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

He was angry, as any person would be, but rather than give in to that rage, he channeled the energy into a book on the topic, De Ira (or On Anger), which he dedicated to his brother. It’s a beautiful, touching book clearly directed at himself as much as the reader. “Don’t hang out with the ignorant,” he writes. “Only speak the truth, but only to those who can handle it.” “Walk away and laugh. . . . Expect to endure much.” This kind of self-talk dates back in Stoicism to Cleanthes, but Seneca was applying it to one of the most stressful situations imaginable—being deprived of your friends and family, an unjust conviction, the theft of valuable years of one’s life.

One of the most common themes in Seneca’s letters and essays from this period is death. For a man whose tuberculosis loomed over him from an early age—at one point driving him to consider suicide—he could not help but constantly think and write about the final act of life. “Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life,” he reminded himself. “Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day. . . . The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.” While he sat in exile, he would comfort his father-in-law, a man who had just been deprived of his own job supervising Rome’s grain supply, “Believe me, it’s better to produce the balance-sheet of your own life than that of the grain market.”

Most interestingly, he quibbled with the idea that death was something that lay ahead of us in the uncertain future. “This is our big mistake,” Seneca wrote, “to think we look forward toward death. Most of death is already gone. Whatever time has passed is owned by death.” That was what he realized, that we are dying every day and no day, once dead, can be revived.

It must have been a particularly painful insight for a man who was watching years of his life tick by—for the second time—due to events outside of his control. It might not have been Stoic to despair at this, but it was certainly quite human.

In a play Seneca wrote toward the end of his life, clearly from heartfelt experience, he captured just how capricious and random fate could be:

If the breaking day sees someone proud,

The ending day sees them brought low.

No one should put too much trust in triumph,

No one should give up hope of trials improving.

Clotho mixes one with the other and stops

Fortune from resting, spinning every fate around.

No one has had so much divine favor

That they could guarantee themselves tomorrow.

God keeps our lives hurtling on,

Spinning in a whirlwind.

Fate had caused him to be born to wealth and had given him great tutors. It had also weakened his health and sent him unfairly packing twice, just as his career was taking off. Fortune had behaved, all through his life, exactly as she pleased. For him, as for us, she brought success and failure, pain and pleasure . . . usually in exactly the form he was not expecting.

Little did Seneca know in 50 AD that this was going to happen again. His trials were about to improve and his life was about to be spun into a whirlwind that history has not quite yet fully wrapped its head around.

Agrippina, the great-granddaughter of Augustus, had grand ambitions for her twelve-year-old son, Nero. Having married Claudius, Caligula’s successor, in 49 AD and convinced him to adopt Nero, one of her first moves as empress was to persuade Claudius to recall Seneca from Corsica to serve as their son’s tutor. Plotting for him to be emperor someday, she wanted access to Seneca’s political, rhetorical, and philosophical brain for Nero.

Suddenly, at fifty-three years of age, Seneca, long a subversive but marginalized figure, was elevated to the center of the Roman imperial court. A lifetime of striving and ambition finally produced the ultimate patron, and the entire Seneca family was ready to take advantage.

What did Seneca teach young Nero? Ironically, just as his father had hired Attalus to tutor Seneca in basically everything but philosophy, Agrippina wanted Seneca to teach Nero political strategy, not Stoicism. Seneca’s lessons would have revolved around law and oratory—how to argue and how to strategize. Any Stoic principles would have been snuck into his lessons like vegetables baked into a child’s muffin or sugar to cover the medicine.