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Books

Men behaving badly: Nero, Claudius and even Seneca could be intensely cruel to women — and fish

A review of a biography of Seneca by Emily Wilson shows the Roman empire at its rotten best

21 March 2015

9:00 AM

21 March 2015

9:00 AM

Seneca: A Life Emily Wilson

Allen Lane, pp.253, £25

They lived in barrels, they camped on top of columns, or in caves: the lives of the sages are often inconceivable to the modern reader. Seneca, however, that rich, compromised sophisticate of the first century AD, is instantly kin, his voice weary with consumerism, his problems definitively first-world. ‘Being poor is not having too little,’ he observed.

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