Sublime

dissembled about some of their own characteristics

Seneca was an incredibly wealthy, even famous, man—yet he was a Stoic. He had many material things, yet, as the Stoics say, he was also indifferent to them. He enjoyed them while they were there, but he accepted that they might someday disappear. What a better attitude than desperately craving more or fearfully dreading losing even one penny. Indif

Indeed, pursuing pleasure, Seneca warns, is like pursuing a wild beast: On being captured, it can turn on us and tear us to pieces. Or, changing the metaphor a bit, he tells us that intense pleasures, when captured by us, become our captors, meaning that the more pleasures a man captures,

“Nothing can satisfy greed, but even a small measure satisfies nature. So it is that the poverty of an exile brings no misfortune, for no place of exile is so barren as not to produce ample support for a person.” —SENECA, ON CONSOLATION TO HELVIA, 10.11b

And just as Shakespeare observed in Macbeth, “Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return / To plague th’inventor,” Seneca’s collaboration with Nero ultimately ended with the student murdering the teacher.