Seneca

Lucius Annaeus Seneca — known as Seneca the Younger — was born around 4 BCE in Corduba (modern Córdoba) in the Roman province of Hispania. The son of the rhetorician Seneca the Elder, he was brought to Rome as a boy and trained in rhetoric and philosophy, where he fell under the influence of the Stoic Attalus and the Sextii.

He rose rapidly through Rome's political and literary life, but in 41 CE the emperor Claudius exiled him to Corsica on a charge of adultery with Julia Livilla, where he remained for eight years. Recalled in 49 CE at Agrippina's urging, he became tutor and, after Nero's accession in 54 CE, his chief advisor. For roughly the first five years of the reign — the so-called quinquennium Neronis — Seneca and the praetorian prefect Burrus effectively ran the empire.

He withdrew from court around 62 CE and devoted his final years to writing. In 65 CE, implicated (probably unjustly) in the Pisonian conspiracy against Nero, he was ordered to take his own life. Tacitus's account of his death is one of the most famous set-pieces in Latin historiography.

Moral Letters to Lucilius (Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium) — 124 surviving letters, Seneca's most sustained philosophical work. On the Shortness of Life, On Anger, On Providence, On Tranquility of Mind, On the Happy Life, On Benefits, and Natural Questions. He also wrote nine tragedies (including Thyestes and Medea) that profoundly influenced Renaissance drama, and the satirical Apocolocyntosis on the deification of Claudius.

c. 4 BCE — born in Corduba.
c. 25 CE — arrives in Rome; studies under Attalus and Sotion.
41 CE — exiled to Corsica by Claudius.
49 CE — recalled; appointed tutor to the young Nero.
54 CE — Nero accedes; Seneca becomes chief advisor.
62 CE — retires from court after Burrus's death.
62–65 CE — composes the Moral Letters.
65 CE — forced suicide after the Pisonian conspiracy.

Seneca was the principal bridge between Greek Stoicism and the Latin tradition that inherited it. His letters were read as quasi-scripture by early Christian writers — a forged correspondence with St Paul circulated from late antiquity onward — and he became the most widely translated and cited Stoic in medieval and early-modern Europe.

Montaigne's Essays, the French moralists, and the entire humanist essayistic tradition trace directly to him. His Latin prose style, aphoristic and pointed, helped shape modern European philosophical writing.