Message in a Bottle

In 1965, when Paul Engelmann was in Tel Aviv preparing his book Letters From Ludwig Wittgenstein with A Memoir for publication, Robin Campbell was in Zambia, translating the letters of Seneca to Lucilius. Engelmann's book would appear posthumously in 1967; Campbell would first publish a selection of Seneca's letters two years later. The timing could not have been more apt. Engelmann discovered in Wittgenstein the possibility of a "new" way forward in human "spirituality": one characterized by verbal asceticism because, as Wittgenstein himself had argued, actions not only "speak louder" but with far greater clarity than words.

Campbell, on the other hand, was well aware that the "new" way forward was but an ancient one: the way that Seneca had articulated and, better yet, exemplified, two thousand years before. I quote here from Tacitus' account of the death of Seneca:

Nero sent Gavius Silvanus to Seneca's home to inform him that he had been sentenced to die. Silvanus lacked the courage to do so and ordered one of his staff to bring the grim tidings to the emperor's former tutor. Upon hearing the sentence pronounced, "Seneca asked for his will. But the officer refused. Then Seneca turned to his friends. 'Being forbidden,' he said, 'to show gratitude for your services, I leave you my one remaining possession, and my best: the pattern of my life. If you remember it, your devoted friendship will be rewarded by a name for virtuous accomplishments.'"

Seneca's letters, like Wittgenstein's, point the old way forward--the only way forward "in our epoch of hopelessly tangled and confused ideologies" [Engelmann, 134]; an epoch in which the subjects of an oligarchic empire refuse to accept the truth about their political condition and, like the Romans of Seneca's day, assert that they are the proud citizens of a functioning republic.