Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living From Zeno to Marcus Aurelius

Yet just a few years into this promising career, only in his early twenties, Seneca’s health nearly cut it all short. He had always struggled with a lung condition, most likely tuberculosis, but some sort of flare-up in 20 AD forced him to take an extended trip to Egypt to recover.

Life takes our plans and dashes them to pieces. As Seneca would later write, we should never underestimate fortune’s habit of behaving just as she pleases. Just because we have worked hard, just because we are showing promise and our path toward success is clear has no bearing on whether we will get what we want.

Seneca certainly wouldn’t. He would spend something like ten years in Alexandria, in convalescence. While he didn’t control that, he could decide how he would spend that time. So he spent the decade writing, reading, and building up his strength. His uncle Gaius Galerius served as prefect of Egypt, and we can imagine it was here that Seneca was given his first real education in how power operated. We can also imagine him pining for and plotting a return.

While he was away, he received news that would foreshadow the arc of his own life. Attalus had somehow run afoul of Tiberius, the emperor, who confiscated his property and banished him from Rome. Seneca’s beloved tutor would spend the rest of his years making ends meet in exile, digging ditches. To be a philosopher in imperial Rome was to walk a razor’s edge, Seneca was learning, and it was to accept that the fates were fickle and that fortune could be cruel.

Seneca’s return to Rome at thirty-five in 31 AD would only reinforce this latter lesson. On the journey home, his uncle was killed in a shipwreck. He also arrived in time to see Sejanus, once among Tiberius’s most trusted military commanders and advisors, condemned by the Senate and torn to pieces by the mob in the streets. It was a time of paranoia and violence and political turmoil. Into this maelstrom, Seneca took his first public office, serving as quaestor by virtue of his family connections.

Seneca kept his head down through Tiberius’s reign, which lasted until 37 AD and through Caligula’s, which was considerably shorter but just as violent. In his book On the Tranquility of Mind

, Seneca would later tell the story of a Stoic philosopher he admired named Julius Canus who was ordered to be murdered when he fell afoul of Caligula. As Canus waited for the executioner, he played a game of chess with a friend. When the guard came to lead him away to his death, he joked, “You will testify that I was one piece ahead.”

Seneca noted not only the quip’s philosophical brilliance, but also the kind of fame it had won for its owner in this terrifying time.

He would have easily seen himself in Canus’s shoes, for he too walked the razor’s edge of life and death under such an unstable king. According to Dio Cassius, Seneca was saved from execution—for what offense, we do not know—only by his ill health:

Seneca, who was superior in wisdom to all the Romans of his day and to many others as well, came near being destroyed, though he had neither done any wrong nor had the appearance of doing so, but merely because he pleaded a case well in the senate while the emperor was present. Caligula ordered him to be put to death, but afterwards let him off because he believed the statement of one of his female associates, to the effect that Seneca had consumption in an advanced stage and would die before a great while.

It was out of the frying pan and into the fire. In a span of less than two years, Seneca would lose his father (in 39 AD at ninety-two years of age), get married (40 AD), then lose his firstborn son (40–41 AD). And then twenty days after burying his son, he would be banished from Rome by Claudius, the successor to Caligula.

What for? We are not sure. Was it blanket persecutions of philosophers? Did Seneca, in his grief, end up having an affair with Julia Livilla, sister of Agrippina? The record is murky, and, like scandals of our own time, beset with rumors and agendas and conflicting accounts. In any case, Seneca was brought up on adultery charges, and in 41 AD, at age forty-five, this grieving son and father was sent packing to the distant island of Corsica. Once again, his promising career was cut capriciously short.

Like his decade in Egypt, this would be a long time away from Rome—eight years—and although he started productively (writing Consolation to Polybius, Consolation to Helvia, and On Anger in a short span), the isolation would begin to wear on him. Soon, the man who had not long before been writing consolations to other people clearly needed some consoling himself.