Seneca

Lucius Annaeus Seneca — Seneca the Younger — was a philosopher, playwright, and for a time the most powerful advisor in Rome, tutor and then minister to the emperor Nero. In 65 CE, implicated in a conspiracy against Nero, he was ordered to take his own life.

His most enduring work is the Letters to Lucilius: 124 letters written in his final years, treating anxiety, time, grief, and friendship with a directness that anticipates the modern essay. He wrote as a flawed practitioner, not a sage — wealthy, compromised, and candid about both.

Every Seneca line in RiseHush cites its letter in the standard numbering of the Epistulae Morales.