Three hundred million sesterces, and five hundred matching tables of citrus wood with ivory legs.
The tables come from Dio Cassius, in a paragraph that is really a charge sheet. While denouncing tyranny Seneca made himself the teacher of a tyrant; while having nothing good to say of flatterers he fawned on Messalina and Claudius's freedmen, going so far as to send them a book of their praises from exile, which he later suppressed out of embarrassment; and while finding fault with the rich he acquired a fortune of three hundred million and served dinner on five hundred identical tables (Dio 61.10, in the Loeb numbering).
Tacitus puts the same figure in the mouth of Publius Suillius, an elderly prosecutor who was himself on trial, and whom Tacitus introduces as terrifying and for sale, terribilis ac venalis. Suillius asks:
qua sapientia, quibus philosophorum praeceptis intra quadriennium regiae amicitiae ter milies sestertium paravisset?
By what wisdom, on which of the philosophers' precepts, had he got three hundred million sesterces inside four years of royal friendship? He carries on: at Rome wills and childless men are netted like game, Italy and the provinces are drained by his boundless lending at interest (Annals 13.42).
So the figure reaches us from a hostile witness and a hostile historian writing a century and a half later. Two sources agreeing, or one number copied twice. @ledger/benfords-law-and-when-it-lies-to-you is good on why a round figure everybody repeats should raise your eyebrow rather than lower it.
I am not going to convert sesterces into euros. Every conversion I have read picks a different basket of goods, arrives at a different answer, and then gets quoted without the basket. These sums are useful for comparison inside the Roman texts and nowhere else.
Here is a comparison from inside the texts, and it is the most damaging thing on this page, and Seneca hands it over himself. At De Vita Beata 21.3, arguing that wealth and philosophy are compatible, he reaches for Cato: Cato praised the austere old generations, in whose day a few silver plates could get you censured, and yet Cato himself owned quadragies sestertium, four million sesterces. Less than Crassus, more than his own ancestor the censor, and, Seneca adds, he would not have turned down more if it had come. Four million is the sum Seneca picks as his precedent for a philosopher being comfortable. The figure his enemies attach to him is seventy five times that.
Not from family land. His own account of the climb, in the speech Tacitus gives him, is genuinely bewildered by it:
egone, equestri et provinciali loco ortus, proceribus civitatis adnumeror?
Do I, born to an equestrian and provincial station, get counted among the leading men of the state? That is from the interview after Burrus died and the knives came out, when Seneca went to Nero and asked to be relieved of his own money. In the same speech he puts his critics' question to himself, and puts it better than they did:
ubi est animus ille modicis contentus? tales hortos exstruit et per haec suburbana incedit et tantis agrorum spatiis, tam lato faenore exuberat?
Where is that mind that was content with a little? Does it lay out gardens like these, walk about these suburban properties, spill over with such expanses of land, with lending at interest spread so wide? (Annals 14.53)
Faenus is the word to keep your eye on. Interest, and by extension the business of charging it. It appears in the accusation against him, it appears in that self-interrogation, and it appears in Nero's reply, where the emperor itemises his gifts: quae a me habes, horti et faenus et villae, what you have from me, gardens and loans and villas (14.55). Nero also observes, with the timing of a man tutored by the finest rhetorician of the age, that he is embarrassed to bring up the freedmen who are visibly richer.
Seneca's proposal was that Nero take all of it: iube rem per procuratores tuos administrari, in tuam fortunam recipi, order the estate to be run by your agents and absorbed into your own fortune (14.54). In the same breath: nec me in paupertatem ipse detrudam, I will not shove myself down into poverty. Nero refused, embraced him and kissed him, and Tacitus notes that the young man was trained by nature and habit to cover hatred with false affection.
The story that gets quoted most has the thinnest support. Dio says one cause of the British revolt was that Seneca, hoping for a good rate of return, had lent the islanders forty million sesterces they did not want, then called the whole loan in at once and used hard methods to collect (62.2.1). Boudica's rising follows in the next sentence.
I would like that story to be usable and I am not certain it is. Tacitus narrates the same revolt at length in Annals 14: the veterans at Camulodunum shoving people off their land, the procurator Catus Decianus whose greed he says drove the province into war, the temple besieged and taken in two days, the ninth legion cut to pieces, Suetonius abandoning London to save everything else. Seneca is not in any of it, and Tacitus had no shortage of motive to put him there. One of the two accounts is missing something and I cannot tell you which.
What survives the doubt is smaller and worse. Nobody in antiquity found it odd that a Stoic philosopher was a moneylender on a provincial scale. That was not the scandalous item on the charge sheet. The scandalous item, for Suillius, was legacy hunting.
De Vita Beata is usually described as Seneca's answer to the hypocrisy charge. It is, but not in the way people expect. He opens by letting the accusation run at length in his opponent's voice, and the accusation is sharper than anything his real enemies managed:
quare ergo tu fortius loqueris quam vivis? ... Cur apud te vinum aetate tua vetustius bibitur? Cur aurum disponitur? ... cur trans mare possides? Cur plura quam nosti?
Why then do you talk braver than you live? Why is wine older than you are being drunk at your house? Why is the gold laid out on display? Why do you own land across the sea? Why more than you have knowledge of? (17.1 to 2)
Then the answer everybody knows: non sum sapiens et, ut malevolentiam tuam pascam, nec ero. I am not a wise man and, to feed your spite, nor shall I be. Require of me not that I match the best but that I be better than the bad (17.3). To the flat charge, aliter loqueris, aliter vivis, you talk one way and live another, he replies that the same was thrown at Plato, at Epicurus and at Zeno, and adds de virtute, non de me loquor, I am speaking about virtue, not about myself (18.1).
That is the part that gets quoted, and it reads as humility. Keep going to chapters 21 and 22 and the treatise stops apologising and starts winning. Riches are to be despised, he writes, not so that the wise man will not have them but so that he will not have them anxiously: non ne habeat, sed ne sollicitus habeat. He does not love riches, he prefers them: non amat divitias sed mavult. And then the real argument, which is that poverty gives virtue exactly one exercise, not being crushed, whereas wealth throws open a whole field for restraint, generosity, diligence, management and magnificence (22.1).
That is a rich man's argument. It is also, as far as I can see, unrefuted. I have taught around it for sixteen years and I still cannot locate the flaw, and I resent that, because the man who wrote it was lending to provincials at interest while he wrote it.
The last word belongs to Tacitus, and it is one word. After Nero declined the money, Seneca altered his habits: no more crowds of callers, no entourage, seldom seen in the city, quasi valetudine infensa aut sapientiae studiis domi attineretur, as if he were kept at home by poor health or the study of philosophy (14.56). No modern thread about Stoic hypocrisy has ever landed a blow like that quasi.
@nightshift/marcus-aurelius-at-four-in-the-morning is why I bothered writing any of this down. Somebody reading Stoicism at the end of a twelve hour shift is doing something with it that Seneca could not do, and the difference is not virtue. She cannot leave. He could.