Good morning.

Today, a villa outside Rome in AD 65… and the philosopher who taught an emperor, then received his order to die.

Let’s begin.

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The Teacher Who Was Ordered to Die

Seneca—Stoicism

R	ome. April, AD 65. A soldier arrives at a country villa a few miles outside the city. He brings a message from the emperor. The old man who lives here must die, today, by his own hand.

His name is Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the most famous philosopher in Rome. And the emperor who sent the message is Nero… his own former pupil.

Seneca was born around 4 BC in Córdoba, in Roman Spain, and came to Rome as a boy. He became a brilliant speaker and writer, until the emperor Claudius exiled him to the island of Corsica in AD 41.

Eight years later, Nero’s ambitious mother, Agrippina, brought him back. She wanted a tutor for her 12-year-old son.

When Nero became emperor in AD 54, at just 16, Seneca became his chief adviser. For a few years, Rome was well governed. Seneca also grew immensely rich, with estates, loans and villas across the empire.

But Nero grew harder to guide, and more dangerous. In AD 62 Seneca retired, and reportedly offered the emperor most of his fortune. Nero refused it.

In those last years, Seneca wrote his greatest work: 124 letters of advice to a younger friend named Lucilius, about how to live well and how to face death. The very first letter opens with a warning about time.

“Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time.”

Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, Letter 1 (translated by Richard M. Gummere)

Then, in AD 65, a plot against Nero was discovered. Seneca’s name came up, though his guilt was never proved. Painters have returned again and again to what happened next, and this is how Rubens saw it.

Peter Paul Rubens, “The Death of Seneca,” about 1612–13. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Public domain.

Seneca stands upright in a basin of warm water, looking up, calm and almost serene. To his left, a doctor opens a vein in his arm. On the other side, a young man writes down his last words. Behind them, two soldiers make sure the order is carried out.

Here is the twist. Rubens copied the body from an ancient black marble statue he had sketched in Rome, which everyone then believed showed the dying Seneca. And the face came from a bronze bust that Rubens owned, also thought to be Seneca. Today, scholars believe neither one was really him.

The real death, as the Roman historian Tacitus tells it, was far slower and harder. His blood flowed too slowly from his old body, so Seneca opened the veins in his legs too. He asked for poison, which did not work. Finally he was carried into a hot steam bath, where he died.

Through it all, Tacitus says, he kept talking, and he dictated his thoughts to secretaries until the end.

His young wife, Paulina, insisted on dying with him and opened her own veins. Nero, not wanting extra scandal, ordered soldiers to stop her. She lived on for some years, very pale, people said, for the rest of her life.

A century and a half after Rubens, a young French painter tried the same scene. He was Jacques-Louis David, and he painted it in 1773 for the Prix de Rome, France’s great prize for young artists.

Jacques-Louis David, “The Death of Seneca,” 1773. Petit Palais, Paris. Public domain.

He did not win. Look to the right, though, and you will see Paulina, collapsing as she is led away. David would go on to become the greatest painter of the French Revolution.

In other words, Seneca’s death became a lesson in how to face the worst with dignity. Long after the emperors had fallen, painters, preachers and writers kept returning to it.

I first read the Letters in my finance years, on a commuter train in a year when markets were falling and colleagues were losing their jobs. It was startling to find a Roman millionaire telling me that the only thing I truly owned was my time. He was right, and I started spending it differently.

For more on Rubens’s painting, the Alte Pinakothek’s own collection page tells the story of the statue he copied: The Death of Seneca, Alte Pinakothek →

Seneca told his friend that nothing was ours except time. On his last day he had very little of it… and he spent every minute talking.

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Three Things Worth Knowing

I	Art The Statue That Wasn’t Seneca

The black marble figure Rubens copied was found in Rome around 1600. It showed an old man standing in a basin, and it was restored and displayed as “the Dying Seneca.” It is now in the Louvre, where it is identified as something far humbler: an old fisherman, a Roman copy of a Greek type. For centuries, artists drew a philosopher’s death from a statue of a man who had probably spent his life on a riverbank.

II	Theater Blood on the Stage

Seneca also wrote tragedies, among them Medea and Thyestes, famous for their ghosts, revenge and horror, including a father served his own children at dinner. Rediscovered in the Renaissance, they shaped the revenge tragedies of Elizabethan England. Without Seneca, it is hard to imagine Shakespeare’s bloody early play Titus Andronicus, or the ghost in Hamlet.

III	Psychology The Stoics and Modern Therapy

In the 1950s and 60s, the American psychologists Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck developed the methods that became cognitive behavioural therapy, now one of the most widely used treatments for anxiety and depression. Ellis openly credited the Stoics. Their central idea is pure Seneca: what troubles us is often less the event itself than the story we tell ourselves about it.

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Curious & Controversial

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Was Seneca a hypocrite? He wrote beautifully about simple living while being one of the richest men in Rome. The historian Cassius Dio, writing over a century later, accused him of greed, and even claimed that his harsh calling-in of loans in Britain helped provoke Boudica’s revolt. Modern historians treat Dio’s charges with caution.

◆	Seneca’s worst moment may have come in AD 59, when Nero had his own mother, Agrippina, murdered. Tacitus reports that Seneca was widely blamed for drafting the letter Nero sent to the Senate to justify it.

◆	The famous bronze bust long called “Seneca,” now in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, is probably not him at all. Many scholars now think it shows the Greek poet Hesiod.

◆	Was he really part of the plot against Nero? Tacitus is unsure, and so are historians today. He may simply have been too rich, and too admired, to be allowed to live.

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Connoisseur’s Diary

Worth Seeing This Week

Rubens’s Death of Seneca hangs in Munich’s Alte Pinakothek, which holds one of the largest collections of Rubens paintings in the world. Stand in front of it, then walk through rooms of his huge altarpieces and portraits.

Where: Alte Pinakothek, Barer Straße 27, Munich. The painting is listed in gallery VII on the upper floor. Closed on Mondays. Tickets: €9; €6 reduced; free for under-18s; just €1 on Sundays. Insider tip: Sunday is wonderful value but the busiest day. Come on a Tuesday or Wednesday evening instead, when the museum is open late. Plan your visit at pinakothek.de →

Worth Reading

Letters from a Stoic — Seneca, translated by Robin Campbell (Penguin Classics). A selection of the letters to Lucilius, short enough to read one a day. Start with the first, on time, and see if you can stop.

Explore Further

Read: The Death of Seneca →, History Today on Rubens’s painting and the statue behind it.

Tonight’s Quiz

1. Which emperor did Seneca tutor as a boy?

A) Caligula

B) Claudius

C) Nero

D) Augustus

Answer: C. Agrippina recalled Seneca from exile in AD 49 to teach her 12-year-old son, Nero.

2. Where did Claudius send Seneca into exile?

A) Sicily

B) Corsica

C) Crete

D) Sardinia

Answer: B. He spent eight years on Corsica before Agrippina brought him back.

3. What does the statue Rubens copied for Seneca probably show?

A) A Roman senator

B) A Greek poet

C) An old fisherman

D) A gladiator

Answer: C. The Louvre identifies it as an old fisherman, a Roman copy of a Greek type.

If the links above don’t respond in your email app, just reply with your answers—I’ll write back.

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Seneca was not a saint. He was rich, he made compromises, and he served a monster. But on his last day he behaved exactly as he had told others to behave, and that is rarer than it sounds.

Tomorrow is Friday… we gather up the week, from a girl with a pearl earring to a philosopher in his bath, and add one new way of looking at all of them.

Until tomorrow,
Charles T. Mayfair

Editor, Connoisseur Daily

P.S. Try Seneca’s own daily habit. In one of his essays, he describes reviewing each day at bedtime: what he did well, where he slipped, what to do better tomorrow. It takes five minutes, and it is the most practical thing in Stoicism.