The Consolations of Philosophy Read online

  5. Lugdunum had been one of the most prosperous Roman settlements in Gaul. At the junction of the Arar and Rhone rivers, it enjoyed a privileged position as a crossroads of trade and military routes. The city contained elegant baths and theatres and a government mint. Then in August 64 a spark slipped out of hand and grew into a fire that spread through the narrow streets, terrified inhabitants levering themselves from windows at its approach. Flames licked from house to house and by the time the sun had risen the whole of Lugdunum, from suburb to market, from temple to baths, had burnt to cinders. The survivors were left destitute in only the soot-covered clothes they stood in, their noble buildings roasted beyond recognition. The

  blaze was so rapid, it took longer for news of the disaster to reach Rome than for the city to burn:

  You say: ‘I did not think it would happen.’ Do you think there is anything that will not happen, when you know that it is possible to happen, when you see that it has already happened …?

  6. On the fifth of February 62, similar disaster struck the province of Campania. The earth trembled, and large sections of Pompeii collapsed. In the months that followed, many inhabitants decided to leave Campania for other parts of the peninsula. Their move suggested to Seneca that they believed there was somewhere on earth, in Liguria or Calabria, where they might be wholly safe, out of reach of Fortune’s will. To which he replied with an argument, persuasive in spite of its geological dubiousness:

  Who promises them better foundations for this or that soil to stand on? All places have the same conditions and if they have not yet had an earthquake, they can none the less have quakes. Perhaps tonight or before tonight, today will split open the spot where you stand securely. How do you know whether conditions will henceforth be better in those places against which Fortune has already exhausted her strength or in those places which are supported on their own ruins? We are mistaken if we believe any part of the world is exempt and safe … Nature has not created anything in such a way that it is immobile.

  7. At the time of Caligula’s accession to the throne, away from high politics in a household in Rome, a mother lost her son. Metilius had been short of his twenty-fifth birthday and a young man of exceptional promise. He had been close to his mother Marcia, and his death devastated her. She withdrew from social life and sank into mourning. Her friends watched with compassion and hoped for a day when she would regain a measure of composure. She didn’t. A year passed, then another and a third, and still Marcia came no closer to overcoming her grief.

  After three years she was as tearful as she had been on the very day of his funeral. Seneca sent her a letter. He expressed enormous sympathies, but gently continued, ‘the question at issue between us [is] whether grief ought to be

  deep

  or

  never-ending

  .’

  Marcia was rebelling against what seemed like an occurrence at once dreadful and rare – and all the more dreadful because it was rare. Around her were mothers who still had their sons, young men beginning their careers, serving in the army or entering politics. Why had hers been taken from her?

  8. The death was unusual and terrible, but it was not – Seneca ventured – abnormal. If Marcia looked beyond a restricted circle, she would come upon a woefully long list of sons whom Fortune had killed. Octavia had lost her son, Livia her son, Cornelia hers; so had Xenophon, Paulus, Lucius Bibulus, Lucius Sulla, Augustus and Scipio. By averting her gaze from early deaths, Marcia had, understandably but perilously, denied them a place in her conception of the normal:

  We never anticipate evils before they actually arrive … So many funerals pass our doors, yet we never dwell on death. So many deaths are untimely, yet we make plans for our own infants: how they will don the toga, serve in the army, and succeed to their father’s property.

  The children might live, but how ingenuous to believe that they were guaranteed to survive to maturity – even to dinner-time:

  No promise has been given you for this night – no, I have suggested too long a respite – no promise has been given even for this

  hour

  .

  There is dangerous innocence in the expectation of a future formed on the basis of probability. Any accident to which a human has been subject, however rare, however distant in time, is a possibility we must ready ourselves for.

  9. Because Fortune’s long benevolent periods risk seducing us into somnolence, Seneca entreated us to spare a little time each day to think of her. We do not know what will happen next: we must expect something. In the early morning, we should undertake what Seneca termed a

  praemeditatio

  , a meditation in advance, on all the sorrows of mind and body to which the goddess may subsequently subject us.

  A SENECAN PRAEMEDITATIO

  [The wise] will start each day with the thought …

  Fortune gives us nothing which we can really own.

  Nothing, whether public or private, is stable; the destinies of men,

  no less than those of cities, are in a whirl.

  Whatever structure has been reared by a long sequence of years, at the cost of great toil and through the great kindness of the gods, is scattered and dispersed in a single day. No, he who has said ‘a day’ has granted too long a postponement to swift misfortune; an hour, an instant of time, suffices for the overthrow of empires.

  How often have cities in Asia, how often in Achaia, been laid low by a single shock of earthquake? How many towns in Syria, how many in Macedonia, have been swallowed up? How often has this kind of devastation laid Cyprus in ruins?

  We live in the middle of things which have all been destined to die.

  Mortal have you been born, to mortals have you given birth.

  Reckon on everything, expect everything.

  10. The same could naturally have been conveyed in other ways. In more sober philosophical language, one could say that a subject’s agency is only one of the causal factors determining events in the course of his or her life. Seneca resorted instead to continual hyperbole:

  Whenever anyone falls at your side or behind you, cry out: ‘Fortune, you will not deceive me, you will not fall upon me confident and heedless. I know what you are planning. It is true that you struck someone else, but you aimed at me.’

  (The original ends with a final, more rousing alliteration:

  Quotiens aliquis ad latus aut pone tergum ceciderit, exclama: ‘Non decipies me, fortuna, nec securum aut neglegentem opprimes. Scio quid pares; alium quidem percussisti, sed me petisti.’)

  11. If most philosophers feel no need to write like this, it is because they trust that, so long as an argument is logical, the style in which it is presented to the reader will not determine its effectiveness. Seneca believed in a different picture of the mind. Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the mind’s weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style. We need metaphors to derive a sense of what cannot be seen or touched, or else we will forget.

  The goddess of Fortune, in spite of her unphilosophical, religious roots, was the perfect image to keep our exposure to accident continually within our minds, conflating a range of threats to our security into one ghastly anthropomorphic enemy.

  Sense of injustice

  A feeling that the rules of justice have been violated, rules which dictate that if we are honourable, we will be rewarded, and that if we are bad, we will be punished – a sense of justice inculcated in the earliest education of children, and found in most religious texts, for example, in the book of Deuteronomy, which explains that the godly person ‘shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water … and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper. The ungodly are not so: but are like chaff which the wind driveth away.’

  Goodness → Reward

  Evil → Punishment

  In cases where one acts correctly but still suffers disaster, one is left bewildered and unable to fit the event into a scheme of justice. The world seems absurd. One alternates between a fee
ling that one may after all have been bad and this is why one was punished, and the feeling that one truly was not bad and therefore must have fallen victim to a catastrophic failure in the administration of justice. The continuing belief that the world is fundamentally just is implied in the very complaint that there has been an

  in

  justice

  .

  1. Justice was not an ideology that had helped Marcia.

  2. It had forced her to oscillate between a debilitating feeling that her son Metilius had been taken away from her because she was bad, and at other moments, a feeling of outrage with the world that Metilius had died given that she had always been essentially good.

  3. But we cannot always explain our destiny by referring to our moral worth; we may be cursed and blessed without justice behind either. Not everything which happens

  to

  us occurs with reference to something

  about

  us.

  Metilius hadn’t died because his mother was bad, nor was the world unfair because his mother was good and yet he had died. His death was, in Seneca’s image, the work of Fortune, and the goddess was no moral judge. She did not evaluate her victims like the god of Deuteronomy and reward them according to merit. She inflicted harm with the moral blindness of a hurricane.

  (Ill. 13.10)

  4. Seneca knew in himself the sapping impulse to interpret failures according to a misguided model of justice. Upon the accession of Claudius in early 41, he became a pawn in a plan by the Empress Messalina to rid herself of Caligula’s sister, Julia Livilla. The empress accused Julia of having an adulterous affair and falsely named Seneca as her lover. He was in an instant stripped of family, money, friends, reputation and his political career, and sent into exile on the island of Corsica, one of the most desolate parts of Rome’s vast empire.

  He would have endured periods of self-blame alternating with feelings of bitterness. He would have reproached himself for misreading the political situation with regard to Messalina, and resented the way his loyalty and talents had been rewarded by Claudius.

  Both moods were based on a picture of a moral universe where external circumstances reflected internal qualities. It was a relief from this punitive schema to remember Fortune:

  I do not allow [Fortune] to pass sentence upon myself.

  Seneca’s political failure did not have to be read as retribution for sins, it was no rational punishment meted out after examination of the evidence by an all-seeing Providence in a divine courtroom; it was a cruel but morally meaningless by-product of the machinations of a rancorous Empress. Seneca was not only distancing himself from disgrace. The imperial official he had been had not deserved all the credit for his status either.

  The interventions of Fortune, whether kindly or diabolical, introduced a random element into human destinies.

  (Ill. 13.11)

  Anxiety

  A condition of agitation about an uncertain situation which one both wishes will turn out for the best and fears may turn out for the worst. Typically leaves sufferers unable to derive enjoyment from supposedly pleasurable activities, cultural, sexual or social

  .

  (Ill. 13.12)

  Even in sublime settings the anxious will remain preoccupied by private anticipations of ruin and may prefer to be left alone in a room

  .

  1. The traditional form of comfort is reassurance. One explains to the anxious that their fears are exaggerated and that events are sure to unfold in a desired direction.

  2. But reassurance can be the cruellest antidote to anxiety. Our rosy predictions both leave the anxious unprepared for the worst, and unwittingly imply that it would be disastrous if the worst came to pass. Seneca more wisely asks us to consider that bad things probably will occur, but adds that they are unlikely ever to be as bad as we fear.

  3. In February 63, Seneca’s friend Lucilius, a civil servant working in Sicily, learned of a lawsuit against him which threatened to end his career and disgrace his name for ever. He wrote to Seneca.

  ‘You may expect that I will advise you to picture a happy outcome, and to rest in the allurements of hope,’ replied the philosopher, but ‘I am going to conduct you to peace of mind through another route’ – which culminated in the advice:

  If you wish to put off all worry, assume that what you fear

  may

  happen is certainly

  going

  to happen.

  Seneca wagered that once we look rationally at what will occur if our desires are not fulfilled, we will almost certainly find that the underlying problems are more modest than the anxieties they have bred. Lucilius had grounds for sadness but not hysteria:

  If you lose this case, can anything more severe happen to you than being sent into exile or led to prison?… ‘I may become a poor man’; I shall then be one among many. ‘I may be exiled’; I shall then regard myself as though I had been born in the place to which I’ll be sent. ‘They may put me in chains.’ What then? Am I free from bonds now?

  Prison and exile were bad, but – the linchpin of the argument – not as bad as the desperate Lucilius might have feared before scrutinizing the anxiety.

  4. It follows that wealthy individuals fearing the loss of their fortune should never be reassured with remarks about the improbability of their ruin. They should spend a few days in a draughty room on a diet of thin soup and stale bread. Seneca had taken the counsel from one of his favourite philosophers:

  The great hedonist teacher Epicurus used to observe certain periods during which he would be niggardly in satisfying hunger, with the object of seeing … whether it was worth going to much trouble to make the deficit good.

  The wealthy would, Seneca promised, soon come to an important realization:

  ‘Is this really the condition that I feared?’ … Endure [this poverty] for three or four days at a time, sometimes for more … and I assure you … you will understand that a man’s peace of mind does not depend upon Fortune.

  5. Many Romans found it surprising, even ridiculous, to discover that the philosopher proffering such advice lived in considerable luxury himself. By his early forties, Seneca had accumulated enough money through his political career to acquire villas and farms. He ate well, and developed a love of expensive furniture, in particular, citrus-wood tables with ivory legs.

  He resented suggestions that there was something unphilosophical in his behaviour:

  Stop preventing philosophers from possessing money; no one has condemned wisdom to poverty.

  And with touching pragmatism:

  I will despise whatever lies in the domain of Fortune, but if a choice is offered, I will choose the better half.

  6. It wasn’t hypocrisy. Stoicism does not recommend poverty; it recommends that we neither fear nor despise it. It considers wealth to be, in the technical formulation, a

  productum

  , a preferred thing – neither an essential one nor a crime. Stoics may live with as many gifts of Fortune as the foolish. Their houses can be as grand, their furniture as beautiful. They are identified as wise by only one detail: how they would respond to sudden poverty. They would walk away from the house and the servants without rage or despair.

  7. The idea that a wise person should be able to walk away from

  all

  Fortune’s gifts calmly was Stoicism’s most extreme, peculiar claim, given that Fortune grants us not only houses and money but also our friends, our family, even our bodies:

  The wise man can lose nothing. He has everything invested in himself.

  The wise man is self-sufficient … if he loses a hand through disease or war, or if some accident puts out one or both of his eyes, he will be satisfied with what is left.

  Which sounds absurd, unless we refine our notion of what Seneca meant by ‘satisfied’. We should not be happy to lose an eye, but life would be possible even if we did so. The right number of eyes and hands is a

  productum

&nb
sp; . Two examples of the position:

  The wise man will not despise himself even if he has the stature of a dwarf, but he nevertheless wishes to be tall.

  The wise man is self-sufficient in that he

  can

  do without friends, not that he

  desires

  to do without them.

  8. Seneca’s wisdom was more than theoretical. Exiled to Corsica, he found himself abruptly stripped of all luxuries. The island had been a Roman possession since 238

  BC

  , but it had not enjoyed the benefits of civilization. The few Romans on the island rarely settled outside two colonies on the east coast, Aleria and Mariana, and it was unlikely that Seneca was allowed to inhabit them, for he complained of hearing only ‘barbaric speech’ around him, and was associated with a forbidding building near Luri at the northern tip of the island known since ancient times as ‘Seneca’s Tower’.

  Conditions must have contrasted painfully with life in Rome. But in a letter to his mother, the former wealthy statesman explained that he had managed to accommodate himself to his circumstances, thanks to years of morning premeditations and periods of thin soup:

  Never did I trust Fortune, even when she seemed to be offering peace. All those blessings which she kindly bestowed on me – money, public office, influence – I relegated to a place from which she could take them back without disturbing me. Between them and me, I have kept a wide gap, and so she has merely

  taken

  them, not

  torn

  them from me.

  (Ill. 13.13)

  Feelings of being mocked by

  (i) inanimate objects

  A sense that one’s wishes are being purposefully frustrated by a pencil which drops off a table or a drawer that refuses to open. The frustration caused by the inanimate object is compounded by a sense that it holds one in contempt. It is acting in a frustrating way in order to signal that it does not share the view of one’s intelligence or status to which one is attached and to which others subscribe