About Seneca’s Letters

I have Seneca’s letters on my Kindle. I dip in and out of it.  It’s not really a narrative and there is no reason to read it linearly.

It’s fascinating.

Here we have a collection of a guy sending letters to a younger man.   On the surface this is fascinating in the sheer mundane nature of the interaction.   The relationship between Seneca and his young friend Lucillius is one of a mentor talking to his mentee, but more like an older uncle sharing advice with a nephew.

We only have Seneca’s side of the conversation.  We don’t know what Lucillius was thinking.  We don’t know if he even wanted this advice.  In some of the more scolding letters we get the impression that he doesn’t always measure up to Seneca’s expectations.

They are in two different places in their lives.  Seneca is essentially a retired rich guy.  Lucillius is closer to that hurly-burly career climbing of the Roman state.  You could imagine this interaction as the first century equivalent of emails or texts.

You have to understand that the way Roman culture worked was a series of Client-Patron relationships. Nobody was really their own man.  They all owed their positions to alliances with people or factions or tribes higher up in the hierarchy.  Lucillius was a client of Seneca.  The relationship with Seneca could help him climb the ladder.

What I love about the letters is that they could be from today.  It you remove or replace the archaic references, they were us.  Nothing has changed.  Here we sit in our New Rome still trying to figure out what it all means, still having to resist buying a shiny car, still being embarrassed to wear out-of-date clothes and still working very hard to be better people.

If it were only that, a collection of familiar letters from 2,000 years ago, it would be fascinating on its own.  But it’s more than that.  Seneca, besides being a retired rich guy, is also a Stoic Philosopher.  He would not have called himself a ‘philosopher’ because the ‘Sophist’ were another school of thought that the Stoics dismissed as a degenerate form of reason.

When we refer to stoicism today we get a picture of people purposely suffering.  Purposely holding out for lost causes.  Purposely leaning into the pain and effort because this is where the truth is.  We see them in our modern, popular opinion has hard and humorless men.

But there was more to what they were preaching than self-sacrifice.   The Self Sacrifice was part of their tool kit.  What they were really trying to find was truth and reason.   They realized that the jewelry and furnishings of life many times got in the way of truth and reason.  They were trying to strip away what wasn’t necessary to see the good stuff.

The stoics were also trying to figure out haw to live a life that was of service to others.  That was a valuable life, a worthy life.  They were trying to figure out how to be satisfied with what they had and live in the now.  They were working to fix the bubbling gray mass inside their skulls so that they could then add value to the world.

Nothing has changed.  I find that comforting and terrifying.  Comforting because the human experience is universal and these things that trouble us are the universal things that should trouble us – across space and time. It terrifying because you would think we might have come up with some answers by now.

The answer that the Stoics came up with is practice.  To practice a valuable life.  To never get it right but leave your mark, lead your life trying, striving and practicing.  They had no silver bullets.  They just knew which direction to run like we should too.

Make no mistake.  Seneca and his ilk were the 1%’ers of the time.  These were idle rich guys.  He tell stories of how he’s quite proud of himself for only taking a couple slaves with him and driving in an old cart to a picnic with a friend.  That’s the kind of smug self-importance that would get you beat up on Twitter.

He also realizes that if some friends from his well-to-do set were to pass him riding in this rough cart on the road he would be embarrassed in spite of himself.  In spite of knowing that what he was doing was the ‘right’ or ‘valuable’ thing to do he knew his mind was still wired to betray his own stoicism.

Reading Seneca’s letters calms me.  It reinforces the fact that all we can really do is accept what we have and then work towards something better.  It tells me that every day is a new day, a gift, a chance to put the polished armor back on and lean into life.  To try to be better.  To try to live up to the gift we’ve been given, by God or the gods if you choose.

I have often said that there is no inherent value in stoically suffering, whether in a race or life.  But, I think that suffering does have value.  Don’t just try to suffer.  Don’t drink suffering like wine.  But, when it comes, and in this life it comes, embrace it and learn from it.  Lean in.  That suffering reveals our core.

Because like me in my articles, Seneca is not writing letters for Lucillius, he is writing them for himself and hoping that in the process they are of service to someone else.

Seneca spends most of his time talking about whether having money is evil and the relationship between being rich and having virtue, whether or not they can be reconciled.  Which should tell you he was worried about his own soul.   A bit ironic I think.  I suppose that’s why Stoicism appeals so much today to the Silicon Valley Nouveau Riche.

There are no silver bullets in Seneca’s letters.  But there are some silver nuggets.  There are some interesting ideas.  There are some timeless threads of cogitation.

You should get a copy and dip into it once in a while.

I think he’d be surprised that we are still reading them 2,000 years later.

Still trying to figure it out.