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Ep. 12: Practising How to Die · The Morning Stoic: The Untold Lives Behind Stoicism

• 0:00
  I imagine a lamp burning low in a study somewhere on one of Seneca's country
• 0:06
  estates.
• 0:07
  It's late.
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  A wax tablet or a roll of paper sits half written on the desk.
• 0:14
  And in the chair beside it, an old man is bent forward, both hands on his knees,
• 0:20
  trying to pull one breath into a chest that will not open.
• 0:24
  That scene is my own picture.
• 0:27
  Seneca doesn't describe the room.
• 0:29
  What he gives us in Letter 54 is something more valuable than furniture: he gives us
• 0:35
  what was going on inside his head while it happened.
• 0:39
  Last time we found him in retirement, writing to his friend Lucilius,
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  who was serving in Sicily.
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  They were letters about the divine spirit within us, and about the things no emperor
• 0:50
  can reach.
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  Those were calm pages.
• 0:54
  Today the calm is tested by the body, and the test is not political this time.
• 1:00
  It's lungs.
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  The letter opens like a man coming back from a good stretch of weather.
• 1:07
  Seneca says his ill health had allowed him a long furlough,
• 1:12
  a leave from duty, and then, suddenly, it resumed the attack.
• 1:17
  You can almost hear Lucilius asking across the water: what kind of illness?
• 1:22
  And Seneca answers with a dry kind of honesty.
• 1:25
  In Gummere's translation he writes that no kind is unknown to him.
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  But, he says, quote, "I have been consigned, so to speak, to one special ailment."
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  He doesn't even want to use its Greek name.
• 1:40
  He tells Lucilius the Latin is good enough.
• 1:44
  It's well described, he says, as shortness of breath.
• 1:49
  Later readers have called it asthma, and a note in Gummere's edition says just that.
• 1:54
  We should be a little careful, though.
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  We can't diagnose a man from a letter two thousand years old.
• 2:01
  What we have is his own account: a sudden tightening, a struggle for air,
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  and an end that comes, as he puts it, like a squall at sea.
• 2:11
  He's specific about that.
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  The attack, he writes, is of very brief duration, and it usually ends within an
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  hour.
• 2:20
  Then comes a line that sounds almost like a joke, if you didn't know the
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  circumstances.
• 2:26
  "Who indeed could breathe his last for long?"