I have set freedom as my goal [Libertas proposita est]; and I am striving for that reward. And what is freedom, you ask? It means not being a slave to any circumstance, to any necessity [necessitati], to any chance; it means compelling Fortune to enter the lists on equal terms. And on the day when I know that I have the upper hand, her power will be naught. When I have death in my own control, shall I take orders from her?--Seneca, Letter 51, Translated by Richard Mott Gummere (with minor corrections).
When, in a moment of sadness, I decided to return to Seneca, I was hoping for wisdom. My first response in reading Letter 51 is disappointment. The letter understands itself as a polemic/litigious [litigavimus]; and it is clearly written by a man out of sorts, in deep turmoil. We are informed near the start of the letter that he left the luxury resort town, Baiae, the day after he reached it. More importantly, for an author, he can't even keep straight who he has been reading "Messala, – or was it Valgius." And his inner turbulence is matched/echoed by the description of the near omnipresence of volcanoes, "many regions belch forth fire" [cum plurima loca evomant ignem].
We don't have to be Freud to discern Seneca is aware his time is nearly up (see also the quoted passage above suggests). There are lots of hints in the letter that he is holding up the modesty of Scipio in political defeat/exile as exemplar to himself. And the reader is left to wonder in what sense Seneca understands his own political retirement as leading to suicide or death. There is, in fact, an interesting historical question, hinted at by Plutarch, whether Scipio committed suicide (admittedly Livy gives no hint of it).*
We know that Seneca found it very difficult to give up his luxury. For some this marks him as a hypocrite. I don't think I am engaging in himpathy when I say that I find more interesting the fact that his inability to live up to his ideals does not make him change his ideals; and his struggles with adhering to his ideals -- the rapid succession of arrival and departure from Baiae are comic and tragic at once -- allow him also to be instructive even persuasive about the challenges to achieve them. The best witnesses against vice are not the saintly preacher, but (as most rehab centers recognize now) former alcoholics.
And yet, above I quote the more philosophical passage. Is freedom really a kind of inner state or, better yet, a disposition? A disposition that allows one to be immune from even necessity (that is, death). I recognize that immunity from external causes is an attractive thought during a pandemic.
When I connect the threads of the letter, it's clear that Seneca is trying his hand at inner exile (political and emotional), and aware he is failing. And failing badly; his travel habits and his inner emotional life (those bursting flames) tell another story.+ This gives the start of the letter -- "Quomodo quisque potest" translated by Gummere as 'everyone does his best'; I think I prefer 'each according to his abilities' -- a double-edged sword. He is falling, and it gives his teaching a harsh quality.
It is not easy to write these lines, recognizing my own teaching fails. And yet, it is difficult to feel compassion for Seneca, the stern lecturer of the worldly-successful Lucilius; Seneca, the exorcist of pleasures.
Looking back at the sentence before the one quoted at the top of this post,** what's lacking is not Seneca's desire for pleasure or his fear about his political fate. No, what's missing in the description of Seneca's inner exile is the acknowledgment of his sadness or, if it that is too modern, of his disappointments his frustrated ambitions. This is mirrored in his treatment of Scipio's downfall/ruin [ruina], which is centered on Scipio's management of his manly honor/nobility [honestius].
Of course, the modern desire for psychological realism bumps up against the ancient rules of decorum. It is too easy, perhaps too lucrative, to turn Seneca into self-help or compassion with his sadness; he is quite clear that "if any vice rend your heart, cast it away from you; and if you cannot be rid of it in any other way, pluck out your heart also."
I wanted to stop there, but I noticed on re-reading that this evisceration of the self is a kind of second-best (perhaps third-best) therapy. In fact, Seneca suggests that in order to destroy the vices, passion needs to be set against passion ("Above all, drive pleasures from your sight. Hate them beyond all other things,"). To eliminate (or strangle [strangulent]) the pleasures, they, or their objects, must be hated; and to habituate such self-betterment, this killing off of bad temptations, location matters.
And just before I press 'publish,' and, think how Christian Seneca sounds, I ask myself why is he reading "Messala...or Valgius?" These are, after all, in addition two significant authors, also two great political survivors of the turmoil of the late republic and early empire. Messala, in particular, was adept at adapting to changed circumstances.
I don't mean to suggest that we should read Seneca's use of freedom in republican terms here. But rather to remark that if freedom is a disposition that allows one to be immune from all circumstance (etc.), it does not follow that one has to be passive in the face of changing fortunes and retreat into an untouchable (and sadness denying) inner citadel. And while it is foolish to think one can escape death (necessity), one may well be able to influence its circumstances and other goods of fortune. I linger on the thought; maybe Scipio is an anti-exemplar here.
It would be a sublime comedy if the very text that is assumed to teach a form of resignation, the killing off of last remnants of pleasures, is really a manual for political survival by a man still hoping for reversal of fortune. Oddly, this cheers me up.
*There is also a not-so-subtle contrast drawn between Scipio, his critic Cato, and the three leading generals who helped destroy the Roman republic in a series of civil wars, "Gaius Marius, Gnaeus Pompey, and Caesar," (Sulla unmentioned, perhaps because he had no villa in the hills above Baiae).
+Seneca has, at various times, clear contempt for Cicero's late political activity, and one wonders if he is not recognizing himself in his previous judgments.
**"The soul is not to be pampered; surrendering to pleasure means also surrendering to pain, surrendering to toil, surrendering to poverty. Both ambition and anger will wish to have the same rights over me as pleasure, and I shall be torn asunder, or rather pulled to pieces, amid all these conflicting passions."
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