Reading List

Authors Like Seneca

In AD 41 the Roman Senate sentenced Lucius Annaeus Seneca to death for adultery with the emperor's niece, Julia Livilla — a charge brought by the empress Messalina and doubted by historians since. Claudius commuted it to exile, and Seneca spent eight years on Corsica. He was recalled in 49 to tutor the twelve-year-old Nero, advised him as emperor from 54 to 62, and grew enormously rich doing it. Then he tried to withdraw, and in the last two or three years of his life wrote the 124 Letters to Lucilius, the book most readers now come to him for. In 65 Nero, after the failed Pisonian conspiracy, ordered him to take his own life. What readers find in Seneca is philosophy as advice to a friend: how to spend time, how to handle anger and grief, how to face death, written by a man who knew exactly how far short of it he fell. The writers below share that idea of philosophy as a practice for living — or they are the writers Seneca was reading, arguing with, and passing on.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Stoicism · Letters and essays · Philosophy as a way of life · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Seneca, read Marcus Aurelius next: the same school, written as private notes instead of letters. Epictetus is the plainest teacher of it, and Cicero the Roman statesman-philosopher Seneca measured himself against. For the essay form his letters led to, read Michel de Montaigne; for the philosopher Seneca quotes most in his early letters, the rival school's founder Epicurus.

10 authors like Seneca

01
The same school, in private · Closest match

Marcus Aurelius

Roman · b. 121 · Philosopher and emperor

Marcus Aurelius was Roman emperor from 161 to 180 and spent much of his reign on campaign along the Danube. The Meditations, twelve books of notes written in Greek and addressed to himself, were never meant for publication. They draw heavily on Epictetus, whom Marcus quotes and admires.

The book most often read after Seneca, and the natural pair. Both are Stoics with power, money and a bad conscience about it, but Seneca writes to persuade a friend and Marcus writes to steady himself. Seneca is the better stylist; Marcus is the more exposed, because nobody was supposed to be reading.

— Lisanne

Every book by Marcus Aurelius →

02
The Stoic teacher, unadorned

Epictetus

Greek · b. 50 · Philosopher

Epictetus was born around AD 50 in Hierapolis, in Phrygia, and grew up a slave in Rome in the household of Epaphroditus, Nero's secretary. Freed after Nero's death, he taught in Rome until Domitian banished the philosophers around 93, then opened a school at Nicopolis in Greece. He wrote nothing: his pupil Arrian recorded the Discourses and condensed them into the short Enchiridion, or Handbook.

The same philosophy from the other end of Roman society. Seneca was Nero's adviser; Epictetus was the slave of Nero's secretary. Where Seneca circles a problem with examples and wit, Epictetus cuts straight to the distinction between what is and is not in our power, and the Handbook reads in under an hour.

— Lisanne

Every book by Epictetus →

03
The Roman before him

Cicero

Roman · b. 106 BC · Orator and philosopher

Marcus Tullius Cicero was Rome's greatest orator and a consul, and in the last years of his life, after his daughter Tullia died in February 45 BC, he wrote much of his philosophy, bringing Greek ideas into Latin. The Tusculan Disputations deal with death, pain and grief; On Duties with how to act well in public life. Proscribed by the Second Triumvirate, he was killed on 7 December 43 BC, and Antony had his head and hands displayed in the Forum.

The Roman who made Latin a language for philosophy, a generation before Seneca. Both were politicians who turned to writing when politics failed them, both wrote letters that survive in bulk, and both were killed by the power they had served or opposed. Cicero is more sceptical and more public; Seneca is more inward. Read the Tusculan Disputations next to the letters on grief.

— Lisanne
04
The rival Seneca kept quoting

Epicurus

Greek · b. 341 BC · Philosopher

Epicurus was born on Samos in 341 BC and founded his school, the Garden, in Athens. Almost all his writing is lost; what survives are three letters and a set of maxims preserved by the biographer Diogenes Laertius. His ethics aims at freedom from fear and pain, and argues that death is nothing to fear because we will not be there to experience it.

The counterpoint built into Seneca's own book. Most of the early Letters to Lucilius end with a maxim to think about, and the maxims are usually from Epicurus, the founder of the school the Stoics opposed. Seneca took good ideas wherever he found them; reading Epicurus shows how much the two schools agreed about death and simple living, and where they parted.

— Lisanne
05
Consolation at the end of power

Boethius

Roman · b. 480 · Philosopher

Boethius was a Roman senator, consul in 510 and from 522 magister officiorum at the court of the Ostrogothic king Theodoric. Accused of treason, he was imprisoned at Pavia and executed in 524. The Consolation of Philosophy, written in prison, alternates prose and verse as Lady Philosophy argues him out of despair; it became one of the most widely read books of the Middle Ages.

Seneca's story with the ending written down. A philosopher rises to the top of the state, loses everything to a ruler, and has only his reading to hold on to. Boethius is more Platonist than Stoic, but the argument — that fortune only ever lent us what it takes away — is the one Seneca makes again and again in his consolations.

— Lisanne
Every book by Boethius →
06
Where the letters led

Michel de Montaigne

French · b. 1533 · Essayist

Montaigne retired from public life in 1571 to his library tower near Bordeaux and published the first two books of his Essays in 1580, adding a third in 1588; in between he served as mayor of Bordeaux. In the essay “In Defence of Seneca and Plutarch” he describes his book as wholly compiled of what he borrowed from those two, and defends Seneca against the ancient charges of greed and hypocrisy.

Seneca's most important reader. The Letters to Lucilius were already essays in all but name — a mind thinking about one subject at a time, in a friendly voice, with examples — and Montaigne took that form and turned it on himself. He starts out more Stoic and ends up more sceptical and more forgiving, which is the best argument with Seneca anyone has written.

— Lisanne

Every book by Michel de Montaigne →

07
The test of the theory

Viktor Frankl

Austrian · b. 1905 · Psychiatrist and memoirist

Frankl was a Viennese psychiatrist who was deported in 1942 and survived Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and subcamps of Dachau; his parents, brother and first wife were killed. Man's Search for Meaning, first published in German in 1946 and in its familiar English form in 1959, joins an account of the camps to the logotherapy he developed. It had sold more than ten million copies by his death in 1997.

Not a Stoic, but the twentieth-century book that asks Seneca's question under the worst conditions: what is left to a person when everything external has been taken? Frankl's answer — the attitude one takes to suffering — is very close to the Stoic one, and he arrived at it in a camp rather than a library.

— Lisanne

Every book by Viktor Frankl →

08
Philosophy as a life

Sarah Bakewell

British · b. 1963 · Biographer · National Book Critics Circle Award 2010

Bakewell was born in Bournemouth in 1963. How to Live, a life of Montaigne arranged as twenty answers to the question in its title, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and the Duff Cooper Prize in 2010. At the Existentialist Café (2016) and Humanly Possible (2023), a history of humanism, take the same approach to other thinkers.

The best modern writer on philosophy as something you live rather than study, which is Seneca's subject. How to Live is about Montaigne, but its chapters on Stoicism and Epicureanism explain the tradition he inherited from Seneca more clearly than any textbook, and in a voice as companionable as the letters.

— Lisanne
09
Seneca's life, contradictions included

Emily Wilson

British-American · b. 1971 · Classicist and translator

Wilson was born in Oxford in 1971 and teaches classics at the University of Pennsylvania. The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca (2014; in Britain Seneca: A Life, 2015) is a short biography; she also translated Seneca's tragedies (2010) and is best known for her translations of the Odyssey (2017) and the Iliad (2023).

The book to read when the letters make you curious about the man. Wilson takes seriously the contradiction every reader notices — the preacher of simplicity who was one of the richest men in Rome, the adviser who wrote Nero's speeches — and treats the plays, which most Seneca readers skip, as part of the same mind.

— Lisanne
10
The modern popularizer

Ryan Holiday

American · b. 1987 · Writer

Holiday worked in marketing, including for American Apparel, and his first book, Trust Me, I'm Lying (2012), described the media-manipulation tactics he had used. The Obstacle Is the Way (2014) and The Daily Stoic (2016, with Stephen Hanselman) made him the best-known populariser of Stoicism; some scholars of Stoicism question how faithfully his books represent it.

Seneca as a self-help writer, which is not far from what he was: the letters are practical advice to a friend about how to live. Holiday quotes Seneca constantly and cuts him into daily portions. Read him for the application, and go back to the letters for the argument and the doubt he leaves out.

— Lisanne

Every book by Ryan Holiday →

Where to start if you loved Seneca

If you want the same school in private, read Marcus Aurelius.

Meditations: an emperor's notes to himself, never meant to be read.

If you want the teaching plain, read Epictetus.

The Enchiridion — the whole of Stoic ethics in an hour.

If you want the form the letters became, read Montaigne.

The Essays, starting with “In Defence of Seneca and Plutarch”.

If you want the man behind the letters, read Emily Wilson.

The Greatest Empire: Seneca's life, with the contradictions left in.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Seneca

Who should I read if I love Seneca?

Marcus Aurelius's Meditations and Epictetus's Enchiridion first: they are the other two great Roman-era Stoic writers. Then Cicero, who brought Greek philosophy into Latin a century earlier, and Montaigne, who said his Essays were built from what he borrowed from Seneca and Plutarch. For Seneca's life, read Emily Wilson's The Greatest Empire.

What books are like Letters from a Stoic?

Letters from a Stoic is Robin Campbell's Penguin selection from the Letters to Lucilius. The closest books are Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, Epictetus's Enchiridion and Montaigne's Essays. Cicero's letters and his Tusculan Disputations are the nearest Roman equivalents, and Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy is the late-Roman book closest in spirit to Seneca's consolations.

What should I read after On the Shortness of Life?

The Letters to Lucilius, which open on the same subject: the first letter is about taking back your time. After that, Marcus Aurelius's Meditations returns again and again to how short life is, and Sarah Bakewell's How to Live shows how Montaigne took up the same questions fifteen centuries later.

Is Marcus Aurelius similar to Seneca?

They belong to the same school and cover much the same ground: death, anger, the use of time, what is in our power. The difference is form. Seneca wrote polished letters and essays for readers; Marcus wrote private notes in Greek, addressed to himself and never meant for publication, which makes them shorter, rougher and more repetitive.

Was Seneca a hypocrite?

The charge is as old as his career. In 58 a political opponent, Publius Suillius Rufus, accused him of amassing three hundred million sesterces, and the historian Cassius Dio later blamed Seneca's loans to British nobles for helping provoke Boudica's revolt; both sources were hostile. Seneca answered critics of his wealth himself, in his essay On the Happy Life, and Montaigne wrote an essay defending him.

Did Seneca influence Montaigne?

Directly. Montaigne quotes him throughout the Essays, and in “In Defence of Seneca and Plutarch” he describes his book as wholly compiled of what he borrowed from the two of them. The Letters to Lucilius, with their single subject, personal voice and examples, are one of the models for the essay form Montaigne named.

Footnotes

  1. Seneca the Younger — Wikipedia
  2. Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium — Wikipedia
  3. Montaigne, In Defense of Seneca and Plutarch (Essays II.32) — HyperEssays
  4. The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca — New York Journal of Books
  5. Imprisonment and Death of Boethius — EBSCO Research Starters
  6. How to Live (biography) — Wikipedia
  7. Epictetus — Wikipedia
  8. Cicero — Wikipedia

List last reviewed 15 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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