Campbell's selection, not the complete letters. That matters.

The richest man in Rome writing letters about the unimportance of wealth is a joke Seneca never quite tells on himself, and I've stopped holding it against him. Hypocrisy is not the same thing as being wrong. He was also tutor to Nero, which is a line on the curriculum vitae that no quantity of good advice about death entirely settles.

What you are buying, if you buy the Penguin, is the Robin Campbell selection: forty of the hundred and twenty-four letters, arranged and trimmed. Perfectly honest, and the cover does say Selected, but I have met three people who believed they had read Seneca and had read a third of him. If you want the whole thing, Graver and Long did the complete Letters on Ethics for Chicago and that's the one on my desk now.

Letter 47, on slaves, is what will stop you. It is not an abolitionist document and anybody telling you otherwise has an agenda, but the argument that the man serving your dinner is a fellow human of the same substance is startling in its context, and he presses it considerably further than he had to.

The prose habit, short punchy clause followed by a metaphor followed by a maxim you could print on a mug, is why he was the most quoted Latin author for fifteen centuries and also why reading him for two hours straight feels like being advised at.

Eight, and better in small doses. One letter with the morning coffee is how the thing is meant to work.