Things seemed good at first. In fact, they seemed good for quite a while. Historians have a name for the first half decade—quinquennium Neronis—and it means “five good years of Nero.” But the next nine years were not good, and there must have been signs before then about the direction he was going to go.

​Seneca was a student of history. He was a student of human nature. He might not have understood it at the outset, but he would have sensed pretty quickly that Nero was not up for the job. He must have been slowly and steadily horrified, especially as the bodies piled up. What did Seneca think when Nero tried to kill his own mother, not once but four times before succeeding?

Yet Seneca continued to ignore his “own soul’s warning,” as the song lyrics go. He added intellectual and moral heft to Nero’s regime. For a man who wrote so eloquently about resisting the pull of ambition and success and money, he must have felt reservations about the enterprise from the beginning, even before Nero’s descent into madness. Was this really the place for a philosopher at all? Should he have been cultivating power and political offices to begin with?

Like most warnings, those pings of Seneca’s conscience were there for good reason. Yet he ignored them. He probably told himself it was his duty, that he was the adult in the room—and he may well have been. Still, it’s also clear that Seneca’s moral authority evaporated every day he was in that room, probably exactly as Nero and all tyrants and gangsters know and exploit. Nero was bringing Seneca down to his level, making him complicit in everything he did.

We are not so different from Seneca, though hopefully we have less blood on our hands. We all need to do better at listening to our soul’s warning. No one is saying we have to be perfect saints, that’s not possibly and probably not even worth trying. We do need to draw clearer lines though and be willing to walk away when people and events cross them. We become like the people we associate with, which is why we must choose our bosses (and our industries) carefully.

We only get one life. We only have one reputation. How will we spend it? What will we do with it? Let Seneca be a cautionary tale.

P.S. If you want to learn more about this Stoic philosopher, we have a whole chapter titled “Seneca the Striver” in Lives of the Stoics. You can also watch our video on Rome’s Greatest Stoic Thinker over on the Daily Stoic YouTube channel, where you can also find video episodes of the Daily Stoic podcast. Head here to subscribe today!

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