Seneca: The Life of a Stoic

This book is a masterpiece: an exhilaratingly provocative, intellectual tour de force. Contrary to what reviewer EJ Hamm states, there is a complete lack of "sarcasm," "arrogance," or "French" theoretical opacity; to the contrary, this straightforward, superbly translated study of Seneca's work (primarily the letters to Lucilius) is considerably more accessible than, for instance, Paul Veyne's admittedly difficult Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?: An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination, the only other Veyne book I've read. This wonderful book is free of gratuitous jargon; technical philosophical terms are sparingly used and clearly defined. Furthermore, Veyne in no way denigrates Seneca. (He writes to praise him, not to bury him!) This is an objective critique which treats Seneca as a serious Stoic philosopher-cum-intellectual for the ages. But having said that, caveat lector: The subtitle is, to be fair, a bit misleading, as this is not a straightforward, linear biography. Just "Look inside" at the Contents, and you can tell that the first and third chapters are biographical, whereas the vast bulk of the book, Chapter 2, is a fascinating and comprehensive analysis of Seneca's stoicism in the context of both canonical early Greek stoicism and subsequent intellectual history, all the way up to the present day. In sum, despite its expensiveness (especially unfortunate for a 191-page book lacking an index!), this is a "must buy" (or at any rate a "must read") for serious (or perhaps just curious) students of Seneca and Stoicism, be they tyros or laics: it is by far the best non-technical modern study of Seneca available. I did not want my review to be ad hominem, yet EJ Hamm's castigation of Veyne's masterpiece is completely unwarranted, and might possibly be explained by a lack of familiarity with Seneca's writings. For although this book is a captivating read (indeed one of the two or three best of the spate of recently published, excellent books on Stoicism), to understand it you need to have already read and absorbed Seneca AND have a modicum of familiarity with Stoic principles. In other words, "Seneca: The Life of a Stoic" is an intermediate-level popular philosophy text. With that qualification, it is nothing short of an irresistible intellectual feast. (Finally -- for the record and apropos of Hamm's comment -- I am neither French NOR have I taken a single course (let alone an advanced degree) in philosophy!)