Seneca

“ Seneca has no spark of the kindly warmth of Horace; he has not the animation of Plutarch; he abounds too much in the artificial and extravagant paradoxes of the Stoics. But, for all that, he touches the great and eternal commonplaces of human occasion—friendship, health, bereavement, riches, poverty, death—with a hand that places him high among the wise masters of life. All through the ages men tossed in the beating waves of circumstance have found more abundantly in the essays and letters of Seneca than in any other secular writer words of good counsel and comfort. ”

“ Moreover, Seneca was his uncle: a comparison shows how profoundly the elder poet influenced the younger. There is the same self-conscious arrogance begotten of Stoicism, the same brilliance of wit and absence of humour. Their defects and merits alike reveal them as kindred, though Lucan stands worlds apart as a poet from Seneca, the ranting tragedian. He was but twenty-five when he died. Age might have brought a maturity and dignity of spirit which would have made rhetoric his servant and not his master, and refined away the baser alloys of his character. ”

“ I must judge as a statesman,’ said Seneca, somewhat offended.
‘Then, if you are only a statesman, do not pretend to act as a philosopher. I speak to you frankly, as one Stoic to another.’
Seneca said nothing. It was evident that he felt deeply hurt by the bluntness of Cornutus, who paused for a moment, regarding him with a look of pity. Then he continued.
‘If it pains you to hear the truth I will be silent; but if you wish me to speak without reserve, you are committing two fatal errors. You dream of controlling passion by indulging it. ”

“ Leaving such barren and unprofitable ground, what can we say of the plays themselves? Even after making due allowance for the hopeless decline of dramatic taste and for the ruin wrought by the schools of rhetoric, it is hard to speak with patience of such productions, when we recall the brilliance and charm of the prose works of Seneca. We can forgive him being rhetorical when he speaks for himself; when he speaks through the lips of others he is less easily tolerable. ”

“ Seneca is all a man. The writings of the first resemble the strains of the flute, to which the ancients attributed the power of calming the passions and charming away the clouds of sorrow, and drawing men by a gentle suasion into the paths of virtue ”

“ Seneca was one of those ardent natures the virgin soil of whose talent shows a luxurious richness unknown to the harassed brains of an old civilisation. His enthusiasm for philosophy exceeded all bounds. He first became a Stoic. But stoicism was not severe enough for his taste. He therefore turned Pythagorean, and abstained for several years from everything but herbs. His father, an old man of the world, saw that self-denial like this was no less perilous than his former triumphs. "Why do you not, my son," he said, "why do you not live as others live? ”

“ Remember that I shall know everything you say or do at Paris, as exactly as if, by the force of magic, I could follow you everywhere, like a sylph or a gnome, invisible myself. Seneca says, very prettily, that one should ask nothing of God, but what one should be willing that men should know; nor of men, but what one should be willing that God should know. ”

“ Seneca made the rarer and the wiser choice in giving his entire enthusiasm to the study of philosophy.
I say the wiser choice, because eloquence is not a thing for which one can give a receipt as one might give a receipt for making eau-de-Cologne. Eloquence is the noble, the harmonious, the passionate expression of truths profoundly realized, or of emotions intensely felt. It is a flame which cannot be kindled by artificial means. Rhetoric may be taught if any one thinks it worth learning; but eloquence is a gift as innate as the genius from which it springs. ”

“ There upon Seneca, not to thwart her noble ambition, from an affection too which would not leave behind him for insult one whom he dearly loved, replied: "I have shown you ways of smoothing life; you prefer the glory of dying. ”

“ Now the writings of Seneca show, in their way, a real anxiety among this class to raise the moral tone of mankind around them; a spirit of reform, a zeal for the conversion of souls, which, though it never rose, indeed, under the teaching of the philosophers, to boiling heat, still simmered with genial warmth on the surface of society. ”

“ We find these sentiments in every writer of the first two centuries of our era who deals with contemporary society. Seneca feels that the world is lost and helpless; that life itself is a fatal gift compared with which nothing is so deceitful and treacherous. Filled with ardour for his philosophy and with confidence in the efficacy of its moral teachings, he nevertheless at times loses heart. ”

“ Persius is uncompromising; he is the true Stoic with the motto 'all or nothing'. But he has nothing of the stilted Stoicism that is such a painful feature of the plays of Seneca; nor, however perverse and affected he may be in diction, do we ever feel that his Stoicism is in some respects no better than a moral pose, a distressing feeling that sometimes afflicts as we read Seneca's letters or consolatory treatises. He speaks straight from the heart. His faults are more often the faults of the school of philosophy than of the schools of rhetoric. ”

“ In that period of luxury and dissipation, when the rage for new inventions was grown epidemic, Seneca arose. His talents were of a peculiar sort, acute, refined and polished; but polished to a degree that made him prefer affectation and wit to truth and nature. The predominance of his genius was great, and, by consequence, he gave the mortal stab to all true eloquence [a] . When I say this, let me not be suspected of that low malignity which would tarnish the fame of a great character. I admire the man, and the philosopher. ”

“ In Seneca's life, then, we see as clearly as in those of many professing Christians that it is impossible to be at once worldly and righteous. Seneca's utter failure was due to the vain attempt to combine in his own person two opposite characters--that of a Stoic and that of a courtier. Had he been a true philosopher, or a mere courtier, he would have been happier, and even more respected. ”

“ The strange ineffable smile of the Christian in pain and agony dying for his God, had gone home to the heart of the great scholar statesman. Like many another Roman citizen of his day and time, Seneca had often seen men die, but he had never before looked on any one dying after this fashion! ”

“ The tendency to regard the true function of philosophy as purely ethical, reforming, guiding and sustaining character and conduct, finds its most emphatic expression in Seneca. He is far more a preacher, a spiritual director, than a thinker, and he would have proudly owned it. His highest, nay, one may almost say his only aim, is, in our modern phrase, to which his own sometimes approaches, to save souls. ”

“ But the cold, materialistic conception of God is irreconcilable with many passages in his writings. Like Epictetus and M. Aurelius, Seneca is often far more emotional, we may say, far more modern, than his professed creed. The materialistic Anima Mundi, interfused with the universe and the nature of man, becomes the infinitely benign Creator, Providence, and Guardian, the Father, and almost the Friend of men. He is the Author of all good, never of evil: He is gentle and pitiful, and to attribute to Him storm or pestilence or earthquake or the various plagues of human life is an impiety. ”

“ Seneca was a great moral leader, the first of a class of philosophers who aimed at winning the people back to the virtue of primitive Rome. His teachings were in strange contrast to the age in which he lived; they bear a striking resemblance to those of the Gospel, with which he may have become acquainted through St. Paul. The fathers of the Church were loud in their praises of “the divine pagan,” but there is no evidence that, as some have stated, Seneca was persuaded by the apostle to become a Christian.
Our philosopher is described as simple in his tastes. ”

“ Such in briefest outline, and without any of that grace of language with which Seneca has invested it, is a sketch of the little treatise which many have regarded as among the most delightful of Seneca's works. It presents the picture of that grandest of all spectacles--
"A good man struggling with the storms of fate." ”

“ We omit the remainder of the nurse's speech out of regard for Seneca's reputation as an artist, for in a long passage of sixty lines he proceeds to scour heaven, earth, and the waters under the earth, for every form of venomous serpent, noxious herb, and dread, uncanny thing that the mind of man can conceive; and by the time he has his full array of horrors marshaled before us, we have grown so familiar with the gruesome things that we cease to shiver at them. ”

“ The names of Seneca, of the elder and the younger Pliny, of Tacitus, of Plutarch, of Galen, of the slave Epictetus, and of the emperor Marcus Antoninus, adorn the age in which they flourished, and exalt the dignity of human nature. They filled with glory their respective stations, either in active or contemplative life; their excellent understandings were improved by study; Philosophy had purified their minds from the prejudices of the popular superstitions; and their days were spent in the pursuit of truth and the practice of virtue. Yet all these sages ”

“ And the Stoic school has the glory of anticipating the diviner dream, yet far from realised, of a human brotherhood under the light from the Cross. Seneca has never risen higher, or swept farther into the future than in his treatment of slavery. ”

“ But Seneca is travelling rapidly on the way which leads to another vision of the celestial city, in which emotion, the passionate yearning for holiness as well as truth, blends with and tends to overpower the ideal of a passionless eternity of intellectual intuition. ”

“ In this respect I think that thou, perhaps, didst exercise the greater self-restraint; for, whereas thou canst not get thyself to give him full praise, he speaks of thee most contemptuously. I myself should hesitate to be judged by an inferior. Yet, if I were constituted judge of such an important question, I should express this opinion. Seneca was a more copious and versatile writer, thou a keener; he employed a loftier style, thou a more cautious one. Furthermore, thou didst praise his genius and his zeal and his wide learning, but not his choice nor his taste. ”

“ Both Cicero and Seneca were men of many weaknesses, and we remark them the more because both were pretenders to unusual strength of character; but while Cicero lapsed into political errors, Seneca cannot be absolved of actual crime. Nevertheless, if we may compare the greatest masters of Roman wisdom together, the Stoic will appear, I think, the more earnest of the two, the more anxious to do his duty for its own sake, the more sensible of the claims of mankind upon him for such precepts of virtuous living as he had to give. ”

“ To men ignorant of Greek, like the first generation of the Renaissance, the fourteenth-century men, much in ancient philosophy was obscure. But one system, that of the Stoics, they studied deeply, and understood, for they had the works of Seneca. For men craving for self-help and the complete training of the faculties, eager to escape from the fixed types of medieval manhood, minted by authority, and taught to distrust conscience, when it was their own, and to trust it only in others, Seneca was an oracle. ”

“ Seneca gives the true Stoic answer in his treatise On Providence: the wise man cannot really meet with misfortune; all outward calamity is a divine instrument of training, designed to exercise his powers and teach the world the indifference of external conditions. In the soul Seneca recognizes an effluence of the divine spirit, a god in the human frame; in virtue of this he maintains the essential dignity and internal freedom of man in every human being. ”

“ It is hardly strange that Seneca should have erred in this way, for compromise was the character of his entire life. He appears to have set before himself the wholly impossible task of being both a genuine philosopher and a statesman under the Caesars. ”

“ Seneca, (12-69 A.D.) , a native of Cordova in Spain, was the greatest philosopher of this age. He early displayed great talent as a pleader, but in the reign of Claudius he was banished to Corsica, where he solaced his exile with the study of the Stoic philosophy; and though its severe precepts exercised no moral influence on his conduct, he not only professed himself a Stoic, but imagined that he was one. A few years after, he was recalled by Agrippina, to become tutor to her son Nero. ”

“ We will own him to be Seneca the wise, Seneca almost the good. To this sage had been given the education of the monster who was to rule the world. This sage had introduced him into power, had restrained his madness when he could, and with his colleague had conducted the general administration of the Empire with the greatest honor, while the boy was wearing out his life in debauchery in the palace. Seneca dared say more to Nero, to venture more with him, than did any other man. For the young tiger was afraid of his old master long after he had tasted blood. ”