JAMES KER
Title, Topic, and Structure
Somewhat surprisingly, On the Constancy of the Wise Person (De Constantia Sapientis) does not contain a single instance of the Latin word constantia. The fact is, at some point in the tradition this short title became a more convenient way to refer to the work than the longer, original title, which asserts a famous Stoic paradox: That the wise person receives neither injury nor insult. As Seneca tells Serenus, his friend to whom the work is addressed, the Stoics stand out from the other schools of philosophy in alone pursuing “a man’s path” (1.1–2). This challenges Serenus (the path is steep and direct), but it also encourages him (the slope will become easier), and it adumbrates the work’s central topic: the path “rises . . . beyond the reach of any missile” (1.1).
We soon learn that Serenus has recently expressed outrage that Cato the Younger was verbally abused and spat on (1.3–3.2). Seneca’s response at the time, he recalls, was to reassure Serenus that “the wise person is safe and sound” (2.3). The present dialogue is launched from that dispute: Seneca now presents a skeptical and impassioned speech of Serenus (3.1–2) and responds to it with an initial clarification of what is meant by “not receiving” an injury or insult (3.3–4.3).
The exordium and narration are followed by a division of topics (5.1–2) in which Seneca bifurcates his theme into “injury” (iniuria) and “insult” (contumelia), and explains that he will deal with each separately. As it happens, his separate treatment goes somewhat against the grain of the Roman law of delicts, in which the actio iniuriarum since the second century BCE had encompassed not only physical injury (the primary sense of iniuria in early Roman law such as the Twelve Tables) but also defamatory actions and words.1 Seneca’s goal, however, is not to scrutinize Roman law but to demonstrate how, for each of the distinct ways in which the reader might understand a person’s being intentionally harmed, the wise person remains untouchable. Distinguishing injury and insult at 5.1 allows him to explore the full spectrum more gradually: he uses the category of injury to focus primarily on instances comparable to physical assault, that are objective and in clear violation of laws, whereas he uses the category of insult to focus on instances in which harm is inflicted by words, involves interpretation, and may lie beyond the laws (i.e., even if we know that clear instances of defamation lay firmly within the actio iniuriarum). This is also Seneca’s way of homing in on the recipient’s interpretation as the real determinant of whether harm has been inflicted at all.
In the discussion of “injury”2 that fills out the work’s first half (5.3–9.5), Seneca directly addresses the question of how someone can do an injury, yet the wise person not receive it—something which, as Serenus’s skeptical reaction already suggests, sounds just as counterintuitive in Latin as it does in English. One broader supposition helps us to make sense of this: injury relates to the body and other external things that are irrelevant to the security of the mind. This idea is reinforced by clusters of syllogistic argument (5.3–5, 7.2, 8.1–2), all of which seek to separate the agent’s intention from the action’s outcome.3 Intentionality, it turns out, can be actively ignored by the wise person, who brushes off wrongdoers’ deeds as if they were chance events of no importance (8.2–9.1). The discussion is brought to life with the historical example of Stilpo of Megara (ca. 360–280 BCE; 5.6–6.7), who shows what it means to distinguish between a “well-founded mind” (6.4) and the destroyed foundations of his city belonging to fortune.
The second topic, insult, is dealt with more extensively than the first (10.1–18.6). Insult is classified in one sense as a lesser, or less real, form of injury (10.2, 16.3). Yet insult also receives sensitive treatment in its own right, with Seneca focusing on the more ambiguous matter of interpreting people’s words.4 The psychological profile of what makes a person likely to perceive insult (10.3) is the opposite of the wise person’s magnificence of mind (11.1), and the analysis of “insult” (contumelia) as deriving from “scorn” (contemptus) introduces considerations of the two parties’ relative status. This allows Seneca to dismiss the different causes of supposed insults typically received by elite Roman men from their social inferiors (e.g., 10.2), except that real superiority is not social but moral: someone’s status as, say, king of the Medes (13.3) is irrelevant in the eyes of the wise person. The extended example with which the discussion of insult concludes centers on the assassination of Gaius Caesar (Caligula), both an avid user of insults and a hostile interpreter of them (18.1–5).
In his peroration (19.1–4) Seneca recasts the topic: what he has really been talking about is mental freedom (libertas), and he suggests a replacement of political freedom with an interiorized, personal autonomy grounded in reason. Indeed, Seneca now hints to his contemporary readers, living in the conditions of the principate, that “those who are not perfect . . . should be put on alert that they themselves must live among injuries and insults” (19.3). In the work’s closing sentence also, he hints at a replacement of one res publica with another: of traditional political freedom with the cosmopolitan ideal of a community of reason shared in by human beings and gods alike.
Constancy and Wise Men
Despite what was said above, the later-added title, On the Constancy of the Wise Person, helps us to perceive a major thread of the work. Seneca elsewhere uses constantia to characterize consistency of behavior from one day to the next or perseverance in what one has proposed or judged, without giving ground (e.g., Letters 55.5, 92.3, 120.19–22).5 In the present work he places particular emphasis on two characteristics of the wise person that are elsewhere closely linked with constantia and with its corresponding Greek term, karteria. One is patientia, “endurance” (2.2), which in the case of the wise person is closely connected to another characteristic: magnitudo animi or magnanimitas (Greek megalopsuchia), “magnificence of mind” (11.1).6 These notions are elaborated by the work’s two main patterns of imagery. One is hardness (the Latin terms include duritia and robur), which captures both the wise person’s immunity and the dynamic weakening effect the wise person has on those who attack him. The second is vertical elevation, which brings together such distinct spatial metaphors as ascending to virtue, rising above fortune, being out of the reach of missiles, contemplating others from a tranquil vantage point, and proximity to god; the theme also tends to trigger a shift to a “sublime” style in Seneca’s prose (e.g., at 9.4).
This portrait of inviolability is aided further by Seneca’s focus on the wise person as such: the work is not about constancy in the abstract but is “a complex meditation on the nature of the Stoic sapiens,”7 both as instantiated in Cato and Stilpo and as seen against the background of popular paradigms (Hercules, Ulysses, 2.1) and abstract philosophical definitions. Although Seneca makes concessions to his reader, focusing at one point not on the sapiens uir (“wise man,” 16.3) but on the consipiens (“man in his right mind”), the work’s last sentence serves as a reminder of the didactic possibilities that come from knowing of a wise person’s having existed at some point in time.8
Seneca’s picture of the Stoic “wise person” (sapiens) in this work is decidedly masculine. This is signaled in the first sentence, with its gendered distinction between Stoics (for whom uirtus, originally “manliness,” is the highest good) and other philosophers (1.1). It is worth pointing out, however, that the emphasis on uir is also about being an adult. In a possible allusion to Lucretius (On the Nature of Things 2.55–58) or to Plato’s cave, Seneca describes children frightened by shadows and other illusory objects as a comparison for how people are led by the mere “thought of pain” to perceive insults as injuries (5.2). This enhances our understanding of the “man’s path” of Stoic philosophy as a progression to the adulthood defined by perfection of our rational nature.
Serenus and the Paradoxes of Roman Public Life
In seeking to offer its addressee, Serenus, a path toward enduring the injuries and insults of everyday high society, this work already has a lot in common with On Anger, addressed to Novatus. Both works argue against revenge and place particular emphasis on magnificence of mind, and both also draw on the reign of Caligula to illustrate the extremes of supposed injury and equally the advantages of restraint.
Annaeus Serenus was a friend of Seneca (or, as his family name may suggest, a relative) whose position during the reign of Nero, if not also in prior emperors’ reigns, clearly shadowed Seneca’s own. Most scholars have wanted to date On the Constancy of the Wise Person to the mid- to late 50s, and prior to On Tranquility of Mind, which is also addressed to Serenus; prior also to On Leisure, if that is addressed to him too.9 Their reasoning is that in On Tranquility of Mind and On Leisure, Serenus speaks for the most part from the position of a Stoic, whereas in the present work he is referred to as suspicious of Stoic claims (3.2), even if he should probably not be seen as one of the Epicureans to whom Seneca refers quite critically later in the work (15.4–16.1). The different portrayals of Serenus certainly invite us to speculate that he converted to Stoicism—the very thing he jokes about here (3.2).
Serenus’s indignation is prompted in large measure by the Stoics’ use of paradoxes, which he catalogs, with counterexamples, at 3.1. In fact, most of the paradoxes mentioned by Serenus here are attested elsewhere in the Stoic tradition,10 including the one that is central to the present work. Plutarch, for example, alludes to Chrysippus’s claim “that the wise person is not wronged (adikeisthai).”11
What annoys Serenus is that the Stoic paradoxes are often falsified by reality: Cato was abused and spat on, despite being wise. Seneca’s response is not to pretend that the climate of the Late Republic was anything other than poisonous, and indeed, the Caligula example at the end of the work, in which the ambiance of the popular assembly (contio) has migrated from the forum into the imperial dining room (18.2), shows new dishes of indignity being served up. His response, rather, is to clarify: his analytical arguments, as well as his forays into satire, are intended to throw into relief the misguided values and attachments of Roman social life. In the process of revealing the central paradox to be no paradox at all, Seneca seeks in turn to reveal the far worse and more genuine contradictions (if not technically paradoxes) in how people value what has no value.
The Stilpo and Caligula examples help in particular to counter Serenus’s resorting to history to prove that the paradoxes are wrong. Though Stilpo himself belonged to his own, Megarian school, and his actions might be taken more generally as an illustration of “self-sufficiency” (autarkeia), his example here (5.6–6.7) embodies Stoic paradox by having the conquered come out on top as the conqueror.
The Caligula example (18.1–5) offers its own kind of vindication that is grounded in the syntax of Julio-Claudian history.12 Seneca’s argument throughout the work would lead us to expect that when Caligula insulted Valerius Asiaticus, simply Valerius’s magnificence of mind would allow him to rise above the insult and live in tranquility (18.2). Yet surprisingly Seneca does not dwell much on Valerius’s response, except for giving the impression that Valerius let the insult go. He proceeds instead with retelling history and juxtaposing the insult to Valerius to the assassination of Caligula led by Chaerea (18.3) in such a way that it appears that one is the punishment for the other.13 This turns the story into an illustration of the claim that the perpetrator of an injury “sooner or later will meet his match: someone will emerge to avenge you also” (17.4; cf. 18.5). But Seneca is not explicitly endorsing revenge: as he soon emphasizes, Caligula’s assassination was self-inflicted, stemming from his own pathological tendency to see insults where there were none, and to react to these with cruelty (18.4–5). So although the Caligula example begins as an illustration of how the restrained man (Valerius) will be vindicated, it serves equally as an illustration of how the unrestrained man (Caligula) who allows himself to be offended by what people say will meet with a self-inflicted punishment—thereby reinforcing a central lesson of the work. It is always easy to suspect that Seneca himself savored Caligula’s assassination as vindication for himself and others who were mistreated by Caligula but showed restraint; he does this here, however, in a way that allows him to remain opposed to the act of revenge while finding some satisfaction in its outcome.14