Nobody who has read Karl Alfred Blüher's admirable history of Seneca's reception in Spain can be in any doubt that the reign of Juan II of Castile (1406–1454) marks a distinctive epoch in that history. It was then that the misleading but endlessly seductive topos of Seneca as Spaniard first began to be widely current, largely as a result of a series of vernacular translations. A couple of relatively late items – a partial revision of a thirteenth-century De ira and a wholly new version of the Apocolocyntosis, both associated with Nuño de Guzmán – were relatively restricted in their immediate influence. These apart, we are concerned with four main instances. There were two translations of Seneca's Tragedies, the earlier and less complete of which was apparently produced under the patronage of the marquis of Santillana. There were, again, two versions of the Letters to Lucilius; here, too, there are links with one of the minority of lay patrons in mid-fifteenth-century Castile, Fernán Pérez de Guzman. In both these cases, translations into other Romance vernaculars appear to have been the immediate source for the Castilian renderings; the textual histories, complex for both Tragedies and Letters, have been studied in articles by myself and Mario Eusebi respectively. The other two major examples of Senecan translation in our period were executed directly out of Latin, and their patron was King Juan II himself. In the early 1430s Alonso de Cartagena translated a series of extracts and treatises, some authentic and some not.