In a letter famous for outlining the genesis of his work The Prince, Machiavelli responded to his friend's description of his day as a courtier in Rome by describing his own daily routine on his farm. The morning he spent bird-catching, taking a book of poetry to pass the time, ‘Dante, Petrarch, or one of the minor poets like Tibullus, Ovid, or some such’.Footnote 1 The afternoon was spent at the inn in noisy arguments over games. However, in the evening he goes on:
I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, out of their human kindness, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death. I absorb myself into them completely.Footnote 2
Machiavelli presents a memorable image of conversing with ancient authors, one more striking for its elision of the texts by which this occurred. There is some playfulness in the contrast between his friend's courtly life in Rome and his own equivalent with the ancients, but the description of how he feels in their company is persuasive, and the dignity of these conferences contrasts strongly with his descriptions of the humiliating business dealings and social contact that was the earlier part of his day; immediately before the passage quoted, he describes the people he had spent time with in the tavern as lice!
In part Machiavelli appears to have recreated a virtual courtly life for himself to compensate for the one from which he had been excluded. He wrote while living on his farm outside Florence. His movements were limited in a number of ways: he was forbidden to travel outside the Florentine dominion and he was not allowed within the palace. He had also recently been arrested, imprisoned, and tortured on suspicion of involvement in a plot against the new Medici regime. The extent to which his movements were restricted is debated, but for present purposes it is enough that Machiavelli felt that he was in a sense in exile, cut off from the courtly life of his peers.Footnote 3 He desired, however, to resume his career in politics and in the letter just quoted he mentions his work The Prince, which he was considering dedicating to the current Medici ruler in the hope that he would give him a role in his government.
The situation of Seneca at the end of his life is not unlike that of Machiavelli. He wrote the Epistles, among other works, in the aftermath of his fall from political influence in the court of Nero. He lived by the precarious grace of the Roman ruler, aware that each day might be his last. The exact nature of the threat he faced was an element in the censorship of the political elite of the Principate.Footnote 4 The mechanics of this were very different from modern censorship.Footnote 5 Having lost favour with the princeps, he was vulnerable to prosecution for maiestas, sometimes translated as treason. Sufficient evidence for prosecution might be found in a malicious interpretation of his writings by an ambitious delator (‘denouncer’), as evidenced by a number of previous prosecutions.Footnote 6 Furthermore, his immense wealth made him an attractive target; this wealth was largely the gift of his erstwhile friend Nero. Indeed, it functioned as a form of control.Footnote 7 It effectively trapped Seneca. Tacitus describes how Seneca had asked Nero to be allowed to retire, and how he had offered to hand over all his wealth to the emperor to manage (Ann. 14.52–54). Yet, as Tacitus makes clear in Nero's reply, Seneca could not return the gifts without making the giver look bad (Ann. 14.55–6) and Nero therefore refused this request. Nevertheless, Seneca changes his way of life, as Tacitus recounts:
Seneca, qui finis omnium cum dominante sermonum, grates agit; sed instituta prioris potentiae commutat, prohibet coetus salutantium, vitat comitantes, rarus per urbem, quasi valetudine infensa aut sapientiae studiis domi attineretur.
Seneca (such being the end of all conversations with one's master) expressed his gratitude; but he reversed the routines of his previous powerfulness: he stopped the throngs of well-wishers, avoided companions and was rarely in the City, as if detained at home by adverse health or the study of wisdom.
(Ann. 14.56.3)Footnote 8Seneca here withdraws from the public role of a Roman aristocrat, no longer meeting his clients or being seen with them in public. However, whereas Machiavelli in his letters furnishes us with evidence that he sought to regain his political status, Seneca in his writings provides no such evidence, but rather presents himself, like Machiavelli, as living with past authors through their books. At Ep. 67.2, for example, he describes ‘most of [his] conversation as being with books’: cum libellis mihi plurimus sermo est.Footnote 9 Seneca's reaction to his effective exclusion from political association was to describe the possibility of associating with past philosophers through their writing and to suggest that the reader might in turn do the same with Seneca. Through such associations, though limited in his immediate public life, he could imagine living a larger and more valuable public life with posterity through his writings.
Retirement from public life, however, was not without its problems for Seneca. His status as a Stoic philosopher could allow delatores to interpret such withdrawal as a criticism of the moral state of the regime, which was precisely the charge brought against Thrasea Paetus not long after Seneca's death. This is the reason that Marcus Wilson plausibly suggests for Seneca's extensive use of Epicurus in the first three books of the Epistles: Seneca aligns the need to withdraw from public life with a general Epicurean quietism as opposed to the politically dangerous Stoic stance on retirement.Footnote 10 At times he describes this retirement from public life in terms of choosing different peers to whom one should hold one's actions accountable. He can be seen filtering his philosophy here, as in other areas, through Roman social practice.
More frequently than describing himself as conversing with books, Seneca talks of being with their authors.Footnote 11 Alongside this image he recommends the reader to subject himself to the censorious gaze of some influential figure from the past, to imagine that that figure is watching his actions. In what follows I will discuss Seneca's use of these images and relate them to recent discussions of the Romans as having a ‘face’ culture, one very concerned with how one is viewed. This is an aspect of Seneca's writing that is given particular prominence by Shadi Bartsch.Footnote 12 The approach I take to examining Seneca's use of an imagined viewer for moral improvement works from two different starting points from that of Bartsch. First, Bartsch takes Seneca to be writing as a member of Nero's court; secondly, she draws upon all Seneca's writing for his ideas on the gaze.
Bartsch suggests that Seneca's membership of Nero's court made it difficult to align himself with the Stoic senatorial opposition.Footnote 13 This claim is problematic on a number of counts. First, for much of Seneca's writing career he was not part of Nero's court. He spent eight years in exile under Claudius; and in the last years of his life, a period of immense literary production, he was, as we have seen, out of favour and in retirement. Secondly, implicit perhaps in such a valuation is the suggestion that Seneca is a spokesman for his social class – that he is writing ideology. This is an idea advanced by Thomas Habinek and taken up by Matthew Roller.Footnote 14 However, in the Epistles Seneca is if anything a critic of the values of his social class. Habinek, following Brent Shaw, presents the Stoic philosophy of Seneca in such a way that its value system is inverted; the absolute values of the good and the bad are subordinated, in effect, to the secondary values of the indifferent things, things neither good nor bad but able either to be preferred or avoided.Footnote 15 Yet Seneca, following Stoicism, argues consistently that only virtue is good and only vice is bad. From this standpoint it is more accurate to characterize his writing not as transmitting the dominant ideology but as a counter-ideology to it.Footnote 16 When, therefore, he encourages his reader to live with influential people from the past, he is not seeking to reassure them in their current beliefs about their status but to urge them to make a radical reassessment of those beliefs.
Seneca's relationship with the imperial court changed over his career, and this is reflected in his writing. His early consolations, for example, react to his exile, while his Epistles preach that public life is incompatible with philosophy.Footnote 17 Bartsch, however, investigates Seneca's use of the gaze without considering how it might have changed over his career. By contrast, I am looking at his use of this image only in the Epistles. Furthermore, I will focus on a number of the letters, taking care to embed his use of the gaze within the context of the argument of each of these letters.Footnote 18 The Seneca in this work is one who writes conscious of his legacy. In Ep. 8 he describes himself as writing for posterity, as pointing out a path of philosophic improvement that he has only lately found. His previous political career is presented, by implication, as wandering. The ever-present threat of death is a frequent topic in the work, reflecting his own awareness of living and writing under the hostile scrutiny of the imperial court and its delatores. As Henderson nicely puts it, he is ‘writing for his life – or (to get closer) for his death’.Footnote 19
The approving gaze
For Bartsch, Seneca has a project to ‘reestablish the sense of some authentic core of non-socially determined selfhood in the turbulent culture of the first century ce’.Footnote 20 She sees this as primarily a matter of the philosopher turning ‘from the public eye to the self-generated eye’.Footnote 21 However, she finds inconsistencies in Seneca's attempt to do this; she thinks that the philosopher, despite trying to recommend self-reliance and autonomy, still wants the approval of others.Footnote 22 A part of the self-generated gaze is the imagined gaze of figures from the past, although, Bartsch suggests, these provide only a ‘ghostly presence’.Footnote 23 Yet the activity of reading, as described in the Epistles, gives substance to these figures, gives their ghostly presence flesh. Seneca appears conscious of how he would like to be read and he seeks to shape this by advising his reader on how to read philosophical works. He situates himself in a constellation of philosophical writers: his relationship to previous writers is variously imagined, and the reader is invited to relate to Seneca in similar ways. Nor is the gaze that Seneca describes simply self-generated; rather he is selective as to the community whose approval he seeks: he rejects public approval for the approval of the community of philosophers, past and future.Footnote 24
Central to the value system of republican Rome was the importance of being viewed; their culture has been called a ‘culture of spectacle’.Footnote 25 As Bartsch describes it: ‘The institutions of the Roman republic – the Senate, the courts, the assemblies, the Forum, the retinues, the censors, even the games – were shaped by the judging force of a collective gaze.’Footnote 26 This culture accounted for much of the importance of spectacle in Rome. Most notable, of course, was the triumph awarded a successful general, but the importance of display can also be seen in the morning salutatio of one's clients and their comitatio when one went to the Forum, both activities that Tacitus tells us Seneca stopped after his retirement from public life. The list could be extended, but the other particularly significant display, comparable with the triumph, was the funeral procession of a senator, in which the body of the deceased was carried down to the Forum preceded by lictors and accompanied by family members and officials, but also actors wearing the masks of his noble ancestors. At the rostra these masked actors sat in curule chairs while the eulogy was delivered by a prominent descendant.Footnote 27
A corollary of this culture of spectacle and the importance of being seen is the concern for honour or reputation that was evident in Roman culture, which we see in Latin terms for emotions such as pudor (‘shame’) and verecundia (‘modesty’). The focus on being seen, for instance, comes across in a recent study of these emotions by Robert Kaster, who describes pudor as a reaction to seeing oneself being seen in discreditable terms.Footnote 28
The establishment of the Principate changed the functioning of this culture in important ways. The avenues for self-display were gradually taken over by the princeps and his court. Over the course of the reign of Augustus, aristocrats who were not members of the imperial family were excluded from celebrating a triumph. The building of public monuments in Rome was similarly monopolized and the funerals of senators were subject to imperial control, becoming less magnificent and eventually ceasing to be public.Footnote 29 It is this diminished scope of the elite for self-display that Bartsch sees Seneca as reacting to in his writing.Footnote 30
For Bartsch, Seneca's reaction is to reject a traditional external moral judgement for an internal one.Footnote 31 In assessing this claim, as mentioned, I will be focusing on the Epistles. This work has a number of qualities that make it significant in this regard. The fact that it dates from after Seneca's fall from power in Nero's court has already been mentioned. It is also a work that develops: the letters between Seneca and his friend Lucilius are a sequence that shows Lucilius gradually adopting a more philosophical life. Furthermore, the letters are a medium well suited to the interest that Seneca shows in the work in the processes of reading and writing in making philosophical progress. Unlike the purportedly oral nature of the philosophical dialogue, the relationship that he creates with his reader is consciously mediated by texts.Footnote 32
Being viewed in Seneca's Epistles
In the early letters Seneca seeks to get his friend to retire from public life, to adopt the style of life that he himself has recently adopted.Footnote 33 In contrast to some of his earlier works, in the Epistles public life is declared to be incompatible with the philosophical life.Footnote 34 More broadly, the values that philosophy teaches are incompatible with popular ones. This can be seen in Ep. 29, a letter that marks an important stage in the early part of the correspondence. It is the last letter of Book 3 and the last letter to close with an excerpted quote from another writer. Its closing sections set the scene for the next book, which contains a number of letters important to this study. The start of the letter is concerned with the shaky progress of a mutual friend, Marcellinus; Seneca then moves to advise Lucilius to take stock of his own progress – how far he has come and what lies ahead – and to take a stand against what frightens him. He then offers a quote in closing, one from Epicurus, who notes that his values are incompatible with those of the crowd. Seneca suggests that this comment is applicable to every school of philosophy by asking who can be pleasing to the crowd who is pleased by virtue.Footnote 35 He here makes virtus, a goddess with a cult in Rome, and therefore a pre-eminently public value, apparently the sole reserve of philosophy and not able to be cultivated in public life. In fact, he implies next, the public would not recognize it: similem te illis facias oportet: non probabunt nisi agnoverint (‘you must make yourself similar to them; they will withhold their approval if they do not recognize you as one of themselves’; 29.11).
Seneca next sets out (29.12) what philosophy can offer Lucilius, in contrast to popular acclaim:
ut malis tibi placere quam populo, ut aestimes iudicia, non numeres, ut sine metu deorum hominumque vivas, ut aut vincas mala aut finias.
…it will make you prefer to please yourself rather than the populace, it will make you weigh, and not merely count, men's judgments, it will make you live without fear of gods or men, it will make you either overcome evils or end them.
These are major claims for what philosophy can achieve, and Seneca can be seen to develop how this is to be done in the next book. They are also claims that relate importantly to the context in which he was writing. His writing might win acclaim or otherwise but it also risked censorship; it might bring him prosecution and death. It is this threat that explains the stress on the last two gifts of philosophy: the ability to live free from fear and to overcome troubles or, if necessary, to take the considered choice of suicide to end them. These are important themes in the Epistles generally and in Book 4 in particular.Footnote 36 The first two are related: being pleasing to the crowd is similar to seeing the esteem of others as a simple numbers game. By contrast, Seneca suggests that philosophy can teach you to prefer to be pleasing to yourself rather than to the crowd. The solipsistic tendency in this preference is balanced by learning to assess the judgements of others, rather than count them. In the next book Seneca develops where to find these authoritative judgements and how to assess them.
Having regard for the influential opinions of others was something that Seneca had discussed in two letters prior to Ep. 29.Footnote 37 At Ep. 11 Seneca had strongly advised following the advice of Epicurus and adopting an influential figure from the past as an internal guardian. Imagining this figure watching one's actions would dissuade Lucilius from behaving badly. He suggested choosing either Cato or Laelius as a custos or exemplum. This person should be someone whose life, speech, and very appearance expressing his soul Lucilius likes: elige eum cuius tibi placuit et vita et oratio et ipse animum ante se ferens vultus; illum tibi semper ostende vel custodem vel exemplum (‘Choose someone whose life, conversation, and soul-expressing face have satisfied you; picture him always to yourself as your protector or your pattern’; Ep. 11.10).
At Ep. 25 Seneca repeats this advice. In this letter and the earlier one, he offers the advice as the regular closing excerpt from another author. In each of the letters the excerpt can be seen to relate to the discussion of the value of verecundia (Ep. 11) or pudor (Ep. 25) in making progress. As mentioned earlier, these are emotions that are relational in their operation, but Seneca is arguing for changing who should evoke these emotions in someone seeking to live according to philosophy. It is somebody internal to the philosopher rather than the society at large. At Ep. 25.6 he suggests that the ultimate goal is to have reverentia tui (‘self-respect’) so that such a guardian, like a paedagogus (‘student-minding slave’), could be dismissed.Footnote 38
Epistle 33 and reading
The three qualities that Seneca picks out for the guardian – his way of life, manner of speech, and appearance – suggest that the reader has the resources to reconstruct them. The last was accessible through statuary and other images, while the others would be available through texts, either about or by these men.Footnote 39 It is appropriate, therefore, that in the next book, Book 4, reading should be an important topic. The most important letter for this is Ep. 33, in which Seneca presents the challenge not just to recite the words of another but to become a writer oneself. In this respect, he would doubtless have approved of the practice of Machiavelli, who describes The Prince as arising out of his evening conferences.Footnote 40Ep. 33 starts with Seneca's rejection of Lucilius’ request for more quotes. These quotes had been an important part of each of the letters in the first three books. In Ep. 2 of the collection he counselled his friend to excerpt and memorize quotes from his own reading. And in Ep. 6 he promised to send some books with all the best bits already marked out to make reading easier. However, as mentioned, at the end of Book 3 the quotes ended, and in Ep. 33, Seneca responds to a request for their reintroduction with the argument that excerpting is not appropriate for Stoic authors. The shift from a generic introduction to philosophy in the first three books to something specifically Stoic was signalled in the second letter of Book 4, Ep. 31, which outlined the Stoic concept of things morally indifferent.
In Ep. 33, to summarize, Seneca makes three important points that can be related to his demand to interact at this stage with books, rather than isolated quotes. The first of these is that Stoics must be read in their entirety; they cannot be read from excerpts:
quare depone istam spem posse te summatim degustare ingenia maximorum virorum: tota tibi inspicienda sunt, tota tractanda. <continuando> res geritur et per lineamenta sua ingenii opus nectitur ex quo nihil subduci sine ruina potest.
So put aside that hope of yours that you can taste the talents of the greatest men in summary: you must look at them as wholes, study them as wholes. The task is performed with a sequence and from its parts a work of genius is woven together from which nothing can be removed without ruin.
(33.5)This is a particularly important passage for Seneca's concept of proper reading. He is insistent on needing to engage with these authors’ ideas in their entirety (tota…tota and nihil…sine ruina). He emphasizes the ingenium of the writers, first as metonymy for the works produced (ingenia) and then as the agent of a work being created (ingenii).
Such a focus on ingenium is consonant with Seneca's view that style is not separable from ideas. The classic definition of this is the proverb talis hominibus fuit oratio qualis vita, ‘People's speech is just like their life’ (Ep. 114.1). That the words you use reveal who you are fits with an aesthetic appreciation of an author, as Seneca goes on to suggest:
nec recuso quominus singula membra, dummodo in ipso homine, consideres: non est formonsa cuius crus laudatur aut brachium, sed illa cuius universa facies admirationem partibus singulis abstulit.
Examine the separate parts, if you like, provided you examine them as parts of the man himself. She is not a beautiful woman whose ankle or arm is praised, but she whose general appearance makes you forget to admire her single attributes.
(33.6)This demand is significant in a number of ways. There is a continued requirement to see the whole over the parts (in ipso homine). It is also striking that, as with Seneca's description of ingenia earlier, the text vanishes and the reader is imagined to have direct access to the writer. It is an elision of the text similar to the one that Machiavelli effects in his evening conferences. Finally, in contrast to imagining these authors as authoritatively viewing the trainee philosopher – an image to which Bartsch gives great importanceFootnote 41 – Seneca here reverses the direction of viewing, and the reader is invited to make an aesthetic judgement of these writers.
After arguing that quotes are not appropriate, Seneca next appears to relent, saying that he can provide his friend with a plenitude of them. However, he goes on to insist that they are really only appropriate to children and beginners. He demands that an imagined interlocutor say what he thinks, rather than rehearse the ideas of famous Stoics:
‘hoc Zenon dixit’: tu quid? ‘hoc Cleanthes’: tu quid? quousque sub alio moveris? impera et dic quod memoriae tradatur, aliquid et de tuo profer.
‘This is what Zeno said.’ But what have you yourself said? ‘This is the opinion of Cleanthes.’ But what is your own opinion? How long shall you march under another man's orders? Take command, and utter some word which posterity will remember. Put forth something – something from your own stock.
(Ep. 33.7)Seneca expands on this challenge. The reader should not be like this interlocutor, someone lurking in another's shadow, but an auctor, someone who initiates things; he should be someone who has nobility, is generosus (33.8). Then, quoting his words back at him, he demands that the interlocutor should differ from a book: ‘hoc dixit Zenon, hoc Cleanthes.’ aliquid inter te intersit et librum (‘“Thus said Zeno, thus said Cleanthes, indeed!” Let there be a difference between yourself and a book!’; 33.9). Given that earlier in the letter Seneca appears to see through texts to their authors, such a comment makes a cipher of the interlocutor.
In expecting the reader to form and express his own opinion, Seneca is making clear what he believes is required at this new level of study. It is principally a matter of attitude to one's teachers. This attitude, he had said at the start of the letter, was something Stoic; they are independent, not under a king.Footnote 42 It is also a posture that he expects to resonate with the reader's aristocratic values; the scope for being an auctor in public life had been diminished under the Principate, but Seneca argues that it is possible in the sphere of philosophy.Footnote 43 He is arguing here for a change in paradigm: the reader should not see writers from the past as speaking to him like a teacher but as speaking with him, very much as Machiavelli describes them. He should not be parroting their words, but subjecting them to critical scrutiny and forming his own opinions. In such a model past writers cannot be on a pedestal, a point that Seneca closes this letter by stressing: qui ante nos ista moverunt non domini nostri sed duces sunt, ‘Those who initiated these things are not our masters, but our guides’ (33.11).
Ep. 33, then, argues for the need to approach authors as wholes, and to form and articulate one's own opinion after reading them. What this means in practice can be understood from what Seneca says elsewhere and from what he says of his own reading practice. In respect of this reading practice, we are presented with something of a puzzle. In general terms he praises past philosophers: in Ep. 33, for example, they are chiefs (proceres, 33.1), and very great men (maximi viri, 33.5). He rolls off their names in lists of praiseworthy philosophers. However, in the course of the Epistles he quotes them relatively infrequently, and then very often to hold up to ridicule their syllogisms. At Ep. 83.9, for example, he describes Zeno as a vir maximus, huius sectae fortissimae ac sanctissimae conditor (‘Zeno, that greatest of men, the revered founder of our brave and holy school’), only to go on to ridicule his syllogistic solution to the problem of whether the wise man gets drunk or not.Footnote 44
Befriending the dead in the Epistles
This criticism of some of the details of works of past philosophers needs to be reconciled with Seneca's exhortation in Ep. 33 for Lucilius to read them, and read them whole, in their entirety. A major clue to this lies in the passages in which Seneca lists their names. Stoic writers such as Zeno, Cleanthes, Chrysippus, and Posidonius occur alongside people not famous for what they wrote but for living philosophical lives: the two Catos, Laelius, Socrates. It appears that Seneca accorded these past Stoic writers respect on a basis similar to that which he accorded to Socrates and Cato – because they too lived philosophically; they practised what they preached. Why this mattered to Seneca can be developed in terms of his encouragement to the reader to develop a relationship with these figures based on his ideas of friendship and exempla, where he elides the distinctions of absence and presence, living and dead.
The fundamental importance of friendship to the conception of the Epistles is obvious.Footnote 45 The friendship of Seneca and Lucilius is one conducted through letters, and their physical separation is a requirement to justify the exchange of letters. Yet Seneca suggests in Ep. 55.9 that it is possible to be intimate (conversari) even with an absent friend: conversari cum amicis absentibus licet, et quidem quotiens velis, quamdiu velis, ‘It is possible to have the company even of absent friends, and indeed as many times as you want and for as long as you want’. A friend, he says further on in the same letter, should be ‘possessed in the mind’: amicus animo possidendus est (55.11). In this way, the friend can be present whenever one desires.Footnote 46 From this perspective, he goes on to claim, complete letters are not necessary: his intimacy with Lucilius is so great that he should only be sending him notes. Nor is even death a barrier to such enjoyment of one's friendship, as he argues by way of consolation at Ep. 99.4.
It is not, perhaps, surprising therefore that Seneca should have suggested in an earlier work, On the Shortness of Life, that one can befriend past philosophers. There he says that those who wish to have various famous philosophers as their most intimate friends (qui…volent habere quam familiarissimos; Brev. 14.5) are engaged in the true duties of life. He goes on to add that becoming a client to one of them would be wholly and genuinely profitable, unlike real clientship.Footnote 47 He adds that you can even be adopted into their noble families, an idea also found in the Epistles as we shall see.
In the Epistles, Ep. 104 invites a similar response to past philosophers. In this letter Seneca invites the reader to live with these philosophers, to converse with them as he suggests one can with absent friends. To put this invitation in its context it is worth considering this letter in some detail. Seneca starts by telling his friend that he is fleeing to his Nomentum villa, not from the city, he insists, but from a fever, which he says resides not in the person but the place. He here includes one of his very few mentions of his wife, Paulina. He remarks that Paulina's concern for him makes him attend more to his health for her sake, and that such concern for oneself for the sake of those close is an honourable emotion that should be indulged.Footnote 48 He then argues that travel in and of itself is not morally useful. Rather we should spend our time in the company of ancient philosophers: inter studia versandum est et inter auctores sapientiae ut quaesita discamus, nondum inventa quaeramus (‘We ought rather to spend our time in study, and to cultivate those who are masters of wisdom, learning something which has been investigated, but not settled’; 104.16). By contrast, addressing an imagined adversarius, he says that when you travel you lead all your ills and passions with you, an image which he then sharpens by insisting that these ills are not being led but are actually within you. Emending one's soul involves changing who one's companions are:
si velis vitiis exui, longe a vitiorum exemplis recedendum est. avarus, corruptor, saevus, fraudulentus, multum nocituri si prope a te fuissent, intra te sunt. ad meliores transi: cum Catonibus vive, cum Laelio, cum Tuberone. quod si convivere etiam Graecis iuvat, cum Socrate, cum Zenone versare: alter te docebit mori si necesse erit, alter antequam necesse erit. vive cum Chrysippo, cum Posidonio: hi tibi tradent humanorum divinorumque notitiam, hi iubebunt in opere esse nec tantum scite loqui et in oblectationem audientium verba iactare, sed animum indurare et adversus minas erigere.
If you want to be stripped of your vices, you must retreat far from the patterns of vices. The miser, the swindler, the thug and the cheat, who will do you much harm if they were just near you, are within you. Transfer to better ones: live with the Catos, with Laelius, with Tubero. But if you enjoy living also with Greeks, spend time with Socrates and with Zeno: the former will show you how to die if necessary; the latter how to die before it is necessary. Live with Chrysippus, with Posidonius: they will give you knowledge of human and divine things; they will bid you be at work, and not just to speak skilfully and juggle words for the amusement of listeners, but to steel your mind and stand erect against threats.
(Ep. 104.21–2)These exempla must be internalized as an antidote to the vicious ones already present in us, exempla that press upon us from all sides in the form of the people around us. On occasions Seneca describes this mass of influence as the crowd (turba), and counsels avoiding it (e.g. Ep. 7.1). To oppose the influence of the popular values of the crowd, Seneca can be seen as proposing what has been called a counter-society of philosophers.Footnote 49 What is not sometimes noticed, however, is that for him this society seems principally of the dead rather than the living.Footnote 50
The ability to stand erect against threats through greatness of soul is what Seneca then expands on, weaving in a line of Virgil: terribiles visu formae, Letumque Labosque (‘Shapes dread to look upon, of toil or death’; Aen. 6.277). Virgil's astuteness at using visu here is noted, as it highlights a crucial distinction between appearance and reality. Seneca then concludes the letter with a lengthy rebuttal of the accusation that philosophers utter words greater than human nature can sustain. This rebuttal is by way of exempla, first Socrates and then more fully Cato the Younger. It seems clear from the length given to the exempla of Socrates and Cato that they serve to illustrate what Seneca means by ‘living with’ philosophers. More than their doctrines, it is their exemplarity that he seems to value from their company; in particular, both of them remain unaffected in the face of Fortune's hostility.
Seneca as an exemplum
Turning, then, to the exemplarity of past authors, we find that they have two major roles: as figures that on the one hand monitor one's actions and on the other inspire emulation. The role of an exemplum as a monitor is one mentioned already; in Epp. 11 and 25 Seneca advised his friend to adopt such an exemplum as an internal guardian. A similar role was played by a particular type of exemplum in Roman society, the imagines (funeral masks) of one's ancestors. As Flower says, ‘For the aristocratic Roman the imagines played the role of an audience which reflected the norms of his “honour group”’.Footnote 51 One was expected to live up to their judgement; Cicero, for instance, at Pro Caelio 34 has Appius Claudius Caecus reproach his descendant Clodia for being unmoved by the imagines of her family.
Bartsch, when discussing the guardian of Epp. 11 and 25, describes this sort of imagined viewer as somewhat ephemeral, a creation of one's imagination.Footnote 52 However, at Ep. 11, as mentioned, Seneca is clear that these figures have objective features: their appearance, their style of speech, and their way of life.Footnote 53 These features become even more relevant if we reflect that Seneca is writing the Epistles for readers beyond Lucilius. In the letter immediately preceding Ep. 33, which suggests how one should read authors, he describes himself in the role of one of these guardians to Lucilius: verba dare non potes: tecum sum. sic vive tamquam quid facias auditurus sim, immo tamquam visurus (‘You cannot deceive me: I am with you. Live as though I will hear, or rather as though I will see what you do’; Ep. 32.1). For Bartsch this passage suggests Senecan presumption: he ‘arrogates’ this role of Epicurus or another to himself.Footnote 54 However, if one accepts that these exemplary guardians have some objective substance, the passage suggests that the reader of the Epistles at the next remove from Lucilius has come to know Seneca well enough through his letters to be able to imagine how he would judge his or her actions. Such a view is further supported not only by what Seneca says in Ep. 33 but also in a number of letters later in Book IV that will be considered below.Footnote 55
Complementary to the more negative role of exempla in judging conduct was their positive one in inspiring emulation.Footnote 56 In this they overlap with the imagines of aristocratic families, which both Polybius and Sallust record as being great spurs to emulation.Footnote 57 We see Seneca as aware of this in his reconceptualization of nobility as something philosophical but having Roman forms. He does this very clearly in Ep. 44, where he argues that it is the mind, not our ancestors, that makes us noble:
non facit nobilem atrium plenum fumosis imaginibus; nemo in nostram gloriam vixit nec quod ante nos fuit nostrum est: animus facit nobilem.
An atrium full of smoke-begrimed busts does not make one noble; nobody has lived to lend us glory, nor is that which was before us ours: the mind makes one noble.
(Ep. 44.5)Footnote 58In fact, he suggests, all previous philosophers can be Lucilius’ ancestors: omnes hi maiores tui sunt, si te illis geris dignum (‘All of them are your ancestors, if you behave in a manner worthy of them’; Ep. 44.3). Alongside the metaphor of past philosophers being one's friends, Seneca here offers that of their being one's ancestors.Footnote 59
In a later letter, Ep. 64, Seneca can be seen as acting within this paradigm, describing himself as relating to the works of previous philosophers like a good paterfamilias and seeking to bequeath an inheritance greater than the one he received:
veneror itaque inventa sapientiae inventoresque; adire tamquam multorum hereditatem iuvat. mihi ista acquisita, mihi laborata sunt. sed agamus bonum patrem familiae, faciamus ampliora quae accepimus; maior ista hereditas a me ad posteros transeat.
Therefore I worship the discoveries of wisdom and their discoverers. To enter, as it were, into the inheritance of many predecessors is a delight. It was for me that they laid up this treasure; it was for me that they toiled. But let us play the part of a careful householder; let us increase what we have inherited. May this inheritance pass from me to my descendants larger than before.
(Ep. 64.7)Seneca describes himself as working within the expectations of the Roman virtue of pietas. Within the Stoic tradition the affective force of erotic love could lead to philosophical progress.Footnote 60 However, Seneca, like other Roman philosophers, was suspicious of any such potential.Footnote 61 This use of pietas suggests that he valued a more moderate form of affection for inspiring philosophical progress.Footnote 62 At the end of Ep. 64, he shows himself expressing his pietas to past philosophers by keeping statues of them and celebrating their birthdays, in a manner analogous to the respect appropriately paid to one's patron.Footnote 63 However, these are outward shows of respect, and Seneca concludes Ep. 64 with the observation that he welcomes these men into his mind with the highest honour:
quidni ego magnorum virorum et imagines habeam incitamenta animi et natales celebrem? quidni ego illos honoris causa semper appellem? quam venerationem praeceptoribus meis debeo, eandem illis praeceptoribus generis humani, a quibus tanti boni initia fluxerunt.
Why should I not keep statues of great men to kindle my enthusiasm, and celebrate their birthdays? Why should I not continually greet them with respect and honour? The reverence which I owe to my own teachers I owe in like measure to those teachers of the human race, the source from which the beginnings of such great blessings have flowed.
(Ep. 64.9)Seneca acknowledges the efficacy of imagines as spurs to conduct, but at Ep. 40.1 he suggests that texts, in particular letters, convey something more essential of a person. They express a recognition (agnoscere) that is more significant than that from a picture, which he implies is merely an image of the body, in contrast to a letter, which is an image of the mind:
quod frequenter mihi scribis gratias ago; nam quo uno modo potes te mihi ostendis. numquam epistulam tuam accipio ut non protinus una simus. si imagines nobis amicorum absentium iucundae sunt, quae memoriam renovant et desiderium falso atque inani solacio levant, quanto iucundiores sunt litterae, quae vera amici absentis vestigia, veras notas afferunt? nam quod in conspectu dulcissimum est, id amici manus epistulae impressa praestat, agnoscere.
I thank you for writing to me so often; for you are revealing yourself to me in the only way you can. I never get a letter from you without us straight away being together. If pictures of our absent friends are pleasing to us, though they only refresh the memory and lighten our longing by an unreal and insubstantial solace, how much more pleasant is a letter, which brings us real traces, real evidence, of an absent friend! For that which is sweetest when we meet face to face is afforded by the impress of a friend's hand upon his letter —recognition.
(Ep. 40.1)This comment seems triggered by Lucilius’ response to a recent letter (Ep. 38) on the efficacy of short letters. In that letter Seneca suggests that conversations are more effective than orations for learning, with the clear implication that letters are analogous to conversations.Footnote 64 At Ep. 40.1, he says that in his letters Lucilius reveals himself to Seneca, which naturally implies that Seneca in turn is also revealing himself to Lucilius.Footnote 65 In the act of reading the two are, like close friends, in each others’ company.Footnote 66 There is also something exemplary in this self-revelation. Showing oneself to an audience concerned with philosophical improvement is something valuable, something to be emulated.
This passage can be read as an instruction to the reader of the published collection: one can come to know Seneca as he reveals himself in his letters, and one can befriend him. In this, Seneca is like the past philosophers described earlier. There are, however, two differences. First, in Epp. 38 and 40, there is the suggestion that in his letters Seneca has chosen a particularly effective way to reveal himself to the reader; he is present more fully than those that wrote in other genres. Secondly he is an exemplum, quite explicitly, not of a sage but of someone making progress, a proficiens; he offers cures that have worked on himself (Ep. 8.2) and describes himself as someone lying in the same hospital as the reader (Ep. 27.1).Footnote 67
Seneca enacts reading an exemplum
The themes of reading and exemplarity are brought together nicely at the start of Ep. 64, the letter whose end was discussed earlier, where Seneca describes how he honours the imagines of great philosophers. There he presents himself as a reader, giving his reaction to reading a philosophical text. It is a passage that shows in action his ideas on reading, on the need to see authors as wholes and to form a relationship with these authors. He models reading for the reader, revealing the types of things he valued in a text, which in turn show the type of texts he valued:
lectus est deinde liber Quinti Sextii patris, magni, si quid mihi credis, viri, et licet neget Stoici. quantus in illo, di boni, vigor est, quantum animi! hoc non in omnibus philosophis invenies: quorundam scripta clarum habentium nomen exanguia sunt. instituunt, disputant, cavillantur, non faciunt animum quia non habent: cum legeris Sextium, dices, ‘vivit, viget, liber es, supra hominem est, dimittit me plenum ingentis fiduciae’. in qua positione mentis sim cum hunc lego fatebor tibi: libet omnis casus provocare, libet exclamare, ‘quid cessas, fortuna? congredere: paratum vides’. illius animum induo qui quaerit ubi se experiatur, ubi virtutem suam ostendat,
We then had read to us a book by Quintus Sextius the Elder. He is a great man, if you have any confidence in my opinion, and a real Stoic, though he himself denies it. Ye Gods, what strength, what spirit is in him! You won't find this in all philosophers; the writings of some who have an illustrious name are bloodless. They lay down rules, they argue, and they quibble; they do not infuse spirit because they don't have any: when you read Sextius, you will say, ‘He is alive; he is strong; he is free; he is more than a man; he sends me off filled with a mighty confidence’. I will confess to you the state of mind I am in when I read his works: I want to challenge every hazard; I want to cry, ‘What are you waiting for, Fortune? Come at me: I'm ready for you!’ I take on the spirit of a man who seeks where he can make trial of himself, where he may display his virtue:
The martial tone is important. It fits with redefining Roman nobility: ‘vivere…militare est’ (‘to live is to fight’), as he says in Ep. 96.5. The Roman martial ethos is retained, but the enemy is now Fortune and the battlefield is internal. Issuing a challenge to Fortune is a striking image that seems to demand a similar response in the reader of his epistle. Seneca has attempted vividly to transfer his own mental state to the reader. In this passage he illustrates through himself the proper way to read philosophy – that is, with a view to applying it. He also passes judgement on what constitutes good philosophy: it should facere animum, literally ‘make or construct mind’. It is relevant that here, as in Ep. 33.5–6 discussed earlier, he elides the distinction between a text and its writer. The claims that he makes about Sextius, ‘vivit, viget, liber est’ (‘He is alive; he is strong; he is free’), can be true only of his mind in as far as it resides in the text they have just read, since the author was dead at the time when Seneca heard his book read. Yet here Seneca proclaims that he is alive, alive like the other philosophers and exempla with whom he exhorts us to live.
Seneca's description of hearing Sextius contrasts with that of Machiavelli and his evening conferences; Seneca is explicit in his reference to a book and to reading, whereas Machiavelli describes only people. Yet the outcome is not greatly different: it is quickly Sextius, not his book, whom Seneca describes, and he is felt to be alive. Furthermore, they share a confidence that an author is visible in his or her text in a way that separates them from some modern readers influenced by modern literary theories. They both also describe reading as a conversation with an author, and both assert that such a conversation can be beneficial. Even allowing that the metaphor in Machiavelli's letter to Vettori is in part a way to salvage his pride in his current circumstances, he still credits his The Prince to these conferences. The image of a conversation is important; it makes the relationship in some sense mutual: Machiavelli, for instance, both receives and produces ideas. In Seneca's case, he is insistent that someone seeking to live philosophically must both read and write; so, too, the judging gaze can go both ways.
Seneca sees benefit in being influenced by an authoritative individual imagined to be able to view one's actions; however, rather than understanding these figures to be shadowy figments of the philosopher's imagination, they are given substance by the activity of reading, which Seneca describes using the metaphors of befriending past philosophers and of being adopted into their noble families. He encourages the reader to reject the values and valuation of contemporary society, but those values with which he advocates replacing them are not solipsistically chosen. They are the values of a textual community, and reading the texts of that community provides a way to internalize the values of a counter-society of philosophers. Indeed, Seneca, as a Stoic, sees these values as found not just in texts but in nature. Stoics seek to follow nature, and to this end Seneca argues that nature wishes us to view her, making us upright to enable this (Ot. 5.4).
Seneca's rejection of contemporary values and his retirement from political life could create the impression that he cut himself off from the living.Footnote 68 It is therefore significant that in the two letters where he recommends living with dead authors (Ep. 104), or shows himself venerating their images (Ep. 64), he also shows himself valuing the company of his wife (Ep. 104) and entertaining close friends (Ep. 64); reading Quintus Sextius was something he did with guests. Political circumstances may have forced Seneca to conduct his public life through his writing and to advocate living with past philosophers as something preferable to engaging in public life, but they did not require him to reject private life also.
In addition to distancing himself from the judgement of his contemporaries in his last works, Seneca took care to avoid having these works used as ammunition for a delator to prosecute him. In this he succeeded, though he was not able to avoid the fallout from the failed Pisonian conspiracy. He suffered censorship of his final words in that he was not allowed to change his will (Tac. Ann. 15.62). However, he did write something in his last hours that was in circulation in Tacitus’ day (Ann. 15.63), though it has not survived to ours, and we can only speculate as to how it might have changed our understanding of him. It is quite likely that he revealed a franker view on the regime under which he lived than in any other of his works.Footnote 69 Nevertheless, Tacitus records Seneca as bequeathing the imago vitae suae (‘image of his life’) to his friends (Ann. 15.62). He bequeathed this image to later generations as well, in his invitation in the Epistles to befriend him and come to know him as he reveals himself in that work.
