promise of further acts of vengeance, Hercules finishes with the fragile hope that the hero – with the help of his two companions Theseus and Amphitryon – will be able to heal his wounded mind and find a way to continue living.
In Act Five – in another ancient version of sumpatheia – Amphitryon threatens to kill himself unless Hercules refrains from suicide. Faced with Amphitryon’s threat, the tragedy grinds to a halt. Repetition across the tragedies is key. Every character, across all eight plays, is caught within the same cycle of cosmic decline and each is rushing towards these points of stillness in the aftermath of repeated action:
Stop now, father, stop, draw back your hand. Give way, my valour, endure my father’s command. This labour must be added to the Herculean labours: to live. Theseus raise up my father’s body, collapsed on the ground. My crime-stained hands shun contact with the one I love.22
As Hercules repeatedly calls for death to ‘stop’, the trajectory of the tragedy turns from death back towards life. The parts of Hercules that allowed him to be heroic are called into action again, but now the monster that he must slay is a psychological one. What is crucial is this shifting internal chemistry that turned a man from hero to crazed murderer: both are made of the same elemental ingredients. After the tragedy, the struggle is now to regain some version of that first formulation that allowed Hercules to survive unbearable situations. It is impossible to go backwards and retrieve an unstained version of his self: he must find a second copy of that first self and apply it now to the essential labour of living. Keeping himself alive after the tragedy will be the hardest labour of all for Hercules. Rather than a single act of strength or valour, it is a task which will demand a continuous, extended exertion of will, for while destruction can be done in a flash, survival is a long, drawn-out process.
The Stoic cosmology tells us that with every connection comes the threat of infection, and that every creative force holds the potential to become a destructive force, but the tragedies also tell us that these are the very parts of human beings – the riskiest parts on the very knife-edge between order and chaos – which must be preserved. The Stoic laws reassert themselves here at the end of the tragedy through the voice of Theseus, a man who has himself endured huge tragedy and who now guides Hercules to ‘Rise up, break through adversity with your usual energy. Now regain that spirit of yours which is a match for any trouble, now you must act with great valour. Do not let Hercules give way to anger.’23 The task of self-preservation can only begin once we have first witnessed the primal limits of self-destruction. It is through the tragedies that an audience can come to know what they – as humans – are up against and which parts of themselves most need to be preserved. The tragedies, with their original, primal forces must therefore come first and the more generalised laws and guidance of Stoicism – like that of Seneca’s 124 philosophical letters – can only come second.
The Letters
Seneca’s philosophical letters were written during the final years of his life, after he had retired from public life. Having served as tutor and advisor to the Roman Emperor Nero for 15 years, Seneca had become extremely well known and wealthy. He had also become entangled in an increasingly corrupt and brutal political elite. In his enforced retirement, Seneca attempted to bring his life back into line with the Stoic principles that he had been advocating throughout his professional life but perhaps not always adhering to.
The letters are addressed to a Sicilian official named Lucilius, although scholars have suggested that he is a fictional rather than a genuine correspondent as no historical evidence of Lucilius’s existence has been found other than Seneca’s letters to him. In her biography of Seneca, Emily Wilson notes that, ‘His name, again suspiciously, seems reminiscent of Seneca’s own: Lucilius is like Seneca’s own smaller, younger self. At times, Seneca seems to present Lucilius as an idealised counterpart to himself.’24 Whether Lucilius was a real person or not, writing to him allowed Seneca to remain ostensibly within the private rather than public realm during his retirement and to be more personal than he had previously been in the tragedies or in the moral treatises that he had written earlier in his life.
Seneca presents himself as the older and wiser of the two friends in the majority of his letters. His explicit aim is to provide Lucilius with a set of useful guidelines which will help him to maintain a healthier mental life: ‘There are certain wholesome counsels which may be compared to prescriptions of useful drugs; these I am putting into writing.’25 In these letters Stoicism is used as a second-order preventative medicine, holding back the threat of contagion which proved to be so damaging in the tragedies:
Hold fast, then, to this sound and wholesome rule of life; that you indulge the body only so far as is needed for good health. The body should be treated more rigorously, that it may not be disobedient to the mind. Eat merely to relieve your hunger; drink merely to quench your thirst; dress merely to keep out the cold; house yourself merely as a protection against personal discomfort.26
This programme of Stoic restraint is designed to prevent the possibility of miniature versions of the tragedies taking place. The mind must remain in control and even the smallest degree of excess cannot be tolerated. The very syntax of the letter is related to its function of prevention. Rather than, ‘relieve your hunger by eating’, the instruction here is to ‘eat merely to relieve your hunger’. In each clause of both the English translation and original Latin, the preventative action precedes the effect that it aims to pre-empt: ‘Cibus famem sedet, potio sitim extinguat, vestis arceat frigus.’27 This almost back-to-front syntax disrupts the pattern of cause and effect and demands a mental readjustment from the reader. Seneca’s dynamic syntax allows concepts to be rapidly turned on their heads; false and unhelpful beliefs can be quickly replaced by or remade into new, more constructive beliefs.
The relationship between Seneca and Lucilius is not always straightforwardly that of a teacher and student or of comforter and comforted. Against hubris and against the borrowed authority of teaching a version of himself, Seneca occasionally steps down from his position of authority and repositions himself not as doctor but as his own patient, not as teacher but as his own student and not as wise philosopher but as a man struggling to meet his own demands. It is in these places that the dynamic of the letters changes. Cracks appear in the surface veneer of Stoic restraint and Seneca’s own psychological struggles can be glimpsed. In these places where the individual is revealed within the general, tensions are shown to exist between the philosophy of Stoicism and the psychology of the man attempting to comply with that philosophy.
While it is helpful to have frameworks and maps that provide a general route or strategy for healthy thinking, the really useful parts of the letters are often paradoxically where the framework doesn’t quite accommodate reality, where something bursts out from deeper within or when the strategy is derailed, and Seneca admits his contradictions, failures and struggles rather than always trying to have a solution. Without these cracks, the letters can be smoothed too easily into something like what has become the generic counsel of CBT. In Letter LXVIII Seneca deviates from the conventional pattern of him imparting advice on his struggling friend. Here he rejects the idea that he can help Lucilius and instead attempts to pause and find a place to ‘lie quiet’ and repair himself:
What, then, am I myself doing with my leisure? I am trying to cure my own sores. If I were to show you a swollen foot, or an inflamed hand, or some shrivelled sinews in a withered leg, you would permit me to lie quiet in one place and to apply lotions to the diseased member. But my trouble is greater than any of these, and I cannot show it to you. The abscess, or ulcer, is deep within my breast. […] There is no reason why
