Review of “On Providence” (ca. 64)
Lucius Annaeus Seneca (writer).
Read in 2024.
This theodicy is patterned after Herodotus’s idea of Scythian strength in The Histories (440 BCE). Seneca spells out a more developed belief that growing up in harsh conditions makes you a better, more controlled person. This harshness is gendered masculine, standing in contrast to the softer childrearing instincts of women. Therefore, as a wealthy Roman, you should rear your own child with discipline and unsympathetically manly tests, like the Lacedaemonians, who physically abused their children in public. This, thought the philosopher, would get you the benefits of a barbarian German upbringing, as well as being closer to the masculine Jupiter’s idea of why we should all suffer in life. This solution to the “problem of evil” is worse than spurious, but interesting for all sorts of reasons, including the later defeat of Rome by said Germans. Perhaps German intellectuals had actually talked themselves into believing that their military efforts were doomed by character-building.
Seneca’s most brilliant and most absurd illustration of his ideal for childrearing has to do with slavery. He says that while you should discipline your own son, you are naturally inclined to give free rein to rambunctious slave boys in your household, who resemble athletes in their energy and freedom, but who are spoiled by your permissive adoration of them, so that your own children end up better people. There is an obvious perversity to this instrumentalization of stoic pop psychology, but it’s a perversity that speaks volumes about the ideological foundations of the empire.
References here: Dune: Part Two (2024).