Seneca and the Letter Form

Seneca: Letters

In this course, Dr Liz Gloyn (Royal Holloway, University of London) explores Seneca’s Epistulae Morales. We begin by providing a brief overview of Seneca’s life and literary output, before focusing in more detail on the letter as a literary form. In each of the five modules that follow, we focus on a single letter, providing close-reading, drawing out the key themes, and making links to Stoic philosophy more generally – including the Stoic theory of ‘indifferents’, the theory of the passions (or pathē), Stoic moral psychology, and Stoic views on the immortality of the soul.

Seneca and the Letter Form

In this module, we provide a brief overview of Seneca’s life and literary output, before focusing in more detail on the letter as a literary form. In particular, we think about other famous letter collections – whether political (e.g. Cicero, Pliny), poetic (e.g. Ovid) or philosophical (e.g. Epicurus) – as well as some of the opportunities afforded by the letter form.