Seneca the Younger

Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger (ca. 4 B.C.-65 A.D.) was a Roman philosopher important in his own day as tutor and "prime minister" of the emperor Nero.

The philosophical works of Seneca although not especially original, show such nobility of sentiment that Christian writers on morality and ethical conduct have drawn on him over the centuries; he seems to have invented a highly rhetorical type of tragedy, the influence of which was especially widespread in the Renaissance; and his literary style, terse, epigrammatic, and full of intermittent brilliance, provided a respectable rhetorical alternative to the long, periodic sentences of Cicero and had some influence on the development of the normal literary prose style of English, French, and other languages.

Seneca was born in Cordova, Spain, about 5 or 4 B.C., the son of the famous writer on rhetoric known as Seneca Rhetor. Seneca's elder brother was proconsul of Achaea in A.D. 51-52 and was the "Gallio" before whose tribunal Paul was brought. His younger brother was the father of the poet Lucan. His mother was Helvia, a cultivated woman deeply interested in philosophy, and one of her sisters was the wife of a man who was later prefect of Egypt. This sister brought Seneca to Rome as a small child.

Seneca's schooling had a great influence on his later life. He disliked his studies under teachers who insisted on verbal criticism and on detailed learning, but his rhetorical studies, under the leading men of his day, including his own father, left a deep impression on his style. He was, however, most deeply involved in the study of philosophy. His teachers, disciples of the eclectic but basically Stoic Roman philosopher Quintus Sextius, filled him with an enthusiasm for philosophy which he never lost and never wholly lived up to, and the rigorous asceticism into which he plunged so weakened his already poor constitution that his health began to decline. He thought of suicide, but was stopped by his regard for his father, who also pointed out that he might be mistaken for a devotee of certain foreign superstitions which the emperor Tiberius was attempting to stamp out. Instead, Seneca was sent to visit his aunt in Egypt.

After his return from Egypt, Seneca secured election (ca. A.D. 31) to the quaestorship as a result of his aunt's influence and began his legal career. His oratory (all of it lost) rapidly gained him renown, which became dangerous after the accession in 37 of Emperor Caligula, who wanted no rivals in this field. Seneca would probably have been murdered if Caligula had not been informed that Seneca was very sick and could not live long. Seneca then betook himself to other literary fields, to alternating periods of retreat and meditation with his public work, and to building his private fortune.

Trial and Exile

After the accession of Claudius as emperor in 41, Seneca was for a while prominent in the court as a member of the party of Agrippina and Julia Livilla, Claudius's nieces. The empress Messalina, however, whose influence over Claudius was all-powerful, saw the two princesses as dangerous rivals and secured the banishment of Julia Livilla in 41 on charges of immorality. Seneca was accused of being her lover and condemned to death by the Senate, but his punishment was changed to banishment to Corsica by the Emperor.

Seneca spent the next 8 years in exile on Corsica. He was miserable. He was a literary man, without access to learned men; a man who loved human society, removed from his friends; a man of acquisitive instincts, deprived of his property; and a man who enjoyed power and influence, reduced to impotence and apparent friendlessness. Cringing flattery of the Emperor and of the Emperor's powerful freedman Polybius proved useless, but in 49 he was recalled at the behest of Agrippina, who had survived Messalina and married her uncle Claudius. Seneca was to be tutor to Nero, her son and the adopted son of Claudius, and he was appointed praetor for the year 50.

Life under Nero

Claudius was murdered by Agrippina in 54, and Nero acceded to the throne. The next 5 years, while Nero was under the influence of Seneca and Sextus Afranius Burrus, became famous for their good government and general happiness. The court was also aware of crimes and intrigues, most notably the murder of Britannicus, Claudius's son, and thus Nero's most dangerous rival, in 55. In 55 or 56 Seneca was appointed to a suffect consulship.

In 59 Agrippina, who had been Seneca's patroness, was murdered by her son - quite possibly, as Nero explained to the Senate in a statement written by Seneca, as the result of the discovery of plots on her part against the throne. In 62 Burrus died, and one of his successors, Ofonius Tigellinus, soon came to exercise an evil influence over his master. Realizing that his major support was gone and that Tigellinus was working for his removal, Seneca, who must have been sick of being compromised by the necessities of state, asked to be allowed to retire and offered to put at Nero's disposal the vast fortune he had acquired in his service; Nero permitted his retirement but refused the proffered wealth.

Seneca devoted the next 3 years of his retirement to his studies and writings, but in 65 he was implicated (along with, among others, his nephew Lucan) in Piso's conspiracy, and his death became inevitable. He was ordered to commit suicide by Nero, according to Tacitus.

Much of the shabbiness of Seneca's life was made up for by the manner of his death, calm and philosophical, which showed true Stoic nobility. Tacitus related that Seneca's body had become so thin from fasting that he had difficulty in getting the blood to flow from his opened veins. His second wife, Pompeia Paulina, wanted to commit suicide with him but was prevented from doing so.

Philosophical Works

Seneca's philosophical works are marked by neither originality of thought nor depth of speculation, but rather by enthusiasm of presentation and an understanding of the practical limitations of life and the weaknesses of human nature. The chronological arrangement of these works is uncertain, but it is generally agreed that very few of them predate his exile.

Ten works, in 12 books, have been handed down to us under the name Dialogues, although only one of them could be considered an actual dialogue. Three of these are consolationes, treatises, partly philosophical, partly rhetorical, attempting to cure grief. In addition, there are three books composing On Anger. On the Happy Life develops the standard Stoic view that happiness is to live in accordance with nature and to practice virtue, and it contains an interesting defense of the wise man's possession and good use of wealth. There are three works addressed to Annaeus Serenus, On the Constancy of a Wise Man, On Tranquility of Mind, and the fragmentary On Leisure.

Some other philosophical works of Seneca are seven books called Natural Questions, written in 62-63, a loosely arranged compilation of information on natural science, which formed the standard work on cosmology for the Middle Ages until the rediscovery of Aristotle. The 124 Epistles to Lucilius contain innumerable digressions which give a fascinating picture of Roman life.

His Tragedies

Ten plays are ascribed to Seneca. One of these, the Octavia, the only extant Roman historical drama, is almost universally rejected as being written by Seneca. The Hercules Oetaeus has also been generally rejected, but the consensus of scholarship favors Senecan authorship for the Hercules Furens, Troades, Medea, Phaedra, Phoenissae, Oedipus, Agamemnon, and the Thyestes, the only play whose Greek model has not been preserved. Nothing is known about the time of composition of these plays.

Seneca's major inspiration was Euripides, the source of half of his dramas. He took from Euripides an interest in psychological analysis, especially of abnormal types, in philosophical speculation, and in rhetorical effect and developed each of these to what often seems an excessive degree. The Stoic doctrine which proclaimed that a good man is totally good and a bad man totally evil makes his characters less humanly alive than the Greek characters. In these plays Seneca's rhetoric is almost unrestrained: overelaboration of realistic detail until it becomes ludicrous, mythological pedantry, and unending verbal cleverness and epigrammatic morality are but part of an overall exaggeration and declamatory urgency which soon wearies the reader.

Seneca's tragedies were not written for actual performance but for dramatic reading. Some actions, such as the murder of Medea's children, could hardly have been presented on an ancient stage, and many speeches and choruses, while too long to be tolerable in the theater, would have been especially pleasing as readings to literary circles trained to appreciate ingenious rhetoric and description. Seneca wrote a very cruel and witty satire on the deification of Claudius, the Apocolocyntosis ("Pumpkinification"). The Emperor's habits, such as his fondness for acting as a judge and playing dice, speech mannerisms, and physical infirmities are mercilessly parodied. The work is, in form, a Menippean satire, composed of mingled prose and verse, and is amusing for its use of legal language and parodies of Claudius's and Augustus's prose styles.

Further Reading

The best biography of Seneca in English is Francis C. Holland, Seneca (1920); the best brief account appears in J. Wight Duff, A Literary History of Rome in the Silver Age from Tiberius to Hadrian (1927; 3d ed., edited by A. M. Duff, 1964). Seneca's philosophical works are discussed in E. Vernon Arnold, Roman Stoicism (1911); Richard Mott Gummere, Seneca the Philosopher and His Modern Message (1922); and T. P. Hardeman, The Philosophy of Lucius Annaeus Seneca (1956). The best account of Seneca's Apocolocyntosis is in Allen Perley Ball, The Satire of Seneca on the Apotheosis of Claudius (1902), but see also J. Wight Duff, Roman Satire: Its Outlook on Social Life (1936).

Almost all of the numerous studies of Seneca's tragedies concentrate either on the use he made of his Greek models or on his influence on later tragedy. Among these studies are John William Cunliffe, The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy (1893; repr. 1925); Frank Laurence Lucas, Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy (1922); Howard Vernon Canter, Rhetorical Elements in the Tragedy of Seneca (1925); Norman T. Pratt, Dramatic Suspense in Seneca and in His Greek Precursors (1939); and Charles W. Mendell, Our Seneca (1941).

Additional Sources

Sussman, Lewis A., The elder Seneca, Leiden: Brill, 1978.

Srensen, Villy, Seneca, the humanist at the court of Nero, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

For more information on Lucius Annaeus Seneca, visit Britannica.com.

1. ‘The Elder’ or the ‘Rhetorician’, born at Corduba (Cordoba) in Spain c.55 BC of Italian stock and educated at Rome. He died between AD 37 and 41, before the exile of his son and namesake (see (2) below). The Elder Seneca devoted himself to the study of rhetoric, and in his old age assembled for his sons a collection of Controversiae (‘debates’) and Suasoriae (‘speeches of advice’). These were model exercises on rhetorical themes used in the schools of rhetoric: the former covered the oratory of the law-courts and took the form of debates about imaginary problems in criminal or civil cases, e.g. whether a soldier has committed sacrilege by fighting bravely with weapons taken from a hero's tomb after losing his own; the latter were exercises in deliberative (political) oratory and were speeches on such themes as whether 300 Spartans at Thermopylae (see PERSIAN WARS) should fight the Persians or run away. All the examples, dating from the time of Cicero to Seneca's old age, are extracts from rhetoricians whom Seneca had heard during his long life, a testimony to his astonishing memory (which he himself tells us was unrivalled) and an invaluable source for literary history. Of particular interest are the prefaces to the Controversiae where he discusses various orators, their analyses (divisionēs) and lines of approach (colorēs) to the debates that follow, with many digressions and anecdotes. Only five of the original ten books of Controversiae and one book of Suasoriae are extant.

2. ‘The Younger’ or ‘the Philosopher’ (c.4 BC–AD 65).

1. He was the second son of Seneca the Elder (see above) and was born at Corduba (Cordoba) in Spain. He was brought as a child to Rome and educated there in rhetoric and philosophy. Embarking on a senatorial career he became an advocate, quaestor, and senator, and achieved a considerable reputation as an orator and writer, so much so that he provoked the jealousy of the emperor Caligula and in 39 narrowly escaped being put to death. Under Claudius, Seneca occupied a position at court. In 41 he was banished to Corsica for alleged adultery with Julia (sometimes called Livilla), the youngest daughter of Germanicus and Agrippina the Elder, and sister of Caligula. Julia's sister, also called Agrippina (the Younger), mother of Nero, had him recalled in 49 and he was made tutor to the young Nero. In 51 Burrus, who was to become Seneca's friend and colleague, was made prefect of praetorians. On the accession of Nero in 54 Seneca became the emperor's political adviser, and for the next few years Rome and the empire enjoyed good government, largely under the direction of Seneca and Burrus. But Nero's behaviour became increasingly wilful, and after the death of Burrus in 62 the willingness of others to condone the emperor's excesses reduced Seneca's influence and he asked permission to retire. He left Rome and devoted the next three years to philosophy and his friends. In 65 he was implicated in the unsuccessful conspiracy of Piso against Nero's life and forced to commit suicide. His courageous death is described by Tacitus (Annals 15. 64).

The inconsistencies between Seneca's moral principles, his political life, and the behaviour of his pupil emperor have provoked much speculation, and he has been severely judged. He would appear to have condoned the murders of Claudius, Britannicus, and Agrippina, and he certainly acquired enormous wealth at a court where his professed moral principles were utterly ignored. He conformed to his principles too late to save his reputation. However, he was a humane and tolerant man, for many years a successful politician and an influence for good, and a writer of considerable and varied talent.
2. Seneca wrote voluminously. Besides the works that survive we have titles or fragments of treatises on geography, natural history, and ethics, among many others. His extant prose works comprise, first, the ten ethical treatises given the name Dialogi (‘dialogues’): De providentia, De constantia sapientis, De ira (in three books), De consolatione ad Marciam, De vita beata, De otio, De tranquillitate animi, De brevitate vitae, De consolatione ad Polybium, De consolatione ad Helviam matrem. These seem to have been written between 37 and 43. The ‘Consolation to Marcia’ is an attempt to console the daughter of Cremutius Cordus (a historian, victim of Sejanus) for the death of her sons. The ‘Consolation to Helvia’ written to his mother to console her for his own exile in 41, shows fortitude and dignity. The ‘Consolation to Polybius’ is addressed to a freedman of the emperor Claudius, an unattractive piece written c.43 to obtain recall from exile. (This Polybius appears to have translated Homer into Latin prose and Virgil into Greek). The treatises ‘On the constancy of the wise man’, ‘On tranquillity of the soul’, and ‘On leisure’ (De otio) were addressed to Annaeus Serēnus, praefectus vigilum under Nero. The theme of the first is that a wise man can suffer neither wrong nor insult. The second is concerned with the pursuit of peace of mind; the third is a defence of leisure and relaxation, and of the value of philosophical speculation and meditation.

Outside this collection of treatises there are further moral essays, De clementia and De beneficiis, and the Epistulae morales, a collection of 124 letters addressed to his friend Lucilius, divided into twenty books. The letters are also in effect moral essays (the fiction of a genuine correspondence is only sporadically aimed at), and are written in the tradition of the philosophical letter (compare PLATO 6) or the diatribe. The nature of the subject-matter—on happiness, the supreme good, riches, the terrors of death, and so forth—and the charm and informality of style, have made them the most popular of Seneca's works. They are persuasive, not dogmatic, in tone, and furnish interesting personal details about the author himself, as well as being illuminating about contemporary life. They were approved and made use of by early Christian writers. Seneca was thought in the Middle Ages to have been a Christian, and was believed by St Jerome and others to have corresponded with the apostle Paul. His treatises were studied by Petrarch (1304–74) and known to Chaucer (c.1343–1400).
3. Of a different order are the seven books of Seneca's Naturales quaestiones, dedicated to Lucilius and written during Seneca's retirement towards the end of his life. This work is an examination of natural phenomena, not from a scientific but from a Stoic standpoint. It is not a systematic work but a collection of facts about nature. The phenomena are grouped according to their connection with one or other of the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, with moral observations scattered throughout. The purpose of the work seems to be to find in nature a foundation for Stoic ethic. Though of little scientific value the work was used in the Middle Ages as a textbook of natural science.

The Apocolocyntosis is a clever and original piece of satirical burlesque on the death of the emperor Claudius, written in the form of a Menippean satire in a medley of prose and verse.

Most of Seneca's prose work is philosophical, and an important source for the history of Stoicism. His own brand of that philosophy was undogmatic and tempered by experience and common sense, and is often used as the basis for moral exhortation rather than expounded as a system of thought in its own right. The style is lively and rhetorical; it catches the attention immediately, but its unremitting brilliance, lacking depth of thought, is tiring: ‘sand without lime’ (i.e. cement that crumbles) is how the emperor Caligula described it.
4. Seneca's most important poetical works are nine tragedies adapted from the Greek: Hercules furens, Medea, Troades (Trojan Women), Phaedra (all based at least in part in Euripides), Agamemnon (presumably owing a debt to Aeschylus but one not easily traced), Oedipus, Hercules Oetaeus (the former very Sophoclean, the latter, which may not be genuinely by Seneca, not very like its presumed source, Sophocles' Trachiniae), Phoenissae (owing a little to Sophocles' Oedipus Coloneus), and Thyestes (a gruesome story with no extant source). A tenth tragedy attributed to Seneca, Octavia, is obviously not by him. (See individual entries for each of these.) The plays are written on Greek lines, that is, with dramatic episodes (written in iambic senarii; see METRE, LATIN 2) separated by choral odes (in lyric metres, most often anapaestic); it is likely that Seneca intended his tragedies for private recitation rather than for acting. They are exaggerations of the Euripidean style, showing psychological insight but markedly rhetorical and pointed in manner, and Seneca loves to dwell on the horrific and macabre elements of the plot. But the stichomythia is often more effective than that of the Greek original, and the ending of Seneca's Medea is more dramatic than that of Euripides. There are fine passages of description, much moralizing, and some striking epigrams. The plays also convey the Euripidean sense of the individual as victim. They exerted a great influence in the Italian Renaissance and in Tudor and Jacobean times in England; stock characters in the romantic plays of Shakespeare, such as the ghost, the nurse, and the barbarous villain, were transmitted from the Greek through the medium of Seneca.

The Anthologia Latina (see ANTHOLOGY 2) includes a number of short poems by Seneca, some containing references to his own life and family.

Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (after 4 bc-ad65) Roman statesman and a trenchant expositor of Stoicism. His principal ethical writings are the Epistolae Morales (‘Moral Letters’), an early literary exploitation of the letter form. He enjoyed a hectic career, which included banishment to Corsica for adultery with Julia Livilla, the niece of the emperor Claudius; his forced suicide provided an influential model of Stoicism in action.

Seneca, the younger (Lucius Annaeus Seneca) (lū'shəs ənē'əs sĕn'əkə), c.3 B.C.–A.D. 65, Roman philosopher, dramatist, and statesman, b. Corduba (present-day Córdoba), Spain. He was the son of Seneca the elder. The younger Seneca went to Rome in his childhood, studied rhetoric and philosophy, and earned renown as an orator when still a youth. He was exiled by Claudius (A.D. 41) ostensibly because of his intimacy with Julia, Claudius' brother Germanicus' daughter. In A.D. 49 he was recalled at the urgings of Agrippina the Younger to become tutor of the young Nero. In the first years of Nero's reign Seneca was virtual ruler with Afranius Burrus, and their influence on the emperor was probably for the best. But the ascendancy of Poppaea, Nero's wife, brought about first the death of Agrippina (A.D. 59), then that of Burrus (A.D. 62). Seneca asked to retire. He had amassed a huge fortune and wanted no more of court life. Accusations of conspiracy were finally leveled at Seneca, who, instructed to commit suicide, slashed his veins. His death scene was considered remarkably noble by the Romans. Seneca was a Stoic, and his writings show a high, unselfish nobility considerably at variance with his own life, in which greed, expediency, and even connivance at murder figured. His Epistolae morales ad Lucilium are essays on ethics written for his friend Lucilius Junior, to whom he also addressed Quaestiones naturales, philosophical—rather than scientific—remarks about natural phenomena. The so-called Dialogi of Seneca include essays on anger, on divine providence, on Stoic impassivity, and on peace of soul. Other moral essays have also survived, notably De elementia, on the duty of a ruler to be merciful, and De beneficiis, on the award and reception of favors. The Apocolocyntosis is a satire on the apotheosis of Claudius. The most influential of his works, at least in so far as European literature is concerned, were his tragedies. It is generally agreed that his plays were written for recitation and not for stage performance. Nine plays, based on Greek models, are accepted as his—Hercules Furens, Medea, Troades, Phaedra, Agamemnon, Oedipus, Hercules Oetaeus, Phoenissae, and Thyestes. A tenth, Octavia, is now ascribed to a later imitator. Although his drama has been deprecated in modern times, no author had a stronger influence on Renaissance tragedy than did Seneca. His atmosphere of gloom, his horrors, his rhetoric and bombast, his stoicism, were all essential contributions to the forming of Renaissance tragedy. The most significant play influenced by Seneca was Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy.

Bibliography

See studies by M. D. Griffin (1976), V. Sorenson (tr. 1984), and D. and E. Henry (1985).

Quotes:

"The bravest sight in the world is to see a great man struggling against adversity."

"Brave men rejoice in adversity, just as brave soldiers triumph in war."

"Fire is the test of gold; adversity, of strong men."

"The good things of prosperity are to be wished; but the good things that belong to adversity are to be admired."

"No untroubled day has ever dawned for me."

"Consult your friend on all things, especially on those which respect yourself. His counsel may then be useful where your own self-love might impair your judgment."

See more famous quotes by Seneca

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