GARETH D. WILLIAMS
The Paulinus addressed in this treatise is in all likelihood Pompeius Paulinus, a knight of Arelate (modern Arles) who, as praefectus annonae probably from 48 to 55 CE, was responsible for overseeing the Roman grain supply; it is now generally accepted that he was also the father of Pompeia Paulina, Seneca’s wife (cf. Tacitus Annals 15.60.4). Given Seneca’s direct injunction to Paulinus to retire from his important position (18.1–19.2), the work is apparently datable to between 48 and 55—a period in which Seneca was himself fully engaged in public life and court politics after his return from exile in 49. If this dating is accepted, two problems immediately present themselves: first, for all the attractive high-mindedness of Seneca’s injunction to Paulinus to retire from his important business of state, just how practical an option can philosophical withdrawal be, not just for Paulinus (let alone for the state he serves) but also for Seneca’s wider readership, ancient and modern, amid all life’s responsibilities and challenges? Second, how can Seneca escape the charge of hypocrisy for urging Paulinus to retire in the very years when he himself was actively engaged at court?
The sheer provocation of both questions perhaps supplies the best answer to each: Seneca’s exhortation to Paulinus hits home if it causes him (and us) to step back from the unrelenting march of life, to evaluate from a radical, alternative perspective the ordering of priorities in our existence, and so to reflect on how we daily use and allocate time. Real but immaterial, time was classified by the Stoics as one of the four “incorporeals” alongside the “sayable,” void and place. At points in this treatise, however, Seneca portrays time as if it were a material commodity, or a form of property that can be given or taken away, conserved or spent, hoarded or wasted (cf. 3.1, 8.1)—a concretizing technique by which he casts time as a currency with transactional value and in need of careful budgeting. Time thus enters the moral sphere because our (Stoic) inner freedom depends on our mastery over time: hence the positive efficiency that Seneca inculcates by urging that time can be reclaimed from the depredations of others (cf. 2.4–5); by instilling a new discipline based on living “right now” (9.1); and by promoting an intolerance of time wasted through submission to vices (cf. 2.1–2), through procrastination (3.5, 9.1), or through pointless engagement in trivia (12.2–13.9). His brisk style, combining shafts of righteous indignation, diatribic broadside, aphoristic brevity, and cutting wit, itself underscores the urgency of his strictures about the value of time: his intolerant sureness of voice contributes to the essential optimism of a work which insists that there is another way.
The distinction drawn in On Leisure between the localized res publica and its counterpart in the cosmic megalopolis (4.1–2) is paralleled by the contrast drawn in On the Shortness of Life between Paulinus’s onerous duties as praefectus (19.1; cf. 18.4: “Recall that energetic mind of yours . . . from an office that is certainly eminent but is hardly in keeping with the happy life”) and the enlightened pursuits that await him in philosophical retirement (cf. 19.2: “You really ought to leave ground level and turn your mind’s eye to these studies”). The change of perspective urged in 19.1–2 is anticipated by two important movements earlier in the treatise, the first in chapters 1–9. There, his condemnation of time-wasting through misguided preoccupation both comforts and cajoles: it comforts by distancing Paulinus (and, by extension, his readership) from the worst offenders whom he surveys; and yet it cajoles us to take stock of our own lives, and so (for example) to submit ourselves to the chastening audit of time squandered that he directs at an imaginary interlocutor in 3.2–3. The second movement extends from 10.2 to 17.6: despite the transition announced in 10.1 from straightforward denunciation to a more constructive approach (“the preoccupied . . . are to be taught a lesson, not simply given up for lost”), Seneca’s condemnatory tone persists in his survey of time wasted on trivial pursuits in chapters 12–13; but those chapters are themselves offset by his change of direction to focus, in 14.1, on those philosophical devotees who “alone . . . are at leisure” and “alone really live.” In contrast to the preoccupied, prominent among them the ordinary Roman client who breathlessly rushes from one obligation to the next in the daily circuit of obsequiousness (14.3–4), Seneca constructs a higher, figurative mode of clientship to accommodating philosopher-patrons such as Socrates or Carneades, Epicurus or Zeno (14.2, 5). Unlike ordinary clientship, this mode of clientela is paradoxically liberating, freeing the philosopher to live as his own master in full control of all times past, present, and future (cf. 15.5); the liberating effects of such clientela are akin to those of participation in the cosmic megalopolis of On Leisure 4.
From this higher perspective, Paulinus’s status as praefectus annonae, however elevated in one way, resembles in another that of the burdened client of chapter 14; higher service awaits him if he can achieve the crucial “letting go” of everyday limitation and preoccupation. All speculation as to whether Paulinus was actually induced to retire by Seneca’s persuasion is surely beside the point: what matters far more is the provocation that Seneca poses to settled attitudes by addressing a figure of Paulinus’s prominence in so radical a fashion. Even if Seneca himself was in officio at the time of writing, the charge of hypocrisy is arguably a minor matter in comparison with the value of this appeal to vigilance and to the taking back of life. Alternatively, On the Shortness of Life may be viewed not so much as the work of a hypocrite but as an embodiment of its own message: even in the midst of the preoccupied life at court, Seneca exercises via his writing the very self-consciousness about the value of time that his treatise promotes in others.
Further Reading
Griffin, M. T. 1962. “De Brevitate Vitae.” JRS 52:104–13.
. 1976. Seneca: A Philosopher in Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press / Clarendon Press; repr. with postscript, 1992), esp. 317–21, 401–7.
Williams, G. D., ed. 2003. Seneca: “De Otio,” “De Brevitate Vitae” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), esp. 18–25.