Seneca's Letters for Seekers

Dear reader — that's a fair first instinct, and it turns out to be part of the story. The Moral Letters to Lucilius are 124 surviving letters (some are lost) written near the end of Seneca's life, probably between 62 and 65 CE. Each one is a short essay to a younger friend on a single topic: time, death, friendship, anger, reading, travel, old age, grief. And there's a catch baked in, because the man teaching simplicity was extremely rich and spent years as an adviser to an emperor everybody remembers as a monster. I'll get to that. The short version is that the letters are better than the guy, and he knew it.

Who Wrote This

Lucius Annaeus Seneca was born around 4 BCE in Corduba, in Spain, and educated in Rome. Lawyer, orator, writer, politician. He was exiled for about eight years under the emperor Claudius, then recalled to tutor the young Nero, and when Nero took over in 54 CE, Seneca became one of his chief advisers, and extremely rich. Lucilius, the guy he's writing to, was a Roman of equestrian rank who rose to be procurator of Sicily. A younger man with a career, a family and the usual pressures. Seneca writes to him as a fellow traveler a few steps ahead, not as a master to a disciple.

He's a Stoic, committed to the idea that virtue is the only good and the wise person is free of disturbing passions. But a flexible one. He quotes the rival Epicurean school all the time and says he does it "not as a deserter, but as a scout." And he says that whatever is true is his own, whoever said it first.

The Only Thing You Actually Own

Letter 1 sets the tone for the whole collection. "Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time." Nature gave us ownership of that one thing, and it's so slippery anyone who wants to can take it from us. Most of life passes while we do wrong, a lot while we do nothing, and the whole of it while we do something other than what we meant to.

He keeps coming back to it. Who values his time, reckons the worth of each day, understands he's dying daily? Letter 4: "Most men ebb and flow in wretchedness between the fear of death and the hardships of life; they are unwilling to live, and yet they do not know how to die." Death, he says, either doesn't come or comes and passes, so it's nothing to dread if it can't stay.

Letter 12, he visits his country house and finds it crumbling, the trees he planted gnarled, and the slave boy he remembers now a toothless old man. He takes it as evidence of his own age and then insists old age is "full of pleasure if one knows how to use it." Letter 26 is more somber, more afraid he's already left it behind. And he tells the story of Cornelius Senecio, a capable Roman knight who spent a day at a sick friend's bedside, ate a good dinner, and was dead within hours of a throat attack, right at the peak of his money. Seneca's verdict: "how foolish it is to set out one's life, when one is not even owner of the morrow!"

You're Afraid Of Stuff That Hasn't Happened

Letter after letter on fear. "There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality." Courage grows by being challenged, he says, the way a boxer who's never been hit can't walk into the ring with confidence.

When Lucilius gets anxious about a lawsuit, Seneca refuses to tell him to hope for the best. His method is the opposite. Assume what you fear will certainly happen, measure the trouble in your own mind, and estimate your fear. You'll find it's either small or short. And don't be unhappy now just because you might be unhappy later.

During the Saturnalia, Rome's week of feasting and license, he asks whether a philosopher should join in. His answer: don't be like the crowd in everything or unlike it in everything. "It shows much more courage to remain dry and sober when the mob is drunk and vomiting." Practice poverty a little, so it can't surprise you.

On joy: he won't write about the weather, he'll write about soundness of mind. The foundation of that is not finding joy in useless things. He isn't taking pleasure away. He wants it born at home, inside you. "Real joy, believe me, is a stern matter."

When Lucilius is upset about small betrayals, slaves who ran off, friends who let him down, Seneca says none of it's unusual. Life's like a bathhouse, a crowd, a road trip, sometimes things get thrown at you and sometimes they hit you by accident. "Life is not a dainty business."

Friends, Crowds, And Slaves

"No good thing is pleasant to possess, without friends to share it." That's why he's writing at all, and why he says a living voice and a shared life help more than any text: "the way is long if one follows precepts, but short and helpful, if one follows patterns."

But avoid crowds. He admits his own weakness: "I come home more greedy, more ambitious, more voluptuous, and even more cruel and inhuman, — because I have been among human beings." He describes an exhibition of unarmored gladiators at noon and how vice slips in through the pleasure of the show.

He also warns Lucilius against making a show of philosophy. Skip the repellent clothes, the unkempt hair, the open scorn of silver dishes. "Philosophy calls for plain living, but not for penance; and we may perfectly well be plain and neat at the same time." Inwardly, differ from the crowd in every way. Outwardly, don't.

On slaves, he's glad Lucilius lives on friendly terms with his. They're "men, comrades, humble friends," fellow-slaves of Fortune, which has the same rights over free men and slaves alike. He describes the cruelty of a typical Roman dinner, where slaves stand all night, hungry and silent. "They are not enemies when we acquire them; we make them enemies." I'd point out he's still a slaveholder writing this. Both things are on the page, and I'm not going to smooth that over.

And to the objection that he tells Lucilius to withdraw while the Stoic school says a man should die in the middle of active work: he's shut himself up "to be able to help a greater number." He takes part of the night for study and spends no day idle.

Reading, Travel, And Being Loud On The Inside

Praising Lucilius for staying put, Seneca warns against scattered reading. Reading lots of authors hastily is like moving house constantly: you end up with many acquaintances and no friends. Food that leaves the stomach as soon as it's eaten does no good. And "it is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor."

Test your progress not by speeches or writing but by steadiness of heart and fewer desires. "Philosophy teaches us to act, not to speak." Your inner life should be of one hue, and word and deed should agree.

Lucilius has traveled widely and still can't shake the gloom. Seneca tells him he's not alone: "You need a change of soul rather than a change of climate." Your faults follow. He quotes Socrates telling a complaining man that globe-trotting doesn't help because he always takes himself along.

And my favorite letter opens with a comic description of his apartment above a public bath. The grunts of the weightlifters, the slap of the masseur, the shouts of a ball-game scorekeeper, the splash of a swimmer, the shrill cry of the hair-plucker, the calls of the cake-seller and the sausage man. "Imagine what a variety of noises reverberates about my ears!" The point: outer noise matters less than inner.

Grief, Sickness, And God

When Lucilius loses his friend Flaccus, Seneca is sorry but doesn't want him grieving more than fitting. He won't demand Lucilius not mourn at all, since that would take a man already above the reach of Fortune, and even he would feel the sting. "Let not the eyes be dry when we have lost a friend, nor let them overflow. We may weep, but we must not wail."

Lucilius has recurring catarrh and fever, and Seneca writes from experience. When he was young he scorned such illness and finally collapsed, reduced to thinness. He often thought of ending his life, but thinking of his old father held him back. He reflected not how bravely he could die but how little his father could bear. "For sometimes it is an act of bravery even to live."

And on God: you don't need to raise your hands to heaven or beg a temple keeper to let you near an idol's ear. "God is near you, he is with you, he is within you." A holy spirit dwells in us, marks our good and bad deeds, and is our guardian. As for how we know what's good: nature "has given us the seeds of knowledge, but not knowledge itself."

So Was He A Fraud

From antiquity, critics have asked how a man who taught simplicity could be so rich and how an adviser to Nero could preach virtue. Roman writers made the charge, and Seneca seems to anticipate it, because the letters get defensive in spots. The fair read takes the criticism seriously without throwing out the work. He includes himself in his own test, which is part of why the book's believable and part of why it's uncomfortable. He says he's "not only reformed, but transformed," and I can't tell you how far his life matched it. Nobody can.

Early Christian writers loved him. Tertullian called him "often one of ours," and by the fourth century a set of forged letters between Seneca and the apostle Paul was circulating, which kept him popular in the Middle Ages. Montaigne borrowed heavily from him. Lately the Letters are back in popular editions and podcasts, and scholars point out the popular versions usually keep the advice about anxiety and drop the claims about virtue, fate, and God.

If you want to read them: one a day, like he suggests. Start with Letters 1, 2, 7, 13, 28, 47, 63 and 78, which cover time, reading, crowds, fear, travel, slaves, grief and illness. The version quoted here is Gummere's old Loeb translation, readable and public domain. Newer ones are livelier. And check whether you're getting all 124 letters or a selection.