Seneca the Younger

Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger, usually known simply as Seneca, was a Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, and satirist of Ancient Rome. Born around 4 BC in Colonia Patricia Corduba, in Hispania, he belonged to the post-Augustan age of Latin literature. His father, Seneca the Elder, was a Roman knight, writer, and teacher of rhetoric, and his family included figures who would also be tied to Roman letters and public life: his elder brother Lucius Junius Gallio Annaeanus and his nephew, the poet Lucan.

Seneca was taken to Rome at a young age and educated in literature, grammar, and rhetoric, the standard training for high-born Romans. He also studied philosophy with Attalus the Stoic, and with Sotion and Papirius Fabianus, who belonged to the School of the Sextii, a short-lived school that combined Stoicism with Pythagoreanism. Sotion even persuaded the young Seneca to become a vegetarian for about a year, until his father urged him to stop because the practice was linked with “some foreign rites.” Seneca’s life was also shaped by illness. He suffered breathing difficulties, probably asthma, and in his mid-twenties seems to have been struck by tuberculosis. He spent years in Egypt with his aunt, who nursed him through a long period of poor health.

After returning to Rome in AD 31, Seneca entered public life. With his aunt’s influence, he was elected quaestor, probably after AD 37, and gained the right to sit in the Roman Senate. His early career as a senator was successful, especially as an orator, but imperial politics soon proved dangerous. Under Caligula, according to Cassius Dio, Seneca’s speaking success angered the emperor enough that he ordered Seneca to kill himself; Seneca survived because he was seriously ill and expected to die soon. In AD 41, under Claudius, Seneca was accused of adultery with Julia Livilla. The Senate sentenced him to death, but Claudius commuted the sentence to exile on Corsica, where Seneca spent eight years.

That exile produced some of Seneca’s earliest surviving works, including the Consolation to Helvia, addressed to his mother, and the Consolation to Polybius, written to one of Claudius’ freedmen after the death of his brother. In AD 49, Agrippina’s influence brought Seneca back to Rome. He became tutor to her son, the future emperor Nero. When Nero became emperor in AD 54, Seneca served as his advisor, together with the praetorian prefect Sextus Afranius Burrus. From AD 54 to 62, the two men helped provide competent government during the first five years of Nero’s reign. Seneca was appointed suffect consul in 56, but his influence over Nero later declined.

As a writer, Seneca is best known for his philosophical prose and his tragedies. His prose includes 12 essays and 124 letters on moral questions, one of the most important bodies of primary material for ancient Stoicism. His plays, all tragedies, include Medea, Thyestes, and Phaedra. In AD 65, Seneca was forced to die by suicide for alleged involvement in the Pisonian conspiracy to assassinate Nero, a charge of which he may have been innocent, though there is no consensus. His calm death became a subject for many painters. Later generations, especially in the Renaissance, saw him as a sage, a model of moral instruction, literary style, and dramatic art. His words still speak because they come from a life spent close to sickness, exile, power, danger, and the daily work of self-command.