Dear Classical Wisdom Member,
Today’s article is of such importance -in its profundity and relevance as well as its universality- that I am going to skip lengthy introductions. After all, life is both metaphorically and literally short, so it's critical from time to time to just get to the point.
So with that, we will delve into an illuminating letter once written by the stoic philosopher Seneca, on “On the shortness of life.”
Read on and discuss whether or not you agree with Seneca’s advice for handling life’s ultimate inevitability.
All the best,
Anya Leonard
Founder and Director
Classical Wisdom
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Seneca and “On The Shortness of Life”
By Van Bryan
Okay, so we are going to be talking about some pretty heavy stuff today. For starters, we are going to examine the looming prospect of our inevitable demise, our inability to picture time as a limited resource, and our unhealthy obsession with frittering our years away enthralled to our labors.
Excited?
Seneca the younger, who is the author of On the Shortness of Life is not one of those philosophers to tackle insubstantial questions. As a stoic, he was committed to nothing short of a societal revolution that would see people abandon their superficial ways and embrace the tenets of stoicism not merely as food for thought, but as a viable way of life.
The problem with societal revolutions is that they can be kind of hard. It is likely then that the stoics, who were nothing if not flexible, decided that the best way to endow stoicism upon the Roman population would be to supplant the philosophy within the minds of Rome’s most notable figures.
It is possible that it was this thought that prompted Seneca to take a position as the tutor, and later an advisor, to a young Emperor Nero. Seneca wrote extensively to the young emperor, attempting to spur him in the direction of philosophy and away from political demagoguery.
Now I’m not going to spoil the ending for you, but let’s just all agree that it didn’t really work out. Nero has been called a lot of things, but a “thoughtful, philosophical leader” was never one of them.
But now I am getting away from the subject at hand. We were talking about Seneca’s letter known as On the Shortness of Life or De Brevitate Vitae. The letter is addressed to Seneca’s friend, Paulinus, who held the rather important position of supervisor of Rome’s grain supply.
As I mentioned, Seneca touches on a few topics that, at the very least, might make you feel a bit uncomfortable. For starters, Seneca tells us that most people refuse to accept the prospect of death and that we waste our lives on useless endeavors as a way to blind ourselves from the inevitable.
And so I thought it might be a good idea if we started with a joke instead, preferably one about the unavoidable darkness that awaits us all.
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