Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

James Romm. Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero. New York: Knopf, 2014. 336 pp. Hardcover $27.95.

Reviewed by Shadi Bartsch

11 November 2014

Does holding high ideals make you behave any better?  Recent scholarship in ethics and psychology has surprisingly suggested that the answer is no.  In a series of studies, Eric Schwitzgebel and Joshua Rust have argued that there is “a general tendency for ethicists to embrace more stringent moral views overall” than the other academic groups they studied, but not to engage in behavior that was any more ethical.[1] Schwitzgebel and Rust focus on scholars rather than saints, but if we looked beyond their specific observations, we might notice that—historically speaking—we demand that just the opposite be true of our great ethical models.  Of course the truth value of the exemplary biographies of Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, and Jesus, to name just a few, is unascertainable, but such accounts seem prerequisite to the success of their teachings.  Even the recent discovery of Paul de Man’s tawdry existence as an anti-Semitic con man[2] has disturbed many of the followers of his critical theory, and he was no ascetic preacher of love for one’s neighbor. Loosely speaking, hagiographical treatment and ethical systems have to go hand in hand, or else we’re not buying.

These issues are raised by James Romm’s new study of the Roman philosopher Seneca, who famously preached Stoic asceticism and self-control while serving as the emperor Nero’s tutor, advisor, and general toady—helping Nero explain away his matricide, for example, and amassing a fortune in the process.  Romm’s project is to explore the tensions generated by Seneca’s life and legacy without reliance on the choice between saint and hypocrite, Stoic idealist and Machiavellian practitioner of realpolitik.  It’s not an easy task.  He does not argue, as some have done, that we need such hypocrisy because we’d have no ethical philosophy at all if we had to live what we preached.  Instead, Romm paints a picture of a man slowly entrapped by his own hopes of changing Nero for the better—a view of the philosopher that resembles the Scottish doctor of Giles Foden’s The Last King of Scotland, who was caught in his role as physician to the mad Idi Amin.  At the end of his life, Seneca seems to have acknowledged his failure at court while hoping his writings could still inspire Stoic ideals in others:  “I show to others the right path, which I have found too late, and worn out by error” (Letters 8.3).  His fellow Romans remained unimpressed, and by 65 AD Nero tired of him and ordered him to commit suicide. In Romm’s interesting and readable account, Seneca emerges as more a tragic figure than a hypocrite—offering us good fodder for the Straussian view that philosophers and politicians are generally best off keeping their distance from each other.

[1] Their research is summarized in “The Moral Behavior of Ethicists and the Power of Reason” (in draft) at http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/PowerReason.htm

[2] Evelyn Barish, The Double Life of Paul de Man (New York, 2014).