Dialogues and Letters by Séneca Page B

increasingly became mentally and morally unstable, Seneca’s influence declined sharply, and after the death of Burrus in 62 he attempted to withdraw from public life. Nero was unwilling to let him go, but from 64 he was at last allowed to retire and live the life of a recluse. However, within a year an unsuccessful conspiracy was formed to kill Nero and replace him by C. Calpurnius Piso. Nero believed (probably wrongly) that Seneca was implicated and ordered him to commit suicide. With no choice in the matter Seneca took his own life in April 65. It was a disastrous episode for his family generally, asboth of his brothers and his nephew, the poet Lucan, also met similar fates from alleged association with the conspiracy.
    Seneca’s life was, to simplify somewhat, that of a compulsive writer (mainly on personal ethics), and a more reluctant man of affairs. Inevitably, students of his works and his times look for harmonies between these two sides of his activities, and often critically point out discrepancies. The commonest charge against him is that his great wealth and the outward show of his life were inconsistent with his philosophical precepts, which were based mainly on Stoic insistence on non-material values for the good life. In his own lifetime he was criticized on the score of his wealth. Tacitus tells us (
Ann
. 13.42.4) that Suillius Rufus attacked him in 58 for acquiring a huge fortune, partly from usury; and critics have not been lacking ever since to assert a discrepancy between his preaching and his practice. He must have been sensitive to gibes about his own wealth, and it is possible that part of his treatise
De Vita Beata
(17 ff.) is an oblique self-defence, where he stresses that having wealth can be justified if you use it wisely. Individual readers will decide for themselves; but it must be allowed on Seneca’s behalf that, for a public figure living in the dangerously volatile atmosphere of Nero’s Rome, it cannot have been easy to be both materially prosperous and philosophically sincere, and at the same time avoid resentment.
WRITINGS
    Seneca has the unusual distinction as a writer of having produced works of great brilliance in both prose and verse – and of having strongly influenced later European literature in both media. His poetical productions, with which we are not here concerned, comprise eight tragedies which are agreed to be by him (
Hercules Furens
,
Troades
,
Phaedra
,
Medea
,
Phoenissae
,
Oedipus
,
Agamemnon
,
Thyestes
). Two others are attributed to him,
Hercules Oetaeus
,which is highly disputed but may be partly his; and
Octavia
, which is certainly not by him. A collection of epigrams has also come down under his name, most or all of which are clearly spurious.
    Seneca’s surviving prose works consists of: (1) ten treatises, conventionally called ‘dialogues’ (
dialogi
), preserved in an important manuscript, the Codex Ambrosianus (
De Providentia
,
De Constantia Sapientis
,
De Ira
,
Consolatio ad Marciam
,
De Vita Beata
,
De Otio
,
De Tranquillitate Animi
,
De Brevitate Vitae
,
Consolatio ad Polybium
,
Consolatio ad Helviam Matrem
); (2) two other treatises,
De Clementia
and
De Beneficiis
;(3)
Naturales Quaestiones
(‘Natural Questions’ – a long work which investigates a range of natural phenomena, both celestial and terrestrial); (4)
Epistulae Morales
(‘Letters on ethical topics’ – 124 of them, addressed to his friend Lucilius).
    Finally, there is the
Apocolocyntosis
, a satirical work written in a form of mingled prose and verse, called ‘Menippean’ after Menippus of Gadara who popularized it. This is a biting satire on the deification of the recently dead emperor Claudius, in which we may see Seneca both demonstrating his literary versatility and paying off an old score.
    Seneca’s works, especially the treatises and the letters, have a double importance: in the history of Latin prose style, and in the