Seneca: The Life of a Stoic PDF
Preview Seneca: The Life of a Stoic
SENECA The Lifeo af S toic Paul Veyne from Translated the French by David Sullivan ROUTLEDGE NEW YORK AND LONDON Publisihne2 d00 3 by Routledge 29 West35 'h Street NewY orkN,Y 1 0001 www .routledge-ny.com PublisihneG dr eaBtr itabiyn Routledge 11 NewF ettLearn e LondoEnC 4P4 EE www .routledge.co.uk Routledigsae n i mprionftt heT ayl&o rF rancGirso up. Originpaulbllyi sahseS den eque: Entretiens Lettres a Lucilius. Copyri©g hEtditioRnosb erLta ffont, S.A.19,9 3. Thep ublishweirssht or ecortdh eitrh anktso t heF rencMhi nistorfCy u ltuforre a grant towardtsh ec osotf t ranslation. Printientd h eU niteSdt atoefsA mericoana cid-frpeaep er. Alrli ghrtess ervNeod p.a rotf t hibso okm ayb er eprinotrer de produocreu dt iliiznae ndy fo rm orb ya nye lectromneicch,a nicoarol t,h emre ansn,o wk nowno rh ereaftienrv entiendc,l uding photocopyainndgr ecordionrig n,a nyi nformatisotno raogrer etriesvyaslt ewmi thopuetr missiionnw ritifrnogm thep ublisher. 10987654321 Cataloging-in-PuDbaltiaic saa vtaiiolnafr bolme t heL ibraorfCy o ngress ISBN0- 415-91125-7 CONTENTS Preface vii CHAPTER! ProloSgueen:efr coam B irttoFih n aDli sillusion ) 1 (1 -6C5.E . CHAPTER2 31 Seneacsaa S toic CHAPTER3 EpiloFgiuneWa:il tn easnsdD eatohft hLei berator ) 157 (63-C6.E5. 173 Notes 187 Chronology v PREFACE Born roughly at the beginning of the present era, Seneca committed suicide at the age of sixty-four, in 65 C.E., on Nero's orders, whose men tor he had been, and whose "friend" (an official title: in their palaces, the emperors did not hold court, but had appointed companions) he remained. For fifteen years, Seneca's destiny had been bound with those of Nero and his mother, Agrippina; his life and death are a sort of nonfiction novel of the Neronian period. Seneca played other roles as well. To the French, at least since the Revolution, the ideal destiny of an author consists of three chapters, one consecrated to each of three noble endeavors: literature, women, and politics (thus Chenier and Shelley in the past, Malraux and Sartre today). In Rome, a century before Seneca, Cicero invented another model of the complete man: he should be at once senator, man of let ters, and philosopher. Seneca had been Cicero's great successor in this triple role, and his contemporaries saluted him as such. Because of his abundant production of essays, and the tragedies that made him the Roman rival of the Greek dramatists in the eyes of his compatriots, he was their preeminent writer. He entered the Senate and belonged to the establishment governing the empire; he embodied its grandeur and its traditions; and he did more: he created one of the great investment banks of the century. Finally, he was, as we anticipated, a philosopher. In the Greco-Roman world, philosophy was practiced by sects, much as in Asia. A philosopher was not concerned with philosophy in general, but was a Platonist, a Pythogorean, an Epicurean, or like Seneca, a Stoic. Philosophy was not part of a university curriculum, but vii Preface viii an advanced study that attracted rich amateurs like Seneca and gave meaning to the lives of private citizens. Many took an interest in it out of cultural curiosity (a cultivated person needed at least a veneer of phi losophy), but to truly be a philosopher was to live out the sect's doc trine, conform one's conduct (and even one's attire), to it, and if need be, to die for it. As disciplines of living and as the spirituality of the elite, the philosophical sects occupied the position filled in other soci eties by religion. Philosophers formed a kind oflay clergy, and like every clergy, they at once aroused respect, surly mockery, and occasionally the distrust of the imperial power. Seneca afforded proof of this, dying for his philosophy after spending his life attempting to reconcile it with his other professions as a politician and as an extraordinarily wealthy court favorite. Sectarian knowledge versus academic instruction, spirituality and a discipline of living rather than cultural object, a lay clergy-all these traits are mutually self-explanatory. Certainly, an ancient philosophy, just as a modem one, was a system of generalization about the world, mankind, or knowledge; it implied a metaphysics, a philosophy of nature, a logic, and so forth. But it was also, and perhaps above all, an art of living, a wisdom. For Seneca, Stoic doctrine is almost exclusively reduced to these. We cannot stress enough that this was an 3ft of living, not a "morality." Despite its false reputation as a moralistic and voluntaristic system, Stoicism was rather an affair of the intellect and had nothing whatever to do with any "morality." Again, a comparison to Asia is in order. Like more than one philosophical Asian sect, Stoicism was, in the fullest meaning of the term, a recipe for individual happiness, although not in the way of Montaigne's art of living: it was rather a method of self-transformation. We shall see that at the end of his life, Seneca had almost completed his transformation into a sage, and from that drew the strength to die a brilliant death. Seneca's philosophical opus, at least the part that survives to us, consists of two parts: the Dialogues, which are not genuine dialogues but might instead be called "Conversations about . . . " ; and the famous Letters to Lucilius, which form the masterpiece of the dramatic final three years of his life. For a number of reasons, these offer the best introduc tion to his work. One of these reasons is the modernity of their style: short, dear, Preface ix penetrating, telling sentences that can make difficult questions accessi ble by means of a sudden metaphor. This has been the style of French intellectual prose since Montesquieu, and of our best journalism, but in antiquity it was considered the antithesis of what was viewed as high style, or eloquence: those ample Ciceronian periods in which, at times, the reader forgets the beginning before reaching the end. This was beside the point: ancient eloquence was in general a sort of bel canto, and like it, attracted innumerable fans. There were, indeed, exceptions such as Demosthenes, whose method was not to charm, to lull, or to seduce, but rather to project a nervous impulse to a captivated audi ence. Seneca's style follows in his path. Despite his clarity, Seneca still must be taken seriously as a philosopher. The time is past when he was regarded as a belletrist lightly brushed with philosophy, studied only by specialists in Latin lit erature. His clarity reveals a firm conceptual foundation, that of Greek Stoicism in its authentic form: Seneca practiced neither a debased nor a vulgarized philosophy aimed at the supposed "practical spirit'' of the Romans. There is another reason to begin with the Letters to Lucilius: their exposi tion of Stoicism starts from the self, the I of the neophyte Lucilius, to whom they offer a knowingly graduated course in Stoicism and a series of exercises in self-persuasion. They start from the interest the I has in becoming a Stoic, and create the perception that the I is all-powerful, that only it matters, and that it can be sufficient unto itself. In order for unhappiness and death not to matter, it is enough to consider them as nothing; if the world is hostile, it is enough to ignore it; the I can do this, and the only thing that matters to it will remain, itself. This is so attractive that one wishes to believe it, and it is the reason the Letters are captivating reading from their opening pages. There is, then, a contemporary application of Stoicism, precisely that suggested by the Letters, directed as they are to the person of a dis ciple: an egocentric Stoicism. It is no coincidence that the revival of Seneca began, in France at least, in the early 1980s, in a certain pub lishing circle connected with Michel Foucault, living under the threat of AIDS. In the face of death, the I, with its capacity for denial, is the only weapon remaining to us.
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