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Learning to Master the Hedonistic Calculus

The food in Epicurus' Garden
For the wise, hunger is the best seasoning.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

The Epicureans put pleasure at the centre of their philosophy. For centuries, they presented the main alternative to Stoicism as a comprehensive way of life. With an appealing message elevated and propagated by poets such as Horace, Lucretius, and Virgil, Epicureanism vied with Stoicism for the hearts and minds of Roman elites.

So, who was Epicurus, and what did he have to teach us?

The Garden School

Epicurus of Samos (341–270 BCE) and Zeno of Citium (the founder of Stoicism) were almost exact contemporaries in Athens but may never have met. A few years before Zeno began teaching, Epicurus founded a school of philosophy in a garden outside the city’s Dipylon gates. This school, called ‘the Garden’, dedicated itself to attaining happiness through the exercise of reason, and, in a highly sexist and stratified society, admitted both women and slaves.

Life in the Garden was not as you might imagine. Epicurus was content with bread and water and famously asked a friend to send him a little cheese so that, when he wished, he might feast. Far more important than luxury was friendship. ‘Of all the things which wisdom provides for the happiness of the whole life,’ he wrote, ‘by far the most important is friendship.’ Thus, the Garden was more of a live-in community, or fellowship, than a school—influenced, no doubt, by Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum.

Although the most famous, Epicurus was not the first philosopher to make pleasure the highest good. A century earlier, Aristippus of Cyrene, a student of Socrates, had advocated a more immediate and sensual form of hedonism. The irony is that Aristippus lived rather more like our idea of an Epicurean, while the moderate Epicurus lived more like our idea of an Aristotelian—or simply our idea of a philosopher.

Pleasure as the Highest Good

According to Epicurus, reason leads to the conclusion that pleasure is good and pain bad, and that pleasure and pain are the ultimate measures of good and bad. This has often been misconstrued as a rampant call for unbridled hedonism, rather than the absence of physical and mental suffering that Epicurus actually had in mind. He referred to freedom from bodily pain as aponia, and to freedom from mental disturbance as ataraxia. His highest pleasure, then, looked more like tranquillity than ecstasy. 

Indeed, Epicurus explicitly warned against overindulgence, since overindulgence so often leads to pain. ‘The pleasant life,’ he wrote in the Letter to Menoeceus (the most important of his three surviving letters), ‘is produced not by a string of drinking bouts and revelries, nor by the enjoyment of boys and women, nor by fish and other items on an expensive menu, but by sober reasoning.’

Pleasure is the highest good, and all else that is good is so only by virtue of the immediate or deferred pleasure that it can procure. The behaviour of infants confirms that human beings instinctively pursue pleasure. All our actions, including those that may be construed as virtuous or altruistic, are, in the final analysis, aimed at obtaining pleasure for ourselves. Just as we can instantly sense whether something is hot or cold, or colourful or dull, so we can instantly sense whether something is pleasurable or painful.

Even so, not everything that is pleasurable ought to be pursued, and not everything that is painful ought to be avoided. Instead, a kind of hedonistic calculus ought to be applied to determine which things are most likely to result, over time, in the greatest pleasure and least pain—and it is above all with this arithmetics of pleasure that people struggle.

Lesson 1: The Two Types of Pleasure

To help us along, Epicurus began by distinguishing between two types of pleasure, ‘moving pleasures’ and ‘static pleasures’. Moving pleasures involve the satisfying of a desire—for example, tucking into a meal when hungry. Static pleasures, on the other hand, involve the state of having had a desire satisfied—for example, feeling sated after having eaten the meal. According to Epicurus, static pleasures are better than moving pleasures because they free us from the pain of need or want.

Lesson 2: The Three Classes of Desire

Because pleasure often arises from the satisfaction of desire and pain from its frustration, Epicurus also distinguished between three classes of desire: natural and necessary desires, such as those for food and shelter, which are hard to eliminate but naturally limited and both easy and highly pleasurable to satisfy; natural but non-necessary desires such as those for luxury food and housing, which offer ever diminishing returns; and vain desires such as those for fame and fortune, which, being inculcated by society, are not naturally limited and neither easy nor highly pleasurable to satisfy.

Epicurus advised that desires of the first class ought to be satisfied, desires of the second class can be satisfied if doing so is easy, but desires of the third class should be entirely eliminated. ‘If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches but take away from his desires.’ Modern life has multiplied vain desires beyond anything that Epicurus could have imagined. The problem with vain desires, such as acquiring the next thing or gaining another thousand followers, is not merely that they are more difficult to satisfy, but that they have no natural point of satisfaction.

Lesson 3: The Two Greatest Fears

Epicurus divided pleasures and pains into physical and mental, and argued that fear of the future, especially fear of the gods and fear of death, are the greatest obstacles to happiness.

Although the gods exist, they have absolutely no concern for, or even awareness of, humankind. Indeed, for the gods to involve themselves in the menial matters of men would be to perturb the supreme happiness and tranquillity that characterises and defines them. Instead of fearing the gods, we would do better to emulate them in their supreme removal and detachment.

Neither should we fear death, and this for two main reasons. First, Epicurus, drawing on Democritus, held that everything in the universe, including the human body and mind, is ultimately composed of atoms. Our death entails the disintegration of both body and mind and the re-dispersion of their atoms. As there is no longer any person to be troubled, death cannot trouble us after we are dead. And if death cannot trouble us after we are dead, neither should it trouble us while we are still alive. Second, the eternity that comes before our birth is not regarded as an evil; therefore, neither should the eternity that comes after our death. These two arguments are early formulations, respectively, of the ‘no subject of harm’ argument and the ‘symmetry’ argument, which have both, more or less, withstood the test of time.

Epicurus’ Own Death

Epicurus died at the age of 72 from the complications of renal colic (kidney stones), which is associated with one of the most intense of all bodily pains. On the last day of his life, he purportedly penned this letter to his friend and follower, the political grandee Idomeneus, which is nothing if not a testament to the overriding powers of philosophy:

I have written this letter to you on a happy day to me, which is also the last day of my life. For I have been attacked by a painful inability to urinate, and also dysentery, so violent that nothing can be added to the violence of my sufferings. But the cheerfulness of my mind, which comes from the recollection of all my philosophical contemplation, counterbalances all these afflictions. And I beg you to take care of the children of Metrodorus [Idomeneus’ brother-in-law], in a manner worthy of the devotion shown by the young man to me, and to philosophy.

The philosopher of pleasure died in agony—and called it a happy day.

Some three centuries later, Seneca, in his Letters to Lucilius, compared his relationship with Lucilius to that between Epicurus and Idomeneus. ‘Who would have known of Idomeneus,’ he asks, ‘had not the philosopher thus engraved his name in those letters of his? All the grandees and satraps, even the king himself … are sunk in deep oblivion.’

When all is forgotten, only the humble philosopher will be remembered.

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Hate Noise? You Might Be a Genius

My silent writing retreat
Where I Wrote The German Greeks, surrounded by all the right sounds.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Silence is God’s first language; everything else is a poor translation. —Thomas Keating

I am excruciatingly sensitive to noise. I always carry earplugs and sometimes fantasise about living in the middle of the woods or on top of a hill. If I were browsing property listings, the first word I’d search for would be ‘secluded’. Is the problem with me—or with the world?

As a misophone (‘hater of sounds’), I’m in pretty good company. Kant hated noise, as did Proust, Kafka, and Darwin—and even, ironically, Wagner. Kant is said to have moved lodgings on account of a crowing rooster, while Proust lined his bedroom with cork.

Among all the great thinkers, none hated noise more openly or fervently than Arthur Schopenhauer.

Schopenhauer and the Noisy Seamstress

In August 1821, while living in Berlin, the 33-year-old Schopenhauer had an altercation with a neighbour, the 47-year-old seamstress Caroline Louise Marquet. On that day, he was enraged by the noise of three women talking in the private anteroom to his apartment. When he demanded that they leave, two of the women complied but Marquet refused.

Later, Marquet claimed that Schopenhauer kicked and punched her and threw her down the stairs, leaving her paralysed on the right side and unable to work. He countered that he had only pushed her, and that she fell to the ground on purpose so that she could sue him.

Following a six-year legal battle ending in May 1827, he was made to pay her medical expenses along with a maintenance allowance of 60 thalers per annum for the rest of her life. On the day she died in 1842, the great philosopher of compassion recorded in his ledger, in Latin, Obit anus, abit onus (‘The crone dies, the burden is lifted’). Moral of the story: Don’t make noise around philosophers.

Schopenhauer built his pessimistic philosophy on that of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who lived all his life in Königsberg (present-day Kaliningrad). Although gregarious and fond of laughter, Kant needed absolute quiet to write. In May 1784, he penned a letter to the police superintendent to complain about the ‘stentorian singing of prayers by the hypocritical inmates of the jail’ (in the Iliad, the Greek herald Stentor had a voice as loud ‘as fifty voices of other men’). He was offended not merely by the noise but also by the insincerity of the prayers, which were offered, he thought, simply to appear God-fearing to the jailor.

Schopenhauer on Noise

In his essay On Din and Noise (1851), Schopenhauer rails hardest not against the nattering of women but the cracking of whips in narrow resounding streets (the nineteenth-century equivalent of revving motorbikes, or those fart-can cars with modified exhausts): ‘Hammering, the barking of dogs, and the screaming of children are abominable; but it is only [his emphasis] the cracking of a whip that is the true murderer of thought.’ To him, the cracking of whips was all the more unbearable for being unnecessary and, worse than unnecessary, useless.

He goes on to link noise intolerance (misophonia, ‘the hatred of sound’) with intellect and creativity:

Certainly there are people, nay, very many, who will smile at [my predicament], because they are not sensitive to noise; it is precisely these people, however, who are not sensitive to argument, thought, poetry, or art, in short, to any kind of intellectual impression: a fact to be assigned to the coarse quality and strong texture of their brain tissues.

The Difference Between Sound and Noise

But not every sound is noise. The difference between sound and noise is not merely one of acoustics but also of perception. The sounds of nature, I find, are almost always more tolerable than those of man. Years ago, I toured Copenhagen Zoo—the only thing open on a Monday—and noted that the most disturbing cries came not from the animals but from the human children.

I enjoy birdsong, the burbling of a stream, or waves lapping or breaking on a shore, but not, say, an air conditioner humming (unless it is very hot outside), children crying, or people shouting or talking without saying anything useful, interesting, or amusing. If I believe that something is important, meaningful, or beautiful, the sound that it makes is much less likely to constitute noise. Noise, then, is whatever I don’t think is worth hearing. In the final analysis, it is whatever dissipates rather than concentrates my energies.

For Schopenhauer, genius is precisely this: the ability of the mind to remain focused on a single point and object. But as soon as a focused mind is interrupted or distracted, it is no better than an ordinary mind. It is, says Schopenhauer, as with a large diamond, which, if shattered, loses most of its value; or as with an army, which, if dispersed, loses most of its power.

It is not merely a matter of genius but also of happiness. For anyone who has experienced it, deep concentration is one of life’s greatest pleasures. Aristotle famously conceived of God, the traditional fount of all reason, as a mind that turns blissfully upon itself. In contrast, people who are too frightened to put two and two together, or too dense to do so, use noise to occupy and numb their minds.

The Stoic Answer: Can We Rise Above the Noise?

Unlike Schopenhauer, the Stoic Seneca (d. 65 CE) sought not to eliminate noise but to rise above it. In his Letters to Lucilius, he claims to be living above a bustling Roman bathhouse, and paints a vivid picture of the soundscape: the grunts of the weightlifter, the slaps and pummelling of the masseur, the splashing of the enthusiast who bombs into the pool, the ceaseless chatter of the hair-plucker who makes his victims yell… ‘So picture to yourself the assortment of sounds, which are strong enough to make me hate my very powers of hearing!’

Despite the din, Seneca remains able to read and write, assuring Lucilius that ‘this racket means no more to me than the sound of waves or falling water.’

Still, he recognises that some noises are worse than others. Intermittent noises, he says, are more upsetting than steady ones. Spoken words are more distracting than mere sounds, in that they demand our attention: compared to speech, even the saw-sharpener is easier to bear. 

Yet Seneca is able to force his mind to concentrate and ‘keep it from straying to things outside itself’. More than that, he sees this as a test of his Stoicism, mental fortitude, and even virtue. Ultimately, he reasons, noise only disturbs us insofar as it resonates with our own emotional turmoil. If our mind is still, no amount of noise can unsettle it; but if our mind is angry or fearful, or burning with greed or envy, no amount of silence can still it: ‘For of what benefit is a quiet quarter or neighbourhood if our emotions are in an uproar?’

We tend to associate sleeping with resting. But unless we are able to still our mind by the use of reason, the night merely changes the form of our worries. Real tranquillity, in contrast, ‘is the state reached by a rational mind when it is at rest.’

I think there is a lot of truth in that. When overwhelmed by noise, I find it helpful to ask myself, ‘Is my annoyance more to do with me or my prejudices than with the noise itself?’ But I would contest that even if we are able to concentrate in a din, our concentration is less profound or complete than it would otherwise have been, and more wearing too.

Seneca concedes that, having tested ourselves, it is simpler to avoid the uproar, or block it out, just as Odysseus blocked his ears and had his men row faster to get past the Sirens. According to lore, the Sirens were fated to die if someone ever escaped their singing, and after Odysseus were never again seen or heard.

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One Man’s Search for Meaning

Man in front of a bleak road
He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how. —Nietzsche & Frankl

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Viktor Frankl (1905–1997) was an Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist, the founder of logotherapy. His experiences in Nazi concentration camps profoundly shaped his outlook, which found its fullest expression in Man’s Search for Meaning, one of the most influential books of the twentieth century.

Viktor Emil Frankl was born in Vienna in 1905. As a schoolboy, he attended evening lectures in philosophy and psychology. While still in his teens, he sent one of his papers to Sigmund Freud, who arranged to have it published in an international psychoanalytic journal. Frankl later joined Alfred Adler’s rival circle, only to break away after concluding that both Freud and Adler had got it wrong.

Freud argued that we are driven primarily by the pursuit of pleasure. Adler emphasised power, mastery, and the overcoming of inferiority. Frankl proposed a third possibility: meaning.

From 1928 to 1930, Frankl organised counselling programmes for suicidal students, which supported his growing belief that people needed reasons to live as well as reasons not to die. After qualifying in medicine in 1930, he specialised in neurology and psychiatry, treating patients with depression and suicidal thoughts.

The Decision

In 1941, Frankl obtained a visa to emigrate to the United States. Then one evening, he returned home to find his father holding a fragment of marble salvaged from a synagogue that had been destroyed by the Nazis. The fragment bore part of the Fifth Commandment: Honour thy father and thy mother. Frankl chose to remain by his parents in Vienna, tearing up his passage to safety.

The following year, Frankl and his family were deported. His parents, brother, and pregnant wife all perished. On arriving at Auschwitz, the guards confiscated the manuscript that he had been working on for years.

Stripped of his possessions, his profession, and even his name, he found himself wondering what remained of his former self.

He later recalled:

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s own attitude in any given set of circumstances—to choose one’s own way.

Frankl’s conclusion echoes that of the Stoics: while our circumstances may be taken from us, our response remains our own. Instead of sinking into despair, Frankl found purpose in imagining the future. He pictured himself lecturing to students about the psychology of the camps, subliming his suffering into knowledge that might help others or illuminate the human condition. He silently reconstructed the manuscript in his mind and, after the war, painstakingly rewrote it from memory.

He also wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, which he drafted in little more than a week. Intended as a brief account of his experiences, it went on to sell many millions of copies.

The ideas he had carried through the camps became the foundation of an entirely new approach to psychotherapy.

The Will to Meaning

Frankl’s message is ultimately one of hope. Even in the most absurd, painful, and dispiriting of circumstances, life can be given meaning—and so too can suffering. Life in the camps confirmed his conviction that our deepest motivation is neither pleasure, as Freud had believed, nor power, as Adler had believed, but meaning. Pleasure and success matter, but they cannot satisfy us for long unless they serve a larger purpose. As Frankl wrote, ‘Happiness cannot be pursued, but must ensue.’

These ideas became the foundation of logotherapy (from the Greek logos, meaning ‘word’, ‘reason’, or ‘principle’), which is often described as the ‘Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy’ for coming after those of Freud and Adler. Part philosophy and part psychotherapy, logotherapy belongs to the existential tradition—but differs from its mainstream in holding that meaning is discovered as well as created.

Logotherapy seeks not merely to relieve symptoms but to help people discover meaning in their lives. According to Frankl, meaning can be found in three principal ways: through creating or contributing something of value; through our relationships, especially the loving ones; and through the attitude we adopt in the face of unavoidable suffering.

Depression and Meaning

Frankl coined the term ‘Sunday neurosis’ to refer to the dejection that many people feel at the end of the working week when they finally have time to realise how empty and meaningless their lives have become. This existential vacuum can lead to all manner of distractions and compensations: anxiety, avoidance, binge eating, drinking, overworking, and overspending. In the short term, these distractions carpet over the existential vacuum, but in the longer term, they prevent action from being taken and meaning from being found.

For Frankl, depression results when the gap between what a person is and what they ought to be, or once wished to be, becomes so large that it can no longer be carpeted over. The person’s goals seem far out of reach and they can no longer envisage a future. As in Psalm 41, abyssus abyssum invocat—’hell brings forth hell,’ or, in an alternative translation, ‘the deep calls unto the deep.’

Thus, depression is our way of telling ourselves that something is seriously wrong and needs working through and changing.

Unless change can be made, there will continue to be a mismatch between our lived experience and our desired experience, between the meaninglessness of everyday life and the innate drive to find meaning, to self-actualise, to be all that we can be.

From an existential standpoint, the experience of depression obliges us to become aware of our mortality and freedom, and challenges us to exercise the latter within the framework of the former.

By meeting this ultimate challenge, we can break out of the cast that has been imposed upon us, discover who we truly are, and, in so doing, begin to give deep meaning to our lives.

After the War

After the war, Frankl returned to Vienna, where he rebuilt both his life and his career. In 1947, he married Eleonore Schwindt, with whom he had a daughter, Gabriele. He became head of neurology at the Vienna Polyclinic Hospital and lectured at universities around the world. He refused to let himself be defined by his wartime experiences. He remained an enthusiastic mountaineer into old age and, in his sixties, fulfilled a lifelong ambition of earning a pilot’s licence.

By the time of his death in 1997, Man’s Search for Meaning had sold millions of copies in dozens of languages. It continues to inspire psychologists, philosophers, doctors, teachers, clergy, and countless ordinary readers searching for purpose amid suffering, loss, and uncertainty. He helped broaden psychology beyond pathology, arguing that resilience depends not merely on optimism or self-esteem but on having a reason to get up in the morning.

His message has become more relevant than ever. Many people today enjoy unprecedented freedom and prosperity, while struggling with loneliness, anxiety, and a pervasive sense of emptiness. Technology offers endless distraction, consumerism endless temptation, and social media endless comparison. Yet none can answer the question that mattered most to Frankl: What is my life for?

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The Exiled Stoic Who Taught Epictetus

Musonius teaching
Be prepared to laugh. Musonius could be severe and hilarious in the same breath—a combination that made him one of antiquity’s most admired teachers.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

If Stoicism has a forgotten hero, it is Musonius Rufus.

Today, the names of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius are familiar to millions. But in antiquity, many regarded Musonius as the greatest Stoic teacher of them all. His lectures attracted students from across the Roman world, foremost among them Epictetus.

Unlike Seneca, Musonius wrote no polished essays. His philosophy was not intended for libraries but for life. He taught in public, argued fearlessly, endured repeated exile, and demonstrated by his example that philosophy is not something merely to discuss, but something to live.

For Musonius, philosophy was not an escape from ordinary life but a preparation for it. It taught people how to eat, work, marry, raise children, endure hardship, and come to terms with death. His school, he liked to say, was not some concert hall, where people came to be amused and entertained, but a hospital, where they came, in trepidation, to be treated.

Yet there was nothing gloomy about him. Though uncompromising in his principles, he possessed a wonderfully dry wit. When a man with a long beard claimed to be a philosopher, Musonius replied that he could see the beard—but not the philosopher.

Beginnings

Gaius Musonius Rufus (c. 25–c. 100 CE) was born in Etruria into a family of Roman equestrians.

As a young man, he went about inquiring into the health of people’s souls, suggesting that his sympathies then lay more with the Cynics than with the Stoics.

He later established himself in Rome as one of the most celebrated Stoic teachers of the age.

When, in 60 CE, the paranoid Nero banished Rubellius Plautus, a Stoic and distant cousin of Nero, Musonius followed his friend to Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) and only returned to Rome after Plautus’ death in 62.

Second and Third Exiles

When, in 65, Nero learnt of the Pisonian conspiracy, led by the senator Gaius Calpurnius Piso, to have him overthrown, he condemned nineteen people to death, including Seneca. Though not involved in the plot, Musonius was banished to the barren island of Gyaros, the Alcatraz of the Mediterranean.

Exile, however, seemed to weigh lightly upon him, even on Gyaros, and one of his surviving lectures is entitled, Why Exile Is Not an Evil.

Exile, he says, does not deprive us of water, earth, air, or the sun and stars. Nor does it deprive us of human companionship. But by removing us from luxurious living, it can cure our bodies and souls of many ills.

More significantly, exile does not prevent us from caring for our real needs and acquiring virtue. On the contrary, it provides us with more leisure in which to study and do good deeds.

Resourceful people are resourceful wherever they find themselves. Those who lack resourcefulness have vice, and not exile, to blame for their miseries. Ergo, it is vice, and not exile, that we should fear.

Musonius returned to Rome in 68, in the reign of Galba. In 70, in the reign of Vespasian, he accused and obtained the conviction of Egnatius Celer, who, despite calling himself a Stoic, had colluded with Nero in condemning the Stoic Barea Soranius and his daughter Servilia to death.

When, in 71, Vespasian banished all philosophers from Rome, his reputation rode so high that he was tolerated to remain—before being banished all the same into his third and longest exile, this time in Syria.

He returned to Rome in 79, in the reign of Titus, and died around 100 CE.

The Teacher of Philosophy

Musonius exerted an important influence on his two most famous pupils, Epictetus and the polymath Dio Chrysostom (‘Dio the Golden-Mouthed’).

To separate the wheat from the chaff, he would often turn would-be students away, explaining to the young Epictetus that ‘the more one pushes the intelligent person away from the life he was born for, the more he inclines towards it.’

His school, he insisted, was no place for clever performances. People came not to be entertained but to be cured. Because treatment can sometimes be painful, students might expect to suffer a bit. He measured the success of his lectures not by the applause that they received but by the shock and silence that they provoked.

He quoted Homer after Odysseus had related the length of his labours:

Thus he spoke, and they all stayed softly in silence,
And they were held by a magic spell in the shadowy hall.

Epictetus records Musonius saying:

Am I to sit down and tell you clever slogans and sayings so that you praise me as you leave, even though the shoulder is no better than it was, the head still hurts, and the abscess and fistula remain? Do young men leave home for these reasons and leave behind their parents, friends, kinfolk, and property so that they may yell ‘hooray’ when you utter witticisms? Did Socrates do this, or Zeno, or Cleanthes?

Musonius could be severe. By Epictetus’ own account, he once rebuked him for overlooking the omission in a syllogism (formal logical argument). Epictetus sought to excuse himself, saying, ‘It’s not like I burnt down the Capitol’—to which Musonius replied, ‘Idiot, the omission here is the Capitol.’

Nothing worthwhile, he insisted, is acquired without pain. But if we think that the path of virtue is too arduous, let us consider the alternatives and how much more trouble people put up with for the sake of gain or how many ills they suffer for the sake of fame, even though these things are worthless.

Practical Philosophy

Insofar as we know, Musonius did not work on anything for publication. However, two of his students wrote down his sayings and opinions. The Discourses, collected by a certain Lucius, form the basis of the 21 short lectures preserved in Stobaeus. But a second work, by one Pollio, has been lost except for fragments.

All in all, there remain 31 fragments (preserved in Stobaeus, Epictetus, and Aulus Gellius), as well as the 21 lectures, which altogether fit comfortably within 80 or so pages.

Musonius’ lectures are full of practical, everyday advice aimed at instilling virtue and include a lecture on home furnishings and even a lecture on hair. Men, he advised, ought to grow a beard on the grounds that the beard is the mark of manhood, on a par with a cock’s comb or a lion’s mane.

Besides facial hair, Musonius advocated a vegetarian diet (preferably raw and unprepared), plain clothing, and shelter of a kind that offers little more than the protection afforded by a cave.

He once gave a thousand sesterces to a man claiming to be a philosopher. When his friends protested that the fellow was a charlatan, he let him keep the not-inconsiderable sum, explaining that money was exactly what he deserved.

To do philosophy, said Musonius, is to reason correctly, and to reason correctly is to act correctly. The person who does philosophy thereby takes care of his country, family, and friends—in a word, everybody.

The person who does not do philosophy, even if he be a doctor, lawyer, or some such, is thoughtless, and thoughtlessness is very near to insanity.

Even if one rules only oneself, no one is more kingly than a philosopher or more fit to rule, because one cannot rule others unless one first rules oneself.

Musonius was not merely a teacher of Stoicism. He showed what a Stoic looked like.

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Did Rome’s Richest Man Live Up to His Philosophy?

The Death of Seneca
According to Tacitus, Seneca modelled his death on that of Socrates, discussing philosophy with his friends.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Few philosophers have lived a life as dramatic or conflicted as Seneca’s. The emperor Nero made him the richest man in the Roman Empire before ordering him to commit suicide.

Today, Seneca is our most important primary source on ancient Stoicism, followed by Epictetus, Musonius Rufus, and Marcus Aurelius.

Stoicism has exerted a profound influence on the history of ideas, shaping the thought of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Adam Smith, and J. S. Mill. In mental health, it inspired what has become the world’s most widely practised form of psychotherapy: cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT).

The Teacher’s Pet

Lucius Annaeus Seneca was probably born in 4 BCE, the same year as Jesus, in Corduba (modern-day Córdoba), Hispania.

His father, Seneca the Elder (Lucius Annaeus Seneca Maior), was a Roman equestrian who wrote books on rhetoric and Roman history. His elder brother Novatus, better known as Gallio, became a senator, and his younger brother Mela was the father of the poet Lucan.

Seneca was raised in Rome. His tutors included Attalus the Stoic, Sotion, and Papirius Fabianus. He so admired Attalus that he ‘practically laid siege to his classroom’. He was ‘the first to arrive and the last to leave’ and often left with the desire to be poor.

He suffered from poor health—possibly tuberculosis on a background of asthma—and, from his mid-twenties, spent several years convalescing in Alexandria, where he lived with his mother’s sister and her husband, Gaius Galerius, the governor of Egypt.

The three sailed back to Rome in 32, but Galerius perished in a shipwreck.

These early experiences of illness and uncertainty may help to explain Seneca’s lifelong preoccupation with adversity, mortality, and the best use of life.

Exile on Corsica

A few years after his return, Seneca was elected quaestor, making him a senator.

According to the historian Cassius Dio (d. c. 235 CE), Seneca, ‘who was superior in wisdom to all the Romans of his day and to many others as well,’ spoke so eloquently in the Senate that the emperor Caligula ordered his execution, only to stay the order after being told that he was in any case terminally ill.

In 41, the throne passed to Caligula’s uncle Claudius, and the new empress Messalina, seeking to eliminate a potential rival, accused Caligula’s sister Julia Livilla of adultery with Seneca. The Senate sentenced Seneca to death, but Claudius commuted the sentence to exile on Corsica.

On Corsica, Seneca wrote the Consolation to Polybius, a letter purporting to comfort Polybius, Claudius’ literary secretary, on the death of his brother, but more likely intended to flatter the emperor in the hope of being recalled from exile.

Tutor and Adviser to Nero

In 49, following the downfall of Messalina, Agrippina the Younger, a sister of Caligula and Julia Livilla, married her uncle Claudius, and had Seneca recalled to tutor her twelve-year-old son, Nero.

When the lad acceded to the throne in 54, Seneca became his adviser and, alongside the praetorian prefect Sextus Afranius Burrus, provided good government during the first five, relatively benign, years of his reign, the so-called quinquennium Neronis.

In 58, the senator Publius Suilius Rufus, who had been close to Claudius, began attacking Seneca with a series of accusations centred upon his rapid rise to fabulous wealth. ‘By what kind of wisdom or maxims of philosophy,’ he inveighed, ‘has Seneca within four years of royal favour amassed three hundred million sesterces?’ In response, Seneca prosecuted Suilius, who was banished to the Balearic Islands.

The charge has echoed down the centuries. How could a Stoic philosopher preach simplicity while becoming the richest man in Rome?

In 59, Nero had Agrippina murdered, and Seneca wrote the self-exculpatory speech that he delivered to the Senate, a speech so artful that the senators moved to congratulate the emperor upon his own mother’s murder.

Downfall and Suicide

But now the tide would turn against our man.

After the death of Burrus in 62, Seneca lost whatever remained of his restraining influence over Nero. Having read the runes, he twice petitioned to retire, once in 62 and again in 64, but Nero refused to cut him loose. Still, he contrived to spend almost all his time on his country estates, working, among others, on his Letters to Lucilius.

His prolonged absences from court may have stoked Nero’s suspicions. When, in 65, the Pisonian conspiracy to overthrow Nero came to light, the emperor condemned a first wave of nineteen people to death, among them Seneca and his nephew Lucan.

By the end of the year, Seneca, his two brothers, and the twenty-five-year-old Lucan had all four been made to commit suicide.

According to the historian Tacitus (d. 120 CE), Seneca modelled his death on that of Socrates, discussing philosophy with his friends and chiding them for their outbursts of emotion.

He slit one vein, and then another, and then a few more, but would not bleed enough to die. Now in considerable pain, he took some hemlock, but this too failed to do the deed. At last, to dilate his veins and ease the pain, he immersed himself in a hot bath and finally suffocated to death.

His wife Pompeia Paulina, whom he had married in later life, attempted to share his fate, but Nero ordered that she be rescued and bandaged up.

Legacy

Seneca had seen the writing on the wall, which is why he worked so assiduously in his final years, seeking, through the Letters, to make himself as immortal as any mortal can be.

Even his carefully staged suicide may have been a part of that immortality project. Tacitus hints as much when, having related Seneca’s last words to his friends, he writes, ‘After these and some similar remarks, which might have been meant for a wider audience…’

Upon his death, Seneca’s works were instantly popular and, according to Quintilian, were ‘in the hands of every young man’. Seneca has been read by most everyone since, including the ‘French Seneca’, Michel de Montaigne, who modelled his Essays upon the Letters.

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Delve deeper into the life and times of Seneca in Stoic Stories, an overview of Stoicism through its best stories.

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