Seneca, Lucius Annaeus

Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (c.4 bc–ad 65), Roman Stoic philosopher, tragic poet, and, like his father the elder Seneca, a noted rhetorician, born in Córdoba. He was appointed tutor to the young Nero and, when the latter became emperor, acted as one of his chief advisers, but, finding this position untenable, he withdrew from the court in ad 62. Three years later he was accused of being implicated in a conspiracy and was forced to commit suicide. His writings consist of tragedies in verse, dialogues, treatises, and letters in prose, which in their different ways all aim to teach Stoicism. Most of his nine plays are on subjects drawn from Greek mythology and treated in extant Greek dramas, but his manner is very different from that of Greek tragedy. He uses an exaggerated rhetoric, dwells habitually on blood-thirsty details and introduces ghosts and magic, the plays were almost certainly not intended for performance but for reading aloud, probably by the author himself, to a select audience.

Seneca's prose writings consist of treatises, some of which are clumsily disguised as dialogues (De Clementia, De Ira, etc.) and a collection of what purport to be letters addressed to one Lucilius constituting a sort of elementary course in Stoicism. These writings were widely read in the 17th and 18th cents. L'Estrange's digest of them (1678) reached ten editions by 1711, so that there is an undercurrent of Stoicism in much of early 18th-cent. thinking, visible not only in Addison's Cato but also in a wide range of writers from Pope to Duck. (See Senecan tragedy, below.)