Review: Ancient wisdom never gets old...
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 04 21, 2014
An amazing book for not only enjoying history, but for learning from it as well!  Perhaps the most valuable (or at least one of the most valuable) quotes from Seneca is “A man is as miserable as he thinks he is”.  That and other life lessons from Seneca that can be understood from studying about this successful Roman really makes it an enjoyable read.  I find it particularly intriguing that so many of the things about life remain relevant in every century, and the life of Seneca illustrates precisely that.I appreciated how Seneca’s human weaknesses were not withheld.  This book would not be nearly as effective to learn from if his failures were covered by the cloak of a brilliant philosopher.  We need to know who someone really is in order to justly value the wisdom in their advice.  If Seneca had been falsely portrayed as a “god” of sorts, personally I would not have placed much stock in his deep philosophies.  I also enjoyed the explanations of possible connections he had to St. Paul and others important to the history of Christianity in those days.  Clearly Roman history during the time of Christ would not be complete without including those significant events, and it is interesting to think of Seneca as co-existing with and possibly even friends with St. Paul and others.This would be a great book for anyone who loves history in general or who might be looking for a specific topic for an academic paper.  It would be easy to write an entire research paper on the life lessons from Seneca and this book holds all the information that would be needed for that.  It is also just a pleasurable book that is easy to read, understand, and learn from.