Sublime

Latin quotes will include a great deal of Seneca’s aphorisms—lines like “Necessity is usually more powerful than duty” (Trojan Women 581), or “Nature takes revenge on everybody” (Phaedra 352), or “Crime must be hidden by crime” (Medea 721). The aphorisms often speak to recurrent preoccupations of Seneca’s, with fortune and its many reversals (“A ma

Seneca has been dubbed the “conscience of the Empire,” 41 although it would be more accurate to see him as its unconscious—but an unconscious with a public voice and a beautiful literary style. His wide-ranging and contradictory body of work articulates the psychological contradictions and pressures of consumerism, globalization, and empire—all the

no claims to literary or rhetorical education and no political ambition, who spent the whole of the first half of his life as a slave. He was a lifelong cripple, probably the result of having his leg broken by a cruel owner in early life. But he was brought to Rome in his youth and owned by Nero’s secretary, the freedman Epaphroditus.

"Contented poverty is an honourable estate."

Seneca would continue to be a polarizing figure throughout much of the next two thousand years. Our earliest surviving response to Seneca’s life, character, and relationship with Nero is a play that has come down to us among Seneca’s own tragedies: the Octavia.