The Trojan Women

I’m good at correcting misconceptions.

In truth, the central role of my job as a philosopher of Stoicism and, especially, as a communicator of Stoicism, is to correct misconceptions.

So that’s the function of this publication now. Not long essays on obscure topics, but corrections to misconceptions I find on social media. I think this is a far more useful thing. More enjoyable too.

Let’s kick things off with a little murder

There are a lot of “Stoicism influencers" on Bluesky. New platforms usually see a large influx of these sorts of accounts in the first year and then they die off as their creators learn the content doesn’t play particuarly well when it’s just overly hashtagged quote porn.

But in this case, I took umbrage with the quote because it wasn’t relevant to Stoicism and it wasn’t something, technically, that Seneca, himself, said at all.

Instead, it's from a tragedy he wrote (Seneca was a great tragic playwright; see Gioia's "Seneca: The Madness of Hercules"). The play was called "The Trojan Women” (or just, “Troades”).

In the play, this quote ("mercy often means giving death, not life" or in some translations "Often it is mercy to kill, not to preserve life") is spoken by Andromache.

The context is deeply tragic: Andromache is facing the terrible dilemma regarding her young son Astyanax's fate. She has hidden him in Hector's tomb to protect him from the Greeks, who have decreed he must die.

When Ulysses (Odysseus) comes to take the boy away, Andromache experiences an agonizing internal conflict and briefly considers whether death might actually be more merciful for her son than the alternative—a life of slavery and humiliation as a captive, especially given his royal heritage as Hector's son.

In this moment of despair, she utters this line, reflecting the idea that sometimes death is preferable to a life of suffering and indignity.

This sort of missing context is a problem…

If you’re a “Stoic bro” and you see something like this, you might think,

“Yeah man! Even the Stoics know that sometimes it’s better to kill your enemy than show them mercy cause sometimes death is mercy. Now let’s go be mean to people because sometimes being mean is actually the kind thing to do, bro.”

Or, if you’re someone who thinks Stoicism is a problematic philosophy that no one ought to be practicing, you might think,

“Here’s another Stoic, glorifying death. More hypermasculine bullshit. Stoicism celebrates mercy killing.”

Neither of these takeaways provide could PR for the philosophy of Stoicism.

Given context, though, it could still be considered Stoic in spirit…

Nothing about this means an Ancient Stoic wouldn't have thought that death was sometimes more merciful than life, but they probably wouldn't have included that in the canon of their philosophy since it wouldn't be mercy or suffering they'd be concerned with it would be about the moral and just choice.

In one of his famous letters, Seneca could have said, "It is sometimes the Good choice to die rather than live" (he didn't say that, but he could of) — in fact, Seneca did commit suicide at the behest of Nero! though, it's not entirely clear whether this was a just choice or not.

The central tenant of Stoicism is Virtue (moral character) — not mercy or death since context would change the just (as in justness) measure of either.

Thanks for reading,
Tanner