ELAINE FANTHAM
Addressee and Circumstances
Seneca’s On Tranquility of Mind is unique among his Dialogues, because it presents a genuine exchange between its addressee, Annaeus Serenus, and Seneca. Serenus, most probably a Spanish kinsman, seems to have come to Rome under Seneca’s patronage; he is also the addressee of On the Constancy of the Wise Person and probably of the truncated dialogue On Leisure, but only this dialogue gives him a voice, which characterizes a young man’s crisis of identity.
The opening chapter raises the question whether the dialogue is supposed to be a letter or a dramatized interview. As an interview it could be modeled on, for example, the master-pupil interviews of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations; as a letter, it could act as a forerunner to Seneca’s one-sided correspondence with Lucilius from the years 63–64 BCE. While the confessional opening chapter can be read as based on genuine requests for help from Serenus, Seneca has most likely adjusted the statements he puts in Serenus’s mouth to include issues he himself wants to discuss in his “reply.” There are features in this first chapter, such as the preoccupation with senatorial magistracies and with the artistry of writing and speaking, that are more relevant to Seneca’s own life than to his young consultant.1 In fact, 1.13–14, with its positive emphasis on the need for grandeur so that the mind can soar, although neatly matched at the close by 17.11, invokes a standard far from, even opposed to, the goal of tranquility.
I read the dialogue as an oral consultation with Serenus as Seneca’s patient: his appeal is couched in terms of sickness, but that of the mind;2 and the situation closely resembles therapy. Serenus has endorsed Stoic principles for a virtuous life, and observed them in his own simple life-style: but he is susceptible to the material values and display of his associates, and is struggling to deny assent to their values. His problem, then, is an inner conflict between instinctive and learned values.
The first sentence focuses on self-examination; the expressions of self-discontent and corresponding attempts at self-adjustment will articulate both Serenus’s speech and the movement of Seneca’s reply from 2.7 and 9 to 14.2, and in the last section, 17.1. This concern with interiority is particularly strong in the systematic therapy of Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius. But although On Tranquility is a therapeutic response to Serenus’s explicit recognition of his own mental dis-ease (even using the medical terms of actual disease) and uses cognitive interrogation as part of its proposed cure, neither it nor Stoic approaches to moral issues conform to modern methods of psychotherapy.3
Where do we place this dialogue within Serenus’s known career? He held a responsible administrative position as prefect of the corps of Vigiles (combined watch and police), probably from 54, when the post was vacated, until Tigellinus took over in 62; but nothing in On Tranquility implies that Serenus was already holding this position. His appointment would reflect Seneca’s influence—still strong at that time—with Agrippina and Nero. Allusions to the difficulty of participating in political life, especially in 3.2–3, are relatively low-key, but suggest the dialogue was composed quite early in Nero’s principate.4 We know only that in Letters to Lucilius 63 (probably written in 63) Seneca looks back to his own grief and distress at the sudden death of Serenus (from accidental poisoning at an official banquet): since Seneca had no children, he may have given Serenus the love appropriate to the son he never had.
Structure
Several attempts have been made to determine the structure of the dialogue as a whole, based either on the subject matter of successive chapters or on fitting it, like Procrustes, to a rhetorical pattern. But the rhetorical model was designed for courtroom oratory; it does not fit philosophical protreptic.
CHAPTER 1
Serenus’s opening speech is a key to the concepts that control the sixteen chapters of Seneca’s reply: this address, almost a confession, has been designed to introduce nearly all the leitmotifs that we can trace in the analysis that follows. Two metaphors are introduced as analogies that will recur throughout the dialogue; first, that of mental sickness (1.2 and 1.4), and second, the analogy of life to a voyage, together with the image of mental peace as calm at sea (1.17; cf. 1.11). Seneca’s reply opens by recalling both these analogies in his references to convalescing patients and to the sea’s residual disturbance after a storm. Throughout the dialogue conventional allusions to sea and storm are meant to remind the reader of the original maritime context of tranquillitas (“a sea-calm after storm”).
Serenus begins with self-scrutiny: after describing his discontent in 1.9, he anticipates Seneca’s prescription, moving in 1.11 to develop the idea of focusing within himself, which is often called Senecan interiority: “Let my mind keep to itself, tend to itself, and do nothing foreign to its needs.” This leitmotif will be taken up pointedly by Seneca’s diagnosis in 2.7: “There are countless characteristics of this vice but only one outcome, to be dissatisfied with oneself,” recalled in 2.11. The many reflexive idioms in this dialogue will concentrate, toward the end of Seneca’s survey of obstacles to calmness, in this admonition concerning the mind (14.2): “Let it have faith in itself, rejoice in itself, respect its own qualities, and as far as possible withdraw from what is alien to it.”
Serenus is represented as a Stoic student, or proficiens, halfway toward control of his own spirit: he has learned Stoic standards of indifference to exterior goods sufficiently to apply them in his domestic frugality, but not sufficiently to escape depression at other men’s luxury. He calls his trouble the weakness of purpose of a good mind (1.15). He has learned enough to regret but not to resist his own wavering (1.9); but it will be left to Seneca to diagnose this regret as “self-disgust” (fastidium: 2.5; cf. 2.10, 2.15, 3.1).5 Serenus describes but cannot name the condition that Seneca identifies in his response. Almost cured of his worldly desires and hopes (hopes are even more harmful than fears), the student still suffers from inner conflict. His ranking of “goods” inverts that of the worldly man; but while based on Stoic values, it is still insecure and tends to aversion to the outside world.
CHAPTER 2
Seneca’s reply offers a new, deeper sense of tranquillitas (2.3), identified as the equivalent of euthumia in Greek. Serenus first uses the word (1.11) without scrutiny as freedom from exterior disturbance, but Seneca interiorizes it, defining it as “stable balance of the soul,” and refers to Democritus’s treatise Euthumia (2.3).6 Three citations (Dialogues 1.6.2, 4.10.5, and 7.27.5) mention Democritus’s indifference to money; Seneca comes closest to On Tranquility 2.3 at On Anger 5.6.3: “We will benefit from the salutary rule of Democritus showing how to achieve tranquility if we do not do many things or things beyond our powers, either privately or publicly.”
CHAPTERS 3–5
The best choice for life would be active involvement in public affairs and service as a citizen to fellow citizens, collectively and individually. For the elite these would have been among Stoic kathekonta, personal duties, or obligations determined by their status, translated by Cicero as officia. One metaphor, that of the soldier on military duty, becomes prominent in chapter 3, developing from a complex analogy between different levels of civil and military service (3.5). This is Roman: no Hellenistic Greek living in the age of mercenaries would have implied the superiority of military to civic duty.
CHAPTER 6
Chapter 6 offers a statement of themes: “We ought to examine ourselves first of all, then the business we are going to tackle, then the people for whom and with whom we will take it on” (6.1). This is true to Democritus, but marks a program that Seneca only partially follows.
CHAPTERS 8–11
Chapters 8 through 11 treat the external assets of wealth and property, which can distract the man striving for tranquility and virtue. But here Seneca brings into play two concepts that govern human circumstance: nature, identified in Stoic thinking with god and providence, and fortune, held responsible for all bad experiences, the attacks of which on the good man dominate these chapters.
CHAPTERS 12–16
Chapters 12 through 16 move from precepts to examples of reversals of fortune, then to models of virtue in face of death (Julius Canus under the tyrannical Caligula at 14.4–9, and Cato of Utica, glorified beyond even Hercules and Regulus, at 16.4).
CHAPTER 17
The final chapter 17 is more upbeat. After new warnings against pretense and self-scrutiny distorted by undue concern with outsiders’ values, 17.3 advises protection of one’s integrity by withdrawal, relaxation, and the discreet use of drinking (17.9–11) to stimulate the mind before closing with the short coda of good wishes to Serenus.
Acknowledgments
I am most grateful to Professor Doug Hutchinson and six students from his course on Seneca for compiling a bibliographical survey for me to use in the fuller discussion of On Tranquility that I hope to publish elsewhere. I would also like to thank James Ker for advice and access to his own introductions in this series.