Seneca and the Uses of Money

The writings of the philosopher Seneca are characterized by a sophisticated engagement with money, which he recognized as a potent force in the society he lived in. Seneca was deeply critical of the intense emotional investment in money he detected in many of his contemporaries. This mistaken investment, on Seneca’s view, put people at risk of psychological harm and distracted them from pursuing a reasoned understanding of what is truly to be valued, that is, virtue. Money, as a means of facilitating commercial exchange, as a measure of value, and as a store of value, is also manifest in Seneca’s frequent deployment of financial imagery in his philosophical writing.