The author of history's most enduring handbooks on tranquility and self-denial was also a billionaire by modern standards, the chief architect of a violently corrupt government, and the writer of some of the bloodiest revenge tragedies in ancient literature. This episode digs beneath the marble bust of Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger to ask whether he was a genuine philosopher doing damage control, a ruthless political survivor using philosophy as cover, or a tragic mix of both. It begins with his chronic asthma and tuberculosis, a decade recovering in Egypt, and the bizarre way his failing lungs saved him from Caligula's execution order.

The conversation follows his eight-year exile on Corsica, where he wrote a stoic masterpiece to his mother and a groveling plea to Claudius's secretary Polybius, then his recall by Agrippina to tutor Ner ...