Humanitas and clementia: Seneca

Seneca the philosopher is, after Cicero, the most prolific user of humanitas/humanus¹⁰ and, perhaps ahead of Cicero, the most significant contributor to the theory of human rights as a whole.

Seneca launches a sustained attack on brutality. His thoughts run as follows:

Poverty and disease are minor evils compared with what is inflicted by man. Huge displays are devoted to swords, fire and chains, wild animals tearing at human flesh, the dungeon, the cross, the rack, the hook, the stake driven through a man, the tunic in flames, the limbs torn apart by chariots going in opposite directions. Cruelty, the least human of all evils, is the province of rulers rather than of private citizens. The ruler’s brutality exceeds all human bounds, his ingenuity devises new and prolonged forms of suffering, making a pleasure out of cruelty and a hobby out of ferocity. He delights in butchering children before their parents’ eyes, in torturing, burning and roasting. Taking pleasure in torture is not just cruelty, it is savagery [saevitia], even madness when it goes as far as murder and mutilation.¹²

At first sight the passage has a ring of genuine involvement, of dedication to something more than an academic exercise. But on the whole Seneca is expressing Stoic thinking rather than sentiment. This is shown by a passage in which he justifies the Stoic elements in humanitas Romana:

The Stoics are considered excessively harsh. At first sight this casts odium on the sect, making it seem to demand punishment without any allowance for human error, and obliging us to unlearn humanitas, thus cutting off mutual help. But in fact no school is more kindly and gentle, more loving of men and more concerned for the common good.

(Clem. II 3-4, 5.2-5 adapted)

The passage fits into the Stoic conception of punishment, and through that into the basic parameters of humanitas Romana.¹³ The Stoics believed that criminal penalties should be precisely defined by the law and should always be exactly as defined, making no allowances for aggravating or extenuating circumstances. Hence the assertion that severity, itself a virtue, excludes maudlin sentiments like pity and sorrow which merely cloud the face of true humanitas. Under the jury-court system the statutory penalty, the poena legis, was the immutable canon of punishment. The system had no room for judicial discretion, for any intensification or mitigation of the penalty by reason of increased or diminished responsibility.¹⁴

Seneca did not, however, go all the way with mainstream Stoicism. As new criminal jurisdictions took shape alongside the jury-courts,¹⁵ so the iron grip of the statutory penalty was loosened and discretionary punishments became possible. Seneca was the pioneer in this fundamental, humanitas-driven redefinition of punishment. Using clementia as his medium, he shaped contemporary thinking about crime and punishment, and he made it his (ultimately unsuccessful) mission to domicile his ideas in Nero’s thinking.

Changed ideas about punishment are the most visible reflection— but no more than that—of changes in the perception of humanitas as a whole.

When it came to the death penalty as such, as distinct from the manner in which it was carried out, Seneca remained an orthodox Stoic.¹⁸ He notes, with no sign of discomfort, that a magistrate sentencing a criminal to death shows no more emotion than if he were killing a poisonous snake (Ira 1.16.3-6). He is also flexible when he defines humanitas: â€?A superior’s treatment of an inferior should be based on humanitas, but the inferior should show the superior reverentia (respect, awe)’ (Quaest. Nat. 4A.18). Thus elitism, always entrenched in Roman society, was considered perfectly compatible with humanitas.