No man can swim ashore and take his baggage with him
Seneca told a friend how to leave a job. What happened when he asked to leave his own?
“The physician cannot prescribe by letter the proper time for eating or bathing,” Seneca wrote to his friend; “he must feel the pulse.” It is an awkward way to begin a letter of advice, and he went on to give the advice anyway.
The writer was a Roman Stoic philosopher with an unusual day job. Exiled to Corsica under Claudius in 41, he was allowed home in 49 to tutor the boy Nero, and when Nero became emperor in 54 he stayed on as adviser. The friend was Lucilius, the procurator of Sicily, a man known only through Seneca’s writings. In the last two or three years of his life Seneca wrote him letters, 124 of which survive. They read as open letters, written with other readers in mind. In Letter 22, in Gummere’s translation, the question is already half settled: “You understand by this time that you must withdraw yourself from those showy and depraved pursuits; but you still wish to know how this may be accomplished.”
Three things from the letter
Seneca does not number his advice. The letter runs to 17 printed sections and the three below are my selection. It also raises leaving life itself, in 22.3 and in its closing sections on facing death, and this piece leaves that aside.
The first is about pace. “You should take a gentle path, that you may loosen rather than cut the knot which you have bungled so badly in tying.” Then he marks one point “of first importance”: stop climbing. “No one is compelled to pursue prosperity at top speed.” (22.3–4)
The second is timing, and he hands it to someone else. Lucilius is told to read a letter from Epicurus, a Greek philosopher from a different school, to one Idomeneus. As Seneca reports it, Epicurus asks him “to hasten as fast as he can, and beat a retreat before some stronger influence comes between and takes from him the liberty to withdraw”, while also hoping for release “provided that we are not in too great a hurry before the time, nor too dilatory when the time arrives.” These are Seneca’s summaries of Epicurus. (22.5–6)
Seneca expects the obvious objection, that a Stoic should stay and wrestle with his duties. The school, he says, has more caution than courage, and that motto applies only to work worth doing: a good man “will not waste himself upon mean and discreditable work or be busy merely for the sake of being busy.” (22.7–8)
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Then he names what actually keeps people in place. “Shall I depart at the very time of harvest? Shall I have no slaves at my side? no retinue for my litter? no crowd in my reception-room?” Men, he says, “love the reward of their hardships, but curse the hardships themselves”, and complain about their ambitions the way they complain about their mistresses. (22.9–10)
The third, on my reading, follows from that list. “If you keep turning round and looking about, in order to see how much you may carry away with you, and how much money you may keep to equip yourself for the life of leisure, you will never find a way out. No man can swim ashore and take his baggage with him.” (22.12)
My additions
The rest of this section is mine. Seneca says nothing about handover notes and tells Lucilius that when to act can’t be settled from a distance. For a modern job I would still use one sheet of paper: what exists only in your head, so someone else can carry on; a date, which can move if the situation does, as long as “later” doesn’t get counted as one; and what you are willing to leave behind.
What he did
Seneca’s own attempt is in Tacitus, a Roman historian who was a small child at the time. After the death of Burrus, Seneca’s colleague at court, in 62, his enemies accused him of piling up wealth beyond a subject’s station. He asked for an interview. It was his fourteenth year at Nero’s side, he said by Tacitus’s account, and he asked that his property be taken into the emperor’s estate so he could go. Nero refused, “added embraces and kisses”, and Tacitus adds that he was trained “to veil his hatred under delusive flattery.”
So when was Letter 22 written? It carries no date. Scholars generally agree the letters are in the order they were written; Letter 8 alludes to his retirement, placed around spring 62, and Letter 23 mentions a cold spring, presumably 63. Other chronologies are possible. My inference from those neighbours is that Letter 22 most likely came after Nero’s refusal; if so, the line about a stronger influence taking away the liberty to withdraw was written by someone who had met one.
What he did next touches two items on that list, the crowd in the reception room and the retinue. “He kept the crowds of his visitors at a distance, avoided trains of followers, seldom appeared in Rome, as though weak health or philosophical studies detained him at home.” Tacitus does not say his property was ever taken. In what Wikipedia dates to 64, it was said, he asked again for a remote retreat, to avert blame for the plundering of the temples, was refused, and “feigning ill health” kept to his chamber. In 65 a plot against Nero was uncovered, one man named Seneca, and Nero sent a sentence of death; Tacitus says the emperor had not convicted him of the conspiracy, and also reports a rumour of a plan, “not without Seneca’s knowledge”, to make him emperor.
If you have left a job, which part was hardest? Show us.
This is opinion for general reflection. Views are my own.
