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

Seneca had grown and continued to grow quite wealthy under Nero’s regime. In just a few short years, he had amassed, largely through gifts from his boss, a fortune of some three hundred million sesterces. He was certainly the richest Stoic on earth, possibly the richest ever to live. One source notes that Seneca owned some five hundred identical citrus wood tables with ivory legs just for entertaining. It’s an odd picture, thinking of a Stoic philosopher—descended from the frugal school of Cleanthes—throwing Gatsbyesque parties funded by the gifts of his murderous boss.

Although most art renders Seneca as lean and sinewy, in fact the real likeness of him survives only in the form of one statue, dating to the third century, which is actually a double bust of Seneca and Socrates. Seneca loved Socrates, marveling once that “there were thirty tyrants surrounding Socrates, and yet they could not break his spirit.” Both men don the classic philosopher’s toga. Curiously, Socrates’s wraps both shoulders, while Seneca’s right shoulder is bare—perhaps a nod to his line about how a man must realize how little he needs to be happy, it is “the superfluous things that wear our togas threadbare.” But the portrait also reveals Seneca as the older man who had clearly enjoyed his share of sumptuous banquets, and had grown quite fat in Nero’s service.

Much of our knowledge about Seneca’s opulence and fortune comes to us via a man named P. Suillius, a Roman senator who was angry at Seneca, suspecting he was behind the revival of Lex Cincia, a law with a provision that lawyers plead cases without compensation. While Suillius’s motives were quite suspect and he would later be convicted on serious criminal charges and banished from Rome, there was at least some truth to his written attacks on Seneca’s hypocrisy. Even Seneca’s response—in his essay On the Happy Life—

seems to set up a standard to which he obviously falls short:

Cease, therefore, forbidding to philosophers the possession of money; no one has condemned wisdom to poverty. The philosopher shall own ample wealth, but it will have been wrested from no man, nor will it be stained with another’s blood—wealth acquired without harm to any man, without base dealing, and the outlay of it will be not less honourable than was its acquisition; it will make no man groan except the spiteful.

Cato was rich. So was Cicero. Neither of them grew rich in the service of someone as odious as Nero, however. Arius and Athenodorus were rewarded handsomely for their service to Augustus . . . but Augustus never murdered his own mother. Cato loaned much of his money to friends without interest, and did not seem interested in growing his fortune for its own sake. “What is the proper limit to wealth?” Seneca would later ask rhetorically. “It is, first, to have what is necessary, and second, to have what is enough.”

Clearly he struggled with that idea of enough.

Over several years, he lent out something like forty million sesterces at high rates to Rome’s British colony. It was an aggressive financial play, and when the colony struggled under the debt, a brutal and violent rebellion broke out that eventually needed to be put down by Roman legions.

Seneca had said that a philosopher’s wealth should not be stained in blood, but it’s hard not to see the drops of red on his.

Why couldn’t he stop himself? It’s strange to say that his talent and brilliance were to blame, but it’s true—as it is for so many ambitious people who end up with controversial fame and fortune. He had been groomed since birth for greatness, expected to become a leading man of his time. He had taken every opportunity that life had given him and tried to make the best of it, he had persevered through difficulties that would have sunk anyone who wasn’t a Stoic, and he had enjoyed the good times too. He had not complained, he kept going, kept serving, kept trying to have impact and to do what he had been trained to do. What he had never done was stop and question any of it, never asked where this was leading him and whether it was worth it.

By 62 AD, it was harder to deny the compromises he was forced to make on a daily basis in Nero’s world. Perhaps there was some lost event that broke him out of his stupor. Perhaps the moral conscience he had learned from Attalus finally won out in the battle with his desire to achieve.