Seneca - Letters from a Stoic

LETTERS FROM A STOIC

ADVISORY EDITOR: BETTY RADICE

LUCIUS ANNAEUS SENECA, statesman, philosopher, advocate and man of letters, was born at Cordoba in Spain around 4 B.C. Despite his relatively undistinguished background and ever-recurrent ill health, he rose rapidly to prominence at Rome, pursuing the double career in the courts and political life for which he had been trained. He began also quickly to acquire celebrity as an author of tragedies and of polished essays, moral, literary and scientific. Sentenced to death by successive emperors (Caligula in A.D. 37 and Claudius in A.D. 41), he spent eight years in exile on the island of Corsica, allegedly for an affair with Caligulas sister. Recalled in A.D. 49, he was made praetor, and was appointed tutor to the boy who was to become, in A.D. 54, the emperor Nero. On Neros succession Seneca acted for some eight years as an unofficial chief minister. The early part of this reign was remembered as a period of sound imperial government, for which, according to our sources, the main credit must be given to Seneca. His control over an increasingly cruel emperor declined as enemies turned Nero against him with representations that his popularity made him a danger, or with accusations of immorality or excessive wealth ill assorting with the noble Stoic principles he professed. Retiring from public life he devoted his last three years to philosophy and writing, particularly the Letters from a Stoic. In A.D. 65, following the discovery of a plot against the emperor, which might have resulted in Senecas elevation to the throne, he and many others were compelled by Nero to commit suicide. His fame as an essayist and dramatist lasted until two or three centuries ago when, unaccountably, he passed into literary oblivion.

ROBIN CAMPBELL lives in Islington, London. An exiled Scot, now a barrister, he decided that Seneca was overdue for discovery while at Wadham College, Oxford, where he was an Open Classical Scholar and gained a First in Honour Mods. He served in Kenya and Uganda with African troops as a subaltern in a Highland Regiment, and after a year at Cambridge learning another African language (Chinyanja), he returned to Africa for three years as a District Officer. This was followed after Zambias independence by a year as a Magistrate, trying witch-doctors, hearing appeals from tribal courts over a vast area and revising this translation at intervals of leisure in the bush. His practice at the bar in Grays Inn tends to be concerned with action by local authorities. He holds strong views on the importance and difficulties of good translation.

SENECA

Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium

SELECTED AND
TRANSLATED WITH AN
INTRODUCTION
BY ROBIN CAMPBELL

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First published 1969
25

Copyright Robin Alexander Campbell, 1969
All rights reserved

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LUCIUS ANNAEUS SENECA was born at Cordoba, then the leading town in Roman Spain, at about the same time as Christ. but also of Novatus, later known as Gallio, the governor of Achaea who declined to exercise jurisdiction over St Paul (Acts XVIII, 1117), and of Mela, less ambitious than his brothers but an able financier (and father of the brilliant young poet Lucan).

Seneca suffered severely from ill health, particularly asthma, throughout his life; he tells us that at one time the only thing which held him back from committing suicide was the thought of his fathers inability to bear the loss. and developed a lasting interest in natural science, speculative rather than empirical (although Pliny speaks of him as an authority on geology, marine life and meteorology, and others have admired his remarks on, for example, evolution or the explanation of rings round the sun). His interest was drawn at an early age to Pythagorean mysticism and various cults of eastern origin then gaining adherents in Rome, before his final acceptance, in large part, of the Stoic philosophy.

After training for the bar he took successfully to public life, becoming quaestor in spite of the handicaps of his health, his foreign background and comparative lack of family or other connexions. When Caligula succeeded Tiberius in A.D. 37, Seneca had become a leading speaker in the Senate, and so aroused the jealousy This incident apparently resulted in his temporary retirement from political affairs.

In A.D. 41, in the first year of the reign of Caligulas successor, Claudius, Seneca again came under sentence of death commuted to banishment for reasons which we do not know. The pretext was adultery with Julia Livilla, the late emperors sister; the more likely explanation is that the new rulers consort, the notorious Messalina, considered him dangerous. His exile on the island of Corsica does not seem to have been endured as stoically as it might have been. The encouraging spirit of an essay of consolation sent to his dearly loved mother Helvia is entirely absent in another addressed to Polybius, an ex-slave who had become a trusted servant of the emperor, which contains some abject flattery and was probably never meant to be published. He had by now suffered the loss not only of his father but of a son, and his first wife died while he was away. The only solace for him in these eight long years of loneliness and near despair was the reception given to the poems, tragedies and essays to friends which he continued composing during his banishment.

His fortunes turned dramatically in A.D. 49. Messalina had been executed and the emperors new wife, Agrippina, had Seneca recalled to Rome, appointed to the high office of praetor and made tutor to her twelve-year-old son Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus (the boy who was shortly to become the emperor Nero). Agrippinas motives, according to Tacitus, apart from the instruction of her son, were a confidence that because of his literary fame the move would gain them popularity, and a belief that he would prove a reliable ally and a useful adviser to herself and Nero in their plans for future power.

There is no evidence that Seneca was connected with the poisoning of Claudius in A.D. 54. But he wrote the speeches which the seventeen-year-old Nero delivered after his accession, and was probably the author of a witty, if to us a little tasteless, attack on the death rulers memory (the Apocolocyntosis or Pumpkinification, an imaginary tale of the rebuffs received by the recently deceased emperor when he presents himself at the portals of Heaven and his application for admission is debated by the Gods). Nero did make a formal speech in honour of his predecessor, which was said to display a great deal of polish and to be a good example of Senecas attractive style, well tuned to the ears of his time.