Seneca, the Stoic at Nero’s court

Who Seneca was

Lucius Annaeus Seneca was born around 4 BCE in Corduba, now Córdoba in southern Spain, into a wealthy family of the equestrian class (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)). He is often called Seneca the Younger, to tell him apart from his father, Seneca the Elder, a writer on rhetoric. His brother Novatus received two of his essays: On Anger, and later, under the name Gallio that he took on being adopted, On the Happy Life. Another brother, Mela, was the father of the poet Lucan.

He trained as an orator and studied philosophy in Rome, with the Stoic Attalus (IEP) and in the school of the Sextii (Britannica (opens in a new tab)). Its founder, Sextius, is the man whose habit of reviewing each day at bedtime Seneca describes in On Anger (3.36). Poor health sent him to Egypt to recover, and he came back to Rome to begin a public career.

In 41 CE the emperor Claudius exiled him to Corsica on a charge of adultery with Julia Livilla, the sister of the previous emperor, Caligula. He stayed eight years. In 49 Claudius’s new wife, Agrippina, had him recalled to tutor her son, the future emperor Nero (Britannica).

Nero came to power in 54, and Seneca and the praetorian prefect Burrus became his chief advisers. For some years they guided the government, and Britannica credits them with reforms to finance and the courts. Then the reign turned. In 59 Nero had his mother killed, and Seneca was blamed for writing the letter in which Nero justified the killing to the Senate (Tacitus, Annals 14.11). After Burrus died in 62, Seneca asked leave to retire and offered to give his fortune back. Nero refused it, and Seneca withdrew from public life as far as he could (Annals 14.53–56).

Those last three years produced the Letters to Lucilius and the Natural Questions (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)). In 65 he was accused of a part in the Pisonian conspiracy, a failed plot against Nero, and Nero ordered him to take his own life. Tacitus, who tells the story in Annals 15.60–64, says that when Seneca was refused the chance to make a will, he left his friends the one thing he still had: the pattern of his life.

What he taught

Seneca held the school’s central belief: the only real good is a good character, while wealth, office, fame and even the people we love are on loan from fortune and can be called back at any time (Consolation to Marcia 10). What sets him apart is how he wrote about it. He wrote in Latin, to particular people about particular troubles: a brother who asked how anger could be calmed, a friend who couldn’t settle, his own mother grieving his exile. He spent little time on Stoic logic, and apart from the Natural Questions, a study of the natural world, his surviving prose is mostly about what to do on a bad day. He borrowed good sense wherever he found it, even ending early letters with sayings of Epicurus, whose school was the Stoics’ great rival (Letters 11 and 16).

He also never claimed to have arrived.

Several exercises now taught as Stoic practice are described in his works, though the names they go by are later labels:

• A nightly review. Each night he went over everything he had said and done that day, a habit he credits to Sextius (On Anger 3.36). It is the basis of the Evening Examination.
• Foreseeing misfortune. Funerals pass our houses, he tells Marcia, and still we never expect a death in our own; a blow long foreseen falls less heavily (Consolation to Marcia 9). The usual label now is premeditatio malorum, a later shorthand.
• Plans with a condition. Because fortune can’t be relied on, the wise man attaches a condition to every plan: he will go to sea, take office or see his business succeed unless something intervenes (On Tranquility of Mind 13). The modern name is the reserve clause.
• Rehearsing hardship. In Letter 18 he tells Lucilius to live for a few days as a poor man does, the way a soldier drills in peacetime, so that hardship is familiar before it ever comes. Today this is called voluntary discomfort.

Which Seneca to read first

If you want one book, read On the Shortness of Life. It is short, about an hour’s reading in Aubrey Stewart’s translation, it takes on a problem everyone has, and it shows Seneca’s method whole: a common complaint, what lies behind it, and what to do instead. After that, choose by the problem in front of you.

Everything in the table except the Letters is free in Aubrey Stewart’s public-domain translations: the essays in his Minor Dialogues (1889, Project Gutenberg #64576 (opens in a new tab)), where On Tranquility of Mind is titled Of Peace of Mind, and On Benefits (1887, Project Gutenberg #3794 (opens in a new tab)). Each passage in this section is from those texts, checked word for word.

Time: On the Shortness of Life

The complaint that life is short, Seneca argues, is really a complaint about ourselves: “we are not poor in days, but wasteful of them” (chapter 1). The rest of the essay names the ways time leaks out, through busyness, other people’s demands and endless postponement. Our chapter-by-chapter guide walks through it.

Anger: On Anger

Three books to his brother, and a full treatise on a single emotion. Book 1 asks what anger is, starting from the old description of it as “a short madness” (1.1), Book 2 shows how it starts and how to stop it early, and Book 3 offers remedies. Read our guide to On Anger for the argument, Stoicism and anger for the free Anger exercise, and his sharpest lines in Stoic quotes on anger.

Grief: the consolations

Three letter-essays to people in mourning: Marcia, still grieving her son three years on; his own mother, Helvia; and Polybius, a freedman at Claudius’s court whose brother had died. Seneca doesn’t forbid grief. He says “let your tears flow, but let them some day cease to flow” (Consolation to Polybius 18). Our guide to the consolations says which to read first, and Stoicism and grief brings their advice to a loss today.

Restlessness: On Tranquility of Mind

His young friend Serenus opens the essay by describing his own state: not ill, not well, unable to settle on anything. Seneca likens him to someone recovering from a long illness: “not unhealthy,” but “not accustomed to being healthy” (chapter 2). The advice that follows is practical: take on work you can finish (6), choose your company carefully (7), and hold your plans loosely (13). If your restlessness looks more like a full inbox, see Stoicism and overwhelm.

Hardship: On Providence

A short essay addressed to Lucilius, it answers the question of why good people suffer in a world run by providence. The answer is that hardship is training: “misfortune is virtue’s opportunity” (chapter 4). It is also one of his most openly religious works. Mothers, Seneca says, want to keep their children out of the sun, while fathers make them work, and God deals with good people in the second way (chapter 2). Stoicism and failure applies it to a career or a plan gone wrong.

Generosity: On Benefits

Seven books, addressed to Aebutius Liberalis, about doing favors, accepting them and repaying them. It is long, and Book 1 is enough to start. Its central claim, that a benefit exists “in the mind of the doer or giver” (1.6), still applies to a birthday present or a reference letter: what counts is the spirit of it.

The Letters to Lucilius, and why we paraphrase them

The Letters are 124 letters in 20 books, written to his friend Lucilius in the last years of Seneca’s life (IEP (opens in a new tab)). Each takes up one subject, often prompted by something that happened that day: a miserable sea crossing, a visit to his old country house, lodgings above a public bathhouse. Many readers think they are the best of Seneca, and they are the source of many of the Seneca lines shared online, not all of them real (see fake Stoic quotes).

We don’t quote them, and the reason is copyright, not quality. The Victorian translations we quote for the essays don’t include the Letters. The standard older English version, Richard Gummere’s for the Loeb Classical Library (1917–1925), is in the public domain in the United States. But Gummere died in 1969, so in countries where copyright lasts 70 years after the translator’s death it stays protected through 2039. Popular modern versions, such as Robin Campbell’s Penguin selection Letters from a Stoic, are under copyright everywhere.

So on this site, as in the app, the Letters appear as original paraphrases: our own summaries in modern English, labeled as paraphrases, with the letter number, and never set as quotations. How we source the Stoics explains the rule. For which edition to buy, see Stoicism books.

Reading his books in order

The dates of most of Seneca’s works are uncertain. Three points are reasonably secure. The consolations are among his earliest surviving works, and the ones to Helvia and Polybius were written in exile on Corsica. On Clemency, addressed to the young Nero, dates from 55 or 56. The Letters and the Natural Questions come from his last years, 62 to 65 (SEP). Most of the other essays fall somewhere between, and scholars disagree about where.

If “in order” means reading order, the answer is the one above: one short essay, then the work that fits your problem, then the Letters.

Seneca’s contradictions

Seneca praised plain living while he was among the wealthiest men of his time, and he wrote about virtue while serving an emperor who killed his own mother. The charges were made in his lifetime. Tacitus records a political enemy, Publius Suillius, asking in public how philosophy had made Seneca so rich so fast (Annals 13.42). There is a smaller contradiction too: in exile he flattered Claudius in the Consolation to Polybius, hoping for recall, and after Claudius died, the Apocolocyntosis, a satire usually attributed to Seneca, mocked the dead emperor’s deification.

He answered the wealth charge himself. In On the Happy Life he puts it in his critics’ mouths, asking why this man says wealth should be despised and yet keeps it, and then replies:

That is the standard Stoic position: wealth is worth having and using well, but it is not good in itself (see preferred indifferents). The test is in his own image: riches may come “only into his house” (chapter 21), never into the spirit, and the way to tell is how calmly you could let them go. In 62 Seneca offered Nero his fortune back. Whether that was detachment or a bid for safety, we can’t know.

On the larger charge, that he didn’t live as he taught, he made no denial. In chapter 17 of the same essay he admits outright that he isn’t a wise man, and says he is content to correct a few faults each day. In chapter 20 he answers for everyone who teaches better than they live:

A fair account holds both facts. His years beside Nero are a real stain: he helped run a government that turned murderous, and he stayed. He also wrote more frankly than most moralists about how far he was from what he described, and he asked readers to “look with respect on those who attempt great things” (chapter 20). Criticisms of Stoicism asks what his case means for the philosophy as a whole. For reading him, the useful stance is the one he takes in Letter 27: he writes as a patient lying ill in the same hospital, not as someone already cured.