 Let me introduce Seneca in general because he's not just a literary figure, he's an important figure in history, in Roman history, but he's a bit enigmatic and we can construct a lot of different images and pictures of what Seneca is, which is why I'm putting this imaginary bust that was created in the 17th century of him here, because we're going to create an imaginary image of him here in the 21st century on the basis of the materials we have, his own writings and what other people have said about him. Now here's a set of facts about him that we can take as certain, and after relating them to you all show how ambivalent of a situation they still lead us in. So it's interesting that he's born the same year as Jesus. Interesting because that allows us to really think about what this period of history is. I think his writings are a lot more interesting than Jesus's writings, not just because Jesus didn't write anything. So of course they are. Insofar as they're interesting, they're interesting. That's one thing we can say about Seneca is he was born in the year 4 AD. In the year 41 AD, he was banished from Rome because he was charged with engaging in adultery. He spent his time in exile on the island of Corsica writing some consolations that we'll read and also writing about natural philosophy, a work that we won't be reading too much of, although we will read a small part of. In 49 he was called back from Seneca in order to tutor this young upstart, very promising individual named Nero. But in 54 he officially becomes his tutor and he has several tutors, receives an excellent education. And in this year Seneca also publishes a satire and was probably working on some of his other dramatic works and also wrote a work on mercy or De Clementia, which is directly addressed to Cicero. And that specific work we will also read and discuss. Nero however as you may have heard turned out pretty bad. He did things like murdering his brother and his own mother and it appears that Seneca wrote a letter on his behalf explaining or even justifying these actions to the Senate. But Nero didn't really repay his kindness for this in the year 62. Seneca asked for permission to retire from public affairs and retire from this advisory role that he'd had for Seneca for so long. And Nero said no you can't do that, you can't actually retire that will be perceived as there being some problem. So you're not allowed to do that. Seneca started writing a series of letters of moral letters at this point that survive in their entirety and I asked you to read the first letter in my own translation part of the supplementary readings for the class but there's a hundred and twenty-three other letters that he wrote that are all collected together and all survive. And I could go into some more details about Nero's life and I will when we read on mercy the work of Seneca directly addressed him. But he did things like well the legend is that he played a violin while Rome burned he may there's questions to whether he may have started the fire or whether it was merely a convenient fire that took care of a lot of real estate problems and allowed him to build this gigantic the largest ever palace and a colossal structure to himself and a fitting theater for his own performances because Nero considered himself an artist although most other people didn't although they didn't exactly say that to him. Seneca was perceived to be part of a conspiracy to assassinate Nero and as a result of that was forced to commit suicide in the year 65 and we have various accounts of his suicide it was a public ritualized suicide that was also sort of bungled because it turns out you can't use Plato's description of Socrates suicide as a handbook for how to commit suicide if you're gonna kill yourself please don't use the veto as a handbook for how to do it it doesn't actually work that way and it will cause complications and you'll need to do other take take other measures and it might not be as pretty as Plato describes it. Those are all facts about his life but they really don't explain to us what the nature and character of this man was in fact they it raises a lot of questions now there are some very good even recent biographies about him one of the most impressive is this one by James Rom called dying every day which focuses on Seneca in the court of Nero dying every day is an expression that Seneca has he thinks that we shouldn't talk about how we're living every day we should talk about how we're dying every day because that's what's actually happening and we ought to focus not on just coming up with the philosophy for how to live but a philosophy of how to die and he takes this claim of Socrates that philosophy is practicing dying very seriously and that what philosophy does is teaches you how to deal with your mortality and figure out how to die correctly something that it's such a touchy subject nobody ever wants to talk about it when we hear that people are dying we say oh don't worry it'll be fine and you'll live forever but it's not actually true and what we ought to do is actually be a lot more serious about that confront it directly and start practicing dying right away now Laura you raised your hand well that's a Latin translation of a Greek sentiment that we find in in Socrates of course Socrates didn't actually write anything so we find it in play though but this idea of meditate on death concentrate on death think about death don't avoid thinking about death which is what everybody actually does but instead think about it all the time and and and don't just think of yourself as being as living think of yourself as dying dying is not something that happens all at once it's something that starts happening the day you're born and so we need to sort of shift our focus and when we realize that it can actually lead to a life-affirming realizations about what to do with the time that we have remaining and what's really important if you people that are told hey you've got six months to live suddenly their priorities in life change a lot okay but we're all in that condition of having a finite life and so we ought to be obviously so if I tell you you've only got 80 years to live it ought to have a very similar effect because it's such a vanishingly small point of time you know relative to cosmic history and so forth so that is a latin-age translation of an expression of a Greek expression of Socrates and a whole kind of way of looking at the point of philosophy yeah so he again it was kind of a bungled thing it didn't work out the you know drinking Camelot is apparently can make you violently sick it doesn't necessarily do the job in so that you slit your wrist but that can take a long time it doesn't always go that well then there's the whole issue of is my wife committing suicide at the same time or not and if he pressure her is doing it or did she voluntarily couldn't live without him and so had to do it and how exactly that all went down is difficult to say especially since our sources that describe it are hostile to him so one of them is in favor of him and others very hostile to him so let me just read this is the very first page of the introduction to James Rahm's account of Seneca at the court of Nero and I think it perfectly encapsulates the two different images we have of Seneca which are completely mutually exclusive but evidence can be used to support either of them okay so introduction the two Seneca's here is one way to describe the career of Seneca writer thinker poet moralist and for many years top advisor in close companion of the emperor Nero by a strange twist of fate a man who cherished sobriety reason and moral virtue found himself at the center of Roman politics he did his best to temper the whims of the deluded despot while continuing to publish the ethical treatises that were his true calling when he could no longer exert influence in the palace he withdrew when insolitude produced his most stirring meditations on virtue nature and death enraged by his departure the emperor he had once advised seized on a pretext to force him to kill himself his adoring wife tried to join in his sober courageous suicide but imperial troops intervened to save her and then here's another way to describe the very same life a clever manipulator of undistinguished origin connived his way into the center of Roman power he used verbal brilliance to represent himself as a sage he exploited his vast influence to enrich himself and touched off a rebellion in Britain by lending usurously to its inhabitants after conspiring in or even instigating the palace's darkest crimes he tried to rescue his reputation with carefully crafted literary self-fashionings when it was clear that the emperor's enmity posed a threat he sought refuge at the altar of philosophy even while leading an assassination plot his final bid for a scheme was his histrionic suicide in which he browbeat his unwilling wife into sharing it okay so but which of those is the true Seneca or rather what is the realistic actual picture we can paint them well in this class we're focused on his actual philosophical writings and how far they relate to earlier philosophical views and how far they're true in and of themselves we're not going to be looking at these historical sources that tell us how he actually lived and so even if it were possible to construct a more realistic picture of him one that would decide between these these two views that wrong describes we won't be able to do it here because we'll be focused on his philosophical work and so here's what I want to say about his philosophical work first of all his advice his playing an advisory role essentially the domestic minister of Nero should be understood in the context of the long history before him and also the long subsequent history of philosophers getting involved in politics and philosophers advising kings and really advising princes and we call this literature the mirror of princes literature where philosophers hold up a mirror supposedly to princes and let them see them their true selves and revise what they do accordingly and this goes all the way back to fourth century even fifth century BC with Isocrates writing letters to Philip to Alexander and so forth telling him and and Cypriot kings and so forth advising them how they should use philosophical insight in order to govern better there's also the episode of Plato and Dionysus a prince from Sicily in Syracuse I don't have time to go into the details of that story but to make a long story short didn't go very well didn't end very well then there's Aristotle's advising a tyrant named Hermaeus and then his taking over the tutoring of Alexander when he was Alexander the small before he was Alexander the great and then there's this example of Seneca and Nero and then there are many many subsequent examples that we could discuss taking us well into the 20th century 21st century actually and you know the outcome of this is that basically it doesn't go well you'd think that philosophers advising politicians would be a good idea but sometimes the advice is misguided and so and is taken and it doesn't go well and sometimes the advice is taken and doesn't go well but the general outcome is that it doesn't seem to go very well and that in it in and of itself is both a political and a philosophical problem I mean it stems back to this argument that Plato makes that there will be no end of ills for mankind unless either kings become philosophers or philosophers are made into kings and the problem is that this is never accomplished the kings don't spend enough time studying philosophy so they don't become philosophers and certainly philosophers are never elevated to the status of being kings exceptions to that include Marcus Aurelius who was a practicing stoic and emperor and then the later emperor Julian who turned back the association of Rome with Christianity and wondered it to be very much more inspired by classical philosophy especially the philosophy of Plato Aristotle and so on now as I said we can't concentrate on or even figure out something as clear as what happened with Seneca's death so in a philosophical mode we have to concentrate on his works and he has a rather large corpus of works that include not just philosophical works but include several other kind of work he wrote a bunch of actual tragedies all of these are nine of these survived he also wrote several philosophical works which we problematically call dialogues or essays I'll explain why that's problematic not all of his philosophical work survived but a substantial number of them do he also wrote three works of consolation designed to take somebody who's suffering from some form of emotional distress and use a kind of as it were cognitive behavioral therapy to relieve that distress and relieve that emotional pain he also wrote as I mentioned earlier a hundred and twenty four moral letters addressed to edify a particular person named Lucilus he wrote seven books on physics those are the natural questions he wrote a satire that most people think he actually was the author of although some people doubt that Seneca was the author of it so we call it a dubious work finally there are spurious works that somebody created and fabricated a bunch of letters that Seneca is supposed to have exchanged with the Apostle Paul because Seneca's brand of stoicism was considered congenial to Christianity and in fact when Christianity which had no philosophical basis was looking for some philosophical basis for its ethics the first stage that it did was try to take over stoic ethics and incorporated stoic ethics and if you want to know something about Christian ethics you need to study stoic ethics but somebody took this a step further and said no he actually was a Christian and he actually engaged in exchanges of letters with early leaders of the Christian church and they fabricated letters to this effect and though they're spurious it's interesting to think about Seneca's legacy in connection with them so these are the dubious and spurious works I've already said enough about those satirical work a tragedy and these letters with Paul here's the Greek tragedies which we do attribute them to him so this is a really important aspect of Seneca that will say almost nothing about that he's an extremely important ancient tragedy and people talk about his influence on later tragedies and later traumatic works such as those of Shakespeare also there have been two books written about how his tragic works relate to his philosophical works both of those students and earlier versions of this class wrote reports up on which you can read in the collection of reports if you're interested in that aspect of his thought further here are the so-called essays or dialogues we don't know how to classify them exactly yeah Laura well partly it is their uncompromising philosophy and saying things like that they're indifferent to death they're indifferent pain they're also indifferent to life and indifferent to pleasure and so you know that looks like a really hard to find philosophy and when we read the Greek philosophers that's the impression we get they're not even like the you know Aristotle or Plato or these academic philosophers who say that virtue is really important and outshines everything else but of course there is there is something good about being healthy about being beautiful about being fit and things like that and that actually is a kind of good and of course there is something good about having wealth and having a living in a stable country and things like that Stoics say no none of that is relevant at all to virtue so that looks like a really radical almost unbelievably radical version of the philosophy we saw Cicero's criticisms of it like that the Seneca is actually taking to be not as radical of a Stoic for several reasons one of them is that he actually combines epicureanism and think the things that epicureanism is valid to a certain extent and for a certain purposes and that's something we see in what we read today in making use of epicureanism somehow so that doesn't look like hardcore hard-carrying stoicism another thing is that Seneca's almost entire emphasis everything he's addressing is to people who are not sages and who need to make moral progress himself in the first case but also Lucilus who he addresses in the various addresses of these philosophical works these aren't these he's not addressing Chrysippus and working on Stoic theory he's addressing real people living hard lives and he's talking about them making moral progress something we don't find Greek Stoic philosophers talking a lot about in Greek philosophers say hey moral progress is irrelevant whether you're at the bottom of the ocean or an inch from the surface you drown meaning if you're if you're not a perfect sage who has wisdom then you don't have any of the virtues and therefore you have all of the vices and you're completely ignorant whereas we find Stoic a Seneca talking a lot more about the stage where you're learning you're getting better you're diminishing your vices but you're not yet a sage so Seneca is a hardcore guy in terms of these telling you things that seem like you know all focus on your death every day focus on how you're dying every day and so forth but there's a way of looking at him is sort of watering down Stoicism in a way watering it down in a very dangerous way in fact a way that's open to certain Epicurean views okay but just an overview of these works on anger which will read for next week giving very practical cognitive behavioral therapeutic advice on how to deal with the emotion of anger on the shortness of life on the firmness of the wise person on clemency or on mercy we're addressed to Miro on the happy life we're discussing today which is addressed to his brother Gallio a work on leisure addressed to his friend Serenis closely related work on tranquility of the mind also addressed to Serenis seven books very substantial books on benefits or on doing favors to people and then a work on providence which is addressed to Lucilus who is also the address of the moral matters yeah so and on anger and on tranquility of mind he simply starts with you know like theories and then he has a practices yeah for you know putting much into your life for a common theme and most of these yes because he wants them to be works of practical philosophy and of course practical philosophy only makes sense and succeeds if people actually live better lives again we don't want to know theory of how to live better we want to live better we don't want to know a theory about what anger is we want to find out a way a means of controlling anger okay we don't want to have a theory about what death is we want to figure out how we should die and what would make our death a good one but his method is very much to as you say begin with a theoretical approach begin with some definitions of it and then get into more and more closer practical advice about how these theories could actually be implemented in your in your life okay so there's a theory about what mercy or clemency is and then there are specific recommendations about how near a lot to be using it in his own case and so on so it is very much a combination of theory and practice and not mere theory the constellations say more about when we get to them but there are three of them and they are addressed to different people and for different purposes interestingly two of them are addressed to women so we get more interaction with women and philosophical interaction with women taking women very seriously they're every bit as philosophical apparently as men