We turn now to one of the most fraught questions about Seneca’s life story: his vast accumulation of wealth under Nero. 25 For our purposes, there are three central questions. First, how rich was he? Second, how exactly did he get his money? And third, how can we reconcile his accumulation of wealth and property with the overwhelmingly negative dep

constant is fear.

Thrasea Paetus. Thrasea was not a philosopher or writer but a politician and an aristocrat, a member of the Senate, who is presented, in both Tacitus and Dio, as a man of absolute integrity. He was the only one who expressed disapproval of the speech Seneca delivered to the Senate in defense of Nero’s killing of his mother: when it was delivered, T

something that belongs to him and is in his power, not something that might threaten his autonomy. He is on a constant quest to reinvent death as a sphere where he can be in control and can express himself, rather than simply at the mercy of somebody else. Death, he suggests, is a great leveler, since ownership of death is available to everybody, n

in what could be seen as an entirely un-Stoic spirit, he suggests that what really makes or breaks a marriage is not how “you” (i.e., the husband) behave, but rather, what kind of woman “you” choose to marry. The real issue then is not the husband’s behavior, but the wife’s. This goes contrary to the hardline Stoic position that what matters is the

Seneca’s standards of what counts as moderate are clearly formed by comparing himself only with the most privileged sectors of Roman society. He says, for example, that, “everyone [sic] now has mules laden with cups of crystal and myrrhine and hand-carved by the greatest artisans” (123.7); the artisans are not included in “everyone.” Seneca was, ev

Tacitus tells us that in the year 62, a man called Romanus accused him of conspiring against the government with Gaius Piso, although Seneca managed, on

Seneca’s time of power and influence was necessarily brief. It was a compromised death, full of second and third guesses, that follows a life of compromises and complex negotiations, between ideal and reality, philosophy and politics, virtue and money, motivation and action.

Human life is, on the one hand, viewed from a cosmic perspective: as in the Natural Questions, viewed from above, as a mere pinpoint of time within eternity. But more commonly, the Epistles present life as something that happens not by the lifespan, but by the day. What matters, then, is not what Seneca did over his years as Nero’s advisor, but rat