‘Letters to Lucilius’ and death
A self-help book written by Seneca
Moral Letters to Lucilius is a
highly modern work in terms of both its generic complexity and its
approach, which resembles a self-help treatise written in the
twenty-first century. Seneca bases his letters on stoic approaches
that may be very useful to today’s society, which lives facing
outwards, frightened and stressed. The objective is to attain a
moral freedom and an inner independence that removes the fear of
death, among other benefits.
Article outline
- Problems of genre and fictionality within the framework of a
philosophy of life
- The philosophical environment in which the stoic conception of
death takes shape
- Returning to genre: Séneca’s self-help epistles, a hermeneutic-rhetorical
discourse on the value of life and how to cope with death
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Notes
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References