Abbreviation
OLD
Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. G. W. Glare, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012).
Introduction
1. See on this most recently “Seneca on Self Assertion,” pp. 346–51 of Inwood 2005.
2. The parallel between physical and mental/moral sickness was a Hellenistic commonplace; cf. (after Seneca) Plutarch’s essay “Whether the Sicknesses of the Mind or of the Body are Worse,” Moralia 500b–502b; Loeb Classical Library vol. 6). Even the words observatio sui (“constant watching”) in 17.1 evoke the medical practice of watching patients (epitērēsis) to observe the progress of their symptoms.
3. See Sorabji 1997 and Williams 1997.
4. See Griffin 1976, 447–48.
5. I refer here to the valuable exploration by Kaster 2005 in chap. 5, “The Dynamics of Fastidium and the ideology of disgust.”
6. It is possible that Seneca knew Democritus only indirectly, but for a more positive assessment see chap. 2, “Epicurus and Democritean Ethics,” in Warren 2002.
On Tranquility of Mind
7. The opening words put into Serenus’s mouth announce the important topic of self-examination and the concern to heal the self; see further 2.7 and 2.9, with the corresponding stress on therapy in 14.2.
8. This is the first reference to Serenus’s condition as a mental or moral disease.
9. Latin animus covers Greek dianoia, the moral and intellectual aspects of personality; usually it is best translated as “mind,” but when it is associated with mood or morale I have translated it as “spirit,” in the sense that we use spirited.
10. Like bulimics, Romans deliberately made themselves vomit to escape the consequences of overeating.
11. The forum was until the principate one public space, the Forum Romanum, to which Augustus added the Forum of Julius Caesar and Forum Augustum. Roman law courts both civil and criminal were held in the open forum, and men negotiated business with and for friends there. Service to friends, equal or dependent (clients), was a primary elite obligation, second only to serving the state itself.
12. Throughout the dialogue, incidental imagery of sea and storm recalls the original sense of tranquility—calm at sea.
13. On self-disgust (fastidium sui) and the different applications of fastidium in general, see chap. 5 of Kaster 2005.
14. This was well expressed by Horace Epistles 1.11.26 (“men who rush across the sea change their environment but not their state of mind”) and by Lucretius before him. Seneca’s short quotation from Lucretius 3.1068 is taken from an extended passage describing self-discontent and its effect on behavior.
15. Athenodorus of Tarsus was the young Augustus’s instructor in philosophy and stayed on to advise the imperial family. We are not certain where the translated quotation and mere paraphrase of his teaching begins and ends. I have followed Reynolds’ text (1977), which assigns to him all of 3.2–8.
16. Seneca is still thinking in terms of senatorial careers and magistracies. At Rome the praetor peregrinus supervised disputes between Romans and foreigners; the urban praetor presided over disputes between citizens.
17. Fortune is held responsible for all apparently undeserved misfortunes. Besides operating in political life, it takes on a more prominent role from chapter 8 onward.
18. A man condemned to exile or disgrace (infamia) would be barred from appearing in court or attending the popular assembly; nor could anyone appear on the speaker’s platform unless invited by the presiding magistrate. Seneca points to the contrast by evoking the un-Roman offices of prytanis, kerux, and Sufes.
19. This recalls the legend of Aeschylus’s brother, who lost both hands at Salamis but fought on; Seneca’s nephew Lucan echoes this legend in his account of a fictitious hero in the sea battle at Massilia. In film comedy, Monty Python created the knight who fought on though deprived of all four limbs.
20. The thirty tyrants took over the government of Athens in 404 BCE at the behest of the victorious Spartans. Athens’s democratic institutions included the Areopagus, an ancient religious court, the boule, or council of five hundred, and the ecclesia, the open assembly of citizens. The rhetorical plural, Harmodii, denotes imitators of Harmodius and Aristogeiton who assassinated the tyrant Hipparchus in 514 BCE. Socrates survived the tyranny but was condemned to death by representatives of the restored democracy in 399 BCE.
21. Curius was consul in 290 BCE and famous for his exemplary refusal of an enemy bribe and also his simple way of life (Valerius Maximus 4.3.5). I have not found the source for this saying.
22. This seems to be a list of Seneca’s topics in sequence: first assessing one’s own capacities, then the enterprise to be taken on, then the human associates or beneficiaries. But it is only a partial analysis of the forthcoming chapters 6–9.
23. This self-assessment recalls Serenus’s initial self-scrutiny, and subsequent references to self criticism in 2.7 and 2.9, and 14.2 below.
24. This strange phrase condemns the giving of dinner invitations as fulfillment of obligation to clients and inferiors; it is as if the patron were using his dining hall as a cheap eating house, where humble people paid for what they ate.
25. Isocrates (436–338 BCE) instructed elite students in oratory, and it is said that he felt his pupil Ephorus needed the spur to rouse him; hence he was better suited to historical writing. His extensive historical work was famous but survives only in excerpts of later writers such as Diodorus.
26. Which Cato is this? The Censor, renowned for his virtue and vigor (b. ca. 235 BCE) or his descendant Cato “of Utica,” famed for his Stoic integrity and living in the generation of the civil war. Most probably Seneca means the latter Cato.
27. Bion of Borysthenes was a Hellenistic Cynic street preacher associated with pithy sayings in the anecdotal tradition; see Diogenes Laertius 4.7.
28. In this discussion of external goods, fortune is shown as in control; compare 8.5 below, where worldly assets are called gifts of fortune (fortuita).
29. Diogenes of Sinope, the notorious fourth-century Cynic, celebrated in the anecdotal tradition (cf.Diogenes Laertius 6.20–83).
30. Romans regarded freedmen (that is, ex-slaves) as low class, but Greek freedmen such as Pompey’s Demetrius were enormously wealthy and powerful. Plutarch’s Life of Cato Minor 13 reports that a whole Asian city poured out to welcome and honor this Demetrius.
31. The Latin text of this phrase is damaged beyond restoration, but it contains a reference to shame.
32. This estimate of the holdings in the great library of Alexandria probably comes from the passage in Livy quoted in the same sentence. The library, assembled by Ptolemy Philadelphos in the early fourth century, was partly burned when Caesar was besieged on the island in 47 BCE, but different sources blame different attacks on Alexandria for the library’s destruction.
33. Illuminated books were an Alexandrian invention; they came to Rome in the last century BCE, in time for Varro to compile an encyclopedia of great men, each illustrated with his portrait.
34. “On the left” presumably refers to the escort chained to his prisoner.
35. This is the typical language of wills and private agreements.
36. The gifts of nature are life itself and health; the rest are gifts of fortune.
37. This is a loose quotation of Cicero’s defense speech “On Behalf of Milo” 92.
38. A possible interpretation of the Latin text here might take copulatos as an allusion to being bound to fortune, and treat it as subsequent to “the linked hands of comrades.”
39. The mime writer Publilius Syrus was challenged by Julius Caesar to perform in his own mimes, a humiliating act for a gentleman. But he composed such powerful one-liners that a whole body of sayings developed and were taught in schools under his name. Cf. Seneca Letters 16.
40. These are the emblems of magistrates (toga praetexta), augurs (the lituus), and patricians: senators and patricians wore distinctive footwear, but this is the only example of lora = shoestraps cited by OLD.
41. This obscure story is not about the general Pompey and Julius Caesar, but about a later Pompeius whom Gaius Caesar (Caligula) imprisoned (as a guest!) and starved to death in his own palace. It is not attested elsewhere.
42. Aelius Seianus was Tiberius’s prefect of the Praetorian guard. He ingratiated himself with the old emperor, slandering and destroying other members of the imperial family and isolating the emperor from affairs at Rome, until Tiberius was undeceived by a warning and sent a letter from Capri to Rome denouncing Seianus, who was executed overnight as a traitor. Tacitus’ account of his fall in the Annales is lost, but there is a graphic description in Juvenal 10.66–77.
43. Croesus, the sixth-century king of Lydia famed for his wealth, is the center of Herodotus’s moral tale in Histories 1.30–33, in which Solon warns him that no man can be called happy until he reaches death. Defeated by Cyrus, he was about to be burned on the pyre when he cried out that Solon had been right (Herodotus 1.86), and was spared. (Cf. Plutarch Solon 27.6–7 and 28.2.)
44. Jugurtha, the usurping king of Numidia, was betrayed and defeated, and brought to Rome to walk on display in Marius’s triumph in 105 BCE.
45. These kings, successors of the ruling Ptolemies and the great Mithridates, were brought to Rome, tricked, and imprisoned by Gaius (Suetonius Caligula 26, 35; Dio 58.26.4, 59.25).
46. This section returns to the starting point of 6.1.
47. Given the opening of the dialogue in Serenus’s self-discontent (cf. 1.4), this is the ultimate condemnation; such men have no time to know their inner selves.
48. This provisional anticipation resembles the Stoic practice of diluting the impact of misfortune by anticipating it (praemeditatio malorum); cf. Cicero Tusculan Disputations 3.29, 3.34.
49. As is his practice, Seneca follows two Greek anecdotes (about the Stoic Zeno and the Cyrenaic Theodorus, the latter threatened by Lysimachus with death) with a more detailed narrative of a Roman moral hero from the recent tyrannical reign of Caligula. The story is otherwise unknown. Within the story, Seneca equates Caligula with Phalaris, the notorious Sicilian tyrant who enclosed his victims in a bronze bull and roasted them to death.
50. Seneca apostrophizes Canus to mark his respect; this is the only apostrophe in this dialogue.
51. This contrast with the gloomy Heraclitus is the single most-quoted story about Democritus. Cf. Seneca On Anger 2.10.5.
52. Sorrow for the dead or grief at one’s own bereavement is apparently accepted as natural; and nature here is contrasted with custom.
53. Opposed to Socrates’ unjust death in prison are four Roman examples: the exile of the honest governor Rutilius in 91 BCE (much quoted by Cicero as a precedent for his own honor in exile); the murder of Pompey in 48 BCE by a Roman soldier acting on Egyptian order; the killing of Cicero by order of the triumvirate in 43; and Cato’s suicide in 46, which was treated as a martyrdom and rehearsed in gory detail, because he reopened the wound he had himself inflicted (see below).
54. The normal context of the Latin idiom “lay hands on them” is the arresting of an offender to take him to court (see OLD, s.v. inicere 6b).
55. Hercules was believed to be mortal until, in agony from the poisoned shirt of Nessus, he burned himself to death on Mount Oeta. Atilius Regulus, Roman commander of an unsuccessful raid on Carthage in 257 BCE, was sent back to ask for ransom for the captive Romans. He persuaded the senate to refuse the ransom and went back to Carthage as he had promised, to be tortured to death. The story, told in detail by Cicero On Duties 3.99 and cited as an example of integrity in Horace Odes 3.5, was subsequently used by Seneca repeatedly in On Providence 3.3 and 3.9 (along with Rutilius, Cato, and Socrates).
56. The saintly Cato of Utica was known to spend the night drinking; men turned away so as not to see him staggering home. Playing with boys (not, perhaps, so innocent), drinking, and dancing are put on an equal footing with licensed relaxation.
57. Asinius Pollio (76 BCE–4 CE), a Late Republican orator, was made consul in 40 BCE, and won a triumph in Illyria. He then withdrew from partisan politics and established the first public library at Rome (before Augustus), winning respect as an advocate and promoter of culture.
58. The Italian fertility god Liber was equated with the Greek Dionysus, and his name was understood as “liberator,” matching the Greek title Lyaeos.
59. The sources for this claim are unknown, but we see from, e.g., Horace Epistles 1.19.7 that it was customary to cite drinking as the inspiration of poets and other great men.
60. There are echoes here of Greek lyric, Plato’s Phaedrus (as below), and Horatian lyric (Odes 2.7, 4.12.28). The passing echo of Phaedrus leads into the unmistakable analogy of the fiery horse in the chariot team of the soul (Phaedrus 246a–247c).
Costa, C. D. N., ed. 1974. Seneca. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
. 1994. Four dialogues of Seneca. Translation and commentary. Warminster: Aris and Phillips.
, ed. and trans. 1997. Dialogues and Letters. London: Penguin.
Reynolds, L. D., ed. 1977. L. Annaei Senecae Dialogorum libri duodecim. Oxford: Oxford University Press.