This meme comes up quite a bit. This is one of my least favorite types of memes, as it really is an appeal to authority, and more often than not, the quotation is inaccurate. This quote is most likely inaccurate, as in Seneca never said it. Looking through Seneca’s works, it just isn’t there.
The difficult thing with trying to nail this quote down though is that it has been repeated thousands of times, and doing a quick search brings up hundreds of “quote” websites that never cite where the quote came from. However, uncovering the source isn’t impossible.
The first mention of this quote, that I can find comes around 1903, at earliest. It can be found in the book “Little Journeys: To the home of great philosophers” by Elbert Hubbard. There is no citation there. The quotation is also a bit different as wise is changed to philosopher, and the tense is past, instead of present.
That isn’t where the quote most likely began though. Instead, it most likely originated with Edward Gibbon in his “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” which was fully completed in 1789. The relevant section states:
“The policy of the emperors and the senate, as far as it concerned religion, was happily seconded by the reflections of the enlightened, and by the habits of the superstitious, part of their subjects. The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.”
Basically, Gibbon was writing about the views of the Romans, and later on someone simplified it and placed it on the lips of Seneca in order to give it more authority. It also have to be noted that Gibbons was quite hostile to religion, and his biases often cloud the history he was purporting to record.
The quote from Gibbons is part of his wider narrative that saw paganism as tolerant, and Christianity as intolerant. He would largely blame Christianity for the decline of Rome. We can see this idea in this particular quote. He’s not talking about religion but modes of worship, and he’s largely talking about paganism here as that is what really prevailed in the Roman world. He then tries to skirt the issue of how there were persecutions of Christians by saying that the Roman leaders just found these modes of worship useful, instead of acknowledging that the Roman leaders also became passionate believers as well.
So to sum up, the quote isn’t from Seneca, but instead from Gibbons. Gibbons allowed his biases to really guide his history, and the quote really is more of an attack than anything else.
