Who is seneca in ancient rome

His life was one of riches, power, ambition, politics—but also one—to the best of his extent—of philosophy, introspection and self-awareness. One thing that stands out from Seneca is that he is one of the most enjoyable and readable of all ancient philosophers. Part of it was due to the fact that his most notable works came in the form of letters.

We have two main recommendations for you to grab:. On the Shortness of Life This collection of three short letters might be the best introduction to Seneca. The main one, On the Shortness of Life , is a stringent reminder about the non-renewability of our most important resource: our time. Letters from a Stoic From the looks of it, Seneca was a trusted friend who gave great advice to his friends. Now we can read those letters and they can guide us through problems with grief, wealth, anger, poverty, success, failure, education and so many other things.

Seneca, in his letters to Lucilius, urges him to choose a role model to provide a standard to live by. This is of course idea that is not unique to Stoicism by any means but Seneca succinctly puts why it is a necessary step in our pursuit of the good life. The person of our choosing can provide us with principles that can help us navigate even the most difficult and treacherous circumstances as well as standards against which we can judge our behavior on a day-to-day basis.

As Seneca wrote,. Choose someone whose way of life as well as words, and whose very face as mirroring the character that lies behind it, have won your approval. Be always pointing him out to yourself either as your guardian or as your model.

There is a need, in my view, for someone as a standard against which our characters can measure themselves. He was a master of it, not its slave. All the upside, none of the downside. We need to constantly reexamine if we are so trapped by the gifts of good fortune that we are scared to lose and therefore turning it into our master.

Seneca understood well how our ego can impede us from learning and progress. Little by little we start buying it more and more. To paraphrase what a journalist wrote about tyrannical leaders, when you keep hearing that you are a superman, you start to believe it. Seneca warned Lucilius against such indulgence:. If we find someone to call us good men, cautious and principled, we acknowledge him.

We are not content with a moderate eulogy, but accept as our due whatever flattery has shamelessly heaped upon us. Agrippina set about promoting Nero ahead of him. She pushed aside or had executed anyone loyal to Britannicus and spread the rumor that he was an epileptic. Agrippina had Seneca recalled nominally so that he could educate the adolescent Nero.

At the back of her mind may have been the model of Aristotle and Alexander the Great. But she also found other uses for his talents. In 53 A. A year after that, the story goes, she had Claudius murdered, using a poisoned mushroom. The speech, which promised the loyal soldiers a huge bonus, was written for him by Seneca. Anyone whom the new regime perceived as a threat was polished off. Britannicus met his end within six months of his father.

This time, the poison was delivered in a pitcher of water. When the boy dropped dead at the dinner table, Nero told the other guests that he was having a fit and they should just keep eating. According to Tacitus, most did. Romm and Wilson acknowledge that the juxtaposition of the adulation and the murder looks pretty bad. By the end of the decade, the philosopher owned property not just in Rome but also in Egypt, Spain, and southern Italy.

The annual salary of a Roman soldier at that time was around nine hundred sesterces. The recall of the loans purportedly prompted the British to revolt. Shortly thereafter, Suillius found himself exiled. Romm and Wilson—and the new wave of Seneca scholars more generally—resist such reductive judgments. It is possible, in their view, to see Seneca as a hypocrite and as a force of moral restraint. In the most generous account, Seneca might even be regarded as a kind of Stoic martyr: to prevent worse from happening to Rome, he stayed on with Nero and, by doing so, sacrificed his good name.

After the emperor sidelined his old tutor came, tellingly, what might be called the novennium Neronis horribilis —the nine terrible years.

During this time, Rome drifted toward chaos as Nero devoted himself to building ever more opulent palaces and competing in the classical version of the Eurovision contest. This is, in itself, remarkable, as only ten Roman tragedies come down to us. Whether this is a case of life imitating art or art masquerading as history is impossible to say.

The plays are also distinguished—strangely, for a Stoic playwright—by the violence of their passions. The strongest characters in Seneca are, as a rule, the most out of control. They operate in a world where redemption is unimaginable and punishment unlikely. Romm and Wilson interpret the plays similarly.

In the tragedies, they argue, myth becomes an instrument for voicing thoughts and feelings it would have been too dangerous for Seneca to express directly. By some accounts, there was within this conspiracy a sub-conspiracy to kill Piso, too, and make Seneca emperor. The plotters bungled things, and Nero cut them down one after another. To the end, Seneca maintained his innocence, and he may even have been telling the truth.

But, as no one knew better than he, truth was not the issue. He was ordered to commit suicide. Supposedly, as he died, he called in his secretary, so he could dictate one last speech. When reading about great deeds, we magnify the virtuous features of the agents, and minimize their negative features Inwood, [10]; Hadot replies to Inwood. By these and similar cognitive operations, we arrive at an understanding of what virtue would actually be.

Two recent publications argue forcefully for a revised order to the books: 3, 4a, 4b, 5, 6, 7, 1 and 2. What are we to think of long discussions about clouds, rain, lights in the sky, lightning and thunder, wind, comets, and earthquakes, combined with detailed treatments of terrestrial waters and, specifically, the Nile? Why does Seneca devote so much time to these phenomena? Scholars read the Natural Questions against the background of the meteorological tradition, a long-standing genre.

Seneca, it is argued, engages in a project that is rather well established Graver , 45 and Different contributions to this genre share a common goal. The rational explanation of natural phenomena will change the way we live in the world. To take a simple example: a person who understands the workings of thunder and lightning is not going to think that Zeus is sending her the message that he is angry. As Graver points out, at the time when Seneca writes the Natural Questions , this kind of concern is most prominently associated with Epicurean philosophy , Epicurean physics is in the business of fighting superstition and fear.

The person who thinks that Zeus is speaking to her through the weather is in turmoil; the person who understands how the elements interact can live a more rational and better life. Now, a Stoic philosopher writing on these matters faces a challenge. Epicureans argue that God does not concern himself with the particulars of human life to the extent of signaling to us that a certain action of ours did not meet his approval.

The Stoic God, however, is caring, benevolent, and concerned with the details of human life. Thus, the fear that easily attaches to meteorological phenomena must be fought with nothing but the detail of physical analysis.

The argument that God would not care to send us signs is unavailable: the Stoic God, and Seneca agrees on this, is in principle such as to send us signs, which is why divination counts as a science cf. The study of clouds or thunderstorms is interesting because we want to understand how clouds or thunderstorms arise—but more than that, it must be salutary 2.

Hadot, , — Seneca pursues a long-standing concern with making nature less scary, thus approaching meteorology partly from an ethical perspective. Moreover, the Natural Questions contain a number of discussions of human beings who act in what Seneca sees as particularly sordid and depraved ways. These passages are often described as digressions. Another reading, put forward by Williams , Chapter 2 , characterizes the Natural Questions as going beyond the meteorological tradition precisely because the text is in this particular way colorful, imaginative, and dramatic.

Only when we view our local lives from the perspective of the stars do we come to see the insignificance of riches, borders, and so on NQ 1. We need the study of nature in order to reach the kind of distance from our everyday concerns that eventually frees us from unreasonable concern for them. And we investigate nature as something that we are a part of.

In agreement with early Stoic thought about the universe as a large living being with parts, Seneca thinks that we are rightly motivated to study nature—nature is the large entity of which we are parts. We might note that Seneca contrasts the study of nature with the study of history; for him, it is the seemingly more theoretical field of physics that has greater practical value.

It is better to praise the gods than to praise the conquests of Philip or Alexander NQ 3. Further, the study of nature is particularly valuable because it is the study of what should happen quid faciendum sit , as opposed to the study of what in fact did happen quid factum NQ 3.

The Stoics are considered ancestors of the natural law tradition. Early Stoic thought about the law is partly rooted in the theory of appropriate action, and partly in a physical account of how reason—Zeus—pervades the world. It is this physical notion of the law that is most prominent in Seneca. In his discussion of earthquakes and human fear, Seneca points out that we err by assuming that in some places, there is no danger of earthquakes; all places are subject to the same law lex 6.

In another context, Seneca points out that the natural laws iura govern events under the earth as much as above 3. The world is constituted so that everything that is going to happen, including the conflagration of the world when it comes to an end, is from the very beginning part of it.

Natural events like earthquakes, and in fact all events, help nature go through with the natural statutes naturae constituta 3. Since nature or Zeus decided in the beginning what was going to happen, everything is easy for nature 3.

The study of nature aims at accepting facts of nature, first and foremost the fact that human beings are mortal. Seneca refers to the necessity of death as a natural law NQ 6. It is the task of science to understand why death need not be feared, that the philosophical life is particularly indispensable because it prepares us for death, and that the kinds of death that we are prone to fear particularly, such as death through an earthquake, are really not much different from more usual kinds of death.

To be free according to the law of nature is to be prepared to die any minute 3. That we are all equals in death reflects the justice of nature 6. Book 3 of the Natural Questions is entitled On the waters of the earth and begins with reflections on the enormous time which the task of natural philosophy may consume; on time that has been wasted with worldly concerns; and the claim that it can be regained if we make diligent use of the present. The fact that human life is finite is thus present from the very first lines of the book.

Just as a human foetus already contains the seed of its death, the beginnings of the world contain its end 3. It is precisely for this reason that things are easy for nature. Its death does not, as it were, come as a surprise—nature is well-prepared. Seneca points to examples: Look at the way the waves roll onto the beaches; the oceans are trained in how to flood the earth 3.

In Letter To use the present well is to be aware of this completeness. More days, and months, and years, will or at least may make up our lives. But we should not think of them as stretching out into the future; rather, they are concentric circles surrounding the day which, right now, is present.

And since even this very day stretches out, from its beginning to its end, we can appreciate it as containing everything—there can be more such days, but they will be more of the same.

Thus, on every such day, if it is lived well, we can be fully prepared to die. The study of nature—of the heavens—eventually leads to knowledge of God or at least, to the beginnings of such an understanding; NQ 1. Seneca characterizes God in a number of ways: i God is everything one sees and everything one does not see.

Nothing greater than his magnitude is conceivable magnitudo […] qua nihil maius cogitari potest ; he alone is everything—he keeps together his work from the inside and the outside NQ 1. God is a part of the world pars mundi ; NQ 7.

At the same time, he emphasizes that it is in thought that we have to see God—he flees human eyes. The study of God is thus not the study of a visible entity 7. Much of Book 4 of On Benefits is devoted to the fact that God is beneficial 4. Indeed, God is the ultimate source of benefits; as cause of all causes, God is also the cause of everything that is good for us, and that includes the sun, the seasons, and so on.

This connects to the point that God is referred to by many names. Seneca envisages the objection that these gifts do not come from God, but from nature; but whoever makes this objection fails to understand that nature is but another name for God 4.

Earlier Stoic theology is partly developed in conversation with and contradistinction from Epicurean theology. The central point of contention in this debate is whether God concerns himself with us, whether he is caring in the sense of attending to the details of how our lives are going.

Seneca clearly shares the orthodox Stoic view that God is supremely caring. For example, Seneca describes the way in which God made the world as if he had built a wonderfully stable and beautiful house to present to us as a gift 4. In response to the question of how we know that there are gods, the earlier Stoics argued that every human being has a preconception of God. Seneca offers a version of this. People would be addressing deities who are deaf 4. The fact that people everywhere seem to turn to God in prayer indicates for Seneca that there must be a caring God.

Seneca further agrees with earlier Stoic physics in taking divination seriously. In his discussions of thunder and lightning in the Natural Questions , Seneca explains that, while every natural event is a sign , we should not think of God busying himself with sending us, as it were, a sign at every particular occasion.

Rather, we should explain natural events by seeking out their natural causes, and at the same time understand that the order of things as a whole is established by God. Since there is this order, divination is possible NQ 2. Fate is the necessity of all events and actions, which no power can disrupt 2. Prayer cannot change fate; but since the gods have left some things unresolved, prayer can be effective 2.

We are a part of God ; to perfect our reason is to achieve the perfect rationality of divinity. In agreement with earlier Stoics, Seneca thinks that the virtuous man is an equal to the gods Letter Ultimately, he is concerned with how we can perfect our soul, and he pursues this question in a variety of ways—by discussing virtue, the soul, nature, and theology. Life and Works 2. Philosophical Psychology 3. Virtue 4. Physics and Theology 5. Life and Works Lucius Annaeus Seneca c.

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