The Roman Chronicles - Titans - Seneca

Seneca The Philosopher Who Served the Tyrant

He wrote more about how to live well than almost any other writer in the ancient world. He spent his life unable to do it. This is the most interesting thing about him.

Seneca was a Stoic philosopher, a playwright, a senator, and — for nearly a decade — the man who governed the Roman Empire from the shoulder of the Emperor Nero. He wrote beautifully about the virtue of poverty while accumulating one of the largest private fortunes in Rome. He wrote about the philosopher's correct relationship to power while drafting the speeches of a ruler he knew to be capable of murder. He wrote about death for forty years, then died in a steam bath, slowly, while dictating.

He was not a hypocrite. He was something more interesting: a man who saw the gap between who he meant to be and who the circumstances made him, wrote about it with searing honesty, and kept going anyway.

From his provincial childhood in Córdoba to the courts of Caligula, Claudius, and Nero; from eight years of exile on Corsica to the centre of the world's largest empire; from the letters he wrote Lucilius about time and friendship and how to face what is coming — this is the life of a man who tried, imperfectly and without apology, to think clearly about what it means to be human inside the conditions that history provides.