Res Publica

Discussion of Seneca’s political thought has tended to concentrate on his relationship to and views about the emperors under whom he lived, in particular Nero. This chapter aims instead to explore how Seneca’s commitment to philosophy as a way of life shapes his political ideas, and vice versa. Seneca uses arguments about the unique value of philosophy to reconfigure and reinvigorate received accounts of the nature of the Roman commonwealth. He also draws on the inheritance of Roman political thought to offer new solutions to some long-standing lacunae in Stoic cosmopolitanism. This chapter’s account of Seneca’s politics emphasizes the diachronic continuities between the Roman republic and the principate in his thought and the richness of his engagement with previous Greek and Roman political theory.

Schools

This chapter examines Seneca’s views on the collective practice of philosophy, through his representations of the philosophical school. Seneca believes that the Stoic school uniquely combines intellectual coherence with latitude for individual inquiry. He demonstrates these features of the Stoic intellectual community by contrast with Epicureanism. The Epicurean school also receives more sympathetic treatment, though, as Seneca uses it to illustrate how philosophy’s vulnerability to public misunderstanding and caricature. The chapter highlights the fundamentally social character of the philosophical way of life in Seneca’s writings, expressed through the often transtemporal and virtual model of community offered by the philosophical school.

Solitude and Independence

Seneca participates in and substantially adds to a Greco-Roman tradition of reflection on the social prerequisites of philosophy. This chapter shows how Seneca develops an account of philosophy’s history and the social conditions that give rise to it. Philosophy’s promise of autonomy is always realized against a social background. Seneca’s attention to this background offers a counterweight to his frequently expressed admiration for the Cynics. Close examination of Seneca’s views about the development of technology and medicine and about the communication of philosophical ideas shows that the Cynic claim that the philosopher can and should slough off the bonds of society stands at odds with Seneca’s description of philosophy’s social enmeshment.

Introduction

Seneca’s writings offer us our widest window into the intersection of the idea of philosophy as a way of life with Roman culture and politics. Seneca was himself alert to the tension between these two sources of moral guidance. His work traces a complex interplay between the two and aims to construct a coherent picture of the philosophical life through detailed engagement with the social context in which that life is lived and the socially constituted array of concepts through which it is delineated. Reconstructing his stance on the questions that emerge requires a combination of literary and philosophical approaches. This book will show that for Seneca the philosophical life can be described and defended only through the materials provided by the ambient community.

Conclusion

Seneca’s description of the social dimensions of philosophy, and his use of social background in clarifying and defending his conception of what philosophy is and can be, marks not a retreat from but rather a vindication and extension of the Socratic ideal of philosophy as a critical practice. Seneca does not simply encode social norms in philosophical language, but rather in his writings stages a subtle interplay between the two that shows both how philosophy necessarily takes its beginnings from an existing social world and how philosophy’s scrutiny of that world can yield challenging and unexpected conclusions. Seneca gives us a philosophy that is neither a complacent recapitulation of the given nor an arid abstraction decoupled from social practice, but rather a genuine art of living.

Slavery

This chapter seeks to broaden discussion of slavery in Seneca by moving away from a focus on Seneca’s normative views about slavery. Instead, it asks what function slavery plays in Seneca’s idea of the philosophical life. Examination of a series of stories about enslaved people shows that Seneca uses such stories both to give specificity to his idea of the philosophical life and to argue for its value. Seneca’s ideas about not only freedom but also instrumentality and moral development turn on the conceptual and rhetorical materials supplied by slavery. The tracing of this dependence is a study in the centrality of slavery in Roman intellectual history.