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Part of
Discourses on the Edges of Life
Edited by Vicent Salvador †, Adéla Kotátková and Ignasi Clemente
[IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature 26] 2020
► pp. 113–124

‘Letters to Lucilius’ and death

A self-help book written by Seneca

| Universidad de Valladolid

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.

Keywords: Seneca, stoicism, death, epistolary genre and self-help genre
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
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 9 April 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ivitra.26.08puj
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