CLAS 357
Seneca (freedom/slavery in the Letters)
April 8, 2024


Barrón, Nero & Seneca (1904)

Seneca: On the Creation of Earthquakes (dir. Robert Schwentke, 2023)

trailer; clip from Berlin film festival



Double herm, Seneca and Socrates

Seneca (ca. 4 BCE-1 CE-65 CE): Cordoba (wealthy equestrian & literary family); sentenced to death by Caligula & exiled to Corsica; restored to Claudius' court (Agrippina, 49 CE): Nero’s tutor, speechwriter, political advisor – estrangement from emperor (62-65 CE, Letters); implicated in Conspiracy of Piso (suicide in Tacitus, Annales 15.62-3)


Letter 8: withdrawal from public life to benefit others ("I show others the right path, which I myself only discovered late . . ., 8.3); "'You should be a slave to philosophy in order to obtain true liberty' . . . the mere fact of being the slave of philosophy is liberty" (8.7, quoting Epicurus) – leading simple life ("Nature"), curtailing desire & hope, etc.

Letter 14: avoid enslavement to your body = avoiding/tolerating poverty, disease > autocracy – withdrawing into philosophy

Seneca, Letter 14.3-6 (tortures and terrors of autocracy)
. . . there are three kinds of dread: we fear poverty, we fear diseases, and we fear what may be inflicted on us at the hands of a more powerful figure. None of all these misfortunes distresses us more than what is threatened by another man's power, for this comes with a mighty din and disturbance. The natural woes which I mentioned, poverty and disease, sneak up in silence and do not inflict any terror on the eye or ear; the other evil makes a huge parade; it surrounds itself with steel and fire and chains and the horde of wild beasts launched against human flesh. In this context think of prison and crosses, the rack and the hook and the stake driven right through a man's body to project from his throat, and limbs torn apart by driving chariots, and the tunic woven and smeared with fiery substances, and whatever else cruelty has devised . . . like great wars, these campaigns of terror have triumphed by their appearance and display of instruments.

Seneca, Letter 14.14
Just now I am summoning you to join the Stoics who were shut out of public life and withdrew to cultivate their lives and establish rights for humanity without causing any offence to the more powerful.

Ruiz Olmos, Seneca (Cordoba, 1954)

Letter 31: gaining knowledge of life (human & divine) = essential/supreme good (quasi-divine), not money, power, fame, etc. – ownership/possession of one's mind (animus) paramount

Seneca, Letter 31.10 (distinguishing Roman Stoicism from Roman elite male culture)
. . . money will not make you equal to God, for he has no money. A magistrate's toga will not do it: God is naked. Renown or self display or the publicity of broadcasting your name among nations will not do it: no one knows the God and many misjudge him without any punishment. Nor will the crowd of slaves carrying your litter along the roads in the city and abroad make you like God. For that most great and powerful God carries everything himself. Nor can beauty and strength make you happy; none of these things survives old age. You must seek something which does not deteriorate day by day, and cannot be obstructed. What is this? The spirit [animus], but when it is right, good, and great. What else would you call this than God lodging in a human body? This spirit can as easily fall to a Roman knight as a freedman or a slave. For what is a knight or a freedman or a slave? Names won by ambition or injustice.

[cf. Stoic Attalus' rejection of a triumph: "This is just a parade" (110. 17)]


Rubens, The Dying Seneca (1612-1613)

Letter 110: good life = absence of desire, hope, fear; scientific & moral contemplation of universe/divine, avoiding luxury ("Do you want to despise the pleasure of food? Then think of its outcome", 110.13)

Seneca, Letter 110.5 (eliminating fear/anxiety through reason)
You have no reason to fear anything; the troubles which disturb us and petrify us are hollow. None of us has discovered what was true, but simply handed on his fear from one to another; no one has dared to come close to what disturbed him and find out the nature and good aspect of his fear. So a false and empty notion is still believed because it has not been refuted.

Seneca, Letter 110.9-10 (sermon against luxury, etc.)
We have dragged our spirits away from this divine contemplation towards shabby and low matters, to be a slave to avarice, to abandon the universe and its limits and its masters who control all things, to scan the ground and explore what evils it can dig out, not content with what has been offered. Whatever will be good for us our God and father placed near at hand; he did not wait for our explorations, and gave things of his own accord. He buried harmful things as deeply as possible. We cannot complain of anything but ourselves; against the will of nature who has hidden them, we have fetched out what will destroy us. We have enslaved our spirit to pleasure, whose indulgence is the beginning of all evils; we have surrendered it to ambition and repute and other things equally hollow and empty.