 Seneca did not limit himself to the political function of advising rulers. Instead, he conceived the role of philosophy as benefiting people generally, in the widest sense of a cosmopolitan ethics and even politics. His De otio (“On Leisure”) contrasts the single commonwealth embracing gods and men in a cosmic citizenship, with the ordinary multiple commonwealths to which the accidents of birth assign us (though these also rightly command allegiance) (4.1). Should such an ordinary regime turn lethal, the philosopher remains a citizen of the cosmic commonwealth, and so his serenity can and should remain intact. That fate befell Seneca himself in 65 CE, when Nero accused him of conspiring in a planned assassination of the emperor and ordered him to commit suicide. To be sure, however, Seneca’s suicide reflected not only political obedience, but also, and perhaps more fundamentally, the belief, previously expressed in his writings (in particular De providentia and De ira, as well as his letters) that suicide is a supreme mark of freedom. No tyranny can so enslave us as to take away this freedom: a freedom to act based on the inner liberation of realizing that death and other worldly losses are in fact indifferent and irrelevant to happiness (Inwood 2005: 307–9).