Ancient Philosophy · Part 24 · Rome, Alexandria and beyond · B2
Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius
Part 24 of Ancient Philosophy: in Philo’s year, a little boy from Spain is learning to read in Rome. He will become the richest philosopher in the world and the adviser of an emperor. After him will come a slave who teaches freedom and an emperor who writes to himself about humility. Sophia tells it all as things to come. The future continuous and the future perfect (he will be advising Nero; by then he will have written…), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight, all three of our philosophers are in the future.
One is a child in Rome now. One will be born in fifty years, as a slave. One will be born in a hundred and twenty, and will rule the world. All three will be Stoics.
A child, a slave and an emperor. I like the sound of this philosophy more and more.
Seneca was born in Corduba, in Spain, a few years before Philo’s present, and is a small boy in Rome now. He will become a famous writer, a senator, the tutor and then the chief adviser of the emperor Nero, and one of the richest men in Rome. His letters and essays on how to live will be read for two thousand years.
Epictetus will be born around 50 CE as a slave in Phrygia, owned by a freedman of Nero. Freed, he will teach Stoic philosophy in Rome and then in Greece. He will write nothing; his pupil Arrian will write down his lectures, the Discourses, and a short handbook, the Enchiridion.
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