The Epistles of Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Seneca and Memmius are also mentioned. He bestowed very little upon himself, by the account he gives of his temperance and frugality, or rather austerity, in his Epistles 107, 87, and 84. And Tacitus expressly says, "Seneca, with a diet exceeding simple, supported an abstemious life, satisfying the call of hunger by wild fruit from the wood, and of thirst by a draught from the brook."

Away then with that calumny in regard to wealth. He was rich, says Lipsius, and yet poor; or not rich for himself, but for others. Upon the whole, we would fain suppose his life to be good, and make no doubt it was so in general. But for his writings, with which alone we are now concerned, they undoubtedly deserve this character, and are not only good in themselves, but tending to the good of mankind. There is a divine providence, and we acknowledge it in Seneca, whom God was pleased to give us as a teacher of strict morality and virtue, introductory, as it were, to the more sublime truths of the Gospel. Tertullian therefore is often pleased to call him "ours." Augustine speaks of his being conversant with the Apostles. Jerome would have had him reckoned in the number of saints. But we shall conclude our remarks with the eulogium of Fronto, a celebrated orator and the grandson, some say, of Plutarch: "Seneca has so exterminated all vice and error that he seems to have restored the Golden Age; and by his labors to have recalled the gods from their long banishment to their wonted care and converse with mankind." May it prove so; may the present age be gratefully sensible of the providence of God in the further declaration of his will! May all the depravity be purged away; what is low and mean exalted; and all by faith and virtue raised again to an affiance with God, by the blessing and assistance of the same divine power!

SOME few fragments, however, of those books of Seneca that are lost are yet preserved in the writings of eminent authors, and particularly Lactantius.

Seneca...