Letters written at the edge of a life

Around AD 62, Seneca retired from Nero's court after two decades of navigating one of history's most dangerous employers. He was in his sixties, wealthy, and aware that his position was precarious. In the years that remained — he was forced to commit suicide in AD 65 — he wrote 124 letters to his friend Lucilius, a provincial official in Sicily. Together they form the Letters from a Stoic, or Epistulae Morales.

Each letter begins with something small — a crowd at the games, a visit to a bath house, a slave's remark — and uses it as a way into something larger: how to use time, how to face death, what friendship really demands, whether wealth is worth seeking. The movement from concrete observation to philosophical reflection is Seneca's characteristic technique, and it gives the letters a warmth that more systematic Stoic texts lack.

Seneca's most insistent theme is time. 'Vindica te tibi,' he writes early on — claim yourself, reclaim your own time, which is the only possession that truly belongs to you. He is impatient with the way people plan to live rather than actually living, squandering the present on obligations that serve other people's opinions of them.

His attitude to death is bracing rather than consoling. He argues that learning how to die is the central business of philosophy, not because death should dominate life but because fully accepting its certainty frees you from the small daily terrors of losing status, comfort, or favour. The person who does not fear death is, paradoxically, the most alive.

Seneca was, by his own account, a hypocrite on several points — he wrote about poverty while owning villas, about simplicity while entertaining lavishly. He acknowledges this plainly in the letters. The gap between his ideals and his life does not undermine the ideas; it makes them more recognisably human.