LAT 521
Introduction to Seneca 's Letters
October 17, 2023

Key to translation passages on the midterm: LAT 421; LAT 521

Trailer, Seneca: On the Creation of Earthquakes (dir. Robert Schwentke, 2023)


Seneca

• 4 BCE-1 CE, Cordoba (wealthy provincial equestrian & literary family); intrigue of Caligula's court (37-41 CE), sentenced to death, exiled to Corsica
  
  
• asthma (suspirium): Egypt; “a rehearsal of death” (Ep. 54); cf. endurance of hardship as Stoic cornerstone
  
  
• Seneca's wealth an "indifferent" (Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Stoic indifferents"); tensions & contradictions of Neronian court life (Ep. 7?)
  
  
  
• restored to Claudius' court in 49 CE (Agrippina): Nero’s tutor, speechwriter, political advisor; estrangement from emperor (62-65 CE; Epistulae Morales); implicated in Conspiracy of Piso (suicide in Tacitus, Annales 15.62-3)
  
  Rubens, Death of Seneca (1610)

Philosophical works

• philosophical Dialogi (e.g. de Otio) and essays (e.g. de Clementia), mostly written before 124 extant Epistulae Morales (increasing complexity of concepts)
  
  
• Seneca's Stoicism: proficiens aspiring to be perfect sapiens, dedicated to ratio, in search for virtus & summum bonum; living in accordance with Nature (cf. Epicureanism); see further Edwards pp. 10-12 for Stoic technical terms/vocabulary
  
  
• Epistulae Morales: Stoic ethics emphasizing individual conscience, intellectual & moral self-development, self-transformation (esp. overcoming anxiety & fear of death, imperviousness to Fortune; cf. fortuna/fatum) > bene vivere (practical & therapeutic ethical philosophy; cf. M. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics) > reason over emotions; self-reliance, self-sufficiency, forebearance of hardship, freedom from ambition (self-mastery)
  
  
• Seneca & epistolary genre: didactic letters on intellectual & moral improvement (cf. lost letters of Epicurus), quasi-dialectical (1st/2nd person); cf. Roman tradition (Cicero, Pliny); publication (literary persona)
  
  
• style: colloquial with rhetorical flourishes (staccato sentences vs. subordination), pointed/epigrammatic (sententiae, brevitas), repetitions, moral exhortations (paraenesis/παραίνεσις), wide range of vocabulary, asyndeton, antithesis, paradox, conceptual metaphor (images of everday life, medicine, accounting, military, etc.), alliteration & wordplay, clausulae (pp. 27-9 in Edwards); quotation (e.g. Vergil)
  
  
• common elements: epistolary markers (salutem . . . uale), opening “response” frame to equestrian friend Lucilius (merger of correspondent/reader); “hook” for general audience; topic(s); imaginary interlocutor; closing thought/quote of the day
  
  
  Gérôme, pollice verso (1871) 
  

• Ep. 7: topic of philosopher's place in society; response to Laelius' inquiry, hook of Roman spectacles, conceptual metaphor of vision/"looking" (spect-) & introspection (Epicurus: satis enim magnum alter alteri theatrum sumus, 7.11; cf. θέατρον/θεάομαι)