Letters from a Stoic

The trouble it addresses

Lucius Annaeus Seneca was born in Córdoba, in Roman Spain, around 4 BCE, and became one of the most powerful men in Rome. He was a celebrated writer, was exiled to Corsica by the emperor Claudius, and was recalled to tutor the young Nero. When Nero became emperor, Seneca served for years as one of his chief advisers and grew enormously rich. As the regime darkened, he tried to withdraw. In 65 CE, accused of involvement in a conspiracy, he was ordered by Nero to take his own life, and did.

The 124 letters he wrote to his younger friend Lucilius, a Roman official in Sicily, come from his last years, after he had stepped back from court. They are the most personal of his works. Penguin’s Letters from a Stoic, translated by Robin Campbell in 1969, is a selection, and it introduced the letters to a wide modern readership.

The trouble they address is busyness and fear. Lucilius is a capable, ambitious man in public life, pulled in every direction and anxious about the future. Seneca writes as an older friend who has known power and danger and is trying, in the time left to him, to teach what he has learned, and to learn it more thoroughly himself.

The exercises

Account for your time. The first letter begins with time. “Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time,” Seneca writes, and yet people allow it to be taken from them by anyone who asks, while they would never give away their money so freely. He urges Lucilius to keep an account of how his days are spent, as a careful person keeps an account of their expenses, and to seize each hour rather than postponing life to some later moment when he will be less busy.

Read deeply, not widely. In the second letter Seneca warns against skimming many authors. “Everywhere means nowhere,” he says; reading everyone is like travelling constantly and so having many acquaintances but no friends. He advises staying with a few great writers, and each day picking out one thought and digesting it thoroughly. The letters themselves often end with such a thought, offered as a small daily gift.

Choose your company. Seneca is frank about the effect of crowds. In the seventh letter he admits that he comes home from them “more greedy, more ambitious, more voluptuous, and even more cruel and inhuman”, and advises Lucilius to keep company with people who will make him better, and whom he can make better in turn.

Rehearse what you fear. In the eighteenth letter, written during a festival when all Rome is feasting, Seneca proposes an exercise. “Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: ‘Is this the condition that I feared?’” Practised voluntarily, in good times, poverty loses its power to terrify. The same reasoning applies to other losses: imagine them in advance, calmly, and they will not take you by surprise.

Change yourself, not your scenery. When Lucilius complains that travel has not lifted his gloom, Seneca replies, in the twenty-eighth letter: “You need a change of soul rather than a change of climate.” The problem goes wherever we go, because it is in us.

Rehearse death. Many letters return to death, not to frighten but to free. Seneca suggests that we die a little every day, since each day that passes is gone, and that a person who has learned to die has unlearned slavery, because they can no longer be controlled by fear.

The picture of a life behind them

Seneca was a Stoic, and the letters set out the Stoic view in practical form. Virtue is the only true good. Wealth, health and reputation are “indifferents”: preferable, perhaps, but not what makes a life good. Fortune can take them at any moment, so a person who depends on them is never secure. A person whose good lies in their own character is invulnerable to her.

The letters are also about friendship. Seneca thought that philosophy was best learned in relationship, through a teacher one admired and a friend one trusted. His letters are full of warmth and self-criticism. He presents himself not as a sage but as someone still making progress, and he shares his own lapses as well as his advice.

The tension in Seneca’s life has always shaped how he is read. He praised simplicity while being one of the richest men in Rome, and he served an emperor whose crimes were notorious. Some of his contemporaries accused him of hypocrisy, and the historian Tacitus records those charges. Seneca addresses the question himself, in the essay On the Happy Life, arguing that a philosopher may own wealth so long as wealth does not own him. Modern biographers, including James Romm and Emily Wilson, have examined that tension with care. For many readers it makes the letters more human: they are written by someone who knew how hard his own advice was to follow.

Carrying it into ordinary work

The first exercise needs no adapting. For a week, note where your hours actually go, and ask of each item whether you would have given that time away if someone had asked you for it directly. The reading advice suits a working life overloaded with information: a few deep sources, one thought each day, digested properly.

The rehearsal of loss is useful for anyone whose position, project or company might be taken from them. Imagining it calmly, and asking whether you could live with it, often reduces the fear that drives poor decisions. And the warning about changing scenery applies to careers: moving jobs does not fix what you take with you.