The Greatest Empire. A Life of Seneca 塞涅卡与罗马帝国

塞涅卡与罗马帝国

INTRODUCTION:

“A ROUGH ROAD TO GREATNESS” *

Lucius Annaeus Seneca died in an extremely dramatic fashion in 65 ce.1 He was forced to kill himself, having been accused of involvement in a conspiracy to kill the emperor Nero. A generation after his death, the historian Tacitus gives a vivid account of the scene, telling us that he died surrounded by his friends and in the company of his wife, who was willing to kill herself at his side. He was a man of around sixty-five or seventy, his body strong from regular exercise but skinny from his frugal diet of bread and fruit and weakened by lifelong chronic bronchitis and asthma. Cutting his wrists failed to do the trick, as did the traditional dose of hemlock. He died only once he stepped into a hot bath and managed to suffocate in the steam.

  Seneca’s death raises many of the puzzles and paradoxes that we will encounter in his life. He modeled his conduct in these last hours on that of Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo, who spends his last afternoon on earth discussing philosophy with his friends before calmly drinking the hemlock and calmly passing away.2 But Seneca’s death was harder to achieve.  He failed to die by the hemlock, or from the less philosophical wristslashing, and had to resort to the innovative use of a steam bath to stop his breath—a more fitting end for a man who suffered from life-long breathing problems, and a mark of his distance from the Socratic model.

  Moreover, Seneca is a Socrates without a Plato willing to tell his story.  Instead, he is surrounded by a group of nameless, undifferentiated “friends,” whose main purpose is to admire the great man and to record his words and deeds for posterity: Seneca had created for himself a mirror-image of the imperial Roman court, with the Philosopher as equivalent to the Emperor. Tacitus slyly tells us that he will not transcribe Seneca’s last words in his narrative, since they are already part of his public works. He hints that Seneca’s own self-publicizing may make him less admirable than his old Athenian model.

  Socrates’ life and his death were intertwined with his philosophical activities. He invented new gods and corrupted young people by his teaching. Seneca followed Socrates in claiming that a wise man spends his whole life learning how to die (tota vita discendum est mori—On the Shortness of Life, 7.3). But he died for reasons that seem to have very little to do with his philosophy, or indeed, might seem to be antithetical to his intellectual pretensions. He was closely entangled with the intrigues of Nero’s court, having served both as his tutor and, later, his advisor and speechwriter. Nero wanted Seneca dead because he suspected, probably rightly, that Seneca wanted him dead; the details of Seneca’s philosophical views (on ethics, the gods, or anything else) had little or nothing to do with it. His death had political causes, even if he managed to give it a philosophical turn. The paradoxes of being both “a philosopher in politics” and a politician in philosophy are central to his life (Fig. I.1).3

  The story of Socrates’ death, as told by Plato, gives an impression of complete calm, total control, and cohesiveness. Not a word, not a gesture, not a limb is out of place; the whole thing is beautifully choreographed and utterly harmonious. Seneca’s death, on the other hand, seems haphazard and full of mistakes. Nothing goes according to plan.  He fails to die by the suicide method he had picked and fails again on his second attempt. It is a story of hesitations, reversals, and multiple changes of mind. When juxtaposed with the death of Socrates, Seneca’s death looks like a failed version of the philosophical end. This Roman philosopher cannot manage to die easily, even after a long life devoted to preparing for it; there is tension, to the last minute, in his attenuated, skinny tendons. The painter Rubens, deeply influenced by Seneca, viscerally makes this point in his famous painting of the death scene.4 Seneca died in a state of struggle against the political powers that were. The attempt to die, and to attain philosophical calm, takes every nerve and muscle in his body. “Living is fighting,” he declared (Epistle 96.5), and dying, too, involved a battle, as well as a long process of trial and error.

  Seneca’s legacy, in both literal and metaphorical senses, is also ambiguous. He promised to leave behind, as his best achievement, the “image of his life.” But he also vowed to leave money to his friends in his will, to show his gratitude to them for their “services” to him. The image of a philosopher who has amassed enormous amounts of money to leave behind him, and one who is obviously obsessed with his own postmortem reputation (rather than, say, with the immortality of the human soul), seems to fall rather short of the Socratic ideal. Moreover, there is no particular reason to believe that Nero honored Seneca’s will: probably he seized the estate back for himself. His wife, who had planned to die with him, was saved by the soldiers and ended up outliving him. Seneca’s dying words are not recorded, at least by Tacitus, our only source. Seneca’s time of power and influence was necessarily brief. It was a compromised death, full of second and third guesses, that follows a life of compromises and complex negotiations, between ideal and reality, philosophy and politics, virtue and money, motivation and action.

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  This book teases out the relationship of his literary output to the events and actions of his life. I am highly conscious of the dangers of circularity, both in deducing life from art and using the art to illustrate or investigate the life. But I hope to show how each side of this binary illuminates the other. Seneca’s writing constantly resonates with the events of his biography, without ever providing a perfect mirror for it. We can read these texts more richly by understanding the social, historical, and personal contexts in which they were produced. Conversely, Seneca’s literary work makes us see more clearly what it was like to live through these interesting times—to suffer through illness, exile, and social exclusion, to rise to the very top of Roman imperial society, and to grapple with the constant dangers and challenges of life in the court of the emperors.

  My first chapter traces Seneca’s origins in provincial Spain; his journey, at a young age, to the capital city of Rome; and his parentage, son of an elite and educated mother and a father whose work on rhetoric and education still survives. I look at the work of Seneca the Elder here, which provides valuable insight into the relationship of this dominating father to his young sons—our Seneca and his brothers—and into the education Seneca the Younger received. He was trained both in literary and rhetorical technique and in philosophy, and I discuss the early influences of his philosophical teachers. We also glimpse Seneca’s bad health from a lung ailment, which haunted his early years. In the second chapter, we encounter a series of journeys: first a long trip to Egypt for a period of convalescence from his bronchial problems; then back to Rome for the beginnings of his political career, under Tiberius, Caligula, and Claudius; then the scandal in which Seneca was accused of a highprofile adulterous affair, and consequently his exile to the island of Corsica. In Chapter III, we move back to Rome: Seneca, now a middle-aged man of about fifty, was recalled from exile thanks to the emperor’s new wife Agrippina and became tutor to her son Nero. I focus on the fascinating tensions and contradictions created by Seneca’s position as the educator of the young prince, including the paradoxes of being an ascetic philosopher who achieved vast wealth in the imperial court. In Chapter IV, we turn to the life and work of Seneca’s last years, his repeated attempts to disentangle himself from Nero’s service, and eventually his long-awaited death. The Epilogue traces some key moments in the reception of Seneca’s life and work in the later Western tradition.  I point to the ways that Seneca’s yearnings for wealth and wisdom, for death and time, for power and kindness, for flexibility and constancy, even in the most terrifying and tempestuous of circumstances, have provoked both shocked resistance and desire to emulate him, in the early Christian period, in the Renaissance, and into the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries.

  Seneca’s life and work have been a source of fascination, although not always admiration, ever since his death. Seneca’s Rome was, like modern Britain, Europe, and especially the United States, a place of vast social inequality. The inhabitants of the early Empire were—like ourselves— struggling to come to terms with huge political, cultural, and economic changes. Rome had emerged from a series of devastating civil wars and transitioned uneasily from a Republic to an Empire under the rule of one man (with the help of the army). Through Rome’s extraordinary military success, the world had quickly become more centralized. The gap between rich and poor was vast, and the elite class had gained wealth undreamed of by their ancestors, including an array of luxury products imported from the distant reaches of the empire. But these upper-class men had, at the same time, lost much of the political power they had had under the Republic and had lost much of their sense of security and identity: the display of wealth was used as an inadequate substitute for self-respect. Seneca’s work is brilliantly articulate about the psychological pressures created by consumerism. “Being poor is not having too little,” he declares: “it is wanting more” (Epistle 2). One of his great themes is the way that people surrounded by an excess of material wealth, and in a culture characterized by competition for status, may become obsessed with striving for unreal or actually damaging “goods” (like new clothes or furniture or houses, elaborate food, thrilling and violent entertainment, or titles, promotions, social power, and the admiration of others), which provide no real happiness or satisfaction. And yet our desires for these unsatisfying things remain, as Seneca also recognized, almost impossible to eliminate; and Seneca constantly suggests that complete withdrawal from the social world is not the solution to the problem. As both a Stoic and a pragmatist, he constantly sought to be engaged in the world without losing integrity. He was deeply aware of how difficult this quest is. This is one of many reasons why his work and life story remain so relevant for us.