Seeing Seneca Whole (Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition)

SEEING SENECA WHOLE

COLUMBIA STUDIES IN THE CLASSICAL TRADITION under the direction of

WILLIAM V. HARRIS (Editor) • EUGENE F. RICE, JR. ALAN CAMERON • SUZANNE SAID KATHY H. EDEN • G.D. WILLIAMS

VOLUME XXVIII

SEEING SENECA WHOLE Perspectives on Philosophy, Poetry and Politics EDITED BY

KATHARINA VOLK AND GARETH D. WILLIAMS

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2006

Cover illustration: Bust of Pseudo-Seneca (Peter Paul Rubens, 1577-1650). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975 (1975.1.843). Photograph, all rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This book is printed on acid -free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISSN 0166-1302 ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15078 2 ISBN-10: 90 04 15078 1 © Copyright 2006 by The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910 Danvers MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii List of Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix List of Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Katharina Volk and Gareth D. Williams, “Introduction” . . . . . . . xiii Richard Tarrant, “Seeing Seneca Whole?” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 James Ker, “Seneca, Man of Many Genres” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 John M. Cooper, “Seneca on Moral Theory and Moral Improvement” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Katja Maria Vogt, “Anger, Present Injustice and Future Revenge in Seneca’s De Ira” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Jula Wildberger, “Seneca and the Stoic Theory of Cognition: Some Preliminary Remarks” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Wolfgang-Rainer Mann, “Learning How to Die: Seneca’s Use of Aeneid 4.653 at Epistulae Morales 12.9”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 John Henderson, “Journey of a Lifetime: Seneca, Epistle 57 in Book VI of EM” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Gareth D. Williams, “States of Exile, States of Mind: Paradox and Reversal in Seneca’s Consolatio ad Helviam Matrem” . . . . . . . . . . . 147 Spencer Cole, “Elite Scepticism in the Apocolocyntosis: Further Qualifications” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 Katharina Volk, “Cosmic Disruption in Seneca’s Thyestes: Two Ways of Looking at an Eclipse” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 Passages cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219

PREFACE

The present volume grew out of the conference “New Directions in Seneca Studies,” which took place at Columbia University on February 27 and 28, 2004. Organized by William Harris with the support of the Center for the Ancient Mediterranean, this gathering brought together ten scholars who approached the work of the Roman politician, philosopher and poet from a variety of perspectives. Seven of the original speakers are represented in the volume, which also includes three further papers that were solicited specifically for this publication. We extend our gratitude to all the contributors, with special thanks to Richard Tarrant for allowing us to use for the collection as a whole a modified version of the title of his paper. In addition, we wish to thank William Harris, without whose initiative and encouragement this volume would never have seen the light of day; the Center for the Ancient Mediterranean and the Stanwood Cockey Lodge Fund, which have lent financial support; the editors of Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition, who have kindly accepted the volume for publication in the series; and the helpful staff at Brill. We are particularly grateful to our research assistant, Stephen Distinti, for his invaluable help in preparing the manuscript. Finally, we thank Princeton University Press for the permission to reprint John M. Cooper’s chapter from Knowledge, Nature, and the Good (2004); the Jeff Wall Studio for the right to reproduce the photograph in Figure 1; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art for letting us put an image of Rubens’ Bust of Pseudo-Seneca on the dustjacket. Katharina Volk and Gareth D. Williams New York, March 2006

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS spencer cole holds a Ph.D. in Classics from Columbia University. He specializes in Latin literature of the late Republic and early Empire. john m. cooper is the Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. He works on Greek philosophy and is the author of Reason and Human Good in Aristotle (1975), Reason and Emotion (1999), and Knowledge, Nature, and the Good (2004), and the editor of Seneca: Moral and Political Essays (1995) and Plato: Complete Works (1997). john henderson is Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of books on Seneca’s letters, on Phaedrus, Statius, Pliny, Juvenal, and Juvenal’s nineteenth-century editor John Mayor, on Roman gardening and on Thorvaldsen’s Museum. 2006 publications include The Medieval World of Isidore of Seville: Truth from Words (CUP), Oxford Reds: Classic Commentaries on Latin Classics, and an edition of Plautus’ Asinaria. james ker teaches in the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published articles on various areas of Greek and Latin literature, and is presently completing a book on Seneca. wolfgang-rainer mann is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. He is the author of The Discovery of Things: Aristotle’s Categories and Their Context (Princeton 2000). Currently he is completing a book length study, to be entitled Fighting with Words: Dialectic and Eristic in Plato’s Protagoras and Euthydemus. He also works and publishes on 19th century philosophy. richard tarrant is Pope Professor of Latin at Harvard University. His publications include editions with commentary of Seneca’s Agamemnon and Thyestes, and the Oxford Classical Texts edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. He is currently completing a commentary on Virgil, Aeneid 12.

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katja maria vogt teaches Philosophy at Columbia University. She specializes in ancient philosophy and ethics and has published Skepsis und Lebenspraxis: Das pyrrhonische Leben ohne Meinungen (Freiburg 1998) as well as a number of articles in both fields. Currently, she is completing a book on early Stoic political philosophy and working on Plato’s Republic and Theaetetus. katharina volk teaches Classics at Columbia University. A specialist in Latin poetry, she has published The Poetics of Latin Didactic: Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, Manilius (Oxford 2002) as well as numerous articles on topics ranging from Homeric formula to the Aetna poem. Currently, she is working on a book on Manilius. jula wildberger is Lecturer of Greek and Latin at University College London and Privatdozentin at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main. Her forthcoming habilitation thesis Seneca und die Stoa. Teil 1: Der Platz des Menschen in der Welt is a systematic exposition of Seneca’s physics and logic as part of the Stoic discourse. She is preparing a bilingual edition of Seneca’s De ira, and has written articles on Stoic anthropology and on Hellenistic philosophy in Lucan and Ovid, whose Ars amatoria was the subject of her dissertation (1998). gareth d. williams teaches Classics at Columbia University. He is the editor of Seneca’s De otio and De breuitate uitae (Cambridge 2003) and the author of recent articles on Seneca’s Natural Questions.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Cover: Peter Paul Rubens, Bust of Pseudo-Seneca, before 1626. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975 (1975.1.843). Photograph, all rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Figure 1: Jeff Wall 1999–2001, After Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, the Preface (transparency in lightbox) = Doy 2005, Plate 8. Figure 2: The “Crypta Neapolitana” (from a 17th cent. engraving) = Maiuri 1937, 13.

INTRODUCTION Katharina Volk and Gareth D. Williams So much can be gathered, inferred or surmised about the “true” character and nature of L. Annaeus Seneca from the writings of the elder Pliny, Tacitus and others in the first century CE and later, but so little of value is revealed in his own writings. Much is written by others of his considerable eloquence, his philosophical high-mindedness, his impressive literary versatility and his important restraining influence on Nero; but there is also much on the negative side, extending from allegations about his hypocrisy and his dark political influence to the corrupting potential of his “daggered” literary style. This complex and intriguing figure, so centrally implicated in the labyrinthine politics and controversies of Nero’s reign in particular, has an obvious appeal to specialists in many branches of modern scholarship, from imperial history to literary biography, from ethical, political and natural philosophy to literary history, criticism and theory. In times that encourage cross-disciplinary research this rich diversity of interest doubtless offers one explanation for the ever-expanding growth of Senecan scholarship in the last three decades or so—a growth stimulated in part by the pioneering efforts of particular scholars and scholarly movements, but one that has also been encouraged by at least three broader developments. First, the long-influential view that “Silver Latin” marked a degenerate departure from the Classical standards of the Ciceronian Golden Age has given way to less jaundiced appraisals of the forces (the rise of declamation in particular) that shaped the evolving literary tendencies of the early empire, so many of them exemplified in Seneca’s elliptical, highly mannered style; the criticisms of a Quintilian, as stern in his condemnation of Seneca’s dangerous stylistic influence (Inst. 10.1.125– 131) as he is committed to Cicero as the Classical role-model par excellence (cf. 10.1.123), represent only one side of a picture whose other side has increasingly drawn sympathetic viewers in recent scholarship. Second (and this is a related point), Seneca’s direct, highly engaging style is itself an active component in the therapeutic work to which so much of his prose philosophy is directed. What were the special conditions under the early emperors, what the distinctive socio-political or

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-cultural tensions, that contributed to or exacerbated the spiritual needs that Seneca’s prose writings aim to address and satisfy? What literary techniques give his spiritual treatment special force? Such questions give Seneca’s writings a powerful resonance and relevance today in a modern world so preoccupied with alternative modes of living as well as with chemical, psychotherapeutic and meditational forms of escape from the depersonalizing pressures of everyday life. Third, Senecan tragedy has been released in modern scholarship from the overbearing shadow of Greek tragic influence, important new editions of several of the plays have placed their literary study on a fresh footing, and the movement in modern art, literature and film to ever more graphic depictions of sensational violence and cruelty has arguably contributed further to an impressive resurgence of interest in Seneca tragicus. In sum: if, as Tacitus has it (Ann. 13.3), Seneca’s literary talent was “well adapted to the ears of his age,” then his writings in both prose and verse are also well attuned to our times. This gathering of momentum in modern Senecan study was one important factor, Seneca’s cross-disciplinary relevance to so many different areas of modern Classical scholarship another, that prompted the organization of a conference on Seneca that took place under the auspices of the Center for the Ancient Mediterranean at Columbia University in February 2004. If Seneca’s life was a complex amalgam of different roles as (in Miriam Griffin’s words) “a philosopher in politics,” his writings are also famously diverse in their generic range and versatility, spanning “speeches, poems, letters and dialogues” (Quint. Inst. 10.1.129) and extending among his extant works alone to at least nine tragedies, twelve moral treatises (Dialogi), two books On Clemency (to Nero), one hundred and twenty-four Moral Epistles, eight books of Natural Questions, seven On Favours, and the extraordinary Apocolocyntosis or Gourdification, that ribald treatment of Claudius’ non-deification after he finally managed to “gurgle out” his last breath (cf. 4.2) in 54 CE. A main objective of the Columbia conference was to explore from a broad range of perspectives—historical, literary, socio-political, philosophical—the different significances that the texts acquire when appropriated by one kind of reader (or specialism) as opposed to another, and also the benefits and mutually informing meanings that can result from crossing party-lines and applying a combination of theoretical and/or interdisciplinary approaches to the same work(s). Of course, this particular attempt to “see Seneca whole” (to borrow from the title of Richard Tarrant’s essay) offers but one contribution to what is a

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broader and most welcome tendency in modern Senecan scholarship. But we neverthless believe that the individual papers at the Columbia conference succeeded in shedding fresh light on, and asking stimulating questions of, particular works, parts of works and the shape or construction of the Senecan oeuvre as a whole (especially in the identification of possible patterns of conceptual coherence across the oeuvre), and thus in opening up distinct lines of inquiry in a field of study that is becoming increasingly crowded. Of the ten essays gathered in this volume versions of seven were presented at the Columbia conference, three acquired later by invitation to John Henderson, Wolfgang-Rainer Mann and Jula Wildberger. In general, the collection may be divided into four categories. First, those that are panoramic in scope: Richard Tarrant set the tone for the original conference in his opening address entitled “Seeing Seneca Whole?,” the published version of which offers a synthetic overview of certain pervasive features of Senecan thought and writing, among them Seneca’s intense engagement in both his prose and tragedies with the Augustan poets, and also the negative implications (“grounds for optimism are slim indeed …”) of his predilection for highly vivid and compelling portrayals of human weakness and moral failing, notably extending to his dark portrayals of the figure of the tyrant in both his prose and verse. While Tarrant traces important thematic continuities across the Senecan oeuvre, James Ker concentrates on questions of genre, first relating the restless generic diversity of Seneca’s writings to his ancient profile as a man of many different pursuits (studia), which stretch beyond politics, literature and philosophy not least to viticulture. Ker’s Seneca shapes his oeuvre by conscious principles of inclusion, exclusion and the reworking of inherited genres, with his different generic experiments subsumed within the economy of a larger polygeneric project, one genre often embedded within or overlapping with another. Indeed, for Ker, the language and idea of economics supplies an important bridging concept across Seneca’s corpus, the notion of “returns,” say, or “(self-)accounting” and spiritual “gains” etc. contributing to the wider “textual economy” for which Ker argues. Second, philosophy: four essays test different aspects of Seneca’s philosophical credentials and position-taking across his oeuvre, the first of them perhaps laying down the boldest challenge in John M. Cooper’s contention that Seneca rejects, and openly disparages, certain prominent modes of Stoic philosophical argumentation while still holding

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the Stoic positions that such argumentation traditionally supports. The ethical philosophy that he espouses may be no different in principle to that of the foundational Stoics, but he promotes those conclusions through his rhetorical rather than logical force of argument, and in at least this respect his Stoicism differs from its archetype. Of course, Seneca’s rejection of a certain kind of Stoic argumentation need in no way imply any simplification or dilution in his own philosophical system. In this respect the contributions of Katja Maria Vogt on Seneca’s analysis of anger in his On Anger and of Jula Wildberger on the Stoic theory of cognition and Seneca’s relation to it both demonstrate his complex, even potentially innovative, engagement with highly technical aspects of the Stoic tradition. So in the case of anger Vogt’s Seneca grapples with the problem of how (if at all) the early Stoic classification of anger as a desire for revenge may be reconciled with the notion of anger as pain occasioned by perceived injustice. In arguing that Seneca deftly acknowledges the pain-element even as he remains true to the conventional Stoic definition, Vogt casts him as an active participant in an ongoing Stoic controversy rather than as a passive transmitter of received ideas. The phenomenon of Stoic assent looms large in Vogt’s analysis of Seneca on anger, and so too in Jula Wildberger’s examination of how a written text can begin to generate the special kind of cognition in the reader that, for Stoics, is the origin of wisdom. What devices does Seneca deploy in striving fully to “grip” and motivate his reader in this direction, the goal of philosophical progress being to adjust and refine our conceptual thinking until there is no inconsistency in our “right reason”? Even if complete wisdom is in practical terms unattainable and the perfect wise man is effectively a chimera, Wildberger’s Seneca engages imaginatively with a major challenge indirectly thrown down by Stoic epistemology: how to empower a text actually to make its reader better or wiser? A particular aspect of philosophical wisdom preoccupies Wolfgang-Rainer Mann in his contribution on Stoic and Senecan attitudes to dying and “preparing for death” in life—a contribution which fuses philosophical and literary approaches to the different texts on which he focuses, beginning with parts of the Aeneid. If Virgil’s Dido is cast as admirably heroic and “philosophical” in the way she embraces her own death by suicide (however premature that death may be from an alternative perspective within the text), she serves for Mann as a powerful antitype to the remarkable Pacuvius who is portrayed in the twelfth of Seneca’s Moral Epistles as staging his own funeral-rites on

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a daily basis, as if rounding out each day as if it were his last. Seneca’s quotation in this letter of Dido’s words in Aeneid 4 as she resigns herself to her death proves pivotal in Mann’s demonstration that Pacuvius is utterly unlike Dido, and anything but truly philosophical, in his constant rehearsals of his own death-rites. This negative exemple of “preparing for death” offers a spectacular foil to Mann’s exploration of the positive aspects of this most Stoic of exercises. Third, Seneca as a literary philosopher: if the essays of Cooper, Vogt, Wildberger and Mann fully establish Seneca’s credentials as a “serious” philosopher, to what extent is his philosophical message affected, shaped or enhanced by the literary medium in which he casts it? To what extent is literary form essential to, even part of, that message? John Henderson takes us on a whistle-stop tour of the Moral Epistles, with early emphasis (among much else) on the letter-form itself— “the stop-start stagger of epistolarity,” closure always followed by new incipit—as mimetically recreating or coinciding with the staccato movement of “real” philosophical progress. Our main destination is Seneca’s account in the fifty-seventh letter of the claustrophobia that allegedly afflicted him on his journey from Baiae back to Naples via the shortcut of the so-called crypta Neapolitana, a tunnel connecting Naples and Puteoli. The tunnel indeed serves as “a way through” on Henderson’s reading, in that the letter’s broader reflections on (coping with the prospect of) death enable Seneca’s persona to pass through his fears; his imprisoning experience underground is paradoxically liberating, the letter an important staging-post for his (our) gradual emancipation from the everyday world of contingency. Literary form and philosophical content are again inextricably bound together in Gareth Williams’ essay on the exiled Seneca’s Consolation to Helvia, his mother. Seneca himself draws attention early in the work to the paradoxical circumstances in which he, the exile on Corsica (41–49 CE), here gives rather than receives consolation. For Williams this paradoxical emphasis finds significant reverberations throughout the Consolation, not least in the possibility that the “real” exile here may not be Seneca but the many vice-ridden types that he surveys in the course of the treatise, types who are “exiles” from themselves, from self-knowledge, from the good. On this approach the Consolation to Helvia is perhaps concerned not so much with the specific case of Seneca’s exile as with the figurative potential of “exile” as a pervasive human condition, embracing the remote and self-sufficent wise man no less than the ordinary delinquent who is estranged from the good.

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In the fourth category, two essays explore possible links between Seneca’s writings and the socio-political contexts in which they were composed. Spencer Cole argues that Seneca’s vicious ridicule of Claudius’ claim to divinity in the Apocolocyntosis is in fact designed to safeguard in its limited way the institution of imperial apotheosis from disrepute; Claudius is no Augustus, whose divine status and cult titles are by contrast aggressively emphasized in the Apocolocyntosis and elsewhere in Seneca’s oeuvre. While Cole implicates the Apocolocyntosis in first-century CE reflection upon the institutional integrity of imperial apotheosis, Katharina Volk’s examination of the philosophical underpinnings of the sun’s reversal in Seneca’s Thyestes is the starting-point for a broader political, and especially Neronian, reading of the play. Her evil Atreus aspires to god-like omnipotence in his ecstasy at finally inflicting terrible vengeance on his brother, Thyestes. If, the sun literally dispelled, Atreus walks tall as the (self-projected) sun-god incarnate, he offers for Volk a tantalizing model or ghost for Nero, that other aspiring Phoebus; and she adduces further evidence to argue that the Thyestes is in effect an anti-Neronian play written in the last years of Seneca’s life after his final alienation from his former charge. No volume of this sort can seek to offer more than a series of snapshots, taken from many different angles, of the range and complexity of Seneca’s writings. Different contributors follow their given preferences, some areas (such as philosophy) and works receive more attention than others, significant parts of the corpus are omitted or underrepresented (nothing on the Natural Questions, for example, or On Favours, and Senecan tragedy receives but limited coverage), and our editorial duties have merely reinforced our awareness of how difficult it is to capture within a limited space the many facets and fascinations of Seneca’s literary/philosophical character. The essays collected here are nevertheless offered in the hope that they shed significant light on those Senecan areas that are covered, and that the aggregate fairly reflects our concerted effort at the original Columbia conference to “see Seneca whole.”

SEEING SENECA WHOLE?

Richard Tarrant Even Seneca’s harshest critics give him credit for versatility.* One of the earliest of those critics, Quintilian, writing in the generation after Seneca’s death, paid grudging tribute to the variety of his writings: tractauit etiam omnem fere studiorum materiam; nam et orationes eius et poemata et epistulae et dialogi feruntur (“he dealt with nearly every branch of literature; speeches, poetry, letters, and dialogues by him are in circulation,” Inst. 10.1.128–129). But despite the many-sided character of Seneca’s output, Quintilian clearly recognized—and deplored—some fundamentally consistent features in his work. Seeing Seneca whole has, however, been difficult for his modern students. There has been much recent progress in all areas of Senecan studies, but for understandable reasons the main contributions have tended to focus on one or the other of the two main bodies of his surviving work, the tragedies and the philosophical texts. That is particularly true of commentaries, which have fuelled many of the recent advances in this area. But since the present set of essays aims to explore all aspects of Seneca’s work, I thought it might be appropriate in this context to attempt a brief synthetic treatment of some pervasive aspects of his thought and writing. 1. You Are Who You Quote Virgil, maximus uates (B.V. 9.2) Ovid, ille poetarum ingeniosissimus (Q Nat. 3.27.13)

One consequence of the intensive study of Senecan tragedy in recent decades has been an increased awareness of Seneca’s indebtedness to Augustan poetry, especially that of Virgil, Ovid, and Horace, and at the same time a greater appreciation for his creative reuse of that Augustan * I wish to thank James Ker, Alessandro Schiesaro, and Katharina Volk for helpful comments and questions.

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material.1 Turning to the prose writings, one is struck by the frequency with which Seneca draws on the same poetic sources for supporting or illustrative citations.2 Virgil and Ovid are by far the most often quoted writers, and in several places Seneca combines citations from them for a particularly strong appeal to poetic authority.3 In Q Nat. 3.1.1 Seneca follows Virgilian and Ovidian quotations with a line of Lucilius, the dedicatee of this and several other works of Seneca, including the Epistulae morales; naming him in the same breath as Virgil and Ovid pays him the highest possible compliment. By contrast, Horace, although his Odes are a constant presence in Seneca’s tragic lyrics, is almost completely missing in the prose works. At times, in fact, Seneca seems to go out of his way not to quote Horace, as, for example, in Tranq. 2.13–15 on obsessive travel as a symptom of inner disquiet, where Horace Ep. 1.11.27 caelum, non animum, mutant qui trans mare currunt (“those who race across the sea change their surroundings, not their soul”) would have been the perfect poetic complement, even more apt than the phrase from Lucretius that Seneca does quote, 3.1068 hoc se quisque modo semper fugit (“in this way each one runs away from himself ”), or in Tranq. 17.10, where Seneca gives a Latin translation of a Greek gnome, aliquando et insanire iucundum est (“sometimes even going mad is pleasant”), rather than Horace’s more vivid and memorable statement of the same idea, dulce est desipere in loco (Carm. 4.12.28). Horace’s Epicureanism is not a sufficient explanation for this avoidance, since Seneca does cite Lucretius several times, not to mention his frequent favorable references to Epicurus himself. Perhaps a more likely reason is that Horace had not achieved the level of widespread popularity that would have made citations from his poetry immediately recognizable to Seneca’s readers.4 In the tragedies, Seneca’s allusions to Augustan poetry are far from inert echoes; in many cases they constitute radical reinterpretations of the original.5 In the prose works, correspondingly strong readings of Virgil and Ovid often take the form of imposing a sense quite foreign

1 For a specimen of that approach at its most subtle, see Alessandro Schiesaro’s treatment of Virgilian and Ovidian motifs in the Thyestes, in Schiesaro 2003, 70–138, 221–251. 2 See Mazzoli 1970 for full discussion and statistics. 3 Cf. Q Nat. 3.1.1, 4A praef. 19, 5.16.1. 4 See also Mazzoli 1998. 5 A good example is the description of the Pelopid royal house in Thyestes 641–682, which negatively reorients Virgil’s account of Latinus’ palace-temple in Aen. 7.170–191; see my notes ad loc. and on 659–664 in Tarrant 1985.

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to that of the original. Ovid’s Phaethon, who provokes his own doom and threatens to destroy the cosmos by recklessly insisting on driving the Sun’s chariot, becomes for Seneca a generosus adulescens and an icon of uirtus, who scorns the safe path and reaches for the heights, uide quam alte escendere debeat uirtus: scies illi non per secura uadendum … humilis et inertis est tuta sectari: per alta uirtus it (“see how high virtue must climb; you will find that it cannot take the safe path … it is for the lowly and idle to seek out a safe route: virtue goes through the heights,” Prov. 5.10– 11); cf. also V.B. 20.5 qui haec facere proponet, uolet, temptabit, ad deos iter faciet, ne ille, etiam si non tenuerit, “magnis tamen excidit ausis” (= Met. 2.328) (“whoever resolves, desires, and attempts to act in this way will trace a path toward the gods; indeed, even if he does not reach them, ‘at least he fell in splendid daring’”).6 In such cases Seneca is not being merely perverse or insensitive, but is instead making the cited material his own by appropriating it for a new use. The explicit citation of poetic passages characteristic of the prose works might not seem to offer as much scope for intertextual play as the more allusive style of the tragedies, but interplay of that sort can indeed be found. Here I will illustrate just one type, the presence of explicit citation of Augustan poets in close proximity to allusive reference to the same texts. For example, at Q Nat. 3.27.13–28.2, Seneca quotes several lines from Ovid’s description of the flood in Metamorphoses 1; shortly before the last of those citations, Seneca writes ubi instat illa pernicies mutarique humanum genus placuit (“when that wickedness persisted and the decision was taken to replace humankind”), the wording of which (placuit in particular) clearly evokes Met. 1.260–261 referring to Jupiter, poena placet diuersa, genus mortale sub undis / perdere (“he decides on a different punishment, to destroy humankind beneath the floodwaters”).7 In De ira 2.9.2, in the course of one of Seneca’s numerous descriptions of universal wickedness (on which I will have more to say shortly), he cites the climactic lines of Ovid’s account of the Iron Age: maior cotidie peccandi cupiditas, minor uerecundia est; expulso melioris aequiorisque respectu quocumque uisum est libido se inpingit, nec furtiua iam scelera sunt: praeter oculos eunt, adeoque in publicum missa nequitia est et in omnium pectoribus eualuit ut innocentia non rara sed 6 In Ep. 56.12–13 Seneca cites Aen. 2.726–729, in which Aeneas contrasts his anxiety for the safety of his family on their departure from Troy with his earlier frenzied fighting without thought for his own survival; Seneca glosses the distinction as one between the imperturbable sapiens and the imperitus who fears for his possessions. 7 This passage is also discussed in Katharina Volk’s paper in this volume.

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richard tarrant nulla sit. numquid enim singuli aut pauci rupere legem? undique uelut signo dato ad fas nefasque miscendum coorti sunt: non hospes ab hospite tutus, non socer a genero; fratrum quoque gratia rara est. imminet exitio uir coniugis, illa mariti; lurida terribiles miscent aconita nouercae; filius ante diem patrios inquirit in annos. (= Met. 1.144–148) Each day the desire for wrongdoing is greater, the shame of it less; with all regard for the better or more just course driven out, lust hurls itself wherever it wishes. Nor are crimes any longer kept hidden: they go in full view, and wickedness has become so open and has taken such a strong hold in the hearts of all that innocence is not rare, but rather nonexistent. Is it just individuals or a few who transgress? On all sides, as if a signal had been given, they throng together to throw right and wrong into confusion. Guest was not safe from guest, nor father-in-law from son-in-law; even brother-love is rare. Husbands plot their wives’ death, wives their husbands’; grim stepmothers mix their pallid poisons; impatient sons seek to learn their fathers’ lifespan.

The quotation is noteworthy at one level because Ovid’s passage literally refers to a period in human history before the Flood, whereas Seneca treats it as an accurate (though incomplete) portrayal of contemporary vice. The discrepancy might suggest that Seneca has simply wrenched the lines from their original context for his own purposes, but I think it is more likely that Seneca realized that Ovid’s description of the Iron Age bore an unmistakable resemblance to the Rome of Ovid’s (and Seneca’s own) day. Seneca’s quotation thus makes explicit an implication already present in his source. But we can go further, by looking closely at the phrase that introduces the Ovidian citation: undique uelut signo dato ad fas nefasque miscendum coorti sunt. The motif of “throwing right and wrong into confusion” does not appear in Ovid’s Iron Age description, but it does appear in a later episode of the Metamorphoses, where Procne, the wife of Tereus, learns that her husband has brutally raped her sister Philomela and is immediately consumed with thoughts of vengeance: fasque nefasque / confusura ruit (“she rushes forth, set on confusing right and wrong,” Met. 6.585–586). I would not go so far as to suggest that the reader of De ira is meant to recall that second Ovidian passage, but at the very least the conjunction shows that Seneca had seen or forged a link between the two passages; the allusion

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to the Procne-Tereus episode has further significance for Seneca, since Ovid’s account of that myth functions as a crucial intertext in Seneca’s Thyestes.8 I recently argued that Ovidian passages such as the Iron Age and Procne depict a form of chaos in the moral sphere analogous to the physical chaos with which the Metamorphoses begins, and, in addition, that this concept of moral chaos helped to shape the use Seneca made of Ovid in the Thyestes.9 When advancing that hypothesis I was unaware of the De ira passage, which offers at least some evidence for believing that Seneca did read Ovid in that way. 2. Accentuate the Negative omne futurum incertum est et ad deteriora certius. (Cons. Marc. 23.1) All the future is uncertain, and more certain to be worse than otherwise.

The tragedies and the prose works have usually been thought to represent markedly different outlooks on human life. As John Fitch writes in the introduction to his excellent new Loeb edition of the tragedies, “moral philosophy in antiquity is optimistic, which tragedy is not.”10 But just how optimistic is the outlook of Seneca’s prose works? Alessandro Schiesaro has referred in passing to the “restrained optimism” of these texts,11 and Fitch himself perceptively observes that “despite the overt optimism of the philosophical works, their emphasis on the extremes of experience, on adversity, torture, violent death, gives them at times a darkness of timbre comparable to the tragedies.”12 Taking this line of argument further, I would suggest that while Senecan philosophy holds out the ideal of a life lived under the control of reason and in harmony with nature, these works offer a depiction of actual life in which weakness, vice, and corruption are so prevalent that grounds for optimism are slim indeed.

See in particular Schiesaro 2003, 70–85. Tarrant 2002. 10 Fitch 2002, 22. 11 Schiesaro 2003, 20–21. Schiesaro notes some very suggestive similarities between the tragedies and the prose works by focusing on the irrational elements in the ostensibly reason-centered philosophical writings. 12 Fitch 2002, 25. 8 9

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One reason for that impression is Seneca’s predilection for images of universal vice and corruption, examples of which can be found in nearly every one of his philosophical writings. Most of these passages are too extensive to be quoted in full, but some capsule statements will give an indication of their flavor: ceterum idem semper de nobis pronuntiare debebimus. malos esse nos, malos fuisse—inuitus adiciam, et futuros esse. (Ben. 1.10.3) Yet the verdict we must render on ourselves will always be the same: that we are wicked, and have been wicked, and—I regret to add—will always be wicked. hoc scito, istic tantundem esse uitiorum quantum hominum. (De ira 2.8.1) Know this for certain, there [i.e., in the Circus Maximus] you will find as many vices as men. nemo sibi tantummodo errat, sed alieni erroris et causa et auctor est. (V. B. 1.4) No-one goes wrong with harm to himself alone, but instead he is the cause and instigation of another’s wrongdoing. Peccauimus omnes, alii grauia, alii leuiora, alii ex destinato, alii forte impulsi aut aliena nequitia ablati; alii in bonis consiliis parum fortiter stetimus et innocentiam inuiti ac retinentes perdidimus; nec deliquimus tantum, sed usque ad extremum aeui deliquemus. (Clem. 1.6.3) We have all done wrong, some in great matters, others in small, some with forethought, others driven by a chance impulse or led astray by another’s wickedness; some of us have failed to stick to our good intentions, and have lost our innocence unwillingly or even while holding on to it; nor have we just done wrong in the past, but we will go on doing wrong to the end of our days.

Descriptions of human weakness or moral failing in Seneca’s favorite poets are invoked with particular emphasis. At Q Nat. 4A praef. 19 Virgil, Ovid, and Menander are cited as authorities for the general depravity of humanity, and at B.V. 9.2 Seneca introduces one of Virgil’s gloomiest gnomai with a verbal fanfare: clamat ecce maximus uates et uelut diuino ore instinctus salutare carmen canit: optima quaeque dies miseris mortalibus aeui prima fugit. (= Georg. 3.66–67) See how the greatest of poets cries out and, as if inspired with divine power of speech, sings the salutary song:

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the best days of life for wretched mortals are the first to flee.

Such images of universal vice take on additional prominence when they are placed as climactic passages at or near the ends of books, as in De ira 2.36.4; Clem. 1.26.1–4; and the final pages of Q Nat. 7, which form a lament for the materialism of the age and the consequent lack of interest in philosophy and good learning. Even when Seneca is not explicitly evoking visions of universal corruption, his absolutizing language can give a description of daily life some of the same global coloring. A typical feature is his fondness for expressions based on nemo and omnes or their equivalents, e.g., Ep. 7.2: inimica est multorum conuersatio: nemo non aliquod nobis uitium aut commendat aut imprimit aut nescientibus adlinit (“associating with many people is against our interest: there is no one who does not make some vice appealing to us, or leave its stamp on us, or smear it on us without our knowledge”); and later in 7.7, on the general effect of even a single bad companion: malignus comes quamuis candido et simplici rubiginem suam adfricuit (“a meanspirited friend makes the rust of his malice rub off on even the most honest and open character”). The strong metaphors in this passage (“smearing” adlinit, “rubbing” adfricuit) lead us toward a more general feature of Seneca’s writing in both prose and verse: his imagination seems to respond more vigorously to vice than to virtue. In his recent book, Restraining Rage, William Harris aptly cites a description of Seneca by Carlin Barton: “a man whose own creative imagination, like that of his nephew Lucan, was filled with erotically luxuriant scenes of violence.”13 That is well put, but the observation can be generalized: it is not only violence that excites Seneca’s imagination, but moral failure of all kinds, from excessive selfindulgence to its opposing fault, over-activity. Seneca’s evocations of vice have a vividness and an eye for telling detail worthy of Juvenal.14 I am thinking of memorable vignettes such as the restlessly idle characters of Tranq. 12.4, who fill their days with pointless social engagements—having attached themselves to someone’s litter, they go so far as to help carry it—, or the workaholic lawyers of B.V. 12.1, who are still at their desks when the night watchdogs are let loose in the court building. On a larger scale, one could cite the Harris 2001, 115, citing Barton 1993, 23. Satiric elements in Senecan prose deserve a fuller study than they have, to my knowledge, received. 13 14

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extended riffs on such topics as noontime gladiatorial combats in Ep. 7 and the glorious cacophony of a bathhouse in Ep. 56. Juxtaposed depictions of virtue and vice are particularly illuminating in this regard. In V. B. 7.3, for example, the structure of the comparison aims for the greatest possible symmetry: altum quiddam est uirtus, excelsum et regale, inuictum infatigabile: uoluptas humile seruile, inbecillum caducum, cuius statio ac domicilium fornices et popinae sunt. uirtutem in templo conuenies, in foro in curia, pro muris stantem, puluerulentam coloratam, callosas habentem manus: uoluptatem latitantem saepius ac tenebras captantem circa balinea ac sudatoria ac loca aedilem metuentia, mollem eneruem, mero atque unguento madentem, pallidam aut fucatam et medicamentis pollinctam. Virtue is something lofty, exalted, and regal, that cannot be conquered or wearied; pleasure is base and slavish, weak and unsteady, its haunt and home the brothel and the tavern. You will come upon virtue in the temple, in the forum, in the senate house, you will see her standing before the walls, covered in dust and burned by the sun, her hands calloused; you will more often find pleasure hiding and taking advantage of darkness, around the public baths and gymnasia and places that live in fear of the police, soft and effete, dripping with wine and perfume, either pale or else dyed and made up as if for its own funeral.

The double sequence of the images, however, each time gives vice the more prominent and elaborate second position, and virtue’s calloused hands are easily outdone in imaginative power by the “places that live in fear of the police” (loca aedilem metuentia) frequented by vice. Senecan prose certainly does not lack for positive personal exempla, figures such as Cato or Socrates, who embody the virtues that Seneca wishes to commend to his audience.15 But even Seneca’s imagines uirtutum can be highly colored by violent or disordered elements, and can also be overshadowed by the attention lavished on incarnations of vice. In Prov. 3.9–10 the tortures of Regulus are contrasted with Maecenas’ notorious self-indulgence: figunt cutem claui et quocumque fatigatum corpus reclinauit, uulneri incumbit; in perpetuam uigiliam suspensa sunt lumina: quanto plus tormenti tanto plus erit gloriae. … feliciorem ergo tu Maecenatem putas, cui amoribus anxio et morosae uxoris cotidiana repudia deflenti somnus per symphoniarum cantum ex longinquo lene resonantium quaeritur? mero se licet sopiat et aquarum fragoribus auocet et mille uoluptatibus mentem anxiam fallat, tam uigilabit in pluma quam ille in cruce; 15

On exempla in Senecan prose see Mayer 1991.

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sed illi solacium est pro honesto dura tolerare et ad causam a patientia respicit, hunc uoluptatibus marcidum et felicitate nimia laborantem magis iis quae patitur uexat causa patiendi. Nails pierce his skin, and wherever he has shifted his tired body, he lies upon a wound; his eyes are forced open in unending wakefulness: but the greater his torment, the greater will be his glory. … So do you think Maecenas is more fortunate, Maecenas fretting over his love-life and mourning the daily rejections of his harridan of a wife, who tries to find sleep through the sound of an orchestra playing softly at a distance? Even though he may drug himself with wine and divert himself with the plash of falling waters and deceive his troubled mind with a thousand pleasures, still he will be as awake on his feather bed as Regulus on his cross. But Regulus has the consolation of enduring hardships for the sake of what is right, and he can turn his eyes from his sufferings to their cause, while Maecenas, jaded by pleasure and weighed down by an excess of good fortune, is even more troubled by the reason for his suffering than by the sufferings themselves.

It seems likely that Regulus appealed to Seneca as an avatar of virtue precisely because he offered scope for accounts of physical torture,16 but here Seneca’s treatment seems almost perfunctory when set alongside the lovingly detailed description of Maecenas’ musically assisted slumbers. I would not, of course, wish to deny that many of Seneca’s graphic depictions of immoral or foolish behavior are meant to serve a therapeutic function, just as a skilled preacher will often lead with a powerful description of sinfulness designed to revolt the listeners and make them more eager to repent.17 What I would argue, though, is that in Seneca the overall balance between negative and positive elements is often tilted, at least in terms of rhetorical effect, toward the negative. If my contention is at all persuasive, the obvious next question is, Why is that the case? Seneca’s training in declamation is one likely factor: specifically, the popular exercise that involved denouncing the evils of the time (the locus de saeculo) provided him with a ready-made repertory of widespread vices and failings.18 At a much more general level, 16 For other references to Regulus cf. Ben. 5.3.2, Tranq. 16.4, Ep. 67.7 and 12, 71.17, 98.12. 17 Traina 1987, 25–41 acutely analyzes Senecan moral rhetoric under the rubric of a “linguaggio della predicazione.” 18 See De Decker 1913, 22–38, Bonner 1949, 60–62 (who notes the commonplace nemo sine uitio est, Sen. Rhet. Controv. 2.4.4).

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wickedness is often more compelling than virtuous behavior, perhaps because most human beings have more direct experience of the former than of the latter. In that respect Seneca is in the same position as other moralists, but I do not think that the same rhetorical imbalance is visible in, for example, Aristotle’s ethical writings. The Stoics’ particularly intense horror of the passions and of the behavior they inspire may offer another partial explanation: what one dreads also fascinates. On that point the analogy between Seneca and a preacher might be pressed a bit further: sin, however roundly condemned, can still exercise a perverse attraction even for a sincere believer.19 Finally, Seneca’s conception of the virtuous person, the wise man or sapiens, itself poses a problem in this regard: his perfection is such that it is difficult to describe him in terms that are both believable and appealing. To say that he commits no wrong action and omits no virtuous one (sapiens autem nihil facit quod non debet, nihil praetermittit quod debet, Clem. 2.7.1) is undoubtedly edifying, but hardly sets the pulses racing. As Seneca himself admits, the pleasures of the wise man are so subtle as to be almost imperceptible: at contra sapientium remissae uoluptates et modestae ac paene languidae sunt compressaeque et uix notabiles, ut quae neque accersitae ueniant nec, quamuis per se accesserint, in honore sint neque ullo gaudio percipientium exceptae; miscent enim illas et interponunt uitae ut ludum iocumque inter seria. (V.B. 12.2) On the other hand, the pleasures of the wise man are gentle and moderate and almost feeble, restrained and scarcely noticeable, given that they do not come in answer to a summons nor, even though they arrive 19 The phenomenon I am describing can be seen in the most dignified and formal expressions of Christian moral sentiment, e.g., the general confession from the evening service of the Anglican liturgy:

Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep, We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, We have offended against thy holy laws, We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health within us. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders. Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults. Restore thou them that are penitent; According to thy promises declared unto mankind in Christ Jesus our Lord. And grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake, That we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life, To the glory of thy holy name. Amen. In that text the offenses and shortcomings are present and specific, while the “godly, righteous, and sober life” that is desiderated remains at best an indistinct prospect.

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unbidden, are they held in high regard or received with any joy on the part of those who experience them; for they mingle and intersperse them in their lives as we vary serious matters with games and amusements.

It is perhaps hardly surprising that Seneca’s moral imagination was more strongly stimulated by wickedness performed with flair and vigor than by the tepid joys of the virtuous. The following two sections take up particular aspects of the larger picture just offered. 3. It’s the Animus, Stupid cum omnia ad animum referamus (Ben. 2.31.1) since we [Stoics] relate everything to the animus

The animus is a constant point of reference in Senecan discussions of the self; in fact, in both Senecan prose and tragedy, the animus often functions as a sort of synecdoche for the whole person. Here I would argue that just as Seneca’s depictions of human life as a whole highlight its flawed and corrupt nature, so also at the microscopic level (as it were), his presentation of the animus is particularly successful in portraying its disorders. A selection of the metaphors in which the animus serves as a synecdoche for the person shows it engaging in a wide variety of somatic behavior; but while the animus has its pleasures (“sed animus quoque” inquit “uoluptates habebit suas”, V. B. 6.1), Seneca more often depicts it in pain or distress. A great soul can be wounded by no weapon (ille ingens animus … uelut nulli penetrabilem telo, De ira 3.5.7–8—the negative phrasing is significant), but a weak one throws down its arms at the first onslaught (quid terga uertis, anime? quid primo impetu / deponis arma?, Ag. 228–229). The animus can be tossed on storms of passion (irae, amoris omniumque istarum procellarum animos uexantium sunt quaedam praenuntia, De ira 3.10.2) and can complain of queasiness (querelas nausiantis animi, Constant. 10.2); it can crawl into corners to escape the wickedness of the age (obirascens fortunae animus et de saeculo querens et in angulos se retrahens et poenae incubans suae, Tranq. 2.11) and make such a din as to keep its owner from sleeping (quid in causa putas esse? animus illi obstrepit, Ep. 56.7). The anger-prone animus requires especially careful tending and can be soothed by read-

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ings from poetry and history (lectio illum carminum obleniat et historia fabulis detineat; mollius delicatiusque tractetur, De ira 3.9.1). As that delightful image implies, the animus can be engaged in address. Seneca here draws on a long poetic tradition of addresses to one’s thumos, but he invests the convention with a far greater degree of inwardness and self-awareness. One instance of address to the animus in the prose works merits a closer look. In De prouidentia 2.10 the younger Cato prepares to commit suicide rather than surrender to Julius Caesar, and appeals to his animus as follows: aggredere, anime, diu meditatum opus, eripe te rebus humanis (“come, my soul, embark on the exploit you have long pondered, snatch yourself away from human affairs”). Senecan tragedy offers a parallel for the language of that self-exhortation in the words of Medea planning revenge on Jason: Med. 565–566 hac aggredere, qua nemo potest / quidquam timere (“attack here, where no one can be fearing anything”). It is also noteworthy that meditatum usually carries negative associations, being applied to carefully plotted crimes or acts of violence: cf., e.g., Cic. Phil. 2.85 meditatum … scelus; Livy 42.52.3 diu meditatum bellum; and most memorably Tac. Ann. 14.1 diu meditatum scelus (Nero’s murder of Agrippina). It has been observed that Seneca attributes to his tragic irati sentiments or attitudes that would be appropriate for a sapiens: for example, Medea’s scornful rejection of fortune (fortuna semper omnis infra me stetit, Med. 520) or the constancy of Atreus when about to slaughter Thyestes’ sons (stetit sui securus, Thy. 720).20 The passage from De prouidentia might be an example of the inverse process, by which the good man is endowed with characteristics—in this case daring, boldness, endurance of hardship—that in Latin literature are often associated with doers of evil. Another possible instance is Ag. 606, where the person brave enough to overcome the longing for life is described as scorning the fickle gods, contemptor leuium deorum. The phraseology evokes the highly negative characterizations of Mezentius in Virgil (contemptor … deum, Aen. 8.7) and Erysicthon in Ovid (qui numina diuum / sperneret, Met. 8.739–740), but boldly re-evaluates contempt for the gods in positive terms. The Senecan animus speaks as well as being spoken to. In De uita beata 2, Seneca argues that one cannot discover how best to live by observing how most men live, since the vast majority are evidence of the worst form of life. In support of that claim—or, perhaps better, to illustrate 20 See Hine 2000 on the Medea passage, my note in Tarrant 1985 on Thy. 703–704 solus sibi / immotus Atreus constat.

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it by another means—Seneca represents the animus of an honest and self-aware person lamenting in an emotional soliloquy all the times it has acted to secure the good will or admiration of others. The passage is too long to cite in full, so I give only its conclusion: “uides istos qui eloquentiam laudant, qui opes sequuntur, qui gratiae adulantur, qui potentiam extollunt? omnes aut sunt hostes aut, quod in aequo est, esse possunt; quam magnus mirantium tam magnus inuidentium populus est. quin potius quaero aliquod usu bonum, quod sentiam, non quod ostendam? ista quae spectantur, ad quae consistitur, quae alter alteri stupens monstrat, foris nitent, introrsus misera sunt.” “You see those who praise your eloquence, dance attendance on your wealth, court your favor, exalt your power? All of them are either your enemies or, what comes to the same thing, they can be. As great as the throng of your admirers, such is also the number of those who envy you. Why don’t I instead seek some genuine good, something to feel and not to show off? The things that people gaze at or stop to admire, what one man points out in amazement to another—those things shine brightly on the outside, but are wretched within.”

The content of the passage does not differ from what Seneca might write or does write elsewhere in his own person, but the element of prosopopoeia gives the message an added impact that can be properly called dramatic.21 We may see here an attempt on Seneca’s part to give virtue a human voice, or, in other words, to capture for virtuous characters some of the immediacy and rhetorical power that Seneca deploys so effectively in his portraits of the diseased and deranged. The dramatic character of such speeches suggests another connection between the dramatic and philosophical components of Seneca’s writing. It seems very likely that tragedy exerted such a strong appeal for Seneca at least in part because it offered scope for representing the disordered animus from the inside out. Introspective monologues such as those of Medea (Med. 893–944) and Atreus (Thy. 176–204) offer a complement to the De ira, which repeatedly describes the horrifying outward appearance of the iratus but which lacks a corresponding portrait of such a character’s inner workings.

21 The same can be said of many other passages of direct speech in the prose works; to confine myself to the same dialogue, see V.B. 20.3–5, 24.4–25.3.

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richard tarrant 4. Ars Regni ars prima regni est posse in inuidia pati (H.F. 353) The first rule of power is to put up with being unliked.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the distinctive character-type of Senecan tragedy is the tyrant. Such figures are conspicuous not only for their number but also for the gusto and consistency with which they expound their approach to ruling. Lycus, Aegisthus, Atreus, and their confreres share a belief that the chief prerogative of their position is the capacity to inflict pain on their helpless subjects.22 That grim conception of the nature and use of power is equally well represented in the prose works; indeed, if one sets aside De clementia, which is unique both in its imperial addressee and its protreptic function, most of the references to rulers (especially kings) in Senecan prose are negative.23 While it is true that the deified Augustus is cited several times as a good and moderate ruler,24 those references are far outnumbered by the hostile mentions of the overreachers Xerxes and Alexander,25 legendarily cruel rulers like Phalaris,26 and the mostly anonymous tyranni who stream into Seneca’s prose writings from the declamation-chambers bearing their standard accouterments of whips, chains, and brandingirons.27 It is significant that the “maxim of subversive statecraft” (in Ronald Syme’s phrase)28 most often invoked by Seneca is the Accian “let them hate, as long as they fear” (oderint dum metuant).29 22 Cf., e.g., Ag. 269 iura regnorum, with my note in Tarrant 1976, also H.F. 511–513, Thy. 247–248, Ag. 994–995, with my note. 23 On tyrant figures in Seneca see Favez 1960; Opelt 1951 (not available to me); brief remarks in Tarrant 1995, 228–229. 24 Ben. 1.15.5, 2.25.1, 2.27.2, 3.27.1–4, 6.32.1, B.V. 4.2–5, Clem. 1.15.3–16.1, Cons. Pol. 15.3, De ira 3.40.2–5. 25 Xerxes: Ben. 6.31.1 and 11, B.V. 17.1–2, Constant. 4.2, De ira 3.16.4, Q Nat. 5.18.10; Alexander: Ben. 2.116.1, 5.6.1, 7.2.5, 7.3.1, Clem. 1.25.1, De ira 3.23.1, Q Nat. 5.18.10, 6.23.2–3, Ep. 83.19, 94.62. 26 Ben. 7.19.5 and 7, Clem. 2.4.3, De ira 2.5.1, Ep. 66.18. See also De ira 3.14 on Cambyses. 27 Ben. 1.11.3, 2.18.6, 3.19.3, Clem. 1.11.4, 1.12.1, De ira 2.23.1, Tranq. 5.3, Ep. 28.8, 70.6; cf. also my note on Ag. 988ff. Gunderson 2003, 90–114 has suggestive remarks on the way declamation allowed Romans to explore sensitive themes—among them tyranny—with a kind of allegorical distance. 28 Syme 1958, 362. 29 Cf. De ira 1.20.4, Clem. 1.12.4 and 2.2.2.

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By contrast, instances in which a king or tyrant shows restraint or fails to act angrily are considered deserving of special mention because of their rarity, a point made explicitly at De ira 2.23.3 quo rarior autem moderatio in regibus, hoc laudanda magis est (with reference to Alexander and Julius Caesar); at De ira 3.11.4, recounting a story of Pisistratus refusing to take offense at the abuse of a drunken dinner guest, Seneca argues that if even despots (tyranni) with their swollen natures have been able to repress their natural cruelty, moderation should not be so difficult for ordinary mortals. Seneca’s numerous references to the emperor Gaius constitute a portrait of sadistic villainy equal to anything in the tragedies.30 Several passages associate Gaius with other notorious exempla of tyranny: he is called Phalaris ille (Tranq. 14.4) and described as a pseudo-Xerxes or would-be Xerxes (B.V. 18.5, cf. Ben. 2.12.2); at De ira 1.20.7–8—the rhetorical climax of the book—Gaius is introduced almost immediately after Seneca has quoted Accius’ Atreus. A specific analogy between Gaius and Seneca’s own Atreus is created by the anecdote given in De ira 2.33, where Gaius condemns a man’s son to be executed and invites the father to dine with him the same day. Like any self-respecting Senecan tragic tyrant, Gaius derives greater satisfaction from inflicting mental torture than from mere physical bloodshed. In particular, just as Atreus expects to take delight in observing Thyestes’ reactions to having fed on his children (Thy. 903–907), so Gaius posts guards to scrutinize his guest’s behavior: propinauit illi Caesar heminam et posuit illi custodem … unguentum et coronas misit et obseruare iussit an sumeret (“offering a toast, Caesar handed him the cup and set someone to watch … he sent him garlands and perfumes, and ordered him observed to see if he would use them,” De ira 2.33.4).31

30 In addition to the passages cited in the text, cf. Ben. 2.21.5, 4.31.2, Helv. 10.4, Constant. 18.1–5, De ira 1.20.8–9, 3.18.3. 31 De ira 3.15.1–2 relates a similar incident involving Harpagus and the Persian king (another frequent emblem of tyrannical cruelty).

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richard tarrant 5. Come, Sweet Death nemo in conspicuo mortem habet (B.V. 20.5) No one keeps death in plain view.

It is fitting to conclude as many of Seneca’s treatises do, with the contemplation of death. Death is, of course, the ultimate closural motif, but its fascination for Seneca goes deeper and, I would suggest, is closely bound up with several of the themes I have been discussing. Seneca presents death as the critical test of a person and in particular of the animus, as in Ep. 76.32: atqui cum uoles ueram hominis aestimationem inire et scire qualis sit, nudum inspice; … animum intuere, qualis quantusque sit, alieno an suo magnus. si rectis oculis gladios micantes uidet et si scit sua nihil interesse utrum anima per os an per iugulum exeat, beatum uoca. But when you want to form a proper estimate of a person and to know what he is like, look at him naked; look into his animus, see of what kind it is and of what size, whether it is great with its own resources or with those of others. If he can look on flashing swords with unblinking eyes, if he knows that it makes no difference to him whether his spirit departs through his mouth or his throat, call him happy.

The following sentence restates the point and clinches it by citing Aeneas’ words to the Sibyl in Aen. 6.103–105. Death also offers welcome escape from the follies of life and from the prison of the world: Tranq. 16.3 (spoken to those who have died bravely) “omnes effugisti casus, liuorem, morbum; existi ex custodia; non tu dignus mala fortuna dis uisus est, sed indignus, in quem iam aliquid fortuna posset” (“You have escaped all misfortune, envy, sickness; you have been released from prison; it is not that the gods thought you deserving of bad fortune, but that they considered you undeserving of being under Fortune’s power any longer”). Death brings final deliverance from the abusive power of rulers: Ep. 26.10 qui mori didicit seruire dedidicit; supra omnem potentiam est, certe extra omnem. quid ad illum carcer et custodia et claustra? liberum ostium habet (“whoever has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave; he is above all power, or at least outside its reach. What does he care about jails and guards and confinements? The door lies open for him”). Subtle tyrants, knowing death’s liberating effect, are accordingly reluctant to grant it: Ag. 996 —Mortem aliquid ultra est?—Vita, si cupias mori (“What is worse than death?” “Life, if you are longing to die”).

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Finally, in light of the arguments presented here, death may have offered Seneca the only genuine release from the unsettling products of his turbulent imagination. The question mark in my title reflects my own doubt that the foregoing pages could achieve their stated goal, a doubt that my readers are now in a position to share. Seneca is too complex and varied to be rendered whole in a short sketch. But I hope at least to have identified some of the traits that would figure in a more fully drawn portrait.

SENECA, MAN OF MANY GENRES

James Ker Seneca’s* may just be the most diverse corpus of writings that survives of any author in classical antiquity.1 Even without factoring in works of dubious authenticity, such as the fabula praetexta entitled Octauia, or those that survive only in fragments, such as a treatise on friendship, we possess an oeuvre comprising (in no particular order) eight tragedies, 124 moral letters in 20 books, two books of a work on the exercise of clemency, a seven-book manual on gift-giving, an eight-book investigation of nature, and a dozen “dialogi”—an umbrella term which covers a three-book work on anger, two consolations on death and one on exile, and works on the tranquillity of mind, moral consistency, the happy life, providence, withdrawal, and the brevity of life. The catalogue can be confidently extended to include at least the three epigrams that survive under Seneca’s name,2 and the prosimetric satire on the death of the emperor Claudius. If more of Seneca’s writings had survived, we would have been able to include orations, geographic and ethnographic works, works on various specific aspects of the natural world, works on various ethical and social topics, a biography of his father, additional poetry, additional letters, and miscellaneous works that included a request to Messalina to help end his exile (which he later suppressed; cf. Dio 61.10.2) and a posthumous text recording his final words as he died (Tac. Ann. 15.63). All this, without seeking to attribute to him the still other works and fragments identified as Senecan in the medieval and renaissance traditions. There are compelling reasons, for example, to believe that the De remediis fortuitorum

* I am grateful to William Harris for the invitation to participate in the conference “New Directions in Seneca Studies” (Columbia University, February 2004), and to the participants, especially the editors Katharina Volk and Gareth Williams, for their comments. 1 On the corpus, and especially its lost, fragmentary, and dubious works, Vottero 1998. 2 Cf. Prato 1964.

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which manuscripts attribute to Seneca is in fact authentic, and that it adds a further genre to the inventory: a meditatio conducted in writing.3 The sense of breadth or heterogeneity we have when faced with the writings we know is made acute by the fact that Seneca’s works are often the only or the earliest surviving examples of their kind: the only whole Roman tragedies, the only Thyestes play, the earliest complete prosimetric satire, the earliest corpus of prose letters in Latin written for publication, the earliest consolations (excluding Cicero’s consolatory letters), the earliest Fürstenspiegel or “mirror of the prince,” the earliest work on the topic of beneficia, the earliest complete work on anger, and so on.4 All of this puts Seneca, a single author, under considerable weight as the representative of distinct areas of ancient literature, in which capacity he has generated separate strands in the textual tradition as well as separate communities of readers up to the present day. The range of writings is sufficiently diverse that Seneca has often been split into two or more distinct identities. The persisting tendency in modern scholarship to speak as though Seneca had written only tragedies, or only prose, or only letters would seem to have its origin in earlier forking paths: Martial had written of the “two Senecas” from Corduba, referring straightforwardly to Seneca the Elder and Younger (1.61.7–8), but by the time of Sidonius Apollinaris the dichotomy had been applied to our Seneca all on his own, to produce a philosophical adviser to Nero and a separate writer of tragedies (Carm. 9.232– 238). Petrarch, in turn, while believing erroneously that Seneca the Younger had written the Controversiae which we attribute to his father, reapplied the notion of two Senecas to solve the conflict of political allegiance that arose in his mind between the works De clementia and Octauia, the latter still being attributed in his day to Seneca (Fam. 24.5.17); and other renaissance commentators and biographers would variously assign some or all of the tragedies to a son (for Boccaccio, “Marcus” Seneca).5 The bifurcation is often a subvariant of the distinction between a moralizing and a pragmatic Seneca—the notion of hypocrisy that has long undermined Seneca’s coherency and authority. I propose, however, to consider Seneca as a single writer of many Cf. Newman 1988. E.g., on De beneficiis as the only specimen of the Peri charitos genre, see Griffin 2003, 90; on De ira within the tradition of works Peri orgês, Harris 2001, 88–128. 5 On the renaissance tradition, Panizza 1984; Ferri 2003, 6 n. 15. 3 4

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works, and to ponder the relevance of this fact for both ancient and modern readers. I begin by looking at generic abundance and flexibility as characteristics of Seneca’s reputation in antiquity. I then move on to consider questions that arise in light of his polygeneric status: How did Seneca shape his oeuvre as a whole? How did he shape a genre? 1. Seneca’s Ancient Profile as a Man of Many studia Among our witnesses to Seneca is Quintilian, who remembers having heard him in person (cf. Inst. 8.3.31, 12.10.11) and devotes a section to discussing and criticizing the popularity of his style (10.1.125–131). To guide the would-be orator in choosing models of Latin eloquence, Quintilian catalogues authors in the genres of epic, elegy, satire, iambic and lyric, tragedy, comedy, history, oratory, and philosophy. He mentions Seneca, however, only at the end of the catalogue, admitting that he has deliberately postponed him “in every genre of eloquence” (in omni genere eloquentiae, 10.1.125). The reason he gives for this postponement is that he needs to explain his misunderstood criticisms of Seneca in the past, at a time when “virtually no one but Seneca (solus hic fere) was in young men’s hands,” in which Quintilian had intended “not to abolish him altogether” (non … omnino excutere) but to prevent him from being “placed ahead of better [authors]” (potioribus praeferri non sinebam, 126). And in fact Quintilian’s present deferral of Seneca, in placing him last, treats him precisely as he had supposedly treated both contemporaries and earlier authors; Suetonius, for instance, reports that Seneca “diverted [Nero] away from past orators in order to delay him longer in awe of [Seneca] himself ” (a cognitione ueterum oratorum [sc. auertit] … quo diutius in admiratione sui detineret, Suet. Ner. 52). But Quintilian’s deferral would also appear motivated by a desire to challenge the ubiquity which Seneca deserves in the catalogue of genres—despite the fact that, as Quintilian admits, “he undertook virtually every possible endeavor” (tractauit etiam omnem fere studiorum materiam, 10.1.128). This contrasts with Quintilian’s favorable treatment of Cicero, whom he refers to in different categories such as oratory and philosophy, saying “M. Tullius, who as everywhere else …” (M. Tullius, qui ubique, 10.1.123). By postponing Seneca Quintilian additionally seems to gain the advantage of being able to focus on (and to criticize) simply one Senecan style, or dicendi genus, rather than to deal with his style in each genre.

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The overall effect, however, is that Seneca, rather than Cicero, emerges as the climax of the discussion of models, at least as it relates to generic diversity. It is almost as if Seneca occupies a separate or superordinate category of genre all by himself—an ironic reinforcement of the exceptionalism for which he is faulted. The heart of Quintilian’s account gives grudging concession to Seneca’s ability and output (10.1.128–129): ingenium facile et copiosum, plurimum studii, multa rerum cognitio, in qua tamen aliquando ab iis quibus inquirenda quaedam mandabat deceptus est. tractauit etiam omnem fere studiorum materiam: nam et orationes eius et poemata et epistulae et dialogi feruntur. [He had] a versatile and abundant talent, a huge degree of endeavor, much knowledge of things—even if he was sometimes misled by those whom he had assigned to investigate things. He undertook virtually every possible endeavor, since orations of his and poems and letters and dialogues are in circulation.

Quintilian’s formulation is worth noting: he sees Seneca as engaged in a blanket activity of studia, which he undertakes as an opportunist with an eye for raw material, almost regardless of its kind. While there has been debate about the reference of such terms as poemata and dialogi in relation to the extant works, the emphasis on generic abundance and adaptability is clear. At the same time, it is noteworthy that Quintilian feels required to undermine the appearance that a single individual was in fact capable of such an output. He races through the list of genres as if Seneca were somehow a contagion that had infected one genre after another. His mention of Seneca’s secretaries is suggestive to us of the later multiplication of Senecas. It is also uncomfortably similar to the image of Calvisius Sabinus, the libertinus whom Seneca himself had criticized for parading the knowledge of his slaves as his own— “as if he knew what anyone in his household knew” (Ep. 27.7). Giving Seneca a taste of his own medicine, Quintilian both acknowledges and problematizes his abundance as a writer.6 In other ancient receptions we find a similarly diverse Seneca. In the play Octauia, which may date as soon as five years after Seneca’s death, the character Seneca appears in the guise of the failed philosophical adviser pining for the studia of his exile on Corsica (384), speaking in the manner of his prose works, and in particular having Nero throw the 6 Other discussions of Quintilian’s subtle critique, bringing out such aspects as its parody of Senecan style, are surveyed by Vottero 1998, 9 n. 24.

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lessons of De clementia in his face (377–592).7 Yet the language and form of the drama, being adapted very closely from Senecan tragedy, reveal the ease with which Roman audiences could view the dramatic and philosophical Seneca in one and the same persona—indeed, it may be that this was unavoidable. This impression is reinforced by epigraphic evidence which shows that Senecan prose and verse had permeated the Roman popular imagination in equal depth: while a verse from Agamemnon is found quoted in a Pompeian graffito, an epitaph from the early second century adapts sentences from both Epistulae morales and De remediis fortuitorum.8 The richest illustration, however, is to be found in the account of Tacitus, whose references to the expertise Seneca brings to his position in the court of Nero—which includes instruction (cf. magister, praecepta), political strategizing (consilia, ratio), taste and decorum (comitas honesta), oratory (oratio, eloquentia, professoria lingua), philosophy (philosophorum praecepta, sapientiae studia), and poetry (carmina)—require us to consider all of Seneca’s known activities as relevant to his historical personality (cf. Ann. 12.8, 13.2–3, 13.11, 13.14, 14.52, 14.56). The same flexibility that Tacitus sees in Seneca’s capacity as Nero’s speechwriter, with his “pleasing talent suited to the ears of his age” (ingenium amoenum et temporis eius auribus accommodatum, 13.3), and in his increase in poetic output as Nero’s poetic interests increased (14.52), would seem to be manifested equally in his use of gardens, villas, money-lending, and patronage, or even in his opportunistic relationships with women of the imperial household or the conversion of his exile into a point of fame. Certainly, the range of studia inertia that his opponents accuse him of appears open-ended (13.42; cf. 14.52–56). A distinctive aspect of these studia, as portrayed by his critics, is the nature of their influence on the tastes of the people, where Tacitus’ choice of words, “to turn the studia of the citizens toward himself ” (studia ciuium in se uerteret), suggests that the anxiety about Seneca was due in part to his power to monopolize people’s “enthusiasm” (14.52). Seneca’s “renown,” his claritudo studiorum (12.8), has recently been discussed by Thomas Habinek as Seneca’s most distinguishing feature, in which it is clearly the studia as much as the claritudo which are important.9 7 On the representation of Seneca, and allusions to his works, Ferri 2003, 226–293 passim. 8 Cf. Gigante 2001, Newman 1988, 97–98. 9 Habinek 2000.

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This is borne out in Tacitus’ two most extensive Senecan episodes: the interview with Nero (Ann. 14.53–56) and the death scene (15.60– 64). The interview gives us a clear image of Seneca’s adaptability in his offer to Nero to downsize his focus from his gardens and villas to a focus on the animus (14.54), and in ways that evoke various of his literary genres—whether in his careful handling of Nero’s beneficia to him10 or in his transition toward a seclusion and solitude which seem to evoke Epistulae morales. The same impression is conveyed in the death scene by Seneca’s easy shift of attention from his actual will—which he is prohibited from rewriting—to the bequest of an imago uitae suae (15.62). In the death scene, Tacitus has Seneca successively shift from mode to mode, including self-examination, advising through exempla, evaluation of beneficia, consolation, exhortation, praemeditatio, and ultima uerba. While Stephen Dyson plausibly suggests that Tacitus’ purpose is to mock Seneca’s death when he describes three different attempts at suicide that are representative of Catonian (bleeding), Socratic (hemlock), and luxurious (bath-ridden) modes respectively, the variety itself demonstrates the polygeneric aspect of Senecan agency in his defining moment.11 Still more emphatic reminders of the breadth of Seneca’s expertise can be found in the works of two contemporaries. Columella mentions Seneca’s farm at Nomentum as a recent illustration that “viticulture can make the paterfamilias wealthy” and that “the return (reditum) on vines is very rich” (Rust. 3.3): his certe temporibus Nomentana regio celeberrima fama est illustris, et praecipue quam possidet Seneca, uir excellentis ingenii atque doctrinae, cuius in praediis uinearum iugera singula culleos octonos reddidisse plerumque compertum est. These days, at least, the region around Nomentum basks in great renown, and particularly the part owned by Seneca, a man of outstanding talent and learning: on his farm it has been ascertained that single iugera of vine-groves have usually returned eight sacks each.

Columella sees viticulture as either an illustration or an extension of Seneca’s ingenium and doctrina, clearly falling within the set of activities in which he excels qua intellectual and celebrity (cf. Q Nat. 3.7.1: ego … uinearum diligens fossor). Pliny the Elder also invokes the name of Seneca 10 Griffin 2003, 119 notes that the interview passage “plays on the [Senecan] terminology of friendship and reciprocity.” 11 Dyson 1970, 78.

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to validate the prestige of viticulture, in particular that of the Nomentan farm once owned by Remmius Palaemon and cultivated by his overseer Sthenelus: this was the farm which was admired, and purchased, by “L. Annaeus Seneca, the foremost among men of learning at that time, and in the position of power which later [was] too much [and] collapsed over him, a man most disinclined to admire frivolous things” (L. Annaeo Seneca principe tum eruditorum ac potentia quae postremo nimia ruit super ipsum, minime utique miratore inanium, HN 14.51). Pliny’s reference to Seneca as princeps eruditorum is scarcely innocent: Pliny’s Annales may even be among the sources who recorded, as Tacitus after him still does, that if the Pisonian conspiracy had succeeded against Nero, there had been talk of making Seneca (rather than Piso) the princeps (Tac. Ann. 15.65). Certainly, the breadth of Seneca’s studia, here shown to extend to viticulture, is not dissimilar in type from Nero’s interests in sculpture, painting, singing, horses, and poetry (cf. Tac. Ann. 13.3)—a set of studia which Nero had corralled into his own innovative performance of power.12 Nero’s wide range of activities could all be seen to share a common “stamp,” which combined excess in all things with the motif of concentration figured in the decoctio Neronis, water first boiled then cooled using snow (cf. HN 31.40).13 Seneca exercised his talents on a different set of materials: myth, friends, money, exile, vineyards, philosophy, and more. He also gave a unique Senecan “stamp” to each of his endeavors in these fields, and to his endeavors as a whole. 2. How Seneca Shaped his Oeuvre Precisely what coherency or consistency can we expect to find in a repertoire as broad as Seneca’s? This question could be addressed at a number of different levels: for example, his Stoic worldview, or his transformation of the literary lexicon. In the present context, I will restrict myself to considering his self-conscious shaping of an oeuvre14 and his reworking of given existing genres. 12 An informative comparison is the wide set of activities attributed to the other rival princeps, Calpurnius Piso, in the Laus Pisonis; these include poetry (163–167) and ball-games and board-games (105–208). 13 On decoctio as a Neronian aesthetic, Gowers 1994. 14 I do not mean to deny the role of accident in determining the oeuvre’s final shape, nor the extent to which the oeuvre’s shape is the sum by-product of experiments conducted in single genres. Seneca is conspicuously changeable in following through

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Much scholarly energy has been expended on defining how each Senecan genre relates to its corresponding generic tradition. Thus, Senecan tragedy has variously been singled out for its removal of the chorus from the plane of the action, or an intensely allusive poetic language which signals self-consciousness about Senecan tragedy’s “belatedness” and its “epigonic nature.”15 The Senecan dialogus, in turn, has proven difficult to define. It lacks genuine dialogue, with interlocutors only entering into the discourse occasionally with objections, introduced by an anonymous inquit; but it has proven equally dissatisfying to call it a “diatribe” (a dubious genre at best), or an essay or treatise, and the term may perhaps be taken to evoke simply the prominent use of prosopopoeia (specifically, sermocinatio).16 Along these lines, Giancarlo Mazzoli has suggested that the Senecan dialogus centers on a kind of “polyphonic play” (e.g., Cato Uticensis speaks of himself in the third person at Prov. 5.10, while Marcia is addressed by a whole “chorus” of voices at the end of Cons. ad Marc.).17 There have also been attempts to distinguish Seneca’s Epistulae morales from earlier epistolographic writing: unlike Horace’s philosophical letters, they are in prose and addressed to a single correspondent; unlike Cicero’s letters to Atticus (which even if they were not published for the first time under Nero were at least an obvious model),18 they appear to have been written with a view to publication and in a more decidedly literary, or “epistoliterary,” mode.19 One passage referring critically to Cicero’s letters, in which Seneca says “so I may pass by all those things which fill the letters of Cicero: which candidate is struggling … how hard a lender on explicit structural programs in his single works (if anything, he tends to impose structure retrospectively, or continually to embark upon altogether new structures, in the course of writing), and we cannot expect anything more disciplined in his structuring of the oeuvre itself. Nevertheless, my goal in the present section is to emphasize those characteristics of the oeuvre that give the appearance, at least in hindsight, of shapeliness. 15 These are just some of the useful observations made respectively by Tarrant 1978, 273 and Schiesaro 2003, 223. 16 Cf. Williams 2003, 3–4; on the “diatribe” see also 26, with reference to Powell 1988, 12–14. Wright 1974 offers excellent structural analysis, though without offering a label beyond that of “moral essays.” 17 Mazzoli 2000, 253, 256. For further bibliography on dialogus, Vottero 1998, 10 n. 25. 18 Cf. Hutchinson 1998, 4, with n. 4. 19 On the novelty of the letters in these respects, Cugusi 1983, 195; Coleman 1974, 279–280, 287–288. For “epistoliterarity,” Henderson 2004, 4 and his contribution to the present volume.

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Caecilius is … It is more than enough to deal with your own woes without dealing with those of another” (ut omnia illa quae Ciceronis implent epistulas transeam: quis candidatus laboret … quam durus sit faenerator Caecilius … sua satius est mala quam aliena tractare, Ep. 118.2), is frequently cited as a fair and revealing account of the major difference of Seneca’s letters from Cicero’s. Marcus Wilson, for example, explains the exclusion of Ciceronian content in part by invoking Seneca’s communicative goal of presenting philosophical doctrine to a wide public—a goal more easily reached without allusions to “persons and events known to Seneca and Lucilius but not to outsiders”; Catharine Edwards reads the exclusion of Ciceronian content as an introspective turn on Seneca’s part, in which “the authorial self … is turned not towards the outside of Roman political life but rather inwards”; Paolo Cugusi sees the “literariness” of Seneca’s letters precisely in the combination of these two notions.20 The focus on the difference of Seneca’s tragedies, dialogi, and letters within their own respective traditions has additionally drawn attention to the appearance of heterogeneity within Seneca’s oeuvre. A precise structural definition of the correspondence with Lucilius, for example, precludes us from treating a single letter as if it were an “essay” in the manner of the dialogi.21 More prominently still, the very notion of tragedy has seemed to be at odds with Seneca’s Stoicism, even if both the tragedies and the prose works can be shown to presuppose the same basic cosmology, as Thomas Rosenmeyer has shown,22 or even if the tragedies can be shown to present positive as well as negative examples (e.g., in Hercules and in Troades) of a sort not radically “other” than those found in the prose works.23 As Schiesaro puts it, Seneca’s choice to write tragedies alongside his philosophical writings is at best “perilous and ambivalent”; Thyestes, for instance, shows “that the other world, the one of passions, blood, revenge, hatred, deceit, and darkness, has its appeal,” and offers the audience a form of spectatorial pleasure.24 Ultimately, Seneca tragicus takes on genre-specific presuppositions which are separate and distinct from those of the prose works. Indeed, the prose Wilson 1987, 103, Edwards 1997, 24, Cugusi 1983, 196. For a survey of Seneca’s exploitation of epistolary form and a critique of seeing Seneca’s letters as “essays”—or, for that matter, as “exhortations” or “pedagogy”— Wilson 1987 and 2001. 22 Cf. Rosenmeyer 1989. 23 Cf. Biondi 2001. 24 Schiesaro 2003, 253–254. 20 21

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works themselves invoke diverse presuppositions which lead to different representations of philosophy in different works, and the tragedies vary from one another a great deal in their outlook.25 Alongside this heterogeneity, however, there are signs that Seneca exercised principles of selection over the oeuvre as a whole. It is instructive to consider the genres that are absent from Seneca’s repertoire, and especially the possible motivations for these absences. An awareness of the dangers of certain genres in an imperial context must have played a part in discouraging him from undertaking historiography; his earliest extant work, Consolatio ad Marciam, begins with the cautionary tale of Cremutius Cordus, whose history cost him his life (1.2–4). But he also explicitly asserts that a moralizing framework is far preferable for treating historical or literary material than are the frameworks of historiography, antiquarianism, or philological commentary: “It is more than enough,” he says in a critique of historians in Natural Questions, “to quench your own woes than to pass on those of another to posterity” (quam satius est sua mala extinguere quam aliena posteris tradere! Q Nat. 3, praef. 5; cf. Ep. 88.4–8; De Brev. 13).26 The paucity of allusions by Seneca to the writings, and the genres, of archaic Latin writers must be put down at least in part to a desire to monopolize and modernize the field of Latin literature.27 His relationship to his contemporaries, however, is particularly noteworthy, since the genres engaged in by such writers as Seneca the Elder (history), Lucan (epic), Persius (verse satire), Cornutus (etymology, theology), Columella (agricultural manual), Petronius (prose fiction), Calpurnius Siculus (pastoral), and others, are all ones which Seneca conspicuously avoided in his own oeuvre. At the very least, we may suspect a collaborative division of labor and/or a competitive drive toward self-differentiation across the sea of genres in Neronian Rome.28 It is equally instructive to note the combination of works in Seneca’s repertoire digesting the oeuvres of several famous Latin authors, or his own. He emulates Cicero in the arc of his career as orator, exile, politician, philosopher, and martyr, but also rewrites him in his studia: De officiis, De amicitia (though strictly entitled Quomodo amicitia continenda sit), An important emphasis of Boyle 1997. On Seneca’s avoidance of historiography, Armisen-Marchetti 1995, Castagna 1991. 27 Several studies have addressed Seneca’s vexed relationship with earlier models: e.g., Setaioli 2000, 219–231, “Seneca e gli arcaici,” Maso 1999, 43–81, “Maiores in Seneca.” 28 On possible relationships between Seneca and other writers under Nero, Sullivan 1985. 25 26

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letters to a friend, consolations, orations, poetry, discussions of old age (e.g., Ep. 12) or of Scipio and the res publica (e.g., Ep. 86), and more. Within his philosophical writings, Seneca’s emphasis on ethics (above all) and natural philosophy, to the exclusion of logic, has been linked by Brad Inwood to an existing bias within the Roman philosophy of his models in the school of Sextius.29 But the pattern of Seneca’s allusions to the different masterworks of Augustan literature yields a disparate but apparently purposeful transposition to his own constellation of genres: while the text he appears to be rewriting most in Natural Questions is Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in Epistulae morales it is Virgil’s Aeneid and Georgics; and Seneca’s letters are conspicuously silent about their literary debt to Horace’s Epistles, preferring instead to quote several times from the Sermones.30 Seneca’s echoing of his own works is no less suggestive. The Epistulae morales in particular have the appearance of a reprise or a companion text, revisiting numerous moments of his oeuvre in compressed discussions of such themes as consolation (e.g., Ep. 63, 99), withdrawal (Ep. 73), friendship (Ep. 9, 55.8–11), and beneficia (Ep. 81.3, explicitly supplementing De beneficiis), and seeming to run in parallel with the projects of Natural Questions (e.g., the shared conceit of Lucilius in Sicily) and the lost (or never completed) Libri moralis philosophiae (cf. Ep. 108.1, 109.17).31 A structural survey of the oeuvre reveals significant shapes. A book from one of the last works, Natural Questions, explicitly expands upon Seneca’s earliest work, the lost De motu terrarum (Q Nat. 7.4). There is a trilogy of consolations, and a trilogy of works dedicated to Serenus, appearing to lead him from scepticism (De constantia sapientis) to unsteady conversion (De tranquillitate animi) to confident Stoicism (De otio).32 The relationship of De clementia to De ira has been interestingly taken up by Mazzoli, who suggests that the two works belong together in a visible contrast, each concerning opposite topics and opposite “mirror” images of the emperor, yet both (probably) three books in length, both dwelling on the oderint dum metuant topos early in the first book, and so on.33 Support might also be seen in the preface of De clementia, where Nero is invited to say: “Anger has not driven me to unjust executions”

29 30 31 32 33

Inwood 1995b, 70. On Horace in Epistulae morales, Berthet 1979. On the Libri moralis philosophiae, Leeman 1953. For the Serenus trilogy, Griffin 1974, 13–14. Mazzoli 2003.

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(non ira me ad iniqua supplicia conpulit, 1.1.3). Mazzoli suggests that a similar approach might be taken to the tragedies, which he sees as distortive mirror-images of the prose works; certainly, the same approach might have be taken to Seneca’s ethnographies, if only we had them. Thus, while it may not be possible to chart a “Book of Seneca” with quite the simplicity that one may posit a teleological “Book of Virgil” on the basis of dialectical relationships between the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid, Seneca’s meta-literary sensitivities are much in evidence.34 3. How Seneca Shaped a Genre In addition to his shaping of the oeuvre, Seneca’s approach to each genre was in a significant sense the same. One path toward recognizing this is offered by the common features of all or most of Seneca’s works: the rhetorical goal is therapeutic rather than narrative, even if the therapy of the tragedies is vindictive; there is a single persona at the center of the text (the addressee, an imagined interlocutor or reader, or, in the tragedies, the protagonist); the persona hovers between two positions, in a state of “crisis,”35 but is invited to find transformation by the end of the text, through restoring a better or authoritative self; the persona is made spectator, evaluator, or interlocutor of him/herself through a process of interiorization; the transformation is framed in forensic metaphors, or conceived of in terms of “revenge” or “self-repossession” (both referred to by uindicatio); the cosmological environment is characterized by sympathy between whole and part; the persona experiences both connection and detachment in relation to psychologically evocative landscapes; each text has a momentum toward death or reminders of death. The list could continue, but it is already sufficient to illustrate the potential for—and, perhaps, the limitations of—talking about all of Seneca’s writings as if they were shaped like a single genre, or at least shared a single template.36 This template provides us with a sketch of a distinctive Senecan “image of man,” to use Bakhtin’s term for describOn the “Book of Virgil,” Theodorakopoulos 1997. Cf. Mazzoli 1997. 36 The compatibility of the tragedies and prose works along axes such as those listed above is noted by Littlewood 2004, 8, who emphasizes “the fragility of Stoic self-representation” throughout Seneca’s writings: “The Stoic sage’s rejection of conventional moral order can resemble the autonomy of a tyrant: both seek to be absolute rulers of a world they construct and sustain for themselves.” Cf. also 15–102. 34 35

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ing what is at the core of each literary genre. Bakhtin also argues that each genre has its own “chronotope”; if a chronotope is needed that will suit all of Seneca’s genres, it will perhaps be found in the timetable of self-transformation delimited by the text, combined with the time of interior solitude in which the self is turned back upon itself.37 Another path toward recognizing Seneca’s common approach—and equally Bakhtinian—is the fact that no Senecan genre allows itself to be read in a mono-generic way, but rather as part of a larger polygeneric project. For all that the dialogi and the Epistulae are different, the dialogi often use an epistolary mode (e.g., the opening of De tranquillitate animi, or the preface to Q Nat. 4a) and the Epistulae include some letters that are equivalent in scope and length to entire dialogi (e.g., Ep. 94, 95). There is a continual embedding of one genre in another: a consolatio in book 6 of Natural Questions, a fabula praetexta hinted at in De prouidentia,38 a satirical mode employed in consolatory passages,39 a hymn uttered by Hippolytus at Phaedra 54–80. In De breuitate uitae Seneca changes horses midstream from exhortation to dialectic, though not for long (10.1).40 Such flexibility has been variously explained: Habinek has sought to explain it in terms of the overriding prerogative of Seneca as “exhortator,” with multiple genres at his disposal and able to switch at will between specialized and generalized discourses of evaluation.41 Wilson, in turn, has singled out the Epistulae for their “controlled volubility of mode,” which is only one step away (a step Wilson appears reluctant to make, it should be said, given his desire to emphasize epistolarity) from being a meta-genre or mega-genre.42 The Apocolocyntosis, I suggest, can be taken as a symptomatic example of Seneca’s polygeneric writing: for all of its uniqueness, the work’s prosimetric form captures the underlying aspiration of the entire corpus. Epistulae morales, for instance, and the Natural Questions, and many of the dialogi, are all constantly engaged in transitions between rhythmic prose and embedded verse, even if not with the same frequency. But Seneca is also fairly methodical in his approach to a given genre. His method can be determined most clearly from the self-conscious 37 38 39 40 41 42

(186).

Cf. Bakhtin 1981, 84–144. Cf. Mazzoli 2000, 256. Cf. Wilson 1997. Williams 2003, 174 rightly emphasizes the continuity of Seneca’s basic approach. Habinek 1998, 139. Wilson 2001, 178; he does, however, see the Senecan letter as “a cluster of genres”

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statement he makes in letter 118, noted briefly above, which concerns his reworking of just one genre: epistolography as it was bequeathed by Cicero. The letter begins with Seneca giving in to Lucilius’ request for more frequent letters, even though the “accounts” (rationes) don’t balance and he is in effect giving Lucilius “an advance loan” (in antecessum dabo, 118.1). This sets the two apart from Cicero and Atticus (118.1–3): nec faciam quod Cicero, uir disertissimus, facere Atticum iubet, ut etiam “si rem nullam habebit, quod in buccam uenerit scribat.” [Cic. Att. 1.12.4] (2) numquam potest deesse quod scribam, ut omnia illa quae Ciceronis implent epistulas transeam: quis candidatus laboret; quis alienis, quis suis uiribus pugnet; quis consulatum fiducia Caesaris, quis Pompei, quis arcae petat; quam durus sit faenerator Caecilius, a quo minoris centesimis propinqui nummum mouere non possint. sua satius est mala quam aliena tractare, se excutere et uidere quam multarum rerum candidatus sit, et non suffragari. (3) hoc est, mi Lucili, egregium, hoc securum ac liberum, nihil petere et tota fortunae comitia transire. quam putas esse iucundum … spectare illas nundinas nec ementem quicquid nec uendentem? Nor will I do what Cicero, a man of the greatest eloquence, orders Atticus to do: that even “if he has no news, he should write whatever comes into his mouth.” (2) There can never be a shortage of things for me to write, so I may pass by all those things which fill the letters of Cicero: which candidate is struggling, who is fighting by his own resources, and who by another’s, who is seeking the consulship by relying on Caesar, who on Pompey, who on his own coffers; or how hard a lender Caecilius is, from whom his nearest and dearest cannot squeeze a penny at less than 12 per cent. It is more than enough to deal with your own woes without dealing with those of another, to scrutinize oneself and see how many things one is a candidate for, yet not to go canvassing. (3) This, my Lucilius, is to stand out from the crowd, this is secure and free: to seek nothing and to pass by the assemblies of Fortune. How pleasing do you think it is … to watch that market without buying or selling a thing?

Seneca’s characterization of the difference between Cicero’s letters and his own is anything but casual. His examples of Ciceronian content, taken from the spheres of politicking (ambitus) and usury (faeneratio), and his own contrasting preference for self-examination and non-participant observation (se excutere … nihil petere … spectare nec ementem … nec uendentem), correspond to a commonplace tripartite model of lifestyles (bioi, genera uitae) usually credited to Pythagoras: at an athletic festival you will find athletes, buyers and sellers, and a “certain class” (quoddam genus) of others, the spectators, who “came for the sake of watching and keenly observing what [is] being done, and how”; so too in life, there

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are those who are slaves of ambition, those who are slaves to money, and those who “[hold] everything else to be worth nothing, but keenly [contemplate] the nature of things”—that is, philosophers (Cic. Tusc. 5.3.9).43 There is, then, a systematic basis for Seneca’s circumscription of his epistolary content, and we can read this as virtually a definition of what it means for him to write epistulae morales44: they stand to the genre of epistolography as the theoretical or philosophical life stands to the set of genera uitae. Seneca proceeds in the following section to underline this as a writer’s choice (118.4–5): quanti animi res est solum nihil petere, nulli supplicare, et dicere, “nihil mihi tecum, fortuna; non facio mei tibi copiam … nihil rogo.” hoc est priuatam facere fortunam. (5) licet ergo haec in uicem scribere et hanc semper integram egerere materiam circumspicientibus tot milia hominum inquieta … How great is the mind that alone seeks nothing, bows down to no one, and says: “You and I have no connection, Fortuna. I don’t give you power over me … I ask for nothing.” This is to render Fortune private. (5) It is open to us, then, to write these things instead and to work out this material which is always inviolate, as we look around at the countless thousands of restless people …

Seneca displaces the authority of Fortuna by rendering her “private” (priuatam facere), in which the term priuatam suggests both a banishment of Fortune from authority and reduction to subject status (cf. OLD s.v. priuatus 1, 2a and 2b)45 and the creation of one’s own, private fortune (OLD 1a–b), which Seneca here represents in the emphatically authorial move of an alternative writing program: “to write these things instead” (haec in uicem scribere). His turn away from Fortuna’s copia, which hints at her traditional cornucopia, is an assertion of his own rival supply of materia—characteristics which we have seen that Quintilian will underline in his sketch of Seneca’s ingenium copiosum (Inst. 10.1.128; cf. 12.10.11: copiam Senecae). 43 Cf. Iambl. VP 58–59 (Joly 1956). The evocation of the tripartite model is enhanced by Seneca’s mention of festive occasions such as comitia (118.3, 4) and nundinae (118.3). For the tripartite model elsewhere in Seneca, cf. De otio 7: tria sunt genera uitae …: unum uoluptati uacat, alterum contemplationi, tertium actioni. Cicero in turn had classified different types of epistolography (Fam. 2.4.1) according to his most characteristic tripartite schema describing the three functions of rhetoric: docere, mouere, delectare. 44 Our earliest testimony for the epithet morales is Aulus Gellius (NA 12.2.3; cf. praef. 9), but it is plausible that the term was coined by Seneca himself. 45 I thank Gareth Williams for drawing attention to this sense here.

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Seneca is not explicit about the consequences of this shift, but its likely significance in his thinking is suggested by various passages which deal with the topic of transformation. In the complex theoretical discussion which comes in the following sections of Ep. 118, Seneca (briefly put) addresses the question of how things that are natural (secundum naturam) can also become goods (bona) by appealing to types of change that are qualitative rather than simply quantitative (cf. non tantum in maius sed in aliud, Ep. 118.14). He illustrates change through growth, process, or addition—such as the addition of a capstone to complete a stone arch—and notes that they are capable of giving a noua condicio or noua forma to something (118.16–17). We are justified in applying these philosophical notions to Seneca’s transformation of the epistolary genre earlier in the same letter by the fact that they strongly echo letter 84, which applies similar notions explicitly to the challenge of how to incorporate material read elsewhere into one’s own writing. In that letter, Seneca uses numerous images to represent the product of the reading-writing process: as moving from inuenta to inuenienda (84.1); as digestion of what has been read, “so that whatever has been gathered in reading our pen may convert into our body/a corpus” (ut quidquid lectione collectum est stilus redigat in corpus, 84.2); as a bee-like process of “mixing those different droplets into a single flavor” (in unum saporem uaria illa libamenta confundere, 84.5); as procreation rather than imitation, so that we resemble the model “as a son, not as an image: an image is a dead thing” (quomodo filium, non quomodo imaginem: imago res mortua est, 84.8); as a matter of “taking everything from whatever model one likes and impressing one’s form on it” (omnibus quae ex quo uoluit exemplari traxit formam suam inpressit, 84.8); as combining multiple praecepta, artes, and exempla into a chorus or concentus ex dissonis (84.10). Each of these images is evocative for our understanding of Seneca’s approach to existing genres. Ultimately, however, Seneca stipulates that such a dramatic transformation can only be brought about if we listen to the voice of ratio, who counsels a restriction of one’s focus: “‘Abandon riches … abandon the pleasures of body and mind … abandon political ambition …’” (“relinque diuitias … relinque corporis atque animi uoluptates … relinque ambitum …”, 84.11), in which Seneca once again implicitly alludes to the model of different bioi. Avoidance of these other bioi leads us on a level path to sapientia, which in fact offers “the most placid and at the same time most abundant resources” (tranquillissimas res … et simul amplissimas, 84.12). Letter 84, then, establishes a clear relationship between Seneca’s notions of adjusting, and especially of circumscribing, one’s

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area of focus and changing an existing literary model into a new form that is qualitatively different. In this instance, the relationship turns on the link between the life of sapientia and an imagined new literary sapor, which both result from a process of collection followed by selection and appropriation. When characterizing his circumscribed version of the epistolary genre, however, Seneca somewhat surprisingly privileges the language of economics. This can be seen in the opening of Ep. 118: even as he prepares to criticize the political and economic content of Cicero’s letters, he presents his epistolary exchange with Lucilius as an economy of sorts (Ep. 118.1–2): exigis a me frequentiores epistulas. rationes conferamus: soluendo non eris. conuenerat quidem ut tua priora essent: tu scriberes, ego rescriberem. sed non ero difficilis: bene credi tibi scio. itaque in antecessum dabo nec faciam quod Cicero … (2) numquam potest deesse quod scribam … You demand more frequent letters from me. Let us compare accounts. You won’t be in credit! Indeed, it had been our agreement that yours would be first—that you would write, and I would write back. But I won’t kick up a fuss. I know you are a good debt. So I will give you an advance payment and will not do what Cicero … (2) There can never be a shortage of things for me to write …

Seneca’s infinite supply of important content is superior to the content of Cicero, but is nonetheless economic.46 The economic analogy is more than skin-deep: it will be developed in Seneca’s alternative ideal of se excutere, a procedure with juridical and economic connotations (e.g., De ira 3.36.2; cf. Plin. Ep. 7.31.2: rationes … excutere). The superiority of this economy, and its qualitative difference, is fleshed out in part by his subsequent contrast between Fortune and his own “private” fortune pursued in the writing of the letters (118.4). We have seen a similar move in letter 84, where Seneca at once rejects the pursuit of diuitiae and advertises the superior riches (res amplissimas) on offer from wisdom (84.11–12). The emphasis on arriving at greater wealth through reducing desire is a distinctive feature of Seneca’s economic thinking, and the substitution of material-quantitative economies with symbolicqualitative economies recurs frequently. Since our focus is genres, it is worth noticing that Seneca develops his moral economy in conjunction with the unique parameters of epis-

46

On Seneca’s metaphorical use of economic terms, Levick 2003, 216.

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tolary form. Thus, in Ep. 118, he seeks to reduce irrelevant content in the correspondence, and to focus on the quasi-economic gesture of se excutere, by reducing the frequency of Lucilius’ letters and presenting his own, more frequent letters as an advance loan (cf. in antecessum dabo). Further correlations are not hard to find. In the first three books of the correspondence, Seneca’s convention of signing off each letter with a quotation (usually from Epicurus) is referred to with various different economic terms (such as mercedula, lucellum, etc.) and is presented as a contribution to Lucilius’ moral resources. The same group of letters also frequently plays upon the brevity of epistolary form and uses the moment of the letter’s ending as a lesson in how to impose an extreme limit on the resources that one needs to be happy—what Epicurus called “happiness with poverty” (laeta paupertas), and which Seneca goes so far as to call true wealth (Ep. 2.6; 17.10). He also explains how the piecemeal aspect of epistolary sermo (cf. 38.1: minutatim irrepit animo) can take effect upon the mind of the reader: like soil that has been planted with many seeds, the fertile mind will enjoy economically miraculous results: “It will itself produce, and will return more than it receives” (ipsa [sc. mens] generabit et plus reddet quam acceperit, 38.2). The letter serves as a vehicle for other transactions also: its daily rhythm makes possible a ratio impensae for all of one’s expenditure of time (1.4; 83.1–7); its communication of news can allow some “profit” (bonum) to be extracted from the incidents of everyday life (55.3); its potential to address a future audience will help to enrich them and generate gratia (21.6). It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that Seneca exploits the potential of epistolary form to generate a “return,” both for Lucilius and for himself, albeit within his specialized economy. This program tells us something, I suggest, about Seneca’s approach to other genres. Even if Ep. 118 is unique in the degree of insight it gives us into Seneca’s thinking about a genre, the program which it allows us to identify—that is, of circumscribing a superior economy within (or perhaps through) a given genre and exploiting the potential of the genre’s form to maximize returns within that economy—is no less manifest in his other writings and studia. This is not to suggest, however, that the economy Seneca circumscribes in each genre is the same: each genre has its own opportunities for distinguishing between economies, and the privileged values within these economies are to some extent even arbitrary. In De breuitate uitae, the specialized economy is time, specifically “life” (uiuere) as opposed to mere “existence” (esse);

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Seneca’s text circumscribes a ratio uitae suae for Paulinus, as opposed to the ratio publici frumenti he is presently required to author in his role as prefect of Rome’s grain supply (18.3). In De beneficiis, Seneca circumscribes a specialized economy of beneficia grounded in the will of the giver, which are not mercenary like debts and which cannot be alienated in the way that material gifts can be alienated by a change in fortune; in persuading Aebutius Liberalis to attend to this economy, Seneca correlates it with his own discourse of “conscience” (cf. 3.10.2: intra tacitam duorum conscientiam) and distinguishes it from the materialistic content of the money-lender’s calendarium or the public acta (1.2.3; 2.10.4).47 In both of these cases, Seneca also consistently exploits the capacity of his circumscribed genre to generate maximum “returns” within the given economy. In De breuitate uitae, he uses the structure of the text as an inventive representation of time: for instance, he organizes the three major exempla in reverse chronological order (Augustus, Cicero, Livius Drusus: 4–6), chooses the text’s exact middle point to expatiate on the division of time into past, present, and future (10.1, in a 20-chapter work), and generally exploits all rhetorical opportunities to give Paulinus a sense of the possibilities of expanding his time through diligent use. In De beneficiis, Seneca generates value not least through advertizing the dedication of the work itself as a beneficium to the aptly named addressee, Liberalis; thus, the very act of writing— in a hyperbolically (or generously) long work—is marshalled to generate a valuable beneficium-obligation (esp. 7.1.1–2). Seneca’s tragedies are susceptible to a similar interpretation. While it would be a somewhat longer story to describe the relevant ways in which Seneca circumscribes the textual economy of tragedies (there is no doubt that it is marked, e.g., by a prevailing absence of the gods), the recent readings of Thyestes and Medea by Schiesaro and by Gianni Guastella have drawn attention to the way in which characters such as Atreus and Medea figure their revenges as “undoing” the wrongs done to them, with a quasieconomic benefit.48 The “returns” which Medea generates, for example, encompass a complete reversion to her pre-exile self (Med. 982– 984): iam iam recepi sceptra germanum patrem, spoliumque Colchi pecudis auratae tenent; rediere regna, rapta uirginitas redit. 47 48

On conscientia, cf. Roller 2001, 82–86. Schiesaro 2003, 105, Guastella 2001, 30. The economic emphasis is mine.

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james ker Now I have recovered my scepter, brother, father, and the Colchians hold the spoil of the golden sheep. My kingdom has returned, and returned is my stolen maidenhood.

Since Medea herself functions as an “author-on-stage,”49 her accomplishment also amounts to a demonstration of Seneca’s own authorial power to generate returns within the textual economy he has constructed. The same logic applies to Seneca’s approach to non-literary studia: his use of villas, gardens, money, vineyards—and, Paul Veyne would add, of inheritances and military conquests (e.g., of Britain by Claudius).50 Even in these cases, we receive hints that he sought to circumscribe his sphere of interest: Henderson’s cryptic reading of Ep. 86 appears to find Seneca favoring olive over grape within the symbolic hierarchies of horticulture.51 Even if we are not always in a position to see how he circumscribed the conventions of a given activity, every case exhibits the same goal of generating maximum value that we have seen in the literary examples. There is one other instance in which Seneca writes self-consciously about his approach to a genre, and which allows us to illustrate his approach in action one more time: the opening of Consolatio ad Heluiam.52 There he acknowledges the strangeness of his writing to Helvia to console her on her loss of him (1.2–3): praeterea cum omnia clarissimorum ingeniorum monumenta ad compescendos moderandosque luctus composita euoluerem, non inueniebam exemplum eius qui consolatus suos esset, cum ipse ab illis comploraretur; ita in re noua haesitabam uerebarque ne haec non consolatio esset sed exulceratio. (3) quid quod nouis uerbis nec ex uulgari et cotidiana sumptis adlocutione opus erat homini ad consolandos suos ex ipso rogo caput adleuanti? … (4) utcumque conitar, non fiducia ingenii, sed quia possum instar efficacissimae consolationis esse ipse consolator. Besides this, when I was unrolling all the monuments of the most renowned writers composed for the restraining and tempering of grief, I did not find any instance of one who had consoled his own family members when he himself was being mourned by them. Thus, I hesitated over the novelty of it and was afraid that this might not be a consolation but an exacerbation of the wound. (3) There is also the fact that a person who raises his head from the very pyre to console his own family 49 50 51 52

Schiesaro 2003, 223. Veyne 2003, 10–11. Henderson 2004, 129, 143. On this work, see the chapter by Williams in the present volume.

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members needs new words that have not been taken from popular and everyday commiseration. … (4) However this may be, let me make the attempt, not relying on any talent of mine but because by myself being the consoler I may offer the most effective image of consolation.

Seneca here casts himself in an unprecedented role for the consolatory genre: that of the consolator who is himself the person whose loss is mourned by the consolanda. This is a significant step beyond the traditional conceit that the consolator is himself also somewhat in need of consolation (e.g., Cic. Fam. 5.16.1: consolatione ipse egerem). It is also distinct from Cicero’s great innovation in the genre, which he called “a unique consolation,” namely his self -addressed consolatio after the death of Tullia (Att. 12.14.3: ut ipse me per litteras consolarer. … adfirmo tibi nullam consolationem esse talem).53 This novel short-circuiting which Seneca imposes on the consolatio, taking it into his own hands to soothe Helvia’s reaction to his own exile, has the effect of being more aggressive in its style, but also—claims Seneca—more effective. By reducing the number of individual parties involved in the consolatio situation, Seneca produces a more restricted textual economy: just as Senecan epistolography excludes the political or economic affairs of the world, the Consolatio ad Heluiam excludes the option of letting some third party console the mother on her loss of her son. Within this restricted textual economy, in which he takes the role of consolator upon himself and emphasizes the special value of self-therapy, Seneca exploits the potential of the consolatory form to generate maximum returns—both in the more effective remedy of his mother’s grief and in the selfaggrandizement which necessarily ensues from his evoking the “most severe wound of all” (grauissimum … ex omnibus … uulnus) which his exile has left on his mother’s body (3.1).54 We might even say that, in using the consolatio to take control of the public perceptions of his own loss, Seneca also secures for himself a geographical “return.” Certainly, this will have helped his claritudo studiorum to grow even in his absence: it was already widespread by the time Agrippina actually recalled him.

For Cicero’s mentions of this lost work, Graver 2002, xxxi–xxxii, with n. 10. On the rhetorical configurations of Seneca’s consolations, Wilcox 2002, Ch. 3, “Letters of Consolation: The absent Apex”; Claassen 1999, 90–98. 53 54

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james ker 4. Conclusion

Scholars have traditionally been reluctant to view Seneca holistically because of the presupposition that his moral philosophy sets a code of behavior which finds his other writings and activities wanting. This is certainly the sense in which Suillius Rufus’ attack on Seneca in the year 58 is to be understood (Tac. Ann. 13.42): simul studiis inertibus et iuuenum imperitiae suetum liuere iis qui uiuidam et incorruptam eloquentiam tuendis ciuibus exercerent. se quaestorem Germanici, illum domus eius adulterum fuisse. an grauius aestimandum sponte litigatoris praemium honestae operae adsequi quam corrumpere cubicula principum feminarum? qua sapientia, quibus philosophorum praeceptis intra quadriennium regiae amicitiae ter milies sestertium parauisset? Romae testamenta et orbos uelut indagine eius capi, Italiam et prouincias immenso faenore hauriri: at sibi labore quaesitam et modicam pecuniam esse. At the same time, [Suillius said,] hooked on meaningless endeavors and the ignorance of young men, [Seneca] was spiteful toward those who exercised lively and pristine speech in the cause of keeping citizens safe. He had been quaestor to Germanicus; Seneca had been an adulterer in his household! Or was it to be thought a worse thing to receive compensation for honorable work at the invitation of a litigant than to defile the bedrooms of imperial women? By what wisdom, what maxims of the philosophers, had he accumulated 300 million sesterces in the fouryear period of his friendship with the emperor? At Rome, legacies and childless benefactors were virtually being tracked down and captured by him, and Italy and the provinces were being drained by unlimited usury. His wealth, on the other hand, was hard-earned and modest.

This is our strongest contemporary evidence for the perception of Seneca as hypocrite. But the fact that Suillius used this approach tells us only that it was a viable polemical argument, not that it was an inevitable perception. The attack is characteristic of the behavior of the Roman aristocracy, treating morality as an overdetermined locus of evaluation and moralism as a competitive strategy.55 But Roman aristocrats, and especially Seneca, employed many more strategies than moralism. Barbara Levick and Paul Veyne have both sought to redress our anachronistic perception of Seneca’s use of money. As Levick explains, “there was no contradiction”: the principles of Seneca’s use of wealth were entirely within the bounds of acceptable 55

Cf. Edwards 1993.

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practice in contemporary Roman society, however much the size of his wealth was exceptional.56 Veyne emphasizes the virtual necessity for the Roman nobility to enrich themselves and develop their patrimonies, and dismisses the notion that a sense of morality served to curb nobles’ financial activities: “if morality is understood as the tacit code of behavior implied by conduct normally held to be normal, then wealth was an object of prestige and its possession was, for a senator, a kind of duty.”57 There is much to be said for a content-neutral approach to Seneca’s studia, in which his accomplishments in the area of philosophy are viewed as simply coordinate to his other accomplishments in the writing of tragedies, in politics, in economics. Levick’s assessment of Seneca’s social agency, for instance, presupposes not that Seneca was “a philosopher in politics” (the sub-title of Miriam Griffin’s important biography of Seneca [1976]), but rather “a politician who happened also to be a philosopher.”58 This is not to deny that it is often revealing to view Seneca’s philosophy as superordinate over his other spheres of endeavor; but it is no less revealing, in the course of analysis, to elevate his economics instead to the same position and to turn Suillius Rufus’ question on its head: by what economic feats did Seneca accomplish his reputation in philosophy? And in this case, the question has an answer: by circumscribing the economy of some endeavor—any unoccupied endeavor—and using it to make a private fortune.

56 57 58

Levick 2003. Veyne 2003, 9–14; quote taken from 12. Levick 2003, 211.

SENECA ON MORAL THEORY AND MORAL IMPROVEMENT

John M. Cooper

I Seneca’s Stoic writings show clearly that he had a complete and accurate, and also an admirably subtle, understanding of Stoic physical theory and Stoic epistemology and philosophy of language, as well as Stoic ethics—his constant primary concern.* His understanding of these matters plainly conforms in all fundamentals to the “orthodox” Stoicism elaborately worked out by the end of the 3rd century BC and set down in a multitude of philosophical treatises by Chrysippus, the greatest of the earlier Greek Stoics. This is so even if in points of detail and matters of emphasis Seneca’s understanding also reflects the work of Greek writers of the 2nd and 1st centuries (Panaetius and Posidonius, most notably). We should bear in mind that Chrysippus and these Greek writers expounded Stoic theory as experts not just in it, but also in philosophical truth. They were professional teachers of philosophy. They addressed their hearers and readers as possessors of the conclusive arguments that would establish, once and for all, all the truths of the Stoic philosophy—in philosophy of language and logic, in physics, in epistemology, as well as in all matters of ethical theory and the correct bases for living a human life. Their function in their writings was to establish, on the basis of philosophical argument and analysis, and to defend against the contrary views of other philosophers, or in response to their attacks, the positions on all these questions that marked Stoicism off as a single school of philosophy, with distinctive doctrines of its own.1 They did not, of course, * This paper is a much condensed version of the chapter “Moral Theory and Moral Improvement: Seneca” in my book Knowledge, Nature, and the Good (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004 = Cooper 2004b), pp. 309–334 and appears here by kind permission of Princeton University Press. The paper of Jula Wildberger in this volume offers supplementary discussion of issues closely related to those I address. 1 I do not mean to deny that there were differences of opinion on some matters

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write as if they were complete “sages” themselves—that is, perfectly and completely developed instantiations of human nature, according to the Stoic account of such perfection. For the Stoics, that perfection requires much more than grasping, in some single writing or otherwise at some single time, the reasons that allegedly support, and conclusively support, particular points of Stoic doctrine. Perfection requires such a grasp on these as leads one constantly, without any possibility of failure, to live the sort of life that the Stoic philosophy was intended to establish as the correct one for a human being. Such a grasp is one that cannot be shaken by any possible arguments later presented, or events in one’s own or another’s life, that might seem to cast doubt on them. That sort of grasp no Greek Stoic author professed to have. Nonetheless, they did write as philosophical experts, experts in the truth, expounding and defending Stoic doctrines on the basis of philosophical considerations which they argued did establish them as true. In two important respects Seneca’s Stoic writings differ from those of his Greek authorities (and, for that matter, from the philosophical writings of his Roman predecessor, Cicero). To begin with, and most crucially, both in his so-called “Moral Essays” and in his 124 Moral Letters to Lucilius, Seneca writes to specific, named addressees as their spiritual adviser or guide.2 He writes as himself a deeply committed adherent of Stoicism, but his purpose is not primarily to expound and defend Stoic doctrines, with appeal to the philosophical arguments on which the Stoic philosophers rested them. Rather, he means to offer advice and assistance to his addressee (and, by implication, his readers in general) in their own efforts to heal their spiritual disorders and discomforts either in general or in particular respects and circumstances. Moreover, he writes explicitly in his Letters, and implicitly or explicitly in each of his Stoic essays, as someone who is working to improve himself and the character of his life through his increasing grasp of the truths of Stoic theory.3 On that basis he offers to aid others in their own efforts (sometimes only presumed, of course—think of Nero, the addressee of On Mercy) to improve themselves and their lives through grasping the truths

among individual Stoic teachers, or developments over time in the doctrine of the school. Since my purpose in this general sketch is to mark Seneca’s writings clearly off from those of these earlier Greek Stoics, such details matter little. 2 The essential work on this aspect of Seneca’s writing is Hadot 1969. 3 See, e.g., 6.1, 3–4, 8.2, 27.1, 45.4, 61.1–2, 68.8–9, 71.36–37, 87.4–5.

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of Stoicism to whatever imperfect degree, and making them their life’s guide so far as they can manage to do that. In Stoic terms, he counts himself as a προκπτων or progrediens—one “making progress”—who may have gotten further in the long effort to win through to a secure grasp on the true basis for living a good human life, but who like his addressees has still much more work to do before he could conceivably claim to have attained this goal. He is a philosophical fellow-struggler— a seeker after the truth who, like his addressees, is a philosophical amateur, not an official Stoic teacher presenting and defending the school’s dogmas.4 He writes as a Roman, for other Romans of the upper classes, seeking to grasp, and help others grasp, the way of life propounded in and by the Stoic philosophical tradition, and to shape their own lives so far as possible in accordance with it. One finds, in fact, not just with Seneca, but with our other main authors in the history of Stoicism under the Roman Imperial regime, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius—oddly, for a Stoic—an almost impassioned interest in curing one’s own spiritual ills, in moral self-improvement, and in helping others to cure and improve themselves. This has always been a major source of their appeal. More strictly philosophical authors who were also sources in later times for Stoic theory, such as Cicero or Sextus Empiricus or Plutarch, have not played nearly so large a role in the survival and continued appeal of Stoic ideas to educated people in the Renaissance and since as these Stoics of the Imperial period.5 However, all three of these authors—as Stoics— are committed to regarding spiritual cures and self-improvement as depending, in the last analysis, on a person’s own improved and deepened understanding of certain philosophical truths. These truths, according to Stoics, provide the crucial grounding and support for the Stoic way of life as the best one for a human being. Moreover, understanding these truths and accepting them precisely for these philosophical reasons—the ones put forward in Stoic theory as proving their truth— is the only secure basis on which to live a Stoic life at all. For Stoicism, life is not improved simply by improved choices and behavior, however welcome that might be in other respects, but only by behavior to the extent that it reflects and derives from an improved state See, e.g., Ep. 45.4. I think here especially of Justus Lipsius, who devoted many years of work to editing Seneca’s works, and to propagating their salutary message for the improvement of individual and political life in early modern Europe. See Cooper 2004a. 4 5

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of mind. And according to Stoic conceptions, only an improvement in one’s grasp of the reasons that make the Stoic doctrines true can constitute such an improved state of mind. Thus, for the Stoics only people’s beliefs about practical matters, only the state of their minds (their power of reasoning) in relation to these, affects how their life goes, for better or for worse, and whether or not it is a good life. For the Stoics, for whom a mind just is a power of thought—there are no non-rational aspects of the human mind on their view, as there are, for example, for Plato and Aristotle—the only way, ultimately, to improve a person’s beliefs is to give them better reasons, and help them to appreciate, in purely rational and philosophical terms, the implications and power of those reasons for transforming oneself and one’s way of life. A Stoic spiritual adviser or guide, such as Seneca wants to be, is therefore in quite a delicate position. By contrast with the Stoic conception of the human good and a well-lived human life, the Epicurean does not make any sort of improvement of one’s mind and in one’s understanding any part of the goal: for Epicureans, a constant pleasurable state of feeling constitutes the good and is the goal of a well-lived life. So an Epicurean could happily rely in his own spiritual guidance simply on getting his patients vividly to see the world through Epicurus’ eyes—as a place made up of atoms and void swirling eternally, with no divine powers of any sort controlling anything that happens, and in which only a pleasurable state of mind is worth striving for. He could limit himself to getting his patients to memorize various basic precepts as guides to achieving and maintaining that state of mind, and to train themselves to remember them as they face adversities and make their choices. For an Epicurean, it does not matter at all on what grounds one holds to this general view, indeed whether one holds to it on any grounds (that is, philosophical reasons) at all: all that matters is that one does keep it and the relevant precepts in mind, and hold to them with a feeling of conviction. But for a Stoic, whose ultimate goal is precisely to improve his own and others’ minds—their grasp of philosophical truths on the basis of the reasons that in fact make them true—matters can never be so simple.6 Writing, as he does, in the ancient tradition of the spiritual director, Seneca adopts a style of writing, and a whole series of rhetorical 6 For a discussion of Seneca’s engagement with Epicurus and the Epicurean outlook on life, see Cooper 2004b, Ch. 13, sect. II (337–346).

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devices, aimed at winning his addressee over to the Stoic world-picture and to feeling its uplifting power, and the sublimity and grandeur of life led in accordance with it. By living this way, Seneca repeatedly makes us feel, we make ourselves partners of the cosmic god, Jupiter or Zeus, in world government, by regarding all external conditions and events, and even ones in one’s body, as strictly indifferent from the point of view of one’s personal good as a rational mind. Speaking, as he does, to persons who are still quite deeply engrossed in bad and harmful ways of life, or constantly apt to fall back into them, this literary style and these rhetorical presentations of the Stoic view are, in themselves, entirely appropriate. Indeed, some might argue that it is only through writing of that inspirational sort that any author has any chance at all of actually affecting the way people live their life: what is needed is a fundamental reform or conversion, and only emotion-stirring appeals to one’s deepest feelings can effect that. Both Plato’s and Aristotle’s theories of moral character, in their different ways, support some such view. Because, for them, human beings have three independent sources of motivation that can and do affect not just how they feel but how they choose and how they act, it can make excellent sense to suppose that appeals, through inspiring writing, to our deepest feelings (seated in parts or aspects of the soul other than reason) are the crucial and most fundamental requirement if one is to work any permanent improvement in another’s life-orientation. Indeed, it is arguable that, for Aristotle, reasoned conviction about moral truth is nothing more than the thought-content of such emotionally-induced states of feeling.7 Seneca, however, is, and wishes to write as, a Stoic—not a Peripatetic, or a Platonist. There is a danger—and I will argue that Seneca does fall victim to it—that in relying so heavily on these rhetorical, emotion-evoking devices of the spiritual director, a Stoic writer will tend to forget or neglect the fact that the ultimate goal (for himself as well as for his addressees) is to achieve a full philosophical understanding of the reasons why the truths of Stoicism really are true. For a Stoic, as I have said, a mere feeling of conviction—such as might well be imbued by these rhetorical means—is not good enough. It might well help at early stages of the process, and might even have some salutary effects at much later ones, in helping people to get through rough spots 7 I take this to be John McDowell’s view. See “Virtue and Reason” and “Some Issues in Aristotle’s Moral Psychology” in McDowell 1998.

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in their lives or bolster them against momentary temptations or other stresses that could lead one to slide back. But it is crucial for any Stoic to keep in mind that, on Stoic views, such feelings of commitment can never be more than an ancillary aid to—cannot provide the substance of—improvement.8 As I will argue, however much Seneca himself does show a detailed and excellent knowledge of Stoic philosophical doctrine and the philosophical grounds that Stoic philosophers put forward in order to establish it, he often evinces a harmfully dismissive attitude to the value, for the good life itself, of knowledge of these matters. The result is a Stoicism, however orthodox and however precisely rendered as theory, that is nonetheless a very different thing in practice and application from the Stoicism of the founders, Zeno and Chrysippus, and their Greek successors. The ideas remain the same, in principle, but as ideas they no longer have the same practical meaning. They no longer play the same role in a person’s life.

Hadot 1969, in her account of Seneca’s methods as spiritual adviser, marks a distinction between a first stage, where the patient comes to know the basic theoretical views that support the Stoic way of life, and a second, in which these views become ingrained in his or her soul, plus a third, in which, through further practice as well as further encouragements of the same sort as at the second stage, they come to be active and effective always in their life (103–126). Thus, on her account, the rhetorical encouragements, which take place at the second and third stages, are preceded by a stage at which the patient first learns the philosophical theories in a purely intellectual way. Here she speaks in terms of their coming to know them: “Erst muß man sich die Elemente des Wissens aneignen, … was ein rein intellektueller Vorgang ist, sodann muß man sich das Wissen so einprägen, daß man es immer parat hat …,” (105). For Hadot, therefore, rhetorical presentations do not compete with philosophical explanations, or replace them in Seneca’s practice: they are a useful, indeed much needed, supplement, applied subsequently to an intellectual, presumably philosophical, training. However, on examination it becomes clear that at the first stage all that happens, for her, is that the doctrines are laid out for patients so that they now know what views or opinions they are expected to hold; here to know the doctrines is simply to know what they are, and be inclined to believe them—not at all, necessarily, to understand them, to know they are true, because one understands the reasons of theory that make them true. For the first stage she refers, in the first instance (118 n. 95), to Ep. 66 and 67, where Seneca sets out the Stoic theory of the good. There Seneca uses rhetorical modes of presentation, and avoids relying heavily on philosophical argumentation, just as much as he does when he moves on to Hadot’s second and third stages. In fact, Hadot quite systematically underrates the value (indeed necessity, for a Stoic) of philosophical argument as providing the basis of belief—just as her author, Seneca, does, as I argue below. 8

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II We can begin by taking note of Seneca’s frequent disparagement of Stoic philosophical argumentation—that is, reason-giving—of certain prominent sorts.9 In a large group of his letters Seneca complains contemptuously about the syllogisms of “dialecticians” (dialectici), including Stoic ones, whether on ethical topics or not.10 He denounces them as worse than useless. He rails against people who, he says, debase philosophy by spending all their time on such “logical” pursuits instead of taking hold of the real problems of life by directly ridding themselves or others of the fear of death, bondage to external objects and events, and the like, through other uses of language than the logically deductive. Here I have in mind Ep. 111 and 102, plus several letters in the 40’s: 45, 48, 49. These deal with logical fallacies and paradoxes (the Liar, the Horned One, and others), which the original Stoics devoted great attention to. Partly, Seneca’s objection is the certainly very reasonable one that these are not of the first importance for one trying to improve his life: there are no immediate good effects for the conduct of one’s life in knowing how and why they are not in fact logically valid arguments. So, excessive or exclusive attention to them, as if the study of these paradoxes is what philosophy actually consists in, would be a serious mistake.11 But in his polemic against such abuses Seneca is 9 See Ep. 45, 48, 49, 82, 83, 87, 111; also the harsh remarks in 71.6 and 85.1. The remarks in 102.20 are different: they speak in some exasperation about the relative waste of time that has to go into a Stoic response to cavilling counterarguments of nonStoic “dialecticians” out to upset the Stoics’ moral applecart (see 102.5); Seneca has just spent some pages dutifully responding. 10 In this he follows Cicero; see Tusc. 2.29–30. 11 Barnes 1997, 13–14 intriguingly speculates that Seneca’s repeated polemic against playing around with these arguments may be evidence that in first-century Rome the study of logic might actually have been all the rage—contrary to the usual inference scholars have drawn from Seneca’s and other evidence about first-century philosophy. Barnes discusses some of these passages in examining Seneca’s attitude to the study of logic, its place and value as one part of philosophy itself (12–23). He argues, persuasively to my mind, that Seneca is objecting (1) to an obsessive and pointless fascination with the famous sophisms and conundrums of the Liar et al., with which Chrysippus had already dealt adequately, a fascination sustained beyond the point where anything of value can come from attention to them, and at the expense of more serious and more important moral inquiry; and (2) to any other study of logic that has no pay-off for the overriding ethical purposes and ambitions of philosophy itself. Thus he is not rejecting the study of logic. Indeed, he commends it—when it is conducted with due regard to its utility for ethical concerns. My concern is not with Seneca’s attitude to the study of logic as a part of the overall study of philosophy, but rather with his failure sometimes

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led also to express doubts about the value of knowing anything about these arguments at all. He goes so far as to say that “not to know them does no harm, nor does the one who does know them benefit from the knowledge” (45.8). In fact, he goes yet farther: the games of logic played in worrying over such conundrums as the Horned paradox and figuring out how to resist the inferences are not merely of no profit, they are actually harmful (48.9), since they crush and weaken the spirit of anyone who takes them seriously. For the classical Stoics, however, knowing about them does matter, because if you do not, then you cannot know that our language, which is to say the essential vehicle of reason itself, is actually self-consistent and coherent, so that it does not itself imply the truth of such absurdities. Ultimately, if you are to live by reason and trust it in guiding your life, you must deal with these paradoxes, so as to rationally convince yourself that reason is not in fact a deceiver. In these letters, then, Seneca shows a willingness (dangerous for any Stoic) to blur the line between overfascination with logic, or logical fallacies, and any proper study of them; and this seems clearly to reveal an inadequate and weak grasp of the real value for the moral life of the study of logic. Again, in several connected letters (82, 83, 85, 87) Seneca ridicules as foolishness (ineptiae) all those famous snappy Stoic syllogisms on moral subjects for which Zeno was so famous (or infamous), such as, for example, the following: No bad thing is glorious, but death is [i.e., is sometimes] glorious; therefore death is not a bad thing (82.9). Wonderful, says Seneca! So, having learned this, I’ve now been freed from fear of death? How foolish! Is that how a general leading his men into battle, to meet death in defending their wives and children, would ever address his troops (82.20–22)? Obviously not. So, Seneca concludes, that is not how a philosopher should seek to improve himself or others listening to him, either. Instead of answering the question whether to fear death by, as Seneca sees it, such fruitless and foolish dialecticians’ subtleties that do not persuade anyone, one ought to weigh and solve it with a view to actual persuasion. You ought not to merely force someone by logical necessity to grant the conclusion

to see clearly enough just how extensive, in fact, the implications for ethics actually are of certain studies in logic broadly conceived (i.e., in “dialectic” in the Stoic sense) and certain ones in physics—and, more generally, for the mental formation needed by anyone who is to live a good and happy life according to the Stoic understanding of what that consists in.

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that death is not to be feared, because it is nothing bad for you—when despite accepting the premisses and seeing the logical necessity of the inference, his true opinion was, and remains, to the contrary. In fact, I think, Seneca’s reference to forcing, by contrast with persuading, is a short-sighted characterization of Zeno’s intentions in propounding such syllogisms. In fact, these little arguments have to be carefully reflected upon, in order finally to see the meaning of the premisses, and finally to appreciate their truth—and so, finally, to understand why you really do have to accept the conclusion as true, if you accept the premisses. There really is, or can be, persuasion through them—when they are properly reflected upon. Seneca’s treatment in these letters of this and several other of these Zenonian syllogisms betrays a serious undervaluation not just, as before, of the analysis of logical fallacies, of the study of logic, but of philosophical reasoning itself. There is a good point in each of Zeno’s syllogisms discussed in 82 and 83, one of direct relevance to how to lead your life—provided that you attend to them in the right, philosophical, way. This is true of the others too. Seneca is presumably correct that no one will make these arguments the sole or even the most important ground of his acceptance of their conclusions—that death is not a bad thing, or that the good man will never get drunk. Other philosophical considerations are available too. But his own preference for “pointing to the facts” by, for example, graphically and movingly describing the oppressiveness and hideousness of the drunken state, is a preference for rhetorical appeals to a person’s feelings over solid reasons why the conclusions really are true. The original Stoics were firm and clear about the far greater value of sound and solid reasoning for establishing such conclusions. In this discussion Seneca shows himself neither clear nor firm about this. Had he been so, he could not have dismissed these syllogisms as simply beside the point—that is, of no use for moral improvement.

III Finally, I would draw attention to a late series of letters (106, 113, 117) in which Seneca struggles with three interconnected, strange-sounding Stoic doctrines: (1) that the virtues are corporeal entities (i.e., bodies), (2) that the virtues are actually living beings (animals), and (3) that though a virtue like wisdom (for example) is a good thing, being wise or being

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just is not good.12 All three are doctrines to know which, he tells Lucilius, is of no profit: to concern oneself with such questions is to waste time on superfluities; these are matters for the schoolroom, not for living one’s life (106.11–12). Nonetheless, in the case of the first of these three doctrines, concerning the corporeality of the virtues, Seneca is quite willing to explain to Lucilius why, however surprising, even outrageous, the idea might seem at first presentation, it is nonetheless true. He endorses on his own behalf the Stoic reasoning which establishes it (106.4–10). The other two doctrines—about the virtues being animals, and being wise not itself being a good—he rejects as too offensive to common ways of thinking to be tolerated, however much they might be part of the panoply of that Greek Stoicism with which in general he aligns himself. For example, Seneca does not want to accept the conclusion that being wise et al. are not good things, because, as he says, that flies in the face of common sense, as well as common ways of speaking.13 At 106.2 Seneca pretends that Lucilius had requested to be told whether the good is a body, but that he had delayed responding because this was one of the questions that he was writing on in some books he was then composing in which he would give a systematic account of the whole of moral philosophy, dealing with all its problems; in 108.1 and 109.17 he mentions this proposed work again. At 106.2, because it would be rude to keep him waiting, Seneca agrees to take Lucilius’ question out of the proper order in which it would be taken up in that work; he will answer it now, and proceed to tell him whatever has to do with questions “of the same sort,” without waiting to be asked. He defines this “sort” vaguely, as questions to know about which is pleasant rather than useful (magis iuuat quam prodest). It is clear that not all the immediately following letters are part of the series thus promised (107 and 110 clearly are not, but 108 and 109 clearly are), and it is not clear for how long after 106 we should look for successors in the projected series. However, because Seneca emphasizes that the questions discussed in both 113 and 117 do belong to the class of things to know which is of no profit to us (113.1, disputationibus nihil profuturis otium terere; 117.20 quid mihi profuturum est scire?), I am inclined to think they are intended as further installments. 13 As usual with Seneca the organization of letter 117, in which he attacks this orthodox view, is fluid at best, so any declaration about his contentions (main or secondary) is somewhat problematic. A review of the whole letter will enable me to explain my understanding of Seneca’s contentions here. He begins, in response to Lucilius’ query whether the Stoic doctrine is true, that being wise is not a good thing, by stating (§1) that he disagrees with his fellow Stoics on this point, and declaring that he will first set out the Stoic view, and then be bold enough to state his own opinion. He sets out the Stoic view in §§ 2–5, where he includes in his exposition two connected objections of other philosophers (perhaps Peripatetics), together with the Stoic way of accommodating their position to these objections. In introducing these objections at §4, Seneca alerts us again that this is a preliminary exercise—preliminary to his taking steps to “withdraw [from orthodoxy] and take up a different position” (secedere et in alia parte considere). At the beginning of § 6, he reiterates his disagreement (ego non idem sentio), clearly implying that he holds that being wise is a good thing: he says the orthodox have 12

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Chrysippus held them to be incorporeal predicates, “sayables,” belonging to robust corporeal entities (the wise people), but not themselves anything corporeal—and hence, neither good nor bad, since anything good or bad must do something, have effects in the world. By contrast, wisdom itself is, on Stoic theory, a robust bodily thing, namely an actual physical condition of the wise person’s mind or soul. Seneca attempts to develop an alternative account of the “metaphysical” status of such things as being wise or being just that will make them not incorporeal predicates, not sayables at all, but rather robust bodily existents. The reason he gives for not accepting the Stoics’ conclusion is that, according to him (117.6), there is no one who does not hold that wisdom (sapientia) is a good, and that being wise (sapere) is also. Now, no doubt this is so, if one is counting only people, whether actual Stoics or not, who have not had the Stoic theory, and its grounds, explained to them; but how about those to whom these have been explained? Surely the latter do not hold this. Why does Seneca not align himself with them (the educated minority), rather than the rest, however more numerous? Why not simply explain the relevant Stoic distinctions, apply them to the current case, and draw the conclusion that, indeed, as a matter of correct philosophical theory, being wise is not a good thing? Seneca could, as a concession to common ways of thinking (and speaking),

only been led to assert the contrary because they have been caught by a “first link” in a chain of argument, which prevents them logically from saying anything else. (He does not make explicit what link he has in mind.) He then presents arguments in favor of his own position on this question (§§ 6–17), beginning (§6) with some methodological considerations. In the course of explaining his own view (i.e., that being wise is a good thing) he takes care to distinguish his position on one crucial point from that of the Peripatetics, and in the course of doing that he says again (§ 14) that he is not yet stating how things seem to him (nondum enim quid mihi uideatur pronuntio). I take this second warning to indicate that his full and true position, which he only gets to much later (§§18–20), is that it does not matter which view you adopt. Your life, your moral understanding, is not affected one iota one way or the other; this is a purely theoretical question devoid of moral or practical significance. (After that, Seneca elaborates on this point (§§21–33), decking it out with high-minded fluff and adding exhortations to true wisdom, which consists in actions and not in worrying about philosophical niceties; but his statement of his position and his argument is concluded in §20.) Thus Seneca’s position is a bit complex. On the one hand, he really does disagree with orthodoxy on the theoretical question whether being wise is a good thing; on the other hand, and more importantly, he insists that this is a theoretical question, and a theoretical disagreement. There is no good point in embroiling oneself in such controversies. In that sense, he can say at the end (§20) that since it does not profit anyone to know which view is true, he will take a chance on holding the one view, while Lucilius can go for the other. It won’t matter.

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emphasize that this is only intended as a theoretical truth, that one certainly does not need to insist on it in contexts of common life. In common life one is justifiably not in the habit of distinguishing between predicates and the physical conditions in virtue of which they hold true of things. So in common life one can perfectly well say and indeed mean that being wise is a good thing. Because one is not distinguishing between predicates and physical conditions (or thinking in any determinate way at all about either), there is no reason not to take this simply to mean that wisdom is a good thing.14 Seneca, however, prefers, as, he thinks, a matter of proper philosophical methodology (indeed a Stoic methodology), to insist upon going along with the general opinion of mankind in this matter: what “everyone” holds must be true, he says (in a misleadingly Aristotelian-sounding tone of voice).15 On that principle, he is committed to holding, against orthodoxy, that being wise and being just, and so on, are good things, just as wisdom and justice themselves are.16 14 In fact, Seneca has already said in effect, at the end of § 3, that precisely this is what the orthodox Stoics do. He says that they do say that being wise is a good thing, all the while referring “being wise” to that on which it depends, namely wisdom. This concession is not the same as the one Plutarch quotes from Chrysippus’ On Goods (On Stoic Self-Contradictions 30.1048a; LS 58H), but it is related to it. Chrysippus grants that someone who speaks of “preferred indifferents” such as health as good things to possess need not be making any mistake, so long as the sense he attaches to the word “good” in that context is not in error ( ν μν το ς σημαινομνοις ο διαππτοντος ατο)—i.e., so long as he does not mean, e.g., that health, etc., actually make a life better, or truly “benefit” one. And he seems to commend such a practice, as being in accordance with the ordinary use of words. I think Chrysippus is entirely right to grant this, and that there is no philosophical, or other, danger in doing so. I also think the other concession, the one Seneca takes note of, is again entirely acceptable. 15 One might connect this methodological principle with Aristotle’s frequent appeals to “reputable opinion,” including especially matters of common opinion or common linguistic usage, as one reference point that philosophical analysis must be responsible to. However, Aristotle’s practice is subtle and nuanced, as Seneca’s principle is not: Aristotle never holds that common opinion must be true, only that there has to be something to be said for it and that the ultimately correct philosophical account of things must preserve this. It might be true only if interpreted in a certain way, but not in others—and that way might, in truth, not really conform to what ordinary people mean in asserting it. On Aristotle, see “Aristotle on the Authority of ‘Appearances’” in Cooper 1999, 281–291. 16 Seneca not infrequently (and perfectly reasonably) insists on his own right and privilege, even though a committed Stoic, to have and defend his own philosophical opinions, even where they may be in opposition or conflict with those of the school’s founders and orthodox spokesmen. See letter 45.4 and Ben. 1.3.8ff., and my discussion of his stance in On the Private Life in Cooper 2004b, Ch. 13, last three paragraphs of sect. II (342–346).

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We should bear in mind, of course, that Seneca writes for readers who are not philosophers themselves and are not expected to become philosophers; they are, and will remain, at best non-philosopher “people making progress.” He is offering, as their spiritual adviser, to help to convince them of the basic truths of Stoic moral philosophy, and to strengthen their capacity and commitment to live in accordance with the moral and more generally practical principles of Stoicism. He is asking them simply to listen to him, to take his explications to heart, and to live according to them—he is not urging anyone to take a complete course in Stoic philosophy.17 That he does not urge them to do that is not my criticism. My complaint is that sometimes, as in the letter we have just been considering, and in the letters I discussed in earlier sections of the paper, Seneca so completely cuts off the basis on which he is encouraging his addressee to live from the reasons provided by Stoic philosophical theory for living that way, that it becomes highly questionable whether they can be making real progress toward virtue and the fully happy life if they follow him. Anyone who is making progress toward that goal, and wishes to make further progress, must never lose sight of the fact that the only way to do so is to increase their understanding of just why those ways of deciding, acting and living are the right and best ones. Seneca allows his preference for rhetorical styles of argumentation to occlude all interest in many of the more abstruse philosophical questions that anyone must pursue if they are actually to make progress toward this goal, and he also places rhetorical argumentation at the front of his stage even in his presentation of the more narrowly ethical parts of Stoic philosophy. The result is a Stoicism that plays down the philosophical argumentation lying behind and supporting the ethical conclusions that he so treasures. Instead, he promotes those conclusions to a large extent solely through rhetorically induced feelings in favor of them. This is certainly Stoicism of a sort, but no longer quite what Zeno and Chrysippus had in mind.

17 It is even open to him, as he explains at a number of places, especially in the first 30 letters, to quote, draw on, and incorporate many Epicurean dicta and theses into his own Stoic advice about, and encouragement for, the moral life. See my discussion in Cooper 2004b, Ch. 13, sect. II (337–346).

ANGER, PRESENT INJUSTICE AND FUTURE REVENGE IN SENECA’S DE IRA

Katja Maria Vogt De ira is, as Seneca states in the beginning, a treatise on how to alleviate anger.* While other emotions may still have something calm about them, anger, according to Seneca, is all excitement, raging towards vengeance (1.1.1). The idea that we should aim at getting rid of anger is tied to the theoretical discussion of anger: once we understand what we actively do when we experience anger, we can stop short of getting angry. De ira stands within a Stoic tradition of discussing the therapy of the emotions.1 Seneca’s concern with anger is not only in line with the general Stoic conviction that emotions are irrational, but also with a more widespread ancient interest in anger as a particularly violent emotion. However, in spite of the particular attention that is devoted to anger, it seems that, of all emotions, anger is surprisingly difficult to understand within the Stoic framework. The violent anger which is at stake in ancient discussions has an element of pain and an element of desire; the agent feels unjustly harmed and desires revenge. But according to the Stoic framework, an emotion can either be a kind of pain (lupê)2 or a kind of desire

* I am grateful to William Harris for inviting me to present an earlier version of this paper at the Conference “New Directions in Seneca Studies” (Columbia Univeristy, February 2004), and for the helpful comments and questions from the participants at the conference. 1 “Emotions” here translates the Greek pathê and the Latin adfectus. There are good reasons for translating both terms with “affections,” which highlights that both are technical notions. However, “affection” emphasizes the passive element of emotion, and it is precisely the Stoic theory which claims that pathê depend on our active assent. For this reason I will stay with the seemingly less technical translation “emotion.” But it should be kept in mind that this term, in the following discussion, figures as a translation of the Stoic technical terms. 2 “Distress” better captures the scope of painful experiences which count, according to the Stoics, as emotions; physical pain is not considered a pathos (cf. Cooper 1999, 454 n. 13). But since I want to compare Stoic theory with other ancient accounts, I will for the purposes of this paper translate lupê as “pain.” On the role of pain and pleasure in Stoic ethics compare also Vogt 2004a, 71–75.

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(epithumia),3 but not a complex phenomenon incorporating both. The early Stoics classify anger as a desire, and—in agreement with this classification—Seneca accepts a Posidonian definition which calls anger a “burning desire (cupiditas) to punish him by whom you think yourself to have been unfairly harmed.”4 Thus, the Stoics opt for describing anger as a kind of desire, not as a kind of pain. However, while other ancient philosophers can describe anger as a desire and still mention its painful element, the Stoic classification of emotions states that every pathos either is a kind of desire, or a kind of pain. Further, according to Posidonius’ as well as other Stoic definitions (see below), anger is a desire to punish or take revenge. To be angry means to desire an action which will bring about retaliation—the emotion of anger is partly defined through the action that the agent desires. We may think that this is due to a concept of anger which is different from our own; for the ancients, anger may have been a more violent state, a state which cannot consist in solitary brooding or silent indignation.5 But independently of such historical changes, what interests me here is a general feature of the Stoic theory of the emotions. It is not only with respect to anger that the Stoics suggest a fundamental link between emotion and action. Anger seems to highlight a general aspect of the Stoic theory of emotion: emotions are defined as excessive impulses, and, according to the Stoic theory of action, an impulse (hormê) standardly sets off an action. It is a striking feature of the Stoic theory of emotion that indeed every emotion—as impulse—causes a bodily movement (which, however, may be obstructed or delayed). Therefore, the action which results from an emotion plays a role in defining the emotion: as impulse, an emotion is characterised by the kind of action that

3 It should be kept in mind that what the Stoics mean is appetitive desire (Long and Sedley 1987, Vol. 1, Ch. 65 translate “appetite”). Since I will have to refer constantly to what the agent does, “desire” is preferable to “appetite”—there is no verb corresponding in a similarly obvious way to “appetite” as “to desire” corresponds to “desire.” The early Stoics define epithumia as an irrational desire (orexis), or pursuit of an expected good (Ps.-Andronicus, On Passions 1 = SVF 3.391, part = LS 65B). 4 Seneca quotes Posidonius’ and two further definitions at a passage from De ira which is lost (between 1.1.3 and 1.1.4), but can be reconstructed from Lactantius. 5 Harris 2001, 25 discusses how the study of ancient ideas about emotions needs to acknowledge that there may be no exact correspondences between the relevant Greek and Latin terms on the one hand, and terms in the modern languages of today’s scholars on the other. He argues that the Greek term orgê refers to a more violent emotion than “anger” in modern English. On this point, see also generally Ch.s 1, 2 and 3.

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goes along with it. This aspect of the Stoic theory, however, raises several intricate questions about anger. Anger, like other desires, is accompanied by an action towards a perceived good (retaliation), but, unlike other desires, it arises from the impression of something bad in the present (the injustice), not something good and therefore desirable in the future. Seneca, who devotes a full treatise to the complexities of anger, may explain some aspects of the early theory which he finds himself in agreement with, and which we don’t see sufficiently clearly due to the scarcity of our sources.6 Thus, I am suggesting turning to Seneca’s De ira, asking whether he clarifies how, according to Stoic theory, the present harm of a perceived injustice and the desire for revenge relate in anger. While I cannot argue for this in any detail here, I will be reading Seneca as essentially in agreement with orthodox Stoic thought about the emotions.7 Once we understand, following the interpretations of John Cooper and Teun Tieleman,8 that Posidonius is unlikely to have disagreed with Chrysippus on the emotions in the fundamental ways which are suggested by Galen, we have less reason to expect an unorthodox position in Seneca: he does not face the need to side either with Chrysippus or Posidonius. Apart from this consideration, three very general aspects of De ira speak for Seneca’s orthodoxy: (i) Seneca nowhere in De ira implies or argues for a dualist or tripartite psychology, which would explain anger through an irrational part of the soul; (ii) he pays considerable attention to the central, orthodox 6 I am assuming that Seneca is, while an orthodox Stoic, a philosopher in his own right. On Seneca as a Stoic philosopher, cf. John Cooper’s paper in this volume. For a detailed argument for this view see Inwood 1993, esp. 150–156. Cf. also Williams 2003, 7 and Veyne 2003, ix. Inwood critically examines interpretations of Seneca which focus on finding the philosophical ancestry of different parts of Seneca’s work, and argues in favour of reading De ira as one treatise (156). An important contribution to the literature which adopts the former perspective is Fillion-Lahille 1984. 7 More specifically, I am assuming either of two scenarios, or, perhaps even more likely, a mix of both: (i) Seneca may further work out some aspects of the theory, while regarding these elaborations as being in line with orthodox Stoicism; (ii) he may discuss ideas which have been presented in earlier Stoic writings, but are not, or are not sufficiently clearly, transmitted. That Seneca may improve some aspects of the Stoic theory of emotion is argued along different lines by Sorabji 1998. Sorabji suggests that Posidonius confronts the Chrysippean theory with objections and counter-examples. He argues that Seneca provides answers to the problems that Posidonius raises, and is thus able to go back to the Chrysippean theory. 8 Cooper 1999; Tieleman 2003.

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idea that anger is set off by assent as a voluntary movement of the soul; (iii) his interest in a first, involuntary movement need not be taken as evidence that he presents a Posidonian rather than an orthodox position; as Graver and Stevens have argued,9 it is likely that the conception of such initial reactive movements of the soul, which do not result from assent and therefore are not pathê, was part of Stoic thought already before Posidonius. Scholarly debate, for the most part, has taken Seneca’s analysis of anger to be an exemplary analysis of one emotion which can be extended to a general theory of all emotions. I too will assume that we can generalize from Seneca’s account of anger to his overall conception of the emotions, and part of my argument depends on this premise. But part of what I hope to show addresses the specifics of anger: anger, which is related to a present (perceived) injustice and a future (perceived) good, does not share its complex structure with other desires. While in other desires the agent relates to something good in the future, and rushes towards it, so as to attain it, in anger the agent relates to something good in the future, the revenge, and rushes towards it, but at the same time she relates to something bad in the present—the perceived injustice. Thus, anger doesn’t seem to have only one “direction of fit”; the agent relates to something bad in the present and to something good in the future. Anger, therefore, might seem to point to a limitation of a classificatory system which suggests that each kind of emotion is characterized by precisely one such direction. I will start with a brief sketch of the early Stoic classification of anger, as well as with a selective account of Seneca’s analysis of anger, focusing on the impressions which figure in anger. On this basis I will first explain in more detail, and then discuss, four closely related questions: (i) Why is anger, without any qualifications or reference to pain, classified as a desire? (ii) and (iii) address what I will call the “anomalies of anger”: (ii) How can anger be classified as a desire, if it does not arise from a judgment about a perceived good in the future? 9 Graver 1999. See also Stevens 2000, who argues that the early Stoics distinguished between impulse and a preliminary impulse. The latter notion was, according to Stevens, later worked out into the conception of propatheia (initial reactive movements in the soul which are, due to testimony on Posidonius’ discussion of them, often associated with the Stoicism of Posidonius). As Inwood 1993, 175 points out, Seneca is distinguishing between two kinds of impulse: the first impetus arises involuntarily, and it is not an impulse proper, i.e., an impulse which leads to action. The second impulse involves assent, while the first, preliminary impulse does not.

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(iii) How does assent to an impression like “I have been wronged” set off movement towards the apparent good of revenge? (iv), finally, takes up a question that arises with respect to all emotions: How can we account for the fact that, according to Stoic theory, the impressions we assent to in an emotion do not present a specific course of action? Seneca’s analysis of the different movements (motus) of anger can, as I will argue, help to shed light on these four questions. It adds to our understanding of how, according to the Stoics, an emotion is an excessive impulse, an idea that up to now has been mostly explored with respect to questions about Stoic psychological monism, not with respect to the link between emotion and action.10 Seneca’s analysis of anger contributes to our understanding of how not only the emotion itself, but also the action that goes along with it, is irrational. According to early Stoic theory, the emotions fall into four classes depending on whether they are directed towards what appears good or bad, and on whether the presumably good or bad object is only expected, and thus in the future, or already present: Since emotion is of this kind, one must suppose that some emotions are primary and dominant, while others have these as their reference. The generically primary ones are these four: desire, fear, pain, pleasure. Desire and fear come first, the former in relation to what appears good, and the latter in relation to what appears bad. Pleasure and pain result from there: pleasure, whenever we get the object of our desire or avoid the object of our fear; pain, whenever we fail to get the objects of our desire or experience the objects of our fear. (Stob. 2.88.8–90.6 = SVF 3.378, 389, part = LS 65A)11

In pleasure we relate to what appears good in the present, in desire to what appears good in the future, in pain to what appears bad in the present, and in fear to what appears bad in the future:

10 Cooper 1999, 453–461 explains how, according to Chrysippus’ theory of the emotions, emotions are impulses, and, as such, “psychic movements of the kind that directly cause voluntary bodily movements.” However, he does not engage with the question how an emotion can cause a specific action, given that it only seems to propel us into a “direction” like “getting away,” or “getting revenge.” 11 While I do not follow Long and Sedley’s translation in all respects, I provide large portions of the text in their translation. I have consulted their English translation for all passages which are contained in their collection. Even though I sometimes diverge from it substantially, I am very much indebted to their translation. Throughout this paper I am citing Stobaeus from the edition of Wachsmuth 1884.

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apparent good apparent bad

present

future

pleasure pain

desire fear12

Anger (orgê) “and its species” are classified as desires: The following are classified under desire: anger (orgê) and its species, thumos, cholos, mênis, kotos, pikriai, and the like, intense sexual desires, cravings and yearnings, love of pleasures and riches and honours, and the like. Under pleasure: rejoicing at another’s misfortunes, self-gratifications, trickery, and the like. Under fear: hesitancy, anguish, astonishment, shame, confusion, superstition, dread, and terror. Under pain: malice, envy, jealousy, pity, worry, sorrow, annoyance, mental pain, vexation. (Stob. 2.90.19–91.9 = SVF 3.394, part = LS 65E).

There is a striking conformity between different ancient texts which deal with anger13: anger arises when we see ourselves slighted, offended, or unjustly harmed, and it is directed at revenge or punishment. In fifth-century and Hellenistic Greek, orgê and thumos seem to be the most frequent terms: while both words are notoriously difficult, they clearly are both used to refer to violent anger which is prone to action. Cholos literally means bile, and seems to refer to a bitter form of anger. Mênis is often translated as “wrath,” and is famously associated with the anger of Achilles. Kotos is a form of anger which goes along with resentfulness, and pikria refers again to bitterness. But in spite of the differences, all these forms of anger have an active component: the angry person seeks revenge or punishment. Seneca’s picture of raging anger, which lacks whatever element of calm other emotions have, shows that his use of ira agrees with this understanding of the Greek terms. According to Diogenes Laertius, the Stoics define anger (orgê) as the desire for retribution against one who seems to have done one an undeserved injustice (7.113). A similar definition is transmitted in Stobaeus: anger is “the desire to retaliate against one who seems to have committed an injustice contrary to one’s deserts” (Stob. 2.91.10 = SVF 3.395). In spite of mentioning the apparent injustice, these definitions do not speak of pain. Annoyance, mental pain, and vexation—ania, odunê, and asê—are grouped under pain. This may seem surprising: why are emo12 Similar outlines have been presented at various places in the literature, most recently by Tieleman 2003, 114. 13 For this brief summary, I am relying importantly on Harris 2001, Chapters 2 and 3, as well as the translation and comments in Long and Sedley 1987, 1.412; 2.406–407.

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tions that could be described as milder forms of anger classified as belonging to a different genus, implying that anger on the one hand, and annoyance, mental pain, and vexation on the other, are of a different kind?14 If we suppose, in line with what I hope to show, that the Stoic classification pays important tribute to the kinds of action which go along with emotion, this seems only plausible. The Stoics could think of annoyance, mental pain, and vexation as fundamentally different kinds of emotion because of the “general direction” of the actions they set off: while they arise, like anger, from a perceived slight or offense, annoyance, mental pain and vexation may go along with a “contraction” in the face of pain, instead of a rush towards retaliation. While the Stoic classification of the emotions is attractive by bringing the intentionality of the emotions into full view, it may seem to fall back behind the subtlety of Plato’s and Aristotle’s ideas on how pain and pleasure figure in emotion.15 In the Rhetoric, Aristotle defines anger as “a desire (orexis), accompanied by pain, for what appears to one to be punishment for what appears to one to be belittlement by people for whom it was not proper to belittle oneself or someone close to one” (2.2.1378a31–33).16 For Aristotle, as for the Stoics, anger primarily is a desire; but for him this desire goes along with pain. His definition of anger seems to acknowledge that, while we feel the excitement of envisaging revenge, we also suffer from the pain that a perceived injustice brings. If we allow for the idea that pain and pleasure can be “secondary emotions,” accompanying other emotions, we can explain the complexity of anger.17 But this route is not open to the Stoics: pain and pleasure, within the Stoic account, are primary emo14 It seems that the early Stoics understand thumos as a milder form of anger—it is defined as anger in its beginnings (Stob. 2.91.11–12). 15 The following brief comments on Plato and Aristotle in no way do justice to this subtlety, or the scholarly debate on the relevant texts by Plato and Aristotle. They are included here in order to give a rough idea of two theoretical options that are closed off for the Stoics: (i) that pain and pleasure go along with other emotions, and (ii) that a single pathos could be explained as having both a painful and a pleasurable component. 16 I am following Cooper’s translation (apart from rendering lupê throughout this paper as “pain,” not “distress”) and his commentary on the passage (1999, 419 n. 23). In De anima 1.1.403a29–31 Aristotle differentiates between how the dialectician and the natural scientist deal with anger, providing an interesting way in which the former would explain it—as the desire to pay back pain for pain (orexis antilupêsêos). This captures, in the shortest possible way, that anger is about pain, but is a desire. 17 In Rhet. 2.1378a20–23 Aristotle describes emotions as being accompanied by pain and pleasure. As Cooper 1999, 414–415 points out, he also defines some emotions that involve pain as kinds of pain; there is weaker evidence that he would make the

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tions.18 They are two of the four kinds of emotion; the four primary emotions straightforwardly divide the range of emotions into distinct groups. Although fear and desire are said to “come first,” the generic emotions are on a par: pain and pleasure only come second insofar as whatever the agent deems good or bad is present, while in fear and desire it is still in the future. Desire can turn into pleasure when the perceived good has been attained, and fear into pain when the perceived bad thing has become a reality in the present. Pain and pleasure are not components of other emotions—no emotion can be explained by how it is composed of both pain and pleasure. The idea of such a mix could offer another way of capturing the complexity of anger. It seems that Plato, even though he talks about desires (epithumiai) like hunger and thirst in the relevant section of the Philebus (34e–36b), provides the framework for such an account. Plato describes desire as a mix of pleasure and pain: the man who desires something enjoys the prospect of having it, and is at the same time in pain because he experiences the lack of what he wants.19 Both pain and pleasure are referred to in the explanation of a desire. Along these lines, one could explain anger as pleasurable with respect to the prospect of revenge, and painful with respect to the perceived injury. But just as the Stoics cannot accommodate the idea that a desire would be accompanied by pain, they cannot explain it as a mix of pain and pleasure. With the earlier, ancient discussion in mind, we may ask (i) whether Seneca’s analysis of anger can explain whether the Stoics are able to capture the painful element in anger, even though they unqualifiedly classify it as a desire. When Seneca introduces his definition of anger in De ira 1.3.3, he writes that Aristotle’s definition is not far from “ours,” i.e., the Stoics’. Aristotle, in Seneca’s account, says that “anger is a burning desire to corresponding assumptions about pleasure. On the question how Aristotle relates pain and pleasure to the emotions see also Rapp 2002, 2.546–550 on Rhet. 2.2–11. 18 One could object that if desire envisages a future pleasure, and fear a future pain, then desire and fear indeed are (while not being themselves the emotions of pleasure and pain) not devoid of pleasure and pain. But this is not entirely correct: while desire relates to future pleasure, it is not supposed to be itself pleasurable, and while fear relates to something bad in the future, it is not supposed to be painful. What we experience is desire or fear, and these are supposed to be distinct emotions from pleasure and pain. 19 The discussion in the Philebus proceeds on the model of depletion and replenishment: the agent, who remembers how it was to be “full,” enjoys the prospect of replenishment, and is at the same time in pain because now she is “empty.”

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pay back pain.” The gist of this definition is that anger is a desire, but refers to pain. At the very beginning of De ira Seneca points out how anger is characterized by the onstorm of pain (dolor), and rages in desire (cupiditas) for revenge (1.1.1). Nevertheless, Seneca remains within the early Stoic framework; he does not explain how anger is a desire which is accompanied by pain, but rather how it is a desire in response to a perceived wrong. The part of De ira where Seneca gives definitions of anger (between 1.2.3 and 1.2.4) is lost, but Lactantius seems to have quoted precisely this passage. According to his testimony, Seneca cites the following definitions: anger is “a burning desire (cupiditas) to avenge a wrong,” “a burning desire to punish him by whom you think yourself to have been unfairly harmed,” and “an incitement of the mind (incitatio animi) to damage him who has done damage or wished to do damage” (Lactant. De ira dei 17.13).20 We can get a clearer picture of how Seneca relates the present injustice and the future good of revenge, by asking how they are reflected in the impressions an agent assents to when she becomes angry. In line with the early Stoics, Seneca thinks that we generate emotions by assent to impressions. Each such impression has a linguistic counterpart, so that we can speak in a shorthand way of the impression “I have been wronged,” meaning the impression to which the lekton “I have been wronged” corresponds. At the beginning of Book 2 Seneca gives a list of what is involved in anger, which he says is compositum and plura continens: we realize something, experience indignation, condemn, and seek retribution (2.1.5). There are two steps prior to the judgment that we have been unjustly harmed: we realize what has happened and we feel the impact of indignation. This first stage of anger is described, only a few lines later, as an involuntary movement (2.4.1), a preparation for emotion. It has often been remarked that Seneca seems to share Posidonius’ interest in the propatheia, states of being moved which are in themselves not yet pathê, given that the agent has not yet assented to anything. After this preliminary movement, according to 2.1.5, there is one judgment—to condemn the other’s deed—and this is followed by action, the quest for revenge. According to this outline, it seems that a single judgment—that one has been wronged—gives rise to anger. This way of reading Seneca is confirmed when we look at the way in which he puts the key question of the early chapters in Book 2: “Anger is 20 I am following the reconstruction and translation of the text by Cooper and Procopé 1995, 20 n. 8.

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undoubtedly set in motion by an impression received of a wrong. But does it follow immediately on the impression itself and break out without any involvement of the mind? Or is some assent by the mind required for it to be set in motion?” (2.1.3; emphasis added).21 Seneca’s answer to this question is an emphatic “yes”—there is an involvement of the mind. The mere impression of a perceived injustice does not set anger into motion; only assent to this impression does. The impression which we assent to in anger is, it seems, an impression received of a wrong. Of course, a lot of earlier assents will figure in the background—e.g., only an agent who judges certain forms of politeness to be important will feel slighted when she is not greeted by her colleague. The immediate assent to “he is offending me” is based on the earlier assent to something like “when people don’t greet me, they express disrespect.” And given that we are talking about anger in the sense that seems to have been prevalent in ancient discussions, the agent who is prone to anger has probably also assented at some point to an impression like “when someone is offending me, he needs to be paid back,” as well as something like “revenge is good.” But the anger arises out of the immediate judgment that one has been wronged. On the basis of Seneca’s account, I can further explain both what I called the “anomalies of anger,” as described in questions (ii) and (iii) above, as well as the general question about emotion and action outlined in question (iv). (ii) According to Stoic theory, emotions are beliefs, and these beliefs are generated through judgments about what is good and bad. The agent who suffers from pathê assents to impressions which present things as good and bad, even though they in fact are (according to the Stoics) indifferent. Insofar as the theory of the good and the indifferent is central to the Stoic theory of the emotions, it seems plausible that the Stoics would single out these judgments as what sets off emotion: for example, according to Chrysippus, pain is a belief that something bad is present (Andronicus, On Passions 1 = SVF 3.391, part = LS 65B). Even though, like in anger, several other assents may figure in the background, we can see why Chrysippus would focus on this belief: without the deficient judgment on what is bad and what is indifferent 21 Cooper and Procopé’s translation (1995). I have used this translation and edition throughout my work on Seneca’s De ira. However, for many of the following passages, I provide my own translation, which slightly modifies, and sometimes importantly departs from, Cooper and Procopé’s translation.

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there would be no pain.22 However, it seems that anger is, compared to other desires, an anomalous case: while other desires can be described with respect to beliefs about the presumed goods that the agent wants, anger seems, according to Seneca, to be generated by assent to “I have been unjustly offended,” not to “revenge is a good.” (iii) According to early Stoic theory, actions are caused by impulses, and an impulse (hormê) is generated through assent to impressions of a specific kind, which we may call hormetic. Even though the impulse causes the bodily movement of action, it is not yet itself the action or bodily movement; it is defined as a movement of thought towards something in the sphere of action (Stob. 2.86.17–87.6 = SVF 3.169, part = LS 53Q). Sources on how exactly the Stoics think of hormetic impressions are scarce. Stobaeus reports that according to the Stoics all impulses are acts of assent, “[b]ut acts of assent and impulses actually differ in their objects: propositions (axiômasi) are the objects of acts of assent, but impulses are directed toward predicates (katêgorêmata), which are contained in a sense in the propositions” (Stob. 2.88.2–6 = SVF 3.171 = LS 33I). Insofar as an impulse is an act of assent, it relates to an impression, and respectively to the axiôma which corresponds to this impression. But strictly speaking, the agent generates an impulse by assenting to an impression. The linguistic counterpart of this impression names—through a predicate—a specific course of action. Assent to the impression causes the motion towards this course of action. While assent refers to the impression, impulse relates to the predicate which is part of the axiôma, and names an action (Stob. 2.97.15–98.6 = SVF 3.91 = LS 33J). Thus each impulse is generated by assent to an impression which describes an action as to be done.23 Seneca clearly agrees with this analysis. In Ep. 113.18 he explains the nature of assent in a practical 22 One of the striking aspects of the Stoic theory is that there is nothing like rational pain. The Stoics propose that the sage will have “good feelings” (eupatheia). Joy is the “opposite” of pleasure, watchfulness the “opposite” of fear, and wishing the “opposite” of desire (Diog. Laert. 7.116 = SVF 3.431 = LS 65F). The idea that these good feelings are opposites of the emotions highlights that they are not milder versions—since they are rational, they are the opposite of the emotions. It is not obvious why there is no such good or rational counterpart for pain (why, for example, the sage would not have any “good” or “rational feeling” when he considers the viciousness of all those around him who are not wise). On the question whether the good feelings relate to what the sage judges to be good and bad, or to what she judges to be indifferent, cf. Vogt 2004a, 76–79. 23 It is a difficult question how exactly the lekton which is assented to needs to be construed. Cf. Inwood 1985, 45 ff., esp. 55–56 and 60–66.

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context: the action of walking is set off through “saying to oneself ” and approving of one’s opinion that one should walk. The Stoics define emotions as impulses (Stob. 2.88.8). Thus, whatever applies to impulses generally, should apply to the kind of impulse which the emotions are. However, if we follow Seneca’s outline, it seems that the angry acts of retaliation are set off by assent to the impression that one has been unjustly wronged, not by assent to an impression which presents a specific kind of action. Following the account of impulse, we would expect that, in anger, we assent to an hormetic impression, i.e., an impression which describes an action as to be done. But through assent to “I have been unjustly wronged” we do not seem to assent to performing any kind of action. The fragments on the physiological definitions of the emotions give some indication of how the early Stoics thought that emotions propel us into action: desire is said to be an irrational “stretching,” or pursuit of an expected good, and fear an irrational “shrinking,” or avoidance of an expected danger. It seems that the emotion impels us toward a certain direction in action: pursuit or avoidance. This motion into one or the other direction seems to be envisaged as a physical extension towards an object, or a physical shrinking back from it. The corresponding physiological definitions of pleasure and pain say that in pleasure people think it right to be “swollen,” and in pain they think it right to be “contracted” (Andronicus, On Passions 1 = SVF 3.391, part = LS 65B). Thus it seems that in pleasure and pain, we don’t have something like a “direction” into which we are being propelled, so that the emotion would be tied up with some kind of action that fits this direction. Rather, in for example annoyance an agent who thinks it right to be contracted may retreat into grim silence, or in pleasure the agent who thinks it right to be elated may laugh. Retreating into grim silence or laughing seem more like expressions of emotion than actions. However, leaving aside this problem we may say that the fact that assent to an impression sets off a physiological motion explains to some extent how it sets off action (without the agent assenting to, e.g., “it is fitting for me to laugh”). But anger still presents a special case. The link between assent and motion is decidedly easier to understand with respect to other desires. If one assents to the impression that a hot bath would be a great good, one’s motion towards this perceived good seems—even though one has not assented to the hormetic impression which presents a hot bath as to be taken now—closely connected to the impression. But in anger the

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relevant impression does not present us with the future good that we desire and towards which we, physiologically speaking, stretch out; it presents the offense, not the revenge. The problem can be described further if we ask how the agent can storm off into a specific course of action. This difficulty—number (iv) from above—, however, is not specific to anger, but seems to pose itself with respect to all emotions. Suppose I assent to the impression that an approaching tiger will kill me—what generates the action of climbing onto a tree or running to the left or to the right? Similarly, if anger is generated through assent to the impression that I have been unjustly harmed, it is quite unclear how I can either bring charges against the offender or kick him without first assenting to an impression which names either the first or the second of these actions. If the agent does not assent to an hormetic impression, she does not assent to doing either A or B. The theory seems to say that when an emotion is generated we storm away into action on the basis of a judgment like that this approaching tiger will kill me, or that someone has unjustly offended me. If the Stoic theory indeed says that in emotion we storm off into action without having assented to an hormetic impression, then the Stoic theory of the emotions seems to be discontinuous with a very basic tenet of the Stoic theory of action: that there is no action without assent to an impression which presents an action as to be done. Given how firmly this idea is rooted in Stoic ethics, we would rightly be reluctant to call it into question. It would seem decidedly more promising if we found a way of making sense of this discrepancy as a meaningful part of the standard Stoic theory. I now want to turn back to Seneca’s De ira and ask whether he either gives any explanation of these difficulties, or whether he amends them to some extent. We may hope to find some suggestion in Seneca that, while the agent primarily assents to “I have been unjustly harmed,” she also assents in a secondary way to something like “this deed needs to be avenged.” An impression like this would be hormetic, but in a deficient way: it would, in a way analogous to the physiological movement of stretching, indicate a direction; but it would not tell the agent exactly what to do. It would also seem to imply the kind of valuejudgment which we would expect in a desire—that revenge is a good thing. When Seneca sets out to describe the three motus of anger in 2.4.1, he writes that he is going to tell us how the emotions begin or grow or

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get carried away. According to this passage, there is first the involuntary reaction to the perceived offense; Seneca calls this stage a preparation for emotion24 and describes it as a “threat.” The second movement is “voluntary, but not insistent” (cum uoluntate non contumaci). The agent thinks something like “it is right for me to take revenge because I have been harmed” or “it is right for him to be punished because he has committed a crime”; the fact that she thinks in terms of what is right or appropriate (oportet) bears witness to the fact that her will is not “insistent.” The third movement is out of control and has defeated reason; the agent does not want to take revenge only if it is called for (si oportet), but wants revenge no matter what (2.4.1). Movement 2, just as movement 1, envisages an agent who is not angry. The agent who is in the second state is in this state through her will, but her will is not an obstinate or insistent will. She actually can think about things, and she can, just like the agent in state 1, stop short of becoming angry. “Suppose that someone thinks himself harmed and wishes to exact retribution, that something dissuades him and he promptly calms down—this is not called ‘anger,’ since it is a motion of the mind obedient to reason” (2.3.4). Following this account, we are able to describe Seneca’s answer to the first question I raised—(i) whether the Stoics capture the painful side of anger even though it is unqualifiedly classified as a desire. Only agents who storm off into action, and thus present us with cases of the third motion, are angry. As long as an agent has not arrived at such an uncontrolled action, there is no way of saying whether she really is angry, or whether she may still turn around and be able to give in to reason. Thus anger really is the storming off into revenge, and is therefore adequately defined as a desire for revenge. At the same time, the starting-point of anger is a judgment about being wronged, and by naming the indignation which hits us, Seneca arguably does not neglect the painful element of anger. Even though he does not use the term “pain” in his detailed analysis, it seems clear that the indignation is a negative type of experience. Thus Seneca remains true to the Stoic classification which steers clear of mentioning pain or pleasure in the definitions of desire and fear. Nevertheless, his elaboration of the first 24 Throughout his analysis, Seneca goes back and forth between describing movement 1 as a preparation for emotion and as what the virtuous person will have instead of anger. On the propatheia kai ou pathos-idea in different authors compare Graver 1999, 308.

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movement, where we experience indignation as a result of perceiving a wrong done to us, seems to acknowledge the negative experiences of anger. If we infer from Seneca’s analysis of anger how the Stoic classification of the emotions works in general, it would seem that the distinction between four kinds of emotion ultimately focuses on the thesis that emotions are excessive impulses (Stob. 2.88.8), and as impulses are directed at action. This would reaffirm the reasoning I have offered for the classification of annoyance, mental pain, and vexation not as milder forms of anger, but as emotions of a different kind: anger and annoyance are of a different kind because anger pushes us into action towards a perceived good, whereas annoyance pushes us into the kind of expressive action that accompanies contraction. Seneca’s account also helps to clarify the two questions relating to the “anomalies of anger.” While Seneca does not explicitly state what the agent assents to in stage 3, we can infer this from the difference between 2 and 3. In stage 2, the agent thinks things like “it is right for me to take revenge because I have been offended.” In stage 3 she does not think in terms of what is right: she will assent to something like “I have to take revenge because I have been offended.” Thus, it may seem that this passage gives indirect evidence for the thesis that, pace Seneca, anger is not generated by assent to the simple impression “I have been unjustly harmed,” but rather through assent to the more complex impression “I have to take revenge because I have been unjustly harmed.” This reading understands movement 3 as an uncontrolled version of movement 2.25 Seneca seems to give the following picture: an agent who is unjustly offended suffers from the impact of this “attack,” and thus experiences the involuntary first movement. This makes her think about what has just happened, and what kind of reaction is called for. While she thinks about this, the ideas of punishment and revenge figure in her thoughts. Seneca’s outline is compatible with either of two readings: either an impression presenting revenge is somehow in the background of the decisive impression “I have been unjustly harmed,” or “I have been unjustly harmed” is, when cited as the decisive impression, simply shorthand for a more complex impression which also presents revenge. In both cases, Seneca would seem to make an effort to explain how 25 Cf. Inwood 1993, 180 on how stage 3 can be interpreted as an uncontrolled version of 2.

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the agent, by assenting to the impression of a perceived wrong, relates to the future good which we would expect in a desire, and how she is propelled into action. Both “anomalies of anger” would be, to some extent, amended: (ii) the relevant impression(s) would present the future good at which a desire is directed (revenge), and (iii) they would indicate the direction into which assent propels the agent (revenge). Two further passages add to this picture. In 2.1.4 Seneca gives the following outline of what is involved in anger: “To receive an impression of wrong done to one, to lust for retribution, and to connect the two, that the damage ought not to have been done and that punishment must be inflicted.”26 Even though Seneca does not explicitly talk of two impressions and consequently two assents (or assent to a complex impression), it may seem that what is tied together are in some sense two judgments, one stating “I have been unjustly harmed,” the other “there must be retribution.” 2.3.4–5 further affirms this interpretation. In 2.3.4 Seneca states that it is impossible to act for the sake of retribution or punishment without the mind knowing of it. In 2.3.5 he writes: “So the first mental agitation induced by the impression of wrong done is no more anger than the impression itself. The impulse that follows, which not only registers but confirms the impression, is what counts as anger, the agitation of a mind proceeding to retribution on its own will and judgment” (concitatio animi ad ultionem uoluntate et iudicio pergentis). Here it seems that Seneca starts out with the assumption that we assent to an impression of wrong done when we generate anger. He goes on to say that the mind proceeds to retribution on its own will and judgment, not that the mind judges that it should seek retribution; however, he is suggesting that the agent’s quest for retribution is voluntary, and this would seem to imply that she has made a judgment about whether or not to seek retribution. Seneca presents us with an account of anger in which anger arises out of assent to a single impression—that one has been unjustly harmed. But he importantly complements this picture by suggesting that the agent who responds to an offense envisages revenge or punishment, or thinks about it. When she assents to the impression that she has been unjustly harmed, this seems to be closely tied to these 26 Cooper and Procopé translate the latter part of this sentence differently: “to put together the two propositions that the damage ought not to have been done and that punishment ought to be inflicted” (nam speciem capere acceptae iniuriae et ultionem eius concupiscere et utrumque coniungere, nec laedi se debuisse et uindicari debere).

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thoughts. Seneca seems to incorporate the thought about revenge into his account of the process that leads up to anger, while at the same time staying true to the Stoic definitions, according to which anger starts out from a perceived injustice.27 But we are still left with the fourth problem (iv): actions that result from excessive impulse, i.e., that go along with emotions, seem to differ from other actions insofar as we do not assent to impressions which name these actions and present them as to be done. If we extrapolate from Seneca’s account of anger, it might seem that desire and fear are not just, physiologically speaking, “stretchings” and “shrinkings” towards and away from the objects that are judged to be good or bad. There may, additionally, also be thoughts which mirror this physiological movement, like “get it” or “avoid it.” But the impressions we assent to do not name specific courses of action. From the point of view of ethics, actions that accompany emotions differ in a very fundamental way from other actions: they are the kinds of actions that only the fool or inferior agent performs; none of the actions of a virtuous agent springs from an excessive impulse. Once we consider that the actions that arise from excessive impulses are actions of those who generally act badly, we can see how the fact that in these actions the agent has not even assented to an impression which presents the course of action fits into the ethical theory. To set off an action through assent to an impression which doesn’t present us with what we are going to do, but simply propels us into some direction, is, on Stoic premises, clearly unwise. The wise man’s lack of any precipitancy in assenting to impressions might partly be described by saying that he would never assent to an impression which will set off an impulse, while not presenting a specific course of action. Thus, (iv) turns out to be not a problem within the Stoic theory. Rather, it highlights a central tenet of the Stoics: that emotions are irrational, which would only make it plausible that they go along with actions which, too, are irrational. In fear, we do not decide to either climb onto the tree or run to the left or to the right, and that is one way of explaining what is so bad about fear. If we are in fear of the tiger, there is no gap between this fear and an erratic attempt to escape. Flight will not be the result of assent to 27 Further, as Frede 1986, 103–107 has pointed out with respect to early Stoic philosophy, not every feature of an impression will be captured in the lekton that corresponds to it. It is important to note that we assent to an impression, not to a lekton or proposition. See also Inwood 1993, 168.

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an impression which presents a specific action as to be done; rather, we run or climb before we even consider the different options. Similarly, in anger, we shout or hit or call our lawyer not because we have assented to an impression like “I will call my lawyer.” One of the many bad things about anger is that we have already shouted or kicked or made the phone-call before we have given assent to any such impression. If this interpretation is convincing, it contributes to our understanding of how not only the emotions themselves, but also the actions that go along with them are irrational. The actions accompanying an emotion are irrational because the agent has not assented to an impression which presents a specific course of action. Loosely speaking, the agent who assents to the impression which generates an emotion, and thus an excessive impulse, isn’t aware of where exactly this assent will take her.

SENECA AND THE STOIC THEORY OF COGNITION: SOME PRELIMINARY REMARKS

Jula Wildberger

I. Introduction When I began to read Seneca’s philosophical writings continuously and in larger quantities, I often experienced an irritating feeling of dissolution and of fading coherence, a phenomenon which Seneca himself describes: if we read and never write, this reading will “slacken and dissolve” our intellectual strength.1 Another image for this effect of Seneca’s texts is proposed in a recent German dissertation: a scholarly discussion of “the problem of ethical progress in the Epistulae morales” seemed to the author, Matthias Hengelbrock (2000, VII), as impossible as nailing a pudding to a wall. With the aid of two of his pupils he finally found a solution: just keep the pudding in the container you bought it in, and nail the container to the wall. Seneca himself proposes another solution. As Margaret Graver puts it: “To read therapeutically, one must begin oneself to be an author …” (1996, 176). When we practice “therapeutic reading,” we approach a text with a certain belief-structure, with our own ratio, and like the bees Seneca describes in his famous Ep. 84 we integrate what we read into this belief-structure in order to produce something new. Both what we read and our own belief-structure must be changed in the process: the thoughts read must be modified and filtered, so that the fitting parts can be assimilated, and our belief-structure, on the other hand, is altered when new beliefs are integrated. This process is supported and reinforced by writing, because, when we write, we must activate our own belief-structure, if we do not want just to repeat and parrot what we have read. Our minds change when we read therapeutically, and the change shows in our writings.2 1 Sen. Ep. 84.2 nec scribere tantum nec tantum legere debemus: altera res contristabit uires et exhauriet (de stilo dico), altera soluet ac diluet. 2 Cf. the discussion of Ep. 84 by Graver 1996, especially 194–201.

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This advice for the reader who seeks moral edification is also instructive for readers who only wish to improve their understanding of Seneca’s texts. This is so, because Seneca shows us what, in his opinion, constitutes a text and what we should therefore expect in his own texts as well: according to Seneca every text worthwhile, any text not uttered by a parrot-like mind, has as its basis and source a belief-structure. This structure is nothing external to the text, nothing like a container containing a soft, amorphous mass; it is its bones, sinews, and joints (Dial. 4.1.2 ossa neruique et articuli), it is the basic plan of a whole (Ep. 33.5 lineamenta) in which every part supports the others. If we can get hold of this structure, we can get hold of the text. I have taken these two images from Seneca himself, and it is interesting to note that both images are applied to a text written by a Stoic philosopher. In the second comparison, Ep. 33.5, no certain individual is referred to; the first comparison is applied to Seneca’s own work De ira, where Seneca—as in other texts—explicitly calls “himself,” the “I” of the text, a Stoic. This “self ”-description has, however, often been called into question, precisely because Seneca’s texts often seem to lack a firm and graspable philosophical structure. This is so, I believe, mainly because of three reasons. Firstly: the structure in question, if there is any, is the belief-structure of the author3 and, therefore, prior to the text. It is not identical with the structure of the text itself. Secondly: by calling “himself ” a Stoic, Seneca tells us that we should expect a Stoic belief-structure in his texts. But large parts of the Stoic philosophical system which were easily accessible to Seneca’s readers are lost to us. It may happen that we do not recognize a text shaped by Stoic beliefs as such, because these beliefs are unknown to us. Thirdly: Seneca does not imply that “he” is going just to repeat what he has learned. On the contrary, he makes it very clear that “he” has something of his own to say. “He” may agree, “he” may accept part of what other Stoics say and reject the rest, or “he” may disagree completely. And such disagreement may not always be made 3 This author must be the person who actually wrote the text, not an implicit author, at least if we wish to avoid an infinite series of authors with a certain beliefstructure who write other authors who also have a certain, possibly different, beliefstructure.—But a belief-structure (e.g., the “Stoic system”) can also subsist at a larger discourse, which would mean for a Stoic: at utterances, written texts, actions, and minds of different human beings living at different times and places who, however, all consent in some sort of “harmony” (cf. Ep. 84.9–10 and, e.g., Ep. 29.11).

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explicit, although it often is. Like the ideal reader-writer in Ep. 84.8– 10, Seneca may shape something new out of sources which we do not recognize. In this paper, I wish to try a new approach to the question raised by Graver, Hengelbrock, and others4 how, according to Seneca, a philosophical text may contribute to make a person wiser and better. Taking as my starting point the belief-structures of Stoic epistemology, I shall point out a basic problem of any kind of Stoic philosophical writing and propose some ideas about how Seneca may have dealt with this problem in the Epistulae morales, because I hope that my observations might offer a basis for further and more detailed research. My question is: What is the pragmatic function of a text in the light of Stoic epistemology? Can a text generate the special kind of cognition which, according to the Stoics, is the origin of wisdom? And if it can not, what else could be its function?

II. The Problem: Can Reading Lead to Grasping? II.1. The Importance of Cognition in Stoic Ethics In order to become a wiser and better person, a Stoic must acquire knowledge. He5 must be able to discern infallibly what is true and what is false and to accept only what is true. The Stoic wise man needs this ability not only to be wise, but also to be a morally perfect person, because all actions (πρξεις) and all passions (πη), which are a subclass of actions, are the result of a decision (κρσις) about the truth value of a proposition. As Seneca puts it: A rational animal only acts, [i] if it has first been stimulated by an impression (species = φαντασα) of something, [ii] if it then has generated an impulse (impetus = ρμ), and [iii] if then assent (assensio = συγκατεσις) has confirmed this impulse.

Seneca also explains what assent is:

4 E.g., Bellincioni 1978 and 1979, Hachmann 1995, Hadot 1969, and Trillitzsch 1962. See also John Cooper’s paper in this book. 5 Although a woman could theoretically be wise, the Stoics and Seneca describe the wise person as a male, and I do not wish to gloss over this fact.

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jula wildberger It is fitting for me (oportet me = κακει μοι?6) to walk. Only then do I finally walk, when I have said this to myself and have approved of this idea of mine.7

Before acting, a person has an impulse-generating rational impression, a φαντασα ρμητικ τε κα λογικ; at this impression, which is a corporeal structure in the mind, subsists an incorporeal sayable (λεκτν), a proposition ("ξωμα), which is either true or false. Assent is withheld or given to this proposition, and every assent to an impulse-generating impression is a (confirmed) impulse.8 Thus, according to the Stoics, every action is a belief about the truth of a proposition. This is the reason why knowledge is necessary not only to be wise, but also to be good, why many Stoic virtues are bodies of knowledge,9 and why every passion is an epistemic error: a passion occurs whenever a person wrongly assents to two propositions, namely (i) that something (very) good or bad is present (or impending) and (ii) that it is fitting for oneself to become agitated about this state of affairs right now.10 Cf. Muson. fr. 31 = Stob. 4.252.11–14; Sen. Dial. 4.4.1. Sen. Ep. 113.18 = SVF 3.169 omne rationale animal nihil agit, nisi primum specie alicuius rei irritatum est, deinde impetum cepit, deinde assensio confirmauit hunc impetum. quid sit assensio dicam. oportet me ambulare: tunc demum ambulo, cum hoc mihi dixi et approbaui hanc opinionem meam; oportet me sedere: tunc demum sedeo. An excellent discussion of this passage is Stevens 2000. See also Diog. Laert. 7.49 = SVF 2.52 = LS 30D. In the translation I have glossed over a problem contained in the word opinionem: Seneca cannot mean δξα, because δξα requires that assent has already been given (see II.2).—On Stoic theories of action and of the passions see also, e.g., Annas 1992, Brennan 1996, 1998, 2000, 2003, and 2005, Gill 2005, Graver 2002, Inwood 1985, Price 2005, Sorabji 2000, Strange 2004, Tieleman 2003, and Katja Vogt’s paper in this book with further references. 8 Cf. Ar. Did. apud Stob. 2.88.2–6 = SVF 3.171 = LS 33I; Inwood 1985, 56–61. 9 E.g., Ar. Did. apud Stob. 2.59.4–60.2 = SVF 3.262 = LS 61H1–5. 10 For the second opinion, without which there would be no impulse, see, e.g., Cic. Tusc. 3.61 and Graver’s 2002 commentary (110–111) with further references.— Accordingly, Seneca distinguishes in De ira two opinions: (i) the opinion that we have been wronged (Dial. 4.22.2) and (ii) the opinion that we did not deserve this (Dial. 4.31.1 duo sunt, ut dixi, quae iracundiam concitant: primum, si iniuriam uidemur accepisse … deinde si inique accepisse). It is remarkable that there is no reference to any psychic movement in Dial. 4.22, where Seneca introduces the first opinion, while in the second passage (4.31) expressions like concitant, commouent (31.2), and mouent (31.3) occur. The distinction is also to be found at the beginning of this book: a person has a rational perception [sc. of a wrong having been done, i.e., he or she has opinion (i) or the impression leading to this opinion], the person then resents what he or she has perceived [impulse-generating impression which, if assented to, might lead to opinion (ii)], the person assents to the impressions and acts accordingly: Dial. 4.1.4 nam speciem capere acceptae iniuriae et ultionem eius concupiscere et utrumque coniungere, nec laedi se debuisse et uindicari debere, non est eius impetus qui sine uoluntate nostra concitatur: intellexit aliquid [opinion (i)], indignatus est [opinion (ii)], 6 7

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Being a good person, being virtuous and enjoying "πεια, then, means to a Stoic: to have the right sort of knowledge and never to err in one’s judgments. II.2. Opinions, Grasping and Knowledge According to Stoic epistemology, the perfect human being, a wise man, does not have opinions (δξαι) but only either thoughts (νοσεις), i.e., rational impressions (φαντασαι λογικα) which he entertains without assenting to them, or knowledge ( πιστμη) which is always true and cannot be lost by way of argument or persuasion. This is so, because the wise man does not assent to every thought which may occur to him, not even if this thought is true, but only to a special kind of impression, the so-called “grasping impression” (φαντασα καταληπτικ).11 As Arius Didymus tells us in his Handbook of Stoic Ethics12: Knowledge is a grasping (κατληψις) which is secure and unchangeable by reason ("μετπτωτον $π% λγου). It is secondly a system of such knowledges ( πιστ&μαι), like the rational knowledge of particulars (' κατ( μρος λογικ [sc. πιστμη]) which exists in the perfect man. … They say that the wise man never makes a false supposition, and that he does not assent at all to anything which cannot be grasped ("καταλπτ)ω), owing to his not opining …

Normal people do not have knowledge, because they assent to nongrasping impressions; such an assent is called “weak assent” and “opinion,” as Sextus Empiricus reports13 The Stoics say that there are three things which are linked together: knowledge, opinion and grasping stationed between them. Knowledge is grasping which is secure and firm and unchangeable through persuasion by meaningful language utterance ("μετπειστος $π% λγου). Opinion is weak and false assent. Grasping in between these is assent belonging to damnauit [assent], ulciscitur [action]. See also Stevens 2000, 156–159 and, for a different reading of this passage, Katja Vogt’s paper in this book. 11 Frede 1999a (see also Frede 1983), Long and Sedley 1987, and Reed 2002 call it “cognitive”; Hankinson 2003 transliterates the term (see 60 n. 30). On Stoic epistemology see also Annas 1990 and Striker 1974, and, e.g., Brittain 2002. Sources are collected in Long and Sedley (“LS”) 1987, Ch.s 39–41, and in Hülser 1987–1988, nos. 248–515. 12 Ar. Did. apud Stob. 2.73.19–23 = SVF 3.112 = LS 41H1–2 and 111.18–20 = SVF 3.548 = LS 41G1; translations by LS, slightly altered. 13 Sext. Emp. Math. 7.151–152 = SVF 2.90 = LS 41C1–5; translations by LS, slightly altered. The intricacies of weak assent are discussed by Görler 1977 and Arthur 1983.

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jula wildberger a grasping impression … Of these they say that knowledge is found only in the wise and opinion only in the inferior, but grasping is common to them both …

Although they have no knowledge, normal people can have grasping impressions. And it is most important that they have this faculty. Without it, intellectual and moral progress would be impossible. We nonwise human beings could never hope to attain a wise man’s state of bliss and perfection, if we had no grasping impressions. For if we want to become a wiser and better person we must stop having opinions and start assenting to grasping impressions only.14 II.3. Grasping and Written Instruction But how can we distinguish whether we grasp something or just have an opinion? In fact, this ought to be rather easy. For a grasping impression is, roughly speaking, an impression which is evidently true and which cannot be wrong. As an unknown Stoic puts it: a grasping impression “all but seizes us by the hair and pulls us to assent, needing nothing else to achieve this effect or to establish its difference from other impressions.”15 The Stoics, probably already Zeno himself, define the grasping impression as an impression [a] which [comes about] from what is ("π% $πρχοντος), [b] which is impressed in and stamped into in accordance with exactly what is (κατ’ ατ% τ% $πρχον), and [c] which is of such a kind as could not come about from what is not.16

There is an ongoing debate on the exact meaning of this definition, which cannot be treated in every detail in this context. Some remarks must suffice: the most important controversial point is the nature of “what is” (τ% $πρχον). Some scholars understand the term as denoting an existent object. With Michael Frede (1999a) I prefer a reading according to which “what is” is a sayable: either a true proposition or a predicate (κατηγρημα) actually belonging to an existent body or sev14 Brennan 1996 and Stevens 2000 prove that there are grasping impulse-generating impressions, according to the Stoics. 15 Sext. Emp. Math. 7.257 = LS 40K3 (translation by LS). 16 Sext. Emp. Math. 8.248 = SVF 2.65 = LS 40E3 ' "π% $πρχοντος κα κατ’

ατ% τ% $πρχον ναπομεμαγμνη κα ναπεσφραγισμνη, ποα οκ +ν γνοιτο "π% μ$πρχοντος. In this passage (246–252) Sextus gives us the most detailed account of this

difficult definition.

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eral bodies in the world, because the term $πρχον is used to denote these two entities in other Stoic contexts as well. Another reason why I prefer this reading is that it would be difficult to make sense of the third clause of the definition if we understood $πρχον as denoting an existing object: How could something ever come about from something which does not exist? The clause would be true of every impression, because nothing can come about from totally inexistent things. For a Stoic, only bodies (σ.ματα) are existent in the proper sense of the word, only bodies are /ντα; either there is a body and it exists and can be causally effective, or there is nothing at all. Sayables, on the other hand, belong to the class of incorporeals ("σ.ματα) which do not exist, but subsist ($φστασαι) at bodies; and they subsist even if they are not “what is.” Μ- $πρχοντα, like a proposition which is not true of any body in the world or a predicate which does not belong to such a body, can nevertheless subsist, e.g., at false language utterances or thoughts of human beings. It is also important to note that, if $πρχον is a sayable belonging to a body, the definition does not require that grasping impressions have a certain causal history. For only bodies can be causes, whereas sayables which are $πρχοντα are effects caused by bodies at bodies. What is required is, firstly, that the cognitive impression has come about in virtue of the fact that at some body or bodies in the cosmos there subsists a true proposition (or a belonging predicate—which amounts to the same, because then this predicate can be truthfully predicated of the body it belongs to and the corresponding proposition subsists at this body). And, secondly, this true proposition must correspond to the proposition subsisting at the impression itself (see II.1). But how this correspondence comes about is not part of the definition. If, e.g., I have the impression “There is a green book on the table,” I may see it directly with my own eyes, I may see it on a monitor by way of a camera scanning the room, I may use an instrument in order to find out whether the light reflected by the object in question has the characteristic spectrum we use to call “green,” I may touch the table and the book, I may open the book, I may call an expert and ask her whether she believes this object to be a book, etc. A certain causal history may, however, be implied by the third clause of the definition. How can an impression be of such a kind as could not come about from what is not? Must I not have direct empirical contact with the book? What, if I ask an expert? How can I ever be sure she does not lie to me, and how can I know whether she

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knows, especially if she is no wise person and as ignorant as I myself and all other normal people? How can verbal instruction by a Stoic philosopher (who admittedly is no wise man)17 ever lead to grasping and so to intellectual and moral progress? How, if at all, can words be the source of grasping impressions? And what is the use of words, if they do not lead to grasping, but only to opinions, which may be wrong and easily lost again? II.4. Did Seneca Care about this Problem? Surprisingly, Seneca seems not to have cared about this problem. Or did he? Although, in his Epistulae morales, he discusses methodological questions (like when, where, how, by which means, with whom etc. to study and practice philosophy) on such a scale that one might call the Epistulae Seneca’s Organon, I could not find in them any definite reference to the concept of grasping. There are, of course, expressions for the perception of something evident (e.g., liquet alicui), and we find words like comprehendere, comprehensio and apprehendere which Cicero used to translate the Stoic terms. But Seneca does not discuss or allude to the definition of grasping, and it is possible that he just uses ordinary language.18 There are, however, good reasons to believe that Seneca knew the concept of grasping: first of all, it was basic handbook-knowledge to be found in any introduction to Stoic philosophy. This is demonstrated by Brouwer 2002. In Ben. 4.33.2 Seneca mentions a certissima rerum comprehensio which cannot lead us in acting, where we have to go by ueri similitudo. In this context Seneca discusses the concept of ε1λογος "πολογα by which a κα&κον is defined (cf. Ar. Did. apud Stob. 2.85.13–21 = SVF 3.494 = LS 59B) and which leads to an action with reservation ($πεξαρεσις, discussed in Ben. 4.33–39; cf. also Dial. 9.13.2–14.1; Inwood 1985, 119–126, 160, 165–175, 210–251; Brennan 2000. I have not yet seen Jacques Brunschwig, “Sur deux notions de l’éthique stoïcienne: De la ‘reserve’ au ‘renversement,’” in Les stoïciens, ed. G. Romeyer Dherbey and J.-B. Gourinat, Paris, forthcoming. On the meaning of ε1λογος and its epistemic consequences see also Brennan 1996).—The impresson discussed by Seneca concerns the future results of our action, not the question whether we should act at all. The wise man, in these cases, has no grasping impression of the type “If I act in this way, the result r will be achieved,” but he must, nevertheless, have the grasping impression “It is fitting for me to act in this way,” because the wise man is determined to act correctly and must be sure whether it is correct to act in this way, whereas he is not determined always to achieve the result he aimed at with his action and, accordingly, does not need to grasp what the result of his action will be (e.g., Ep. 85.32 huic enim propositum est in uita agenda non utique quod temptat efficere, sed omnia recte facere; Ep. 14.16). 17 18

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Secondly, Cicero, whom Seneca certainly had read, discusses it in his Academica, because the concept of grasping was central to the critique raised by Academic skeptics against Stoic “dogmatism.” Furthermore, Seneca mentions or implies other terms and concepts of the theory sketched above: he distinguishes between opinion and knowledge as well as between weak and strong assent, and in descriptions of a perfect mind mention is made of the coherent body of knowledge such a mind must have.19 In Ep. 88.43–46, Seneca criticizes philosophers who show a strong interest in skeptic epistemology and skepticism and rejects their studies as being a hostile attack on truth. Whereas other philosophers, who study “useless” liberal arts, simply do not promote knowledge, skeptics actually prevent it and harm their students’ natural faculty to perceive what is true. They aggressively deprive me of any hope to acquire knowledge at all. … The others do not light the way, so that the vision may be directed to what is true, these men gouge out my eyes.20

We may, therefore, assume that although Seneca did not explicitly discuss it, he was acquainted with the concept of grasping and its role in Stoic epistemology, and that he did not want to take up a serious debate with the skeptic critics of this concept, because he thought the possibility of certain perception was either evident and, therefore, did not require any proof by further evidence (cf. Ep. 88.46) or at least a necessary precondition for doing philosophy at all. Without hope to attain knowledge, why should we practice what is defined as the striving for “knowledge of the divine and the human” (cf. Ep. 89.4–5)? III. How Can Philosophical Reading Be Epistemologically Profitable? According to Seneca, it is the job of a philosopher to “light the way” and to “direct the vision of others to what is true” (Ep. 88.45). From the tenets of Stoic epistemology it follows that a philosophical text which performs this function must have the effect that its readers grasp more than they grasped before reading this text, since knowledge and wisdom are acquired by way of grasping. I shall now investigate whether Seneca 19 On the concept of πιστμη (scientia) see, e.g., Ep. 31.6 and 8; 50.8; 66.6; 71.27–28; 76.19; 92.3; 95.57; 115.18. 20 Ep. 88.43 audi quantum mali faciat nimia subtilitas et quam infesta ueritati sit. 45 … hi

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says anything about such a function of his texts and whether he actually does something in the Epistulae morales which might have the effect described. III.1. Can Written Texts Generate Grasping Impressions? Tokens of written or spoken words are bodies (e.g., a layer of ink or air in motion) at which sayables subsist. At the written words “On 27 September 2004 the author of this text had eggs for lunch” subsists a proposition which may be true (a $πρχον) or false (a μ- $πρχον), e.g., if I had something else for lunch or no lunch at all or if this text had not one but three authors or was generated by a computer. But how can you know? Obviously, if you formed an impression that I had eggs for lunch that day when reading this paragraph, this impression was not grasping. And this seems to be true of most impressions we form when reading or hearing a text. What, however, if you read a sentence like: “Either a person is eating an egg at this very moment, or not: the aforementioned person is eating an egg at this very moment”? The impression you have when reading this sentence might, in fact, be of such a kind as could not come about from a false proposition. The Stoics seem not to have had a concept of analytic in contrast to synthetic truth, but they seem to have had an intuition that there is something like logical evidence.21 They acknowledged five “indemonstrable” syllogisms and certain rules for valid arguments, and in Diogenes Laërtius we read that, in addition to sensory grasping, there is grasping by means of reason (λγος) and that this kind of grasping is of “what is reached through demonstration.”22 The context, in which λγος is opposed to α2σησις, the faculty of sensory perception, shows that λγος must here mean the faculty of rational perception which makes human beings rational animals. The demonstration, however, by which something is rationally grasped, requires another kind of λγος as well: meaningful language, either in the form of internal λγος νδιετος, the thoughts of a rational animal,23 or in spem omnis scientiae mihi eripiunt. … illi [other philosophers who are criticized in § 42] non praeferunt lumen per quod acies derigatur ad uerum, hi oculos mihi effodiunt. 21 Bobzien 1996, 192. 22 Diog. Laert. 7.52 = SVF 2.84 = LS40P ' δ κατληψις … λγ)ω δ τ3ν δι’ "ποδεξεως συναγομνων … 23 Sources for Stoic λγος νδιετος are collected in Hülser 1987–1988, nos. 528– 535.

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the form of external λγος προφορικς which consists of written or spoken language utterances. So, if a $πρχον is a true proposition, not an existing, physical body (see II.3), it is reasonable to assume that, according to the Stoics, conclusions of valid arguments can be grasped on the basis of verbal instruction—if the premises of the argument have been grasped before, a fact which might often be difficult to assess for the author, who does not know his reader personally.24 Seneca, at least, seems not to have relied extensively on this method to generate grasping impressions in his readers. Arguments which are valid according to the strict standards of Stoic syllogistic are rare in his oeuvre, and he never discusses the formal validity of syllogisms. More than once, he advises Lucilius not to devote too much attention to the study of syllogistic and dialectic and states his conviction that syllogisms, by themselves, do not further and might even hinder moral progress.25 One reason why Seneca shows himself so impatient with dialecticians and skeptics is, I believe, quite simple: for him, it seems, the basic problem is neither to have a grasping impression, whether by way of sensation or by rational perception of a demonstration, nor how exactly to define this impression nor how to be sure whether one has one— this ought to be evident to the person who has the impression, if there is any such impression at all. For Seneca, the real problems occur not while we assent to a grasping impression but before and after assent. What the philosopher really should be concerned about is the obstacles which hinder us from grasping what ought to be evident to us (III.2) and the reasons why we do not retain what we have already grasped, why our assent to grasping impressions is so weak (III.3). III.2. How Texts Make the Reader Grasp Something Even if texts could not generate grasping impressions by themselves, verbal instruction could still help the reader to experience grasping impressions outside the text in question.

24

A valid argument must contain true propositions only. Cf. Ep. 45, 48, 49, 111 on paradoxes and sophisms, 82, 83, 85, 87 on the value of syllogistic arguments in ethics, and 102, 106, 109, 113, 117 on dialectical problems and arguments in ethics (102.4 moralibus rationalia immixta). I discuss Seneca’s critique in more detail elsewhere: Wildberger (forthcoming), chapter 2.4.3. See also Tilg 2003 and John Cooper’s paper in this book. 25

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III.2.a. Blinding False Beliefs According to Sextus Empiricus, “later Stoics” added a new element to the definition of the grasping impression: a grasping impression must be without “obstacle,” because such an 4νστημα prevents assent. Obstacles of this kind are false opinions which are contrary to what is perceived, e.g., the opinion that the dead never return from Hades, which prevented Admetus from grasping that he was actually seeing Alcestis, as, in fact, he did.26 Even without this addition to the theory it is clear that false beliefs may hinder grasping and that texts can remove such obstacles, e.g., by syllogistic arguments or by pointing out what is evident to the reader and has already been grasped. To remove the obstacles which hinder the sight of the mind is, according to Aristo, whom Seneca cites, the first function of theoretical instruction, of the decreta of philosophy (Sen. Ep. 94.5 = SVF 1.359); the obstacles to be removed are opiniones falsae (Ep. 94.6, 36), and Seneca regards their removal as a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for dispectus rerum agendarum (94.36), i.e., for a sufficiently subtle and differentiated perception of what is fitting for oneself to do.27 In Ep. 17, for example, Lucilius has grasped the basic fact that philosophy is very useful, but not the details of its eminent usefulness28; Lucilius is hindered from grasping that it is right now fitting for him to retreat from office and to devote himself to philosophy by the false opinion that it is fitting for him to concern himself with his financial affairs right now. The rest of the letter is dedicated to the task of demonstrating to Lucilius that the second opinion is, indeed, false. III.2.b. Exhortation as a Cause of Grasping Another easy means to help readers grasp what is true is quite simple and frequently applied by Seneca. Often we do not grasp what is true, just because we omit to perform the necessary acts of perception. Accordingly, Seneca asks Lucilius, the exemplary reader, to pay more attention to a matter, to take a closer look at something, to see what Sext. Emp. Math. 7.253–257; partly in LS 40K1–3. Cf. also 94.5 ad officiorum dispiciendum ordinem. Subtlety of perception is discussed below (IV.2.b). 28 Ep. 17.2 … et summam quidem rei peruides, quantum philosophia prosit, partes autem nondum satis subtiliter dispicis … The reinforcing prefix in peruides may indicate grasping. 26 27

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other people are doing, to observe himself as well, to experience things on his own instead of just believing what others say or even to try out something in order to find out what it feels like, as, e.g., in Ep. 18, where Seneca advises Lucilius to live like a poor man for several days to see whether poverty is something to be afraid of.29 It is obvious that Seneca does not content himself with the theoretical exposition of a subject; he also gives praecepta, directions how to act. And it is very important to see what exactly this means: it means that Seneca causes impulse-generating impressions in his readers, impressions which are meant not only to inform his readers about some fact, but to set them in motion. This in turn means that readers must realize that what is said is not just some universal truth, but concerns themselves as well. An impulse-generating impression is an impression of something which is fitting for oneself at this very moment,30 an impression that it is fitting to move oneself in a certain way right now. It is not enough theoretically to know what is good and what is bad for human beings in general; in order to act, I must also believe that is fitting for me and that I should do it now. This is one reason why Seneca, as he often does,31 urges us to hurry up, to hesitate no longer, to start right now. And this is what Seneca seems to have in mind when he says to Lucilius, as, e.g., in Ep. 16.3, that philosophy is no idle pursuit of words but a thing of life and death which should direct all of Lucilius’ actions, or when Seneca criticizes people who never dare to do what they have been learning for such a long time (Ep. 33.8). This type of person is criticized again in Ep. 108, where Seneca shows in more detail how we can read or listen to texts with more benefit. It is important to realize (a) that it is me the text is speaking about,

29 See also, e.g., Ep. 1.1 et si uolueris attendere; 20.1–3; 22.10; 24.2 and 12–14; 50.3–4; 59.14; 76.27–29; 83.1–2; 98.4 siue alios obseruare uolueris (liberius enim inter aliena iudicium est) siue te ipsum fauore seposito, et senties hoc et confiteberis …; 99.7 respice celeritatem rapidissimi temporis, cogita breuitatem huius spatii per quod citatissimi currimus, obserua hunc comitatum generis humani eodem tendentis …; 99.10 propone temporis profundi uastitatem et uniuersum complectere, deinde hoc quod aetatem uocamus humanam compara immenso: uidebis quam exiguum sit quod optamus, quod extendimus …; 99.13 aspice illos iuuenes …: plus timeri quam sperari potuisse manifestum erit; 110.3–12 (esp. 110.6 tanti putemus oculos intendere: iam apparebit …; 110.11 quid ergo nunc te hortor ut facias? nihil noui—nec enim nouis malis remedia quaeruntur—sed hoc primum, ut tecum ipse dispicias …); 114.2–7; 119.8.—Many of these passages also concern praemeditatio futurorum malorum (on which see III.3.b). 30 Ar. Did. apud Stob. 2.86.17–18 = SVF 3.169 = LS 53Q1 τ% δ κινον τ-ν ρμ-ν οδν 5τερον ε6ναι λγουσιν "λλ’ 7 φαντασαν ρμητικ-ν το κακοντος ατεν … 31 E.g., in Ep. 1; 4.1; 32.3; 35.4; 76.5; 101.10.

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(b) that I must start to move, and (c) that I must do it now. Seneca illustrates this by reading Virgilian verses philosophically (108.24–27): Virgil’s general descriptive sentences are explained—you have to understand what you read (decreta)—and turned into directive expressions directed at the first person plural (praecepta). Virgil says “Time speeds away without repair”; the philosopher reads “We must be vigilant; if we do not speed up we will be left behind …” So, on the one hand, Seneca shows his readers how to have impulse-generating impressions when reading other authors’ texts; and, on the other hand, he himself already combines descriptive and directive expressions which are addressed to a first or second person. A purely theoretical instruction would not change the reader’s life, which consists of actions (Ep. 95.4); and if readers do not change their life, they cannot observe themselves acting in a better, more consistent way, which is exactly the experience needed in order to acquire a clearer concept of what is good for oneself and, thus, practical wisdom. If we did not act and do what is fitting for us to do, we could never grasp what it means for us to act in such a way.32 There is, of course, the danger that the reader is set in motion in the wrong direction—we must not forget that the philosopher is no wise man. This danger can, however, be reduced if the philosopher moves his readers towards what he himself by his own experience has grasped as being good and useful for himself (e.g., Ep. 8.2; 27.1). It is reasonable, therefore, that Seneca demands that a teacher of philosophy really believes, that is: grasps, what he says.33 Furthermore, the most frequent and most important object of motivation in Seneca’s Letters is to motivate readers to do philosophy; in other words: Seneca asks them to have cognitions for themselves and to find out by their own observation what is good and useful for them.

32 This is the process of ο8κεωσις to oneself as a rational animal as described, e.g., in Cic. Fin. 3.20–22 = LS 59D2–6. I believe that, at least for Seneca, this process continues as long as a person is not yet perfectly rational: cf., e.g., Sen. Ben. 5.14.4 uos ad speciem ueri componite animum et, dum honestum discitis, quicquid est in quo nomen honesti iactatur, id colite. See also Inwood 1995a. 33 See, e.g., Ep. 75.1–5 and 100.11, where Seneca also implies that readers can recognize whether a speaker means what he says.

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III.3. The Problem of Weak Assent III.3.a. Weakening Assent Stoic assent is no punctual act of accepting, it is a continuous effort. Assent means to accept an impression, which is a corporeal change of one’s corporeal mind, as corresponding to the facts of the world and to hold it there, fixed in the mind. If assent is weak, the ‘grip’ of the mind by which it holds what it has assented to is not firm enough to retain the impression for a long time. This problem is enhanced when assent is given to an impulse-generating impression: then, additional strength is needed to keep up the movement of the mind, the impulse, until the action is completed. As shown in III.2.b, it is the task of the philosopher to set his readers in motion34: But as virtues once received [in the mind] cannot leave again and are easily kept, so it is most difficult to begin making progress towards them, because it is typical of the weak and sick mind to be afraid of what it has not yet experienced: therefore it must be forced to begin.

As I wish to show now, it is also the task of the philosopher to keep his readers going, after they have begun their philosophical progress. In Ep. 16.1, for example, Lucilius has already grasped (liquere hoc tibi) that it is fitting for him to do philosophy and has even experienced what a relief philosophy is. However, Lucilius’ assent is weak and there is constant need to urge him on. The action has not yet reached the proposed aim: to turn Lucilius’ mind into the perfect bona mens of a wise man, whose knowledge and virtues “cannot leave again.” As yet, it is necessary to make firmer (firmandum) and fix more deeply (altius figendum) his correct but weak assent (bona uoluntas) to the true impulse-generating impression “It is fitting for me to do philosophy right now.”35 34 Ep. 50.9 sed quemadmodum uirtutes receptae exire non possunt facilisque earum tutela est, ita initium ad illas eundi arduum, quia hoc proprium inbecillae mentis atque aegrae est, formidare inexperta; itaque cogenda est ut incipiat. 35 Ep. 16.1 liquere hoc tibi, Lucili, scio, neminem posse beate uiuere, ne tolerabiliter quidem, sine sapientiae studio, et beatam uitam perfecta sapientia effici, ceterum tolerabilem etiam inchoata. sed hoc quod liquet firmandum et altius cotidiana meditatione figendum est: plus operis est in eo ut proposita custodias quam ut honesta proponas. perseuerandum est et assiduo studio robur addendum, donec bona mens sit quod bona uoluntas est. See also, e.g., Ep. 1.1, 2, and 5; 4.1; 5.1; 13.1; 19.1; 20.1; 35.1; 41.1; 76.5; 82.1. Lucilius is advised to do the same thing for his own friend (36.1). Inuicem hortari is one of the things friends can do for each other (34.2): ego cum uidissem indolem

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If I happen to have grasped that it is fitting for me to do philosophy right now and have, accordingly, begun reading the Epistulae morales, Seneca will constantly tell me: “Ita fac”. The text which tells me that it is fitting for me to do philosophy causes an impulse-generating impression similar to my own first impression which made me start reading this book. If I assent and retain this new moving corporeal structure—at least for a while—it will reinforce the movement of the older corporeal structure(s) already present in my mind and thus help me to proceed further. Weak impulses are a kind of weak memories: the mind slackens until the moving structure in it fades and is lost without trace. Therefore, we need verbal “admonition” which “turns the attention to [what is fitting for us], arouses [the impulse-movement], and raises the coherence of the memory,” which is a permanently retained impression, “so that it cannot glide out [of the mind].”36 The movement will, of course, last longer, the memory will be retained for a longer time, if the impression which caused it was very strong. This may be one reason why Seneca criticizes ethical instruction by syllogisms as ineffective. In addition to the fact that uttering syllogisms often does not cause impulse-generating impressions at all, because they normally do not contain directive expressions (see III.2.b), instruction of this kind generally is “slippery because of its subtlety” and, therefore, quickly forgotten. Non-wise readers must be pushed on with blunt but strong language utterances.37

tuam, inieci manum, exhortatus sum, addidi stimulos nec lente ire passus sum, sed subinde incitaui; et nunc idem facio, sed iam currentem hortor et inuicem hortantem. 36 Ep. 94.25 non docet admonitio, sed aduertit, sed excitat, sed memoriam continet nec patitur elabi.—For the Stoic definition of a memory as μνιμος κα σχετικ- τ9πωσις see Plut. Comm. not. 1085a = SVF 2.847 = LS 39F. 37 Ben. 3.5.1 quemadmodum, mi Liberalis, quaedam res semel perceptae haerent, quaedam, ut scias, non est satis didicisse (intercidit enim eorum scientia, nisi continuetur), geometriam dico et sublimium cursum et si qua alia propter subtilitatem lubrica sunt … On the nimia subtilitas of syllogistic arguments see, e.g., Ep. 82.24; 85.1; 65.16.—It remains to be shown what exactly the term “subtle” refers to in this context. I would suggest that it has something to do with the subtlety of the concepts used (see IV.2.b); an impression would, accordingly, be subtle, if it is formed with very specialized, maybe even physically very small concepts, so that the impression activates only few structures within the mind.

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III.3.b. Assent out of Weakness Weak assent is weak because what is assented to is not firmly retained in the ‘grip’ of the mind, but also because the mind is so weak that it can easily be moved and changed. The coherent, strong mind of the wise man can only be moved in the right way and measure: only grasping impressions set it in motion, and these, being true, never contradict a prior grasping impression; the weak, incoherent mind, on the other hand, is moved by grasping impressions as well as by non-grasping, but “convincing impressions” (φαντασαι πιανα). And this second type of weakness is a further reason for the weak ‘grip’ of the imperfect mind on what it has grasped. The Stoics distinguish between grasping and convincing impressions; an impression may not be grasping but convincing, and thus may cause a “smooth movement” in the mind although it is false.38 This difference between convincing and grasping impressions seems to have been regarded as one of the two basic reasons why human beings do not develop properly, but start to assent to erroneous impressions and to want what is not fitting for them. This διαστροφ of the adolescent mind was explained by “the things being convincing” (πιαντης τ3ν πραγμτων) and by “the voices of the many sounding all around us” (κατχησις τ3ν πολλ3ν "νρ.πων/τ3ν συνντων).39 But a false convincing impression may not only cause a new nongrasping assent, it may also loosen the ‘grip’ of the mind on something already grasped by causing a contrary movement to the movement 38 Sext. Emp. Math. 7.242–243 = SVF 2.65 = LS 39G1–6. See also the commentary on LS 40G. There are also true convincing impressions. 39 Sources are collected in SVF 3.228–236; e.g., Diog. Laert. 7.89 and Gal. P.H.P. 5.5.14 = SVF 3.229a (cf. LS 65M).—A different distinction is given by Seneca in Ep. 94.13: we are either already corrupted or easily to be corrupted (duo sunt propter quae delinquimus: aut inest animo prauis opinionibus malitia contracta aut, etiam si non est falsis occupatus, ad falsa procliuis est et cito specie quo non oportet trahente corrumpitur). The second reason, however, corresponds to the first reason given above: that we are corrupted, if things are convincing to us and if we assent to false convincing impressions all too quickly (cito specie quo non oportet trahente).—Seneca also uses the verb impellere to denote a convincing impulse-generating impression (e.g., Ep. 13.13; 52.1 quid est hoc, Lucili, quod nos alio tendentes alio trahit et eo unde recedere cupimus inpellit?).—Both reasons appear in Dial. 12.5.6 (κατχησις) and 12.6.1 (πιαντης: quos prima rerum species, utcumque credita est, aufert).—Ep. 82.15–16, a very instructive passage, concerns the nature of convincing impressions of "διφορα; cf. also Ep. 118.8–9.—In Ep. 87.33 Seneca (discussing an argument of Posidonius = fr. 170 Edelstein and Kidd) uses the expression species ueri similis ac plerisque credibilis.

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caused before by the grasping impression, as in Ep. 17, where Lucilius has grasped that it is fitting for him to do philosophy, but has now the convincing impression that it is fitting for him to care for his financial affairs. In addition to reinforcing the right impulses caused by grasping impressions, the philosopher has to prevent his readers from assenting to false convincing impressions contrary to what has been grasped. One important means to do that is the so-called praemeditatio futurorum malorum.40 Certain objects of perception, e.g., a dying friend, a heap of diamonds, a torturer showing his instruments, are liable to cause in the weak mind strong convincing but false impulse-generating impressions, which will, if assented to, result in passions; these passions in turn may set the mind in a motion which may hinder or even stop the motion caused before by a grasping impression. Now, praemeditatio futurorum malorum can be directed at the first opinion constituting a passion (see II.1): the philosophical writer can, for example, cause grasping impressions or instruct his reader to have grasping perceptions on his own according to which things like the death of a friend are not bad and things like a heap of diamonds not good. Praemeditatio futurorum malorum is, however, also a kind of mental vaccination by which the reader is prepared to resist the convincing impressions which cause the second opinion of a passion: that it is fitting in such a case to become agitated. For the reader must learn not to give in to this προπεια, his first preliminary impulse leading to a passion; when he perceives the glitter of diamonds, the waxen face of a dead friend, or has, for example, a strong sensation of physical pain, he must not assent to the convincing impression that it is fitting for himself to become agitated about that now.41 In order to achieve this, the philosophical writer does not cause grasping impressions: the reader is to have “fantasies” (φανταστικ) which he generates out of his own mind without any object of perception being present. A fantasy is an “empty pulling”: the mind sets its corporeal concepts (4ννοιαι) in motion and causes a change in itself

40 Hadot 1969, 60–62; Manning 1976; Buffa 1989; Newman 1989; Wacht 1998; Sellars 2003; Panaetius fr. 115–116 van Straaten/85 and 87 Alesse; Cic. Tusc. 3.28–30, on which see Graver 2002, 96–99.—In Seneca see, e.g., Ep. 4.4; 24.2; 76.34; 88.17; 91.1 and 3; 98.5; 101.1; 104.12; 107.1–8; 114.26–27. 41 In addition to Stevens 2000 see, e.g., Abel 1983, Graver 1999, Inwood 1993, Sorabji 2000, 66–92, and Tieleman 2003, 127–128, 284.

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which is similar but not identical to an impression, i.e., the alteration caused by a real object of perception.42 A fantasy of a horse, e.g., is caused by moving the concept of horse and is in some way similar to the impression caused by a real horse. As they are generated by the mind itself, such fantasies are, however, not as effective as real impressions. The impact of a fantasy of toothache generated by moving the concept of toothache is quite different from the impact of a grasping impression of an aching tooth itself. By generating such harmless fantasies a text can prepare its readers effectively to face the real thing: by moving his concept of pain and generating lively fantasies of toothache or, for that matter, slowly burning hands,43 the reader can learn to endure real pain. The reader can find out and train the right reaction to the first impulse to become agitated about what may cause a passion in him, because the pressure exerted by a convincing fantasy is much weaker than the pressure exerted by a convincing impression. Both urge the mind on to assent and to move accordingly, but whereas the impression might not be resisted, the fantasy can.44 Regular training with fantasies can thus help build up structures which will later resist the convincing power of the actual object. And this effect can be enhanced by an author who is able—e.g., by means of the enargeia of his style—to create lively and strong fantasies in his readers.

42

“Aëtius” 4.12 = SVF 2.54 = LS 39B; Stob. 1.136.21–137.4 = Ar. Did. 40 = SVF 1.65

= LS 30A.

43 For gruesome descriptions of physical injuries see, e.g., Ep. 14.5 or 24.5 and 66.51 (on Scaevola’s slowly burning hand). See also Sen. Dial. 4.2.2–3. 44 I assume that fantasies can be convincing, like real impressions, and that they can be accepted by some sort of quasi-assent. This is, however, a point which has yet to be proved. A real assent to fantasies is most probably impossible, because, as there is no object of perception, there can be no δε ξις, which means that there cannot ever subsist a definite proposition (like, e.g., “This is a horse”) at a fantasy. Cf. Bobzien 1999, 100 on these propositions, which she calls “definite assertibles”: “… in the case of definite assertibles, assertibility or statability … becomes in part pointat-ability, and Stoic point-at-ability requires intrinsically the existence of the object pointed at.”

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IV.1. “The Voices of the Many Sounding around Us” The structures the reader will build up, strengthen, or modify by praemeditatio futurorum malorum are concepts. Concepts, 4ννοιαι or προλψεις, are corporeal structures in the mind built up by experience ( μπειρα): impressions are retained as memories, and comparison and combination of many such memories results in the formation or modification of a concept.45 Accordingly, the content of concepts is universal like definitions or universal propositions, and when we discuss definitions, we discuss the content of our concepts.46 There can, of course, be wrong concepts, for example a concept of human good according to which such a good can be taken away by chance or a concept of wealth according to which wealth is always useful. A wrong concept of physical pain will be formed, if I assent to many false but convincing impressions, that it is fitting for me to avoid this painful object here by all means. I will then, in the end, have a wrong concept of pain according to which physical pain is something always and by all means to be avoided. In addition to that, new concepts are formed without experience by having many fantasies in which features of different existing concepts are modified or combined, e.g., the concept of horse with the concept of man to create a new concept of centaur. Such a concept cannot be called wrong in the same way as the wrong concepts described above; there simply exists no body which falls under this concept of centaur.47 45 Important sources are collected in LS 39C–F; see also Hülser 1987–1988, Ch. 2.2.2.—As with grasping, Seneca uses different expressions to refer to concepts: for πρληψις, e.g., we find praesumptio (Ep. 117.16), 4ννοιαι κοινα are referred to, e.g., as what nature dictates to us, as uoces publicae (Ep. 8.8; 21.9), or as sensus communes (9.21). Another term for 4ννοια is persuasio, and such a persuasio is (or can be) identical with what Seneca calls a decretum in Ep. 94 and 95, as is indicated in 95.44. It is reasonable, therefore, to assume that the prauae opiniones against which we need decreta and theoretical instruction are concepts as well. Seneca does not use Cicero’s term notio. 46 See, e.g., Cic. Tusc. 4.53 = LS 32H5 and 8 nam superiores definitiones erant Sphaeri, hominis in primis bene definientis, ut putant Stoici; sunt enim omnino omnes fere similes, sed declarant communes notiones [= ννοας κοινς], alia magis alia. … quae enim istarum definitionum non aperit notionem nostram quam habemus omnes de fortitudine tectam atque inuolutam? 47 It is a difficult question whether a universal proposition corresponding to a concept of centaur, like, e.g., “A centaur is a rational animal,” can be true or false at all. Furthermore, there are reasons to believe that the sayables subsisting at concepts are not propositions but rather predicates. Wrong concepts like the erroneous concepts

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Their ability to have and generate their own concepts is what makes human beings rational.48 It is, however, this same ability which causes errors and imperfection. Human beings can form concepts of nonexistent things, like a centaur, and can then have rational impressions of real objects which resemble those concepts, e.g., the impression “That body over there is a centaur” of a man on a horse seen from afar, and, erroneously, assent to this impression. Or they have a perverted concept of pain, according to which pain is evil and bad and to be avoided by all means and at any costs, and assent to convincing impulse-generating impressions like “It is fitting for me to avoid this torture at all costs” and “It is therefore fitting that I now betray my best friend in order to avoid being tortured.” Furthermore, human beings do not keep their errors to themselves but utter them to others, so that individual errors are multiplied to a resounding concert of false statements, which are then perceived, assented to, remembered, and turned into even more wrong concepts.49 These new concepts and the false opinions caused by erroneous utterances all loosen the ‘grip’ of the mind on what it has grasped and further weaken its already weak assent. Only the wise man has knowledge which is “unchangeable by meaningful language utterance” (see II.2); what is grasped by weak assent can be changed this way. The philosopher must, therefore, react to this kind of verbal disinformation with correct verbal counter-instruction of his own. One way to do this is that the philosopher raises his own voice against the

of good, wealth, and pain mentioned above are wrong, e.g., because they contain incompatible features (wealth also attracts thieves and murderers and is useless, if you are cast out alone on a deserted island) or features which do not belong to every object falling under the concept (some pain must be endured; at least some kinds of human goods cannot be taken away by chance). In the latter case the concept has to be divided and differentiated to suit these different kinds of objects (see IV.2.b). 48 In a polemical passage Galen attributes to Chrysippus the view that the rational faculty, the λγος, of human beings is an aggregate (;ροισμα) of concepts and preconceptions (P.H.P. 5.3.1 = SVF 2.841 = LS 53V). This certainly is not a definition of human λγος, but we should keep in mind that the process of becoming a rational human being is described as a process of concept formation, as, e.g., in “Aëtius” 4.11.1–4 = SVF 2.83 = LS 39E and Cic. Fin. 3.20–22 = LS 59D2–6. 49 See, e.g., Ep. 31.1–3; 32.4; 36.1–2; 41.8; 45.6; 60.1; 67.12; 72.7; 81.27–32; 82 (esp. 82.23); 91.9 and 19; 94.7; 95.58 (possibly with a reference to non-grasping impressions caused this way: quod nihil liquet incertissimo regimine utentibus, fama); 97.10; 110.3; 115.11– 17; 118.7; 123.6–17 (where the similar danger of false philosophical instruction is also discussed).

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opinions of all mankind.50 More effective, however, is the advice altogether to avoid perception of what others say and do, to close one’s ears as Odysseus did with those of his comrades when approaching the Sirens and not to listen to the dangerous public voice which “sounds around us coming from every part of the world.”51 The third counterinstruction consists in advising the reader not to believe what others say, but to wait until he himself is sure to have a grasping impression. The Stoic wise man has the virtue of “Not-assenting-prematurely” ("προπτωσα),52 and not to assent prematurely is exactly what Seneca asks Lucilius to do, e.g., in Ep. 13. He warns him that we are all too quick to believe what others believe (8 cito accedimus opinioni). When Lucilius seems to be in danger, he should not pay attention to what he hears, but to what he feels, should consult his own patientia—his experience of what is happening to him at the moment and, at the same time, his ability to endure this experience—, and ask himself whether there is any reason why these people should be afraid for him.53 IV.2. Concept Formation IV.2.a. Concept Correction “Not-assenting-prematurely” also means to check carefully whether the alteration of the mind undergone by way of an impression exactly fits into the concept in question. A grasping impression “is impressed in and stamped into in accordance with exactly what is” (see II.3), and, as I believe, this means not that every feature of the object perceived 50 Ep. 87.5 contra totius generis humani opiniones mittenda uox erat. See also, e.g., Ep. 82.23; 94.52–74; 95.34–35. 51 Ep. 31.2 ad summam sapiens eris, si cluseris aures, quibus ceram parum est obdere: firmiore spissamento opus est quam in sociis usum Vlixem ferunt. illa uox quae timebatur erat blanda, non tamen publica: at haec quae timenda est non ex uno scopulo sed ex omni terrarum parte circumsonat. See also, e.g., Ep. 7; 8.1; 69.2. 52 Diog. Laert. 7.46 = SVF 2.130 = LS31B2; PHerc. 1020 col. IV.1–28 = SVF 2.131 = LS 41D1. 53 Ep. 13.6 illud praesta mihi, ut, quotiens circumsteterint qui tibi te miserum esse persuadeant, non quid audias sed quid sentias cogites, et cum patientia tua deliberes ac te ipse interroges, qui tua optime nosti, “quid est quare isti me conplorent? quid est quod trepident, quod contagium quoque mei timeant, quasi transilire calamitas possit? est aliquid istic mali, an res ista magis infamis est quam mala?” ipse te interroga, “numquid sine causa crucior et maereo et quod non est malum facio?” As in Ep. 18, Seneca informs us that his advice is of Epicurean origin (13.4 non loquor tecum Stoica lingua, sed hac summissiore; 18.9); it makes, however, perfect sense in the context of Stoic epistemology as well.

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must be impressed onto the mind, but that the corporeal alteration in the mind caused by the object of perception must fit exactly into the corporeal concept used in forming the rational impression of the object of perception. If, e.g., the wise man has the impression “This here is a centaur” he will carefully check whether the structure of his mental alteration really has all the characteristic marks of an impression of a centaur, i.e., marks which only fit into his concept of centaur; for it might well be that what he has perceived are the common characteristics of both his concept of man on horse and of centaur, so that the impression fits both concepts equally well, because he has seen the object in bad light and very far away. In order to be a grasping impression of a centaur, it must fit into the concept of centaur exactly and into this concept only. Otherwise it is, if at all, the grasping impression that “Either this is a centaur, or this is a man on a horse.”54 Whenever I have a false rational impression, this impression does not fit exactly into the concept I have linked it with.55 To avoid this error is, I believe, for Seneca the most important project of Stoic syllogistic and theoretical instruction. Much of what he writes has the function to support readers in sorting out the concepts they have and in learning to recognize whether an impression has been linked to the right concept. And here, as we have seen in III.1, verbal instruction itself can be the cause of grasping impressions, e.g., if the reader is shown in a syllogism that his concepts of good and of wealth are incompatible. Seneca is not interested in Chrysippean syllogistic. More often than the propositional calculus developed by Chrysippus and characteristic of much of Stoic logic, he discusses syllogisms of the predicate calculus. And even then, he does not dis-

54 Those authors who understand τ% $πρχον as a term for a real, existing object have difficulty in assessing exactly which characteristics of this real object should be perceived. If we take $πρχον as denoting a true proposition or a belonging predicate, the answer is easier. Firstly: the characteristics perceived must be those which define the predicate truly predicated of the object of perception and can vary according to the predicate used. In order to grasp that “This is a man” I need not perceive as many features as if I wanted to grasp that “This is Socrates.” Secondly: which characteristic features are contained in the definition of the predicate depends on the individual concept the perceiving person has, because the individual concept is the corporeal structure where the definition relevant for the impressions of this perceiving individual subsists. 55 This is true even with respect to wrong concepts. There simply cannot be an impression which fits them, because the predicates subsisting at these concepts do not belong to any body in the world.

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cuss whether the conclusion is correctly drawn from the premises. What he discusses extensively are the terms and the corresponding concepts used in the premises. He is interested in the concepts and in how to apply them correctly. He wants to be shown, for example, by which characteristic marks a friend and a flatterer can be distinguished, i.e., how the concept of friend and the concept of flatterer differ and how I can find out whether I should link the impression I have of a person behaving in a seemingly friendly manner with the former or the latter concept.56 In short: Seneca is interested in definitions (see IV.1), not in syllogisms. He does not discuss how the terms in a syllogism are logically linked together; he discusses the meaning of these terms, and a syllogism can sometimes help clarify this meaning. This kind of discussion, in turn, is helpful for grasping. For inconsistent concepts are not only useless, because there is no object that can be grasped with them; they are also dangerous, being the source of convincing impressions to which a careless perceiver may assent like the person believing to see a centaur in the mist, when it was only a rider. Therefore the philosophical writer causes new impressions and lets the reader have his or her own perceptions and fantasies which will— if accepted and assented to in sufficient number—gradually change the original concept. This is what happens when, as Margaret Graver describes it, “pockets” of coherent belief are built up and enlarged in cognitive therapy (1996, 110–117). However, Graver does not distinguish between single beliefs and the concepts generated out of such single beliefs. But this distinction is crucial: a single belief, which is one impression assented to, will not change a concept; we must assent to similar impressions and must have the same belief many times, before a concept, which is generated out of a large number of beliefs, starts to change. This may be one reason for the repetitiveness so characteristic of Seneca’s philosophical writing (see, e.g., Ep. 27.9). And this process of concept formation is, I believe, what Seneca describes in Ep. 84 (see I) and what he means when he speaks metaphorically, e.g., of “digesting,” “drinking in” or “being steeped in” some philosophical truth57 or when 56 Ep. 45.6–7 quid mihi uocum similitudines distinguis …? res fallunt: illas discerne. 7 adulatio quam similis est amicitiae? … doce, quemadmodum hanc similitudinem possim dinoscere. … in his magno periculo erramus: his certas notas imprime; see also 45.9–10; 48.4; 118.7–8. 57 E.g., Ep. 2.4; 84.7; 94.11 hoc cum persuasi mihi et perbibi; 110.8 … si illa se non perfuderit

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he says, as in Ep. 16.1, that a bona uoluntas or propositum, a good decision to act (and the action itself) must be repeated over and over again to become fixed in the mind as a concept of something fitting for oneself to do. Progress in philosophy, then, is changing one’s concepts until there is no inconsistency left. As a consistent and contradiction-free set of concepts must correspond exactly to the contradiction-free real word— otherwise some inconsistency would remain—, a mind which has such a set of concepts, a “right reason” (=ρ%ς λγος), is not only stable and steadfast in its assents, it also cannot be moved in any wrong direction because all its impulse-generating concepts are pointing the right way. This is the reason why practical knowledge like the virtues could be defined as a system which derives its stability from itself.58 IV.2.b. Refining One’s Concepts: Expert Impressions In addition to eliminating contradictions, philosophical discussion of concepts generates new and finer, more subtle concepts, so that the reader is enabled to have “expert impressions” (φαντασαι τεχνικα).59 The Stoic, e.g., can distinguish between a good and an indifferent normally to be taken (a προηγμνον or commodum), because in comparison to other, uninstructed people, he has finer, expert concepts of what is fitting for human beings. And without such necessary finer concepts rational behavior is impossible. Human souls consist of much subtler material than animal souls, and the internal structures of human minds are, correspondingly, much finer than those of animals.60 But the mind of an imperfect human is still much blunter, the structures in it much grosser than those in the mind of the perfect wise man. This subtlety is, according to Seneca, neither natural nor inborn, but must be achieved artificially by concept formation. Ars est bonum fieri (Ep. 90.44). Even if all errors were removed there would not automatically follow the ability to distinguish precisely what is to be done (Ep. 94.36). And it is at this point, again, that verbal instruction has a crucial role to play, e.g., by

sed infecerit, si eadem, quamuis sciat, retractauerit et ad se saepe rettulerit, si quaesierit quae sint bona, quae mala, quibus hoc falso sit nomen adscriptum, si quaesierit de honestis et turpibus, de prouidentia. 58 Ar. Did. apud Stob. 2.73.23–74.1 = SVF 3.112 = LS 41H3; cf., e.g., Sen. Ep. 94.50 ipsa sapientia, quae iam eo perduxit animum, ut moueri nequeat nisi in rectum. 59 Diog. Laert. 7.51 = SVF 2.61 = LS 39A7; see also Annas 1992, 81–82. 60 Ep. 124.17–19; Dial. 3.3.7.

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pointing out dissimilarities and by demonstrating that certain features contained in one concept like the inexpert concept of what is good are incompatible and ought to be divided into two different concepts.61

V. Limits: The Concept of Perfect Man In the field of concept formation there seems to be no limit to what verbal instruction can do: any concept can be distinguished and divided finer and finer—as infinitely as all bodies in the cosmic continuum can be “divided to infinity.”62 In addition to that, an infinite number of new concepts like the concept of centaur can be formed, e.g., by combination (horse and man), on the basis of similarity (from the picture to the real object), by analogy, magnification and diminution (from the concept of man we can form a fantasy of a giant or a dwarf), transposition (imagining humanoids with eyes on the chest), opposition (imagining death as the opposite of life), or privation (imagining somebody without hands).63 What, however, is the epistemological value of such concepts? How can we distinguish which of them are concepts of an existing body or a subsisting incorporeal and which are not?64 This seems not to matter in the case of centaurs and humanoids with scurrilous features; it matters, however, at least in the case of one concept which is of central importance to the προκπτων or proficiens, the man who strives for perfection: the concept of the perfect man he is intending to become himself. Such a man most probably does not exist, according to the Stoics, and if he exists, we do not know him. Therefore, this concept cannot be formed just by having grasping impressions of a real specimen of perfect man. As Seneca tells us, the concept is formed in exactly the same manner as concepts of giants and men with eyes on the chest! There is an element of sensory perception: we observe and gather together into 61 Two verbs Seneca often uses in these contexts are distinguere (e.g., Ep. 9.13–14; 30.17; 44.6; 66.6; 67.4; 71.7; 84.5; 85.14, 18, 28; 120.9) and dispicere (e.g., Ep. 17.2; 26.3; 94.5; 95.54; 107.1; 109.16; 110.11). 62 Stob. 1.142.2 = SVF 2.482 = LS 50A1. It is important, however, to keep in mind that bodies never are infinitely divided but always have a certain shape, magnitude and individual quality at which certain sayables subsist. 63 Diog. Laert. 7.53 = SVF 2.87 = LS 39D; see also Sext. Emp. Math. 8.57–60 = SVF 2.88. 64 Seneca knows such a distinction proposed by “some Stoics”: Ep. 58.15.

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one concept actions repeatedly performed (Ep. 120.4 obseruatio … et rerum saepe factarum collatio) by different individuals who happened to do something right (but, of course, not perfectly right, because they were no wise men). Great parts of the concept are, however, formed without such perceptions: by analogy with the sanity and strength of the body (Ep. 120.4–5), by diminution of what is wrong and magnification of what is good and praiseworthy (5), by opposition (8 ex contrario), and by distinction of vices which are similar to virtues (8).65 The wise man of this concept is a combination of features partly observed in different persons, partly imagined altogether! Why should anybody decide to try to become something which might be as real as men with eyes on the chest or centaurs? In this paper, I will not endeavor to give a definite answer to this question. I wish only to point out one aspect relevant to it: after having shown how we form the concept of perfect man by combination, analogy, and other methods, Seneca suddenly starts to speak as if we actually had observed such a perfect man, a man who did not only show right behavior on one field, but every virtue. Observing this quasi-real perfect man, Seneca continues, “we understood that in him virtue is perfected” (120.11), a virtue which then could be analyzed and classified.66 What is Seneca doing here? The same thing, I believe, which he is doing when he is describing, e.g., Cato or Socrates as wise men, although he must have known that they most probably were not as perfect as they were depicted in philosophical hagiography. But why should an author tell his readers what he himself does not believe to be true? He does so, I suppose, because this is one means of concept formation by way of imagination and fantasies: as I can form a concept of Socrates by similarity from a picture of Socrates, I can form a concept of perfect virtue and the perfect man by similarity from a verbal picture of an idealized, perfect Socrates, and this concept 65 Note that this kind of concept formation is not mentioned in the other sources we have, a fact which, again, demonstrates the importance Seneca attributes to the differentiation of concepts (IV.2.b). Seneca demands the same kind of distinction between something good (a friend) and something bad which seems to be good (a flatterer) in Ep. 45.6–7 (see IV.1). 66 Seneca uses the indicative mood, past tenses, direct speech, and expressions denoting a clear perception of something present: Ep. 120.10 alium uidimus … uidimus … praeterea idem erat semper … intelleximus in illo perfectam esse uirtutem. 11 … ex quo ergo uirtutem intelleximus? ostendit illam nobis ordo eius et decor et … 12 quomodo … nobis apparuit? … numquam … maledixit, numquam … excepit, … subiit. quicquid inciderat non tamquam malum aspernatus est …, sed … 13 necessario itaque magnus apparuit … etc.

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will be as clear and as present in my mind as is the verbal picture the author has painted for me to read, by this means guiding my actions and lighting me the way as Seneca wanted the philosopher to do at the end of Ep. 88 (see II.4). The imaginary perfect man Seneca sets before our eyes “made many understand his nature and shone brightly in no other way as a light in the dark,” and thus may change our life, for “our thoughts and actions are of the same quality as our concepts, and as our thoughts and actions are, so is our life.”67 If we act according to our concept of perfect man, this illusionary image of our fantasies might become a graspable reality.

67 Ep. 120.13 fecit multis intellectum sui et non aliter quam in tenebris lumen effulsit; 95.44 ergo infigi debet persuasio ad totam pertinens uitam: hoc est quod decretum uoco. qualis haec persuasio fuerit, talia erunt quae agentur, quae cogitabuntur; qualia autem haec fuerint, talis uita erit. On the thought that good concepts are like a light in the dark see also Ep. 110.8; on “characterpainting” as a means of ethical instruction see Ep. 95.65–73. That Seneca is speaking about concept formation in this passage as well can be inferred from §67: excellentis animi notas nosse, quas ex alio in se transferre permittitur.

LEARNING HOW TO DIE: SENECA’S USE OF AENEID 4.653 AT EPISTULAE MORALES 12.9

Wolfgang-Rainer Mann

Introduction Prompted by an unclarity in the Behistun inscription (where the Persian king, Darius I, commemorates his own greatness), Wilhelm Schulze, in a classic paper from 1912, sets out to analyze carefully the meaning of a single expression (and its counterparts, as they occur in various Indo-European languages, both ancient and modern) that is equivalent to the Latin suam mortem habens or sua morte obit. Schulze’s question is: What does Darius mean by saying that his predecessor, Cambyses, had “died his own death”?1 While one might be tempted to understand this and similar phrases as ways of referring to suicide—and while Schulze’s predecessors did so understand the Old Persian version of the locution which underlies the Behistun inscription—he argues that any such understanding is fundamentally mistaken. Rather, ‘dying one’s own death’ corresponds to what, in the modern languages, is often referred to as ‘dying a natural death.’ More precisely: as part of a common Indo-European inheritance, there is (according to Schulze) something like a conception of fate, or of an alloted life (-span), such that if a person lives out his life, he will, at the end, die his own death. After a fairly extensive investigation, Schulze thus concludes: “… mori sua morte bedeutet nichts anderes als fato suo mori und steht unserem ‘[eines] natürlichen Todes sterben’ ganz nahe, wenn es mit ihm auch nicht genau identisch ist.”2 As an integral part of this conception, we also encounter the idea of a dies fatalis or dies uitae (= dies leti), of each

1 Schulze 1912 ( Schulze 1934, 131–148). In what follows, all references are to the = 1934 reprint. For a recent assessment of Schulze’s work, see Gippert 2001. See also Borger and Hinz 1984, 419–450, esp. §11 n. f (p. 425). On the inscription more generally, see Schmitt 1990. 2 Schulze 1934, 143.

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person having, so to speak, his own day; as Vergil’s Juppiter puts it: stat sua cuique dies (Aen. 10.467; cited by Schulze 1934, 139). And contrasted with this idea of one’s own death, there is, according to Schulze, the idea of dying a death that (in a sense) is not one’s own: Wohl mag der Philosoph—mit Seneca epist. 69, 6—behaupten: nemo nisi suo die moritur, nemo moritur nisi sua morte, der Glaube des Volkes ging andere Wege. Für seine naivere Empfindung bedeutet der eigenmächtige Eingriff des menschlichen Willens—besonders, aber nicht ausschließlich, wenn er sich als gesetzlose Gewalttat äußert—eine Durchbrechung des Fatums, eine Verkürzung der vorausbestimmten Lebenszeit. Man kann nicht nur πρ% >ρας oder πρ% φ9σεως, man kann auch πρ% μορας oder, was manchmal auf dasselbe hinausläuft, ante diem sterben.3

And here we have arrived at Aeneid 4, where Vergil uses the expression ante diem to characterize Dido’s dying as premature, contrasting it precisely with her fated death, or, as we could now say, following Schulze, with her own death: nam quia nec fato merita nec morte peribat, sed misera ante diem subitoque accensa furore … (Aen. 4.696–697) … since she was dying neither her own death nor a deserved one, but wretchedly, before her day, inflamed by sudden madness …

That characterization seems at odds with what Dido herself says, in lines that could virtually serve as her epitaph4: 3 Schulze 1934, 140–141; compare also 141 nn. 1–8, where he documents the various formulations. 4 Highet 1972, 182 comments that these lines seem “like the epitaph of a monarch.” Cf. Clausen 2002, 107–108: “In effect, Dido pronounces her own epitaph or elogium (655–656), which recalls, in its starkness and simplicity, the elogia of Roman worthies, men such as Appius Claudius Caecus, censor (312 B.C.) and twice consul:

complura oppida de Samnitibus cepit. Sabinorum et Tuscorum exercitum fudit. pacem fieri cum Pyrrho rege prohibuit. in censura uiam Appiam strauit et aquam in urbem adduxit. aedem Bellonae fecit. He seized many towns from the Samnites. He routed the armies of the Sabines and Etruscans. He forbade making peace with King Pyrrhos. He paved the Appian Way as censor and brought water into the city. He built the temple of Bellona. Virgil modifies the severity of Dido’s elogium, and thus accommodates it to the style of her speech (and to his own style), by casting it in the form of a tricolon, each colon of which, like the lines of Appius’ elogium, ends with an active verb.” One should also

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uixi et quem dederat cursum fortuna peregi, et nunc magna mei sub terras ibit imago: urbem praeclaram statui, mea moenia uidi, ulta uirum poenas inimico a fratre recepi. (Aen. 4.653–656) My life is lived. And the path Fortune assigned me, I have run through. And now a glorious shade of what I was will go beneath the earth: I have founded a great city; I have looked upon my city’s mighty walls, I have exacted vengeance for my husband from the brother who was my enemy.

Especially the first line, i.e., 653, engaged Seneca’s attention. He cites it at De beneficiis 5.17; at De vita beata 19.1; and at Epistulae morales 12.9, in a context that is worth quoting in full, since it will be the object of our further attention5: Pacuuius, qui Syriam usu suam fecit, cum uino et illis funeribus epulis sibi parentauerat, sic in cubiculum ferebatur a cena ut inter plausus exoletorum hoc ad symphoniam caneretur: βεβωται, βεβωται. nullo non se die extulit. hoc quod ille ex mala conscientia faciebat, nos ex bona faciamus, et in somnum ituri laeti hilaresque dicamus: uixi et quem dederat cursum fortuna peregi. crastinum si adiecerit deus, laeti recipiamus. ille beatissimus est et securus sui possessor qui crastinum sine sollicitudine expectat; quisquis dixit, ‘uixi,’ cotidie ad lucrum surgit. sed iam debeo epistulam includere. ‘sic,’ inquis, ‘sine ullo ad me peculio ueniet?’ noli timere: aliquid secum fert. quare ‘aliquid’ dixi? multum. quid enim hac uoce praeclarius quam illi trado ad te perferandam? ‘malum est in necessitate uiuere, sed in necessitate uiuere necessitas nulla est.’ quidni ‘nulla sit’? patent undique ad libertatem uiae multae, breues, faciles. agamus deo gratias, quod nemo in uita teneri potest. calcare ipsas necessitates licet. ‘Epicurus,’ inquis, ‘dixit. quid tibi cum alieno?’ quod uerum est, meum est. perseuerabo Epicurum tibi ingerere, ut isti qui in uerba iurant, nec quid dicatur aestimant, sed a quo, sciant quae optima sunt esse communia. VALE. (Ep. 12.8–11) Pacuvius, who had made the Province of Syria his personal property by squatter’s rights, used to hold funeral rites in his own honor, with wine, sepulchral feasts, and all the rest; and he would have himself be borne recall the frequent use, in Roman funerary inscriptions, of uixit + the number of years and months the deceased person had lived. 5 For my translation, I have cheerfully pilfered turns of phrase, etc., from R.M. Gummere’s Loeb edition (1917), as well as from Henderson 2004, 23–24; in particular, I owe to Henderson the idea of translating the Greek into German.

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wolfgang-rainer mann out from the dinner table to his bedroom, while rent-boys clapped and sang in unison: ‘Abgelebt ist er!’ ‘Abgelebt ist er!’ Not a day went by, but that Pacuvius had himself carried out on a bier. This thing, which he was wont to do having a bad mental state, let us do from having a good one. Let us go to rest, being joyful and of good cheer. Let us say: MY LIFE IS LIVED. AND THE PATH FORTUNE ASSIGNED ME, I HAVE RUN THROUGH. And if God will add a tomorrow, let us receive it with a light heart. That man is most happy, and in secure possession of himself, who can await (each) tomorrow without anxiety. Whoever has said, ‘My life is lived,’ arises every morning to further gains. But now I ought to finish my letter. What (you say), shall it arrive without any little extra for me? Not to worry; it bears something along. But now why did I say, something?—Actually, a great deal. For what is more noble than this saying, which I entrust to the letter to convey to you: IT IS BAD TO LIVE BESET BY NEED. BUT THERE IS NO NEED TO LIVE BESET BY NEED. In what way, no need? In every direction, there lie paths to freedom: they are many, short, and easy. Let us thank God that no-one can be shackled to life. It is possible to spurn the very need that does (seem to) hold us. You say: Epicurus said that—What are you doing with something belonging to another? I say: whatever is true, I claim as my own. And I will keep on sending Epicurus to you, so that all those who set such great store by sayings, yet value not what gets said, but (only) who says it, may come to understand that what is best, is common property. FAREWELL.

In Section 1, I will briefly consider the meaning of line 653 as it occurs in Vergil. I will focus on the discrepancy or tension between Dido’s utterance, quem dederat cursum fortuna peregi, and the epic narrator’s comment, nec fato merita nec morte peribat. Then, in Section 2, I will turn to Seneca’s use of Dido’s words. (And I will proceed as if Pacuvius, too, quotes Aeneid 4.653—an imaginative leap, to be sure, but one licensed by the ‘mourners’ chanting βεβωται, βεβωται, which corresponds exactly, I would maintain, to the Roman funerary use of uixit.) In particular, we will want to see what the difference is (or: would be) between uttering this line ex bona conscientia and uttering it ex mala conscientia.6

6 ‘Would be,’ because, presumably, only a wise person will really be able to speak these words (or any others) ex bona conscientia.

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1. Vergil It will obviously not be possible, on the present occasion, even to attempt to do justice to the figure of Dido, still less to the whole of Aeneid 4.7 But I do think it is possible to discuss the detail I am considering (more or less) in isolation from the larger, more complex context(s) in which it belongs. As already noted in the Introduction, Vergil seems quite deliberately to have Dido echoing Roman elogia and funerary inscriptions in lines 653–656. The simple, lapidary quality of her words bestows a kind of dignity on her; and her utterance stands in marked contrast to the emotionally highly-wrought language of lines 305–330 and 365–392 (cf. also 450–477).8 Indeed, one could say that hers is a heroic dignity, both in the way in which she accepts (what she sees as) her fate,9 and in the way in which she decides to kill herself—eschewing the woman’s death of hanging (herself), and choosing instead to fall on her (rather: Aeneas’s) sword.10 Now if hers were the only perspective or point of view, or if it were otherwise confirmed (say, by the Gods somehow validating it), she would succeed in attaining the kind of heroic end and status she performatively claims for herself. But one of the central facts about Dido is that, right from the start, not only does she not understand what happens—especially her own emotions and actions—but the epic narrator shows us how (to put it bluntly) Dido is being duped by the Gods. To oversimplify grossly: with 7 Helpful discussions of Dido (for our purposes) include, Clausen 2002, Ch. 4 “Dido and Aeneas” and, especially, Johnson 1976, 66–74. 8 Compare also the contrast between the merely simulated calm of 477 (and of Dido’s words to her sister, Anna, at 478ff.), and the true calm of 653–656. 9 Perhaps the following comparison is too loose to serve as a strict parallel, but I am reminded of the transition, in Iliad 18, between Achilles’ intense grief (22–35) and his calm acceptance of the ‘fact’ that given how things are, he will die: “I must die soon, then; since I was not to stand by my companion / when he was killed. And now, far away from the land of his fathers, / he has perished, and lacked my fighting strength to defend him” (98–100; emphasis added); cf. “Now I shall go, to overtake that killer of a dear life, / Hektor; then I will accept my own death, at whatever / time Zeus wishes to bring it about, and the other immortals” (114–116; emphasis added) (both translations: R. Lattimore). We might also remember that Achilles was sometimes thought to have been the first Stoic. One important difference between Achilles and Dido, however, is that while he essentially sees things clearly (at any rate: as clearly as does any mortal in the Iliad), her perspective will be revealed as radically incomplete and, to that extent, as incorrect. 10 See Loraux 1987, Ch. 1 “The Rope and the Sword.”

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Venus and Juno arrayed against her (1.657–688; 4.90–128; 4.160–172), she never stands a chance.11 Yet first we need to go back still further, to Book 1. The res in the middle of which the Aeneid begins is the storm Juno has coaxed Aeolus into causing, by unleashing the Winds upon the Trojan refugees as they set sail from Sicily (1.65 ff.). Neptune, astonished by the roiling waters, rises from the sea and dresses down the Winds, sending them back to Aeolus and his “barred prison,” where they belong (1.132– 141); and he “calms” the waves (1.142). After this, the battered Trojan fleet (with Neptune’s assistance) makes for the shores of Libya (1.157ff.). Once on dry land, the Trojans secure food and (somewhat) regain their strength and composure, while Aeneas mourns his lost companions: Orontes, Amycus, Gyas, Cloanthus, and the crudelia fata of Lycus (1.220– 222). The scene or perspective now shifts (1.223) to Juppiter, who is looking down—serenely it seems—from the very height of the heavens to the world below, casting his eyes on Libya. Venus interrupts him, complaining that he is not keeping his promise to her: to allow the Trojans to reach Italy, and so to set in motion the events that would lead to the 11 For discussion, see, e.g., Butler 1935, 24; Klinger 1967, 443; Wlosok 1967, 103; or Coleman 1982, 154–156 (on Venus’s effect on Dido); cf. also his further remark: “It is not just that the goddesses [sc. Venus and Juno] are depicted as if they were two rivals in comedy striving to outwit each other; but the noble Dido is in the process reduced to a pawn in an unnecessarily squalid game” (163). D.C. Feeney, in his magisterial The Gods in Epic, speaks of Dido as “doomed throughout to incomprehension of how two gods and two goddesses are making a wreck of her life” (Feeney 1991, 181). For a different view (= the Goddesses as, in effect, external manifestations of human motivations which are—and would be—there anyway), see Gellie 1972, 138–148. This as it were local question is obviously related to the much larger question of the extent to which the Gods in the Aeneid are (or might be) dispensable, that is, the extent to which the “human narrative” might prove “comprehensible on its own terms” (see Feeney 1991, 169). Feeney argues persuasively against such “naturalistic” (I would say: reductionist) readings (162–187), suggesting that “Vergil’s methods regularly appear to destabilize prevailing criteria of plausibility, even as accepted in the poem itself ” (176)—in other words, while the Aeneid appears on one level to demand, or at least to allow, being read “as a piece of quasi-realism, or veiled naturalism, with a ‘realistic’ narrative just beneath the surface” (169), on another level (or at other moments), it presents us with “the hallucinatory fantastic” (168), with descriptions that are “essentially impressionistic” (171), in ways which defeat attempts at purely realist readings. (Here Feeney rightly refers to Johnson 1976 as an important milestone in bringing to light this disquieting aspect of Vergil’s epic technique [ibid.].) One consequence of this destabilization, which will prove of importance for us, is that it will be impossible ever fully to integrate the (differing) divine and human perspectives on the ‘events’ of the Aeneid, or to resolve the gulf between them unequivocally in favor of either the human or the divine.

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emergence of the Romans, from whom there would arise leaders to rule the world (1.229 ff.). Juppiter tries to assuage her fears, saying: … manent immota tuorum fata tibi; cernes urbem et promissa Lauini moenia, sublimemque feres ad sidera caeli magnanimum Aenean; neque me sententia uertit. hic tibi (fabor enim, quando haec te cura remordet, longius et uoluens fatorum arcana mouebo) bellum ingens geret Italia … (Aen. 1.257–263) … the fates [fata] of your people remain unshaken (you’ll see); you will gaze upon the city and the promised Lavinian walls; you will carry high up to the stars of heaven great-souled Aeneas; nor has my decree been reversed. Now since this care so gnaws at you, I will speak [fabor] further, unrolling [sc. the scrolls], and put into words the secret, fated things [fatorum arcana]: he (you’ll see) will wage a great war in Italy, and …

No sooner does Juppiter finish foretelling the pre-Roman and Roman future, than he sends Mercury down to Libya, so that Aeneas and his companions will be properly received: haec ait et Maia genitum demittit ab alto, ut terrae utque nouae pateant Karthaginis arces hospitio Teucris, ne fati nescia Dido finibus arceret. (297–300) Thus he speaks and sends down from on high Maia’s son, so that the lands and towers of newly built Carthage may offer open welcome to the Trojans—lest Dido, ignorant of fate, keep them barred from her borders.

At long last we can ask: What fatum is Dido ignorant of ? (i) Her own fate, as it will unfold in Books 1 and 4? (ii) The fate of the Trojans (and thus also that of the Romans as well as that of her own people, the Carthaginians) which Juppiter has said remains unchanged (immota)? Or (iii), the things just said by Juppiter? (In 261–262, by an etymological sleight of hand, Vergil raises the question, does saying something—or at any rate: does Juppiter’s saying something—make it fated, or does the fact that something is fated make it be the sort of thing Juppiter says?)12 T.E. Page observes: “The words fati nescia are effective so long as they are left vague and mysterious, but admit of no clear explanation, for 12

See Commager 1981, 104.

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why should Dido drive away the Trojans because she was ‘in ignorance of destiny’? Surely Dido would have been much more likely to drive them away if she had been acquainted with destiny, for Aeneas was to cause her death and the descendants of the Trojans were to destroy Carthage.”13 Perhaps overly rationalistic, but he does have a point. And this suggests that “we might almost understand it [sc. the expression fati nescia] as ‘Dido, who had not heard Jove’s speech.’”14 Realist, or rather, rationalistic interpretation will face two problems. First, in connection with Aeneid 1, it would seem that if Juppiter had spoken different words, fate, too, would have been different. Yet that stands in real tension with what Juppiter says to Hercules in Book 10. Pallas has (in the midst of his battle with Turnus) prayed to Hercules (459–463); Hercules has heard him—he weeps for Pallas and would save him (464–465), but for Juppiter’s intervention. (The scene is modelled on Iliad 16, where Zeus sheds “tears of blood” [459] for his son, Sarpedon, and where he considers snatching him from out of the battle with Hector, to save him, but is dissuaded from doing so by Hera.) These are Juppiter’s very words: stat sua cuique dies, breue et inreparabile tempus omnibus est uitae; sed famam extendere factis, hoc uirtutis opus. Troiae sub moenibus altis tot gnati cecidere deum, quin occidit una Sarpedon, mea progenies; etiam sua Turnum fata uocant metasque dati peruenit ad aeui. (10.467–472) Every man’s last day is fixed. Lifetimes are brief, and not to be regained, For all mankind. But by their deeds to make Their fame last: that is labor for the brave. Below the walls of Troy so many sons Of gods went down, among them, yes, my child, Sarpedon. Turnus, too, is called by fate. He stands at the given limit of his years.15 (tr. R. Fitzgerald; emphasis added)

Page 1902, 170 ad loc. Commager 1981, 105, referring to W.V. Clausen. 15 With 467–472, one should compare the epic narrator’s moralizing apostrophe to the reader at 501–502: nescia mens hominum fati sortisque futurae/ et seruare modum rebus sublata secundis! (Fitzgerald has: “The minds of men are ignorant of fate / And of their future lot, unskilled to keep / Due measure when some triumph sets them high.”) This comment comes after Turnus has slain Pallas, stripped the corpse of its baldric, and has gloried in his triumph (479–500). The scene is modelled on Hector’s killing of Patroclus 13 14

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For here it would seem that the Gods themselves cannot alter fate, and that they are not its authors. The second problem, also occasioned by this passage from Aeneid 10, arises in connection with the lines from Book 4 which we have already seen. For if it is really the case that “every man’s last day is fixed,” then it cannot literally be true that Dido died ante diem (i.e., before her last day), nor can it be true that her death was not a fated one. Resolving these problems—if they even can be resolved—is a task far beyond the confines of this paper. But they vividly illustrate a kind of incommensurability amongst the various perspectives in the Aeneid: that of its human protagonists, that of the Gods, and that of the epic narrator. And thus in regard to Book 4 in particular, I would suggest that there is no wholly stable answer to the question, which assessment, Dido’s or the epic narrator’s, should we take to be true. Clearly Dido’s words, uixi et quem dederat cursum fortuna peregi, despite being moving and heroic in their immediate context, cannot be taken (completely) at face value, for they are (at least partially) undermined by the epic narrator’s perspective in 696–697. It is equally clear that the narrator’s perspective, too, cannot be regarded as fully authoritative and final, for it is called into question, both by what Juppiter says to Venus in Book 1, and by what he says to Hercules in Book 10. Vergil (one suspects) is fully aware of these inconcinnities; and he is (presumably) deploying them precisely to resist the sort of resolution rationalistic interpretation seeks. When we come to Seneca, we will see that matters are, in a way, much simpler. From the Stoic perspective, there is but one answer here: nemo moritur nisi sua morte (“No one dies any death other than his own,” Ep. 69.6.). The ironic distance (or incongruity) between Pacuvius’s utterance and the (Stoic) truth of the matter is thus a different one: it is the gap between the fool and the wise person, a gap which one can make progress in bridging, by learning how to die (and by learning what that ‘lesson’ is even supposed to be).

and stripping Achilles’ armor from him; but in Homer, the remarks on overstepping one’s bounds are spoken by Zeus (Iliad 17.198–206). See Feeney 1991, 157–158, for some reflections on the significance of transferring the moral perspective from Juppiter (Zeus) to the epic narrator.

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wolfgang-rainer mann 2. Seneca

On a by now widely shared view, the first twelve Letters form a kind of introduction to the ‘collection’ of the Epistulae morales as a whole, which is itself devoted to showing—specifically to their addressee, Lucilius, but more generally to us, Seneca’s readers—how Stoicism bears on the conduct of life, rather, how the kind of wisdom a Stoic wise person possesses will make for a happy and flourishing life. (And it is important to emphasize that the Stoic claim here is not merely that such wisdom will make for a happier and more flourishing life than a life lived without it, but that this wisdom will secure a genuinely good life for the wise person, no matter what any ‘vagaries of fortune’ might suggest to the contrary16—on this point, as in so much else, the Stoics show themselves to be wholly within the Socratic tradition.) And as Letter 4 makes clear, one significant obstacle to living the kind of life Nature intended for us is the fear of death: profice modo; intelleges quaedam ideo minus timenda, quia multum metus adferunt. nullum malum magnum, quod extremum est. mors ad te venit; timenda erat, si tecum esse posset; sed necesse est aut non perveniat aut transeat. ‘difficile est,’ inquis, ‘animum perducere ad contemptionem animae.’ non uides, quam ex friuolis causis contemnatur? alius ante amicae fores laqueo pependit, alius se praecipitauit e tecto, ne dominum stomachantem diutius audiret, alius ne reduceretur e fuga, ferrum adegit in uiscera. non putas uirtutem hoc effecturam, quod efficit nimia formido? nulli potest secura uita contingere, qui de producenda nimis cogitat, qui inter magna bona multos consules numerat. hoc cotidie meditare, ut possis aequo animo uitam relinquere, quam multi sic complectuntur et tenent, quomodo qui aqua torrente rapiuntur spinas et aspera. plerique inter mortis metum et uitae tormenta miseri fluctuantur et uiuere nolunt, mori nesciunt. fac itaque tibi iucundam uitam omnem pro 16 For the Stoics, there will of course be no vagaries of fortune, strictly speaking, since all events—the whole history of the world—unfold according to a deterministic and providential plan. Thus what may look like bad fortune from a given individual’s (limited) point of view, will really be good from the cosmic perspective. The wise person recognizes this. However (contrary to what is sometimes claimed), even the wise, never mind the fools, are not omniscient, and so even the wise will not always know how it is that some (seemingly) bad things which befall them really are good. Nevertheless, a sage will know that any such (seemingly) bad thing actually is good; and this is what makes possible the sage’s legendary equanimity. (Recall Chrysippus’s remark, “If my toe had brains, it would seek to be muddied,” apud Epictetus 2.6.10. Cf. also Frede 1986, 93–110; see esp. 108ff.).

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illa sollicitudinem deponendo. nullum bonum adiuuat habentem, nisi ad cuius amissionem praeparatus est animus; nullius autem rei facilior amissio est, quam quae desiderari amissa non potest. … ut potestas maior absit, nemo non seruus habet in te uitae necisque arbitrium. ita dico: quisquis uitam suam contempsit, tuae dominus est. … intelleges non pauciores seruorum ira cecidisse quam regum. quid ad te itaque, quam potens sit quem times, cum id, propter quod times, nemo non possit? at si forte in manus hostium incideris, uictor te duci iubebit; eo nempe, quo duceris. quid te ipse decipis et hoc nunc primum, quod olim patiebaris, intellegis? ita dico: ex quo natus es, duceris. haec et eiusmodi uersanda in animo sunt, si uolumus ultimam illam horam placidi expectare, cuius metus omnes alias inquietas facit. (Ep. 4.3–6 and 8–9) You must at least make progress. You would thus understand that some things are to be feared all the less, precisely because they inspire such great dread. It is not a great evil, if it is the end of evils. Death is approaching you; it would be a thing to fear, if it could stay with you; but necessarily death either does not come at all, or passes by as something wholly transient. It is difficult (you say) to bring the mind to a point where it can look down on life as something of no account. But don’t you see the frivolous reasons why people do look down on life as something of no account? One man hangs himself in front of the door of his girlfriend; another throws himself from the roof, so that he need no longer obey his illtempered master; still another commits seppuku, so as not to be captured after having run away. Do you think that virtue will not be as efficacious as excessive fear? No man can have a life free from care, if he thinks excessively about lengthening it, or if he reckons as a great good: living through many consulships. Reflect upon this every day, so that you may be able, with a mind at ease, to let go of life—this life which so many clutch at and cling to, in exactly the same way as those who are being swept away by raging torrents (try to) cling to thorny brambles and sharp rocks. Most people are caught in an ebb and flow between the fear of death and the torments of life. They are wretched. And they are unwilling to live, because they know not how to die. So with all this in view, make the entirety of (your) life congenial to yourself—by setting aside all anxiety about it. No good thing makes its possessor happy, unless his mind is prepared for the possibility of losing it. Yet no loss is easier to bear, than losing that which, once lost, cannot even be sought. …

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wolfgang-rainer mann Even if he lacks any greater, real authority, every slave has the power of life and death over you. Let me put it like this: whoever judges his own life as being of no account, is lord and master over yours. … You will come to understand that just as many people have been killed by the anger of slaves as by the anger of kings. What is it to you, then, how powerful he may be whom you fear, since no one doesn’t possess that (power) which you fear so greatly? But what if you should fall into the hands of the enemy? The conqueror will command that you ‘be led away.’ Well, yes—to that place where you are already ‘being led.’ Why are you playing tricks on yourself and only now, for the first time, grasping that which you have been subject to all along? Let me put it like this: from the moment you were born, you have been: ‘being led there.’ We must wrap our minds around this and similar thoughts, if we want to be at ease in facing that final hour, the fear of which makes all the other hours be ones lacking in ease.

Yet already here, and certainly by the time we encounter the topic again in later letters, we may be left with the impression that Seneca is morbidly preoccupied with death, that the kind of attention he pays to it, say, by retelling the final days of various heroic figures, betrays an obsession with dying, which seems much more like a symptom of the fear of death, than anything like a means towards allaying this fear. So one would like to know more clearly how the (Epicurean) injunction to reflect upon death (meditare mortem) actually is conducive to living a good life rather than a pathological one.17 Or to put the question more provocatively: Isn’t Pacuvius, with his endless ‘funerals,’ reflecting upon death every day? We receive a further important pointer on how to construe Epicurus’s injunction in Letter 26: … interim commodabit Epicurus, qui ait: ‘meditare mortem’ … hic patet sensus: egregia res est mortem condiscere. superuacuum forsitan putas id discere, quod semel utendum est. hoc est ipsum, quare meditari debeamus; semper discendum est, quod an sciamus, experiri non pos17 The question of Seneca’s use of Epicurus has been much discussed in the literature. For our present purposes, it does not really matter whether we believe this use to be motivated by Lucilius’s (supposed) own Epicureanism, or by Seneca’s thought that even if Epicureanism is fundamentally flawed, Epicurus did grasp some things (or was making progress towards grasping some things), so that his sayings, if provided with a Stoic gloss, could be seen as true and useful. In the former case, the deployment of Epicurus would in effect be part of a rhetorical or pedagogical strategy; in the latter case, it would (in part) be an illustration of a Stoic ‘truth’: the sage and the fool differ not so much in what they say and do, if that is described extensionally, as in the attitude they take towards (and the understanding they have of) what they say and do.

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sumus. ‘meditare mortem’; qui hoc dicit, meditari libertatem iubet. qui mori didicit, seruire dedidicit; supra omnem potentiam est, certe extra omnem. quid ad illum carcer et custodia et claustra? liberum ostium habet. una est catena, quae nos alligatos tenet, amor uitae, qui ut non est abiciendus, ita minuendus est, ut si quando res exigit, nihil nos detineat nec impediat quo minus parati sumus, quod quandoque faciendum est, statim facere. (Ep. 26.8–10) … in the meantime, Epicurus will help (sc. me) out, with this saying: REFLECT UPON DEATH … Its meaning is plain: it is a splendid thing to learn and master how to die. Perhaps you think it is superfluous to learn that (art) which is to be used only once. But that is why we ought to reflect upon it. We must always be learning (that thing), when we are unable to put to the test, whether we really do know (it). REFLECT UPON DEATH. He who says this is bidding us to reflect upon freedom. He who has learned to die has unlearned slavery. He is above all power, or at any rate, beyond it. What are prison, guards, and bars to him? For him, the exit-door is open. There is but one chain which binds us: the lust for life. It cannot be cast off. But it can be so weakened that when the occasion demands it, nothing can hold us back or stand in our way from being any less ready to do that thing straightaway, which, at some time or other, we must do in any event.

In order fully to understand the upshot of what is being said in these passages from Letters 4 and 26, we need to remind ourselves of a relevant bit of Stoic doctrine. Central to their theory of value is the distinction between things that are genuinely good (or bad), and things that are neither good nor bad, and are thus indifferent (adiaphora).18 Now labeling something as ‘indifferent’ might suggest that it does not matter at all whether one obtains it (in case one does not already have it), or loses it (in case one happens already to possess it). Up to a point this is exactly what the doctrine of indifferents comes to. However—at least according to mainstream Stoic thinking—there is a further distinction

18 These issues have been treated frequently in the literature. Two helpful recent contributions are Barney 2003 and Vogt 2004b. On the difficult related issue of how one is to understand the notion of the good in Stoicism, see Frede 1999b. The fragments and testimonia are collected in Long and Sedley 1987. (Vol. 1 contains the translations and brief philosophical commentary, vol. 2 the Greek or Latin originals and some short, more philological notes.) Sections 58, “Value and Indifference,” and 60, “Good and Bad,” include much of the material relevant to the present discussion. (N.B.: Henceforth, I will be citing sections from this work as LS + the relevant section number, e.g., LS58; individual fragments or testimonia receive letters with these numbers, e.g., LS58 A.)

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to be drawn, between things which are, as we might say, utterly and completely indifferent, and those which are not, and are accordingly to be regarded as either preferred, or dispreferred. Having an odd number of hairs on one’s head can serve as an example of an indifferent of the former kind. The suggestion is that not only is it rational for me not to care whether I have an odd or an even number of hairs on my head, but this is the sort of thing I just could not care about one way or the other (unless I were in the grip of some sort of fairly extreme, disturbed mental state). Thus here the Stoic view can easily seem like straightforward, common sense: no sane person cares about these kinds of things. Yet matters are not so simple, for most of the traditional ‘goods’ and ‘evils’ are treated as being indifferent in the other way. Thus on the one hand, bodily goods (like physical beauty, strength, or health), external goods (like wealth, social status, or political power), and life itself are regarded as preferred indifferents; on the other hand, bodily ills (like ugliness, weakness, or disease), external evils (like poverty, low social status, or lack of power), and even death itself are regarded as dispreferred indifferents. Talk of some indifferents as preferred, and of others as dispreferred, of course suggests that they are not wholly or utterly indifferent—a suggestion which is reinforced by the examples the Stoics actually use. And indeed the art of living will involve properly selecting amongst these indifferents, namely, by selecting in favor of the preferred ones, and against the dispreferred ones. Here, however, we need to proceed carefully, to avoid misunderstanding what is involved: when selecting in favor of, say, health, a wise person is going for what, in a sense, it is natural or rational to go for. (For Nature has so constructed human beings that their natural state is: being healthy, or tending towards being healthy.) But this must not be understood either as the claim that actually being healthy is a good (and that failing to achieve or to maintain health is thus an evil), or as the claim that in selecting in favor of health, the wise person is pursuing health as a good. Why not? One reason (though this is to express matters slightly anachronistically) is that the Stoics seek to neutralize moral luck, to insure that it will play no role in a good life, and therefore, no role in a happy and flourishing one. They thus want to deny that whether a given person is good (i.e., wise or virtuous) or not (i.e., foolish and vicious), depends on anything other than the condition of the leading part of his soul (= to

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hêgemonikon), or that this is in any way hostage to fortune. And so attaining or possessing external goods, or indeed bodily ones—i.e., any of the so-called goods of fortune—has no part in making a good life a good one. For example: whether or not I am healthy in fact does depend on a whole host of factors, many of which lie wholly outside of me and over which I have no control. Thus in order to be insulated from this sort of luck, the Stoics exclude health from the good life, strictly speaking, and they stipulate that what is at issue (as far as goodness is concerned) is selecting well, not attaining the preferred indifferents (and/or avoiding the dispreferred ones). A famous passage in Cicero, De finibus 3.22, illustrates the point by means of an analogy with archery (cf. also Plut. Comm. not. 1071B–C). Prior to our encounter with Stoicism, we might think that the goal of archery is hitting the target; that the good archer actually does hit his target; and that an archer who fails to hit his target is a bad archer, precisely on account of that failure. But the Stoics suggest that the goal of archery is not: hitting the target (= obtaining a preferred indifferent, or avoiding a dispreferred one), it rather is simply: aiming well (= selecting properly among the indifferents). The link between excellence at archery and success at hitting the target is thus broken, at least to the following extent. Someone might hit the target by mere luck, despite not aiming well; yet such ‘success’ is in no way to his credit, nor should we say that he possesses the art of archery. And it is equally possible that someone misses the target, despite having aimed well (say, a sudden gust of wind blew the arrow off course); in this kind of case, his ‘failure’ should not really be viewed as his failure, nor should we call into question his mastery of the art of archery, because in aiming well, he in fact did everything he did fully in accord with the principles, rules, or precepts of that art. But there is another reason as well. The Stoics (notoriously) hold that everything that happens, down to the smallest detail, happens in accord with a Providential Plan for the World (as a whole). This means that nothing that happens is bad, in the sense of being contrary to Fate or Providence. But that also means that if in a specific case, say, if in my own case, I end up not being healthy (despite having selected in favor of health, and having done everything in accord with the art of medicine, and in accord with whatever other arts or kinds of knowledge are relevant), this cannot, strictly speaking, be something bad. Indeed, if I were a wise person, I would see that my ‘failure’ to have obtained this preferred indifferent was not really a failure at all. As Michael Frede

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rightly notes, the wise person will recognize that his ‘failure’ actually proves to be a kind of success.19 There are of course a whole host of difficult questions we cannot consider here, including: Why should I view something, e.g., my own illness, from a ‘cosmic’ perspective rather than from my own, more limited one?20 How is one to reconcile the idea that selecting well among indifferents has a kind of value, or rather, that these indifferents themselves have a kind of value, with the thought that only the virtues are good, and only the vices are bad?21 How much of the view depends 19 See Frede 1986, 110: “… it does not really matter to [the wise person] which way the things he does turn out. For whether he succeeds or fails, it will be for the best for the world in either case. And since this is what he was aiming at in the first place when he felt impelled towards what he failed to obtain, he succeeds even in his failure.” For a slightly different interpretation of this point, see Inwood 1985, 213–214: “The same action can be described as ‘going home for Thanksgiving,’ as ‘honouring one’s parents,’ and as ‘doing a just act.’ The wise and virtuous man is the one who construes his actions as acts of virtue, as things which ought to be done. Simply making the right selection does not constitute virtue, although it is essential for it. The virtuous man thinks of his action as being right and in accordance with Nature’s will. He thinks of himself as doing the action because man was made for acting thus. So when the virtuous man goes home for Thanksgiving, he does not just assent to the proposition ‘I should go home for Thanksgiving’; he also assents to ‘by doing so I honour my parents’ and ‘by doing so I do a just act.’ If his selection of the appropriate action is also to be virtuous, he must also assent to these propositions. In so acting, the virtuous man sees his actions as expressions of virtue. In this way the sage can insure that his actions and intentions will never be frustrated. For the impulse to going home is reserved (after all the plane might crash); but the impulse to doing a good act cannot be frustrated and so no reservation is required. … If a man assents to a proposition which describes his action as virtuous, then his action will never fail of his objective. For although one may not achieve one’s goal under the description ‘honouring one’s parents’ or ‘going home for Thanksgiving,’ if the action is construed by the agent as a just act it cannot fail. For to do one’s best, consciously to do all that is in one’s power, is in itself a just act if it is done with an awareness of the good as one’s reason.” (All emphases added.) (A full discussion of Inwood would obviously require analyzing the distinction between reserved and unreserved impulses; but the overall import of his remarks should be clear even without such an analysis.) See also Vogt 2004b, 74–77 for yet another, extremely subtle approach to the issue. 20 The process of (what the Stoics call) oikeiôsis is meant to account for and explain the transition from identifying the good solely with my own ‘good’ (= my well-being) to identifying it with the cosmic good. See LS57, esp. A, F, and G. For brief discussion, cf. LS, vol. 1, 351–354. See also Striker 1983 (repr. in Striker 1996, 281–297); Inwood 1985, esp. Ch. 6 “Moral Evolution”; and, again, Frede 1986, 108–110. 21 Carneades seems to have been the first to raise the objection that the Stoics contradict themselves by, as it seems, on the one hand setting up virtue (reason) as the sole good, and hence the end to be pursued, and thus treating it as being of incommensurably greater value than anything else, and on the other hand, treating preferred indifferents as if they do have some value (and thus that a life of virtue + a certain number of preferred indifferents would actually be better than a life of virtue

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on the idea that there is a Providential Plan for the World? And not least, how is one supposed to resolve (what to many interpreters has seemed like) the deep tension between the Stoic claim that people are wholly responsible for their choices, and the Universal Fate which they hold governs the World? Difficult as these questions are, we can already see that there will be an enormous difference between the wise person and someone who takes the various preferred indifferents actually to be good, and the various dispreferred ones actually to be bad. Notice also that this difference need not manifest itself in any overt behavior: thus both a wise person and (at least a certain kind of) a fool might do the right sorts of things in order to maintain and enhance their health: they will eat nutritious meals; they will eat the right amount of food; they will follow an appropriate exercise regimen; they will go to the relevant doctors if they become ill; they will obey their doctors’ instructions and take the prescribed medicines; and so on. Indeed, if they both live healthy lives (i.e., do not succumb to some sort of debilitating or otherwise ‘bad’ disease), there might well be no way at all (if we look ‘in’ on them from, as it were, the ‘outside’) to tell the fool apart from the wise person. The difference between them consists wholly in something ‘internal,’ in what one might describe as the attitude or outlook they take on, among other things, their being healthy. That difference will most obviously come to light in case things actually do end up going ‘badly’ for them: the fool will regard his illness as a terrible thing; he will be subject to thoughts like, ‘Why am I, of all people, afflicted in this way?,’ or ‘It’s unfair that I should suffer so, when this other person is doing fine,’ and so on. The wise person, on the other hand, will continue doing whatever he is doing, secure in the knowledge that everything that is happening is (ultimately) for the best, and that he has done everything required of him. At this point we can return to Seneca. It is clear that he attributes to the fool the thought that life really is a good (perhaps the greatest of goods), and that death really is something bad (perhaps the worst

without any preferred indifferents), and as if they thus are also ‘ends’ of a sort; but now it would appear that Stoics do not, after all, recognize only a single good or end. Besides the Cicero and Plutarch passages mentioned in the body of the text (= LS64 F and C), see all the fragments in LS64; cf. LS63 and 58; for brief discussion, see LS, vol. 1, 406–410. See also Inwood 1985, 205–215 and Striker 1986 (repr. in Striker 1996, 298–315).

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of evils). But it seems to me that in the passages quoted above he goes a step further. The suggestion seems to be (and this is a thought we should be familiar with from Epicurus) that even though the difference between the fool and the wise person is an ‘internal’ one, the sort of situation described in the previous paragraph either cannot occur, or will be extremely rare—that is to say, it is not the case that there will be no way of telling the two of them apart (when looking ‘in’ from the ‘outside’); on the contrary, the difference between the fool and the wise person will manifest itself in virtually every aspect of their lives, as part of all of their everyday behavior. The slavery in question (at 26.10) is the fear of death; it is rightly called slavery, because the person who does fear death in this way lets that fear govern his life, not just on those occasions when there are (let us say) obvious dangers to life and limb, but on all occasions: that is why anyone who looks down on his own life as being of no account (quisquis uitam suam contempsit), i.e., treats it as an indifferent, will have power over the life of someone who regards life as a genuine good (cf. 4.8). The fear of death thus suffuses the whole of life and exercises a distorting influence on it: recall Seneca’s comment that the fear (metus) of “that final hour” (ultimam illam horam) “makes all the other hours [sc. of our life] be ones lacking in ease” (omnes alias inquietas facit) (4.9). Or rather, the person who does fear death in this way, i.e., who holds the various false beliefs about the goodness of life and the badness of death, himself distorts his own life to such an extent that he can be described as unwilling to live (4.5); in other words, he is incapable of willing to live, that is, making the kinds of choices and decisions (including selecting appropriately among indifferents) that are necessary for leading a life that could so much as be a candidate for a good life. Thus when Seneca says, “most people (plerique) … are unwilling to live, because they know not how to die” (4.5), this should not be thought of as an overly pointed paradox, or as reflecting a (morbid) obsession with death, but as a simple statement of fact. Learning how to die is not indulging in some sort of pathological fantasy, it rather is learning how to live. Part of the lesson to be learned is recognizing that while the attachment to life is, in a way, natural (and for non-rational animals, including human children—whom the Stoics regard as non-rational animals— such an attachment just is natural, without qualification), in the case of a rational being, any overly strong attachment to mere (biological) life is irrational. A rational being, if it is actually being rational, will rather seek to live rationally, i.e., in accordance with reason, i.e., in accordance

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with the logos of the world as a whole. Thus if such a being (e.g., a person who is, in the Stoic sense, wise) finds that it is no longer possible to live in this way, then, because “the chain” (= “the lust for life”) which binds him to mere (biological) life has been “weakened,” he is “ready to do that thing straightaway” which he “must at some time or other do in any event” (26.10). (Seneca is here perhaps even stating the notorious Stoic view that the wise person will be prepared to commit suicide—if that is what reason demands.22 Recall Letter 12.10: “In every direction, there lie paths to freedom: they are many, short, and easy. Let us thank God that no-one can be shackled to life. It is possible to spurn the very need that does [seem to] hold us.”) Now, at long last, we can return to our friend Pacuvius (from Letter 12). I take it to be uncontroversial that Seneca means to be describing, in vivid terms, an unhealthy mind (conscientia mala) leading to unhealthy behavior. The contrived theatricality of Pacuvius’s ‘funerals,’ the male prostitutes who make up the chorus of ‘mourners,’ the endless repetition, the performative contradiction between the perfective aspect (or Aktionsart) of the perfect tense verbs, uixi and peregi, and the fact that he needs to keep on saying them, the patent insincerity—all are signs that far from having learned how to die and being reconciled to his mortality, Pacuvius is a slave to the fear of death, who indulges in a rigid (perhaps unconsciously motivated) apotropaic ritual which is doomed to failure. (And its psychological failure is displayed in his need to keep putting on these mock funerals, over and over again.) History always repeats itself, but the first time it is a tragedy, the second time, a farce. When Dido says, uixi et quem dederat cursum fortuna peregi, there is a noble simplicity in what she says. Indeed, for Seneca (or for any Stoic), there is a greater or more heroic quality to her words than there is in Vergil. That is because, as we have seen, Vergil problematizes her utterance by having the epic narrator point out that hers was not a fated death, that she is dying ante diem. But the Stoics 22 See LS66G and H; for brief discussion, see LS, vol. 1, 428–429. It is crucial to recognize, in coming to terms with this part of Stoic doctrine, that they are in no way recommending suicide: the wise person should not be thought of as somehow subject to a death-wish. Rather the wise person, recognizing that life (being alive) is a preferred indifferent, will not seek to cling to it, no matter what the cost. But the wise person also recognizes the ‘value’ of life, and so he will not carelessly or mindlessly endanger himself, or commit suicide on a whim or in order to make some ‘grand’ gesture. One might also want to ask: To what extent does Seneca’s own suicide (as depicted by Tacitus) conform to the Stoic model?

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hold that no one dies a death that is not fated; or, alternatively, that everyone dies his own death.23 The task for all of us—learning how to die—is coming to own our death as our own death. But Dido, in a way, does precisely that. And so Seneca must in effect take her side—it is she, after all, who sees things aright, not the epic narrator. But this only serves to highlight how ridiculous, in fact, how grotesque, Pacuvius is being when he attempts the noble gesture, which, by being repeated daily, fails at being even a simulacrum of such a gesture. There is one further irony in Letter 12. In anticipation of an objection Lucilius might raise (to Seneca’s use of Epicurus), Seneca admonishes him to pay attention to “what gets said,” not to “who says it.” But the object lesson that Pacuvius provides, suggests exactly the opposite: it makes all the difference in the world, who it is who says, uixi et quem dederat cursum fortuna peregi. For this sentence—like any other—will mean one thing when spoken by a wise person and another (indeed, something wholly different) when spoken by a fool. If we learn the lesson Seneca would have us learn, we could speak Dido’s words wholeheartedly and mindfully. At the same time, we would have been freed from the need to speak any such words. But we could, lightly and with ease, say a quick uixi before going to sleep and await, ex bona conscientia, (each) tomorrow with patience and good cheer.

23 In the article with which we began, W. Schulze notes that Seneca himself says so; see Ep. 69.6: nemo moritur nisi sua morte. illud praeterea tecum licet cogites: nemo nisi suo die moritur (“No one dies any death other than his own. And there is also this for you to reflect on: no one dies on any day other than his own”).

JOURNEY OF A LIFETIME: SENECA, EPISTLE 57 IN BOOK VI IN EM

John Henderson The only way out is through The only way we’ll feel better The only way out is through ultimately Morissette, “Out is Through,” 2004

In the Epistulae Morales, Seneca deflects the Latin letter from the rattle and hum of this world—the politics, society, and everyday living of Nero’s imperial Rome and its worldpower, government, and elite. En route to direct engagement with moral arguments, logical puzzles, and the technical apparatus of Hellenistic epistemology, ontology, and deontology, he trades on the associations of the epistolary format in showing how the coordinates of the external habitus provide challenging material for cerebration.1 The epistolary genre checks out the apparatus of philosophy in terms of its applicability in the Roman context of Latin language and discourse.2 In just one major sequence, in the first half of EM VI, Seneca presents a mimetic sequence set around a tour of the Bay of Naples area. Here he runs smack into GraecoRoman culture: the history of Italy and the myths of Rome, playing Odysseus and Aeneas, himself at once another hero of the Republic and one more imperial escapee. In context, the itinerary profiles a graded series of spiritual ordeals, and prompts the desired lessons. Its climax, at EM 57, finds the ultimate scenario for a psychic journey beyond. In the Naples underpass, he plays through a private meltdown of collapse in mud, dark, and swoon; and soars to a higher plane, to 1 Henderson 2004 ( = “H 2004” below) concentrates on EM 12, 55, 86 (171–174, “Appendix. Here to Stay,” maps and tabulates all “Places and Persons Named in EM”). The present essay stems from a panel at the Classical Association Annual Conference (2004) held in Leeds. My thanks to Diana Spencer for inviting me to hold forth. 2 Vindication of generic imprinting of whatever material is stamped into EM: Wilson 1987 and 2001; cf. Lavery 1989. Their perpetually shifting readability gets downplayed (under-appreciated) by analysis within Philosophy.

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the stars, blinding light, break on through to the other side. Here epic nekuia-cum-astral scintillation catches up with modernizing consciousness, as Latin prose is set to dramatize individual experience pushed past extremity. The letter shows how to fasten upon jarring mundane circumstance and deliver the POW of bliss to thunderstruck reading— in this case, to turn disoriented stress into transportation to hyperspace.3 What good is this crisis for thinking? Seneca channels writing to get us out of this world, reaching for eternity to realize the essence of Being. Then the campaign to habituate strenuous reasoning presses ahead. Bursts of auto-portraiture will recur, but ere Book VI the collection has completed its transformation of writer and addressee into a pact to renounce unreasoning existence. Embodied contingency will persist as intermittent jolt and spur to philosophize, as “we” stumble and falter along the road through its denigration toward its elimination from our preoccupation. The autography of this therapeutic writing enshrines philosophy as a continuous drive to battle on through the distraction of life to reach past mortality to discountenance, more than consciousness, the entire baggage of happenstance, including the paraphernalia of language, social-individual persona, and cultural situatedness. Nonetheless, the “postcard” qualities of Seneca’s solitary record of tripping to (and fro) the coast function, too, to emphasise the dependence of philosophy on contingency—weather and traffic conditions, bus or boat, hover or chunnel, the way round or cut through!—as its raison d’être. Till death stops the chain of mail, reason must never succeed absolutely in repressing its Sitz im Leben. And we better get used to it.4 This essay takes a wild shot at DOING exactly that. 1. If I Were Dead, Would My Records Sell: EM 1–52 I doubt if there is a brighter spot in all New York than this hole of mine and I do not exclude Broadway. Or the Empire State Building on a photographer’s dream night … I can now see the darkness of lightness. And I love light. Perhaps you’ll think it strange that an invisible man should need light, desire light, love light. But maybe it’s exactly because 3 4

Cf. Elkins 2001, esp. 171–173, “The history of being thunderstruck.” Smith 1995. See esp. Schönegg 1999 for EM “als philosophisches Kunstwerk.”

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I am invisible. … In my hole in the basement there are exactly 1,369 light bulbs. I’ve wired the entire ceiling, every inch of it. … The truth is the light and light is the truth. Ellison 1952, 6–75

ita fac, mi, Lucili … fac ergo, mi Lucili, quod facere te scribis … interrogabis fortasse quid ego faciam qui tibi ista praecipio (1.1, 2, 4). Seneca rolls the ball6: on this journey by post, valorized “deeds” will assume this form, of self creation from first principles: from the outset, “doing” re-positions us, rearranging you/me, my you, through reason: uindica te tibi …; persuade tibi … (1.1).7 The opening topics map Space onto Time, you can tell— you are told—they are programmatic (et si uolueris attendere …, 1.1). Opening the book that opens the collection, we must know “one dies every day” and “life runs past,” so any “start” will never be “too late”: get it?, bono tempore incipies (1.5). Latin letters were the most prestigious prose genre where book composition from a number of serial subunits metonymized an expanding collection of books. The first time Seneca makes you surge past the shutdown valediction of epistolary closure and stagger into a new incipit is fed straight into classic moral product, as travel is anathematized as “shiftless scurrying,” “a sick psyche’s bucking,” disproof of the “settled” psyche that belongs to “consistency, in a word hanging-out-with-your-self ” (discurris … locorum mutationibus inquietaris. aegri animi iactatio est … compositae mentis … consistere et secum morari, 2.1).8 Travellers have “many hosts, few friends,” no?, and same goes for adventurers in bookland, too. Be warned, transience gets lost in transit: before we hopped across into this second letter-space, the lesson was “to die every day” (cotidie mori, 1.2)9; this now transposes into settling into a routine of reading wisdom, “acquire some help every See Doy 2005, 105–107, “The invisible Subject,” and Fig. 1. H 2004, 6–18 on EM Book I; cf. esp. Scarpat 1975. Other fine sequential readings of the Letters play down book divisions: esp. Hachmann 1995; Maurach 1970. 7 See esp. Edwards 1997 on “self-transformation” as the project in EM. Radical reappraisal of Senecan theorems of selfhood: Bartsch 2006, chapters 4–5, in particular refining conceptualization and mobilization of Senecan “interiority” (for which cf. esp. Thévanaz 1976; Grimal 1992). The whole image-repertoire of EM, staked out so painstakingly by Armisen-Marchetti 1989, is meant to drain off colour and erase difference as everything wells into activation of moral praxis. fac is Seneca’s delight: e.g., 109.17, fortiorem fac me, iustiorem, temperantiorem, and the conceitful sonorities of 117.33, fac me fortiorem, fac securiorem, fac fortunae parem, fac superiorem, etc; cf. 114.17 for robust discussion of mouth-whetting Sallustian constructions with facio. 8 Cf. esp. 104.18. 9 See esp. 101.1, omnis dies, omnis hora quam nihil simus ostendit … quid sibi istud principium uelit quaeris? … 5 6

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day to bat off financial pressure, dying, and the rest of the afflictions …: when you’ve scurried over reams, pick out one item to digest that day” (aliquid cotidie … compara; et cum multa percurreris, unum excerpe quod illo die concoquas, 2.4). Such is your old Seneca’s own “deed,” always in the groove, back in the class that never graduates (hoc ipse quoque facio, 2.5). “Today’s nugget” is on its way; a gem from Epicurus, for Seneca has taught himself to trespass into enemy territory for fieldwork (hodiernum hoc est quod apud Epicurum nanctus sum. soleo enim et in aliena castra transire—non tamquam transfuga sed tamquam explorator). Letter 3 continues with the good work of consolidation by habituation (soleas … facere; ita uiue; consuetudo fecit … facies … fecerunt … faciendum, 3.1, 3, 4). Its successor tells us that success in this consists in consolidating the start made in successive consolidation: perseuera ut coepisti … (4.1). Watch words of “progress” take form—“arrive,” “get there”—“meditate daily”—“do it” (profice; perueniat; perducere; cotidie meditari, fac itaque, 4.3, 4, 5, 6),10 and mount the “journal” custom of a lemma a day as the “end” of each letter instalment: sed ut finem epistulae imponam, accipe quod mihi hodierno die placuit … (4.10). The stop-start stagger of epistolarity transforms into the puncturing of each salvo by its closure via supplementation with point through this writerly ruse of formal “postscript”; a move which obliges retrospective re-pondering of the body of the letter just read, which will have been thinking with the chosen thought for the day, must have reposed on its meditation, whence materialized the reasoning represented by today’s “diary-entry.” And so, we re-commence, The Pattern is set—set the pattern: quod pertinaciter studes … ut te meliorem cotidie facias … (5.1). The punchline message at the end of the day ends the day’s text with the text of the day, which crystallizes epistolary format as embodying the formative massage of this correspondence course of treatment (5.7): sed ut huius quoque diei lucellum tecum communicem, apud Hecatonem nostrum inueni cupiditatum finem etiam ad timoris remedia proficere. “Desines” inquit “timere, si sperare desieris.” PS. To share this today’s spot of lucre with you, Lucilius, I came across in our Hecato that limiting desires also progresses alleviation of fear. “Thou shalt cease” he says “to fear if thou hast ceased to hope.”

With this dynamic instituted and inculcated, the book is set to lurch its way from one day to a next, traversing the same ground on the same 10

On (prae)meditatio: esp. Armisen-Marchetti 1986; Newman 1989.

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mission of “perseverance” to the (same) end. Piece by piece. At times, instalments link formally, in places letters follow up on each other; otherwheres, they situate themselves as the same cumulative process in other words. “One, broken, journey: peregrinatio, iter, fuga, secessus, nauigatio …”11 As a run of stop-overs: “Avoid crowding” → “You tell me to avoid crowding” (7.1 → 8.1), and “The same Stilbo … as in my last letter” (10.1 ← 9.18–19). Through “transcription” from child to adult, “transfiguration” by a special book, to one boy giving himself his own bad company followed by another’s grand blushing start, precipitating relapse as our old guru goes back to his roots to backslide, last time out, and close this carefully designed suite in spluttering shame at letting himself and his lessons down (4.2; 6.1; 10.1; 11.2; 12.2–3).12 For Book I finally finds Seneca’s out-of-town home as the place that imagines quotidian mundanity—“Wherever I have turned myself ”—into the vital chip in the circuitry of our Life-Time. Here we map metonymic metaphor, delivered along the chain of epistolarity: twelve folded into one, and the next post set to continue/start the campaign again (13 = II.1). Just as EM 12 completes itself by re-cycling suicidal Dido’s epitaph for closure—uixi et quem dederat cursum Fortuna peregi (12.9)—while promising to keep on keeping on, and dish out more of the same: perseuerabo Epicurum tibi ingerere … (12.11). Books to come shall now register as abiding by, as deviating from, this paradigmatic first sally. And, so, add themselves as paradigms, repeat versions or new variants both. A lesson or three that will last, what mileage for Senecan teaching can be extracted from its conditioning by specifically epistolary dynamics13; correlatively, how much purposive thinking comes from brooding over reading samples—this is what we are getting used to replicating in reading Seneca—; and counter-generically, how demonstratively the mimetic world of socialpersonal-commercial-political intercourse can be demoted to occasional and optional baseline for salutary excogitation. In Book I, the milieu from which the letters write has featured Seneca’s metropolitan stamping-ground of forum and threshold, arena and senate-house (EM 5, 7, 11), before at the death parading the dramatic potential of scenography so far (now still more glaringly) repressed, in the slightest touch of narrativity provided by the move out to the decrepit plane-trees of 11 12 13

The “journey-metaphor”: Lavery 1980, 151–155. On EM 12: H 2004, 19–27. Lana 1991.

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superannuated Seneca’s suburban self. Of the long-suffering addressee’s whereabouts and standpoint, not one word. Book II14 therefore departs from a retrospect on Lucilius’ progress. Spiritual progress, first. (Obviously.) The book starts up with its first ending spoonful of Epicurus devoted to doubling the idiocy of beginning—“Always [semper: i.e. = cotidie] starting to live!” (13.16)—with the shame of beginning—“Old men off travelling or trading, starting to live!” (13.17). The second entry neckotiates the tricky straits between humiliation and prudence in keeping a head on a sage’s (merely corporeal) shoulders: “like handling a squall en voyage” (in nauigando procellam, 14.7); and this is where Lucilius comes in(to the picture): cum peteres Siciliam, traiecisti fretum … (14.8). To get to Sicily means thinking your way through “Scylla-and-Charybdis”—whatever sort applies. Philosophical retreat? Political evasion? sed postea uidebimus … (14.14).15 For now, ponder “HMS X sinks in port: and so …—what do you believe happens in mid-ocean?” (14.15). We’re here, recall, to excogitate “the daily dole” of secondhand Wisdom, and today’s will be “golden,” and what matters is that it’s time to flatten all cult of personality, “not that it matters whose clipping is in the mix”: you want to know what Lucilius is up to? Today’s watchword, “Who enjoys riches the most? Who needs riches the least,” you think it’s about (a?) Lucilius raking it in, and living it up, in Sicily? You think it isn’t? You think. This gathering gets on with, gets back to, philosophizing epistolary dynamics, from the “ancient ethic” incapsulated in the formula SVBEEV (15.1) through the up-date si philosopharis, bene est to the end in ualediction that counts (15.11); through postscripts on the finis miseriarum (cf. 17.11) and on “beginning postscripts as letter endings” (EM 18–19); to the self-reflexive finale on fame-production in the wake of the Letters of Epicurus and Cicero (21.3–5): compare Seneca and addressee with those glorified losers Nisus ’n’ Euryalus (20.5). Lucilius is just (just!) the protreptic régime’s necessary prompt, for cotidiana meditatio; perseuerandum; already, a book and a half in, intellege multum te profecisse (16.1–2). “Shake him out,” and find he is a vector of epistolarity (excute te ↔ circumspicies quid haec epistula munusculi attulerit: excute illam, et inuenies, 16.2, 7). “No fare needed to go the whole way to Philosophy” (17.7, etiam sine uiatico peruenire). It makes Seneca think, the fact he lives his space-time Xmas in Rome, where festivities make a sociopath of the ascetic who 14 15

H 2004, 29–31. See EM 68, with Maso 1999, chapter 4.

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won’t give his cotidiana consuetudo a rest (18.12). Otherwise, mundanity only intrudes when Lucilius’ letters inspire good hope and a bravo—ita fac—, that is to say, worry his minder with the distractions that preoccupy his protégé (19.1, istis occupationibus). Seneca need not tell his own, totting up, tale—“We’ve lived on the foam, let’s die in port”—but Lucilius has his name-and-fame still to fashion: shunning celebrity, including the anchorite’s, but not holing up in a hide-out … We are permitted the luxury of a profile (19.3): in medium te protulit ingenii uigor, scriptorum elegantia, clarae et nobiles amicitiae; iam notitia te inuasit … Pushing you into the limelight: livewire temperament; classy writings; luminous alliances with notables. Plus celebrity has just plagued you …

He has the dependants and associated duties that menace the person of standing, bad as an ocean to cross: fortunate at present to be so fortunate at present as to be removed from harm’s way (19.5): tulit te longe a conspectu uitae salubris rapida felicitas, prouincia et procuratio et quicquid ab istis promittitur. Carrying you off far from sight of healthy living: whirlwind success; province, administrative post, whatever promise all this holds for you.

“Lucilius” has the space, the time, to incubate in Sicily. The storm will hit him later, when success waits in ambush back at Rome. Meantime— fluctuaris, imperial administrator overboard (20.1). Book III tacitly congratulates readers for having internalized repression of the biographic urge. Lucilius (we get moving, by doubting the efficacy of therapeutics by mail) “knows he must be delivered from those preoccupations, seductive and evil” (22.1). Lucilius will never return, to face the music; but he’s menaced by a threatening prosecution (presumably for doing his job?, 24.1: we shan’t be told). He’s not learned (from Horace or Vergil) that travel doesn’t shift or lift mental depression (peregrinatione tam longa et tot locorum uarietatibus; terrarum … nouitas …, cognitio urbium aut locorum; etc. etc., 28.1–2), as we learn from a spaced-out letter full of sea-crossings whose postscript, “The start of salvation? Know your sin,” is figured as “harbour-dues”: tempus est desinere, sed si prius portorium soluero (28.9). To take Lucilius down any last remaining peg or two, this collection ends up focussing on an interloper, one Marcellinus (EM 29): sceptic in peril, and giving our administrator a piece of his mind for PS: si pudorem haberes, ultimam mihi pensionem remisisses … (29.10). If Seneca ever catches him lapping up celebrity, “there’ll be

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some dose of withering pity—from one who knows the road that leads to popularity of that sort! Vale” (29.12). Going, going, gone. Book IV opens up with a good guy going down, Aufidius Bassus, like a ship riddled with holes and foundering. A long, long letter of death that spells necrology for the Senecan post-script.16 Instead of cuttings, from here on in any tag will be pure Seneca (30.18): sed uereri debeo ne tam longas epistulas peius quam mortem oderis. itaque finem faciam: tu tamen mortem ut numquam timeas semper cogita. uale. —But I must worry you’ll loathe letters this long worse than death. So I’ll make an end: you, though, get thinking and never stop, so you never fear death. Fare well.

Lucilius must be re-habilitated anew, personhood formally subordinated to Senecan ratification: agnosco Lucilium meum: incipit quem promiserat exhibere (31.1). “Self-making” intensifies (fac te ipse felicem; facies autem …; te … faciet …, faciet; faciet; te facere, 31.5, 9–10), to a Virgilian climax (“et te quoque dignum | finge deo.” finges autem, 31.11), around the conceit: “How do you make it all the way to the summum bonum?” “No, not up the Alps, … or through the Syrtes, or between Scylla-Charybdis, etc. etc.”—and, yes, the confirmation flashes past (plus denigration! 31.9)17: quae tamen omnia transisti procuratiunculae pretio. You climbed every mountain, mind—thanks to that adminnikinstration!

This volume in twelve helpings confines itself to its last with thoughtgenerating epistolographics all the way. Seneca does check up on news of Lucilius from people coming “from your province” (32.1), just as he asks in the latest, as in many an earlier, letter for a few words from “our leading lights”—but (naturally) means {more postscripts from} “our {sect’s} main sages,” so he and we can be told that excerpts are no use (flosculi)—no, the whole corpus needs reading entire (33.1).18 Take 16 H 2004, 16 n. 27, cf. 29–31: Epicurus appears in EM: 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29; 30, 33 (the “PS” operator exhumed for rumination), 46, 52, 66, 67, 79, 81. On the Senecan “PS”: Hachmann 1996. 17 Vassileiou 1971 traces a career for Lucilius from Alps-Epirus-Africa here. 18 Book XIV will impress this indelibly, at cosmic scale, when Lucilius wants philosophy divided up into its limbs, through its parts, for students in a hurry to comprehend

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note, reader, this corpus is growing: don’t just “walk in your forebears’ tracks,” we’re here to “make use of the old road,” or, if we “find a nearer, flatter, one,” let’s “build it” (33.11): “our” sages are “not masters, but guides.” There’s plenty of Truth left for the Future. Vale. For the rest, this suite goes up-beat, as the task-master is rejuvenated for joy at pupil’s progress over the distance of the collection to date, and the processing goes on (turbam olim reliqueras, 34.1 ↔ EM 7–8): si perseueraueris …; pergis ut coepisti; profice; dum mihi proficis; profice … (34.4, 35.1, 2, 4). He asks for the rate of exchange to speed up, presses for a consignment of books to read, no crammers, mind, and earns congratulations for himself writing more often (EM 38, 39, 40). The method required is “step-by-step,” that “daily work-out” regimen (pedetemptim procedere; exercitatio cotidiana, 40.7, 13): so, the appropriate style for the philosopher to adopt must (you guessed!) be anything but up-beat: summa ergo summarum haec erit: tardilocum esse te iubeo. uale (40.14). Still no mimesis to record, and the book wraps up with more episto-literarity (41.1, 8): SENECA LVCILIO SVO SALVTEM facis rem optimam et tibi salutarem si, ut scribis, perseueras ire ad bonam mentem … … quomodo autem reuocari ad salutem possunt quos nemo retinet, populus impellit? uale. SENECA TO FRIEND LUCILIUS: GREETINGS {& GOOD HEALTH} You’re doing the best thing there is, good for your health. If, as you write, you’re keeping on with the trek to a sound mind … … How can people be recalled to good health when no one brakes them, and the masses stampede them? Fare you well.

Book V brews up both sides of the mail link, foregrounds textual exchange: Lucilius is still that big wheel in Sicily we know (43.1). A grumpy eques Romanus—on the iter uitae (44.1). Complaining of book shortage—at risk of Seneca setting sail across the Scylla-Charybdis whole, but must learn that we cannot view the totality of Philosophy or the Universe, be content with sectioning “into parts, not bits,” through “computation” plus “gradus” (89.1, 9–15; 16–17). Our best guide to reading our way to the wisdom of EM? per partes peruenietur ad totum (108.2).

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straits (at his age), swimming, even, this tour of duty is dragging on so long—wanting books from Seneca (45.1–3), who next tells he can’t put down the book Lucilius despatched him, comment to follow (wait for it!) after re-reading (46.1–3). More information on Lucilius arrives with—from—his couriers (47.1), and so does a jumbo screed he sent ex itinere—tam longam quam ipsum iter, answer pending meditation, a look round for counsel (48.1). Still the journey doesn’t change—consult Virgil: hac ad summum bonum itur? … “sic itur ad astra?” (48.10–11). Without warning, lo!, Seneca is on the move (49.1)19: ecce Campania et maxime Neapolis ac Pompeiorum tuorum conspectus …: totus mihi in oculis es. Look! Campania. Above all, Naples. The sight of your Pompeii …: you, all you, fill my eyes.

Out of Rome, to get close enough to Lucilius (no swim). Taking a look at familiar places brings friends to mind across miles and years: totus mihi in oculis es. In the narrow space of life there are “no long intervals,” not just at sea, but any place the gap between life and death is a “slim interval” (49.2, 11): so many gradations “in such a narrow bottleneck,” no easing “my narrow neck of time” (in quam angusto quodam, 49.3; angustias temporis mei, 10). Next up, a late delivery spurs more thoughts on the power we assign “place and time,” leading to the collection’s first naming of Rome, as a (the?) site for self-blind conniving at our cooption by the social machine (50.1, 3). Each according to his powers, let’s get geophysical: as Lucilius has Etna, fire-belching Everest of Sicily, so Seneca makes do with Baiae, worthy opponent for a satisfying slanging-match against luxuriance (contenti sumus Bais ↔ satis diu cum Bais litigauimus, 51.1, 13).20 Not that you should declare loathing for a place, any place, but somewhere to avoid, all the same (the Nilotic “Canopus” of Italy: 51.3, cf. 13). Why the excursion (in)to the holiday resort? Etna spews sensational writing (51.1), and Baiae is a hybristic hubbub of topics for persiflage: drunks teetering along the sea-affront, boat-trippers living it up fortissimo, orchestrated lakes beaming muzakkety-yak, just name it. The famous “Campanian treatment” story that unmanned the Hannibal that waltzed Alpine snowstorms; his conqueror Scipio roughing it at Liternum, so near, so far from, Baiae. Other local legends of Roman heroes besides (51.4–12). A pre-packaged tour of the 19 20

Summers 1910, 217 on EM 51 neatly travelogues the collection; cf. H 2004, 32. H 2004, 32–33; Hönscheid 2004.

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wrong place to choose for locating body or moral self, when Freedom demands we choose “a jokeless zone, consecrated ground” (51.4, 10). Back in the swim: fluctuamur, the job’s not (yet, ever) done: differam hoc in praesentia (52.1, 15). A sixth series calls, then. At the least. We can have no idea how Seneca will pick up his momentum and walk. Stooping to a veritable spree—half the book—of farcical fabulation. Really. 2. quid ergo nunc te hortor ut facias? nihil noui—nec enim nouis malis remedia quaeruntur (110.11): EM 63–124 At 45.13, Seneca had contrived an ending from opinionation on epistolary scale21: sed ne epistulae modum excedam, quae non debet sinistram manum legentis implere, in alium diem hanc litem cum dialecticis differam nimium subtilibus et hoc solum curantibus, non et hoc. uale. But—not to bust the limit for a letter, which mustn’t fill full the reader’s left hand, I shall put off for another day this dispute with discussants both hyper-sophisticated and occupied with this and only this, not this on the side. Fare well.

Book VII eschews mimesis, instead ((un)duly) breaking generic bounds with its seven pieces the lowest total so far/to date. The number of jolts per book will thereafter decrease drastically (5 → 6 → 3), as we complete the first decade of volumes—, and, while picking up, never regain the steady flow of handy sized hunks collected just into double figures that characterized Books I through VI; several monsterpieces— worth a book’s bulge each—lie ahead (the first at 66).22 Here begins another book with necrology, for Flaccus—targeting the finem doloris (63.1, 12). “Yesterday you were with us (sc. in mind)” twins with “Half yesterday I was unwell” (64.1 ↔ 65.1). Spring marks Senecan time—it must be late Spring, he is “nailed to his bed, thank you old age”; “most of his conversations are with Lucilius’ letters, he doesn’t so Cf. 85.1, peperceram tibi … quod si facere uoluero, non erit epistula, sed liber … H 2004, 28–29. These hulking missives stand a fat chance of getting into the eternal selections from EM, Seneca’s massive grauitas is generally unrecognized. 21 22

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much write back to them as reply to him” (67.1–2). The pupil is told: “hide, at rest—and hide the hiding” (68.1), before the book shuts on a fresh denunciation afresh of shiftlessness of body as of mind: mutare te loca et aliunde alio transilire nolo … (69.1). No change, then, from Seneca’s inexorable halma of psychic stabilization, this unrelenting concatenation. This book-end loudly resumes the terms and strategy of EM 12, the first “epilogue.” It “preludes” the next initiative, Book VIII, which returns us fully amplified to Book V (70.1 ↔ 49.1)23: post longum interuallum Pompeios tuos uidi. in conspectum adulescentiae meae reductus sum … After a lengthy gap, I’ve set eye on your Pompeii. It took me back to a sighting of my own youth …

Off we must sail, on the voyage of life with Virgil for the second time of asking (70.2 ↔ 28.1). Soon, too, we’ll reach for his poetic stars again (73.15 ↔ 48.11).24 Our writing dyad are parted, the partner needs reminding, “by a vast sea {!: straits or gulf ? Evidently as wide as it feels …}” (71.1). Another upbeat finale capitalizes on receipt of a cheering letter, enough to stir one more Jeremiad on human vulnerability, “to shipwreck and similar,” just “like” another “squall or lightning strike” (74.1, 4 ↔ 14.7, 53.4; 57.8).25 None of these revisits simply reprises what was afoot first time out (nor could they). But reinforcement palpably re-directs the collection hereabouts. Book IX pairs Lucilius moaning at getting casual letters—as if they’re meant to be enjoyed, not improve!—with Lucilius threatening a feud if he doesn’t get told Seneca’s daily trivia, cueing a brisk uita from everyman—off to school for lectures, past the Naples theatre on the way to Metronax—: first we chew over “something I said in an earlier letter”; then, we pick up on a lengthy “demonstration in an earlier letter” that hasn’t satisfied Lucilius, and offer a compact re-run (75.1 ↔ 76.1; 75.5 ↔ 76.7, 25, 26: recapping 74.14, 16).26 Two strikingly vivid patches of scenography slot into this category, of sequel, follow-up: first the mail-arm of the imperial fleet delivers its payload of news from the colonies (77.1–2):

H 2004, 36–37. Cf. 92.31, 93.10 (death of Metronax). 25 For Senecan naufragium: Allegri 1999. Cf. esp. 81.2; Seneca’s rough-it country picnic at 87.1, naufragium antequam nauem ascenderem feci … (H 2004, 49–50); 88.7; 103.1. 26 Cf. 121.18, itaque, ut in prioribus epistulis dixi … 23 24

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subito nobis hodie Alexandrinae naues apparuerunt … gratus illarum Campaniae aspectus est: omnis in pilis Puteolorum turba consistit … cum intrauere Capreas … Suddenly, today, the ships from Alexandria appeared over the horizon … Campania loves catching sight of them: the whole crowd takes up position on the pier: Pozzuoli … Once they’ve negotiated their way in past Capreae …

But our prophet has “more fare than road to run,” on that life-changing journey which the latest suicide, Tullius Marcellinus, just showed no one needs to complete, since (to reiterate) “any stopping completes said journey,” there being “no journey without end”: ui(t)a (77.3–4, 13, uiaticum … uia; iter; iter).27 You know, someone said, the world’s a stage, and life’s a play—but it takes epistolarity to drive the point home with finality: no matter where you stop, ad lib. your exit (77.20): quocumque uoles, desine: tantum bonam clausulam impone. uale. Wherever you want—stop. Only see you fetch it a noble conclusion. Fare well.

And Lucilius? First he’s reported in sick, and inevitably it’s one more familiar malady to Seneca, who’s been there and done it (78.1). The remedial letter back must have done the trick, since we next await a letter which will diary the circuit of Sicily he will just have completed (is this tour a cure? Not our concern): (79.1) what’s the low-down on that Charybdis up close (79.2)? There’s that Etna, again—just the place for one more hot poetaster to clamber up Parnassus, a peak where (you’ll find) success plateaus (79.1–5, 8: cum ad summum perueneris, paria sunt).28 Finally, back to base, with Seneca reporting on today’s ballgame (80.1). Sour as ever: “Except for the ‘Mask of happiness’ and the new turn given to the ‘Play of life’ image of 77.20, this letter does little but repeat thoughts with which previous letters in this Selection have already made us familiar.”29 Apart from … Book X’s triad shrugs off occasionality, rising instead to the fullest description of our host’s regimen: singulos dies tibi meos et quidem totos indicari iubes … faciam ergo quod iubes … diem meum recognoscam. … hodiernus

27 28

uale. 29

96.3, omnia ista in longa uita sunt, quomodo in longa uia et puluis et lutum et pluuia. H 2004, 38; cf. 84.13, si conscendere hunc uerticem libet, … uenies ad summa per planum. | Summers 1910, 274–275.

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dies solidus est. … uide quid exercitatio cotidiana proficiat. But the thought that occupies this today, survives from yesterday—and it concerns preaching against gurus’ patently flimsy preaching against … inebriation! (83.1–4; 8). Book divisions elude us for a while, but there are to be no further Lucilius “episodes,” and the Teacher extends himself to just the one epiphanic visitation to that Scipio shrine at Liternum, incubating in the villa and parable-mongering in the garden, “through the wall from Baiae” (EM 86 ↔ 51.11),30 before he reverts to a jag of stop-overs at a row of properties back in the out-of-town belt round Rome, at Nomentum (“on the run from, not Rome, but fever”), Ardea, and Alba (104.1, 110; 105; 123 ↔ 12.1, suburbanum meum).31 Soon before the letters fade away, towards that last collection, that last post …32 By which time, we’ve long been taught the recursiveness of training for life, its beneficial longueurs: “To those who ask ‘For how long this same stuff?,’ answer: ‘I should have said “For how long you gonna sin these same sins?” You want the cure to stop before the sickness? quia recusatis, perseuerabo.’ … How far …, how far …? How far, again? Everywhere …, everywhere, everywhere … How little …, how little …, how little …?” (89.18–22; 23): haec aliis dic, ut dum dicis audias ipse; scribe, ut dum scribis legas, omnia ad mores et ad sedandam rabiem adfectuum referens. stude, non ut plus aliquid scias, sed ut melius. uale. Tell other people the news, so you can tune in while you tell it. Write so while you write you read it. Relate the whole lot to morality, to lulling mad-dog emotions. Study hard, not so you know something more, but so you know something better. Fare well.

So when Lucilius’ ever more pressing “wants” have to be held over from one letter to the next (108.1, 39 → 109.1), and Seneca delivers, “even though this really belonged in the orbit of books of moral philosophy {i.e., not the EM},” he is told peremptorily (109.17–18):

30 H 2004, 53–61, 93–170. When Lyons suffers 100% burns, at its centenary, Seneca points to the personificatory function of its human span of life (91.14). 31 H 2004, 40–42. 32 On this “eternal open-endedness” of Seneca’s drive to death: H 2004, 28–29.

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cogita quod soleo frequenter tibi dicere. … totiens enim illo reuertor. … nunc doce quod necesse est. uale. Ponder what I am in the habit of telling you. … For I often go back there. … Now, teach me what need be. Now. Fare well.

3. Come on the Amazing Journey, and Learn All That You Should Know: EM 57 SENECA LVCILIO SVO SALVTEM 1 cum a Bais deberem Neapolim repetere, facile credidi tempestatem esse, ne iterum nauem experirer, et tantum luti tota uia fuit ut possim uideri nihilominus nauigasse. totum athletarum fatum mihi illo die perpetiendum fuit: a ceromate nos haphe excepit in crypta Neapolitana. 2 nihil illo carcere longius, nihil illis facibus obscurius, quae nobis praestant non ut per tenebras uideamus, sed ut ipsas. ceterum etiam si locus haberet lucem, puluis auferret, in aperto quoque res grauis et molesta: quid illic, ubi in se uolutatur et, cum sine ullo spiramento sit inclusus, in ipsos a quibus excitatus est recidit? duo incommoda inter se contraria simul pertulimus: eadem uia, eodem die, et luto et puluere laborauimus. 3 aliquid tamen mihi illa obscuritas quod cogitarem dedit: sensi quendam ictum animi et sine metu mutationem quam insolitae rei nouitas simul ac foeditas fecerat. non de me nunc tecum loquor, qui multum ab homine tolerabili, nedum a perfecto absum, sed de illo in quem fortuna ius perdidit: huius quoque ferietur animus, mutabitur color. 4 quaedam enim, mi Lucili, nulla effugere uirtus potest: admonet illam natura mortalitatis suae. itaque et uultum adducet ad tristia et inhorrescet ad subita et caligabit si uastam altitudinem in crepidine eius constitutus despexerit: non est hoc timor, sed naturalis affectio inexpugnabilis rationi. 5 itaque fortes quidam et paratissimi fundere suum sanguinem alienum uidere non possunt; quidam ad uulneris noui, quidam ad ueteris et purulenti tractationem inspectionemque succidunt ac linquuntur animo; alii gladium facilius recipiunt quam uident. 6 sensi ergo, ut dicebam, quandam non quidem perturbationem, sed mutationem: rursus ad primum conspectum redditae lucis alacritas rediit incogitata et iniussa. illud deinde mecum loqui coepi, quam inepte quaedam magis aut minus timeremus, cum omnium idem finis esset. quid

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john henderson enim interest utrum supra aliquem uigilarium ruat an mons? nihil inuenies. erunt tamen qui hanc ruinam magis timeant, quamuis utraque mortifera aeque sit: adeo non effectus sed efficientia timor spectat.

7 nunc me putas de Stoicis dicere, qui aestimant animam hominis magno pondere extriti permanere non posse et statim spargi, quia non fuerit illi exitus liber? ego uero non facio: qui hoc dicunt uidentur mihi errare. 8 quemadmodum flamma non potest opprimi—nam circa id diffugit quo urgetur—, quemadmodum aer uerbere atque ictu non laeditur, ne scinditur quidem—sed circa id cui cessit refunditur—, sic animus, qui ex tenuissimo constat, deprehendi non potest nec intra corpus effligi, sed beneficio subtilitatis suae per ipsa quibus premitur erumpit. quomodo fulmini, etiam cum latissime percussit ac fulsit, per exiguum foramen est reditus, sic animo, qui adhuc tenuior est igne, per omne corpus fuga est. 9 itaque de illo quaerendum est an possit immortalis esse. hoc quidem certum habe: si superstes est corpori, proteri illum nullo genere posse, quoniam nulla immortalitas cum exceptione est, nec quicquam noxium aeterno est. uale. 1 When duty called me to head back for Naples from Baiae, no trouble, I convinced myself a storm was in being, so I’d not be doing a second seatrial. And … the entire road … was such a sea of mud, it could maybe seem that I nonetheless did go sailing. The entire destiny that runs every wrestler’s régime was the experience I had to suffer through on that day: to follow the mud-lotion greasing, a sand-scour rubdown gave us a welcome in the hidey-hole tunnel to Naples. 2 No longer stretch than that there prison-cell, nowt murkier than them there beacons, they enable us not to see through the dark, but to see it. Besides which, even if the site did have light, the dust’d snatch it away— that’s heavy stuff, dust, and a right drag out in the open as well, so how ’bout there, where it gets churned up in itself and, ’cos it’s shut inside without a breath of ventilation, falls back down on the ones who’ve just stirred it up? Two nuisances, polar opposites, between them put us through it together: same road, same day, we made heavy weather of (1) mud + (2) dust. 3 And yet … there was something …—that murkiness did hand me a topic to think: I felt a “mind-jab” and—short of fear—“mood-shift,” brought about by an unfamiliar situation’s strangeness + nastiness combined together. No, I am not now speaking as me to you about myself, miles off being an acceptable human being as I am, let alone a paragon who has come through, but rather about the proverbial saint who’s through with Fortune’s sway over him: his “mind,” his as well, will get “jolted,” his hue take a “shift.”

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4 For, dear Lucilio mio, there be some things no brand of heroism can get away from: that’s Nature’s reminder of heroism’s mortality. So it is, the saint will (a) tauten expression when faced with a tear-jerker, (b) shiver when faced with the unexpected, (c) black out if, stood up at the edge of a height, he takes a look down into the chasm: that’s not fear, no, it’s natural reflex, beyond Reason to overpower. 5 So it is, that some bravehearts perfectly prepared to shed their own blood cannot stand the sight of someone else’s, and some of ’em when faced with handling, examining, a fresh wound, some, an old gangrenous one, others, they buckle and blow their minds; others handle being on the receiving-end of a sword easier than looking on. 6 Accordingly, as I was saying, “I felt” a—no, no way a through-and-through paroxysm, but “a shift”: back again, at the first sighting of light being restored, upbeatness returned—not as a result of thinking or telling. Next I started talking over with myself the old chestnut of how inappropriately we fear some things more or else less, though for all of us there’s one and the same end. For what odds does it make whether it’s a watch-tower collapses down on somebody or a hill? None at all, you’ll find. And yet … there’ll be folk who fear the second sort of collapse more, even though both of ’em are equally death-laden …—that’s how far it holds that fear looks not at the accomplishments but at the accomplices. 7 Now you suppose I’m talking about Stoics who reckon the human psyche can’t make it on through when its owner has been pulverized by a ton weight—it gets instantly disintegrated, ’cos it’s got no free way out? Well that’s not what I’m doing, for sure: those who say this seem to me to go wrong. 8 The same way (1) a flame cannot be squashed—as it gets every which way round what is bearing down on it—, and the same way (2) air doesn’t get bruised, in fact not even cut, by whipping and jabbing it—no, it goes a-pouring round what it’s displaced by, like so, the mind, which consists of the least substantial material, cannot be nabbed and spifflicated inside the body, but thanks to being rarefied it busts out right through what is squeezing it. In the way lightning, even when it’s shot its bolt through far and wide, it’s flashed its lightning, has a way to return back that is through a mini-bolthole, like so, the mind, which is still more insubstantial than fire, has an escape route that is through every bit of body. 9 So it is, the question to ask about the mind is whether it can be that it be immortal. This, anyhow, cop for certain: if its existence survives the body, it cannot be obliterated any shape or fashion, since no brand of immortality comes with a let-out clause, and neither is anything lethal to what is everlasting. Fare well.

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john henderson 4. Down in the Hole: EM 57 in Book VI It was I | who was the hourglass And the sands of time | like shattering glass Went past me | like a tunnel to the sea. S. Nicks, “Goodbye Baby,”on Fleetwood Mac, 2003

Straightway, Book VI announces that anything can happen (53.1)33: quid non potest mihi persuaderi, cui persuasum est ut nauigarem? What can’t I be talked into, when I’ve been talked into a voyage?

In a matter of a sentence or two of incipient narrative, we are in it up to here: “I’d got to the point where it made no odds to me whether I went on or went back.” In just the few off-shore miles from Lucilius’ Naples to Puteoli, life figures its options: take your chances on the short-cut over the waves? Fail to cope when the going gets rough? Out of your element, landlubber, know your frailty; swim for it—find your road, make it. This parody Ulysses chunders his way to expose the dis-ease in our constitution from mind lodged in body. It takes such a minute movement, dodgy sea or perilous ailment, before, whether stomach or toe, body lets you know; the sinking spirit, though, fools us all (trouble—what trouble?). To partner this first fun adventure for Seneca since that cameo back in his childhood’s leafy suburbs, he next moves us straight back “inside” from the Italian riviera scene to relate a sudden attack, “just like” another “squall,” of his intermittent, till now long dormant, physical affliction. A respiratory problem— asthma—a.k.a. the “breathy sigh” (54.1, suspirium). The psycho-physical intrication overspills into the most graphic burst of “real-life” narrative showcase of description in the collection so far34: back from a ride along the Campanian shore near Cumae, Seneca’s verbal boneshaker of a promenade by sedan re-winds, to take us along for a bumpy shake-up, limbering up the body to dislodge bile from the throat, or thin that clogged respiration. Our perseverance along the sand-bar beach one ridge away from Baiae keeps us going through the Siren On 53: Motto and Clark 1971; Wenskus 1994. On 55: Motto and Clark 1972–1973; 1979; Saylor 2002; H 2004, 62–92; see now Hönscheid 2004. 33 34

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portrait of hedonism personified as the paradise home of Servilius Vatia, Epicurean recluse and refugee from the perils of politics—and of life. The 2-D visit to the villa’s façade is a page-long shot of mundane superficiality injected to inoculate reading against the lure of retreat to Lotus-land for peace of mind. We tour to denigrate touring, as ekphrasis turns vehicle for denigration of descriptive writing (55.8): sed non multum ad tranquillitatem locus confert. But—location is not that much of a positive factor for gaining calm.

This “little” goes a long way. Epistoliterarity makes this modest input, telling on itself: set pieces can’t pinpoint where thinking is at. “You’re not in Campania”? How so? Minds make presence. The next unlikely reel on location torments Senecan peace of mind with noise: rooming above a bath-house (where? Campania? Nowhere? Dystopia) is no place for thought to dwell.35 Overlooking life in the gym: panting, groaning, puffing, whistling, rasping, respiration; smack of flesh, calling the score; rowdies and “stop thief !”; complete pandemonium … To do its work, this latest showcase of writerly coruscation ransacks the lexikon to furnish the wares of mundanity with all the epistolographic normality of colloquialism, over-egged into vulgarity: pilicrepus, scordalus, alipilus, biberarius, botularius, crustularius, popinae institor, serrarius, pausarius … (56.1, 2, 4, 5). An ear-bruising assault on the calm of sanity, to be sure, but this bath-house bathos is a spot of ordeal literature where it’s worth plunging in so we can tell if our composure is noise-proof, and then move out (56.14–15). Here at the centre of Book VI, it’s high time to work back over the trajectory of our relationship with Senecan thought through his relationship with his relationship with Campanian Lucilius. The mimetic sequence runs us smack into another way “to get back” by “going over the same ground,” this time doubling round a second time from Baiae to Naples (repetere, 57.1), in an ordeal on dry-ish land, or rather, underneath it.36 The mimetic sequence perseveres, that is, hitting the tunnel as a second short-cut on the word-road that bumps over ocean or heaves through mountain to everywhere normality cannot otherwise take us. The tour homed on those mind-dinning flesh-pots of Baiae to smuggle our dummy into t/his most demanding-demeaning plunge On 56: Motto and Clark 1970; Hönscheid 2004. On the tunnel, for real: Fig. 2, Maiuri 1937, 11–14: long closed, Agrippa masterminded? 35 36

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into physiological stress, where bodily pressure folds into psychic transport that blacks, blanks, out consciousness to envision Philosophy as starburst. Ordinary space shrinks and elongates to pipe us through and out of this world. Let’s go back over this extra-mundial route, go there so we never need to again.37 Not till we attain Nirvana.38 Like Lucilius’ Sicilian straits, Seneca’s Campanian coastline narrows readerly through-passage between sea and land. The life-squashing constrictions of bile and phlegm down inside the Teacher’s throat imprint his tale of the geography by Cumae, sporting that “narrow, enclosed, spit” along which our psychonaut pilots to explode “the narrow lives we would lead if thinking ever suffered close-down” (55.2, uelut angustum iter cluditur ↔ 55.11, in angusto uiuebamus, si quicquam esset cogitationibus clusum). The claustrophobic underpass forces us down the ultimate access-route to visionary bliss beyond sharing. But our tunnel vision does not land us on the far side of ephemerality beyond this one special instant, for there will recur sporadic, marooned, irruptions of the mimetic dimension; and the possibility of a second “travelogue” will condition all the letters to come—by suspension. They serve to bring the preaching back down to self-recognition before it forgets, and swallows its own sonorities whole. For sure, this dystopic metaphor roughs up the import of Plato to Rome. For this horizontal pot-hole of a “cave” goes somewhere, transports people—us—along a thoroughfare where you can (only) see the darkness you are living in. Here bathophobia pressures our mind-body dualism to feel entrapment of soul in body; in this theorem, Hellish discomfort channels us from urbane wit straight to searing shock past the curb of rationality, where minds don’t usually go. Mud up to here, we muck in, wrestle our way through to the murk. One day; one journey. Sand-scouring + mud-packing. Not, as first supposed, one after the other, but both these opposites at once (57.2, 3: simul). Spatial and perceptual dimensionality collapses in double conceit (“long cell”; “visible non-invisibility”). Preparing the killer third paradox, for this “dust” is the dust we are: this dust “rolling on itself, the dust falling on the ones that raised it,” is not dust “out in the open,” dust as is, above board dust; this dust is “shut in,” “no way, 37 On 57: Motto and Clark 1973; Setaioli 1991, 84–85; Schönegg 1999, 73–76, “Durchbruch zu Platon”; H 2004, 35. 38 On Seneca’s (for once explicitly role-playing) personation of The Sage: Edwards 1997, 33 on 57.3.

Figure 1. Jeff Wall 1999-2001, After Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, the Preface (transparency in lightbox) = Doy 2005, Plate 8.

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Figure 2. The “Crypta Neapolitana” (from a 17th-cent. engraving) = Maiuri 1937, 13.

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nowhere to breathe.” Yes, this tunneling pulverizes us, the sand in the mud, particles in suspension, waves of them, as we could say. No mystic harrowing of Virgil’s Avernus this, nor invitation into John Malkowitz’s visor. No, this door to perception resists narration—would rather show up what we are made of. All of us passengers, not just the cultureheroes. Human beings do a lot with looking; and this is physiologically wired in together with physical reflexes—we scowl, shiver, black out (57.4, caligabit)—which finesse the intervention of reasoning. So we should reason. Take dizzy heights, vertigo; blinding light, in subterranean suffocation: these extreme conditions may well blankly overwhelm minds: see?39 Whether pressurized to gaze down serene and clear over the pathetic spectacle of humanity making heavy weather of living; or entombed in enforced introspection to meditate selfhood blind. Here meet combat without “sighting” the enemy; no orientation from triggered pain, mortification, body-slicing; in the cut-and-thrust of ordinary lives (57.5). Philosophers, they like to perch themselves on high up the “watch-tower” of κατασκοπ; so Seneca plays ugly, has stuck us under that “hill” (57.6). Down with the suffering self trapped in the temporary body, far from the aether above, home for the eternal soul. Underground and immured, our hero has passed through fear, beyond any “perturbation,” intent on feeling trapped by the exhilarating logic he sees in the bonds of mortality. Squashed soul crushed into smithereen specks by the roof caving in …—it was to think this that we 39 Murk and dark variously power the Senecan drive for reason from EM 3.6, “quidam adeo in latebras refugerunt ut putent in turbido esse quicquid in luce est”; cf. 49.11, has tenebras discute. Knotted themes loom ahead as the collection bulks out: 79.11–12, cui sol per caliginem splendet, licet contentus interim sit effugisse tenebras, adhuc non fruitur bono lucis. tunc animus noster habebit quod gratuletur sibi cum emissus his tenebris in quibus uolutatur non tenui uisu clara prospexerit, sed totum diem admiserit et redditus caelo suo fuerit …; 89.2, nobis … quibus perrumpenda caligo est et quorum uisus in proximo deficit …; 90.28, mundus, … cuius uera simulacra uerasque facies cernendas mentibus protulit; nam ad spectacula tam magna hebes uisus est; 94.58, quae per longissimorum cuniculorum tenebras extrahuntur; 96.3, quomodo in longa uia et puluis et lutum et pluuia; 102.28, aliquando naturae tibi arcana retegentur, discutietur ista caligo et lux undique clara percutiet. imaginare tecum … tunc in tenebris uixisse te dices cum totam lucem et totus aspexeris, quam nunc per angustissimas oculorum uias obscure intueris …; 110.6– 7, “nam ueluti pueri trepidant atque omnia caecis | in tenebris metuunt, ita nos in luce timemus.” quid ergo? non omni puero stultiores sumus qui in luce timemus? sed falsum est, Lucreti (2.55–56), non timemus in luce: omnia nobis fecimus tenebras. … uides autem quam sit furiosa res in tenebris impetus. … sed lucescere, si uelimus, potest; 120.13, non aliter quam in tenebris lumen effulsit; 122.4, on “night-birds” (lucifugae = lychnobioi), qui se tenebris dicauerunt …: quanto plus tenebrarum in animo est. ille in se stupet, ille caligat, inuidet caecis. quis umquam oculos tenebrarum causa habuit?

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descended into the tunnel; it can make no “sense”—there is no death beyond death, since “soul is like flame, like air, it can only escape every which way around what’s flattening it; and unsliceably, unhurtably, it pours around what displaces it” (57.8). Only more so: there’s always a way through for this “dust” (no vents needed). Spirit cannot be muddied or greased out of its infinitesimal substantiality; nor crushed and ground into disintegration subjected to no matter what pressure. This “dust” is different—“bursts right through what falls on it” (57.8). So the tunnel is indeed a “way through.”40 It looks like the inversion of celestial space-travel, but the “air/flame” of the soul is like a lightning-flash lasering down and back up, through its minute tube in the firmament41; the “length” of the Naples underpass (longius); the “breadth” of the careering thunderbolt (latissime); the microscopic level of psychic materiality has need of neither way in nor exit. No corpuscle, body, corpse, however compacted, could contain psyche stuff. Putting yourself in the position which the soul must occupy should thrill your mind, as the ugliness of mock-obliteration “shifts” relations between sensing self and the rest of your material being (57.3, mutatio), such that the mind “receives a blow” (ferietur), in the biophysical sense that can make sense of this, and the mind cannot “escape” bodily physiology (effugere), in the sense that this can be true, and this is “nature”’s way to rub in its “mortality” (57.4), in the sense that the “mind” is not identical with the “soul” (animus, 3 bis, 5, 8 bis, vs animam, 7).42 Cf. Novikov 1998, esp. 95–138, “Holes in space and time.” Cf. “Know-It-All” Jacobs 2005, 47, “Lightning goes up. It shoots right up from the ground and into the cloud. This is what the encyclopedia [sc. Britannica] says in the section on climate and weather. I reread this passage a couple of times to make sure I hadn’t gone batty—but no, lightning goes up. To be technical, it does first go down—there’s an initial bolt called the ‘leader’ that zips from the cloud to the ground. But the bright part, the part that flashes, is the ‘return stroke,’ which goes from the ground back to the cloud. This is profoundly unnerving. … This is a whole new level of ignorance. … To be confronted with this totally counter-intuitive information—it makes me paranoid. What other incorrect ideas do I have? … Is Keanu Reeves a brilliant actor?” 42 Cf. Amato 2000, 157–177, “Who will tremble at these marvels?”, esp. 176–177, “The mind will not forsake the body and its senses. … Humans easily forget the universal whirl of particles. … Even when human beings have written the obituaries of minuscule things past and embraced infinitesimal and virtual things new, they will still fear dust’s final requiem for all life. They will still dread the infinite granularity of all things, their own selves and meanings included. ||” 40 41

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Reach bedrock, and we can look up/down on “vast height/depth” (57.4, uasta altitudo). No eyes can see through the darkness (or through any of the other ten instances of per on this postcard), but realising the psychological force of mental recovery, beyond the reach of thought or self-control, has nevertheless managed to image a privileged instant of integration where experience and logic collude to vindicate human being from phobophobia. And the odds against tomorrow ever knowing: 4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancs? But … triumphant insistence of nine end-stopping repetitions of est/esse (in 57.9) already presses us on to our next stop, where the whistle blows on our incapacity to think without jargon, in the form of thinking with our Latinate incapacity to say τ% /ν, mouthing only essentia, past Greek. Just think: what would it be to lack awareness of any such contingency as this linguistic-conceptual-cultural fix? Yes, we just burrowed deep to oblige the mind, for once, to finesse thought. But the journey of our lifetime still awaits us, always up ahead, as we skip through to more mental distress, in the form of argumentation pounding our capacity to think, think over, then think some more. Into perpetuity, letter by letter. With EM 57 the first half of Book VI terminates, springing us into metaphysics: the essence of Platonic theory. Launched by Roman imagination through the impossibility of Latin terminology, we confront and surmount the lack of just the one tiny monosyllable required to frame cosmic truths for Essentialism. We have learned our Letters, know to pounce: so where does the intransigence of τ% /ν take reason that Hellenic thought cannot begin to miss? EM 58 quits in-body reconnoitering and pitches into conceptual battle, against frail psychology, over and across the cultural chasm/bridge of ?transferability?/untranslatability: angustias Romanas