GARETH D. WILLIAMS
In this treatise Seneca strives to ease his mother’s sorrow over his banishment to Corsica in 41 CE, apparently on the charge of adultery with Julia Livilla, the emperor Gaius’s sister (cf. Dio 60.8.5); given the time that Seneca lets pass before offering this consolation (cf. 1.1–2), the work can plausibly be dated to 42/43. The paradoxical novelty that he, the lamented, offers comfort to his lamenter (cf. 1.2) gives an idiosyncratic stamp to this Senecan variation on that subgenre of the ancient consolatory tradition, the consolation on exile, examples of which survive (in part or whole) in Greek from the Cynic Teles (third century BCE), the Stoic Musonius Rufus (ca. 30–100 CE), Dio Chrysostom (Musonius’s pupil), Plutarch (ca. 45–after 120 CE), and Favorinus (ca. 85–155 CE). A familiar Stoic emphasis in that tradition is that to be excluded from one’s homeland is no great hardship: as citizens of the universe, exile deprives us not of our true fatherland (patris) but only of our given polis (Musonius Rufus, That Exile Is Not an Evil p. 42.1–6 Hense). Elsewhere, Seneca himself urges: “Live in this belief: I am born for no one corner of the universe; this whole world is my country” (Letters 28.4).
Seneca duly invokes this familiar emphasis in his Consolation for Helvia: “Wherever we go, the two finest attributes will go with us—universal nature and individual virtue” (8.2). He builds on this core point, however, to analyze the exilic condition from a perspective that is less visible in the Greek tradition. If our existence is centered not in localized place but in the universal whole, and if the mind is directed away from the narrowness of petty preoccupation with earthly matters (terrena, 9.2) to engage instead with the universal immensity, the very idea of exile takes on a paradoxical quality: who is more truly the exile, one banished from the localized state, or one alienated from, or blind to, the higher claims of cosmic citizenship? On this figurative approach, Seneca’s exile as represented in this Consolation marks a homecoming of sorts. In concluding the treatise with a rapturous vision of his mind soaring from ground level and ascending unfettered to the celestial heights, where it finally luxuriates in “the most beautiful sight of things divine” (20.2), Seneca truly arrives: far from merely ending on a climactic note of good cheer to console Helvia, his flight of mind amounts to a journey from exile, and from all the everyday involvements and distractions that he associates with our alienation from the cosmic viewpoint. Already, the sage who keeps his distance from the crowd and from the dubious attractions of external goods (cf. 5.1) is a figurative exile from everyday values, while the masses are themselves estranged from what Seneca portrays as the favorable conditions of our birth (“We are born in circumstances that would be favorable if we didn’t abandon them,” 5.1). The gluttons who crave ever more exotic foodstuffs from distant parts of the world (10.2–11) give extreme expression to this estrangement, hopelessly alienated as they are from the simple life in accordance with nature. The endemic moral corruption of Rome in the present alienates it, Seneca asserts, from the standards of Rome past (cf. 12.5–7); in comparison with what he further portrays as the vices to which Roman womanhood routinely succumbs in his day (16.3–5), Helvia is truly an exile of sorts from contemporary degradation, and more at home in the company of such republican role models as Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi (16.6).
In these various ways Seneca on Corsica offers in his Consolation to Helvia a wide-ranging literary-philosophical disquisition on many different modes, versions, and connotations of exilic alienation; his theme is not so much his own exile as the exilic condition itself, both literal and figurative. Helvia may find ample comfort for her loss of Seneca to exile in the support of her family (18.2–19.7), but philosophy beckons as the source of greatest solace (17.3–5). Yet the self-reliance that Seneca inculcates in her by detaching her from vulnerability to external circumstance suggestively extends the exilic theme in yet another, fortifying direction, with self-retreat figured as inner exile; and the protections offered by Helvia’s mode of self-reliance may extend, in turn, the relevance of Seneca’s message from the particular case of his mother’s grief to his prescription of a way of life, a way of coping, for any reader in parallel distress. In this respect, his Consolation to Helvia constitutes no special, intimately personal case within his philosophical oeuvre but amounts to another stage or aspect of the therapeutic program that his prose corpus cumulatively represents.
As part of his critique of the nature of exile itself, moreover, Rome herself is characterized as a city crowded with exiles, and as a place whose identity is founded on displacement: Rome too is explicitly implicated in Seneca’s roving survey in chapter 7 of peoples displaced over the ages, and cities founded, by colonization or migration. Roman power, however unprecedented, ubiquitous, and influential in one way (cf. 7.7: “Wherever the Romans have conquered, there they settle”), is “normalized” by its integration within this larger pattern of human experience—an aspect of the Consolation that gently interrogates the underpinnings of Roman self-assurance by suggesting that “being Roman” is no fixed commodity but an ongoing process, or a state of negotiation, in a fluid world. The cosmic viewpoint thus functions not just to bring alleviation from trauma at the personal level; by locating Roman power within a macrovision of human development and transition across time, Seneca also asserts a form of detachment from the very authority that exiled him in the first place. The individual may be controlled and sentenced by imperial edict, but Seneca rises above such confinement and vulnerability in Claudius’s Rome in the 40s BCE by exercising primary citizenship in the cosmic whole. The paradoxical end result is that the exile is empowered by his punishment, liberated as he is by cosmic release in the Consolation to Helvia to view afresh Rome’s place in the world.
Further Reading
Fantham, E. 2007. “Dialogues of Displacement: Seneca’s Consolations to Helvia and Polybius.” In Writing Exile: The Discourse of Displacement in Greco-Roman Antiquity and Beyond, ed. J. F. Gaertner (Leiden: Brill), 173–92.
Williams, G. D. 2006. “States of Exile, States of Mind: Paradox and Reversal in Seneca’s Consolatio ad Heluiam.” In Seeing Seneca Whole: Perspectives on Philosophy, Poetry and Politics, ed. K. Volk and G. D. Williams, Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition (Leiden: Brill), 147–73.