Seneca's Letters to Lucilius

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 4 BCE to 65 CE) was a Stoic philosopher, playwright and for years the adviser of the emperor Nero. After retiring from court around 62 CE, he wrote the Epistulae Morales, moral letters to Lucilius, a younger friend who held a post in Sicily. The 124 surviving letters, in 20 books, read like one side of a conversation, each focused on a single topic, and they come with a modest tone: Seneca presents himself as a fellow traveler who is still making progress. The first letter urges Lucilius to claim his time for himself and not let hours slip away.¹²³

Seneca's subjects include grief, friendship, anger, wealth, old age, the fear of death and how to read philosophy for practical use. He draws on earlier Stoics but borrows freely from Epicurus, whom he quotes with approval. The letters turn Stoicism, a school with a complex logic and physics, into a manual for living. They were written under growing danger. In 65 CE, after the Pisonian conspiracy against Nero, Seneca was ordered to kill himself, and Tacitus describes how he opened his veins and, when bleeding was slow, took poison, and finally suffocated in a steam bath.²³

Renaissance readers prized the letters, Erasmus edited Seneca in 1515, and Montaigne quoted him constantly. Modern Stoic revival books often start with Seneca.²³