How to Do the Right Thing: An Ancient Guide to Treating People Fairly
Selected, translated, and introduced by Robert A. Kaster
Below you can read an exclusive excerpt courtesy of Princeton University Press from Robert A. Kaster’s new book, How to Do the Right Thing. (Seneca)
How ancient Stoicism can help teach us to treat others—and ourselves—more fairly and mercifully.
How to Do the Right Thing
(pp. vii-xvii) selected, translated, and introduced by Robert A. Kaster
“That’s not fair!”
I cannot now recall how old my two children were when those familiar words first passed their lips, but it was probably somewhere in the mid-single digits. Though I recall being a bit surprised the first time around, I shouldn’t have been. The exclamation seems to emerge from a primal human sense: you know how you deserve to be treated, and you know that, just now, you have not been treated that way—you’ve been given a raw deal; you’ve not been done right by. That is the sense of fairness this book explores—fairness at the everyday, person-to-person level—taking as its source the ethical writings of the Stoic philosopher and Roman statesman Seneca.
Born near the end of the first century bce or very early in the new era, to an Italian family that had settled in southern Spain, Seneca was educated in literature, rhetoric, and philosophy in Rome. He lived quietly and (from our vantage point) obscurely, in Rome and for a time in Egypt, until he began a career as a minor magistrate and senator sometime in the 30s ce, after a well-connected aunt pulled some strings. But in 41 his comfortable way of life blew up, as the emperor Claudius sent him into exile for committing adultery with a sister of Claudius’s predecessor, the psychopath Caligula.
When Nero had his mother murdered in 59, Seneca stood by him, drafting a letter—a cover-up that fooled no one…
For eight years he lived in isolation on Corsica—then one of the wildest, roughest places in the Mediterranean—until Agrippina, Claudius’s new wife, prevailed on him to recall Seneca so that he could supervise the education of her son, the twelve-year-old Nero. The association set the course for the rest of Seneca’s life. When Nero was adopted by Claudius in 50 and soon became the heir apparent, Seneca was still his tutor. When Nero became emperor in 54, Seneca became one of his chief advisers. When Nero had his mother murdered in 59, Seneca stood by him, drafting a letter—a cover-up that fooled no one—for Nero to send to the Senate. In 62, as Nero was becoming ever more erratic and proximity to him ever more dangerous, Seneca formally requested permission to retire and, when permission was not granted, informally withdrew from court. And in 65, when a conspiracy to assassinate the emperor was detected and its members punished, Seneca was falsely implicated and forced to commit suicide.
And throughout all that time—in fact, starting under Caligula, before his exile—Seneca was compiling a vast output of poetry and prose, much of which survives today as the most diverse and influential body of literature produced by a Roman writer in the first century of our era. His prose writings are largely devoted to ethics and treat a great range of topics from a predominantly Stoic point of view. These texts provide the raw material for our consideration of everyday fair dealings between ordinary people: for though that sense of fairness is not the central topic in any of Seneca’s ethical writings, principles and words of advice relevant to the virtue’s practice appear throughout them.
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