"Successful and fortunate crime is called virtue"
About this Quote
Power doesn’t just write the laws; it rewrites the moral scorecard. Seneca’s line is a cold-eyed diagnosis of how societies launder brutality into respectability the moment it stops being punishable. “Successful and fortunate” is the tell: ethics, in public life, often trails behind outcomes. If you win, you’re a founder, a savior, a stabilizer. If you lose, you’re a criminal. The quote isn’t celebrating cynicism so much as exposing a civic reflex: we treat results as proof of righteousness, then retrofit principles to match the verdict.
As a Roman statesman under the Julio-Claudian court, Seneca knew this from the inside. Imperial politics was a theater where banishments, confiscations, and executions could be framed as necessary governance if they consolidated order. Under Nero, especially, violence didn’t have to disappear to become “virtue”; it only had to be narrated as security, piety, or duty. Stoicism preached an inner moral law indifferent to fortune, but Seneca is noting how the crowd - and the court - do the opposite. They bow to Fortune and call it character.
The subtext is a warning about complicity. Once “success” becomes the standard, everyone has an incentive to admire the victor’s methods, not interrogate them. Seneca is pushing the reader to separate moral judgment from social applause, to ask the dangerous question in any political era: if the same act had failed, would we still call it noble?
As a Roman statesman under the Julio-Claudian court, Seneca knew this from the inside. Imperial politics was a theater where banishments, confiscations, and executions could be framed as necessary governance if they consolidated order. Under Nero, especially, violence didn’t have to disappear to become “virtue”; it only had to be narrated as security, piety, or duty. Stoicism preached an inner moral law indifferent to fortune, but Seneca is noting how the crowd - and the court - do the opposite. They bow to Fortune and call it character.
The subtext is a warning about complicity. Once “success” becomes the standard, everyone has an incentive to admire the victor’s methods, not interrogate them. Seneca is pushing the reader to separate moral judgment from social applause, to ask the dangerous question in any political era: if the same act had failed, would we still call it noble?
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
|---|
More Quotes by Seneca
Add to List
