III

Consolation for Frustration

Thirteen years before painting the Death of Socrates, Jacques-Louis

David attended to another ancient philosopher who met his end

with extraordinary calm, amidst the hysterical tears of friends and

family.

The Death of Seneca, painted in 1773 by the twenty-five-year-old

David, depicted rhe Stoic philosopher's last moments in a villa out-

side Rome in April AD 65. A centurion had arrived at the house a

few hours before with instructions from the emperor that Seneca

should take his own life forthwith. A conspiracy had been discov-

ered to remove the twenty-eight-year-old Nero from the throne;

and the emperor, maniacal and unbridled, was seeking indiscrimi-

nate revenge. Though there was no evidence to link Seneca to the

conspiracy, though he had worked as the imperial tutor for five

years and as a loyal aide for a decade, Nero ordered the death for

good measure. He had by this point already murdered his half-

brother Britannicus, his mother Agrippina and his wife Octavia; he

had disposed of a large number of senators and equestrians by feed-

ing them to crocodiles and lions; and he had sung while Rome

bumed to the ground in the great fire of 64.

When they learned of Nero's command, Seneca's companions

blanched and began to weep, but the philosopher, in the account

provided by Tacitus and read by David, remained unperturbed,

and strived to check their tears and revive their courage:

Where had their philosophy gone, he asked, and that resolution

against impending misfortunes which they had encouraged in each

other over so many years? 'Surely nobody was unaware that Nero

was cruel!' he added, 'After murdering his mother and brother, it

only remained for him to kill his teacher and tutor'.

He turned to his wife Paulina, embraced her tenderly ('very

different from his philosophical imperturbability' ~- Tacitus) and

asked her to take consolation in his well-spent life. But she could

not countenance an existence without him, and asked to be

allowed to cut her veins with him. Seneca did not deny her wish:

I will not grudge your setting so fine an example. We can die with

equal fortitude, though yours will be the nobler end.

But because the emperor had no desire to increase his reputation

for cruelty, when his guards noticed that Paulina had taken a knife

to her veins, they seized it against her will and bandaged up her

wrists.

Her husband's suicide began to falter. Blood did not flow fast

enough from his aged body, even after he had cut the veins in his

ankles and behind his knees. So in a self-conscious echo of the

death in Athens 464 years previously, "Seneca-asked his doctor to

prepare a cup of hemlock. He had long considered Socrates the

exemplar of how one might, through philosophy, rise above exter-

nal circumstance (and in a letter written a few years before Nero's

command, had explained his admiration):                   \

He was much tried at Home, whether we think of his wife, a

woman of rough manners and shrewish tongue, or of the children

... He lived either in time of war or under tyrants . . . but all these

measures changed the soul of Socrates so little that they did not

even change his features. What wonderful and rare distinction! He

maintained this attitude up to the very end . . . amid all the

disturbances of Fortune, he was undisturbed.

But Seneca's desire to follow the Athenian was in vain. He drank

the hemlock and it had no effect. After two fruitless attempts, he

finally asked to be placed in a vapour-bath, where he suffocated to

death slowly, in torment but with equanimity, undisturbed by the

disturbances of Fortune.

David's rococo version of the scene was not the first, nor the finest.

Seneca appeared more like a reclining pasha than a dying philoso-

pher. Paulina, thrusting her bared right breast forward, was dressed

for grand opera rather than Imperial Rome. Yet David's rendering

of the moment fitted, however clumsily, into a lengthy history of

admiration for the manner in which the Roman endured his

appalling fate.

Though his wishes had come into sudden, extreme conflict with

reality, Seneca had not succumbed to ordinary frailties; reality's

shocking demands had been met with dignity. Through his death,

Seneca had helped to create an enduring association, together with

other Stoic thinkers, between the very word 'philosophical' and a

temperate, self-possessed approach to disaster. He had from the

first conceived of philosophy as a discipline to assist human beings

in overcoming conflicts between their wishes and reality. As

Tacitus had reported, Seneca's response to his weeping compan-

ions had been to ask, as though the two were essentially one,

where their philosophy had gone, and where their resolution against

impending misfortunes.

Throughout his life, Seneca had faced and witnessed around him

exceptional disasters. Earthquakes had shattered Pompeii; Rome

and Lugdunum had burnt to the ground; the people of Rome and

her empire had been subjected to Nero, and before him Caligula,

or as Suetonius more accurately termed him, 'the Monster', who

had 'on one occasion . .. cried angrily, "I wish all you Romans had

only one neck!" '

Seneca had suffered personal losses, too. He had trained for a

career in politics, but in his early twenties had succumbed to

suspected tuberculosis, which had lasted six years and led to suici-

dal Depression. His late entry into politics had coincided with

Caligula's rise to power. Even after the Monster's murder in 41, his

position had been precarious. A plot by the Empress Messalina had,

through no fault of Seneca's, resulted in his disgrace and eight years

of exile on the island of Corsica. When he had finally been recalled

to Rome, it had been to take on against his will the most fateful job

in the imperial administration - tutor to Agrippina's twelve-year-

old son, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, who would fifteen years

later order him to kill himself in front of his wife and family.

Seneca knew why he had been able to withstand the anxieties:

I owe my life to [philosophy], and that is the lease of my obligations

to it.

His experiences had taught him a comprehensive dictionary of frus-

tration, his intellect a series of responses to them. Years of

philosophy had prepared him for the catastrophic day Nero's cen-

turion had struck at the villa door.

2

A Seneom dictionary of frustration

Introduction

Though the terrain of frustration may be vast - from a stubbed toe

to an untimely death - at the heart of every frustration lies a basic

structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.

The collisions begin in earliest infancy, with. the discovery that the

sources of our satisfaction lie beyoiyi our control and that the

world does not reliably conform :o our desires.

And yet, for Seneca, in so far as we can ever attain wisdom, it is by

learning not to aggravate the world's obstinacy through our own

responses, through spasms of rage, self-pity, anxiety, bitterness,

self-righteousness and paranoia.

A single idea recurs throughout his work; that we best endure

those frustrations which we have prepared ourselves for and

understand and are hurt most by those we least expected and can-

not fathom. philosophy must reconcile us to the true dimensions

of reality, and so spare us, if not frustration itself, then at least its

panoply of pernicious accompanying emotions.

Her task is to prepare for our wishes the softest landing possible

on the adamantine wall of reality.

The Consolations of philosophy

Anger

The ultimate infantile collision. V\' cannot find the remote control or

the keys, the road is blocked, the re.; s'want full - and so -we slam doors,

deracinate plants and howl.

1. The philosophy held it to be a kind of madness:

There is no swifter way to insanity. Many [angry people] . . . call

down death on their children, poverty on themselves, ruin on

their Home, denying that they are angry, just as the mad deny

their insanity. Enemies to their closest I. tends . .. heedless of the

law . . . they do everything by force . . , The greatest of ills has

seized them, one that surpasses all other vices.

2. In calmer moments, the angry may apologize and explain that

they were overwhelmed by a power stronger than themselves,

that is, stronger than their reason. They', their rational selves,

did not mean the insults and regret the shouting; 'they* lost

control to darker forces within. The angry hereby appeal to a

predominant view of the mind in which the reasoning faculty,

the seat of the true self, is depicted as occasionally assaulted by

passionate feelings which reason neither identifies with nor can

be held responsible for.

This account runs directly counter to Seneca's view of the

mind, according to which anger results not from an uncontrol-

lable eruption of the passions, but from a basic (and correctable)

error of reasoning. Reason does not always govern our actions,

he conceded: if we are sprinkled with cold water, our body gives

us no choice but to shiver; if ringers are nicked over our eyes,

we have to blink. But anger does not belong in the category of

involuntary physical movement, it can only break out on the

back of certain rationally held ideas; if we can only change the

ideas, we will change our propensity to anger.

3. And in the Senecan view what makes us angry are dangerously

optimistic notions about what the world and other people are

like.

4. How badly we react to frustration is critically determined by

what we think of as normal. We may be frustrated that it is rain-

ing, but our familiarity with showers means we are unlikely

ever to respond to one with anger. Our frustrations are tem-

pered by what we understand we can expect from the world, by

our experience of what it is normal to hope for. We aren't over-

whelmed by anger whenever we are denied an object we desire,

only when we believe ourselves entitled to obtain it. Our great-

est furies spring from events which violate our sense of me

ground rules of existence.

5. With money, one could have expected to lead a very comfort-

able life in Ancient Rome. Many of Seneca's friends had large

houses in the capital and villas in the countryside. There were

baths, colonnaded gardens, fountains, mosaics, frescos and

gilded couches. There were retinues of slaves to prepare the

food, look after the children and tend fbi garden.

6. Nevertheless, there seemed an unusual level of rage among the

privileged. 'Prosperity fosters bad tempers,' wrote Seneca, after

observing his wealthy friends ranting around him because life

had not turned out as they had hoped.

Seneca knew of a wealthy man, Vedius Pollio, a friend of the

Emperor Augustus, whose slave once dropped a tray of crystal

glasses during a party. Vedius hated the sound of breaking glass

and grew so furious that he ordered the slave to be thrown into

a pool of lampreys.

7. Such rages are never beyond explanation. Vedius Pollio was

angry for an identifiable reason: because he believed in a world

in which glasses do not get broken at parties. We shout when

we can^t find the remote control because of an implicit belief in

a world in which remote controls do not get mislaid. Rage is

caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins

(however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not

been written into the contract of life.

8. We should be more careful. Seneca tried to adjust the scale of

our expectations so that we would not bellow so loudly when

these were dashed:

When dinner comes a few minutes late:

What need is there to kick the table over? To smash the goblets?

To bang yourself against columns?

When there's a buzzing sound:

Why should a fly infuriate you which no one has taken enough

trouble to drive off, or a dog which gets in your way, or a key

dropped by a careless servant?

When something disturbs the calm of the dining room.

Why go and fetch the whip in the middle of dinner, just because

the slaves are talking?

We must reconcile ourselves to the necessary imperfectibility of

existence-

Is it surprising that the wicked should do wicked deeds, or

unprecedented that your enemy should harm or your friend

annoy you, that your son should fall into error or your servant

misbehave?

We will cease to be so angry once we cease to be so hopeful.

Shock

An aeroplane belonging to the Swiss national airline, carrying 229 people,

takes off on a scheduled flight from New York to Geneva. Fifty minutes out

of Kennedy Airport, as the stewardesses roll their trolleys down the aisles

of the McDonald Douglas MD-ii, the captain reports smoke in the cockpit.

Ten minutes later, the plane disappears off the radar. The gigantic

machine, each of its wings 52 metres long, crashes into the placid seas off

Halifax, Nova Scotia, killing all on board. Rescue workers speak of the

difficulty of identifying what were, only hours before, humans with lives

and plans. Briefcases are found floating in the sea.