Seneca (also known as Seneca the younger) was a statesmen, poet, and philosopher in Rome during the early empire period. Seneca is known for many things in history such as various emperors that he served and how his writings impacted their reign. In addition, many older Greek writings are known to us thanks to Seneca writing them down and giving his own version with some creative freedom. However, separate from all these other writings and history I will be talking about his worldview and some of his general history.

To start, Seneca was born to a wealthy family in Rome with many brother and a famous father. He grew up and learned from philosophers within the Pythagorean and Stoic schools of thought. Seneca grew up as a famed orator and statesmen with the highest education available to him. He became a senator under Caligula which is known to not be a good emperor, and Seneca himself contributed to writing the wrong doings of Caligula. He escaped Caligula’s wrath by already being sick, and this sickness helped him because Caligula thought he was going to just die soon anyways. After Caligula died, Claudius took the throne and he was exiled after a false report that he had an affair. He came back after flattering Claudius. Once he came back he tutored the future emperor Nero. He went on to be Nero’s advisor and had riches and power. Once Nero’s other advisor died Seneca blended into the background of politics and he committed suicide after  being accused of being involved in a conspiracy to kill Nero. He was most likely not involved in the conspiracy, but Nero still ordered him to kill himself.

The more interesting part of Seneca (to me) is the school of philosophy he was apart of. The school of thought was known as stoicism which has made a small return in todays society. While the return of the kind of stoic kind of thought is interesting, it does not encompass all of the part of the older school of thought. Stoicism is a ethical school of thought that comes with metaphysics as well. The school of thought believes that some sort of rational agent is involved (whether that be God or the rational universe depends on the stoic) in life. In addition, the stoic believes that we should only live rationally. For the stoic, they hold the belief that people are filled with passions (such as happiness, anger, sadness etc) and these passions are in direct conflict with reason. The stoic believes that the mind can only occupy one thing at a time, and the mind should always have reason occupy it. Stoics also believe that all material things are only lent to you and that you must learn to accept your role in life and do good with it. The phrase Memento Mori originates from the stoics and the phrase means remember that you will die. This phrase is important to the stoic because they want to view all things rationally and know that their life like many other things are mortal.