Peter Paul Rubens and workshop, The Death of Seneca. Museo del Prado, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Penguin Classics
Letters from a Stoic
Advice from the richest philosopher in Rome.
$16.00
Available · worldwide delivery
- Author
- Seneca; trans. Robin Campbell
- Publisher
- Penguin Classics
- Published
- January 2004
- Pages
- 0
- Format
- Paperback
- Size
- Standard
- Language
- English
The Library Essay
Advice From a Man Still Practising
Seneca wrote these letters to his friend Lucilius in the early sixties of the first century, in retirement from a career that had made him tutor and minister to Nero and one of the richest men in Rome. They counsel simplicity from a man who owned estates, and steadiness in the face of death from a man who would shortly be ordered to die, and the tension is exactly what keeps them alive; this is philosophy written by someone still struggling to follow it.
The letters range from friendship and illness to slavery, noise and the proper use of time, always in a plain conversational Latin that Robin Campbell's Penguin Classics selection carries naturally into English. They have been read continuously for nineteen centuries, by Christians and sceptics alike, as the most companionable of the Stoic texts.
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