Seneca the Younger

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, known as Seneca the Younger, was a Roman Stoic philosopher, dramatist and statesman. Born in Spain, he rose to become the tutor and then the chief adviser of the emperor Nero, and amassed one of the largest fortunes in Rome, before being forced to take his own life in 65 CE. His essays and letters, written in a vivid, quotable Latin, are the fullest surviving account of Stoic ethics, and his tragedies shaped the drama of Renaissance Europe.

Seneca was born in Corduba, today's Córdoba in southern Spain, in about 4 BCE, although dates a few years either side have been proposed. His father, also called Lucius Annaeus Seneca and known as Seneca the Elder, was a wealthy man of the equestrian order and a writer on rhetoric. Of his two brothers, the elder, Gallio, became governor of Achaea and appears in the Acts of the Apostles dismissing charges against Paul the Apostle at Corinth; the younger, Mela, was the father of the poet Lucan.

He was taken to Rome as a child, in the reign of Augustus, and educated in rhetoric and philosophy. His teachers included the Stoic Attalus and Sotion, a follower of the Sextian school, which combined Stoic ideas with Pythagorean practices such as vegetarianism, which Seneca adopted for a time. He suffered from chronic illness, probably asthma or tuberculosis, and spent a period in Egypt with his aunt, whose husband was the prefect there.

Returning to Rome around 31 CE, Seneca began a career in politics and made a name as an orator. Ancient writers report that the emperor Caligula was jealous of his talent and considered having him killed. In 41 CE, early in the reign of Claudius, he was accused of adultery with Julia Livilla, the emperor's niece, a charge probably engineered by the empress Messalina. He was exiled to Corsica, where he spent eight years and wrote consolations to his mother and to an imperial freedman, the second of which openly pleads for his recall.

In 49 CE Agrippina, the new wife of Claudius, brought him back to Rome to tutor her son, the future emperor Nero.

When Nero became emperor in 54 CE at the age of sixteen, Seneca and the praetorian prefect Burrus became the most powerful men at court. For about five years they steered the government, and ancient historians regarded these early years as a period of good rule. Seneca wrote Nero's speeches and dedicated to him On Clemency, an essay urging the young ruler to govern with mercy. He also wrote the Apocolocyntosis, a cruel satire on the deification of the dead Claudius.

The position came at a moral cost. Seneca accepted vast gifts from Nero and became enormously rich, which exposed him to charges of hypocrisy for preaching the indifference of wealth. He remained at court after Nero had his stepbrother Britannicus poisoned in 55, and when Nero had his mother Agrippina murdered in 59, Seneca appears to have known in advance and drafted the letter to the Senate justifying the killing. After Burrus died in 62, his influence collapsed. He asked to retire, offered to give his wealth back to the emperor, and withdrew from public life.

In 65 CE the discovery of a conspiracy to kill Nero and replace him with the senator Gaius Calpurnius Piso gave Nero a pretext to eliminate Seneca, although there is no firm evidence that he was involved. He was ordered to kill himself. The historian Tacitus describes how he opened his veins, and when death came slowly, took poison and was finally placed in a hot bath. His wife Pompeia Paulina tried to die with him but was saved on Nero's orders.

Seneca was a Stoic in the tradition of Zeno of Citium, but he was less interested in logic and abstract theory than in how to live. His central theme is that virtue is the only true good, that external things such as wealth, office and health are outside our control, and that reason can free us from the passions that make us miserable. In On Anger he analyses rage as a false judgement and offers methods for preventing it. On the Shortness of Life argues that life is long enough if we stop wasting it on trivial pursuits. On Tranquillity of Mind, On the Happy Life and On Providence deal with how a wise person faces misfortune, and On Benefits examines giving and gratitude.

His masterpiece is the Moral Letters to Lucilius, 124 letters written in his last years to a younger friend. In them he presents philosophy as a daily practice of self-examination, recommends the regular contemplation of death so that it loses its terror, and treats slaves as fellow human beings who share the same reason. He freely borrowed from other schools, quoting Epicurus often, on the grounds that truth belongs to everyone. He also wrote the Natural Questions, a study of natural phenomena such as earthquakes, comets and the Nile floods.

Seneca wrote at least eight tragedies on Greek mythological subjects, including Medea, Phaedra, Thyestes, Oedipus, Agamemnon and The Trojan Women. They are full of violent passion, ghosts and long rhetorical speeches, and may have been written for recitation rather than full staging. They are the only Roman tragedies to survive complete.

Seneca's moral writings appealed to Christian readers, who found in them a close kinship with their own ethics. A forged exchange of letters between Seneca and Paul circulated from the fourth century and helped secure his reputation in the Middle Ages. In the sixteenth century his tragedies became a model for playwrights across Europe, and the revenge dramas of Elizabethan England, including early works by William Shakespeare, owe much to them. Michel de Montaigne drew heavily on his essays, and Justus Lipsius made him central to the Neostoic revival. He remains one of the most widely read writers of Hellenistic and Roman philosophy, and the gap between his teaching and his life at the court of the Roman Empire continues to divide his readers.