Seneca and Nero: The Ultimate Test
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Welcome to Stoicism Today! This week we are pleased to bring you a lightly edited transcript of James Romm’s keynote address from Stoicon 2025, Seneca and Nero: The Ultimate Test. You can view the original recording (complete with Q&A) here.
If you’re a committed Stoic and a phone call comes asking you to serve at the highest level of an autocratic government, what would you do? What should you do? Say you agree to serve and become chief minister to the ruler, but discover he’s immoral, corrupt, vain, and only loosely tethered to reality. What should you do? Should you remain in service in hopes of keeping the state from imploding? Or should you preserve your own soul by getting as far from the palace as possible?
Then imagine you have a huge social media following with millions reading your every online post. Should you use your platform to agitate against the regime or to support it? Or would you ignore it altogether and pretend you weren’t involved? How would your Stoic philosophy guide you in navigating the ultimate test of the question of civic engagement? A situation in which in order to stay engaged, you either have to collude in horrendous abuses or else put your own life at risk by refusing to collude.
This scenario I’ve sketched is the one that confronted the Roman Stoic Seneca the Younger in the first century AD, except that instead of a telephone call, he received a summons delivered by messenger to the island of Corsica, where he’d been sent into exile. And instead of a social media feed, he had a large readership for the moral essays that he’d begun to publish while on Corsica and kept on publishing throughout the remaining 33 years of his life. He was summoned to Rome to assume the post of tutor to teenage Nero, the heir apparent to the emperorship.
After Nero’s succession at age 17, Seneca served in a role that we might compare to White House chief of staff, a trusted insider with access to all the right people, responsible for making sure things run ran smoothly, consulted by Nero on most key questions of state. Seneca’s first English language biographer, Miriam Griffin, dubbed him, in the title of her study, a philosopher in politics. Though some, myself included, have wondered whether that phrase shouldn’t be reversed to characterize Seneca as a politician in philosophy.
That question aside, let me focus on the ethical issues that Seneca’s story raises and how they relate to the theme of Stoicon 2025. Stoicism advocates service to humankind, which often involves political participation and activism—in contrast to Epicureanism, known in antiquity as “the garden” because it sanctioned withdrawal into a private realm where the soul would be protected from discord. In one of his essays on the tranquility of mind, Seneca uses an extended military metaphor to contrast the two schools of thought, Epicureanism and Stoicism, extolling the latter and rejecting the former. To withdraw into private life, he writes, is equivalent to military desertion. As soldiers in the army of moral effort, we must keep to our place in the phalanx, that is, in public life: “Even if others will occupy the front line and fate has set you back in the third row, Seneca tells us in his address, “Fight from there with your voice, encouragement, example, and spirit. Even with hands cut off, the person who stands firm and gives support with his shouts finds something to contribute to his side.”
Then drawing the lesson from the analogy, Seneca continues, “If fortune has displaced you from the first level in government, stand and give support with your shouting. If someone chokes you by the throat, stand and give support with your silence. The effort of a good citizen is never useless.”
As often in his essays, Seneca cites the example of Socrates, the Greek philosopher to whom he looked for models of moral virtue. In examining the question of civic engagement, Seneca claims in On tranquility of mind that Socrates had remained engaged during the reign of the 30 tyrants at Athens, a harsh authoritarian regime that put to death hundreds of its political enemies: “Socrates was openly out in public life. He bore himself as a mighty example, walking as a free man among 30 slave masters.”
Again, Seneca spells out the lesson to be drawn: “However the government presents itself, we shall either expand ourselves or shrink ourselves in such a way that we shall be taking action, not paralyzed or strangled with fear. For burying oneself is not a form of salvation.” That last quote seems like a clear-cut call for political activism, but Seneca’s views are rarely clear-cut.
The example of Socrates, for example, in fact goes two ways, as Seneca was undoubtedly aware. Yes, Socrates had refused to go into retreat under the regime of the 30, but neither did he challenge that regime. When ordered by the 30 to arrest one of its enemies and bring him in for execution, Socrates had simply gone home and done nothing. An act of resistance perhaps, but a passive and silent one, hardly a case of “give support with your shouting.”
Then, too, Seneca concludes the whole discussion with a huge qualification of his preceding exhortations. If you happen upon a less flexible period of politics, he tells his addressee, you will have to see to it that you claim more time for leisure and study, just as you would make quickly for the harbor on a dangerous voyage. You should not wait for public affairs to send you away, but extricate yourself from them. Less flexible sounds like a euphemism for authoritarianism or autocracy, the system under which Socrates had briefly operated during the reign of the 30 and in which Seneca spent his entire life. Which metaphor, army or navy, are we to take as Seneca’s definitive view? Are we to stand in the phalanx and shout even with our hands cut off? Or are we to leave open waters for safe anchorage when the seas get choppy?
Seneca’s own career, as we shall see, shows that he was unsure how to resolve this dilemma. But first, let me look at another of Seneca’s essays. In this treatise, probably addressed to the very same person as On tranquility of mind, Seneca shares very different thoughts about politics, much more sympathetic to the possibility of disengagement. In the beginning of the surviving portion of this essay, its opening has unfortunately been lost. An opponent to Seneca’s views is heard arguing about staying active in politics no matter what. The opponent says to Seneca, “Surely your Stoics say we shall remain in active service right up to the very end of life without ceasing to apply ourselves to the common good,” accusing Seneca of verging closer to Epicurean thought than to Stoic. Seneca then defends his views using multiple arguments.
First he claims that leading Stoics Zeno and Chrysippus had kept aloof from politics, so others have a right to follow their lead. Note how this conflicts with his evocation of Socrates in On tranquility of mind. Second, Seneca recurs to a view that he attributes to Zeno that “the wise man will participate in public life unless something prevents him.” Well, says Seneca, that let out clause might be invoked for numerous reasons. Perhaps the sage has insufficient power to be of help. Perhaps the state is so vicious and corrupt that it cannot accept his help. Or perhaps the sage is physically debilitated. Thus, Seneca argues, it’s possible for someone who has all options before him, before experiencing any of life’s storms, to settle in a safe retreat and devote himself from then on to liberal studies, and to spend time in uninterrupted leisure, more or less as one would do in the garden of Epicurus.
Seneca resolves this apparent abandonment of Stoic principles by positing that there are two republics that one might benefit by one’s actions. A smaller one, the state or the nation of which one is a citizen and a larger one, the entire human race. This greater commonwealth, says Seneca, we can serve with devotion even in leisure. “Or rather, I think even better in leisure by inquiring what virtue is, whether it is one or many, whether this planet, which includes within it seas and land masses, exists alone, or whether God has scattered many such bodies, whether the world is immortal or to be counted among things that are perishable.”
Seneca then asks, “What service to God does the contemplator of such matters provide? That God’s great works are not without witness.” Seneca elaborates on this last thought with reference to the central Stoic principle, live in harmony with nature. Personifying this nature as an entity with will and intention, Seneca asserts that nature wants to be contemplated: “Aware of its own skill and its beauty, it gave us life to be spectators of its great spectacle, since it would lose all pleasure in itself if it displayed its works, so vast, so bright, and beautiful to an empty solitude.”
He goes on to extol pursuits like cosmology and astronomy in rapturous tones as fulfillments of this divine imperative that nature’s spectacle must be witnessed. Then he comes back to the original problem, whether withdrawal from public life is permissible under Stoic principles. “But nature wished me to do both,” he writes, “to be active and to be free for contemplation.” He resolves the problem with an intriguing and potentially problematic formulation. “And I am doing both,” he says, “since even contemplation entails action.”
At this point, the opponent steps into the discourse again and is clearly not happy. Contemplation, the opponent points out, can be undertaken in a spirit of pleasurable withdrawal, taking the sage entirely away from action. Seneca concedes the point but turns the tables by pointing out that action without contemplation, the life of the career politician for example, is just as much a violation of nature. Then he again appears to give the Stoic sage a let-out clause that allows for rejection of politics: “If what is lacking is not the doer but the tasks to be done, surely then you will allow the sage to consort with himself.” It’s a cryptic sentence, but one that I think can be understood in the context of the Roman autocracy. For many people, indeed almost all, political action is simply not an available option and so need not be pursued.
Seneca has once again drifted far from the irrepressible soldier of On tranquility of mind who shouts when he has no hands and bears mute witness when his voice is choked off. And just as Seneca retreats here from his earlier infantry metaphor, so he also modifies his nautical one. All the philosophic schools endorse contemplation, he writes, but some, that is, the Epicureans, make contemplation the goal. Whereas for the Stoics, “it’s a place to ride at anchor, not a harbor.”
That’s a bit difficult to unpack, but I think we should interpret “ride at anchor” to mean pause from action, but still stay in the public sphere. Just as a moored ship remains on open water even though its oars are shipped and its sails are reefed. Whereas “to seek harbor” means total withdrawal. Just what he’s advocating in terms of political action is hard to say.
In the last segment of On leisure, Seneca deals with let-out clause number two of the three he first proposed, namely, the idea that the state may be so corrupt that the sage cannot influence it or be heard by it. Here, Seneca’s grant of license to withdraw becomes nearly a blanket amnesty. “I ask you, to what commonwealth is the sage going to attach himself?” Seneca asks. “To that of the Athenians where Socrates was condemned to death? You can’t tell me that the sage will attach himself to this commonwealth. If I wanted to make a survey of commonwealths, I wouldn’t find a single one that could tolerate or be tolerated by the sage. And if no commonwealth can be found of the sort that we visualize for ourselves, leisure turns out to be the inescapable option for all.”
In a final sentence of this discussion, Seneca reverts to seafaring as a metaphor for political life. If one were told not to set sail on waters where ships are wrecked and sudden storms can arise, one would never set sail at all. And there apparently the matter rests, though it’s possible that this essay On leisure is truncated at its end and that we don’t have the full ending.
We can easily imagine what the opponent would have said if he had been allowed to step back in. He would say, isn’t this a recipe for total political non-participation by virtuous men? Meaning that the government will be run by the vicious. Aren’t you laying down arms, to evoke your own analogies, and letting the other side have the run of the field? And is it really adequate to say contemplation entails action as though merely gazing at the stars somehow fulfills Zeno’s dictum that the wise men will take part in public life? This seems to be an abdication of duty, thinly justified by your famously sinuous rhetorical and verbal skills.
How Seneca might answer those arguments is unclear to me. In fact, Seneca’s thinking on the question of engagement is so varied and so all over the map as to elicit one of my favorite takedowns in all of classical scholarship. In discussing Seneca’s magnum opus, the letters to Lucilius, sometimes also called the moral epistles, biographer Miriam Griffin says as follows: “There is such a wealth of advice on the subject of engagement that it is difficult, if not impossible, to give an account of Seneca’s view which would produce a consistent and coherent system.”
In Seneca’s defense, that variousness of opinion may not be merely the sign of sloppy thinking, but rather of the inner conflict Seneca himself experienced in his attempt to be a philosopher in politics or a politician in philosophy. That is, to combine the highest level of political action with a commitment to contemplation of nature and study of philosophy.
In advising others how to negotiate this tension, he may have been talking about himself. His life, after all, posed the ultimate test of whether a corrupt state or a delusional ruler could listen to a wise man. For a while, at least, that ruler did listen. The first five years of Nero’s reign were widely judged a success in large part because of Seneca’s influence and that of Seneca’s close ally in the palace, a man named Burrus. Nero was in his late teens and early 20s in these years and willing to be governed by wiser heads, including by his mother. But tensions grew as the emperor matured and rebelled against his mother’s influence, finally deciding in ‘62, after seven years in power, that his mother had to be killed. The ensuing assassination—to which Seneca was a co-conspirator, according to the historian Tacitus—is generally marked out by historians as the start of Nero’s downward spiral into mania and delusions, a spiral that took him increasingly far from Seneca’s influence.
The death of Burrus at about the same time also diminished Seneca’s clout and pushed him toward the sidelines of the imperial palace. Probably at about this time, Seneca composed the darkest, most harrowing among his 10 surviving tragic plays, the play Thyestes. And I’d like to bring that play into this discussion of Stoic civic engagement.
I should say that it’s not the usual thing to discuss Seneca’s plays as opposed to his prose works in the context of Stoic philosophy. The plays sometimes seem so far from the essays as to be the work of a different author. Indeed, Renaissance humanists thought that they were from a different hand. And one can find a few scholars who still believe that today. But most classicists acknowledge these plays as authentic Senecan works, perhaps composed as a way for their author to look at the world through a different and mythic lens. None of the plays can be dated with certainty, but as I’ve argued elsewhere, Thyestes seems to reflect in a deeply personal way the circumstances of Seneca’s place at the court of Nero in the 60s AD.
For the play casts its title character, Thyestes, as a philosopher drawn into politics, and utterly destroyed as a result. The myth on which the play is based concerns two royal brothers, Atrius and Thyestes, the sons of Tantalus and rivals for the throne of Argos. In most versions of the myth, these two brothers are equally determined to rule. But Seneca has diverged from that plot. He’s cast Thyestes as an aesthetic sage who, when the play begins, is in a meditative retreat far removed from the seat of power. That is, he’s practicing the sort of withdrawal that Seneca recommends to wise people who inhabit corrupt commonwealths. He comes on stage speaking the following words: “Go back,” he tells himself, “back to your forest den, the close-packed groves, the life you shared with beasts, beastly itself. The sheen of power should not mislead you with its meretricious gleam.”
Like some St. John the Baptist crying in the wilderness, this unaccommodated man seeks the peace of the wilderness and a life of shaggy primitivism. He regards politics as a source of vice and peril. Yet here he is in Argos at the doors of the palace, scarcely knowing what forces have brought him there or why he does not turn and flee. Ultimately, he will enter the palace and there suffer the grimmest fate of any figure from mythology. He will unknowingly consume his own children whom his brother has butchered and simmered into a stew.
It’s risky to assume that Thyestes is a stand-in for Seneca himself. Nonetheless, I think this play contains one of Seneca’s more personal and authentic statements about the danger to the philosopher of political engagement as well as of the forces that impelled him into Nero’s palace. When Thyestes thinks his brother is going to share the throne of Argos with him, make him co-ruler, he drinks and celebrates riotously, bidding himself in a haunting line to “banish the old Thyestes from your mind.” The rapid flip-flop from renunciation of power to joyful embrace of it calls into question just who this old Thyestes was, the hermit who claimed to prefer a primitive life.
Seneca too had readily grasped at a scepter when it was offered. In his letters to Lucilius, he admits that one flaw in particular had stood in the way of his progress towards Stoic perfection, namely, ambition. Turning back for a moment to Seneca’s biographical record, we read in Tacitus’s annals that Seneca finally did try to extricate himself from political life at a point where his influence had waned and Burrus, his principal ally, was dead. Tacitus relates a private conversation between Seneca and Nero in which the philosopher offered to give up his entire estate, an enormous aggregate of land and wealth, if he could be allowed to leave the palace for good. Nero refused, but the offer nevertheless does Seneca huge credit, aligning him with his own advice in On leisure. If, that is, we believe that the episode really took place.
In my book Dying Every Day I took Tacitus at his word and presented this episode as part of the factual record. But in the intervening years I’ve become more skeptical about this. One has to wonder what source Tacitus could have had for a private conversation of this kind. And one has to take account of the effort, following Seneca’s death and extending into the years when Tacitus wrote, to rehabilitate Seneca’s reputation and whitewash his collusion with Nero.
A remarkable play survives from this post-Seneca era in which Seneca and Nero are central characters, dramatized by some anonymous author who wanted his audience to understand their relationship. This unknown playwright gave Seneca a moving speech in which the sage laments his return to Rome when he could have remained in a peaceful exile on Corsica observing the stars and planets. The idea that Seneca had gone unwillingly into the palace jibes with the idea reported by Tacitus that he had stayed there unwillingly. Both texts provide a valuable moral salve to those who might feel pained by Seneca’s political activities. So I don’t know at this point how far I can trust Tacitus in this matter or in a later passage where he reports that after requesting to be excused from the palace and refused, Seneca tried his best to stay out of the public eye to the point of feigning illness in order to stay in his room.
A skeptic might ask, could this not be a way to put a positive spin on what was observed by the public—that Seneca no longer walked at the emperor’s side—when the explanation might easily be that Nero had simply grown tired of his former tutor and didn’t include him in the inner circle? These are insoluble questions, even though they lie at the heart of the larger mystery. How much or how little did Seneca want to be or try to be at the heart of Roman government? But Tacitus supplies an even more pressing question, also insoluble but fascinating to contemplate, whether Seneca wanted or tried to become emperor. I’ll close by recounting this remarkable episode, to my mind the most bewildering one in Seneca’s bewildering story.
In 65 AD, a conspiracy formed to assassinate Nero and place a senator named Piso on the throne in his place. A large number of senators and high officials took part, including Seneca’s nephew, the poet Lucan. It’s not known whether Seneca himself was involved, although after the plot came to light, Nero assumed that he was and ordered him to commit suicide, resulting in the death scene recorded by Tacitus and depicted by prominent Renaissance and Enlightenment artists. The only evidence against Seneca was a letter that he had sent to Piso, declining to meet him personally, but wishing Piso well: in Nero’s eyes, a signal that Seneca knew and approved of the plot. Whether Seneca intended any such meaning is anyone’s guess, but given Lucan’s central role in the conspiracy, it seems unlikely that Seneca did not know of its existence.
Tacitus then reports a rumor that circulated in his own day and admits he cannot vouch for its veracity. He has heard that the soldiers involved in the plot intended to kill Piso after killing Nero and make Seneca emperor instead. He then adds—again with the caveat that this is rumor—he cannot vouch for it that Seneca knew of this plot within a plot that would have resulted in his own elevation to supreme power. In examining this remarkable rumor in my book Dying Every Day, I wrote, “here is the measure of how little, in the end, we understand Seneca. We cannot know that had Rome acclaimed him, he would have declined to rule.”
Well, I hate to end this marvelous Stoicon meeting with huge unanswerable questions, but Seneca cannot help but leave us with those. In contrast to Epictetus, the former slave who had no political role and didn’t want one, or to Marcus Aurelius who pursued and then wielded absolute power, Seneca occupies a messy middle ground in both his life and his writings. He feels the pull both of civic engagement and of withdrawal from the public sphere into a realm of quiet contemplation. He urges us at different times to fight in the front lines of politics and to seek a safe harbor away from the riptides and storms. Perhaps his ultimate lesson is that there is no dogma that will guide us through troubled civic waters. Our choices must be guided by circumstance, what kind of state we inhabit, what capacity we have to exert influence, and to what degree we endanger our safety by activism. Stoicism is complex and contingent enough to justify many pathways through troubled times. Perhaps under that principle, we can say that Seneca passed the ultimate test of participation at the court of Nero.
About the Author
James Romm is an author, reviewer, and the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College in Annandale, NY. He specializes in ancient Greek and Roman culture and civilization. His reviews and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, the London Review of Books, the Daily Beast, and other venues. He has held the Guggenheim Fellowship among others, and is the author of many books, including Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero, and Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Greece’s Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic Masterpiece.
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