Seneca the Wordsmith
The life of a Roman
Today’s letter is adapted from the Stoa course Lessons from Lives of the Stoics. Check it out on the Stoa app.
Seneca saw emperors come and go. At one point, he was rumored to be the richest man in all of Rome. Despite a life of political intrigue, risk, and bustle, he wrote plays and philosophical works fated to outlive him.
It’s not much of an exaggeration to say he was a combination of Shakespeare, Socrates, and Thomas Jefferson. This is a combination so rare that, for most of history, scholars believed Seneca the playwright and Seneca the philosopher were two different people.
His writings and life contain deep lessons about how to live well. Seneca is worth emulating, and yet he also made decisions that are lessons in how to avoid ruin.
Born around 4 BC in modern-day Spain, he moved to Rome, where he eventually served as a senator. He was renowned for his rhetorical skill. Indeed, he may have been too good. He was exiled from Rome on grounds of being involved in an affair with an emperor’s sister. This charge was likely fabricated by his political enemies.
Almost 10 years later, Seneca was called out of exile by the ambitious and strategic Agrippina, the mother of the Roman emperor Nero, to serve as Nero’s tutor.
This role placed him in the powerful and precarious position of advising Rome’s most powerful man. Unfortunately, despite Seneca’s lessons, Nero was neither the most sane nor the most virtuous emperor.
Nero’s early years were prosperous. It’s surmised that, at this point, Seneca, Agrippina, and another one of Nero’s tutors, Burrus, essentially ran the Roman Empire.
Yet Nero’s later reign was disastrous. Though some historians have argued that he’s painted in too negative a light, Nero was greedy, impulsive, and unstable. Senators were pressured to play the sycophant to his childish behavior. Not all did. Those who didn’t faced exile or death.
In time, Nero’s rage turned to Seneca. The emperor ordered Seneca to commit suicide in 65 AD.
And so ended the life of a Stoic philosopher, advisor, and playwright. Seneca lived a complex life.
One lesson that shines through is his dedication to language.
When we remember Seneca, we should remember someone who saw speech as a craft. Today, many of us treat our conversations with ourselves and others in an informal and trivial manner. However, language is a weighty thing.
What do you say to comfort someone grieving? This is a situation Seneca was placed in again and again. One of his most famous letters, the Consolation to Marcia, was written to a mother who had lost her son three years earlier and was still in deep mourning. Someone who treats language seriously is prepared to know what to say and think in life’s high-stakes situations. Anyone who treats words in a flippant way is not.
A focus on language may seem odd, but it is through words that we communicate with others and think. By devoting himself to the word, Seneca’s ideas outlived him hundredfold.
In a life of politics and action, Seneca practiced his craft in philosophy, speeches, and plays. Many politicians write or ghostwrite books today. Yet how many of them are truly great works?
Seneca’s work is sublime. His plays heavily influenced Renaissance playwrights. His philosophy has stood the test of time. This is only so because Seneca took his ideas, and the vehicle by which he expressed them, seriously.
We should picture Seneca perfecting his thought through language in private, not merely in public. He reflected often. In On Anger, he writes:
When the light has been taken away and my wife has fallen silent, aware as she is of my habit, I examine my entire day, going through what I have done and said. I conceal nothing from myself, I pass nothing by. I have nothing to fear from my errors when I can say: ‘See that you do not do this anymore. For the moment, I excuse you.’
Each day, he asks what he did well and where he could improve. His Moral Letters to Lucilius show the fruits of this practice. In those letters, he passes on his hard-won wisdom on life to his peer and friend, Lucilius.
He was able to do this because of how devoted he was to his craft and to philosophical reflection.
Seneca’s life was far from perfect. He is the first to admit it. Nonetheless, behind all of his practical advice and wisdom is something we must not miss: the love of language.