Abstract: (Biographical tragism and the tragic ambivalence in Seneca's existence) Spent at the imperial court, under the rule of some bloody emperors (Caligula, Claudius, Nero), Seneca's life is a subject full of controversy and paradoxes, especially in relation to the Stoic ideal of life promoted by the philosopher; wealth, compromises, access to power contradict the simplicity and austerity cultivated by Stoicism, raising doubts about the way in which he correlated theory to practice. Livinging in  the context of the determinism imposed by the political power and the atrocities committed by political actors to preserve their own positions, the man's (politician's) endeavor was a continuous experimentation in the field of the tragic. If the threat of death (therefore, seen  as an absolute limit) was behind every decision, Seneca's life stratagems were moves on the chessboard of a destiny that would not be able to avoid the tragic end. Thus, the confrontation with the limits of the system and with the ultimate limit (the danger of death) became a pervasive experience that the philosopher sublimated in the plane of thought, and the tragedian revealed  on the stage of the tragic experience. The Apollonian compensation brought by Stoic philosophy to a life permanently marked by the consciousness of the  final limit is counteracted by the Dionysian revelation of the ambivalent dynamics of living (the mechanisms of emotions, of passions that the Stoics tried to uproot). Centered on monstrous passions, Seneca's tragedies represent the radiography of an infernal mechanism by which emotions generate or limit each other, dragging the individual into a tragic mixer.