Seneca: Lucius Annaeus Seneca, noted as the tutor of the emperor Nero and the author of numerous philosophical, theatrical and rhetorical works. He was born in Cordoba of an equestrian family at some point between 4 BC and 1 AD. He was the second son of the Elder Seneca, a notable teacher of rhetoric.

Seneca moved quite quickly into exalted circles. A rhetorical demonstration in 39 AD is said to have aroused the jealousy of Caligula, and in 41 he was exiled to Corsica on the charge of committing adultery with the emperor's sister. He was recalled in 49 AD through the influence of Agrippina the Younger, who had recently married the emperor Claudius, and made tutor of Nero. After Nero's accession in 54, he acted as the chief minister of state in company with the praetorian prefect Afranius Burrus. It may be that these two limited Nero to crimes against immediate family members (he murdered his adoptive brother Britannicus in 55, his mother in 59 and his wife in 62), while leaving other members of the governing class alone (there was only one execution, that of Junius Silanus in 54, but that was the work of Agrippina). In general terms they seem to have continued the patronage pattern of the latter years of Claudius. After the murder of Agrippina, the influence of both began to wane, and when Burrus died in 62, Seneca soon decided to go into retirement. It is generally believed that he took advantage of his position at court to enrich himself, and thus was accussed of hypocrisy by his enemies in that he preached the virtues of the simple life while amassing a huge fortune.

After his retirement, Seneca became the object of court gossip, and he was accused of complicity in the great conspiracy against Nero in 65 AD (a charge that seems to have had no foundation). He was ordered to commit suicide, and he did so.

The major works of Seneca that have survived are ten ethical treatises known as the Dialogues, which range in date from 43-55 AD. They cover a number of subjects such as consolation in time of grief, providence, tranquillity etc. Works such as these were the source of his repuation as a philospher prior to the accession of Nero. The On Clemency is a longish work dedicated to Nero at the very beginning of his reign on good government. The Apocolocyntosis, a work whose title may be translated into English as The Pumpkinification belongs to the same period. It is a satire on the deification of Claudius. The On Benefits, in seven books was begun at roughly the same time, though we do not know when it was finished. The Natural Questions, and the Moral Epistles (124 of them) deal with questions of natural history in the first case (not without some influence of ethical theory), and the proper life. Both works belong to the period after Seneca's retirement. Nine tragedies on themes from Greek mythology also survive. Along with a tenth play on a Roman theme (the murder of Nero's wife Octavia) that is falsely attributed to Seneca, these works form the sum total of our actual knowledge of Roman tragic drama, and they exerted a considerable influence of the development of European drama after the Rennaissance.