1. The Latin manuscripts begin in midsentence, but the general sense is clear.
2. That is, the Seven Wonders of the World; the list was fluid in Seneca’s day.
3. Seneca is alluding to the Stoic doctrine of ecpyrosis.
4. Three cities destroyed by the Romans: Carthage and Corinth in 146 BCE, Numantia in 133 BCE.
5. There is nothing outside the universe, so it has nowhere to fall.
6. Seneca here alludes to his exile.
7. Reading eum hominem <in sinu> continuisse.
8. In Latin “lovable” (amabilem) picks up “friends” (amicos) in the previous sentence.
9. The liberal arts were the subjects covered in a general education; later the list was standardized to include grammar (chiefly the study of literature), dialectic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.
10. That is, with his mind.
11. Literature was regarded as a safer pursuit than politics or other areas of public life.
12. Compare Lucretius 5.222–27.
13. In mythology, Atlas carried the world on his shoulders.
14. Polybius had translated Homer into Latin and Virgil into Greek.
15. Claudius had written on Roman, Etruscan, and Carthaginian history.
16. Seneca ignores, whether deliberately or through ignorance, the verse fables of Phaedrus, written during the reign of Tiberius.
17. “The divine” here includes the heavenly bodies, widely regarded as divine beings.
18. When Seneca wrote, Claudius had three children: Antonia, from his second marriage to Aelia Paetina, and Octavia and Britannicus, from his third marriage to Messallina.
19. Compare Lucretius 3.971.
20. Seneca is quoting a fragment of Roman tragedy of uncertain authorship (quoted also by Cicero Tusculan Disputations 3.28, 58, with slightly different wording). At birth, the Roman father lifted the baby off the ground, an act of formal recognition that the child was his own.
21. Homer or Virgil. From what follows it seems that Polybius’s translations were in prose.
22. A financial image: fortune is a creditor who releases a struggling debtor from his debt upon payment of an agreed fraction of what is owed; in return for payment of his brother’s life, Polybius can keep the lives of his other relatives.
23. It is a standard theme of Roman imperial panegyric that the emperor’s true home is among the gods, but the writer appeals for him to stay on earth as long as possible.
24. Augustus died at the age of seventy-six; Claudius was in his fifties when Seneca wrote this.
25. The son in question is Britannicus; his mother was Claudius’s third wife Messalina. Britannicus was born in 41 CE. Subsequently, after Claudius’s marriage to Agrippina, her son Nero was promoted above Britannicus, who, according to the ancient sources, was murdered by Nero in 55 CE, the year after Nero became emperor. Claudius would see Britannicus as his successor after he had died and ascended to heaven.
26. Julius Caesar and Augustus, both ancestors of Claudius, had been deified, and they traced their ancestry to Venus, but “his family” may well refer to the gods in general.
27. The previous emperor was Gaius Caligula (r. 37–41 ce).
28. It was a commonplace of imperial panegyric to compare the ruler to a star.
29. Gabinius Secundus defeated the Chauci, a German tribe, during Claudius’s reign. Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo also campaigned against the Chauci in 47 ce, but that was probably after the date of this work (see the next note).
30. Claudius led a successful invasion of Britain in 43 CE. This passage was clearly written before that, or at least before the news had reached Seneca in Corsica.
31. Claudius’s father Drusus campaigned in Germany from 12 BCE till his death in 9 BCE, and won triumphal insignia. Claudius did celebrate a triumph after the conquest of Britain.
32. Suetonius (The Life of Claudius 34.3) reports that Claudius did allow some exiles back to Rome to watch his triumph. But Seneca was not among them.
33. Thunderbolts, wielded by Jupiter in mythology, are a regular metaphor for punishment inflicted by emperors. In Rome a traditional religious ritual was performed at any spot struck by lightning.
34. The public calendar, the Fasti, was the official record of magistrates who had held office each year. The public annals may refer to the annales maximi, the records kept by the pontifex maximus in the Early and Middle Republics, but more likely refer to Roman historical works more generally. Claudius himself was a historian; see 8.2 above.
35. This is Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus the Elder, who defeated Hannibal; the brother is Lucius Cornelius Scipio Asiagenes. But other writers, probably correctly, say that Publius died before Lucius. Publius probably went into voluntary exile in 184 BCE to avoid prosecution, and died the following year.
36. Publius rescued his brother a few years before his exile; the exact date is uncertain. Only a tribune in office could veto another tribune.
37. This is the younger Africanus, Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus Africanus Numantinus, son of Lucius Aemilius Paullus, and subsequently adopted by the son of the elder Africanus. His natural father Paullus celebrated a triumph after his defeat of Perseus in 167 BCE. One son died five days before the triumph, the other three days after it.
38. This Scipio destroyed Carthage in 146 BCE.
39. Lucius Licinius Lucullus, who led the Roman army in the Third Mithradatic War and died in 57/56 BCE, and his brother Marcus Licinius Lucullus.
40. The sons of Pompeius Magnus (Pompey the Great): Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus Minor (who was executed after the battle of Munda in 45 BCE), and Sextus Pompeius Magnus (who was executed in 35 BCE, after being defeated at the battle of Naulochus the preceding year).
41. This sentence is problematic, for their sister was Pompeia, who married a Sulla, so that her death could not have had the effect here described. It is sometimes assumed that Seneca is confusedly thinking of the death of Julia, daughter of Julius Caesar. She married Pompey the Great in 59 BCE, cementing the alliance between Pompey and Caesar, and her death in 54 BCE was seen as a catalyst in the breakdown of the alliance. She was Pompey’s second wife, and so stepmother, not sister, of the two Pompey brothers under discussion here. Another possibility is that Seneca refers to the baby daughter of Pompey and Julia, who was a half sister of the brothers: Julia died while giving birth to this baby daughter, who died a few days later.
42. Octavia died in 11 BCE; her son Marcellus had died in 23 BCE.
43. The sons-in-law were Marcellus and Agrippa, and the grandsons were Gaius and Lucius Caesar (see section 4 below). But he had only one child, his daughter Julia, and she died in banishment, having outlived Augustus; so Seneca may be thinking of Gaius and Lucius here too, for they were adopted as sons (see the next note).
44. He was grandson by birth (son of Agrippa and Julia, Augustus’s daughter), son by adoption.
45. He was actually Claudius’s maternal great-uncle (his mother Antonia was daughter of Octavia, Augustus’s sister); possibly the Latin word has that meaning here.
46. In 2 ce. “Leader of the Youth,” princeps iuuentutis, was a formal title they both received.
47. Marcus Antonius, the father of Claudius’s mother Antonia, in 43 BCE formed the second triumvirate with Octavian, later Augustus, and Marcus Lepidus. He was defeated by Augustus in 31 BCE. His brother Gaius Antonius was killed in 42 BCE.
48. This refers to the defeat of the armies of Brutus and Cassius at Philippi in 42 BCE.
49. It is puzzling that fortune is described as attacking twice, but then Germanicus is the only brother mentioned. But Tacitus (The Annals 2.82) describes how in 19 ce two reports of Germanicus’s death reached Rome: the first subsequently proved to be false, but the later one was true.
50. The entrance to the imperial palace resembled a temple, and a laurel tree grew in front of it.
51. In the imperial period people swore oaths by the current emperor, and by Augustus after his death.
52. Drusilla died in 38 ce.
53. Some corrupt words are omitted in the translation.
54. Images of the gods were regularly displayed on couches.
55. This was the Stoic view; but Seneca commonly distances himself from the strict Stoic view that the sage will have no emotions at all. Here he embraces the Aristotelian doctrine of the mean, i.e., the idea that one should shun excessive emotions (as he says in 18.6).
56. The conclusion recalls the end of Ovid’s Tristia book 3 (3.14.47–52), where the poet complains about being surrounded by foreign voices in his place of exile, Tomi.