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

Finally, finally, Seneca attempted to withdraw. We know he didn’t confront Nero. That would have been too much. There is no evidence of a principled resignation, as the Stoic-inspired secretary of defense James Mattis would give to President Donald Trump in a disagreement over policy in Syria. Instead, Seneca met with the emperor and futilely attempted to convince Nero that he didn’t need him anymore, that he was old and in bad health and ready to retire. “I cannot any longer bear the burden of my wealth,” he told Nero. “I crave assistance.” He asked Nero to take possession of all his estates and his wealth. He wanted to walk away clean into retirement.

It would not be so easy.

He’d gotten his hand bloody grabbing the money, and there would be blood getting rid of it.

A few days after their meeting, Nero murdered another enemy.

In 64 AD, the Great Fire struck Rome, and, boosted by strong winds, would destroy more than two-thirds of the city. One rumor spread that Nero had started the fire himself, or at least allowed it to burn for six days so that he could rebuild the capital as he liked. His reputation as a dilettante and a psychopath were fertile seeds for these conspiracy theories, and so, moving quickly, Nero found a scapegoat: the Christians. How many he ordered to be rounded up and killed we do not know, but one of them was a brilliant philosopher from Tarsus—the same intellectual ground that spawned Chrysippus, Antipater, and Athenodorus—who had earlier escaped death thanks to Seneca’s brother during Claudius’s reign. Saul of Tarsus, whom we know today as Saint Paul, was added to Nero’s pile of bodies.*

As blood flowed and fires burned, could Seneca feel anything but guilt? Tyrannodidaskalos—

tyrant teacher. That’s what they called him. It was true, wasn’t it? Hadn’t that been what he had done? Hadn’t he shaped Nero into the man he had now clearly revealed himself to be? At the very least, it was hard to argue that Seneca hadn’t lent credibility and protection to the Nero regime. Maybe it was despair that Seneca felt in those dark days—what he had tried to hold off for so long was now breaking loose.

“We’ve spent our lives serving the kind of state no decent man ought to serve,” one of the Stoics says in The Blood of the Martyrs, Naomi Mitchison’s haunting 1939 novel about the persecution of the Christians in Nero’s court. “And now we’re old enough to see what we’ve done.”

Centuries before Seneca, in China, Confucius had been a teacher and an advisor to princes. He had danced the same dance as Seneca, trying to be a philosopher within the pragmatic world of power. His balancing principle was as follows: “When the state has the Way, accept a salary; when the state is without the Way, to accept a salary is shameful.” It took Seneca much longer than Confucius to come to this conclusion. It’s inexcusable—the shame was obvious the first time

his boss tried to murder his mother . . . at least it should have been to someone trained in virtue.

But that was not how Seneca saw it, not for nearly fifteen years of service with Nero. In time, he would come to echo Confucius, writing that when “the state is so rotten as to be past helping, if evil has entire dominion over it, the wise man will not labor in vain or waste his strength in unprofitable efforts.”

But he had done precisely that for far too long. Withdrawing as best he could, Seneca turned fully to his writing. In a remarkable essay titled On Leisure, published after he retired, he seems to be wrestling with his own complicated experiences. “The duty of a man is to be useful to his fellow-men,” he wrote, “if possible, to be useful to many of them; failing this, to be useful to a few; failing this, to be useful to his neighbors, and, failing them, to himself: for when he helps others, he advances the general interests of mankind.”

Only belatedly did it occur to a striver like Seneca that one can contribute to his fellow citizens in quiet ways too—for instance, by writing or simply by being a good man at home. “I am working for later generations,” he explained, “writing down some ideas that may be of assistance to them. . . . I point other men to the right path, which I have found late in life. . . . I cry out to them: ‘Avoid whatever pleases the throng: avoid the gifts of Chance!’” Seneca himself would note the irony that in communing with these future generations he was “doing more good than when I appear as counsel in court or stamp my seal upon a will or lend my assistance in the senate.”