Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, known as Seneca the Younger (c. 4 BC – AD 65), was a Roman Stoic philosopher, dramatist, and statesman, the most important Latin prose writer of the early imperial period. He was born at Corduba in the Roman province of Baetica in southern Spain, the second son of the rhetorician Seneca the Elder, and was brought to Rome as a child for education in rhetoric and philosophy.

His early career as senator and orator was interrupted in AD 41 when the emperor Claudius exiled him to Corsica on a charge of adultery. Recalled in AD 49 through the influence of Agrippina the Younger, he was appointed tutor to her young son Nero. When Nero became emperor in AD 54, Seneca and the praetorian prefect Burrus effectively governed the empire for several years, a period later remembered as comparatively well-ordered.

His surviving prose works include the moral essays known collectively as the Dialogues, the long treatise De Beneficiis, the natural-philosophical Naturales Quaestiones, and the 124 Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, which remain among the most widely read texts of ancient Stoicism. He also wrote nine surviving tragedies on Greek mythological subjects, including Medea, Thyestes, and Phaedra.

Implicated, probably wrongly, in the Pisonian conspiracy of AD 65, he was ordered by Nero to commit suicide and did so by opening his veins, an event described in detail by Tacitus.

Seneca is a Roman cognomen of the Annaei, derived from Latin senex meaning old man; Lucius and Annaeus are his praenomen and nomen, and he carried the masculine form.