CICERONIAN:

Could we say that Seneca is "the Stoic par excellence"?

That would be a difficult judgment to make since it would be based on personal taste. But Seneca was the Stoic par excellence historically speaking. For example, the humanists who created the early Italian Renaissance had access to all of Seneca's writings in Latin, and they were deeply influenced them. In terms of ethics, Stoicism was about becoming more virtuous as a person, and it was a remarkably pro-social philosophy. Renaissance humanism was a movement to create a more humane and virtuous society with better leaders. In this way, the writings of Seneca helped to ignite early Renaissance humanism, which was a revival of ancient virtue ethics. The humanists also drew upon the ideas of Cicero, a Stoic-inspired philosopher, whose ideas of civic virtue expanded upon Stoic ideas.

Later in the Renaissance, when the Italian humanists learned to read Greek, the writings of the two major Stoics who followed Seneca - Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius - were published. But they seemed to have had very little impact at that time.

Marcus Aurelius is hugely popular now, but that is a very recent development. He only started to become popular in English in the 19th century, and he's at peak popularity today. But people have been reading and learning from Seneca for 2,000 years.

If you carefully study Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, you'll discover that they were largely expressing the same ideas, but each in their unique way, because they were addressing different audiences. Of course, since they were all Stoics, that's not surprising. The ideas of Epictetus were recorded by his student Arrian, but even his most famous idea, which people call "the dichotomy of control" today, is found in Seneca's idea of virtue versus Fortune. Virtue, or our inner character, is "up to us", while Fortune is "not up to us".

So which Stoic writer does a reader like the most? In the end, it's a matter of personal taste. But historically speaking, you can find almost every important Stoic idea in Seneca's Latin writings and the writings of Cicero, even if you don't read Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus. That's why people in the early Renaissance understood Stoicism very well, even when Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus were not yet available.

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