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Ep. 9: I Come Home More Cruel · The Morning Stoic: The Untold Lives Behind Stoicism

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  Picture an older man at a desk, after a walk through the city that did not go the
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  way he planned.
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  I imagine the lamp is not yet lit, the light in the room gray,
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  a sheet of paper in front of him.
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  He has been out among people, and something he saw has followed him home.
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  He does not hide it.
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  He puts it in a letter.
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  The man is Seneca.
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  If you listened to the episode about his ledger of lost hours,
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  you'll remember where we left him.
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  He has stepped back from Nero's court after the death of Burrus,
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  the commander who had helped steady the young emperor's reign.
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  He is writing, in these years between about AD 62 and 65, to a younger friend named
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  Lucilius, who is working as a procurator in Sicily.
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  Lucilius is an equestrian, an administrator, a man with literary ambitions and a
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  province to manage.
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  He is exactly the sort of person who has to spend his days among crowds.
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  So Letter 7 begins with a question Lucilius seems to have asked,
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  or that Seneca pretends he asked.
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  What should I most avoid?
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  And the answer is one word.
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  Crowds.
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  What strikes me is how Seneca makes that answer land.
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  He doesn't stand above the crowd and lecture.
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  He starts with himself.
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  In Richard Gummere's translation, he writes: "I shall admit my own weakness,
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  at any rate; for I never bring back home the same character that I took abroad with
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  me."
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  Then he goes on.
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  Something he has forced to be calm within him is disturbed.
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  Some of the enemies he thought he had routed return again.
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  He gives a picture for it.
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  A man who has been sick for a long time cannot be carried out of the house without a
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  relapse.
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  That is what a soul is like when it is recovering from a lingering disease.
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  Not cured.
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  Convalescent.
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  Every public square is cold air.
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  This is Julian's reading, not Seneca's phrase, but I think the honesty is the whole
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  point of the letter.
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  Here is an adviser to an emperor, a famous writer, the man the next centuries would
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  call a sage, and he tells his friend that a crowd can undo him in an afternoon.
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  That is not a man selling a flawless system.
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  That is a man showing his chart.
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  Seneca tells Lucilius that of all the crowds, none is worse for character than the
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  habit of lounging at the games.
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  Vice, he says, steals upon a person through the avenue of pleasure.
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  And then he describes what happened to him.
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  A quick word on how a day at the arena often ran, because Seneca assumes you know
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  it.
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  Mornings were commonly given to animal hunts, and condemned prisoners could be
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  thrown in among the beasts.
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  Afternoons were the trained gladiators, fighting with armor and rules,
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  and sometimes the crowd could even spare a loser's life.
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  In between sat the midday hour, when many people drifted off to eat.
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  That is the hour Seneca walks into.
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  He says he attended a midday exhibition, quote, "expecting some fun,
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  wit, and relaxation."
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  He was hoping for a break, a place where, as he puts it, men's eyes have respite
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  from the slaughter of their fellow men.
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  I imagine him slipping in out of the heat, finding a seat on the stone,
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  thinking he had chosen the lighter part of the day.
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  It was the opposite.
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  Gummere's translation has him say that the earlier combats were the essence of
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  compassion, but now all the trifling is put aside and it is pure murder.
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  A note in the Gummere edition explains that during the luncheon interval,
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  condemned criminals were often driven into the arena and made to fight,
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  for the amusement of the spectators who stayed.
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  The men have no armor.
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  They are open to blows at every point, and no one ever strikes in vain.
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  There is no skill here, Seneca points out, because skill only delays death,
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  and the crowd does not want delay.
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  Many people, he says, prefer this program to the regular pairs.
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  Of course they do.
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  And then comes the line that carries the whole letter.
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  "In the morning they throw men to the lions and the bears; at noon,
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  they throw them to the spectators."
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  Sit with that for a moment.
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  The beasts were the morning's entertainment.
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  At noon, the entertainment is the audience's own appetite, set loose on one
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  another's victims, and the victims are made to do the killing.
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  The crowd has become the arena's last animal.
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  Seneca gives us what the spectators shout, and I will read only the first of it,
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  because it is enough.
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  "Kill him!
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  Lash him!
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  Burn him!"
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  They complain that the man doesn't die well.
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  They want him whipped toward his wounds.
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  And when the fighting stops for a break, the organizers have an announcement ready,
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  that a little throat cutting will fill the gap so that something is still going on.
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  Then Seneca does something I find remarkable.
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  He imagines Lucilius objecting.
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  But he was a highway robber, a murderer.
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  Fine, Seneca answers.
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  Grant it.
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  Grant that he deserved the punishment.
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  Then he turns on the reader with a question: "what crime have you committed,
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  poor fellow, that you should deserve to sit and see this show?"
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  This is not a protest against the games as an institution.
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  Nothing in the letter calls for them to end, and it would be a mistake to make
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  Seneca into a modern campaigner.
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  His concern is narrower, and in a way more unsettling.
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  He is watching what the show does to the person who watches.
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  And scholars still debate whether this was an afternoon he truly lived through on a
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  walk through Rome, or a scene he arranged on the page to make a point.
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  The letter doesn't tell us, and I won't pretend it does.
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  Either way, the point stands, and he makes it in the first person.
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  Here is the sentence he has been building toward.
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  He asks Lucilius what he means by all this, and then he tells him,
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  in Gummere's wording: "I mean that I come home more greedy,
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  more ambitious, more voluptuous, and even more cruel and inhuman,
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  because I have been among human beings."
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  Read it slowly.
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  Greedy.
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  Ambitious.
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  Voluptuous.
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  Cruel.
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  Only the last two are about blood.
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  The first ones are about wanting more, and wanting to rise,
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  and wanting pleasure.
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  The crowd didn't only teach him to enjoy a killing.
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  It stirred up everything in him that was already restless.
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  And the final phrase turns the knife, because I have been among human beings.
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  The danger is not monsters.
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  It is us, in numbers.
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  He widens it past the arena.
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  No one, he says, is without some vice that they make attractive to us,
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  or stamp upon us, or taint us with unconsciously.
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  The friend who loves luxury softens us.
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  The rich neighbor wakes our greed.
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  The gossip rubs some of his rust onto us, even if we are sincere.
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  And he says that even Socrates, Cato and Laelius might have been shaken by a crowd
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  unlike them.
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  If those three could wobble, he tells Lucilius, what chance do we have?
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  Now, you might expect the next move to be contempt.
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  Look down on them.
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  Seneca blocks that too.
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  "You must either imitate or loathe the world."
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  Those are the two traps, he says, and both are to be avoided.
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  You shouldn't copy the bad simply because they are many, and you shouldn't hate the
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  many because they are unlike you.
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  I think that second warning is easy to miss, and it may be the more modern one.
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  After a day of watching people at their worst, the tempting response is a cold,
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  superior disgust.
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  Seneca says no.
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  That too is a way of being captured.
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  It keeps the crowd living in your head.
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  His remedy is quiet.
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  "Withdraw into yourself, as far as you can."
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  Not forever, and not in contempt.
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  He adds, "Associate with those who will make a better man of you.
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  Welcome those whom you yourself can improve.
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  The process is mutual; for men learn while they teach."
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  A small circle, then.
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  A few people who pull in the right direction.
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  And he closes with a kind of gift, three sayings.
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  One from Democritus, that one man means as much to him as a multitude.
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  One from someone nobody can name, who was asked why he worked so hard at something
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  so few would understand, and who answered that he was content with few,
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  content with one, content with none at all.
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  And one from Epicurus, a philosopher whose school Seneca often quotes with respect,
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  though he did not belong to it.
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  Epicurus wrote to a friend: "I write this not for the many,
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  but for you; each of us is enough of an audience for the other."
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  That last line lands differently once you've walked through the arena with him.
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  An audience of two.
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  Against a stadium of thousands, shouting.
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  Seneca's final instruction to Lucilius is short.
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  "Your good qualities should face inwards."
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  Don't perform them.
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  Don't wait for applause.
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  Many men praise you, he says, but have you any reason to be pleased with yourself,
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  if you are a person the many can understand?
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  What I take from the letter and the life together is this.
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  Seneca was no stranger to power or to crowds.
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  He had served in the most watched house in Rome.
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  And in the years when he finally had some distance, what he wrote down was not a
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  victory.
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  It was an admission that he went out one day hoping for a little relaxation and came
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  back changed, and that the change frightened him enough to write it down for a
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  friend.
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  That is a kind of courage I trust more than certainty.
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  He noticed the cost, named it, and stepped back.
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  As you move through your morning, whatever crowds are waiting for you,
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  that is the man I would keep in mind.
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  Not the sage on a pedestal.
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  The one at the desk, in the gray light, being honest about what the day did to him.