Men behaving badly: Nero, Claudius and even Seneca could be intensely cruel to women — and fish

They lived in barrels, they camped on top of columns, or in caves: the lives of the sages are often inconceivable to the modern reader. Seneca, however, that rich, compromised sophisticate of the first century AD, is instantly kin, his voice weary with consumerism, his problems definitively first-world. ‘Being poor is not having too little,’ he observed. ‘It is wanting more.’

Those in need might disagree. But from where Seneca was sitting, in his personal banqueting suite with 500 ivory-legged tables (all matching, no less — matching furniture in Rome was considered staggeringly smart, due to the lack of means of mechanical reproduction) he was able to cultivate the elegant indifference to luxury that speaks to our age so vividly.

Seneca has recently reached a new mass market by lending his name to a character in The Hunger Games trilogy, as the author of this admirably versatile biography points out. ‘The books meditate on Senecan themes,’ writes Emily Wilson, bringing her enormous intellect to bear on the YA franchise for a moment