author
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
d. 65
A Roman Stoic thinker, statesman, and playwright, his writing has stayed alive for nearly two thousand years because it speaks so directly about anger, grief, power, and the shortness of life. His essays and letters still feel surprisingly modern: calm, practical, and deeply human.
8 Audiobooks
L. Annaeus Seneca on Benefits
by Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Between Heathenism and Christianity Being a translation of Seneca's De Providentia, and Plutarch's De sera numinis vindicta, together with notes, additional extracts from these writers and two essays on Graeco-Roman life in the first century after Christ.
by Charles William Super, Plutarch, Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Minor Dialogues, Together With the Dialogue on Clemency
by Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Apocolocyntosis
by Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Two Tragedies of Seneca: Medea and The Daughters of Troy Rendered into English Verse
by Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Seneca's Morals of a Happy Life, Benefits, Anger and Clemency
by Lucius Annaeus Seneca
The Tragedies of Seneca Translated into English Verse, to Which Have Been Appended Comparative Analyses of the Corresponding Greek and Roman Plays, and a Mythological Index
by Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Physical science in the time of Nero : being a translation of the Quaestiones naturales of Seneca
by Lucius Annaeus Seneca
About the author
Born in Corduba in Roman Spain around 4 BCE, Seneca later built his life in Rome, where he became known as an orator, philosopher, dramatist, and public figure. Ancient sources and standard reference works describe him as one of the leading intellectual voices of the first century CE, and he is usually known today as Seneca the Younger to distinguish him from his father, Seneca the Elder.
His life joined philosophy and politics in a dramatic way. He was exiled under the emperor Claudius, later returned to Rome, and became tutor and adviser to Nero. Alongside that public career, he wrote works that made Stoic ideas vivid and personal, especially the Letters to Lucilius, as well as essays such as On Anger and On the Shortness of Life. He also wrote tragedies that had a major afterlife in European literature.
Seneca died in 65 CE after being ordered to take his own life in the aftermath of a conspiracy against Nero. That ending helped fix his image in history, but readers have kept coming back to him for a simpler reason: he writes about how to live well when the world is unstable, time is limited, and character matters most.