https://bookstoic.com/authors/seneca/Recent content in Seneca on BookStoicHugoenSat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0100https://bookstoic.com/books/letters-to-lucilius/Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0100https://bookstoic.com/books/letters-to-lucilius/<blockquote> <p>Continue to act thus, my dear Lucilius: set yourself free for your own sake; gather and save your time, which till lately has been forced from you, or filched away, or has merely slipped from your hands.</p> <p><cite>Seneca, <em>Letters</em>, 1, trans. Richard Mott Gummere</cite></p> </blockquote> <h2 id="what-it-is">What it is</h2> <p>Seneca was the richest man in Rome and Nero&rsquo;s tutor. In his last years he wrote to Lucilius, a procurator in Sicily, a series of letters on how to live: one subject per letter, drawn from whatever happened that week. The letters are literary rather than private, and were meant to be published, but they keep the tone of a friend talking.</p>https://bookstoic.com/books/on-the-shortness-of-life/Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0100https://bookstoic.com/books/on-the-shortness-of-life/<blockquote> <p>It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested.</p> <p><cite>Seneca, <em>On the Shortness of Life</em>, 1, after Aubrey Stewart</cite></p> </blockquote> <h2 id="what-it-is">What it is</h2> <p>One of Seneca&rsquo;s ten moral essays and the most read. The claim is in the first paragraph: life is not short, it is squandered. The rest of the essay is a catalogue of the ways, from ambition to leisure that is not really leisure, and a closing invitation to spend time with the philosophers of the past instead.</p>