A Note on the Text

Seneca lived from about 4 BC to 65 AD. He wrote in Latin, in the first century AD. He was a lawyer, a politician, a playwright, and one of the most important thinkers of the Roman world. He tutored the Emperor Nero as a young man and spent years as one of the most powerful people in Rome before falling out of favor and being ordered to take his own life.

This book is an adaptation, not a translation.

That distinction matters. A translation renders the words of the original as closely as the target language allows. An adaptation keeps the arguments, the structure, and the core claims, but rewrites the language for a different kind of reader.

This volume adapts John W. Basore's 1932 English translation of Seneca's Moral Essays, published by Harvard University Press in the Loeb Classical Library (Volume II). Basore was an American classical scholar. His translation is careful, accurate, and in the public domain. It is also written in the formal early-twentieth-century English of its time, which most young readers find slow going.

That is the gap this edition is trying to close.

Every argument Seneca makes in Basore's text is in this adaptation. Every key claim is present. The order of the arguments is kept. Where the original uses difficult vocabulary, we have used plain everyday words. Where the original uses one long sentence with several clauses, we have broken it into short sentences a middle school student can read without stopping.

What we have not done is add claims Seneca did not make, or put feelings into his voice that the source does not support. Where extra context is needed, we have added it in italic editor's notes at the start of each numbered section. Those italic notes are the editor's words. The plain text is an adaptation of Seneca. Italic voice and plain voice never mix inside one paragraph, so you can always tell who is speaking.

Part II (On Tranquility of Mind) is a dialogue. Section I is in the voice of Serenus, a younger friend of Seneca's, describing his own state of mind. From Section II to the end of Part II, the voice is Seneca's. Italic editor notes mark these transitions.

Readers who want the literal text should read Basore's translation directly. It is available in print through Harvard University Press (Loeb Classical Library L254) and freely online through Wikisource and the Internet Archive.

This edition is for everyone else. For the student who has never read philosophy. For the young person standing at the beginning of their life. For anyone who takes seriously the question of how to live.

That was always who Seneca was talking to.