Important Roman philosopher, dramatist and orator of the imperial period (c. 4 BC-AD 65). The second son of Seneca the Elder, a famous teacher of rhetoric in Rome and the uncle of the poet Lucan, he was born in Corduba, in Spain, but raised in Rome, where his training in rhetoric and philosophy led to a brilliant public career. He became tutor and chief advisor to Nero, but was later implicated in a plot against the emperor and forced to take his own life. Seneca is the only Latin writer to have worked in both prose and poetry. As a representative of Stoic philosophy he is famous for his philosophical and moral treatises (e.g. De ira, De vita beata, Ad Marciam de consolatione) and works of moral philosophy in letter form (the Epistulae Morales). As a tragic poet he drew his subject matter mainly from Euripides (e.g. Medea, Phaedra, Troades); his tragedies are generally much darker than his prose works, full of blood, crime, horror and catastrophe. Seneca, finally, is also the author of the Apocolocyntosis, a parody on the deification of the Emperor Claudius and the sole Menippean satire (i.e. a satire combining prose and verse) surviving from Latin antiquity.