Note: This article on the Roman philosopher Seneca was written on January 11, 2000. There was a distinct shortage of material on Seneca at that time. Within a year and a half, the following were available at the Latin Library:
Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, de Providentia, de Consolatione ad Polybium, de Consolatione ad Marciam, de Consolatione ad Helviam, de Constantia, de Otio, de Brevitate Vitae, de Tranquillitate Animi, de Vita Beata, de Ira, de Clementia, Apocolocyntosis, Medea, Phaedra, Hercules, Agamemnon, Oedipus, and Proverbs.
There is a shortage of material by Lucius Annaeus Seneca, tragedian, philosopher, and counselor to Nero, on the Internet. Not only are there no translations of his plays, but even the Latin texts are limited to
Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, de Tranquillitate Animi, de Vita Beata, Apocolocyntosis, Medea, and Proverbs. Seneca is not the only Roman writer slighted, but this lack is significant because he was an important writer for the Renaissance and beyond. His themes and philosophy should even appeal to us today, or so says Brian Arkins in "Heavy Seneca: his Influence on Shakespeare's Tragedies".
Seneca - Brief Bio
Seneca the Elder was a rhetorician from Cordoba, Spain, where our thinker, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, was born in about 4 B.C. His aunt took the young boy to be educated in Rome where he studied a philosophy that blended Stoicism with neo-Pythagoreanism. Seneca began his career in law and politics in about A.D. 31. He soon fell afoul of the first of three emperors, Caligula. Eventually, his trouble with the emperors led to his death. Caligula was dissuaded from killing him. Claudius had him exiled. But after a falling out with Nero, Seneca took his own life in a lingering, pathetic manner in 65 A.D., detailed by Tacitus:
Seneca's Death
"Seneca, as his aged frame, attenuated by frugal diet, allowed the blood to escape but slowly, severed also the veins of his legs and knees.
"Seneca meantime, as the tedious process of death still lingered on, begged Statius Annaeus, whom he had long esteemed for his faithful friendship and medical skill, to produce a poison with which he had some time before provided himself, same drug which extinguished the life of those who were condemned by a public sentence of the people of Athens. It was brought to him and he drank it in vain, chilled as he was throughout his limbs, and his frame closed against the efficacy of the poison. At last he entered a pool of heated water, from which he sprinkled the nearest of his slaves, adding the exclamation, "I offer this liquid as a libation to Jupiter the Deliverer." He was then carried into a bath, with the steam of which he was suffocated, and he was burnt without any of the usual funeral rites."
Next: Seneca - Practical Philosophy
