Intertextuality In Seneca S Philosophical Writings

This volume is the first systematic study of Seneca’s interaction with earlier literature of a variety of genres and traditions. It examines this interaction and engagement in his prose works, offering interpretative readings that are at once groundbreaking and stimulating to further study. Focusing on the Dialogues, the Naturales quaestiones, and the Moral Epistles, the volume includes multi- perspectival studies of Seneca’s interaction with all the great Latin epics (Lucretius, Vergil and Ovid), and discussions of how Seneca’s philosophical thought is informed by Hellenistic doxography, forensic rhetoric and declamation, the Homeric tradition, Euripidean tragedy and Greco-Roman mythology. The studies analyzes the philosophy behind Seneca’s incorporating exact quotations from earlier tradition (including his criteria of selectivity) and Seneca’s interaction with ideas, trends and techniques from different sources, in order to elucidate his philosophical ideas and underscore his original contribution to the discussion of established philosophical traditions. They also provide a fresh interpretation of moral issues with particular application to the Roman worldview as fashioned by the mos maiorum. The volume, finally, features detailed discussion of the ways in which Seneca, the author of philosophical prose, puts forward his stance towards poetics and figures himself as a poet. Intertextuality in Seneca’s Philosophical Writings will be of interest not only to those working on Seneca’s philosophical works, but also to anyone working on Latin literature and intertextuality in the ancient world.

This volume is the first systematic study of Seneca's interaction with earlier literature of a variety of genres and traditions. It examines this interaction and engagement in his prose works, offering interpretative readings that are at once groundbreaking and stimulating to further study. Focusing on the Dialogues, the Naturales Quaestiones, and the Moral Epistles, the volume includes multi-perspectival studies of Seneca's interaction with all the great Latin epics (Lucretius, Vergil and Ovid), and discussions of how Seneca's philosophical thought is informed by Hellenistic doxography, forensic rhetoric and declamation, the Homeric tradition, Euripidean tragedy and Greco-Roman mythology. The studies analyzes the philosophy behind Seneca's incorporating exact quotations from earlier tradition (including his criteria of selectivity) and Seneca's interaction with ideas, trends and techniques from different sources, in order to elucidate his philosophical ideas and underscore his original contribution to the discussion of established philosophical traditions. They also provide a fresh interpretation of moral issues with particular application to the Roman worldview as fashioned by the mos maiorum. The volume, finally, features detailed discussion of the ways in which Seneca, the author of philosophical prose, puts forward his stance towards poetics and figures himself as a poet. Intertextuality in Seneca's Philosophical Writings will be of interest not only to those working on Seneca's philosophical works, but also to anyone working on Latin literature and intertextuality in the ancient world.

A selection of Seneca’s most significant letters that illuminate his philosophical and personal life. “There is only one course of action that can make you happy. . . . rejoice in what is yours. What is it that is yours? Yourself; the best part of you.” In the year 62, citing health issues, the Roman philosopher Seneca withdrew from public service and devoted his time to writing. His letters from this period offer a window onto his experience as a landowner, a traveler, and a man coping with the onset of old age. They share his ideas on everything from the treatment of enslaved people to the perils of seafaring, and they provide lucid explanations for many key points of Stoic philosophy. This selection of fifty letters brings out the essentials of Seneca’s thought, with much that speaks directly to the modern reader. Above all, they explore the inner life of the individual who proceeds through philosophical inquiry from a state of emotional turmoil to true friendship, self-determination, and personal excellence.

Hercules is a tragedy of great theatrical, poetic, and cultural value. Written probably at the intersection of the principates of Claudius and Nero, it addresses central issues of early imperial Rome, even as it speaks profoundly to our times. Among its concerns are violence and madness; imperatives of family and self; Rome, identity and place; the nature of virtue; the longing for immortality; the theatre of rage; and the empire of death. The play is dramatically innovative, spectacular, and arresting: from its fiery, monumental god-prologue (the only one in Senecan tragedy), through meditative soliloquies, impassioned speeches, trenchant dialogue, a failed wooing scene with an impressive after-life in Tudor drama, a stunning entrance for Hercules and his captured hellhound, Theseus' ecphrastic narrative of the hero's infernal 'labour', to a familicidal madness scene and an emotionally turbulent, non-violent finale, in which the instinct for self-punitive suicide is thwarted by the claims of kinship and the acceptance of intolerable suffering. The whole is bound together by some of Seneca's most affective choral lyrics, as intellectually engaging as they are emotionally potent. Hercules is A. J. Boyle's sixth, full-scale edition for OUP of a play by or attributed to Seneca. It offers a comprehensive introduction, newly edited Latin text, English verse translation designed for both performance and academic study, and a detailed exegetic, analytic, and interpretative commentary. The aim has been to elucidate the text dramatically as well as philologically, and to locate the play firmly in its contemporary historical and theatrical context and the ensuing literary and dramatic tradition. As such, its substantial influence on European drama from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries is given emphasis throughout; this and the accessibility of the commentary to Latinless readers make the edition particularly useful to scholars and students not only of classics, but also of comparative literature and drama, and to anyone interested in the cultural dynamics of literary reception and the interplay between theatre and history.

"Several decades of scholarship by now have demonstrated that Roman thinkers have developed in new and stimulating directions the systems of thought they inherited from the Greeks, and that, taken together, they offer a range of perspectives that are of philosophical interest in their own right. This collection of essays pursues a maximally inclusive approach, covering not only authors such as Augustine, but also poets or historians. It pays attention to the mode in which these works were written (giving rhetoric too its due) and their often conscious reflections on the process of translating, or transferring Greek ideas to Roman contexts"--

"This volume contains sixteen essays on various aspects of Ovid's engagement with philosophical trends and topics. Ovid has long been celebrated for the versatility of his poetic imagination, the diversity of his generic experimentation throughout his long career, and his intimate engagement with the Greco-Roman literary tradition that precedes him; but what of his engagement with the philosophical tradition? Ovid's close familiarity with philosophical ideas and with specific philosophical texts has long been recognized, perhaps most prominently in the Pythagorean, Platonic, Empedoclean, and Lucretian shades that color his Metamorphoses. This philosophical component, however, has often been perceived as a feature subordinate to Ovid's larger literary agenda; and because of the controlling influence conceded to that literary impulse, readings of the philosophical dimension have often focused on the perceived distortion, ironizing, or parodying of philosophical sources and ideas. This book counters this tendency by (i) considering Ovid's seriousness of engagement with, and his possible critique of, the philosophical writings that inform his works; (ii) questioning the feasibility of separating out the categories of the "philosophical" and the "literary" in the first place; (iii) exploring the ways in which Ovid may offer unusual, controversial, or provocative reactions to received philosophical ideas; and (iv) investigating the case to be made for viewing the Ovidian corpus not just as a body of writings that are often philosophically inflected, but also as texts that may themselves be read as philosophically adventurous and experimental"--

Seneca’s developed metaphors draw on what is known to describe the unknown. They put hard ethical in highly accessible, and often quite entertaining, terms. The present book provides a functional description of Seneca’s dialectical relation between metaphorical language and philosophy. It shows how Stoic philosophy finds a new means of expression in Seneca’s highly elaborated rhetorical discourse, and how this relates to the social and cultural demands of Neronian culture. Metaphors are purposely utilized to work "collectively" rather than by category or type and that, therefore, the analysis of what metaphors do when Seneca chooses to combine them in clusters, demonstrates the existence of a "metanarrative of rhetoric". This approach is fundamentally innovative and has the advantage of gauging the functioning of Senecan style as a whole, rather than focusing on single features of its rhetorical functioning. The main target is to show how philosophical preaching materially contributes to the healing of human soul because it shapes the individual’s cognitive faculty in a way that is physical and not simply figurative. The stylus and the scalpel blend in their functions. This kind of therapy is not just the simulacrum of a more "real" one, it is in itself medical in nature.

Unfinishedness and incompleteness are a central feature of ancient Greek and Roman literature that has often been taken for granted but not deeply examined; many texts have been transmitted to us incomplete. How and to what extent has this feature of many texts influenced their aesthetic perception and interpretation, and how does it still influence them today? Also, how do various editorial arrangements of fragmentary texts influence the reconstruction of closure? These important questions offer the opportunity to bring together specialists working on Greek and Roman texts across various genres: epic, tragedy, poetry, mythographic texts, rhetorical texts, philosophical treatises, and the novel. Reading a text by focusing on its current unfinishedness or incompleteness, or the textual signs suggesting an unfinished or incomplete state, the contributors examine the relations between author, reader and text as underscored by the verbal, generic and aesthetic features of each work. This edited volume brings together a broad spectrum of approaches to ancient and modern texts and aims to reach out to a broad scholarly community consisting not only of Classicists but also scholars of other literature and aesthetics.