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

Seneca can clearly see this body language, and yet he proceeds. He proceeded for many years, in fact. Why? Because he hoped some of it—any of it—would get through. Because he knew the stakes were high. Because he knew his job was to try to teach Nero to be good (he would literally die trying). And because he was never going to turn down a chance to be that close to power, to have that much impact.

In the end, Seneca made little progress with Nero, a man whom time would shortly reveal to be deranged and flawed. Was it always a hopeless mission? Was Seneca’s steady hand a positive influence—one that Rome would have been worse off without? We cannot know. What we know is that Seneca tried. It’s the old lesson: You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. You control what you do and say, not whether people listen.

All a Stoic can do is show up and do their work. Seneca believed he had to, and clearly, he wanted to also. As he would later write, the difference between the Stoics and the Epicureans was that the Stoics felt that politics was a duty. “The two sects, the Epicureans and the Stoics, are at variance, as in most things,” Seneca wrote. “Epicurus says: ‘The wise man will not engage in public affairs except in an emergency.’ Zeno says: ‘He will engage in public affairs unless something prevents him.’”

Nothing was preventing Seneca—least of all his own ambitions—so he kept trying.

Sources tell us that for the first several years, Seneca was the steady hand. While he was working with Burrus, the military leader also chosen by Agrippina, Rome was, for the first time in some time according to contemporaries, well run. In 55 AD, Seneca’s brother Gallio was made consul. The following year, Seneca himself held that position.

Like the poem Seneca wrote about fate said, however, this was not to last. In fact, that seems to be the constant theme of Seneca’s life—that peace and stability are fragile and punctured, quite capriciously, by events outside his control. Nero, driven by paranoia and the cruel streak he inherited from his mother, began to eliminate his rivals, starting with his brother Britannicus, who was dispatched with poison, just like Claudius. He forced out his mother and began to make designs to kill her too—failing several times to deliver a fatal dose of poison. One account has Nero attempting to have his mother killed in an elaborate boating accident. Finally, by 59 AD, the deed was done.

That early, restrained-but-waiting Nero captured in the Barrón statue was now released. In Tacitus’s words, he deferred no more on long meditated crimes. With his power matured, and oxidized into his soul, he could do what he liked, no matter how depraved. It was a turning point noticed by Seneca, for sure. While Arius had advised Augustus to eliminate the other, “too many Caesars,” Seneca had to remind Nero that it was impossible for even the strongest king, in the end, to kill every successor. Eventually someone would come next. But Nero didn’t listen, and ultimately murdered every male in the Julio-Claudian line.

When Nero wasn’t killing, it’s not as if he was dutiful in attending to the business of the empire. He was racing chariots at a special track he liked outside Rome, with slaves dragooned into watching and clapping for him. He neglected the state so that he could perform onstage, singing and dancing like some cut-rate actor—a fact of which his attendants prevented him from knowing by, according to Suetonius, not allowing anyone “to leave the theatre even for the most urgent reasons.”

Seneca was horrified, so why didn’t he leave? How could he be a part of such an embarrassment?

One explanation is fear. His whole life he had watched emperors murder and banish with impunity. He had felt the hard hand of their injustice himself more than once. Imperial vindictiveness loomed over him. As Dio Cassius relates, “After the death of Britannicus, Seneca and Burrus no longer gave any careful attention to the public business, but were satisfied if they might manage it with moderation and still preserve their lives.” Perhaps he thought, as people think today with flawed leaders, that he could do good through Nero. Seneca had always looked for the good in people, even someone as obviously bad as Nero. “Let’s be kind to one another,” he once wrote. “We’re just wicked people living among wicked people. Only one thing can give us peace, and that’s a pact of mutual leniency.” Maybe he saw something in Nero up close, a goodness despite the flaws, that has been lost to the historical record.

Or maybe his very real fear and these blind spots were compounded by the tempting self-interest of Seneca’s position. It’s hard to get someone to see, the expression goes, what their salary depends on them not seeing.