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

The primary form of this service came in the shape of philosophical letters, intended not just for his friend Lucilius, to whom they were addressed, but also for publication to a wide audience. If he couldn’t impact the events of Rome directly, he figured, he could at least reach people through his pen—it could also help assure him the “immortal” fame he still craved. Succeeding on both counts, this collection, known as Moral Letters, sells many thousands of copies a year in countless languages.

Like Cicero, Seneca would spend three years (62–65 AD) completing all his letters and books, a fact for which the literary world is eternally grateful. We can imagine him liking the symmetry with such an illustrious peer, thinking even of how the theatrics of his retirement would play. It was also smart—turning to his writing was a convenient way to stay out of the fray of Nero’s increasingly volatile ways. “My days have this one goal, as do my nights,” he wrote, “this is my task and my study, to put an end to old evils. . . . Before I became old, I took care to live well; in old age I take care to die well.” Sadly, far too much of Seneca’s work before and after this period would be lost. Emily Wilson estimates that more than half of his writings did not survive, including all his political speeches and personal letters, as well as works on India and Egypt.

It was, for all the looming danger, a period of joy and creativity for him. He wrote of sitting in his rooms above a busy gymnasium, tuning out all the noise and just locking in on his philosophy. He wrote of the process of becoming, with time, a better friend to himself—an admission, perhaps, that his ambition may have been fueled by an early feeling of not being enough, of not being worth much. He said in one letter that only those who make time for philosophy are truly alive. Well, now he was actually doing that, and he was quite alive. Each day, as he wrote in his exile on Corsica, “I can argue with Socrates, doubt with Carneades, find peace with Epicurus, conquer human nature with the Stoics, and exceed it with the Cynics.”

Seneca also spoke of philosophy as a way to look in the mirror, to scrape off one’s faults. While we don’t have any evidence that he directly questioned his work for Nero in his writings—serving was part of his political code, as it would be for General Mattis in our time—we can tell that he wrestled extensively with how his life had turned out. The closest Seneca would come to addressing a figure like Nero would be in a play he wrote called Thyestes

, a dark, disturbing story about two brothers battling for the kingdom of Mycenae.* It’s impossible to read this story today and not see it as a kind of dialogue between Seneca and Nero, a warning against the draws of power and the unspeakable things human beings do to each other in the pursuit of it.

The most telling line in the play states a fact that Seneca had painfully come to understand: “Crimes often return to their teacher.”

And so they had.

He writes in Thyestes, “It is a vast kingdom to be able to cope without a kingdom.” This too he was painfully experiencing. For the third time in his life Seneca had lost next to everything. He believed, as he would now write to Lucilius, that “the greatest empire is to be emperor of oneself.”

It was a realization a long time coming.

Seneca would again find that philosophy did not exist only in the ethereal world or only on the pages of his writings. Tacitus tells us that Nero’s first attempt to kill Seneca—again by poison—was spoiled by Seneca’s meager diet. It was hard to kill someone who had so turned away from their former life of opulence that he was eating mostly wild fruits and water from a burbling stream. But even this reprieve was short-lived.

In 65 AD, conspirators, including a Stoic senator named Thrasea (see “Thrasea the Fearless”) and his brother’s son, Lucan, began to plot against Nero’s life. Seneca was not directly involved, not like Cato or Brutus had been involved, but he was at least more courageous than Cicero. One rumor had it that the conspirators planned to put Seneca back in charge after Nero’s death. Is his involvement enough to redeem him? That he was finally willing to break decisively with the monster he had helped create? When the conspiracy failed, Seneca put his life on the line to try to cover for the more active participants.

This choice sealed his fate. Nero, a coward like Hitler in his last days, sent goons to demand Seneca’s suicide. There would be no clemency, despite the essay Seneca had written for his student all those years ago.