Seneca stands apart from other philosophers of Greece and Rome not only for his interest in practical ethics, but also for the beauty and liveliness of his writing. These twelve in-depth essays take up a series of interrelated topics in his works, from his relation to Stoicism, Epicureanism, and other schools of thought; to the psychology of emotion and action and the management of anger and grief; to letter-writing, gift-giving, friendship, and kindness; to Seneca's innovative use of genre, style, and (...) humor. Recalling Socrates's critique of philosophical writing in Plato's Phaedrus, this volume gives particular attention to Seneca's ideas about the techniques of reading, writing, and study that make philosophy beneficial to the individual and to society. Clear explanations and careful translations make the volume accessible to a wide range of readers. (shrink)

The third and fourth books of Cicero's _Tusculan Disputations_ deal with the nature and management of human emotion: first grief, then the emotions in general. In lively and accessible style, Cicero presents the insights of Greek philosophers on the subject, reporting the views of Epicureans and Peripatetics and giving a detailed account of the Stoic position, which he himself favors for its close reasoning and moral earnestness. Both the specialist and the general reader will be fascinated by the Stoics' analysis (...) of the causes of grief, their classification of emotions by genus and species, their lists of oddly named character flaws, and by the philosophical debate that develops over the utility of anger in politics and war. Margaret Graver's elegant and idiomatic translation makes Cicero's work accessible not just to classicists but to anyone interested in ancient philosophy and psychotherapy or in the philosophy of emotion. The accompanying commentary explains the philosophical concepts discussed in the text and supplies many helpful parallels from Greek sources. (shrink)

On the surface, stoicism and emotion seem like contradictory terms. Yet the Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome were deeply interested in the emotions, which they understood as complex judgments about what we regard as valuable in our surroundings. Stoicism and Emotion shows that they did not simply advocate an across-the-board suppression of feeling, as stoicism implies in today’s English, but instead conducted a searching examination of these powerful psychological responses, seeking to understand what attitude toward them expresses the (...) deepest respect for human potential. In this elegant and clearly written work, Margaret Graver gives a compelling new interpretation of the Stoic position. Drawing on a vast range of ancient sources, she argues that the chief demand of Stoic ethics is not that we should suppress or deny our feelings, but that we should perfect the rational mind at the core of every human being. Like all our judgments, the Stoics believed, our affective responses can be either true or false and right or wrong, and we must assume responsibility for them. Without glossing over the difficulties, Graver also shows how the Stoics dealt with those questions that seem to present problems for their theory: the physiological basis of affective responses, the phenomenon of being carried away by one’s emotions, the occurrence of involuntary feelings and the disordered behaviors of mental illness. Ultimately revealing the deeper motivations of Stoic philosophy, Stoicism and Emotion uncovers the sources of its broad appeal in the ancient world and illuminates its surprising relevance to our own. (shrink)

The concept of πρoπαειαι or "pre-emotions" is known not only to the Roman Stoics and Christian exegetes but also to Philo of Alexandria. Philo also supplies the term πρoπαεια at QGen 1.79. As Philo cannot have derived what he knows from Seneca, nor from Cicero, who also mentions the point, he must have found it in older Stoic writings. The πρoπαεια concept, rich in implications for the voluntariness and phenomenology of the passions proper, is thus confirmed for the Hellenistic period. (...) It is not to be expected that Philo's handling of this or any concept will necessarily conform to the usage of his Stoic sources. His evidence is nonetheless of great value where it coincides with that of other witnesses. In QGen 4.73 the emphasis falls upon involuntariness and the mechanisms of impression and assent as in Epictetus fr. 9. The πρoπαεια saves the virtuous person's insusceptibility to emotion exactly as it does for the Stoic spokesman in Gellius NA 19.1; this point is of some interest in view of the Christological use of this concept in Origen and Didymus. QGen 1.55 and 3.56 indicate that the occurrence of the πρoπαειαι is dependent upon uncertainty, and further, that for Philo, as for Seneca in Ira 2.3.4, a thought not acted upon can count as a πρoπαεια. In QGen 4.15-17 and 1.79, Philo indicates that hope and perhaps laughter may be related to joy as πρoπαεια to παoς; these assertions are not paralleled in extant Stoic texts. Further, in QGen 2.57, he names "biting and contraction" as the ευπαεια corresponding to grief, supplying a helpful parallel for Cic. Tusc. 3.83 and Plut. Virt. Mor. 449a. The topic may well have been discussed by Posidonius, as suggested by Cooper and others, but Posidonius' attested innovations are rather different in character from the points which have caught the attention of Philo. Taking together the indirect evidence of Philo, Seneca, and Cicero, we may reasonably infer that the πρoπαεια concept belonged already to an earlier period of Stoicism. (shrink)

Helen's self-disparagement is an anomaly in epic diction, and this is especially true of those instances where she refers to herself as "dog" and "dog-face." This essay attempts to show that Helen's dog-language, in that it remains in conflict with other features of her characterization, has some generic significance for epic, helping to establish the superiority of epic performance over competing performance types which treated her differently. The metaphoric use of χύων and its derivatives has not been well understood: the (...) scholiast's gloss "shameless" is no more than a functional equivalent, and interpretations linking it primarily with reckless courage or with sexual misconduct are not well founded. An analysis of contexts suggests that "dog" as an insult has a fundamental association with physical greed and even cannibalism. The implied notion of avarice, however, may also be extended into other behavioral spheres, including those of fighting and sexuality. A character may also be called "dog" for reviling or slandering another unjustly. These strongly negative implications are out of keeping with the character given to Helen in epic. For where tragedy and lyric generally represent Helen as blameworthy, Homeric epic tends to absolve her of blame and to make her personally as well as physically attractive. The unexpected application of dog-terms to her may therefore be read as an allusion to other versions of the Troy legend which were more hostile to Helen. Negative portrayals of Helen are likely to have figured in the ancient kitharodic narrative which was a precursor of both tragedy and lyric; these are perhaps the unfriendly "songs" mentioned by Helen at Il. 6.357. By referring to such defamatory narratives through the dog-insult and through other instances of Helen's self-blame, the epic performer marks his own more favorable treatment as a generic preference. (shrink)

In Stoic theory, the principal affective response of the wise person is joy, the virtuous counterpart to the problematic pleasure or delight of ordinary agents. Close attention to Seneca’s usage in the Moral Epistles reveals that while he often speaks of joy as a central element of the normative life, he employs more than one philosophical conception of gaudium, and not from casualness, because each conception coheres in its own way with Stoic orthodoxy. These inconsistencies in his handling of an (...) idea he cares about can provide clues to his working methods and, ultimately, to differences of approach he had found in treatises of Hellenistic and Roman philosophy on such subjects as ethics and friendship. (shrink)

Examines Lucretius ' solution to the problem of perceptual relativity that was posed by ancient skeptics as a challenge to the possibility of knowledge based on the senses. The solution, having to do with differences among individuals in the ' pores ' through which effluences enter the body, is fundamental to Lucretius ' Epicurean epistemology. There are interesting problems, however, with some of the cases, and it is also interesting to note the disturbing element of violence in Lucretius ' description (...) of the mechanics of perception in these cases, an effort perhaps to address the reader at a more emotional level. The results are applicable also to the "honeyed cup" simile which Lucretius uses for his own philosophical therapy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Manhandling of Maecenas:Senecan Abstractions of MasculinityMargaret GraverGaius Maecenas was many things: a magnet for wealth, a shrewd political player, a patron of exceptionally sophisticated taste, and to some, at least, a cherished friend. It is disconcerting, then, to see what a one–sided image of him appears in the philosopher Seneca. Although reasonably complete evidence was available, Seneca's account hardly gets beyond Maecenas' mannerisms of dress and deportment, "how (...) he walked, how prissy he was, how he sought the limelight, how he refused to conceal his faults."1 And even these traits are boiled down, in the last analysis, to a matter of prose style: "isn't his prose just as loose as his tunic was unbelted?"2The motive for this reductive treatment is well worth investigating. If Seneca passes too quickly over some aspects of Maecenas' character, it may be that his real object is not Maecenas himself but an abstract principle which Maecenas serves to illustrate. My aim here is to show that Seneca's literary thought does indeed become abstract in this way, and that the principle involved—essentially a point of hermeneutics—holds considerable interest both in literary studies and in moral philosophy. Speaking as a philosopher, Seneca uses Maecenas to explore from the negative side a conception of the ideal condition for the human psyche; speaking as both philosopher and critic, he comments as well on the means by which that condition is to be recognized from without. This ideal condition he calls by the name virtus, a word which retains its culturally determined associations with the male gender and norms of masculine behavior even while it invokes centuries of philosophical and especially Stoic thought on the ethical goal.3 The complexity of virtus can be traced also in his remarks on what he calls the "virile" style, and in other related metaphors extending well beyond those passages immediately concerned with Maecenas. The sometimes peculiar results can be seen as a by–product of the interaction between cultural mores of first–century Rome and serious philosophical thought on questions of character, action, and evaluation.The notion of a "virile" style does not, of course, originate with Seneca himself. Recent work by Gleason and Richlin in particular emphasizes the frequency with which terms borrowed from the realm of gender and sexuality are employed by rhetorical writers, as early as the Ad Herennium author and prominently in the works of Seneca the Elder.4 The younger Seneca differs from his predecessors, however, in that he consistently attaches gender language not to the deportment of speakers but to the style of written works.5 Terms which Cicero had applied primarily to the pitch and modulation of the voice or the grooming, stance, and gestures of the speaker (pronuntiatio), Seneca philosophus transfers confidently to discourse received exclusively by reading: passages from Maecenas' memoirs (Ep. 114.4–8) and Arruntius' histories (114.17–19), a book by his own interlocutor Lucilius (46.1–3), philosophical works of Epicurus and others (33.1–2), his own letters, and those of Lucilius (75.1, 115.1–2).This habit of imputing "virility" (or its absence) to writers, as opposed to speakers, requires Seneca to offer some further explanation of his thinking. For it is not at all clear that features of written style can be [End Page 608] reliably linked with personal characteristics of the author; in fact, there was at Rome a strong current of opinion which regarded this assumption as a particularly egregious fallacy.6 A theorist who insists upon it nonetheless must be either very misguided or very thoughtful. Seneca shows himself to be the latter sort of theorist in two ways: first, in specific passages of the 114th Epistle which attempt to justify the derogation of Maecenas through an unusually careful description of the role of the ingenium or literary talent; second, in a broad parallel between his stated views on propriety of style and his Stoic–derived position on probity of conduct. Given their manner of articulation, even his most derisive remarks on "effeminacy" commit Seneca to a positive notion of stylistic excellence which can be linked to a recognizably Chrysippan... (shrink)

This interdisciplinary volume will be essential reading for students and scholars working on Greco-Roman philosophy, Roman rhetoric, and the history and literary culture of the Roman Republic. It showcases innovative methodological approaches to Cicero the philosopher and defines new directions for the immediate future of the field.