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Seneca's Life and Times
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Seneca: Letters
In this course, Professor Catharine Edwards (Birkbeck, University of London) provides an introduction to Seneca the Younger and his Epistulae Morales. We begin by providing a broad introduction to Seneca's life, career, and literary output, before moving on in the second module to think about the philosophy of Stoicism. In the third module, we explore the letter as both a means of communication in the Roman world as well as a well-developed literary genre, before turning in the fourth module to consider Seneca's distinctive prose style. Finally, in the fifth module, we provide a close reading of one of Seneca's letters – Letter 53.
Seneca's Life and Times
In this module, we think about Seneca's life, career and literary output, focusing in particular on his political career, his relationship with the imperial family, and his often chequered reputation.
Hello. I'm Catherine Edwards.
00:00:02I'm professor of Classics and Ancient History
00:00:04at Birkbeck in the University of London.
00:00:06And I'm going to talk today about Seneca and particularly Senecas letters.
00:00:08Seneca the younger was born in Cordoba in what is now Spain.
00:00:12We're not quite sure exactly When between four. B. C. E and one C. E.
00:00:16Um, he was a wealthier question family.
00:00:21His father, who we call the elder Seneca,
00:00:24was actually a very distinguished restoration with a career in Rome.
00:00:27His mother was called healthier.
00:00:30We know a little bit about her from the
00:00:32treaties that Seneca addressed to her sometime later.
00:00:33So he had a wealthy background with his Roman eyes.
00:00:37Spanish family, Um, quite early on, his family went to He was in Rome,
00:00:39where he had obviously high level rhetorical and philosophical education,
00:00:45and in one of his letters, he talks about his rhetoric,
00:00:50teachers and his philosophy teachers in Rome.
00:00:55So he studied with Atlas stoic as well as papyrus, Fabiano's and sociology,
00:00:57and was another philosophy teacher.
00:01:02And it was ST John who inspired Seneca to turn vegetarian at least for awhile,
00:01:04much to his father's disapproval.
00:01:08Um, now Seneca suffered from poor health.
00:01:11Even in his youth, it seems he went off for a trip to Egypt for health reasons.
00:01:13Um, but came back to Rome in the year 31 c e.
00:01:18Sometime later, he was elected Krista, and thus he became a senator,
00:01:24and he established quickly a reputation as an absolutely brilliant orator.
00:01:30So things looked like they were going really well for Seneca.
00:01:34Unfortunately,
00:01:36early in the reign of Claudius in the year 41 he was convicted of involvement in, um,
00:01:38the adultery of previous Emperor Gaius, his sister, Livilla.
00:01:44And there are all sorts of stories about adultery with
00:01:49female members of the imperial family in this period.
00:01:51Who knows what the truth was of the allegation.
00:01:54But anyway, so Niko spent eight years in exile on the island of Corsica.
00:01:57So eight long years of kind of thinking about philosophy.
00:02:01Um, he wrote this treatise to his mother. Um, but finally he was recalled to Rome.
00:02:04That was on the initiative, it seems, of the Emperor Claudius new wife, Agrippina.
00:02:11Agrippina wanted Seneca back in Rome to be tutor to her young son,
00:02:16who would later become the Emperor Nero.
00:02:21So,
00:02:24Sir Nicholas, back in Rome closely involved with Nero for more than a decade.
00:02:25Uh, that's what his tutor.
00:02:30And then when Nero succeeded, Claudius, near 50 for Seneca,
00:02:32became near his adviser, Um, and Speechwriter.
00:02:37So here is the Imperial speechwriter,
00:02:41and one of his works is the treaty is called Dick Lamantia on Clemency or Mercy,
00:02:43addressed to the young emperor, um soon after his accession,
00:02:49offering the Emperor kind of philosophically informed model of what the
00:02:53relationship really ought to be between a ruler and his subjects.
00:02:57So he's a very powerful figure.
00:03:00At the Imperial Court, he became subject consul in 56.
00:03:02Now, when historians write about Nero's reign, they often characterised.
00:03:08The early years is relatively benign compared to what came later,
00:03:13and the sort of positive years of Nero's reign are attributed by Tacitus and
00:03:17others to the influence of Seneca as well as the Praetorian prefect Boris.
00:03:22But Seneca was also implicated in the murkier aspects of Nero's rule.
00:03:27Allegedly, it was Senator.
00:03:33He wrote that rather tricky speech, which, uh,
00:03:35the Emperor Nero had gave to the Senate after
00:03:39he'd had his mother murdered in the year 59.
00:03:42Tacitus attributes to Seneca,
00:03:46a really remarkable ability to conceal his true feelings in his dealings with Nero.
00:03:48He's good at that kind of working with a very powerful
00:03:52and dangerous man and knowing the right things to say,
00:03:56but not quite good enough. In the end,
00:03:59Seneca
00:04:02acquired extensive property, including magnificent estates.
00:04:03He was a very, very rich man. Both Tacitus and Juvenile called him pride the ways.
00:04:07Unsurprisingly, he had a lot of enemies.
00:04:12He was their accusations against him, recorded by Cecilia's,
00:04:15a close associate of Nero, his predecessor,
00:04:19alleging that he enriched himself through extortionate
00:04:21money lending often associated with Britain.
00:04:24In fact, one of the causes of the revolt of Boudicca Deo,
00:04:27the historian Dire also describes Seneca as debauched,
00:04:32so kind of in a sexual misbehaviour.
00:04:35On the other side, we have Marshall, who also had a background in Hispanic to,
00:04:38um in Spain, celebrating Senecas generosity as a patron.
00:04:42Quite a lot of modern scholars have talked about
00:04:46Seneca as a hypocrite because in his writings,
00:04:49and we find this particularly the letters he talks about,
00:04:53how really poverty is an awfully good thing.
00:04:55If your freedom material possessions, you don't worry about them,
00:04:58and yet he seems to have been a very rich man.
00:05:00We'll come back to that later.
00:05:04Another really interesting thing about Seneca is that he was a prolific author.
00:05:06Quintillion who writes on the education of the orator and what you're young orator,
00:05:10ought to read comments on the variety of Senecas output.
00:05:14I've already mentioned his treaties on clemency. He also wrote plays.
00:05:19It's not easy to work out exactly what the dates are of all these plays,
00:05:23but at least some of them date from the reign of Nero,
00:05:26including his Thigh ST's a very bloody and horrible play
00:05:29on the subject of of of kind of cannibalism,
00:05:33um, brothers killing each other and so on.
00:05:36UM, he wrote numerous philosophical treaties.
00:05:40Is the natural questions on meteorology, meteorology, uh,
00:05:43and all those speeches for Nero,
00:05:49and I think it's worth bearing in mind.
00:05:52Senate has experienced his flexibility,
00:05:53his extraordinary talent for writing speeches for different characters.
00:05:56So and I think that that sense of the dramatic is something
00:06:02that we get a strong sense of in in the letters themselves,
00:06:04something we can come back to, and sometimes it's even kind of within the individual
00:06:09kind of self addresses a common mode and in Seneca well,
00:06:13actually sort of exhort himself to do something,
00:06:18and that has a kind of quite a dramatic quality.
00:06:21The letters are one of the last things that Seneca wrote
00:06:24after he stepped down from his role as Nero's adviser,
00:06:27and one of the striking things about them is how little reference
00:06:31they make to details of the time in which he lived.
00:06:34There is very little mention of Rome as a place,
00:06:38even though he spent so much of his life there,
00:06:42and it's clearly a leading figure in Rome,
00:06:44and one person is very conspicuously totally absent.
00:06:46And that is the Emperor Nero, not one reference to him.
00:06:50What should we make of that?
00:06:54Well, it's certainly not the case that their historical context is irrelevant.
00:06:56Seneca is concerned with the fear of death as
00:07:01a huge challenge to be overcome if you like.
00:07:04The central challenge of human life is in
00:07:07some ways relates to obviously the universal human condition
00:07:10and particularly Senecas situation as an older man who
00:07:13suffered for a long time from poor health.
00:07:17But it's also a worry about what Nero might do to him near it had his mother killed.
00:07:19Um, you know, he would hardly bulk at killing off his old tutor.
00:07:25And indeed, um,
00:07:29in the year 65 Nero sent messengers to order Seneca to take his own life,
00:07:30so that was a very well founded fear.
00:07:35
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Edwards, C. (2018, August 15). Seneca: Letters - Seneca's Life and Times [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/seneca-letters/letter-writing-dc2e99c3-0b8c-441d-b005-67d723f39735
MLA style
Edwards, C. "Seneca: Letters – Seneca's Life and Times." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 15 Aug 2018, https://massolit.io/courses/seneca-letters/letter-writing-dc2e99c3-0b8c-441d-b005-67d723f39735