Res Publica

Abstract

Discussion of Seneca’s political thought has tended to concentrate on his relationship to and views about the emperors under whom he lived, in particular Nero. This chapter aims instead to explore how Seneca’s commitment to philosophy as a way of life shapes his political ideas, and vice versa. Seneca uses arguments about the unique value of philosophy to reconfigure and reinvigorate received accounts of the nature of the Roman commonwealth. He also draws on the inheritance of Roman political thought to offer new solutions to some long-standing lacunae in Stoic cosmopolitanism. This chapter’s account of Seneca’s politics emphasizes the diachronic continuities between the Roman republic and the principate in his thought and the richness of his engagement with previous Greek and Roman political theory.