Sublime

Seneca’s writing during his time of exile allowed him to work through the feelings of grief, boredom, powerlessness, and—perhaps especially—rage that must have felt at times overwhelming in his forced exclusion from the world of the capital.

No man can have a peaceful life who thinks too much about lengthening it, or believes that living through many consulships is a great blessing.

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

almost impossible to eliminate; and Seneca constantly suggests that complete withdrawal from the social world is not the solution to the problem. As both a Stoic and a pragmatist, he constantly sought to be engaged in the world without losing integrity.

As he himself acknowledges, an exile like himself is allowed to have more slaves than the great writers and philosophers of old: “It is well known that Homer had one slave, Plato had three, and that Zeno, who first taught the stern and masculine doctrine of the Stoics, had none.” Life with friends and family, and at minimum four or five slaves, doe

will annotate them too, so that you need not expend much effort hunting through them for the profitable bits, but can get right away to the things that I endorse and am impressed with.

The implications of Suillius’ attack were that Seneca was not only very wealthy, but wealthy despite an entirely false claim to be “philosophical,” and wealthy at the expense of other citizens. Legacy-hunting was a common corrupt practice in Rome at the time, memorably depicted in literary texts such as Petronius’ Satyricon, in which the central ch