“Philosophy teaches us to act, not to speak. Its demands are these: each person should live to the standard he himself has set; his manner of living should not be at odds either with itself or its way of speaking.” — Seneca, Epistulae Morales, Letter 20 (Graver and Long, p. 73)
When my son was born, the extra room in my house was a tomb to the bygone era of bachelorhood. Exercise equipment and collectible disc golf discs lined the walls, along with tools from the course and boxes of shirts for sale. We needed a nursery.
All of my things needed a new home so I built a shop in my backyard. Each morning after my writings and readings I go out to my exercise equipment. I usually have some Stoic teaching on, often a good time for longer-form recordings. A good spot for Seneca to fill. It doesn’t command my attention the way Marcus, Epictetus, or Musonius do. It’s more like background noise — Audible, Kindle, Books. Some quotes written here and there. He’s everywhere around me, but only the shorter works land. I regularly reach for his works on anger and the shortness of life. The letters don’t give the same intuitive trust I find in the other Stoics; there’s a performative flair to them that doesn’t feel all that Stoic to me. Wanting letters, or essays, I reach for Montaigne, who isn’t even a Stoic.
Seneca the Younger, born around 4 BCE, was sick from childhood. Tuberculosis. The only life he knew was tainted with sickness. By his twenties, he was close to suicide. Not framed as a Stoic wielding ultimate control. Just a young man sick and tired, fighting to catch his breath.
Exploring philosophy, trying on different ideas and mindsets, he landed with the Pythagoreans. A soul could transmigrate from human to animal, so eating meat was out of the question. A conspicuous, outsider philosophy. Persuaded by his father on outward appearances, he dropped it.
A talented man in a dangerous city, he used his skills as a lawyer and rhetorician to gain influence that nearly cost him his life in Caligula’s court. An alleged adultery gave Claudius reason to exile him to Corsica, where he wrote consolations. A manual on how to handle exile while hiding misery in his personal letters.
Corsica ended not with justice but with usefulness. Courts changed hands, new alliances formed, but for Seneca in this version of Rome, a different woman started moving pieces on the board. Not being Claudius’s biological son, Nero was adopted when Agrippina married the emperor. She had been working from the beginning to position Nero for the throne.
Needing more than a marriage contract to make Nero legitimate, she sought credibility. Seneca provided that in the form of something that looked like virtue from a distance. Agrippina recalled him to tutor her son, the man who would eventually order his death.
The Praetorian prefect, Burrus, alongside Seneca, ran the empire in his name for five years, the Quinquennium Neronis. A period of administrative reform and restrained imperial power. Nero gave speeches that were the model of how an emperor should sound. Seneca wrote those speeches.
Still at hand was the bloodline problem. Britannicus found himself at a dinner party, poisoned and dying at the table. Nero announced to the room that it was a seizure and continued eating. One calm, measured bite at a time.
The man who wrote speeches about what an emperor should be. Composed letters, plays, and treatises on the Stoic life. A life built on doing the next right thing regardless of difficulty; wrote nothing, said nothing, did nothing.
A well-documented period of history leaves a silent record of Nero’s guiding hand. Without theatrics, without confrontation, without a letter or a vote, something else died at that dinner table. The quinquennium was over.
The time for another death in the family had arrived. In spite of all the posturing and grooming, Agrippina had outlived her usefulness. He staged an elaborate shipwreck with hinges and collapsible hulls that worked in every single way except for its main goal. Agrippina swam to shore after watching a servant be beaten to death with oars. She had called out for help, impersonating her mistress.
Nero had people killed before, never with theatrics or elaborate schemes. His grandfather was a man of the people, and his mother carried on that respect. He needed this to land clean and look like an accident. He needed to be able to face it.
After swimming to shore she went home to her villa. Not running or hiding, she wrote a letter saying she survived the accident and was fine, not to worry. In hopes that if she sat quietly, he would leave her be. He did not. His guard was dispatched to do it the old-fashioned, time-tested way. Agrippina was brutally stabbed to death and buried that night. She needed to go away and someone needed to explain.
In a letter to the Senate, it was explained that she had sent a single assassin, who was caught, and in her shame, she killed herself. The shipwreck earlier in the day was shown as evidence of bad luck for a vicious woman who would have her own child killed. The historian Tacitus points the finger where it most likely belongs.
“It was no longer Nero, whose monstrousness outstripped the complaints of all, but Seneca who was the subject of adverse rumor, because in such a speech he had inscribed a confession.” — Tacitus, Annals 14.11 (trans. Woodman)
Rome knew who Nero was. Rome knew what Nero was. A man who didn’t write like that. Who didn’t use Latin that way. Seneca did.
Agrippina was respected, cherished even.
Not a child killer, and certainly not dumb enough to send a single assassin to try to kill an emperor.
The word is not hypocrisy. That’s saying one thing and believing another. Seneca believed what he would go on to write in the letters. Seneca believed in his philosophy.
The word is akrasia. Acting against your own better judgment.
Which is what makes a man write a letter framing an innocent woman. A century earlier, Cato the Younger took his own life rather than live under Caesar’s Rome. There was a precedent. He chose to return home to his villa with his two thousand citrus-wood tables.
Alcuin wrote a letter opposing the forced baptism of the Saxons. The institution would not listen. He wrote the better letter and got overruled, so he stayed and did his duty.
Seneca wrote a worse kind of letter. On purpose.
These are two different failures.
Burrus died, and so did Seneca’s protection. He wanted to give the wealth back and retire. Nero refused. Publicly. All but saying: No, sir. You will stay where I can see you.
He withdrew without leaving. Staying home when he could. The next three years were spent writing the letters to Lucilius. Letters on ethics. Letters I don’t trust. Letter 1: “Do that, dear Lucilius: assert your own freedom. Gather and guard the time that until now was being taken from you, or was stolen from you, or that slipped away.” — Seneca, Epistulae Morales, Letter 1.1 (Graver and Long, p. 25)
He spent 30 years in Nero’s service.
Is this wisdom?
Is this regret?
Something else?
Nothing in the world outside of those letters is changed by it.
The Agrippina letter is buried away in an archive and she is buried away in the ground.
There is no one left to keep Nero in check.
Seneca doesn’t get a parking lot moment. He doesn’t get redeemed; that’s not coming. He keeps writing anyway.
I don’t sense guilt in the letters. I don’t hear remorse.
I read a double life not connected to the man writing about it. I see a canyon-sized divide between philosophy and action. He was surrounded by men jumping to Nero’s orders, carrying out despicable acts, looking at them as somehow different, and taking the time to speak on ethics to others.
Contemporary Stoics, living models, were at hand. Their work built completely around philosophy being nothing without action. Musonius Rufus was exiled twice and he kept teaching; he did not change what he said. He didn’t soften it or hide behind a letter.
Epictetus, a student of Musonius, built one of the most action-based Stoic frameworks in the tradition. Less talk, more doing. Is it in or out of your control to do the right thing in this moment?
Living examples. He was not alone in his philosophical school. He was alone because he chose not to close the gap.
His name was thrown in with a plot against the emperor. Whether involved or not, the order came: choose your method. He chose to open his veins. He died slowly, due to his older age and poor circulation. As he bled out, he was dictating to his scribes; he was not done talking yet. Eventually, he was moved to the sauna, where he would suffocate on the steam.
Paulina, his wife, was not ordered or expected to go with him. She chose it. Why continue to live when everything was being taken away? She had no audience, no legacy, and the man she loved was bleeding out in their home. The right thing to do was to die with him. She acted.
Nero’s guard bound her wounds to keep her alive; she was pale for the rest of her life from blood loss.
Seneca was married to and lived with a Stoic while he wrote about Stoicism in the next room. There was no performance, there was no writing, no three-year letter campaign about how to do the right things, regardless of whether they are hard. She opened her veins and stared death in the face. No attachment.
The letters were beautifully composed by a brilliant man. I agree with a lot of what his Stoic virtue ethics has to offer. A man who builds himself into a position of power using his voice does not get to be selectively absent from the legacy that voice leaves behind. Especially when that legacy includes a body count and evidence.
I don’t trust them because his two identities never lined up. They weren’t found in an unmarked grave or filed away in a prison archive. They were written from the comfort of a beautiful villa.
By someone acting like a Stoic.
Plain truth. Rough edges.
Closing Question
Where in your life are you using words to avoid the cost of your actions?
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