Seneca’s Suicide
Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1612-13. Altes Pinakothek, Munich.
Classical education has a bad name these days. Progressives reject it as the oppressive legacy of the white male patriarchy, and the religious as pagan and immoral (if they’re not proselytizing some ersatz version of the Classics). There’s a general perception that the Classics are outdated. But, like gravity, ignore the Classics at your own peril.
That peril is the peril of all ignorance - inadvertent subjugation to what you’ve chosen to ignore, or that you turn away from in lazy contempt founded more on intellectual insecurity than reason. You cannot escape the West’s classical legacy. That’s not a judgment as to the morality of the Western Canon, there’s much that warrants criticism. But the critical attack on the canon itself is a product of a tradition that prizes iconoclastic critical thinking, and the critic of the canon finds themselves in the contradictory position of simultaneously endorsing the very thing they’re rejecting.
Etymologically, the word “liberty” derives from Latin. A vast number of the words in the English language do. Do we reject liberty because of its classical roots? No one does, because everyone craves liberty. No one wants to live as a slave. But ignorance is its own form of slavery that too often leads to tyranny. Cultural revolutions that seek to erase the past too often end up repeating all the past slaughter for the same old ignorant reasons.
These erasure attempts usually take the form of ad hominem attacks. Ad hominem means “to the human” in Latin, and is a logical fallacy Aristotle identifies 2500 years ago. It confuses a concept with the person espousing it and claims that the faults of the person are the faults of the concept. It’s the mistake of rejecting dogs because Hitler liked dogs. But no one rejects liberty because the slaveholder Thomas Jefferson espouses it in the Declaration of Independence.
This brings me to Seneca, the subject of the Peter Paul Rubens painting above. Thomas Jefferson kept multiple volumes of Seneca in his library alongside multiple copies of Lucretius’s atheist masterpiece “de rerum natura.” It’s only recently I came across Seneca because public education doesn’t teach classical Latin authors anymore. The progressives and the religious worked together on Seneca’s erasure, the progressives because he’s a dead white male, and the religious because they don’t want you to know there are alternatives to their superstitions.
This is a bit of a straw man argument (an Aristotelian concept) because one of the reasons we still have Senceca’s texts after he wrote them in the first century AD is because Christians preserved them because of his affinities to their worldview. Christianity rips off a lot of Seneca. (They do the same thing with Plato while they do their best to destroy classical texts that don’t jive with their metaphysics). And there are progressives who embrace Seneca. As progressives should, because he was one.
Like all of us, Seneca is full of contradictions. He writes convincingly of the equality of all humans, slave and free alike, in a way unheard of in the classical world. Likewise when it comes to loving your fellow humans. And his letters on ethics are still in print and worth the read even after two thousand years. Yet at the same time, he’s the richest man in the Roman Empire, a slave owner, a counselor to Caligula, and Nero’s childhood tutor and later counselor.
The painting above depicts his suicide. Accused of a conspiracy by Nero, he’s given the choice of execution or suicide. He chooses suicide, slits his wrists, and gives a philosophy lecture while bleeding out. He believed in part that one should live their life in preparation for the moment of one’s death and that one should die not in fear but with purpose. Whatever you think of that, Seneca practiced what he preached when faced with death.
You can read Seneca and decide for yourself. He demands you use your reason and not your passion in your intellectual endeavors. For Seneca, reason is a divine gift we share with the gods and the key to living an ethical life. His influence on the founders of the United States is enormous. The same with other classical authors like Cicero, Lucretius, and Sallust. It’s irrational and dishonest to ignore the classical foundations of the United States. Progressives do it because they think historical horrors abrogate any of the perpetrator’s concepts (ad hominem), and the Judeo-Christian crowd because they don’t want you to know that the founders of the United States were rejecting religion and its factional bloodshed when they wrote the Constitution. The Constitution is a secular document.
Democracy and theories of Republican government are Greco-Roman concepts nowhere found in the bible. Our Senate is named after the Roman Senate, not the Ark of the Covenant. Most of the founders had classical educations; the Federalist Papers are full of references to Greek and Roman history with little reference to the Judeo-Christian tradition.
I recently bought a copy of Longinus’s “On the Sublime” (I hadn’t heard of it before either), a classical text, that turned out to once be owned by William Patterson. Patterson was one of the principal architects of the United States Constitution, New Jersey’s first Senator, the primary drafter of the Judiciary Act of 1789, and then later an Associate Justice on the United States Supreme Court alongside Justice John Marshall when Marshall writes his seminal opinion in Marbury v. Madison for a unanimous court. Patterson majored in the Classics at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton), and his education is emblematic of most of the Founders. I think I inadvertently bought one of his college textbooks. His signature is in the front, alongside Robert Ogden’s, who was a member of the Stamp Act Congress. The Stamp Act Congress is the first time Congress assembles in America.
When I read Seneca on slavery and love my view of Thomas Jefferson changed. Particularly my view of his relationship with his lover and slave Sally Hemmings. The relationship is more complex than the binary master/slave reductionist view commonly held, a view that I now think diminishes Hemming’s power and tacit influence on the founding of the United States.
Slavery is an abomination, but like it or not it’s prevalent globally for most of humanity’s history. And even though people like to condemn the Western Canon for the injustice of slavery you cannot escape the fact that it’s that very tradition that introduces the concepts of liberty, equality, and rational discourse that lead to the result that in our age no rational, ethical, moral person accepts slavery. But don’t take my word for it, read up and use your reason to decide for yourself. Seneca asks nothing more of you than that.