Literal translation for Seneca’s letters

I’ve fin­ished trans­lat­ing the let­ters in book 3 as lit­er­al­ly as pos­si­ble (proof­read­ing is still to be done). 🎉

The lit­er­al trans­la­tions are usu­al­ly the most time-con­sum­ing part of work­ing on a new book. That’s why I’m already work­ing on it long before we announce the book here in the feed. But I think it’s real­ly worth the effort.

A few tasks are still to be done, but we should be able to pub­lish Seneca next week!

But if you want to get in the mood for sto­icism over the week­end, we’ve already pub­lished books 1 and 2. My favorite let­ters are:

Book 1:

• Let­ter 1 (Seneca urges Lucil­ius to val­ue and save his time, argu­ing it is the only pos­ses­sion that is tru­ly ours and that the most dis­grace­ful loss is through care­less­ness.)
• Let­ter 2 (Seneca advis­es against dis­cur­sive read­ing, rec­om­mend­ing instead that Lucil­ius linger with a few mas­ter-thinkers to tru­ly digest their wis­dom and for­ti­fy his mind.)
• Let­ter 7 (Seneca describes his vis­it to a glad­i­a­to­r­i­al match, ques­tion­ing the moral­i­ty of such vio­lence.)

Book 2:

• Let­ter 13 (Seneca advis­es Lucil­ius to face fears and chal­lenges with courage, empha­siz­ing that many fears are imag­i­nary and that true strength comes from endur­ing dif­fi­cul­ties.)
• Let­ter 16 (Seneca empha­sizes the neces­si­ty of philo­soph­i­cal study for a hap­py life and urges Lucil­ius to be con­sis­tent in his pur­suit of wis­dom.)