The Daily Stoic - Ask Daily Stoic: Ryan and James Romm Talk Seneca, Nero and Dying Every Day

Episode Date: July 22, 2020

Ryan speaks with James Romm, an author and professor of Classics, about Seneca, one of the three key figures of Stoicism who later in life became an advisor to the emperor Nero. They discuss Seneca’s career as a writer and philosopher and the contemporary lessons we can draw from his life.James Romm is the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College. He has written for The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and in other venues. Professor Romm has written a number of books about classical antiquity, with subjects ranging from Herodotus and Tacitus to Seneca and Alexander the Great.Get Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero: https://geni.us/VocBYPGet Daily Stoic's Seneca bust: https://store.dailystoic.com/products/seneca-bustThis episode is brought to you by GoMacro. Go Macro is a family-owned maker of some of the finest protein bars around. They're vegan, non-GMO, and they come in a bunch of delicious flavors. Visit http://gomacro.com and use promo code STOIC for 30% off your order plus free shipping.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow James Romm: Twitter: https://twitter.com/JamesRommHomepage: http://www.jamesromm.com/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic. For each day, we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good life. of necessary for living good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoic.com. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wunderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward.

Listen to Business Wars on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. In summer of 2014, I was working as a consultant on the turnaround of American apparel and I was staying in Los Files and I was walking and I stopped at Skylight was staying in Los Files, and I was walking, and I stopped at Skylight Books there in Los Files, which is one of my favorite independent bookstores, great little bookstore. I actually seen Robert Green do a book signing there many, many years ago, and I saw in the window a book called Dying Everyday, and it had a picture of Seneca on the cover.

And I totally didn't know this book was coming out, and I rushed it, and I got it, and I read it. this is by a book by James Rom, and it's an incredible book. It's a biography of Seneca, but it really focuses on Seneca in Nero's Court, and all of the contradictions and dilemmas and temptations and excesses that that represented. It was sort of an eye-opening heart-wrenching book for me, because I so admired Seneca and sort of only sort of knew about his service for Nero as kind of a footnote and sort of really see it in full color and grew some detail was obviously a little disillusioned, but it was also sort of also sent, you know, me into some personal introspection.

Seneca's complicity in Nero's regime and his explanations for it and his idea I'm doing good, even in a mess up situation, was somewhat analogous to the time that I'd spent at this sort of controversial company over the years where I'd work with this sort of singular, sort of equally unaccountable figure who ran his company kind of like an imperial court and was guilty of excesses and

dysfunctions, but you know how to good heart and it done bad things and you know is someone naive or they complicit or they collaborate or are they actually a check against you know further excesses. It was just the you know the absolute right book for me at the right time. It opened my eyes to a lot of stuff. It made me think and question. It really great book forces you to look in the mirror. And that's what James Rahm's book did. It's long been a favorite of mine. I've interviewed him a couple times for Daily Stoke just on our website. I've written, you know, things inspired by his books on numerous occasions. And so I wanted to talk to him about the book on the podcast. He also has another book we talk about. He did two editions or translations

of Seneca for Princeton University Press. My favorite is his One How to Die, which is a sort of a whole book on Seneca and Momentum. I'm just fascinated with James's work. He takes Seneca, makes him accessible, you know, really gets into the core of who Seneca is as a person. It's one of my favorite biographies of all time. It's just a great book. So I'm so excited to talk to James. I've recommended this book to lots of politicians

that I've known that have reached out because it is such an of the moment book, as we talk about in the interview, you know, Seneca trained and worked his whole life to make his way into power and then, and then he gets there and he is working for a person who he could not have been more unlike, and you know, is Seneca a hypocrite,

or is Seneca, you know, taking one for the team? Is Seneca making the best out of a bad situation for everyone or is Seneca enabling the bad situation? And that's really the paradox, the contradiction, the complexity of Seneca's life. And so it's fascinated to talk to James about that. I hope you can listen to this with an open mind. I know sometimes we're getting a little political on this, and look, I wish that the world was so simple and easy, and there was nothing bad going on,

and it would be easy to just only talk about personal productivity and personal resiliency, and the fun historical quirks of stoicism. But that's not the world we live in. We live in a complex world where the decisions of leaders and the personality and the character of leaders has a real impact, not just on ourselves, but on future generations and on the rest of the world.

And so, I would be not doing my job and we would not be being philosophical. We certainly wouldn't be being stoics if we ignored politics. So when I talk about politics, I'm not talking about my personal view on this issue or that issue, we don't get into that. It's not just that, hey, I'm not a fan of Trump for this reason.

I'm talking about how the stoics would look at a personality type like X, right? I'm interested in how Shakespeare would look at a personality type like X. I'm interested in how these traits can be cautionary tales for us as individuals, but also what they go to as far as who we are as people. What we're going to allow, what we're going to turn our eyes away from, what we're going

to endure, what we're willing to put up with. Where do we draw the line? And Seneca is just such a fascinating vessel to have that conversation because he was the second most powerful man in Rome, but to become that, he had to do it through Nero. And does that make him a hero or a villain? That's a complicated, fascinating question. I think this is a great interview, check it out.

And look, I hope this doesn't come across as a flaw and dismissal or attack on Seneca. It's not. I have one of our daily stokes statues of Seneca on my desk because I admire him, because he is a hero of mine. He is a brilliant writer, and I think fundamentally was a decent person.

I think he's just also got elements in him that make him cautionary. And so, you know, when Seneca says like, hey, without a ruler, you can't make crooked straight. It's not just picking heroes you admire because they were fully perfect people. It's in looking at some of Senaqa's failures where he should have acted and didn't,

where he could have acted differently, but then that we can make better decisions in our industry, in our families, in our own political views. And so Senaqa, someone I admire, and if you wanna check out our statue, I think it's really cool. It's in the daily stoke store, but, Sena, because someone I admire, and if you wanna check out our statue, I think it's really cool. It's in the daily stoke store.

But Sena, because someone I admire, but also someone I have learned a lot of what not to do from. And that's why James' book hit me the way it did when it hit me. So I hope you'll check out his books, dying every day, and of course, how to die, along with many other awesome articles. He's written a piece he wrote from the New Yorker recently

which you can check out and hope you enjoy the interview and I will talk to you soon. So James when I first read your book I guess this would have been six years ago now almost seven years ago now obviously I was familiar with Seneca I was a fan of Seneca. I felt like Seneca had always been relevant. I read your book. He felt more relevant. He feels like a figure almost becomes more relevant with the passage of time, particularly this strange moment of history we're in right now. Yes, I think that's true. He's been especially relevant in my eyes, at least during the Trump administration, when a number of our political figures have been in a similar

position to the one that he was in with Miro. And I would argue that some of his thoughts about death, disease, dying, are increasingly front and center in the time of the COVID crisis. Yeah, I think so. And I do wanna get into the Trump thing a little bit, but when I say that I feel Sena Kazerlovin, I think part of that, obviously,

that his political life is relevant, but I also just feel like, we can tend to have this sense of philosophy as being this abstract thing, but the sense of the ability to make the struggles of life so, as a figure who is deeply ambitious, but also very earnest, you know, very, very philosophical, but also very practical. He feels relevant in the sense that part of what America and Rome seem closer together than before as well. I don't know if that makes sense. Well, I think that's true. Seticus time, the Hyroman Empire, the time of Nero, was beset by huge inequities of wealth and status, and also struggled with materialism and fear of missing out.

And these are things that we could try his best to come back, to keep the soul from being tormented by things that it doesn't have, things that are out of reach or that other people have and we don't. These are all things that we most of us struggle with every day. Yeah, I mean, I think two of the letters I'm thinking of it and I'm forgetting the exact numbers of them. But he writes this one letter and I actually I use this of the letters I'm thinking of is, and I'm forgetting the exact numbers of them. But he writes this one letter, and I actually I use this in the opening of Stillness is the key, where he's trying to concentrate

and the sort of the noise of the street and the world and all the distractions swirling about him strikes me as very easy to update for the social media era. And then also that letter he writes about, sort of people who travel who are, you know, sort of fleeing from one place to the other, he likens them to the, you know, the insomniac flipping the pillow over and over trying to get comfortable. Obviously the pandemic has shifted some of these things a little bit, but I think in Senaqa, there's

this sense that, you know, people are people and we've been struggled with and bothered by and driven by the same demons for as long as we've been around. Yes, but what's interesting about that first letter you mentioned is that Seneca had deliberately rented a room in a very noisy place above a bathhouse to challenge himself to put himself through a kind of, you know, torturous environment so that he would have to really focus his mind. Yeah, that idea of testing himself

and not sort of taking the distractions or the temptations for granted, but sort of leaning into them and working on them. That is a theme of Seneca's works. You know, obviously the sort of the practicing poverty, the meditating on misfortune, on mortality. He did seem to be someone who took the training of the philosophy quite seriously. Would you agree? Yes, indeed. And even to the point of practicing death, as he puts it,

he suffered from some kind of a paralytic condition in which he would become gripped by an inability to breathe. And he reports that it felt like dying. And he came to regard those episodes as practice for death. An idea that was very important to him. Going back to his ambition for a second, I sort of see him as the most ambitious of the Stoics. He and Cicero sort of see him as the most ambitious of the Stoics. He and Cicero, you know, sort of seem to embody this sort of,

a very modern sort of drive to get to the top, to be the best, to not necessarily do it through violence, the way that a general or a conqueror would, or even, you know, financially the way an entrepreneur would do it. But they see, he, he, Santa Cus seems to be interesting in that he was, he strove to be the best politically he wanted to be, the best writer of his generation he wanted to be the best thinker of his generation. Where does that, it's almost like a ceaseless ambition in him.

Where does that come from? You know, it's, it's bread in the bone, I think. His father was a great red-arition, but not politically inclined and warned his sons against political activity. But nevertheless, Seneca and his older brother both went into politics, both entered the Senate, and of course, Seneca rose to be really the second most powerful person in the empire. So I don't know how to explain it.

He talks in his own letters about suffering from ambition. He felt that was one flaw that he had not conquered with all of his tools, all of his stoic tools. So I think it was just part of his DNA. Do you think it satisfied him? I mean, you have this fascinating note in the book, which I've rift on a little bit, but you say, you know, he was such a talented playwright

and such a talented philosopher that it was inconceivable to later historians that one person could have accomplished such greatness in both fields. Like we thought there was writer, Seneca and philosopher, Seneca. Do you think he felt like he got where he wanted to get or know?

You mean with his writing or in his political career? Well, I mean, like you take, like I was watching the, when you study like great athletes, there's this sense that, you know, from the outside we look at them and they go, oh, how wonderful it would have been to win five Super Bowls or three champions. But what they focus on is like just how close they came to doing more or often you find

that it didn't really satisfy them the way that you think it would. I guess I've always just been curious, like do you think, do you think Sennaka's vice with ambition was such that he was able to enjoy what he had, or do you think there was this sense, actually he says this, you know, poverty is a sense of not having enough. Do you think he actually kind of felt poor in that sense?

I don't think he felt poor. I think if anything, he was somewhat embarrassed by his wealth and he did try to give it back or give it to Nero in order to buy his way out of politics, but failed because Nero refused to accept it. I don't know if he felt unfulfilled. He wrote the tragedies all during the time when he was also writing the philosophical works. And you have to ask why one would write tragedies

if one was also totally satisfied with the stoic essays that he was composing. And I don't know the answer to that question. He obviously felt that there was another side of life, another side of experience that he wanted to explore, that he could access through tragic poetry, which is in some ways that, at the other end of the spectrum, from, you know, stoic teachings, because it has to do with extremes of emotion and the abandonment of the rational minds.

They are very, very dark place. They're very dark place. They're incredibly dark. And evil is triumphant in several of them. So what was going on with that? I don't think anyone has ever really understood it, and I don't claim to, but it's an amazing mystery. I guess I'm asking because there is this sense in the Stoics, Marcus really talks about it most, sort of the worthlessness

of fame and the emptiness of achievement in a sense that it's what it's all about is process virtue, et cetera, and that these sort of earthly things don't matter. And yet of the Stoics sort of sent a cajases those things the most or achieves them most on his, I would say on his own merits, right? You know, Marcus really is a chosen for emperor. It's not like he worked his whole life to eventually win the presidency. And so, you know, I just think like, as a writer, I wonder if you've ever thought this. It's like, Seneca has that, like Seneca's fame is so great that there, as you say in the

book, there's a line of graffiti from one of his plays on a wall in Pompeii. You know, does, does getting to the top of the mountain for him is that satisfying or is it, is there some emptiness there? Well, he, um, if he felt empty, he'd never admitted to that in his writings, you know, he writes as a person who is getting a men's fulfillment out of his mental life. But then it's hard to know how much to trust his writings because so much of them are availed

that he grew between himself and his public. I noticed that in your book, and I was going to ask you about that. There is so much conspicuously never addressed in Seneca's writing. He never talks about whether he's conflicted about working for Nero. He never talks about, does he wish he did things differently. He tends to probe Lucilius much more than he probes himself. Although I guess there is some, he dances around he dances around, you know, sort of,

do you serve a corrupt state or not? But do you feel like Seneca was self-aware or was he actually just really good at analyzing everyone but himself? Yeah. I think he was self-aware and also very aware of his public image. And I think he used his writings

to cultivate a public image that pleased him. And therefore, it concealed a lot of his real life and his real experience from the public. I could tell, so when I've read Emily Wilson's biography of Seneca and obviously I've read yours I could tell she liked Seneca not very much you I could tell liked Seneca, but we're also very conflicted and and you it's like it almost felt like you didn't entirely trust him Is that because of that you know you spent so much time trying to get behind that veil?

Yes Is that because of that, you know, you spent so much time trying to get behind that veil? Yes. I spent a lot of time on Tassadist's account of Senika. And in Tassadist, you see Senika doing things that you just can't imagine him doing from reading his writings. And Tassadist is a pretty reliable historian. So we have to think that he really did at least most of those things. You have this double image, this double self,

and it's very hard to keep the two sides together. I find that part of his fascination. And I enjoy the riddle, but I think it ultimately is insoluble. I was just reading Andrew Roberts writing on Churchill and he was saying one of the hard parts about writing a biography of Churchill is that, you know, Churchill was such a great writer and psychologist that he often all the things you would want to say about him, he said about himself. And there's a Churchillian element of Senna Katu in the sense that you have this beautiful writer and speaker, this person who has utterly mastered his native language. And from that sense, and from some of the leadership,

it's deeply inspiring. And then you look, when you look at some of the less people who are not inclined to do him any favors, when you read, as you're saying, when you read Tacitus, his description of Seneca, suddenly a lot of the glamour and glory goes away. And I found that with Churchill. It's like when you read Churchill and you focus on the myth of Churchill, which Churchill, as seriously, you know, puts together, he's one of the greatest men of all time.

But then when you look at some of the colonialism and you look at some of the other aspects, suddenly the shine comes off. And maybe that's where we come down with, where we come down with Seneca. That's quite possible. Yes, that's not a bad analogy. I was just hearing something about Churchill wearing pink underwear, pink lady underwear.

So, you know, when you take the pants off, you see what people are wearing underneath. Yeah, I mean, Seniko was clearly in his own time, an ambivalent figure. There were very divided feelings about him. And we know this because we have a play written by one of his strong admirers, the play called Octavia, which seems to have been written only a couple of years after his death and gives a very admiring portrait of him. And then we also have accounts in Cassius' Dio that make him look like a totals

candle. And Cassius Dio was relying on contemporary sources as well. So from his own time, from his own contemporaries, we have two very different accounts. And yeah, it's sort of like those, you know, DeGal, a heroic figure who had almost a cultish sense, you know, cultish fans and then also had almost deranged enemies. You see that with Churchill,

you see that with, with, uh, Theodore Roosevelt. There is the, it's so hard to know. know, and as you talk about in the book, so much of, for instance, even what we know about Senaqa's supposed access and hypocrisy comes from one of those, obviously biased enemies. Yes, Cassius Dio reports that he used to give dinner parties at which he used 500 dining tables. Huge, lavish banquets.

And again, it's unthinkable, leading Santa Cazone writings that he did those things, but who knows? Right. Yeah, it's very hard. It's like from, I think it's Tacitus, we hear that near the end of Santa Cous Life, he was so frail and lean from his sort of stoic diet that he was impossible to kill with poison. That's hard to reconcile with the account that just a few years earlier, he was throwing Gatsby-esque parties for

thousands of people. That's right. Do you think the truth is somewhere in the middle, or do you lean one in one direction or the other? Yes, I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. I think, you know, people are just generally complex. And whenever you read a very intense biography of even a contemporary figure for whom we have lots more documentation than we have for Santa Cah,

you can still come up with things that seem totally contradictory or inconsistent that point two different directions. So I think it's just part of human nature really. You've just an extreme example. To go back to sort of where we were at the beginning, this idea of human nature, perhaps that's the timelessness in Senaika,

which is this tension between ambition and principle, wanting to be at the center of things, and then being the person who's right, but utterly unable to affect the direction of events. What do you think Senaika would make of this political world we're in now around a sort of authoritarian sort of singular figure who some people love,

some people hate, I think any non-political definition, certainly a figure of excess, certainly a person of ambition. What would Sen. Kamikov of American politics right now? Well, I think he'd see a lot of common elements with his own times. I wrote a piece for New Yorker.com when the op-ed from the anonymous author came out in the times, I don't know, more than a year ago,

saying, you know, I'm part of the behind the scenes effort to stop the resistance. But I'm a highly placed White House staffer, but my job is to keep the president from doing stupid things. We even take things off of his desk so that he won't see them and act on them. And that person didn't leave the administration as far as we know and didn't ever identify him or herself,

was willing to serve because it was better than not serving. The administration would be a better place if that person was in it than if they left. And so this was the dilemma that Stoic's face in the time of Nero that their presence at court could help to keep Nero from going off track. And yeah, as he eventually did, going totally off the deep end.

But that also made them collaborators. It was a very difficult dilemma to resolve. Yeah, and I think one of the tensions I've thought about, it's like, you worked your, like Socentech works his whole life to, you know, he goes to law school and the Nackets Knocked Off Track because of his illness, then he makes his way into the Senate, and then Nackets Knocked Off Track

because banished by Claudius, and then that gets knocked off track because banished by Claudius. And then he gets called back to, so now he's living on this rock in the middle of nowhere. And now he gets called back and he accepts it and suddenly finds himself thrust into the center of things, albeit, you know, with Nero, I've actually talked to some, you know, sitting Congress members. And they were talking about that too, where it's like, look, I was on this track, my whole life, let's say, to be, you know, secretary of, you know, the interior or the head of the CIA or whatever. And now, I didn't pick Donald Trump,

but now I have the chance to do that job. It must have been, I guess what we're asking Sennaka to have done, which is essentially self exile himself for a third time, it might be totally unrealistic for a human being. I don't know. Yes, I agree. And also, we have to bear in mind that he didn't take his job,

the job that brought him back from exile in order to be a member of the Imperial Court. He was brought back as a tutor to a 13-year-old to help train him to be a good emperor. And he might have regarded that as the greatest opportunity a philosopher could have. He was like Aristotle with the young Alexander. So his political role evolved out of that,

but initially it was more of an educational role and didn't involve him in any nefarious deeds. So it was a kind of a slippery slope. He got involved in a way that led to places he could never have anticipated. And I guess that sort of brings up the same question that a lot of people have about Marcus Arelius and commonest.

It's like how much do you blame the teacher or the father for the sins of the student or the child? And I'd be curious, do you, did Seneca fail as a teacher or did he succeed pretty well considering the raw material? Yeah, that's a good question. I think he would regard himself as having succeeded in that. He established his moral authority so that Nero trusted a lot of government to him. Nero was already irredeemable at the point where Seneca entered his life. I think all the evidence we have was that Nero

was just really a rotten kid to the core from the get-go. And there was very little a teacher could do. But he won enough of Neuros Trust and even friendship, it seems, for a time that he was able to do most of the governing on Neuros' behalf. So there was what the Romans called the Queen Quenium Neuronus, the first five years of Neuros' reign, were regarded as a golden age, because nothing really bad happened. There were no abuses of power, and then gradually things went downhill. But those five years were probably mostly Zeneca's doing. Right. Yeah, and I guess that is the slippery moral quandary of it, which is you go, hey,

do you judge someone on how much bad they prevented, or how much good they did? Do you judge someone on the fact that we got five good years before the country goes off a cliff, or are they complicit for not having prevented that from happening in the first place? And I guess that's the paradox of Seneca. Yes, exactly. Do you feel like someone like Thrasia, so that's the sort of stoic in Seneca's time who takes pretty much the opposite tax. So it's like if Seneca is general Mattis, then Thrasia, and again, Trump and Nero are not nearly on the same scale. Trump's never murdered his mother or, you know, is not. We're, you know, the American presidency even off the rails is nothing compared to a Roman emperor off the rails.

But in the analogy, if Seneca takes the general Mattis route or the sort of the work within the system route, then Thrasia, the other stoic takes the never Trump or the resistance route, he is the, I'm gonna stop this as much as possible. I will not be complicit. I'm gonna be the spoke in the wheels. Who do you think, when you look at it and you study,

who do you feel I took the right path, or is there something we can learn from either one? I'm just curious what you think of that sort of compare contrast to the two people. Yeah, I think there was a book recently called American Neuro that was about the Trump presidency. I forget who wrote it. But and also David Remnick of the New Yorker has made the analogy in his column for the

talk of the town. You know, there's a lot in common in the disregard for decorum and the popularity that that inspired in a certain segment of the population. Nero, we tend to forget, was hugely popular with the masses and with those who liked to see the Roman elite taken down a notch. And after his death, you know, there were crowds who were sincerely wildly sincerely, wildly applauding him when he went on stage as a singer because this was something no emperor had ever done, no political figure had ever done. It was breaking all the boundaries and they loved that. You know, similar to the way Trump is admired by some for taking on the deep state. Yeah, so they're both transgressive figures and transgression inspires a certain,

you know, fandom much though we may regret it. Well, and then I guess I'm curious like as far as how this joke responds to that, I guess I'm just curious about the path, right? We have the we have the deep state path of Sennaeneca, which is like, I'm going to try to I'm going to try to limit the excesses from the inside. And then you have Thrasia, who on the outside is like, I'm going to sort of conspire and try to stop this. Do you feel like Seneca was Seneca doing the right thing or was sentica lying to himself because he really just wanted What he wanted? Yes, I don't know if it's possible to draw a fine line between those two. It's clear that he wanted out

At a certain point and I think right that fact is terribly important that when the fire of Rome took place in 64 after Nero had been nine years in power and Seneca saw you know Nero building the domicile area, the grotesque golden palace for his own pleasure at the expense of the Roman people, and he tried his best to get out. And it was too late because his moral authority was too much of a valuable commodity to the regime. So somebody who was, you know, a die-hard, a political animal would not have got tried so hard

as he did to get out. That's true. That doesn't credit. Sure, sure. And, yeah, Thrasia, I guess, gets some credit for having been prescient about the whole thing and maybe Sennaqa gets the demerit for having been a bit naive and optimistic.

Yeah, I wanna read a sentence that I came across recently in the introduction to Sennaqa's Medea by a man named Costa, CDN Costa, because I think it represents really as close as I've seen to my own point of view. Kustus is discussing the charge of hypocrisy and collusion with Nero. He says, the charge must in part be admitted, this wonderful academic language. The charge must in part be admitted,

but it should also be allowed that he lived in appallingly difficult times, that he certainly attempted to set his face against brutality and corruption, and that when he failed to curb it, probably no one suffered more anguish than himself. I think that's very well said. That's very good formulation, yes. So wrapping up, I wanted to conclude with, I loved your translation and addition with Princeton University press. The Senaq is how to die. I joke, actually, there's a footnote in my next book.

It's sort of how much did Senaq talk about death enough to fill a 250 page edition from James Rom? Why did you do that book and what does it mean to you? Well, that book is part of a lovely series that your listeners should know about the ancient wisdom for modern readers series at Princeton. They have about two dozen volumes now. And I have two other. Very good. On Senate. Yeah, they're really good. They make ancient philosophy current and meaningful to general readers. I thought death is just an overwhelmingly important topic for a Senate. He thinks about it constantly.

It intrudes into other topics that are totally unrelated. He's always aware of the shadow of death, and he thinks that preparing for death is essential to living a good life. life, and you can't really be fully alive unless you're also aware of your mortality. So it's something that we don't think about a lot in our society. We tend to hold death at a great distance. I agree with Zeneca that it's ultimately, you know, it's another right of passage, just like birth and marriage and coming of age. And it should be incorporated as much as those things are.

So I brought together the passages from a lot of disparate works, very hard to tencentig it down to anyone, topic, he tends to roam around a good deal. So I helped to help the reader out by pulling together disparate passages and putting them together into one package. Yeah, momentum more, it seems to be the theme of of Santa Cousin's life. As you said, you know, even from a very young age with this medical condition and then, you know, when he a very young age with this medical condition, and then, when he says death hangs over us, it's hard not to feel that that was literally true in his case from his tuberculosis or whatever it was to escaping a death sentence under a colodious to

essentially getting one under Niro.ira. I mean, it was, it was very real to him. Mm-hmm. Yes, very real. And as I say, he regarded his illness, his respiratory seizures as a practice for death. He experienced him as like a little taste of death. Do you feel like in his final moments that he held true or is it as it is, as it feels like maybe Tacitus's view

that maybe it's a bit theatrical? Yes, the scene in Tacitus is very hard to read. The tone is elusive. So as you mentioned, he was kind of thin and emaciated and tried to cut his veins open but didn't bleed out enough to die. And he was in great pain and, you know, probably quite messy, but he nevertheless brought out a vial of poison which he prepared and took that and that still didn't work. So he ended up having to steam himself to death in a hot bath. And the description of this long sequence in tassatives

is a little bit of a black comedy. I think tassatives find that, you know, slightly amusing, but grotesque at the same time that it was so hard for him to die. I can't help but see it as a victory for him in the end, because he persisted and he suffered. And for him, it was kind of a badge of honor to suffer in death.

He describes in his writings some very agonizing deaths in a way that makes them models of fortitude. And so the fact that he suffered and persisted, I think makes it kind of a good ending for him. And I think also that it was infamous and that we're talking about it now is probably I've got to imagine would have been satisfying to him that he reached the level of a Kato or the heroes or the people that he wrote about.

It seems like in the end that that's that's what he wanted. Yes. You're right. The comparison with Kato is very striking. Kato who tried and failed on his first attempt to commit haraqiri to disembowel himself. And then when someone tried to sew him up and save him, he ripped out his own guts and killed himself.

So that gets described or alluded to by Seneca numerous times. And Kato is clearly his greatest Roman hero, greatest hero of any kind after Socrates. The fact that he also had to go through a multi-stage suicide is very striking. Yes, no, I think it's, he is one of the paradoxes and enigmas of history and of stoicism and endlessly fascinating and thank you so much for your excellent books

and writing on the topic. They've been great for me and I appreciate you coming on to talk about topic. They've been great for me and appreciate you coming on to talk about them. Well, thank you for having me. It's been a very interesting conversation. If you're liking this podcast, we would love for you to subscribe. Please leave us a review on iTunes or any of your favorite podcasts, listening apps. It really helps and tell a friend. Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke early and add free on Amazon Music,

download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown-Oller, we will be your resident not-so- so expert experts.

Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding, and thinking. Oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong. What would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts.

You can listen ad free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app.