Author Description

Innovator in the literature of philosophical advising and reshaper of myth in tragedy, at turns inspiring and disturbing: This is Seneca the Younger. A mosaic of readings from four main genres with select follow-up passages showcases Seneca as therapeutic consoler, mirror to the prince, tragedian of the passions, and moral epistolographer a thinker whose literary voice sounds against the volatility of his times. Seneca spins the republican Cicero s stylistic legacy and Augustan literature s gold into the distinctive silver of the first century CE: concise in encapsulating ideas, inventive in borrowing the vocabulary of everyday life, and with a propensity for using vivid images to depict emotional experience. This is a style the historian Tacitus deemed fitted to the ears of his age. Introduction to Seneca s life, death, philosophy, style, and literary influence 568 lines of unadapted Latin text selected from eight works of Seneca: Consolatio ad Helviam 1.1 4, 2.1 5, 3.1 2, 17.3 18.3, 20.1 2; Epistulae Morales 85.40; Consolatio ad Polybium 13.3 4 De Clementia (book 1) 1.1 6, 9.1 12, 10.1 3; Apocolocyntosis 10.1 3; De Ira 1.2.1 3 Medea 1 18, 40 50, 155 76, 301 8, 361 79, 537 50, 670 93, 849 69, 904 15, 926 36, 1008 13, 1018 27 Epistulae Morales 2.1 6, 40.1, 49.1 3, 55.1 5 and 8 11; De Amicitia fragment