Moral Essays, Volume I: De Providentia. De Constantia. De Ira. De Clementia

This book should be given to every 9th grade student and they should be made to read it. Such wisdom over centuries. Would highly recommend for anyone who is interested in introspection and becoming a better person!!

Seneca's Moral Essays are some of THE greatest chicken soup for the soul reading ever, without question. I have to serious question the solidity of mind of anyone that would give these masterfully translated titles anything less than five stars. They're simply fantastic and deserve to be read now, more than ever, with the utmost enthusiasm and gravity.

I bought this because I had been reading Seneca's plays ("Thyestes" is good but the others are fairly boring) and wanted to find out more about Seneca's philosophical outlook. Answer to that question: he is a Stoic, and I think you can get most of the same information about Stoic philosophy from looking the word up on Wikipedia. Seneca is a competent writer and not a difficult read, but as a philosopher he's not all that interesting, This is a useful edition if you have a smattering of Latin and want to check the original against the translation (which is old but serviceable).

The surviving corpus of Seneca's Moral Essays are his earliest works, yet they contain many of his fully developed Stoic ideals. All the essays are generally short, with the exception of Seneca's treatise On Anger; and they are all moral exhortations written in a direct manner and in a style both convincing and charming. The contents of these Essays left their mark upon the writings of the Latin Church Fathers, of which many would have enjoyed seeing Seneca sainted; and they preceded the later burst of Plutarch's voluminous corpus of Moral Essays by just over a century and probably provided the great writer with an excellent model despite the disparity of language with Seneca. In this first volume the treatises included are (1) On Providence (2) On Firmness (3) On Anger (4) and On Mercy, which is addressed to the emperor Nero. These volumes are an important source for Roman Stoicism and they are recommended for students as a primer for the later philosophic finishes that they are destined to face.

what an overtly dependant philosopher.