Introduction to Seneca’s Epistulae Morales
Seneca the Younger (4 BCE–65 CE) was an influential and prolific writer, moralist, poet, and public servant in the middle of the first century of the Common Era. He came from a very prominent provincial family from Corduba in Spain, but spent most of his life in Rome. After a rocky relationship with two of the Julio-Claudian emperors (Caligula and Claudius), which included seven years of banishment to the island of Corsica, Seneca surprisingly found himself appointed to be the tutor to the young emperor-to-be Nero. In fact, for the first five years of Nero’s reign, Seneca served as a vice-regent, essentially running the Empire until Nero came of age. Eventually, Nero could not abide the disapproving eye of his former tutor, and Seneca was ordered to commit suicide on trumped-up charges of conspiracy.
Perhaps due to his long experience of the vagaries of power and corruption, Seneca was a lifelong proponent of Stoicism, one of the main systems of thought available to Romans from earlier Greek philosophy. Seneca seeks to ground all of his writing, no matter what the genre, in this very ordered and rational philosophy. One of Seneca’s most popular and enduring writing endeavors was the personal letter, which amounted to a philosophical reflection on various issues of life in the Roman world. The final selections of Chapter I are drawn from these moral reflections, written to his friend (who may or may not be fictional) named Lucilius. This collection of 124 letters offers a master class in Stoic philosophy.
As with the earlier selections from Cicero, Seneca is deeply concerned with virtue, and choosing the right sort of people to be friends with. Seneca, however, adopts a much different style and tone from Cicero, and he serves as one of the few viable alternative models for prose authors in antiquity. Seneca’s brand of Stoicism was highly influential on the early Christian leaders. If you read further in his epistles, a good deal of his moral philosophy will seem familiar to due to its adoption into the moral language of Christianity and from their into a range of schools of western ethics.
