L. Annaeus Seneca
Philosopher, dramatist, and Nero's tutor
c. 4 BC – 65 AD
Lucius Annaeus Seneca was born around 4 BC in Corduba (Córdoba), in Roman Spain, into a wealthy and intellectually distinguished family — his father, Seneca the Elder, was a famous rhetorician. He was brought to Rome as an infant and educated in rhetoric and philosophy, developing an early attachment to Stoicism that would define his life and work.
His career was turbulent. He was exiled to Corsica in 41 AD by Claudius, supposedly for an affair with the emperor's niece — more likely for political reasons. He spent eight years there before being recalled by Agrippina to tutor her son, the future emperor Nero. For the first five years of Nero's reign (54–59 AD), Seneca and the praetorian prefect Burrus effectively ran the empire, and ran it well. Then Nero grew up, murdered his mother, and began the slide into tyranny. Seneca tried to retire; Nero let him go but kept him under surveillance. In 65 AD, accused of involvement in the Pisonian conspiracy, Seneca was ordered to kill himself. He opened his veins in the bath, discoursing on philosophy to the end.
His philosophical works — the Moral Letters to Lucilius, the Dialogues, the Natural Questions — are the most accessible and practically useful philosophical writings to survive from antiquity. They deal with anger, grief, the shortness of life, the proper use of time, the fear of death, and the conduct of daily life with a directness and warmth that feel startlingly modern.
His tragedies — nine survive — are rhetorically extreme, psychologically violent, and enormously influential. They were the model for Renaissance tragedy: Marlowe, Kyd, and Shakespeare all learned from Seneca's Medea, Phaedra, and Thyestes.
The Pumpkinification of Claudius — a savage satire on the recently deceased emperor's attempt to be admitted to heaven as a god. The gods take one loo...
Seven books on giving, receiving, and the obligation that lies between. When does a gift become a debt? Can you be grateful to someone who helped you...
An essay addressed to the young emperor Nero, arguing that mercy is the supreme virtue of a ruler. The irony is excruciating — Seneca was writing to a...
124 letters to a friend named Lucilius on how to live, how to die, how to deal with anger, grief, boredom, and other people. Seneca's Stoicism is prac...
Hercules returns from the underworld, his labours complete, to find his family threatened by a tyrant. He saves them — then Juno drives him mad, and h...
Hercules is dying. The poisoned robe sent by his jealous wife Deianira is burning him alive. He climbs Mount Oeta, builds his own funeral pyre, and as...
Fragments of a play — or possibly two plays — about Oedipus in exile and the civil war between his sons Eteocles and Polynices for the throne of Thebe...
Seneca's retelling of Euripides' Trojan Women. Hecuba, Andromache, and the captive women of Troy face the final cruelties of the victorious Greeks — t...