Review of Moral Epistles (ca. 62 CE)
Lucius Annaeus Seneca (writer).
Read in 2025.
A collection of 124 letters from Seneca, in early retirement, to the procurator of Sicily. They had a deal to exchange thoughts. The procurator, named Lucilius, was a younger man, asking questions, which are not preserved except in Seneca’s answers.
The chronology is a little shaky, but the letters are probably preserved in their original order or close to it, and probably took about three years to write.
The writing style is a mix of the formal and the conversational. Seneca wants to keep it “spontaneous and easy”, but he both lectures Lucilius and tries to sell him on the Stoic school of philosophy. One letter is a fascinating survey of the rudimentary sciences of the time, as a kind of career advice. Seneca sometimes touches on natural philosophy in other letters, but he recommends his own field, the philosophy of character and virtue. He returns frequently to the notion that a good Stoic would be able to resist torture, which was probably an effective sales tactic for an audience of younger men, but it’s also a fantasy of personal empowerment that paints a picture of society.
Nominally, the Stoics recommended a materially simple life in accord with “nature”. Letter 90 prefigures Marshall Sahlins’s perspective on the Stone Age as a better time to live, with fewer facts to marshal. By the first century CE, the remaining Stoics were coloured by the mores of their society. Seneca’s frequent mentions of masculine endurance under torture are a symptom of that development, and that’s in spite of the fact that he is otherwise critical both of the debauchery of the upper classes in Rome and of imperialist violence. He writes, in letter 95:
We are mad, not only individually, but nationally. We check manslaughter and isolated murders; but what of war and the much-vaunted crime of slaughtering whole peoples? There are no limits to our greed, none to our cruelty.
Letter 91 is an evocative essay on the burning of the Roman colony at Lyon (Lugdunum). Seneca correctly predicts that the fire would not be the end of that colony, but there is a definite mood of decline and fall, both in the empire and in Seneca’s own health. His religion looks ahead to the Neoplatonist Christian theology that was developing at the same time and would dominate the Dark Ages, but Seneca’s own idealism is tempered by curiosity. He wants to learn about the true geography of the Strait of Messina, which he identifies as Homer’s Scylla and Charybdis. With surprising frequency, he quotes Epicurus, the purportedly effeminate founder of a rival school.
Most endearingly, Seneca attacks sophistry many times, and earnestly draws Lucilius away from its clutches, but his own philosophy is tarred by wishful thinking and weak reasoning. He writes, for example, that “wisdom never slips back into folly”, and that his objective is to look at the world like one of the immortal gods.
References here: Soft drinks and ethical nihilism, Essays (1580), The Ego and Its Own (1844), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015).