Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

Philosophical norms and political attachments: Cicero and Seneca 437
First, if the work were truly Stoic, a Senecan letter for example, the
attack on Claudius would simply be shorter. We would get a good sense
of Claudius and his badness, as an exemplum, as Seneca uses Caligula in
de Ira, but then we would move away to more general moral sentiments.
Instead, Claudius is the protagonist of the work, and the story of the
work is the surprise of his rejection and undoing. The text’s attention
to Claudius is obsessive, fascinated, and revolted, sentiments that are understandable
in a speaker and audience who have lived with this man for
many miserable years, their most cherished projects being impeded by
his foolishness, their relatives killed by his unjust capriciousness, their
whole lives laid waste by his cruelty and stupidity. Seneca of course
was such a person, enduring a long exile in Corsica on Claudius’ account.
What makes the work still funny, in this era so far from its original
moment, is that we all know what it is to feel that kind of intense
and obsessive hatred for someone in power over our lives, and to rejoice
and damn him in fantasy when he has died (or resigned, or finished his
term in office, as the case may be). Such feelings of hatred and release do
naturally express themselves in an obsessive focus on the physical traits
of the person hated, his manner of speaking, his gait, his lack of verbal
finesse. And the satisfaction of damning such a person to a loathsome
task for all eternity is very great when one has these sentiments. What
is clear, however, is that the sentiments elicited by this obsessive focusing
are as non-Stoic as Cicero’s about Antony. The text’s constructed
audience consists of people who care intensely about the political,
who hate, who feel disgust, who grieve for the murdered, hope for a
better time to come.
Second, the speech of Augustus (Apoc. 10 f.), clearly the moral center
of the work, is serious, dignified, admirable. And what is Augustus’
mental state? He is very angry, he says, so angry that he can hardly contain
himself. He also says that he feels shame before the office he invented,
when he sees it filled as Claudius has filled it. The work portrays the
anger and shame as appropriate reactions to Claudius’ murders of Augustus’
kin. And Seneca is in here too somewhere: for one of the
two murdered Julias was the Julia with whom he was accused of committing
adultery, and for whose sake he almost lost his life. Whether
there was truth in the story or not, the public would assume that the
author of the work is not indifferent to her fate. Augustus is angry,
he says, because how could one not be angry at the murder of so
many kin, the disregard of the rule of law, the combination of foolishness
and cruelty in the entire reign? The work accepts ordinary valua-