Roman Senator Seneca Quotes

In February 62, Seneca came up against an unalterable reality. Nero ceased to listen to his old tutor, he shunned his company, encouraged slander of him at court and appointed a bloodthirsty praetorian prefect, Ofonius Tigellinus, to assist him in indulging his taste for random murder and sexual cruelty. Virgins were taken off the streets of Rome and brought to the emperor’s chambers. Senators’ wives were forced to participate in orgies, and saw their husbands killed in front of them. Nero roamed the city at night disguised as an ordinary citizen and slashed the throats of passers-by in back alleys. He fell in love with a young boy who he wished could have been a girl, and so he castrated him and went through a mock wedding ceremony. Romans wryly joked that their lives would have been more tolerable if Nero’s father Domitius had married that sort of a woman. Knowing he was in extreme danger, Seneca attempted to withdraw from court and remain quietly in his villa outside Rome. Twice he offered his resignation; twice Nero refused, embracing him tightly and swearing that he would rather die than harm his beloved tutor. Nothing in Seneca’s experience could allow him to believe such promises.

You will see that the most powerful and highly placed men let drop remarks in which they long for leisure, acclaim it, and prefer it to all their blessings. They desire at times, if it could be with safety, to descend from their high pinnacle; for, though nothing from without should assail or shatter, Fortune of its very self comes crashing down.8 The deified Augustus, to whom the gods vouchsafed more than to any other man, did not cease to pray for rest and to seek release from public affairs; all his conversation ever reverted to this subject—his hope of leisure. This was the sweet, even if vain, consolation with which he would gladden his labours—that he would one day live for himself. In a letter addressed to the senate, in which he had promised that his rest would not be devoid of dignity nor inconsistent with his former glory, I find these words: "But these matters can be shown better by deeds than by promises. Nevertheless, since the joyful reality is still far distant, my desire for that time most earnestly prayed for has led me to forestall some of its delight by the pleasure of words." So desirable a thing did leisure seem that he anticipated it in thought because he could not attain it in reality. He who saw everything depending upon himself alone, who determined the fortune of individuals and of nations, thought most happily of that future day on which he should lay aside his greatness. He had discovered how much sweat those blessings that shone throughout all lands drew forth, how many secret worries they concealed. Forced to pit arms first against his countrymen, then against his colleagues, and lastly against his relatives, he shed blood on land and sea. Through Macedonia, Sicily, Egypt, Syria, and Asia, and almost all countries he followed the path of battle, and when his troops were weary of shedding Roman blood, he turned them to foreign wars. While he was pacifying the Alpine regions, and subduing the enemies planted in the midst of a peaceful empire, while he was extending its bounds even beyond the Rhine and the Euphrates and the Danube, in Rome itself the swords of Murena, Caepio, Lepidus, Egnatius, and others were being whetted to slay him. Not yet had he escaped their plots, when his daughter9 and all the noble youths who were bound to her by adultery as by a sacred oath, oft alarmed his failing years—and there was Paulus, and a second time the need to fear a woman in league with an Antony.10 When be had cut away these ulcers11 together with the limbs themselves, others would grow in their place; just as in a body that was overburdened with blood, there was always a rupture somewhere. And so he longed for leisure, in the hope and thought of which he found relief for his labours. This was the prayer of one who was able to answer the prayers of mankind.

Traditionally, in the system that Augustus inherited from the Republic, the Roman command structure was class-based. As mentioned earlier, the officer class came from the narrow aristocracy of senators and equestrians. The great armies of the Republic were commanded by senators who had attained the rank of consul, the pinnacle of their society. Their training in military science came mainly from experience: until the later second century B.C., aspiring senators were required to serve in ten campaigns before they could hold political office 49 Intellectual education was brought to Rome by the Greeks and began to take hold in the Roman aristocracy sometime in the second century B.C.; thus it is the Greek Polybius who advocates a formal training for generals in tactics, astronomy, geometry, and history.50 And in fact some basic education in astronomy and geometry-which Polybius suggests would be useful for calculating, for example, the lengths of days and nights or the height of a city wall-was normal for a Roman aristocrat of the late Republic or the Principate. Aratus' verse composition on astronomy, several times translated into Latin, was especially popular.51 But by the late Republic the law requiring military service for office was long defunct; and Roman education as described by Seneca the Elder or Quintilian was designed mainly to produce orators. The emphasis was overwhelmingly on literature and rhetoric;52 one did not take courses, for example, on "modern Parthia" or military theory. Details of grammar and rhetorical style were considered appropriate subjects for the attention of the empire's most responsible individuals; this is attested in the letters of Pliny the Younger, the musings ofAulus Gellius, and the correspondence of Fronto with Lucius Verus and Marcus Aurelius.53

As the Roman senator and Stoic philosopher Seneca said: “No tree becomes rooted and sturdy unless many a wind assails it. For by its very tossing it tightens its grip and plants its roots more securely… disaster is virtue’s opportunity.