Seneca was at the height of his career. Orator, writer, senator, a man whose speeches were repeated around Rome. In the year 41, shortly after the murder of Caligula and the accession of Claudius, he was charged with adultery with Julia Livilla, a sister of the murdered emperor.
Nearly all historians regard the charge as a political construction, probably driven by Messalina, the wife of the new emperor. Evidence hardly mattered. He was sentenced to banishment on Corsica: in the first century no holiday destination but a rough, thinly populated island with a poor reputation, far from everything he had been.
He stayed eight years, from 41 to 49. What he did there survives, and it is uncomfortable reading. He wrote a consolation to his mother explaining that his exile takes from him nothing that is truly his. And he wrote a letter to Polybius, a powerful freedman at court, full of flattery, in the hope of being recalled.
His recall had nothing to do with justice. In the year 49 Claudius married Agrippina, and she brought Seneca back to tutor her son. That son was Nero.
Seneca thus became teacher and later adviser to the man who would eventually drive him to his death. For five years, together with his ally Burrus, he effectively governed the empire, and those years count as the best-governed of Nero's reign. Then he lost his grip. In 62 he asked Nero to let him hand back his entire fortune and withdraw; that was refused, but he withdrew anyway. In 65 he was linked to a conspiracy and Nero ordered him to die.
Eight years on an island, convicted of something you did not do, with no end in sight. You can wait, you can flatter, or you can work.
The tempting sorting is that Seneca bore his exile exemplarily. His own letters deny it. Beside the calm consolation to his mother stands the letter to Polybius, in which he humiliates himself before a courtier in the hope of return. Those two letters were written by the same man in the same years.
That is exactly what makes the case usable. The verdict, the island, Messalina's power and the length of his sentence: all outside him. What did lie with him was what he did with eight years, and there the answer is mixed: he wrote work that lasted two thousand years, and he made attempts he would later rather not reread.
The sorting he himself offers is the sharpest. To his mother he writes that exile is no more than a change of place, and that everything genuinely his travels with him. That is precisely the two boxes, written down by someone sitting in the middle of it.
It is fair to ask whether Seneca lived up to his own teaching. He preached detachment from wealth and was one of the richest men in the empire. He wrote about steadfastness and flattered a courtier to get home. He tutored an emperor who had his mother killed, and stayed on.
The most honest reading is not that he was a hypocrite but that he was a practitioner who did not always manage it, and who wrote that down. His letters are not the report of a man who can do it, but of a man attempting it.
In which waiting room of your life are you sitting now? And what could you make there if you stopped staring at the door?
Yours, Not Yours · A Stoic practice ground · All cases · Questions or suggestions