On the Shortness of Life

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.

Seneca wrote On the Shortness of Life around 49 AD. He was at the time one of the richest men in Rome, personal tutor to the teenage Emperor Nero, and a practicing Stoic philosopher who preached simplicity while owning estates across the empire. The contradictions were not lost on his contemporaries. The essay is addressed to his friend Paulinus, who held the important post of overseeing Rome's grain supply, and its argument is deceptively simple: life is not short — we waste it. We hand our hours to pointless business, to other people's emergencies, to anxiety about things we cannot control. Seneca points out that Augustus, who ruled the known world, spent his reign longing for retirement; that Cicero, pinned between Pompey and Caesar, called his own life a kind of exile; that even the most powerful men in history died feeling they had not yet begun to live. The essay is twenty short chapters. The prose is two thousand years old and sounds like it. The condition it diagnoses could have been written last Tuesday.