Seneca the Younger (c. 4 BCE - 65 CE) was a Roman Stoic philosopher, dramatist, orator and statesman. He served as tutor and later chief adviser to the emperor Nero, and wrote moral essays, a collection of philosophical letters and a group of verse tragedies that influenced European drama for centuries. [1] Ordered to die after being implicated in a conspiracy against Nero, he became for later readers an emblem of the Stoic confrontation with death. [2]
Early life and education
Lucius Annaeus Seneca was born around 4 BCE at Corduba in the Roman province of Hispania, into a prosperous provincial family. His father, Seneca the Elder, was a noted authority on rhetoric, and the family moved to Rome while Seneca was a child. [1]
In Rome he was trained in rhetoric and drawn to philosophy, studying with teachers who combined Stoic doctrine with the ascetic practices of the Sextian school. Chronic ill health, probably a respiratory illness, marked his youth and led to a long convalescence in Egypt before he returned to begin a public career. [2]
Public career
Seneca entered the Senate and gained a reputation as an orator and writer under the emperors Tiberius and Caligula. In 41 CE, early in the reign of Claudius, he was accused of adultery with the emperor's niece and banished to Corsica, where he spent eight years in exile and continued to write. [1]
He was recalled in 49 CE at the instigation of Agrippina the Younger to act as tutor to her son, the future emperor Nero. When Nero came to power in 54 CE, Seneca and the praetorian prefect Burrus effectively guided the administration, and the early years of the reign were later remembered as comparatively well governed. Seneca held a suffect consulship in 56 CE. [2]
Philosophy and writings
Seneca's philosophical work is practical rather than technical. His essays include On Anger, On Clemency, addressed to the young Nero, On the Shortness of Life and On the Happy Life, while the Naturales Quaestiones examines natural phenomena in a Stoic frame. [2]
His most influential work is the Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, a sequence of one hundred and twenty-four letters written in his final years, which treat friendship, fear, wealth, illness and mortality in a direct conversational style. [3] He also wrote tragedies, among them Medea, Phaedra and Thyestes, whose rhetorical intensity and scenes of violence strongly shaped Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.
Fall and death
Seneca's influence over Nero declined after the death of Burrus in 62 CE, and he withdrew from public affairs, offering to return his very large fortune to the emperor. Critics in his own time and since have noted the tension between his immense wealth and his teaching on the indifference of external goods. [1]
In 65 CE he was accused of involvement in the Pisonian conspiracy, a plot to assassinate Nero. Ordered to take his own life, he cut his veins and, according to the account of the historian Tacitus, dictated final reflections to his secretaries as he died. [4]
Legacy
Seneca's prose was read continuously through late antiquity and the Middle Ages, and early Christian writers treated him with unusual sympathy. Montaigne, Erasmus and the Renaissance humanists drew heavily on him, and his tragedies gave European playwrights a model for serious verse drama. [3] In the modern era the Letters have remained the most widely read introduction to Stoic ethics. [2]
