Cato, Thrasea, and Helvidius were doers, not writers, and
their legendary heroism inevitably lends them a somewhat
two-dimensional quality. A more complex and much more
interesting figure was the poet Lucan’s uncle, Lucius
Annaeus Seneca (c. 4 B.C.–A.D. 65), commonly known as
Seneca the Younger to distinguish him from his equally
distinguished father. Originally councillor to the young Nero,
he was eventually forced to commit suicide after being
implicated in an attempted coup against his erstwhile pupil.
Men’s lives are not always consistent with their ideals, and
some critics have found it hard to reconcile Seneca’s
fabulous wealth and his shameless flattery of Nero with his
philosophical views. Yet his works (in particular the Letters
to Lucilius) remain the most engaging and accessible
expressions of later Stoicism. Because they were written in
Latin they were also among the most influential on
succeeding generations.
But not all Stoics were wealthy senators. There was
another kind of Stoic exemplar as well: the outsider whose
ascetic lifestyle won him the admiration of his wealthier
contemporaries and enabled him to criticize the pretenses of
upper-class society with real authority. An early example of
the type is Gaius Musonius Rufus (c. 30–100), a member of
the Roman administrative class, the so-called knights
(equites), who was banished by both Nero and Vespasian. A
still more dramatic example was Musonius’s student
Epictetus (c. 55–c. 135), who had taken up the practice of