Seneca, On Leisure

Two reasons justify the following translation. Firstly, this remarkable text is very rarely included in compilations of Seneca’s work, missing from both the Penguin and Oxford selections; as a result, the most readily available translation perhaps remains that of J.W. Basore’s Loeb from 1932.

The only published recent translation is that of J.M. Cooper and J.F. Procopé (1995), who translate the title as On the Private Life and preserve some of the more old-fashioned language of Basore.4 The only modern edition of the Latin text with English commentary is G.D. Williams’s, which was

published in 2003 and was the text used for this translation.

The second reason concerns the translation itself. While there is not the space to compare closely my translation with the existing ones (all good in their own way), there are a few points worth making.