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Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger |
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Seneca the Younger is the principal Stoic philosopher, essayist, and tragedian of imperial Rome. Undoubtedly the most brilliant literary figure of his day, he was also its most complex and most enigmatic. Orator, Stoic philosopher, epistolary, natural scientist, satirist, poet, tragedian, statesman, financier, courtier, sycophant, wealth-encrusted eulogist of the simple life--Seneca requires from the modern reader an unusual complexity of response. Few readers today have stared into the face of a Caligula or experienced the paralyzing nightmare of a tyrant's court. Seneca had; and he became part of the nightmare and its victim. In A.D. 65 at a villa outside Rome he killed himself on instructions from the emperor Nero, whose tutor and chief minister he had been. Seneca's dialogues, treatises, and tragedies are products and indices of an age of moral and cultural crisis. The style of the tragedies is that of shock. Their declamatory form, spectacle, ideological structure, and overt theatricality mirror the spectacular, histrionic, and self-consuming world of late Julio-Claudian Rome.
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