When the Roman emperor Nero was young and still earning his reputation for profligacy, he announced his intention to give 10 million sesterces to a favorite member of his court. This extravagance appalled his mother, who came up with a plan to get her son to reconsider. She ordered the coins piled up, believing that once Nero saw the size of the heap, he’d reduce it. Her gambit failed: “I did not realize that I had given him so little,” said Nero, who then declared that he would double the gift.
If the story is true — it comes to us by way of Cassius Dio, a historian who described it more than a century after it would have happened — then the Roman writer and statesman Seneca almost certainly knew about it. He even may have witnessed it: Seneca was Nero’s boyhood teacher and later his imperial adviser. The man who was arguably ancient Rome’s greatest philosopher never wrote about the episode in his letters or elsewhere, at least not directly. That wasn’t his style: Seneca rarely recorded the incidents of his life. Yet Nero’s rash act, if it occurred, must have been on his mind when he composed his longest manuscript on a single subject, De Beneficiis. Usually translated into English as On Benefits, this tract on the morals of giving and receiving now appears in an abridged version and with a snappy new title from Bard College classicist James S. Romm: How to Give. Seneca doesn’t mention Nero anywhere in these pages, but it’s easy to suppose that the emperor’s bad example inspired the philosopher to offer an alternative vision.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca — sometimes called “Seneca the Younger” — was born in what is now Spain around the time a better-known fellow was born in Bethlehem. He lived until the year 65, when Nero — by this point, a full-on megalomaniac — ordered him to commit suicide. Admirers of Seneca tend to see a virtuous man who wrote compelling meditations on great subjects and suffered at the hands of a tyrant. Critics regard him as a treacherous and cold-blooded schemer who maneuvered his way into political power and in the end got what he deserved. The truth is surely somewhere in the middle, but all can agree that Seneca was a man of considerable talents. Had he never served the emperor or written a word of philosophy, his Wikipedia entry still would recognize him as a popular playwright.
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