Seneca Lucius Annaeus - Dialogues and Essays

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

LUCIUS ANNAEUS SENECA (c.1 BCAD 65) was born in Corduba, Spain, and educated in Rome. Plagued all his life by ill health, he embarked on a political career after a stay in Egypt. In 41 he was exiled by the emperor Claudius and only returned to Rome in 49, when he became tutor to the young Nero. Together with the prefect of the Praetorian Guard Sextus Afranius Burrus, he acted as a senior adviser to Nero until 62, withdrew to private life, and was forced to commit suicide in 65. He had taken up writing as a young man. His earliest extant treatises date from the period before his exile. He continued to write throughout his life and was particularly productive in his final years. His treatises are recognized as the most important body of work on Stoicism in Latin. He also wrote the Letters to Lucilius and several tragedies, the earliest extant specimens of the genre in Latin.

JOHN DAVIE is Head of Classics at St Pauls School, London. He is the author of a number of articles on classical subjects and has recently translated the complete surviving plays of Euripides for Penguin Classics (four volumes). A member of the Hellenic Societys and Roman Societys Visiting Panel of Lecturers, he divides his time between London and Oxford, where he teaches Classics to undergraduates at Balliol and other colleges.

TOBIAS REINHARDT is Fellow and Tutor in Latin and Greek at Somerville College, Oxford. He has published books on Aristotle, Cicero, and (jointly with Michael Winterbottom) on Quintilian.

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SENECA

Translated by
JOHN DAVIE

With an Introduction and Notes by
TOBIAS REINHARDT

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Translation John Davie
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First published as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 2007

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British Library Cataloging in Publication Data

Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, ca. 4 B.C.-65 A.D.
[Selections. English. 2007]
Dialogues and essays / Seneca; translated by John Davie; with an
introduction and notes by Tobias Reinhardt.
p. cm. (Oxford worlds classics)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-13: 9780192807144 (alk. paper) 1. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus,
ca. 4 B.C.-65 A.D.Translations into English. 2. Conduct of
lifeEarly works to 1800. 3. EthicsEarly works to 1800. I. Davie,
John N. II. Reinhardt, Tobias. III. Title.
PA6661.A7S46 2007
878.0109dc22 2007016351

Typeset by Cepha Imaging Private Ltd., Bangalore, India
Printed in Great Britain
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ISBN 9780192807144

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Lucius Annaeus Seneca was born around 1 BC as the second of three sons into a wealthy family of the equestrian class in what is today Cordoba in southern Spain. His father, likewise born in Spain but of Italian descent, is known as Seneca the rhetor; he had a keen interest in rhetorical education and wrote, late in his life, probably between AD 37 and 41, summary accounts of performances which he had witnessed in the rhetorical schools as a young man. His younger brother Annaeus Mela, on whom apparently the elder Senecas hopes had rested more than on his brothers (Controv. 2 pref. 34), withdrew from public life as a young man; Melas son was the poet Lucan, whose epic on the civil war is extant.

Seneca, along with his brothers, was soon sent to Rome, where he started the conventional course of education pursued by wealthy young Romans who were to embark on a career as an advocate or politician; their father accompanied them in order to oversee their education. In due course this academic training involved substantial reading of

He became quaestor, a high-ranking financial clerk. But in AD 39 a particularly spectacular performance in court aroused the jealousy of the emperor Gaius (Caligula); on this occasion Seneca seems to have escaped execution only because a courtier pointed out that he would soon die anyway, on account of his bad state of health (at least according to the third-century historian Cassius Dio, at 59.19.7). In AD 41, after Caligula had been murdered and Claudius had become the new emperor, Seneca was accused of adultery with Julia Livilla, a sister of Caligula, and had to go into exile on Corsica until 49. After Claudius death Seneca wrote a vitriolic satire on the deceased emperor, the Apocolocyntosis (Pumpkinification [of Claudius]). It has been suggested that the real reason for his exile was that he favoured and promoted a less autocratic style of government than Augustus successors had adopted. This view is certainly consistent with certain aspects of two dialogues written during his exile: in his Consolation to Helvia he praised two high-profile opponents of the dictator Caesar (9.4-8: Marcus Junius Brutus and Marcus Claudius Marcellus), while in the Consolation to Polybius, written for a powerful freedman at the imperial court, he devised an image of a mild and reasonable emperor.