Thesis outline more

Liz Gloyn Seneca and the Ethics of the Family Outline of Thesis ± Liz Gloyn ± December 2010 Page 1 of 5 The writings of Seneca, a Roman philosopher of the first century AD, comprise our largest body of work for understanding Stoicism under the early Roman empire. These texts provide an unparalleled source for what was the most influential philosophical school in Rome at this period, particularly in terms of its social philosophy, and it continued to be influential through the Renaissance and Enlightenment. While scholars have extensively studied Seneca¶s approach to Stoic doctrine, they have neglected his concern with the practical application of philosophy to everyday life. My dissertation explains how the importance Seneca places on correct conduct within a familial context is not only compatible with his focus on the sage¶s selfsufficiency, but enriches our understanding of how the Stoic wise man attains virtue. In Seneca¶s philosophical writings, the family provides practical examples of ethically appropriate behaviour. Despite Stoicism¶s insistence on the ultimate autonomy of the wise man, he strongly emphasises the importance of the family, For instance, he writes consolatory literature with strong Stoic underpinnings to a mother mourning the death of her son, and a man mourning the death of his brother. It is impossible to read Seneca¶s work without an awareness of the role that such relationships play in it, yet to date there is no monograph that examines the function of the family as a core theme in his philosophy, or that considers how he applies his Stoicism to the subject. My dissertation fills this void by examining texts in which relationships between family members, for instance mothers and sons, brothers, or husbands and wives, provide one of the foundations upon which Seneca constructs his argument. Seneca took considerable care to tailor the content of his work to its anticipated audience. There is a clear difference between the range of ideas Seneca is willing to present to an audience already invested in Stoicism and his approach to a more diverse readership without strong philosophical convictions. The advice that Seneca gives about the family therefore differs depending on which audience he addresses. The practical application of philosophy found in more general texts contrasts strongly with the rarefied approach used in works targeted at those prepared to commit further to Stoicism, but I do not believe that ideas expressed through the Liz Gloyn Page 2 of 5 latter approach undermine the precepts laid out by the former; it is possible to trace a unified ethics of the family through Seneca¶s work. My overall aim in this work is to show that Seneca considers the pursuit of virtue to be fundamentally grounded in the family. The family may be an indifferent, and thus the sage can be virtuous without it, but Seneca still ascribes an important role in moral development to familial relationships. While the sage may still be virtuous, and the proficiens reach virtue, outside a familial framework, Seneca implies that it is certainly easier to become virtuous within that structure. He himself began his pursuit of philosophy within the boundaries of his family, and thus learnt from those around him as well as from the teachers with whom he studied. Each chapter of this thesis operates as an independent unit, and thus readers only interested in (as it might be) mothers, brothers or the Epistulae Morales can turn their undivided attention to the appropriate chapter. However, I hope that reading from beginning to end will create a sense of the building blocks of the family that Seneca works with, and that the independent chapters will mutually reinforce my overall argument. I start with the most basic block, that between mother and child; then progress to the relationship between siblings; and then to the artificially created relationship of marriage. This prepares the ground for a more abstract look at both the role of exempla and the appearance of the family in the Epistulae Morales. Chapter one examines the Consolatio ad Marciam and the Consolatio ad Helviam, both addressed to women in their role as mothers, and examines the significance of motherhood in those texts. Stoicism adds a fundamental extra element of consolation for Marcia in Seneca¶s deployment of oikei sis theory. Seneca also connects the procreative role of a mother to nature¶s creative role in bringing the universe into being; mothers and nature share a common role of begetting and relinquishing offspring. In the Consolatio ad Helviam, Seneca depicts his own relationship with his mother and provides his own family as a practical example of how a mother should relate to her children. Her fulfilment of oikei sis extends out from her consideration of her own children to that of her grandchildren, modelling the practicalities of these kinds of relationships. Seneca also explores Helvia¶s relationship with his aunt, providing a further example of how family members model virtuous behaviour for us, and shows how Helvia both learns and teaches within the environment of the family. The two women are never depicted as perfect sages, but they serve to demonstrate perfect behaviour. Through these two case studies, Liz Gloyn Page 3 of 5 we see how a mother is instrumental in providing her children with the model from which one may learn how to become a Stoic sage. Chapter two shifts its focus from the parental to the fraternal relationship. The Consolatio ad Polybium provides the main source material; although Seneca partially revisits the consolatory themes found in the ad Marciam and ad Helviam, he adds a new element to the mix, more appropriate for a man who is mourning his brother than a mother mourning her son. Seneca uses the model of the cosmopolis to show that all humans are in fact Polybius¶ brothers in reason, and thus he has obligations to them that surpass those to the brother who has died. One element of this consolatory tactic is to suggest that Polybius take especial comfort from the emperor Claudius, who functions as a symbolic figure of reason within the consolation, enabling the fraternal relationships that sustain Polybius in his grief. Finally, through manipulating the force of the bond between brothers in the cosmopolis, Seneca strengthens his own implicit plea for recall from exile; he suggests that Polybius has a moral obligation to him as a brother in reason to save him from banishment. The framework provided by Polybius¶ brothers, both biological and spiritual, gives Seneca the opportunity to model secure relationships that can survive the external shocks of fate, and provide moral support for those within the network. Chapter three examines Seneca¶s view on marriage, an artificially created rather than biological familial connection and one thus subject to slightly different considerations. The source material mainly comes from the De Matrimonio, which is a problematic text. It survives only through quotations in Jerome¶s polemical Adversus Jovinianum, which have obviously been tailored to suit Jerome¶s argument for the superiority of virginity over marriage. This chapter provides a much needed English summary and discussion of the evidence, and proceeds to outline what we can extrapolate from the surviving fragments about Seneca¶s views on marriage. This reconstruction is obviously a cautious and partial one, but reveals important insights into the role Seneca believes marriage plays in the life of a sage, especially given the tendency of some modern scholarship to pigeonhole Seneca as a misogynist. The analysis is supported by passages taken from elsewhere in Seneca¶s work on the subject of marriage, including accounts of Seneca¶s own relationship with his wife. Marriage seems to be portrayed as providing an important site of ethical stability, and the De Matrimonio appears to recognise that women are equally as capable of attaining virtue as men. Liz Gloyn Page 4 of 5 Chapter four turns to the most prominent family in Seneca¶s works, the imperial family, and asks what their depiction tells us about Seneca¶s familial ethics. The imperial family are often used as an exemplum for correct moral behaviour in a given situation, which follows Augustus¶ efforts to make his family a model of good conduct for the Roman populace to emulate. However, Seneca often undercuts the supposedly perfect imperial family through the way in which he constructs his exempla, thus problematising their carefully constructed public image. The imperial family turns out to be an example of how not to do familial relationships, and of what happens when the ethical support network a family should provide is destroyed by the pursuit of political power rather than of virtue. Their failings serve to remind the reader that only the Stoic sage is capable of virtue; worldly power is not enough to ensure moral perfection. Chapter five closes this study by considering the representation of the family found in the Epistulae Morales, Seneca¶s final work and his most philosophically meticulous. Familial relationships, along with other distracting external indifferents, are stripped out of the twelve letters that form the programmatic first book, only to be reintroduced in ways that caution the reader against relying on familial networks more than the individual self. However, as the collection gradually progresses, slowly the family begins to take on a role in moral development ± one that is hedged about by caution, and not as wholly positive as the depiction found in other works, but still an important part of a sage¶s moral landscape. The letters withhold the conventional family until Seneca¶s pupil, the reader of the collection, has built up sufficient philosophical expertise to avoid being mislead. He has been purified by his philosophical journey through the Epistulae Morales, and thus by the close of our extant collection can begin to reintroduce the concept of the family into his intellectual and moral life in its proper place. There are, of course, qualifications and caveats in place, given the higher level of philosophical sophistication at which Seneca expects his reader to be operating ± but the family remains part of the overall moral structure that ultimately surrounds the sage. The conceptual thread that runs through these chapters shows that Seneca constructs the family as a fundamental part of how we learn to be moral human beings. Through our interaction with our families, we gain the ability to discern what is good and what is virtuous, and in an ideal world, have models of behaviour to emulate and thus come close to achieving virtue. The importance of the family as a supportive environment for moral development has not yet received its full due from scholars of Stoicism; I hope that my work will bring an Liz Gloyn Page 5 of 5 acknowledgement of its importance one step closer. I do not claim that the Stoics thought achieving virtue without a family was an impossible endeavour; however, Seneca¶s arguments suggest that achieving virtue within the family was the much preferred option. I hope that this will not only provide insight into Seneca as an individual writer, but also serve as a starting point for a consideration of familial ethics in Stoicism as a whole. At the present moment, there is no full treatment of the issues surrounding the family in Stoicism, particularly marriage and parenthood, or that compares the approaches of the Hellenistic schools. The fragmented picture of oikei sis and the question of gender equality needs to be pieced into a full understanding of how the school as a whole approached the issue of the family and behaviour within the context of those relationships. Seneca¶s obvious concerns with such questions are an excellent place to start this investigation. Liz Gloyn Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey December 2010