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Writing in a letter to his friend Lucilius around AD62, the Roman philosopher Seneca outlined two arguments for vegetarianism.

His “Letters” were written to Lucilius while the latter was undergoing what we’d now call a midlife crisis, and they brim with both affection and rigor.

“I am far from being a tolerable person, much less a perfect one,” he admitted to his friend Lucilius, to whom the “Letters From a Stoic” are addressed.

“There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us,” Seneca wrote.

From Lucilius and Juvenal in classical Rome to the brilliant likes of Dave Chappelle and Kate McKinnon today, satirists have delighted and challenged audiences with their pinpricks — sometimes dagger thrusts — of acid humor.