Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger wrote the finest Stoic prose in Latin and served as Nero's minister. Born at Corduba in Spain around 4 BC into a wealthy equestrian family — his father was a rhetorician — he was brought to Rome as a child and trained in rhetoric and philosophy, and suffered from asthma and probably tuberculosis all his life. He made a reputation as an advocate and writer under Caligula, who nearly had him killed for a speech, and was exiled to Corsica in AD 41 by Claudius on a charge of adultery with Caligula's sister. Agrippina had him recalled in AD 49 to tutor her twelve-year-old son, the future Nero. When Nero became emperor in AD 54, Seneca and the praetorian prefect Burrus effectively governed for five years, and the period was well administered. The compromises accumulated. He wrote the speech in which Nero justified murdering his own mother in AD 59, and he grew enormously rich — an estimated three hundred million sesterces — while writing that wealth is indifferent to the wise. He answered the charge himself, arguing that a philosopher may possess what he is not attached to, which convinced few contemporaries and fewer since. He withdrew from public life after Burrus died in AD 62. His works — the Letters to Lucilius, On Anger, On the Shortness of Life, and nine tragedies that shaped Elizabethan drama — are practical rather than systematic. Implicated in the Pisonian conspiracy in AD 65, he was ordered to die, opened his veins, and, the blood coming slowly, took hemlock and finally suffocated in a hot bath.
- Lived: 4 BCE – 65 CE
- Nationality: Roman
- Roles: philosopher, playwright, statesman, tutor
