Letters from a Stoic

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time.” Everything else — your body, your money, your standing, the people you love — is on loan from Fortune, callable tonight. That claim organizes all 124 of these letters, and they are not a treatise. Seneca wrote them in his last years to a single man: Lucilius, a Roman knight serving as procurator in Sicily, a friend with Epicurean leanings he keeps trying to convert. He wanted them to sound like the two of them talking on a walk, “spontaneous and easy.” Most close with a maxim he calls the day’s profit, usually lifted from Epicurus: “I cross over even into the enemy’s camp — not as a deserter, but as a scout.”

Seneca on SummaryShelf

Letters from a Stoic