfaction upon his public life. No doubt, his own tastes preferred the serene detachment of an onlooker portrayed in the following passage:

You dun me for more frequent letters: let’s compare accounts—you’ll not be solvent! The bargain, of course, was that you were to start—you were to write, I was to write back. But I’m not going to make difficulties: I know you’re safe for credit, and so I’ll pay in advance, and not do as that master of style, Cicero, tells Atticus to do—write anything that rises to his lips, even if he has got no news. I can never be at a loss for matter, though I skip all the details that fill Cicero’s letters—what candidate is in difficulties; who is fighting with other people’s backing, who with his own; who is standing for the consulship in reliance on Caesar or on Pompey or on a money-chest; what a skin-flint Caecilius is, out of whom his own relations can’t shift a coin under twelve per cent. No, it’s better to handle one’s own troubles than other folk’s, better to examine oneself to see in how many affairs one is a candidate, and yet decline to vote. This, my dear Lucilius, is the noble line—the line that means tranquillity and freedom—to compete for nothing, and entirely to give the elections of fortune the go-by. How great do you take the pleasure to be when the assembly of the tribes has been summoned, when the candidates are on tenterhooks within their respective quarters, when one is offering money, another acting through an agent, another smearing with kisses the hands of folk to whom he’ll refuse his handshake after election, when all are waiting in dumb amazement for the crier’s voice—how great the pleasure to stand at one’s ease, a spectator of that Vanity Fair without either buying or selling anything?⁠[670]⁠

The discussions frequently bear, like St. Paul’s epistles, the mark of the Stoic diatribe. Objections are supposed to be raised (inquis) by Lucilius or by an imaginary opponent to be scrutinized and refuted. And there is something Bionean in sharp sarcasms recalling those of the Apocolocyntosis. The philosopher makes great game of the futile queries raised by pedantic teachers (lxxxviii. 7-8 and 37); of brainless pleasure-seekers in Rome, the human “antipodes” who turn night into day (cxxii.); of an outrageously vulgar parvenu freedman who purchased highly educated slaves to enable him to parade learning by proxy (xxvii.); of a philosophical lecturer’s rapid delivery, which was too like the glibness of a cheap-jack (xl. 3, istam uim dicendi rapidam atque abundantem aptiorem esse circulanti quam agenti rem magnam ac seriam docenti); or of luxurious baths hot enough to parboil a condemned criminal (lxxxvi. 10).

The remarks on style in various letters are instructive, as coming from one whose own style has provoked severe criticism in ancient and modern times. Letter 84 discusses the assimilation of reading, and states a theory of style in the making: bee-like we should gather widely, but the combined products must finally be made our own. In Letter 100, writing for the soul is contrasted with writing for the ear, and Seneca distinguishes the prose of Fabianus with the artificially inverted prose of the day. Letter 114 examines decadence in style, which is explicable on the hypothesis that it is a mirror of morals. Seneca’s citations here illustrate the loose and undisciplined compositions which, he argues, reflected the character of Maecenas. With the spread of luxury the affected manner in literature keeps pace, and eccentricity of expression captures the cultivated public as well as the common herd. There is no absolute standard: fashion sways style. While some ape the diction of earlier generations, others cannot abide the old-fashioned; and Seneca points the distinctions between the long rhythmic sentences of Cicero and the terse abruptness of Sallust. In the next letter, 115, he warns Lucilius not to be over-anxious to attain to a fine style: matter is more than manner—the question should be “what?” not “how?” Then, anticipating the famous Le style est de l’homme même, he declares that style is the yield of a man’s mind (oratio cultus animi est).

This raises the question of Seneca’s own prose. The stress laid on the “what,” rather than the “how,” goes some way, though not all the way, towards explaining why he wrote, as many would have it, so badly. Quintilian, the champion of a phase of restored Ciceronianism in the next generation, may be taken to speak for the hostile critics. In a well-known passage⁠[671] he examines Seneca’s merits and demerits. In Quintilian’s eyes Seneca’s style was spoilt by all sorts of blemishes, and he felt it his duty to point his students to stricter standards of taste. Tacitus afterwards recorded Seneca’s power of appealing to his contemporaries.⁠[672] This very attractiveness Quintilian recognized, but feared: “he charmed because of his faults only” (placebat propter sola uitia). Conceding Seneca’s ready and rich intellect, his learning and versatility, brilliant sententiae and moral value, he at the same time indicates his weaknesses—liability to be misled by those who “devilled” for him in scientific inquiries (aliquando ab his quibus inquirenda quaedam mandabat deceptus est); want of strict accuracy in philosophy; and a style all the more pernicious because full of fascinating faults (eo perniciosissima, quod abundant dulcibus uitiis). Yet Quintilian considers that, in spite of wilful mannerisms, Seneca is safe reading for those of maturely trained judgement, for he allows there is much in him to approve and to admire. Next century, when an archaising movement had set in, Fronto condemns his style more sweepingly for its “fever-producing plums” (febriculosis prunuleis), while Gellius records some readers’ dislike for his glib vulgarity as well as other alleged defects, and censures Seneca for having, in the now lost twenty-second book of the Epistles, dared to pass unfavourable criticisms on Ennius, Cicero and Virgil.

It is clear that a lover of Cicero’s polished amplitude will not feel drawn to the Senecan sentence which, by comparison, must appear offhand, and, despite frequent use of pointed balance, to a large extent formless. In order that a sententious thought might go home impressively and might be easily recalled and quoted, a premium was set upon its smart and brief formulation. The literary fashion was everything by fits and starts and nothing long; for the copious rounded periods of the older oratory had for the time lost their power of attraction. So eloquence no longer flowed in a full broad stream, but glittered iridescent like intermittent jets shot into sunlight from a cleverly contrived fountain. Seneca himself writes⁠[673] that he would like his Letters to Lucilius to be as natural in tone as if he were chatting with his friend seated or walking at his side; and so colloquial words and phrases do not surprise us. Indeed they fit the easygoing argument, as homeliness fits some sermons. But Seneca adheres to this simple model no more rigidly than Wordsworth to his theory of “a selection of the language really spoken by men.” Seneca is far from avoiding the artificial; and his style, like his character, has complexities and inconsistencies. It is intelligible, then, that critics should distinguish good and bad qualities in his composition, but perhaps it is more profitable to ask whether, with his style, he fulfilled his main object in writing. He had to face the fresh problem of composing readable tracts on ethical questions mainly Stoic: so, as an experimenter and innovator, he was sure to depart from traditional lines. Yet sometimes it looks as if he were censured for not being another Cicero. In literature, however, there are many mansions. The opening for Seneca was to create the Latin philosophical essay; and here he is, on the whole, a success.

To this success his power of awakening interest greatly contributed; for he is not a dull writer. He secures varied effects by neglecting logical method, so that he becomes pleasantly discursive; he diversifies his science with rhetorical descriptions; he illuminates a point with wonderful fertility in examples; and he holds the attention by his lively manner in arguing a question. Homeliness of expression alternates with elevation of thought. It is a personal and unmistakeable style, crowded with those disconnected, jerky, antithetic and epigrammatic sentences which made Macaulay say: “to read him straightforward is like dining on nothing but anchovy sauce.” After all, those same forcible and quotable sentences have the merit of leaving Seneca’s position clear. Now, the virtue of an essay, in the true and original sense, lies largely in this, that, while it may not exhaust a subject, it must, if a good essay, convey a lucid impression. The qualities here noted are parallel to those in the writings of Montaigne and Bacon, and constitute Seneca one of the most admirable essayists in the world.

Everywhere we meet with such terse sayings as these:⁠[674] “A life is not incomplete, if it is honourable”; “it is not an important matter to live—it is important to die honourably, wisely, courageously”; “as a play, so is life—it matters not how long, but how good the acting is”; “success is a restless thing ... it intoxicates in more ways than one” (res est inquieta felicitas ... mouet cerebrum non uno genere); “a humiliating and grotesque sight is an old man at his A B C” (turpis et ridicula res est elementarius senex); “old age is an ailment for which there’s no cure” (senectus insanabilis morbus est). There are paradoxes like “some people have stopped living before they could start” (quidam ante uiuere desierunt quam inciperent); or balanced clauses, “in a multitude of books is distraction—so, as you can’t read all you’ve got, it’s enough to have as much as you can read”; or pieces of workaday wisdom, “what’s the good of meeting one’s trouble halfway? You’ll have the trouble fast enough when it comes” (quid iuuat dolori suo occurrere? satis cito dolebis cum uenerit), or “if you don’t want a man to lose his head in a crisis, you should give him practice beforehand.”⁠[675]⁠

Superabundant terseness of this sort leaves the reader dazzled and fatigued. Seneca’s is a prose which produces an effect analogous to that of his nephew Lucan’s hectic verse.

His language,⁠[676] as we might expect, is an amalgam of the literary and the vulgar. On the one hand, there is the contribution of rhetoric and learning—poetic words, archaisms, philosophical terms, Hellenisms; on the other hand, the contribution of spoken Latin. A good deal of his vocabulary he shares, not with the more literary authors, but with Varro, Columella and the elder Pliny. From trade come such words as botularius (“sausage-maker”) and libitinarius (“undertaker”); and from agriculture, such as folliculus (“pod”) and retorridus (“parched up”). There are colloquial words like pilicrepus (“ball-player,” found in inscriptions), scordalus (“brawler,” in elder Seneca and Petronius), and diminutives like centunculus (“a little patch”). There are also rare words, not known before Seneca, like collatrare (“yelp at”) and perpessicius (“much enduring”). To other words he gives a new meaning.

Traces of Seneca’s influence are found in Juvenal and Tacitus; and early Christian writers⁠[677] like Tertullian, Lactantius and Jerome were attracted by the spirit and words of one who was for long believed to have corresponded with St. Paul. His prose style is definitely echoed in Tertullian’s Apologeticum; for its peroration, fiercely triumphant in its eulogy upon martyrdom, contains antitheses, exclamations, historical instances and short crisp utterances which ring as if they might have come from a converted Seneca.

If only as the exponent of Latin Stoicism, Seneca deserves lasting fame. The spirit of the later Stoicism can be gathered from his Latin essays and epistles, and in Greek from the Discourses of Epictetus recorded by Arrian and from the Meditations composed by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. In the eyes of all three, the Stoic mode of thought guarantees healing for the wounds of life. But internal peace can be attained only by hard-won victories over self and over circumstance, by persevering progress towards virtue—a progress which, Seneca wisely insists, is in itself virtue—by trust in Providence, by acceptance of the Divine Will, by harmonizing oneself with Nature. The precept of Epictetus, “endure and abjure” (ἀνέχου καὶ ἀπέχου), expresses much of this ascetic faith. The tranquillity which the stricter Stoics of Greece would confine to the perfect sage is, in the more sensible Roman spirit, claimed by Seneca for him also who is advancing and has made some headway. It is a hard fight to advance, he says, but “you are sworn to make yourself a good man”⁠[678] and the very striving is virtue.⁠[679] This is typical of the Roman rejection of the more pedantic early Stoicism. In Seneca the system has become an enlightened and broadened one, too practical to mistake paradoxes for genuine intellectual or moral sustenance. So too Seneca’s breadth of sympathy indicates the widening of the moral ideal; for cosmopolitanism has transcended the old opposition between Greek and barbarian. The claims of others are infinitely heightened, when in each fellow-man there is recognized, notwithstanding imperfections, some spark of an all-pervading divine essence. Forbearance, kindliness and true humanity are the fruits of such a creed: so out of a once rigid and unbending system disdainful of feeling, intolerant of human frailty, was evolved the Neo-Stoicism which could not but be moved by the sorrows and follies of the world, and could not look upon a distressed gladiator or a sick slave without seeing a kinsman deserving commiseration. It was a great gain for the world that at Rome the strength of Stoicism had grown less harsh, its exaltation less arrogant, its integrity less priggish, its calm less unfeeling.

At first it is not unnatural that in the restrained and self-confident Stoic philosophy a reader might seem to encounter a remote and even repellent quality as of a system too unreal to be literally practical. Yet in fact this is a mistake. The Roman Stoicism of the first century was no mere theoretic elaboration: it was a faith which offered genuine consolation amidst desperate afflictions. It could confer upon a believer the victory in defiance of the most malignant arrows of fortune. In such a faith some men could steel themselves, for the sake of the state, to help the work of government in trying times, and some could die triumphant over human injustice. History bears the clearest testimony to the inspiring vitality of the creed; and it is from this standpoint that one can best observe the human side of Seneca. Behind his preaching of Stoic doctrine there worked a powerful earnestness which goes far to justify the iteration of counsels throughout the massive corpus of his treatises and letters.

The very seriousness of this philosophy, then, related it to life: it is in part the outcome of actual and often dangerous experience in dark times. It is a seriousness which makes the lighter human touches rarer and more precious. No doubt the sage cannot descend so easily to earth from an Olympian superiority as the ordinary littérateur who may be content to view mankind from the plain rather than from the heights; and one realizes that is was easier for Cicero and Pliny to unbend in their Letters than for Seneca in his. It is, then, all the more to the credit of Seneca’s good sense, as it certainly adds to his interest, that, though the Letters primarily subserve the purpose of permanent ethical instruction, he is by no means wanting in “small talk” and humour. The same breadth of mind that saved him from being a rigid dogmatist taught him to discover material for comment everywhere—vegetarianism, study in rowdy surroundings, slops for an invalid, the invasion of a dining-room by kitchen appliances to keep dainties hot.⁠[680] He can make fun of and, at the same time, defend the Stoic annihilation of emotion: with a touch of mischief he reports the young man’s question to Panaetius, “Should the good Stoic fall in love?”⁠[681] Never interested in logic, he jests at syllogisms more than once:⁠[682] they are not applicable, he insists, to the supreme question of human good and human conduct: “such subtleties make savants rather than saints” (non faciunt bonos sed doctos). A similarly jocular vein at the expense of pedants runs through his letter on virtues viewed as animalia,⁠[683] where he leads the Stoic argument by a reductio ad absurdum to the conclusion that to make a wise speech in the senate is an “animal.” Referring to his sea-sickness, he remarks facetiously that if he had regularly to be put ashore, as he was after one brief trip on the Bay of Naples, then a voyage anywhere would take him twice as long as Ulysses’s wanderings lasted, and with mock seriousness he affects to think that we owe the elaborate Odyssey ultimately to the hero’s mal de mer.⁠[684] So, too, he drops the philosophic mantle to give us vivid pictures like that of his picnic with a friend,⁠[685] or a tissue of exaggerations in satirizing the luxury of the day: “We have reached such a pitch of luxury that we decline to tread on anything but precious stones” (eo deliciarum peruenimus ut nisi gemmas calcare nolimus, lxxxvi. 7).

Such ordinary human notes strengthen Seneca’s power over us when we turn to his grave and elevated thought. He does not work out systematically for us the whole body of the Stoic doctrines; but few can rise after reading in his books without feeling the better for it. A tonic bracing of the spirit comes from the serene forbearance advocated in the De Ira; the uncalculating generosity so estimably pervading the De Beneficiis; the princely, if Stoically guarded, clemency recommended in the De Clementia; the widely sympathetic understanding of human nature evident in the Letters; the virtuous conquest of desire proclaimed as the secret of bliss in The Happy Life; and the complete mastery of the soul indispensable for The Constancy of the Wise Man or for The Tranquillity of the Mind. The closing words of his last letter to Lucilius show the true Stoic independence of worldly standards:

I shall give you in brief a rule whereby to measure yourself, whereby to gauge your development: in that day you will come to your own, when you realize that the successful are of all men most miserable. Good-bye.

MISCELLANEOUS LEARNING

After the study of achievement so manysided as Seneca’s in philosophy, oratory and natural science (apart from his contribution to satire and drama), a brief sketch of contemporary learning is appropriate. In history the Neronian period did not shine. The impressions of Domitius Corbulo in Asia, of C. Suetonius Paulinus in Mauretania, of Ti. Claudius Balbillus in Egypt, and of L. Antistius Vetus in Germany made little mark. Agrippina, the emperor’s mother, composed memoirs which the elder Pliny and Tacitus quote. Works by jurists were not directly literary; but they were so frequently influential on Roman thought and its formulation that it is right to record the names of the younger Nerva, father of the future emperor; Proculus from whom the “Proculians” took their name, and, among their “Sabinian” rivals, C. Cassius Longinus. Much philosophy continued to be written in Greek, as was done by Musonius Rufus and by Cornutus, who also was the author of works on grammar and rhetoric. But Latin was employed for philosophical purposes not only by Seneca but by Papirius Fabianus and Celsus. Stoicism, whether in formal exposition or in the actual lives of its professors, became one of the mighty intellectual and moral forces of the time. The independence of spirit, too, which the system fostered made its followers suspect: some of their tenets might readily be misconstrued as those of a political opposition, while a defiantly courageous manner of dying gave to many victims of an emperor’s cruelty a semi-religious halo of martyrdom. Among such victims were Barea Soranus, and Paetus Thrasea of Patavium, author of a panegyric upon the younger Cato which Plutarch used. Thrasea’s ruin in A.D. 66 involved his son-in-law Helvidius Priscus in banishment; but Helvidius returned when Galba had succeeded Nero, impeached twice unsuccessfully his father-in-law’s accuser, and brought upon himself a second exile under Vespasian.

It was to Nero that Caesius Bassus dedicated his metrical treatise: he may, as mentioned elsewhere, be identical with Persius’s poet-friend. Scholarship was also represented by Q. Asconius Pedianus (A.D. 3-88) and M. Valerius Probus of Berytus. The former proved himself a thorough investigator into the subject-matter and meaning of classical writers in his Liber contra obtrectatores Vergilii and his commentaries upon Cicero’s speeches. We possess, in impaired form, his commentaries on five speeches.⁠[686] One most valuable portion is his introduction to the Pro Milone. On Cicero’s Verrine orations notes of a very different character, as superficial as the genuine Asconius is satisfying and as grammatical as he is historical, have come down along with the other comments, but are usually referred to a “Pseudo-Asconius” of the fifth century. The eminent grammarian Valerius Probus⁠[687] belongs to the Neronian period, though he outlived it by many years.⁠[688] His provincial education had brought him under the influence of older Latin books, and as a teacher in Rome he retained that interest in the style of the past which guaranteed linguistic equipment for his editions of Latin authors. He left a miscellany of notes upon archaic Latin;⁠[689] and Gellius, who often cites him, shows that he delivered lectures to his pupils on the subject. He elucidated, with critical notes, Terence, Lucretius, Virgil, Horace and Persius.

The oratory of the day recalls the names of the Stoic speakers in the Senate, Paetus Thrasea and Helvidius Priscus. Eprius Marcellus made himself notorious as a delator; the rhetorician Julius Africanus we shall find praised by Quintilian⁠[690] and coupled with Domitius Afer; Galerius Trachalus had his talents used by the Emperor Otho in the composition of speeches.⁠[691] Fabricius Veiento, who was accused in A.D. 62 for his satiric codicils directed against senators and priests, was banished by Nero, and had his books burned, but was in Rome again practising delation under Domitian. Among the professors of rhetoric were Clodius Quirinalis from Arelate (Arles); Antonius Liberalis who maintained a feud with Palaemon; and Verginius Flavus, the eminent teacher, who had Persius for a pupil.⁠[692]⁠