Moral Essays. with an English Translation by J. W. Basore

Sprung from the rich and talented Spanish family of the Annaei, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, second son of Seneca the rhetorician, became the most important public and literary figure at Rome in the age of Nero. His mother was Helvia, a lady of native intelligence, some culture, and many \irtues. An elder brother, Novatus, known after his adoption as Galho, was governor of Achaia under Claudius, and sur\ives in Christian annals (Acts xviii. 12-17) with undeserved odium as the Roman official before whom the apostle Paul was arraigned. Mela, the younger brother, of more retiring disposition, but rated by his father as the ablest of the three, lives only as the father of a famous son-the epic poet Lucan, whose precocious and flamboyant powers marked him out as the prodigy of his distinguished, but illfated, family, of which no chief member survived the catastrophe of the Pisonian conspiracy. Lucan, his father, and both his uncles were all objects of Nero's vengeance...