Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living From Zeno to Marcus Aurelius

Born around 4 BC in Corduba, Spain (modern Córdoba), the son of a wealthy and learned writer known to history as Seneca the Elder, Seneca the Younger was destined for great things from birth. So were his brothers, Novatus, who became a governor, and Mela, whose son, Lucan, carried on the family’s writing tradition.

Entering the world near the end of the reign of Augustus, Seneca was the first major Stoic with no direct experience of Rome as a republic. Seneca knew only of the empire; in fact, he would live through the reigns of the first five emperors. Never did he breathe in the freedom of Roman libertas that Cato and his predecessors had all enjoyed. Instead, he spent his entire life attempting to maneuver within the turbulent court regimes of increasingly autocratic and unpredictable power.

Yet for all these changes, his childhood remained more or less identical to those of the philosophers who had come before him. His father selected Attalus the Stoic to tutor his boy, primarily for the man’s reputation for eloquence, wanting to imbue his son not just with a righteous mind but with one capable of communicating these ideas clearly and convincingly in Roman life. His son took to education with gusto—by Seneca’s own telling, as a child he cheerfully “laid siege” to the classroom and was the first to arrive and last to leave it. We know that Attalus didn’t tolerate “squatters,” the kind of students who lounge around and listen, or at best take notes so as to memorize and repeat what they heard from the lectures. Instead, it was an active process, with debating and discussion, and involved both the teacher and the student. “The same purpose should possess both master and scholar,” Attalus said of his methods, “an ambition in the one case to promote, and the other to progress.”

By progress, Attalus had more in mind than just good marks and the appearance of being articulate. His instruction was as much moral as it was academic, as he spoke at length to his promising young student about “sin, errors, and the evils of life.” He was an advocate for that core Stoic virtue of temperance, instilling in Seneca lifelong habits of moderation in diet and drink, causing him to give up oysters and mushrooms, two Roman delicacies. He poked fun at pomp and luxury as fleeting pleasures that did not contribute to lasting happiness. “You must crave nothing,” Attalus told Seneca, “if you would vie with Jupiter; for Jupiter craves nothing. . . . Learn to be content with little, and cry out with courage and with greatness of soul.”

But the most powerful lesson that Seneca learned from Attalus was on the desire to improve practically, in the real world. The purpose of studying philosophy, he learned from his beloved instructor, was to “take away with him some one good thing every day: he should return home a sounder man, or on the way to becoming sounder.”

Like countless young people since, Seneca experimented with different schools and ideas, finding value in Stoicism and the teachings of a philosopher named Sextius. He read and debated the writings of Epicurus, from a supposedly rival school.* He explored the teachings of Pythagoras and even became, for a time, a vegetarian based on Pythagorean teachings. It’s a credit to Seneca’s father, and a reminder to fathers since, that he patiently indulged this period and encouraged a range of study for his son. It can take a while for precocious young people to find themselves, and forcing them to curtail their curiosity is expedient but often costly.

What Seneca was doing was developing a range of interests and experiences that would later enable him to create his own unique practices. From Sextius, for example, he discovered the benefits of spending a few minutes in the evening before bed with a journal, and combined this with the kind of probing moral reflection that Attalus had taught him. “I avail myself of this privilege,” he would later write of his journaling practice, “and every day I plead my cause before the bar of self. When the light has been removed from sight, and my wife, long aware of my habit, has become silent, I scan the whole of my day and retrace all my deeds and words. I conceal nothing from myself, I omit nothing. For why should I shrink from any of my mistakes, when I may commune thus with myself?”

This part of Seneca, his earnest commitment to self-improvement—firm but kind (“See that you don’t do that again,” he would say to himself, “but now I forgive you”)—was beloved by his teachers and clearly encouraged. But they also knew why they had been hired, and that his father, no fan of philosophy, was paying them to train his son for an active and ambitious political career. So this moral training was balanced out by rigorous instruction in the law, in rhetoric, and in critical thinking. In Rome, a promising young lawyer could appear in court as early as age seventeen, and there is little doubt that Seneca was ready as soon as he was legally able.