The story of Pseudo-Seneca

Pseudo-Seneca at the National Roman Museum in Rome, photo by the Author.

If you are interested in Stoicism you have likely heard of the story of the so-called “Pseudo-Seneca,” but just in case, here it is. Stoicism had ceased to be an independent school of philosophy in the ancient world well before the end of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE. Some of the other schools lingered only a bit longer, until the Byzantine emperor Justinian I closed the last of them, the Academy in Athens, in 529.

But ...