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Even though it was one of the most creative periods of his life, even though he was finally free of the affairs of state, Seneca must have been nagged by a profound disappointment. He had failed. Failed not only to corral Nero, but he had failed himself in his philosophy, staying so long in the service of so bad a man. Sure, he still had his estates, he had his family, he had his friends, he had his considerable intellectual powers and interests.
But he was in exile, literally, infigatively, as he took his walks in the countryside, filling his days with nature and writing, he was nonetheless a tragic figure. Seneca in this period calls to mind a certain song lyric by the band Bears Den. How he protected Nero for so long, how had he gotten so rich in the process, was unseemly. He was a cautionary tale to his fellow Romans and certainly to his philosophical peers.
Like that line from Sophocles, he had gone to a tyrant's court of his own free will and come out a slave. And this is ultimately the main philosophical lesson that Seneca has to teach us. Be wary whom you go to work for, be suspicious of your own ambition, don't ignore your own soul's warning, moral compromises add up, and eventually destroy you. That is the broken parable of Seneca.
And by the way, there's a great book that I've recommended many times on Seneca's trials in the service of Nero. It's James Roms dying every day, Seneca at the court of Nero. We have it, the painted porch, I'll link to that. And Professor Roms has been on the Daily Snow podcast many times talking about this exact thing.
He was here actually not too long ago, I'll link to that episode. I think it's really worth listening here. Let me bring you a little piece of it, actually. Philosophers shouldn't be just writers, they should be doers.
And maybe this is what leads Seneca astray to, is he wants to be in the room where it happens and loses his bearings as to when one should leave the room where it's happening. And it's a fine line, I guess, between wanting to be a doer and not just a talker and then when is your ego leading you into a bad place? That's right. And when do things get so messy that you have to extricate yourself?
Seneca tried to extricate himself but failed. Yes. And Plato succeeded but then had to answer all kinds of questions about what went wrong, why did he bail, and the disaster that he left behind became much worse after his departure? So yeah, things got very strict.
Well, I have this quote that I think it strikes me as maybe the sort of through line of both your books, but I had this on my desk. I don't know when or why I wrote it down. But Pompey's last words, he quotes Sophocles. He says, whoever makes his journey to a tyrant's court becomes his slave, although he went there a free man.
And so you think you're going to do good work for a flawed person or that you're going to be above the industry that you're working in, right? Because most of us aren't going to go work for actual emperors or kings. But you think you can go into that place and not get your hands dirty, but you can't. Right.
Exactly. The philosopher has ideal notions of what politics is about as the Republican shrines, those ideals in the highest way. And then when you hit the ground, hit the ground splattering, things don't work out so neatly. For Seneca, it's fascinating to me because obviously Nero doesn't start out as a tyrant, right?
His mother is obviously flawed and maybe you could have said he could have seen it coming. But with Seneca, it seems much more like a frog in a pot. But he is slowly being turned up and then he is in that space where they say it's very hard to see something that your salary depends on you're not seeing. And if you can't, you can't get out.
Yeah. Nero started off on a relatively good path. The first five years he was reigned, we're later referred to as the Q&A. And he was the best time of the Roman Empire.
It wasn't until he became a 20 or he approached his 20s and had the, actually, no, he was well into his 20s after five years and more gumption, more autonomy and took the reins into his own hands more and then things started to really crash. Is it mental illness or is it what power is it that power is itself kind of a mental illness? In his case, very much so. The freedom to do anything, to have whatever pleasures he wanted, to kill his mother or whoever else he wanted, have the Praetorian guard at his beck and call, those who drive many human beings into delusions and insanity.
And in his case, he was already a little shaky to begin with. So it just sort of exaggerated his natural flaws. I think there's an interesting contrast, right? So both Marcus Aurelius and Nero are not born to be emperor.
So an odd series of machinations get chosen for it. Both get introduced to philosophy and philosophers pretty early. There is this sense that the job will be hard and that they need to be philosophical. So they're both trained in stoic philosophy, Marcus Aurelius by Junius Rusikus, Nero by Seneca himself.
And it goes in very different directions. Yes, Marcus Aurelius is the anti-neuro in many ways. What's ironic is that his teachers had all learned from Epictetus, who had been present at the court of Nero and had probably seen the disaster with Seneca. So there is a direct line of transmission, really, from Seneca to Marcus.
But the two of them are very distinct. And of course, Nero and Marcus are just antithetical. The one man who clung to his moral principles, even in spite of immense duress, immense pressure. And the other who collapsed really as soon as the opportunity for wrongdoing came around.
So anyway, check out Dine Every Day, Seneca at the court of Nero and listen to Professor Ron's episode on the Daily Stole Podcast.