Читать книгу Letters from a Stoic - Donald Robertson - Страница 11

Seneca's life at Rome was defined by several dramatic reversals of fortune, owing to his falling in or out of favour with successive Roman emperors. Indeed, it's no exaggeration to say that the drama of his real life often rivals that found in the celebrated tragedies written by him. He was born during the reign of Augustus, the founder of the Roman Empire, who died when Seneca was around eighteen years old. Indeed, over the course of his life, Seneca would witness the successive rule of all five emperors from the Julio-Claudian dynastic line: Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero.

Seneca the Elder had his son educated in philosophy and rhetoric. The father greatly admired a Greek Stoic called Attalus, who became his son's first and main teacher in philosophy. Seneca the Younger speaks fondly of him several times:

This was the advice, I remember, which Attalus gave me in the days when I practically laid siege to his class-room, the first to arrive and the last to leave. Even as he paced up and down, I would challenge him to various discussions; for he not only kept himself accessible to his pupils, but met them half-way. His words were: ‘The same purpose should possess both master and scholar – an ambition in the one case to promote, and in the other to progress.’ (Moral Letters, 108)

Little is known about Attalus, and although he authored several works, none of them survive. Curiously, Seneca has nothing to say about the most famous Roman Stoics of his lifetime. Thrasea and his circle are ignored. The most influential Stoic of this era, Musonius Rufus, has been called the ‘Roman Socrates’ by modern scholars. He was mentor to the leaders of the Stoic Opposition against Nero's rule, and later became the teacher of Epictetus. Musonius was about forty years old when Seneca died, but he's not mentioned even once in Seneca's writings.

In 20 CE, when he was aged around twenty-five, Seneca became quite ill from a lung condition. He travelled to Alexandria in the Roman province of Egypt, where his uncle Gaius Galerius served as prefect. While there he learned that his tutor, Attalus, had been exiled by Emperor Tiberius. Either in Rome, or perhaps later in Alexandria, Seneca became a student of the School of the Sextii. Dating from around 50 BCE, it was one of the first major schools of philosophy to have originated in Rome, although they apparently wrote in Greek. Little is known of their teachings except that they were a unique hybrid of philosophical ideas, including elements of Stoicism and Pythagoreanism. Seneca held the school's founder, Quintus Sextius, in exceptionally high regard:

We then had read to us a book by Quintus Sextius the Elder. He is a great man, if you have any confidence in my opinion, and a real Stoic, though he himself denies it. (Moral Letters, 49)

Although they were an eclectic school of philosophy, Seneca preferred to call the Sextians Stoics, thereby bolstering his own credentials as a Stoic teacher. As far as we know, Seneca had never travelled to Greece – an omission that would potentially have weakened his status as an expert on Stoic philosophy in the eyes of fellow Romans.

In addition to reading the works of Sextius, Seneca became the student of an otherwise unknown Sextian philosopher called Sotion.

It was but a moment ago that I sat, as a lad, in the school of the philosopher Sotion: but a moment ago that I began to plead in the courts, but a moment ago that I lost the desire to plead, but a moment ago that I lost the ability. (Moral Letters, 49)

Seneca describes Sotion's views on reincarnation and vegetarianism, which are clearly influenced by those of Pythagoras – although the Sextians claimed to arrive at the same conclusions based on different arguments.