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

Seneca’s life had been a complex maze of contradictions, but now, staring at the end, he managed to summon a courage and a clarity that had long escaped him. He asked for something to write his will upon and was rejected. So he turned to his friends and said he could bequeath them the only thing that mattered: his life, his example. It was heartwrenching, and they broke down when he said these words.

It would seem absurd to say that Seneca had practiced for this moment, but in a way, he had. All his writing and philosophizing, as Cicero put it, had been leading up to death, and now it was here. He seized the opportunity to practice what he had so long preached. “Where,” he gently chided his weeping friends as well as the audience of history, “are your maxims of philosophy or the reparation of so many years’ study against evils to come? Who knew not Nero’s cruelty? After a mother’s and a brother’s murder, nothing remains but to add the destruction of a guardian and a tutor.”

Not long before, he had written to Lucilius that while it was true that a tyrant or a conqueror could suddenly send us off to our death, this was actually no great power. “Take my word for it,” he had said, “since the day you were born you are being led thither.” Seneca believed that if we wanted “to be calm as we await that last hour,” we must never let the fact of our mortality slip from consciousness. We were sentenced to death at birth. For Seneca, all Nero was doing was moving up the timeline. Knowing this, he could now hug his wife, Paulina, and urge her calmly not to grieve for him too much and to live on without him.

Like so many other Stoic women, she was not content to be told what to do. Instead, she decided to go with him. Slitting the arteries in their arms, the couple began to bleed out. Nero’s guards—apparently on Nero’s orders—rushed in to save Paulina, who would live on for several more years.

For Seneca, death did not come as easily as he would have hoped. His meager diet seemed to have slowed his blood flow. So next, he willingly drank a poison he had kept for precisely this moment, but not before pouring a small libation to the gods. Could he have thought in that moment back to something Attalus had said so long ago? That “evil herself drinks the largest portion of her own poison”? It was proving true for Seneca, and it would prove true for Nero soon enough as well.

The man who had written so much on death was finding, with irony, that death did not come so willingly.* Did this frustrate him? Or did he have one eye on history, knowing fate was prolonging the scene he had long meditated on? When the poison did not work, Seneca was moved to a steam bath where the heat and dense air finally finished him off. There is an entire genre of paintings of the death of Seneca, including versions done by Peter Paul Rubens and Jacques-Louis David. Invariably they seem to show Seneca as perhaps he wished to be seen, no longer fat and rich but lean and dignified again. Everyone else in the room is hysterical, but Seneca is calm—finally the perfect Stoic he could not live up to in life—as he departs from the world.

Shortly after, his body was disposed of quietly without funeral rites, per a request he had made long before, which to Tacitus was proof that like a good Stoic, “even in the height of his wealth and power he was thinking of his life’s close,” as well as his eternal legacy.

But everything else he had gained in life was lost, except for the books we now have. And within a year, Nero would take his brother too, for crimes don’t only return upon their teachers but also to the people and things they love.

CORNUTUS THE COMMON (Cor-NEW-toos)

Origin: Libya

B. 20 AD

D. 68 AD

The line in Rome was that “we can’t all be Catos.” Meaning that few had his sheer, inhuman constancy and courage. But another way to look at that expression might be that we won’t all achieve towering fame. Philosophers in modern times speak of the concept of “moral luck”—how the time we were born and the situations we find ourselves in determine how heroic we’ll turn out to be.

Lucius Annaeus Cornutus turns out to be such a Stoic—not a Cato or an Agrippinus, but an ordinary man in extraordinary times who did the best he could. Born around 20 AD in Libya, Cornutus was a Phoenician like the Stoic founder Zeno, but his life’s impact was much closer to that of the second Zeno than the first. He ultimately came to Rome through the auspices of Seneca’s family—hence the name Annaeus—very likely through his brother Mela, as Cornutus taught his son Lucan.