Seneca preached Stoic restraint while becoming one of Rome's richest men
Seneca tutored the young Nero, helped run the empire competently for five years, and wrote some of antiquity's most influential moral letters. A rival senator charged him with piling up three hundred million sestertii in just four years of service, and his end came by Nero's order in AD 65.
Born around 4 BC in Corduba, in Roman Spain, Seneca was the son of Seneca the Elder, a famous teacher of rhetoric, and uncle of the poet Lucan. He was carried to Rome as a small child, studied with Stoic teachers, and in his early twenties went vegetarian for about a year until his father objected that the habit looked like foreign cult practice. He suffered breathing trouble, probably asthma, for most of his life.
His career nearly ended several times. Cassius Dio says Caligula, jealous of his speeches, ordered his death but relented when told Seneca was sick and would die anyway. In AD 41 the empress Messalina accused him of adultery with Julia Livilla, a charge some historians doubt; Claudius turned the death sentence into eight years of exile on Corsica, where Seneca wrote consolations including one to his mother Helvia.
Recalled in 49 to teach Nero, he became the new emperor's adviser in 54 alongside the prefect Burrus, wrote Nero's accession speeches, served as suffect consul in 56, and mocked the deification of Claudius in a satire. In 58 the senator Suillius attacked his wealth and morals; Tacitus calls the accuser deeply biased, and Seneca had him prosecuted, but the charge of hypocrisy has followed Seneca ever since. When Burrus died in 62 his influence collapsed, and Nero twice refused to let him retire.
Withdrawing to his estates, he produced the Natural Questions and the Letters to Lucilius. His surviving prose, 12 essays and 124 letters, is among the richest sources for ancient Stoicism, and tragedies such as Medea and Thyestes made him a model for Renaissance dramatists. Implicated in the Pisonian plot to kill Nero, probably wrongly, he was forced to take his own life; his calm death became a favourite subject for painters.
Source: Seneca the Younger
