Breakfast with Seneca: A Stoic Guide to the Art of Living

PREFACE

MY RELATIONSHIP TO SENECA AND HIS WRITINGS changed once the crisis hit.

I was sitting in my office when an email arrived from a dear friend. I opened it with curiosity, expecting to find something pleasant. But the text screamed out at me. She had written, only moments before, “I just took half a bottle of tranquilizers. I’m sorry for the pain I caused you in your life.”

That was the entire message.

I went cold in disbelief and read it twice just to make sure.

Then, while feeling unspeakable grief, I immediately got into my car, drove over to her place, and took her to the emergency room. She was in the hospital for a couple of days, and then transferred to a psychiatric hospital. Once in the psychiatric hospital, she begged me to help her get out. This was the beginning of her ordeal, and I was essentially the only person around to help her.

Of course, it was an ordeal for me, too. We had been in love. And it literally felt like the bottom had fallen out of my world. Her life could have come to an end. Fortunately, it didn’t. But for me, the raw emotions and despair I was feeling were overwhelming. It felt like my life was ending, too: not physically, but emotionally.

Fortunately, I had a good friend who visited me once a week. I saw a therapist for a while. But most helpfully, I started reading the writings and letters of Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 4 BC–AD 65) each day, as a way to recover my mental and emotional equilibrium. While Seneca had been an interest of mine before this happened, after the crisis his words became a kind of medicine.

Perhaps not by coincidence, some of Seneca’s most famous writings are long messages of consolation, written to specific friends, about how they could overcome their experiences of grief. In any case, it worked. Over time, Seneca’s wise and steady voice helped me to regain the feeling of being a normal human being. It also put me in touch with a profound thinker who possessed a much deeper and more satisfying vision of human life than we are encouraged to hold by society today. I had discovered a wise mentor and companion who offered a steady stream of reliable and practical advice about the human condition, human psychology, and how to live a happy, flourishing life.

What I also discovered in Seneca’s writings is that nothing significant has changed in human nature over the last two thousand years, which made everything he had to say contemporary. Vanity, greed, ambition, pursuit of luxury, and runaway consumerism—aspects of Rome’s elite, decadent society that Seneca described in detail—are all still very much with us.

But countering these negative aspects of human behavior, Seneca teaches his readers how to overcome worry and anxiety; how to live a good life under any conditions; how to live with purpose and cultivate excellence; how to contribute to society; and how to overcome grief and all kinds of obstacles that might (and certainly will) cross our paths.

After that first reading of Seneca, I kept returning to his pages. There’s always something to be reminded of, or something to understand more deeply. Then there’s another dimension to Seneca’s work: he has one of the best writing styles of all times, and encapsulates his thoughts in pithy, epigrammatic lines like: “Our lack of confidence does not result from difficulty; the difficulty comes from lack of confidence.”1 Ralph Waldo Emerson loved to read Seneca too, and even imitated his style.

I FIRST STARTED READING Seneca when I woke up, with a morning coffee.

Then, over a decade ago, I moved overseas to the beautiful city of Sarajevo in southern Europe, where I live with my wife and son. Of course, I brought Seneca along for the adventure, and once settled here, I developed a new habit. After working in the morning, I’d stroll down the hill and read Seneca during lunch, next to some ancient Roman inscriptions housed in a local museum.

Now, when possible, on my perfect kind of morning, I’ll go out and have breakfast with Seneca—hence the title of this book. After dropping my son at school and working out in the gym, I pick up a filter coffee with milk and settle down at a table at Hotel Central, a magnificent building from Austro-Hungarian times. There I pull out an e-reader with Seneca’s complete letters and his other writings, and order an omelet. That’s my favorite morning ritual. No one has any idea what I’m reading, let alone that I’m most often reading the same author, but I can usually get through one or two letters before heading home.

SENECA STRESSED HOW PHILOSOPHY and friendship should go together. As he wrote, “The first promise of real philosophy is a feeling of fellowship, sympathy, and community with others.”2 Because Seneca’s principal works are letters, and essays written for specific Roman friends in an intimate and conversational style, a spirit of friendship permeates his writings.

Seneca believed that real philosophy is a joint undertaking—it’s not something we do alone, but a journey we undertake with others. That’s why he wrote the letters in the first place. But this idea goes back at least to Socrates, for whom philosophy and dialogue were a shared journey, a collaboration between friends.

Of course, I’m not talking about what philosophy has become in the modern academic world, which is something quite different. But philosophy in ancient times was closely allied with friendship. (See chapter 1, “The Lost Art of Friendship.”) If it were possible to restore that connection today, it would be a happy development.

It’s easy for modern readers to feel friendship with Seneca also, due to the details of his personal life that he shares in some of his letters. While the letters themselves, written during the last two or three years of his life, are devoted to practical philosophy and what it means to live a good life, Seneca confided many personal details to his friend Lucilius: what it’s like to be old, details about his travels and other annoyances, how he almost died from an asthma attack, and the crazy behavior of people in Roman society. (Seneca, who had lived among the wealthiest and most powerful people in Rome, was a chief adviser to the emperor Nero, so he saw every kind of bad behavior, including political assassinations.)

DESPITE THE VERY HIGH level of interest in Stoicism today, no one has written a book explaining Seneca’s teachings for the general reader, even though he’s been called “the most compelling and elegant of the Stoic writers.”3 I hope this book will fill that void, and provide a bird’s-eye view of his thinking. (Seneca is very consistent in his thinking, but his ideas about specific topics are scattered across hundreds of pages.)

This book might satisfy the entire curiosity of some readers about Seneca’s philosophy. But for those who wish to continue on to Seneca’s actual writings, or to host their own breakfasts with Seneca, may this guide serve as a helpful companion on that quest.

—David Fideler