Letters from a Stoic

Review by Steve Savage

Letters from a Stoic, the title of Robin Campbell’s selection from Epistulæ Morales ad Lucilium by Seneca the Younger, is one of those titles that seem unnecessarily offputting. (Two others that come to mind are Charles Reade’s The Cloister and the Hearth and Hugh Miller’s My Schools and Schoolmasters, and I shall leave the reader, if sufficiently interested, to find out why.) It is true that Seneca’s book consists of letters, and it is true that he was in the Stoic camp rather than the Epicurean, so the title is not inaccurate. However Seneca’s version of Stoicism is urbane and inclusive – he regularly quotes from Epicurus to make a point – and anyway at this distance his philosophical views are likely to be less interesting than his descriptions of his own life and environment.