Attalus

Seneca's teacher. Seneca came first to his lectures and left last, gave up oysters and mushrooms for life because of him, and was still quoting him forty years on.

Who he was

Attalus was a Stoic teacher in Rome early in the first century AD. Almost everything known about him comes from two men. One is the elder Seneca, who calls him a man of great eloquence and says he left Rome after being outmanoeuvred by Sejanus, the powerful prefect of Tiberius. The other is his son, the Seneca, who heard him lecture as a young man. None of Attalus's own writing survives.

The lecture room

In a letter written late in life, Seneca describes laying siege to Attalus's school: first to arrive, last to leave. When Attalus praised poverty, he writes, he often walked out wanting to be poor; when Attalus mocked pleasure and praised a sober table and a clear mind, he wanted to live that way. Some of it held for good. He gave up oysters and mushrooms for the rest of his life, and perfume, and hot baths, and in old age still slept on the kind of hard mattress Attalus recommended. Other habits, he admits, came back, though he kept them close to abstinence.

The dog at the table

Seneca preserves several of his teacher's images. One is about wanting. Have you seen a dog snapping at the scraps its master throws? Whatever it catches it swallows at once, and its mouth is already open for the next. That, Attalus said, is how we are with whatever fortune hands out. Another is about friendship: it is more pleasant to make a friend than to have one, as it is more pleasant for a painter to paint than to have painted.

What is fixed and what is not

We know Attalus only through the two Senecas, and the son is recalling his youth decades later, with a writer's sense of a good line. His dates, his origin and the details of his exile are unknown.

Why he is on this site

The dog is a picture of desire the Stoics would recognise at once: never full, always waiting for the next throw, and the throwing is not up to the dog. What was up to Seneca was what he did after the lecture, and he reports the result honestly: some things stuck and some did not. That is what practice looks like. Whether the lessons held once Seneca was rich is the question in the case Seneca and the charge of wealth.