Seneca the Younger

c. 4 BC – AD 65 · Roman Stoic philosopher, dramatist and statesman

Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger was a Stoic philosopher, tragedian and Roman statesman who served as tutor and then adviser to the emperor Nero. His surviving work — the Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, a dozen ethical essays, the Naturales Quaestiones and nine tragedies — is one of the largest bodies of ancient Stoic writing we still have, which is exactly why unsourced moral one-liners drift toward his name. This particular sentence is not among them: it appears nowhere in the sourced sections of his Wikiquote page, and the proverb is first recorded in English in the nineteenth century, nearly eighteen centuries after his death.

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