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PhilosophersEP. 000· Recorded 65 AD

“I learned to die. That set me free”

LAS
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Statesman · Tutor to Emperor Nero · en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_the_Younger

Seneca was born in Córdoba, exiled to Corsica, and spent eight years alone before returning to Rome as the most powerful man behind the most dangerous emperor in history. He traces his Be, Do, Have, patience, writing, and the freedom no one could take.

Be

Patience. Built by illness as a boy and eight years of exile in Corsica. He did not choose it, it chose him. He lost his son on that island. He had no audience, no power, no Rome. Only the choice of what to do with the silence. He chose to think. That choice made everything else possible.

Do

Writing. Not for Rome. Not for Nero. For the discipline of thinking clearly when everything else was gone. The Letters to Lucilius, 124 letters to a friend about how to live, written in his final years knowing the end was close. Not to be remembered. Because the writing was the only way he knew how to survive what was happening.

Have

Freedom. Not the freedom of wealth, he had that and it complicated everything. The freedom from the fear of death. When Nero's order came in 65 AD, he discovered he had actually built it. Not performed it. Built it. His letters crossed two thousand years. That is the Have that cannot be taken.

“A man who has learned to die has unlearned how to be a slave.”

— Lucius Annaeus Seneca