Dialogues and Letters Read Free

form gives a flexible two-way framework, which allows Seneca to talk about himself as much as he exhorts Lucilius. The result is that autobiographical details are a very obvious and appealing feature of the
Letters
, in which Seneca is far from always acting the finger-wagging mentor, but frequently pokes fun at himself and his own philosophical pretensions. A good example of this is Letter 56, in which he complains about noisy lodgings he has taken; he goes on to suggest that this is not a problem for one who has acquired inner calm and philosophical detachment; and then he sabotages this high moral lesson by admitting that he himself will take the easier option of moving house.
    We cannot be certain to what extent these letters were a genuine correspondence. Seneca is clearly talking through Lucilius to a wider audience, and Lucilius’ presence is less evident in some of the later letters. Possibly the correspondence started as a genuine exchange between friends; but as it progressed and Seneca increasingly enjoyed this medium of philosophical communication, he began to think of publication, and Lucilius’ importance as a notional addressee declined. But however Seneca envisaged them, the
Letters
have undoubtedly been his most popular works,especially in the Middle Ages, and they are widely regarded as his greatest achievement.
PHILOSOPHICAL BACKGROUND
    It is clear then that, supreme stylist though he was, Seneca’s aim in writing his treatises and letters was not simply to indulge his literary art. He saw himself as a philosophical evangelist, and many of his works are consciously protreptic, exhortations to others to study philosophy and to benefit from its teachings. His own beliefs were founded mainly on Stoicism, one of the major philosophical systems that had developed in the Greek world in Hellenistic times. However, he was no hidebound Stoic, but eclectic in accepting other explanations of the physical world, and other views on moral values appealed to him, from whatever source they came. The Romans were not on the whole philosophical innovators, but they took over Greek ways of thinking and adapted them to their own needs and inclinations. Seneca himself was not an original thinker, but he was a brilliant expositor of received ideas, and his treatises and letters are our most important sources for Greek Stoicism in its Romanized form. (Two other important witnesses for this are Epictetus, late first/early second centuries AD , and the Emperor Marcus Aurelius in the second century AD .)
    But even if the Romans did not show much originality in philosophy, they taught it vigorously, and we know something about Seneca’s early training and his philosophical mentors. In his youth he was influenced by a school founded by Quintus Sextius in the Augustan period, and he was personally taught by two of Sextius’ disciples, Sotion and Fabianus. From this school he seems to have derived his own brand of eclectic Stoicism. Another teacher important for his development as a thinker was the Stoic Attalus, whom he admired greatly and quotes several times in the
Letters
(e.g., 110 in our selection).
    Thus Stoicism was the most important single strand in Seneca’s teaching – Stoicism modified to the mental and moral requirements of thoughtful Romans. It is not usually clear to what extent Seneca himself was responsible for these modifications, but he certainly endorsed them. The changes were mainly in emphasis: ‘Roman’ Stoicism was more interested in the ethical side of Stoic teaching, and less in Stoic logic and the Stoic account of the physical structure and behaviour of the cosmos. Of course, Stoicism had not remained a static and unchanging system of beliefs since its beginnings in the late fourth century BC . Already in the second and first centuries BC two major theorists, Panaetius and Posidonius, had made important modifications to earlier Stoic theory; and by the time Stoicism became a