Seneca the Younger (4 BCE — 65 CE)

Seneca: Slowing Down Time

“Life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear for the future.”

Steven Gambardella

Mar 23, 2019 · 11 min read

A bust of Seneca in Seville. Seneca was born in modern Spain and is regarded as a local hero in Córdoba. (source: Wikimedia Commons)

At the beginning of Annie Hall, Woody Allen, speaking to camera, relays an old joke: two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of them says, “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.” The other one says, “Yeah, I know; and such small portions.”

“Well,” Allen says, “that’s essentially how I feel about life — full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly.”

Seneca would beg to differ. Life, the Roman philosopher remarked, is long if you know how to use it. Moreover, there is nothing more precious than time. What good is anything without the time to enjoy it?

Seneca the Younger (4 BCE — 65 CE) was a Roman dramatist, a senator under the reign of Caligula, a Stoic philosopher, and a tutor and later a political advisor to Nero. A high achiever by any measure. He was a well-connected member of the Equite — or Knight — second tier aristocratic class, and well educated in rhetoric and philosophy.