Seneca

Lucius Annaeus Seneca was born at Corduba, in Spain, around 4 BC and died near Rome in 65, ordered by Nero to take his own life after the conspiracy of Piso. Son of a teacher of rhetoric, he made a career at the bar and in the senate, was banished to Corsica by Claudius in 41 and recalled in 49 to teach the young Nero. When Nero became emperor in 54 Seneca was, with Burrus, the man who ran the government; he withdrew from it in 62 and spent his last years writing.

The letters to Lucilius, procurator of Sicily, belong to those last years: one hundred and twenty-four letters in twenty books, each a short essay that starts from a detail of daily life and ends, in the early letters, with a saying to be paid over like a debt. The dialogues are earlier and addressed to named people: On Anger to his brother Novatus, On Providence to Lucilius, On the Firmness of the Wise Man to Serenus, On a Happy Life to his brother Gallio, On Clemency to Nero himself, the consolation to Marcia, daughter of the historian Cremutius Cordus. He also wrote tragedies and a treatise on natural questions.

The English texts on this site are Richard Mott Gummere’s translation of the letters, published in the Loeb series between 1917 and 1925, of which thirty letters are on Wikisource, and Aubrey Stewart’s Minor Dialogues of 1889. Gummere numbers the sections of each letter, so an extract is cited as Letter 13, §4; Stewart numbers the chapters of each dialogue, so that a passage of On Anger is cited by book and chapter. The corresponding French pages rest on Joseph Baillard’s translation of 1861. The passages of Seneca in the app are reserved to Stoic+, so this page shows only what the editions themselves say, with the file and line of each extract; the works are listed below, and the sentences attributed to him are checked in Quote check.