The American Freedom Network

“What We Do In Life Echoes In Eternity”

September 21, 2009 – 7:24 pm

In personal, as well as in public life, peril and the test they make of one’s character are as common as they are unavoidable, for all but the most timid souls.  To paraphrase Shakespeare, some are born to it, some seek it, and others have it thrust upon them.  How the crisis met is often, at first glance, the seeming product of instinct, chance, or a snap decision.  What makes those actions possible is lifelong habit and choice, whether understood as such, or not.  The title of this inquiry is taken from Gladiator, where it is spoken by Maximus, and its’ origin is in the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.  Stoicism, the ancient school of virtue of which the latter is the most famous disciple, and how its adherents fared in the facing of the major crisis of their lives, is what we will now consider.

This inquiry will center on the most famous of the later Roman Stoics, and on a latter-day disciple, examining how their philosophy fared in the face of the major life crisis that each confronted.  Seneca, Senator and playwright, had to deal with Nero’s tyrannical and insane rule as one of Rome’s leading citizens.  He will be examined in light of what his letters and plays say about his beliefs and in light of how he chose to deal with a situation intolerable to a man of honor.  Marcus Aurelius, last of the ‘Good Emperors’ of the second century, will be judged by his Meditations, in light of his choice about his successor. Epictetus faced no single defining crisis that forced upon him so drastic a choice as Seneca or Marcus Aurelius had, but one of his students did.  James Bond Stockdale, living 19 centuries after the Enchrideron was written, chose, as a captive of the Communist government of North Viet Nam, what to do with the teachings of the crippled slave that he professed to live by.  These three Stoics in crisis will comprise our subject.

Socrates had four famous students; Plato, Xenopohon, Alcibiades, and Anthisthenes, the man considered Socrates’ spiritual heir by his contemporaries.  Antisthenes was a proto-cynic, and would have remained famous to this day had he not been of the same generation as Plato, and had he not been the teacher of Diogenes and Zeno.  Diogenes, founder of the Cynic school, was famed in his lifetime more than anyone in the Hellenic world, except for the Hellenes’ conqueror, Alexander of Macedon.  Zeno began Stoicism as a school of philosophy as Diogenes’ contemporary, in the middle years of the third century, B.C.  Stoics had certain tenets held in common:  the belief in a Divine Providence that governs the Universe, a World-Soul, which is the divinity of all things, as the entirety of Creation is part of the Mind of God; the end of days in a cosmic fire, to be followed by the reincarnation of all things; and the road to serenity and peace as lying within our will to grasp by recognition that things external to the self are immaterial to happiness, and divinely ordained.

The Stoic view of human nature was that it was perfectible through a discipline that revolved around three basic topics of moral philosophy: the Desires and Aversions, the Pursuits and Avoidances, and the Assents.  The goal of this was to obtain such serenity as was coextensive with Duty, and unmindful of Fortune.  Like Calvinism in a later age, adherents were few to a discipline that demanded discipline above and beyond the capaciy of the average mind and soul.  Those who persevered did, in proportion to their numbers, great service to the common weal. Scipio the Younger, Cato the Younger, Cicero, Seneca, Burrus, the ‘Good Emperors,’ including Marcus Aurelius were all public men who professed Stoicism or were at least well-wishers; Spengler said that all real Romans had a Stoic nature and temperament, unawares.

SENECA:  Lucius Annaeus Seneca is the first of the Triumvirate of Virtue in the Imperium who are the objects of our scrutiny.  Born a provincial in Iberia, he rose to prominence in the Eternal City amidst the ephemeral fortunes of courtiers who rose and fell in favor with Emperors with the regularity of the Sun.  Committed to a life which disdained worldly fortune, he amassed through the use of his legal and oratorical gifts a fortune unequaled in the world, according to Tacitus (3).  His fortunes were reversed thrice, as he was ordered put to death by Tiberius, then reprieved, only to have his life decreed forfeit by Claudius, the sentence commuted  to exile in Sardina, only to be recalled to tutor the future Emperor Nero (4).   The latter’s first years were remembered as the best of the four score years between Augustus’ death and Nerva’s elevation, even as his last were the worst.  In tandem with the soldier Burrus, Seneca governed the Roman world from behind the throne.  After Burrus’ murder, Seneca’s growing fortune and rising popularity made enemies of his student’s envy and avarice, and the master of the Empire accepted his schoolmaster’s protestations of ill health (and his fortune) as reason for retirement from public life (5).  The Stoic philosopher was unable to retire to the porch and watch the world pass by; hounded by Nero’s suspicions, if not his assassins, the aging teacher had to remain on the move.  When, at last, he grew weary of the chase, he chose to leave this life for death’s embrace,  in accord with the teachings of the Stoa.

Seneca’s choice of suicide over continuing to live in a situation that he found intolerable was in concert with his writings on the subject throughout his lifetime.  A playwright whose operas were never meant for the stage, but only for private circulation, he puts into the mouth of Oedipus in, The Phoenecian Women, a speech expounding at length on the justification for suicide:

…’Tis better I should find the way I seek,

Alone? the path that takes me out of life

And frees from sight of this crime-laden head

the earth and sky. (6)

and later:

…My child,

No longer strive; in my own hands I hold

The right to live or die.  I laid aside    

Freely my sovereign power, but still retain

Sovereignty o’er myself. (7)

Oedipus justifies suicide as fit way to end a sinful life in repentance.  Did the tutor of Nero and keeper of so vast a fortune as no private man could boast of believe himself unfaithful to his true love, Philosophy? Would the finality of irreversible sin have been before Seneca’s eyes as he roamed, vagabond, in his old age, waiting for an ill-omened message from Nero?   Mad Hercules, another Senecan drama, offers this passage from its tragic subject, after he is deluded into killing his family in a mad rage brought on by Juno, his sworn enemy among the gods:

Why I should longer keep my soul in life,

And linger on the earth, there is no cause;

For I have lost my all: my balanced mind,

My arms, my reputation, children, wife,

The glory of my strength? my madness too,

There is no remedy for tainted souls;

But death alone can cure me of my sin. (8)

and,

If I yet live, I have committed wrong;

But if I die, then I have suffered it.

I haste to purge the earth of such as I. (9)

Hercules is thus another case of wrong transfiguring heroic character so formidably that no remedy can be offered but to die.  This speech is one of consummate self-loathing, transfixing in tragedy the soul that gave it utterance.  To view either Oedipus or Hercules as model for Seneca’s own suicide requires of the philosopher some self-admitted crime so odious that the stain cannot be wiped out, in his eyes, but by self-spilled blood.  Without this, only the anthem,  ”In my own hands I hold the right to live or die,” justifies Seneca’s letting despair inform reason (lacking the light of transcendent faith) of the only course left open to honor.

Seneca’s Letters, written to Lucilius, a younger friend, were intended to be teaching epistles, in a manner not unlike St. Paul’s.  Therein we find the master exhorting his pupil and friend to claim everything that is true and right as his own, regardless of source (10).  Epicurian quotes abound, and it is curious indeed that Rome’s most famous Epicurian, Petronius, the ‘Arbiter Elegante,’ should have chosen to follow Seneca in self-chosen death, when Nero’s existence became unbearable for him.  Lucilius learns in Letter XII that Seneca believes we should live every day as if it were our last; that, while no one is so old as not to hope for one more day, we should go to bed with Virgil’s words upon our lips:

I have lived: I have completed now the course

That fortune long ago allotted me.

The most telling reference comes from Letter LXX, where he deplores the treatment of gladiators, while admiring one slave who killed himself rather that live with sin:

…there was lately in a training-school for wild-beast gladiators a German,

who was making  ready for the  morning exhibition: he withdrew in order

to relieve himself, the only thing which he was allowed to do in secret and

without the presence of a guard.  While so engaged, he seized the stick of

wood, tipped with a sponge, which was devoted to the vilest uses, and

stuffed it, just as it was, down his throat:; thus he blocked up his windpipe,

and choked the breath from his body…the foulest death is preferable to the

fairest slavery.

What can be admired among the barbarians is not unworthy of the philosopher.  From Letter LXIII:

…Perhaps, too, if only there is truth in the story  told by the sages that some

welcoming abode awaits us, he whom we suppose to be dead and gone has

merely been sent on ahead.(13)

Death is not to be feared, nor is it necessarily the end of things.  What matters is to live in conformity to nature, and he is happy who thinks himself happy.

Seneca’s writings, examined cursorily here, clearly show no contradiction between his expressed philosophic views and his actions at the moment of crisis in a life filled with such moments.  He lived a Stoic; indifferent to fortune (even while he amassed a a magnificent one) as to misfortune; he died a Stoic.

(To be continued.)