Seneca’s “Lost Cause”
The Myth of the Noble Stoic/Southern Slave Owner
Seneca’s Letter 47 is a striking document in the history of Roman slavery. In it, the philosopher vividly outlines the horrors of this institution and forcefully acknowledges the humanity of the enslaved. At first the letter seems to be a welcome recognition by an ancient writer that slavery is a fundamentally unjust, dehumanizing system. But it quickly becomes something even more disturbing: a eulogy of slavery, at least when practiced by Stoic masters.
While some ancient thinkers endorse the idea of “natural” slavery — i.e. that slaves are by nature suited to this condition — Seneca argues instead that humans are enslaved simply due to unfavorable chance. Near the beginning of the letter, he responds to an imagined interlocutor who endorses the “natural” view. Not only are slaves human beings, Seneca asserts, they are colleagues and friends (all translations are my own):
“They are slaves.”
—No, human beings.
“They are slaves.”
—No, our colleagues.
“They are slaves.”
—No, humble friends.
“They are slaves.”
—No, our co-slaves — if you consider that fortune has the same power over both.
Although the letter’s nominal addressee is Lucilius (to whom all the Moral Epistles are addressed), Seneca imagines a general “you” whose views he is attempting to correct — a “you” who clearly belongs to the same free, male, and elite status as himself. He urges this “you” to see the common humanity that exists between him and “the one he calls his slave,” who “breathes on equal terms, lives on equal terms, and dies on equal terms” as his free counterpart. Seneca himself claims to judge men from their character rather than the tasks they perform, “for each man provides his own character, whereas chance assigns him tasks.”
This urge to treat the enslaved as equal human beings runs counter to the horrifying picture of Roman slavery that Seneca paints (and condemns) elsewhere in the letter, wherein masters routinely brutalize their slaves to satisfy their own passions. Seneca responds with dismay and revulsion to the silencing, beating, and sexual exploitation of slaves, saying that Romans treat slaves as beasts of burden and are “exceedingly arrogant, exceedingly cruel, exceedingly abusive” toward them.
It does, I admit, initially seem extraordinary that an elite Roman man can see such humanity in the enslaved. It is simply not an argument one often finds in Greco-Roman texts. And it is one inescapably indebted to Seneca’s Stoicism, which defines slavery not as an exterior state in which one human is subjected to the arbitrary will of another but as an inner state in which one is enslaved to his own passions and desires. Any man, according to Stoic doctrine, can be a slave — even the free master of another. And if any free man can be a slave, then any slave can be free.
Despite these objections to slavery’s dehumanizing aspects, the letter makes me profoundly uncomfortable due to its many echoes of an old but tenacious falsehood that I have encountered throughout my life in the American South: the myth of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. This myth has left its fingerprints nearly everywhere I’ve called home, from Knoxville (despite East Tennessee’s own mythologized Unionism) to Charlottesville to Sewanee. These echoes hit me powerfully when I recently discussed the letter in an upper-level seminar on Roman Stoicism, and I grasped the opportunity for us to critically interrogate it side-by-side with the mythology of the Lost Cause, whose relics are gradually being dismantled from our campus.
One of the chief tenets of the Lost Cause, which arose in the aftermath of the Civil War to cast the South in a heroic light, was that enslaved blacks had been happy in that “peculiar institution” and felt strong ties of loyalty to their masters. The romanticized image of the noble Southern planter — what W.E.B. Dubois calls the “conventional story of the old slave plantation and its owner’s fine, aristocratic life of cultured leisure” (an image that the Classics served no small part in manufacturing) was a key aspect of this narrative.
What starts in Seneca’s Letter 47 as a recognition of the humanity of slaves quickly gives way to a similarly romanticized view, as Seneca replaces what he considers to be slavery’s less savory aspects with a damaging fiction: that the institution can be redeemed, even turned into a force for good in the life of the enslaved, by the noble Stoic slave owner.
The ideal Stoic master, according to Seneca, will dine with his slaves and refrain from physical abuse. He will observe a sort of Golden Rule, treating his social inferior as he would want a superior to treat him. He will “live mercifully and courteously with his slave, and admit him into conversation, council, and fellowship.” He will remember that fortune is fickle and may one day make a slave of him, too.
What Seneca advocates is not so much something new, as he sees it, but the restoration of the mos maiorum, a return to how the Romans of old treated the enslaved. After all, dining with slaves is an act that Plutarch also attributes to Cato the Elder, that paragon of old-fashioned morality. In Letter 47, Seneca romanticizes this past as a time when the entire familia, of which slaves were a part, formed an ordered unit bound by mutual respect:
They called the master “father of the household” and the slaves “family members” (a practice which continues still in mimes). They instituted a festival day on which masters dined with their slaves — it wasn’t the only day they did this but they made a special point to on this day. They allowed slaves to hold honors in the household and to pronounce judgments, and they considered the house to be a tiny republic.
The positioning of the house as a microcosm of the state seems, in Seneca’s mind, to grant slaves some of the perquisites of freedom without the requirement that they indeed be free.
What the slave owner receives in exchange, according to Seneca, is the slave’s loyalty:
Those who were allowed to speak to their masters and among themselves, whose mouths were not sewn up, were prepared to offer their neck on behalf of their master and turn the threatening danger onto their own head. They spoke at dinner-parties but under torture were silent.
The slave’s prioritizing of his master’s life and bodily integrity above his own undermines the supposedly egalitarian view elsewhere in the letter. The Stoic master’s humane treatment of his slaves, in the end, is less a reflection of their intrinsic human worth than his own cultured and cosmopolitan humanitas. The loyal slave’s chief value is to furnish evidence for the Stoic credentials of his master. Such fidelity attests to the master’s ordered rule over himself as well as his household.
Seneca’s “loyal slaves” readily call to mind the Lost Cause, with its idealization of plantation life and oft-repeated stories of slaves guarding the home front during the Civil War. Stephen Elliott, who served as an Episcopal bishop in the Confederacy and was one of the founders of my institution, defended slavery in precisely these terms. In 1866 he gave an address arguing that the “behavior [of slaves] during the long fierce war which has now terminated is the sublimest vindication of the institution of slavery […] which could have been offered to the world.” He goes on:
These people never once lifted their hands or their voices voluntarily against their owners, but with nobody to coerce and restrain them save weak women and infirm men and boys too young for military purposes, they remained quiet, docile, industrious, obedient, exhibiting in no case, that I have ever heard of, insubordination or disorder.
Such paternalistic narratives long continued to be espoused by historians and were key in shaping a falsified but prominent view of pre-Civil War race relations that took root in the Jim Crow South.
This view reappears again and again in Southern school textbooks. E. Merton Coulter’s History of Georgia, published in 1954 for use in junior high schools, contains a description of plantation life that harkens back to Seneca’s idealization of masters and slaves dining together (as it drips with racist stereotypes):
There was a close feeling of friendship between the slave and ‘old massa.’ White and negro children played together and many of the Missus’ children were mothered by a colored ‘mammy.’ Often whites and blacks were thus even closer than friends. The master often had a barbeque or a picnic for his slaves. They then had a great frolic.
In the period of Jim Crow, Confederate monuments went up across the South to shore up white supremacy, and these often repeated such paternalistic views of slavery. In North Carolina, a Confederate monument erected at the Tyrell County courthouse in 1902 reads on one of its panels, “in appreciation of our faithful slaves.” The Heyward Shepherd monument in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia offers another potent example. This myth is also on display in the Arlington National Cemetery, where in 1914 the United Daughters of the Confederacy set up a Confederate memorial. One of its images is of a black slave in Confederate uniform marching to war alongside white Southern soldiers and a “mammy” lovingly tending to the children of her master as he leaves for battle.
This idealizing view contradicts the horrifying truths of American slavery, and the documented stories and words of those who were enslaved offer forceful proof against it. Frederick Douglass’ autobiographical writing, for example, undertook to counter these Lost Cause myths that he saw already taking hold.
The Lost Cause defense of slavery as a benign institution relies on the white supremacist assumption that black people required the corrective and Christianizing influence of their masters. Seneca’s notion that slaves enjoy equal humanity — and can be morally superior to their masters — initially seems to run counter to such a view of the intrinsic inferiority of slaves. And yet, when you scratch the surface of the letter, the equality that he posits between master and slave collapses.
When his imaginary interlocutor objects on the grounds that Seneca “summons slaves to the pileus” (i.e. argues for abolition), Seneca counters that he by no means intends to topple the hierarchy. Rather, he wants to fashion a master worthy of his superior position, one that can be “revered” (colere) just like a god. This same ascending trifecta of slave-master-god is espoused by Richard Hooker Wilmer, a Confederate Episcopal bishop: “This people became gradually Christianized. Their habits of subordination to their earthly master inclined them to an easier submission to the will of God.”
Wilmer’s Christianizing master finds further parallel in Seneca’s suggestion that associating with honorable Stoic masters can positively influence the character of slaves and rid them of anything servile in their character. The slave in fact offers raw material (materia) that a master, like an artist (artifex), can sculpt to reflect his own virtues. It is such virtues that are front-and-center as early as the opening sentence of the letter, where Seneca tells Lucilius that his treatment of slaves is a testimony to his prudentia (“wisdom”) and eruditio (“learning”).
Seneca is ultimately less interested in the condition of the slave than that of the master, with whom he readily identifies; Seneca, unlike his fellow Stoic Epictetus (a freedman), had no personal experience of being enslaved. The only truly problematic slavery in the letter is the interior, moral one the master may be experiencing.
While the letter has much to say about the liberation of the master’s soul, it has nothing to say about the liberation of the slave’s body, a consideration that Seneca’s Stoic notion of freedom as an internal state renders moot. It is not surprising that one prominent Southern defender of slavery, James Henley Thornwell, in an 1850 sermon entitled “On the Rights and Duties of Masters” (delivered for “the benefit and instruction of the coloured population”), approvingly quotes Seneca’s letter — alongside passages of Pythagoras, Plato, Cicero, and Claudian. Yoking the Stoic definition of freedom (that “slavery to sin is true slavery”) to a New Testament passage, Colossians 3, that was long used to justify slavery, he writes:
It is precisely the assertion of this freedom — this dominion of rectitude — this supremacy of right, which the Apostle enjoins upon slaves — when he exhorts them to obey their masters in singleness of heart as unto Christ […] To obey under the influence of these motives, is to be slaves no longer.
Thornwell shows how a philosophy designed to inculcate freedom in the soul opens up a means by which the continued enslavement of a person’s body can be justified. When, as Page duBois puts it, “social position in a slave society is a matter of indifference for the philosophically enlightened […] there is no need to argue for abolition.”
This focus on the character of the master as a way to gloss over or ignore the experiences of his slaves is nowhere more evident than in the Southern tendency to make a saint of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, who is in many ways the Southern avatar of Seneca’s Stoic master. In the popular imagination of many, he was a reluctant slave owner who nevertheless nobly agreed to join Virginia’s secession (which, according to another Lost Cause tenet, wasn’t really about slavery at all). He has been eulogized by one American president after another. A speech President Reagan gave in 1984 praising Lee as an “American legend” who “called slavery a great moral wrong” and “rode off into myth and glory” offers one example of such hagiography.
Scholars and journalists such as Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Ta-Nehisi Coates and many others have shown how this portrait of Lee as a “good slave owner” is simply false, and it offers cover for his willingness to go to war to maintain the institution. Lee in truth endorsed the same paternalistic view that slavery was good for black people, arguing that the “painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their instruction as a race.” Yet the myth remains. And while many are eager to topple it, others kill to keep it in place.
No matter how many knots Seneca or proponents of the Lost Cause tie themselves into to posit the idea of a noble master, neither the Southern gentleman nor the Stoic sage can ever redeem slavery. What I can and must do in my classroom is try to untangle these knots and thereby expose how profoundly the inability to think beyond such myths limits one’s philosophical and moral imagination.
Classicists can play a role in exposing and deconstructing the pernicious mythology of American slavery for our students. And, at the same time, we can show how the Greeks and Romans also told themselves such fictions. But taking on such material can be daunting for a classicist. We are not specialists in the history of American slavery or the Civil War, and most of us did not grow up in the South amid their legacy.
Yet Classics is full of opportunities for us to do this kind of comparative, critical analysis, as Stephen Blair, Savannah Marquardt, Sarah Teets, and Samuel Ortencio Flores, to name just a few examples, have shown. Classical literature is teeming with these fallacies about “happy” and “loyal” slaves, from Eurycleia and Eumaeus in the Odyssey to the clever but faithful slave of Roman comedy. It is not just ancient texts, but Greek and Latin textbooks, as Erik Robinson, Dani Bostick, and Kelly Dugan (currently writing a dissertation on this topic) have shown, that present paternalistic, stereotyped views of slaves; we would do well to recall that it was textbooks that long gave expression to the mythology of the Lost Cause.
Such classroom discussions also complement the larger projects underway at many Southern institutions to uncover and acknowledge their ties to the slaveholding past. A group led by history professor Woody Register is currently spearheading such a project here at Sewanee, and similar work is underway at numerous other schools.
Perhaps the most confounding surprise to me, as I take on such material in the classroom, is how little my students can initially tell me about the Lost Cause — even those raised in its midst. When I asked a group of students just this past fall if any of them could tell me one of its tenets, not a single student raised their hand. I would be glad to consign it to oblivion if only it weren’t still so insidiously powerful, still so blinding.
Stephanie McCarter is an Associate Professor of Classics at The University of the South in Sewanee, TN. She has published essays on Classics and the modern world in Eidolon, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, The Millions, and elsewhere, and she is currently at work on a verse translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. You can find out more on her website.
