HARRY M. HINE
From internal references we know that this dialogue was written during the reign of the emperor Claudius while Seneca was in exile on Corsica—that is, between 41 and 49 CE. Seneca expresses the wish (13.2) that Claudius may open up Britain and celebrate triumphs, which implies that he was writing before the conquest of Britain and Claudius’s subsequent triumph in 43 CE (or possibly very soon after, on the assumption that the news may have taken a little while to reach Seneca). The addressee, Polybius, was one of the freedmen who played an important role in the imperial palace during Claudius’s reign—others were Marcus Antonius Pallas and Narcissus. Polybius held the post of a libellis, in charge of documents, particularly petitions; and he may also have been a studiis, in charge of literary matters. His role as imperial freedman is well attested by other ancient writers on the period, but only from Seneca do we know that he was also a literary man, and had translated Homer into Latin prose and Virgil into Greek prose.
The death of Polybius’s brother prompted Seneca to write this work of consolation. The start of the work is lost, and we do not know how much is missing; but in what we have, Seneca covers a number of the standard themes of ancient consolatory literature (see the translator’s introduction to the Consolation to Marcia). Little of the content is specifically Stoic, and in fact Seneca in passing repudiates, without naming its protagonists, the strict Stoic view that the wise man will feel no grief at all. But the arguments are tailored to Polybius’s own circumstances: Seneca suggests that he use his literary talents to write about his brother and preserve his memory for posterity; and he appeals to the close relationship Polybius has with Claudius, imagining the emperor making a consolatory speech to the freedman, and telling him that the mere presence of the emperor, and the demands of his service to him, should distract him from his grief.
Yet the work is not just a consolatory treatise for Polybius but also an appeal to Claudius to recall Seneca from exile. Seneca’s praises of the emperor can seem hollow and hypocritical, and some have thought them deliberately ironic. There is certainly a strong contrast between what Seneca says about Claudius in this treatise and what he later says about him in the Apocolocyntosis, the vicious and hilarious satire on the deification of Claudius written early in Nero’s reign: the treatise praises Claudius for his justice, fairness, and eloquence, whereas the satire exposes his injustice, arbitrariness, cruelty, and incoherence; the treatise looks forward to his gaining a well-deserved place in heaven after his death, but the satire has him ejected from Olympus and consigned to a menial, bathetic fate in the underworld. However, we should perhaps not overstress the conflict, real though it is. Most of the praises of Claudius in the dialogue fit firmly within the conventions of imperial panegyric that had been established since Augustus’s reign; and the criticisms, found in historical sources as well as in the Apocolocyntosis, may have been amplified after Claudius’s death.
The structure of the work, so far as it survives, is clear and straightforward: chapters 1–11 offer advice of various traditional sorts; chapters 12–13 tell Polybius to think of the comfort he can get from his surviving relatives and from the emperor (and Seneca expresses the hope that Claudius will recall him from exile); chapters 14–17 give various examples for Polybius to emulate (14.2–16.3 is put into Claudius’s mouth, and 17 offers the negative example of Caligula); and chapter 18 is the conclusion.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Elizabeth Asmis and the press’s reader for suggesting improvements to the translation, but I alone am responsible for any remaining deficiencies.
Further Reading
Atkinson, J. E. 1985. “Seneca’s Consolatio ad Polybium.” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt II.32.2:860–84.
Kurth, T. 1994. Senecas Trostschrift an Polybius: Dialog 11; Ein Kommentar. Beiträge zur Altertumskunde 59. Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner.
Olberding, A. 2005. “The ‘Stout Heart’: Seneca’s Strategy for Dispelling Grief.” Ancient Philosophy 25:141–54.