How to Have a Life: An Ancient Guide to Using Our Time Wisely

Seneca's "On the Shortness of Life" offers valuable wisdom on how to make the most of our time, highlighting the ways we squander it and fail to realize its preciousness. James Romm's new translation, along with two Senecan letters, provides a vibrant and relevant perspective for today's readers, urging us to live a real life and attain immortality.

Format: Hardback
Length: 200 pages
Publication date: 18 October 2022
Publisher: Princeton University Press

Who doesn't occasionally worry that our time is being stolen by smartphones, the Internet, and television, preventing us from living life to the fullest? How can we make the most of the time we have on Earth?

In the first century AD, the Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger offered one of the most famous answers to this question in his essay "On the Shortness of Life." This work has more to teach us today than ever before.

In How to Have a Life, James Romm presents a vibrant new translation of Seneca's brilliant essay, along with two Senecan letters on the same theme, complete with the original Latin on facing pages and an inviting introduction.

With devastating satiric wit, skillfully captured in this translation, Seneca lampoons the ways we squander our time and fail to realize how precious it is. We don't allow people to steal our money, yet we allow them to plunder our time, or else we give it away ourselves in useless, idle pursuits. Seneca also describes how we can make better use of our brief days and years. In the process, he argues, we can make our lives longer, or even everlasting, because to live a real life is to attain a kind of immortality.

A counterweight to the time-sucking distractions of the modern world, How to Have a Life offers priceless wisdom about making our time—and our lives—count.

Weight: 250g
Dimension: 123 x 178 x 20 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780691219127