To be virtuous, in Seneca’s book, you had to understand your passions and put them in check. He acknowledged that passions were inevitable in their physical dimension, but were really just symptoms that one has to suppress in order for reason to prevail.

This is the only way you can live in accordance with logos – the divine breath of the world. My takeaway was that helping old ladies on and off buses is no good unless you’re doing it in accordance with the cosmos. According to Seneca, anyway.

Most of us today regard the “being a good person” thing as being distinct from any wider belief system or religious base. But for Seneca it was rooted in a philosophy called Stoicism, which deals with everything from the natural world, to grammar and dialectics. That’s where the idea of logos comes from. Stoicism shows a way to remain happy in spite of misfortunes, and insists on personal virtue.

What sparked incredibly lively debate among the In Our Time guests was another thing we grapple with today: how to be a rich man espousing the moral virtues of a life of poverty. Or, to put it in a modern context, it's like asking how you reconcile an anti-materialist stance with a love of trainers that cost north of £100.

Seneca used the classic get-out-of-jail-free card by saying that you can have riches, you just mustn’t become too attached to them. Mary Beard scoffed in response to this: “Rich men have used the Senecan excuse ever after!”