Who is Seneca? (Rome’s Greatest Stoic Thinker)

154,775 views Sep 27, 2020 #Seneca #RyanHoliday #Stoicism

For a boy born in a tiny village in Southern Spain—some 1,500 miles away from the place he dreamed of making a name for himself—it would please Lucius Annaeus Seneca very much to know we are still talking about him today. His fellow Stoics wrote at length about the worthlessness of celebrity, the foolishness of chasing posthumous fame, the inevitably of time passing and sweeping our names into obscurity. Seneca studied those philosophers. He read those writings. He agreed with them. “The deep flood of time will roll over us,” he wrote. “Some few great men will raise their heads above it.” But most are “destined…to depart into the same realms of silence, [to] battle against oblivion.” Aware as Seneca was of the improbability of lasting significance, it didn’t deter him. If anything, it propelled him. In a way, it only reaffirmed what he already knew.