Letters from a Stoic

What It Is

A hundred and twenty-four letters in Latin, written in the last three years of Seneca's life, after he had withdrawn from Nero's court and was waiting to see what the emperor would do about him. They are addressed to Lucilius, a friend and imperial official in Sicily. Whether he wrote back, or was ever more than a convenient ear, is still argued about; the letters were shaped for publication from the start.

They are not correspondence as we understand it. Each one begins in something small and domestic, a noisy bath-house under his window, a journey, an illness, a crowd at the games, and turns without hurry into an argument about how to live. Most run three or four pages.

The style is why he has never gone out of print. Seneca writes in short, hard, freestanding sentences that detach from the page and lodge in you. Caligula, who had reason to dislike him, called his prose sand without lime. He meant it as an insult. It is also an accurate description of the effect.

Why It Matters

This is the Stoicism people actually read. Epictetus is more rigorous and Marcus Aurelius is more moving, but Seneca is the one who wrote for an audience and knew how to hold it. Montaigne built the essay out of him. The Elizabethans took his cadences. Every modern book about resilience and hardship is drawing, usually without saying so, on this well.

Then there is the problem, which you should not read around. Seneca was the richest private citizen in Rome, a moneylender on an imperial scale, and for years the man who made Nero's reign presentable. He wrote about the worthlessness of wealth from inside a fortune. The charge of hypocrisy is fair, and it is old; Cassius Dio was pressing it within two centuries.

It is also, oddly, the reason to read him. Nobody writes better about the pull of money than a man who could not put it down. The letters are the record of an intelligence arguing with its own life and losing, and that is worth more than a consistent philosopher would be.

Before You Read

Do not read this book front to back. It will exhaust you by letter thirty and you will conclude Seneca repeats himself, which he does, because he was not writing a book you would read in a week.

One letter a night is the right dose, and a month or two is the right span. Nothing in the sentences is difficult. The difficulty is resisting the urge to consume it.

Read with a pen. He is the most quotable of the ancients, and a marked copy becomes a book you return to rather than one you finished.

Which Translation to Read

• Robin Campbell (Penguin Classics, 1969) — recommended. Still the best English prose anyone has made of Seneca: clean, mordant, quick, and it keeps the snap of the short sentences that are the whole point of him. It has converted more English readers than every other version combined. The cost: it is a selection, forty-odd letters out of the hundred and twenty-four, so you are reading someone else's Seneca. The notes are thin, and the English is recognisably of its decade. View on Amazon →
• Margaret Graver and A. A. Long, Letters on Ethics (University of Chicago Press, 2015). The complete letters, the first full English version in nearly a century, and precise about the Stoic technical vocabulary Campbell tends to dissolve into plain speech. The scholarly standard. The cost: an academic volume at an academic price, and the exactness costs some of the bite.
• Elaine Fantham, Selected Letters (Oxford World's Classics, 2010). The largest selection available in a cheap paperback, with a headnote to each letter that tells you what it is doing and how it connects to the rest. The best-annotated way in. The cost: Fantham's English is accurate and unmemorable. She will not leave lines in your head the way Campbell does.

Take Campbell to read, Fantham if you want more of them with better guidance, Graver and Long if you want all of them. Ignore the self-help repackagings that strip the letters into bullet points; the argument is in the prose, and they throw the prose away.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read Campbell's introduction first. It is biographical rather than a walk-through, and Seneca reads very differently once you know what he had been doing for the previous fifteen years and what he expected to happen next.

Argue with him. Seneca is a rhetorician before he is a philosopher, and he will occasionally win a point with a phrase rather than a reason. Notice when.

Keep him near Epictetus and Marcus. The three Roman Stoics are best read as a conversation: the ex-slave who is merciless, the emperor who is talking to himself, and the courtier who is trying to persuade you. Seneca is the one who most wants you to like him. Do not let that be the reason you dismiss him.