Who Is Seneca?

Ryan tells the tale of Seneca, one of the three most important Stoic philosophers who advised an emperor and authored countless works of fiction and advice. This episode is brought to you by Amazon Alexa. Amazon Alexa is the perfect system to use to set up your house with Smart Home functionality—and with the new Amazon Smart Lighting Bundle, it’s easy to get started. Just connect your Amazon Echo Dot with your first Sengled color changing light bulb and you’re on your way. Visit Amazon.com/dailystoic to get 20% off the bundle.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We reflect, we prepare, we think deeply about the challenging issues of our time, and we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring.

• 0:53Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. The more I read about him, just the more endlessly fascinated I am with Seneca. I mean, he's brilliant, he's complicated, successful, falls from grace, claws his way back up, gets caught up in one of the worst regimes in history, escapes, sort of slinks out of it towards the end, then produces some of the most brilliant, provocative, philosophically wise writings ever put down in any language, and then is tragically, his life is tragically cut short,

• 1:38Ryan Holiday?

  some would say, in a way, with the chickens coming home to roost. But anyways, just a fascinating human being. And I think that's why his example has been so polarizing, also inspiring, flummoxing, intriguing, all of these things. One of the crazy things that I think is underrated as far as Seneca goes is just how Influential he was in his own time as a writer? Like James Rahm talks about this in his book on Seneca, which is very good, Dying Every Day. He says, "For most of history, historians believed that Seneca, the playwright, and Seneca, the philosopher-politician, were two separate people.

• 2:23Ryan Holiday?

  The idea was no one could be so talented as to be both of those figures." And it's confusing, of course, because so many people in ancient Rome had liked the same names. But he's saying that's as if Emerson also wrote Goethe's Faust. And as I say in Lives of the Stoics, it's actually more crazy. It'd be like if Emerson wrote Faust and had served in the Lincoln administration. So Seneca is just all over the place. I mean, there is a line of graffiti at Pompeii from that time, before the explosion, of a line from Seneca's plays. So he was famous in his own time, just as a writer. You know, his philosophical work was famous,

• 3:08Ryan Holiday?

  but obviously is much more famous to us today than it probably was in his own time. Probably too close to his political stuff to have been fully appreciated. But, you know, just an intriguing figure because he probably writes about Stoicism the most eloquently of all the Stoics. Yet his lifestyle is not the most at odds with it, but the most complicated and real, right? I think Seneca is relatable to us today because he did struggle. Where it seems like Marcus Aurelius was almost like a superhuman. And Epictetus, of course, is superhuman. And James Stockdale is superhuman. You know, Seneca, you get this hint of worldly ambition, and there's some Epicurean tendencies there.

• 3:52Ryan Holiday?

  And he just feels like, he feels like he'd be at home. Today, in our world, as he would have been at, you know, at one of Gatsby's parties in the roaring twenties, or at a French salon during the King Louis time. It's just, you know, he's just an endlessly fascinating figure. I love talking about him. So I want to really answer that question. Who is Seneca? What was so incredible about the life of one of Stoicism's great thinkers? And we put this episode together as part of the Lives of the Stoics campaign. Actually, I haven't even checked out the book yet. I definitely hope you do. There's a, one of my favorite chapters to write was the chapter on Seneca. But here is the life of Seneca.

• 4:37Ryan Holiday?

  It's a short episode, but I think it packs a punch. And then, of course, if you want to read more about Seneca, check out the book or check out many, many, many of the things that I've written about him.

• 4:57Ryan Holiday?

  For a boy born in a tiny village in southern Spain, some 1,500 miles away from the place he dreamed of making a name for himself, it would please Lucius Aeneas Seneca very much to know that we are still talking about him today. His fellow Stoics wrote at length about the worthlessness of celebrity, the foolishness of chasing posthumous fame, the inevitability of time passing and sweeping our names into obscurity. Seneca studied these philosophers. He read their writings. He agreed with them. "The deep flood of time will roll over us," he wrote. "Some few great men will raise their heads above it, but most are destined to depart into the same realms of silence

• 5:41Ryan Holiday?

  and to battle against oblivion." Aware as Seneca was of the improbability of lasting significance, it didn't deter him. If anything, it propelled this young man. In a way, it only reaffirmed what he already knew. Born with a chronic illness, Seneca realized at an early age what so many never do. Life is short, fragile, and extraordinary. So we must see To it, he said, that our lives, like jewels of a great price, be noteworthy not because of their width, but because of their weight. Let us measure them by their performance, not of their duration. That's exactly what Seneca did. He performed, right

• 6:23Ryan Holiday?

  down to the last moments of his life, a theatrical suicide that would rival that of his hero, a Stoic philosopher and Roman senator named Cato the Younger, who famously disemboweled himself rather than live under Julius Caesar's tyranny. Unlike his hero, however, Seneca never got to taste any part of that freedom of Roman libertas that Cato and his predecessors had all enjoyed. Instead, he knew only of the empire. Seneca would live through the reigns of the first five emperors of Rome, and to say it was a time of tremendous violence, paranoia, and uncertainty would unfairly understate it. No one's station in life

• 7:06Ryan Holiday?

  put them high enough or far enough from the reach of the bloodlust of these evil emperors. Most people opted to keep their heads down, to simply endure the political chaos, to stay completely off the imperial court's radar. Seneca, on the other hand, spent all of his life attempting to maneuver towards and within the turbulent court regimes. And according to the historian Dio Cassius, he nearly got himself killed doing so. After masterfully pleading a case in the senate in front of the Emperor Caligula, Caligula ordered Seneca to be put to death, but afterwards let him off, Dio says, because he believed the statement of one of his female associates to the effect that Seneca had consumption

• 7:49Ryan Holiday?

  in an advanced stage and would die before a great while. Seneca's chronic illness saved his life, at least temporarily. Caligula's successor Claudius didn't care how long Seneca had to live. When he came to power in 41 AD, one of his first orders of business was to banish Seneca from Rome. What for, we don't know. Most likely, a blanket persecution of philosophers or some trumped-up Charge. In any case, Seneca was sent packing to the distant island of Corsica. His time in exile was productive at first. He wrote three famous works: Consolation to Polybius, Consolation to Helvia, and On Anger, in a short span. But the isolation would soon

• 8:34Ryan Holiday?

  begin to wear on him. Soon, the man who had not long before been writing consolations to other people clearly needed some consoling himself. Then again, who wouldn't? Even the strongest animal begins to wilt when deprived of its friends in the herd. But thankfully, Seneca had begun his practice of letter-writing, which would continue all his life. He wrote about a lot of different things in that time: about friendship, about love, about nourishing the body, about wealth and status, and how quickly life can be flipped upside down. In a play he wrote towards the end of his life, Seneca captured just how capricious and random fate could be. "No one has had so much divine favor," he said, "that they could guarantee

• 9:15Ryan Holiday?

  themselves tomorrow. God keeps our lives hurdling on, spinning in a whirlwind." Well, in 50 AD, Seneca didn't know it, but his trials were about to improve, and his life was about to be spun in a whirlwind that history has not fully wrapped its head around. The Empress Agrippina, plotting for her son Nero to be the emperor someday, recalls Seneca from Corsica to tutor her boy. A statue of Seneca and Nero done by a Spanish sculptor, Eduardo Barone, manages to perfectly capture the dynamic between this wonderful teacher and this strange, headstrong student. Seneca sits with a document that he's written across his lap, trying to point to a spot in the text, trying to instill in his young

• 9:59Ryan Holiday?

  charge the seriousness of the tasks before him. Nero is hooded, his expression is sullen, both fists are clenched, and one of them rests on his temple as if he can't bring himself to pay attention. Soon enough, he is thinking, "I won't have to endure Seneca's lectures much longer. Then I'll be able to do whatever I want." Seneca can clearly see this language, and yet he proceeds. He proceeded for many years, in fact. Why? Because he hoped that some of it, any of it, would get through because he knew the stakes were high, because he knew his job was to teach, to try, and he was going to die trying to teach Nero to be good. A few short years later, Seneca would run afoul with Nero.

• 10:42Ryan Holiday?

  Realizing alarmingly late just how deranged Nero was, Seneca tried to walk away from politics. Nero would not let him. Instead, paranoid and cleaning house of potential enemies, Nero sent goons to demand Seneca's suicide. Seneca made no plea for pardon. When his request for something to write down his will was denied, he turned to his friends and said he could bequeath to them the only thing that mattered: his life, his example. It was heart-wrenching, and they broke down when he said these words. "Where," he said, chiding gently, "not just his friends, but the audience of history, are your maxims of philosophy

• 11:21Ryan Holiday?

  or the preparation of so many years of study against evils to come?" "Who knew not Nero's cruelty?" he said. "After a mother and a brother's murder, nothing remains but to add the destruction of a guardian and a tutor." Hugging his wife, he urged her not to grieve for him too much and to live on without him. Instead, she decided to go with him. Slitting the arteries in their arms, they began to bleed out. Seneca's meager diet seemed to have slowed his blood flow, so next he willingly drank a poison he had kept for precisely this moment, but not before pouring a small libation out to the gods. When this poison did not work, Seneca was moved to a steam bath where the heat and dense air finally finished him

• 12:06Ryan Holiday?

  off. Shortly after, his body was disposed of quietly without funeral rites, per a request that Seneca had made long ago, which, to the historian Tacitus, was proof that, like a good Stoic, even in the height of his wealth and power, Seneca had been thinking of his life's close. The Stoics were not just thinkers and writers. Even 2,000 years ago, they talked about pen and ink philosophers. They meant that derisively. They wanted philosophers who were doers, right? And that's the point of Stoicism. It's to help make you better in the real world. And so the new book, Lives of the Stoics, is going to look at how did these actual human beings live the ideas in the philosophy they espoused?

• 12:51Ryan Holiday?

  In all my other books, I've been talking about the ideas, the teachings of Stoicism. But this is the first time the lives of the Stoics have been documented all in one place, literally ever in history. It's how did these men and women apply the ideas of Stoicism to the challenges of their lives and of their times? From the Stoics, we can learn so much about resilience, about perseverance, about happiness, about virtue. So I'm so excited about the new book, Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living from Xeno to Marcus Aurelius. Please check it out, and thank you very much. Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living from Xeno to Marcus Aurelius by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman, available anywhere books are sold.