JAMES KER
Title and Topic
The work known as To Lucilius on Providence is referred to in the earliest surviving manuscript with the longer title Why Some Misfortunes Happen to Good Men, though Providence Exists. This title derives from a question which, we are told in the work’s opening lines, Lucilius has recently asked Seneca.1 As Seneca goes on to explain (1.1), his friend’s question would most properly have been answered in a larger work on providence—something he is not writing here, and evidently never wrote. Had he done so, Seneca would no doubt have given his own cast to the doctrines we read about in Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods, our fullest surviving source for Stoic theology and providentialism—and for the contrasting Epicurean view that the world is the product of chance and that the gods have no interest in human affairs.2
Seneca effectively announces that the work he is writing—which is, in fact, the shortest of the Essays that survive complete3—belongs within the more circumscribed area that has become known, since Leibniz, as the “theodicy” question: how the existence of bad things (or, in post-Christian terms, “evil”) in the world can be reconciled with the world’s having been designed by a divinity. Its focus on theology and theodicy helps to explain why On Providence is among the most frequently quoted Senecan texts in early Christian literature, even if Christian notions of original sin, eternal life, and divine judgment transfigured the debate.4
But there is little trace here of the kinds of explanation that we know Chrysippus and other Stoics offered for the existence of bad things, for example as necessary opposites of goods or minor byproducts of a major good.5 Seneca alludes to such topics elsewhere in his writings, pointing out in one discussion of the gods, for example, that they are “sometimes neglectful of individuals” (Letters 95.50). In the present work, Seneca does not entertain Lucilius’s complaint at all regarding bad things happening to good men, but argues, paradoxically, that the “bad things” not only are not bad but actually are among providence’s most beautiful provisions. The problem, like so many other problems addressed by the Stoics, is reduced to a matter of correctly recognizing which things are valuable and which are not.
The work’s focus is narrowed further by another term of Lucilius’s question: the focus on “good men” (boni uiri). The focus on good men is motivated, from Lucilius’s point of view, by the fact that they are the ones to whom bad things ought least to happen, so that the question seemingly exposes one of providentialism’s most flagrant self-contradictions. But for Seneca the question becomes an opportunity to explain how the matching of good men with bad fortune is something of ethical and epistemological benefit, both for those who endure it and for those who look on.
Seneca, Lucilius, Audience
On Providence is the first item in Seneca’s collection of Essays (Dialogi). But the Essays are not arranged chronologically (e.g., the early work Consolation to Helvia is positioned last), and when we turn to the question of where On Providence fits in Seneca’s life, it is no easier to date it precisely than it is to date most of Seneca’s tragedies.6 A number of circumstantial factors make it less likely that it belongs to Seneca’s exile years (as a few scholars have believed) or to his time in Nero’s court than to the last years of his life, following his retirement in 62 BCE.
The clearest indication of a later date for the work is its dedication to Lucilius, the friend to whom Seneca also addresses the two major works of his last years, Natural Questions and Letters to Lucilius.7 On Providence casts Lucilius in the role of an ingrate who complains about the world, when in fact the problem lies in his own mistaken values. This gives Seneca a chance to promise his friend: “I will reconcile you with the gods” (1.5; cf. Letters 74.10–11). Being portrayed in this way, Lucilius stands in for any reader who fails to appreciate the beneficial potential of misfortune. Indeed, Seneca’s main interlocutor becomes more anonymous as the work proceeds, and occasionally a plural “you” is addressed (e.g., 4.6).
The work has an obvious relevance to Seneca and his aristocratic contemporaries in light of their vulnerability to sudden changes of fortune in Julio-Claudian Rome, and especially given how easy it was to view the Roman Empire as coextensive with the world and the emperor as god. The work’s message: endure calamity, and do so in an aggressively dismissive way, not only by refusing to value calamity as bad but by turning it to good or even seeking it out. Yet apart from two quotations from his contemporary Demetrius the Cynic (3.3, 5.5), Seneca discusses misfortune almost exclusively via Cato and other republican heroes, together with Socrates. This wide-ranging inventory of the different forms that calamity can take makes the work a generalized and versatile form of preemptive consolation.
The Structure of the Discussion
On Providence has been described as less like a line and more like a spiral.8 The work implicitly makes good on its promise to be a kind of defense speech, comprising what scholars have identified as an exordium (1), narration (2), division of topics (3.1), argument (3.2–6.2), and peroration (6.3–9). But Seneca frequently surprises the reader with unexpected turns. For example, after announcing in the opening lines that he will not be writing a work on providence (1.1), he immediately embarks on a sublime and vivid description of law-like movements in nature (1.2–4) to appeal to the reader’s sense of wonder and to set the scene for an earthly spectacle.
Seneca characteristically refrains from outlining his argument until he has introduced some general ideas that are basic to the work (1.5–2.12), above all the gods’ use of tough love, and their “impulse to watch great men wrestling with some calamity” (2.7). His main example, Cato’s suicide at Utica in 46 BCE, belongs in the long tradition of evaluating the merits and significance of Cato’s suicide. Here he emphasizes Cato’s acquisition of “freedom” (libertas) and the gods’ role as spectators (2.10). In the latter, Seneca would seem to be exploiting the strongly visual aspect of Latin prouidentia (lit., “foresight, looking forth”) that is absent in Greek pronoia (“forethought”).
Seneca’s formal outline (3.1) serves as a clear guide, at least initially. He says he will be seeking to show “how things that seem bad are not,” and sure enough, Lucilius’s question and Seneca’s response are repeated throughout the work in ever-changing language. The outline also breaks the topic up into separate points, which do indeed define the work’s main structure (approximately 3.2–4.16, 5.1–2, 5.3–6, 5.7–11, 6.1–2), though the transitions become less perceptible as the work unfolds.
Other rhythms and units add a sense of continuity. The analogies from parenting, from athletics, from military discipline, and from spectacle, all introduced in the preliminary discussion in chapters 1 and 2, recur and are viewed from different angles. The typology of misfortunes is embodied in the recurring catalogue of moral exemplars, especially in the crescendo of repeated rhetorical questions (3.5–14) in which each individual is juxtaposed to an example of despicable behavior in the same general sphere of activity or using the same body part.
Seneca also introduces different speakers to the text in a series of evenly spaced monologues. In addition to Cato, Demetrius, and the interlocutor, we hear from fortune and nature (3.3, 3.14); and in the work’s final chapters, the fading formal outline is succeeded by two more extensive speeches: one from the Phaethon episode in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (5.10–11), the other in the voice of “god” himself (6.3–9). This final speech constitutes the work’s fullest presentation of the divine, which Seneca has stealthily allowed the reader to glimpse in multiple guises throughout, as nature, fortune, providence, fate, and god (cf. Natural Questions 2.45.2–3). And in the work’s final lines, god catalogues different forms of suffocation corresponding to the four elements of nature (water, air, earth, fire; 6.9), thus returning to the theme of suicide while also recalling the sketch of nature’s orderliness in chapter 1.
Misfortune and Self-Knowledge
At the work’s exact middle point, Seneca represents nature explaining why she made Cato’s life so full of “grievous” things (3.14). Nature’s statement lays bare the most basic lesson of the work: things considered bad, even if they are grievous, are not in fact bad, and nature wants “all” to “know” it. At some moments Seneca seems to allow that misfortunes are genuinely regrettable (5.9, 6.6). Yet good men’s misfortunes are deliberate, sent with a teaching purpose, and the main instructor is god: with the assistance of fortune, god trains good men “to be as good and outstanding as they can be” (2.7) and to become as like to god as is permitted.
Seneca’s notion of “a spectacle worthy to be looked on by god as he inspects his own creation” was to become a central motif in the discourse of Christian martyrology, and it is probably Seneca’s most tangible influence on the Christian tradition (2.9 with note). Seneca’s god, however, is in one sense inferior to humans: as god himself explains in the work’s final chapter, god “is beyond suffering bad things, you are above suffering them” (6.6; emphases added). So when god devises misfortunes to test humans (4.8), he has something new to learn from how they rise above their suffering.
Seneca places equal emphasis on the potential for human beings themselves to learn through misfortune (4.3). The attempt at self-knowledge (notitia sui, 4.3), even if we go down in flames like Phaethon (5.11), demonstrates a man’s willingness to obey god and to “offer himself up to fate” (5.8). This, ultimately, is the sense in which calamity is “in the interest of the very men to whom” it happens (pro ipsis, 3.2): it is an opportunity to act, and especially to think, in a way that agrees with the nature of the world. But in explaining the sense in which calamity is “in the interest of everyone” (pro uniuersis), Seneca only alludes briefly to the idea that good men or women in Roman public life can benefit others through their toil (5.3–4): his emphasis is on how good men give a lesson (documentum, 3.9, 4.12), being “born to serve as an example” (nati . . . in exemplar, 6.3).
Seneca presents this heuristic potential of misfortune as part of the teleology of nature. When he compares the courageous man to the sea which colors all the water that enters it (2.1), the simile is more than a simile: it locates human rationality and virtue within a broader spectacle of nature where, as demonstrated in Natural Questions, many lessons of moral import can be learned—as in the Roman amphitheater or in animal sacrifice (1.8, 6.8). Seneca makes his words complicit in this natural teleology, demonstrating how grievous events can be converted into, or revealed as, an opportunity for the highest form of self-knowledge—the knowledge gained by Cato and Phaethon alike.
Selected Reading
Dragona-Monachou, Myrto. 1994. “Divine Providence in the Philosophy of the Empire.” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt 2.36.7:4417–90.
Setaioli, Aldo. 2007. “Seneca and the Divine: Stoic Tradition and Personal Developments.” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 13:333–68.