Société d'Études Latines de Bruxelles

The question of Seneca's Wealth

Author(s): Harry E. Wedeck
Source: Latomus, T. 14, Fasc. 4 (Octobre-Decembre 1955), pp. 540-544
Published by: Société d'Études Latines de Bruxelles
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41520672
Accessed: 27-06-2017 18:54 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

Société d'Études Latines de Bruxelles is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to Latomus

This content downloaded from 143.106.200.224 on Tue, 27 Jun 2017 18:54:38 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 The question of Seneca's Wealth

One of the most provocative features in the Epistulae Morales

of Lucius Annaeus Seneca is the flagrant discrepancy between his
precepts, in regard to wealth and poverty, on the one hand, and,
on the other, his manifest disregard, if not defiance, of these pre-
cepts in his accumulation of vast riches. Can this dichotomy be
resolved, or is it to be accepted without demur? There is, too, the
still larger question whether one may dissociate the man from his
pronouncements or whether the totality of a man - his acts, at-
titudes, convictions - may be considered as a close-knit insepar-
able unit.
References to Seneca's wealth and to his views on wealth and
poverty occur largely in his Letters : other allusions are from
ternal sources (*). An analysis of these citations suggests the fo
lowing reflections :
Wealth, according to Seneca, is not necessary for happiness. On
the contrary, craving for wealth is demoralizing and brings unhap-
piness. If desires are curbed, satisfaction with what one has will
be enough. Poverty is not a deterrent to the good life. For pos-
sessions pass, being merely a temporary loan from fate. We are
overloaded with superfluous possessions. Frugality will free us from
the chances and variations of fortune and make us self-dependent.
But still, money is not evil in itself, if rightly used (2).

(1) See Mayor's note on Juvenal 10, 16. - References to Seneca's Letters
follow : 1, 5 ; 2, 4 ; 2, 6 (cf. 119, 9) ; 4, 10 (cf. 27, 9) ; 4, 11 ; 5, 2 ; 5, 6 (cf. 119,
7 and 115, 11) ; 8, 5 ; 8, 10 (cf. 18, 12-13) ; 87, 7 ; 110, 17-18) ; 14, 17 ; 14, 18 ;
17, 3 ; 17, 4 ; 17, 7 ; 17, 9 ; 17, 11-12 ; 17, 15 ; 18, 7 ; 18, 8 ; 18, 12-13 ; 20, 7 ;
20, 8 ; 20, 10 ; 20, 13 ; 21, 7 ; 51, 8 ; 70, 18 ; 80, 5-6 ; 82, 11 ; 84, 11 ; 87. I ;
87, 4-5 ; 87, 7 ; 87, 15 ; 87, 22 ; 87, 28 ; 87, 32 ; 87, 41 ; 90, 38 ; 94, 7 (cf. 94,
6) ; 104, 34 ; 108, 11 ; 108, 14 ; 110, 15 ; 110, 17-18 (cf. 110, 15) ; 110, 18 ; 110,
19 ; 110, 20 ; 115, 11 ; 119, 7 (cf. 110, 19) ; 119, 9 (cf. De Ben., 11, 27) ; 119,
12 ; 123, 16. - References from external sources are as follows : Suetonius,
Nero , 35 ; Juvenal, 10, 16 ; Tacitus, Annales, 13, 42 ; 14, 52 ; 14, 53 ; 14, 56 ;
15, 64 ; Dio Cassius, 61, 10 (but cf. Waltz, Vie de Sénèque, pp. 388-389) ;
62, 2 ; 62, 25 ; Tertullian, De Anima, 20 (noster Seneca) ; Lactantius,
Institutes, 4, 24 ; Ausonius, Gratiarum Actio, 1 ; Jerome, De Viris Illustri -
bus, 12 ; Augustine, Epistles, 153, 14 ;
(2) Seneca says ( De Vita Beata , 17, 2) that his enemies may criticize his

This content downloaded from 143.106.200.224 on Tue, 27 Jun 2017 18:54:38 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE QUESTION OF SENEGA'S WEALTH 541

In his own person, then, it would seem that Seneca condemns

the lust for money and luxurious living (x) ; deprecates the possession
of it per se ; stresses that the true wealth is within our own control,
a matter of rigid ethical self-discipline ; and concludes that it is
an irrelevant intrusion in the pursuit of the good life. His advice
and exhortations to Lucilius, together with his own apothegms, his
citations from Epicurus to reinforce his points, indicate the unchanging
sameness of his views throughout his Letters ; that is, Seneca, in
his capacity as a doctrinaire, as a teacher of ethics to a numberless
audience sifted through Lucilius, unequivocally condems not only
excessive wealth, but whatever is beyond the simple means of the
self-examining man (2).
How may this attitude be reconciled, then, with the possession
of immense wealth that made Seneca a byword for that very wealth?
Praediues is attached to him as if it were a permanent stock epithet.
The luxurious villas and gardens that were his were the talk of Rome,
gossiped about by Suetonius and Dio, stigmatized by Juvenal and
Tacitus. All the external evidences, in fact, point to the continuous
association of Seneca with vast possessions : although it was re-

wealth: Qua re ... pecuniam necessarium tibi instrumentum existimas ? ...

Adice , si vis , сиг trans mare possides ? - The reference is to Seneca's invest-
ments in Britain and other provinces. As an absentee landlord, Seneca also
controlled extensive estates in Egypt. - Seneca was also accused of being
one of those very captatores he himself so vigorously condemned : «... he
was one of the richest men, if not the richest man, in Italy under Claudius
and Nero, and was himself an owner of large properties » (M. Rostovtzeff,
The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, Oxford, The Claren-
don Press, 1926, p. 95.
(1) That Seneca « advocated the contempt of wealth and yet accumulated
it, is not to be gainsaid » (J. Wight Duff, A Literary History of Rome in the
Silver Age , London, T. Fischer Unwin, 1927, p. 204). It is strange that
among some of the earlier critics there does not seem to have been an aware-
ness of the discrepancy between Seneca's wealth and his epistolary counsel.
Cf., for instance : « On ne sera pas tenté de dire en lisant tant de passages élo-
quents sur le dégoût des grandeurs, que ce sont des fantaisies oratoires »
(Constant Martha, Mélanges de littérature ancienne , Paris, Hachette, 1896,
p. 240).
(2) Personally, Seneca was frugal and abstemious, abstaining from oysters,
mushrooms, wine, perfume, enervating warm baths : Inde ostreis boletisque
in отпет vitam renuntiatum est ... Inde in отпет vitam unguento abstine-
mus... Inde vino carens stomachus. Inde in отпет vitam balneum fugimus ,
deeoquere corpus atque exinanire sudoribus inutile simul delicatumque credidi-
mus (108, 15-16). - But the virtue of such abstention is not wholly attri-
butable to his inclinations, but to the rigors of his health. He suffered largely
from asthma (54, 1), occasional fainting spells in his younger days (77, 9),
fever and chronic catarrh (78, 1).

This content downloaded from 143.106.200.224 on Tue, 27 Jun 2017 18:54:38 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 542 H. E. WEDECK

ported that, when aging, he was rea

Nero rejected his offer : that, furth
of Rome, he gave the bulk of his fortune to rebuild the city. To
literate Rome, the name of Seneca was not linked with the philo-
sopher's shabby cloak and staff, with Stoic austerity and self-
negation. The name of Seneca, to Rome, meant an accumulation
of precious objets d* art It meant immense investments in the pro-
vinces. It meant moneylending techniques that brought in gigantic
sums. It meant endless and munificent gifts from the Emperor and
numerous legacies. And it meant, of course, violent criticism and
odium .
But in none of the cited testimonies are Seneca's own personal
traits and habits impugned. He is never accused, in any single
instance, of personal extravagance, luxury, or ostentation. The
cumulative testimony merely asserts his possession of great wealth ;
while the criticism is uniformly directed at the means and sources
of such wealth (*).
It must be borne in mind, however, that there is no logical reason
for identifying a writer's precepts with his own practice. Actually,
that would be tantamount to an argumentum ad hominem . Martial
himself, possibly, is the most glaring example of the divergence
between his lasciva pagina and his vita proba (2). So, anteriorly,
with the shorter occasional pieces of the Appendix Vergiliana. So
possibly with Horace. So certainly with Persius, who approaches,
even more than Martial, the supreme case of the most unbridled
literary obscenity (8) as contrasted with a chaste private life.
Hence it is not a remote or untenable hypothesis to consider that,
in his Letters, intended for publication as they were, Seneca virtually
dissociates his own person from his writing, certainly in so far as
specific ethical concepts are concerned. His writing then becomes
objective, applicable to all men in general who have the philo-
sophical tendency and who seek the virtuous life. In consequence,

(1) Misch thinks that Seneca remained in office under Nero « undoubtedly
not merely out of political ambition or for the sake of the immense wealth
his post procured for him, but because it enabled him to do some good or to
prevent some evil » (Georg Misch, History of Autobiography in Antiquity ,
2 vols., London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1950, vol. 2, p. 417).
- This view is of course conjectural. Even if the suggestion were warranted,
it would be a weak apology.
(2) 1, 4, 8.
(3) This became a well established literary convention, reaching its most
startling height in the sixth century, in the elegies of Maximianus. These
elegies, in their lubricity, exceed Martial at his most licentious. See H. E.
Wedeck, The Poetic Techniques of Maximianus Etruscus in Latomus, XI,
1953, pp, 487-495,

This content downloaded from 143.106.200.224 on Tue, 27 Jun 2017 18:54:38 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE QUESTION OF SENEGA'S WEALTH 543

the Letters - and their ethical validity - are unaffected by the

preceptor's own conduct or attitudes. A morality remains a mo-
rality, even if uttered by a scoundrel. Thus Seneca is inculcating
a morality, without reference to the inculcator. Nor is the thus
committing a unique incomprehensible dichotomy. He is, in a
sense, doing exactly what the modern novelist does whose characters
expound conflicting views and who holds himself, objectively and
conceptually, aloof from those views. He is a moraliste de cabinet ,
and he allows his precepts to come forth as it were in vacuo , with-
out relation to himself. So Thackeray presents his characters, and
even in his capacity as the writer, the originator, the very creator
of these fictional personages, makes his own commentary on their
actions. So Joseph Conrad, especially in his Lord Jim , examines
his own characters as if, once they were projected from his imagin-
ation, they assumed a personality and status of their own. So, much
more effectively, Thomas Mann, notably in his Joseph trilogy,
views his characters as if they were detached from his creation and
had an existence apart from the creator.
Thus Seneca enunciates his precepts, his attacks against wealth,
his eulogy of the austere life, of the virtues of poverty (x). These
precepts are no less admirable in themselves, they are no less valid,
even though Seneca did have an intense passion, not for using
wealth - which could be condoned - but for the mere possession
of wealth - which is more inexplicable and essentially meaningless.
That sense of possession may be reprehensible, particularly in the
case of a man who in other directions displays warm humanitarian
attitudes ; it may be the object of acrimonious and justifiable attack ;
but in no sense does it invalidate Seneca's philosophical condemna-
tion of wealth.
The problem of Seneca's wealth has now been broached and exa-
mined. A conjectural and admittedly hypothetical explanation of
the major inconsistency has been adumbrated, in terms of the crea-
tive yet objective projection of the writer into his fictional character-
izations.

(1) Is Seneca honest? Yet he says: quanto turpius aliud scribere, aliud
sentire (24, 19). - К. P. Harrington, Seneca's Epigrams in Transactions
of the American Philological Association , Boston, 1915, vol. 46, pp. 207-215,
in his introductory paragraph comments on Seneca's inconsistencies, on his
« meditations of a millionaire time-server upon the simple life and rigid vir-
tue ». Perhaps a too forthright simplification of Seneca's character. - Car-
lyle, commenting on Seneca's service to « God and mammon », exclaims :
« Oh 1 the everlasting chatter about virtue ! virtue ! In the Devil's name
be virtuous and no more about it ». Quoted by T. R. Glover, The Conflict
of Religions in the Early Roman Empire , London, Methuen and Co., 1909,
p. 4.

This content downloaded from 143.106.200.224 on Tue, 27 Jun 2017 18:54:38 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
544 H. E. WEDECK

Yet this solution lies basically in th

And in Seneca's case we might come nearer to the truth by exa-
mining the palpable, material evidence. In brief, Seneca has preached
one principle and followed another - in the deteriora sequor trad-
ition of Medea. There are certain mitigating features in the matter
of his personal asceticism. But over all looms the actuality : the
dichotomy between a man's acts and his thoughts. We cannot
definitively probe these thoughts. We can conjecture and deduce
within an approximately reasonable degree. But there is, in the
ultimate, nothing but metaphysical probings. We must therefore,
taking into consideration all the factual testimony, conclude that
Seneca's contempt for wealth cannot be reconciled with his ac-
quisition of wealth, and that he has refuted and denied his own
apothegm advocating intellectual honesty : quod sentimus loquamur ,
quod loquimur sentiamus (75, 4).

Harry E. Wedeck.

This content downloaded from 143.106.200.224 on Tue, 27 Jun 2017 18:54:38 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms