Dear Reader,

Seneca's Moral Epistles are no easy ride, no homogeneous concatenation, or sequence. Charm; irritation. Tormenting and tormented, they are a tease of technical quaestiunculae pursued to the death, amid casual notelets of worthy chat and ephemeresque self-caricature. They make generalizations, and they make them odious.

Readers will first be acclimatized to a particular style of epistolarity, then weaned from it; teased with sudden signals of a reprise, only to find the repeat subjected to critical re-examination, and on occasion to outright theorization, deferred. Seneca piles in; checks us out. This is critical writing, it puts itself under pressure.

The line of thought must cartwheel and career onwards, dogged and aleatory by turns; over before anything can settle, or unfurling exponentially into an ocean of fulmination. Catch as catch can.

Collaterally, these intense bursts of philosophical fire are concentrated on the one single addressee, and fellow-disciple: enlightening Lucilius; more or less lucid, looking to mature towards the recessive goal, virtuous integrity.

Seneca the ultimate senex cares for committed readers; out to cure them, more suo, from human cares with cold-turkey treatment. Intimidating, insinuating, everything in these Moral Letters is going to hurt bad. Bad enough to warrant Seneca's emergency pack of never-ending salvation.

Queror, litigo, irascor: ‘I grouch, sue, rage’ (Epp. 60.1). Locked in a lift with a booby! This genial ghoul implants annoyingly wry, recalcitrant, habits. It hurts him, too, this chummy ‘Teacher-and/as-Pupil’.