Alan Saunders: The journey of Greek philosophy to the Roman Empire and what happened to it there.

Hello, I'm Alan Saunders and this week on The Philosopher's Zone we're looking in further detail at a topic we touched on last week in our conversation with Martha Nussbaum: the moral doctrine of stoicism.

Now, as she told us, much that we know about these Greek ideas, we know from the Romans who took them up. One of the most significant of these was Lucius Annaeus Seneca and this week we hear about him from Rick Benitez, Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Sydney.

To begin with, Seneca was a Roman citizen, but he wasn't Italian. His family came from Cordoba, in what is now Spain. So where and how did he learn his philosophy?

Rick Benitez: He learnt his philosophy from Attalus and Sotion. These are people who were influenced by Greek Hellenism and particularly Stoicism.

Alan Saunders: The Hellenistic philosophers were Greek and Seneca was a Roman citizen, and at least one writer has said that it's quite important that Seneca is thinking in Latin, that unlike his near contemporary, Cicero, who's probably thinking in Greek, Seneca's thinking in Latin.

Rick Benitez: Yes, I do think that's quite important. I think more important for us that he's writing in Latin and he's writing in Latin in a highly rhetorical style. He's writing with particular tropes and modes of a kind of rhetoric that most of us fail to appreciate, and so I think a lot of the meaning of Seneca's letters and his tragedies, is lost to many readers who don't appreciate rhetoric.

Alan Saunders: And what you talk about Seneca's letters, we're presumably not talking about personal correspondence, we're talking about, as it were, writing for publication, are we?

Rick Benitez: Well these are letters to Lucilius; these are the ones I'm particularly talking about, the moral epistles, and they're addressed to a particular person. But at the same time they're not written in the way in which we just write, say, emails to friends nowadays. They're written with a particular function in mind, an educative function especially, and they contain a lot of philosophy and wisdom.

Alan Saunders: What is it that we miss by not understanding his style and what is in his philosophical style that's not in the Greek originals?

Rick Benitez: Well look, I think one of the really big differences between Greek philosophy and Seneca's Latin writing, is the expression of attitudes and the way that attitudes are expressed, and I think this comes up particularly clearly in Seneca's literature, in the tragedies. I think that it's clear from the rhetorical style in which the tragedies are written that they are, if you want, analyses or descriptions of emotions, they express emotion in that way but they're not feeling it. They're not meant for us to feel the emotion, and if you look at original Greek tragedy, its be-all and end-all is the experience of deep and difficult emotions.

Alan Saunders: Well let's backtrack a bit to the philosophical underpinning of what he writes, which is Stoic philosophy, which originates in Greece; what for him is the ethical agent in philosophy, body and soul, who are we talking about?

Rick Benitez: The soul is composed of pnelma, a breath, right? It's very, very fine, but it is tenuous and able to hold things together and it is material like the rest of the body. Everything for the Stoics is material; they are naturalists. They don't believe in the existence of supernatural substances, or metaphysical substances. And Seneca shares those views. So the mind has a certain physical reality, and it is distributed throughout the body, and it's like if you want to use -- Stoics like analogies themselves -- it's like a spider's web, right? Clings to things and holds them together, and is able to respond to impressions, movement, and to be able to direct motion outwards.

Alan Saunders: And on death, what happens to the soul?

Rick Benitez: Well the soul is dissipated very much like what happens with the rest of the body. The body decays faster than the soul, but, the soul as well.

Alan Saunders: So there is no God in this universe of his?

Rick Benitez: Well God is immanent for Stoics; God is reason.

Alan Saunders: Right. So God pervades all things but there is no lord and master.

Rick Benitez: There's no separate, but reason is lord and master.

Alan Saunders: And we should act according to the Stoics, and to Seneca, we should act in accordance with nature?

Rick Benitez: That's right. But you know, you could compare Stoics and Epicureans interestingly, on exactly this point. To act according to nature doesn't always mean what you think it means. For the Epicureans to act according to nature comes a lot closer to what your ordinary 21st century person might think. You're born with a desire to seek pleasure and avoid pain, so to be a pleasure-seeker and a pain-avoider is natural, and that's to act according to nature. That's part of the Epicurean view about things. But the Stoics' view about what nature is, already involves particularly a specially Stoic view about what human nature essentially is and that is the nature to be a reasoning animal. So to act according to nature for a Stoic is always to act as reason would dictate, and that doesn't always mean to seek pleasure and to avoid pain.

Alan Saunders: What then if we are going to act as reason dictates, what is the role of emotions? Do they tell us what to do with our reason, which is what people like David Hume believed in the 18th century, that reason was the torch and that emotion told us what direction to point it in -- or are the emotions things that are distracting us from the course of nature and of reason?

Rick Benitez: Well it's not just that they're distracting us, but the Stoics, and by the way, there's quite a bit of diversity and range across a few hundred years of Stoicism, but in general, the Stoic view of the ontology of emotion is that emotions are false judgments. They're forms of judgment, but they're false ones. So you could never act emotionally and be acting rationally at the same time for a Stoic.

Alan Saunders: Is it not possible for my emotions and my reason just purely by chance, to coincide?

Rick Benitez: It's not really possible, because they are the same type of thing. They're judgments. The contents of your reason is judgment, and the contents of your emotion is judgment. But, and this is simplifying a bit, the content of your emotional side of things is false judgment, so that cannot be rational.

Alan Saunders: So emotion is by definition, false judgment?

Rick Benitez: That's right. Chrysippus was the most ardent proponent of the view that emotions are nothing but false judgments.

Alan Saunders: This is the Greek philosopher?

Rick Benitez: That's right.

Alan Saunders: On the subject of emotion, an emotion that seems to have been a particular interest to Seneca was anger; that seems to be quite central, doesn't it?

Rick Benitez: That's right. His essay, De Ira (On Anger) is I think a tour de force of clinical pathology. I think of Seneca in writing that essay as like a medical doctor in, say, the 19th century or early 20th century, standing before a group of other doctors, some learners and clinicians, right? And very clinically dissecting the disease which he thinks anger is, and so his descriptions of anger are wonderful, accurate descriptions of physiology of anger, of the kind of expression of anger, of the actions that people perform under anger, and it's all an analysis I think, of a disease. That's the best way to look at it.

Alan Saunders: What is the nature of the disease? I mean how does he describe it?

Rick Benitez: Oh well, can I give you a wonderful little passage - ?

Alan Saunders: Please do.

Rick Benitez: Here is a passage from De Ira in translation; the Latin I think would be even better. But I will get the point across, and it describes an angry man:

His eyes blaze and sparkle, his whole face is crimson with the blood that surges from the lowest depths of his heart; his lips quiver, his teeth are clenched, his hair bristles and stands on end; his breathing is forced and harsh. His joins crack from writhing; he groans and bellows, burst out into speech with scarcely intelligible words, strikes his hands together continually and stamps the ground with his feet; his whole body is excited and performs great angry threats. It is an ugly and horrible picture of distorted and swollen frenzy. You cannot tell whether this vice is more execrable or more hideous.

So that's the pathologist, Seneca, coming in at the end to tell us about the disease.

Alan Saunders: Do you think he is writing on anger because he knows that it is an emotion to which he himself is particularly prey? Is this a way of as we would say these days, 'working through his own issues'?

Rick Benitez: I actually don't think that, but that's an interesting suggestion. You can find in the letters of Seneca some indication that he thinks he doesn't attain to the standard that he ideally wants, and he doesn't think even that he attains to the standard that Attilus had. He thinks he should abstain, for example, from mushrooms, oysters, perfume and steam baths. He wants to be that austere, and sometimes he fails. And he is a bit angry at himself when he fails; he wants to do better. But I think it's really he's writing about anger because he wants to help others with this disease, there is so much anger around him, and there are so many people that become angry, because they're so attached to things.

I think one of the really brilliant perceptive comments that Nussbaum makes in her treatment of Seneca, is that in some respects, we can see him as writing for the person who has aspirations to be a Roman hero, and a Roman hero type is the one who will feel anger, and will act out on their anger in ways like Seneca describes.

Alan Saunders: One of the great examples in classical literature of somebody who is a hero, who is possessed by anger, is of course Achilles in The Iliad, presumably he's got it bad from Seneca's point of view.

Rick Benitez: Exactly. And I think that makes a really good contrast between the Greek attitudes and the kind of attitudes that Seneca wants to promote to his Roman audience.

Alan Saunders: Rick Benitez.

As far as I know, Seneca, our subject this week on The Philosopher's Zone, is the only great philosopher to be a character in a great opera. Here he is in The Coronation of Poppea, Claudio Monteverdi's extraordinary music drama of 1645.

SINGING

Alan Saunders: As it happens, Seneca was no stranger to drama himself. He wrote plays, on themes from Ancient Greece, our primary focus this month. But did that mean he was writing for the theatre? Rick Benitez.

Rick Benitez: We have no evidence of his tragedies ever having been performed. We have very good reason to believe that the performance of tragedies, that is with actors and costumes and scenes, had become decrepit by Roman times, and that if anything like these tragedies were performed, they were performed in recitation only.

Alan Saunders: He did an oedipus, didn't he? Obviously following a very famous Greek model. What else did he write?

Rick Benitez: Well there's an Agamemnon, there's a Thyestes, there's a Medea. So we have tragedies that are in their content and their characters and their myths, modelled on Greek tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. More Euripides probably than anyone else.

Alan Saunders: Now you've already said something about the role of emotion in his tragedies. I mean there are various interpretations of the tragedies from this point of view, one of which, which is Martha Nussbaum's is that you saw all this high emotion or heard, or read all this high emotion, and it served a therapeutic purpose.

Rick Benitez: Yes. I think there's a difficulty with that interpretation. It's a very interesting interpretation. I think first we have to look at what the difficulty is. From Seneca, in his own words, we have plenty of evidence about his attitude towards emotions, that they represent a kind of disease, that we should forgo them, that even a little bit of emotion, feeling a little bit of emotion, paves the way for feeling more and more. So these kind of remarks from Seneca, and there are plenty of them in his letters, seem to me to show that he's the sort of person that thinks any experience of emotion is potentially a dangerous thing.

Alan Saunders: So it's not like a vaccination, it's more like just one drink for an alcoholic?

Rick Benitez: That's exactly right, yes, very much like that. And so it's playing with fire to experience the emotions, and there's no doubt that the characters in Seneca's tragedies express emotional attitudes. But if the aim is for the audience to feel those emotions, in anything like the intensity that the characters feel them, then Seneca's really playing with fire. And I worry that here's a philosophy who wants to help people, he is humane, but I can't understand easily why he would be playing with fire when he thinks the emotions are so bad. So that's what I think the problem with the therapeutic approach is.

Alan Saunders: So why is he doing this? What is he writing these plays?

Rick Benitez: Well I think, my own view is that he writes them as great works of style, for one thing. And so he is showing his rhetorical prowess and his literary prowess, and he's doing a very esoteric kind of aesthetics, because he's writing anti-tragedies. He's writing plays that are modelled on Greek tragedies; they have the characters of Greek tragedies, the themes and the myths, but he's in a sense trying to destroy the very essence of Greek tragedy, which was that the experience of emotion is the thing that shows you human life. And Seneca is saying, 'No, the experience of emotion through his tragedies, is the destruction of human life. And aren't we glad that we're Stoics and we're not like the miserable characters, Thyestes, Medea, in these plays'.

Alan Saunders: So he's assuming a Stoic audience; he's not assuming that these are going to be works that persuade people to Stoicism?

Rick Benitez: Well I think they could persuade people to Stoicism if they were meant as rational persuasions, but they're not going to persuade people to Stoicism by transforming their feelings. They're not going to persuade people by making them feel certain ways, where suddenly through that feeling they recognise that they ought to reduce the role of emotion in their lives. They won't work that way. So I think he's either speaking directly to other Stoics, or to people who are potentially, they're going to listen to the argument, so they're already half-way there.

Alan Saunders: We have here a philosopher who thinks that emotion is by its very nature, misleading, who believes that we should free ourselves from the claims of the world around us. He then becomes first tutor and then advisor to the Emperor Nero. Now given his beliefs, this was an odd career choice, wasn't it?

Rick Benitez: Yes, a very odd choice.

Alan Saunders: Why is Seneca doing this?

Rick Benitez: Well, I think he's got no choice. You can't turn down a job like that, it's an offer that you can't refuse.

Alan Saunders: He was a speechwriter for Nero; he wrote the oration with which Nero ascended to the imperial throne; do we know whether he ever had high hopes of his young protégée?

Rick Benitez: Well some of the histories that I've looked at about this period suggest that in the early years, we could probably think that Seneca was doing all right as an educator for Nero. But the imprint of his education didn't last.

Alan Saunders: Indeed not. And let's look at Seneca's death; how did he die?

Rick Benitez: He was implicated in a plot, and so this is treasonous and he had to commit suicide. And he committed suicide by blood-letting. But because of his age, so the story goes anyway, because of his age, the blood was flowing very slowly and clotting and the like, and so he had to be given poison as well, and then he had to be helped to be put into a bath to speed and to facilitate the flow of blood, and even then, he had to be suffocated in the bath because none of the other -- it was a bit Rasputin-ish, isn't it? None of the other methods were working. So finally Seneca came to an end through suffocation.

Alan Saunders: What philosophical lessons do we draw from not just his philosophy but also his story? I mean his philosophy looks as though it does not stress our role as agents in the world, it does not stress our responsibility to other people, and therefore our political responsibilities, and it was his political responsibilities that eventually undid him.

Rick Benitez: Yes, that's a really interesting question, and it's part and parcel of the question about Stoicism and how can a good Stoic care about the world and act in the world and act politically? I think the legacy of Seneca for us philosophers is more to be found (and this is where I disagree with people like Nussbaum) is more to be found in his epistles and in his essays than to be found in his tragedies. I don't think the great work is the tragedy. But the kind of life that he recommends in his essays and his letters, for example was highly influential on early modern philosophers like Descartes who used Seneca's writings to help cure Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia of her melancholy. And one of the key things in the way in which the cure was affected is our way of seeing, interpreting, our circumstances, and actions, our own actions, our own thoughts, and those of others. If you want it in modern political parlance, how to spin it. But from the philosopher's point of view, how to spin it accurately in fairness to yourself and to others. And I think there's a lot of that to be found in Seneca, about how to see things clearly, and how not to take them necessarily in ways that they just appear.

Alan Saunders: And helping us to see things clearly was Associate Professor Rick Benitez from the University of Sydney.

The show is produced by Kyla Slaven, the sound engineer is Charlie McKune, and I'm Alan Saunders.

Next week, it's back to Greece to find out what happened to philosophy there after the death of Aristotle.