Seneca

The Stoic Seneca (b. c. 4 bce–d. 65 ce), mentor to Emperor Nero and one of the wealthiest men of his time, has been studied as the brilliant and enigmatic father of Silver Latin prose and, together with his nephew Lucan, as an outstanding representative of the rhetorical, gory baroque of 1st-century ce Latin poetry. The latter subject is covered in the parallel bibliography on Seneca’s tragedies; the present article is dedicated to Seneca as a philosopher. This very fact, that we now regard his philosophy as a research subject by itself, reflects a fundamental change in his reception. For a long time, the majority of scholars saw in Seneca a wielder of edifying words rather than a serious thinker, a moralizer and eclectic, who would not hesitate to mix disparate ingredients from competing schools into a hotchpotch of sparkling, sententious diatribe. At the beginning of the 20th century, those interested in philosophy mined his works for traces of his Greek models, the “real” philosophers whom they deemed worthy of study, in particular the Stoic Posidonius (b. c. 135–d. 51 bce). In the 1960s and 1970s, attention to Seneca himself increased significantly in anglophone scholarship. While Italian scholars have always insisted on an holistic approach, refusing to detach stylistic considerations from an analysis of conceptual content and never separating his political thought from his life as an active politician, scholars in Germany and France followed the lead of Paul Rabbow’s famous research on Seelenheilung (“psychotherapy”) and Seelenführung (“psychagogy”) and read Seneca as a spiritual guide. All these approaches continue to play an important role in international Seneca scholarship, but two recent tendencies deserve special attention. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s readings of Seneca as a representative of “the care of the self” in ancient philosophy, study of Senecan therapy and psychagogy has resulted in increasingly sophisticated explorations of what one might call his philosophy of authorship. What is more, considerable improvements in our understanding of Stoicism, Seneca’s professed school, have revealed his well-informed commitment to his predecessors. Against the more clearly defined backdrop of Hellenistic and Imperial Stoicism, it has also become easier to recognize and illustrate facets of Seneca’s originality, a work that is still ongoing or rather, one may dare say, has only just begun.