Seneca

Lucius Annaeus Seneca was born about 4 BC at Corduba, today's Córdoba, in Spain, and was brought to Rome as a child. There he studied rhetoric and philosophy and became the most eloquent writer of the Stoic school. He rose to fame as an orator and senator, was exiled to Corsica by the emperor Claudius in AD 41, and was recalled eight years later to tutor the young Nero, whose chief adviser he became when Nero took the throne.

The good government of Nero's first years owed much to Seneca. But as the emperor grew more tyrannical, Seneca withdrew from court and gave himself to writing. In AD 65, accused of a part in the conspiracy of Piso, he was ordered to take his own life and died with calm composure. He left the Moral Letters to Lucilius, twelve philosophical dialogues and nine tragedies, through which the Stoic thought on freedom, time and death has spoken to readers for two thousand years.