Seneca tutored Nero, made a fortune advising him, and understood years in advance how that arrangement was going to end. In his last three years he pulled back from the palace and wrote letters to a friend named Lucilius, who was governing Sicily and asking, in his roundabout way, how a man ought to live.
They read like letters, not lectures. Crowds. Insomnia. The racket from the bath house under his window. A friend dead at sea. His own asthma, which he calls rehearsing for death. The slave standing behind the couches at dinner, and what a man owes him. The arena at noon, when the shows stop being contests and become executions. Each letter starts with something that happened that week and turns, without ever raising its voice, into a question about time, fear, money, and how long a life actually needs to be.
He is the most quoted of the Stoics because he was writing to one man instead of to posterity. Nothing here is addressed to an audience. It is one friend telling another what he has worked out so far, and admitting where he has not.
This is the Civil Savage Society edition of Richard Mott Gummere's translation, all 124 letters entire, newly typeset in a 6 by 9 inch US Trade format, 636 pages. Most editions on the shelf are selections of thirty or forty letters. This is the whole correspondence, under the roman numerals the letters have been cited by for centuries, with the section numbers scholars quote and Gummere's own notes at the foot of the page carrying their marker. What it leaves out is the apparatus that talks over the work: no introduction, no bibliography, no index of somebody else's opinions.
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