Seneca the Younger

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, known as Seneca the Younger, was a Stoic philosopher of ancient Rome as well as a statesman, dramatist and, in one work, a satirist, writing in the post-Augustan age of Latin literature. Trained in rhetoric and philosophy in Greece, he was exiled to Corsica under the emperor Claudius before returning to Rome to tutor the young Nero, becoming his advisor when Nero became emperor and, together with the praetorian prefect Sextus Afranius Burrus, providing competent government for the first years of the reign. His influence waned with time, and in AD 65 he was made to take his own life over an alleged role in the Pisonian conspiracy against Nero, a charge on which there is still no settled consensus. He left twelve moral essays and 124 letters that form one of the most important surviving bodies of Stoic writing, alongside tragedies including Medea, Thyestes and Phaedra, and his own calm suicide became a byword for Stoic virtue admired throughout the Renaissance.