On the Shortness of Life

Pompeius Paulinus held the grain supply of Rome — the ships, the granaries, the dole that kept the city fed and therefore quiet — and he was probably Seneca's father-in-law. The essay written for him tells him to resign. Its opening move is to refuse the premise everyone brings to the subject: the complaint that life is too short is not an observation about nature but an alibi, and nature has been generous. What people do with the grant is spend it on other people. Seneca's word for the class he is attacking is the occupati, the occupied, and the sting is that they are not idlers — they are the ones who look busiest, the men whose diaries are full and whose days belong to petitioners, patrons, litigation and the next appointment. A man who is never free is not living; he is being used, and by consent. Against that he sets the one life he thinks gets longer rather than shorter, the life given to philosophy, on the grounds that it annexes the past: read what earlier minds wrote and their centuries are added to a man's seventy years. The dating turns on Paulinus, who held the grain office in two separate stretches; in any case the essay comes after Caligula's death in 41, which it refers to. Most scholars take the earlier stretch and put the work around 49, but the alternative sits more than a decade later, and the two readings produce a very different adviser: one just back from exile, one near the end of his power. Seneca took his own advice in 62, when he withdrew from Nero's court.