The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca

Seneca has been dubbed the “conscience of the Empire,” 41 although it would be more accurate to see him as its unconscious—but an unconscious with a public voice and a beautiful literary style. His wide-ranging and contradictory body of work articulates the psychological contradictions and pressures of consumerism, globalization, and empire—all the

in many ways. Some of these connections are suggested in Suzanne Collins’ bestselling trilogy, The Hunger Games, whose popularity speaks to the relevance of Seneca’s age to ours. The Hunger Games is set in a dystopia that combines the United States (in an exaggerated but highly recognizable future era) with imperial Rome. Collins emphasizes the mas

Foucault’s focus on the “care of the self” built on Seneca (and Epictetus) to recognize that the gaps between psychotherapy, political activism, identity politics, and ethical philosophy might be less wide than had once been believed. 37 Seneca’s discussion of anger, and of the emotions in general, bears comparison with modern analysis of emotional

“Nero’s Big Weekend,” which goes back again to the story of Poppaea. But he began to be taken rather more seriously. In Britain, Ted Hughes created a stripped-down version of his Oedipus in 1968, which emphasized the horror and bleakness of the original. 35 Seneca gradually began to seem relevant again, not (as in the early modern period) as an adv

T. S. Eliot’s influential essays “Seneca in Elizabethan Translation” and “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca” (both 1927) helped perpetuate a deeply hostile attitude toward, specifically, Seneca’s tragedies while claiming to buck the trend. Eliot notes the “censure” heaped on these works and comments that it is well deserved. These plays are, h

Seneca and gave rise to a new form of tragedy all over Europe, spreading to Spain, France, and Britain in somewhat different ways. In purely formal terms, much in early modern drama was modeled on Senecan tragedy, including the five-act structure. Early works like Gorbodoc even borrowed the classical chorus, although that was soon dropped.

Thomas Jefferson was, perhaps unknowingly, using “the language of Stoic philosophy” when he drafted the Declaration of Independence, with its claim that “all men were created equal”; 27 the masculine language (“men”) is very much in tune with the Stoic emphasis on manly virtue (virtus) and on a model of social equality that has few implications for

For Descartes, the passions are not dangerous or misleading; they are “all by nature good.” 24

Descartes has often been seen as the father of modern philosophy and modern scientific thinking. But in his ethical thought, at least, he looked back closely to the ancients and especially to Seneca’s On the Happy Life, on which he gave an extensive commentary in his letters to Princess Elizabeth in 1645. Descartes insisted—like Seneca and other St