1. Allusion to the Aesopic fable of the lion and the fox: the “sick” lion draws sympathetic visitors, but the wily fox notes the one-way direction of all the prints. So for Seneca, individuals are swept along toward ruination by the one-way traffic of mass opinion.
2. Virgil Aeneid 9.612.
3. Presumably a reference to Stoic suicide.
4. Seneca exploits a notorious Stoic inconsistency (one that he will, in fact, deny later in On Leisure): Zeno of Citium (335–263 BCE) and Chrysippus of Soli (ca. 280–207 BCE), the first and third heads of the school, advocated public service but never actually performed it themselves, at least in the conventional sense (but cf. 6.4–5).
5. Not direct quotations, but a neat antithesis contrived by Seneca.
6. Given Seneca’s own de facto retirement from the Neronian court after 62 CE, autobiographical overtones have been detected here. But the grounds for exemption from service in 3.3 are too well attested before Seneca, too conventional rather than personally revealing, to be interpreted as unambiguously autobiographical.
7. Zeno’s dream in his Republic of a universal civic awareness (a notion influenced by earlier, especially Cynic, ideas) was adapted by Chrysippus to shape the “cosmic city” idea of later Stoics.
8. Of the three familiar parts of Hellenistic philosophy, logic, physics, and ethics, Seneca here begins with staple ethical questions before progressing to physics, first on the nature of the physical cosmos, then on its divine governance. Key differences between the Stoic and Epicurean worldviews in Seneca’s survey of physical questions here—the Stoic material world continuum, god immanent throughout it, is contrasted with random atomic motion in the void, with no divine involvement in this or any other perishable world—revive the interschool rivalry featured in 1.4–5.
9. The Stoics.
10. In Stoic theory, the rational human soul is a portion of the universal fiery divine breath/pneuma. In 5.5–6, Epicurean and Stoic ideas are again in tension (cf. n. 8 above); but what transcends their rivalry here is the model of self- and world-questioning that Seneca presents as engaging any discerning mind at its peak performance.
11. A key Senecan emphasis also elsewhere (e.g., On Tranquility of Mind 4.8, Letters 3.6), with elaboration in 6.2–4 below.
12. Cf. 1.5 and n. 4.
13. Because they were not freeborn Athenians, Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus were ineligible for legal or political office there.
14. Formularized in Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics 1095b 17–19), but the distinction extends back to Plato and his predecessors.
15. An Epicurean; Seneca possibly alludes to a point of discussion in the treatise’s lost opening.
16. I.e., the Epicurean aims to achieve “katastematic” pleasure (e.g., not being hungry) as opposed to the “kinetic” sort (e.g., eating to relieve hunger).
17. Cf. Epicurus Letter to Menoeceus 129–30.
18. The distinction glances back to 2.1–2: in the case either of retirement to the contemplative life from early age (2.1) or withdrawal after a career in service (2.2), the Stoic is always committed to action; for even in retirement Stoic contemplatio (here in effect the anchoring place) is still directed to action for the common good.
19. Along the lines of Zeno’s prescription in 3.2 above.
20. So fastidiose, which is rendered more pejoratively by other translators (to the effect of “fussy,” “choosy”). Yet the sage delineated in chapters 4–6 is hardly disdainful of, or fussily selective about, public service per se. Active service within/to the community is his mandated goal, but on close inspection he is without a useful or relevant role to play within the (inevitably corrupt) states he surveys; hence retirement to philosophical action is the only realistic option (8.3).
21. After Alexander’s death in 323 BCE, Aristotle, accused of impiety, left Athens, allegedly recalling the Socratic precedent (399 BCE) as he did so.
22. For resistance to claims that On Leisure is incomplete at its transmitted end, see my introduction to this essay.