— philosophy —
Letters from a Stoic
Seneca
— 65 —
“
Seneca was a Stoic philosopher, Nero's tutor, and one of the richest men in Rome; a walking contradiction who wrote beautifully about it.
⚖The case for it
Seneca was a Stoic philosopher, Nero's tutor, and one of the richest men in Rome; a walking contradiction who wrote beautifully about it. These 124 letters to Lucilius cover grief, anger, time, death, and friendship with devastating clarity. 'It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a great deal of it.' He was right.
— the canon
✕The case against
Seneca preached indifference to wealth while amassing one of Rome's great fortunes and writing speeches for Nero, and the letters never quite metabolize that. Read straight through, they repeat: death again, fortune again, the same sturdy consolations recycled. The correspondence is also staged; Lucilius is a device, and the intimacy is a performance.
— the honest librarian
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