Trust is a matter of reciprocal relationships, not of prediction, risk, and reliance.

Friendship, accordingly, is always helpful, but love sometimes even does harm. Try to perfect yourself, if for no other reason, in order that you may learn how to love.

He urges him in the very first epistle to “persuade yourself that what I write is the case” (1.1); it is not the writer’s job to teach, but that of the reader himself. But Seneca constantly works in the Letters to undermine the distinction between the reader and the writer; we are supposed to become so closely involved that this distinction disappe