Seneca Overview

Seneca lived in an intemperate world, a world corrupt with violent, unruly passions. Rome in the first century A.D. was saturated with viciousness, vengeance, bloodlust, and spite. The desire for political and economic power permeated the public sphere; uncontrollable passions perverted... [more]

Seneca lived in an intemperate world, a world corrupt with violent, unruly passions. Rome in the first century A.D. was saturated with viciousness, vengeance, bloodlust, and spite. The desire for political and economic power permeated the public sphere; uncontrollable passions perverted human reason; insatiable appetites drove men to extraordinary excesses. Seneca observed all this with disgust. And perhaps with a bit of perverse fascination as well. Indeed, his tragedies depict physical and emotional excess so relentlessly and viscerally that one wonders whether the man did not entertain a certain predilection for the same things he criticized. In his version of "Oedipus," for example, Jocasta rips open her own womb. In "Thyestes," the bodies of children are served at a banquet. This is the kind of sublime violence echoed later in Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus" and "King Lear," violence that seems saturated with a fascination for the very phenomena it critiques. But Seneca's hatred of the excesses that surrounded him was, for the most part, sincere. He brought the Stoic philosophy of the Greeks -- a philosophy that preached temperance and asceticism -- to the decadent culture of Rome. He maintained a vegetarian diet for many years, shunned the desire for material wealth, and promulgated an ethics of simplicity and self-restraint. He denounced material comforts as debilitating influences. (He even claimed to have slept on a pillow "so hard that it leaves no trace after pressure.") In particular, he lambasted Romans for their indiscriminate appetites. "Has Nature indeed given us so insatiable a stomach, while she has given us such insignificant bodies?" he asks in his "Epistola." "No, it is not the hunger of our stomachs, but insatiable covetousness that costs so much." Seneca lived during the height of Roman decadence, when excessive indulgence was, for the elite at least, the norm. He saw this as the source not only of spiritual decline but also corporeal disease. Amidst such exorbitant debauchery, it's no surprise that Seneca came to see life in general as essentially chaotic, adventitious, and subject to blind chance. But in the face of such a state of affairs he maintained a properly Stoic -- and tragic -- disposition: incapable of controlling his fate, he could nevertheless control his attitude towards it. It was in this freedom of disposition that he discovered a happiness that, he insisted, could continue no matter what happened to him. And it was with such an attitude that he confronted his death. Seneca, rather than suffer the injustice of execution by the jealous emperor Nero, imbibed a vial of poison and suffocated himself in the steam of a hot bath. [show less]