Seneca

 SENECA

Seneca (born 4 BC, Corduba (now Córdoba), Spain died 65 CE, Rome, Italy was a Roman philosopher, statesman, orator, and tragedian. He was Rome’s leading intellectual figure in the mid-1st century CE and was virtual ruler with his friends of the Roman world between 54 and 62, during the first phase of the Emperor Nero’s reign.

Seneca was the second son of a wealthy family. His father, Seneca (Seneca the Elder), had been famous in Rome as a teacher of rhetoric. His mother, Helvia, was of excellent character and education. His elder brother was Gallio and his younger brother was the father of the poet Lucan. An aunt took young Seneca as a boy to Rome, and there he was trained as an orator and educated in philosophy in the school of the Sextii, which blended Stoicism with an ascetic. Seneca’s health suffered, and he went to recuperate in Egypt, where his aunt lived with her husband, the prefect, Gaius Galerius. Returning to Rome about the year 31, he began a career in politics and law. Soon he fell foul of the emperor Caligula, who was deterred from killing him only by the argument that his life was sure to be short.

In 41 the emperor Claudius banished Seneca to Corsica on a charge of adultery with the princess Julia Livilla, the emperor’s niece. In that uncongenial milieu, he studied natural science and philosophy and wrote the three treatises entitled Consolationes. The influence of Julia Agrippina, the emperor’s wife, had him recalled to Rome in 49. He became praetor in 50, married Pompeia Paulina, a wealthy woman, built up a powerful group of friends, including the new prefect of the guard, Sextus Afranius Burrus, and became tutor to the future emperor Nero.

The murder of Claudius in 54 pushed Seneca and Burrus to the top. Their friends held the great army commands on the German and Parthian frontiers. Nero’s first public speech, drafted by Seneca, promised liberty for the Senate and an end to the influence of freedmen and women. Agrippina, Nero’s mother, was resolved that her influence should continue, and there were other powerful enemies. However, Seneca and Burrus, although provincials from Spain and Gaul, understood the problems of the Roman world. They introduced fiscal and judicial reforms and fostered a more humane attitude toward slaves. 

In the 16th to 18th century, Senecan prose, in content and style, served the vernacular literatures as a model for essays, sermons, and moralizing. John Calvin, Montaigne, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are instances. As the first of “Spanish” thinkers, he had an influence in Spain that was always powerful. Nineteenth-century specialization brought him under fire from philosophers, scientists, historians, and students of literature.