How Stoical Was Seneca?

And how good a historian was Tacitus in the The Annals?

Mary Beard reviews Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero, by James Romm, Hardship and Happiness, by Lucius Annaeus Seneca, translated from the Latin by Elaine Fantham, Harry M. Hine, James Ker, and Gareth D. Williams, and The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca, by Emily Wilson, at The New York Review of Books. (via University Bookman)