De Beneficiis concerns the award and reception of gifts and favours within society, and examines the complex nature and role of gratitude within the context of Stoic ethics.

[8][9] Mario Lentano provides a collation of a number of sources who posit different periods of about these years in Brill's Companion to Seneca.

[14] Seneca's aim of the work was, through a discussion of benefits (to regulate a practice):[15] maxime humanam societatem alligat which very much holds human society together[16] The giving of beneficia was for Seneca the most important thing that morally bound humans in society: For it follows that if they are ill placed, they are ill acknowledged, and, when we complain, of their not being returned, it is too late, for they were lost at the time they were given.

De Beneficiis concerns the nature of relative benefits to persons fulfilling the role in social exchange of either giver or receiver.

This is of the form of and etiquette of bond-formation between persons by the giving and exchanging of gifts or services (favors), and is prescriptive [23] of the way in which the aristocrats might behave, for the good of ancient Roman society.

[41] Nicholas Haward chose the title The line of liberalitie: duly directing the well bestowing of benefits and reprehending the common vice of ingratitude.

[42][43] Arthur Golding called the work Concerning Benefyting, that is to say the dooing receiyving and requyting of good turnes.

[46][47] The work is recognised as having been influential in the writing of the sociologist Marcel Mauss, specifically his essay The Gift,[48] first published in 1925 in French, and translated in 1954 into English.