The Weekly Sage hopes to regularly bring brief profiles of key contributors to thought and faith before a Christian audience for historical education and awareness of valuable resources.

Seneca the Younger

• “There is no other life so free, so clean of sin, so respectful of the ways of old, as that which leaves the city walls, to be happy in the woods. Anger, lust, and greed do not set fire to the heart of the innocent man whose home is on the mountain tops. The winds of the faithless mob leave him unswayed, unmoved by their perverted hate and brittle love. He is no slave to established power, wants none for himself. He does not pursue the futile goals of fame or fleeting wealth. He is free from hope and free from fear. Black, biting envy does not pursue him with mean grasping jaws. He does not know the wicked crimes whose seeds are sown in cities. He does not tremble, guilty, at each sound, or twist his words in fear. He has no wish to be rich, live in a thousand-columned house, and have his roof inlaid with thick gold leaf….The wicked look for sin in secret, with lights out; in fearfulness they hide inside a house of a hundred rooms. Better, live in the light, let heaven be your witness.”[1]
• “A good man never thinks about his gifts unless he is reminded by someone wishing to repay them. Otherwise the benefits are converted into loans. Treating a benefit as an expenditure is a shameful form of loan-sharking. No matter how previous benefits have turned out, carry on bestowing them on others. They will be better off in the hands of the ungrateful who might perhaps be made grateful someday by a sense of shame, a convenient opportunity, or emulation. Do not give up. Keep on with your task and fulfil the role of a good man. Assist one person with wealth, someone else with credit, another with your influence, someone else with your advice, another with sensible instructions. Even beasts are aware of kindnesses, and no animal is so intractable that care and attention will not gentle it and produce affection towards his handler….A man is ungrateful in the face of the first benefit? He won’t be in the face of the second. Has he forgotten them both? The third will remind him of those he let slip….Besiege him with your benefits.”[2]

Seneca the Younger (4 BC – 65 AD), the common name for Lucius Annaeus Seneca, was a politician and man of letters from the early Roman Empire. Having made a significant impact on the society and policy of his day, Seneca also left a lasting legacy through the numerous works that were preserved after his death. The tragic plays were widely read and influential in Shakespeare’s day, and his letters preserved a model of Stoic philosophy and statesmanship that has impressed leaders ever since. However, his personal story also bears lessons for people and citizens.

Born in Spain, Seneca yet entered life as part of the Imperial Roman elite. His father was a well-known teacher of rhetoric who had gained equestrian status. As a result, both of Seneca the Younger’s brothers also had influential careers – one in finance, and the other in politics. This latter, Lucius Junius Gallio Annaeanus was later known as Junius Gallio and is mentioned in Acts 18, being the Gallio who dismissed the charges brought against Paul. While little is known about Seneca the Younger’s early upbringing, he spent time in Egypt as well as Spain, being mentored by various elite relatives.

Seneca’s entry into politics came comparatively late in life, gaining the office of quaestor around the age of 40, and thereby beginning to sit in the Senate. His rhetoric was criticized by the Emperor Caligula, but as that wild tyrant was known for insulting leaders who later emerged as effective and moderate, this may count to Seneca’s credit. Nevertheless, when the Emperor Claudius succeeded Caligula, Seneca was the victim of palace rivalries among influential royal ladies, and found himself exiled to Corsica.

In this period, Seneca began making the literary contributions that contributed to his significance to future generations. His six tragedies, Phaedra, Medea, Oedipus, Hercules Furens, Trojan Women, and Thyestes all evince a singular style that relates to Seneca’s Stoic philosophy. As a young boy he had been trained by philosophers in Stoicism, learning to suspect passions and desires. No doubt his time at the Imperial Court, with its suspicions and violence, reinforced these teachings, and Seneca’s plays reveal the depths of the trauma and upheaval that unregulated emotion can cause. Whether craving power, renown, or physical pleasure, the key figures in Seneca’s plays fail to follow the ethical standards so clearly before them, and find themselves in a downward spiral of wrongdoing and consequences. While there are those who recognize what is right, urge it on others, and seek guidance and justice from heaven, they are uniformly disappointed.

While Seneca’s tragedies are engaging and thought-provoking literature, borne out of the difficulties and education of his early career, they were not his only major contribution. After Nero succeeded Claudius as emperor, Seneca found himself back in favour at court, serving as the young Nero’s tutor and speechwriter. In this period, he contributed significant works such as On Benefits, On Anger, On Clemency, and The Pumpkinification of Claudius the God. While the first three are standard Stoic treatises, emphasizing the value of restraint and the life of the sage, the last is a satire of the death and supposed deification of the Emperor who exiled Seneca, departing perhaps from the style of self-control he advocated.

Nevertheless, Seneca’s prominence lasted only from AD 54 to 62. Unwilling to cooperate with Nero’s increasing violence and wickedness, Seneca found himself increasingly out of favour, supplanted by younger and wilder imperial companions. When he refused to aid in an assassination attempt, Seneca was forced to commit suicide. However, having suffered severely from illness his entire life, and well aware of the example of Socrates, Seneca accepted this fate without remorse, preparing extensively by giving speeches to attendants before perishing. While Seneca’s philosophy is full of valuable insights, such as the importance of friendship and the need for discipline, his exultation of human will and achievement in the face of a hopeless and hostile world feels bleak in the face of the Christianity that developed in his lifetime. No wonder that the loving plan of salvation through belief in Jesus had such influence in a society corrupted at the apex and hopeless toward traditional Roman religion at the base.

• “The first men on this earth, however, and their immediate descendants, followed nature unspoiled; they took a single person as their leader and their law, freely submitting to the decisions of an individual of superior merit. It is nature’s way to subordinate the worse to the better. With dumb animals, indeed, the ones who dominate the group are either the biggest or the fiercest. The bull who leads the herd is not the weakling, but the one whose bulk and brawn has brought it victory over the other males. In a herd of elephants the tallest is the leader. Among human beings the highest merit means the highest position. So they used to choose their ruler for his character. Hence peoples were supremely fortunate when among them a man could never be more powerful than others unless he was a better man than they were. For there is nothing dangerous in a man’s having as much power as he likes if he takes the view that he has power to do only what it is his duty to do. In that age, then, which people commonly refer to as the Golden Age, government, so Posidonius maintains, was in the hands of the wise. They kept the peace, protected the weaker from the stronger, urged and dissuaded, pointed out what was advantageous and what was not….To govern was to serve, not to rule. No one used to try out the extent of his power over those to whom he owed that power in the first place. And no one had either reason or inclination to perpetrate injustice, since people governing well were equally well obeyed, and a king could issue no greater threat to disobedient subjects than that of his own abdication.”[3]
• “Why go through individual cases? When you see the forum packed with a mob, and the polling place filled with a swarming crowd, and that circus where the greatest part of the populace is on display, be sure that there are just as many vices on hand as there are people. Those you see in civilian dress are constantly warring among themselves. One man’s led to destroy another for a small gain; no one profits save from another’s harm; they hate the prosperous and despise the poor, resent the greater man and afflict the lesser. Goaded by a host of desires, they lust to win some trivially pleasurable prize from any and every depravity. It’s a way of life no different from a gladiatorial school: living and fighting with the same people. It’s a gathering of wild beasts – except that beasts live peacefully among themselves and don’t bite their own, whereas these get their fill by tearing each other to pieces.”[4]

[1] Seneca, Six Tragedies, trans. Emily Wilson, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 16-17.

[2] Seneca, On Benefits, trans. Miriam Griffin and Brad Inwood, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), 20.

[3] Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, trans. Robin Campbell, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), 162-163.

[4] Seneca, Anger, Mercy, and Revenge, trans. Robert A. Kaster and Martha C. Nussbaum, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 39.