Seneca went one afternoon to the arena expecting something light. Between the programmes, when the public ate and the celebrated fighters rested, something other than the fights people came for was put on.
What he saw were condemned men, without armour, without helmets, without any skill, set against each other. The winner then had to face the next, until nobody was left standing. There was nothing to parry and nothing to defend; it was a method of execution offered as entertainment.
He writes that the crowd called for more. Strike, burn him, why does he meet the sword so cowardly. And he writes what he noticed in himself: that he came home crueller and less human than he had gone out, simply from having been among people.
The letter is included as number seven in the collection to Lucilius. It is one of very few texts from antiquity in which anyone objects to the games, and he aims that objection not at the organizers but at the spectator.
Seneca draws no political conclusion from it. He does not argue for abolition and tables no proposal; in Nero's Rome that would have led nowhere anyway.
What he does do is the advice filling the rest of the letter. Withdraw into yourself, but in order to come out better. Be careful whom you keep company with, because the crowd leaves something behind in you, even when you do nothing.
You are in a hall where everyone wants something you do not want, and you notice it beginning to pull at you.
The tempting sorting is that he sets himself morally above the crowd. He does the opposite, and that is what makes the letter usable: he notes that it worked on him.
The cut is therefore not between him and the crowd but inside himself. The games, the cruelty and the shouting lay outside him; he could not stop them and did not try. What did lie with him was whether he would go, how long he would stay, and who he would be afterwards.
That last is the sharpest. He describes not a choice in the moment but a change you only notice afterwards. You have done nothing, approved of nothing, only watched, and still you have shifted.
The conclusion he draws is practical and not lofty. Choose your company. Not because other people are bad, but because attention is contagious and you are not the judge of your own immunity.
There is something uncomfortable in what he does not do. He watches people being slaughtered and draws from it a lesson about his own character. The condemned appear in the letter not as victims but as occasion.
That is the blind spot of the whole school on this point: it is excellent at protecting your own judgment and weak at naming injustice that ought to be remedied. Seneca had power, knew the emperor, and did not use it. Withdrawing from the arena is a solution for the spectator and for nobody else.
From which company, which timeline or which programme do you come back harder than you went in? And what stops you from doing it differently tomorrow?
Yours, Not Yours · A Stoic practice ground · All cases · Questions or suggestions