Abbreviations
LS
Long, A. A., and D. N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
SVF
Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, ed. Hans F. A. von Arnim. Leipzig, 1903–24.
Introduction
1. Compare the title used by Lactantius: Why Many Bad Things Happen to Good Men, though There Is Providence (Divine Institutes 5.22.11).
2. On providence in the ancient philosophical tradition and in Seneca, see Dragona-Monachou 1994 (with discussion of the present work, 4440–42); also Traina 1997, 7–20; Dionigi 1997, 54–70. For Stoic texts, see SVF II, 1106–86.
3. The implausible theory that the work is in fact incomplete is discussed and dismissed by Traina 1997, 22.
4. On providence (and Seneca’s work) in the Christian tradition, see Traina 1997, 13–20; on Augustine in particular, Dionigi 1997, 51–54, 62–70.
5. For these two arguments, see Aulus Gellius Attic Nights 7.1.1–13 (= SVF II, 1170 = LS 54Q); Plutarch On Stoic Contradictions 1050e (= SVF II, 1176).
6. For discussion of the work’s date, see Griffin 1992, 396, 400.
7. The confrontation of Lucilius at 1.1 seems plucked from the epistolary to and fro, especially in Letters 96.1.
8. The spiral metaphor is credited to Grimal by Traina 1997, 22. On the work’s structure, see Wright 1974, 48–54; Abel 1967, 97–123.
On Providence
9. Seneca’s sketch of what he supposedly is not going to mention (praeteritio) touches on the material of Natural Questions (e.g., 1.pref.15).
10. Perhaps even “rival”: as Traina 1997, 86 notes, the term used here, aemulator, suggests something more than the standard resemblance (similitudo/homoiôsis) to god.
11. Home-born slaves (uernae) were typically treated better than other slaves, and also less strictly than freeborn children, sometimes with a view to their providing cheeky entertainment.
12. For Christian echoes, see, e.g., Minucius Felix Octavius 37.1: “What a beautiful spectacle for god, when a Christian comes into combat with pain”; also Lactantius On the Deaths of the Persecutors 16.6–7.
13. Cato the Younger (95–46 BCE), who committed suicide at Utica (hence his conventional title Cato Uticensis) after the defeat of Pompey and the advance of Julius Caesar’s forces. On Seneca’s use of Cato here and elsewhere, see Isnardi Parenti 2000; Hutchinson 1993, 273–79; Griffin 1992, esp. 190–94; Abel 1967, 111–13; and in the tradition more generally, Goar 1987.
14. M. Petreius was a commander of Pompeian forces, Juba a Numidian king who fought with the Pompeians. When their cause became hopeless after the battle of Thapsus in 46, they agreed to kill each other.
15. Cato supposedly read “Plato’s dialogue on the soul,” i.e., Phaedo (Plutarch Cato the Younger 68.2); Seneca elsewhere refers to him reading a “book of Plato’s” at Letters 24.6.
16. Cato’s initial wound, made earlier the same night with a sword or dagger, had been sewn up; he subsequently tore it open with his bare hands.
17. These topics correspond more or less to 3.2–4.16 (in the men’s interest); 5.1–5.2 (in everyone’s interest); 5.3–6 (the men are willing); 5.7–11 (these things are fated); and 6.1–2 (they are not in fact unhappy).
18. Demetrius the Cynic, a philosopher exiled by Nero and again by Vespasian, is mentioned frequently in Seneca’s later works (e.g., On Benefits 7.1.3–2.1), though he is also mentioned often by historians and other philosophical writers such as Epictetus and Lucian.
19. The list recurs at Letters 98.12–13 and elsewhere, with minor changes. On its functions and variations, see Mayer 2008, 304–6.
20. Q. Mucius Scaevola (= “Left-handed”), early Roman hero, was captured after attempting to kill Lars Porsena, the king of Clusium, who was besieging Rome. Mucius thrust his hand into a fire to show his indifference to being condemned to death, and was set free by the king.
21. C. Fabricius Luscinus (early 3rd c. BCE) resisted the attempts of king Pyrrhus to bribe him during war, and was famous for living in poverty on his farm.
22. A reference to the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian Seas, to the east and west of Italy.
23. P. Rutilius Rufus (b. ca. 160 BCE), a Roman statesman who was also a Stoic (being a student of Panaetius), was exiled in 92 on charges of corruption; his defense speech was modeled on the Apology of Socrates. He refused Sulla’s invitation to return to Rome.
24. A mocking allusion to Sulla’s epithet, felix, “lucky, fortunate.”
25. After becoming dictator in 82/81, L. Cornelius Sulla (138–78 BCE) proscribed and executed thousands of Romans (cf. Plutarch Sulla 31). Severed heads were displayed at the lacus Seruilius, located next to the Roman Forum, to the west of the Basilica Iulia.
26. I.e., because they are dead.
27. The lex Cornelia de sicariis et ueneficiis, a law on homicide and poisoning, introduced by (Cornelius) Sulla in 81 BCE.
28. M. Atilius Regulus was a commander in the First Punic War; in 250, as a captive of the Carthaginians, he was sent to Rome to negotiate terms of peace, but told the Romans to continue the war, insisted on returning to Carthage, and was tortured, with his eyelids sewn open, and put to death.
29. C. Maecenas (d. 8 BCE) was the major patron of the arts in the age of Augustus; Seneca chiefly refers to his own florid writing and luxurious lifestyle, as well as to his ostentatious erotic life with his wife Terentia.
30. I.e., Maecenas’s wife.
31. Around sixteen of the twenty-six mentions of Socrates in Seneca focus on his death. On Socrates in Seneca, see Isnardi Parenti 2000.
32. I.e., the first triumvirate of the 50s BCE.
33. P. Vatinius, though the butt of jokes for his physical deformities and the target of invective from Cicero, held a series of high political offices during the first triumvirate, and beat Cato in the election for praetor in 55.
34. Tiberius put on relatively few shows compared with Augustus (cf. Suetonius Tiberius 47).
35. Seneca shifts from “you” singular to “you” plural.
36. I.e., the Spartans, whose legendary austere regimen for raising their children (the agôgê) is a staple example in moral philosophy.
37. Nations celebrated for their tough character, supposedly due to the harsh elements.
38. I.e., they are indifferents. For explanation of the theory, see LS 58.
39. Appius Claudius Caecus and L. Caecilius Metellus, statesmen of the Middle Republic; Metellus lost his sight when rescuing statues of the gods from fire in the temple of Vesta.
40. Otherwise unknown.
41. Mentioned already at 3.3 above.
42. This passage partly echoes the verses of Cleanthes reproduced at Letters 113.26. For the broader Stoic background on fate and free will, see LS 55.
43. The text is corrupt: †hoc passa est†. I have followed Reynolds’s suggested hoc <natura non> passa est.
44. For Chrysippus’s notion of events whose fates “hold together” (cohaerentia), see Aulus Gellius Attic Nights 7.1.9 = LS 54 Q (2).
45. Ovid Metamorphoses 2.63–69, then 79–81; Seneca supplements the verse quotations with prose paraphrase. The speaker is the Sun, who fails to deter his son Phaethon from driving his chariot across the sky and causing a conflagration. Compare the use of Phaethon in On the Happy Life 20.5.
46. The philosopher Democritus of Abdera, roughly contemporary with Socrates. For the story, see Diogenes Laertius 9.35, 39.
47. Plural.
48. The options, that death is either an end or a transition, are the same as those given by Socrates in the last pages of Plato’s Apology of Socrates; compare Letters 65.24.
49. Reading Reynolds’s suggested <si> trahitur, though it remains awkward.
50. I.e., as Cato did (cf. 2.12 above).
Basore, John, trans. 1928. Seneca, Moral Essays, vol. 1. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Davie, John, trans. 2007. Seneca, Dialogues and Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.