SENECA


Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the Younger, was Rome's leading intellectual figure in the mid-1st century AD. He was philosopher, statesman, orator, and tragedian.

Seneca was the second son of a wealthy family from Spain.

The father, Seneca the Elder, had been famous in Rome as a teacher of rhetoric.

An aunt took Lucius as a boy to Rome; there he was trained as an orator and educated in philosophy.

Seneca's health suffered, and he went to recuperate in Egypt.

Returning to Rome about the year 31, he began a career in politics and law. Soon he fell foul of the emperor Caligula, who was deterred from killing him only by the argument that his life was sure to be short.

In 41 the emperor Claudius banished Seneca to Corsica on a charge of adultery with the princess Julia Livilla, the Emperor's niece. The influence of Agrippina, the Emperor's wife, had him recalled to Rome in 49.

He became praetor in AD 50, married Pompeia Paulina, a wealthy woman, built up a powerful group of friends, including the new prefect of the guard, Sextus Afranius Burrus, and became tutor to the future emperor Nero.

The murder of Claudius in 54 pushed Seneca and Burrus to the top. Although provincials from Spain and Gaul, they understood the problems of the Roman world. Seneca and Burrus were a tyrant's favourites.

When Burrus died in 62 Seneca received permission to retire, and in his remaining years he wrote some of his best philosophical works. In 65, Seneca's enemies denounced him as having been a party to the conspiracy of Piso. Ordered to commit suicide, he met death with fortitude and composure.

Within his philosophical work best written and most compelling are Seneca's Epistulae morales, addressed to Lucilius. Those 124 brilliant essays on Stoic philosophy treat a range of moral problems not easily reduced to a single formula.

His tragedies were intended for playreadings rather than public presentation. The pitch is a high monotone, emphasizing the lurid and the supernatural.

The principal representatives of classical tragedy known to the Renaissance world, these plays had a great influence, notably in England.

Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, and Cyril Tourneur's Revengers Tragaedie, with their ghosts, witches, cruel tyrants, and dominant theme of vengeance, are the progeny of Seneca's tragedies.

Quintilian, the 1st-century AD rhetorician, criticized his educational influence; Tacitus was ambivalent on Seneca's place in history. But his views on monarchy and its duties contributed to the humane and liberal temper of the age of the Antonine emperors.

Meanwhile, the spread of Stoicism kept his philosophy alive: new horizons opened when it was found to have Christian affinities. There was a belief that he knew St. Paul and a spurious collection of letters to substantiate it.

Studied by Augustine and Jerome, Seneca's works consoled Boethius in prison. His thought was a component of the Latin culture of the Middle Ages.

Known to Dante, Chaucer, and Petrarch, his moral treatises were edited by Erasmus; the first complete English translation appeared in 1614.




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