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Reviewed by:
  • Bibliografia Senecana del XX Secolo
  • William M. Calder III
Andrea Balbo, Italo Lana, and Ermanno Malaspina . Bibliografia Senecana del XX Secolo. Università degli Studi di Torino Publicazioni del Dipartimento di Filologia Linguistica e Tradizione Classica, 23. Bologna: Pàtron, 2005. Pp. xxxii, 878. €65.00. ISBN 88-555-2831-9.

The book began as part of the bimillenary celebration in Italy of the birth of Lucius Annaeus Seneca. It was carried to completion by a dedicated and erudite Kollektiv largely at the University of Torino. We can only be grateful for what they have accomplished. The result is without question one of the most useful and welcome books available on Seneca, and it will be repeatedly consulted by all Senecan scholars. The volume seeks to collect everything published on Seneca in the twentieth century, prose and poetry. Hercules Oetaeus, Octavia, the epigrams, and even the correspondence with St. Paul are included. After all, Saints Augustine and Jerome considered it authentic. Six thousand and six items are listed and summarized. Reviews of books are gathered under the entry for the book, which is the best indication of contemporary reception. Reprints and translations are listed. The growth of interest in Seneca throughout the last century is simply astounding. There are eight entries for 1901 and 193 for 2000!

Four most welcome indices close the volume, which make the treasures easily available to specialists. An index auctorum allows one immediately to discover what C. P. Segal wrote about Seneca in the twentieth century. The gold medal goes to Pierre Grimal with seventy-one entries! Silver to William Hardy Alexander with forty-nine. I have a paltry eleven. An index rerum divides the entries into twenty-six categories that include authenticity, biography, textual criticism, chronology of the writings, exegesis, sources, language and style, politics, history, theater, and many others. A delightful index of famous figures from history and fiction (Clytemnestra and Medea) has a huge entry on Nero, but includes also Anouilh, Francis Bacon, Richard Bentley, Dante, Wilhelm Dilthey, T. S. Eliot, Freud, Günter Grass, Karl Marx (once only), Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Richard Wagner, and many, many others. Finally there is an index locorum to all passages in Seneca treated.

Try though I may, I cannot find an omission nor a misprint, other than that the reprint of Housman's obscene emendation of NQ 1.16.7 at Hermes 66 (1931) 405–6 (=Classical Papers 3.1178) evades notice. The authors reasonably omit bits on Seneca in general histories of the Roman Empire, of Roman literature, western philosophy, vel sim. If a scholar, writing a book or article on, e.g., Sophocles, illuminates en passant a passage in Seneca, this one cannot fairly expect to find. Wilamowitz's name is missing, [End Page 174] but see R. Scott Smith, "In Speculo Euripidis: Seneca Tragicus and Wilamowitz," in M. Mülke, ed., Wilamowitz und kein Ende: Wissenschaftsgeschichtliches Kolloquium Fondation Hardt, 9. bis 13. September 2002, Spudasmata 93 (Hildesheim 2003) 209–43. Leo accepted seventeen emendations mailed him by Wilamowitz in his text and cited thirteen more in his apparatus. A good deed never goes unpunished. Obviously this detracts in no way from a book for which I have only praise. I hope it begins a genre of volumes devoted to individual authors in the twentieth and perhaps even the nineteenth centuries. Such books speed up enormously the progress of scholarship and discourage unnecessary duplication of effort. I can only congratulate those devoted young scholars who have given us this monumentum aere perennius! Thank you for the best Annaean birthday gift!

William M. Calder III
Universiy of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign
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