Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, usually referred to simply as Seneca (or Seneca the Younger, to distinguish him from his famous father, Seneca the Elder), was born around 1 B.C. in the Roman province of Hispania Ulterior, in what is now the city of Córdoba, and was educated in Rome. The author of numerous plays, moral essays, books of natural history, satire, and rhetoric, Seneca is best remembered as a Stoic moral philosopher. His oft-quoted philosophical writings made him a favorite of, among many others, Francis Bacon, Montaigne, Erasmus, Pascal, Calvin, and Diderot. Indeed, Seneca remains much admired and frequently quoted today.

Seneca called upon people to control their emotions and not allow themselves to be driven by passion or anger. Adversity should be met calmly and rationally, and death should not be feared. “A gem cannot be polished without friction,” he wrote, “nor a man perfected without trials.” “It does not matter what you bear, but how you bear it.”

So, Seneca lived a simple, contemplative, consistently virtuous life? Well, not exactly. His life was entangled in the tumultuous intrigues of Roman imperial politics, leading some to question his legacy and label him a hypocrite.

Shortly after coming to power in 41 A.D. following the assassination of the emperor Caligula, the emperor Claudius banished Seneca to exile on Corsica, after Seneca was accused of having committed adultery with Julia Livilla, Caligula’s sister and Claudius’s niece. Eight years later, Claudius’s fourth wife, his niece Agrippina, sister of Julia Livilla and Caligula, persuaded her husband to recall Seneca to Rome, to serve as tutor to her son Nero, who Agrippina had convinced Claudius to adopt and name as his heir. A few years later, in 54 A.D., Claudius died, allegedly having been poisoned by Agrippina, thus elevating Nero to the throne.

The tutor Seneca thus suddenly found himself chief advisor to the man who would become one history’s most notorious despots—a relationship that would help make Seneca one of the richest men in Rome. But, to be fair, during the first five years of Nero’s reign, the time when Seneca had great influence over him, the emperor ruled competently and Rome was safe and stable. It was only after Nero began to disregard his old tutor that he (and Rome) descended into what would become madness and a reign of terror.

In 59 A.D. Nero had his mother Agrippina killed, and he called upon Seneca to help him cover up the crime, by ghostwriting a letter to the Senate accusing Agrippina of plotting a coup and of having committed suicide when the plot was discovered. In the years that followed, Nero no longer sought or relied on Seneca’s counsel. Even though Nero denied his requests for permission to retire, Seneca devoted himself to his writing and was rarely at court.

But after an assassination plot was foiled in 65 A.D., Nero immediately lashed out against the men he believed were complicit in it. One of them was Seneca.

Seneca was having supper with this wife in his villa outside of Rome when a tribune of the Praetorian Guard arrived with a group of soldiers bearing an order from the emperor commanding Seneca to commit suicide. Insisting that he knew nothing of the conspiracy (likely he did not), Seneca sent the tribune back to Nero to declare his innocence. Unmoved, Nero repeated his order.

Seneca’s behavior in the face of his immediate impending death was consistent with his Stoic beliefs. He calmly dictated his last wishes, then cut the veins on his arms, as did his wife, Pompeia Paulina, who insisted on dying with him. But because Nero had ordered that Paulina not be allowed to kill herself, the soldiers had her servants dress her wounds and she was removed from the room. Meanwhile, because he wasn’t bleeding enough (a fact the historian Tacitus attributed to Seneca’s old age and frugal diet), Seneca cut the veins on his legs as well. When that too failed to kill him, Seneca drank a cup of poison he had a friend prepare for him. Finally, the poison having seemingly failed, Seneca immersed himself in a warm bath, to cause his blood to flow more freely. Soon afterwards, he passed away.

Seneca’s calm acceptance of his death has inspired numerous great works of art, including paintings by Jacques-Louis David, Peter Paul Rubens, Luca Giordano, and others. The painting shown here is “The Death of Seneca” by Manuel Domínguez Sánchez (1871), which hangs in the Prado Museum in Madrid.

“Life is like a play in the theater: it does not matter how long it lasts, but how well it was played.”