Insights into This Ancient Problem
Even wealthy Romans suffered from over-work and stress. Everyone has believed their era is worst.
Can Ancient Leadership Philosophy Be Helpful?
Wanting a break from reading leadership studies over the last long weekend, I headed to the library to seek an ancient Roman Stoic philosopher, Seneca. I’ve always related Stoicism to Zen - where I’ve found the greatest comfort when stressed. It occurred to me to look up his essays from 2000 years ago since I often refer to him as author of a key observation about how leadership works - “we make our luck when preparation meets opportunity.” He seems to have been the first to write this down.
Seneca is known as a playwright and essayist, but also amassed considerable wealth in business and ultimately served in the Senate, at one point becoming virtually prime minister of the Empire under one of several Caesars he served - and survived - until Nero finally caught up with him. He remained philosophical to the end.
His Work Feels Modern
What startled me were the similarities in his descriptions and advice about day-to-day Roman life as lived by key politicians and officials of the Empire. To one he writes, ‘why do you work so hard? You complain constantly that you’d like to retire, take life easy and have time for yourself. You stay long hours in the Senate, judging cases and giving legal advice. What’s stopping you from taking time off? Do you really need another villa? Are we so self-important that we think our advice is so necessary to everyone that we can’t work a reasonable day?’ Sounds familiar doesn’t it?
He praises a Senator who refuses to work after 4:30 (after his usual start early in the morning) and still gets his work done. He approves these limits and notes how others adhere to them. Why, he asks, do we keep working constantly while planning to take life a bit easier after 50 and then fully retire at 60 when we don’t even know if we’ll live that long? He cites good and bad examples that sound as if he was intimately familiar with today’s corporate stress - too many letters to read and write, too many petitioners to see. While not following his own advice apparently, he promotes and supports those who do.
Ironically, Seneca was still working when fate and nasty politics caught up with him at age 69. He lived his life with as much conflict between behavior and intention as any of us today. Do as I say, not as I do. While serving in tremendously influential public roles he nevertheless churned out play after play and essay after essay in addition.
Yet he did manage to stay true to the principles he promoted in one significant way. Though often quite sickly from childhood, always pushing himself to do more, and sometimes stifled in his ambitions, even exiled for seven years from Rome by one of the Caesars before Nero, he managed to remain “indifferent.” In other words, good times and bad were all the same to him, at least as far as we see from his writing. He kept on striving in his own fashion, at a pace that suited him. As for others, he encouraged moderation.
This is the key he points out for us. If we suit ourselves, and truly know ourselves well, we can find a balance that suits us.
We Can Learn in Many Areas
Seneca’s work casts an interesting light on lives today. It reads as if he were here with us, a precursor of the modern age in all its confusion and complexity. I often remind myself that in 400 years there were 140 Roman Emperors, an average tenure of just under 3 years each. That’s not much different from today’s CEOs who average 2.6 years in office or our politicians with political terms of about 4 years.
Human organizational life is what it is more because of our basic human make-up than the changes we believe are so pressing and numerous today. We like to think that previous generations faced an easier pace. The key difference is that today we don’t kill our leaders (virtually all Emperors were assassinated rather than retired or deposed). Instead we give them big severance packages to go away. The same change occurred in sports where we pay our top athletes enormous salaries rather than have them dispose of each other in the Forum.
So is there an answer or a clear meaning? It’s hard to say for certain. What stands out is that the Romans were above all human, constantly occupied with what they felt they had to do. Seneca firmly believed he could walk away from it all at any time and perhaps he could have, as he seemed to do in exile. That offered at least a notional safety valve, but unless pushed, he kept on working. Undoubtedly he made mistakes, but those seem to have been generally on the side of trying to do his best.
The key seems to have been that when he had to slow down due to illness or banishment, he could… without guilt, without feeling a great loss or that his absence would “ruin his career.” At the same time he showed he could get back to work when it suited him again. This ability to take breaks and know with assurance that you can, let’s us work when we need to and rest without guilt and fear for the future. In other words, the right attitude can help a lot.
There’s no question Seneca contributed to society. Some critics condemn his works as not the best the era had to offer, not creative enough, too easily falling into common clichés. (Even the critics sound modern.) Yet his comments are most valuable and most insightful to posterity on common issues, such as how Romans of his time wanted over-heated daily baths with clear water and flowing showers in contrast to previous generations who accepted bathing less frequently and tolerated basic amenities. By recognizing and reflecting on common human concerns, Seneca offers a legacy worth more to us today than the Caesars themselves.
Above all, he stands as trying to be ordinary in the moment, as someone struggling with his own failings, frailties and mistakes, willing to re-examine and try to live to a higher standard. While he doesn’t follow his own logical advice completely, he certainly lived with passion and intention, and a desire to do what he could to improve the situations he found himself in. We might question why this sometimes meant he did his best even for evil Emperors, undoubtedly helping some of them survive longer than they should have (and incidentally accepting their gifts along the way), but he wasn’t trying to destroy governments and disrupt societies.
Value for Ourselves, Help for Others
Interestingly, he was able (and willing) to live quite grandly with his growing wealth and servants, yet he insisted that owners should not refuse to eat with these servants, nor should the rich waste money on frivolous extremes of fashion in clothing, lifestyle or possessions. Whether he always lived up to his ideals, he spoke for better behavior. Perhaps if the Empire had been sustainable, with more philosophies such as his in high places, we would have developed better democracies sooner.
The long history of the world and the histories of individuals share many ups and downs - many show periods of two steps forward, one-and-a-half back. What counts is persistence with the intention to do better.
We can, and we should, go at our own pace, choose the paths we want… but persist! And slowly, over time, we will all leave a piece of a legacy of value to the future. Meanwhile perhaps we should not take ourselves so seriously.