Dying Every Day Read online

  Seneca was in his midsixties and feeling his age. Constantly cold, depleted by lifelong respiratory disease, he claimed to be “among the decrepit and those brushing up against the end.” Everywhere he looked, he saw reminders that he had passed into the last phase of life, his senectus. Making the rounds of his estates, he found that a stand of plane trees had become gnarled and withered; he scolded a caretaker for failing to irrigate them. The man protested that the trees were simply too old to be helped. Seneca did not reveal to the caretaker, but did to his readers, that he himself, in youth, had planted those trees.

  Seneca was often on the move, whether checking on his properties or following the emperor and the court through Italy. He was in Campania much of the time, sometimes visiting the wealthy resort towns of Baiae and Puteoli. He went at least once to Pompeii, as he eagerly wrote to his old friend Lucilius, a native of that town. Seneca felt closer to Lucilius as the years advanced, perhaps because so many other friends were dead. A man slightly younger than Seneca, a fellow member of Nero’s staff—caretaker of the emperor’s estates in Sicily—Lucilius shared Seneca’s literary tastes and philosophic concerns. He was also a fellow survivor, having undergone torture at the hands of Messalina and Narcissus, Seneca’s persecutors as well.

  Wherever Seneca went in these years, he carried on work on his magnum opus, a remarkable set of short moral essays framed as letters. Ostensibly addressed to Lucilius, these letters were in fact aimed at a wide audience. But the fiction of an intimate correspondence gave Seneca latitude in the structure of the essays, as well as unusual freedom to vary voice, tone, and technique. The melding of ethical inquiry with epistolary style produced a breakthrough for Seneca. He carried on the Letters to Lucilius at far greater length than anything else he had written and with greater candor about his life and thoughts—or at least, what seems to be candor.

  A typical letter begins with a moment from daily life, then goes on to explore insights arising from that moment. In one of the letters, for example, Seneca describes a trip to a friend’s vacation home, a wealthy estate house in Puteoli (modern Pozzuoli).

  To reach this house from Baiae, his point of departure, Seneca needed to cross a three-mile bay. He set out on a small hired ship, although dark clouds loomed in the distance. Hoping to beat the storm, Seneca told his steersman to save time by taking a direct route rather than hugging the shore. But that only put him in deep, open water when the winds began to pick up. Halfway across, when there was no longer any point in turning back, Seneca found himself in a pitching, heaving swell. Seasickness, a condition he found intolerable, began to torment him, though he found he could not relieve his distress by vomiting.

  Panicking, Seneca urged the steersman to change course and head for the nearest shore, but that was a rough coastline without anchorage. The steersman argued that the ship could not go near those rocks, but Seneca was by now in agony. He forced the crew to bring the ship as near to land as they could. And then he leaped into the sea.

  Noting that he had always been a good swimmer, Seneca describes to Lucilius how he got himself to shore and hauled himself painfully onto the rocky beach. Somehow he located a faint path leading to the villa he was seeking. He now understood, he writes whimsically, that the sufferings of Odysseus, driven about in his ship for ten years as described in the Odyssey, must have stemmed more from seasickness than from sea monsters.

  Later, washed and changed, with the villa’s slaves giving his body a rubdown to restore its warmth, Seneca reflected on how nausea had driven him to desperation. “I endured incredible trials because I could not endure myself,” he writes, using a typically pointed turn of phrase. Then he let his thoughts wander down their usual path, toward the search for a virtuous life, a life of moral awareness. Discomforts overwhelm the body, Seneca muses, in the same way that vice and ignorance overwhelm the soul. The sufferer may not even know he is suffering, just as a deep sleeper does not know he is asleep. Only philosophy can rouse souls from such comas. Philosophy, Lucilius, is what you must pursue with all your being. Abandon all else except philosophy, just as you would neglect all your affairs had you fallen gravely ill.

  The letter lands its readers at a very different place than where it appeared to be headed. The retching, desperate man who pitches himself into the sea turns suddenly into a serious thinker. Seneca’s portrait of his own folly in taking a shortcut, and his description of embarrassing physical distress, draw us in with their frankness and closely observed detail. Once we have been hooked by Seneca the man, Seneca the sage reels us in.

  But Seneca was not only a man and a sage; he was also a politician. His mastery of image making during his decade at Nero’s side, his many efforts to manipulate public opinion, make the task of reading his Letters to Lucilius a complicated one. Is it the real Seneca we see before us—a man of profound moral earnestness, whose every third thought is of philosophy—or an imago, a shape conjured by the wordsmith’s arts? Did Seneca himself, after fifteen years in which his every written word was a political act, even know the difference?

  Seneca explores in one of his letters how an author’s style reflects his character. He seems not to have considered that style might shape character—that constant, prolonged engagement in “spin” might make it hard for an author to stop spinning. In the Letters, Seneca is often spinning himself, performing himself as philosopher. “Philosophy is such a sacred thing that even that which resembles it wins approval by means of deception,” Seneca writes to Lucilius. There are times in the Letters when he too deceives, though just how often is very hard to say.

  Seneca describes in one of the Letters the course of a typical day, but the description is only partial. His morning is consumed with reading and thinking, interrupted for a spot of exercise—a footrace against a young slave boy, Pharius, whom Seneca, on that particular day, had managed to tie. Then a tepid bath, with water heated only by the sun; for Seneca, who throughout his life kept up a habit of cold-water bathing, no longer has the fortitude he once had. Then comes a spare lunch: dry bread and other simple fare, requiring neither the use of a table nor the washing of hands afterward. Then a nap—brief, for Seneca claims not to need much sleep.

  It is the ideal portrait of a sage in retirement, tranquil, ascetic, serene. But the description takes us only to the midpoint of Seneca’s day. The letter turns to other topics, leaving afternoon and evening a blank. As in much of what he wrote, Seneca has contrived to have it both ways. He wins our trust with his willingness to expose himself. But then he leaves gaps in the record, keeping important moments veiled.

  The Letters contain no mention of Seneca’s political career. The deeds he took part in, the crises he managed, the people he had watched, or helped, Nero kill—none of them even entered his thoughts, if we judge the Letters to be their record. Perhaps he could not mention these topics without provoking the princeps; perhaps silence was the price he paid for freedom to publish. Whatever the reason, the Letters form a strangely partial self-exploration. Seneca examines himself from every angle, seeks the truth at every turn, seems willing to confide all—yet he says nothing about the most consequential part of his life, still ongoing at the time he was writing.

  A few vague statements in the Letters seem to imply regret for the past or to admit failure. “I show the right path to others; I myself spotted it only late, after wearing myself out with straying,” he says. He compares his moral condition to that of a patient with skin lesions that have at last stopped spreading, though they also are not healing. He claims to have found an unguent for these sores, a medicine he will record and transmit for posterity: the Letters themselves.

  Not for the first time, Seneca portrays his moral self as suffering from incurable illness—a trope that allowed him both to acknowledge shortcomings and to disclaim responsibility. Coming from a man who colluded in the murder of Agrippina, the metaphor suggests special pleading or even an apology. Not all readers of the Letters have been willing to accept it.


  Seneca had begun his literary career by pondering the omnipresence of death. “We are dying every day,” he had written to Marcia to console her for the loss of her son. Now, as he neared the end of that career, the theme of death, and especially suicide, occupied his mind more than ever. He saw death drawing ever nearer, and the thought of hastening it by his own action was becoming very real.

  In the Letters, Seneca anticipates death as a great philosophic challenge, the ultimate test of character and principle. Seneca’s moral heroes, Socrates and Cato, had had their finest moments when they met that test. Socrates had calmly drunk a cup of lethal hemlock, then vowed an offering to the gods for having healed him. Cato had resolutely torn out his own bowels rather than have his wound stitched up. Seneca had chosen the compromises of the court over the absolute quest for virtue, yet he glimpsed a final chance to join these sages. His death might in the end redeem his complex, imperfect life.

  All around him, Seneca encountered premonitions and foretastes of the coming crisis. His respiratory illness caused him attacks in which he could not draw breath and lingered in a state of near-asphyxiation. Referring to these moments by the medical term meditatio mortis, “rehearsal for death,” he describes to Lucilius how he had ceased to dread them. “Even while suffocating, I did not stop resting serene in brave and cheerful thoughts,” he proclaims. “Take this as a guarantee from me: I will not tremble when I reach the brink; I am already prepared.”

  Examples of suicide also surrounded Seneca, reminders that the path of “freedom,” as he had called it in De Ira, was always open. Two cases greatly impressed him, both involving enslaved gladiators forced to fight in the arena. Finding their plights intolerable, both men resolved to die, despite being constantly under guard. One man contrived to visit a privy and force the lavatory sponge down his throat, choking himself to death. Another, while being driven to the arena on a cart, drooped toward the ground as though falling asleep, then inserted his head between the wheel spokes so that its rotation broke his neck. Despite almost total powerlessness, these men had found release.

  Meditating on these examples, Seneca takes on the gloomy question of whether one should commit suicide to preempt a death that is certainly coming. To endure torture or wasting disease is brave, he concludes, but to do violence to oneself and end these conditions is also brave. He cites arguments on either side, then admits, uncharacteristically, that he cannot make up his mind.

  Seneca had reason to dwell on such topics. His relationship with Nero had become a kind of captivity, or else a wasting disease, likely to kill him in the end. He was dying every day, just as surely, and even more slowly, than the rest of suffering humanity. But his plight was not wretched enough to call for the final solution—at least, not yet. Indeed there are passages in the Letters, and in his other late prose work, Natural Questions, that suggest he was doing his utmost to stay alive.

  In one of the Letters, Seneca appears to offer Nero a mutual nonaggression pact. The topic he has chosen to discuss with Lucilius is whether philosophers are the enemies of monarchs. Of course they are not, Seneca opines. Rulers preserve the peace that allows sages to think great thoughts; the sage should revere the ruler as a child does a parent, or a student his teacher. Seneca quotes two obsequious lines of verse, originally addressed by the poet Vergil to the emperor Augustus:

  He is a god who made this serenity for us,

  A god—such he will always be, to me.

  The quote suggests a continuing effort to cut a deal with the princeps, a deal Nero had already once refused. Seneca will go quietly into retirement and not defame the regime, in exchange for being left unharassed. If Nero will become an Augustus and provide safety, Seneca will become a Vergil and give praise.

  A parent, a teacher, a god—Seneca, in his midsixties, could not have relished giving these roles to Nero in his midtwenties, his own former pupil. He kept the discussion general and left the analogy implicit. But in another work composed at the same time, Natural Questions, he was more direct. Here, in a treatise dealing with meteorology and earth science, Seneca again dared to make mention of Nero, a name he had not set down in writing for nearly ten years.

  Seneca knew that Natural Questions would have powerful readers, probably including Nero himself. He took care to mention the princeps, at several points, in ways designed to show amity and win favor. In one passage, he praises Nero for his poetry—an arena in which Seneca’s talent had, according to Tacitus, posed a threat—and even quotes a line he claimed to especially admire. In a second passage, he discusses an expedition (otherwise unknown) that Nero had sent to the upper Nile. There, in a phrase that drips with insincerity, he characterized the princeps as “a man passionately devoted to truth, as he is to the other virtues.”

  In a third passage of Natural Questions, Seneca confronted his Nero problem by way of historical analogy. As was well known to Seneca’s readers, the Macedonian king Alexander the Great had brought a philosopher to his court to elevate its moral standing—much as Seneca had been brought to Nero’s. For years that sage, Callisthenes, had dutifully played his part, until one day, for unknown reasons, he shook off subservience. He stood up at a banquet and, before the assembled high command, denounced Alexander’s pretensions to godhood. Within a few months, he was dead, on Alexander’s orders.

  Seneca recalls this notorious murder in the following way: “This is an eternal charge against Alexander, that no virtue, no success in war will redeem. Whenever someone says, ‘He killed many thousands of Persians,’ there will come a reply: ‘… and Callisthenes.’ Whenever it is said ‘He killed Darius, who ruled the greatest empire of that time,’ there will come a reply: ‘… and Callisthenes.’ ” The reminder of Alexander’s stained legacy carries an implied warning for Nero: if he too kills a philosopher, the crime will darken his name forever.

  But even while touting the lessons this episode held for Nero, Seneca ignored the lessons it might have held for himself. Perhaps Alexander had incurred eternal reproach—but Callisthenes, at the same time, had won eternal glory. Some inner voice had prompted that sage to stand up and denounce a tyrant. The effort had cost him his life, but Callisthenes, if he shared the outlook of Socrates and Cato, the one all Stoics professed to admire, must have felt the sacrifice was worth it.

  Had Seneca ever tried to emulate Callisthenes, or did he now hope to? With all his eloquence and inside knowledge, he could have done much to harm Nero’s regime. Nothing suggests he felt tempted to use those weapons. Rather, he sought to keep writing, keep mum about the crimes he had seen, and keep alive. He would take a different path than Callisthenes. He would make himself too respected a sage for even Nero to kill.

  While Seneca was composing Natural Questions, in 62 or 63, Campania was shaken for a number of days by severe earthquakes. Though Romans could not have known it, their sumptuous resort region straddled an active fault line; thus comes the vulcanism (ongoing today) of Mount Vesuvius. Pompeii and Herculaneum, wealthy resorts on the Bay of Naples, were hardest hit by the temblors. A stone frieze recovered from Pompeii gives one artist’s record of the event, depicting cracked and collapsing buildings in the public square.

  Seneca reflected on the disaster in Natural Questions, one portion of which deals with earthquakes. Curious details caught his interest: a flock of hundreds of sheep inexplicably dropped dead; a bronze statue was split down the middle; a man taking a bath watched his bathwater disappear into cracks that appeared between tiles, then surge up again as the cracks reclosed. Residents wandered away from the scene, some babbling insanely, some in a catatonic trance. Many, Seneca noted, vowed to leave Campania and never return to the stricken region.

  The fact that destruction had arisen from the sudden instability of solid ground impressed Seneca mightily. To his philosophic mind, earthquakes offered a paradigm of greater instabilities, the evanescence of life itself. Death is stalking us everywhere, he mused, playing on his favorite theme. How useless to fear or dread death, still more
useless to flee it! We panic over natural disasters, though the smallest things—a gangrenous cut, an accumulation of phlegm—can do us in just as easily. We fret over oncoming floods, when a drink of water that goes down the wrong way can be every bit as lethal.

  This refusal to lament Campania’s fate exemplifies the Stoic approach to misfortune. Happiness comes not from one’s circumstances but from cultivation of Reason, the Stoics taught; a true sage, a sapiens, would be unharmed by torture or loss, even loss of life. But such acceptance can translate all too easily into passivity, especially in an autocracy where death often arrives by imperial order. By insisting that death is everywhere and cannot be escaped, Seneca seems to relieve himself of the burden of action. For indeed, Seneca was taking very little action in these years to help himself or others.

  History supplies an ironic footnote to Seneca’s discussion of the Campania quake. The refugees he scoffed at for leaving Campania were in fact, as time would tell, saving their lives. Seventeen years later the region would be enveloped by ash and hot gases, in the volcanic eruption that entombed Pompeii and Herculaneum. The earthquake had been not a disaster so much as a warning. Seneca, his eyes fixed on the ubiquity of death, had not seen that Nature was offering escape.

  A frieze depicting the devastation caused by the Campanian quake.

  In August 64, Romans again faced sudden ruin, this time in Gaul, in the regional capital Lugdunum (Lyons). A fire raged through the town, virtually annihilating it in a single night. Again Seneca preached acceptance and calm, expressing his views this time in one of the Letters to Lucilius. His point of departure is the grief of his friend Aebutius Liberalis, a native of Lyons who had, in all likelihood, lost everything in the fire. It is pointless to grieve, Seneca reminds Liberalis, when disaster is the common lot of humankind. Far better to practice praemeditatio malorum and imagine doom before it arrives, mentally embracing it until it ceases to terrify.