How to Have a Life

A vibrant new translation of Seneca’s “On the Shortness of Life,” a pointed reminder to make the most of our time

Who doesn’t worry sometimes that smart phones, the Internet, and TV are robbing us of time and preventing us from having a life? How can we make the most of our time on earth? In the first century AD, the Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger offered one of the most famous answers to that question in his essay “On the Shortness of Life”—a work that 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, plus 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.

"[A] lively and sometimes arresting translation. . . . Once again Princeton University Press and Professor Romm have put us in their debt."---Ray Morris, Classics for All

“Life is neither too short nor too long. It is what it is. What matters is what we make of it, as this superb new translation of Seneca by James Romm clearly illustrates.”—Massimo Pigliucci, author of How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life