Dying Every Day

Classical historian James Romm tells the story of Seneca, Rome's leading writer and philosopher, through his years at the court of Nero. Banished in his fifties, Seneca was then appointed to tutor the twelve-year-old future emperor, with the boy's mother, Agrippina the Younger, controlling them both. Seneca served as the boy's teacher, moral guide and stand-in father, and once Nero took the throne at seventeen, the two in effect ruled the empire together. Romm shows how, under Seneca's influence, the young emperor at first governed with restraint, cutting taxes and pardoning prisoners, before growing vain and slipping out of his tutor's control. Weaving Seneca's own writings into the narrative, the book examines a philosopher's moral struggle inside a violent regime.

Ryan Holiday named it among the big biographies he read in 2014 and said he loved it.