The Ideological Context

The biographical and political circumstances in which Seneca composed De clementia are well observed and need only brief reiteration.Footnote ⁶ Born in Cordoba and educated at Rome, the Stoic philosopher had been banished to Corsica early in his political career by the emperor Claudius for suspected adultery with Julia Livilla, the sister of Caligula. His exile was revoked in a.d. 49, however, after the intervention of Claudius' new wife, Agrippina, and Seneca was appointed praeceptor to her son, the young Nero, charged with educating the royal prince in the traditional aristocratic syllabus of the studia liberalia. After Nero's accession, as De clementia powerfully illustrates, the emperor remained under the informal political tutelage of Seneca, who, together with Burrus, the prefect of the praetorian guard, exercised an extraordinary degree of influence at court until the latter's death in a.d. 62 and Seneca's subsequent fall from grace and eventual suicide in a.d. 65.

Considerable political optimism surrounded Nero's early years. The dominant image conveyed in the accession literature to which Seneca's treatise belongs, as Susanna Braund has underlined, is ‘of a new era of peace, security and justice’ after the maladministration and civil unrest of the previous reign. One charge traditionally levelled against the moral seriousness of De clementia is that its praise of Nero's innocentia and his bloodless reign to date rings particularly hollow since it was almost certainly composed after the murder in early a.d. 55 of Britannicus (the son of Claudius and a rival claimant to the imperial throne). But we do not know whether Nero was responsible for his death; if he was — or was believed to be — then Seneca's formulation of a policy of imperial clemency arguably looks more, rather than less, apt. Moreover, and more importantly, the accusations of adulation become harder to sustain once we obtain a firmer grasp of the rhetorical codes in which Seneca's theory is couched. Its readers — not only Nero but also those other members of the political élite trained in the ars rhetorica — will have identified a fairly sophisticated strategy of praise at work in the shape of Seneca's argument, which, as we shall see, lends its approving tones a sharper edge than is customarily observed in the historiography.

Seneca moves into place the terminology with which he will pursue the Principate's pivotal contention about its restoration of liberty to the republic in the first chapter of De clementia, congratulating his prince on the fact that ‘everything entrusted to your guardianship (fidem tutelamque) is kept safe … nothing has been taken from the res publica by violence or secret fraud on your part’.Footnote ⁷ Here Seneca broaches some central ideas — of trust and tutelage — which he will subsequently develop to defend his repeated description of the Roman civitas under monarchical government as a res publica. At the same time, his proem advances an additional point: the Roman res publica is a body now enjoying not only felicitas but also libertas. As he puts it, the Roman populace now looks upon ‘the happiest form of res publica … lacking nothing for supreme liberty (summam libertatem) save the licence to ruin itself’.Footnote ⁸

Although Seneca uses the word libertas only once when referring to the state of the monarchical res publica, his point in the prologue is no mere aside. Seneca substantiates his claim in detail, using a vocabulary and set of arguments which were conventional in discussions of libertas, its antonym, and the condition of the res publica. The claim itself can be plotted on an arc of ideological assertion which stretches from Augustus' boast in the Res Gestae that, ‘at the age of nineteen … I raised an army, with which I successfully championed the liberty of the republic when it was oppressed by the tyranny of a faction’, to the repeated acclamations of the restoration of liberty under Trajan in Pliny's Panegyricus.Footnote ⁹ In fact, the essential outline of Seneca's case for the monarchical republic can already be observed in the Res Gestae, where the proclamation of the princeps as vindex libertatis presented Augustus in juridical language as the liberator of a person held in a servile condition contrary to the law.Footnote ¹⁰ The thrust of this argument is relatively clear: the Roman people should think of the transformation of its res publica at the hands of Augustus as the passage of a body from an unlawful state of servitude under the domination of a partisan faction to a condition of liberty, now rightfully restored by a single person. In De clementia Seneca presents a more sophisticated version of this story about the liberation of the Roman body politic — formerly torn apart by internal division but now unified under the rule of a perfectly rational princely mens — by relocating the narrative to a firmly Stoic moral universe. Within this setting, Seneca can apply some philosophical rigour to the concepts which he has appropriated, his argument buttressed by those crucial features of the Stoic system, determinism and providentialism, without which, as Anthony Long has pointed out, ‘any attempt to eludicate Stoic ethics’ was bound to be ‘broken-backed’.Footnote ¹¹

The Republican Inheritance

To some extent, then, De clementia supplies further evidence of Seneca's tendency, identified by Matthew Roller, to deploy elements of his Stoicism to ‘ground or critique’ conventional Roman moral values.Footnote ¹² But one questionable strand of interpretation runs through Roller's illuminating work, which surfaces in the view, expressed elsewhere in the recent literature, that when the terms libertas, servitus and the lexical set associated with the institution of slavery are deployed in the political domain, they are no longer to be understood literally, but as ‘conceptual categories associated with slavery … deployed metaphorically to structure the power relations found in the derived domain of politics’.Footnote ¹³ We are said to be looking, in short, at a ‘conceptual metaphor’.Footnote ¹⁴

Metaphors clearly abound in both the republican and the imperial political literature, Seneca's treatise included. The very idea of the res publica as a body in Roman political thought — prone to the disease of corruption, capable of grotesque deformation in times of civil conflict, and so on — exemplifies the phenomenon of which Roller speaks. But even here one might recall that republics are taken to consist, inter alia, of bodies in a straightforwardly physical sense; and the extent to which a wholesale metaphorical shift can be assumed to have necessarily occurred to the language of slavery and freedom when it comes to be applied to the body corporate is less clear. If we want to understand the political importance of libertas to Roman republican thought, we arguably need to interpret its double-jointed claim — that, properly constructed, the res publica offers a constitutional structure which keeps citizens free from domination, and that to live under a monarch is almost certainly to be reduced to a condition of unfreedom which reduces the subject to a servile status — much more literally. Seneca sees the force of this claim extremely clearly. In fact, he is ready to concede the point entirely. As he sees it, the emperor's subjects are indeed entirely dependent upon his arbitrary will, which is one reason why he repeatedly, and rather scandalously, discusses acts of cruelty and clemency within master-slave relations as exempla to be considered by the prince when thinking about his conduct towards his subjects.Footnote ¹⁵ But this is only because he is simultaneously engaged in redefining the terms of the debate, moving away from formal and juridical definitions in order to argue that to be a slave really means something altogether different. If anyone is engaged in engineering shifts in the meaning of libertas from the literal to the metaphorical in the political realm, it is Seneca rather than his republican predecessors whose thinking about freedom he is subverting.

Notwithstanding the degree of ideological conflict over what a civitas libera looked like and how best to secure it, especially in the late Republic, the analysis of the concept itself remained deeply indebted to a juridical understanding of freedom and servitude which was later codified in Roman law.Footnote ¹⁶ As the Digest puts it, the difference between free and unfree persons consists in the fact that ‘some persons are in their own power, some are subject to the law of another’.Footnote ¹⁷ Slaves are persons in the power of their masters. As such, they are said to be ‘subject to the jurisdiction of someone else’.Footnote ¹⁸ As Quentin Skinner summarizes it in his work on the early modern, neo-Roman account of the free state, ‘it likewise follows that what it means for someone to lack the status of a free subject must be for that person not to be sui iuris but instead to be sub potestate, under the power or subject to the will of someone else’.Footnote ¹⁹ Roman law classifies slaves as items of property: they are defined as persons but also as things which legally belong to their master.

This Roman concept of libertas thus continued to enshrine the fundamental contention of pre-Platonic Greek classical thinking, in which, as Bernard Williams remarked, ‘being free stands opposed above all, to being in someone's power … to lack freedom is paradigmatically ... to be subject to the will of another’.Footnote ²⁰ In Roman political thought, this understanding of free and unfree persons provides the basis of a theory of civil liberty in which the state of freedom is conceptualized in two distinctive ways. First, Roman citizens are thought to be unlike slaves in that they do not live in potestate domini; on the contrary, they live in a state of non-domination, to use Philip Pettit's term.Footnote ²¹ The term is appropriate: in De re publica, Cicero reports the view that ‘a people ruled by a king lacks many things, most importantly libertas, which consists not in having a just master, but in having no master’.Footnote ²² This statement encapsulates the distinctive character of the Roman conception of libertas. The essence of freedom is not held to consist simply in the actual absence of interference in the pursuit of one's chosen goals. Good masters can grant us that much. As Skinner points out, a great deal of Plautine comedy plays upon the fact that Roman slaves often experience the absence of interference in their lives — Tranio's master in Mostellaria has been in Egypt for three years — but no matter how much space and licence they enjoy on such occasions, they remain assuredly slaves, ‘subject or liable to death or violence at any time’.Footnote ²³ On the Roman understanding, to be free from any acts of arbitrary interference by another agent upon the exercise of our powers is not a sufficient condition of libertas. We must also be free from the potential threat of any such acts occurring. In other words, we must enjoy an enduring condition of immunity from arbitrary intervention. For it is eminently possible for another agent who has the power to intervene at will in someone else's life not, in fact, to do so, but for this state of affairs still to obstruct the enjoyment of one's freedom because non-intervention in such cases is simply forbearance: that agent retains the power of intervening according to their arbitrary judgement. In that state of affairs, we remain in the power of — indeed, at the mercy of — someone else. The mere threat of the deployment of another's discretionary powers is thought not to curtail one's liberty by inhibiting freedom of action and expression but to negate it.

The second characteristic of this idea of civil liberty is that it is conceptualized as a kind of status, a position protected from arbitrary interference. Freedom was said to be available to citizens only within a specific type of civil association capable of structurally guaranteeing the absence of masters in their lives. Romans identified the constitutional arrangements of their res publica as just such a structure, enshrining the iura, or rights, of its members and guaranteeing them against the possibility of their arbitrary subjection to the jurisdictional power of another.Footnote ²⁴ Those arrangements envisaged numerous forms of interference — in the shape of laws, most obviously — upon the agency of the citizens which were considered non-arbitrary and essential for the maintenance of liberty. Indeed, those laws were regarded as virtually synonymous with liberty itself, so fundamental were they held to be to the conservation of iura, and therefore civic freedom.

If governmental interference in the lives of citizens was to count as non-arbitrary, it needed in theory to be guided by reference to the arbitrium, or decision-making power, of them all. The degree of civic participation in the popular assemblies afforded by the constitution was thought, in conservative quarters, to ensure the inclusion of the citizen body to a sufficient degree to sustain the claim that each and every one of them lived sui iuris, and that libertas could consequently be predicated of the entire corpus rei publicae, as Cicero calls it.Footnote ²⁵ Populist demands for greater political equality, meanwhile, stipulated additional constitutional safeguards — the tribunate and the right of provocatio above all — as a further condition of libertas. But the basic consensus was that the body politic remained free by ensuring that citizens retained at least two crucial powers: ‘the right to elect officeholders directly and to vote on legislation’.Footnote ²⁶ By these mechanisms, they consented to the laws governing them; and no individual person or group of persons could be said to be imposing their particular will upon the wider body politic. In theory, then, that body could be held to be free in the same way as an individual free person: governed according to its own arbitrium.

The Ciceronian res publica

Even Cicero's most conservative inflections of this account of the res publica always include ‘a fundamental recognition of popular sovereignty’, as Schofield underlines.Footnote ²⁷ In Pro Sestio, for example, Cicero claims that the guiding wisdom of the constitution had been to ‘set the consilium of the Senate to preside over the res publica for ever’, while maintaining that its architects had nevertheless wanted ‘to have them [sc. the senators] chosen for that consilium by the whole people, and to make admission to that highest order open to the industry and virtue of the citizens’, especially in view of their rôle ‘to protect and increase the liberty and advantages of the common people’.Footnote ²⁸ Furthermore, if a free people delegates the power of consilium within the res publica to an elected aristocracy, the transfer takes the form of a trust, an idea which Cicero develops in his De officiis (as Schofield further notes) when delineating the duties of magistrates: ‘as with a guardianship, the administration of the res publica should be conducted in the interests of those who are entrusted to one's care, not in the interests of those to whom they have been entrusted’.Footnote ²⁹

The impact of the Ciceronian inheritance upon Seneca's reconstrual of the res publica as a monarchical entity in De clementia is discernible in two main ways. In the first place, De officiis had been a concerted attempt to think philosophically about some central elements of Roman republican ideology in an explicitly Stoic genre to which Seneca himself also contributed (although his own De officiis is lost).Footnote ³⁰ But it had implicated Stoic ethics in a robust attack on the idea of monarchy itself; and that association Seneca, as successor to the most distinguished philosophical writer of the republican period and as the architect of a new ideology, is intent upon breaking.

Although parts of De clementia appear to be quite self-consciously engaging with questions raised in De officiis, it is perhaps best not to regard the relationship between the two texts in terms of a duelling match: those debates may have been structured around conventional topics discussed more widely than is evident today. The connection lies at a deeper conceptual level: both are indebted to the same Stoic theory of moral personality. In Cicero's hands, that theory explicitly structures his account of the duties and decorum of the republican magistrate. In Seneca's argument, the terms of the same theory are manipulated differently in order to focus on the persona of the princely judge now presiding over the res publica. But Seneca also wants to retain parts of Cicero's apparatus within his design of the res publica, especially the notion of trust, in order to counter the accusation that no form of fides can be said to exist in a monarchical polity.Footnote ³¹

In De officiis, the discussion of trust addressed the question of how to ensure that individuals in government did not act out of their particular concerns but instead aligned them with those of their fellow citizens. Cicero's response to this problem was to make the cultivation of a set of civic virtues, especially justice and the maintenance of fides, central to his account in order to ensure that magistrates became servants of the common good. This solution is accompanied by a basic idea of representation. In a famous passage, Roman citizens are asked to lay aside their partisan interests as they enter government, and to adopt instead a rôle as political actors by assuming the persona civitatis as a whole:

Here, as Neal Wood points out, Cicero treats the civitas ‘as one person, whose likeness can be simulated by a single mask’.Footnote ³³ Although in De officiis Cicero gives us no account of the political ontology involved in the representation, his vision seemingly presupposes an underlying image of unity in the group whose persona the magistrate assumes.

To predicate libertas of a collective group in the form of a populus, a civitas or a res publica, then, underlined a fact about its constitutional organization that secured its citizens against the assertion of the ius and potestas of any individual or faction over the body politic which would reduce it to a servile status. And to be a slave in potestate domini meant becoming an item of property. Of all the things that the words ‘res publica’ could be stretched to designate in Roman politics — from the most material kinds of objects to more abstract notions of the common good — they were not easily applicable to items that had passed into private ownership. In De republica, Cicero describes the res publica as res populi; here, Schofield suggests, ‘the idea is presumably not that res publica is literally speaking property, but rather that the affairs and interests of the people may be conceived metaphorically as its property’.Footnote ³⁴ To construe this line of argument purely metaphorically, however, risks eclipsing an important fact about the res publica, namely that it also consisted in very material objects like bodies, buildings and land.Footnote ³⁵ That these things, as well as less tangible matters, might become the property of someone other than the citizens themselves was a real concern, and Seneca needed to attend to it.

Cicero's attack on Caesar in De officiis draws deeply upon the entrenched view that monarchy was rarely more than an arbitrary form of domination tantamount to slavery. The dictator had been ‘a man who longed to be king of the Roman people and master of every nation’.Footnote ³⁶ His desire was irrational and unjust: ‘anyone who says that such a desire is honourable is out of their mind: for they are approving the death of laws and liberty; and taking their own oppression — a foul, detestable thing — to be something glorious.’Footnote ³⁷ Caesar had been ‘a king who oppressed the Roman people themselves with the Roman people's army, and forced a city that was not just free, but even the ruler of nations, to be his slave …’.Footnote ³⁸ In more reflective mode, Cicero had conceded in De re publica that monarchy may be a valid form of republic, but even there libertas was not said to be one of its characteristics. The populus liber emerges after the expulsion of the kings, which is described as an act of liberation from the yoke of slavery.Footnote ³⁹ One finds the same equiparation between monarchy and unfreedom in Livy and Sallust in their accounts of the civitas libera. As Livy puts it, ‘the rule of the kings at Rome, from its foundation to its liberation, lasted two hundred and forty-four years’.Footnote ⁴⁰ In Book 2, his theme is ‘the new liberty enjoyed by the Roman people, their achievements in peace and war, annual magistracies, and laws superior in authority to men’.Footnote ⁴¹ Sallust similarly comments in the Catiline that the abolition of the monarchy marked a new era in which ‘the civitas, once liberty was won, grew incredibly strong and great in remarkably short time’.Footnote ⁴²

Clemency, Conscience and the Roman civitas in Seneca's speculum

Seneca presents much of his case for monarchy in a relatively conventional idiom. The crucial virtue of clementia had been the quality for which Cicero had praised Caesar in Pro Marcello and Pro Ligario, where some basic features of the concept in Seneca's work can already be discerned; and it had been pressed into the service of Roman imperial ideology by Augustus.Footnote ⁴³ Nevertheless, Seneca is extraordinarily prepared to acknowledge the depth of the changes to the structure of Roman politics which the imposition of monarchical government had caused. This feature of his argument in De clementia is more frequently observed than fully explained. For John Cooper and John Procopé, ‘what is striking about Seneca's account of monarchy is its frankness and absolutism’; similarly for Miriam Griffin, De clementia combines a ‘frank acceptance of the Principate on historical grounds with advocacy of a new ideology instead of pretending that an approximation of the old Republic still survived’.Footnote ⁴⁴ From the opening, breathtakingly explicit declaration of the powers of the Roman princeps — characterized by Susanna Braund as ‘chilling’ — De clementia breaks entirely with the prevailing pattern of Roman imperial ideology which had worked to mask the shift towards autocracy within Roman political life since the Augustan ascendancy.Footnote ⁴⁵ That task had been pursued by preserving a degree of ambivalence about the monarch's status, often representing him as a ‘civilis princeps’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Seneca's depiction of the prince continues to incorporate several discursive elements associated with this construction — gestures of recusatio, the emperor's unguarded passage through a loving civitas, and so on.Footnote ⁴⁷ But these commonplaces are deployed within a reconfigured theoretical landscape in which there is absolutely no concession to considerations, so pivotal to the general thrust of the ideology of the Principate, of ‘sustaining the illusion of the supremacy’ of the ‘traditional organs of government, the senate and the people constituted in various assemblies’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Seneca's prince is said to be many things to the Roman people — father, doctor, teacher — but his status is never dissembled, in the language of civilitas or any other, to suggest that he is ‘still a citizen in a society of citizens’.Footnote ⁴⁹ On the contrary, that particular mask is stripped away in Seneca's opening sentences as another takes its place in the rhetorics of the text. Even the detested language of royalty floods back into the picture as Seneca mounts a powerful justification of monarchical absolutism.Footnote ⁵⁰

Seneca's decision to break with the dominant theatrics of the day is connected to his introduction of a quite new persona onto the Roman political stage. Although he wants to continue to talk about the republic and its liberty, Seneca recognizes that those terms need applying to a radically reconceptualized political body in order to offer a sufficiently convincing framework within which to think about events on the ground. He wants to show which features of the contemporary political landscape can — and which cannot — be adequately explained and defended at a moral level. Indeed, his argument only offers a defence of the arrangements he describes if the Roman princeps does, in fact, embody the moral personality which Seneca depicts in the mirror. Seneca earns himself that well-observed degree of unnerving frankness when itemizing the prince's powers by sinking this condition deep into the structure of the text. He relies on one figure of thought in particular in order to carve out the space for his philosophical work.

Consider his opening:

The image of Nero — engaged in the process of conscientious self-examination whose benefits Seneca had extolled in De ira — is animated by an act of impersonation.Footnote ⁵² The persona of Nero embodies the main precepts of Seneca's text; he is an ingenious rhetorical device summarizing Seneca's case in the proem. Nero already is as he should be, which explains why Seneca says in Book 1 that ‘no one seeks an example for you to imitate — except for yourself’; and why in Book 2, his stated aim is ‘that you be as familiar as possible with your good deeds and words so that what is now a matter of natural impulse in you may become a matter of settled judgement’.Footnote ⁵³ Seneca's apparent task is not to make Nero different but to keep him as he is.

Yet Nero is shown what he is through an impersonation, then praised for being the conscientious figure with whom Seneca brings him face to face. Everything hinges upon this act of recognition. The absolute judicial, legislative and military power which Seneca attributes to the prince is only Nero's if he can incorporate the supremely rational persona in the mirror. Seneca dramatizes this struggle brilliantly, making the fictive Nero baulk at the task: ‘But this is slavery, not imperium!’Footnote ⁵⁴ Seneca's reply reprises the doctrine of princely servitude adumbrated in De consolatione ad Polybium: ‘What? Are you not aware that this means a noble slavery for you …You cannot escape your lot. It besieges you; wherever you descend, it follows you with great pomp and ceremony. The slavery of such supreme greatness lies in the impossibility of ever becoming anything less.’Footnote ⁵⁵ Seneca is unsparing:

Two observations about this passage help reveal the extent to which Seneca's theory is self-consciously articulated as an account of a moral persona. In the first place, it is strongly reminiscent of Cicero's warning to his republican magistrate in the De officiis to avoid pretences: ‘as Socrates used to say so admirably … the nearest path to glory … is to behave in such a way that one is what one wishes to be thought. For men who think they can secure for themselves unshakeable glory by pretence and empty show, by feigning their speech and countenance, are utterly mistaken.’Footnote ⁵⁷ Concerned about the implications of the dramatic metaphor involved in his injunction that magistrates embody the ‘persona civitatis’, Cicero insists that their conduct must issue from a genuinely moral personality.Footnote ⁵⁸ Seneca's warning that ‘no one can wear a persona for long’ makes the same point about political agency to a different kind of political actor, and in richly ironic terms: the aspiring thespian Nero is urged to lay aside acting in order to assume the moral rôle which Seneca is impressing upon him through the fiction of impersonation.

The second observation requires more context. From Chrysippus onwards, Stoic ethics were conceptualized within a cosmic polis comprised of humans and gods, bound by their shared capacity to comprehend and embody the providential, immanent rationality which governs the universe and which Seneca calls variously in his writings ‘nature’, ‘providence’, ‘fate’, ‘fortune’, ‘god’, ‘the gods’, and ‘Zeus’. This capacity to reason is said to provide humans and gods with the basis of a community by supplying them with a notion of justice and law. That law is the law of nature, which, for the Stoics, is another way of talking about reason. In De ira, Seneca rehearses this doctrine, informing his readers that they inhabit both a ‘greater city’ and a local one; and in De otio, he also mentions the existence of two republics:

The Stoics used this framework to elaborate a body of social theory about how to conduct oneself in whatever political community one inhabited. But the rôle of the cosmic civitas in Stoic political theory, for which the evidence is ‘indirect, fragmentary and inconsistent’, is harder to specify.Footnote ⁶⁰ The cosmic community has real claims upon our allegiance. They transcend those of any existing political community into which we are born and they resemble the kinds of demands traditionally associated with political authority. Still, the Stoic city is plainly not an entity with written laws, and its authority resides in no terrestrial institution, only in reason itself. Was a work like Chrysippus' On the Republic an account of an ideal constitution of the sort discussed by Plato and Aristotle, consisting in a set of doctrines deduced from the cosmic city and aimed at providing a normative yardstick for an actually existing political community? Or was it an attempt to incorporate features of the Stoic city within a more practicable political theory designed for a less exorbitantly conceived community?Footnote ⁶¹ Seneca's theory in De clementia appears to alternate uneasily between both these approaches, in part because it blurs the conceptual boundaries between the two cities, as we shall see.

The Stoic Theory of personae

Notwithstanding its debts to Hellenistic treatises on kingship, some characteristics of De clementia suggest that it is conceived as a contribution to a more local genre of Roman political writing insofar as it furnishes praecepta which articulate the duties of a specific kind of persona within a Stoic apparatus dating back to Panaetius: a theory, in fact, of personae.Footnote ⁶²

As Cicero relays it in De officiis, this theory posits a basic distinction:

The point of the division in the theory is to introduce a degree of specificity into Stoic moral reasoning by attending to what Inwood calls ‘situational variability’.Footnote ⁶⁴ The Stoics say that we must first of all cultivate our rational nature — our first persona — as members of the universal city which obliges us to observe some exceptionless principles enjoined by natural law. In his extensive discussion of Stoic axiology in letters 94 and 95, which is initially broached in terms of personae, Seneca calls these principles decreta.Footnote ⁶⁵ They bolt together to give Stoic ethics an overarching deontology. They relay that humans are social creatures born for the common good and bound by reciprocal love, and they are often presented tersely — follow nature, cleave to reason as the sole good, and so on. Seneca, for example, reminds us in De clementia, that ‘man should be seen as a social animal born for the common good’.Footnote ⁶⁶ But while decreta underline the basic Chrysippean point to obey natural law, they give little substantive guidance on what to do in life. A body of more specific instructions is needed to help negotiate local contexts.

These praecepta help shape a second persona, another layer of moral identity adapted to the particular abilities of each human and the socio-political circumstances in which they live. Cicero discusses these considerations of context and character in terms of nature and fortune: ‘the greatest influence on this reasoning is carried by nature, the next greatest by fortune’ and ‘we must certainly take account of both in choosing a way of life’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Cicero complicates matters by further partitioning: a third persona is said to be the product of chance and contingency determining our social position; a fourth coalesces around the occupation we decide to follow. But the crux of the theory is the division between the first and second personae, which gives structure to the fundamental Stoic preoccupation to supply moral advice to an agent obliged to inhabit both the cosmic and the local civitas. Unless they qualify as a supremely rational sapiens who alone performs morally correct actions termed katorthōmata, these agents need praecepta as well as decreta. Hence the emergence of a literature on kathēkonta, or officia — appropriate actions informed by an incomplete grasp of the moral situation in question which nevertheless correspond to the right thing to do if a reasonable justification can be provided in their defence — of which Cicero's text, based in part on Panaetius' On Appropriate Actions, is the most famous example.Footnote ⁶⁸

The Princely persona in De clementia

Seneca's analysis of the princely persona in De clementia is punctuated by the terms of this theory of personae. His precepts single out forms of moral conduct as peculiarly fitting for the prince, and he repeatedly articulates that concern in a language of officium and decorum.Footnote ⁶⁹ These concepts shape his philosophical work, enabling him to segregate specifically princely moral obligations from those which his protagonist shares with the rest of humanity on account of their shared, rational nature. So, for instance, Seneca reminds us that the cultivation of clemency is necessary to all human beings. ‘Of all virtues’, he says, ‘none befits a human being more, since none is more humane.’Footnote ⁷⁰ Since we all err, it sometimes makes sense for everyone to adopt an attitude of leniency when wronged if we want a modicum of fluidity in social life. But, he adds, while ‘mercy, as I said, is natural to all human beings, yet it most becomes emperors finding when among them more to save and greater scope’.Footnote ⁷¹ For ‘no one could conceive of anything more becoming to a king or prince than mercy’.Footnote ⁷² Seneca picks out the virtue of magnanimity in the same way: ‘greatness of mind befits any mortal, even the lowliest — for is anything greater or braver than to beat back the force of ill fortune? But this greatness of mind has more ample scope in good fortune and is shown to better effect upon the magistrate's bench than down on the floor.’Footnote ⁷³Moderatio is similarly treated: all humans need this quality — even bees are capable of it, after all — but ‘the human mind needs a greater moderation to match its power to do greater violence and harm’.Footnote ⁷⁴ And the greater the capacity of the human to inflict damage, the greater the need for the virtue.

Furthermore, when Seneca exemplifies the content of princely policy, he resorts to the vocabulary of officium to characterize the responsibilities of the merciful prince: ‘What, then’, he asks, ‘is his duty? That of good parents …’Footnote ⁷⁵ Seneca's procedure thus generates a typology of virtues held to be specifically fitting for the sovereign persona, given his providentially allotted fortuna as the bearer of imperium.Footnote ⁷⁶ But the prince's natura must also anchor the Senecan persona. Seneca's prince occupies the heights of power because of his natural capacity for moral excellence. This condition lies behind Seneca's comment that Nero would find the weight of expectation on his shoulders ‘hard were that goodness of yours not natural (naturalis bonitas) but put on for the moment’.Footnote ⁷⁷ It also underpins Seneca's claim to Nero to be recalling his ‘good deeds and words so that what is now a matter of natural impulse in you may become a matter of settled judgement’.Footnote ⁷⁸ In sum, Seneca's text illustrates a generic concern to capture and analyse circumstantial factors in order to recommend appropriate action for moral agents in the Roman world. But its originality lies in its more specific concern to provide a philosophical account of a new kind of persona in Roman political life.

Seneca and the Free Body Politic

In Seneca's theory, the civitas over which the princeps rules is worldwide in extent. His prince rules ‘in place of the gods’ over ‘all mortals’; he has been chosen by them to wield the ‘power of life and death over peoples’, and to hold the ‘state of everyone’ in his hands; and he is entrusted with the duty of accounting — ‘should the gods demand it’ — for ‘the whole human race’.Footnote ⁷⁹ As vicegerent of the gods on earth, the princeps wields the power of life and death over his subjects: their status has been placed in his hands. As imperator, the princeps retains supreme command of the military: their weapons are drawn at his nod. The princeps exercises full jurisdictional power: the laws spring from his mouth.Footnote ⁸⁰ Seneca unpacks the image of the body politic systematically. He tells his prince that ‘you are the mind of the res publica, and it is your body’, and informs him that that body's well-being depends upon the mental qualities of its princely head: ‘the gentleness of your mind will be transmitted to others … it will be diffused over the whole body of the empire. All will be formed in your likeness. Health springs from the head.’Footnote ⁸¹ The relationship between the political body and its princely mind is picked out in the language of slavery. Just as ‘the body is entirely at the service of the mind … hands, feet and eyes do its business, the skin that we see protects it’, so, says Seneca, ‘in the same way this vast multitude of men surrounds one man as though he were its mind, ruled by his spirit, guided by his reason; it would crush and shatter itself by its own strength without the support of his consilium’.Footnote ⁸² Catastrophic consequences await the political body if its ruler's psyche becomes emotionally disordered: at the mind's command, ‘we lie still … or else we run restlessly about when it has given the order. If it is a greedy master, we scour the sea for profit; if an ambitious one, it has long since led us to thrust our right hand into the flame …’.Footnote ⁸³ The extent of the body's dependency upon the prince is total: he is the ‘bond which holds the res publica together, the breath of life … the mind of the empire’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Seneca underlies the longevity of this relationship, observing that ‘long ago Caesar so deeply invested himself in the res publica, that neither could be separated without the ruin of the other. He needs the strength and the res publica needs a head’.Footnote ⁸⁵

Seneca's account of the status of those living within the princely body politic commences with the monarch loftily looking down on ‘an immense multitude, quarrelsome, factious, uncontrolled’, whose unruly disposition is checked only by ‘the yoke now upon it’.Footnote ⁸⁶ A little later, the prince is described as a vinculum binding the riotous multitude together into a coherent res publica.Footnote ⁸⁷ The Roman citizens are unambiguously subject to the ius and potestas of the prince. The sors and status of everyone is entirely in his hands and at his mercy. As the arbiter of life and death, he wields the ius gladii over them. The clement prince's boast that ‘my sword has been sheathed, indeed hung away altogether’ only renders it more visible. The fact that Seneca's theory of government is also an extended piece of penology speaks volumes about the status of the princely subject. Seneca later recharacterizes this vitae necisque potestas as patria potestas, asserting that the relation between the clement ruler and his subjects is a paternal one in which the power to punish by death (legally enjoyed by Roman fathers over their children as well as by masters over slaves) is always exercised benevolently. But he is already conceding ground.Footnote ⁸⁸ Under any conventional interpretation, the relation between prince and subject which he describes is the same as that of master over slave, as Seneca himself clarifies later in the De beneficiis:

The massive shift which Seneca's argument in De clementia is designed to engender is pivoted upon this same point of recognition. What Seneca wants to make central to our evaluation of princely rule is not the formal elements of the relation of power which subsists between ruler and ruled, but the moral qualities of the person who exercises that power. If the prince shoulders his moral obligations as Seneca delineates them, then his political rôle is to be appraised differently as one of a father rather than a master.

In redescribing the relation between prince and subject in such terms, Seneca insists that he is not merely differentiating between good and bad masters. His claim is that this relation does not necessarily constitute a form of slavery at all — any more than the social institution of slavery necessarily imposes servitude, properly understood, upon the slave. Seneca's conception of freedom and slavery is entirely different from the conventional Roman understanding of those terms. Suzanne Bobzien reminds us that ‘freedom was an indispensable philosophical concept in early Stoic ethics’, before becoming ‘central in the moral philosophy of the Roman Stoa’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Seneca's philosophy is no exception, as Inwood demonstrates.Footnote ⁹¹ That questions about freedom surface in the monarchical theory of De clementia is not hugely surprising. Politics was a part of ethics for the Stoics, and Seneca's treatise is anatomizing a moral as much as a political value.Footnote ⁹²

For Seneca and the Stoics, if one's rational powers were developed to the point of having eliminated the passions and aligned oneself with the dictates of providence one could maintain one's freedom in the face of tyranny, imprisonment and even torture. In a notorious passage, again in De beneficiis, Seneca asserts:

Seneca's vision of human liberty here has a revealing local inflection: it is framed in terms of the Roman civil account of a free person as one who is sui iuris; but it substitutes a civil conception of ius for a metaphysical one. This adjustment is crucial to Seneca's argument about libertas and the res publica in De clementia, in which there is a systematic attempt to supplant one idea of law with another. In particular, we see it in Seneca's argument that ‘though you have the right to do anything to a slave, yet there are things which the law common to all living creatures forbids you to do to a human being’.Footnote ⁹⁴ But more generally in his reconstruction of the res publica, we witness the steady displacement, at a normative level, of the positive laws of the Roman civitas with the law of reason as the basis of its political government within a providential universe.

The grounds for this manoeuvre are prepared by Seneca's initial extension of the boundaries of the Roman civitas to include the entire human race, which is said to involve the prince in a relationship with the gods grounded in reason: he has received his authority from them to rule in their stead over men, and he is obliged to render ratio to them for the terms of this trust. The prince's political relation with the gods reveals a degree of interpenetration between the cosmic and terrestrial cities. The gods, figuratively at least, are the source of his imperium and of his political obligations.

These claims about the prince's accountability as a trustee attest to the degree of attentiveness with which Seneca restructures the traditional picture of the res publica, carefully itemizing the duties of its new governor in a language derived from republican ideology. Note, too, the idea of election: the prince has been chosen (‘electus sum’) by the gods to wield imperium over the global res publica as the administrator of an estate. Seneca congratulates the figure of Nero because ‘everything entrusted to your guardianship is kept safe … nothing has been taken from the res publica by violence or secret fraud’.Footnote ⁹⁵ The prince, then, is not the dominus of a res publica, now reduced to the status of a piece of private property, nor are the citizens slaves; he is steward, tutor and custodian, entrusted with power over them as the vicegerent of the gods — indeed, as their trustee — and he must administer his estate rationally. The ‘free, free-born, and well-born’ citizens are not chattels; Seneca reminds his prince that they have been ‘entrusted to you not as slaves but as wards’.Footnote ⁹⁶

Absolutism, Reason and the lex naturae

Setting up the theory in this way gives Seneca the tools with which to legitimate monarchical absolutism. Given his decision to individuate clementia as the defining princely virtue, his theory obviously involves him in considerations of the prince's relation to civil law. But Seneca's argument about the moral basis of monarchical rule is pervaded by a legal vocabulary and imagery elaborated around another notion of law entirely. As a Stoic, Seneca thinks that to be virtuous means living in accordance with providential reason, and that reason is the lex naturae which governs the cosmos:

If the princeps can be shown to embody reason in his rule of the Roman populus, he can not only be held to be supremely virtuous; he can also be said to govern according to lex naturalis, and hence rightly, justly, legitimately. His exercise of clemency demonstrates this capacity. For ‘clemency has a freedom of decision: it judges not by legal formula but by what is equitable and good’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Clemency is a supra-legal quality, a ‘moderation that remits something of a deserved and due punishment’, and ‘something which stops short of what could deservedly be imposed’.Footnote ⁹⁹ In the interests of equitable solutions, mercy remits punishment when justice, strictly interpreted as conformity to existing law, might demand it. Indeed, clemency is true justice duly observed. The gently paradoxical reasoning running through the theory is that acts of clemency, in which the exercise of the prince's power beyond positive law is at its most manifest, clearly illustrate his subservience to the law that matters most in the cosmos.

Having made a Stoic conception of ratio the normative basis of the civitas, Seneca can now claim that his reassembled picture of the Roman res publica exhibits all the elective, representative, and lawful characteristics that a rational person in pursuit of their freedom could ask of it. Seneca's argument that the Roman populus enjoys ‘supreme libertas’, lacking nothing but the licence to ruin itself, rests on two distinctive components in his account of the body politic: his description of the princely persona as the epitome of rationality; and his corresponding denigration of the capacities of the Roman people to govern themselves without tutelage. Seneca works hard throughout the text to erase the idea that the populus without the prince might be considered a coherent, unified body with any capacity for rational agency. In De republica, the populus at the heart of Cicero's definition of res publica was not just ‘any and every collection of human beings’ haphazardly bundled together, but ‘a collection of a multitude which forms a society by virtue of agreement with respect to justice and sharing in advantage’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The image of any such underlying unity to the Roman populus is evacuated from Seneca's picture. Instead, we encounter repeated descriptions of the Roman citizens as a mere multitudo which ‘surrounds one man as though he were its mind, ruled by his spirit, guided by his reason; it would crush and shatter itself by its own strength without the support of his discernment’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ And Seneca cites the Georgics, in which the monarch of the bees is compared to an earthly ruler: ‘when their king is safe, they act with one mind./When he is gone, they break their pact (fidem).’Footnote ¹⁰² These views have some pedigree: Varro and Livy had expressed anxieties, heightened by civil conflict, about the deficiencies and deformities of the Roman body politic.Footnote ¹⁰³ Seneca's vision of the Roman people without the prince diagnoses similar problems: an amalgam of divisive, self-destructive elements becomes a viable political body only upon the acquisition of a princely head. The yoke and chain on the multitude are thus the restraints of reason, imposing upon it the providential rationality of the cosmos which produced the Principate amid civil division and restored the res publica to health.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Reason, Representation and Self-mastery

For his argument about the free republic to work, Seneca must contend that the princely persona is the embodiment of Stoic rationality. One way of doing so is to present him as the representative of those who have elected him: the gods. Seneca tells us that his exercise of mercy aligns his government of the civitas with that of the cosmos:

There is more than a trace of a mimetic idea at work in this analogy: the imperium of the divine vicegerent over his subjects should resemble the imperium of the cosmos. Elsewhere Seneca writes the principle of monarchy into his metaphysics. In De beata vita, he declares that ‘we are born in a kingdom; to obey god is freedom’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ And in De clementia, the ‘king’ bee is held to exemplify the naturalness of monarchy.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

But the proper exercise of imperium also demands a mastery of the moral reasoning which meshes praecepta with decreta in a manner characteristic of the true sapiens. That specification becomes explicit in Book 2 as Seneca steadily replaces the figure of the princeps with that of the sapiens as his protagonist:

This kind of equitable assessment of time, place, circumstance and character in different types of cases — the essence of clemency — is exactly what the prince claims in the prologue to have already understood, declaring that ‘I have been touched by the first flush of one person's youthfulness, by another's extreme old age. I have granted pardon to one man because of his high position, to another because of his low estate …’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Seneca's argument also makes an heroic degree of self-mastery the prerequisite of supreme power. The only guarantor of the rule of reason — and therefore law — is the prince himself. His persona is shown in Seneca's mirror to be deeply self-reflexive, his rational capacities sharpened by the practice of conscience.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The sovereign prince talks to himself (‘loqui secum’), watches over himself (‘me custodio’), and even spares himself (‘mihi peperci’) in the act of self-inspection: conscientiousness is a condition of absolutism. Seneca urges the sovereign to ‘respond to damage openly inflicted upon himself by keeping his mind under control (animum in potestate), by remitting the punishment if he can safely do so’.Footnote ¹¹¹ The prince must establish potestas over his own mind in order to exercise potestas correctly over others. Seneca turns the princely psyche into a realm over which reason maintains its imperium by eliminating every emotional perturbation, especially anger. That work done, the prince can claim to be equipped to emancipate, in turn, the political body from its unruly tendencies and align its government with the providential direction of the universe, thus restoring it to true libertas.