They Will Shove This In Your Face
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What moral compromises did Seneca make while advising Nero?
Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. They will shove this in your face. He had to compromise from the start. Seneca had no love for emperors, but Nero was his way back from exile, his chance to be at the center of things once again, having been unjustly exiled by Claudius in 41 AD. So Seneca swallowed some of his true feelings to advise and to teach Nero. And how did the emperor reward him for this commitment? by shoving the moral compromise in Seneca's face constantly. Seneca had to watch as Nero fixed the Olympics so he could award himself the prize. He had to help Nero give a speech after Nero killed his own mother.
He stood aside as members of the ruling class were forced onto the stage, humiliated in performance, even sent into the arena to fight wild beasts. It's a problem as old as time. Just ask Plato, who found himself in the same position with the tyrant in his time. Those that first ask us to bend our principles a little will ultimately return to ask for more and more. They will ultimately require us to contort ourselves into utterly unrecognizable positions. We think we're being pragmatic. In actuality, we're being humiliated. Moral compromise is never a single act. It creates a precedent, then another, and another.
How does moral compromise create a dangerous precedent?
As James Rahm shows in Dying Every Day, Seneca at the Court of Nero, we have some signed copies at the Painted Porch, and in Plato and the Tyrant, and in his interviews on the Daily Stoic, this is how good men and women end up being trapped. Not all at once, but step by step. And actually, James Rahm's book on Seneca was a book that changed my life. I read it during the sort of fall of American Apparel, and it opened my eyes to some of my own moral compromises, and it changed me. Thought about his book many times in the years since. I'm fascinated by the example of Seneca. He's been on the podcast a couple of times. He was actually just here in Austin not that long ago. And I asked him about precisely this.
And we talked about it. I'm going to bring you a chunk of that episode here for the rest of today's episode. James Rahm is great. Do read Plato and the Tyrant and Dying Every Day and check out his fuller episodes on The Daily Stoic Podcast.
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What lessons can we learn from Seneca's relationship with Nero?
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What moral compromises did Seneca make while advising Nero?
0:00–1:39
2
How does moral compromise create a dangerous precedent?
1:39–3:57
3
What lessons can we learn from Seneca's relationship with Nero?
3:57–5:11
4
How do historical figures like Plato relate to modern moral dilemmas?
5:11–9:08
5
What personal experiences shaped the host's views on moral compromise?
9:08–13:34
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The Daily Stoic
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