Seneca is a tricky character for me. On one hand, I admire his life’s path. He was a speechwriter and advisor, orator, and philosopher. He’s also an outstanding writer, albeit one a bit too self assured. At times I appreciate Seneca’s clarity and confidence, but it can be too much at times, making me wish he had a touch of Montaigne’s self doubt.
But he was also the right hand man to Nero, one of history’s greatest villains. Seneca would make a fascinating anti-hero for a historical drama about ancient Rome — or even a modernized version of his story. Because he was a tutor to Nero first and then an advisor, his legacy is certainly a mixed bag.
Some historians argue that the time of Seneca’s greatest influence were the periods when Nero was most sane. I suppose he can give him credit for that. But clearly none of his wisdom sunk in. Perhaps we can blame Nero’s mother Agrippina for Seneca’s failure — she forbade Seneca to instruct Nero in philosophy, limiting his instruction to rhetoric. So, in a way, Seneca became a test case of the Socrates and Plato’s view that rhetorical instruction without a philosophical foundation is decadent and prone to breed monstrous rulers.
Even so, Seneca served as Nero’s speechwriter and had an opportunity then to slip in some philosophy to his rule. After Nero had his mother murdered, Seneca’s influence dropped sharply (his role was merely to moderate Agrippina’s influence.) It was at this point that Nero became the infamous tyrant who would eventually order Seneca to take his own life, ultimately making Nero his murderer.
To read Montaigne at any depth, you eventually have to form an opinion of Seneca, if for no other reason than how often Montaigne steals from him. Nearly every topic Montaigne assayed had an equivalent in Seneca’s corpus. Not surprisingly, Montaigne feels obliged to defend Seneca against charges of hypocrisy in this essay, although a very different sort of criticism. Here, Montaigne takes issue with those who have criticized Seneca for using his political influence to become wealthy:
Seneca’s virtue is so evidently alive and vigorous in his writings, which themselves provide such a manifest defence against such insinuations as his being excessively rich and spendthrift, that I could never accept any witness to the contrary. Moreover in matters such as these it is more reasonable to trust the Roman historians than foreign Greek ones. Now Tacitus speaks most honourably of his life and of his death, portraying him in all things as a great man, most excellent and most virtuous.
Seneca covers this subject quite a bit in his writing, actually. He has no problem with people making as much money as they can, so long as they view the money as being pointless towards their happiness. I have a hard time squaring that philosophy with his life. You don’t go out of your way to become as rich as him—leading him to acquire quite a few servants and slaves—without thinking the money is useful and necessary.
Montaigne defends Seneca in part because he always defends his idols. He liked promoting role models who may very well have never existed in his form. Here, Montaigne speaks of some ancients in Plutarch’s writings, but I think the views expressed apply just as well to his semi-fictionalized vision of Seneca:
I consider some men, particularly among the Ancients, to be way above me and even though I clearly realize that I am powerless to follow them on my feet I do not give up following them with my eyes and judging the principles which raise them thus aloft, principles the seeds of which I can just perceive in myself, as I also can that ultimate baseness in minds which no longer amazes me and which I do not refuse to believe in either …. I admire the greatness of those souls; those ecstasies which I find most beautiful I clasp unto me; though my powers do not reach as far, at least my judgement is most willingly applied to them.
A goal of philosophy according to Montaigne is to create models of virtuous behavior. So, in his view, Plutarch was a more valuable philosopher than Plato because he sketched models of human behavior for all of us to live up to:
In those parallel lives (which are the most admirable part of his works and to my mind the one he took most pleasure in) the faithfulness and purity of his judgements equals their weight and profundity. He is a philosopher who teaches us what virtue is.
But I remain skeptical. I think Seneca’s stoicism comes across as lacking in all the ways Montaigne points out. However, he isn’t without wisdom, and I especially like his thoughts on friendship. I’ll close with some:
Even if the sage is self-sufficient, he still wants to have a friend. If for no other reason, he wants to keep such a great virtue from going unused. His motive is not what Epicurus says in this very letter, “to have someone to sit beside him in illness, or to assist him in imprisonment or in need.” Instead, it is to have someone whom he himself may sit beside in illness, whom he himself may liberate from an enemy’s capture.
I love that final thought about liberating someone from an enemy’s capture. It put me in mind of this Fiona Apple song, which I’ll let close out this essay.
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