Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger (ca. 4 BC-65 AD) was a Roman philosopher important in his own day as tutor and "prime minister" of the emperor Nero.

The philosophical works of Seneca although not especially original, show such nobility of sentiment that Christian writers on morality and ethical conduct have drawn on him over the centuries; he seems to have invented a highly rhetorical type of tragedy, the influence of which was especially widespread in the Renaissance; and his literary style, terse, epigrammatic, and full of intermittent brilliance, provided a respectable rhetorical alternative to the long, periodic sentences of Cicero and had some influence on the development of the normal literary prose style of English, French, and other languages.

Seneca was born in Cordova, Spain, about 5 or 4 BC, the son of the famous writer on rhetoric known as Seneca Rhetor. Seneca's elder brother was proconsul of Achaea in AD...