Emily Wilson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Classical Studies. She has a BA from Oxford in Classics, an MPhil, also from Oxford, in English Literature (1500-1660), and a PhD from Yale in Classics and Comparative Literature. She is the author of Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton and The Death of Sophocles: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint.

Seneca lived in a world where dissimulation was a way of life, and the confusion between reality and failure woven into the very fabric of the state. It is the mirror he holds up to it which makes him such a great and unsettling writer, and which Wilson's fine biography does so much to explicate