Letters from a Stoic

Seneca's Moral Letters to Lucilius (Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium) are 124 letters that the Roman philosopher and statesman wrote in the last years of his life, after he had stepped back from Nero's court. They are addressed to his younger friend Lucilius, then a Roman official in Sicily, but Seneca wrote them with a wider readership in mind. The letters come down to us in twenty books, and the collection is not complete: an ancient writer quotes from a twenty-second book.

The letters have no chain of argument. Many start from something ordinary, such as a visit to his old country house (Letter 12), a midday show at the arena (Letter 7) or the December festival in Rome (Letter 18), and turn it into a lesson in Stoic philosophy, the school that holds that a good character is the only true good. This summary follows the themes the letters keep coming back to: time, philosophy as a way of living, reading, the crowd, friendship, wealth, fear, death, the treatment of slaves, and the good that is truly our own. It names the letters it draws on.

Notes. "Letters from a Stoic" is the title of Robin Campbell's well-known Penguin selection (1969). This summary draws on the complete collection of 124 letters, so some of the letters it names may not be in that selection. The English quotes in this summary come from Richard Mott Gummere's complete translation (Loeb Classical Library, 1917 to 1925), which is in the public domain and uses some older wording. The Dari lines are our own translation of the English. Seneca sometimes speaks of God and the gods, and in some letters he defends a person's choice to end his own life; the summary reports these as his own views.