Gunderson - The Sublime Seneca (2015)

THE SUBLIME SENECA

This is an extended meditation on ethics and literature across the Senecan corpus. There are two chapters on the Moral Letters, asking how one is to read philosophy or how one can write about being. Moving from the Letters to the Natural Questions and Dialogues, Professor Gunderson explores how authorship works at the level both of the work and of the world, the ethics of seeing, and the question of how one can give up on the here and now and behold instead some other, better ethical sphere. Seneca’s tragedies offer words of caution: desire might well subvert reason at its most profound level (Phaedra), or humanity’s painful separation from the sublime might be part of some cruel divine plan (The Madness of Hercules). The book concludes by considering what, if anything, we are to make of Seneca’s efforts to enlighten us. erik gunderson is Professor of Classics at the University of Toronto. He is the author of four other scholarly monographs: Laughing Awry: Plautus and Tragicomedy (2015); Nox Philologiae: Aulus Gellius and the Fantasy of the Ancient Library (2009); Declamation, Paternity and Roman Identity: Authority and the Rhetorical Self (2003); and Staging Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Performance in the Roman World (2000). He is also the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Rhetoric (2009). His work spans languages, genres, and eras, and he consistently brings to bear modern critical perspectives when exploring the ancient world.

THE SUBLIME SENECA Ethics, literature, metaphysics

by ERIK GUNDERSON

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107090019 © Erik Gunderson 2015 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2015 Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Gunderson, Erik, author. The sublime Seneca : ethics, literature, metaphysics / by Erik Gunderson. pages cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-09001-9 1. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, approximately 4 b.c.–65 a.d. Epistulae morales ad Lucilium. I. Title. pa6661.e8g9 2015 188–dc23 2014032239 isbn 978-1-107-09001-9 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

V both beautiful and sublime

Contents

1

Introduction 1

Misreading Seneca

14

2 Writing metaphysics

37

3 The nature of Seneca

56

4 The spectacle of ethics

74

5 Losing Seneca

88

6 The analytics of desire

105

7 The last monster

127

Conclusion: The metaphysics of Senecan morals

148 158 209 221

Notes Bibliography Index

vii

Introduction

What is the relationship between ethics, literature, and metaphysics in the writings of Seneca? The title of this volume, not being punctuated as a question, implies that an answer might be on offer. Something like an answer is. But it is useful to retain from the outset a hesitation relative to ready answers. Even asking the sort of question that might yield a ready answer should give us pause. Seneca himself warns us against this. What is designated by the terms ethics, literature, and metaphysics? What do these terms mean in standard contemporary discussions of philosophy? Is there a distance between their English meaning and their Greek and Latin precursors? What is the nature and scope of this difference? How does Seneca fit in here? And, most importantly, does Seneca himself use these terms in a non-complex manner? That is, is “ethics in Seneca” a simple, discrete concept? There are other fundamental problems that need to be flagged from the outset. The present discussion does not even start from the assumption that it knows quite who Seneca is or how to read what he wrote. A briefly annotated table of contents to the present volume might offer an overview of the project. In their way, the chapters furnish a set of questions relative to reading Seneca. Put somewhat flippantly, such a table of contents might run thus: Seneca writes reading. Seneca writes being. Seneca writes the being of meaning. Seneca writes seeing. Seneca writes Seneca’s erasure. Seneca writes that desire erases. Seneca writes that only suffering means anything. This is overly schematic. It also hides a key problem in the course of pretending to be the presentation of and solution to still other problems. The above questions and answers are linked. And their answers have a cumulative force. The first chapter informs the next and so on to the last. I am not offering a collection of chapters, each about its own little world. The reader is first asked to see that reading Seneca is a problem, and that Seneca himself knows this. Then one sees that philosophical writing is also a problem: what “is” philosophical writing when read within the Senecan 1

2

The Sublime Seneca

story of ontology? Then comes the third chapter which offers a key to the whole: “the author” furnishes a would-be solution to some of the initial difficulties. Next we see that “optics” and “perspective” (as mobilized by “the author”) provide a means of moving ahead towards Seneca’s version of enlightenment. However, as the next chapters argue, there are a variety of reasons to greet these literary and theatrical solutions to philosophical difficulties with caution. Seneca’s treatment of gender justifies our hesitation: claims that femininity is defective and masculinity is whole yield immediate resistance in the modern reader. Finally, we will find that in his tragedies Seneca engages with important philosophical impasses without, though, feeling constrained to offer the orthodox philosophical answers that doctrinaire Stoicism has at the ready: What is the relationship between desire and reason? Is the mundane self somehow doomed to a species of guilt and misery by the very fact of the transcendental? Ironically, these literary texts offer some of the most philosophically engaging ideas that speak most directly to contemporary interests. Throughout one has to be concerned about the ways Seneca has made the status of “Seneca” into an element of the philosophy. We need to know something about the agent of the verb before reading any of those nounverb-object phrases just above in which Seneca-writes-X. This will not, however, be a presentation of Seneca in the manner in which one might lay out a corpse in an autopsy theater. There one gestures to the cold, clean table and commences with a description of the structure and function of the organs on display as well as the various and ultimately fatal defects to be found in the cranium. The present project is instead a Senecan hunt after Senecan wisdom. This somewhat dangerous complicity with Seneca is meant to illuminate his working the better in the end. But it also takes seriously Seneca’s own insistence that a theater of knowledge does not involve corpses and scalpels but instead living players whose play is not mere play.1 This pursuit of Senecan wisdom requires that the alpha and the omega lie on the same circuit, that mortal spirit and cosmic spirit communicate. For this last, consider the unusual properties of a Möbius strip. It joins the beginning to the end. It also has but a single outer edge: the seemingly disparate surfaces of the band turn out to be one and the same. Meanwhile the “other” outside edge has gone missing: just before joining the ends to form a loop the artificer’s hand gives the band a twist, and the outside edge vanishes. Ethics, literature, and metaphysics: what do these words designate? For present purposes ethics can designate “reflective answers to the question, ‘How should I live?’”2 Not every modern evocation of the word ethics

Introduction

3

understands it in that manner, but it is not unusual to see it used after this fashion, and, more to the point, this sense takes us efficiently back to ancient philosophy and its preoccupations. But one must not be over-hasty here: at its core this is not a discussion of Stoic ethics or even Seneca’s relationship to Stoic ethics.3 Seneca sets forth answers to the question, “How should I live?” But I am not aiming at a rehearsal of the answers on offer. Instead I am interested in examining when, where, how, and why Seneca has presented the question itself. Hence the simultaneous insistence on retaining a literary-critical relationship to this question: the manner of presentation is of as much interest as are the answers. Literature is a portmanteau word in contemporary English, and one that likely provokes a certain measure of reserve. The term is heterogeneous at best, and narrowly elitist at worst. Everyone would likely agree that “literature” is some sort of marked use of language.4 Disputes will presently arise: what exemplifies this privileged subset of language? What is the nature of the claims to privilege? As with “literature,” so with the Latin litterae. Litterae can designate, inter alia, an epistle, a public document, an edict, literary composition, scholarship, and belles lettres. In form and content Seneca’s Moral Letters can be called “letters” in more than one sense. “Literature” is obviously an ill-fitting translation for the term litterae. And yet the ill-fittedness itself might sensitize us to key questions: How is it that language can suture together the incommensurate? How can it transform mere words into “something more”? And what is this “more”? And then this “something more”: what is it? It is something higher, better, stirring: it is sublime, then. Before discussing the sublime – another fraught and impossible term – we should pause to note that the literary operation is often philosophically consequential without, however, being philosophically explicit, rigorous, or, frequently, justified. Philosophical work gets done, but one will want to think through the nature and scope of the work before hastily praising the synthesis of the two modes. Nevertheless, one is advised by Seneca that elements of the ethical project ought not to be entrusted to philosophy in its most rigorous form. “All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore Socrates is mortal.” The syllogism is true, but it does little to stir in its auditor a sense that he or she should live more like Socrates. Philosophical rigor can pass over into rigor mortis. And, unlike Socrates, the student of philosophy is not yet dead, despite being on the march towards his or her own inevitable death. “The sublime” likely evokes aesthetics first and foremost for an English speaker, especially when seen in a phrase using the word literature: “Of

4

The Sublime Seneca

things in nature and art: affecting the mind with a sense of overwhelming grandeur or irresistible power; calculated to inspire awe, deep reverence, or lofty emotion, by reason of its beauty, vastness, or grandeur.”5 This sense of the word will play its role in the argument to follow. But, importantly, the way in which one reaches this version of the term is itself important. Sublimis means “aloft” in Latin. But it also means “lofty” in the more abstract sense, and it can be applied to styles of speech, for example, to indicate what we would call an elevated literary style.6 How does the “up there” and the “out there” become something that provokes awe down here and within us? And what sort of ethical consequences follow in the wake of this awe? And given that awe tends to be an “ineffable” sensation, what sort of explicit argument goes unspoken at this rapturous moment? Finally, metaphysics. “Is there a Stoic metaphysics? The answer obviously depends on what we mean by ‘metaphysics,’ a word which no classical philosopher would have understood, despite its two Greek components and its familiarity as the title of the most famous of Aristotle’s works.” Thus begins the chapter entitled “Stoic Metaphysics” in The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics.7 Nature, or physis, is everything for the Stoics. And, accordingly, there is nothing after or beyond it (meta). Brunschwig does not discard the category, though. He instead opts to pick one of the traditional modes of addressing the issue of metaphysics: he refines his object and turns to an account of Stoic general ontology.8 If it is not unambiguously true that there is a Stoic metaphysics, it is also difficult even to determine if there is a specific “metaphysics of Seneca.”9 Seneca’s letter on Platonic ontology looms large in the whole of this study even if the doctrinal question of ontology is not really the point of emphasis in the letter. Modes of being are not an abstract topic for this study. They yield concrete problems of interpretation in the larger context of the whole endeavor to read Seneca: What is the relationship between being and literature? And the sublime? And ethics? And Seneca? And here we will not give a simple primacy to “the question of being.” Nor will we concern ourselves overly with the way that Seneca purportedly struggles to integrate Platonic metaphysics with the Stoic supreme genus. First, I am not sure that there is all that much of a struggle: the battle is in fact pointedly deferred. Next, if there is such a struggle, it is a topic that ought to be addressed within the framework of the history of ideas: How do Stoics variously incorporate or fail to incorporate Platonic ideas? In any event, these questions can be largely left to one side for the moment. This volume aims to explore Senecan stories and storytelling: we will occupy ourselves with topics like “the story of being” and the issues that arise when articulating it as a story.

Introduction

5

This survey of key terms, does it satisfy? Probably not. Each term is itself overly complex, fraught with contradictions, and each makes for an imperfect fit with Stoic orthodoxy or Latin idiom. Of course, is there really a Stoic orthodoxy? And is Latin so stable? Categories such as those essentialize objects: Stoicism as a discrete thing, Latin as an ossified language that tidily maps signifier upon signified. But I have already said that Seneca says we have to worry about ontology. And do words ever fit so neatly with things? Not for readers of Seneca, they don’t. Seneca’s terminology is fluid. His style is “deliberately non-professional.”10 Seneca’s distinctions and Seneca’s claims may ultimately have a fixity to them – if, that is, one can ever reach “the final analysis” – but their immediate articulation can be striking. Words can and will have multiple senses in play at once. The technical and non-technical meanings of words will both be active simultaneously. Improper terminology is put forward to advance a point. To the extent that the Senecan project resembles a Bildungsroman of the animus, there are a number of reversals, plot twists, and detours on the road to wherever it is we end up. In a magisterial moment one might declare, “Someone who doesn’t care about the distinction between beata uita and felicitas doesn’t care about Stoic philosophy.” The two really are to be distinguished as a matter of Stoic orthodoxy. And yet Seneca himself uses them as if they were synonyms: “Anyone who hesitates over the question of Diogenes’ happiness (felicitas) is able as well to doubt the condition of even the immortal gods: or are they too little blessed (parum beate degant) because they don’t have estates and gardens?”11 Seneca “knows better” than to write this way, but this is, in the end, the way he chooses to write. Why? What is the connection between the technical and the commonplace, the everyday and the philosophical? Consider, then, the opening of Moral Letter 59, the letter, that is, that comes to us right after his letter about ontology. Seneca addresses this problem of vocabulary directly. The letter opens: “I got a great deal of pleasure (uoluptas) from your letter. Allow me to use words in their common sense, and don’t apply to them their Stoic signification.”12 Seneca demonstrates his understanding of the Stoic distinction between gaudium and uoluptas: the former designates a positive affective experience, the latter is a vice. Seneca next gives a grammatical commentary as well as a sociological one. And this after gently mocking schoolmasterish modes elsewhere in the Letters and even in the letter just before this one. But at the close of these various readings and re-readings of the Latin terms Seneca reaffirms the propriety of his initial transgression: “Nevertheless, I did not improperly say that I got a great deal of pleasure from your

6

The Sublime Seneca

letter . . .”13 It does one no good, then, to be convinced in advance that we know that for a Stoic uoluptas is bad; that Seneca is a Stoic; and, thus, that uoluptas designates bad pleasure whenever we see it in the Senecan corpus. That is not how Seneca writes. He knows that you might read him that way. And so he writes lessons about reading Senecan writing. We will want to be careful, then, about making too many presuppositions given that the rules are being set forth and even modulated in the very passages where one might be tempted to bring some abstract and a priori sense of the Rules of Reading Seneca to bear. It seems safest to stay ad hoc and ad loc. when approaching his texts. Seneca could have written a textbook, but he did not. And he simultaneously shows and tells us why he did not. Which brings us back to the problem of how to read this book about how to read Seneca. It too can be a bit slippery: now loose, now technical. It is less so, I believe, than one might fear at first. Much is either a commentary that sticks fairly close to how Seneca works or a sort of direct imitation of his own moves. But a few sleights of hand will be detected, ones that allow us to connect Seneca’s discussion to ways of reading his discussion that are informed by post-Senecan considerations. The value of these anachronisms is supposed to be heuristic. I am not arguing that one needs to see Seneca in Kant or Kant in Seneca, but instead looking for a manner in which one can rephrase Seneca so as to have a productive and critical encounter with him. This too is the sort of thing Seneca does all of the time with his own antecedents: “Epicurus has a couple of fine ideas, but let me rephrase them somewhat . . . ” In Seneca questions of narrative matter. They really matter. And so they must matter to us as well. For example, Seneca writes Moral Letters to Lucilius. But Seneca also writes to us. He knows we will be reading this. He knows that we do not know what was in that last letter which Seneca claims to have received and to which he responds. This is where Moral Letter 1 begins, by the way, with a reference to a letter Seneca has just seen and that we never will see.14 Our confusion and asymmetrical knowledge is an element of the project proper, it is not some accident that arises as a function of incomplete knowledge and the lamentable loss owing to the vicissitudes of historical preservation. The problem before us is not a function of some failure to transmit both sides of a discussion that is being faithfully recorded in the Moral Letters. Seneca implicates us in this seeming discussion and in the circuit of exchange. We are invited to mistake ourselves for eavesdroppers and interlopers who have landed in the middle of a conversation about wisdom. But it is not Lucilius’s enlightenment that really matters. We matter. We are the ones being constantly addressed though never addressed.

Introduction

7

Who are we? What are we doing? What, if anything, is happening to us as we read? A Senecan lesson: of import is the conversation itself and its particular flow. The product cannot be dissociated from the process. A stark enumeration of conclusions is insufficient. Seneca himself insists on this point. Seneca never radically segregates form from content. The medium and the message are fundamentally interrelated. In fact one could correct this to “they are ethically related.” Seneca thinks closely about the ontological status of philosophy-asdiscourse. Seneca is concerned with the conditions of possibility for efficacious communication. And for Seneca the literary is philosophical. That is, the valorized literary performance is a performance that has philosophical weight, one that is philosophically consequential and efficacious.15 And yet it is not enough to merely herald this synthesis of philosophy and literature. How will it all work? What can Seneca tell you that will genuinely touch you in your animus? Reading, writing, and speaking are never taken for granted. Or, if we wish to employ a metaphor derived from our own Hollywood spectacles, Seneca never jump-cuts to “The Truth” without making us aware that there is a camera, a perspective, a director, an editor. Many ways of reading Seneca have not been entertained. Some of these alternatives have been documented in the end-notes. These notes come at the end both figuratively and literally: those who are looking for something more or something different or even just something to one side should consult them. In the body I tend to offer readings of selected passages and accounts of individual works. Throughout I am as much interested in how these texts work as in what they explicitly say. Accordingly, cross-references to similar claims as found in Seneca or others, though potentially abundant and enlightening, have been deprecated. I am principally interested in the architecture of relatively large units. This discussion is sparing of details that fall outside the texture of the immediate co-ordinates of the discussion itself. The basics of Seneca’s life are strikingly unimportant in what follows. Seneca lived from ?1 bce to 65 ce. He was a provincial who rose to literary and political prominence. He was exiled owing to intrigue in the imperial house. He returned as the tutor to the young emperor Nero. He was later driven to suicide by the same. There is, naturally, much more that could be said.16 But only the exile gets any play in the course of this volume. And one will find that neither intrigue nor the imperial house is ever mentioned in Seneca’s discussion of his banishment. Concrete historical issues are not the sort of things that especially preoccupy either the texts under discussion or the readings of them on offer. Indeed, despite some noteworthy exceptions such as the On Clemency

8

The Sublime Seneca

addressed to Nero, and the nasty Apocolocyntosis that arrives in the wake of Claudius’ death, and the all too practical etiquette lessons of the On Benefaction, there is a marked silence surrounding questions of actual public life in Seneca’s works. The contrast with Cicero is stark: the one author routinely situates his works in a specific moment, the other regularly moves with all possible haste from the specific to the abstract.17 Knowing more about Seneca’s particulars can, of course, be very useful: there is a politics to the erasure of the political from these texts. But others have written about these worldly subtexts. This complicity with Seneca is an experiment: Where might it take us? Even as there are many other kinds of reading than one that prioritizes taking a text in the terms that the text itself sets forth, it seems very useful to linger within the framework set out by Seneca. He is, after all, so often insistent about the question of framing. His texts are routinely giving us their own elective contexts and then working within them. Why not take the journey walking by his side, at least to begin with? This is not an especially comprehensive reading of Seneca. It is a targeted reading. The results are meant to be broadly significant, but the treatment is not exhaustive. A select number of themes have been put in the foreground, and it might be difficult to appreciate any number of things that are going on in the background. Seneca’s pervasive discussions about major issues such as the self, death, and pleasure are not especially prominent in my own discussion.18 Nevertheless, those ideas are important in their own right, would provide useful preliminary knowledge with which to approach this discussion, and they might furnish places where one might return in light of it. But they are not my central concerns. An ad hoc and rough-and-ready Stoic primer on selected issues can be found at the heads of chapters. And yet Seneca is not afraid to rewrite orthodoxies when he thinks it suits his ends. Think again of pleasure and joy above, of uoluptas and gaudium: How and why do we keep them apart and how and why do we bring them together? I have not hesitated to rewrite Seneca when it suits my own ends. A good deal of my own method turns on retaining double senses, refusing to resolve issues, and forging “improper” associative links. For example, and it is no mere example, Seneca’s cosmology uses a lot of ideas that could be used to explain and explore literature. Mind and body, meaning and matter, author and text: the attempt will be to think with and through this disparate set of terms for as long as and as best we can. Seneca traffics in disparities that turn out in the end to be unities. This book itself aims to demonstrate the unity of a seeming diversity. As Stoic logic, ethics, and natural history are subdivisions of a larger whole, namely

Introduction

9

Stoic philosophy in general, so too are ethics, literature, and metaphysics a plurality that subsists within a logically antecedent unity, namely Senecan thought. And Seneca preoccupies the body of the present study. But even the generality of this genus, “Seneca” itself, needs to be worked through. This itself is a philosophical question: What is a Senecan author?19 The preface to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit gives us an admonition: “[T]he real issue is not exhausted by stating it as an aim, but by carrying it out, nor is the result the actual whole, but rather the result together with the process through which it came about.”20 The journey itself matters. The present introduction states an aim. The body of the text attempts to carry it out. And, moreover, it attempts to demonstrate that process always matters when it comes to determining the result of Seneca’s labors. The first chapter provides what I see as a fitting introduction to the reading of Seneca, namely an account of Seneca’s story about misreading. Seneca leaves it to us to pick the proper frame within which to pin him down. A frame offers four corners, four sides, a delimited space. We can capture everything within this domain, step back, and coolly appraise. That sounds appealing. But note that Seneca himself offers no “general introduction to Senecan thought.” Seneca’s Moral Letters lack an introduction and conclusion. Seneca’s tragedies can lose their divine frame. An ex cathedra/ex machina declaration as to “The essence of Seneca” runs the risk of violating the spirit even as it pretends to give the letter. Seneca’s individual texts generally avoid prefatory remarks that stand apart from the actual work at hand. That is, Seneca offers his reader both process and product: he does not present the aim as the essential, abstractable matter and something that leaves the execution of that aim inessential. There is an unwisdom, then, in premature abstraction, in stepping back too soon and surveying the whole from a vantage not yet properly gained. Have questions been begged by Seneca himself, though? Perhaps. And they affect the result in that the process no longer seems uncomplicated. On the one hand, the Stoic sage exists nowhere in the world. On the other hand, the proficiens knows the end-point of his journey without having yet reached it.21 Indeed, the emblematic figure of this very process of progress is someone looking back at himself as if from the terminus of the journey as he advances along the road towards that same end. For me this “as if” reveals the ethical, literary, and metaphysical knot qua knot. The “as if,” if nothing else, adverts as to the literary dimension of the enterprise.22 But the key feature to be noted in this aggregation of issues is the very fact of their correlation: none can be segregated from the rest or even given true primacy without the dissolution of the whole problematic.

10

The Sublime Seneca

And this brings us to our own presuppositions. How do we look back at Seneca? We have a strong tendency to place ourselves in the position of sagesse: Seneca’s fitful struggles offer us a spectacle. We look on, more advanced not just in time, but so too in sensibility. What is beheld is an object-of-knowledge. The contours of this object vary: but, in general, Seneca is that object commonly known as the situated historical subject.23 We behold a species of the genus Romanum. As a complex compound he potentially exemplifies a number of categories: Roman, imperial subject, provincial, poet, philosopher. On the one hand, the knowledge gained from the objectification of Seneca is indeed variously enlightening. On the other hand, we generally avoid taking Seneca and his project seriously.24 And by this I mean to indicate that we set a distance between what he was doing and what he thought he had to say to us and what, for our part, we are going to allow all of it to mean to us. There is an irony to this situation: Seneca himself is fascinated by the possibilities of apathetic spectatorship. He is attracted by the notion that a self could be an object.25 However, Seneca does not simply assume a figure positioned to draw a conclusion: he examines as well the process of reaching the moment for conclusion. Conversely, we often presuppose our own apathetic spectatorship as an opening move in our own reading of Seneca. More advanced on the road to wherever it is we are going, we would never think to let Seneca play Seneca to us, to let him be for us the proficiens who set out before us and who offers guidance to the addressees of his works. Readers of Seneca are often reading through him and looking for his sources.26 Of interest is the original, not the copy. The founder of a school is wanted, not a follower. The situation is again ironic. Chrysippus becomes the sage, Seneca the mere proficiens who did not quite get Stoicism yet (or ever). We rush down the road to Stoic wisdom. We hasten past our encounter with Seneca so as to find “enlightenment,” namely the dogma of Chrysippus. One is to note that in this case enlightenment specifically means the acquisition of information about doctrine rather than any subjective shift on our own part. If Seneca were original and productive, then he would have more of a claim to our attention. Again, this statement says much about ourselves, and less about the co-ordinates within which Seneca, or any ancient philosopher for that matter, worked. Innovation and revolution are not especially prized in their own right: the Cynics are (counter-)revolutionary Socratics.27 Zeno, the first Stoic, is happy himself to be considered a “Socratic” as he makes his own break with Plato and further evolves Cynic themes.28 Stoicism itself was a living tradition that continually evolved through its history, but the

Introduction

11

fruit of this change over time was not a sense that they were no longer Stoics but rather that they were becoming the more true to their own thought.29 Seneca’s innovation, to the extent that an innovation is on offer here, arises within the context of his fusion of philosophy and literature. The innovation emerges not on the side of content, but rather as a function of form. And what ensues is consequential for the contents of the philosophy itself. Let me make an outline of the literary dimension of the philosophical thought and the manner in which philosophical truths unfold within narrative time. Seneca makes it clear to the reader of the Moral Letters early on that he is being true to his own thought, and that, importantly, this thought is not necessarily constrained by a dogmatic adherence to Stoicism.30 Moreover, one is even asked to question the very relationship between the categories of “property” and “doctrine.” Perhaps they are incommensurate entities, maybe the metaphorical yoke that would unite them only highlights how ill-suited these yoke-mates are. The question of appropriation will be discussed at greater length in the reading of Letter 108. But the theme is present from the start of the enterprise as a whole. In the first letter we learn that “nothing is ours.”31 In the second we go scouting and plunder some loot from the Epicurean camp and meditate upon it.32 In the third we critique Theophrastus, read a bit of Pomponius, remix it, and make it our own. Nature guides us here.33 In the fourth we plunder from the Epicurean garden something that seems nice: Seneca offers as a gift something he saw, liked, and grabbed.34 In the fifth Seneca tells us that our/my resolution is to live in accordance with nature.35 What does nostrum mean here? “Living in accordance with nature” is orthodox doctrine. But which orthodoxy? It fits both a Cynic as well as a Stoic. And, in any case, is Seneca saying “our Stoic resolution” or “my personal resolution”? On the one hand, nothing is ours and everything belongs to someone else. And, on the other, we freely appropriate to ourselves whatever we find from wherever we find it. As Seneca will put it before long, “I am generous with others’ property. But why did I say ‘others’’? Whatever is well said by anyone is mine.”36 Here we can see the Roman imperialist who is glad to scout, fight, plunder, live large, and not give a second thought to the geo-political system that is the enabling condition of his expansive and well-furnished estate. But the philosophical thesis being developed in tandem with this suspect universalism puts us on notice that everything in here is particularly Senecan, but, conversely, nothing is really his.37

12

The Sublime Seneca

And this brings us to the dual problem of “finding Seneca” and “reading Seneca,” a problem that is explored in the two negatively titled chapters: “Misreading Seneca” and “Losing Seneca.” It also brings us to the letter I jumped over: Letter 6.38 Seneca declares that his encounter with all of the philosophy he has been reading has been consequential. He has been corrected and transformed. Emendari: corrected as a person? Emended like a text? Both? Transfigurari: transfigured in his character?39 Can one hear as well figures of speech hidden in figura and/or the translated term μετασχηματίζεσθαι? Seneca is about to demonstrate/emplot (argumentum) a “transformed/translated soul” (translatus animus) right before our very reading eyes. This whole metaphor of “translation” gets worried over at great length by both Seneca and myself: see Letter 58 and the discussion of it below. One has misgivings even before one is told explicitly to have them: To what extent has Seneca been “bookified”? And what are the practical philosophical consequences of this? If the secondary meaning of all of these terms wins out, what then? Lucilius, writes Seneca, wants to read the writings that have so transformed Seneca. Take a second look at the situation: an author writes a narrative voice into an epistolary fiction. This narrator writes into his letter the fiction of his addressee’s voice: inquis . . . Real selves and represented selves proliferate. We have entered what could turn out to be a hall of mirrors in which the transfiguration on offer is not conducive to enlightenment. Instead, one staggers about surrounded by mere images. The solution to this metaphysical problem: presence.40 Seneca can send you the books with all the good bits underlined, but what really matters is the uiua uox (6.6).41 A multiply bookish Seneca warns us that a book is not a life. Moreover, writing gets written down/off as not-life.42 We have, then, a serious problem in front of us. Reading, writing, life, philosophy: what are we going to do with this tangled mess? English idiom retains a productive ambiguity here: a “serious problem” can be a complex one or a weighty and consequential one. The present situation straddles both categories. Indeed, that only rephrases the problem itself: What are we to do about ineluctable category-straddling? When I mentioned above, then, that I was interested in taking Senecan philosophy seriously, what I had in mind was engaging earnestly with his thought in the very terms that he sets forth as the constituent elements of seriousness. We set to one side the “seriousness” of writing a philosophy textbook. Seneca reads these. But he also does not in the end “take them seriously,” not as seriously as he does something else. And what that something else might be is the very thing that is being written up before our eyes. Writing/doing philosophy: that’s the issue at hand. If only there were a sharp division between writing and doing,

Introduction

13

between reading and living, between literature and philosophy, well, then things would be so much simpler. Foucault sets an agenda: in Seneca we see self-writing, a technology of the self.43 Such is definitely present in Seneca’s work, and Foucault guides one along useful paths and in a manner that is not in the least naive.44 But there is a danger here: one cannot simply take up an objective position and observe this technological apparatus from the outside.45 Seneca himself meditates on the metaphysics of this truth-game of the self.46 He does not merely act within it. We should not turn him into a simple subject who acts autonomously within a system while we abstract rules about the system by observing those actions.47 Seneca has already thought carefully about the problem of the objectification of a self: he asks if we are ourselves really standing outside the system under observation when we look in at someone. The observer inevitably participates in any given moment despite the posture of mere observation. We do find in Seneca a subjectivist praise of the subject and his story of the self.48 Concomitantly, however, we find a meditation on self as spectacle and a meditation of the epistemological status of self-observation.49 I doubt that Seneca’s answers would today inspire many adherents to his philosophical or practical commitments, nevertheless Seneca is working at a level of theoretical sophistication and self-awareness that fundamentally complicates any attempt to objectify his practice via standard academic accounts that would catalog the contents of his thoughts.50 This is because Seneca has already himself complicated all of these categories. Furthermore he has even asked what it means to complicate them. This is not to deny that some higher-order synthesis might not ultimately be desired. An objectivist account of Senecan discourse could be retained and then fused with a subjectivist account of the same. However, what I have endeavored to investigate is Seneca’s own exploration of this same problematic: How can the subjective and the objective meet? What is the role of representation in this process? The task entails grappling with ethics, literature, and metaphysics. Living, writing, and being are all at issue. And hovering somewhere out there a Geist-cum-Gespenst: Seneca, the point of divine origin and ghostly return.

chapter 1

Misreading Seneca

This chapter is propaedeutic. It addresses itself to the question of hermeneutics. Before we can read Seneca, we need to learn to read Seneca. But how can we learn such a thing? Seneca himself offers us lessons. Seneca writes about reading. In fact, he writes a good deal about misreading. And one ought to handle such a theme carefully: perhaps these are words of warning; perhaps those misreaders resemble ourselves; and perhaps Seneca is warning us against a certain kind of erroneous relationship to his text. What will make for an authorized Senecan reader? The initial question, then, is not “What will we find in Seneca?” but rather, “How does Seneca say we ought to approach Seneca if we are to begin to find things?” Both the larger structure of the collection of Moral Letters and the individual letters themselves resist easy categorization.1 Like verse collections, these also seem to have at least some sort of arrangement by “book.” That is, we find that themes cluster and evolve and we also find that the structure of this evolution is not unrelated to the book divisions. And yet, again like a book of verse, the progression is not necessarily linear or obvious. And Seneca’s addressee Lucilius is himself often presented as being curious as to what, exactly, Seneca is up to.2 Attempts have been made to identify narrative arcs.3 Many of these accounts also include a sense that one is witnessing (philosophical) progress.4 Such efforts clarify much, but obviously run the risk of yielding obscurity as well if they are too rigid. A basic complicating fact: no letter is an essay on a single topic. These letters are internally heterogeneous, and, accordingly, the sort of connections they have with other letters is also varied. What seems like a secondary element of one letter might be revisited later.5 A theme might return much, much later in the collection and not in an adjacent letter from the same book. Furthermore the rules that seem to govern some sets of letters do not apply to others. Moral Letter 33 even explicitly states that the pattern of composition has recently been changed.6 And the long, complex letters 14

Misreading Seneca

15

that come towards the end of the collection have much more ambitious and challenging narrative structures than had the initial ones.7 In short, one does need to read all of the Moral Letters and to read them as a sort of epistolary novel.8 But, like a rich and complex novel, the plot is not especially linear and the unfolding of a core theme like “the journey towards wisdom” is not the tale of an uneventful passing from England to France and then to the Continent on some Grand Tour from which one returns much improved and a proper gentleman. Instead, this is something much more fraught and fitful, a sort of Sentimental Journey that muses, and not without an ironic charm, as to its own conditions of possibility as it makes its way from somewhere to somewhere else. Both Lucilius and Seneca have been reading a lot of philosophy and discussing it before the first letter begins. And there seems to be plenty more left to say when the letters leave off. Unfortunately, we know that there were once more books of the Moral Letters than exist today. Nevertheless, I doubt that the last letter of the last book ended, “Well, now we are wise.” And hence while I would not reject that these Stoic proficientes are indeed making some sort of progress, I am not ready to commit myself to blunt claims that Lucilius has been led by Seneca toward wisdom without bringing up any number of qualifications that would involve issues of distance traveled, directness of path, and distance remaining.9 When we actually follow the plot of individual Senecan letters we find more than we bargained for. Something more than a simple collection of statements has been set before us. The flow of the argument can be very complex, the relationship between points only hinted at, and the presentation much more playful and ironic than dogmatic. The medium seems to be related to the message. It seems, indeed, to say something more than the simple message. It is up to us to figure out to what extent this literary supplement fills out and to what extent it supplants the literal argument. What is the nature and scope of their interrelation?10 The problem of reading Seneca is not an abstract concern. Reading is a theme that is immanent within the Letters themselves. Seneca regularly writes about reading philosophy.11 Seneca also writes of a more general situation, and he explores the dimensions of the philosophical encounter with texts. What happens when one meets up with philosophical writings? The salient point here being, does the encounter itself yield philosophical dividends? Is some surplus generated in the exchange or does the philosophical content merely pass from one place to another without yielding any real effect? There is a danger, then. One can read philosophy without reading philosophically. Different modes of reading produce different results

16

The Sublime Seneca

when applied to the same text. In the end, whether or not Seneca’s own writings will count as philosophy is at stake here. And yet it is not so much Seneca himself as it is his reader who stands to lose in this regard. As readers we may already bring a style of reading to bear on his text that makes the content of his writings philosophically null. Seneca has before him the task of constructing a readership who can and will read the philosophy of Seneca. Such a reader needs, however, to have already read the lesson on reading that he is presently imparting. This logical and chronological paradox is not lost on Seneca. The net result is a written portrait of reading that is multi-layered and polyvocal, one filled with various names, times, and rhetorical modes. This portrait is pointedly complex. Rather than begging the question of reading Seneca, Seneca entreats us to question all of the ways that one reads and misreads. Only these detours will get us to our destination. Letter 108 of the Moral Letters is the penultimate letter of its book.12 The letter, filled with deferrals and detours, presents itself as a deferral and a detour. The complex microcosm of the letter itself evokes another complexity: the macrocosm of the corpus of Letters. Introductory reading lessons according to Seneca: fine, a nice place to start. But Seneca himself is 108 letters into his project.13 Of course, there has been plenty of talk about reading before now. In fact, the first book of letters was filled with readings and re-readings of Epicurus. So we come to this juncture not entirely unprepared.14 And, though there are defects in our abilities as readers, it would seem that we have been reading “well enough” up to this point. Though these are in some ways basic reading lessons, we are nevertheless amidst some of the most sophisticated material in the body of Moral Letters. Seneca is, we are told, busily working up his never to be published masterwork, Books of Moral Philosophy. He does not necessarily have as much time for the Moral Letters anymore.15 We are at a potential turning-point, then. Maybe the Moral Letters are no longer going to be the appropriate vehicle for transmitting what Seneca wants to say. The letters themselves have been getting longer and more sophisticated.16 Lucilius is a more ambitious reader, and Seneca a more ambitious writer. But maybe at this juncture letters about moral philosophy need to give way to books of moral philosophy. That, at least, is where we find ourselves. As we will shortly see, this letter is itself already playing its programmatic reading and writing games before it spells out just what those games might be.17 What the letter makes clear is that Letters and readings of them are complex constellations whose meanings become available only after you are in a specific position from which you look back. Retrospection and

Misreading Seneca

17

retroactivity are philosophically consequential. Or, rather, they are written up as being such. The reader’s philosophical way forward and the textual past matter to one another both in this letter and in the Letters more generally. This letter tells you how they matter to one another. Lucilius has asked for some philosophy from Seneca ASAP. Lucilius, says Seneca, cannot wait for Seneca’s books of Moral Philosophy to be finished. His lust for learning, his cupiditas discendi, burns hot and needs to be addressed at once (108.1). And this is just what Seneca does: he addresses the very will to know. Seneca defers offering an answer to the moral question that Lucilius poses and instead addresses the very fact of the question. It is only with Letter 109, the last letter of the eighteenth book, that Seneca takes up the suspended question: an sapiens sapienti prosit? Can one wise man be of service to another?18 Letter 108 produces a double deferral, then. It is a detour on our way to Letter 109. And Letter 109 is itself standing in the place of the book on the topic that Seneca is writing and has yet to finish. But what if Seneca’s Moral Letters were those very books of Moral Philosophy? What if learning to read this here and now was what mattered most? What if the lust to learn the contents of some magisterial summary of Senecan Moral Philosophy were somehow errant and distracting us from important matters immediately to hand? Seneca’s treatment of the issue of mutual benefaction is itself complex and nuanced. Obviously he does not think it an impossibility. However, for the moment let us note that the service Seneca does for Lucilius in Letter 108 takes place in a situation where we do not ourselves know the unstated premise to this exchange. That is, in Letter 108 we do not learn of the question that prompted the letter itself until the next letter, Letter 109. We may ourselves have a lust to learn the question, but we are put off for the time being. The teasing mode of pedagogy enfolded within this formal structure already contains a hint as to what kind of answer Seneca gives to moral questions more generally: forms and modes matter. That is, philosophy is often a question of a how and not a what, a matter of style rather than content.19 We are at once in dangerous territory: philosophy might well collapse into rhetoric if this keeps up. And yet there are styles and then there are styles. Some rhetorics are full, others empty. Some modes of appropriation of philosophy are themselves richer, some more vapid. These issues are raised both by the content of Letter 108 as well as by its form. The itinerary of this long epistle seems to wander from topic to topic and to digress within its digressions. Nevertheless, in the course of this meditation on the difficulties of reading, we constantly find ourselves circling around

18

The Sublime Seneca

problems of deferral, fragmentation, reception, authorship, works, and life. Seneca is not telling an easy tale. More is asked of us than a simple recognition and subsequent embrace of plenitude and a concomitant refusal of vacuity. Instead, we are asked to concern ourselves with hermeneutics itself: how can one read in a manner that prevents our lust for learning from yielding a missed encounter with the very wisdom for which we long? Let us work our way through the course of this letter. The movement of ideas at first glance seems somewhat erratic.20 However, their juxtaposition itself reveals something about the bit-by-bit nature of both becoming wise and reading these piecemeal accounts of wisdom entitled Moral Letters. The opening conceit is that this letter takes the place of the book. And then the letter itself stands in for the next letter that actually addresses the question asked. The deferral is justified: don’t let a cupiditas discendi trip itself up. The next point: you have to advance carefully towards the whole. One can neither be too scattered nor seize the entirety at once.21 Lucilius is presently consoled: the student can in fact expect to drink in as much as he wishes in the end, for this sort of imbibing only makes the soul ever more capacious. If broad-bellied Socrates could drink forever from a wine sack without becoming drunk, one can quaff ever more Socrates without bursting one’s soul: “The more the soul takes on, the more it expands.”22 And here we find our first jump. “I remember that Attalus used to teach me this lesson back when I used to besiege his school, first to come and last to leave. I’d even provoke him to certain discourses while he strolled. He was not just available for his students, but he even met them head-on.”23 The lesson Seneca offers Lucilius was a lesson that Attalus offered to Seneca. Seneca used to be like Lucilius. He longed to learn. That agreeable conceit is not the whole of the situation, though. Seneca suffuses his description of his school days with violent metaphors.24 Playing the highwayman, the young Seneca said to Attalus, “Stand and deliver.” Seneca now hands over to an equally insistent Lucilius just the same coin. And he does so not so much because Lucilius has forced him to do it, but rather he does so because he was hoping for just such a confrontation all along. As the story of Attalus’s words continues, Seneca transitions into a direct quotation from Attalus on the respective roles of teacher and student: the one should wish to do good, the other to have good done to him. The prodesse required by Attalus’s definition of a teacher in fact anticipates the for-now repressed question subtending the whole of Letter 108 and soon to open Letter 109: “Can one wise man be of service to another?” (an sapiens sapienti prosit?). Seneca figures for us a complex set of possible relationships to philosophy: the eager encounter, the negligent encounter, and the resistant

Misreading Seneca

19

encounter. After the portrait of eagerness, Seneca continues with an image that is more general. One need not even be a student proper of philosophy: merely to spend time with it affects people. Seneca offers two similes: those who spend time in the sun get a tan; those who spend time in a perfume shop take on the scent of the place.25 Even the unsuspecting, then, are benefitted by philosophy should they linger with it. Seneca adds a qualification: he said unsuspecting, not recalcitrant, neglegentes and not repugnantes (108.4). After conjuring Attalus’s voice a moment before, Seneca next bodies forth an imagined objection from an invisible interlocutor. This interlocutor seems a lot like a Lucilius who resists: “What’s this? Don’t we know of certain men who sat and sat for years on end at the homes of the philosophers and who got not even a touch of color?”26 The sun of wisdom shines on them, but to no effect. Seneca concedes the point: these are not the philosophers’ disciples, but their tenants. We are about to revise our schema from before. The eager encounter with philosophy might be a missed encounter where eagerness winds up near wisdom but never in fact connects with it. Despite enthusiasm on the part of some students, what Seneca finds is a different purpose from that professed: they come to hear, not to learn. School becomes a spectacle for them: the speeches, the delivery, the fine tales delight the ears. Seneca even admits that a large segment of the people attending a school are there for idle pleasure. A corrupt desire for learning transforms everything. The school becomes a theater. The auditorium turns into a pleasant spa. Such students do something rather remarkable: they transform “doing” into “play-acting.” The Latin language imposes a certain philosophical problem upon its speakers: agere can mean so many things, and subsumed within it are both the act that is earnest as well as the act that is but an act. Thus when Seneca begins, non id agunt ut . . . , “What they are doing is not this . . . ” he evokes the difficulties latent in the performative dimension of agere itself.27 The students drive and lead their teachers into a ghostly double of the school wherein the sage become performers of knowledge rather than men who themselves lead others along the path of wisdom. This double vision is inescapable for all that it is lamented. Language does give pleasure. And language does have the power to make of others mere players. Words have the power to evacuate of their contents the doings of others. Words can always be mere words. And so one has to be careful to connect them to the proper concrete things. Seneca is not just critiquing theater, he is also staging a theater piece of his own: he stages a sort of burlesque of education reduced to mere showiness. And it is this very

20

The Sublime Seneca

burlesque that ought in the end to enable us to get back to (a staging of) the school as a school. Seneca laments those who come to the potential philosophical encounter with no intention of forming or reforming their characters but rather for the sake of delighting their ears. People come ready to take notes, but only with the intention to take down the words, not the things themselves. And thus begins a sad chain of citations: the same words will be repeated to others to no effect just as they were fruitlessly heard by these mere copyists.28 The thing itself, wisdom, has gone missing even as the image of the thing is transmitted. We are standing before the portrait of a dead text, of an un-dead text even. It is possible to write down philosophy in an entirely unphilosophical manner. This transcription will itself be propagated unphilosophically. Once the thread is broken, it would seem, the philosophy is gone forever. Bootleg editions of the latest Seneca concert may circulate, and tedious collectors pore over them. But these collections evince a perverse lust for learning. Seneca has no time for people who memorize every lick from the show and then geek out about it with their music nerd friends. The point of the philosophy is to be transported and therewith to be transformed. As a performer, Seneca is teaching not just wisdom, but life itself. Nevertheless the desire of the audience contains within itself the seeds of a radical rewriting of the original will of the teacher, specifically “the will to benefit.” Instead of “doing philosophy,” the teacher becomes for these students a mere performer of wisdom and accordingly liable to all of the absurd vicissitudes of fame and fashion. Let us be a bit more careful about Seneca’s catalog of students. The paragraph is arranged as something of a rogue’s gallery. The first set contains the majority (magnam partem . . .). These were the ones who were in it for a bit of aural delectation. Next are “a number” (aliqui tamen . . .). These are the stenographers who will disseminate the empty words at the expense of things: they offer uerba while the res ipsae escape. In third place are “certain people” (quidam . . .). These fellows are the too-keen auditors, the superfans. What one says passes at once into their visage and their soul. They go into immediate ecstasies that recall those of orgiastic Phrygian eunuchs who rave on cue to the sound of a pipe (108.7). Seneca is, then, not amused, and this image is chosen so as to repulse. And yet these men who are too readily penetrated by philosophy, these bugger-me-now-Socrates types, are vile precisely because of a lewd relationship to the very pounding and thrusting of the res ipsae whose evanescence-cum-emasculation was so lately lamented. In short, something odd has just happened to the argument. We need to take a closer look at the flow of ideas.

Misreading Seneca

21

These students are ravished by the fair face of the res, not by the sound of empty words. They have things half-right, these half-men (semiuiri).29 In spite of the reflexive revulsion one is asked to feel at the simile, the real project here is to figure out how to get everything sorted properly, how to make the full transition from the one who lusts for learning to the one who has a sage relationship with the substance of philosophy itself. The semi-sage semiuiri get caught up in an enthusiasm for the substance of philosophy in a manner akin to the passion inspired by the mere rhetoric of virtue. It is this oscillation between the empty and the full that leaves them half-full half-men.30 Seneca lingers on this last set of students. We need to figure out just how they work. It will help us figure out just how Seneca himself works. They are ravished and goaded on by the beauty of the material itself: rapit illos instigatque rerum pulchritudo (108.7). Seneca’s pronouns and tenses in this passage start to become complex. These half-men are not entirely them and then and there. They are potentially us and here and now. “A vigorous indictment of death, a defiant opposition to fortune: at once a longing to do what you hear” (si quid acriter contra mortem dictum est, si quid contra fortunam contumaciter, iuuat protinus quae audias facere) (108.7). The point here is the “you.” “Those people” (illos) found in the prior sentence have become singular and personal and unexpectedly so. The generic hypothetical of the potential relative (quae audias) suddenly entangles the reader in this semi-virtuous maddening mess. Moreover, defiance shown to death and fortune sounds a lot like what Seneca himself has been instilling in “you” in so many of the 107 preceding letters. But Seneca at once reverts to “them” even as his moods and tenses become increasingly complex: “They are affected by these sayings, and they are as they are bidden to be, provided that cast should abide in their spirit, provided Joe Public, that eloquent critic of the noble, does not at once intercept this fine impulse. Few were able to convey all the way home that state of mind which they took upon themselves.”31 Philosophy’s students “are” of a certain sort, “if . . . ” The sentence starts with a promise: it really happens. Teaching works. But then the sentence continues with the arrival of a condition: “provided . . . ” And this provisional qualification is itself understood to be true owing to hard experience: it is an empirical truth that few eager students make the perilous journey home from school without losing their virtue once they fall in with the wrong crowd, namely the crowd itself. The fair face of the philosophical truths, the pulchritudo rerum, sets the mind of the auditors into a certain virtuous cast. And yet this is a fragile formation and one that is readily

22

The Sublime Seneca

smashed. The crowd has its own rhetoric, and it pleads a case against the noble (honestum) that is all too successful.32 And now Seneca skirmishes one more time with our key conjunction of themes: desire, language, and the thing itself. “It is easy to excite a listener to a lust for what is right.”33 The cupido discendi from the opening reappears, but as transformed: now it is a yearning for what is right, a cupido recti.34 This desire is like a seed that nature has planted and that one cultivates in the soul of another. Or, switching metaphors, people are like sleepers whom one need only rouse. Seneca’s example is no mere example: “Don’t you see how theaters are filled with noise whenever certain things are said? We publicly recognize them and testify by our consensus that they are true.”35 “You” see how “we” behave: the theater is a site where truths are declared and then recognized as true by the public will. Above, the school was like a theater: students came to enjoy showy words and phrases. Some even got excited by the things themselves, but such passions were likely short-lived. The public was to blame. Now, however, the theater is a sort of school. The dramatic author replaces the teacher; the people the student. And the rerum pulchritudo is not something that imparts a cast of mind. It is now a manifest verity laid bare by masked performers and recognized as eternal by the same populus who can be trusted to plead the case of vice when found outside the theater. Seneca, a man who himself penned plays filled with moral maxims, is not taken in by the people’s stagey performances at the shows. Scoundrels applaud virtuous verses. They delight as their own vices are castigated (108.9). Sensible spectators will see through the pretence. But Seneca is not here to do away with the theater of virtue or even the theatricality of learning, nor is he a critic of poetic discourse relative to philosophy’s truths. Instead, the conclusion “you” are to draw from this spectacle of scoundrels cheering on shows – a spectacle that Seneca has himself staged for your edification – is that were a philosopher to lace his own salutary precepts with verses, his more skillful handling of the matter would yield even finer results.36 In short, poetry can work wonders. And one notes as well that poetry is presently attempting to work wonders. The story of the power of poetry is part of the potent tale about philosophy itself. This letter is awash in verses.37 A citation of Cleanthes is adduced. Cleanthes also praises the power of poetry and its ability to affect us. “The same ideas are listened to carelessly and cause less of a stirring when spoken as prose: when meter is added and fixed feet make taut an exceptional sentiment, that same idea is launched as if from a more vigorous cast of the arm.”38 Cleanthes on poetry is now

Misreading Seneca

23

Seneca on Cleanthes on poetry. Seneca’s rather poetic image of the javelin cast of verse is added as a gloss upon Cleanthes’ own metaphor of the trumpet. The uerborum inanium sonitus from above has been reworked. What was once empty verbiage has been transfigured. Now we hear a sound that compresses the density of genuinely substantial res and allows the rerum pulchritudo to strike its auditors to best effect. One weaves in poetry in order to drive home philosophy’s pointed points all the more forcefully. Poetry encapsulates the lesson. Conversely, in declaring that poetry encapsulates lessons Seneca necessarily commits himself to a symbiosis between philosophy’s substance and the rhetoric of philosophy.39 Hold fast to the words, and the matter itself will follow: Verba tene, res sequentur. We began with philosophy fallen into mere rhetoric. Now we behold a philosophy that relies on rhetoric, a philosophy that has res that are not radically dissociated from uerba but rather are best conveyed by certain configurations of uerba.40 Verses get the audience worked up; they force a confession from it, “Yes, this is the truth!” (108.12). When you see this happening, says Seneca, press home your advantage, push the point, load it on, set aside your philosophical syllogisms and similar clap-trap. Abuse avarice. Abuse luxury. And so forth. Verses pave the way for philosophy, yes. But they pave the way for a certain rhetoric of philosophy and even a fusion of rhetoric and philosophy. Syllogisms and other clever bits of the philosophical genius are superfluous: a salvo of verses opens up a breach. Into it rushes the philosopher armed with forceful abuse of vices. Seneca’s vigorous injunctions to Lucilius on this matter are a form that mirrors a hypothetical content. Lucilius the would-be student has turned into Lucilius the would-be teacher. This teacher is taught by Seneca in a manner that mirrors how he will himself teach: short, sharp commands are given. An advantage is being driven home as Seneca talks about driving home advantages. And, of course, it was both verses and talk about verses that opened up the initial breach. The story of rhetoric and the rhetoric of the story converge. Seneca even uses an image from the domain of oratory proper: “Readily are tender characters reconciled to a love of the good and the proper, and the truth lays its hand upon those still teachable and gone only a bit astray provided it finds a suitable advocate.”41 Philosophy needs someone to plead its case. And should this case be well made, then it inspires love, an honesti rectique amor. This sage and thoroughly reputable love recalls, of course, the rather suspect lust for the proper discussed above, the recti cupido. And that was itself an echo of the opening lines of the letter with its ultimately misguided

24

The Sublime Seneca

lust for learning, its discendi cupido. This abstract maxim about a love for the proper is about to be made all too concrete with an example drawn from Seneca’s own experience. But it is already concrete to the extent that the audience of this advice about advice has met a suitable advocate in Seneca. Note what really happens to the audience in Seneca’s mixed metaphor concerning truth’s barrister. I under-translated “lays its hand upon” above. The Case of Truth as advocated by a good teacher does not so much free the hapless young thing from a false charge nor does it acquit the fellow who is a bit bad; instead the truth enslaves. That is, this forensic process casts us into a sort of bondage even as the rhetoric is deployed on our own behalf. What awaits us is a loss of our own claim upon ourselves, for manum alicui inicere in a legal context means making a claim upon a person or thing. The truth is appropriating us to itself. What we find here is something akin to servitude. But it is also a more complex species of bondage, a seruitium amoris. Catullus, Propertius, and Ovid all know what it means when a puella puts her hands upon a young man. The erotics of learning are complicated and compounded in this moment. Truth needs persuasion in order to captivate wastrel youths and turn them into Lovers of the Proper. Philosophy and rhetoric are necessarily joined: there is no message without the medium, and there is no bonfire of love where persuasion has not kindled it. But no doubt a proof will be demanded for this outlandish claim, a concrete example that will lend credibility to Seneca’s pleadings for a fusion of philosophy and rhetoric. Seneca again offers himself as the example, again playing the exemplary object of the argument even as he is the exemplary subject of the argument. However, the Case of Seneca is much less simple than it might at first seem. Its truth of the truth is not entirely straightforward. Seneca says that when he used to hear Attalus perorating against vices, errors, and life’s evils, he would pity the human race and fancy that Attalus was a quasi-divine figure placed above the human lot.42 The reaction to Attalus’s rhetoric is a sort of self-abasement. Seneca sees himself being seen by his sublime teacher, and he feels humble. Attalus’s rhetoric of philosophy becomes for Seneca a semi-comic self-subjection to arguments he feels as commands. If Attalus praises poverty, then Seneca longs to leave the schoolhouse a pauper. If Attalus abuses bodily pleasures, Seneca adopts a puritanical regime (108.14). We are asked to chuckle at Seneca the too-keen student of philosophy. The general situation recalls Alcibiades’ portrait of his relationship to Socrates in Plato’s Symposium. That too is a self-ironizing narrative of

Misreading Seneca

25

enthusiasm, over-excitement, positive efforts, and ultimate backsliding. The new life that Seneca eagerly began at Attalus’s behest did not last. When he got back into the swing of Roman life, little from these fine beginnings remained in the end. Seneca catalogs the elements of Attalus’s influence upon himself. In a series of sentences beginning inde . . . inde . . . Seneca enumerates lifestyle choices that were prompted by and consequent upon Attalus’s teachings. But the catalog ends by noting its own meagerness relative to the whole: “Everything else that was cast aside has returned.”43 It is an empirical truth that this eager student did not make the perilous journey home from school without losing some of his virtue. Older and wiser: the yoking of these two notions is almost axiomatic. And yet Seneca proves a subtle critic of them. Older can mean less passionate, less in love with the truth. A youth’s enthusiastic beginning is succeeded by the feeble efforts of an old man. A passionate embrace of precepts in the abstract degenerates into a few fossilized habits still preserved amidst the mature and sophisticated charms of life at Rome. Seneca continues with a discontinuity. “Since,” he says, “I am telling you about how much more keen I was in pursuing philosophy as a youth than in following through on it as an old man . . . ”44 The letter is becoming a catalog of shame, of missed encounters, of loves betrayed. Lucilius is warned against a desire for learning that might trip itself up. Lucilius is told of a theatrical relationship to wisdom, of students who misappropriate and thence betray wisdom. And now we wander through the recollections of a man who longed to learn and yet who subsequently betrayed wisdom. Seneca the author of the epistle stages a theater-piece in which a character named Seneca learns, loves, and loses. The next scene in this drama involves Sotion, Pythagoras, and Sextius. Sotion was, like Attalus, Seneca’s teacher. Sotion taught Seneca about Pythagoras and Sextius and why they both were vegetarians. Seneca teaches Lucilius about Sotion’s teaching. The doctrines of Pythagoras and Sextius are all but prefatory to the main point which is the rhetoric of Sotion’s philosophy. “Once Sotion had set all of this forth and rounded it out with his own points, he said, ‘Don’t you believe that . . . ’”45 What follows is a long quote from Sotion himself. The citation is filled with rhetorical tropes. Sotion is persuading. His style bears a striking resemblance to the aggressive staccato mode of Seneca’s own Letters. Sotion runs through a series of pointed questions as to the immortality of the soul: non credis . . . ? non credis . . . ? non credis . . . ? Next Sotion argues from authority: “Great men have so believed.” The word uiri is emphasized: if you want to be one of

26

The Sublime Seneca

philosophy’s “real men,” then you will believe just as they have believed. And with this Sotion draws his conclusion: itaque . . . Seneca should give up eating meat either because it means not harming translated/transmigrated souls or because it is a token of frugality. Sotion ends with a sententia, a quotable-quote that encapsulates his teaching: “Believe and lose what? I snatch from you fodder for lions and vultures.”46 Seneca records his reaction to Sotion’s philosophical oration. The words incited him to vegetarianism. Within a year he found it not just easy, but even agreeable. Seneca has been making a broader point amidst all of these various philosophical arguments. His examples, he says, were designed to reveal the vigorous enthusiasm of young men. All they need is someone to exhort them and to give them a push (108.23). Examples of the truth of Seneca’s argument are taken from Seneca’s own life: he was exhorted, he was given a push. And yet we have the feeling that he is a man who preaches to youths what he himself falteringly practices. This is not, however, the point Seneca is driving towards at this moment. He is instead setting us up for a return to the opening problematic of the schoolhouse as a mere theater of virtue, a site of empty spectacles. Both teacher and student have their own species of vice here: the one party instructs us in how to argue, not to live; the other is determined to cultivate his wit, not his soul. Seneca offers his own quotable-quote at this juncture: “And so what was once philosophy has been turned into philology”:47 Sed aliquid praecipientium vitio peccatur, qui nos docent disputare, non vivere, aliquid discentium, qui propositum adferunt ad praeceptores suos non animum excolendi sed ingenium. Itaque quae philosophia fuit facta philologia est. Multum autem ad rem pertinet quo proposito ad quamquam rem accedas. Qui grammaticus futurus Vergilium scrutatur non hoc animo legit illud egregium fugit inreparabile tempus: “vigilandum est; nisi properamus relinquemur . . . ” To some extent the defect arises owing to a failing on the part of teachers who teach us to debate, not to live. It is also partially a failing on the part of the students who insist (propositum adferunt) that their teachers improve not their soul (animum) but their talent. And thus what was philosophy is transformed into philology. But your intentions (quo proposito) make a tremendous difference when you undertake any given thing. The person who will one day be a grammaticus scours Vergil and as he reads that wonderful verse time takes flight never to be recovered he does not think to himself (non hoc animo), “I must be on my guard. If I don’t pick up the pace, I’ll be left behind . . . ” (Seneca, Moral Letters 108.23–24)

Misreading Seneca

27

This antithesis between philosophy and philology provides the core question of the letter: How is one to read? The letter stages philosophy and philology as antithetical. But the letter also teases us with the problem of finding a synthesis. Not only is there an obvious implicit hermeneutic issue here given that we are ourselves attempting to learn what Seneca is teaching about teaching, but the remainder of the epistle walks us through modes of reading. We will get to Seneca’s three readers in a moment. The more pressing issue is the manner in which Seneca singles out the soul and life. Teachers should teach life and thus improve their students’ souls. Students should cultivate their souls so as to live better. Reading and writing ought to keep this end (propositum) in mind, writes Seneca to his reader Lucilius. That we read the same words raises a question: Will we read them or misread them? Everything hinges upon an act of will on the part of the reader. How you approach a matter, says Seneca, matters as to what becomes of the matter: Multum autem ad rem pertinet quo proposito ad quamquam rem accedas (108.24). Let’s unpack this verse of Senecan philosophy and read it as closely as we can. Res is used twice in the sentence. And then something else allows these two versions of the word “thing” to communicate. The material over which one works (ad quamquam rem accedas) is bound up with the question of the abstract meaning of one’s own activity (ad rem pertinet). And the activity in question is, of course, the search for textual meaning. How you approach a book will affect what you find in it. Seneca’s Latin breaks away from Stoic orthodoxy when he doubles up res this way and uses it twice in a row but variously on each occasion. At this heterodox juncture – a juncture enabled by the “otherness” of one sense of a word with respect to another sense of the very same term – Seneca generates a thesis that typifies what is for me “Senecan thought.” That is, we see here the “authoring” of a metaphysical claim by means of what is effectively a literary gesture. Seneca posits that the “immaterial” res, the meaning of one’s act, is in fact the true substance to which the wise would attend. This is the meat of the matter, the stuff of philosophy, even as it is a quintessence that appears nowhere in the world. And yet the concrete has been correlated with the sublime. The meaning of a thing, that beyond to which it properly appertains, and its physical tangibility are not the same “thing,” even if the same word, res, is used of each. The bond between the two versions of this same word is forged by quo proposito, “what one intends.” This brief apparition of intentions “matters.” Intentions cause the virtual space of the text and the metaphorical space of the soul to momentarily line up: when you set before yourself the task of reading in a certain manner, then suddenly what you read will have significance for your soul. In fact,

28

The Sublime Seneca

finding a way to make the soul and the book relevant to one another is a major problem for the Senecan project more generally and one to which we will make a number of returns. Seneca’s proposition entails making quo proposito into the heart of the matter. He intends for intentionality to matter: hoc propositum proponit. “Intention” is obviously an artifact of translation, and Seneca very specifically does not write the word intentio.48 I am myself not tracking that more general and abstract question of “intentions” around which a discussion of intentio might circulate, namely the directedness of the mind towards objects of thought.49 Instead I am interested in a more volitional version of intentionality: those mental states that strive to reach some sort of goal that has been set forth either as a concrete or abstract aim. Seneca’s idiomatic use of proponere captures the situation quite well. The letter “puts it out there” that volition matters. This is a petitio principii. The two notions, “writing intentions” and “the intentionality of writing,” each ground themselves by way of an appeal to the other. To the extent that one can posit intention and propose the existence of the propositum without asking further questions, then the symbiosis of letter and life can proceed apace. Given philosophical readers, then there are philosophical writers.50 Seneca writes into the remainder of the letter a variety of readings of Vergil. We see the grammarian’s reading, the philologist’s reading, and also the philosopher’s reading. Seneca writes parodies of the other two readings. Seneca writes earnestly of the philosophical reading. We have, then, a representation of philosophical reading written into this bit of philosophical writing, namely Letter 108 itself. Reading Vergil is appropriated to the task of reading philosophy. Reading Vergil philosophically also becomes an emblem of the poetics of Senecan epistolography. That is, Seneca makes and does philosophy by writing up reading. Poetics, poetry, poiein. Doing, performing, agere. Epic poetry, dramatic poetry, philosophical prose: all three are the same if you know how to read/write. These statements might seem forced. One might wonder if I am myself not claiming this for the sake of a bit of would-be dazzling word-play. In that case one would have a forced reading of Seneca. The sophistry would diverge from the res ipsa, namely Seneca’s own intentions when he wrote this letter. The letter as well as the present commentary on the letter both insist on the following questions, though: What is the archaeology of “intending”? And this same excavation of the question of meaning and one’s relation to it exposes the complex and contradictory relationships between making and doing, past and present, writing and reading.

Misreading Seneca

29

The first snippet of Vergil in question is fugit inreparabile tempus. Seneca gives us the philosophical weight of it: “One must be on one’s guard; if we don’t make haste, we will be left behind . . . ”51 The grammarian instead reads with an eye bent on noting that as often as Vergil talks of time’s swiftness, he uses the word fugit: sed ut obseruet, quotiens Vergilius de celeritate temporum dicit, hoc uti uerbo illum “fugit” (108.24). Seneca imagines a proto-grammarian who becomes captivated by a shallow version of allusions and intertexts: he will cite Vergil’s Georgics 3.66–68 as a comparandum to Georgics 3.284 which is the verse we are presently considering. Something escapes the notice of the grammarian, aliquid illum fugit. What he cannot see is what the very line means on its face. While he is having his grammatical fun, time flies from him, and with it the meaning of the verse itself. One must be on one’s guard here. Seneca is a crafty writer. The trick to reading Vergil is that there is no real trick to it: the message of the Georgics is the message of the Georgics.52 Of course, there is a bit more to it than this. There is also the whole question of establishing the validity of this unmediated mode of reading. There is also the delicate matter of depth: it might yield a sort of scandal. That is, to the extent that we will even admit of a subtext, we want one that is not subversive but instead supportive.53 My reading of the Georgics as it relates to Seneca’s letter may or may not be tendentious. The real issue here is the extent to which Seneca advocates a certain species of tendentious reading. One reads “in order to.” The reader brings something to the text, a desire, an intention.54 This letter insists upon as much. In fact, the philosophical reading only brings out that which was already there in the book worth reading: the message set there by a good author’s philosophical inscription. “The one who looks for philosophy takes these same words [of Vergil] where he ought to.”55 There is no space between the ethical obligation of reading and the ethical act of reading philosophically. What follows is a moral gloss on the Georgics done as the direct speech of a philosophical reader: “‘Vergil,’ he says, ‘never says that the day goes, but that it flies, . . . ’” The voice of the philosophical reader written into this philosophical letter recalls the voice of the philosophical narrator of the Letters more generally. So too does it recall the vigorous ethical rhetoric of Attalus and Sotion: “Why, then, do we hesitate to spur ourselves on . . . ?”56 The reader is already drawing conclusions as he reads. As he reads, this good reader makes of himself an Attalus to himself. The border between the representation of the self-rhetoric of a philosophical reader written into this letter and the rhetoric of the letter itself is meant to blur. There is no real difference between the rhetoric of “quid ergo . . . ?” and id exhauriri . . . ? Both questions appear at 108.25, but one of them is “quoted” and the other direct. One

30

The Sublime Seneca

question comes from the reader written into the letter, the other comes from the surface of the letter itself. Elided and yet necessarily anticipated are the questions that we as readers must be asking ourselves as we read these same questions. The goodness of good reading is always also moral. Furthermore, the good reader hears both the voice of another and his own voice as the voice of that other. The good reader hears the good teacher teaching him ethical lessons. This good teacher is the narrative voice of the text, but so too is the good teacher the voice of ethical conscience. This voice is both before and after the text: it informs the act of reading as an intentional one; it is likewise inculcated as the function of having read well. We see the shifting between these registers in phenomena like the indistinct boundary between the quoted question and the direct question at 108.25. A second passage about time’s flight provokes another deluge of philosophical glosses. We find an affinity for a specific mode, the alternation of questions and answers: quare . . . ? quod . . . quare . . . ? quia . . . quia . . . quod . . . itaque . . . (108.27). The tone and tropes recall Sotion’s address to the young Seneca. Of course, we are already wondering whose voice that was: Sotion’s own? Sotion recalling the questions his own teacher once put to him? Seneca’s voice as he put words into Sotion’s mouth? Or is the situation more complex: has Seneca’s own voice become Sotion’s own under his tutelage? For if we have read up to this point in the Letters more generally, we recognize the moment as “pure Seneca”: we’ve seen this sort of thing many times before in the preceding letters. Seneca’s reading lesson teaches us how to interrogate a text. But the product of this process will not just be a truth of the text at hand, a sound knowledge of what it means to read Vergil, for example. The product of this process is instead a specific hermeneutic technique that prepares us to appreciate the meaning of the poetic text by appropriating to ourselves the eye-cum-voice of the philosophical reader-cum-commentator more generally. Seneca sets against his philosophical meditation upon the meaning of these verses the grammatical meditation. All that the grammarian wants to say of this passage, says Seneca, is that Vergil always uses “diseases” and “old age” together. Seneca conjures the cross-reference that the grammarian would doubtless adduce: not only does Aeneid 6.275 have morbi and senectus together as in Georgics 3.67, but Vergil also uses tristis in both places. Seneca is almost too kind as to what we are to make of this style of reading. He tells Lucilius not to wonder that the same field offers to the cow grass, to the hound the hare, and to the stork a lizard. It is only when we ourselves

Misreading Seneca

31

ruminate on the absurdity of wishing to be either a cow or a stork that we realize what sort of hunt for knowledge we ought to choose. The word ciconia offers Seneca the chance to transition to Cicero. Cicero’s On the Republic is a commons that feeds philosophers, philologists, and grammarians variously. The philosopher admires that so much can be said against injustice. The philologist takes notes about the biographical minutiae of Rome’s early kings and technical details of the early constitution. The grammarian remarks that Cicero uses reapse for re ipsa and sepse for se ipse. The grammarian thinks himself felix as he goes about his researches and finds a tasty bit of herbage/verbiage: “Thereupon he thinks himself blessed because he has discovered why Vergil elected to say quem super ingens | porta tonat caeli. He says that Ennius stole this from Homer, and Vergil from Ennius. For Cicero has in this same On the Republic the following epigram of Ennius: si fas endo plagas caelestum ascendere cuiquam est, | mi soli caeli maxima porta patet.”57 The joy of the grammarian consists in finding texts and intertexts, in wandering through poetry and happily making connections without ever stopping to ponder the question of felicitas itself. The finis the grammarian sets himself is infinite. Hence the danger of philology or grammatical studies to the philosopher, the man who must reflect carefully on ends/de finibus rather than write a commentary upon the On Ends. The letter is drawing to a close. So too is my commentary on this letter. But the letter’s very conclusion entails the realization that a commentary yields a misreading. In fact, the irony is even more pointed than that: the more learned the commentary, the further from the mark we are likely to find ourselves. To the extent that we make of knowledge an object of study rather than eagerly taking upon ourselves the ethical burden of the encounter with knowledge, then philosophy becomes philology. While this may not be quite a pearls-before-swine situation, nevertheless, it is a matter of hares before storks. Seneca himself flags this same danger of the philological mode. He worries that even miming such is dangerous for a philosopher. To do so risks a lapse, even a collapse into either philology or grammar: ne et ipse . . . delabar (108.35). So Seneca reverts to his core thesis: one needs to listen to philosophy with an ear for the good life, the beata uita. We should not seek after archaic words or novel compounds. Inept metaphors and figures of speech are irrelevant. What we want are precepts that will do us some good, magnificent and spirited phrases which ultimately will be converted to good use. Let us thus learn these things so that what were words shall become works.

32

The Sublime Seneca I have just paraphrased section 35 of the letter. The Letter proper reads: sed ne et ipse, dum aliud ago, in philologum aut grammaticum delabar, illud admoneo, auditionem philosophorum lectionemque ad propositum beatae uitae trahendam, non ut uerba prisca aut ficta captemus et translationes inprobas figurasque dicendi, sed ut profutura praecepta et magnificas uoces et animosas quae mox in rem transferantur.58

We need to labor over some of the details of the Latin itself. A return of philology, then. But will it or won’t it serve philosophy itself in the end? Philological misreading threatens philosophy with a collapse. Conversely, philological reading may well be able to serve the good life, or at least point out the true difficulty of the path before us. Notice, then, the polyvocal uoces invoked by Seneca. These are phrases and pronouncements, words in the abstract and maxims in the concrete. That is, there is a slip in the word itself between “idea conveyed by words” and “words as actually uttered.” The “voice” of philosophy is thus both the sentiment entailed in a philosophical phrase and the actual voice of the philosopher who speaks it. Already at the level of the word uox, the uox uocis, if you will, we find a translation between orders. This is as well a translatio improba.59 Seneca has just used this phrase of dread philology’s mode of reading. Above the phrase designated the “inept metaphor” that philology loves to detect. But the very movement of metaphor itself must be examined as to its propriety. There is a philosophical issue at hand: whether or not the figures spoken by the philosopher can be transferred anywhere where they will do any good.60 Seneca hustled us away from a preoccupation with figures of speech. Nevertheless, there is a danger that haunts the text: philosophy itself might just turn into another figura dicendi. Philosophy might be reduced to a mere matter of words both dissociated from and never amounting to ethically consequential things. Seneca has to have the metaphor of transfer, the translatio translationis. The uoces depend upon it in multiple dimensions. First, the uox uocis itself entails a species of meta-metaphor, as I have just mentioned. Next, philosophical phrases are both grand and grand-making: a double read of magnificae is needed here, even if one branch of the reading is that of the etymologist rather than the philosopher. Similarly, these phrases are both themselves spirited and productive of spirit: as with magnificae, so with animosae. The phrases transmit spirit from there to here: uox is a vehicle of animus. Spirit is both in the words and soon to be in the heart of the hearer of the words. The transfer that Seneca insists upon happens even before he formally articulates its necessity. This transfer is entailed in the very phrases, the very

Misreading Seneca

33

uoces that lead up to his formal philosophical claim. The transfer of words into things recapitulates Seneca’s concerns about the move between abstract and concrete res from above.61 The rhetoric of philosophy must be translated into the practice of life, not into a love of words qua words or even fair images of things qua fair images. The voices out there need to be made one’s own, to make the passage from the it to the me. Where id was, let ego be.62 However, if we learn the philosophical lesson and make it our own, we might remain blind to a philological conundrum that ensues. The phrase, the voice that exhorts us to learn these matters so that what were words will become works, ut quae fuerint uerba sint opera, this voice also just asked us to turn words into texts.63 The translatio improba in this case would be the manner in which the words moved into works without ever once becoming deeds. The perils of stenography return. But note that Seneca too has been thinking along these lines. The very next section tackles the problem of men who live other than as they teach one ought to live (108.36). In fact, they are even more interesting characters: they have learned philosophy as if it were some sort of commercial craft. Having learned philosophy after this fashion, they then proceed to teach the noble contents of philosophy without themselves ever living the life that corresponds to those maxims. These well-published philosophy professors closely parallel the students who went to school with notebooks to catch the words and not the things and to fruitlessly disseminate the same to others (108.6). Philosophical words and texts move from the school and into the heads of such people but never into their hearts. So too do they disseminate what they learned: we behold ever more words and textual works without any worldly works to correspond to them. Everything remains hypothetical and virtual: everything is mere text and the translation from the abstract to the concrete never takes place. And yet this very movement from abstract to concrete is an ethical sine qua non. Seneca describes such teachers as living refutations of the potential utility of learning. They are like sea-sick helmsmen entrusted to guide a ship in a storm. Even though we know that Seneca himself gets sick at sea, we are asked to take these words from our teacher and not the life (as written) of our teacher. We are asked to seize upon these fine uoces as the rudder with which we will steer our own way through life. “How can a ship’s guide help me when he is stunned and puking?”64 Philology can make us sensitive philosophical readers, sensitive precisely to the intricacies of the problem of reading philosophy and/vs. living it. The crescendo of the letter concerns appropriation: people offer “philosophy,” but everything they say is someone else’s property: “Plato said it,

34

The Sublime Seneca

Zeno said it, Chrysippus and Posidonius and that massive column of names so many and so great.”65 How can they prove that what they say is really theirs? “Let them do what they have said.”66 The probatio of the probity of the philosopher consists in the translatio proba of word into deed. The utterances are to be performed. The Opera Senecae are to be the deeds of Seneca and not just The Writings of Seneca. The initial translation from word into deed is the only means by which we can justify a subsequent translation whereby the Works of Seneca is a phrase that does double duty, entailing the Deeds of Seneca as well as The Writings of Seneca. Moreover, to the extent that the deeds are in fact Seneca’s, then the words are not plagiarized, they are authentically his own. The plagiarist is the one who cites instead of acting. Philological source-criticism necessarily misses the philosophical point: the authentic philosophical experience is precisely that, an experience. This experience may come from words and ultimately yield words, but as an experience it is the font of its own uniqueness and authenticity. Those who seize upon the uerba prisca within Seneca’s own works deprive themselves of a specific futurity in the name of an utterly dead past: profutura praecepta cannot emerge out of such a process. Seneca ends his letter by saying that it was but a beginning. He has said his piece, now he will satisfy Lucilius’s desire: the desiderio tuo satis faciam. It is now safe to engage with the cupiditas discendi. After preliminary remarks like these, touching upon such heady matters will not lead youthful souls into indiscretion. Seneca, then, proposes to “transfer” untouched the substance of Lucilius’s demand into a second letter. It would do no good to listen to such difficult topics with wearied ears.67 Of course, it is not clear that Lucilius’s desire was really left untouched: the topic of the next letter is, after all, “Can one wise man be of service to another?” This letter has satisfied Seneca’s desire to say something to Lucilius, but it has also quietly been taking up the very thing that Lucilius desired to hear, even if he did not know that he wanted to hear it put just so. In fact, to the extent that the alien wisdom of Seneca, his uerba aliena, are not merely taken down by Lucilius but instead taken to heart, then what Seneca desired to say will have been what Lucilius desired to hear, and the words will become his own, sua. Everything turns upon the extent to which Lucilius is willing to take the notion of ut profutura praecepta in rem transferantur and to transfer it into a precept for his own life. This will be the precept of precepts, the lesson on how to take lessons. Seneca ends with a potent collocation of themes: futurity, desire, translation, the letter. Seneca is translating/transferring the contents of Lucilius’s desire into another letter. The desire was the desire to know. But Seneca

Misreading Seneca

35

knew that Lucilius did not know the res spinosa of the relationship between desire and reading. Hence he wrote Letter 108 instead of and as a preface to Letter 109. The probity of the translation between the registers of desire and wisdom can only be guaranteed if one attends to the details of this letter on letters. One needs to appreciate that the precepts will not do any good, that the profutura of 108.35 and the prosit of 109.1 will never converge if the details of the answer to the question of “What is it to read philosophically?” are not understood in advance. What is the future of philosophy? It is the translatio of desiderium into a letter to come announced in a letter at hand. Once we know how to read what we are reading, then we will know how to read what we will read. To what extent is Letter 108 a self-reading letter? The message of the Georgics is just what it says, one is told. When it says “Time flies,” that is the end of it. And it is likely a waste of time to think otherwise. But is the philosophical weight of this letter exclusively contained in, as well as exhausted by, the message that it bears on its own face? Even as Seneca decries philological commentary as alien to philosophical enlightenment, we come to appreciate that philology has been excavating specifically philosophical themes. Only a pedantic grammatical commentary on transferre, for example, can reveal the latent ethics of translation and its multiple dimensions within this letter. Seneca insists that philosophical reading will offer a qualitative improvement to the reader. The one who knows how to read Vergil sagely will be the wiser for it in the end. The mere quantitative accumulation of Vergilian cross-references and usages is a mode of reading that will never enlighten. Read poetry, then, like a philosopher. But there is another possible claim here as well: read philosophy as if it were poetry. This is exactly the thing we are scared away from at the letter’s opening. And yet we have to return to it in a revised form by the time it closes. It is dangerous to go to school eager for fine phrases and to become captivated by the rhetorical flourishes that punctuate the discourse of virtue rather than to be enchanted by virtue itself. Nevertheless, we cannot merely jettison the medium in the name of the message. Philosophy does in fact come to us via language. There is a translatio that must be made: quae fuerint uerba sint opera. Seneca’s overt message about reading is too small for Senecan reading and reading Seneca. Even as Seneca affirms that it is the intention of the reader that matters most, he tells a tale of well-intentioned readers who go astray, of overenthusiastic youths and lapsed old men. He teaches Lucilius how to teach while setting to one side the rather awkward issue that Lucilius may be best suited to the role of student. He praises helmsmen while remaining silent

36

The Sublime Seneca

on his own ambiguous qualifications to take the helm. It is only a literary reading of the corpus of the letters, their parts, their wholes, the movement of passages, of books, that allows us to catch sight of the full scope of the philosophical complications that surround the relatively simple propositions that are often at issue: the command to “Read wisely,” for example. Who is speaking? To whom? When? How? Can he be trusted? Why the epistolary form rather than some other? Such elementary literary critical questions matter, and they matter philosophically. The truth of the proposition that reading can do us some good must always also be attended by a second proposition: namely that “to propose” (proponere) entails “to set forth in words.” The translation of words into deeds is itself easier said than done. And Letter 108 captures precisely this paradox: to praise deeds over words itself involves spinning out a wordy wisdom that may be an opus in only a literary sense and not a concrete one. Writing readers into the letter offers an attempt to constrain this treacherous process. The philologists and grammarians are examples of souls who fall into the infinite abyss of representation and citation. The philosopher is the wise fool who makes a break from the game and sires himself as the author of textual meaning in the very gesture by which he appropriates meaning to himself. Thus one reads Vergil correctly only when the Georgics are internalized. The process may well resemble misreading, or, at a minimum, incomplete reading. However, this letter asks of its readers that they learn to read thus if they are ever to save themselves from philology and at last stand forth as philosophers.

chapter 2

Writing metaphysics

Seneca’s fifty-eighth Letter to Lucilius weaves together literature, metaphysics, and ethics. The philosophical content of the letter and the literary form of the letter are interrelated. As the last chapter showed, Senecan letters mount a philosophical performance. The letters contain philosophical arguments and assertions, but, more importantly, they also perform an ethics-of-literature while also commenting on ethics.1 Seneca stages a theater of philosophy. And in this theater one is asked to speculate on speculation itself. One does so as a theater critic. Taking center stage is a character named Seneca who acts out the role of philosophical guide. Meanwhile a second Seneca, Seneca the author and the stage-manager, concatenates the various soliloquies of this character. This second Seneca inevitably adds a further dimension to those same declarations made by the first. This extra dimension provokes questions that exceed the simple claims of the various individual philosophical maxims. For example, in one letter we see Seneca getting sea-sick (53). In another he talks about philosophy as a helmsman (85). In another he speaks of the absurdity of a sea-sick helmsman (108). Each passage has its particular force when taken in isolation, but their juxtaposition produces yet another dimension to the letters in general.2 When we look at the letters as a literary corpus, we can locate issues that complicate the propositional content of any claim taken in isolation. And there are still further complications: what does the term “proposition” itself mean? The previous chapter closed with it. The present one begins with it. The word proposition is something of a grab-bag. As such it is perfectly Senecan in that, like propositum, it works on various levels at once and its lay sense is always also working alongside its philosophical sense. “Disambiguation” will be attempted where possible, but, when investigating Seneca and his methods, such is not always possible or even desirable. As noted in the introduction, Seneca can pointedly refuse to write his philosophy in technical vocabulary while opting instead for everyday uses of Latin. My 37

38

The Sublime Seneca

discussion will almost always take the broader version of proposition. For present purposes a proposition is not “a statement that expresses a concept that can be true or false,” but instead “a statement or assertion that expresses a judgment or opinion.”3 Frequently these same statements have a primarily ethical, and not a constative force: they provoke reflection on what one ought to do, not what is or is not the case. The two domains are often convergent, and the latter may well be a subset of the former. But not everything that is true requires an ethical reaction, and we are going to focus on truths of ethical import, truths to which one ought not be indifferent: The term “proposition” has a broad use in contemporary philosophy. It is used to refer to some or all of the following: the primary bearers of truthvalue, the objects of belief and other “propositional attitudes” (i.e., what is believed, doubted, etc.), the referents of that-clauses, and the meanings of sentences . . . The best way to proceed, when dealing with quasi-technical words like “proposition,” may be to stipulate a definition and proceed with caution, making sure not to close off any substantive issues by definitional fiat. Propositions, we shall say, are the shareable objects of the attitudes and the primary bearers of truth and falsity.4

This encyclopedia entry explains that the Stoic doctrine of lekta roughly fits its own (narrowed) definition of a proposition. This claim is justified via an appeal to Seneca’s Moral Letter 117.5 This authoritative evocation of Stoic lekta does not engage with the literary situation of the letter to which one is referred. Seneca depicts the terminological discussion contained in that letter as a collection of tedious little questions (quaestiunculae) concerning a philosophical distinction drawn between the noun sapientia and the verb sapere: how is it that the former can be considered a good, but the latter not a good (bonum)?6 In the course of his summary Seneca upbraids himself for descending into the very hair-splitting terminological distinctions that he is abusing.7 And Seneca avers that having real wisdom (sapientia) and actually living wisely (sapere) both entail avoiding empty terminological subtleties such as this.8 Seneca ends by asking sarcastically, “Tell me this: once I have learned the difference between sapientia and sapere, will I be wise (sapiam)? Why do you prefer to hold me back among the words for wisdom rather than its works?”9 Some philosophers spend their time discussing propositions such as “Cato is walking.” But Seneca invites the analysis of a different sort of proposition: “Seneca is writing wisdom.” What are we to make of that? What is its ontological status? We are told that it is better to know where Cato is going when he walks than to know that he walks and to appreciate that the words “Cato walks” constitute a lekton. Where is Seneca going when he writes,

Writing metaphysics

39

“Seneca is writing . . . ”? Is he writing the path to wisdom? Or is he just writing the words “the path to wisdom”? We seem to be in need of a clearer understanding of how words and things work in Seneca’s Letters. The last chapter focussed more on words. This one will attempt to figure out things. But, really, the words and the things cannot be tidily segregated in the Senecan corpus. Readers who have read Seneca’s letters in order will already be in possession of a discussion of things before they reach Moral Letter 117. And they will, in fact, already have seen this same sort of simultaneous inclusion and dismissal of technical philosophy as can be seen here. And so too is the dismissal effectively done in the name of the active verb sapere rather than the potentially inert noun sapientia.10 The sixth book of Seneca’s letters has a narrative arc. Though one often refers to Seneca’s letters via an absolute numbering scheme and it is less common to see readings of them that emphasize their sequential arrangement, it is nevertheless clear that there are narrative qualities to Seneca’s epistolary novelization of a Philosophy of Spirit: not only is there a thematic flow to individual letters, but themes also evolve in the course of sequences of letters.11 In book six we have a letter about our sea-sick spiritual helmsman and his surprise to have sailed (53). Still sick, still traveling, Seneca catches his breath long enough to report an asthma attack and writes up some meditations concerning sickness unto death (54). A visit to Baiae provokes not your usual sun-lover’s romp at the beach but instead meditations about long-dead Vatia and his villa: what can a philosopher on the move through the world learn from the places, people, things in it (55)? Noisy lodgings: how can we find (spiritual) peace and quiet (56)? The journey continues with a trip to the underworld, a descent into and return from the cave: after Plato a philosopher can never merely pass through a tunnel (57).12 Then comes Letter 58, the letter where we will linger, a letter that does not mention Seneca on the move, but is nevertheless all about the movement of metaphor. In Letter 59 Seneca writes himself reading Lucilius. What do self-possession and linguistic mastery have in common? What is a good metaphor for the self, and how can such metaphors help us work on ourselves?13 Seneca is getting impatient: When will we become useful to ourselves and to others? Only when we learn that bodily desires lead us down the road to a living death (60). “Let’s stop wanting what we wanted,” opens the next letter. Getting your (abstract) will in order means you are prepared to meet (concrete) death (61). But the book ends with a new beginning (62): Seneca has always got time for friends and for books and for self-work. “Wherever I am, I am mine (ubicumque sum, ibi meus sum).” The

40

The Sublime Seneca

journey is over when we discover the fundamental importance of the beingthere of the self, the proper object of our literary and moral works. These letters are obviously composed according to what we might call a literary logic. But they are always also insisting that they are not “merely” literary. Let me begin with some key conclusions. The philosophical sublime and the literary sublime converge.14 Each, it turns out, is a metaphor for the other.15 Seneca is doing wisdom while he comments on it in the Moral Letters. And philosophy is translated into and translated by the letters themselves. This thesis produces a significant quandary for any commentary on Seneca. To the extent that that commentary “translates” the letters into a non-literary catalog of Senecan claims, this commentary dismantles the very artifice and artistry of the letters that make them truly philosophical. In an important sense, then, this presentation will necessarily be a failure. It singularly fails to do some of the very things that are vital to Seneca’s project. While Seneca translates philosophy into literature and, in turn, while literary performance is a metaphor for philosophical performance, any exposition of this process tends only to reduce the Letter. Commentary draws this letter back down from the sublime without clearly leading any of us back up to it. This reduction takes place in tandem with the generation of dogmatic assertions about Seneca. Conversely, as we have lately seen, Seneca himself gently mocks the notion that mere dogmatism will ever make anyone wise. To know, that is, is very much different from to do. The most difficult thing of all is to make an ascent and to translate from knowledge to the act. The Latin verb transferre can be translated as “to move a thing over across from one place to another.” The Greek verb μεταφέρειν can be translated as “to move a thing over across from one place to another.” Seneca meditates on the problem of translating Greek ethics into Latin letters. Translatio inevitably itself becomes a metaphor of metaphoricity: the word tracks not just the movement from Greek to Latin, but it enacts the very movement of metaphor.16 That is, translatio performs its own content. And yet translating a thing implies negotiating both identity and difference: transferre, after all, both is and is not the same thing as μεταφέρειν.17 Let us look at a proximate example. The sixth book of the Moral Letters begins, “What can’t I be convinced to do, since I’ve convinced myself to sail?”18 Seneca writes of his physical translation. The journey is a metaphor, as they say.19 But it is multiply a metaphor and multiply a translation. Seneca translates this physical movement into the epistolary format. Furthermore, the metaphorical journey towards virtue is translated by

Writing metaphysics

41

even as its translates the physical movement of a sea-sick Seneca. This letter shows us a Seneca who is manifestly a Stoic proficiens. Seneca is not a man who has reached his destination. He has neither arrived at a literal place nor has he attained that metaphorical end-point of the philosophical journey where one becomes a Stoic sage. In short, proficiens, a technical term from philosophy, has had its metaphoricity extracted from it, and it is now dramatically re-staged for the eyes of the reader.20 Already things are impacted: metaphor of metaphor, the translated translates. And yet it is this very involution that we need to explore. Seneca himself invites reflection on what it means to translate ethics, to move them from the world and onto the page. And, more importantly, he wonders what it might mean to lift images off the page and to move them back into our lives. As we saw in Letter 108, the challenge is to correlate the res with the opera. Let us turn, then, to a detailed examination of Letter 58.21 Here one will find art and philosophy, as well as a synthesis of the two. This letter offers an account of Plato’s metaphysics, but this very account is itself in the end metaphysical.22 And so we can read for both the story of metaphysics and the metaphysics of the story.23 The convergence of these two concepts is, in the end, the point of the whole exercise. And even if a doublet like “the story of metaphysics” and “metaphysics of the story” sounds like a mere verbal flourish and a bit of rhetorical sand that lacks philosophical lime, Seneca’s own project regularly imposes these paired sets of subjects-become-objects and objects-become-subjects. As it shuttles between subjects and predicates, the letter investigates the metaphysics of the metaphorical quality of philosophical writing itself. Accordingly, even as it is already a challenge to understand metaphysical dogma qua dogma, Seneca is not really aiming at an exposition of doctrine. Instead he is trying to do something in the course of expounding something. And yet how can such writing transport the subject towards wisdom? What is the ethical valence of whatever it is that writing itself might be? The metaphysical dogma of Plato gets translated into the ethical doctrine of Seneca.24 This translation, this movement from metaphysics to ethics, entails a specifically literary action. That is, only “literary devices” – and they are in the end no mere literary devices – allow us to appreciate that the story of being can be a metaphor for ethics and that ethics can translate ontology into our lives.25 Let me briefly outline the difficult flow of Letter 58.26 Seneca opens with the story of a conversation about Plato. Then he talks about the Latin language. Next he discusses translating the Greek term τὸ ὄν. After this he

42

The Sublime Seneca

offers a brief survey of the relationship between genus and species. Finally he makes his presentation about Platonic being. This ends with some notes about the world of appearances. Seneca then makes a break, and he explores the ethical ramifications of what has come before. And this discussion flows into an account of that specific being, Plato, and his wholesome life.27 Finally we talk about suicide.28 Even more finally, we talk about ending a letter. How we get from point A to point Z is important here. The details of the journey among all of these different stops on the letter’s winding course matter. For metaphor-as-movement and movement-as-metaphor themselves matter.29 The letter opens with an observation about the poverty of language.30 Latin is particularly impoverished: it cannot translate a number of Greek philosophical terms.31 The character who narrates the letter – we are invited to translate this narratological long-hand into the name “Seneca,” of course – was recently engaged in a discussion concerning Plato. He and the other participants found themselves wanting for numerous Latin words that could adequately translate Plato’s thought. This “the poverty of the Latin language” gives one pause. Surely this is a game, a literary trope.32 We can find it used elsewhere in Latin literature as a prelude to luxuriant performance. And Seneca hardly thinks that he is truly unable to translate Plato. Instead, he is flagging that his translation will not be literal, but rather that it will be literary. Think aemulatio, or translation-with-a-difference. Is Seneca really so poor? Is he not rather about to array for us once again his copious Latinity? And, more to the point, will this Latinity not in fact translate Greek wisdom even as we talk of the impossibility of this same movement? Indeed, we are invited to reflect on what is entailed in the movement of wisdom itself: Can it really be transported from one place or one person to another? If so, how might that transfer be effected? Seneca next engages in a philological and sociological excursus which is both a detour and a key part of the journey itself. Seneca offers an account of words that do and do not exist in Latin, of words that have died, of words that could exist but are scorned. The discussion is explicitly marked as a quasi-parody of grammatical erudition. Philology offers a farcical prelude to the philosophical drama. The erudite overture closes with a conjured Lucilius warily asking Seneca, “Where are we going with this studied opening?”33 A character within the letter notes the rhetorical feel of the letter up to this point: “There has been a good deal of posturing . . . ” The letter warns us against itself. It puts us on notice that not every voice within a letter emerges from the mouth of a philosopher presenting “the truth.”

Writing metaphysics

43

But the letter also tells us something about ourselves and our relationship to this panoply of voices: we are wary readers, readers who are too clever by half to be taken in by Senecan cleverness. When Seneca actually gives an example of a word that has disappeared, his example is no mere example. What the Greeks call an oestros, the Romans used to call an asîlus. Vergil’s Georgics offer the proof. However, a gadfly cannot only be found driving bucolic flocks amidst Latin hexameters. What of that metaphorical gadfly, Socrates? He too has his sting. And Seneca himself translates this same nettlesome Socratism into his own Latin letters. The word for gadfly has, according to Seneca, “died,” interisse. Did it die a timely death or an untimely one? Was it sentenced to drink hemlock for corrupting youth, or did it merely grow old? In either case, it briefly lives again within the space of the Letters, conjured as an example of the riches of language for those who can and will tap into them. Literature can breathe metaphorical life into the dead. Conversely, when we later talk of suicide, literature will breathe metaphorical death into the living. Metaphor already implies a metaphysics. Yet the transfer between these two poles is not a passage that can be taken for granted. Seneca begs to be permitted to use the word essentia. Latin purists will snort at such a gaffe. Seneca justifies his transgression via an appeal to noble precedent: Cicero used it. Also Fabius has employed it in more recent times. Seneca also makes an appeal to utility: one really needs to talk about being, and thus the word for it is needed.34 In short, the being of the word “being” is itself in question. This problematic status of being-as-word affects all of the words about being that follow: Is any of this really real? Seneca is at the moment being teasing and ironic: this whole passage is couched in questions of the niceties of good Latin. Latinitas is here merely a vehicle for manifesting erudition and social distinction, not for conveying the contents of philosophical concepts. However, it turns out that the word essentia is in some ways inessential to Seneca’s argument. He is in fact more interested in a term that cannot ever make it into Latin even as it is the focus of the account of metaphysics that follows. At the end of his discussion of dead and missing words Seneca declares, “When you appreciate that there is a single syllable that I cannot alter into Latin, your condemnation of our dire Roman straits will only grow. What is this, you ask? τὸ ὄν. You must think me a dolt: the answer is a commonplace; it can be translated this way: Say, quod est.”35 And how shall we translate this last into English. “That which is” will do. But one is being asked to feel anxious about the adequacy of this otherwise obvious and

44

The Sublime Seneca

straightforward translation. Seneca continues, “But I see there is a big difference here: I am forced to set a phrase in the place of a word. But if I really must do so, I will put down quod est.”36 What are we to put in the place of τὸ ὄν, then? This is the question. A second question: When we are forced to put something in the place that properly belongs to τὸ ὄν, have we in fact failed to note the difference that this translating makes? The etymological punning of my own argument seeks to translate the difficulties that Seneca raises concerning the translation of being. This matter of the translation of τὸ ὄν raises a still more general problem: namely what is the ontological status of translation itself? “Is” τὸ ὄν quod est? Or is the Latin version of being merely a substitute and stand-in for the truer and realer version of being given by the Greek? Let us get back to our overview of the letter. Seneca pauses here. Seneca says that we need to understand the distinction between genus and species before we can get into a discussion of Platonic ontology. Seneca proceeds to trot out an Aristotelian account of the concatenation of being and the metaphysics of predication.37 That is, before we can arrive at Plato’s metaphysics, we have to first be transported through Aristotle’s logic. More precisely still, we read the metaphysics of Plato as told by a friend of Seneca, and then Seneca tells what he was told to a friend, namely Lucilius. And we read what he wrote to Lucilius. Metaphysics is then, “metaphysics,” a thing-in-quotes, in more than one sense. We are not being offered “Being according to Seneca the Stoic,” we are instead listening to various stories about being as related by Seneca the reporter.38 In the end, our narrator is happy to step back from what he says about being and leave unresolved any implied conflicts in these various accounts. Offering “the one true story of being” is not, it would seem, his job. The emphasis, accordingly, seems to fall on the word “story” in the phrase “story of being.” Platonic metaphysics is not itself especially consonant with Stoic theories of metaphysics.39 However, Seneca’s story of Plato-on-being is filled with stories of artistry and of storytelling. And these stories seem to be very relevant indeed, and they are relevant not so much to our understanding of Stoic philosophy per se but rather to our appreciation of Senecan philosophical writing. But back to Seneca’s preliminary exposition of categories: the genus is general; the species is specific. A human is a species. A dog is a species. There is something common between the two of them, their genus, and this is the animal. Animal is to be taken etymologically. That is, we are interested in things with an anima. Of these, some can move, others cannot. Seneca is thinking of animals vs. plants. Thus he draws the distinction between

Writing metaphysics

45

animal and animantia. The animans is thus the higher genus of which the animal is a species. The same logic distinguishes between things that have a body or corpus. Some have an anima, some don’t. A rock is not a man. However, both belong to the genus of the corporalia. It is the distinction between the corporeal and the incorporeal that gets us to our destination, though. For both of these are species of the highest and most general and generative genus, quod est or, to go back to the Greek, τὸ ὄν.40 Seneca concludes, “Therefore this genus is the first and foremost, and, if you will pardon the expression, ‘general.’ The other genera certainly do exist, but as specific species.”41 The Latin here matters: hoc ergo est genus primum et antiquissimum et, ut ita dicam, generale. The antiquissimum part needs to be transferred into English via a suitable set of metaphors that can convey the same freight as the original term. Antiquus allows us to see a pun on “priority”: it expresses both logical and temporal anteriority.42 There are extra-logical aspects to the genus vs. species distinction. Therefore let us make a second turn of this same screw. Genus means what logicians still call a genus. It also means birth or stock, that from which one is generated in a material sense. Genus might also be good stock. Species might also be mere appearance. And indeed the telos of the letter itself argues for a conclusion derived from alternate meanings of these words: we come to appreciate that a gentleman is not taken in by appearances. In short, a literary read of these logical terms can already translate us over into a version of the ethical second half of the letter before we actually get there. Seneca provides an example of the meaning of the word species. Human beings come in various different species: Greeks, Romans, Parthians; white, black, tawny; Cato, Cicero, Lucretius. The named names throughout the letter are the fine stock from which to draw Latin lessons, but they can equally be described as so many species belonging to the single genus “Latin author.” One notes, then, that the homines mentioned by Seneca are not, “mere men,” they are “great men.” In the masterful and polyphonic universe of the letters, the reader is left with a hanging question: Is Seneca just another member of this same genus, or is he somehow more generale? Despite his belated appearance on the scene, is there something nevertheless more “antique” about Seneca’s epistles, and does their more general genre somehow best capture the metaphysics of literature? There is in fact a hint of this in the form of the argument itself: once Seneca works his way up to quod est, he then makes his way back down the chain of logic. The genus antiquissimum comes first, middle, and last. It is the point of departure, the focal point, and the

46

The Sublime Seneca

end-point of the argument. We will talk more about him when we arrive at the second half of the letter, but we can already intimate that there is something special about the author. For the subjected argument that comes at the end of the demonstration of the priority of quod est unwrites that same priority. After his initial introduction to genus and species, Seneca appends the Stoic account of a different primum genus. This is the quid as opposed to the quod est. The quid encompasses things that occur only to the mind and do not actually appear in natura. For example, Centaurs, Giants, and “whatever else is fabricated by false thoughts and comes to have a kind of image.”43 The arts and their virtual reality are manifestly implicated.44 There are two possible “firsts” within the ontological doxography of the letter: a Platonic one and a Stoic one. Since the letter presents itself as a doxography, this is not a cause for excessive concern. However, that said, we nevertheless have trouble finding anything anterior to the figure of Seneca, the masterful tripartite author, narrator, and character of the Letters. That is, the editor of the textual spectacle of “Plato vs. the Stoics on being” quietly slips into a privileged metaphysical slot of his own. There are further logical conundrums in Moral Letter 58. The genus homo can be split variously into species. Homo is itself a complex conjunction of multiplicities. There are Greeks and Romans, white and black, Cicero and Lucretius. These are different differences contained within the same genus. However, let us be perverse and take uerba instead of homines as the genus within which to explore the notion of species. Performing this operation on the Moral Letters of Seneca produces untidy results. For example, epistulae are not orationes. These two literary genres belong to different species of the more general genus litterae. But this taxonomy is not quite right. Litterae is a possible synonym for epistulae. Thus the species would belong to its own genus. However, this paradox of Seneca’s Stoic letters does, despite the difficulty in logic, seem to be important in the practical functioning of the transference/translatio of wisdom. The logic of a Letter: Is it a more general genus or not? Like homo, an epistula encompasses different differences within itself as a genus/genre. It contains orationes. It is filled with epic. Vergil is of course quoted with a certain regularity. And there is also a playful Homeric motif that runs through them. Seneca several times appears as an Odysseus figure: he sails, he wanders. Seneca is a wily man and one never at a loss. And when we see him sea-sick, this comic Ulysses is but another clever translation into Latin of the faux poverty of the Romans. For, though he dressed as a beggar, was not Homer’s Odysseus really only the more kingly for it in the end?

Writing metaphysics

47

The letter also participates in another key set of differences at the same time. Letter 58 is part of a more general genus, namely the corpus of collected letters. The more general body-of-letters relates letter-to-letter in a manner analogous to a letter’s own internal self-relation. Both are analogously heterogeneous. Nevertheless, neither body fails to cohere because of this internal diversity. In particular, when we move our way up to the principal principle of this body of letters we will find the mind of the author, Seneca, the simultaneously incarnate and abstracted philosopher. The metaphysics of the epistolary logic conjures the specter of The Author of the corpus as the sustaining cause of this quasi-bodily whole. But before we can speak of Authors, we need to talk of being. The letter now at last addresses the six modalities of being according to Plato. The first is quod est, that is, τὸ ὄν. The second is that which surpasses all others. The third consists of the ideae. The fourth of the idos. The fifth of concrete things. The sixth of quasi-entities.45 The first item in this story of Plato’s metaphysics is the cogitabile. The cogitabile is that which does not and cannot exist as a material object, it is only an object of thought. The cogitabile can neither be seen, nor touched, nor comprehended by any of our senses. The cogitabile is, says Seneca, generaliter. It deals, then, in genera. The analogy is once again drawn from homo. Homo generalis, that is, humanity in the abstract or the genus “human,” nowhere appears in the world. However members of the species do exist. The examples are two special cases: Cicero and Cato. Similarly, animal is a thing of thought, not of the world. However, species of animals can be perceived: horses and dogs. This first version of being offers a rigid distinction between the material and the immaterial. It maps this distinction onto the species and genus distinction. But we can ourselves choose different examples in order to yield more pointed results. What, then, of Seneca cogitabilis, the Seneca who can only be thought, who is, strictly speaking, always and only a figure of thought? In fact either Seneca as the author who subsists anterior to the text or Seneca as the character within the text fulfills this requirement of immateriality: author and character are “notional” and not present in the here and now.46 Even so, one gets the feeling that the character within the text is itself “specious”: he is nothing but a species, a thing to be gotten beyond. Meanwhile the author appears to be a general and generative genus. Learning metaphysical distinctions can accordingly lead us to narratological distinctions. But, as will be argued at length below, narratology itself does philosophical work in Seneca. There is a mutual entanglement between categories of being and narrative categories. And, of course,

48

The Sublime Seneca

complaints that these are illicit entanglements from the standpoint of some strict version of Platonism or Stoicism do little to change the fact that one can detect these interactions between the two levels and that, moreover, such interactions prove vital to the edifice of Seneca’s overall project. The second mode of Platonic being is glossed as follows: it is that which is preeminent and surpasses everything. The initial example is “The Poet” which term naturally evokes for a Greek Homer: the best of all poets. However a metaphysical gloss follows and translates it: “And so what is this?” (quid ergo hoc est?, 58.17). The answer is deus scilicet, maior ac potentior cunctis: “God, of course, who is the greatest and most powerful of all.” We move then from the earthly sublime of Homer to the heavenly sublime. Homer is in his own way a species of the genus divinity. We are able to make divinity cogitabile by means of thinking of this divine poet. The reality of the idea of Homer serves as the foundation for the metaphysics of divinity more generally. The poet who gave life to the gods in his poetry gives life to them all over again, albeit otherwise when he finds himself translated into the world of Seneca’s Letters. But let us take this mode of being as we did the last one. That is, what are its literary and ethical valences? What happens when we insert the name Seneca again? We can first imagine a Seneca who was a leading literary star of his day, a man who was preeminent in a number of genres. But this empirical Seneca with his accomplishments in the realm of literature serves only as a means of beginning to think through another Seneca, the artificer of a sublime ethical universe that is conveyed to us, yes, by means of literature. “Homer” helps us to understand “God.” “Seneca” helps us to understand “Seneca.” Perhaps this last pair should be written as Seneca1 and Seneca2 to avoid confusion. Nevertheless Seneca’s (but which one . . . ?) ends are served by fostering the ready transfer between these two figures. His philosophical project actually requires this confusion. After the cogitabile and the excellens we get to the third Platonic mode of being, things quae proprie sunt. Seneca writes his reader asking the question, “What are these?” We are discussing the ideae. Or, to translate this term, we are talking about “The Forms.” “What is an idea? It is what Plato thinks it is. Listen: . . . ”47 The idea is defined as the exemplar aeternum from which the things of the world arise.48 Analogously – and it is no mere analogy – the idea of Plato is the eternal exemplar from which the letter on metaphysics arises. Plato, this figure of thought, is both general and specific in his excellence. He is both our common possession and particularly proprius unto himself. Seneca the artificer of the letter offers as his example of the operation of the ideae the

Writing metaphysics

49

activity of a painter. He says, “I want to make a likeness of you. As the exemplar for the picture I have you. From this my mind takes a certain bearing which it applies to its work. So that face which instructs and disposes me, the face from which the imitation is sought, this is the idea.”49 In order to paint his portrait of metaphysics, Seneca paints a portrait of metaphysics as portraiture. Similarly, Seneca paints himself painting, and the Seneca we see painting is painting the portrait of Plato, the famed painter of Forms. Of course, there is no real canvas here, only the idea/idea of a canvas. The literary idea and the idea of literature render the Platonic idea-as-model on the multiply metaphorical canvas of the epistle. Seneca could have written “a painter” and discussed “a subject.” But instead he writes of “you” and “me.” He writes of me wanting to capture you, your likeness. The example is then both concrete and specific while itself gesturing to a still more general and generative image of a me–you relation that is a matter of image-making, of the imaginary. “You” and “me” are both concrete and specific – Lucilius and Seneca, for example – but so too are they a more general and generative pair, some “you” and some “me.” And it is this doubling that makes the philosophy translatable: “you” does not need to be Lucilius and “me” does not need to be Seneca. In fact, if the pronouns were chained to those specific nouns, there would be no possibility for philosophy here, only a history of two specific men. The thing would become a matter of mere words. After the ideae comes the idos. Plato would call the latter the εἶδος, and the usual modern transcription is eidos. Understanding the distinction between the idea and the idos is difficult, says Seneca, but he wants to make sure you credit the difficulty to Plato’s account, not his own.50 Seneca returns to his literary paintbox to help us out. He says, “Just above I used the image of a painter.”51 Actually, Seneca used not the image of a painter, but rather the image of a painter painting an image.52 This oscillation of subject and object is itself a telling moment; the metaphysics of Senecan artistry requires the confusion: it allows for the movement between abstract representation and concrete reality. Seneca continues, “He would look at the man himself, when he wanted to reproduce Vergil with his palette.”53 “The idea was the face of Vergil, the exemplar of the work that was to come. The idos is that which the artist draws from this and puts upon his work.”54 The distinction is thus glossed, “The one the artist imitates, the other he creates.” Shortly thereafter Seneca writes, “The idos is within the opus, the idea is outside of the opus. And it is not just outside of the opus, but it is anterior to the opus.”55

50

The Sublime Seneca

These distinctions allow us to re-evaluate this Seneca who is painting the portrait of metaphysics. He does not so much hope to capture the thing itself as to set in his work the idos of metaphysics, not its substance but its likeness. Seneca is an artist whose medium is the epistle and whose material is philosophy. Instead of oil on canvas we have philosophy on papyrus roll. The work of making the work itself, the opera involved in fabricating the opus, involves translating this difference between idea and idos. Seneca leverages the metaphor of painting as a means of capturing the distance and deferral involved in the movement from the one to the other. The world we live in is itself one great work of art. It can itself be described metaphorically as a great canvas. But, more importantly, it really “is” itself a giant machine of metaphor perpetually translating from idea to idos. The Form of the table is perpetually being translated into concrete tables in the here and now.56 The ontological status of the world of specious appearances cannot be segregated from the ontological status of art and artistry. Each is a metaphor for the other. Each translates the other. If we dismiss Seneca’s trope as a “mere” metaphor, we miss a key point of the letter and its theory of literature. The world around us is itself also “merely” metaphorical. In fact we are encouraged to focus on the movement back up the chain of being that the idos or work of art allows. By means of the idos we can think back to the idea. The insubstantial work of art allows us to begin our own metaphorical journey back towards the source of being rather than becoming mired in the world of appearances. There are two modes of being left. They are dealt with in two short sentences. That is, the first four modes receive almost all of our attention. The last two are given the status of simple assertions that either do not require or simply will not receive commentary.57 The fifth mode is those things which communiter sunt. This means omnia. And by omnia Seneca means homines, pecora, res. The fifth modality is, then, “reality,” the world of concrete things.58 The sixth mode is the ghostly double of the fifth. These are the things which quasi sunt. These are virtual realities, the as-if real. The “examples” offered are void and time, inane and tempus. In fact, the sixth mode houses the fifth: things exist in space and time. These as-if essences provide the setting within which the actual resides. The virtual space of the letters is a void that nevertheless offers a potential ethical plenitude with which to fill one’s life. The virtual time of their narrative unfolding is a literary as-if that can really help us in the here and now. Meanwhile the here and the now have to be reappraised. The omnia of the world are not prior to anything. They are posterior logical categories. The

Writing metaphysics

51

whole world of appearances is not some independent reality but instead a highly dependent one from which we would wisely free ourselves.59 And, suddenly, a break in the tenor of the letter: “What good are these fine distinctions going to do me?”60 asks the interlocutor conjured within the virtual space of the letter. The narrator paints a portrait of the recipient reading the letter. The idos of this reader’s reaction is painted onto the canvas. The answer to this question might come as something of a surprise given the copious rehearsal of the philosophy of being that has just taken place: all of this does no good at all. Nihil.61 Nevertheless this Nothing is not exactly nothing. Ontology, or, rather, reflections on ontology, offer ethical possibilities:62 “What good are these fine distinctions going to do me?” None, if you ask me. But just as that engraver with weary eyes long fixed on his work relaxes them by sending them elsewhere, and, as they say, feeds them, just so we ought to relax our mind periodically, and we ought to refresh it with certain amusements. But let the very amusements be opera.63

The workman turns from his work to amuse himself with . . . more work. The metaphor of the artist turning aside from his works is written into the works of Seneca as a turn back towards work. Once again the detour is part of the tour. The metaphysics was both the work written into the letter and the work that allows us to take a break from the work of the letters themselves. Seneca writes, and in so doing he works to carve out an elaborately wrought ethical universe of Letters. The artfully rendered idos of metaphysics in this one letter distracts us from the idea of ethics even as it restores to us the proper perspective from which to view this ethical universe. Ontology makes for a useful distraction. Seneca writes, “From every notion, even if it is utterly removed from philosophy, I attempt to dredge up something and to make it useful. And what is there that is further removed from moral correction than the notions that I just went over? What can I take from them which will check my desires?”64 The devil’s advocate comes up with an answer to his own question. Philosophy has just been identified with moral philosophy. And so a rather disturbing idea arises: Platonic ontology might not really be philosophy for Seneca. It might be the sort of thing that can be put to good ethical use when properly reworked by a skilled philosopher-cum-artist. It might be no different, then, from a visit to the gladiators, a trip to a seaside resort, the story of noisy lodgings over some baths, or the narrative of a dark passage through a tunnel. Presently, Seneca shifts away from that version of things: Platonic ontology both is and is not (moral) philosophy. Platonic ontology teaches us that those

52

The Sublime Seneca

things which impinge upon our senses and provoke our desires are not really real: negat Plato ex iis esse quae uere sint. We are instructed to attend rather to those things that are eternal. A portrait of the sublime ensues. And this is an ethically loaded portrait of the sublime. That is, turning our eyes aloft is now not just a metaphysical act, but it is a specifically ethical one. Indeed, its ethical valence is precisely what concerns us at this juncture given that we have declared that metaphysics itself has only a sort of quasi-being and is potentially a void so far as ethics is concerned. Knowing the stuff of philosophy is not the same as being wise. And the story of metaphysics needs to be translated into an ethical story. Indeed, the story of metaphysics becomes a preface to ethics. We are exhorted to send our mind towards those things which are eternal: ad illa mittamus animum quae aeterna sunt. This is the world of ideas/ideae. Seneca conjures a likeness of a man sending his thoughts towards the divinity of thought itself. Seneca gives us, then, a portrait of the sublimity of this realm that generates out of itself our own world, a world that is but a canvas painted after the likeness of the ideae. Seneca continues: “As they whirl on high let us marvel at the forms of all things and god turning among them and looking out on their behalf. Although he cannot make these things immortal, because the material itself precludes it, he seeks to safeguard them from death and with his mind (ratio) he attempts to defend them from the defect of their body (corpus).”65 Let us marvel, then, at the apotheosis of the figure of the artist: this figure is himself an idos who has been translated into the sky. The metaphor of the artist has been sublimated into a figure who guarantees all of the other metaphors. Now the image of the artist orchestrates the sublime movement of a whole universe of forms. The commentary on quo proposito in Moral Letter 108 can be resumed and extended at this moment: the artist and his intentions have become metaphors for the smooth functioning of metaphoricity itself. Seneca declares, “For everything abides not because it is eternal, but because it is looked after by a solicitous regent. Immortal things do not need someone to watch over them. These mortal things the artist preserves by using his own power to vanquish the fragility of matter” (58.27).66 The artifex who merely painted pictures in the metaphysical segment of the latter returns here towards its close as the artifex of the world itself.67 He is the sustaining cause of the world. His solicitude is superadded to the universe of ideae as a means of ensuring that the idos abides as best and as long as it may. In Letter 108 we are taught that readers’ intentions matter. In Letter 58 we are taught that authors’ intentions matter. The intending reader and the

Writing metaphysics

53

intending writer converge at the moment of textual reception. And then something profound can happen: a translatio proba can take place. What was an abstract word can become a concrete deed. This image of a god acts both as a metaphor of and a metaphor for literary authorship as well. After all of this talk of modes of being, what is the ontological status of god himself? He is not a part of the summary of being, and yet he intervenes at a key moment in the narrative of being. He appears right where the abstract and concrete meet. Nevertheless, he is himself a fiction, something introduced as a necessary supplement to the whirl of forms that we see above us.68 Indeed, we are told that were god dead, there would be no world-as-work. Without his solicitude, everything would fall apart. And now Seneca brings us down from the sublime and metaphysics and back to earth and ethics. Seneca makes an ethical observation: Good, clean moral living is healthy for you. It turns out that Plato, that critic of bodily being, lived a long life. His prudent relationship to the truth of bodily being in fact prolonged his own existence. Because of his artful tutela sui Plato died at eighty-one. The metaphysician has become a physician of sorts: health tips from Dr. Plato. This is not a Plato one expected to meet. It is not even a Plato who seems especially Platonic. Plato gets written up as a Senecan figure: he is preoccupied with the care of the self, and he is duly rewarded for it. The metaphysician par excellence gives testimony to the happiness of the ethical life. By translating his wisdom into an ethic of self-regulation, says Seneca, Plato survived many dangers and sea-journeys. By sagely translating between metaphysics and ethics, Plato drew out the journey of his life. This image of Plato, this idos Platonicum is itself multiply metaphorical. This image translates between metaphysics and ethics, Greek and Latin, Plato and Seneca, dialogues and epistles. The letter is coming to a close. The final segment after we hear of old man Plato is a meditation on suicide. When is the right time to die? Seneca examines the life that is worth living: this life is one where a man is still in possession of the better portions of his faculties, where his mind remains strong and in control. What happens, then, when tutela sui becomes impossible and when the artifex can no longer orchestrate the vast revolution of ideae? If the mind itself starts to be damaged, if one loses the enjoyment of oneself, if life becomes a burden to all of life’s own purposes, then it is time to die. The portrait here, then, is of an artist who is no longer able to look after himself. In contradistinction to the great celestial artificer, the taint of materiality afflicts a mortal one. The body will have its revenge. But before

54

The Sublime Seneca

the body can have a full Thyestean measure of revenge, the animus, that token of the divine within man, should be willing to will its own non-existence. An ethics of mastery guides life on the model of, as well as with an eye to, the metaphysical sublime. But if such becomes impossible, then it is time for the artist to die. And here the artful letter closes: sed in longum exeo. “But I’ve gotten far afield.” Has he? Seneca adds, “There is still more material which could potentially draw out the day.” Did he wish to sustain the matter of this material, the lively letter could be drawn on, the ideas could swirl before us still longer. But, adds Seneca, “How can a man put an end to his life if he can’t to his letter? So ‘Farewell,’ a finale that you will read more gladly than these undiluted deaths. Farewell.”69 Have no fear: the divine mind that animates the letters has not died. In fact the next letter will meditate on metaphor all over again. Vergil and Plato reappear. The game of proprie gets played out one more time. God tumbles about among his ideae both literally and metaphorically: Letter 59 again has a figure of masterful artistry and a masterful artistry of figures. Other letters play similar games. While there is life there is art. And even death has its literary qualities. Like the man he once tutored, Seneca too can justly exclaim, Qualis artifex pereo. “Seneca,” the likeness of the author written into the Letters by their author, “is”/is a metaphor for Seneca, the author. And “of essence” in the literary process itself is the status of the “is” that yokes “Seneca” and Seneca.70 And so let us take one final look at the artist, to draw his portrait as he draws portraits. Specifically the Senecan artist “is” metaphorical. First, the question of being itself cannot be separated from the notion of the movement from idea to idos and the metaphoricity this translatio entails. To the extent that an artist exists, an artist is already implicated in the metaphorical quality of being itself. The Senecan artist’s essence is medial and mediating. My formula is obviously something of a paradox, as it offers a designation of determinate being when we are in fact interested in the translation between abstract being and the realm of becoming. Let me gloss it then. The artist is no mere thing in and of the world. The artist and his action reproduce a more profound structure of the universe itself. The artist orchestrates metaphor. The artist sets ideas whirling. The artist translates. The artists straddles both the metaphysical and the physical. The careful movement between these registers is itself artistry. Moreover, the proper appreciation of the relationship between the two registers is a matter of ethics. In this sense we can say that Senecan artistry

Writing metaphysics

55

performs ethics and that the letters “are” ethical. Their content is ethical, but their form and their mode of exposition are likewise ethical. The journey on which they take the reader is a movement that recapitulates the metaphor of existence itself. Something is gained in translation when we discuss Plato’s metaphysics: we learn how to understand the good life itself.71 Seneca chooses to explicate Platonic metaphysics because, for Plato, or at least for Seneca’s Plato, matter doesn’t matter. The status (or lack thereof ) of matter in Platonic metaphysics allows the letter to enact the transfer from metaphysics to ethics, and from letter to life. In sum, this letter on metaphysics offers an opportunity to see the logic of letters. The logic of letters is a logic of translation and metaphor. Senecan translation entails both a metaphysics of artistry and an ethics of artistry. An artist is a god in his own right and among his works is his very life. Conversely, that special example of the species homo named Seneca may himself be an idos, but his Letters paint the portrait of another Seneca, the idea of Seneca. Furthermore the life of opera, of literary works, is more real and more permanent than is the mundane work of mere life. But nevertheless the two are and must be related. Each sustains the ethical validity of the other via a metaphysics of metaphor.

chapter 3

The nature of Seneca

“” inquit Trimalchio “quicquid videtis hic positum, de uno corpore est factum.”

(Petronius, Satyricon 69)

We have been examining the way in which Seneca’s philosophical writing does its work. First: How can one read so as to find philosophical content? Next, how can representations be turned into ethical realities? The first question cannot be answered without an appeal to an intending author. And the second as well requires the addition of a medial figure, the solicitous author. Accordingly one has to address the nature of authorship head-on. On the one hand, assenting to a philosophical proposition ought not to entail any appeal to the author of that proposition. Consider the lekton “Cato is walking”: this “sayable” either is or is not the case. “Cato is walking” is something that we judge immediately. We see the walking, we are not told of it. On the other hand, although Seneca’s writings may well contain statements of the form “Cato is walking,” these are part of a much more complex apparatus. And this complexity extends well beyond the already complex question of the Stoic logical apparatus itself.1 Nevertheless, my own discussion is far less concerned with the formal role played by sayables and assertables and modality within the Stoic system of logic than it is with a narratology of concepts like sayables within Seneca’s presentation of Stoic thought. And this narratological approach seems to be all the more justified in that Seneca himself – or at least the narrators of his various texts – can so often be found shooing us away from concerning ourselves overly with the details of Stoic logic. Seneca writes the words “Cato is walking.” And then he discusses them. Or, rather, an author by the name of Seneca wrote a text that purported to be a letter to a man named Lucilius in which the words “Cato is walking” appear. See Moral Letter 117. The word before that statement about Cato is, “I say . . . (dico).”2 So the words “Cato is walking” are already quoted, “I say, 56

The nature of Seneca

57

‘Cato is walking.’” Just because some “I” says it, we are asked to imagine that our senses are really beholding it. As a lekton “Cato is walking” is either true or false. Saying, “I say, ‘Cato is walking’” turns the proposition (lekton) into a statement. In fact in this letter, the subject of the verb dico is not even the narrator of the letter. It is an unnamed expositor of philosophical orthodoxy. The letter leads onto its virtual stage a speaker who walks us through Stoic doctrine.3 Those who care about narratological niceties will punctuate, then, as follows: “The narrator of the letter says, ‘Someone says, “I say, ‘Cato is walking.’”’” It turns out that in the end the narrator of the letter will say that he does not much care about Cato or his walking, at least not in any dogmatic sense. It was important to hear from the unnamed Stoic and to give ear to him as he expounded orthodoxy, but the flow of the letter moves beyond him. What the narrator cares about is what will become of “you,” the person who reads all of these various words. And the narrator, “is” he the author? In identifying the two are we somehow yoking two of the distinct modalities of being surveyed in Moral Letter 58 without explicitly acknowledging as much? At its core, narratology is a tool for making descriptions.4 It helps one to avoid casual confusions in those places where a confusion is possible. For example, the phrase “Seneca says . . . ” is fundamentally misleading. Seneca never says anything. The writer is not the narrator.5 And writing is not speech. One can be casual about such distinctions in many contexts, but sometimes it is important to be attentive to them. And this is one of those occasions. The hard and fast lines one might draw between authors and characters as well as those that differentiate separate layers of speech can blur in the texts we have before us. And, it turns out, this blurring is philosophically consequential. The how of Senecan philosophy matters to the what of Senecan philosophy. Indeed, the how very much affects our understanding of the “what” that commonly goes by the name of Seneca. And, given the complex role of authorship in the story of metaphysics from Letter 58, it seems very necessary to revisit the question in an expanded form. This time we will explore it with an eye to physics. Moral Letter 58 already invited us to do as much: the heavenly artifex up there was looking after the real world down here. How, then, does the story of nature fit in with Seneca’s philosophical storytelling more generally? The answer to this question, in good Senecan fashion, will itself be a heterogeneous multiplicity that nevertheless is made to converge upon a seeming unity. This unity will turn out to be both a philosophical claim and a demonstration of that same claim. The story of philosophy and the

58

The Sublime Seneca

philosophy of the story once again converge. In fact, without this double and co-ordinated movement of story and philosophy, the Natural Questions would never be able to provide coherent answers to its own queries.6 What follows will be an exploration of a structural feature of the Natural Questions. This is a selective reading, to say the least. Of importance here is the relation of physics to metaphysics and literature to philosophy. Rather than do justice to a long and complex text, I seek only to put this somewhat neglected work in play within the context of a broader array of Senecan writings.7 The corpus of Seneca is filled with differences. His texts fall into a number of different genres. Tragedies, moral essays, moral letters, and natural science are all to be found.8 But, more importantly, these categories are not tidily partitioned off from one another: the tragedies are filled with stories of the heavens and ethical discourses that we can find handled in extenso in other genres. Meanwhile the moral works are literary in every sense of the word while also regularly casting an eye towards nature and the order of the cosmos. And, of course, the Natural Questions are filled with heated ethical passages.9 And so too is the text suffused with verse citations.10 If we pause to note it, we can also find in the Natural Questions issues of character, plot, and storytelling.11 We have, then, different classes of texts as well as stylistic differences within texts. We should add to this catalog of differences Seneca’s methodological diversity as well. Seneca’s scientific method admits of multiple orders of explanation. A number of these are not consonant with our own ideas of science.12 Some issues are addressed via appeals to logic, and analogy predominates here.13 Logic is, as one might guess, the dominant mode within this work.14 However, other questions occasion an engagement with authority. And the major species of authority that attract Seneca’s interest are philosophers, poets, historians, and maiores nostri. In addition to the concrete methodological heterogeneity of Seneca which juxtaposes ratio and auctoritas, we can look more closely at the logic of Seneca’s reasoning in its own right, the ratio of his ratio. Here as well we observe a collection of differences. As an intellectual framework Stoicism itself, of course, has a quasi-heterogeneous structure.15 One typically divides it into three branches: logic, ethics, and natural science. One is not, however, supposed to take this divergence for a fundamental disparity, but rather to see here a plurality that subsists within a unity.16 The solution to the apparent paradox of Stoicism is to be found within basic tenets of Stoicism itself. Logos predominates: the universe is both reason and rational. Logic apprehends logos in its own terms. Ethics explores how one might live

The nature of Seneca

59

in accordance with logos. Natural science finds in the visible world the traces of the rational order that subtends it.17 The aforementioned heterogeneity of Senecan ratio is, then, in part only seeming, an artifact of a perspective that fails to appreciate the story of uniformity on offer within Stoicism.18 Yet an interlocutor who stated, “Of course: he was a Stoic, after all . . . ”19 would only have assumed a conclusion without attending to the process that yields this product. Manifold and themselves heterogenous techniques are employed to suture together the “philosophy of Seneca” as a putative unity. Furthermore, the other differences outlined above are also overcome: different modes of argumentation, different orders of explanation, different genres, different narrative levels, even differences between speakers can all be surmounted. Everything is in communication with everything else. And this communication allows for the Senecan corpus to be transformed from a body of texts into an index of spirit. Let us look, then, at Seneca’s Natural Questions. Our aim will not be a better appreciation of the Stoic doctrine of nature. Instead, we will meditate on the “Seneca” part of the phrase Seneca’s Natural Questions. The name Seneca offers an obvious as well as obviously misleading answer to the problem of the coherence of the Natural Questions. The figure of the author and its conjoined twin, the specter of the work, often serve as a pair of tropes that facilitate criticism. The two notions are leveraged to explain (away) interpretive issues, even as they are themselves very much in need of interpretation. Indeed, the notion of “the contradictions of the man himself ” offers an especially enticing means by which to solve critical problems by pushing them into the realm of biography. I do not wish to read the Natural Questions according to that sort of paradigm: the author is cause, the text effect; the author wills, the text manifests the will. The issue I wish to examine instead is the manner in which the text argues for – “authors” even – a sense of how authors and texts work. The story of authorship on offer is philosophically freighted. And, accordingly, starting from a position where authors intend and texts bear witness to intentions entails setting out from the end-point of a philosophical argument and assuming a conclusion before even beginning the journey. We need to explore a specific heterogenous homology that “is” philosophical and biographical and something still more, specifically, narratological. The coherence of the Question of Nature comprises an impossible unity that exists only by means of a set of carefully orchestrated crossreferences.20 Each of the terms is itself a disparate plurality and yet nevertheless when properly deployed and woven together a product is

60

The Sublime Seneca

produced: both philosophy and the philosopher. That this pair echoes that of the work and the author is no accident. The narratology of wisdom matters because it is not merely a descriptive exercise. Enlightenment is a process promoted specifically by the layered and structured deployment of “me” and “you” and “us” and “them” in the text. Moreover, we have not only a collection of characters but concomitantly a set of perspectives. The narrative frame presents these “character focalizers” whose bias and limitation are frequently highlighted.21 And this same frame provides an external focalizer. The narrator offers descriptions that are themselves interpretations. Moreover, this frame encourages us to privilege certain character focalizers over others.22 Let us examine “you” first. Here we can find an actual “you,” a specific second person singular: Lucilius, Roman gentleman, magistrate, and friend.23 This is the same “you” deployed in the Moral Letters, and it is indeed similarly deployed. Many of the most rousing moral passages in the Natural Questions contain a vocative that calls out specifically to Lucilius and commands his attention.24 Sometimes this you is marked as a you-at-a-distance.25 The text bridges that distance in multiple senses.26 Lucilius is not present at the here and now of the narration. But then again, “you” more generally are also not present. Lucilius as the specific second person regularly slides into a generic second person. And if we halt this slide by insisting that we are not to hear ourselves being addressed when we read the word “you,” then we forestall an important movement of the argument itself.27 For the most part, it can be very hard to state categorically that any of the second person addresses are necessarily made to Lucilius where the vocative form of his name is not present. And, of course, even then we could readily talk of these moments in tropological as opposed to biographical terms.28 This hypothetical you is regularly addressed by the narrator of the Natural Questions. It also seems to talk back to him. Or, rather, the narrator imagines what “you” will say. He responds to what he knows “you” want from him.29 There is a quasi-dialogue at work between “you” and “me.” But, at the end of the day, these might not actually be two different parties. “You” might be another name for “me.”30 Seneca’s ideal other can readily convert into a story of the self.31 Of course, the friend has long been a double for the self in this kind of writing: Cicero’s On Friendship insisted upon such.32 When he exhorts Lucilius to self praise in the preface to Book 4a, the long series of reflections that are to fill “your” head are packed with specific details that sit very well with the biography of Seneca himself.33

The nature of Seneca

61

We need to make a survey, then, of a homologous collection of sets wherein difference is entertained and yet overcome in the very constitution of the set itself. Set number one: philosophy. Philosophy consists of logic, ethics, and natural history. Set number two: Seneca’s sources. Theses are philosophers, literary figures, natural historians. Set number three: Seneca, the Seneca who writes philosophy, literature, and natural history. Set number four: narratology. Seneca writes of “me,” “you,” and “them.” What concept can unify these disparate elements? And, more importantly, how is one going to tell the story of this unity? These categories are somewhat tendentious, but that seeming vice is rather a virtue: they are all meant to collapse and when they do so, they converge upon a point rather than scatter in disparate directions. Let us add to the collection before engaging in the critique. Compound set number one: Seneca the stylist.34 When writing philosophy, literature, and natural history, Seneca employs in every genre rhetorical modes that one might characterize as typical of the others as well. That is, the plays are filled with ethics as well as meteorology. And the story of meteorology is filled with ethics as well as citations of Ovid. Compound set number two: the sources are themselves complex collocations. Flavius Papirius Fabianus is a philosopher, literary artist, and natural historian.35 Vergil is a philosopher, literary artist, and natural historian. Compound set number three: the sources themselves are multivocal. Thus “my book,” “your book,” and “his book” all themselves contain their own internal collections of “me,” “you,” and “them.”36 And now we can turn to the Natural Questions and its unity amidst heterogeneity. Seneca offers a description of the philosophical status of heterogeneity for us, at the end of his long discussion of the nature of comets. Seneca transitions to a discussion of the mundus. The argument begins with a challenge to the reader: “And how about this? The universe itself, if you reflect upon it, isn’t it put together from diverse elements?”37 We then hear about the different seasons of the year and the different constellations that attend them. Seneca extends his position with another question that already contains its own answer: “Don’t you see how much the elements contrast with one another? They are heavy and light, cold and hot, wet and dry. This whole concord of the universe is composed out of discordant elements (concordia ex discordibus constat).”38 One can, of course, say the same of the very book that makes this claim. One last note: it is possible to play the grammarian game here. The phrase concordia discors could itself lead us to a diverse collection of (poetic) authors and (metaphysical-cum-ethical-cum-programmatic) passages: Horace, Ovid,

62

The Sublime Seneca

Manilius, and Lucan all use the collocation.39 Rather than discussing Seneca’s allusions to Roman poets, let us posit the following instead: what is at stake in Seneca is the intertextuality of the cosmos more generally. Tracing allusions should not distract us from the idea of integration and harmony itself. Moral Letter 108 asked us to read this way: a philologist’s hunt for poetic antecedents ought not to distract us from the philosophy and its own poetics of enlightenment. At the moment, then, we have only the sense of the general congruence between the question of writing and the question of the world. But Seneca next transitions to the topic of the author of the universe, nature herself, and we find a number of specific echoes with the question of authorship more generally: Non ad unam natura formam opus suum praestat, sed ipsa uarietate se iactat. Alia maiora, alia uelociora aliis fecit, alia ualidiora, alia temperatiora; quaedam eduxit a turba, ut singula et conspicua procederent, quaedam in gregem misit. Ignorat naturae potentiam qui illi non putat aliquando licere, nisi quod saepius fecit. Nature does not offer her opus in a single form. In the very variety of it she vaunts herself. She makes some things grander than others, some more swift, some more powerful, some more measured. Certain things she plucks from the crowd so that they can advance as singular and conspicuous. Certain she dismisses into the mob. Ignorance of nature’s power, that’s what leads a man to think that she can never do a thing unless she often does it. (Natural Questions 7.27.5)

Nature is a master stylist, and she knows it. Were nature an orator, we would say of her that she was well versed in amplification and diminution. Accordingly, were a critic to believe that an author is some simple “stylistic unity,”40 then this would reflect a naive understanding of authorship: the superlative stylist is capable of unusual effects when they are demanded. In his essay “What is an Author?” Foucault observes that the author “serves to neutralize the contradictions that may emerge in a series of texts” and that the author acts as “a point where contradictions are resolved, where incompatible elements are at last tied together or organized around a fundamental or originating contradiction.”41 A concordia discors coheres, then, as a concept precisely because one posits some anterior and higher order that sutures the contradictions. After we assume the existence of an author, then contradictions become more seeming than real. They designate the place where a failure of perspective has occurred.

The nature of Seneca

63

One has by now likely noted a certain seemingly uncritical and retrograde tendency on my own part throughout this volume. I seem to ill play the part of critic of the category of the author when I so regularly conjure a Seneca who is the subject of a variety of finite verbs. But I wish to make myself the author of a somewhat different point about authorship. It is the following: that the text authors a sense of the author. Furthermore, the text insists that successful interpretation arrives where one has encountered the author as the highest principle of ordering. This is the sequel of the claim above that Seneca intends for intentionality to matter: the text authors the validity of its own philosophy of authorship. At this juncture we can continue reading along with Foucault. Foucault shifts away from the way the author-function is generally adopted and over to a series of observations about the narratology of authorship. He observes the way in which “the text always contains a certain number of signs referring to the author.”42 Foucault insists upon the heterogeneity of the various “I”s that one finds in a text: the first person of the preface, of the narration, of the demonstration.43 These are discordant for Foucault, and they furnish a point of critical intervention. Nevertheless, these same different first person singulars are presented as concordant by the Natural Questions. These different layers and this split self are only seemingly different and only apparently split. Only ignorance of the potentia of authorship permits one to make the error of seeing heterogeneity in the text of the world. The above passages from Book 7 make the question of heterogeneity seem too incidental. The topic emerges in the middle of a discussion of comets. And even if these arguments do appear at one of the marked structural segments of the work, namely a prolix ethical meditation that closes a book, one might nevertheless have the sense that Seneca has merely stumbled onto the issue and is not especially keen to flag it for us. However the topic makes a prominent return two books later in what is today known as Book 2. Though traditionally called “Book 2” owing to its order of preservation in the manuscripts, this book was likely the final book of the work.44 And there the topic of heterogeneity is even more strongly associated with questions of authors and intentions. Natural Questions 2.2 formally defines unitary bodies in contradistinction to composite bodies. Seneca claims that aër is a unitary body. The chief consequence of this proposition – although it is in fact likely its chief aim – is that the atmosphere becomes a medial medium offering a continuous connection that attaches the earth to the starry heavens. The demonstration of the unity of the aër continues, and it contains within it an analogic proof:

64

The Sublime Seneca Esse autem unitatem in aëre uel ex hoc intellegi potest quod corpora nostra inter se cohaerent. Quid enim est aliud quod teneret illa quam spiritus? Quid est aliud quo animus noster agitetur? Quis est illi motus nisi intentio? Quae intentio nisi ex unitate? Quae unitas, nisi haec esset in aëre? Quid autem aliud producit fruges et segetem imbecillam ac uirentem erigit, arbores aut distendit in ramos aut in altum exigit quam spiritus intentio et unitas? That there is a unity to the atmosphere can be understood even from this: our bodies are themselves coherent. And what else holds them together if not soul (spiritus)? What else is it that impels our minds (animus)? What is mental movement if not tension (intentio)? And is there any tension without unity? And what is unity if this were not something possessed by the atmosphere? What indeed brings forth the crops, what raises up frail, green grain, what makes the trees stretch out their branches, what drives them aloft other than oneness and tension of spirit (spiritus intentio et unitas)? (Natural Questions 2.6.6)

The analogy is complex, and acceptance of it entails taking on a whole host of interlocking propositions. In fact, that is the core claim: everything is indeed interlocking.45 The universe coheres just as our body coheres.46 The universe is animated just as our body is animated. In fact all living things – and the universe is among them – share the same core mechanism of animation: tension of spirit. Of course, intentio and spiritus need to be taken in multiple simultaneous senses throughout the passage even though not all elements of this multiplicity will always be in play at the same time. Even, then, as the passage explicates the restricted technical sense of the words as they are used by philosophers, it also evokes the non-technical meanings of these same terms.47 According to the narrator, there is not in fact a difference between the ancient and the modern conception of Jove, at least not among the wise. Jupiter may well have his cult and temples, but that’s not the thing sensible men then and now have in mind when they speak of him: sed eundem quem nos Iouem intellegunt, rectorem custodemque uniuersi, animum ac spiritum mundi, operis huius dominum et artificem, cui nomen omne conuenit. Vis illum fatum uocare, non errabis; hic est ex quo suspensa sunt omnia, causa causarum. Vis illum prouidentiam dicere, recte dic; est enim cuius consilio huic mundo prouidetur, ut inoffensus exeat et actus suos explicet. Vis illum naturam uocare, non peccabis; hic est ex quo nata sunt omnia, cuius spiritu uiuimus. Vis illum uocare mundum, non falleris; ipse enim est hoc quod uides totum, partibus suis inditus, et se sustinens et sua. They understand Jove the same way as we do: he is the guide and guard of the universe, the heart and soul of the world (animus ac spiritus mundi), the master and maker of this work (opus), someone whom every name suits. If

The nature of Seneca

65

you want to call him fate ( fatum) you will not be mistaken. He is that upon which everything depends, the cause of causes. If you want to call him providence, you will be right. He is that thing according to whose council provision is made for this universe (mundus) such that it may make its way unimpeded and develop its own inner workings. If you want to call him nature, you won’t be in the wrong. He is that according to which everything is born, by whose spirit (spiritus) we live. If you want to call him the universe (mundus), you will not be mistaken. He himself is this whole which you see, instilled within his own parts, both sustaining himself and his own. (Natural Questions 2.45.1–3)

This passage argues for the identity of the different. It also stages an identity of persons amidst its heterogenous perspectives. Or, more properly, it folds the omniscient first person narrator into the narrative of the ubiquity of Jove.48 The literary form and the narrative contents interact in this discussion of the interaction between the divine and the universe.49 “We” and “they” are yoked in our appreciation of the identity (eundem) of Jove. This singularity of opinion between the two parties appreciates that Jove is a collection of linked concepts: guidance and protection, mind and spirit, mastery and making.50 The two parties agree that Jove consists of doubled faculties which always apply themselves to a single object: the world-as-work. The uniuersum is the mundus is the opus. The paragraph assigns a task to its “you.” You are in possession of a collection of incomplete propositions about Jove. The narrator invites you to set them forth and then to appreciate that “you” are talking about one and the same thing (idem) when you designate Jove variously. And, further, your position is in fact one and the same as is “ours” and “theirs” when it comes to the polyphonous naming of Jove. “You” have a desire to name. What you will find when you act upon this desire is that this futurity will reproduce the past understanding of Jove even as it mirrors the present-in-the-text exegesis of him. First, second, and third person are mappable onto present, past, and future tenses. Where you will be, the narrative ego already is. The difficulty of the concept of Jove lies largely in his double status. Yes, Seneca’s argument is difficult because it articulates a received difficulty.51 But I am less interested in the history of the idea of god than I am in the details of its present articulation. Jove is not just a helmsman and guard. He is also both inside and outside the universe. Everything may well depend upon him, but he too is effectively one of those same things. His relationship to the universe is simultaneously one of homogeneity and heterogeneity. But more important is the claim that Jove is the spiritus of life itself. This takes us right back to the description of aër. We were asked to understand

66

The Sublime Seneca

the atmosphere as akin to spiritus. Spiritus gives coherence to our bodies and it stirs our intellects within us.52 Jove as nature is the animating principle of the world-body and the world-soul, and the thing that links the two of them to produce a unity. The concept of spirit allows matter and mind to be related to one another organically.53 The concept of authorial intention allows work and meaning to be related to one another organically. Textual hermeneutics is of course at stake here. But note as well that the metaphysics of interpretation more generally is in play. On the one hand, some of this is done by fiat from the beginning. Jove is an author of an opus. And he is an intending author given that his work is marked not just by his artisanship (artifex), but also by his mastery (dominus).54 But the issue is revisited in a more complex manner. Jove was initially called the spiritus mundi, but we now discover that if you wanted to call him the mundus itself, that this would be appropriate as well. He is both the thing and the thing that sustains the thing. Jove is the whole. He is also within the parts of the whole. He holds together the parts, and in so doing he simultaneously holds himself together. “You” are attempting to understand the meaning of the heterogenous opus that is Nature. With a bit of guidance on the narrator’s part, you will not go astray. You will appreciate that Jove is both homologous to and nevertheless distinct from nature. Al(i)ter but idem: you are attempting to understand that heterogenous opus that is the Natural Questions. With a bit of guidance on the narrator’s part, you will not go astray. You will appreciate that Seneca is both homologous to and nevertheless distinct from the Natural Questions. He is inside it as the narrator. He is outside and before it as the author. The spirit of Seneca as a sustaining tenor, as a ubiquitous intentionality, makes possible the coherence of the Question of Nature as encompassed by the universe of the text.55 We find that Seneca’s homologies allow for the transcending of differences between logical and narrative orders. Inasmuch as Seneca takes seriously his own story of metaphors from Moral Letters 58, what are for us often illicit transfers are nevertheless for him vital elements of the enterprise. Conceptual doublets proliferate in the text. Hence Seneca’s passage on mirroring mirrors the text itself.56 This is not the first time we have seen that “the x of y” and “the y of x” sit next to one another in his thought. But, obviously, “reflecting representation” and “representing reflection” threatens to cast us into a hall of mirrors from which there is no exit. Nevertheless, Senecan metaphysics does not fear a descent into infinity and a chaos of illusions that spring from still other illusions. Instead he is focussed on the

The nature of Seneca

67

ascent: it is possible and necessary. One can move from image to thing, from uerba to res, from idos to idea. We can begin with Seneca’s description of the optics of rainbows. This passage “reflects” the way optics more generally work in the text:57 iamnunc illud accedit, quod aeque manifestum est speculi ratione imaginem reddi, quia numquam nisi e contrario redditur, id est nisi ex altera parte stetit quod appareret, ex altera quod ostendere. Rationes, quae non persuadent sed cogunt, a geometris afferuntur nec dubium cuiquam relinquitur quin arcus imago solis sit male expressi ob uitium figuramque speculi. Nos interim temptemus alias probationes quae de plano legi possint. Inter argumenta sic nascentis arcus pono quod celerrime nascitur . . . And now we have this as well: it is equally clear that the image is produced in the manner of a mirror (speculi ratio) since it is never produced except in opposition. That is, on one side there was that which appeared, on the other that which made manifest. The geometers bring to bear explanations (rationes) that do not persuade but compel, and nobody is left any room to doubt but that the rainbow is an image of the sun that has been ill-expressed owing to the shape and defect of the mirror. And yet let us make trial of other proofs that can be read informally (de plano). Among the arguments (argumenta) that a rainbow is thus born I set the following: the swiftness of its birth . . . (Natural Questions 1.4.1–2)

The image of reason, the imago rationis, much like the likeness of the sun, has itself been decomposed. The white light of reason and the rationality of nature itself has been exploded into its diffracted colors: we see a veritable peacock’s tail of arguments in its place. And we see more than just arguments. We see literariness as against geometry more generally. We have allusions and intertexts, rhetorical expansions, sententia and colores, and, most importantly, narrators and characters, speakers and addressees. The relationship between these parties is carefully orchestrated so as to yield the proper literary-philosophical process and product. The light of reason has not so much been ill-expressed because of a defect of the medium as it has been pointedly displayed precisely in this manner and not in some other. That is because it is vital that “you” hear arguments made by “me” rather than being handed down juridical/mathematical rationes that you are compelled to heed.58 In that circumstance you would assent to reason’s sway, but you would not be an enlightened subject, only subjected to enlightenment.59 Geometry’s rationes possess a double advantage that is eschewed by the narrator: geometry offers a pure rationality that is both the subject and the object of the proof: ratio means both reason and account-of-reason, and, for

68

The Sublime Seneca

the geometers, this state of affairs “works.” But the narrator is neither a god nor a geometer. A quasi-divine figure, the narrator reflects in failed and distorted form both god and the author. A product of the text but also set against it, the author is both within the text and without it, both dependent upon it and the thing from which all else hangs, a thing caused and a cause of causes. “You” need to have this encounter with the author de plano, on the level two-dimensional plane of a virtual here-and-now of the text. And so here you have the narrator. You cannot have an abstract encounter with the author. Unable to look at the sun directly, man needs to contemplate the rainbow instead.60 A narratological approach to the Natural Questions is required if one is to appreciate that enlightenment and perspective are fundamentally intertwined. Knowing nature consists of seeing nature, and, indeed, seeing it from a specific perspective. The philosophy of perspective provides one of the opening themes of the text as a whole. There we are told that we generally mis-measure phenomena because we look at them from our own meager standpoint.61 This failure of perspective leaves the reader assumed to be unable to answer the narrator’s more-than-rhetorical question: What is of principal importance in human affairs?62 The question is repeated seven times. To the first answer we will give pride of place. What matters most is to have seen the whole thing with the mind’s eyes: animo omne uidisse. It is less the seeing than the having thus seen that matters: the revolution comes from the perspective itself. There is the period before one saw thus and the period after one has so seen.63 The reader has yet to see in this manner, the narrator has so seen. Moreover, what is seen is not every individual thing, omnia. What one sees with the mind’s eyes is instead that everything is itself but a single, unitary thing, an omne. When the lot of it has been seen qua lot, then the revolution takes place.64 Of course, this perspective is a specifically divine one: only a god can stand apart from nature and contemplate it even as he is within it.65 Observing the motion of the stars in the sky raises up the animus that contemplates them. Such effectively yields a return to its own origins for the soul (1.pr.11–12). The soul becomes a spectator (spectat, spectator, 1.pr.12) of the universe.66 And it is a curious observer: observation of nature provokes the examination of individual items and then quaestiones: Secure spectat occasus siderum atque ortus et tam diuersas concordantium uias; obseruat ubi quaeque stella primum terris lumen ostendat, ubi columen eius summumque cursus sit, quousque descendat; curiosus spectator excutit singula et quaerit. Quidni quaerat? Scit illa ad se pertinere.

The nature of Seneca

69

Untroubled (secure) it observes the setting of the stars and their rising as well as their courses, concordant despite such diversity. It notes where each star first shows its light to the land, where its summit and the apex of its course is to be found, and how far it descends. A diligent observer, it scrutinizes and investigates individual items. And why shouldn’t it investigate? It knows that these things pertain to itself. (Natural Questions 1.pr.12)

What might initially appear to be chaotic and confusing is ultimately appreciated to be a concordia discors. Natural questions are self-interested questions for the soul. Carefree on the one hand, the soul does nevertheless have a curiosity born of a care-for-the-self: though divergent, securus and curiosus are yoked terms. Apathetic spectatorship is replaced by engaged reflection.67 And this reflection takes the form of a collection of quaestiones that address themselves to various elements of nature.68 When the soul finally gets its answers it comes to know something: god. Pondering the vastness of the universe, the soul comes to scorn the narrowness of its former home.69 The “former home” turns out to be the earth itself. Abstracted reflection on the universe has the uncanny effect of making one realize that what one had taken for one’s home was not quite one’s home after all: Illic demum discit quod diu quaesiit; illic incipit deum nosse. Quid est deus? Mens uniuersi. Quid est deus? Quod uides totum et quod non uides totum. Sic demum magnitudo illi sua redditur, qua nihil maius cogitari potest, si solus est omnia, si opus suum et intra et extra tenet. Thence it at last learns what it had long sought (quaesiit). Thence it begins to know god. What is god? The universe’s mind. The whole that you see and the whole that you do not see. And so finally his own greatness is restored to him, a magnitude than which nothing greater can be conceived: a singularity, he is all things; he sustains his own work both from within and from without. (Natural Questions 1.pr.13)

All of the quaestiones can be resolved into this one: knowing god. Nosse naturam has shifted over to nosse deum.70 But what, after all, is god?71 He is knowing itself: one is supposed to wrap one’s mind around the idea that god is the mind of the universe, the mens uniuersi. And this genitive is both subjective and objective: that is, god is the mind that the universe has as well as the mind that has the universe. Moreover, the grammatical subject-object difference provides no difference in the end once the synthesis of these antitheticals is properly sublated: god is the universe. The biggest idea of all is that there is one single thing that is in fact also everything. And yet, there is a bigger idea still, a supplement that one adds

70

The Sublime Seneca

on to this already grand idea of the identity of the one and the many. This additional concept posits that the one is both inside and outside, that it stands in a distinct relationship separate from the everything that it also is. And, of course, the everything that is, is a work, the work of an author. The author is both before his text, and embedded within it like some narrator of the world-as-text. The author is the mind that is both the subject and object of a uniuersum. The author is the whole that you see, and a whole that you cannot see: he sustains the notion of the work both from within and from without.72 The logic of a mirror, the speculi ratio produces a split between the thing seen and the thing causing the image that is seen.73 We are back in the territory of the distinction between idea and idos from Letter 58. There the idea was the face of the subject, the idos was the painting of that face. The logic of this argument concerning the e contrario of mirrors splits image and essence.74 Within the mirror one sees image, without it one locates essence as the image’s cause. Essence is the whole that you cannot see. Image is the whole that you can see.75 The text is the mechanism that both argues for this ratio and argues according to this ratio. That is, the text tells you a tale of the nature of representation, and then it represents according to that logic. Nevertheless there is an exception to this metaphysical rule: god’s spirit, or is it the spiritthat-is-god? The divine is all animus. The relationship of narrator to author then mirrors, stricto sensu, this same image of divine imagery: the narrator you see, and e contrario, the author you cannot see. But the “finality” of the thing within, its raison de ne pas être, is a provocation: the image will lead you to speculate, via the logic of the speculum upon essence. The spectacle of the mirror, the speculi spectaculum is staged within the text as the mechanism not just of knowledge more generally, but of selfknowledge in particular. Mirrors were, it is claimed, discovered specifically so that human beings could come to know themselves: Inuenta sunt specula ut homo ipse se nosset (1.17.4).76 We add then to our list and take knowingnature, knowing-god, and knowing-self as our triad. In this passage seeing one’s image immediately passes into moral reflection.77 That is, the soul inside the body is the spectacle behind the spectacle. What one really ought to see “with the mind’s eye” when beholding the physical spectacle of the self in the mirror is a spiritual and moral “essence” that both causes and eludes the image of the self. As this lesson is imparted, a tirade against the immoral use of the mirror has just come to a close. It was introduced as a sort of fable, a fabella.78 Hostius Quadra was a sensualist. And he used mirrors in the pursuit of his

The nature of Seneca

71

bodily pleasures. He had a mirror that magnified. And so he would behold the spectacle of his own lewd acts in a manner that made them even more obscene than they already were. The image supplements and supplants direct experience: as Hostius is penetrated by another man he delights to see in the mirror a penis enter him that is even larger than the one properly performing that improper act.79 The narrative is not content to give the basic image of this foul optical contrivance. The narrative rhetorically amplifies and repeats the scene of amplified and repeated obscenities. A spotlight shines on an antiphilosopher.80 The spectacle of his relationship to images will instruct us: Ille, quasi parum esset inaudita et incognita pati, oculos suos ad illa aduocauit nec quantum peccabat uidere contentus, specula sibi per quae flagitia sua diuideret disponeretque circumdedit; et, quia non tam diligenter intueri poterat, cum caput merserat inguinibusque alienis obhaeserat, opus sibi suum per imagines offerebat. That man, as if it were too little to experience things unknown and unheard of, called upon his own eyes to aid in the process. He was not content with the (direct) sight of the extent of his transgressions. And so he placed all around himself mirrors whereby he could divide up and distribute his own outrages. And, since he was unable to look into things as carefully as he might when he had plunged his head down below and was latched onto someone’s crotch, he would offer to himself his own work (opus suum) through images. (Natural Questions 1.16.4)

The division and disposition of physical images has been rhetorically divided and arranged for maximum moral effect, an effect that, of course, mirrors in reverse the immoral effect of the original event.81 The opus of Hostius Quadra becomes the fabella of Seneca.82 Offered to us within the narrator’s opus is the image of a man obsessed with images. These images lead Hostius beyond the surface of the world, but rather than provoking a mystical ascent, they induce an immoral descent.83 For Hostius the whole that is both within and beyond the mirror is a mirage: the penis lodged in his anus is a concrete reality, not a spiritual abstraction. And it is, in fact, smaller than it looks: indulgence in a lewd, distorted image of it provides a means of causing the member to feel still bigger than it actually is. Images of Hostius’ lust for images proliferate. The narrator shows us him looking in the mirror over and over again. Ultimately, the man is transformed via the distorting surface of the textual mirror into the spectacle of a monster, a monster that loves the distorted spectacle of its own depravity: at illud monstrum obscenitatem suam spectaculum fecerat (1.16.6).84

72

The Sublime Seneca

What the narrator has said early on about Hostius is repeated and reflected when Hostius is presented as narrating his tale in his own person. No basic piece of information is added to our understanding of the situation when Hostius tells the tale of his mirrors. What is added is an additional narrative layer, a narratological image conjured by the power of the pronoun “I” to turn egos into ideals, selves into images: Id genus speculorum circumponam mihi quod incredibilem magnitudinem imaginum reddat. Si liceret mihi, ad uerum ista perducerem; quia non licet, mendacio pascar. I will surround myself with the sort of mirrors that will produce images of amazing size. Were it allowed, I would make them realities. Since it is not, I will be fed by the lie. (Natural Questions 1.16.8–9)

Hostius longs to find something on the other side of the mirror. He knows that this thing, a massive penis, can only be enjoyed as a lie, not directly. The image as a spectacle feeds the imagination. One is forbidden to go beyond nature and to enjoy beyond concrete corporeal limits. Hostius has found a way to escape those boundaries by deploying a meta-/beyondphysics of representation that mirrors – in distorted fashion, of course – that of the narrator. The narrator also longs to find something on the other side of the mirror. He knows that this thing, divine animus, can only be enjoyed as a narrative, not directly. The image of the cosmic animus as presented by the text feeds our imagination, it fires our own animus. The mirror of the text shows the incredible magnitude of god. Were it allowed to us, we would experience god and nature directly. But it is not allowed. So we must be fed by the narration of the truth. But does narration narrate the truth, or does it just narrate and designate the object of narration to be “the truth”? The Natural Questions are filled with different orders of difference. I have arrayed a number of them. We find represented within this work different philosophical schools, different aspects of philosophy more generally, different aspects of nature, different literary genres, different literary modes, and different narrative voices. The ordering of these different differences reveals a collection of homologies between them. More importantly, we also behold the overcoming of differences in the name of a higher order synthesis. The most slippery difference that becomes indistinct is the author and the narrator. The conflation of these two figures yields a dynamic philosophical synthesis. Thesis meets thing counterposed. Then the opposition is overcome (Hegel’s aufgehebt). And this overcoming is part of a metaphysical ascent (if it is not metaphysics itself ).

The nature of Seneca

73

Further difficulties are produced in the process of constituting the idea of a place where heterogeneity can be resolved, a mundus that contains all antitheticals while synthesizing them. Chief among these difficulties is the opposition of god and world wherein he must be both within and without creation. That this god mirrors the narrator/author dyad produces a troubling regression for the pessimistic reader. Perhaps the only mundus that really contains and synthesizes all of these antitheticals is a text. Thesis meets textual image of thing. The opposition is narrated as overcome. This overcoming is part of a story of metaphysical ascent. Within this narrative is the narrator, promising to take us up to the spectacle of the universe and to offer us a glimpse of realty. But what if god, than which nothing is bigger, is just a narrated greatness and no better a thing to feed oneself with than the image of a huge penis as seen in a distorting mirror?85 The Natural Questions is about your enlightenment. That is what its narrator has in mind. The text is suffused with different orders, with the literary and the philosophical, the logical and the ethical, the expository and the dialogic. The ordering of this heterogeneity, the concordia that arises from the seemingly discordant yields the mundus that is the text about the mundus. Knowing nature, knowing god, and knowing oneself are conjoint processes. And they entail being addressed by philosophy, learning to listen to it and to read the text of the world. The nature of narrative and the narrative of nature are congruent. And the impossibilities of narrative “are” the impossibilities of metaphysics.86 That is, a text cannot give you the author himself. In the last chapter we saw Seneca explore the idea of Homer, of Plato, of Vergil. And now we can see that the idea of Seneca himself is at stake. The narrator is the idos that re-presents Seneca. The narrator is his stand-in. The narrator does not give you the man himself. The text can only provide a narrative that guides you to an ineluctable sense of authorship and a rather specific set of answers to the question, “What is an author?” When you will have answered this correctly, then you will not just know something about Seneca, you will also know something about the author of the world. Where you will be, the narrative ego already is.

chapter 4

The spectacle of ethics

Spectacle is an omnipresent theme that saturates ancient life: seeing and being seen, watching and being watched are basic functions. The question “Who is watching whom” can productively guide the analysis of a diverse collection of ancient texts and institutions. Moreover, this insistence upon the very idea of perspective is by no means some modern theoretical obsession imposed upon the ancient world. Rather theōrein, theōria, spectare, and spectaculum are words that preoccupy antiquity itself. Furthermore, they all lead ineluctably to questions of seeing, seeming, and being.1 That is, a curious peek in at ancient watching can rapidly turn into hand-to-hand combat with questions of the metaphysics of presence in antiquity. If we are willing to grant that ancient society was spectacular and that, moreover, this very fact was something of which people in antiquity were fully aware, then of course we find a great deal of play with visual metaphors and their possibilities. We can focus our own energies less on looking for spectacle itself and instead concentrate on exploring the variations upon the theme. What does it mean “to adopt an ethical perspective” within a world saturated by spectacles? Watching and being watched are already over-determined categories. Thus self-watching in a philosophical sense does not occur in some pure space and one cannot automatically conjure some transcendental perspective ex nihilo. The ethical author may well aspire to reach such a position, but one already understands that the labor of reaching it entails setting out from a here and now of worldly spectacle. If philosophy in general and ethics in particular enjoin self-watching under the banner of “know thyself,” then how can one construct a theater within which to engage in this activity? When the answer to the question of “who is watching whom” is “I am watching myself,” what are the rules of optics that allow such speculation? Where can theōria sit so as to get the best view of the self? Optics has already been an important element of our discussion of Seneca up to this point. Earlier chapters have emphasized speaking and listening 74

The spectacle of ethics

75

and an analysis of voices. It ought, though, to be clear that there is a related question to examine. Specifically the physical-cum-metaphorical-cummetaphysical positions of these speakers is a requisite element of the analysis. Any description of the philosophical work that is going on needs to discuss space and not just speech. Positions inevitably yield perspectives and lines of sight. An elaborate panoply of spectacles can be found in the works of Seneca. These spectacles do not just work in a manner that parallels the presentations of orders of speech, but the two major themes of spectacle and speech intersect and are themselves co-ordinated. Indeed, we are often being asked to give ear to someone precisely because that other has been in a position to see something that we have not. The discussion of modes of being involved visual analogies: the relationship between idos and idea was explained by an appeal to the visual arts. And in Moral Letters 58 we also looked up at god as he looked upon and looked after the world itself. In the Natural Questions this divine perspective again mattered. It also affected our relationship to the author. Furthermore, the infernal had its own optical element: the story of Hostius was a story of mirrors. In this and subsequent chapters the weight of the discussion will shift somewhat: optics will predominate over narrative. The shift in emphasis to the visual is not supposed to mean that a sensitivity to questions of voice should be forgotten. Instead they should be understood as durable concomitant themes. For a Roman the question of spectacle might most obviously bring to mind gladiatorial shows and dramatical festivals. There is a long Roman tradition of theaters and amphitheaters, editores, actores, and gladiatores. This tradition affects the ways in which one talks about perspective, standpoint, and audience in the same way that the neutral idea of “to watch” today is always also at least partially informed by its most common variants: “to watch television” or “to watch a movie.” If a philosopher wishes to take control of the spectacle and to re-stage stagecraft for his own purposes, he cannot but engage with spectacle as he finds it. And early on in the Moral Letters Seneca decidedly does engage spectacle as he finds it.2 He stages ethics as he shows us virtue and vice fighting it out on the sands of an imaginary arena.3 In fact this metaphorical battle comes in the course of an anecdote about Seneca sitting down to watch blood spilled in the actual arena.4 Seneca leverages the power of metaphor to translate from one spectacle to another. And so Seneca builds a theater of virtue, and this theater yields a revised vision of a scene of death: death as the object of bloodthirsty spectacle is transformed into death as the object of sage speculation. Seneca recasts the structural elements of the arena: the

76

The Sublime Seneca

giver of shows is replaced by the giver of texts. The events that unfold on the sand become events that unfold on the page. The spectator becomes the reader. This textualization can also be read as a systematic abstraction, as a replacement of the mundane with the sublime and, concomitantly, vice with virtue. Furthermore these three functions – producing, acting, watching – all collapse. Seneca writes a portrait of himself acting.5 He writes a portrait of himself watching. Not only does Seneca produce, then, a narrative with a strong visual logic, he also inserts into the narrative a spectator for that same spectacle, a character named Seneca. The reader is also a sort of second Seneca. Ostensibly the reader is Lucilius. Lucilius the reader is conjured as a friend; and we readers become an amicable second self or alter idem to Seneca. But this can be taken even further. The reader is an out-of-phase Seneca, a second self who has not yet read the text that Seneca has written. The reader is a Seneca avant la lettre, a Seneca who has not yet read Seneca’s letters. However, after we behold the textual spectacle we will be able to adopt Seneca’s perspective and therewith Seneca’s conclusions. Identity of perspective ideally produces an identity of conclusions. Contrast the rationes of geometers as discussed in the previous chapter. One must assent to them. Two and two have always made four, and they always will. Such timeless and subjectless truths are immediately apprehended by any who understand mathematics. They do not even require assent, a feature which helps to explain Seneca’s evocation of the idiom of tyranny relative to mathematical proof. Conversely, Senecan ethical thought unfolds in a narrative mode. There are plots and characters. Senecan thought also unfolds over narrative time. Moreover, the unfolding of the story involves as well a species of stagecraft. We do not just hear, but we also “see” the story of wisdom. Seneca translates from the material world and its ephemeral shows into an abstract world wherein the mind can contemplate an eternal spectacle of virtue. In fact, the ethical project itself is predicated on this movement. Learning to see the nullity of the material world from the sublime and eternal perspective is the sure seat from which the ethical observer looks out upon all. This is the end-point of Seneca’s project. But how is one to acquire such a position? Questions of who is watching whom, from where, and how cannot presuppose their own answers. That is, Seneca may well advocate a cosmic perspective, but he does not assert that one can automatically attain it. One needs to do more than just be shown a portrait of the sublime amphitheater in order to adopt a successful ethical orientation. Admission to the first

The spectacle of ethics

77

fourteen rows is not free. One must first labor to become a member of the aristocracy of virtue, to borrow a phrase that has been used of Seneca’s project.6 Only then is one entitled to sit where one must sit in order to be virtuous. It is a paradox, I know. And not the only one we will see this Stoic spinning. As in our previous readings, this text also regularly stages the spectacle of progress towards virtue. We see the proficiens making his way towards excellence. This is what we watch as we read. And so we find a second and related paradox: the text is constantly enacting the structure of virtue even as it cannot guarantee that there is a virtuous eye actually occupying the privileged position. In fact, the text perhaps assumes the contrary: the reader is an audience that is in need of correction. The eye that watches is not itself watching from a virtuous perspective. We are, then, conjured as sitting in a position where we are shown that we cannot see properly. And yet from this very same seat we look upon the image of a model of an amphitheater that is declared to be sublime. It is a theater of virtue into which we are invited. Perhaps this account is at the moment all a bit too abstract, a bit too gladiator-in-the-sky. Let us try to bring things back down to earth before we make a second attempt at storming the vault of heaven. Let us watch, then, Seneca teaching us how to watch.7 The seventh letter of the Moral Letters is regularly cited by people who work on ancient spectacle. The midday spectacle or meridianum spectaculum therein depicted in gory detail offers invaluable evidence concerning the arena as a locus for public executions of criminals. That is, the “what” of the letter has been much studied. But let us consider the manner in which this staged event is strategically restaged by the letter. The letter opens with an imagined question from Lucilius: “You want to know what you ought to consider as most to be avoided? The crowd.”8 Contact is contagion. A metaphor of disease settles over the opening to the epistle. Immorality rubs off on us. And it is easy to do the math: if the other makes me sick, then the larger the company, the more the danger.9 Accordingly, as Seneca puts it, “Nothing is as devastating for good character as to take a seat at some spectacle.”10 This maxim is a conclusion Seneca has reached. We probably do not immediately adopt it as our own. We are about to behold the spectacle of Seneca reaching this conclusion, though. And the spectacle of the spectacle Seneca saw is meant to turn Seneca’s conclusion into our own by the letter’s end. “By chance,” says Seneca, “I lit upon a midday spectacle.”11 I suppose that one can accidentally stumble into a brothel or that one can accidentally

78

The Sublime Seneca

light upon a cock-fight. But there is something rather naive and disingenuous about a narrator who claims he was taken so much by surprise.12 Beware, that is, the artifice of our narrator. He is not narrating a history. He is staging a philosophically consequential drama. The bloodshed at this show is far worse than what Seneca had seen before. One notes, then, his eyes have already seen plenty of killing in the arena before this episode takes place. In this letter we see the worst of what Seneca saw; and we see it through his eyes. Seneca imposes his perspective on us: all of the tricks of the narratological trade shape our reception of the killing. But perhaps we see awry despite Seneca’s stagecraft. Suddenly Seneca sits next to us and, distracted from the show proper, we find ourselves in a dialogue with him. At first we might not even appreciate that this is a dialogue. We hear speech, but we cannot pin down the speaker: “But so-and-so is a crook! He killed a man,” says someone. Whose voice is this? An actual person’s? A hypothetical person’s? Lucilius’s? Yours? Seneca retorts, “So what? Because he is a killer he deserves to suffer this: you, you poor bastard, how is it you came to deserve to watch this?”13 “You” have been put in your place, then. But even if “you, the reader” do not think that this was addressed to you, one still has to ask the following question: What has the reader either done or not done so that he or she needs to watch this epistle unfold? We just happened upon this letter as Seneca had happened upon the show. We had perhaps been expecting something else, and yet now we find ourselves on the defensive. The letter expands out to exemplarity and proximity more generally. What we see and the company we keep affects us. And, given the general depravity of the world, there is nothing worth seeing and nobody worth spending time with. In fact, by the time Seneca reaches his conclusion, his reader has turned into Seneca. That is, the ideal audience numbers both one and zero: editor and spectator collapse. Let’s take a look.14 Seneca says there is no reason to go out in public in order to broadcast one’s genius. There is nobody, he says, who can understand you.15 “Perhaps some one or two people will come along, and you will need to mould and to educate them so as to appreciate you. ‘For whose benefit, then, did I learn these things?’ There is no reason to fear that you have wasted your effort if you have learned it for yourself.”16 This “you” whom Seneca addresses sounds a lot like “Me, Seneca.” When you, Lucilius, meet the right person, Seneca says, then shape him to appreciate you. But this is just what Seneca himself did when Lucilius came along: he went to work on Lucilius so that he could appreciate Seneca.17 What Seneca learned for himself he also learned for Lucilius, a second and belated self.

The spectacle of ethics

79

This notion that you and I are so strongly correlated is confirmed by the very next sentence: “But lest I have learned today just for myself alone . . . ” One learns for oneself and for the friend who is a self by another name. Seneca goes on to share what he learned today: some philosophical maxims from Democritus, from an unknown sage, and from Epicurus. Their wisdom has become Seneca’s own has become ours. The third maxim is itself a matter of spectacle: said Epicurus, “These things are not for the many, but for you; for each is for the other a sufficiently large theater.”18 Seneca stages a theater of the one and the other that is big enough for virtue. Within it one loses sight of the toxic crowd, a crowd that both must be seen by the wise and one that must never be entered into by them. Another spectacle then: the many are hustled off the stage in order to be replaced by the ego and the alter ego speculating upon their mutual speculation. The final line of the letter is, then: “Let your good qualities look inwards.”19 This letter leverages spectacle for ethical ends. That much is obvious. But it also reveals that the ethical spectacle starts from the more familiar sort of spectacle and strategically deforms it. The ethical spectacle redoubles mundane spectacle while also ostentatiously turning away from vulgar spectacle. A theater of the profound and of the profundity of the self is erected in its place. The letters themselves are converted into an optical apparatus. In them the other – that is us, the readers of Seneca – is molded and instructed. This happens as one watches the character named Seneca travel through a tunnel, lodge over a bath house, barf his guts out with sea-sickness, and, in general, fight hard to be a good man. Seneca the author shows what happened to a character named Seneca. Seneca shows this to a viewer who is a Seneca-to-be because he will have seen the Seneca-who-was. This, then, is the spectacular apparatus of the letters. It is a factory of ethics. It is not, mind you, a place where ethics is merely presented dogmatically or recounted incidentally. Ethics is produced by the Moral Letters in the same way that an editor produces gladiatorial games: there is an institution, an occasion, a venue, an audience, and a collection of performers. The whole lot of them constitutes the substance and meaning of the show much as the complex interrelationships between roughly the same elements constitute the essence of the Letters as Moral Letters.20 I would like to offer a second case study. In the seventh letter Seneca presents the idea that seeing is an ethical activity. In the Consolation to Marcia he offers similar meditations on the bond between spectacle and ethics, but he complicates these with questions of gender. In fact, gender is a sort of detour, an Umweg that leads back to the road of the one and of the unitary. The consolation as a whole is structured around a series of

80

The Sublime Seneca

spectacles, but the final thing-to-be-seen entails a felicity that corresponds uniquely to masculine identity as opposed to feminine fertility. The Consolation asks us to imagine three metaphorical spectacles: genderas-spectacle, life-as-spectacle, and the world-as-spectacle. These last two can be seen only from the sublime perspective. Moreover, Seneca turns away from femininity and refuses to look at the female sex. This turning away from the female sex is in fact a key element of attaining the sublime perspective. Thus not-looking at women is an enabling condition for taking one’s seat and looking in on the very ethical spectacle that is meant to console. And yet the person in need of consolation is a woman named Marcia. The translation between worldly and sublime entails an erasure of that which is female about the woman who is its addressee. And the translation between worldly and sublime also entails a translation between the felicitas of female fertility and the more abstract “happiness” of unified masculine presence. The Consolation is a long and elaborate text. I hardly think it possible to do much justice to this work in any brief treatment of it. And a more prolix treatment of a number of related questions about gender will appear in the next chapter. Presently I will just examine a couple of plot points and then focus in on the key consolatory spectacles.21 Like Letter 7 the Consolation employs a mixed martial and medical diction. Marcia’s sorrow will be cured by means of a hostile encounter with it.22 To the extent that Marcia disidentifies with her own affect and sits back and watches Seneca do battle with it, then that same battle will be successful and, of course, she will be cured. Thus, successful orchestration of the metaphorical apparatus and its roles is, in and of itself, consolatory work: if Seneca the editor of the textual show can get his audience to become an audience, then the battle is more than half over. There is one more theatrical layer, though: the reader who is not Marcia is watching too. This reader watches Seneca stage a Marcia who hesitates to take her proper seat at the show. We secondary readers who sit impassively as we watch Marcia and Seneca’s fight against Marcia’s sorrow are already conjured into a certain seat of wisdom. Of course, our impassivity may well be insensibility and not true enlightenment. But the Consolation takes pains to make sure that we appreciate that we are adopting a perspective relative to life itself and not just Marcia’s life.23 In the end, we come to appreciate that we are not just watching the spectacle but that we are part of the spectacle so long as we live. So let us look more closely at the ethics of looking in the Consolation. One of the first things we see is Seneca not looking at Marcia’s gender: says Seneca, “This high-mindedness of yours forbids me to take your gender into

The spectacle of ethics

81

consideration.”24 The verb that I have translated as “take into consideration” is respicere. This failure to respect Marcia’s gender and this failure to look back at Marcia’s gender structures the shape of the ethical universe into which she is invited. Qua ethical subject she is asked to check her gender at the door to virtue.25 The “problem” of Marcia’s gender is a recurrent theme of the text. The opening sentence contains the conceit that Marcia is far removed “from the weakness of the female spirit.”26 And the closing sentence of the first paragraph speaks of Seneca’s confidence concerning the coming task given Marcia’s robur animi and her tried and true uirtus. Robur of itself quietly evokes a masculine ethos. And uirtus, a feminine noun that encapsulates masculine excellence, in itself lays the pattern for Marcia’s consolatory redemption: Marcia is a feminine noun who will find peace when she enters the specular and spectacular apparatus of masculine excellence.27 If Marcia can be transcribed into the ranks of men, then she is well along the road of virtue. And there is a precedent: Cloelia.28 When Seneca enumerates examples of excellent women, he gives us some examples familiar to readers of Livy or Valerius Maximus. First we see Lucretia. To Brutus, he says, we owe libertas, to Lucretia Brutus himself.29 Note the erasure of the female, and the transition to the male enfolded within this story: a woman’s death yields a great man. But following hard on the heels of this example is a second one. Cloelia made a bold escape from her captors. And thus says Seneca “we all but transcribed her into the ranks of men.”30 Specifically she was given an equestrian statue. And Seneca sees in this statue a lingering reproach to effeminate youths who act as they do in a city where even women have been honored with a horse.31 This transcription of gender is, we come to appreciate, no accident. Just before the example of Cloelia this segment as a whole is introduced by the words, “I know what you will say, ‘You have forgotten that you are consoling a woman. You are enumerating examples of men.’”32 Seneca knows what Marcia is going to say. Seneca knows that Marcia thinks that her gender is forgotten. It is not so much a thing forgotten as it is a thing to be gotten over. Of course women have uirtutes. And Seneca will give the exempla. But these are examples of women being as good as men.33 In another passage Seneca again knows what Marcia is going to say, and again he elides her gender but in a somewhat more subtle manner. The following is the imagined rejoinder to the proposal that sorrow arises from the loss of a potential defender with the death of a son. “I know what you will say, ‘My personal losses don’t move me. Indeed he is unworthy (dignus) of solace who (qui) takes the death of a son ill as if it were the loss of a slave and

82

The Sublime Seneca

who is able to take into consideration anything about his son other than the son himself.’”34 The pronouns are masculine here. Marcia’s retort is done in a man’s voice. Seneca knows that Marcia is going to imagine herself as a generic third person. In her abstract and philosophical rejoinder to Seneca’s preceding point she speaks of herself and of her situation in the masculine singular. Or, this is what Seneca says she says. In any case, this semi-wise Marcia who is halfway to getting Seneca’s broader point has already discarded the specificity of her own sex in the name of a generic masculinity. Marcia is constantly being slipped into a masculine position. When she sees herself and her specific condition with the eyes of a generic man she will be closer to virtue. Seneca writes that one needs to foresee the possibility of losing a child. And that if one does not, then trouble ensues: “That man lost his children. You too can lose yours. That man was condemned. Your innocence is similarly vulnerable. This error deceives, it emasculates when we suffer what we never foresaw we could suffer.”35 I am interested in a phrase in the middle of this citation: Error decipit hic, effeminat. If we translate the generic masculine into the specific feminine we see this sentence otherwise: Marcia has lost her son. Her sorrow has made a woman of her. Wisdom would prevent such a mistake. In short, a woman with uirtus ought to fear being turned into a woman by unexpected troubles. Seneca’s advice only makes sense if the generic subject of wisdom is either a man who fears becoming a woman or a woman who has set aside her gender. “We” who are on the road to wisdom are men. The same gender slippage occurs right after the preceding passage. Seneca writes, “Whatever this is, Marcia, which comes from without and glimmers all around us, children, offices, riches, large atria and vestibules packed with a crowd of clients clamoring to get in, a famous name, a noble or fair wife . . . ”36 Let us pause at the wife. Marcia, I think it safe to assume, does not have a wife. In fact, none of the preceding items fits a woman well: it is a laundry list of the good but all too worldly and ephemeral things that a Roman gentleman would wish for himself. One ought not fall back on that old saw that nos means “me, Seneca” here. Nos means “us” in this passage: it is generic. Just as the nos in the passage above was generic. And just as the tu in the passage above was generic. The generic ethical subject is always a man.37 The human condition that one learns to despise is a man’s condition. In order to be consoled for the death of her son Marcia needs to see things from the proper perspective. Ultimately, she needs to appreciate that such is the life of man. In English “man” oscillates between designating a male human being and the species Homo sapiens. In Seneca’s ethical world wisdom is something

The spectacle of ethics

83

that may well characterize a Homo sapiens, but we seem instead to always be speaking of a uir sapiens.38 We will return to these questions about gender as a non-spectacle and the sex of the spectator later. Let us presently look at some of the key spectacles that are shown to us in the text. First, there is a matched pair of spectacles. In section 17 Seneca begins yet another of his explorations of life and death as follows: “If someone were to say to a person who was heading off to Syracuse: ‘First know all of the inconveniences and all of the pleasures of the future journey, and then set sail. Here are the things that you might admire: first you will see . . . ’”39 The word uidebis, “you will see,” occurs throughout the list that follows always in either first or second position in its clause. Thus, the interlocutor presents to “you” the would-be traveler a verbal spectacle that maps out in advance all that you will see.40 And then Seneca lists reasons for not going to Syracuse. The reasons for not going to Syracuse are not really real reasons. In the letter the tyrant Dionysius menaces visitors with various horrors. However, this dreadful tyrant has been dead for centuries: quite literally “you” will not see Dionysius either do or threaten to do anything to you if you go to Syracuse. This is true both for ourselves and for Marcia, and it is true for precisely the same reason in both cases: Dionysius is dead, and Syracuse has long been integrated into the Roman empire. Nevertheless, this announcement of the good and bad of Syracuse to an imaginary traveler is used as the foundation of an analogy: as is this (fictional) journey, so is (actual) life. Nature, says Seneca, tells all of us: “I deceive nobody.”41 And then Seneca’s Nature enumerates the good and bad that might befall us if we have children. Seneca next both shifts and recapitulates this tour. In section 18 he turns the prospective traveler into the person being born and about to embark on the journey through life. “OK, use this image to evaluate one’s entry into life as a whole. When you were weighing the question of seeing Syracuse I set forth for you what could please you and what could displease you. Imagine that I am giving you advice at the moment of your birth: ‘You are about to enter into a city . . . ’”42 The “you” that the Senecan “I” addresses when called into council is a man. “You are about to enter” translates intraturus es. The grammatical construction is masculine. And so we are again not talking to Marcia as a concrete, determinate individual. The specific addressee, “you,” in fact designates the generic male subject all over again. The person who is about to live sees a whole spectacle of life: uidebis . . . uidebis . . . uidebis . . . The same vivid future indicatives of the second

84

The Sublime Seneca

singular reappear in the text. Most of what you will see is the stuff of natural history and indeed of the Natural Questions themselves: stars shining, the sun, the moon, the planets. And, says Seneca, “when you have become satiated by the spectacle above, you will turn your eyes down towards the earth.”43 Again the grammar is masculine: we read satiatus. Seneca also uses the word spectaculum: to ponder the heavens is to behold a spectacle. One turns from it to an earthly one. Again natural history predominates. And again we find uidebis . . . uidebis . . . uidebis . . . By the final uidebis life’s spectacle has become more complex: “You will see no species of human boldness untried, and you will be both a spectator and yourself one of those making grand efforts.”44 “You” will be both a spectator and a spectacle. The former word is in the Latin, spectator, the latter is implicitly there given its use above. Seneca turns Marcia into both spectacle and spectator. He also once again fails to respect and/or take into consideration her gender. We readers behold her becoming a he. The Consolation as a spectacle stages the vanishing of woman-kind. And thus does one wisely choose life. This is a lesson “we” learn as we readers watch Seneca say “I” while Marcia listens to him as a “you.” And yet this disappearance of women is itself a metaphor for the work of consolation: the actual disappears in the name of a hypothetical that somehow consoles us for the tragedy of being. This trope governs the following passage. Seneca insists in section 24 that “It is just the image of your son that has perished and a likeness of him that was an unlikeness: he himself is in fact eternal and he is in a better condition. He has been stripped of burdens that were not his own and left to himself.”45 The metaphysics of metaphor from Letter 58 returns: the material son was not really real. The real face of the son was nothing but the image of the son: it might have seemed like it was an idea, but it was instead the idos: “The idea was the face of Vergil, the exemplar of the work that was to come. The idos is that which the artist draws from this and puts upon his work.”46 The truth of the son will instead be the image that Seneca is about to stage for us. That is, the idos fashioned by this painter of philosophical truth proceeds from a specific idea, namely that the sublime other world is more real than our vulgar version of reality. The consolatory spectacle of the true son and his sublime status is itself choreographed as a spectacle, and this spectacle consoles provided we view it from the proper perspective.47 The sacred band of Scipios and Catos has taken the dead son under their wing.48 The boy’s grandfather shows him the spectacle of the universe: the wandering of the stars and the cities of the land. The passage is uncannily familiar. We have seen this before. This was

The spectacle of ethics

85

the spectacle of life. It is, then, precisely because the son has died that he now sees the very sorts of thing that “you will see” if you choose to be born. Life’s spectacle has been restaged: it is now shown to be the show that specifically awaits the dead, the dead who have cast off this image of living and are now able both to be seen for what they themselves really are and to see things as they really are. Only the about to be born and the recently dead can see life for what it is. The eyes of the living themselves are at best beset by myopia if not actually blind. Marcia is again commanded to imagine something. This time she is to imagine her father staring down from the celestial citadel and enjoining her to cease from her sorrows (26.1). He will address Marcia with a spirit that is tanto elatior quanto est ipse sublimior. That is, the literal sublimity of the dead father himself has been transferred to his metaphorical qualities. Naturally, this “literal sublimity” is itself but a metaphor. It is in fact a function of Seneca’s own rhetorical staging. Marcia’s father is in heaven because that is where Seneca puts him. Seneca commands Marcia to listen to this sublime image of her own father. Before she listens, she is first asked to look. Seneca gives an order to Marcia: “Consider your father and your grandfather.” Respice patrem atque auum tuum (26.3). “Consider,” “be mindful of,” or, more literally, “look back at”: this word respicere does important preparatory work in the consolation. “This high-mindedness of yours forbids me to take your gender into consideration.”49 Seneca refused to look at Marcia’s gender. The verb was respicere. And now that Seneca is reaching the end of his consolatory work, Marcia is enjoined to look up at a collection of great and lofty men. We turned away from the female body and its sex. We turn now towards male spirits.50 This father to whom Marcia looks up himself looks back down at her as she suffers in the blood-soaked sands of life. He declares that the dead have a clear view of things: “We have united into a body and, since we are not surrounded by deep night, we see that there is nothing among you mortals – despite what you imagine – that is desirable, nothing lofty, nothing glorious. Instead everything is lowly, and weighted down, and anxious, and cognizant of a mere fraction of our light.”51 Inhabitants of the sublime world live at peace. And from their perspective they re-see the cosmos: Marcia’s father beholds everything in its vastness.52 Moreover, he appreciates that the world is in flux. Everything gives way, even the world itself. The sublime spectator beholds a spectacle as bright as if the noon-day sun shone on it: the death of everything. Men, lands, mountains, seas: everything will be destroyed. There will be flames, deluges, earthquakes, and

86

The Sublime Seneca

plagues.53 Compare, then, the meridianum spectaculum above.54 It was pure slaughter. There was nothing but murder. What crime had we committed that we should have to see it? And yet now the end of the world itself is illuminated, and the sight of it edifies. Kill, beat, burn! Occide, uerbera, ure! Such was the voice that shouted for carnage in Moral Letters 7.55 And yet the same violence unfurls before the father’s eyes. We are lucky to have found such a sublime seat from which to fully appreciate it. What virtue must have been ours that we are able to see it. But that end of all things is itself only the beginning of the end. The end of all and the end of the Consolation itself virtually coincide. After the end of the world comes the end of the heavens as well.56 The universe will collapse in on itself. Star will smash into star. And whatever now shines here and there will burn with a single unified fire. That which looks and that which is looked at collapse. The cosmic perspective will become no perspective at all: all will be one. There will be no outside-the-spectacle. This is what the dead father wishes to show us. In this ultimate spectacle there is light, but it only illuminates the point-singularity of a unified cosmic fire that sees itself seeing itself. Says Marcia’s ghostly father, “We happy souls as well, we who’ve received as our lot eternity, when it pleases the god to remake all of this once again, amidst a universal collapse we will ourselves become a modest supplement to the massive ruin, and we will revert to our ancient elementary particles.”57 And then Seneca concludes the whole thus: “Happy is your son, Marcia: he now knows these things.”58 The happy soul of the father and his voice are succeeded by the voice of Seneca who designates the son happy. Happiness consists of seeing what father saw and in knowing what father knows. Seneca stages the spectacle of this spectacle of seeing/knowing and invites Marcia to see with other eyes. The male gaze she will adopt will be that of her father. It will also be that of her own son. And it will be that of Seneca as well. What must Marcia do to have deserved to see all of this? She must surrender her identity qua weeping mother. She must lay aside the sense that her felicitas is bound up with her fertility. She must abandon that meaning of felix that is bound up with biology, with reproduction, with life itself. Instead, she must look at the spectacle of life with the eyes of death, with the dead eyes of the virtuous men who surround her.59 Otherwise she herself becomes nothing but another spectacle of those who cannot see and thus suffer. Who is watching whom? Father is watching. Seneca is watching. The reader is watching. But admission to Seneca’s sublime theater of virtue is not quite so simple as deciding to show up in time for the show. Instead,

The spectacle of ethics

87

virtue is predicated on seeing oneself seeing oneself.60 There is a mastery of the spectacle of the world that ensues. Seeing oneself seeing oneself entails becoming an editor who is a spectator who is a gladiator. Seeing oneself seeing oneself allows one to stare at the terrifying hole in the world, to stare into the maw of death and lack. But what will you see when you do this? You will not see the end of the world. You will instead see the emptiness of this world. You will see this empty world of ours evacuated in the name of the true imago of an imaginary sublime order. This other order is ordered much as our own. However, for one contemplating a journey to the island of the dead there are only advantages to be pointed out to us by our tour-guide. The tyranny of death can no longer oppress us. Hoc uidebis: this is what you will see when you learn how and where to sit in Seneca’s amphitheater of textual virtue.

chapter 5

Losing Seneca

Throughout we have been examining the relationship between what one ought to do and the truth of the universe as well as that which allows the individual access to the answers to such questions: ethics, metaphysics, and philosophical literature, then. Literature offers the potentially unexpected element. And yet it is precisely storytelling that matters lest one be left with empty philosophical injunctions: “This is nature. Live in accordance with it.” Technical discussions of doctrine are included in the writings of Seneca, but they are not given pride of place. Consider Moby Dick. One could learn a lot about actual whaling from reading it. And the passages on whaling are by no means superfluous. They are quite necessary to the whole. However, the “point” of the novel hardly seems to be some simple narration of the empirical qualities of life at sea. Seneca writes narratives of the animus, its education, its progress, its reversals, and its various trials. Points of doctrine are essential. But though necessary, doctrine of itself is not sufficient. Knowing-wisdom and living wisely are very different affairs. What sort of writing is adequate to describing the spirit and its vicissitudes? How can one (fallible) spirit be of service to another? A series of questions arises at this juncture: How do texts work? What is the status of representation? What are authors? The answers are explored above. We have been acquiring a sense of the sophisticated emplotment of Senecan philosophy. Certain literary devices are very important. Perspective and person are vital. But perhaps they are vital in that they allow for a certain sleight of hand. They allow one to accomplish the requisite work, but not always with the rigor and explicitness one might ask of a different sort of writing, that of the symbolic logician: ∀x∈Φ(x), for example.1 One especially hesitates when looking at the way gender has been emplotted within the philosophical Bildungsroman. The hierarchical antithesis between the genders is leveraged in the service of other hierarchies. Of 88

Losing Seneca

89

course, men are hardly free from vice in Seneca’s world. Indeed, they are the most likely persons to meet his critical eye. But it is also not the case that men are asked to get beyond their gender in order to improve their souls. They are instead asked to live up to that which is best about virtue itself and in so doing be true to their own virility: the good uir evinces uirtus. The present chapter is the sequel to the last. Again a woman will be asked to surrender her gender. But this time there is an intimacy to the project: the man who addresses the woman is entangled in the contents of his own advice. And, finally, we readers become inevitably entangled in this same problematic: the status of our own apathetic spectatorship is at issue. In the wake, then, of coming to appreciate the story of wisdom as a story, we can now revisit it as increasingly resistant readers, or at least ones who are more ready to read against the grain. A knot binds philosophy to representation in Senecan thought. At this point we are in a position to ask ourselves if in fact the writing of ethics is not the looping together of the twin threads in a manner that leaves them indissolubly entangled. “Ethics” becomes then something a bit different from a simple matter of “how one ought to live.” Living well becomes entangled with writing well and with reading well. Seneca explores the manner in which philosophical truths are communicable. His writings meditate on the status of writing itself: What does it mean to write? What does it mean to read? Wisdom-as-communicated becomes the core issue. There is a strong sense of the encounter with an other in all of his explicitly ethical writings as well as in the Natural Questions. This other is both a concrete and specific other, and this other is always also an absent other.2 There is both a physical and metaphorical gap that writing indicates. The “and” in the phrase “you and I” becomes a site for philosophical labor. “And” can be a disjunctive word: “apples and oranges.” “And” need not be a disjunctive word, though: “eyes and ears.” Writing points out this gap and then variously negotiates it: distance is lamented, expanded, contracted, overcome. You and I are not the same person: this is a truism that regularly maps itself onto Senecan writing as “you and I are not in the same place” and “you and I do not see the same thing from the same perspective.” But one notes that this disjunction is not insurmountable and that a conjunction is possible. That something has been written down for us to read is itself the symbol/ symptom of difference. And when we read texts that are not addressed to us, this difference is doubled: not only are we not Seneca, but we are not the proper addressee. And yet Seneca knew that we would read this. He knew that we are not Lucilius, that we are not Marcia. He knew that “we” would

90

The Sublime Seneca

read the word “you” and think, “Well, he’s not talking to me, he’s talking to the addressee, to some you who knew himself as Lucilius or herself as Marcia.” And yet neither Lucilius nor Marcia is ever addressed as a “you” who is certain to listen, as a “you” who will say, “Well, of course, Seneca, since you say that that is how things are . . . ” With Marcia in particular, resistance and reluctance are part of the construction of her persona. Seneca, then, has done a fair amount of thinking about how he might write to “you” and how he might get “you” to listen despite your reluctance to listen. Seneca meditates on the philosophical status of the noncoincidence of the me and the you. Seneca does, however, believe in communication. His texts take pains to communicate to us a sense that communication is possible. What, though, is the politics of this philosophy of communication? More specifically, what differences have to be discarded in order for two to have an encounter via literature? Seneca’s Dialogi are very much not Plato’s Dialogues. Specifically, the multiplicity of voices – that multiplicity which for us is an essential element of the very notion of a “dialogue” – has gone missing. Other than a brief ventriloquization of Serenus at the head of the On Tranquility of the Soul, these Dialogues read like hortatory essays written out on a topic and then sent off to someone with whom Seneca already has a standing relationship. Nevertheless, despite the lack of “genuine dialogue” in the Dialogi, at issue in them is the possibility of communication. And such takes place when the “interlocutor” – that is, the mute addressee – has been presented with the means by which to see issues as the narrator sees them. Seneca pleads the case of the gods in the On Providence.3 Dear Lucilius will come to know why it is that bad things happen to good people. Friend Serenus will learn of the specifically virile constancy of the philosopher in the On the Constancy of the Sage. Nature has put you at your post: never retreat, never surrender. The analysis of anger takes three essays: now brother Novatus can appreciate the nature of this madness which too often leads reason astray, and he can understand how to be purged of it. Brother Gallio is told that, once he knows what happiness is, then he will be able to have a happy life in the essay On the Happy Life. How is one to make use of leisure? What is inner peace? What does living well rather than merely long mean? There are also meditations on the meaning of loss. What does the absence of the other mean for the self?4 These are the questions that preoccupy Seneca’s dialogues. Seneca writes to his mother to console her for her loss.5 Ethics and difference in this “dialogue” involve us in an ethics of sexual difference. And the problem of sexual difference qua problem and qua “solved

Losing Seneca

91

problem” allows philosophy to be adequate, to be sufficient, to console in its completeness. As was the case with Marcia, if Seneca can successfully stage this encounter with the philosophical sublime in contradistinction to the vulgar mundane, then Helvia will have been consoled. If, then, the literary sublime can evoke in her a sense of the philosophical sublime, there will be no need to grieve her loss. And what has she lost? Why, Seneca himself, of course. Her son is in exile.6 It turns out that Seneca is asking her to lose something else, and when she loses this thing, this new loss will help her to overcome her earlier loss of Seneca. If Helvia gives up her gender, then she will give up her grief. Seneca offers his mother the spectacle of “apathetic spectatorship.” Consolation occurs when one adopts a specific perspective, a perspective that does not suffer. Instead it beholds suffering and remains itself unmoved.7 The core metaphors of the argument are familiar from the last chapter, and they again work to effect the translation between orders of things. The literary representation of a specific optical apparatus serves as the representation of the legitimate structure within which to appreciate lifeas-spectacle. What we see in this text, then, is a key synthesis of core Senecan ideas. Moreover, this synthesis matters for our relationship to “Seneca.” The Consolation to Helvia itself crystalizes this issue: What is our present relationship to an absent Seneca? Are we willing to be consoled for his absence? Can a text-of-Seneca affect us? And, if so, how? The topographies of virtue and gender are related. The relationship is associative, manifold, evocative, “literary.” And yet it cannot be merely literary because such takes place in the light of a philosophical project. Man and woman, high and low, outside and inside, eternal and qualified: these antitheses are made to communicate with one another. And the narrative progression of the play of these dichotomies itself acts as an index of philosophical progress. For someone like Luce Irigaray, they are also so many indices that bear witness to gender as a moment of philosophical impasse in the western philosophical tradition. Women have regularly played a specifically ancillary role within the masculine project of philosophy: they become handmaidens who guarantee that there is a material place from which the project of man-as-spirit can be undertaken.8 Irigaray lays out a set of co-ordinated ideas: the material-feminine, woman as envelope, woman as origin, woman as not-subject. Each of these ideas has attached to it either explicitly or implicitly the notion of “for a man.”9 The supposedly neutral philosophical subject is in fact a man, and this man emerges out of a specific relationship to the female thing.

92

The Sublime Seneca

We have already seen the gendering of the philosophically prized perspective: once one will have ascended to the proper vantage and then seen the cosmos from it, then one will know what the “good men” of the Consolation to Marcia know. This same philosophical movement recapitulates Irigaray’s logic of masculine emergence.10 That is, man emerges out of the maternal/material. He sets himself against it, and woman is reduced to a mere condition of possibility for a man rather than a subject in her own right.11 Irigaray at this juncture produces a statement that we can ourselves return to later after considering the structure of the argument of the Consolation to Helvia: “[W]oman’s suffering arises also from the fact that man does not conceive that women do not exist.”12 At stake, then, is the “pathology” of the reader of the Consolation to Helvia itself, a pathology that is maternal/material and to-be-overcome.13 Let us begin our investigation of the Consolation to Helvia at the middle of the text. At roughly the center of the Consolation Seneca elects to linger on the exile of Marcellus. After a good half-dozen clever turns of phrase concerning the reactions of Brutus and Caesar to his exile, Seneca transitions to Marcellus’s hypothetical self-rhetoric on the occasion. “Surely you don’t doubt but that so great a man as Marcellus often urged himself to bear exile with equanimity: ‘ . . . ’”14 Seneca asks “you” to ask yourself what a man like Marcellus must have asked of himself. Num dubitas quin . . . accordingly assumes that we are already in possession of the rhetoric of virtue, we need only conjure it for ourselves from within us. Of course, conjuring it from within ourselves is not quite what is happening in this passage. We are instead being presented with it: “you” are told what Marcellus told himself. And yet what Marcellus told himself is what Seneca has been telling us all along. The very first point “Marcellus” makes to himself is that exile is not miserable, and that his dedication to his studies has resulted in his appreciation that everywhere is a patria for the wise man.15 This is Seneca’s own thesis, and one he has been arguing throughout. But the evocation of disciplina here already points forward to the end of the text where Helvia will be exhorted to send herself back to her studies. Here Marcellus sends himself back to his own studies momentarily and from them he derives the assurance that he has no doubt but that exile is meaningless to him. Wherever he is, there he is at home. There is elaborate confluence of related schemata: difference in time, difference in place, difference in narrative and narrated voice, and, ultimately, difference in gender are all indifferent differences once the proper philosophical perspective has been adopted. Moreover, this perspective is

Losing Seneca

93

always already available: one need only go back to the books in order to appreciate that Seneca is Marcellus, that our distance from either/both of them indicates only our own self-imposed exile from a wisdom that can be found everywhere, and that we nevertheless have available to us the vessel with which we can as proficientes make our way towards them/philosophy. This vessel that will move us towards both Seneca and self-possession is discipline/education/literature. Seneca posits a bundle of concepts that are not one and yet are to be taken as a unity. In the injunction to return to study from the close of the Consolation to Helvia Seneca uses disciplinae, liberalia studia, and bonae artes as virtual synonyms. The yoking of the ideas is emblematic of a core mode of Senecan philosophizing: philosophy and literature are necessarily fused. The sententiae that frame Marcellus’s soliloquy are not fundamentally different from the moment of self-rhetoric where the wise man recognizes that his place is every place. This very same rhetoric is part and parcel of the articulation of the core philosophical themes in the passages dedicated to a philosophy of virtue. And this philosophy of virtue is always also a rhetoric of virtue. For Seneca is not so much interested in philosophical abstractions that are “out there” as he is concerned with the problem of philosophy incarnate, of the life lived philosophically. And here the stories we tell ourselves and how we tell them really matter. With all of its metaphors and metonymies self-rhetoric is the vehicle that lets us set about translating ourselves from one way of looking at the world to another one. And this alternate view is, it is claimed, the truer view. Perhaps we should take a closer look at Seneca’s own metaphors before unhesitatingly going along with him on this multiply metaphorical journey to enlightenment. The dominant metaphors in the Consolation to Helvia are familiar from other works of Seneca: the diction of war, medicine, and gender appears throughout. Seneca arrays this metaphorical panoply in a manner likely to strike the casual reader as insensitive to the specific status of his addressee. That is, Helvia is addressed as if going to war and evincing manly uirtus were notions that naturally resonated with her.16 Seneca chooses to spur her to virtue in terms that she already and axiomatically acknowledges as valid. At least this is how the Consolation to Helvia reads. Seneca is not uniquely obtuse about his mother’s own sex. Nor is it appropriate to say that this text is never really addressed to her. Instead, Seneca’s metaphors are making a specific argument: once Helvia translates herself over to the male perspective, then the spectacle of virtue that Seneca stages for her will both satisfy and console. As with Marcia, the “cure” for

94

The Sublime Seneca

the sickness of Helvia’s sorrow will be effected when she sees herself as a man sees himself. The theoretically neutral category of “philosophical virtue” is in practice a gendered category. Unphilosophical vice is likewise a gendered failing. What is implicily true here is made explicit in the sexualized attacks on Maecenas and Hostius Quadra, two “broken” men. The end of the Consolation to Helvia lingers on the idea that a woman is properly the object of the male gaze, and Seneca shows his mother the spectacle of her own sister. However, this is itself part of a multi-layered scheme: one both sees and is seen. And a virtuous person will see her-/ himself as if s/he were being watched within a theater of virtue wherein all of the spectators have a male gaze. Despite the concrete, empirical question of the gender of the actual subject in pursuit of virtue, the reflexive gaze of the virtuous soul is nevertheless itself gendered male. Reflexivity and reciprocity are fundamental terms of the Consolation as a whole. For, as Seneca himself observes from the start, the novelty of this text is that he is consoling his mother when he is himself the object of her lament. Rather than being a sad object, Seneca emerges as the triumphant subject. Rather than being, then, an image of suffering that causes suffering, he will be the image of consolation that consoles. Seneca needn’t even be particularly clever, he claims, because it is the optical itself that is efficacious here: properly staged, consolation takes care of itself.17 This last maxim naturally requires us to think about the structural force of Senecan tragedy as well. But the question of what notions propagate themselves autonomously in the plays will have to wait until later. Helvia as initially shown to herself is a martial, even manly figure who need only return to a virtuous personal past. She will feel pudor to let one more wound upon so scarred a body break a soul that has conquered so many miseries.18 Continued happiness undoes others: but those who have long suffered bear the worst with brave and unmoving constancy. The vocabulary throughout leans on a virile ideology of martial impenetrability: uictor, cicatricosus, fortis, and immobilis are set against images that evoke feminine weakness such as delicatus, conlabi, eneruare, flere, and gemere. Accordingly, since Helvia has never been given a “leave of absence” (uacatio: a technical military term) from sorrow (2.4), and since she has throughout her life borne so many wounds nobly, this latest one ought not to perturb her. This recens uulnus is such as might make a raw recruit (tiro) cry out when the doctor sets his hands to it, but a hardened ueteranus bears even the worst injuries without a groan: pati and impassivity are conjoined in their case. And so in her own case she should bravely face Seneca’s ministrations.19 A uir fortis is a war hero in Latin, and Seneca has just demanded of

Losing Seneca

95

his mother one more act of silent-suffering-as-valor in an idiom that is military throughout.20 The militarism goes both ways: Seneca is himself not just a doctor, but he is also a warrior. Seneca will triumph over the pathology of his mother once he shows her that he does not himself suffer anything that might let him be called miserable let alone a cause of misery to others.21 Speaking of his own rhetorical strategy whereby he confronted Helvia with her sorrows Seneca declares, “My act was bold (magno animo). For I was resolved to conquer your sorrow, not to limit it.”22 Seneca’s model of the self is a more general category that embraces and unites a variety of metaphorical registers.23 The topography of this self is itself paradoxical. And it is this specific paradox that allows for Seneca’s elaborate knot of metaphors. That which is best about ourselves, our animus, is our inmost self, something deepest within us. And yet this same faculty is also that which is most lofty. The soul, then, is both deep within the body and it is also far above and beyond the body. The body, then, is a sort of envelope, a threshold between two versions of the soul. And of these two versions of the soul, one is particular, the other universal. Accordingly, the body is the discarded thing that is nevertheless essential to a philosophical(-cum-metaphorical) movement of spirit. The encounter with this dead thing provokes the sense of a beyond, of something more and grander “out there.” That is, the repudiation of the abject (maternal) body “gives birth to” the spirit as sublime. Seneca decries fleshy desire as a hidden death implanted within our own bellies (hoc secretum et infixum uisceribus ipsis exitium; 13.3). And Seneca contrasts this to flesh as the medium of propagation. However, the word I translated as “bellies” can also mean “womb” when used of a woman. We are each pregnant with doom, and bodily pleasure leads to this deathly birth.24 The inverted and valorized version of this, of course, is a sort of psychic pregnancy as per the Platonic tradition.25 If the mind realizes that the domain of the body is properly and exclusively biological, claims Seneca, then all vice is laid low in a once-and-for-all conquest: non singula uitia ratio sed pariter omnia prosternit: in uniuersum semel uincitur (13.3). The jump in logic is striking: the war of virtue against vice has been reduced to a single battlefield, namely the body itself.26 The body is the repository and mother of psychic death. Conversely the soul is the repository and father of psychic life. One notes, then, the topographical point that Seneca makes hard on the heels of his indictment of the body: the sage sets everything in himself (omnia in se reposuit; 13.4). And yet the “in” where one puts everything is itself an abstraction, and one

96

The Sublime Seneca

that is pointedly so. For this petty body of ours (corpusculum hoc, 11.7) is but the prison of our soul. It is perpetually harassed. Meanwhile, the soul itself is sacred and eternal, and something upon which one cannot lay a finger.27 In this schema one can see the fitness of Helvia as addressee: hers is the body that once housed Seneca; hers is the body to which he now returns. But the message as he returns is one of bodily repudiation: the body is the source of nothing good; it is but an impediment to psychic virtue. Moreover, the body is not just an object of suffering, but it is also an object-cause of suffering, it gives birth to vice-as-death. Losing-mother is an image that haunts the Consolation to Helvia even as this text purports to be about losing a son. Helvia’s own mother died in childbirth (2.4). Seneca’s motherless mother began her militant life of virtue immediately,28 at the very moment she lost/discarded her own mother. The image Seneca deploys is the opposite of this: Helvia was discarded, she was left out to live, ad uitam quodam modo exposita es. Seneca has inverted the Latin idiom used for exposing children: ad necem exponere has become ad uitam exponere. Condemned to live, exiled from her absent mother’s body, baby Helvia was virtue’s own warrior. She was, then, Seneca before there was a Seneca. And this open letter from Seneca to his mother reminds her of the Seneca she was and the Seneca she can become again. She need only expose herself all over again to life, to the real life of the soul by detaching herself from (effeminate and bodily) sorrow. The double of the image of losing-mother is that of losing-the-fatherland. Carere patria is, of course, one of the core motifs of the whole of the Consolation to Helvia.29 And yet the fatherland cannot be lost. The wise soul is properly at home anywhere in the cosmos.30 The soul is housed within a world that, much as the wise man himself, has set everything in itself (omnia in se reposuit). The wise soul knows this; it knows that it contemplates and admires the world even as it is itself the most wonderful part of that world.31 Wisdom consists in appreciating the non-antithesis between spirit and world. And wisdom also includes the spectacle of seeing oneself as part of this world-that-contains-spirit. What must be set to one side is a concrete motherland of bodily desires as opposed to an infinite and abstracted fatherland of psychic virtues. It is pointless, then, to complain that the land of Seneca’s exile is not fertile (ferax, 9.1) in the concrete sense given that it spawns so many sage abstract ruminations in Seneca’s spirit. Only the narrow soul is distracted by the terrestrial.32 The sage appreciates that mundus designates the universe as a whole and the orderly order of things. This world-of-spirit is bigger and more real than the world-as-soil, the terra.

Losing Seneca

97

The terrestrial is properly the object of empire. This is true both literally and figuratively. On the one hand, Seneca evokes Roman conquest, and on the other, Seneca advocates a psychic mastery of the world as a concept. At the end of a long, rhetorical passage, Seneca offers a sound-bite, and if we let it stick in our head then we can re-think its sense in the broader context of his argument: “Wherever a Roman has conquered, there he dwells (ubicumque uicit Romanus, habitat; 7.7).” This political truth ought to be a philosophical one as well, and the imperium of empire ought to be a metaphor for the imperium of mind. The philosopher who has mastered the concept that the terrestrial is a mere indifferent has therewith conquered it. This mastery makes him truly cosmopolitan and at home anywhere in a world that he has subjugated to thought. The empirical world which Seneca has glossed as a world-of-empires will never yield the purity required of concepts that might satisfy philosophical thought: everywhere you look you will find that things are mixed together and grafted on. Fate has decreed that nothing will stay in its place.33 Set against this flux and impermanence of the terrestrial is the potential permanence of the philosophical individual. The “ubiquity” of the earthly is neutralized. It becomes an everywhere that is a nowhere. It is a place thoroughly territorialized and subjugated by imperious reason. The earth may provide to reason evidence as to the truth of nature, and the earth may yield virtuous men, but the earth is but an envelope, an origin, a from-which and not an in-itself. This list of qualities of terra is “maternal-feminine” in Irigaray’s sense. And the point I wish to make is that Seneca insists that a woman who would be virtuous needs to repudiate this aspect of herself in order to translate/transcribe herself into a masculine psychic order of things. The indifferent and transitory must be replaced by a universal that is also eternal. Here, it is also important to bear in mind that the addressee of the Consolation to Helvia both is and is not a specific female individual, Helvia. Seneca is addressing the “problem” of being-a-woman, and this is also a problem of being mired in the particular rather than ascending to the universal. Let us, then, add another image to our catalog. In addition to losing-mother and losing-the-fatherland we have losing-the-feminine. Seneca’s text erases textuality in the name of authors and intentions. Immediately after telling his reader that wherever we go we take with us our common nature and particular virtue, Seneca insists on the cosmic “intentionality” of this schema:34 Id actum est, mihi crede, ab illo, quisquis formator uniuersi fuit, siue ille deus est potens omnium, siue incorporalis ratio ingentium operum artifex,

98

The Sublime Seneca siue diuinus spiritus per omnia maxima ac minima aequali intentione diffusus, siue fatum et inmutabilis causarum inter se cohaerentium series – id, inquam, actum est ut in alienum arbitrium nisi uilissima quaeque non caderent. This was done, trust me, by whoever was the one who gave form to the universe, whether he is that all-powerful god, or a bodiless reason that crafts great works, or a divine spirit suffused with equal tenor through all things great and small, or fate and the unchangeable chain of causes linked with one another – this was done, I say, so that nothing would fall into another’s sway but what was of least value. (Consolation to Helvia 8.3)

This collection of equivalents not only concatenates causes and effects but it also links up authors and texts as part of a great chain of being-asmeaning.35 “Believe you me (mihi crede),” says the narrator, “this is how it is.” Either “Seneca” or “Seneca’s text” can be substituted throughout this description of the transcendental order and its intentionality (id actum est ut . . .). Seneca gave form to the whole of the text. Seneca is all-powerful relative to his text. Seneca is a bodiless reason that has crafted the grand opera Senecae. The spirit of Seneca saturates the whole, from the articulation of the major segments of the text to the rhythm of its individual clauses. The chain of words is a chain of ideas, and with this chain Seneca binds together meaning and message. And he makes a bid that his text should become the cause of a virtuous effect. The whole of this gloss requires a certain theory of the author and meaning, of course. One says, then, that Seneca intends that intentionality work thus. As we saw with quo proposito in Moral Letter 108, Seneca intends that “to intend” mean something, that, indeed, it should mean everything. Seneca the abstract and masterful author of the text as well as Seneca the specific and virtuous character within the text are two figures who emerge “from the text” but are nevertheless “beyond” the text. Anyone who reads the Consolation and allows herself to be consoled by it therewith allows herself to get the realer than real Seneca at the expense of giving up the only seemingly real Seneca. This means that both the Seneca portrayed by the text and the Seneca “behind” the text come to be convincing and adequate surrogates for an absent Seneca. As in the Consolation to Marcia, “human virtue” and “masculine virtue” tend to blur. In this dark hour Helvia needs to call upon her uirtus.36 She needs to go toe-to-toe with an enemy she knows well and has defeated before. Her body is bloody. It is not intact. New blows fall upon old scars.37 Rather than some untouched virginal female we see here the body of a battle-weary veteran.

Losing Seneca

99

Seneca catalogs female failings and then denies that Helvia has had any share in them. These gendered failings cluster around sex specifically. Seneca berates unchaste bodies, shame at fecundity, the deceit of cosmetics, and erotic clothing that reveals more than it conceals. Other women revel in inpudicitia, Helvia in pudicitia. Accordingly (itaque) Helvia cannot hold out a muliebre nomen as a justification for sorrow. She had nothing to do with female vices, and thus as well she will avoid womanly tears.38 The designation “woman” is a mere designation, “woman” is in Helvia’s case but an arbitrary signifier that does not correspond to a real signified. Her acts are those of a man. One can, then, do a lot with Seneca’s use of the word nomen. Nomen can mean “name” and “title” and also “noun.” It can also mean “excuse” or “pretext.” Just about all of these senses can be entertained by readers of the passage. Obviously a combination of “title” and “pretext” gets to the heart of Seneca’s point. But there is also a kind of “grammar of gender” at play here: as a subject of verbs, this noun/name “Helvia” has been not so much a feminine subject as a masculine one. She has long since betrayed her deceitful gender and shown herself to be authentically virile/ virtuous by means of her many acts of heroism/fortitude.39 Seneca’s very next argument reaffirms the idea that nouns are mere signifiers, and that, as such, they can be shifted about freely. And the muliebre nomen is just another noun, “sex” is not some hard and fast fact. And the muliebre nomen is a noun that one ought to displace and replace: virtue is the name one gives to overcoming the name/noun “woman”: Ne feminae quidem te sinent intabescere uulneri tuo, sed †leuior† necessario maerore cito defunctam iubebunt exsurgere, si modo illas intueri uoles feminas quas conspecta uirtus inter magnos uiros posuit. Not even women allow you to waste away over your wound, but, once you have made quick work of your inevitable sorrow, they will bid you to rise up, provided you are willing to look to those women whose conspicuous virtue placed them among the ranks of great men. (Consolation to Helvia 16.5)

Look to the spectacle of female virtue: intueri and conspicere set us squarely within a visual idiom. Once Helvia looks at a virtue that was once duly beheld, then she will replace her sense of a sorrowing self with a second self, the woman who is set among the lists of men.40 The noteworthy example and the model to which one aspires is an exemplum,41 and the author of a moral essay vividly sets before his reader’s eyes a verbal reflection of a properly visual spectacle. Seneca offers a powerful synthesis: literature and spectacle are joined in order to serve philosophical ends. Theater and metaphor, the metaphor of

100

The Sublime Seneca

theater, and the theater of metaphor: this collocation does philosophical work. And the work it does specifically transitions us from the status of empty words to full deeds. But the “deed” that one learns is impassivity. One learns to see that Seneca is gone and to feel no soul-wrenching woe. This abstract theater is co-ordinated with a concrete theater. And once again the movement from concrete to abstract is itself part of the philosophical work of metaphor. As in the Consolation to Marcia the very act of adopting a specific theoretical perspective is in and of itself “philosophical.” Exemplification entails the choosing of a single figure as a model. A more general genus of virtue is being advocated, but a specific instantiation of that virtue is selected and displayed. Cornelia was exemplary: she bore the loss of her sons nobly. Rutilia was exemplary: she even accompanied her son into exile. Marcellus was exemplary: he was a virtuous exile whose very virtue effectively exiled those who remained in Rome and were therefore deprived of the privilege of his company. Seneca is himself exemplary: he is the son in exile who consoles his mother. He is the reader of the tale of Marcellus who successfully becomes a second Marcellus. As both an author and reader and as a spectacle and spectator Seneca has gotten it right. All that remains is for Helvia to get herself sorted out. And Seneca insists that it is specifically literature that will enable Helvia to find her consolation. First Seneca explains how this is the case, and next Seneca pens a piece of exemplary literature. And then he sets his newly minted exemplum within what is already an exemplary and literary text: Seneca shows Helvia the example of her own sister. Seneca leads Helvia where he himself has already been: to books.42 He has already himself returned to study in a double sense: he is both a reader and a writer. And this very text leads Helvia to literature by itself being literature. The promise Seneca makes for the future results of reading are being made good in the here and now. And it must be stressed that “Senecan literature” is clearly not some simple, dewy affair, a dalliance with a bit of amusing poetry or a long afternoon spent huddled up with a juicy novel. Literature as recreation cannot be what Seneca has in mind. “Distractions” have just been set to one side: taking trips and getting buried in business matters were the sort of thing that merely deceived sorrow. Now sorrow is to be made to cease. Liberalia studia must, then, facilitate the process by which one yields to ratio and thereby at last finds consolation.43 Helvia’s sister is held up as a mirror that will allow Helvia to find and to co-ordinate her own proper self. Seneca also describes this solacium as an exemplum. But as an exemplum she is one that Seneca himself has specifically

Losing Seneca

101

authored. Had this women lived in days of yore, avers Seneca, she would have been written up by the poets as was Alcestis (19.5). The “turn to liberal studies” has taken place by means of the text itself: the solace of study stands before us, an exemplary example authored by Seneca himself, a father of ethical books and ethical spectacles. I know my sensible aunt, says Seneca, and she will not put up with your useless sorrow: “She will tell for you the tale of her own exemplum, one of which I was myself also a spectator.”44 The solace is an example is a spectacle. The spectacle is one Seneca saw. The spectacle is one he re-stages now for his mother. His mother occupies a dual position: she is to identify both with her sister and with the spectator of the spectacle. The lesson to be learned is that the sister herself has become the spectator to her own spectacle: she herself has the requisite “distance” from her own deed to tell it as a story. “Solace” in this context means moving from being a character suffering on the stage to becoming a spectator of the drama of one’s own life, a spectator who appreciates the fear and the pity it arouses without ever succumbing to it. This metaphorical movement from character to spectator involves as well the appreciation of the “literary” quality of life itself. And the bonae artes that encompass, of course, “good literature” can be glossed as a specifically sage appreciation of literature, of the philosophical reading of life-as-literature as well as the ability to translate, to sublate, even, from the mundane to the sublime. What, then, is the aunt’s story? It is a story that Seneca transforms from her story into a story about her: ea narrabit becomes acta eius Seneca narrat. Seneca tells the story in four parts. First he narrates the deed. Next he talks of its qualitative greatness. Then he steps back and talks of his aunt’s life in Egypt when she was the prefect’s wife. Finally Seneca cuts back to the exemplary deed one more time, and he draws for his mother the moral of that story so far as she herself is concerned. The great act itself is told in a single vivid sentence: when her husband died in an accident at sea, though she herself was shipwrecked as well, she nevertheless forged back into the storm-tossed waters in order to recover his corpse.45 Much longer is Seneca’s insistence that the deed is worthy of commemoration and literary elaboration. The gilt frame momentarily threatens to distract us from the painting on the canvas. But our eyes return to the aunt presently. Or do they return to her? Paradoxically, what one most admires about her is her invisibility.46 Seneca’s aunt was never seen in public when she was in Egypt. She never let an Egyptian into her house. She asked nothing of her husband. She allowed nothing to be asked of her. For sixteen years she kept this up. Seneca’s bon mot: “It were a great deal if the

102

The Sublime Seneca

province had approved of her for those sixteen years: it is greater still that it was ignorant of her.”47 What was best about her as a woman was the spectacle of her as a nonspectacle. However, when she enters into the scene of her own spectacular virtue, both gender and optics are transformed. Seneca explicitly gives the moral of the story to his mother: Haec non ideo refero ut laudes eius exequar, quas circumscribere est tam parce transcurrere, sed ut intellegas magni animi esse feminam quam non ambitio, non auaritia, comites omnis potentiae et pestes, uicerunt, non metus mortis iam exarmata naue naufragium suum spectantem deterruit quominus exanimi uiro haerens non quaereret quemadmodum inde exiret sed quemadmodum efferret. Huic parem uirtutem exhibeas oportet et animum a luctu recipias et id agas ne quis te putet partus tui paenitere. I am not telling you all of this in order to enumerate her praises: so tidy a runthrough in fact only circumscribes them. But I do it so that you can appreciate that she is a great-hearted woman whom ambition and avarice, that companion and cancer of all power, did not conquer. When the vessel was already stripped of its rigging and she was beholding the spectacle of her own shipwreck a fear of death did not keep her as she clung to her lifeless husband from seeking not a means of escape but a means of burial. You ought to yourself evince a virtue equal to hers, to reclaim your spirit from sorrow, and to see to it that none believes that you regret your own child. (Consolation to Helvia 19.7)

Greatness of spirit, magnitudo animi, is one of those characteristics that Seneca presupposes as an object of his audience’s admiration and emulation.48 The bold spirit with which an exemplary figure acts itself ought to inspire in us a desire to behave similarly. Helvia’s sister was unconquered by material concerns, mere indifferents. And she bested as well the fear of death, that constant menace with which the philosopher himself wrangles.49 The fear of death did not scare the aunt off from her duty. She beheld the spectacle of her own situation (naufragium suum spectantem). And Seneca himself, remember, was a spectator of this very scene (spectator fui). Helvia’s sister saw herself as Seneca saw her. Seneca writes that her eyes were as Seneca’s own. Seeing oneself within the spectacular apparatus of moral philosophy is “orthopoetic”: a creative spark flashes, and one’s sense of spectacle lends a moral clarity of vision. One does not seek to “escape” from the shipwreck that is life itself,50 one instead prepares oneself to act nobly when the occasion comes.51 Clinging to a corpse and doing right by it, this is “ethics” and “greatness of spirit.” There is a dead object positioned square in the center of the tragic stage of life’s own drama. We will shortly turn to

Losing Seneca

103

look at the mangled corpse of Hippolytus, a vile body to which this one should be compared. That corpse disrupts our sense of closure and resolution. In this consolation we find something beautiful and something sense-ful in finding a place for a corpse as well as our own place relative to it. This lifeless object inspires one’s nobler acts. Doing right by this dead thing wins praise. Being seen serving the corpse of obligation is “virtuous” and “exemplary.” Seeing oneself as if part of just such a spectacle animates those who are magno animo. Seneca produces a conceptual antinomy: service to life is the same as service to death. Helvia will be as virtuous as her sister when she does well not by a corpse but by a child. But the child she will serve well is Seneca himself. The corpse that Helvia ought to cling to amidst this shipwreck of her fortunes is the empty place where Seneca was.52 While the “real” place of Seneca is empty, a realer than real Seneca writes of/looks in upon this same place. Seneca tells his mother to see herself as he imagines himself seeing her: this will be a “consolatory” moment. Helvia will reclaim her animus from grief “for herself,” but she will do so in the terms set forth by another. The deathly metaphoricity of Senecan ethical writing suffuses the final movement of the Consolation. The movement out is the movement to the grave: the aunt chooses efferre over exire. And one sees that the metaphorical movement of transferre also converges with efferre here: the path from the here and now to the sublime beyond entails a radical encounter with death. This encounter begins by staring into the dead eyes of the corpse in front of us, but it ends by oneself insensibly seeing the spectacle of life. This spectacle of death will console Helvia for her loss of Seneca by offering her a substance that makes good the hole at the center of her life, the not-dead and non-there Seneca. And now Seneca the writer transitions to the very end of the essay. He has written of one spectacle, the sister. Now he will write up a second spectacle: himself. This spectacle is likewise the spectacle of the soul’s ascent to a position from which it can appreciate the absolute spectacle of all space and time. Since Helvia will inevitably think of her son, he is now going to command her how to think of himself: qualem me cogites accipe (20.1). After being given instructions in ethical perspective and ethics as perspective, Helvia is to courageously imagine in her mind’s eye the animus of her son. Seneca has achieved the same perspective as had Marcia’s dead son in the consolation addressed to her. Seneca’s spirit, keen after the truth, is now free to ponder its own nature and the nature of the universe.53 The two are as one: the nature of the animus and the nature of the uniuersum are more than a rhetorical doublet. There is no qualitative difference between the

104

The Sublime Seneca

rationality of the mundus and that of the animus.54 Only those mired in the terrestrial cannot see this. The terrestrial is for the mind merely a transitory preliminary spectacle. Nevertheless, it is a spectacle that eventually leads it to grander, higher things. Seneca says as much in his very next sentence. His mind surveys the lands: terras primum . . . Next (tunc) his mind ascends to the space between the earth and the sky: it ponders meteorological phenomena specifically with an eye to transforming them from occasions for fear to objects of knowledge. Finally (tum), having made a survey of these lower things, his mind bursts forth to ponder the highest ones. It enjoys that most glorious spectacle of the divine (pulcherrimo diuinorum spectaculo), and mindful of its own eternity it wanders all time, both past and present.55 The particular, the qualified, the suffering, the terrestrial, the feminine. This is the tangled mess from which every unqualified spirit must raise itself. One loses the particular, but in the name of the universal. Suffering arises from the fact that man (as homo-cum-uir) does not conceive that the body has no meaning. One sets aside the narrow perspective of life, but only as a means of seeing all of everything sub specie aeternitatis. The labor of consolation consists of enabling another to make this transition and to give up the one perspective in the name of the other. Living as a concrete ethical subject means braving the waves in order to cling to this caput mortuum amidst the endless flux of life. Only by imagining oneself as a spirit contemplating this same spectacle from without can one find a specifically sublime happiness, a lifeless gaudium that has renounced the uoluptates as well as the pains of the terrestrial world. In this text we have the sequel to the Consolation to Marcia and its renunciation of the spectacle of the world in as much as Seneca has added to it the metaphysics of authorship as found in the Natural Questions. Once we stop mourning the loss of the terrestrial Seneca, then we can ourselves become the sublime one, a self-siring and selfauthoring realer-than-real virile essence.

chapter 6

The analytics of desire

For Seneca, ethics and literature are a pair. That is, Seneca explores both the way in which literature does ethical work and the manner in which ethical thought is communicated by literary means. Seneca does not posit a facile antithesis between philosophy and literature. Seneca sees reading and writing as part of the philosophical journey itself. The very notion of philosophy as a journey is already a metaphor. And such literary devices do real work in Seneca’s writings via the transfer between the abstract idea and the concrete idos, the transfer between the model and the likeness. As with the moral philosophy proper, Senecan tragedy also stages ethics.1 The tragedies stage ethics in a much more abstract sense. The tragedies provoke encounters with the very structure of ethical thought itself. Naturally one can and should read Seneca’s tragedies not just for their engagement with his philosophy, but for present purposes a narrowed focus has been adopted.2 However, the emphasis in this chapter and the next will not fall on a technical exposition of the philosophical motifs in the plays. Instead, we will discuss the plays as sites where Seneca explores themes and issues that admit of a formal philosophical presentation but that have pointedly not been given such a presentation.3 These plays can be read as places where key themes are subjected to thought experiments. And, importantly, the products of these experiments are not constrained in advance by philosophical doctrine in as much as the issues being explored concern foundational elements of the philosophical enterprise itself. These experiments represent moments where one sees Seneca himself asking hard questions whose answers by no means presuppose an orthodox Stoic articulation. These are, of course, plays and not philosophical treatises. But the questions that arise in the course of these plays do nevertheless offer new vistas onto the core themes of this study. One even finds that it is not easy to offer a simple, doctrinaire Stoic answer to these tragic questions about nature. For me, then, the plays reside at the limit of philosophy, in every sense of that 105

106

The Sublime Seneca

phrase. They mark both the within which and the beyond which of the ethical enterprise.4 I would like to read Seneca’s Phaedra as an analytics of desire. I want to give this phrase a certain philosophical weight. We have two questions before us: Why does desire matter for philosophy? And what consequence does its analysis have for reason itself ? We have just seen how gender is something that troubles Seneca’s philosophy. Seneca does present a way in which the problem of gender can become a solved problem. And this “solution” is philosophically useful in that it is the premise for an ethical transformation. It is less clear, however, that desire is a problem of the same configuration. The analysis of desire in the Phaedra will demonstrate that circuits of desire and circuits of meaning are themselves profoundly related. They are, however, in a state of fundamental non-communication. Moreover, when we reach that point that lies beyond desire we are simultaneously at a point beyond meaning. To the extent that we have any experience of a sublime perspective in this play, we have been taught to fear our own desire for it. The unfeeling quality of the sublime is not an ataraxia that we would relish as philosophers, but an utter indifference to human meaning from which we recoil as human beings even as we recognize in it a point of departure and return of our own passions.5 In addition to reconfiguring our sense of the sublime in Seneca, I will also explore a new variation on the ethics of perspective. The Phaedra stages a vast panoply of perspectives. The characters within the drama each have their own perspective and their own ethical commitments to the judgments that (more or less) reasonably ensue from occupying that position.6 However, each of these characters also finds himself or herself degenerating as the play progresses. The commitment to reasonableness on each of their parts finds them ever more enmeshed in the toils of unreason. Each successive step puts them in an increasingly absurd position as they march towards an encounter with the very desire from which they have been hiding all along. On the one hand, we have the seeming completeness of the world of reason, and on the other the incompleteness of the discourse of passion. And it is this very antithesis between reason and passion that undoes them all. The Phaedra is, then, a sort of philosophical burlesque.7 But it does not offer a simple resolution of the form, “If only they had been more sensible.” For the play questions the imbrication of sense and nonsense. Accordingly, if we take the orthodox Stoic proposition of the role of reason in the cosmos we can see in the play a systematic rewriting of it.8 For a Stoic logos unites the three fields of logic, physics, and ethics. The metaphysical structure of truth is logical, that is, it obeys the dictates of logos as reason. However, this same

The analytics of desire

107

logos is the sustaining tenor of the physical world itself.9 One’s ethical duty is to determine rationally what the (rational) structure of the cosmos itself is and to behave accordingly. “Living in accordance with nature” and “following nature” are then fundamentally ethical propositions. These are likewise rational enterprises in every sense of the word rational.10 However, in the Phaedra following nature does not mean living in accordance with reason. Following nature leads inexorably to a disastrous encounter with unreason.11 Much as not every moment in a Moral Letter needs to be pressed as a declaration of philosophical orthodoxy, it is likely counterproductive to ask of the tragedies that they be anything more than loosely Stoic: they are places to explore ideas, not disseminate points of doctrine.12 It will be useful to consider the extent to which the philosophical “looseness” of the (im)moral psychology of the Phaedra speaks to and expands our core themes: how does literary form allow for the exploration of philosophical content? How does some super-sensible out there and up there relate to the question of what one ought to do? There is an ongoing debate on the relationship between reason and desire in Seneca’s thought more generally.13 Is Seneca a “psychological monist” who holds that unreason merely reflects improper movements of a fundamentally rational soul? Does he admit of a non-monistic view that admits of some sort of independence of desires?14 Of course, excessive attention to Seneca’s personal orthodoxy can be misleading in the short term: the philosophically consequential claims articulated by the various characters, none of whom is either Seneca or a Stoic, do drive the action of the play forward. Nevertheless, despite the lack of philosophical accreditation of the dramatis personae to say nothing of the tragic genre itself, in the Phaedra we do see various movements of various souls. And these movements can themselves be described as proceeding along a continuum of sorts in that un-reason and reason are profoundly related. It is just that all of the quasirational movement of the souls in question marches them in the wrong direction: they move away from the sort of psychic states advocated by Seneca’s philosophical works. The characters of the Phaedra all start in positions of relative virtue, but the plot unravels everyone and exposes the (il)logical conclusions to which their fundamental commitments lead them.15 The Nurse is a good servant to her mistress, so good, in fact, that she becomes a criminal on her behalf. Phaedra is split: she sanely knows herself to be mad.16 Her reason has apparently compassed her desire, and yet reason seems utterly impotent to do anything in the wake of this comprehension. Hippolytus flees the depravities of city and sex in order to live in accordance with nature, and yet the nature out there is

108

The Sublime Seneca

neither chaste nor rational. Theseus, duped by appearances into drawing a reasonable but erroneous conclusion, calls upon his father Poseidon to grant his wish that Hippolytus be brought to justice. But what comes out of the sea is anything but a manifestation of divine logos, and the death of his son unwrites multiple layers of the very order that this retribution was meant to safeguard. The core plot of Seneca’s play is no different from that of Euripides.17 We start with a portrait of Hippolytus the chaste hunter. We discover that his stepmother Phaedra has conceived a desire for Hippolytus in the absence of Theseus, who is her husband and his father. Phaedra is struggling to conceal her passion. Phaedra’s nurse pries the truth out of her and is instrumental in the revelation of Phaedra’s desire. Hippolytus is outraged to learn of this desire. Hippolytus is then falsely accused of pursuing Phaedra. When Theseus, who has just returned, hears this charge he is furious. Seeking retribution Theseus calls upon his own father Poseidon to grant one of his three wishes and to destroy his son Hippolytus. A monster from the sea causes a horrible chariot crash while Hippolytus is driving his team. Theseus learns that his son is actually innocent and feels profound regret at being over-hasty in his vengeance. A review of the different choices made by the two dramatists will reveal that Seneca has written a more pointedly psychological drama. His vision is also much blacker than that of Euripides. I wish only to highlight one difference, though. Euripides has a divine frame: Aphrodite speaks a prologue and Artemis appears in the final scene. Both give an objective overview of the drama, a god’s-eye view that is initially shared only with the audience and later shared as well with the characters. This transcendental perspective that mediates between the subjective and objective registers has been stripped out of Seneca’s play.18 The very possibility of such a perspective has been put in doubt.19 The Phaedra is a drama of missed encounters, stark emotions, regret, and characters abandoned to fates of their own making. No god declares the meaning of the drama in advance or retroactively. The drama contains only two events: a message of desire is transmitted from character to character, and a father curses his son. Seneca takes this raw material and makes of it a story of the analytic decomposition of all of the characters. Though the characters themselves remain in the end who they were in the beginning, we nevertheless come to appreciate that the structure of their proper selves was also the structure of their improper selves. There is a hole in each character’s thinking that leaves them blind to a desire that simultaneously organizes both their virtue and their vice.

The analytics of desire

109

Let us look first at the progress of the choral odes. These track the evolution of the theme of desire as well as offering a sort of melodic counterpoint to the various positions of the main characters. Like many a chorus before them, the chorus of the Phaedra can only generalize. It understands things at the abstract level. In fact, the chorus is itself abstract. Its entries onto the stage are unmotivated. These participants do not take part in the action. They are detached and belated: they are not in the plot, and they are purely reactive to the plot.20 But in this they are emblematic of the trouble of the main characters: they too construct meaning belatedly and regularly they too feel like passive spectators rather than protagonists in their own drama. The first choral song is about love and the power of love. The whole world knows Venus’ son. Every kind of person knows him as well. Love is even felt in heaven above. And so too has the Chorus itself felt love.21 The Chorus catalogs. There is a sense that Love is the figure who gathers within his embrace a closed set, a cosmic order of people, places, and things, each of them his subjects. Many rather colorful stories are the product of his reign, but they all make sense when seen from this perspective: they all bear the stamp of Love. Near the end of this choral song amor is glossed as natura. And the Chorus sings that “Nature claims all for itself.”22 This is a key assertion. It turns the erotic ode into a quasi-philosophical one. This postulate about nature has decidedly Stoic resonances to it, and it likewise participates in a broader exploration of natural order in the play more generally. But there is an important difference here: it is desire, not reason that orders nature in such verses. And this is the central philosophical question of the play: When we conceive of nature are we to imagine a rational or a passionate force? What principle subtends the world in which we find ourselves? The Chorus’s second ode praises the beauty of Hippolytus when he rushes off in anger after learning of Phaedra’s passion. The Chorus offers an appraisal of his decus. This word and the related term decor appear at key junctures in the play.23 Here the conceit is that Hippolytus is the most attractive thing ever to have lived. He is favorably compared to the moon and to other heavenly beauties. The Chorus next reflects on the fleeting quality of beauty. One should enjoy it while one can. This is, of course, a sort of reasoned confession of unreason. Hippolytus is pointedly making no use of his beauty. He speeds away from Athens and from enjoying what might otherwise be his. And yet the Chorus immediately rewrites the nature into which he plunges himself: this very natural landscape is suffused with desire.24 The various powers of the forest are sure to assail him: naiads, dryads, and Pans await his arrival. The moon too

110

The Sublime Seneca

stayed her course when she saw him. Thus, not only is nature thoroughly libidinized, but it is also itself prone to disorder in the face of its own desires. The Chorus even lets itself get carried away with desire as it appraises Hippolytus. The last portion of the ode compares him to gods and heroes in respect to qualities that have nothing to do with beauty: his manly good looks are winning him praise for strength, size, spear casts, and archery. The ode closes with a wish that such good looks might go unpunished: may they in fact vanish and be replaced by the appearance of ugly old age. Only thus will he be safe.25 It is a curious fantasy. Great beauty allows divine attributes to accrue to Hippolytus when his praises are sung. But then the Chorus wishes that he not suffer the penalties for being seen as they see him and read as they read him. All of nature could turn into a Phaedra in response to Hippolytus’ good looks. And the Chorus itself is already well advanced down the same path of madness. They imagine divine punishment – is this going to be a rape or a thunderbolt, though? – befalling the youth for crimes which are of their own making. That is, Hippolytus’ only crime is to incite desire. In the first ode amor was a sort of “sustaining tenor” of the cosmos. Here it is a disorderly principle felt within subjects, and it is prone to punish the objects of desire. If the first two choral songs oscillate between order and disorder in an oddly antithetical positing of the nature of Love, then the next two advance the argument by retaining the cosmological reflections but shifting from Love to Fortune. This is an important conceptual substitution. Rather than songs about order and desire we have instead meditations on order and a blind drive.26 If desire is a principle of impulsion that is attached to even as it lies behind an object, Fortune is a blind drive that is deracinated from objects and satisfies an internal logic that is alien to human hopes and dreams. The third choral song comes not long after the second. Only one scene intervenes. In it Phaedra tricks Theseus into believing that Hippolytus made a sexual assault upon her person. After Theseus makes his prayer to his father for the death of his son, the Chorus sings a song that opens with an elaborate invocation of “Nature, the great parent of the gods and you the ruler of fiery Olympus.” This song addressed to Nature and to Jove her prince regent emphasizes cosmic order: we hear of the movement of the stars, the flow of the seasons, and the agricultural calendar. But all of this order is invoked only to end with a pointed question about disorder: How is it that the governor of this vast machinery can be so distant and unconcerned (securus abes) when it comes to mankind? Doesn’t he care about rewarding the good and harming the bad?27

The analytics of desire

111

The Chorus at once shifts to an indictment of Fortune. They complain of her that “Fortune governs human affairs according to no order at all. She scatters her gifts with a blind hand and favors what is worse.”28 There is a stark contrast here: on the one hand, the heavens are a providential clockwork.29 On the other hand, the lives of men are an ugly chaos.30 The movement of the stars reveals a beneficent necessity. Meanwhile, the lives of men bespeak the malice of chance.31 “Lust overwhelms the holy, treachery rules in the lofty palace, the people relish empowering swine. They cultivate and loathe the very same men.”32 And the brief song closes with the lament: “O empty chastity and false beauty!” (o uane pudor falsumque decus! 988). Fortune is not just blind, she is spiteful. The apotheosis of her cruelty is the transvaluation of two of our prized terms: chastity and beauty.33 Abuses of Fortune are hardly unfamiliar in ancient literature. However, the Fortune that appears here is not just an aleatory element.34 Instead she is a radically evil principle.35 She sows disorder. She evacuates the rewards of virtue and of beauty. There is only plenitude in ugliness and vice. Fortune and her pleasures are, then, obscene. She makes a mockery of that which men ought to prize and relish and that which Hippolytus in fact seems to embody. Ethical reflection is left with a paradox: living in accordance with nature means living under the reign of both a kindly Jove and a lewd, tyrannical Fortune. The cosmos is double: it is both orderly and chaotic. It is materially rational and ethically insane.36 This sadistic portrait of Fortune reappears in the fourth and final choral song. After the messenger announces to Theseus that his wish has come true and that his son has been destroyed, the Chorus again reflects on Fortune. Their ode begins with casus and Fortuna and is done in dark tones: violence and madness characterize the movement of chance.37 The tallest peaks are the most storm-tossed, claims the Chorus. This is because Jove fears for the sky and attacks anything that draws near it. Again, this is not blind chance but something much more sinister, a cosmic spite that maintains the order of the world by punishing those who rise too high. And this time the split between Jove and Fortune dissolves: both are jealous and hostile. I have lingered on the chorus because, as I mentioned before, even if it takes no role in the drama it nevertheless offers an index of its thematic evolution. And in these songs we see the elaboration of a fundamentally tragic thesis: the cosmos is both rational and irrational. Nature is both beautiful and sublime. When I make this latter distinction I wish to evoke a fragment of Kantian thought as well as a Lacanian commentary on that element of Kant.38 We will also begin to unpack a motif that has arisen in

112

The Sublime Seneca

the course of the discussions of the Natural Questions, the Consolation to Marcia, and especially the end of the Consolation to Helvia. Kant designates the beautiful as sense-ful form while the sublime is senseless form.39 Natural beauty in Kant designates “purposiveness without purpose.”40 A natural formation is beautiful, says Kant, because while it has no purpose outside itself, it is nevertheless structured as if it had one. As Alenka Zupančič puts it, the beautiful is the place where we feel that nature knows. The beautiful instills in us the sense that the universe is a machina concors. Conversely, the sublime is a figure of excess. Kant’s examples are a volcano or a storm. The sublime is a part of nature, but this is nature with a different face, one of violence, cruelty, and caprice. If the beautiful is where nature knows, the sublime is where she enjoys. And here one has to insist on the qualification that is so easily forgotten: this is all subjective. “[T]he sublime is not to be sought in the things of nature, but only in our ideas.”41 It is the representation, not the thing itself that provokes the sense of the sublime.42 Thus, the experience of the sublime provokes a species of introspection that yields a sense of awe and mystery.43 In the play we look at Nature and then imagine cruel Fortune in her place. There ensues a subjective rewrite: one “feels” the radical indifference towards humanity on the part of the universe. And to the experience of the Phaedra we can contrast a divergent subjective experience, an experience that ensues as a function of the arguments, representations, and arguments about representations deployed in the Natural Questions and the Consolations. In those texts a subjective transformation is effected: Nature is felt/known to be beautiful. The objective and the subjective are harmoniously co-ordinated in the process of the encounter with harmony itself. Hitherto, then, what I have been designating as the Senecan sublime has been something much more like the Kantian beautiful: a spectacle of order and purpose; we see and we know that the mundus itself is rational, that it itself knows. In the Phaedra the machina concors has been replaced by a machina discors.44 As the Phaedra develops a disturbing thought presents itself: namely the idea that human existence itself is governed according to the logic of the sublime as opposed to the logic of beauty.45 We search in vain for the beauty of divine reason. Yet the divine perspective has been stripped from the play.46 It may shimmer on the horizon, but we cannot be sure that it is the product of reason itself and not a mirage conjured solely by our desire for reason. We yearn. Rationality might only be one of the objects towards which desire reaches, but this gesture arises out of anything but a well-reasoned pursuit of rationality. Seneca has here forged a drama around a portrait of nature that poses a logical challenge. This challenge assaults reason not just incidentally but

The analytics of desire

113

profoundly. Seneca’s dramatic paradox poses the problem of reason itself. It is a paradox that is positioned anterior to foundational claims of Stoicism and one that does not have an orthodox Stoic elaboration: what if all were not reason and reason were not all? Can reason really account for desire? Or are reason and desire bound up in a complex dialectic that never allows the former to master the latter? What sensible account can we make of the nonsense that seems to drive us forward? The characters in the play each embody a species of sublime irrationality. Let us review them with an eye to appreciating the full difficulty of the entanglement of nature with both reason and desire. The Nurse goes from philosopher, to orator, to murderous liar. We see in her case a blind fidelity to authority. And it is precisely because the Nurse is so clever about guessing what her mistress wants that she manages to produce an outcome that is not at all desired. When we first hear from the Nurse she sounds like she has lately been penning a few Moral Letters of her own. She readily defines virtue and vice. She is chock full of philosophical sententiae with a certain rhetorical jingle to them. She chastises Phaedra for claiming that a god named Amor is compelling her when she ought really to recognize that this is just a case of libido looking to excuse itself by investing in mythology.47 Phaedra is rich, powerful, and bored. Phaedra’s passion is little but an irrational movement of ratio. If she would just choose to get better she would already be well down the road to a cure.48 The Nurse knows all about wisdom without being wise. Instead she is merely cunning. She materializes a number of the dangers we saw in Moral Letter 108 where Seneca explored the dangers of a hollow relationship to wisdom. In the face of resistance, the Nurse shifts tactics. What she knows and what she does with her knowledge are distressingly disparate matters. When she realizes that Phaedra is not yielding to her sensible advice, the Nurse promptly changes course and resolves to try to procure Hippolytus for her mistress. Or, as the Nurse sagely tells herself before immodestly beginning her assault on Hippolytus’ modesty: “Pudor makes for a lousy servant to regal power.”49 The Nurse is more than happy to have the empty shell of reason be the token of her fidelity to Phaedra. Her cunning reason is quick to dispense with the category of shame should circumstances so dictate. And they do. When attempting to persuade Hippolytus to abandon his commitment to chastity the Nurse launches into a set of mythological and cosmological observations about the necessity of sex. If there were no sex, there would be no babies, and without babies the world would die in the space of a generation. The Nurse rounds out this syllogism with the following

114

The Sublime Seneca

conclusion: “Accordingly take nature as your life’s guide. Spend time in the city. Cultivate the civic crowd.”50 The first line is almost pure Stoicism: live in accordance with nature. The second is an absurdity from Hippolytus’ standpoint. He already has been following nature by living in it. He sees in the crowd only the possibility of a degeneration from his commitment to nature and the purity of solitude. The Nurse makes the city and human society into a part of nature. And if a man is in fact a politikon zōon, as she argues, then the human passions that arise in human company are themselves part of the natural dispensation. The Nurse serves her mistress first by offering rational arguments to Phaedra herself and next by offering specious ones to Hippolytus. Ultimately, the Nurse believes only in loyalty to Phaedra. Such is made clear by the use to which she puts her quick wits when Hippolytus rebuffs Phaedra and storms off back to the countryside. The Nurse says that the best defense will be a strong offense. They should accuse Hippolytus of being a seducer before he accuses Phaedra. The nurse is a sort of philosopher-cum-sophist who knows everything but understands nothing. She can achieve ends, but even as she precipitates the plot she does not really appreciate what it is she has done. The Nurse makes nature a mere signifier and subjects it to the social. While the Chorus are nearly able to formulate the impasse between nature as a knowing regent and nature as capricious and obscene, the Nurse knows only how to mobilize arguments about nature. For her, nature is just another noun/nomen. And this mere word is to be used in the service of servitude itself.51 However, the fact that nature has become a hollow signifier yields a capricious and obscene quality to the Nurse’s own position in the play. For in practice she overturns propriety as wantonly as does the Fortune abused by the Chorus. Her reason is but a willing slave to desire. I have been evolving a thesis about a split perspective in this play. And no character embodies this theme quite so clearly as does Phaedra. Her whole conundrum can be summed up in the phrase, “I know better, but . . .” She is helpless in the face of an alien and alienating force: she talks of madness forcing her and wonders “What good is reason? Madness conquers and reigns.”52 And this madness is quickly glossed as an unnamed Amor who rules over Jove himself. Even the divine and provident regent feels the touch of folly. Phaedra clings doggedly to her split self: she identifies, that is, with herself as alienated. If the nurse is faithful to the principle of serving power, then Phaedra cleaves to the idea that she is not her own mistress. She says, “I call all of you gods to witness: this my wish I do not wish.”53 The ego who calls

The analytics of desire

115

upon the gods and is unwilling, is not, however, the same creature as the ego who wills. The one is the voice of propriety, a self who understands the ethical burden of being the wife of a king and the stepmother to Hippolytus. This ethical subject has repudiated desire. And this better self narrates the fortunes of a libidinal subject who has immorally embraced desire. The second self is the object of passions, a helpless creature, one who is acted upon even as the voice of her conscience berates her the whole while. In this wish we see the culmination of a fusion of the two perspectives that began earlier when Phaedra told Hippolytus of how she loved the way he resembled his father Theseus (646ff). The terms in which Phaedra praises Hippolytus are unnerving. The boy arouses her longing because he is now as his father was in the past. The advent of this new illegitimate passion is nothing so much as the return of that old passion. And in fact it replays that passion with an emphasis on not its legitimacy, but rather its dreadful quality. Phaedra’s sister Ariadne was ruined by Theseus. And so now is Phaedra ruined by his son. Phaedra in her next scene will lead Theseus to the conclusion that Hippolytus sexually assaulted her. There she speaks in riddles that all have two answers: she could be indicating either herself or Hippolytus.54 However, the lie which kills Hippolytus in fact achieves an amorous end. It is Hippolytus’ death that allows Phaedra to have Hippolytus without having him. This was the solution she had sought all along: impure wanting as well as the chastity of not having can both be sustained infinitely now that Hippolytus is dead. Phaedra at this moment takes the same “next step” that she took earlier in the play. At line 710 Phaedra begged to be slain by Hippolytus that she might die chaste. Of course this chaste-making penetration is nothing but the obverse for the other sort of penetration that Phaedra simultaneously has in mind. When she commits suicide Phaedra again uses death to blur propriety and impropriety. She calls out, “O death, a wicked love’s only remedy | O death an outraged chastity’s greatest glory | I flee to you. Open your benign bosom.”55 The propositions contained within it are the ones with which Phaedra began the play. Death ends desire. Death preserves chastity. For Phaedra to live is to love and to live is to lust. This is morally intolerable. Thus she calls on death to witness her virtue. She will die. But the gesture is as double as everything that comes before. Phaedra tries to stage a beautiful death in order to save herself from the sublime horror of affect. And yet the fixity of death and fate to which she appeals is itself nevertheless ambiguous and double. Death may well allay passion, but in her case it hardly offers belated glory to outraged chastity. Her flight to death’s bosom sounds like just another

116

The Sublime Seneca

unchaste bid at finding a remedy for her own lust.56 Phaedra has found a way so that the principle of her amor can live beyond death itself.57 Phaedra’s character is broken, and her final scene radically reinvests in her initial bifurcation. At first glance Hippolytus would appear to be a figure of great constancy and Phaedra’s polar opposite.58 Where Phaedra vacillates in the face of her desire, Hippolytus is steadfastly chaste. This is true, but one must also note that Hippolytus is thoroughly passionate about his rejection of passion. If Phaedra recognizes her desire and recognizes as well that it splits her in two, Hippolytus cannot even acknowledge that he has a passion let alone identify its source. Hippolytus has a passion for repudiating passion. Refusal gets his juices flowing. The world of the city is the world of love is a world of depravity. This verdict leads Hippolytus to the countryside. He adopts a radical moralizing stance. At line 483 and following when Hippolytus articulates his “flee the crowd” thesis, we can even hear echoes of the severe voice from Seneca’s own Moral Letters. Hippolytus alienates himself from the community in order to pass an objective and critical verdict upon it. From a purely schematic perspective, we might declare this move something of a success: orderly nature indicts disorderly culture. However, Hippolytus’ experience is not one structured merely by schematism. Communing with nature itself has sexual overtones even if Hippolytus will not acknowledge this. The Chorus clearly recognize the erotic possibilities of the countryside. Moreover, the life of the woods that Hippolytus leads reminds more than one character in the play of his Amazonian mother and her pursuits.59 “What is really going on with Hippolytus?” Theseus answers this question both correctly and incorrectly. Theseus is tricked into believing that his son is a pious fraud. However, it may well be that Hippolytus is a pious fraud without himself realizing as much. By fleeing to the woods, is Hippolytus conducting an affair with his mother rather than his stepmother? Naturally, it would be a chaste affair given that his mother is dead, but this only means reproducing the Phaedra fantasy of legitimate transgression all over again. However, let us imagine an even more perverse alternative: Hippolytus has his mother by becoming her. Here we can also see a disavowed seduction of his absent father in the same gesture. For Antiope herself both was and was not a chaste huntress: Hippolytus’ very existence testifies to this paradox. Hippolytus claims that his relationship to women is simple, but it is in fact complex precisely because of these claims of simplicity. Hippolytus argues, then, that the “single solace” of the loss of his mother is that now he can hate all women.60 His mother was an obstacle to passion, but now that

The analytics of desire

117

obstacle has been removed. The passion he feels is not love but hate. But the question to ask is the following: Is hate just another name for love refused? At line 486 Hippolytus speaks of the furor that inhabits the minds of citydwellers. He then goes on to catalog the passions of the city largely omitting, it turns out, erotic passion. Lust for wealth and power dominate in his account. But he does build to a crescendo where he aims his reproaches squarely at women. This indictment begins right after a line that has provoked some difficulty. After invoking examples of kin-slaying Hippolytus offers a praeteritio that does not exactly make sense. He says, “I have nothing to say about stepmothers: nothing is more mild than beasts” (taceo nouercas: mitius nil est feris, 558). The line may indeed be corrupt, but it is a strikingly fortuitous corruption because it expresses exactly the opposite sentiment from that we expect to find.61 We thought that Hippolytus would keep silent on the question of the savagery of stepmothers, not their gentleness. The rhetorical trope that emphasizes by faux omission here includes and therewith emphasizes precisely the wrong idea, namely that stepmothers might well be delightful creatures. In the very next line Hippolytus launches into a noisy complaint that adduces, it turns out, another stepmother: Sed dux malorum femina: haec scelerum artifex obsedit animos, huius incestae stupris fumant tot urbes, bella tot gentes gerunt et uersa ab imo regna tot populos premunt. sileantur aliae: sola coniunx Aegei, Medea, reddet feminas dirum genus. But Woman is the root of all evil. She crafts crimes, She besieges hearts. Owing to her unchaste romps myriad cities smolder, myriad peoples battle, and myriad upturned empires oppress their peoples. The others can go silent: Aegeus’s wife alone, Medea, rendered the whole race of women toxic. Phaedra 559–64

Women mean sex, and sex means trouble. The world is their victim. Where Phaedra said “I know better, but . . .” Hippolytus says, “I know precisely that . . .” At this point the Nurse asks a perfectly reasonable question: “Why does the guilt of a few turn into an indictment of all?” (565). The answer is unreasonable:

118

The Sublime Seneca (Nutrix) Cur omnium fit culpa paucarum scelus? (Hippolytus) Detestor omnis, horreo fugio execror. sit ratio, sit natura, sit dirus furor: odisse placuit. (Hippolytus) I hate them all, I shudder, I shun, I execrate. Call it reason, nature, or dread madness: It is my pleasure to hate them . . . Phaedra 565–68

Hippolytus packs four strong emotional verbs into a single line.62 Then he blurs in the next line three things that are meant to be separated. A Stoic might be ready to identify ratio and natura. But the play itself regularly challenges the extent to which this identification is possible. Specifically natura seems to contain both ratio and some irrational component. The line thus encapsulates a larger problem: Does nature encompass both ratio and furor ? 63 Is nature somehow sandwiched between reason and madness? Is nature some unthinkable synthesis of the two? Hippolytus is not going to answer any such questions. Hippolytus’ point is much more direct and can be translated thus: “I don’t know why I hate them, but I hate them.” This is yet another deformation of Phaedra’s logic: “I know better, but . . .” Hippolytus has resolved to hate. But the principle that governs his resolution is left as a pointed enigma. The dirum genus of women has him talking of a hypothetical dirus furor on his own part. The solution to this furor is hatred and flight from the city.64 Hippolytus is not, then, just a strict moralist, but an impossible one. His adamantine position is too rigid. It is blind to its own subtleties despite its seeming bluntness. Thus, the more Hippolytus is challenged and the more he is asked to confront love, the more bizarre are Hippolytus’ reactions. In the abstract Hippolytus hates women because of a resolve that lacks a true principle. In the concrete his reaction to Phaedra’s confession is not just extreme but multiply unreasonable. It may well be mere hyperbole when Hippolytus wonders how it is that the gods do not strike Phaedra down then and there (671). But his subsequent arguments indicate that his absolutist stance aims not so much at justice as it aims at absolutism itself. Hippolytus imagines himself as in need of a good blast of Olympian lightning: he is guilty of having pleased his stepmother (683). Then Hippolytus attempts to argue that Phaedra is somehow more monstrous in her lust than was Pasiphaë. And then Hippolytus talks of his “envy” for his father: Medea was not as bad as this. The charitable might offer a defense of these arguments, but it will be hard going. Telling your apparently dead

The analytics of desire

119

husband’s son that you think he is sexy is not quite the same thing as having a wooden heifer built to facilitate your lust for a bull. Nor is one woman’s verbal come-on obviously worse than another’s attempt to poison her stepson. Hippolytus wants fervently not to be wanted. Being desired sullies him. And his reaction to desire is an over-reaction. Hippolytus declares that Diana would accept Phaedra’s blood as a just sacrifice upon her altar. Hippolytus would rather piously stain his patron goddess than himself be touched. Hippolytus is ready to make impure the goddess of purity in the name of preserving a chastity that is shot through with traces of disavowed desire. If Hippolytus cannot rationally live in accordance with nature, he is more than happy to do so irrationally. We have one last character to review and then a final scene to examine. The last character is also the star of the last scene: Theseus. Although Theseus is also depicted as a husband, a son, and a stepson at various junctures of the play, Theseus is principally tied up with the theme of paternity. What is at issue is an evolution of his character through a set of predicates that attach themselves to the term “father.” He is at first an absent father. Then he is a returned father. Then he is a vengeful father. And finally he is a father who attempts to reassemble his son’s scattered corpse. These four versions of Theseus’s paternity all have one thing in common: each is itself a species of blindness. Theseus is the blind point of authority to which the others look even as it fails to look back at them and to see them as they really are. When Theseus is in Hades, Phaedra and Hippolytus both still acknowledge what he stands for as a husband and a father. Here his blindness is more literal: he does not look back at them from the underworld, nor should one expect him to. But when he returns Theseus remains blind to the truth, and he only understands what he is told. In fact he is all too quick to conclude that his son has gone bad. Indeed, Theseus says he saw it coming: his son’s holier-than-thou show was a fraud all along ( ficta maiestas uiri, 915). And then when Theseus invokes his curse, he effectively channels a blind rage into the very monster that his own father sends from the sea. Finally, this father’s will as carried out by his own father Neptune makes Hippolytus into a thing that can no longer be seen as Hippolytus. And hence the last version of our blind father Theseus: the one who tries and fails to reassemble Hippolytus. Like Phaedra and Hippolytus, Theseus also finds himself split. He is a principle of law and order qua prince of Athens, head of household, and father to his son. However, he is also passive, blind, and impotent. And yet the staring and empty eyes of Theseus’s tragic mask are nevertheless authoritative. Like Phaedra Theseus claims not to want what he really wants.

120

The Sublime Seneca

However, Theseus has the concrete power to convert his desire into an efficacious wish. Theseus’s wish is granted, and his paternal authority is underwritten by his heavenly appeal. However, the sublime appears only in monstrous guise. There is nothing beautiful in the moment. Let us linger on the disintegration and reassembly of Hippolytus. Here we see Hippolytus being broken: Late cruentat arua et inlisum caput scopulis resultat; auferunt dumi comas, et ora durus pulcra populatur lapis peritque multo uulnere infelix decor. moribunda celeres membra peruoluunt rotae; tandemque raptum truncus ambusta sude medium per inguen stipite ingesto tenet; [paulumque domino currus affixo stetit] haesere biiuges uulnere – et pariter moram dominumque rumpunt. inde semianimem secant uirgulta, acutis asperi uepres rubis omnisque ruscus corporis partem tulit. Far and wide he bloodies the fields; smashed his head bounces off the crags; the brambles rend his hair, his fair face a hard rock despoils, his ill-starred beauty dies from a thousand cuts. Swift wheels send his dying limbs whirling. Finally his ravishment: a trunk burned into a stake holds him thrusting its mass straight through his groin. [For a moment the car stays, its lord transfixed,] The team hesitates at the wound – they simultaneously break their obstacle and their lord. Thence half-dead the bushes cut him up, blackberries pierce with cruel thorns, and the spiny broom takes its share of his body.

Phaedra 1093–1104

Hippolytus’ efforts to live according to nature have been converted into a death where he is scattered throughout nature. As opposed to Phaedra’s metaphorical split, Hippolytus literally splits in two. And then he is torn into ever smaller pieces. Beauty is systematically decomposed at the cruel hands of nature unto the point of monstrosity. Nature enjoys Hippolytus, and we shudder. But to what extent are we going to trace this back to Theseus? That is, this sexualized assault on Hippolytus is not just an image of blind nature’s fury, it is also a disavowed representative of a father’s jealousy and wrath. The death of Hippolytus offers us a chance to see desire become the desire of an Other. If the normative figure of the law is the internalization of the dictates of a

121

The analytics of desire

sublime authority perceived as external to the self, here we find a systematic inversion of that schema. A father’s fantasy has been projected onto the world. His own volcanic wrath turns into Nature’s violence. But Theseus does not recognize in this rape and murder the signs of his own will. In Euripides’ Hippolytus the play closes with a reconciliation of father and son under the watchful eye of Artemis. In Seneca’s Phaedra we have only the grim task of gathering the son and then attempting to recognize him after his radical transformation.65 Theseus supervises the task thus: Disiecta, genitor, membra laceri corporis in ordinem dispone et errantes loco restitue partes: fortis hic dextrae locus, hic laeua frenis docta moderandis manus ponenda: laeui lateris agnosco notas. quam magna lacrimis pars adhuc nostris abest! durate trepidae lugubri officio manus, fletusque largos sistite, arentes genae, dum membra nato genitor adnumerat suo corpusque fingit. hoc quid est forma carens et turpe, multo uulnere abruptum undique? quae pars tui sit dubito; sed pars est tui: hic, hic repone, non suo, at uacuo loco. haecne illa facies igne sidereo nitens, †inimica flectens lumina? huc cecidit decor? Scattered, sire, limbs of a mangled body set in order and straying from their place restore the parts. Here his brave right hand’s place, here his left hand skilled at controlling the reins is to be set down: I recognize the signs of his left side. So great a measure of him still eludes our tears! Steady, you hands that tremble at a sad task, Stay your lavish tears and keep dry, my cheeks: let a father tally for his son his limbs and a body build. This, what is it, formless and foul, torn on all sides with massive wounds? I don’t know what part of you it is, but it is part of you: here, put it back here, not in its own place, but in an empty one. Is this that face that shone with a heavenly flame, that turned even . . .? Has his beauty been reduced to this? Phaedra 1256–70

Theseus’s first line performs his own tragedy: disiecta and membra are themselves sundered by the word genitor. As a genitor Theseus has lately caused

122

The Sublime Seneca

the radical degeneration of the thing he sired. It is father who rent the body. But genitor itself is a word with a split meaning. Hitherto genitor has meant Neptune when spoken by Theseus. Now the word appears in a self-address. It marks yet another split subject in our play, this time one who is contemplating a split body lain at his feet. Phaedra’s two selves consisted of the one who sanely spoke of the other who madly desired. Theseus’s doubled self only marks that paternal authority become paternal rage splits both the self and the other, not precisely how it does so. In splitting his son Theseus proved himself an omnipotent father by appealing to his own omnipotent father. But Theseus is unable to formulate this idea in this form. Theseus never admits what Phaedra put so crisply, that she willed what she did not will. The macabre in this scene has occasioned commentary that is none too flattering to Seneca.66 Namely the moment reads to some as tedious if not risible. I wish to linger on Seneca’s lingering. This moment is absurd only when seen from a certain perspective. However, it is just the question of perspective that is at issue here. Seneca has forged a moment that is not in the least beautiful in the Kantian sense: that is, we do not see here a form betokening a purpose. This is not a scene where violence is made beautiful and where aesthetic sense shields us from insensible horror. There is no sense here whatsoever. In fact we are marking the radical absence of intelligibility.67 This bloody mass is not the product of some beautiful will, rather it is the fruit of obscene enjoyment. There is no transcendental horizon that makes this all make sense.68 Any such horizon is in fact imported by us as an audience. And the fantasy of such a horizon bespeaks our own desire to find a harmonious machine in the text. We seek a carefully wrought apparatus that expresses the Intentions of The Author. Our own perspective as commentators on the play seduces us. We imagine ourselves to be the ones who took it all in: we know what Theseus et al. do not know. That is, the “beauty” we see is specifically a function of our sense of “purpose” afforded by our distance and “objectivity.” A failure to see beauty in the play does not change this situation at all: from our perch we bemoan the ill-fitted plot, the discordant characters, and the excesses of style. We declare that Seneca may have tried, but he failed. And if he failed to try, that too was a failure.69 The beautiful aesthetic object is closed and complete, a machina concors whose sense-ful form we attribute to The Author.70 Praises of Senecan intertextuality converge on this point: Seneca was a masterful master of the tradition and he works skillfully within the poetry-machine. Did we read and tremble without understanding why – something a masterful philologist would never admit to doing – then we would have genuinely participated in the sublime quality of it.71

The analytics of desire

123

The passage is both revolting and absurd. What Theseus encounters is the abject and disgusting thing that is the very bloody incarnation of his own disavowed and perverse will.72 Theseus confronts the problem of making something recognizable out of this bloody and horrific mass in front of him. He labors to reconstitute the very body and form that he once knew. What Theseus strives to recover is, as the last line of this passage indicates, his son’s beauty. He longs to re-find sense-ful form. This is the way we looked at the corpse of Helvia’s brother-in-law: staking one’s life in a bid to honor the idea of a man was exemplary in its grandeur. Conversely, Theseus confronts a senseless mass that can never be put back together again. It is not fair. It is foul, turpis. This body in pieces cannot be reconstituted in a manner that would restore it to being whole. Instead it is a Not-Whole. And not only is it incomplete, it contains within its disorderly mass a part that is radically unintelligible: “I don’t know what part of you it is, but it is part of you. Here, put it back here, not in its own, but in an empty place.” The metaphorically blind Theseus is confronted with what he has all along been unable to see. Theseus faces the very violence and invisibility of his own desire. Theseus longs to reconstitute his son’s beauty. But he is instead condemned to assemble the fact that what is before him is a horror sprung from sublime roots.73 Theseus has encountered the disgusting object-cause of his own desire. I appreciate that the term “object-cause of desire” is itself an odd and unfamiliar concept to evoke when glossing oddness and unfamiliarity. By it I mean to designate that thing that is posited as external to a subject and yet stirs desire in this same subject. It is the objective cause of a subjective experience. Or, to be even more overt about the Lacanianism of my position, let me offer the following gloss on Lacan from Joan Copjec: Lacan locates the cause of being in the informe: this term combines the idea of the unformed and the inquiry. The unformed is that which has no signified, no significant shape in the visual field. The inquiry is the question posed to representation’s presumed reticence. The subject is the effect of the impossibility of seeing what is lacking in the representation, what the subject, therefore, wants to see.74 Clearly, Hippolytus has become unformed. Theseus is making an inquiry that would force the opaque thing confronting him to become (in)formed all over again. The reticent mass in front of him becomes the object around which Theseus’s desire for meaning circulates and to which it applies itself. Theseus is not, of course, a Lacanian. A Lacanian relishes such a moment for its psychoanalytic exemplarity. Something about desire can be learned here.

124

The Sublime Seneca

However, Theseus is not interested in an analytics of desire, he strives for synthesis. Theseus wants to reconstitute Hippolytus’ beauty and thus to cause form and purpose to converge yet again.75 And yet Theseus is confronted with a mass that cannot yield coherent signs any longer. The multiply blind father is finally forced to look at his son in a situation where he will be unable to see something that lies behind the world of appearances, a beauty that burns like a star. Instead, Theseus sees that there is nothing to see other than exactly what he sees. And yet this does not stop him from wanting to see something more and something beyond what confronts him. In fact, what Theseus sees only provokes his desire for seeing all the more fiercely. The very impossibility of reconstituting Hippolytus as a whole fuels his passion to do so. And this same impossibility forces Theseus to make a gesture that is emblematic not just of his own current relationship to Hippolytus but so too of the crises of desire that have haunted our characters throughout the play. Theseus is forced to put into an empty place of its own the enigmatic bit of the other that is of the other but not his in any familiar sense of the word. Theseus puts back in its place (repone) the uncanniness of Hippolytus. Theseus puts in its own and empty place the je ne sais quoi of desire itself. Look, there it is. But what, after all, is it? And where does it fit in the order of things qua order? So let us step back and look at the play as a whole. What has been going on here? It is my thesis that Seneca has staged an analytics of the nature of desire. In so doing he exposes a serious logical impasse in the way one is to understand both nature and desire. Nature is a closed and coherent sign system, a thing complete in itself, a providential clockwork that guarantees the cycle of life. Nature is also blind, cruel, capricious, and even immoral. This split in nature is the object-cause of desire itself. That is, it is because of the incoherence of nature that there is desire. And by desire I mean that the characters desire to make sense of this cleft even as they conjure it away in the name of sense itself. The unformed (informe) of Nature provokes their inquiry (s’informer). All of the characters orient themselves around the project of making sense of what they think they want even as their acts reinscribe the very split that drives them on. Rather than finding in their world a blind drive that has no purpose, the chorus and characters all seek to assemble a sense of a beyond. They appeal to various notions of coherent meaning even as there is nothing particularly coherent or meaningful going on about them. The Nurse is the superlative servant who ruins her mistress. Phaedra is so proper that she will kill and die for a lust that is in her but not of her. Hippolytus will hate lust unto the point of taking a perverse pleasure in hatred itself. Theseus wills the

The analytics of desire

125

monstrous sublime and yet yearns for the beautiful. The Chorus praises and blames love, it acquits and indicts nature herself. Throughout the play there are signs that mythical history is repeating itself, that something awful has returned. There is a non-sense that haunts the characters and leaves them feeling trapped in an autonomous and cruel universe. This whole apparatus of repetition and return churns around and around specifically in spite of what is willed or intended by the characters. There is a seemingly autonomous reproduction of tragedies of desire. Everyone remains a stranger to themselves, to their desire. Fate takes the fall: the unreasoning reason that governs the world wishes them ill.76 The logical conclusion of their desires yields not sense but non-sense. And hence the particular sadism of Senecan tragedy and its dark rationality.77 Seneca’s analysis breaks down his characters both logically and literally. They are forced to march towards the object-cause of their desire. And by the end of the play we have a pile of bloody corpses. The broken body of the other embodies the encounter with one’s own desire in its raw form. Nothing much has really happened in this play other than the evolution of a thesis about the nature of desire. We are presented with the mimesis of a praxis where the unfolding of a syllogism yields the action. The net result is a satanic rewriting of Stoicism itself and Stoicism’s commitment to the profound bond linking reason, nature, and our impulse for virtue.78 Nature, say the Stoics, leads us towards our proper end, and this end is virtue. But at the end of the Phaedra we find mere finality in the formless form of an unrecognizable corpse. In the Phaedra we do not see a rational nature leading rational humanity towards virtue, we see instead an ethical fidelity shown for the goal towards which a driving force aims without any real insight into either the goal or the drive being evinced by the characters on stage. Everyone in the play lived according to nature. How do we know this? It is because they were all ready to die according to the dictates of a desire none of them ever fully understood. Reason, nature, madness: the ethical tragedy lies in the realization that these are not three different terms, but rather an impossible unity to which we are self-subjected. The inverted mirror image of this tragic situation was what we saw in the Natural Questions. There we beheld the image of the author. And this image was radically distinguished from that of the perverted Hostius Quadra. The idos-cum-idea of the author gave the reader the illusion that seeming heterogeneity can in fact be unified.79 Knowing god and living in accordance with reason produces the salutary synthesis of desire in the Natural Questions. The literary journey enables the metaphorical transfer: nature

126

The Sublime Seneca

works, it is sense-ful, says the Natural Questions. To read that work is to read and thence know a thing of beauty. The Natural Questions offers a means of escaping the nightmare of the Phaedra by providing the very transcendental perspective that Seneca stripped from Euripides’ play. Nevertheless, not only should we hesitate to praise the theodicity of the Natural Questions, one even finds a tragic rejoinder to any facile understanding of the mere presence of a divine perspective as the guarantor of an innocent order of things. And so we turn to Hercules.

chapter 7

The last monster

Fascinated by the profound imbrication of ethics and literature, Seneca offers multiple explorations of the literary medium as that which both enables and potentially forestalls the philosophical message. Seneca does not merely announce the superiority of philosophy and then expound philosophical claims. Instead, he heralds the problem of logos and then he explores logos in its various dimensions with an eye to finding philosophy. In so doing Seneca offers an examination of the complex relationship between language and reason. Seneca’s efforts are not confined to prose. He also explores philosophical themes in his tragedies. In the Phaedra a dangerous philosophical question is asked. This question is one that only tragedy will be allowed to ask since it is a pointedly improper question concerning the status of philosophy itself. An unhappy, skeptical air hovers over the following queries that have a philosophical weight but a tragic tenor: “What if when one pursues the letter of wisdom from a finite, mortal perspective one instead encounters in the end only the antithesis of the spirit of wisdom? What if love of wisdom were ultimately a question about the nature of love? And what if that love was of a more general genus than was wisdom itself ?” This next reading will ask a related question: “What if finding one’s place as a human being in the universe means surrendering oneself to a contraposed sublime from which one has been excluded?” Tragedy is a place where one takes all sorts of ideas to their outer limits, including philosophical ones. Tragedy as a genre had since its inception indulged in the daring thought-experiments. And Seneca is more than happy to employ tragedy as a laboratory for his own interests, a place where he can investigate and where he can play the role of madness’s scientist. Seneca’s Hercules makes a fitting place for us to linger and to close because in this instance a limit is not transgressed by a villain, but it is instead constituted qua limit by a hero. Consider the company Hercules keeps within the tragic corpus: Atreus is a monster who plots a cannibalistic revenge on his brother. 127

128

The Sublime Seneca

Medea is a child-slaying sorceress. Oedipus and Agamemnon are difficult members of troubled dynasties. But Hercules, despite his own inherent complexities, is also often read as a positive figure. And for the Stoics he even becomes an exemplary figure who can teach us something about man’s own god-like qualities.1 Thus, even though the other tragedies affect us – that is, after all, one of the points of all the fear and the pity – any play with the title Hercules already threatens to hit us even closer to home. Or, rather, it threatens to attack the place where our own ideals reside. To begin with, I would like to entertain once again the Lacanian commentary on Kantian ethics. In his tragedies the questions Seneca asks and the way in which Seneca asks them bear important structural homologies with both Kantian ethics and the Lacanian revisitation of that ethics. And here it is the homology between certain key themes that matters, not any identity of claims or any putative filiation between them. The problem of ethics qua problem is similarly articulated by all three parties. And, accordingly, the Lacanian Kant can help us rethink Seneca’s Hercules. The key themes in play are first the relationship between the earthly and the sublime and next the perspective that enables ethical thought given this antithesis between the two orders.2 What does it mean to be an ethical subject? How are “subjection” and “subjectivity” related? Kant insists on the distinction between the pathological world of experience and the noumenological world of intellect. Kant is at great pains to detach the foundation for all of his ethics, including and especially his famous Categorial Imperative, from the world of experience and to ground it in the transcendental realm of a priori categories and faculties. The various Critiques all work to clear away the deceptive “pathological” entities that are likely to haunt our philosophical thought in order to leave us in a position to appreciate the purity of pure reason.3 A key moment in any such transcendental philosophy will be the manner in which it binds heaven and earth. That is, how is the apathy of the transcendental to have anything whatsoever to do with the pathology of actual human existence? We will see that Hercules has to labor over this same question.4 However, in Kant the purity of pure reason requires of it ruthless closure and rigorous systematicity. Let me gloss his position in Stoicizing terms. This is not to imply that he was a Stoic, of course. The aim is to find an idiom in which to discuss Kant with Seneca. Or, more specifically, the aim is to see where a specific structural feature of Kantian ethics is convergent with something we see in Seneca. In Kant, then, we find a metaphysical order of logos where the logic of logos relates to itself and is fully rational and sufficient. The logic of the world of experience and the rationality of the

The last monster

129

physical realm are distinct from this first logos. However, this very distinction between the two realms both enables and requires the ethical project of living in accordance with reason. Living in accordance with reason means successfully uniting in practice the relationship between these two orders: one’s life harmonizes these radically disjoint spheres in a manner that in fact glosses over the rupture between the two of them.5 There is a moment of alienation in the original Kantian disjunction where the subject is confronted with a dilemma: either you are pathological or you are metaphysical. This disjunction disappears in the successful ethical act, an act that announces the universal by means of the particular. Here is where the Lacanians say “not so fast.” Alenka Zupančič argues that in fact it is the particular that has become universal, that the logic of the earthly object haunts the transcendental and its objects of thought. The mundane has illegitimately become sublime. Accordingly, Kant’s transcendental idea can be glossed as nothing so much as the way the understanding sees itself being seen by reason.6 That is, the transcendental is a projection, a fantasy. Furthermore, this process comes to look far less noble when the philosophical project is glossed as “identification with the perspective of the Other.”7 The Lacanians argue that the ethical subject takes upon himself or herself a certain perspective, a radically alien and alienating perspective.8 This is the transcendental perspective of the divine logos. And that logos is positioned to make a Last Judgement upon the world. Such an ethics also entails the splitting of the self, a sort of self-alienation that invites in an Other. This Other guarantees both the very possibility of judgment and the necessary corollary that all judgments passed on subjects in the world will find them wanting, that is, guilty.9 Our Hercules has to confront this very problem of a split and guilty self: he is both a hero and a monster.10 The Senecan version of the problem of the Last Judgement is done by way of a variety of portraits of being towards death, of living with dead eyes. The Letters and the consolatory Dialogues articulate this most explicitly and insistently: How is one to look at things so as to enable one to act properly? The right answer to this question regularly entails adopting a sublime perspective.11 But the Tragedies have their bit to say as well. They also stage ethical situations. In fact, they stage them multiply. The tragedies present characters with various relationships to the problem of ethics. And by “the problem of ethics” in this context I mean the problem of the actual in its relationship to the ideal.12 The tragedies also present characters whose personal trajectory reconfigures their relationship to the problem of ethics. And as a consequence of their experiences the constitution of the ideal itself ultimately shifts. Finally, the tragedies also stage ethical staging. That is,

130

The Sublime Seneca

they challenge the audience to consider the problem of what it means to confront such a problem. Or, put less abstractly, what are we to do about the story of Hercules? Do we care? Should we? What does it say about us if we do not care at all? This last question implies a further one: the tragedies stage the specter of their own author. This is a muta persona whom we are inclined to designate with the stage name “Seneca.” The author, the tragedies imply, does care about the problem of ethics. He has conjured the problem qua problem in the very gesture of writing his plays. There is a whole ethical apparatus here: the plot of the myth, the articulation of the plot in the play, and the very fact of the play itself. Our own relationship to the structural overdetermination of this apparatus sweeps us inexorably into a situation where we become liable to a species of ethical judgment whether we wish it or not. This narratological meditation leads us to our final bit of Lacanian spilt ink for the moment. The tragedies problematize ethics in that they stage the problem of the order of meaning. The tragedies also stage a sacrifice that that order requires of the hero. For, as is obvious, Senecan heroes suffer. The tragedies stage suffering as the apotheosis of ethical fidelity to an idea even as this same suffering regularly entails the annihilation and/or abasement of the figures within the drama and, in particular, of the central figure. The tragedies stage the price that must be paid so as to render the order of the gods orderly and distinct from that of men. The result: men then revere this same order that they have themselves purchased at the cost of several pounds of flesh. We can accordingly say that Senecan tragedy is less ethical in content than it is ethical in form. On this reading Senecan tragedy becomes a mimêsis of the praxis of ethics itself: it stages the split that institutes the distance between the earthly and the sublime. It stages the split that ethics itself negotiates. The ethical tragedy we encounter in The Madness of Hercules is the heroic end of heroism itself. Hercules is called upon to embrace heroically a very specific necessity: his thirteenth labor as well as his first and only labor is the choice to live. He chooses to live not as the almighty son of an almighty father, but instead as the accursed son of a cuckold. The sublime reference point of the cosmos as a whole is in fact consolidated by this choice that knots together a double albeit painful gesture of filial piety. The cruel and arbitrary order that has harried Hercules throughout his life herewith becomes utterly cruel and utterly arbitrary. Hercules no longer seeks to act and thereby to transform his concrete situation. Hercules refrains from vanquishing the last monster and instead lets it live on. Hercules acknowledges himself as a bearer of infinite guilt in the eyes of

The last monster

131

the gods and of the world. He accepts this guilt even though he had no choice in the matter of the slaying of his children and he was utterly insane when he killed them. In short, we behold the splitting of the subject Hercules. His concomitant normalization consolidates the sovereignty of that Other order that he himself had threatened by means of his earlier heroic labors. Our demi-god finally finds his place in the order of things when he becomes a self-indicted blood-stained man who is ashamed of the very fact that he lives. The plot of the Hercules can be outlined as follows: Juno announces her intention to destroy Hercules by using his own uirtus against him.13 Then we see how Lycus tyrannizes Thebes and Hercules’ family in the hero’s absence while he is off on his labors. Halfway through the play Hercules arrives from the underworld with Cerberus and Theseus in tow. Hercules gets up to speed on what has been happening while he was away. Hercules pops off again to go kill Lycus. Hercules returns covered in Lycus’s blood. His thanksgiving sacrifice is tainted. He goes mad. He kills his wife and his children. He passes out. When he awakes he realizes what he has done. He feels tremendous regret. He is convinced not to kill himself. This outline naturally gives one little of the savor of the experience of reading the Hercules. What is missing, then? First, a great deal of energy is expended on telling and retelling the story of Hercules by all of the participants in the drama. These stories accumulate. And they likewise build up a sense that nobody in the play can quite get over the labors of Hercules. Hercules himself cannot seem to manage to find “the last labor.”14 The play is, then, repetitive.15 Of course, many of Seneca’s dramas are repetitive and full of catalogs.16 And yet there is also regularly within them a striving to make a break. A fantasy shimmers before our eyes: perhaps this last example that we are presently watching will not so much belong to the old set of examples as be the first element in an entirely new set. And so we wonder: Are we at the end of one order of things? Are we at the beginning of some new order of things? And yet it is apparent that there is a problem with Hercules’ heroic return from hell since the hero drags more than a little bit of the infernal back up with him.17 Most obviously he has brought Theseus with him. But, even more importantly, Hercules has done as bidden, and he has hauled Cerberus out from Hades. As the play makes clear, the monster is unhappy to see the world, and the world the monster. Most disturbing of all is the infernal quality that has attached itself to Hercules. First we have a portrait of the order of things down below that will shortly fit all too well the way things work up here. The following verses are

132

The Sublime Seneca

spoken by Theseus in the course of his long narrative description of the underworld: quod quisque fecit patitur; auctorem scelus repetit, suoque premetur exemplo nocens To the doer his deed is done; the crime its author revisits; personal precedent oppresses the guilty. The Madness of Hercules 736–37

On the one hand, this is a portrait of the justice of the cosmos from the perspective of a transcendental judgment. The wicked may well prosper in this world, but in the next they will pay for their crimes. In fact, they will make their restitution in precisely the terms of their transgression. There is a reflexive Golden Rule logic at work: as one does, so is one done to.18 This same logic from beneath the earth reappears upon the earth along with Hercules’ own return. Its earthly manifestation is as madness and nightmare. When Hercules kills his children, he both does the deed and suffers for it. The crime seeks out its author. And the guilty man is oppressed by his own precedent. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. More proximately, it might be the case that Hercules returns not so much as himself but as a Pluto-on-earth. First, we are told more than once that Hercules has bested death in the fullest sense of the word. In line 609 Hercules declares that had he wished it, he could have ruled the underworld. He came, he saw, he conquered. “What more is there to say?” he says. Or, more literally: et, si placerent tertiae sortis loca, regnare potui: noctis aeternae chaos et nocte quiddam grauius et tristes deos et fata uici. morte contempta redi: quid restat aliud? uidi et ostendi inferos. Had the realm of the third allotment pleased, I could have been its king. Shapeless, endless night, and something worse still, also the sad gods and the fates did I conquer. Death scorned, I return: is that all there is? I saw hell. I showed it.19 The Madness of Hercules 609–13

Hercules’ brash proclamation will be punished in very short order, of course. And he is about to put on an infernal show all over again when he slaughters his family. But even the Chorus at 832 seems to agree that

The last monster

133

Hercules’ self-description as a potential king of the netherworld was no mere boast even if they are less sanguine about it. As they put it, “This alone was wanting from the number of his labors: to despoil the king of his third portion.”20 The language of the tertia sors is identical in both passages. And so we are left to wonder if Hercules in his capacity as unstoppable hero has displaced or replaced one of the fundamental structuring structures of the cosmos. In this regard we ought also to note the almost complete absence of Neptune in the play. Nearly all of the reflection on order in this play is oriented around the underworld, the world, and the overworld, or, to put names to these abstractions, Pluto, Hercules, and Jove.21 And in this very schema you can already see that the logic of the substituted third necessarily haunts Hercules: for he risks becoming a third brother to his own father and a man to whom is allotted a most profound fate and portion of his own. And so let us turn to boundaries and bounding more generally.22 In addition to the major structural boundaries of the cosmos like the distinction between the world and the underworld, we also hear a good deal about “too much” and “too little” and “limits” throughout the play. The play begins with Juno describing how what has come before was too little for her.23 And it was too little for her because Hercules not only survived his tests, but he even broke still further bonds while achieving them. Juno describes a sort of play before the play: a spectacle that traumatized the gods and that provoked the dramatic events that we ourselves are about to behold: parum est reuerti, foedus umbrarum perit:24 uidi ipsa, uidi nocte discussa inferum et Dite domito spolia iactantem patri fraterna. cur non uinctum et oppressum trahit ipsum catenis paria sortitum Ioui Ereboque capto potitur? en retegit Styga! patefacta ab imis manibus retro uia est et sacra dirae mortis in aperto iacent. at ille, rupto carcere umbrarum ferox, de me triumphat et superbifica manu atrum per urbes ducit Argolicas canem. uiso labantem Cerbero uidi diem pauidumque Solem; me quoque inuasit tremor, et terna monstri colla deuicti intuens timui imperasse. Leuia sed nimium queror; caelo timendum est, regna ne summa occupet qui uicit ima: sceptra praeripiet patri. A return is too little. The deathly compact has died: I saw with my own eyes hell with its darkness dashed aside

134

The Sublime Seneca

and with Pluto subjugated he boasts to his father: spoils fraternal! So why not drag bound, bested, chained Jove’s very peer in his allotment? Why not take power over a captured hell? Look, Styx unveiled! Exposed lies the way back from the nethermost shades; the rites of dread death lay open for all to see. Look at him, exultant, the prison of the dead breached, he triumphs over me and with haughty hand through Argive cities leads the black dog. At the sight of Cerberus I have seen the day fail and the Sun afraid. A shudder seized me as well. Looking upon the three necks of the monster in defeat I feared to have bidden it. My complaint: trivialities but already too much. Heaven is at risk: the highest realms can be seized by the man who conquered the lowest. He’ll snatch away his father’s scepter.

The Madness of Hercules 49–65

It will be noted that the outrageous excess of the twelfth labor is nevertheless just what was commanded of Hercules. He is culpable for doing what he had to do. This initial paradox itself foreshadows the slaughter of his family that is to come.25 There too Hercules will wind up guilty and liable even though he only did what he was compelled to do. In any case, Juno’s command yields fear, but not for the hero. Hercules is exultant. Conversely the cosmos itself feels a sort of horror.26 Heaven trembles to see down into the underworld. There is light where there should have been darkness. And on this well-lit stage Juno sees something that stirs her passions.27 Iactantem and the enjambed fraterna: “Look at him gloat at Pluto’s defeat!” Juno also explicitly fantasizes. She looks into an imagined future and beholds the prospect of a divine regent enslaved, not just his dog. And so among the things seen that should not have been seen she also beheld a truth about Hercules: he can usurp gods’ kingdoms. Heaven trembles to see what has come up from Hell and onto the earth. And an inference is readily drawn: the ascent of the lower towards the higher might only continue apace. Hercules the pathbreaker might break more paths still and therewith break all of everything so far as the current cosmic dispensation is concerned. There is a tragedy in the making for the royal house of Jupiter here: this present fear could well turn into a pitiful plight not for the agent of the labors but for the audience of them, the gods themselves. And so Juno proposes a sort of catharsis: she will allow the heavenly audience, the Sun, herself, even Jupiter, to be as they are and what they are by visiting destruction upon Hercules via the only means possible, namely himself. Heaven will be cleansed of its emotions only when Hercules has been made

The last monster

135

utterly unclean. Their spectatorship will be made apathetic: the crushing of Hercules enables their own freedom from perturbation. The completeness of the labors of Hercules will occur when that labor at last becomes involuted and folds back in upon itself. The labors of Hercules will no longer point at any beyond. All there will be is the self-labor of Hercules. In this play we find “the imitation of an action that is serious and that has magnitude, complete in itself.” I have obviously been playing a bit with Aristotle’s portrait of the tragic for a while now. The point I am getting at is that the story of Hercules is not so much tragic as it is meta-tragic. Or, rather, Juno imagines a cosmic meta-tragedy and an infinite progression of labors that will ultimately strike all too close to home. The last labor might be the destruction of the very heaven that guarantees her own power. This would be a most serious action indeed whose magnitude, were it completed, would revolutionize the cosmos. And so she resolves to make the tragedy happen elsewhere: on earth and to Hercules rather than in heaven and to Jupiter. By enforcing a distance between audience and action, Juno guarantees that the boundaries that sustain tragedy as an esthetic experience will remain unbroken. One will have the imitation of an action, and not an action. One will have a finite praxis and not an infinite one that threatens to unbound order itself. The tragedy Juno is about to stage will demand of Hercules that he recognize himself as a tragic figure who subjects himself to an order that brings him sorrow. If there is to be no revolution in heaven, there has to be something of a revolution upon earth itself: Hercules must be put in his place, as it were. But this place that will be his does not exactly exist yet. Hercules has shown himself to be too mobile. The last labor will make his place for him, though. It will fix him in a new earthly order that simultaneously guarantees something about the fixity of the pre-existing cosmic order. This future perfect will not just have completed itself, but also it offers a retroactive closure to the all too progressive present whence it arose. A first clue to the structure of this revolution to which Hercules will be (self-)subjected comes from the mouth of the Chorus. The Chorus sings a song about death running from line 830 to 892. This song comes just before Hercules returns from killing Lycus and then starts killing his own kin as if they were Lycus’s family. In this song the Chorus notes, as we have seen above, that all Hercules failed to do was to make himself king of Hell. The Chorus meditates on the underworld. It compares the endless march of the shades to a variety of worldly congregations. Its first simile is unnerving: the Chorus likens the dead below to the hordes of spectators who enter a theater for the games. Without getting into the fraught question

136

The Sublime Seneca

of whether or not Senecan drama was in fact performed in a theater, the evocation of the theater in this passage nevertheless has to be taken as a meta-theatrical reference.28 The underworld teems as does the world. The eye of life and the eye of death are uncannily akin to one another.29 The Chorus oscillates. On the one hand, all life, everything under the sun is but a crop that Death will one day harvest.30 On the other hand, Hercules’ return is disruptive of their own sense of death. After their gloomy appraisal of life lived under the shadow of death they at once shift meters and sing that “A glad day has come to Thebes.” And less than ten lines later they find themselves saying how Hercules has brought peace to everything under the sun from east to west. The Chorus also add in a third compass point. We would gloss it as “The South,” but the verse literally reads, “and where the sun cleaves to the middle and denies shadows to bodies.”31 Juno feels timor when she ponders her own potential future if Hercules is not stopped. The Chorus feels timor when they contemplate the inevitability of death. And yet Hercules has brought a peace and happiness that potentially allows for an end to all fears: under the pax Herculanea bodies will no longer have shadows, men will not have ghosts.32 This is a pleasant dream, but one the gods would never allow to become a reality: only gods are deathless. The madness scene and the recovery scene illustrate the problem of order as it relates to Hercules.33 Hercules returns from killing Lycus. He calls upon the gods. He will offer them sacrifices. But there is already something a bit off here in that Hercules speaks of the gods as his brothers (908). Having an immortal father and a mortal mother usually results in a decided inferiority relative to the established members of the pantheon. The next irregularity is explicitly flagged by Amphitryon: Amphitryon is concerned that Hercules is about to make a sacrifice with blood-stained hands. Hercules’ response is to go one step further in the direction of monstrosity and to wish that he could pour out a libation of Lycus’s very blood to Jupiter (920). This is an impious piety. Even before Hercules is formally insane we find yet further degeneration as basic distinctions blur. When Amphitryon bids Hercules to pray that his father should end his labors, Hercules’ response only stirs up trouble rather than settling things. Hercules’ response to his mortal father’s suggestion about the sort of prayer to make to his immortal father is this, “Me, I will pronounce prayers worthy of Jove and myself (ipse concipiam preces | Ioue meque dignas,” 926–27).34 On the one hand, we can say that Hercules is cleverly using dignas in two different senses, once of the one who offers and again of the one who receives. However, if we let ourselves be obtuse, we see

The last monster

137

instead a strict parallel: Hercules and Jove are set on the same footing. And this is the very thing that Juno – if not Jove himself – fears.35 The prayer proper is both innocuous and ominous in its content. Hercules prays for peace, more or less just as his mortal father bade him to do. And yet the orderly order for which Hercules prays is the very order that Hercules himself has regularly troubled: (Hercules) ipse concipiam preces Ioue meque dignas: stet suo caelum loco tellusque et aether;36 astra inoffensos agant aeterna cursus, alta pax gentes alat; ferrum omne teneat ruris innocui labor ensesque lateant. ... si quod etiamnum est scelus latura tellus, properet, et si quod parat monstrum, meum sit. – sed quid hoc? medium diem cinxere tenebrae. Phoebus obscuro meat sine nube uultu. quis diem retro fugat agitque in ortus? unde nox atrum caput ignota profert? unde tot stellae polum implent diurnae? primus en noster labor caeli refulget parte non minima leo iraque totus feruet et morsus parat. (Hercules) Me, I will pronounce prayers worthy of Jove and myself: Let each in its own place heaven, the earth, and the ether stand. Let the stars make eternally their smooth passage. Let profound peace nourish the nations. May all iron benign cultivation of the field occupy; may swords sulk in obscurity. ... If any crime yet remains for the earth to bring forth, let it make haste, and if she readies a monster, let it be mine. – What’s this? High noon girt with shadows. Apollo’s passage is dark, not a cloud and yet no face. Whence has night its dark head unwontedly brought forth? Whence do the stars the whole sky fill by day? Lo, my first labor: in no small quarter of the sky shines the lion, seething entire with rage and soon to snap.

The Madness of Hercules 926–31; 937–46

138

The Sublime Seneca

The Chorus dreamed of a Herculean peace that might envelop the world. Hercules prays for a peace that will come when everything is in its place and the whole machina concors of the cosmos runs smoothly. And yet he wonders if there might not be one more monster. Yet another effort, Hercules, if you would become free. The earth has been purged of monsters and stands on the threshold of being the very mundane world in which we ourselves live. Only the last monster must be slain. And, of course, the monstrum meum turns out to be ego, monstrum. No sooner does Hercules make his final request than it is granted. In Euripides the audience and the chorus can literally see “the madness of Hercules” personified in the characters of Iris and Lyssa who appear on stage.37 These are not characters in Seneca’s drama. Seneca instead stages a purely subjective experience. Seneca offers a double vision: first there is the order that the audience sees, and then there is the disorder that the hero sees. Hercules sees cosmic disorder, and yet the audience appreciates that the only remaining figure of monstrous chaos is Hercules himself. The audience sees the hero as a monster, not the monster Lyssa overthrowing the hero. Hercules’ madness contains a vision of the unwriting of his own story. His labors are cataloged in this play yet again. However, this time they are tasks that become undone even as they undo Hercules himself. Similarly, the hell that Hercules brought up onto earth earlier in the form of Cerberus is now a new chaos of his own making. Hercules imagines pulling heaven down upon the earth. The constellations are metaphorical Lions and Bulls. But that is because something from the world was rendered sublime. They became metaphors. And they became mere metaphors because of Hercules’ heroic acts. What had been the terror of Lake Lerna is now but a collection of remote stars. But what if these metaphors returned to reality? What if the end of the age of monsters had not really been reached? What if the sublime were to descend and render ridiculous all of the efforts to keep it up there and out there away from us? During the next phase of his madness Hercules asks a forbidden question: “What have I left undone?” He has conquered the world. The sea has made way for him. The underworld has been assaulted. The only realm that has gotten off unscathed is the sky. Next stop, heaven: immune caelum est, dignus Alcide labor (957). The adjective dignus has returned, and this time in a purely menacing manner. Hercules has been promised the stars by his father, and now he intends to have them whether or not the gods care to live up to their end of the deal. Hercules is ready to unbind Saturn and to set his grandfather against the kingdom of his impious father (965–66). The way

The last monster

139

forward is also the way backward: overcoming the father brought “impious Jove” into power. It is time to do the same again by undoing the founding crime of the current order.38 Hercules is also ready to stage a second Gigantomachy (966ff.) and thus to stage a repetition in reverse of the cosmogonic struggles familiar to readers of Hesiod.39 And then we reach the third moment of Hercules’ madness, the actual slaughter of his children as if they were the children of Lycus. In Euripides the murders are reported by a messenger. In Seneca they take place before the audience’s very eyes. In Eurpides Hercules’ wife Megara is killed because she is mistaken for Lycus’s wife. In Seneca Megara is mistaken for Juno. Hercules sees himself assaulting his stepmother (1018). Juno’s fears were in a sense all too well founded. When he awakes Hercules is sane again. There are two issues remaining in the play: Hercules needs to recognize what he has done, and he has to react to this knowledge. Entangled with this process is a much more rigorous engagement with a theme that has been with us throughout the play: Who is Hercules’ father? Throughout the play both Amphitryon and Jupiter have been designated as such. It is a problem that admits of an easy solution only if we ourselves conjure it away: “Of course Jupiter is the real father. Amphitryon is just the guy who raised Hercules.” However, in the final act of the Hercules both Hercules and Amphitryon struggle to formulate and answer for themselves this question of paternity, a question our own knowledge of “the facts of mythology” reduces to a non-issue. Hercules awakens confused. He also declares much to his own shame that he is afraid at what he sees before him (1147). He asks first for his father, then his wife. One assumes that the parens in 1149 is Amphitryon. However, Hercules’ thoughts jump to a new idea and a new father just a few lines later. He has been beaten. His father must have left the sky to sire another son at whose birth the night was stayed even longer than in his own case (1157–59). This pater has to be Jove. And the fantasy is of a Jove who begets a son whose birth is even more disorderly for the cosmic order than Hercules’ own.40 This double perspective on paternity continues through the scene. For example, in 1198 genitor is Amphitryon. In 1202 genitor is Jupiter. At 1176 Hercules asks: “Why, sire, are you silent?” (quid, genitor, siles?). This is addressed to Amphitryon. A few lines later the same word appears addressed to the same man, and yet there are loftier resonances. “Sire, and the ever fair divinity of your name, speak: who overthrew my house?”41 The mortal father is addressed as if he were a god. When Hercules yields to the mortal Amphitryon as if he were yielding to a divine father, then the play can end. It is Amphitryon who proposes the

140

The Sublime Seneca

answer to Hercules’ dilemma in the form that will ultimately be adopted. He says, “This is a job for Hercules: bear this mass of ill” (nunc Hercule opus est: perfer hanc molem mali, 1239). At first Hercules refuses. To live would be to abandon shame. Hercules sanely demands his arms again. He will find a road to death. His suicide will be his second heroic katabasis into the underworld. Only this time he will not return either with a monster or as a monster. The two wrangle for some time, trading epigrams. Hercules’ investment in honor makes him impervious to Amphitryon’s all too human considerations. Amphitryon appeals to Hercules’ sense of obligation. He should think of his father’s sorrow. This too fails. The calculus of his mortal father is far too lowly for Hercules. And so when he is urged to show himself forgiveness Hercules shoots back: (Hercules) Veniam dabit sibi ipse, qui nulli dedit? laudanda feci iussus: hoc unum meum est. succurre, genitor; siue te pietas mouet seu triste factum siue uiolatum decus uirtutis, effer arma; uincatur mea fortuna dextra. (Hercules) Will he who gave none to others offer himself forgiveness? My praiseworthy deeds I did because bidden. This alone is my own. Help me father, whether pietas moves you or my sad fate, or the violated grandeur of my valor. Bring forth my arms. Let Fortune be conquered by my right hand. The Madness of Hercules 1266–72

Hercules is at a halfway point. He appreciates that virtue means everything. But he also realizes that his own claims to it are ambiguous: he did what he had to do. The glory of Hercules, the kleos of the hero whose name reads as “Hera + kleos,” then, may well not be his own kleos but rather Hera’s. The other order that grounds his acts also deprives them of their full meaning. His genitor ought to come to his aid. The earthly father will allow Hercules to have again the uirtus and the pudor that heaven itself stole from him. Note the implications of this: transcendental ideals such as laus and uirtus have been vitiated by the transcendental order. Hercules needs one more feat of arms to get himself back on the right path again. Hercules seeks to find a truly Herculean labor in his own suicide, a successful act that he can truly own. Hercules reuses the language of the labors in his next repudiation of life: “I hasten to cleanse the earth,” he says (1279). But he is himself the last

141

The last monster

monster to come his way: iamdudum mihi | monstrum impium saeuumque et immite ac ferum | oberrat (1279–81).42 This labor will be greater than the Twelve. And yet Hercules hesitates. He cannot kill himself. And he is ashamed of his failure. In his anger Hercules even entertains tearing down Thebes and covering himself with it. And when that seems not enough, he imagines doing the same with the heavens themselves: “The whole mass that sits in the middle of the cosmos | and separates the gods from mortals I shall turn against my own head.”43 If Hercules cannot find his way back to uirtus, then the cosmos itself can go to hell, says Hercules in his despair. Amphitryon at last affirms that he will restore to Hercules his arms. Hercules greets the gesture by declaring it “worthy of the sire of Hercules” (digna genitore Herculis). Again we care about “the worthy” (digna), but now we are finding the proper framework within which to discuss it: ethical acts in the here and now. At last Hercules’ father understands honor: this mortal has conceived a sense of the divine. But Hercules’ father has a key qualification in mind. Hercules can only kill himself at the cost of killing his aged father as well. Amphitryon declares that his corpse will lie as the “sin of the sane Hercules” (Herculis sani scelus, 1313). It is only this gesture that turns Hercules away from his own version of a thirteenth labor and towards a revision of it dictated by Amphitryon: (Hercules) Iam parce, genitor, parce, iam reuoca manum. succumbe, uirtus, perfer imperium patris. eat ad labores hic quoque Herculeos labor: uiuamus. (Hercules) Spare me, sire, spare me. Withdraw now your hand. Yield, uirtus, and endure a father’s command. Let this labor as well enter the list of labors Herculean: Let us live. The Madness of Hercules 1314–16

No sooner does Hercules choose to live than he again slides back into despair. Where will he live? Where can he flee? The problem of pudor remains even if uirtus has been reconfigured. Hercules can’t even go back down to the underworld because he is known there too. Theseus’s solution is abrupt, unsatisfactory, and the end of the play: “Go to Athens. We can clean you up there.” The last lines of the play read, then: “That land calls you which is wont to make the gods innocent.”44 Nearly 100 lines of Euripides become four of Seneca. We have reached the end of the play. We can begin to come to some conclusions. The Hercules offers a dramatic staging of a split subject.

142

The Sublime Seneca

Hercules is who he is because he is an impossible and contradictory creature. And yet his impossibility and contradictions are none other than those faced by subjects more generally. Every subject faces the conundrum of having two fathers, a material one and an invisible one. It may well be that, like Amphitryon at 1246 the worldly father calls upon the ius of his nomen in order to make an appeal upon his son. Paternity is invoked as a name, as a noun, as a right, as a law. The abstract Name of the Father becomes the invisible thing that underwrites the privileges of the person who happens to be the man who fed you. Hercules may be oedipal in the psychoanalytic sense of the term, but this is precisely because he is not Oedipus. Hercules’ whole story is one of not slaying his father(s). And yet by not slaying his father Hercules winds up with a double figure of paternity, one earthly and one sublime. Moreover, Hercules’ experience of the sublime is itself a divided one. Jupiter is a heavenly regent who has his duly allotted place in the orderly order of the cosmos. However, Hercules’ stepmother Juno is a force of blind and blinding persecution. The bifurcation recalls the split between Jove and Fortune in the Phaedra. One notes that Hercules’ labors have served both aspects of a contradictory heaven. In his very obedience to the arbitrary toils imposed upon him Hercules demonstrates the importance of ethical fidelity to obedience itself, an obedience that is required even when the commands imposed upon him are oppressive. In short, the more Hercules suffers, the more kleos he himself wins: his pathêmata can all be referred back to noumenological categories, to abstractions such as uirtus and pudor. In suffering at Juno’s hands he has proven his fidelity to Olympian ideals. Hercules is a hero, yes, but he is not necessarily the hero of his own acts.45 The labors were bidden: his praise is not his own. He insists that his suicide would be the only act that was truly his own. As a suffering subject he looks back and finds that he has been objectified by his own acts. He retroactively discovers that as a conscious ethical subject he is not the equal of his own acts in as much as he has not willed them. Accordingly, the murder of his own children is all too typical of his experience more generally: he is a subjective figure who acts out of necessity and only subsequently appreciates who or what he must be in the wake of his own acts. This fidelity to necessity has left him a hero. It has also left him a monster. Despite the constant threat of a cosmological revolution arising from Hercules, the order of things is nevertheless repeatedly reinforced by him rather than overthrown. It is clear that were he actually to will a revolutionary act he might in fact execute it: heaven could in fact be made to feel

The last monster

143

his power. However, qua alienated subject Hercules finds himself time and again reinscribing the very form of the order that is oppressing him. Hercules is the author neither of his own heroic deeds nor of his monstrous slaughter. And yet Hercules knows that neither is he less heroic nor is he less guilty for this.46 There is another order which explains the whole of his story, a story whose climax is the realization of his own alienation. The same sublime order that evacuates meaning nevertheless also gives meaning. The place where Hercules finds himself is constituted by this very speculation as to a second order of things that is in fact orderly. This speculation produces the figure of an Other that knows what it wants even as Hercules does not know what this “it” that is wanted is. In fact Hercules constantly misses the target and fails to satisfy the Other. And this very failure keeps him acting.47 Juno is the name given to this inscrutable demand from on high that demands acts that nevertheless never satisfy. Jove is allowed to wash his hands of all that is ultimately going on in his name. In fact, heaven will only be happy when Hercules has been cut down to size. But in so far as Hercules wills this order that he does not understand and that keeps him acting blindly and errantly, Hercules wills himself as a guilty subject of this same heavenly order rather than some other sublime order.48 Hercules would rather support the transcendental notion of being judged and found guilty than imagine what it would mean in fact to invoke the chaos of the reordering of the cosmos.49 Hercules is punished for crimes he was ordered by the law itself to commit.50 The net result is a Hercules who is ashamed to go on living. He feels himself a criminal in his own eyes and in the eyes of the whole universe. Hercules would rather do anything than put his anima before his pudor, and yet he is asked to do just that. Hercules is commanded to live in shame. Hercules’ uirtus is provoked, and a legion of ethical categories are mustered against him. Hercules is challenged by his father to endure living as a heroic task.51 This last labor is also a first labor in as much as it potentially has a very different structure. Hercules will sacrifice his pudor in the name of his pudor : that is, he will rise to the challenge of casting aside the very abstractions that make life worth living. He is being invited to be not just an incidentally guilty subject but a willfully guilty subject. Hercules’ successful ethical act announces the universal by means of his particular sorrow. This is not a bargain Hercules is quite ready to make. He instead chooses to reinvest in the structure of guilt and necessity rather than elective criminality. He forces his father to force him to live. This is the terrestrial version of a “I had no choice” to which Hercules has long since contrived to be subject and thus subjectify himself. Hercules lives because his father

144

The Sublime Seneca

made him do it, because he could not bring himself to kill his father in killing himself. Hercules reinvests in the alienation of his own reason for living.52 Hercules refuses, then, to give up on the support of his own fantasy, a fantasy wherein he is supremely dutiful even as this duty and obedience yield suffering.53 The infinite thus parasitizes the finite.54 Duty feeds on Hercules’ sacrifice of his life to the concept of obligation itself. And Hercules derives an obscene if disavowed pleasure in living on as guilty. This is the supreme sacrifice to the desire of the Other. Zupančič summarizes Kant’s position thus: “the question is that of attaining the point of view from which one can embrace the whole of one’s existence as if from outside.”55 Seneca constitutes here and throughout his corpus an apparatus that facilitates just this perspective whereby one embraces the whole of one’s existence as if from outside. The Stoic ethical project more generally aims at a sort of pathos of apathy, the experience of a lack of excitement when one takes up a sublime perspective relative to one’s mundane sufferings.56 Describing this other vantage point and moving the ethical subject asymptotically towards it is a major project within the Senecan corpus. One never quite gets there. One never quite satisfies this other order’s desire that we fully alienate ourselves to it and thus apathetically look on with approbation at the spectacle of our own suffering. In fact the very notion of philosophical contentment – a gaudium that defines itself against uoluptas – conjures a pathology that is imputed to the noumenological realm: it will feel good to look down at ourselves thus. But maybe the pleasures offered by gaudium are not quite as advertised. Recall again Seneca’s refusal to erase the word uoluptas in the name of the word gaudium in Moral Letter 59. Was that mere irony? Perhaps we can now see instead a symptom of a latent truth of Senecan wisdom more generally: the earthly always returns, and the sublime can never be detached from it. The mundane is not something that falls short of heaven. Instead, heaven is bound to earth via the logic of projection and fantasy. Philosophers, “lovers of wisdom,” have translated, or, rather, sublated, their lusts into delights by looking up into the sky and imagining in that conjured space the pleasure of looking back down from it. Gaudium pretends to be the sublime metaphor and sublimation of uoluptas.57 But gaudium might well be only a metonym, one word substituted into the place of another without being superior to it. Indeed, the substituted word is something of an inadequate substitute in as much as it obscures circuits of desire and the broader logic that enables the game of substitutions more generally. A theatricality of ethics can be found throughout the writings of Seneca: watching oneself with the eyes of virtue is fundamental to his thought.

The last monster

145

“Theater” is an ethical apparatus whether we speak of it literally or metaphorically, whether it is an earthly or a sublime institution. Authorship or mere theatrical spectatorship can seduce us: they offer a metaphorical shortcircuit, and they allow one to assume from the beginning a position that can be attained only with difficulty and in the end. One instead begins with a god’s eye view that has not been earned. The endless ironies of tragedy are part and parcel of this question of perspective: the pathêmata of the characters are watched and judged from the standpoint of the noêmata of the audience. Theater can thus both expose the mechanism of philosophical reflection and short-circuit it.58 We appreciate the split between orders without appreciating that something is enforcing that split. When Hercules prays for monstrum meum, this is “ironic.” It is ironic because Hercules is blind to what we can see. Hercules does not know his own story. We do. Hercules has to be brought to the point where he can see himself for what he is, and then he has to choose to accept as his own the labor that this recognition entails: he will be culpable for living on in spite of his culpability. The ethical anagnôrisis is the peripeteia. However, the reversal in this case is less an overturning of ethics than the apotheosis of it. The audience is invited to make a heroic and ironic recognition of its own. It has the opportunity to recognize in the story of Hercules its own story. Was all that has come before “my story” or not?59 Am I ready to take upon myself a radical acceptance of a cruel and capricious universe? Am I also ready to declare that this universe is nevertheless just even as it condemns me for acts that I did not will? For example, I took pleasure in watching Hercules suffer. I claim that Seneca made me do it. But am I ready to see myself as the monster who was willing to blindly watch on as all of this happened without fully seeing just what it meant to see this at all? This is what I find intriguing about Senecan tragedy. I see in it a structural ethics. It is an ethical machine inhabited by monsters. Much is grotesque, plenty is risible from a certain perspective.60 And yet as soon as one adopts the perspective from which this is serious, one becomes multiply liable. One is liable for the pleasure and pain that this machina concors of suffering yields. The experience is the pleasure of being the Other to whom suffering is offered as a spectacle and to whose obscene joys infinite sacrifices might be made. It is the pleasure of watching a mortal refuse to storm heaven. Our own apathetic spectatorship has its overt as well as its disavowed joys. We experience the gaudium of being Jove while furtively savoring the uoluptas of Juno. We savor being Kant with a dash of Sade thrown into the mix.61

146

The Sublime Seneca

The Senecan corpus is perpetually evoking the machine and its concord. And this corpus is itself a sort of harmonious machine churning out with systematic regularity a praise of harmony. Or, rather, one is invited to understand that such a thing might be on offer beyond the horizon of our limited appreciation: this thing is Seneca, the spirit of an author whose coherence lends coherence to the body of his works. Seneca is the metaphorical/ metaphysical form of the artist and artist of forms. The sublimity of Seneca himself means that all of this means something in the eschatological end. But what does it all mean? That, of course, is something that critics-becometheologians can tell us. They will themselves heal the rift between being and meaning as they look back down at the text from the perspective of the author. And the love of the lovers of words will always find a well-fitted place for every logos that suffuses and animates the body of the text. Let us go back over our portraits of the cosmic machine. At the end of the Consolations: look at someone looking at the machine and be consoled. You, a mere mortal woman, will be content when you realize that dead eyes can see the orderly order of the whole universe. The Natural Questions seem to translate us into the position of those dead and lost children next to whom stands a sublime father-figure who tutors their gaze. Our soul wants to read in the heavens the very stuff written into that book. It wants to take up a position from which the seemingly discordant machine is revealed instead to be a concordant one. Soul-as-subject and universe-as-object: the two are made for one another. And, importantly, the concord of the latter says something about the structure of the former. But only, of course, in the case of the soul that has been able to raise itself up to see the spectacle, not the one mired in the mundane. Conversely, in the Phaedra the dialectic of the beautiful is on offer, but only as a mirage. The sense-ful form of a concordant machine of nature gives way as the tragic meditation progresses. The perspective that might appreciate the sublime has been lost, and in the end what we get instead of a glorious cosmic mechanism is a broken corpse with a missing/extra piece. Hercules longs for peace and concord, but as a thing that straddles the mortal and the divine he is himself the discordant extra element within the universe. The mortal soul is itself, of course, usually figured as the thing that is both mundane and sublime, as that which, after a “Herculean effort,” can raise itself aloft to the heavens. But the tragedy of Hercules exposes something about the machine: the machine enforces the gap qua gap. Only an impossible leap gets you to the other side. This is a leap only the literary imagination and its as-if version of the sublime offers us while we are still alive. And here we are, you and me. Here

The last monster

147

at this point in our discussion, we are making a survey. We survey at a distance the very trope of the view from afar. We can see that when making the look back at the world what one sees and how one sees it reveals a sublime order that has purchased its beauty and its privilege at a dreadful price. Our mundane world is a nightmare, because the beyond is a glorious machine that makes sense of it all. Behold the Stoic fantasy. Literature complicates philosophy even as it enables it. Philosophical confidence is emplotted into the letters. Philosophical complications are folded into the plot of the plays. The literary “as if” enables us to see where we are going. The letters and dialogues read as if they are earnest. In them it sounds as if enlightenment is possible. The narrator speaks as if he has the voice of the author. And the author seems as if he is in complete control. It seems as if we can get back to Seneca himself via his writings. With tragedy a skeptical note creeps in. Maybe all of this is only a transcendental illusion, and maybe Stoicism only works to the extent that it is written up as if it worked.

conclusion

The metaphysics of Senecan morals

One has long read Seneca, of course. But much of the engagement with him has also been a reaction to a Seneca who stands for something rather than a response to the details and nuances of his texts themselves. His modern reception as a philosopher has been cool. Those pressed for time can be satisfied to find in him a hypocritical representative of a passé philosophy. And yet a close reading of him reveals affinities with major philosophical themes from the twentieth century: being towards death, for example.1 I have asked what it would mean to listen to the Senecan address.2 I have no interest in advocating that we necessarily let him interrupt us with his interpellation, that we turn around and become subjectivated within a specifically Senecan universe. It is hard to imagine that any such attempt to hear ourselves named by Seneca could be especially felicitous given, if nothing else, the divergent speech situation in which we find ourselves.3 And even within his own textual universe we note problems of address, especially when it comes to addressing the female other. Modern readers are keen to set aside the notion of woman as thing to be gotten beyond. In short, there is every reason to resist Seneca and in so doing to resist structures of elite male social reproduction that strategically conflate the unqualified absolute with the privileged particular.4 Nevertheless, listening to Seneca is in its way an ethical gesture, and one that I suspect has value for us: to give ear to the other is an ineluctable part of the game of the self.5 This is not just a Senecan proposition, but it leads a post-classical life as well. There is something nearly contemporary about a number of Seneca’s formulations, and it is not surprising that he has attracted increased interest in a period where different modes of ethical thought are under investigation.6 But back to particulars. What does it mean for us if we declare that every particularity one discovers is in fact a member of one of two higher-order genera? The two modes of explaining (away) Seneca: “He was a Stoic” (and so a member of that well-understood genus); “He was a man of his age” (and 148

Conclusion: the metaphysics of Senecan morals

149

so classifiable as a Roman within a socio-cultural milieu that – somehow or other . . . – determines what we see before us). One can even take a further step and subsume philosophy within history, and thereupon do away with the potential heterogeneity of thought and time: all meditations become timely ones. Despite their utility within an academic context, such tropes require a certain naiveté that deafens us to other possibilities.7 Aristotle’s categories, the Stoic supreme genus, Leibnitz’s monad, and Hegel’s logic become comforting objects that have been adequately objectified within a history of ideas. Nevertheless, there are implications for the subject who constitutes these as objects-of-thought. That is, in cataloging stories of metaphysics, one risks making a concrete commitment to a specific metaphysical-cum-practical structure in which specimen catalogs matter most and one in which they matter to the exclusion of other concrete possibilities.8 Such behavior bespeaks our own arrogation of a privileged and particular perspective: because we have mastered these philosophyobjects of our own making, we imagine that we know better than those many myopic philosophical subjects. And it is here that I am interested in championing Seneca as a “serious philosopher.” This is also another way of saying that for purely selfish reasons one might do well to reflect on his thought. Seneca insists that philosophy is both abstract and concrete. Seneca is wary of the story of categories in and for itself.9 Seneca, in fact, is very much worried about stories and storytelling. What is the metaphysical status of the narrative of philosophy? Can one communicate wisdom? Can one advance towards it? What, in the end, is Seneca doing? Who, in the end is “he,” this person addressing “you”? We often have a narrator’s spiritual autobiography in front of us, but it can be hard to see the concrete historical individual named Seneca in it. A self-as-written is taking precedence. What, if anything, is his addressee(-as-written) going to do in response? It is said that Plato gave up tragedy and became a philosopher. But he did not make a break from the literary. On the contrary, he writes beautifully, and the writing qua writing and qua beautiful writing is itself one of the philosophical problems. Such is announced early on: the star of Plato’s philosophical romance is a man who never wrote. There is always another layer to Socratic irony, namely Platonic. Seneca, orator and tragedian, writes philosophy. He never makes a break from the literary. He writes beautifully, too beautifully even. Quintilian indicts Seneca for corrupting the youth and introducing new literary gods into the state. Seneca offers a multi-layered translation of the Platonic problems. He also adds explicit mediation on translating-Plato as a problem. What does it mean to philosophize? Do we

150

The Sublime Seneca

philosophize when we write up philosophy? What does it mean to do it in Latin? What does it mean to do it as a Stoic? Meanwhile, Seneca hides himself in plain sight. Plato disappears from the Platonic corpus. Seneca sits squarely in the middle of it. This shift thematizes the mystery/authorship dyad. We have, then, another Platonic translation. My argument is not that the Senecan corpus represents a dogged meditation on Plato. Seneca thinks plenty about Plato. Seneca also thinks a lot more about Stoic authors. Seneca is, however, working on the same kinds of issues as had Plato, and he does so with a similar set of tools. We are used to taking Plato seriously as a philosopher who explores the conditions of possibility of philosophy itself. And our own relationship to Plato’s “seriousness” can be used to rediscover in Seneca the dimensions of a similarly ambitious project no matter what one makes of the actual results. And so we come back to the problem of philosophy and its relationship to literature. Though either one of the two terms might well be posited as the antithesis to the other’s own thetic condition, a synthesis has been regularly encountered in the history of philosophy/literature. Plato is familiar. Nietzsche is as well.10 Derrida literally reads philosophy side by side with literature.11 And he was himself regularly decried as an author of fictions rather than a philosopher in his own right. Kierkegaard’s Either/Or is a philosophical-cum-literary piece concerning antitheticals and ethics. And then we can turn to the deceptive “other side” of the story: Lucretius, Sade, and Lautréamont. They were not just wordsmiths. Seneca fits right in with this crowd of writers who were both/and as well as neither/nor. Even someone who at first blush might seem to be resolutely unliterary nevertheless needs a “literary” reading: Hegel. The Phenomenology of Spirit is a Bildungsroman. Compare Rousseau and Goethe.12 Seneca offers something akin to this in the Letters, but he begins his epic in the Horatian middle and leaves us in some doubt as to whether or not we can ever end.13 Hegel is all about the fusion of process and product. And so he has to give an account of the genealogy of the philosophy in tandem with the positive contents of the same. Hegel offers a narrative of the plot of the history of philosophy itself. And he has to do this. That is because the history of philosophy is effectively the history of spirit, and spirit itself is history.14 Furthermore, there is no divide between philosophy and biography: “Philosophical doctrines are not abstract doctrines, they are ways of life.”15 Hegel is hard to read because Hegel makes no sense until you have already read Hegel and assented to the structure of that experience rather than to the letter of its propositions. The Hegelian narrative transports you to a position wherein you can appreciate

Conclusion: the metaphysics of Senecan morals

151

the dialectical movement of spirit because your own spirit has itself so moved. The anagnôrisis comes with a reversal: one realizes that the Hegelian account of spirit is in fact the story of one’s own spirit as well as the story of how it became ready to listen to the story of spirit.16 We are much more used to philosophical demonstration that comes via the syllogistic of major premise and minor premise combining to yield a conclusion. But Hegelian logic moves, and it moves dialectically. And for him the static subject-predicate quality of standard philosophical claims fails to take us where we are going.17 Let us pause to note some Hegelianism avant la lettre: Seneca’s propositions move as well: the proposition that itself defines the term “proposition” – namely the phrase “Cato is walking” – itself moves from mouth to mouth and ’twixt and ’tween narrative layers. This multiple movement of the lekton “Cato is walking” reveals a qualitative difference between what Seneca is doing and what he claims the logicians are all about. We saw Seneca using propositum in Letter 5: Seneca set forth something he resolved to do, namely to live in accordance with nature.18 And we discussed at some length the quo proposito of Letter 108 whereby intentionality was inserted into the Senecan philosophical project. A multiply dialectical movement is latent in these propositions about propositions. First, to set forth implies as well to move towards: the thing set forth is put out there as a goal.19 One translates propositum as “resolution.” The propositum is no mere thing out there, though: it is “my thing” and a thing about which I am particularly concerned. It is also already “my thing” before I even reach it, before, even, I really know what it is or how to read it, or, for that matter, before I even know who I really am. Throughout this volume one is expected to feel anxious when the word translation appears, and the present problem of translating propositum is no exception to that rule. This motion towards entails both progress and return: one aims to take on for oneself that thing which one first abstracted from within the contents of one’s (abstract) thinking. This object-of-thought is then subsequently set forth “out there” as a goal. And one aims at turning the intimate-cum-alien proposition, “Live in accordance with nature,” into something that is truly one’s own proposition. Of course, it was already one’s own in that it was a cogitation that was then turned into a proposal. And yet it was not yet “really” one’s own. And that is the (philosophical) point of proposing the resolution: there is work to be done. This work transforms the worker himself. Meanwhile, the dialectical movement affects not just the subject of the proposition – and he is the “subject of the proposition” in multiple senses of that phrase. But this movement affects as well the terms of the proposition:

152

The Sublime Seneca

“nature” will not be the same by the time this is all over. Nature is reason, and reason structures nature. But we have yet to reach that point in Seneca’s narrative. Let us not get too far ahead of ourselves. Hegel’s narrative in the Phenomenology works as a selective retelling of the history of philosophy. His narrative contains no dates and no proper names. Its co-ordinates are only moments in an evolutionary process, a process that properly exists only within the confines of his philosophical fable. A reading of Senecan philosophical romances can help prepare us for the Hegelian roman even as Hegel can assist us in making a return to Seneca. The most famous episode from Hegel’s tale of self-consciousness is probably the myth of Lordship and Bondage. Its sequel is entitled, “Stoicism, scepticism, and the unhappy consciousness.” Hegel’s analysis-cum-narrative offers us a chance to re-read Seneca’s own narrative of wisdom. Specifically, Hegel helps us to see a sort of postStoicism at work within the Senecan corpus. Hegel identifies Stoicism with the valorization of independent self-consciousness and the pure abstraction of the “I.”20 Detached thinking is prized: freedom from perturbation, sublimity, and objectivity are all co-ordinated.21 Stoicism is, then, a philosophy of perspective. But detachment and indifference are flawed ideals: the idea of freedom is not the living reality of freedom.22 Living in accordance with reason, then, runs the risk of negating “life”: all actual contents can be evacuated in the name of a sterile sublime.23 And yet this Hegelian portrait of Stoicism does not describe Seneca’s Stoic writings. It may well depict certain dogmatic moments within them, but one should not mistake a part for the whole. Specifically, we do not encounter in Seneca the pure abstraction of the “I.” The ego is always multiply present and at different levels: the ego of the author, the ego of the narrator, the inset ego of a character speaker, and the ego in dialogue with the tu. This feature of Senecan writing lends itself to the sociological critique of his philosophy: the expansions of the contents of abstract morality are merely rewritings of qualities prized in the hic et nunc of the life of an elite Roman male. But rather than Roman insipidity in the face of Greek wisdom (and some measure of that may well be here too) we can also see something in this writing that is “more advanced” than simple Stoicism when read in the light of the Hegelian critique of Stoicism. The different selves in Senecan writing do not all naturally fall into line. In particular, we do not just find the valorized self-consciousness of the author. Of course, it is possible to read Seneca that way and to assume from the outset that The Author is a god-like consciousness that reigns as a complete and sovereign lord over the text and the work of meaning that is

Conclusion: the metaphysics of Senecan morals

153

commanded of it. But such a reading neglects the presentation of the problem of authorship within the corpus itself. Even as the possibilities of a sublime perspective are explored, the corpus retains within it what we will presently describe as skeptical and “unhappy” notes, and these notes are present precisely because of the form of the narrative itself. Skepticism appears most clearly in the tragedies. They embed critiques of Stoic certainties concerning identity and self-consciousness. Everyone in the Phaedra is bifurcated. For Hercules the universe is split, and he is himself the thing that splits the universe. But this kind of bifurcation informs not just the eschatology of the tragedies, but even the form of the prose works. Seneca as emplotted as a character within the philosophy is not even as sage as the author Seneca who seems to write these works. “Seneca” splits the textual universe: the author is not the character. Hegel’s Unhappy Consciousness is unhappy because it experiences itself as split. On the one hand, it is conscious of the eternal, the sublime, and the unchangeable. This corresponds to Stoic certitude: logos is reason is freedom is consciousness. On the other hand, the Unhappy Consciousness is conscious of the negation of all of this in the protean and changeable world of the empirical. Moreover, the empirical world contains as one of its elements changeable consciousness. The unhappiness arises from the sense that the self falls on the side of the “merely” changeable and that it has been sundered from the eternity of reason.24 But how is one to bridge the gap? That is the philosophical task proper. Hegel, naturally, believes that he has found the solution to the problem. Seneca, at a minimum, has posed the problem as such. Moreover, the structure of the answer is implicit in the form in which the problem is both posed and explored: the space of narrative articulates the problem of the self in both form and contents. Consciousness as split: this is written into the fabric of Seneca’s texts. What are the differences and distinctions? Whence do they emerge? Can they be overcome? What would that process look like? These are the Senecan themes that I have attempted to explore. I take them to be sophisticated musings and meditations. Furthermore, they a/effect us as well if we choose to listen to them. For Seneca is asking not just what it means to write philosophy, but also what it means to read philosophy. Ultimately, there is an impasse. It does not all “really work” in the sense that “Seneca” enlightens “us.” Put bluntly: Does reading Seneca make you a better person? It is not easy today to find a reader of Seneca who says as much of the encounter with him, especially among specialists in Latin letters. In fact, discussions of Seneca are generally predicated on the notion

154

The Sublime Seneca

that expecting such of him would be an absurdity. This routine and perhaps even universal failure to enlighten itself sheds a useful sort of light. Seneca progresses all the way out to the limit. He makes the metaphorical journey out to the point where one purchases coherence even at the cost of taking on the burden of something fundamentally incoherent as the (impossible) condition of possibility in general. And “Seneca” is the noun/nomen that names the impossible beyond where meaning resides/is figured as residing. Qua beyond, then, the name Seneca names the missed encounter with the sublime author as well as the unhappiness of the empirical in the face of the absolute. I have conjured multiple meta-tragedies of Senecan philosophy. In contradistinction to my own order of presentation, it seems that the tragedies generally antedate the “philosophy proper.”25 Why, then, should such a challenging articulation of the metaphysics of ethics come “early” in his corpus and not at the end?26 A preliminary answer that will not of itself satisfy: my approach to Seneca is synchronic. That is, even if the plays are not Stoic allegories – and they should certainly not be reduced to such since they can be predicated on para-Stoic propositions – the logic of the universe that the plays work with (even if in distorted and perverted form) has as its correlate the logic of the mundus as described within Seneca’s philosophical treatises.27 And it is these very commitments that are shared across genres that interest me here. In fact, it is specifically the idea that literature and philosophy are themselves connected that most interests me. Problems can be starkly presented in the tragedies. A crisis that splits meaning and being can be posited, but the more arduous task of a philosophical presentation that resolves the split is not required of them. The confrontation with the horror of the sublime can be precipitated, then, in the absence of an explicit argument about the sublime. Indeed, at issue is the relationship between logos and the sublime. A philosophical presentation of such is by no means the task at hand. To declare that the Phaedra is about desire is not the same thing as the experience of watching the Phaedra. The Senecan thesis needs to unfold over diegetic time and in a dramatic space. Likewise, one needs to be aware of the possibility that something more than simply the presentation of philosophical theses is occurring over the course of the drama of the Moral Letters. Indeed, this supplementary work gets done throughout the prose works where “you” and “I” meet. Authorship and spectation themselves serve as places where one sees the development of a resolution to the crisis of the splitting of the world. These themes get worked through explicitly outside of the dramas. However, given that both authorship and spectatorship are major themes of the

Conclusion: the metaphysics of Senecan morals

155

tragedies, especially the Thyestes, it is worth remembering that the dramas again offer extreme portraits of problems that have philosophical dimensions.28 The tragic articulation of the questions of authorship and spectatorship is, of course, a nasty one. The tragedies indicate that Seneca does not simply posit the freedom of self-consciousness as per Hegel’s portrait of the Stoic. The tragedies offer the skeptical rejoinder to any such freedom: radical freedom of thought and intense individuality become negative and negating principles. This negation is indeed the “actual experience” of freedom.29 For the skeptic the other and the exterior become contingent. In skepticism the manifold determinateness of the world is as nothing relative to the infinitude of the thinking self. The skeptic realizes – that is, lives – something latent in the notion of Stoicism when he negates the world.30 Atreus is the master-plotter. He stages a scene of cannibalism. He watches his brother Thyestes eat his children. This moment of annihilation expresses Atreus’ radical freedom. And yet he is simultaneously convinced that he has missed the mark even as he got just what he had willed: the author intended, emplotted, and effected his will, and yet he still has trouble fusing intention as cause and satiated desire as effect.31 Missing is recognition on the side of the victimized other: sed nesciens . . . (1067). “What Scepticism causes to vanish is not only objective reality as such, but its own relationship to it in which the ‘other’ is held to be objective and is established as such.”32 And so let us circle back once again to Hegelian Unhappiness as we look for the road to virtue rather than vice. For the unhappy consciousness a split in the structure of the self is not just recognized, but taken on as true. The goal is to find a way to mediate between the individual and the unchangeable.33 This is what Hegel posits, but it is also where we find the dramaturgy of Seneca’s metaphysical writings, writings that serve as a philosophical sequel to the skeptical position embodied by the (negative) freedom of an Atreus.34 The ethics themselves labor under a tragic star: the absolute is impossible for the individual, and yet one must nevertheless do something about it. Tragedy does not get the last word when it comes to articulating the difficult problem of the relationship (or lack thereof ) between what you want and what you get. The practical moral philosopher steps forward to talk to us in earnest tones about the same. One must set off towards enlightenment, because it is all too clear that wherever it is that we need to be, we are not really there yet. The phrase, “One must set off towards enlightenment,” is a line of philosophical dialogue. Of itself this phrase already goes beyond the sterile logic-of-grammar of “Cato is walking” by shifting the subject of the verb as well as adding in a modal modifier: “one is obligated to walk.” But there is

156

The Sublime Seneca

not just a revised statement. The statement itself emerges from a virtual place of enunciation: it springs forth as a voice rising out of a text. And these Senecan texts are multi-layered and polyphonous. And so we find a critical Senecan supplement: it is not the idea of the necessity of enlightenment that is at issue, but rather the structure of its promulgation. Everyone already assents to the claim that enlightenment is a good thing. Furthermore, as Seneca himself insists, a philology of philosophy will do us no good: a successful grammatical analysis of the terms “enlightenment,” “is,” and “good” likely leaves the analyst in precisely the same position occupied at the beginning of the analysis. Something more is needed, and it is offered in the form of a poetics of wisdom.35 Such a poetics attempts to offer both the process and the result. It strives to write enlightenment. The fruits of Seneca’s labor can hardly be seen as an unqualified success. We have a catalog of suspect tropes and failed metaphorical transfers to hand. In order to overcome the very notion of the qualified Seneca aligns it with woman. The individual and the unchangeable can perhaps be correlated if we set aside gender. Or perhaps it is desire that is the problem. But that cannot be correct either: a desire to know is among the species that fall under the more general genus of desire. Meaning and being and desire all wind up on this side of the equation: something horrific lies on the other side. Or perhaps it is metaphysics itself that troubles us, the very positing of a disjunct here and there. A metaphysics of literature also runs the risk of “solving” the problem of Hegelian unhappiness too easily. When the author “is” character, narrator, and all-knowing spirit that guides the pen, then everything works. It also works too well. The metaphysics of the narratology of the Natural Questions offers the easy way out.36 The journey to metaphysics then traces out a narrative arc that has a beginning, middle, and end. We will eventually get there. Really. That’s what it says, right there in the book. Conversely, the world itself is legible in bookish terms. On offer is a still more sophisticated embrace of the ubiquity of logos and the power of intentions to sustain the meaning of the wor(l)d. The Moral Letters do not just claim that there is a metaphoricity of philosophy. They argue for it while arguing according to it. Again, it is not clear that we have a successful argument/performance on our hands. Nevertheless, the formulation of the problematic is itself an exciting and productive feature of Seneca’s writing. Though Nietzsche heaps scorn upon the Romans, the sophistication of his own radical philological-cumphilosophical project is already adumbrated by Seneca.37 And this outline is even to some measure filled in, but, of course, to very different effect.

Conclusion: the metaphysics of Senecan morals

157

Among our own unavoidable ethical burdens is deciding whether and how we elect to read Seneca. To the extent that we ourselves believe in authors and texts, we risk (re)writing a narrative of being and meaning. Intentio applies itself both to the sustaining tenor of the real as well as to that of the text. And yet, unlike Seneca’s own meditations on me, you, and the text, our own dominant modes of reading and writing can apotheose the author without realizing that a core topic under investigation to begin with was a difficulty that arises specifically in the wake of an apotheosis of authorship. “Apathy” is a second and converse risk for readers such as ourselves: we often stand at a distance from what Seneca wants to tell us, viz., be a good man. We imagine instead a Seneca who can tell us something about any number of things – with the notable exception of our own wisdom. We imagine that our readings of his writings will disclose that other message on offer: doxography, biography, politics, predilections . . . We become complicit in our own metaphysics of texts, and a tragic metaphysics at that. Seneca has been staged in our little theater of knowledge: when his reversal corresponds to our own recognition, then, at that very moment, the spark of knowledge flashes. But it illuminates without enlightening. While I see a number of dead-ends for Seneca’s fellow-travelers should they follow him too far along the journey that he lays out for us, he has at least made some advances. Of particular and lasting interest to me is the problem of the philosophical partner and the way this other party potentially affects the self-as-author. Can the other be of service to the self?

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. I am claiming, then, for Seneca something not unlike what Deleuze says of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche: “They no longer reflect on the theater in the Hegelian manner. Neither do they set up a philosophical theater. They invent an incredible equivalent of the theater within philosophy, thereby founding simultaneously this theater of the future and a new philosophy” (Deleuze 1994: 8). There are some major distinctions that might be noted, of course. Nevertheless, let us hold fast to the idea that a theater might be lodged within philosophy and that philosophy might involve a performer and performances and not just a set of neutral observations. 2. Honderich 2005, s.v. “ethics and morality.” 3. The fourth chapter of Inwood 2005 should be consulted by those who are interested in these issues. On offer as well are items that are germane to my own slightly displaced and more narrow take on Senecan ethics. 4. See Habinek 2005 for the elaborate story of speech registers at Rome. The Latin question of “song” is in fact even more complex than the ambiguous category of “literature” in English. See also Habinek 2005: 104: Seneca achieves the successful synthesis of an ideal shared by both Cicero and Quintilian: philosophy, oratory, and song can and should be united. 5. The Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “sublime 7.” 6. Mazzoli 1990 examines the relationship between the physical loftiness of the sublime in the Natural Questions and the ethical loftiness of the moral works. 7. Brunschwig 2003: 206. Brunschwig might even have noted that it is not always clear what we mean when we use the term metaphysics today. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. “metaphysics”: “It is not easy to say what metaphysics is . . . The word ‘metaphysics’ is notoriously hard to define” (http://plato. stanford.edu/entries/metaphysics/). Nevertheless, one has long consulted with profit the materials collected under the heading of Stoic metaphysics in Long and Sedley 1987a. 8. Brunschwig 2003: 206. 9. Rabde Romeo 1966: 132 adumbrates the difficulty of determining such: Seneca’s presentation is not systematic; it is scattered; there is a seeming incoherence between passages; he avoids the technical language used for metaphysical discussions. 158

Notes to pages 5–9

159

10. Both points can be found at Inwood 2005: 123. 11. Seneca, On Tranquility of the Soul 8.5: Si quis de felicitate Diogenis dubitat, potest idem dubitare et de deorum inmortalium statu, an parum beate degant quod illis nec praedia nec horti sint nec alieno colono rura pretiosa nec grande in foro fenus. 12. Seneca, Moral Letters 59.1: Magnam ex epistula tua percepi uoluptatem; permitte enim mihi uti uerbis publicis nec illa ad significationem Stoicam reuoca. Compare the opening of the second book: Non loquor tecum Stoica lingua, sed hac summissiore . . .: “I am not speaking with you in the Stoic tongue, but in a more mild idiom . . .” (Moral Letters 13.4). 13. Seneca, Moral Letters 59.4: Tamen ego non inmerito dixeram cepisse me magnam ex epistula tua uoluptatem. 14. Habinek 1998: 146: “Senecan openings . . . are invasive and unmediated: they situate the reader in a conversation already ongoing and refer to a world outside that defined by speaker and interlocutor only to deny its claims to validity.” 15. Schafer 2009: 111: A close reading of the Moral Letters “shows Seneca to be a literary artist of the first rank, and it shows that (and how) this artistry does not merely share space with the philosophical material but reinforces it as well. For Seneca positions his genius where these two domains, the literary and the philosophical, converge.” 16. Despite a number of significant gaps in our evidence, there has been no shortage of biographies of Seneca. Griffin 1976 remains a classic. The life and work as they relate to the times can also be found in Fuhrmann 1997. And Mangas Manjarrés 2001 is organized according to a similar plan. Veyne 2003 opens with a compressed biography that leads the reader into an engaged appraisal of Senecan philosophy. Ker 2009b reveals the extent to which the contents of our own putatively neutral stories about Seneca’s life have accumulated as a function of various pointed appropriations of the philosopher by subsequent generations. 17. But timely and topical theorization is not the same thing as a documentary account of the imperial age: “On Clemency exists in a sphere as abstract as that of Rousseau’s On the Social Contract” (Veyne 2003: 17). And while there is a consensus that On Benefaction is very much connected to its moment, the abstraction of the presentation means that one will need to argue as to the nature and scope of such connections. See, then, the arguments of Griffin 2003: 105–20 as well as her presentation of others’ approach to the question. 18. The present state of the work on these questions is quite mature and satisfying. One can, for example, consult Bartsch and Wray 2009 on the self and Ker 2009b and Setaioli 2000 on death. And Foucault’s History of Sexuality was transformative of the way one talks about pleasure in both Greece and Rome. 19. Compare Ker 2009b: 10–12: “death” is a place where both Seneca as an author and the whole corpus of Senecan writings can and should be engaged. 20. Hegel 1977: 2. 21. Veyne 2003: 69: “Taken literally the paradox [of the extreme rarity of sages] seems huge: it comes down to saying that Stoicism exists, but there have never been any Stoics.” Compare the paradoxical notion of “bootstrapping.” How, for example,

160

Notes to pages 9–11

does one write a compiler for a computer language? The question has a “the chicken or the egg” quality to it, and yet people answer it all the time. The solution to the problem is “Senecan”: one uses an existing language to generate a compiler for the new language. Compare Wittgenstein 1922: “My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)” (6.54). 22. Armisen-Marchetti 1989: 53: philosophy and aesthetics are not so much reconciled to one another in Seneca as there is a synthesis of the two projects. 23. Senecan Stoicism as a reaction to the imperial system: this historicist thesis is very familiar. Yet few appreciate that they are being Historians of Spirit when they articulate it. Compare, then, Hegel 1977: 121: “As a universal form of the World-Spirit, Stoicism could only appear on the scene in a time of universal fear and bondage, but also a time of universal culture which had raised itself to the level of thought.” 24. Veyne 2003: ix: it is time to take Seneca seriously as a philosopher. The foundation for this seriousness: the certainty of self-consciousness in Stoicism. See Veyne 2003: x–xi who seems not to see that he is slotting himself straight into a Hegelian critique, even though he has read Hegel on the Stoics (see his remarks at Veyne 2003: 80). 25. The theme appears throughout the pages of Bartsch and Wray 2009. Of lasting interest to me is Gill 2009: 77–78: tragic subjects in Seneca have an objectivist framework within which they self-objectify. And it is precisely because these are damaged and split selves that this process emerges in the form that it does. 26. Williams 2012: 9 embarks from a much more useful position: “Above all, this study is committed to the view that he controls his sources rather than being controlled by them.” 27. True to their model, Cynics privilege life over text, and a lack of texts has left much about them obscure. But on their Socratism see Branham and GouletCazé 1996: 9–12 and Long 1996: 32. 28. See Sedley 2003: 11. 29. Note that Seneca is unavoidably innovative. The very fact that he thinks in Latin rather than Greek is productive of philosophical shifts. See Gill 2003: 49– 50 who is picking up a thesis variously developed by Inwood and Nussbaum. 30. Pre-conceptions are not especially useful for reading the Letters. RichardsonHay 2006: 11: “Book 1 is its starting point and nothing about it (number or length of letters, its organization, its thematic propensities and divergences, its contextual situations and developments) can simply be assumed. The reading of Book 1 becomes a process of unravelling.” In framing the problem of reading thus, Richardson-Hay is following in a relatively well-established tradition as her own notes make clear. 31. Literally, “Everything belongs to someone else, only time is ours” (omnia, Lucili, aliena sunt, tempus tantum nostrum est, Moral Letters 1.3). Compare Moral Letters 58.22: time is among the things that only have an as-if existence (quasi sunt).

Notes to pages 11–13

161

32. Seneca, Moral Letters 2.6: Epicurus’s maxim that “poverty is a joyous thing” has its terms redefined. No: Joy means you are rich. And what is important is not desiring more than you already have. Foucault 1997c: 212 sees in this passage an example of “the local truth of the precept” and “its circumstantial use value.” That is “How can I be an orthodox Stoic?” is not the core of the project. 33. Theophrastus: Moral Letters 3.2. Pomponius: Moral Letters 3.6. 34. Seneca, Moral Letters 4.10: accipe quod mihi hodierno die placuit . . . 35. Seneca, Moral Letters 5.4: nempe propositum nostrum est secundum naturam uiuere. 36. Seneca, Moral Letters 16.7: non est quod mireris animum meum: adhuc de alieno liberalis sum. quare autem alienum dixi? quidquid bene dictum est ab ullo meum est. 37. One notes an ostentatious indifference to the debates over “plagiarism” that can be found in Latin literature. The typical language of that discourse highlights “theft” or “misappropriation.” One typically sees terms such as furtum, surripere, sumere, and even transferre (McGill 2013: 8–9). In fact one idiom for literary theft has effectively been flipped: “another’s as if one’s own” (alienum pro suo) has turned into “it’s all mine” (omnia mea sunt), and this despite the fact that the words originally came out of another’s mouth. 38. On this letter, see Henderson 2004: 12–13 from whom I liberally appropriate. 39. What was once philosophy has perhaps turned into philology on my part. Hachmann 1995: 56–57 offers a more proper reading of the passage and its terms: we are on the road to appreciating the Stoic theory of logos. The word likely jumped out at its early readers: Bourgery 1922: 274 lists it as a neologism. 40. Derrida 1981: 324: Plato’s cave and its play of mirrors and shadows is subsumed within a second apparatus, namely the theater of Soller’s Numbers. Platonic presence becomes the play of presented presence projected on a textual surface. Such is precisely what we are not to imagine in Seneca, says a figure appearing ex machina, i.e., “Seneca.” 41. Derrida 1976: 50 is an obvious cross-reference for a critique of “the metaphysics of presence.” But Henderson 2004: 12 spells out Seneca’s paradoxical argument: “[Y]ou can’t beat live shared speech . . . [The classic philosophers] learned to become great teachers through witnessing their great teachers teaching (learning).” 42. Meanwhile, a book cannot be read without access to the life. Mansfeld 2005: 20 describes an interpretive mode prevalent in antiquity: “The study of the life, activities, and saying of a philosopher was regarded as an indispensable preliminary to that of his writings.” This idea that self and text ought to be fused when it comes time to interpret either/both has as its more proximate analogue Seneca’s “own” citation/translation of a Greek cliché: “As was their speech, so was their life” (talis hominibus fuit oratio qualis uita, Moral Letters 114.1). One can and should read bi-directionally, and that is just what happens to Maecenas in this letter. 43. See, for example, Foucault 1988: 39–68; Foucault 1997b; Foucault 1997c; and Foucault 1997d.

162

Notes to pages 13–14

44. Foucault’s work is extended, revised, and critiqued in light of Seneca’s corpus throughout Bartsch and Wray 2009. 45. Ker 2009a: 172 flags the problem of Foucault’s objectivist perspective. 46. Foucault 1997c: 211 justly draws our attention to this technology as a means of “establishing a relationship of oneself with oneself.” And he insists on the profound interconnection between self and writing. But what Foucault deprecates are two key dimension of the project in Seneca. First there is the elaborate writing of self-writing and self-reading produced by Seneca himself (as opposed to merely discovered by Foucault). Next there are Seneca’s own haunting questions, “Yes, but can any of this work? And, if so, how?” Compare Henderson 1999: 232–37 on Seneca’s contemporary Persius and his efforts to dramatize the (Foucauldian) training of the will in the age of the Care(s) of the Self. The results of the process, a frightful analysis rather than a smooth, selfassured synthesis: “With his rasp of warp words Persius writes down the Roman self in its bodily boundaries and surfaces as a network of tainted orifices, perforous skin, so many plates of meat” (Henderson 1999: 243). This sounds a lot like the sorts of things we will see in Senecan tragedy. Persius’s project is a “satire on, and of, Self-care” (Henderson 1999: 248). 47. See the critical appraisal of the illusion of objectivism at Bourdieu 1990: 34. 48. Compare Bourdieu’s critique of Sartre: “[S]ubjectivism universalizes the experience that the subject of theoretical discourse has of himself as a subject” (Bourdieu 1990: 46). 49. See the fourth and especially the fifth chapters of Bartsch 2006 for a full and thoughtful exposition of the Senecan problematic of reflexivity. 50. Foucault 1997c: 216 invites us to go astray by making reading too easy: “To write is thus to ‘show oneself,’ to project oneself into view, to make one’s own face appear in the other’s presence.” The objectivist reader need merely read over Lucilius’s shoulder and therewith give an account of Roman Practice. But let’s take a second look: Seneca stages a (flawed) character named Seneca for a conjured reader named Lucilius, and then he publishes the lot of it for the rest of us. What exactly has been “shown” here given that so many layers of fiction are surrounding these various selves? 1 MISREADING SENECA 1. Wilson 2001 offers a critical appraisal of the various modes of reading the Moral Letters via assimilating them to a non-epistolary genre: for many these texts are instead essays, exhortations, or pieces of pedagogy. Inwood 2007c also emphasizes letters as genre with conventions that affect both form and content. And Seneca both works within and plays with these conventions. 2. See Wilson 2001: 174–77 on Moral Letter 27. 3. Henderson 2004: 6–27 offers a superb walk-through of the first book of Moral Letters. The question of narrative arcs in the Letters has attracted a lot of attention: such arcs are clearly present, but major and minor themes are also not developed in a linear manner, and several topics will be in play at any given

Notes to pages 14–15

4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

163

moment. The general issue is not contentious, but the interpretation of the details can be: Maurach 1970 presents elaborate portraits of the various connections between letters, and he constantly distinguishes his vision from that of Cancik 1967 who works under a similar banner with divergent results. In addition to the survey of the debate in Richardson-Hay 2006, the introduction to Hachmann 1995 also provides a thorough review of this topic. The question of structure also receives extensive treatment in Henderson 2006. A recent example: Schafer 2009: 72–74 offers an upbeat appraisal of Lucilius’s progress over the course of the Moral Letters. He asks more and better questions over time. And he is asked to consider more sophisticated topics at greater length. See also Williams 2005b: 447: the Natural Questions also reveals signs of progress: “The journey is all, with different stages of philosophical progress both attained and set before us as goals in different books of the Natural Questions.” Similar claims are made for the structure of Book 6 of the Natural Questions in Williams 2006b. Richardson-Hay 2006: 15: “This technique [of internal integrity and design] holds good for the EM as a whole. Apart from the structural coherence of a Book, lines can be drawn between letters that disregard distance and draw individual epistles together in a meaningful coalescence of subject or theme. The process, one of intensification, interpretation, clarification and insistence reveals the evolution and growth of Seneca’s arguments as he moves towards certain resolutions and developments.” See Wilson 2001: 183 on this “turning-point in the collection and in the relationship of both Seneca and his reader to the philosophical ideas with which they are engaged.” Compare Henderson 2004: 30. Henderson 2004: 29: Seneca is inculcating reading habits by forcing us in our reading to “react in the light of the reading experience, and to project the result into reading further.” Wilson 2001: 185. I very much agree with Henderson 2004: 43: we are witnessing “spiritual bricolage.” And though a bricoleur does get something done in the end, neither is his the same process nor does he fabricate the same product as that on offer from the skilled professional who exclusively works with the finest tools imported direct from the factory in Athens. Readers who prefer Latin terms to French ones can consult Schafer 2009 on praecepta as distinct from decreta in Moral Letters 94 and 95. See the introduction to Inwood 2007b for the interaction of literary form and philosophical content in Seneca. Narratological issues are treated as well. Compare Edwards 2008: 98. Her chief object of study is the proliferation of Senecan selves on display and the consequences of this for reading him. The topic is a vital one. See also Inwood 2005: 31–38 on literary form in Seneca. And even as Inwood 2009: 63 posits a tension between literary form and philosophical innovation, it is precisely in the form that Ker sees possibilities for productive philosophical work (Ker 2009a: 161). Grimal 1978: 411: the literary is the rhetorical, and the rhetoric has an effectively therapeutic end. Volk and

164

11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

Notes to pages 15–17

Williams 2006: xii: Seneca’s style is “an active component in the therapeutic work to which so much of his prose philosophy is directed.” Wilson 1987: 102 observes that there is a widespread sense in Rome that literary presentation and philosophical content are highly compatible. On Stoic hermeneutics and Seneca’s relationship to such, see Hine 2004; Batinski 1993; and Nussbaum 1993.We need to take seriously Nussbaum’s claim that detached spectatorship is a figure for philosophical reading, even if, as with Hine 2004: 190–91, one can doubt the details of her argument. One ought to be aware, though, that “sadistic spectatorship” and “ambivalent spectatorship” are also Senecan motifs. See Littlewood 2004: 240–59. von Albrecht 2004: 68–98 offers a translation and thematic commentary. Compare Schafer 2009: 67: Moral Letters 94 and 95 are programmatic, essential to the whole corpus of letters, and all about what it is Seneca is teaching and how. And yet, we are very far into the project indeed when this vital issue finally gets addressed. And, even so, it is hardly a decisive and unambiguous intervention. Schafer 2009: 68–69: “[T]he work is self-referential and self-applicable. Letter 2 instructs Lucilius in what and how to read . . . [L]essons take much better when they are shown rather than merely said. The letters represent a teacher, Seneca, rendering instruction to his student, Lucilius. The work itself is an exemplum of its own doctrine. Our experience of studying this exemplified course of moral training is, by Seneca’s own stated doctrine, supposed to convince us of its value more fully than any argument in its favor could.” See Schafer 2009 on this moment in the corpus of letters. See Leeman 1953 for a perhaps too-earnest attempt to track the influence of these (alleged) books in progress on the contents of the Letters. A number of Leeman’s claims actually seem very weak if one believes that the Moral Letters are not the documents of a “real” correspondence between two men. See again Schafer 2009: 72–74. Compare von Albrecht 2004: 78–79 on the programmatic quality of this letter. And see his conclusion at von Albrecht 2004: 90: “Der Text spiegelt – ja verwirklicht gewissermaßen – in seiner sprachlichen Struktur nicht nur Senecas Stiltheorie, sondern auch bestimmte Aspekte seines philosophischen Denkens.” The question is a very old one, and Lucilius will only be asking for Seneca’s take on the answer to it. A variation of this debate is already present in Aristotle: “Does the (philosophically) happy man need a friend? They say that he is self sufficient, so why would he need a friend? . . .” (Ἀμφισβητεῖται δὲ καὶ περὶ τὸν εὐδαίμονα, εἰ δεήσεται φίλων ἢ μή. οὐθὲν γάρ φασι δεῖν φίλων τοῖς μακαρίοις καὶ αὐτάρκεσιν. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1169b3–5.) Senecan style is another topic with a rich and varied bibliography. For an overview of the topic of Seneca’s style(s) in the Letters see Richardson-Hay 2006: 75–126. Many discussions tend to catalog what others said about Seneca’s style – the critics are all interested parties – and what Seneca himself says about style – as he is an especially interested party. Much discussed is Seneca’s own

Notes to pages 18–22

165

Letter 114. Wilson 1987: 1 tackles the question of how “style is the man” might relate to the very letters that relate this maxim to us. See especially Wilson 1987: 109: “The style in which Seneca writes, the elements of literary and stylistic analysis, of autobiography and diary are all philosophically significant.” See also Currie 1966: 87. A doggedly empiricist and technical approach to his style can produce interesting results that break free of the indigenous debate: see Coleman 1974 and Bourgery 1922. 20. See Wilson 1987: jumps in thought are an element of the fusion of philosophical form and content. 21. Seneca, Moral Letters 108.2: nec passim carpenda sunt nec auide inuadenda uniuersa: per partes peruenietur ad totum. 22. Moral Letters 108.2: quo plus recipit animus, hoc se magis laxat. 23. Moral Letters 108.3: haec nobis praecipere Attalum memini, cum scholam eius obsideremus et primi ueniremus et nouissimi exiremus, ambulantem quoque illum ad aliquas disputationes euocaremus, non tantum paratum discentibus sed obuium. 24. See Armisen-Marchetti 1989 for a comprehensive survey of the universe of Senecan imagery. Steyns 1906 is probably of interest only if read in conjunction with Armisen-Marchetti. 25. An amusing parallel: according to Encolpius spending time in the declamatory schoolhouse makes one reek of the stuff. We are asked to compare the effects of hanging out in the kitchen (Petronius, Satyricon 2). Our own nose detects the bouquet of the commonplace: in both instances we are in the presence of a long-familiar line of argument regarding education. A more reputable comparandum can be found at Plato, Symposium 175d–e: Can wisdom flow from one person to another like water from a full vessel to an empty one? However, this autonomous movement is presented by Socrates as an impossibility. 26. Seneca, Moral Letters 108.5: “quid ergo? non nouimus quosdam qui multis apud philosophum annis persederint et ne colorem quidem duxerint?” 27. See Henderson 2006: 124–25 on the question of “doing” philosophy in/ through Seneca’s letters. 28. Moral Letters 108.6: aliqui tamen et cum pugillaribus ueniunt, non ut res excipiant, sed ut uerba, quae tam sine profectu alieno dicant quam sine suo audiunt. 29. The “virility” of Senecan philosophy will be discussed at more length below. 30. Critics of Seneca at times make him confront the same antithesis: his is but a rhetoric of virtue posing as wisdom and not a substantial philosophy of such. 31. Seneca, Moral Letters 108.7: adficiuntur illis et sunt quales iubentur, si illa animo forma permaneat, si non impetum insignem protinus populus, honesti dissuasor, excipiat: pauci illam quam conceperant mentem domum perferre potuerunt. 32. Williams 2012: 88: “[T]he crowd serves as a permanent background presence in and across the Letters, as if constantly testing Seneca’s formation in Lucilius (and the reader) of self–reliance.” 33. Seneca, Moral Letters 108.8: facile est auditorem concitare ad cupidinem recti. 34. See Inwood 2005: 132–56 on (ethical) volition in Seneca. Note especially that Seneca usually deprecates desire (cupido) and seeks to explore volition (uoluntas) as in Moral Letters 116.1: nam cum tibi cupere interdixero, uelle permittam . . .

166

Notes to pages 22–28

35. Seneca, Moral Letters 108.8: non uides quemadmodum theatra consonent quotiens aliqua dicta sunt quae publice adgnoscimus et consensu uera esse testamur? Zintzen 1972: 151–53 reads this and related passages from the Moral Letters and composes a sort of handbook to the ethical reading of Senecan tragedy. 36. And yet this proposal does not seem to offer much guidance when it comes to reading Seneca’s own plays. These are decidedly not collections of salutary precepts. They are, though, inter alia, much as is this letter, meditations on the conditions of possibility of wisdom. 37. Verse citations are frequent in the Letters. See Coleman 1974: 280–81 on how they are used. 38. Seneca, Moral Letters 108.10: eadem neglegentius audiuntur minusque percutiunt quamdiu soluta oratione dicuntur: ubi accessere numeri et egregium sensum adstrinxere certi pedes, eadem illa sententia uelut lacerto excussiore torquetur. 39. Armisen-Marchetti 1989: 249: “[B]ien loin de présenter la gratuité d’un élément décoratif, l’image assume des fonctions essentielles au sien du discours, et se relève indissociable du projet d’ensemble de Sénèque, avec la double visée qui le caractérise: visée philosophique et visée esthétique.” See also her remarks concerning res and uerba on the following two pages. 40. von Albrecht 2004: 2–3: this can describe the Moral Letters themselves. They are the instrument of philosophical education where the ultimate goal is the transformation of men through the power of language: “Es geht ihm um die Verwandlung (transfigurari) des Menschen durch das Wort. Die Mittel stellt ihm die Rhetorik bereit.” 41. Seneca, Moral Letters 108.12: facillime enim tenera conciliantur ingenia ad honesti rectique amorem, et adhuc docilibus leuiterque corruptis inicit manum ueritas si aduocatum idoneum nacta est. 42. Moral Letters 108.13: ego certe cum Attalum audirem in uitia, in errores, in mala uitae perorantem, saepe miseritus sum generis humani et illum sublimem altioremque humano fastigio credidi. 43. Moral Letters 108.16: cetera proiecta redierunt. 44. Moral Letters 108.17: quoniam coepi tibi exponere quanto maiore impetu ad philosophiam iuuenis accesserim quam senex pergam, . . . 45. Moral Letters 108.20: haec cum exposuisset Sotion et implesset argumentis suis, “non credis” inquit . . . 46. Moral Letters 108.21: quod istic credulitatis tuae damnum est? alimenta tibi leonum et uulturum eripio. 47. Moral Letters 108.23: itaque quae philosophia fuit facta philologia est. 48. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. “Intentionality in Ancient Philosophy” (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality–ancient/). Caston’s caution in that entry is apposite: “But a mere study of terminology, even when done correctly, tracks the wrong items.” 49. We will discuss Stoic lekta later and these are in fact an element of the philosophical question of intentio.

Notes to pages 28–32

167

50. The word propositum in Latin can also be used to designate the first premise of a syllogism. The statement “there is such a thing as intentionality (sunt proposita)” is itself, then, a propositum. 51. Seneca, Moral Letters 108.24: uigilandum est; nisi properamus relinquemur. 52. At the risk of anticipating issues that will be addressed in the conclusion to the whole, see Hyppolite 1974: 125: “The great joke, Hegel wrote in a personal note, is that things are what they are.” 53. Note that if one looks “more deeply” into this reading of the Georgics we find that we are only looking more deeply into Letter 108 itself. Georgics 3.284–86 is itself a transitional moment in that poem much as the introduction of these lines marks a transition in this letter. Sed fugit interea, fugit inreparabile tempus, singula dum capti circumuectamur amore. hoc satis armentis: superat pars altera curae . . . Meanwhile time flies, flies never to be retrieved, while we make our individual rounds as love dictates. Enough of herds. The other measure of our care remains . . . 54. The issue of authorial intention receives an extended treatment in subsequent chapters. 55. Seneca, Moral Letters 108.25: ille qui ad philosophiam spectat haec eadem quo debet adducit. 56. Moral Letters 108.25: quid ergo cessamus nos ipsi concitare, . . . ? 57. Moral Letters 108.34: felicem deinde se putat quod inuenerit unde uisum sit Vergilio dicere quem super ingens | porta tonat caeli. Ennium hoc ait Homero [se] subripuisse, Ennio Vergilium; esse enim apud Ciceronem in his ipsis de re publica hoc epigramma Enni: si fas endo plagas caelestum ascendere cuiquam est, | mi soli caeli maxima porta patet. The cross-references are Vergil, Georgics 3.260–61; Cicero, On the Republic fr. 6; and Ennius, fr. var. 23–24. One notes that we have not moved very far from where we started in the Georgics. 58. Translated: “But lest even I, while busy about some other matter, myself slip into the role of philologist or grammarian, I offer this warning: listening to and reading philosophers is an activity to be applied to the aim of living a good life. The point is not to seize upon old words or novel words or over-bold metaphors and figures of speech. Instead one is to seize upon profitable precepts and grand and high-spirited phrases and thereupon transfer them to the matter at hand, namely living well.” 59. Compare the discussion “shameless metaphors” in the prelude to the pornographic reading of Maecenas’ style in Moral Letter 114.1: quare aliqua aetas fuerit quae translationis iure uteretur inuerecunde. 60. Schönegg 1999 is excellent on this topic. Schönegg 1999: 47: “In zahlreichen Briefen denkt Seneca darüber nach, wie sich Philosophie vermitteln lasse, welche Wege, welche Mittel sinnvoll seien, welche Rhetorik angemessen, welcher Stil zu seiner Philosophie, zur Philosophie überhaupt passe.” And Armisen-Marchetti 1989: 23–26 emphasizes that metaphor is a philosophical

168

61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

Notes to pages 33–38 issue in Seneca, not a mere stylistic concern. See Pratt 1963 for a related type of project, but one that begins with and concentrates on the tragedies. Gauly 2004 gives philosophical weight to Seneca’s metaphors, but spends less time on Seneca’s own philosophy of metaphor. And so too does it obliquely participate in the sexual panic of the rape by words to the extent that the improbity of that scene is resumed in the fear of translationes improbas in this scene. See Bartsch 2009: 195 on Senecan metaphor: “Seneca constantly asks us to refigure our self-understanding as an essential step on the path to selfimprovement” (original emphasis). She later declares that “[W]e might say that the result of using figura is transfigurari” (Bartsch 2009: 213). Senecan metaphors are transformative for the self that encounters them. Conversely, a word of warning from Seneca himself via Henderson 2004: 79: “All imagery, as such, may mislead. And it may lead us to see that imagery misleads . . . It might, so far as the Epistulae Morales are concerned, be the metaphor of all the Metaphors We Live By” (original emphasis). Asmis 2009: 123 has a warning for Seneca’s readers: his metaphors threaten to outstrip proper Stoic doctrine and hence to mislead. Compare Inwood 2005: 33. Mazzoli 2005 evokes this passage as part of his discussion of the possible and necessary reconciliation of “words” and “things” in Seneca’s philosophical works. Seneca, Moral Letters 108.37: quid me potest adiuuare rector nauigii attonitus et uomitans? Moral Letters 108.38: omnia quae dicunt, quae turba audiente iactant, aliena sunt: dixit illa Platon, dixit Zenon, dixit Chrysippus et Posidonius et ingens agmen nominum tot ac talium. Moral Letters 108.23: quomodo probare possint sua esse monstrabo: faciant quae dixerint. Moral Letters 108.39: quoniam quae uolueram ad te perferre iam dixi, nunc desiderio tuo satis faciam et in alteram epistulam integrum quod exegeras transferam, ne ad rem spinosam et auribus erectis curiosisque audiendam lassus accedas. 2 WRITING METAPHYSICS

1. A phrase from one of Schönegg’s section headings encapsulates the complexity and profundity of the Senecan project: “Der Doppelcharakter der epistulae morales: Abbild und Aufruf, Ergebnis und Ziel” (Schönegg 1999: 69). 2. See Lampe 2008 for not just a reading of Seneca’s nausea but an adumbration of how one might re-read Senecan themes more generally. 3. The phrases are both taken from dictionary entries. See www.oxforddiction aries.com/definition/english/proposition. The distinction arises when we move from the first entry under “proposition” to the entry marked as specific to logic. This yields a shift from “expressing a judgement” to “expressing a concept.” 4. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. “propositions” (http://plato.stan ford.edu/entries/propositions/).

Notes to pages 38–40

169

5. More on this difficult topic can be found at Long 1986: 135–37. Compare Sedley 2005: 400–2 where “Dion walks.” 6. Seneca, Moral Letters 117.1. 7. Moral Letters 117.18. 8. Moral Letters 117.25: Hoc est sapientia, hoc est sapere, non disputatiunculis inanibus subtilitatem uanissimam agitare. 9. Moral Letters 117.33: Dic mihi: cum quid inter sapientiam et sapere intersit didicero, sapiam? Cur ergo potius inter uocabula me sapientiae detines quam inter opera? 10. For the “orthodox” Stoic position see Moral Letters 117.13: Plurimum autem interest utrum illud dicas an de illo. Senecan ethical thought deprecates the ontological niceties of the abstract being-of-sapientia in the name of pursuing the concrete reality of a life lived wisely. So, yes, “it makes a big difference whether you say sapientia or you talk about sapientia”: it’s just that Seneca’s difference is a different difference than the one being articulated by the inset voice of orthodoxy. 11. See again Henderson 2004 on how to read Seneca by the book. 12. Motto and Clark 1973a examines the journey of Letter 57 and, along with Motto and Clark 1973b, is an important precursor to later work. 13. On Letter 59 see Bartsch 2009. Note in particular Seneca’s simile at Letter 59.16: “The soul of the wise man is like the cosmos beyond the moon: it is ever bright and clear there (talis est sapientis animus qualis mundus super lunam: semper illic serenum est).” The correlation between self and cosmos will be of lasting interest to us. 14. Reydams-Schils 2010: 202–3 on the philosophical sublime: “The theme of sublimia runs through the entire range of Seneca’s writings, early as well as late. All these passages call the soul or mind to a higher realm, and are therefore pivotal in an argument such as Donini’s that while Seneca may have remained a Stoic with respect to ethics, in physics he was attracted to the Platonic hierarchical view of reality.” Littlewood 2004: 9 on the tragedies: “The artificiality of Seneca’s dramatic worlds plays well with the philosopher’s insistence that the external world is an illusion. The stage is used repeatedly in Seneca’s philosophical prose as a metaphor for the unreality of existence outside the confines of the philosopher’s mind.” Williams 2012: 27 on the sublimity of nature: “In the imaginative world of Senecan natural philosophy, our striving to know sublimia thus raises us from a level of literal, terrestrial cognition to a higher plane of seeing, inferring and speculating, so that Seneca’s debate with his interlocutor in Book 1 [of the Natural Questions] is not just, or perhaps even primarily, about the true cause of haloes, rainbows and so on, but also between different kinds of world perception.” 15. Armisen-Marchetti 1989: 240 offers a compelling metaphor for metaphors in Seneca: “L’image n’est pas plaquée sur la pensée à la façon d’un vêtement, ou si elle l’est, c’est comme une tunique de Nessus que l’on ne pourrait arracher sans déchirer les chairs vives du texte.” A survey of the question of metaphor in Seneca can be found at Richardson-Hay 2006: 94–101.

170

Notes to pages 40–41

16. See Henderson 2006 on the philosophical weight of the metaphor of movement in Seneca. Compare Armisen-Marchetti 1991: 101; Bartsch 2009: 193; and Henderson 2004: 147–49. The metaphoricity of the Greek original – that is, μεταφέρειν “transfers” the literal sense of a verb meaning “to transfer” into a figurative domain – is already an issue in Aristotle. His whole discussion of metaphor is full of “transfers.” See Lloyd 1996: 211. 17. A related claim is, then, Inwood 2005: 20: Seneca thinks in Latin and in him we can find “first-order Latin philosophy.” Philosophy has “moved” from Greece to Rome and from one language to another: and something productive has therewith happened to it. See Armisen-Marchetti 1989: 205–22 for both an account of a number of Stoic technical terms as translated by Seneca and the manner in which the new metaphorical networks that emerge play out in Seneca’s philosophy. She explores as well Seneca’s innovative philosophical metaphors (Armisen-Marchetti 1989: 223–40) and the dynamic sign-system within which he deploys them. 18. Seneca, Moral Letters 53.1: quid non potest mihi persuaderi, cui persuasum est ut nauigarem? 19. And Schönegg 1999 is an invaluable resource for Letter 58. See also ReydamsSchils 2010 who discusses it along with the philosophically convergent Letter 65. For the metaphor of the journey as deployed by Seneca throughout his works, see Armisen-Marchetti 1989: 86–90 (“chemin”) and Armisen-Marchetti 1989: 140–42 (“navigation”). Henderson 2006 examines this metaphor in Letter 57. There are, naturally, numerous related entries one could peruse such as “pilote.” Lavery 1980: 151–55 addresses not only the travel metaphor, but also its sometimes awkward fit with the philosophical issues under discussion. 20. There is a consequential corollary: in antiquity reading “transports” the reader closer to the author. See Habinek 2000: 286–88 on the specific case of Seneca, his writing, and his readers. 21. For a commentary on the letter, see Inwood 2007b: 107–36. Inwood’s emphasis is on the philosophical points at issue. 22. See Brunschwig 2003 for an overview of Stoic metaphysics. The metaphysics presented by Letter 58 plays a starring role in the heated scholarly debate about the details of Stoic supreme genus. On that question, see Brunschwig 2003: 220–22, or, in much more detail, Brunschwig 1988. See also Inwood 2007b: 120–23. Compare Rist 1969: 152–72. Brunschwig 1988: 51–60 attempts to situate this letter within the debate. See further Sedley 2005: 385–86 on Platonic elements of Stoic metaphysics. Compare Hahm 1977: 7–12 on the Stoic reception of the Platonic Forms and its affinity with Aristotle’s understanding of the Ideas. Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoa are, of course, present in this letter. And what Hahm says of the Stoics more generally seems to hold for Seneca specifically: Plato and Aristotle provide a basis from which Stoic metaphysics emerges, but there is no special fidelity to this point of origin (Hahm 1977: 21). And, as Tieleman 2007: 138 notes, Plato is generally cited when he is saying something that accords with Seneca’s specifically Stoic commitments. See Armisen-Marchetti 1989: 34–36 on the relation between

Notes to pages 41–42

171

this letter and Seneca’s Stoic theories of representation more generally. See also Ortega Muñoz 1983, who follows closely on Rabde Romeo 1966, for a discussion of both Moral Letters 58 and the Natural Questions. 23. Compare Henderson 2006: 124: “Seneca channels writing to get us out of this world, reaching for eternity to realize the essence of Being.” 24. Schönegg 1999: 88: “Seneca ist wirklich ein Übersetzer: er übersetzt platonisches Gedankengut in den stoischen Kosmos und nähert dabei die platonish–dualistische Ontologie der monisticsh–stoischen an.” Note that metaphysics and ethics, Plato and Stoicism can be set up as awkward antitheticals in some accounts of Seneca’s thought. See Gauly 2004: 14–16. However, this way of looking at things too easily ends up in speculative intellectual biographies and tales of internal tensions in the corpus. 25. Ker 2009a: 182 highlights “what Seneca sees as the necessary role of representations in mediating any adequate discourse on the self.” Armisen-Marchetti 1989: 206–7 flags the Derridean dimensions of the problem of metaphor in Seneca: How can one escape the basic metaphoricity of language itself? 26. Inwood 2007a: 149 advises us to read this letter in its own terms, not as a chapter in the history of Platonism. Further, Letter 58 needs to be read in conjunction with Letters 65 and 66 (Inwood 2007a: 150). He should be consulted for a careful analysis of Letter 65. 27. Conversely Letter 114 is all about Maecenas’ body and his shameless metaphors. For Plato’s take on this sort of thing, see Timaeus 88c on the correlation of healthy mind and healthy body. 28. See Hill 2004: 145–82 on Seneca’s treatment of suicide more generally. 29. See Ker 2009a: 179 for movement, metaphor, and the practice of ethical instruction: “The question is how the specific metaphors used to articulate self-relations can be construed as ‘necessary,’ or in what way they can be seen to ‘move’ or affect their audience and their speaker.” And Ker concludes his piece by noting that, in effect, one can only arrive at our ethical end via metaphorical means, Ker 2009a: 187. 30. On the poverty of language in general and the inevitable recourse to metaphor see On Favors 2.34.2: ingens copia est rerum sine nomine . . . Seneca’s examples: people, beds, and verses all have “feet.” 31. On the poverty of Latin relative to Greek, compare On Anger 1.4.2 and Moral Letters 87.40. See Armisen-Marchetti 1996 on Seneca as a translator of individual Greek philosophical terms. See especially Armisen-Marchetti 1996: 79–81 on the variety of figures of speech, including, of course, metaphor, that are used as Seneca moves Greek technical terms into Latin. Furthermore, Seneca has a preference for direct, vivid, and immediate terms over technical and abstract terminology, and he often strives to capture a Greek concept with a concrete Latin metaphor (Armisen-Marchetti 1996: 83–84). 32. Schönegg 1999: 78: “Das Lamentato ist zum Topos geworden.” 33. Seneca, Moral Letters 58.6: quid sibi, inquis, ista praeparatio uult? quo spectat? Note, the “you” addressed by this letter on being is himself/are yourself a non– entity, a fiction in multiple senses of the word. See Schönegg 1999: 92.

172

Notes to pages 43–48

34. Markedly absent here, the language of being is super-abundant in Letter 57. See Henderson 2006: 145. 35. Seneca, Moral Letters 58.7: magis damnabis angustias Romanas, si scieris unam syllabam esse quam mutare non possum. Quae sit haec quaeris? τὸ ὄν. Duri tibi uideor ingenii: in medio positum, posse sic transferri ut dicam “quod est.” 36. Moral Letters 58.7: sed multum interesse uideo: cogor uerbum pro uocabulo ponere; sed si ita necesse est, ponam “quod est.” Contrast the confidence of Rist 1969: 153: “(quod est = τὸ ὄν).” The problem of translation has disappeared, or, rather, it has been reduced to its most banal co-ordinates: what Latin term “is”/equals what Greek term? Note also that the antithesis of uerbum as against uocabulum actually has two meanings: either word vs. word or phrase vs. word depending on how we ourselves elect to translate. 37. See Aristotle, Categories 2a11. 38. See Inwood 2007a: 151 on philosophical reportage here and in related letters. 39. Nevertheless, the tension can be over-stated, and it does appear that Seneca feels that some sort of rapprochement is possible between Platonism and Stoicism: “With the quotations from Epicurus, [Seneca] is borrowing from the enemy camp; in the case of Plato, he is exploring genuine affinities, yet giving them a Stoic turn of thought. There can be no doubt that the Platonic coloring in Seneca is significant” (Reydams-Schils 2010: 214). 40. It will be noted that Seneca himself never again uses τὸ ὄν. But he does later adopt without comment two Latinized Greek words, idea and idos. 41. Seneca, Moral Letters 58.12: hoc ergo est genus primum et antiquissimum et, ut ita dicam, generale; cetera genera quidem sunt, sed specialia. 42. Compare Inwood 2007b: 108. 43. Seneca, Moral Letters 58.15: et quidquid aliud falsa cogitatione formatum habere aliquam imaginem coepit, quamuis non habeat substantiam. 44. See Brunschwig 1988: 33–40 on the search for a place for Mickey Mouse within the menagerie of Stoic metaphysics. It will be noted that my argument, in following Seneca and the course of his argument, likewise fails to articulate let alone adjudicate important underlying (Stoic) problems: among the nonthings, how do τὰ νοούμενα (“items conçus”) relate to αἱ ἔννοιαι (“conceptions”) and τὰ ἐννοήματα (“les objets intentionnels de ἔννοιαι”)? 45. These same names and technical terms will return in Letter 65: the discussion of the taxonomy of causality evokes Aristotle and Plato and idos. 46. The author remains an indispensable notion, though, for most readers as well as modes of reading. Foucault 1997a examines the various investments readers have in “the author function.” 47. Seneca, Moral Letters 58.18: quid sit idea, id est quid Platoni esse uidebatur, audi . . . See Sedley 2005: 411 on the manner in which orthodox Stoicism recategorized Platonic Forms. Throughout one should bear in mind Inwood’s admonition that orthodoxy and heterodoxy are not helpful terms when reading Seneca. Instead we should imagine a philosophical openness which should not be confused with mere eclecticism (Inwood 2005: 23–24). For a rather different version of the answer to the question quid sit idea, see Cicero’s

Notes to pages 48–50

173

translation of the Platonic term ἰδέα as species at Tusculan Disputations 1.58: nihil enim [Plato] putat esse, quod oriatur et intereat, idque solum esse, quod semper tale sit quale est (ἰδέαν appellat ille, nos speciem). 48. Ironically the Latin word exemplar can also designate the copy rather than the original. 49. Seneca, Moral Letters 58.18: uolo imaginem tuam facere. exemplar picturae te habeo, ex quo capit aliquem habitum mens nostra quem operi suo inponat; ita illa quae me docet et instruit facies, a qua petitur imitatio, idea est. 50. And yet it is not clear that Plato really is to blame for the obscurity. Schönegg 1999: 87: “Platon gebrauchte die Begriffe εἶδος und ἰδέα unterschiedslos. In der Sekundärliteratur zum Timaios geisterte das von der Idee verschiedene Eidos schon vor Seneca herum. Dieser Eidosbegriff ist möglicherweise auf eine missgedeutete Timaiosstelle zurückzuführen.” 51. Seneca, Moral Letters 58.20: paulo ante pictoris imagine utebar. 52. The paintbox Seneca has used is itself on loan: other philosophers have talked of painting, including Plato himself. And indeed the image of a painter painting can be found both in Plato and in Seneca. See Plato, Republic 500e3–4 for the painter of constitutions who paints according to a divine model (ὡς οὐκ ἄν ποτε ἄλλως εὐδαιμονήσειε πόλις, εἰ μὴ αὐτὴν διαγράψειαν οἱ τῷ θείῳ παραδείγματι χρώμενοι ζωγράφοι). One notes, though, that the passage as a whole is political and psychological rather than metaphysical and that the technical language of the forms has not been adduced. But who would ever demand of artists that they produce ever only one and the same painting? 53. Seneca, Moral Letters 58.20: ille cum reddere Vergilium coloribus uellet, ipsum intuebatur. 54. Moral Letters 58.20: idea erat Vergilii facies, futuri operis exemplar; ex hac quod artifex trahit et operi suo inposuit idos est. 55. Moral Letters 58.21: etiamnunc si aliam desideras distinctionem, idos in opere est, idea extra opus, nec tantum extra opus est, sed ante opus. Contemporary treatments of this topic usually print eidos as per the customary transliterations of Greek words. But I am retaining idos as a reminder that we are discussing Seneca’s portrait of Platonic εἶδος and not “εἶδος itself.” 56. Compare Marx on fetishistic table-turning (Marx 1906: 82). 57. Specifically Stoic metaphysics reads like a footnote or an afterthought. Nevertheless, one imagines that the discussion of the last two genera and their relationship to the preceding ones would occupy an extended place in a formal Stoic tract on metaphysics: the critique of Plato and the subsumption of his metaphysics within their own happens precisely here. See Brunschwig 1988. Wildberger 2006: 94–99 offers a detailed exposition of the relationship between Letter 58 and Stoic ontology as well as the scholarly debate surrounding this question. 58. Brunschwig 1988: 54: “choses qui sont ‘au sens ordinaire du terme’ (je comprends ainsi le mot communiter).” Inwood 2007b: 128: “in the ordinarily accepted sense.” He compares Cicero, On Duties 3.17: nec id quod communiter appellamus honestum, quod colitur ab iis, qui bonos se uiros haberi uolunt, . . .

174

Notes to pages 51–53

59. Seneca, Moral Letters 58.22: quacumque uidemus aut tangimus Plato in illis non numerat quae esse proprie putat. 60. Moral Letters 58.25: quid ista inquis mihi subtilitas proderit? 61. The critique of technical philosophy is part of the philosophical enterprise itself in Seneca. Compare Letter 82.8–10: is a syllogism that proves that death is glorious really enough to cause you to cease to fear it? Barnes 1997: 12–23 offers an overview of Seneca’s various criticisms of empty, quibbling philosophical logic. See Hamacher 2006: 22–36 on the vicissitudes of “dialectic” in various sequences of Letters as well as his commentary ad loc. The Letters often insist on foregrounding the topic of the status of philosophical discourse itself. Dialectic and ontology are presented as potential nullities. They are given their plenitude only when articulated within the proper context. And that context is woven before your very eyes in/as the corpus of the Letters. Compare Schönegg 1999: 66: actual life is the consummate philosophical deed. The study of technical aspects of philosophy is merely an element in an ethical training program. 62. See Inwood 2007b: 131 on this “break” in the argument: “Despite the apparent naturalness of such a ‘pragmatic break’ it is important to recall that this is a deliberate structural and thematic feature of the letter. We need to ask not just about its significance within the framework of the letter-writing persona (Seneca the correspondent) but also from the point of view of Seneca as an author. To do otherwise would be akin to neglecting the difference between Socrates as a character and Plato as an author.” 63. Seneca, Moral Letters 58.25: sed ipsa oblectamenta opera sint. 64. Moral Letters 58.26: Hoc ego, Lucili, facere soleo: ex omni notione, etiam si a philosophia longissime auersa est, eruere aliquid conor et utile efficere. Quid istis quae modo tractauimus remotius a reformatione morum? quomodo meliorem me facere ideae Platonicae possunt? quid ex istis traham quod cupiditates meas conprimat? 65. Moral Letters 58.27: miremur in sublimi uolitantes rerum omnium formas deumque inter illa uersantem et hoc prouidentem, quemadmodum quae inmortalia facere non potuit, quia materia prohibebat, defendat a morte ac ratione uitium corporis uincat. 66. Moral Letters 58.28: manent enim cuncta, non quia aeterna sunt, sed quia defenduntur cura regentis: inmortalia tutore non egerent. haec conseruat artifex fragilitatem materiae ui sua uincens. 67. See Bartsch 2009: 208–12 on the Senecan self and the metaphor of the artifex. See also Armisen-Marchetti 1989: 80. 68. Seneca, Moral Letters 58.27: Miremur in sublimi uolitantes rerum omnium formas deumque inter illa uersantem et hoc prouidentem, quemadmodum . . . The relationship between this god lolling among the forms and the translation between the idea and the idos is not at all as tidy as some of my own images make out. What the text emphasizes is not the work of metaphor that this godcum-artist may or may not pursue. Instead, his role is presented as that of guardian, overseer, and tutor of existence. And yet we are left with the nagging sense that this god knows how to paint, that he knows how to paint your face as well as the face of Vergil.

Notes to pages 54–58

175

69. Seneca, Moral Letters 58.37: sed in longum exeo; est praeterea materia quae ducere diem possit: et quomodo finem inponere uitae poterit qui epistulae non potes? uale ergo: quod libentius quam mortes meras lecturus es uale. See Ker 2009b: 173–74 on “ending letter and life” in Moral Letters 61. This is but part of a whole chapter Ker has dedicated to the emplotting of death in the Letters. 70. The discussion of the Natural Questions will revisit this question at length. 71. Note, then, that despite the colorful and unusual route taken, Seneca’s complex overall position fits with Stoic conceptions of these same issues. As Brunschwig 2003: 209 puts it, “It is clear that [Stoic] ‘ontology’ cuts across a number of divisions or boundaries, and includes not just ‘meta-physics,’ but also ‘metaethics’ and ‘meta-logic’ as well.” Compare Brunschwig 2003: 231–32 which emphasizes the ethical consequences of Stoic metaphysical commitments. 3 THE NATURE OF SENECA 1. See Bobzien 2003 for an overview. 2. Seneca, Moral Letters 117.13: Dico deinde: Cato ambulat. 3. This virtual speaker likely emerges from within Stoicism itself, though: the sayable needs a speaker who says it. 4. See Bal 1985: 3. 5. Bal 1985: 8. 6. Williams 2012: 4: “The two objects of study, natura ipsa and the Senecan text, are in a way commensurate.” 7. Its neglect is more a relative than an absolute matter. The text is not typically part of one’s academic training, in contradistinction to the Moral Letters, tragedies, Apocolocyntosis, and even the Dialogi. Significant portions of these texts inevitably form elements of virtually every classicist’s degree program. See Hine 2009 and Hine 2010 for an annotated bibliography to the Natural Questions. This is a voluminous collection of references, but it is itself scant in comparison to those found among the 870 pages of Malaspina’s compilation of Senecan bibliography in the twentieth century (Malaspina 2005). 8. See Ker 2006 for a survey of the heterogeneity of the Senecan corpus and those elements common across it. Particularly useful is his observation that every time Seneca takes on a genre, he embeds another genre within it (Ker 2006: 31). Notice the heterogeneous nature of the items that are provided in the account of the unity of the Senecan corpus in Tarrant 2006: a constant set of authors quoted; a negative emphasis; focus on the animus; focus on tyranny; focus on death. One can hardly but think of Foucault on Borges’s Chinese encyclopedia (Foucault 1973: xv). 9. Scott 1999 gives an overview of the scholarship concerning these passages, and then argues that they promote the key Stoic theme of living in accordance with nature. The introduction to Gauly 2004 regularly addresses the connection between ethics and natural science in the Natural Questions. Gauly insists that Letter 58 is a key part of appreciating the Natural Questions, but for reasons that are rather different from my own.

176

Notes to pages 58–59

10. This should come as no surprise. The philosophers had long been citing the poets. See Batinski 1993: 69. 11. Inwood 2005: 200 emphasizes the bold literary motivations subtending the philosophical work going on in this “meteorological treatise.” 12. Another collection of differences: the sense of natura itself in the Natural Questions. See Chaumartin 1996: 182 where four distinct uses are pointed out, three of which are substantial in terms of Seneca’s own position. Chaumartin then tracks the integration of this disparate collection in the course of Seneca’s argument. Compare Stahl 1964: 439–40 on the syncretism of Stoic and Platonic metaphysics in the Natural Questions. The introduction to Gross 1989 offers a survey of the kinds of questions scholars have asked of the Natural Questions. Sources, book order, and, to a lesser extent, style have been the central concerns. 13. See Armisen-Marchetti 1989: 283–308. 14. Nevertheless, Seneca does not use the full toolbox: allegory and etymology have been set to one side. See Batinski 1993: 69. 15. But only quasi-heterogeneous: all branches of knowledge are ultimately inseparable, and the wise man will have a mastery of them all (DeLacy 1948: 264). 16. Seneca himself explicitly hierarchizes the relationship between the three branches in the Natural Questions itself. See the summary of Chaumartin 1996: 177–78. Chaumartin tracks a number of tensions between the programmatic moments of the Natural Questions and what one actually finds in the remainder of the text. Gauly 2004: 73–85 evokes Bakhtin and explores dialogism and heteroglossia in the structure of the Natural Questions. This is an interesting approach, but my own interest in (the production of ) monologism moves me in a different direction. 17. Compare Rosenmeyer 2000: 103 and Scott 1999: 57–58. For Stoic ethics in particular there seems to be a basic syllogism: human nature is rational. Reason strives towards virtue. To live in accordance with nature accordingly means aiming at virtue. Such a line of thinking seems to have been a foundational element of Stoic ethics, and it was an explicit element of the basic teachings of the founders of Stoicism. See Diogenes Laertius 7.86–87: τοῦ δὲ λόγου τοῖς λογικοῖς κατὰ τελειοτέραν προστασίαν δεδομένου, τὸ κατὰ λόγον ζῆν ὀρθῶς γίνεσθαι τοις κατὰ φύσιν· τεχνίτης γὰρ οὗτος ἐπιγίνεται τῆς ὁρμῆς. Διόπερ πρῶτος ὁ Ζήνων ἐν τῷ Περὶ ἀνθρώπου φύσεως τέλος εἶπε τὸ ὁμολογουμένως τῇ φύσει ζῆν, ὅπερ ἐστὶ κατ’ ἀρετὴν ζῆν. ἄγει γὰρ πρὸς ταύτην ἡμᾶς ἡ φύσις. ὁμοίως δὲ καὶ Κλεάνθης ἐν τῷ Περὶ ἡδονῆς καὶ Ποσειδώνιος καὶ Ἑκάτων ἐν τοῖς Περὶ τελῶν. 18. One once felt the Natural Questions itself to be a fundamentally heterogeneous work split between incompatible scientific and moral passages. That view has faded from the bibliography. Stahl 1964: 426 championed a break away from the proposition that the Natural Questions is an eclectic and ill-executed piece of philosophy and insisted that we read for its unity. A demonstration of that unity followed. Stahl 1964: 431 flags the Natural Questions as a fundamentally literary project that fuses the ethical and the scientific elements. Stahl’s work

Notes to pages 59–60

177

looms large in subsequent readings of the Natural Questions. See the introduction to Berno 2003; Cordoñer 1989: 1803–5; and Rosenmeyer 2000: 105 for reviews of the erstwhile problem. See Maurach 1965: 57–58 for a review of it while it was still a problem. 19. Note that my presentation mirrors the way that interlocutors are woven into the Natural Questions itself. See Grimal 1989: 1965 on reading Seneca as a philosopher: “[N]ous croyons qu’il sera plus fécond d’admettre, au moins à titre de postulat, et jusqu’à preuve du contraire, que Sénèque croit profondément à la vérité de ce qu’il dit, que ses variations apparentes trouvent leur explication dans un système d’ensemble, cohérent, qu’il nous appartient de découvrir.” Grimal continues with a preliminary portrait of Seneca’s relationship to the Stoics and his stance as “un disciple indépendant et constructif” (Grimal 1989: 1965). The whole piece is, of course, dedicated to exploring Seneca’s Stoicism. 20. On the conceptual cross-references that allow the ethical to be tied to the physical, see Stahl 1964: 428–30. 21. Bal 1985: 104. 22. See Bal 1985: 108–9. On the specific hierarchy of perspectives see Bartsch 2006: 246: “[T]here is missing here any sense of genuine deliberation . . . [T]here is simply the morally superior watcher and the proficiens at whom the barrage of instruction and rebuke is aimed.” 23. See Habinek 1998: 143–47 for a subtle account of the strategic deployment of social station, sexuality, and “you” and “me” within Seneca. 24. The close of Book 6 is especially dense: the vocative Lucili occurs three times in Natural Questions 6.32 and its exhortation to fortitude in the face of death’s inevitability. See Costa 1995 for a survey of Seneca’s rhetorical modes within the philosophical works. Exhortations to “you” figure prominently in his discussion. And Costa’s examples are often chosen from the Natural Questions. 25. Natural Questions 4a.pr.20. 26. Compare Gunderson 1997 and Gunderson 2007 on letters and the problem of distance. 27. Habinek 1998: 147: “Seneca’s play of tu and ego creates an inaccessible dialogue, inward directed and self-sustaining. Yet for all its independence of the reader, the discourse between Seneca and his addressee intrudes itself upon us unapologetically and insists upon our cooperation in this very intrusion.” 28. Compare Gauly 2004: 78–85. He also offers a review of the narratological bibliography. 29. See, for example, Natural Questions 2.59.1: intellego quid dudum desideres, quid efflagites. 30. See Ker 2009a: 165 for address and self-address blurring in the On Anger. Star 2006 offers a wide-ranging discussion of self-address in Seneca with an emphasis on the tragedies. Boyle 2012: xlvi–xlviii notes the specifically declamatory quality of much of this tragic self-rhetoric. And yet this style is less superficial than it is “a major instrument of profound interiority” (Boyle 2012: xlviii). 31. See Bartsch 2006: 10 and Bartsch 2006: 230–31 on self-dialogue in Seneca: a knowing self talks to a learning self. “In terms of their pronomial identification,

178

Notes to pages 60–63

the roles of the internalized voices are fluid and not fixed, the I can also be the you” (Bartsch 2006: 246). Bartsch offers a valuable explication of the dialogue between the first-order self and the second-order self as a narrative feature of Seneca. And she observes that the dialogic is a function of enlightenment itself: if the proficiens ever reached his goal, the self-address would vanish (Bartsch 2006: 243). 32. Cicero, On Friendship 80: Ipse enim se quisque diligit, non ut aliquam a se ipse mercedem exigat caritatis suae, sed quod per se sibi quisque carus est. Quod nisi idem in amicitiam transferetur, uerus amicus numquam reperietur; est enim is, qui est tamquam alter idem. 33. See Natural Questions 4a.pr.14–18. 34. Grimal 1989: 1992 notes the false antithesis between rhetoric and philosophy in Seneca: “Pour Sénèque, [l’éloquence] est une forme de la vie intérieure, de méditation passionnée.” 35. Flavius Papirius Fabianus is a first ce rhetor who becomes a philosopher. He writes a Naturalium Causarum Libri. 36. For example, the work of Strato is set into the Natural Questions. But Strato is presented as himself addressing a “you” when hashing out a question of nature. In 6.24.4 “immo,” inquit . . . introduces a quote from a book, not an interlocutor. The debate is a back-and-forth with a text. Compare Anonymous 2009: 161–65 on this phenomenon in Aulus Gellius’ Attic Nights. 37. Natural Questions 7.27.3: quid porro? mundus ipse, si consideres illum, nonne ex diuersis compositus est? 38. Natural Questions 7.27.4: non uides quam contraria inter se elementa sint? grauia et leuia sunt, frigida et calida, umida et sicca; tota haec mundi concordia ex discordibus constat. The vocabulary here has, of course, nature as its primary referent. But a lot of it had long since been co-opted within discussions of style. And it would be an easy enough exercise to point out the mixture of the heavy and the light within Seneca’s own works more generally and not just the Natural Questions specifically. Of course, only a critic of him would use the terms frigid or dry of his style. Nevertheless, such have seldom been wanting. 39. quid uelit et possit rerum concordia discors appears in Horace, Epistles 1.12.19. Ovid has discors concordia fetibus apta est at Metamorphoses 1.443. Manilius proposes a fertile discordia concors at Astronomica 1.142. We read temporis angusti mansit concordia discors in Lucan 1.98. Lucan also has the nightmarish natura discors at 1.589–90. 40. Compare Foucault 1997a: 214. 41. Foucault 1997a: 215. 42. Foucault 1997a: 215. Note, then, one solution to the “problem” of the seeming divergence between Seneca’s prose and verse: there was more than one author at work. A second extreme position: the drama gives the real Seneca, the philosophical texts just a (theatrical) mask. See Rosenmeyer 1989: 8–9 for a review of the issue. 43. Foucault 1997a: 215–16.

Notes to pages 63–66

179

44. On the question of the original order of the books in contradistinction to the manuscript order, see the preface to Hine’s edition (Hine 1996: xxii–xxv) and Cordoñer 1989: 1784–95. I accept that the original order was III, IVa, IVb, V, VI, VII, I, II. 45. This account is fully consonant with the Stoic physics more generally. For such, see White 2003: 127–33. Seneca’s account of spirit fits also with Stoic psychology, in as much as this too is ultimately analyzable in physical terms. See Long 2005: 560–62 and Sambursky 1959: 21–22, 29–31. Furthermore, the theological dimension of Seneca’s argument is likewise unsurprising in that theology is part of physics for Stoics. See Algra 2003: 153 and Brunschwig 2003: 208. On the issue of Stoic “unity” here, see Hine 1981: 143–49. Williams 2005a likewise emphasizes analogy as a key to the whole of the Natural Questions. 46. See Armisen-Marchetti 1989: 305–7 on the microcosm/macrocosm analogy. See Williams 2006b: 137 for similar arguments about spiritus in Book 6. 47. Though capable of technical precision, Seneca will in fact avoid it and opt for evocative formulations. See again Armisen-Marchetti 1996. Róman Bravo Díaz 1991 examines the awkward fit between the two different definitions of spiritus in the Natural Questions themselves. In Natural Questions 2.1.3 there is a technical definition. In Natural Questions 5.13.3 we see a use of the word that is much more casual and connected to idiomatic Latin (Róman Bravo Díaz 1991: 23). 48. And yet, as Rosenmeyer 2000: 109 points out, this passage is a rarity, and talk of Jove is not itself ubiquitous: “This is perhaps the greatest surprise of the argument of the NQ: the Stoic identification of natura with the divine creator and the spermatic pneuma is so little in evidence.” 49. See also Hine 1981: 397: “In form and content there are resemblances to hymnic style.” 50. DeLacy 1948: 258: “Stoics recognize that there is no one-to-one correlation between words and meanings, inasmuch as a single thing can have several names, and a single word may have several meanings. God, for instance, has a great many names, in accordance with his many aspects.” 51. Stahl 1964: 435–37 unpacks Seneca’s argument in its own terms and relates it to Stoic traditions. 52. The body–world analogy reveals that the philosophy of man (i.e., anthropology) is also a metaphysics of nature. 53. Williams 2005a: 154: “At this late stage in the Natural Questions, this disquisition on air assumes a suggestive retrospective relevance in supplying a foundation of sorts, or perhaps rather a capstone, for the cosmic unity pictured in earlier books; for Seneca’s treatment of the internal coherence of air makes oneness fundamental to the world at a primary, elemental level, setting in a real, physical base his vision of cosmic coherence at more speculative and artistically intuitive levels in the work.” 54. See Batinski 1993: 73 on Stoics and poets: “The Stoics assumed that the text was a cohesive unity controlled by the poet.” Seneca’s relationship to this tradition: “Seneca shares with [the Stoics] assumptions about the text and the reader: the

180

Notes to pages 66–68

text is paradigmatic of an unalterable structure or logos; poetry serves a utilitarian function; and the reader’s task is to discern this structure by posing the correct question” (Batinski 1993: 73). Further: “In agreement with his fellow Stoics, Seneca equates the text and his interpretation with the author’s intent” (Batinski 1993: 76). 55. See Rosenmeyer 1989: 93–112 for a discussion of the manner in which the notion of tenor pervades the Senecan corpus. 56. Form and content converge elsewhere in the Natural Questions. See Mazzoli 2005 on the ethical force of the description of the course of the deluge: for Seneca res and uerba really ought to work together. These sorts of convergence seem to be aspects of what Williams 2005b: 418 describes as an “experimental mode of physico-moral investigation” at work in the Natural Questions. And so, for example, the passage on winds is itself “tumultuous” (Williams 2005b: 429). 57. The passage on rainbows should be read with the finale on Hostius Quadra: see Leitão 1998: 132–33. Hine 2006: 52: the list of phenomena studied is actually topical items in the contemporary Roman imagination. 58. Speaking de plano is not simple informality. Hierarchy is both abolished and preserved in the image: a magistrate descends from his dais to speak to us literally/metaphorically “on our own level.” 59. Compare Natural Questions 1.5.13: the narrator’s sententia, which may well be the verdict of a magistrate, is identical to that of Posidonius. But demonstration of the point is impossible without geometry and their proofs that compel assent: in eadem sententia sum qua Posidonius ut arcum iudicem fieri nube formata in modum concaui speculi et rotundi, cui forma sit partis e pila secta. hoc probari, nisi geometrae adiuuerint, non potest, qui argumentis nihil dubii relinquentibus docent solis illam esse effigiem non similem. neque enim omnia ad uerum specula respondent. 60. See Natural Questions 1.12.1 on the indirect observation of eclipses. 61. Natural Questions 3.pr.10: magna ista, quia parui sumus, credimus; multis rebus non ex natura sua sed ex humilitate nostra magnitudo est. Compare the remarks of Inwood 2005: 166–67, 177. 62. Natural Questions 3.pr.10, 11, 12 . . .: quid praecipuum in rebus humanis est? 63. Williams 2006b: 145–46: seeing from the cosmic vantage-point is the “main objective of the Natural Questions as a whole, ‘to have seen the all with your mind.’” 64. The revolution is philosophical and not a “Roman revolution.” See Hine 2006: 46: “In Seneca the contrast is not, as in Cicero, between more and less enlightened views of what constitutes earthly glory and Romanness, but between earthly glory and the pursuit of philosophy.” Hine’s study offers a portrait of the historical and biographical moment in which Seneca’s ahistorical argument emerges. 65. Rabde Romeo 1966: 148–50: the relationship between god and the cosmos is a vexed question in Senecan studies. And this is no surprise as one can find passages where there is a unity of god and cosmos as well as passages where there is a clear distinction drawn between them. Rabde Romeo ultimately

Notes to pages 68–70

66.

67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76.

181

concludes that Seneca’s anthropological commitments prevent him from committing to a rigorous monism. Specifically, Seneca is not willing to sacrifice the possibility of human liberty. Hutchinson 1993: 223 is much more pragmatic: there is an underlying unity, but differences in different passages can be attributed to divergent literary aims. This is an important notion to bear in mind when reading such passages. But Hutchinson has let himself off the hook when it comes to specifying what that core unity might be. We will return to this theme in the next two chapters. See Küppers 1996 on the sublime perspective in Seneca, an issue of lasting interest for the present study. Küppers documents the pervasiveness of the concept in the prose works as well as its centrality to Seneca’s thought. Faggin 1967: 31: Seneca is not alone in emphasizing this theme. Poets, astrologers, and philosophers had turned the soul into, as Faggin puts it, the protagonist of a cosmic adventure. Faggin 1967: 33–34 who notes the parallel with Consolation to Marcia 25. Meanwhile a word of warning from the tragedies: spectatorship regularly works as an allegory of sadistic authorship. See Littlewood 2004: 11–13. One rejoices to behold the spectacle of crimes willed and the whirling of a whole universe of suffering. This same sadism can even spread to watchers who are not themselves authors of wickedness (Littlewood 2004: 215–40). See Cordoñer 1989: 1780–82 on the issue of quaestiones relative to the Naturales Quaestiones. Natural Questions 1.pr.13: tunc contemnit domicilii prioris angustias. Gauly 2004: 170–76 reads this preface in a Platonic light: the ascent of the soul to the heavenly perspective entails a repudiation of the body as its prison. Hutchinson 1993: 237: “intellectual and literary climax” converge in this passage. God and the self are conjoined in Senecan thought: “Chez Sénèque . . . c’est l’expérience de Dieu qui est au centre de sa vie intérieure” (Grimal 1989: 1990). Grimal 1978: 421 sees a strong bond in Seneca between the unity of the individual work and the unity of the universe: “[L]e philosophe, jusque dans l’expression littéraire de sa pensée, suit la Nature et la loi universelle.” Natural Questions 1.4.1 again: quia numquam nisi e contrario redditur, id est nisi ex altera parte stetit quod appareret, ex altera quod ostendere. See Cicero, Topics 47 for a formal presentation of the structure of e contario arguments. There is a striking resemblance here, then, to the Lacanian account of mirror and the relationship between the imaginary and the symbolic. See Lacan 2006c. More obliquely, the non-existent Latin word for essence, viz. essentia, acts like objet à: the (non-)word essentia serves as empty place-holder in the here-and-now for the concept of gaze. And it is the gaze that allows the human subject to play the being-and-meaning game with the screen on which it finds the image. See “What is a picture?,” the ninth chapter of Lacan 1981. Here too Seneca has adapted an old line of thought. In the Platonic Alcibiades I “see thyself” is displaced by “know thyself,” and optical inspection shows us the way to introspection (132d–133b). Compare Leitão 1998: 153–54.

182

Notes to pages 70–73

77. Natural Questions 1.17.4: multa ex hoc consecuturus, primum sui notitiam, deinde ad quaedam consilium. 78. The passage has attracted a fair share of commentary. Berno 2003: 33–35 offers a survey of the bibliography, and then she goes on to offer a detailed reading of the whole episode. Compare Williams 2005b: 422 on another “fable” in the Natural Questions where the tale of mining offers more than a mere proof of a claim but also a moral allegory as well. 79. Natural Questions 1.16.2: haec autem ita disponebat ut, cum uirum ipse pateretur, auersus omnes admissarii sui motus in speculo uideret ac deinde falsa magnitudine ipsius membri tamquam uera gaudebat. 80. See Leitão 1998: 144–46: Hostius argues in a manner akin to the narrator. Williams 2005a: 144 emends Leitão: “Hostius [is] an unambiguous antitype, a grotesque distortion of the philosopher drawn in the preface.” Williams’s ideas are resumed in the second chapter of Williams 2012, which discusses the moralizing passages of the Natural Questions more generally. Compare Myerowitz 1992: 150; Berno 2003: 45–46; and Bartsch 2006: 109. 81. See Berno 2003: 36–41 on the multiplied narration of the fabella. 82. The story also has manifold connections, both literal and figurative, to the Roman stage in general and to Seneca’s drama in particular. See Berno 2003: 53–61. 83. Leitão 1998: 139–46 comments extensively on the god vs. Hostius antithesis in Book One of the Natural Questions. 84. The Natural Questions makes nature – itself rationally structured – accessible to reason. The marvellous designates a site of cognitive failure. And nature does not herself create “monsters,” but Hostius Quadra’s madness makes of him one. Such is the position of Toulouze-Morisset 2004. See especially Toulouze-Morisset 2004: 216 on the monster himself: “L’ordre cosmique exclut la monstruosité. Seul l’homme la fabrique ou se fabrique lui-même comme monstrum.” Quadra has completely perverted the trajectory of enlightenment wherein a curiosus spectator comes to know more about nature and not about lust. 85. Compare the conclusion of Williams: though the Natural Questions fits together multiple orders and universalizes, the philosophical spectacle of the mundus may well have been upstaged by Quadra’s mundus muliebris (Williams 2005a: 163). Cosmetics, then, over cosmos. 86. Compare Hegel on the problem of statements of the form “God is . . .” (Hegel 1977: 12–13). The absolute is posited, but it can only be static in such a formula. Dialectical movement is forestalled. In Seneca dialogism and narrative act as the medium that mirrors in the finite and concrete a structure that “reflects” “speculatively” the absolute and abstract and thereby moves us towards it “metaphorically” (transferre). Note as well that the order of presentation of the Natural Questions both is and illustrates the metaphysics of metaphor. As Cordoñer argues, “De cette manière, insensiblement, se produit un transfert de caractère métaphorique sur chacun des éléments qui, à mesure qu’ils s’éloignent de la terre acquièrent une plus grande transcendance” (Cordoñer 1989: 1800).

Notes to pages 74–78

183

4 THE SPECTACLE OF ETHICS 1. Küppers 1996: 65 connects Letter 58 and its ontology to the broader question of theôria-as-spectacle in Seneca. Moreover, Küppers is making an argument about Senecan ethics. 2. More abstractly still, in the primordial subjective moment, the world itself serves as a given-to-be-seen for a seer. Spectacles are necessarily “found” in the course of finding one’s own place in the world. See Lacan 1981: 74 and Quinet 1995. 3. The idea that gladiators and Senecan virtue are profoundly linked is an old one: Rosenmeyer 1989: 57 reviews and revives it. See also Barton 1992: 15–25; Busch 2009: 267. Compare also Gunderson 1996: 133–42. See the comments and review of the literature at Richardson-Hay 2006: 255–61. Ker 2009b: 78–83 resumes the issue but he also opens out onto the relationship between spectacle, ethics, death, and the author. His exploration is, accordingly, convergent with a number of the themes presently under discussion. See also Ker 2009b: 119–22. 4. See Boyle 2012: xxi–xxv on the multidimensional “theatricality” to Roman aristocratic life and the manner in which Seneca and other imperial authors engage with this theme. “It is arguable that in early imperial Rome’s confounding culture the distinction between persona and person began to collapse. Certainly the distinction between ‘reality’ and ‘theatre’ dissolves conspicuously within the theatre/amphitheatre itself ” (Boyle 2012: xxiv). 5. The senator as (mere) actor under the emperors has been a site of much scholarly activity. See, for example, Dupont 1985 and Edwards 1997. Following up on themes developed at greater length in Bartsch 1994, Bartsch 2006: 228 writes: “Senecan Stoicism, in its attempt to separate forms of performance that were philosophical in nature from forms that simply kow-towed to prevailing political necessities, acknowledged the problem rather than dismantled it.” 6. See Habinek 1998: 137–50. 7. Armisen-Marchetti 1989: 124–26 offers a survey of the manner in which the shows are deployed throughout Seneca’s works. For example, the arena is a metaphor for the human condition and the Stoic proficiens is himself a kind of gladiator. 8. Seneca, Moral Letters 7.1: quid tibi uitandum praecipue existimes quaeris? turbam. 9. Moral Letters 7.2: utique quo maior est populus cui miscemur, hoc periculi plus est. 10. Moral Letters 7.2: nihil uero tam damnosum bonis moribus quam in aliquo spectaculo desidere. 11. Moral Letters 7.3: casu in meridianum spectaculum incidi, lusus expectans et sales et aliquid laxamenti quo hominum oculi ab humano cruore adquiescant. 12. Compare, then, the untrustworthy Encolpius who is surprised when the old woman leads him to a whore-house when he tells her he is lost (Petronius, Satyricon 6). His own “spiritual guide” perhaps knows more about him than he does himself. Closer to home, see the opening of Seneca’s Oedipus: curis solutus exul, intrepidus uagans | (caelum deosque testor) in regnum incidi (13–14).

184

Notes to pages 78–81

Oedipus “happens” upon his fate in language that closely parallels the narrator “happening” upon the midday slaughter. 13. Seneca, Moral Letters 7.5: “sed latrocinium fecit aliquis, occidit hominem.” quid ergo? quia occidit, ille meruit ut hoc pateretur: tu quid meruisti miser ut hoc spectes? 14. See Henderson 2004: 44: “By the time he has finished with us, we friends are very alone with Seneca, with the texts of philosophy, with that voice buzzing round its hive in our skull. He has got us where he wanted us, seizure of the philosophical letter from Epicurus, for a Stoicizing imperial Rome” (original emphasis). Compare Henderson 2004: 27: the proficiens/t reader gets caught doing things pari passu. It turns out that “Seneca’s” parables are to be read as “one’s own.” 15. Seneca, Moral Letters 7.9: nemo est qui intellegere te possit. 16. Moral Letters 7.9: aliquis fortasse, unus aut alter incidet, et hic ipse formandus tibi erit instituendusque ad intellectum tui. “cui ergo ista didici?” non est quod timeas ne operam perdideris, si tibi didicisti. 17. Lucilius is Seneca’s product. See Moral Letters 34.2: “I’m staking my claim on you. You are my work (adsero te mihi; meum opus es).” 18. Moral Letters 7.11: egregie hoc tertium Epicurus, cum uni ex consortibus studiorum suorum scriberet: “haec” inquit “ego non multis, sed tibi; satis enim magnum alter alteri theatrum sumus.” 19. Moral Letters 7.12: introrsus bona tua spectent. 20. As with the shows, so too with the letters: the giving of them is not a simple top-down affair. Reaction, counter-reaction, debate, and argument are elements of both highly variegated productions. On the multifariousness of the arena, compare Gunderson 1996. 21. Shelton 1995 emphasizes consolation via female examples. Mauch 1997 offers a volume-length study of the deployment of women in Seneca’s philosophical writings. 22. Consolation to Marcia 1.5: ego confligere cum tuo maerore constitui. Wilson 1997: 63 notes a pattern in Seneca’ consolatory rhetoric: the passivity of therapy is converted into a rhetoric of the valorous, embattled individual. 23. Compare Bartsch 2009: 197–98: epistemology and ethics are fused in Seneca. Moreover, this game of perspective is used to console. 24. Consolation to Marcia 1.5: haec magnitudo animi tui uetuit me ad sexum tuum respicere, . . . 25. Asmis 2009: 124 notes the oddity of a man addressing a woman thus. Wilcox 2006 is especially interested in the question of uirtus here. See also Langlands 2004 and Ker 2009b: 93. One finds in the consolatory letters of Cicero’s correspondence a good many of the themes and arguments that Seneca deploys, including, of course, an instance upon the manliness of persevering in the face of sorrow. On these letters see Wilcox 2005 and Hutchinson 1998: 49–77. 26. Consolation to Marcia 1.1: nisi te, Marcia, scirem tam longe ab infirmitate muliebris animi quam a ceteris uitiis recessisse . . . 27. See Graver 1998: 621 on the confluence of masculine style and masculine spirit in Seneca’s own prose. (Virile) “virtue” enables this convergence. Or, at least, it

Notes to pages 81–83

185

seems to enable it: Graver also points out the difficulties that ensue if one follows up on Seneca’s arguments. 28. See Shelton 1995 on Seneca’s deployment of exempla in this work. 29. Consolation to Marcia 16.2: Bruto libertatem debemus, Lucretiae Brutum. 30. Consolation to Marcia 16.2: tantum non in uiros transcripsimus. 31. Consolation to Marcia 16.2: Cloelia exprobrat iuuenibus nostris puluinum escendentibus in ea illos urbe sic ingredi in qua etiam feminas equo donauimus. Seneca is playing with eques equo publico language, that is, with the technical vocabulary of civic life. 32. Consolation to Marcia 16.1: scio quid dicas: “oblitus es feminam te consolari, uirorum refers exempla.” 33. See also Wilcox 2006: 89–91 on the role of the male examples in Seneca’s consolations to women. 34. Consolation to Marcia 19.3: scio quid dicas: “non mouent me detrimenta mea; etenim non est dignus solacio qui filium sibi decessisse sicut mancipium moleste fert, cui quicquam in filio respicere praeter ipsum uacat.” 35. Consolation to Marcia 9.5: ille amisit liberos: et tu amittere potes; ille damnatus est: et tua innocentia sub ictu est. error decipit hic, effeminat, dum patimur quae numquam pati nos posse prouidimus. 36. Consolation to Marcia 10.1: quidquid est hoc, Marcia, quod circa nos ex aduenticio fulget, liberi honores opes, ampla atria et exclusorum clientium turba referta uestibula, clarum , nobilis aut formosa coniux ceteraque ex incerta et mobili sorte pendentia alieni commodatique apparatus sunt; nihil horum dono datur. 37. Note that Senecan philosophy is super-saturated with gendered themes and theses, and it is frequently not especially generic in its deployment of them. Edwards 2005: 85: “In Seneca’s writing, the image of the Stoic philosopher is repeatedly presented in the most masculine terms; he is a soldier or gladiator fighting against vice or against the ills of fortune.” Habinek 1998: 144 shows that the sexuality of Senecan discourse can have its innovations and surprises as well: “To put it simply, while proclaiming the inherited values of upper-class male sexual conduct, Seneca sets in operation a mode of reading that requires the reader to be an accomplice in his own violation – a humiliating state of affairs according to traditional Roman sexual ethics.” 38. I would, then, supplement the claim of Motto 1972: 157 that “[Seneca] sought to deal intellectually with women precisely as he dealt with men” with the words, “that is, qua men.” Meinel 1972: 195: “So sind Marcia und Helvia für Seneca einmal mehr ruhmeswürdige Ausnahmeerscheinungen, deren er sogar – und das ist ja das höchste Lob eines Stoikers für eine femina – männlich Eigenschaften, virtutes, zugeschreibt.” 39. Consolation to Marcia 17.2: si quis Syracusas petenti diceret: “omnia incommoda, omnes uoluptates futurae peregrinationis tuae ante cognosce, deinde ita nauiga. Haec sunt quae mirari possis: uidebis primum . . .” 40. Lacanians will note, then, an identification with the function of the gaze. The gaze is not just something that looks, but it is also something that shows the spectacle of the world. See Lacan 1981: 75.

186

Notes to pages 83–86

41. Consolation to Marcia 17.6: dicit omnibus nobis natura: “neminem decipio.” 42. Consolation to Marcia 18.1: hanc imaginem agedum totius uitae introitum refer. an Syracusas uiseres deliberanti tibi quidquid delectare poterat, quidquid offendere exposui: puta nascenti me tibi uenire in consilium. “intraturus es urbem dis hominibus communem, . . .” One can also note a shift from an earlier episode. The potential and generic voyage to Syracuse where “if someone were to say to a person . . .” has become actual and specific. Formerly “you” weighed the question, and “I” expounded on it. The new hypothetical is introduced via an imperative: puta, “imagine.” And again it is specifically articulated as a you/me question and not a someone/someone else issue. 43. Consolation to Marcia 18.4: cum satiatus spectaculo supernorum in terram oculos deieceris, . . . 44. Consolation to Marcia 18.7: uidebis nihil humanae audaciae intemptatum erisque et spectator et ipse pars magna conantium . . . 45. Consolation to Marcia 24.5: imago dumtaxat fili tui perît et effigies non simillima, ipse quidem aeternus meliorisque nunc status est, despoliatus oneribus alienis et sibi relictus. 46. Seneca, Moral Letters 58.20. 47. Compare Feldstein 1995: 156 on the impersonal perspective of the Other. 48. Consolation to Marcia 25.2: excepit illum coetus sacer, Scipiones Catonesque, . . . At the risk of turning philosophy into philology: an important precedent subtending this passage is Cicero’s “Dream of Scipio” from his Republic. The Scipionic perspective is, then, already an element of the Roman reception of Platonic thought. See Stevens 2006: 162–65 for a discussion of Cicero’s use of the philosophical possibilities of shifts of perspective in the Somnium. 49. Consolation to Marcia 1.5: haec magnitudo animi tui uetuit me ad sexum tuum respicere, . . . 50. In fact, we could turn away from Marcia’s body because her own spirit was so great: her animus was characterized by magnitudo. 51. Consolation to Marcia 26.3: coimus omnes in unum uidemusque non alta nocte circumdati nil apud uos, ut putatis, optabile, nil excelsum, nil splendidum, sed humilia cuncta et grauia et anxia et quotam partem luminis nostri cernentia! 52. This passage looks back to Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, and it also anticipates the Natural Questions. See Grimal 1978: 384–85. See Ker 2009b: 79 for the emphasis on the god’s own point of view in Seneca’s On Providence: a dying man needs to behold his own death after the same fashion. 53. It is a long and vivid catalogue: Nam si tibi potest solacio esse desideri tui commune fatum, nihil quo stat loco stabit, omnia sternet abducetque secum uetustas. Nec hominibus solum (quota enim ista fortuitae potentiae portio est?) sed locis, sed regionibus, sed mundi partibus ludet. Totos supprimet montes et alibi rupes in altum nouas exprimet; maria sorbebit, flumina auertet et commercio gentium rupto societatem generis humani coetumque dissoluet; alibi hiatibus uastis subducet urbes, tremoribus quatiet, et ex infimo pestilentiae halitus mittet et inundationibus quidquid habitatur obducet necabitque omne animal orbe submerso et ignibus uastis torrebit incendetque mortalia (Consolation to Marcia 26.6).

Notes to pages 86–91

187

54. Reydams-Schils 2010: 207 points out the more direct comparison: the optics of the Consolation “reads like a blueprint for the Naturales quaestiones.” She also notes the kinship of this moment to Moral Letters 79.12 and On Leisure 5. 55. See Seneca, Moral Letters 7.5. 56. Consolation to Marcia 26.6: et cum tempus aduenerit quo se mundus renouaturus extinguat, uiribus ista se suis caedent et sidera sideribus incurrent et omni flagrante materia uno igni quidquid nunc ex disposito lucet ardebit. 57. Consolation to Marcia 26.3: nos quoque felices animae et aeterna sortitae, cum deo uisum erit iterum ista moliri, labentibus cunctis et ipsae parua ruinae ingentis accessio in antiqua elementa uertemur. 58. Consolation to Marcia 26.7: felicem filium tuum, Marcia, qui ista iam nouit! 59. Compare Ker 2009b: 121: Seneca praises Aufidius Bassus’ “postmortem perspective” in Moral Letter 30. 60. Compare Gunderson 2000: 107–10. See also Lacan 1981: 74, 80–81. 5 LOSING SENECA 1. The example, of course, is not innocent; see the eighth chapter of Copjec 1994. 2. There are different absences, of course: Marcia as an addressee is “less absent” than Helvia, for example. Nevertheless, the Consolation to Marcia is written and read, it is not spoken and heard in a face-to-face encounter. 3. On Providence 1: causam deorum agam. 4. And herewith I will shamelessly side-step the Consolation to Polybius. The imperial freedman has lost his brother. Seneca consoles him. The piece is generally read as a fawning bid for Seneca’s own return from exile, and thus more the work of a courtier than a philosopher. And, indeed, we hear a good deal about masks, eyes, and the details of political life and somewhat less about the grand Stoic themes. Nevertheless, the negative judgment passed on life and the praise of the sublime perspective now enjoyed by the brother (Consolation to Polybius 9) reveal that core elements of the Senecan sublime can be found here too despite the many tokens that this is the work of a mondain. Indeed, this may well be the real scandal: the prized motifs are deployed in a text laced with hypocrisy precisely to lend it the air of sincerity and authenticity. 5. Ferrel 1966: Seneca means the opposite of what he says in the Consolation to Helvia. This is not really to Helvia. It is for Messalina. Seneca hates exile. He is angling for a return. 6. Emperor Claudius, his niece Julia Livilla, sex, and Seneca are the chief ingredients. But how are they to be combined? Actual adultery? Mere knowledge of impropriety? Trumped-up charges with Messalina pulling the strings? A survey of the circumstances and duration of the exile can be found in Griffin 1976: 59– 63 and Meinel 1972: 1–17. Fantham 2007: 176: “[T]he consolations to Helvia and Polybius are marked by a generic displacement, for Seneca, as we shall see, displaces elements typical of one type of consolation (consolation for exile) to another type (consolation for bereavement) . . . [T]he generic displacement is also personal, as Seneca shifts the focus away from himself to the losses suffered

188

7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

Notes to pages 91–94 by Helvia and Polybius.” See also Ker 2009b: 87–112 for a survey of consolation across the Senecan corpus which regularly emphasizes the theme of Seneca’s own absence. Whitmarsh 2001: 140 reminds us that ancient stories about exile have a performative aspect, that they are staged for an audience: “It is preferable to consider these consolations as public dramatizations of the therapeutic process, packaged ‘presentations’ of exilic identity” (original emphasis). The specific identity under question for Whitmarsh is that of the Greek intellectual under the Roman empire. Irigaray 1993: 10. For feminist theory and Seneca more generally, see Robin 1993. Irigaray 1993: 10. Williams sees in this consolation a collection of tales of alienation: the alienation of the sapiens from the crowd, the alienation of the crowd from the good, the alienation of the soul from its cosmic home . . . See Williams 2006a: 148– 49. Nevertheless I wish to emphasize that the point of origin for the argument is also the point of origin for man: the mother. Exile as an allegory for the Roman condition (Williams 2006a: 173) should no more forget Helvia than Aeneas should forget Creusa. And yet losing-woman is at the heart of the foundation myth in both cases. Irigaray 1993: 84. Irigaray 1993: 84. Compare, then, Lacan’s “woman is a symptom of man.” Žižek 1993: 188 glosses the phrase thus: “[It] means that Man himself exists only through woman qua his symptom: all his ontological consistency hangs on, is suspended from, is ‘externalized’ in his symptom. In other words, man literally ex-sists: his entire being lies ‘out there,’ in woman” (original emphasis). This language of hanging and dependency will be found in Seneca’s Latin as well. See also Robin 1993: 116–17 on the pervasive deprecation of the feminine position in Senecan drama. Consolation to Helvia 9.7: num dubitas quin se ille [i.e., Marcellus] tantus uir sic ad tolerandum aequo animo exilium saepe adhortatus sit: . . . Consolation to Helvia 9.7: quod patria cares, non est miserum: ita te disciplinis inbuisti ut scires omnem locum sapienti uiro patriam esse. See Williams 2006a: 160: Seneca’s Marcellus is effectively spinning a “Stoic Paradox” for us. Compare, then, Cicero’s Stoic Paradoxes where philosophy finds pointed and personal rhetorical elaboration. For example, the paradox omnes stultos insanire is explored with a reference to Cicero’s own exile (Cicero, Paradoxa Stoicorum 30). Compare Foucault 1990: 83–84 on the masculine character of moderation and self-control in the classical Greek era: this excellence is virile, even when evinced by a woman. Consolation to Helvia 1.4: utcumque conitar, non fiducia ingenii, sed quia possum instar efficacissimae consolationis esse ipse consolator. Consolation to Helvia 2.2: quid consequar? ut pudeat animum tot miseriarum uictorem aegre ferre unum uulnus in corpore tam cicatricoso. Consolation to Helvia 93.1: sed quemadmodum tirones leuiter saucii tamen uociferantur et manus medicorum magis quam ferrum horrent, at ueterani quamuis

Notes to pages 95–98

189

confossi patienter ac sine gemitu uelut aliena corpora exsaniari patiuntur, ita tu nunc debes fortiter praebere te curationi. 20. See McAuley 2008: 10 on the aggressive way that Seneca stages his mother’s body. 21. Consolation to Helvia 4.1: uincam autem, puto, primum si ostendero nihil me pati propter quod ipse dici possim miser, nedum propter quod miseros etiam quos contingo faciam. 22. Consolation to Helvia 4.1: magno id animo feci; constitui enim uincere dolorem tuum, non circumscribere. 23. The topic of Seneca and the self is sufficiently broad and rich as to have merited a whole volume: Bartsch and Wray 2009. 24. Looking back at the Natural Questions we can ask, “Hostius Quadra, is your rectum a grave?” He was being inseminated with pleasure itself, and so, then, with disaster. My question is stolen from Bersani 1987, who, though he likely knows Seneca only by way of Foucault, seems nevertheless to have some responses to him. 25. The image of Socrates as midwife is one of the most important metaphors in ancient philosophy. 26. Seneca returns to sex at Consolation to Helvia 16.3: there he praises his own mother’s chastity. 27. This is a paraphrase of the end of a long fugue on the animus: Corpusculum hoc, custodia et uinculum animi, huc atque illuc iactatur; in hoc supplicia, in hoc latrocinia, in hoc morbi exercentur: animus quidem ipse sacer et aeternus est et cui non possit inici manus (Consolation to Helvia 11.7). 28. As mentioned above, Seneca uses the martial word uacatio here. 29. See, for example, Consolation to Helvia 6.2. 30. Consolation to Helvia 9.7: omnem locum sapienti uiro patriam esse. 31. Consolation to Helvia 8.4: mundus hic, quo nihil neque maius neque ornatius rerum natura genuit, animus contemplator admiratorque mundi, pars eius magnificentissima. 32. Consolation to Helvia 9.2: angustus animus est quem terrena delectant: ad illa abducendus est quae ubique aeque apparent, ubique aeque splendent. 33. A loose translation of Consolation to Helvia 7.9–10. 34. See Veyne 2003: 42–43 on nature as intentional in Stoicism. 35. Compare the discussion of Seneca, Natural Questions 2.6.6 in Chapter Three. 36. McAuley 2008: 12 notes that the use to which Helvia is put “participates in and underpins a broader programme of masculine self-fashioning in Roman culture.” And the whole argument seeks to deproblematize the virility of uirtus (McAuley 2008: 21). 37. Consolation to Helvia 15.4: sed quanto ista duriora sunt, tanto maior tibi uirtus aduocanda est, et uelut cum hoste noto ac saepe iam uicto acrius congrediendum. non ex intacto corpore tuo sanguis hic fluxit: per ipsas cicatrices percussa es. Meinel 1972: 46 sees a reminiscence of Seneca the Elder’s Controversiae 1.8.3 here. That is a war hero declamation. I’m not sure there are enough points of contact for me to agree, but a father’s work that is suffused with the rhetoric of martial

190

38. 39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44. 45.

Notes to pages 99–101 masculinity should indeed be kept in mind when reading the rhetoric of the son to his mother. Consolation to Helvia 16.4: non potes itaque ad optinendum dolorem muliebre nomen praetendere, ex quo te uirtutes tuae seduxerunt; tantum debes a feminarum lacrimis abesse quantum uitiis. As Mauch 1997: 26–28 notes, the alignment of the positive qualities with masculinity and negative with femininity pervades the writings of Seneca. And so when it comes to addressing Helvia the fundamental virility of “Senecas virtus-Begriff” means that female virtue gets defined on the basis of male virtue. Compare Manning 1973: 171. Compare “transcription into the ranks of men” from the Consolation to Marcia. See also Žižek 1993: 58: “woman” is the barrier between the phenomenological and the noumenological. She is the thing subtracted in order that the two might relate to one another. The “gender ambiguities” of the staging of Helvia and reader-as-Helvia are not “mere ambiguities,” but rather structuring components of the whole and enabling conditions of its resolution. Notice that this paragraph ends with the word exemplum (16.7). The stylistic device of hyperbaton strongly sets this noun off and stresses it. The tradition of exemplification at Rome has a vast bibliography. One could start with Skidmore 1996: 13–21, though. Roller 2001: 88–97 explores Seneca’s recalibration of the discourse. Mauch 1997 examines exemplification and gender in Seneca throughout its pages. Shelton 1995 focusses on how Seneca deploys the discourse of exemplification when addressing a woman. Consolation to Helvia 17.3: “I, though, prefer your sorrow’s end to its deception. Accordingly I am leading you where all who flee fortune ought to take refuge: to liberal studies. They will heal your wound, they will pluck from you all your sorrow.” (Ego autem malo illum [sc. dolorem] desinere quam decipi. Itaque illo te duco quo omnibus qui fortunam fugiunt confugiendum est, ad liberalia studia: illa sanabunt uulnus tuum, illa omnem tristitiam tibi euellent.) Henderson 2006: 146 allows us to connect this passage to the letters on metaphysics and metaphor: “We took the magical mystery tour precisely so we could learn, finally, that ‘liberal studies’ are the way to get somewhere: everywhere, any time” (original emphasis). If we want to be a bit more precise: liberalia studia will be a broad set of pursuits. They consist, roughly speaking, of the knowledge with which a gentleman is expected to concern himself. As one might imagine, the exact contents of this knowledge are very fluid and contested even as the label attached to them remains static and universally praised. See Hadot 1969: 120–23 for a discussion of Seneca’s treatment of the liberal arts in Letter 88: they can seem mere puerile preliminaries when set next to the arduous task of philosophy. Consolation to Helvia 19.4: sed si prudentiam perfectissimae feminae noui, non patietur te nihil profuturo maerore consumi et exemplum tibi suum, cuius ego etiam spectator fui, narrabit. My paraphrase leaves out some of the sentimental family details: carissimum uirum amiserat, auunculum nostrum, cui uirgo nupserat, in ipsa quidem

Notes to pages 101–105

191

nauigatione; tulit tamen eodem tempore et luctum et metum euictisque tempestatibus corpus eius naufraga euexit (Consolation to Helvia 19.4). 46. Consolation to Helvia 19.6: post hoc nemo miretur quod . . . Even the lead-in to the “invisibility” passage itself evokes the visual. Mirare designates, after all, a specific kind of looking. 47. Consolation to Helvia 19.6: multum erat, si per sedecim annos illam prouincia probasset: plus est quod ignorauit. 48. Characterizing the person who is magno animo occurs 11 times in the Dialogues, 5 in the On Favors, 4 in the On Clemency, and 10 in the Moral Letters. It is regularly a place where social praise and ethical praise converge. 49. Mauch 1997: 154 unpacks the philosophical virtues of Helvia’s sister that one can adduce from this episode: magnitudo animi, constantia, fortitudo, ἀπάθεια. And these combine to give us a sense that this perfectissima femina might somehow exemplify ratio perfecta. 50. For Seneca’s use of life as a shipwreck see, for example Consolation to Marcia 6.3; Consolation to Polybius 9.6; and On Ease 8.4. 51. This is the explicit advice of Moral Letters 91.7–8: imagine the worst and firm up your animus. Set before your mind’s eye exiles, torture, war, and shipwrecks: cogitanda ergo sunt omnia et animus aduersus ea quae possunt euenire firmandus. exilia, tormenta [morbi], bella, naufragia meditare. 52. Recall as well the empty space left by Helvia’s absent father above and the manner in which duty filled it. 53. Consolation to Helvia 20.1: animus omnis occupationis expers operibus suis uacat et modo se leuioribus studiis oblectat, modo ad considerandam suam uniuersique naturam ueri auidus insurgit. 54. Compare the argument concerning the Natural Questions above: knowingnature, knowing-god, and knowing-the-author are correlated activities. 55. Consolation to Helvia 20.2: tum peragratis humilioribus ad summa perrumpit et pulcherrimo diuinorum spectaculo fruitur, aeternitatis suae memor in omne quod fuit futurumque est uadit omnibus saeculis. 6 THE ANALYTICS OF DESIRE 1. There is a long-standing question of whether or not these plays were actually staged, and, if, so, whether as plays or through recitation. See Tarrant 1985: 13–15 for an overview. See Kugelmeier 2007 and Zwierlein 1966 for volume-length studies. That the plays are notionally dramaturgical and that this dramaturgy is connected to the spectacles imagined by the philosophy is all that concerns me. Boyle 1983 and Dupont 1995 both aim to moot the staging debate. Dupont seeks a manner in which to productively recast its terms. 2. Ker 2009b: 126 identifies four major branches of interpretation: literary history, performance, Julio-Claudian history, and philosophy. See also his survey of the various philosophical readings of the plays (Ker 2009b: 128). 3. See Marti 1947 for an overview of the variety of tragedies and pseudo-tragedies written by an extensive list of philosophers hailing from numerous differing

192

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

Notes to page 106

schools. Rosenmeyer 1989: 38 also draws our attention to the dramatic qualities of the philosophical writings of not just Seneca but so too Musonius, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. Marti herself believes that there is a primarily philosophical orientation to the dramatic works and that the set of them forms an “Essay on Man” (Marti 1945: 223). Her hypersynthetic argument, though flawed, makes for useful juxtaposition with its converse: that the tragedies are disjoint from the philosophical works (Schiesaro 2003: 6–7). The “philosophy and/vs. poetry” question has attracted a substantial amount of commentary. Hine 2004 offers a survey of philosophical readings of the plays: his conclusion is that most are merely “diagnosing” the plays via externally imported schemata. The last chapter of Staley 2010 shows the extent to which life, tragedy, and philosophy really do need to be thought of simultaneously in Seneca. For example, “tragic Socrates” is an important figure for Seneca (Staley 2010: 127). Compare Wittgenstein 1922 on ethics and the limit of logical propositions: “The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other – he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy – but it would be the only strictly correct method” (6.421). The tragic song, in effect, breaks out just where Wittgenstein ends: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (7). The ancient theory of the literary sublime (as ideally adapted to tragedy) and its relationship to Seneca’s philosophy is explored by Armisen-Marchetti 1989: 53– 59 and Michel 1969. I am working with a different definition of the sublime than that of τὸ ὕψος, a term that need only be translated as “elevation (of style).” Nevertheless, both studies bring out a number of useful issues, as well as foregrounding the key problem of how rhetoric might be used to motivate virtuous action in a philosophically legitimate manner. Littlewood 2004: 121–27 explores the relationship between Longinus’s sublime and Senecan tragedy as a self-aware genre. Michel 1969: 254–57 argues that the Senecan conception of the sublime straddles both his philosophical and his tragic texts. Busch advocates reading Seneca for a dialogue between conflicting points of view (Busch 2009: 270). Hine 2004: 194 demands that we respect the “plurality of competing voices” in a drama rather than seeing in a given moment the voice of the poet. Dupont 1995: 238 usefully characterizes the various perspectives on offer in the Phaedra thus: “On y rencontre une succession d’amorces d’interprétation: chacune de ces exégèses est toujours fragmentaire; il faut souligner en outre leur extrême banalité.” See Gill 2009 for a philosophical reading of the passions of Phaedra in the Phaedra. There is a well-established tradition of specifically Stoic readings of the play. See, for example, Leeman 1976 and Lefèvre 1969. The bibliography on Senecan tragedy routinely speaks of the relationship between Stoicism and the plays. Readers like Pratt find unity between

Notes to page 107

9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

193

Seneca’s Stoicism and the themes and images of his plays. See Pratt 1963: 233– 34. Noting the convergence is important for reading the whole of the corpus. For example, Lawall 1983: 23 glosses the end of The Madness of Hercules by way of appeals to both the On Clemency and the On Providence. Lawall is hardly alone in making such productive connections. But even if Seneca’s philosophy and poetry share a certain conceptual grammar and syntax, they do not necessarily always unite in the details of what they say. One should resist the temptation to make Stoic orthodoxy the key that unlocks all doors (even if it does unlock so many). Hine 2004 asks that we be careful about readings of Seneca that diagnose rather than interpret. Coffey and Mayer 1990: 29 posit that the “most convincing interpreters” of the tragedies have eschewed philosophical readings. It is possible to lose sight of the ironies of both Seneca’s prose and his verse if we assume that we will be reading something that is ultimately orthodox in spirit. Compare Littlewood 2004: 16. The Stoic conception of tenor is complex. See Long and Sedley 1987b: 289. I have emphasized the way in which it relates to the world-soul, a notion which itself has ethical import: “human beings, as ‘parts’ of the whole, should conform themselves to universal nature by perfecting their rationality” (Long and Sedley 1987b: 319). Compare Sedley 2005: 389. See Schofield 2003: 244 on Zeno and Chrysippus. See also Inwood 2005: 243: “[O]ur acquiescence in those laws [of nature] is not motivated by a sense of capitulation to the brute force of overmastering fate. We follow nature . . . for the same reasons that Socrates put himself at the disposal of the laws: their claim on us is reasonable and fair.” The Phaedra outlines a starkly contrasting situation. Compare Poe 1983: 156 on Seneca’s Oedipus: “As a perversion Oedipus elects the only course possible – to act in accordance with nature’s perversity.” Inverted nature also appears in the Agamemnon: uersa nature est retro (34). See Shelton 1983: 169 on the play: “Yet Seneca suggests that the cosmic confusion is a direct consequence of human irrational behavior which had earlier been described as a storm in the soul.” On the Phaedra as a play about “nature,” see Boyle 1997: 60–67 and Davis 1983: 125–27. See Schiesaro 2003: 29 on the perversion of “following nature” in the Thyestes. Even that might be asking too much. As mentioned above, Schiesaro 2003: 6–7 suggests that we would be best off dispensing with any need to see Stoicism in the plays. And he is not alone in holding such views. A brief overview of the topic can be found at section 3.1 of the Seneca entry of The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/seneca/). Inwood 2005: 41 concludes that most of the so-called evidence for a nonmonistic approach to Senecan psychology appears in non-technical and “literary” moments: a vivid image in a letter does not entail a commitment to all of the implications of such an image. This statement is usually put much more negatively. See, for example, Leeman 1976: 209: “Thus the characters of the drama each embody a typical species of human evil.”

194

Notes to pages 107–111

16. This core paradox of the drama has attracted a good deal of scholarly attention. Gill 2009 uses it to explore the Senecan concept of self more generally. 17. There is no reason to assume that Seneca was thinking about Euripides to the exclusion of other versions of the story. Ovid, after all, is a favorite of Seneca. Coffey and Mayer 1990 document the extensive interaction between this play and the various works of Ovid. Compare Jakobi 1988: 63–89. Littlewood 2004: 6 advocates a largely Roman approach to the plays in general: “As any commentary shows, Senecan tragedy is stitched together from lines of Virgil and Ovid: this is its primary material.” Nevertheless, there is a long tradition of examining the relationship between Seneca and Greek tragedy that generally de-emphasizes Latin predecessors. See, for example, Grimal 1963: 307–8: “[L]a Phèdre de Sénèque n’est pas issue d’une seule source, elle n’est pas non plus indépendante de tout modèle, mais elle résulte d’une synthèse, opérée entre deux, ou plutôt trois tragédies grecques, sans parler de l’influence possible exercée par Lycophron ou même par Ovide.” 18. Lefèvre 1969: 144–45 explores the consequences of this. 19. Compare the famous last line of Seneca’s Medea: where Medea goes, there are no gods. Atheism is the lesson Jason has learned from the play, even as, of course, he sees his wife ride away in a chariot given to her by her divine grandfather. See Lefèvre 1981 on similar eclipses of the sense of the divine within Seneca’s dramas. 20. Compare Shelton 1978: 48 on the chorus of The Madness of Hercules. Contrast the conclusions of Robin 1993: the objectivity of the chorus reflects male privilege. 21. Phaedra 330: credite laesis. 22. uindicat omnes | natura sibi (Phaedra 352–53). Note that uindicare has a number of meanings that ought to be entertained simultaneously. 23. In the scene where Theseus is tricked he asks the question: “Tell me, who overturned my decor?” (894). And here decor is a gloss for Phaedra’s pudor (893). Similarly six lines later decus is used as a gloss for the family sword that Hippolytus left behind at the scene of his supposed crime (900). Thus the son has beauty of person and the father has the beauty of position. The one purportedly threatens to overturn the other. 24. Compare Segal 1986: 66–69. And see Segal 1986: 97–102 on natura. 25. Phaedra 820–23: raris forma uiris (saecula perspice) | impunita fuit. te melior deus | tutum praetereat formaque nobilis | deformis senii monstret imaginem. 26. Henry and Walker 1983: 136 note the rewriting of Providence in the Oedipus: “Fate in the Oedipus is not the operation of Providence, to be joyfully accepted by the wise man; it is malign and irrational, and man can neither cooperate with it nor resist it.” See also Poe 1983: 148 on the sense one gets in the Oedipus that nature might be malign. 27. Compare the insignificance of the gods relative to fortuna and fatum that one can see in Seneca’s Agamemnon (Tarrant 1976: 5). 28. Phaedra 978–81: res humanas ordine nullo | Fortuna regit sparsitque manu | munera caeca peiora fouens: | uincit sanctos dira libido, . . .

Notes to page 111

195

29. We have already seen in Natural Questions 2.45 and Consolation to Helvia 8.3 Seneca’s own declarations that fate is the name one gives to the series of causes and effects bound to one another and extending through time. And On Benefits 4.7.2 is verbally nearly identical to the passage in the Natural Questions. See also Pratt 1983: 48–49: “Chrysippus is quoted as saying: ‘Heimarmene is a natural order of the Whole by which from eternity one thing follows another and derives from it in an unalterable interdependence.’” Then Pratt goes on to discuss antecedent cause (the situation) and active cause (human will) as they converge around ethical acts within the context of the concatenation of causes and effects. The result is “a kind of human freedom, but obviously a very limited kind that is more controlled than free” (Pratt 1983: 49). “To [the Stoics] Fate is the system or causal nexus or Nature ‘seen as the order of events in time’” (Pratt 1983: 51). 30. Compare Kant 1988: 98. And see Kant 1988: 132 on the sufferings of the Stoic sage in this world 31. See the comments of Tarrant on this theme in Seneca’s Agamemnon and elsewhere (Tarrant 1976: 1884). 32. Phaedra 981–84: uincit sanctos dira libido, | fraus sublimi regnat in aula; | tradere turpi fasces populus | gaudet, eosdem colit atque odit. 33. In fact they have been so transvalued that the commentary on this passage says we need to retranslate the whole conceit of the line: uane is to be taken as “ineffectual” because “his chastity could not save Hippolytus” (Coffey and Mayer 1990: 175). And this means that we take decus as “reputation.” The line then becomes: “O ineffectual chastity and delusive reputation!” A rendering that is possible only because of a singular “context” for these words. 34. See Rosenmeyer 1989: 70–74: in his dramas Seneca mobilizes the rich contemporary understanding of the nuances of a category like Fortune and articulates such within a constellation of “partial perceptions of the principle of causality” for dramaturgical ends. And we are not meant to take any one passage as a hardened expression of true dogma as articulated by The Author, but rather as an expression of “the fullness and contrariness of the living scene” (Rosenmeyer 1989: 78). 35. Compare Sade 1990: 238: “Destruction being one of the chief laws of Nature, nothing that destroys can be criminal.” That is, the philosophy of nature properly regarded teaches “inhumanity.” 36. See Boyle 1997: 65: this is a subjective appraisal of the third chorus. A fuller synthesis from a broader perspective is possible. 37. Phaedra 1124, 1125: furit, ferit. 38. Küppers 1996 and Bickel 1959 both explore Seneca and the cosmic perspective via Kant. Bickel stresses Letter 64, a text that does not make for an especially useful central point in a discussion of this topic. Küppers explores the prose works of Seneca, but he avoids the plays. Küppers emphasizes a number of disjunctions between Seneca and Kant. In particular Küppers 1996: 73 points out that the inaccessibility of the noumena divides Seneca from Kant. Küppers also thinks this strongly divides the classical from the post-classical. But this means setting aside a whole sceptical tradition within antiquity. More to the

196

Notes to pages 112–114

point, however, the prose works of Seneca constantly flag the noumena as also (but let’s not hope merely . . .) literary. Furthermore, the tragedies regularly play a “what if ” game: What if the cosmos were really just a psychic projection? What if the divine perspective were unavailable to us? In short, the specter of epistemological limitation haunts Senecan philosophy. Kant, then, helps to make explicit issues already present within Seneca even if the elaboration of these same issues is markedly different. 39. Zupančič 2000: 157. 40. Zwecksmässigkeit ohne Zweck. Note also that beauty is segregated from emotion (Kant 1951: 62) in contradistinction to the emotional valence of the sublime. What is demanded of Nature is an apathetic appreciation of it in its beauty. An “emotional” encounter is what we get, though. This is a punch-line to Seneca’s tragedy more generally: his plays are sublime rather than beautiful, and that is the point . . . Compare Kant on pleasure/pain in the sublime and its movement as opposed to the repose of the beautiful (Kant 1951: 6–97). 41. Kant 1951: 88. 42. Kant 1951: 89; compare Kant 1951: 121. 43. Compare Kant 1951: 94. 44. Compare Rosenmeyer 1989: 112: “Sumpatheia inspires both jubilant praise of the organic beauty of the order created by the divinity and grisly catalogues of that order gone wrong.” See also Rosenmeyer 1989: 140 for a double vision of nature in Seneca: it is both harmonious and monstrous. 45. Kant constantly evokes notions of violence and pain relative to the sublime: the mind is set in conflict with itself when confronted with the sublime. Pleasure is bought at the specific price of pain (Kant 1951: 99). In Kant, then, we find a fundamental psychological alienation. However, Kant does argue for ultimate integration under the banner of reason. 46. Contrast Kant 1951: 191–92. The three antinomies of pure reason all point to the same conclusion: the world has a merely phenomenal status, and there exists a super-sensible substrate. The passage is a useful summary of all three of his Critiques. 47. For the nurse as a quasi-Seneca, see the anonymous author of the Octavia who imitates the passage at 557–65 and gives its sentiments to Seneca himself. See Ferri 2003: 283–85. 48. Phaedra 249: pars sanitatis uelle sanari fuit. 49. Phaedra 430: malus est minister regii imperii pudor. Hippolytus’ own stance is antithetical: he believes that his own chastity is indeed an excellent steward to his own princely status. 50. Phaedra 481–82: proinde uitae sequere naturam ducem: | urbem frequenta, ciuium coetus cole. 51. Compare and contrast: in Seneca’s consolations to women, gender is a mere nomen. One is told to get beyond it in the service of enlightenment. 52. Phaedra 184: furor cogit and quid ratio possit? uicit ac regnat furor. 53. Phaedra 604–5: uos testor omnis, caelites, hoc quod uolo | me nolle. This broken self delivers a broken line in making this utterance: line 605 contains only the

Notes to pages 115–118

197

words me nolle and is thus either submetrical or hypermetrical depending on one’s perspective. 54. Compare Davis 1983: 122–23 on these double meanings. 55. Phaedra 1188–90: o mors amoris una sedamen mali, | o mors pudoris maximum laesi decus, | confugimus ad te: pande placatos sinus. 56. Segal 1986: 104: “She dies out of fidelity not so much to love as to the fantasy of love.” See also Segal 1986: 195–96 for the chaste/unchaste paradox she forges. Grimal 1963: 314: “Cette mort est ambiguë, comme l’avait été toute sa conduite . . . Elle meurt pour ne pas survivre à la ruine de son amour et aussi pour sauver son respect d’elle-même.” Grimal even sees in Phaedra’s death an affirmation of Stoic liberty. Provided one understands Stoicism itself as split, then I would agree. Hill 2004: 168: “In death at the hands of Hippolytus Phaedra finally finds some tenable resolution of the dissident impulses tearing her apart by which the coincidentia oppositorum (‘resolution of opposite forces’) for which she yearns might be achieved.” 57. The same basic problem can also be found at Phaedra 711. Phaedra asks Hippolytus to kill her so that she can die at his hands with her chastity intact. In Latin erotic verse death has sex as its second meaning. Compare the French notion of “la petite mort.” 58. But, of course, he is not. See Littlewood 2004: 71: in the Phaedra there is “an uncomfortable erosion of distinctions between moral opposites.” 59. And then there is the intertextual problem of his speech. Littlewood 2004: 263 sees a “deviant intertextuality” throughout the play. More specifically, “[w]hen . . . Hippolytus is describing a sexless Golden Age with lines from Ovid’s Amores he is invoking a voice deviant inasmuch as it runs directly counter to his intentions.” Littlewood continues with a lengthy discussion of Seneca’s erotic contamination of Hippolytus via a collection of intertextual references. Compare Jakobi 1988: 75–77. 60. There is a disconcerting echo of Phaedra’s o mors amoris una sedamen mali (1188) in Hippolytus’ solamen unum matris amissae fero (578). Sedamen is to solamen as mors is to amor. 61. Coffey and Mayer 1990: “mitius . . . feris: this clause, which must offer a comment related specifically to stepmothers, has long caused difficulty since its most obvious sense is that ‘there is nothing gentler than wild beasts.’ The context however requires ‘the very beasts are altogether gentler (than stepmothers)’ . . . The desired sense is not to be found in the transmitted text, nor have emendations which stick closely to the paradosis proved satisfactory. The clause may therefore be severely corrupt.” 62. And the very fact of collocation is itself a sign of affect. See Coffey and Mayer 1990: 142: “The heaping up of verbs in asyndeton indicates intense emotion.” 63. Segal 1986: 99: “His vehemence of feeling is so great that he can treat natura as an equivalent of reason on the one hand and of madness on the other.” 64. One notes that the introduction of civic life began with the invocation of furor as well.

198

Notes to pages 121–125

65. Segal 1986: 215: Seneca has “contaminated” Euripides’ Hippolytus with the Bacchae (where Cadmus puts Pentheus back together again). Boyle 1997: 112: “It seems no accident, for example, that Theseus’ attempt to put together the separated fragments of his dismembered son in the final act of Phaedra is the construct of a scene which is itself an attempt by Seneca to put together the separated fragments of the dismembered oeuvre of Euripides – as the Roman dramatist endeavors to bring together fragments of Euripides’ Hippolytus and Bacchae into a new, harmonious whole.” 66. Coffey and Mayer 1990: 17–18 cannot bring themselves to excuse it. 67. Schiesaro 2003: 201: “In Theseus’ anguished question at the sight of his dismembered son – Hippolytus hic est? (Sen. Phaed. 1249) – we can infer a much larger question of the nature of representation and the understanding behind it.” For Segal 1986: 217 this moment reveals the “autobiography” of the work itself. An engaging idea, even if it is somewhat divergent from my own reading. 68. Contrast Boyle 1997: 67: the play forms a whole in which natura is served: “The play ends in ritual and order (1275–80), as Hippolytus’ opening instructions to his fellow-hunters are echoed in those of Theseus to the same huntsmen (1277–79). The framework, the structure of things, rerum natura, remains constant.” 69. Costa 1973: 6–7: “[Seneca] has not on the whole a lyric bent, but occasionally there are passages of great beauty, like the lovely aubade in the first chorus of the Hercules Furens. For those who want a short-list of the better plays it might be said that the Troades, Medea, and Phaedra have on the whole less of the Senecan extravagance, and are the most palatable to modern taste.” 70. Of course, an author who is out of control might himself be inspired to sublime heights. Compare the convenient ancient fiction that Aeschylus was a drunk when he wrote: the plays are wonderful, but there is much in them that does not, strictly speaking, “make sense.” 71. Can/Do/Should we feel anything? See Leeman 1976: 211. And see the next chapter for the further development of this question. 72. Lacanians would call it Das Ding. 73. Kant 1951: 82: “The sublime, on the other hand, is to be found in a formless object, so far as in it or by occasion of it boundlessness is represented, and yet its totality is also present to thought” (original emphasis). Kant means the infinitely large, but Hippolytus’s infinite division and does-not-add-up problem offer an analogue. Compare Kant 1951: 108: “We may describe the sublime thus: it is an object (of nature) the representation of which determines the mind to think the unattainability of nature regarded as a presentation of ideas” (original emphasis). It is the manifestation of the inscrutability of nature, then. 74. Copjec 1994: 35. She continues: “The gaze, the object-cause of desire, is the object cause of the subject of desire in the field of the visible. In other words, it is what the subject does not see and not simply what it sees that founds it.” 75. Compare Dupont 1995: 17. 76. Compare Boyle 2012: lxx on Oedipus’s relationship to fate in Seneca’s Oedipus: “Though Oedipus’ freedom from fear and hope is apparent as he accepts the

Notes to pages 125–128

199

guilt of his fate, that fate is presented as malignant, and potently criticized as malignant by Oedipus (1042–6).” See also Boyle 2012: lxxv. 77. Thus while I sympathize with the suggestion of Schiesaro 2003: 21 that the plays express tensions that the prose is “unable to repress,” I do not actually opt for a psychological idiom to depict the relationship between the two projects even if I use psychoanalytic categories to explore the products of these projects. The plays strike me as explorations of truly difficult issues within the philosophical enterprise. In origin they are more a thought-experiment, then, than an uncontrolled eruption. See Rosenmeyer 1989: 123, 151: the philosophy offers themes and modes of thought that are worked through to different effect in the plays; meanwhile a pessimism and rogue stoicism that is latent in the prose gets fully expressed in the verse. Compare Auvray 1989: 5. Wray 2009: 250 also offers a useful place to begin: tragedy pleads the other side of the case of reason. But this other side does not necessarily have a bad case to make. And, for that matter, what of the issue of the very existence of the two sides? 78. See again Natural Questions 8.2 and Diogenes Laertius 7.86–87. 79. Grimal 1978: 394 lays out all of the terms, even if he ultimately assembles them rather differently: “La découverte de la sagesse, comme harmonie intérieur, apparaît comme d’un autre ordre: la découverte de l’harmonie du monde. L’une des originalités de Sénèque, l’une des plus riches de conséquences, est d’avoir remplacé le Naturam sequi par un Deum sequere.” 7 THE LAST MONSTER 1. Chrysippus says that Hercules becomes a god as a reward for his benefactions to mankind (SVF 1009). Cicero asserts that the story of Hercules’ labors is evidence of a natural and general impulse towards benefitting others (Cicero, On Ends 3.65). Hercules is also an allegorical figure within Stoic theology. See Cornutus, De natura deorum 63 and Plutarch, Isis and Osiris 367c. The Stoics seem, then, to find Hercules to be “good to think with.” But Seneca’s specifically tragic story of crime and compulsion complicates the generally rosy portrait of Hercules when he is evoked within philosophical discussions. 2. Contrast the Foucauldian insistence of Veyne 2003: viii: “We cannot stress enough that this was an art of living, not a ‘morality’.” Compare Veyne 2003: 31: “obeying nature” is not a central issue because “[W]hat always prevails is care for oneself.” Veyne 2003: x is interested in Seneca precisely because the Kantian imperative is not there. And yet Seneca pens his art of living with an eye to sublime questions of right and wrong. And even if we ourselves wish to be empirical and sociological, it remains an empirical fact that Seneca reflected on metaphysics and morality. See Veyne 2003: 71 where the Kantian metaphysics of morals and its relationship to Stoicism does in fact get discussed. But then see Veyne 2003: 127–28 for a prolix articulation of the position that “care of the self ” matters and Kantian ethics does not. One does not need Foucault’s help to make this point: Egermann 1972: 34 (originally published in 1940) makes substantially the same observation.

200

Notes to pages 128–131

3. Throughout: when I say “pure reason” I am talking about “pure speculative reason” in contradistinction to “practical reason.” 4. But tragic Hercules is not quite the same figure as a Stoic hero. See Rosenmeyer 1989: 25. See Fitch 1987: 15–20 on his fundamental ambiguity outside the play. Compare Billerbeck and Guex 2002: 22–25. For my purposes, Seneca’s Hercules is philosophically significant, but not because of any particular adherence to or exemplification of Stoic orthodoxies on his part. Rosenmeyer 1989 also argues against reading for orthodoxy per se. See Lawall 1983: 6 and Motto and Clark 1981: 101–3 on readings of the play that try to shoe-horn it into the categories laid out by Aristotle’s Poetics. Fitch 1987: 35, 42 warns us not to let a pre-existing sense of what ought to happen distract us from interpreting what does happen. Littlewood 2004: 107–27 examines the intertextual aspects of the play. The elaborate web of literary references time and again yields irony, ambivalence, and disruption. The likelihood of a “straight” Stoic allegory withers. One has to deal with apt observations such as “[i]n this tragedy Herculean uirtus (115) is an imitation of and a model for the scelus which Juno intends (121). Juno and Hercules are inseparable from one another” (Littlewood 2004: 117). 5. A major motif of Senecan drama is the conflict between passion and reason. See Herington 1966: 455–56. But in this play the very passion–reason dyad itself is at issue. I concur with the terms and even the basic modality of Auvray 1989: 7 without, though, agreeing with her ideas about the movement from suffering to wisdom: “[I]l semble que la tragédie parvienne . . . à concevoir, en le représentant, le passage de la grandeur humain à la raison universelle, du sublime de la révolte furieuse au sublime de l’acceptation rationnelle” (emphasis added). Substitute “beauté” for the second “sublime” and one has the framework for my own general argument concerning the “passage”/translatio that is at issue in these plays. 6. Zupančič 2000: 71. 7. Zupančič 2000: 74. 8. Zupančič 2000: 77. 9. The Freudian version of this story is more familiar. Its star is the persecutory superego. 10. See von Fritz 1972 on the gulf between guilt in Greek tragedy and Senecan tragedy. Compare Opelt 1972: 92–93. For a survey and critique of the scholarly debate over Hercules’ guilt see Motto and Clark 1981: 108–13. Compare Shelton 1978: 58–59. My own use of the term is, of course, effectively ironic: Hercules is ultimately guilty only of being himself. 11. Inwood 2005: 292–93 offers a positive evaluation of perspective and detachment in Senecan philosophy. 12. The normative ideal as a specifically literary possibility – even as the same is an empirical impossibility – can be seen as a positive contribution provided by Seneca’s ethical thought (Inwood 2005: 296). Certain elements of philosophy proper, that is, only work within the domain of literary representation. 13. Boyle 1997: 106: the whole play is “a dramatic critique of the central Roman virtue, uirtus.” Compare Lawall 1983. See also Boyle 1997: 109 on this rethinking

Notes to pages 131–134

201

of Stoic Hercules. See Shelton 1978: 11–14 for the structural differences between Seneca’s treatment and that of Euripides as well as the significance of these differences. 14. Lawall 1983: 10: “All that comes earlier in the play is preparation for understanding Hercules’ final labor.” 15. See Schiesaro 2003: 186: “By creating a framework in which certain sections of the play appear to revolve back to a point in time that has already been treated, and by substituting iteration for linearity, these tragedies make repetition an essential modality of tragic representation.” 16. The last chapter of Rosenmeyer 1989 sees in the catalog an essential element of Senecan drama that answers specific dramatic needs. 17. Ker 2009b: 136: “The katabasis in the Hercules is more fully articulated [than what one sees in the Phaedra] as a medium for thinking about death.” Ker 2009b: 137: “Throughout the Hercules, the underworld also serves as a shifting point of reference in successive choral odes.” 18. Billerbeck and Guex 2002: 354: the sentiment has a number of parallels in Seneca’s tragedies. 19. The line picks up on Juno’s own reading of his labor. We will examine this shortly. The conceit also has a metapoetic quality in both locations: it can describe Seneca as well. 20. The Madness of Hercules 832–33: derat hoc solum numero laborum, | tertiae regem spoliare sortis. 21. See Pratt 1963: 201: this play is saturated with ideas of order. And further dimensions are also posited as interconnected, including the physical, mental, emotional, and cosmic. Compare Henry and Henry 1985: 79: “When a Senecan play shows us order in disintegration, this is a total kind of ruin, with chaos engulfing the cosmos, the worldly kingdom, the individual soul. The process is one, spreading on all three levels. It is rarely possible, within the play, to distinguish the processes that are taking place on these separate levels.” Segal 2008 discusses at length the strong internal/external correlation in Senecan drama. 22. Though there are substantial differences in our accounts, Bishop 1966 also emphasizes the question of cosmic order in this play. 23. Littlewood 2004: 76: “Juno’s prologue is a representation in a divine, supernatural mode, of human megalomania.” A version of this idea is worth bearing in mind throughout my reading of the play: the transcendental is ultimately a projection out there of the merely mortal. The significance of “accepting” the divine order is thus doubly subjective. It is a disavowed species of selfsubjection. 24. A transposition of line 49 to a position after line 54 is accepted by Fitch 1987, but it is not printed in Zwierlein 1985. Billerbeck 1999: 210–12 discusses the arguments for retaining the manuscript order. 25. Rosenmeyer 1989: 38–39 notes a correlation between Stoic paradoxes and tragic situations in general. And, moreover, “[T]he Senecan revolution made for a large-scale intensification of the obvious analogy between Stoicism and drama.”

202

Notes to pages 134–137

26. Compare von Albrecht 2004: 109–10. von Albrecht also stresses the need to connect this comsological preface to the Natural Questions. 27. See Aygon 2004: 310 on Juno’s descriptio: “Ces trois images, fondues dans celle du triomphe, expriment d’une manière hyperbolique à la fois le côté extraordinaire du spectacle et l’émotion de Junon: dolor (humiliation), ira (indignation de voir un dieu vaincu, Dis) et même metus, à la fin (tremor 61, timui 63).” 28. For an extensive discussion of Senecan meta-theater see Littlewood 2004: 172–258. 29. Shelton 1978: 48: the chorus has a “philosophy of non-involvement.” That is, they believe in detachment and objectivity (even if they are not themselves really detached and objective), and in effect they have already taken a position relative to the core problematics of the play. 30. The Madness of Hercules 870–74: tibi crescit omne, | et quod occasus uidet et quod ortus. | parce uenturis: tibi, mors, paramur; | sis licet segnis, properamus ipsi: | prima quae uitam dedit hora carpit. 31. The Madness of Hercules 884–85: et qua sol medium tenens | umbras corporibus negat. 32. Ecce homo. He is destiny. He will break the history of mankind in two. He is an event. Who is he? Why, Nietzsche, of course. See Nietzsche 1967 and Nietzsche 1997: 262–68. Compare Derrida 1988 and Zupančič 2003: 2–28. This Nietzsche character – reader of Ovid (nitimur in uetitum . . .), selfaggrandizing stylist, over-sharing hypochondriac, particular who insists on his universality – also reminds us of that Seneca fellow. 33. The interpretation of this scene has attracted a great deal of attention. There is a major split between camps: some see it as externally imposed, others as arising out of Hercules himself. The debate usually gets played out as a reflection of one’s views concerning the relationship between purported commitments of Seneca’s Stoic philosophy and the messages one sees in his plays. For a survey, see Billerbeck and Guex 2002: 25–29. Of course, internal and external are so often mutually entangled in the plays that it is not clear that positing a necessary antithesis is useful in this particular instance. 34. Henry and Henry 1985: 108: we note that Senecan irony and sarcasm are at work here when we compare it to the Troades and the Agamemnon and hear a Neronian echo as well. 35. What impiety, if any, do we find in this scene? This question has been variously answered. Lawall 1983: 13 reviews the debate and exculpates Hercules, his sacrifice, and his prayer. 36. Zwierlein 1985 prints the manuscript reading. And he points us back to the discussion of aër at the opening of Natural Questions 2. Fitch 1987, Billerbeck 1999, and Billerbeck and Guex 2002 all opt for the suggested emendation to aequor. Earth, sky, and sea as divisions of the universe are indeed a familiar triplet, and it fits easily here. However, the sea is remarkably under-represented in the play, so one might hesitate to insert it here. Aether intrigues: earth, medial medium, and heaven each in their place. This idea suits my sense of the

Notes to pages 138–143

37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50.

203

broader themes of the play even better as well as my own understanding of the Natural Questions. See Pratt 1983: 22–24 for a table of comparisons between the plays of Euripides and Seneca. The plots of both plays are set side by side at Billerbeck and Guex 2002: 10–19. A commentary on Seneca’s dramatic choices is included. Friedrich 1972 surveys the similarities and interprets the play in light of the salient differences. Zintzen 1972 makes a similar effort with an emphasis on the philosophical force of the variations. NB: the present order, though orderly, is also criminal. It is not just Juno who’s bad. Compare Littlewood 2004: 119–20. One notes that Iphicles has gone missing: the play strips out the extant earthly brother. Instead it conjures the idea of a hypothetical sublime one. Of course, Iphicles and Hercules share only a mother, and not a father . . . The Madness of Hercules 1184–85: genitor, tuique nominis semper mihi | numen secundum, fare: quis fudit domum? Lawall 1983: 18: “It is one of the deepest ironies of the play that this monstrum is the very answer to his own impassioned request at the end of his great prayer for peace (937–39).” The Madness of Hercules 1293–94: onus omne media parte quod mundi sedet | dirimitque superos, in meum uertam caput. The Madness of Hercules 1343–44: illa te, Alcide, uocat, facere innocentes terra quae superos solet. On this motif, compare Zupančič 2000: 101ff. Cf. Zupančič 2000: 118: “It’s not my fault” is an admission of guilt. Zupančič 2000: 165. Zupančič 2000: 182: The subject becomes guilty when the desire of the Other becomes the desire of the subject. Hercules refuses, that is, to be a Nietzschean heroic poet/philosopher/worldhistorical actor. Hercules refuses to go “beyond good and evil” and adopt that perspective which transcends the very transcendental schema that condemns him. The following, then, utterly fails to describe Hercules the Stoic hero: “People are familiar with my call for the philosopher to place himself beyond good and evil – to have the illusion of moral judgement beneath him . . . Moral judgement has this in common with religious judgement, that it believes in realities which do not exist. Morality is merely an interpretation of certain phenomena, more precisely a misinterpretation” (Nietzsche 1998: 33) (original emphasis). Accordingly, Shelton 1978: 66 captures the problem of the play while also missing the mark: “[Seneca believes] that the tragic hero must recognize himself as the cause of his own misfortune. The recognition is the real tragedy, not the murders.” Hercules recognizes that his hand did the deed, but he fails to recognize that in supporting the transcendental in general he has also willed the very system that makes him guilty in spite of his intentions. Contrast the Stoic exaltation of Hercules and a heroism defined as a freedom to act (Rosenmeyer 1989: 86). Seneca’s Hercules needs to find a space for freedom

204

Notes to pages 143–148

within a general structure of constraint: he grapples with the human condition rather than enjoying the divine one. See also Motto and Clark 1981: 101. 51. On this labor as a labor see Motto and Clark 1981: 105. 52. By another name: the object-cause of desire, objet petit a. See Zupančič 2000: 230. 53. Compare Zupančič 2000: 232. See also Kant 1998: 35: “[T]he sublimity and inner dignity of the command in a duty is all the more manifest the fewer are the subjective causes in favor of it and the more there are against it.” 54. Zupančič 2000: 249. 55. Zupančič 2000: 253. 56. See Zupančič 2000: 158 on the safe spectator of destruction. 57. Lacan 2006a: 423: “We see that metaphor is situated at the precise point at which meaning is produced in nonmeaning.” 58. Compare Auvray 1989: 33: “Doit-on comprendre au contraire que le dépassement de soi vers la sagesse est toujours menacé par un dénouement tragique?” 59. Hine thinks that his impartial reading of Senecan tragedy – one where the plays invite “ethical reflection” – saves him from the commitments of specific philosophizing interpretations (see Hine 2004: 208–9). I agree that “ethical reflection” is an essential consequence of these plays, but being offered an ethical spectacle qua spectacle entails being swept up within a specific Senecan apparatus that constrains our own ethical position in advance. 60. Zupančič 2000: 153: what is sublime from the perspective of the superego is ridiculous from the perspective of the ego. 61. Lacan 2006b: 663: “If happiness means that the subject finds uninterrupted pleasure in his life, as the Critique of Practical Reason defines it quite classically, it is clear that happiness is denied to whomever does not renounce the pathway of desire. This renunciation can be willed, but at the cost of man’s truth . . . [In Sade] it is the freedom to desire that is a new factor . . . because this revolution wants its struggle to be for the freedom to desire.” CONCLUSION: THE METAPHYSICS OF SENECAN MORALS 1. See Trovato 2005: 238–42. Trovato can be used to fill in some of the gaps left by Ker 2009b. 2. Of course, Seneca is properly just “Seneca,” the persona that seems to speak to us from his pages. See Long 2009: 30 and his bibliography. 3. See Butler 1997: 1–41 on Althusser and Austin. 4. The philosophy is not just an account of truth, it is also an element of a virtuoso production. See Habinek 2000: 284 where four elements of “cultural virtuosity” are flagged: the theatricalization of power; writing as performance; the representation of politics via ethics; and the privileging of general over specific discourse. “[T]he Senecan text assimilates the elite Roman’s vested interest in preserving his privileges to the interest of the whole human society, past and

Notes to pages 148–151

5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

205

present” (Habinek 1998: 148). Both Habinek 1998: 137–50 and Habinek 2000 emphasize the theme of social reproduction as key to an appreciation of Seneca’s project. As an example: the neighbor is a contemporary ethical issue. A number of prominent figures have taken up the theme. See, for instance, Badiou 2001; Lévinas 1998; Schmitt 2005; and Žižek et al. 2005. See Long 2009: 35–36. Compare Ierodiakonou 1998 on the reception of Stoic thought over time. She is particularly interested in the story of Stoicism’s radical devaluation in the nineteenth century and its rediscovery in the twentieth. See Derrida 1988 on the problems of propriety when it comes both to Nietzsche as well as the time of writing. The seventh and eighth theses of Feuerbach: everything is social. We like these two. But many theses remain. Of particular import is the second: thinking is tied to reality and to power and to practice. But the thinking in question here is not someone else’s thinking. Instead it is our very own thinking. The critic is a subject, indeed a potentially revolutionary subject (eleventh thesis). And the critic who forgets this slides back into a Feuerbachian stance: everything is a mere object of contemplation (first thesis). However, the philologist will not hear the call on point of principle: Marx uses the word “philosopher,” not “scholar.” See Marx 1976. Noch einmal: quae philosophia fuit facta philologia est. Lost Stoic dogma is reconstructed via readings of Seneca. The enterprise is valid, but it moots a key Senecan trope: a critique of dogma as a means of “doing” Stoicism. See Nehamas 1985. See Derrida 1986. See Hyppolite 1974: 11. This mode of reading Hegel is resumed by Butler 1999. The ending is a problem as well: Gellius claims to have read from Book 22, we only have a Book 20. Spirit is history: see Hyppolite 1974: 31. Hyppolite 1974: 49. Compare Adorno on reading Hegel (Adorno 1993). On the one hand, “[t]he substance of Hegel’s philosophy is process” (Adorno 1993: 121). Meanwhile, on the other, the subject constantly moves in relation to its object (Adorno 1993: 99). A key “object” under study in the Phenomenology is self-consciousness. No simple presentation of this object to some subject is possible. Nevertheless, one may attempt to engage in a process that brings the subject into a new kind of relationship to the object. For Adorno this process when written yields the Hegelian “antitext.” But it must be noted that Adorno does not credit Hegel with mastery of this process, or even a full awareness of it. And so every faithful reader of Hegel necessarily becomes a critic of Hegel (Adorno 1993: 146). Hegel 1977: 39–40. See again Moral Letters 5.4: nempe propositum nostrum est secundum naturam uiuere.

206

Notes to pages 151–154

19. Recall as well the discussion of philosophical resolve and the doubling of the matter of matter at Letter 108.24: multum autem ad rem pertinet quo proposito ad quamquam rem accedas. 20. Hegel 1977: 121: “This freedom of self-consciousness when it appeared as a conscious manifestation in the history of Spirit has, as we know, been called Stoicism. Its principle is that consciousness is a being that thinks, and that consciousness holds something to be essentially important, or true and good only in so far as it thinks it to be such.” 21. Hegel 1977: 121: “[W]hether on the throne or in chains, in the utter dependence of its individual existence, its aim is to be free, and to maintain that lifeless indifference which steadfastly withdraws from the bustle of existence, alike from being active as passive, into the simple essentiality of thought.” 22. Hegel 1977: 122: “Freedom in thought has only pure thought as its truth, a truth lacking the fullness of life. Hence freedom in thought, too, is only the Notion of freedom, not the living reality of freedom itself.” 23. Hegel 1977: 122: “The True and the Good, wisdom and virtue, the general terms beyond which Stoicism cannot get, are therefore in a general way no doubt uplifting, but since they cannot in fact produce any expansion of the content, they soon become tedious.” Compare Hyppolite 1974: 182–83. 24. Hegel 1977: 126: “This new form [i.e., the Unhappy Consciousness] is, therefore, one which knows that it is the dual consciousness of itself, as selfliberating, unchangeable, and self-identical, and as self-bewildering and selfperverting, and it is the awareness of this self-contradictory nature of itself . . . [T]he Unhappy Consciousness is the consciousness of self as a dual-natured, merely contradictory being.” 25. It might be helpful, then, to say something about the dates of the key texts under investigation. The Consolations are among the earliest prose works that we still have, but they are placed in the middle of this book. The Consolation to Marcia may well be the earliest preserved work of Seneca (Grimal 1978: 266), although Seneca is probably over 40 years old when this appears. The Natural Questions and Moral Letters are among Seneca’s last efforts. They are discussed first. The dating of the plays is a notorious problem (Coffey and Mayer 1990: 3–5, Grimal 1978: 424, and Tarrant 1985: 10–13), but the ones discussed here are effectively “early” texts. Unusually for a work of Seneca, The Madness of Hercules might have a quasi-date: before 54 ce. See Fitch 1981: 289. If one accepts Fitch’s stylistic arguments, the Phaedra is earlier than The Madness of Hercules (Fitch 1981: 307). On the general lack of dates for the works of the corpus see Griffin 1976: 1–2. But see Griffin 1976: 395–411 for a reconstruction of the dates of the prose works. Compare the schema of Grimal 1978: 457–60. 26. And it is not just ethics. The Phaedra can be used to explode the Natural Questions. 27. Compare, then, Hegel on tragedy: tragedy has a philosophical content, and hence the several readings of the Antigone (see especially Hegel 1977: 279–89). Conversely philosophy itself contains tragedy within its broader narrative arc: the Unhappy Consciousness is “tragic” (Hegel 1977: 454–56). And Hegel

Notes to pages 155–156

207

deploys this comment not as a mere trope or analogy. Tragedy is a fundamental part of the Phenomenology of Spirit and no mere figure of speech found within The Phenomenology of Spirit. 28. See especially Schiesaro 2003. The two topics are regularly addressed throughout the volume. But Schiesaro’s emphasis is on the role of the passions, not on reason’s role: the author is an author of crime, watching is feeling, and so forth. Seneca is exploring the dark obverse of his favored philosophical themes. Fitch 1981 argues for a late date for the Thyestes. 29. See Hegel 1977: 123. 30. The English translation is perhaps less explicit than the German on this point: “Der Skeptizismus ist die Realisierung desjenigen, wovon der Stoizismus nur der Begriff, – und die wirkliche Erfahrung, was die Freiheit des Gedankens ist; sie ist an sich das Negative, und muß sich so darstellen” (Hegel 1988: 140). Hyppolite 1974: 185: “[S]kepticism discovers that omnis determinatio est negatio.” 31. Thyestes 1055: uerba sunt irae datae; 1066: cecidit in cassum dolor. 32. Hegel 1977: 124. 33. See Lefèvre 1981: 36 on the yoked tragic-cum-philosophical paradoxes of Seneca: “On the one hand, the paradox of Seneca’s philosophy: That man is free who recognizes God and submits to his will. On the other, the paradox of Seneca’s tragedies: That man is truly unfree who does not recognize God and makes himself a god – a living example of the unfreedom of freedom.” Lefèvre argues that the liberated nihilists of the tragedies worship as God only a projection of their inner selves. Let us gloss this more fully in light of this conclusion. Formally, the situation of a Medea is identical to the subjected wise: in both instances individual logos is seemingly correlated to transcendental logos. The only difference is the point from which one sets forth in order to generate the correlation: do we begin from the particular or from the universal? But in each case there is a failure to mediate the here and the there in a satisfactory manner. Stoic freedom passes into alienation and negation. Skeptical self-assertion turns into subjection to the passions, and these are new, false gods. 34. See Hegel 1977: 128. See Hyppolite 1974: 13: skepticism provides an introduction to metaphysics. 35. Seneca even meets the preliminary requirements of a Derridean presentation, without, of course, himself being deconstructive. The following programmatic statement from Derrida could be translated into Senecan terms: “A discourse on life/death must occupy a certain space between logos and gramme, analogy and program, as well as between the differing senses of program and reproduction. And since life is on the line, the trait that relates the logical to the graphical must also be working between the biological and biographical, the thanatological and the thanatographical” (Derrida 1988: 4–5). And both Nietzsche and Seneca are worried that the question, “What is a friend?” might get rewritten as “What is a professor?” See Derrida 1988: 36–38. 36. I see another dangerous solution in the structure of “willing.” See Inwood 2005: 132–56 on (prose) volition in Seneca. The issue has a long scholarly history. Inwood 2005: 143 argues that Seneca’s innovation lies in his extended

208

Notes to page 156

explorations of the “second-order quality of our mental lives (i.e., when the mind takes itself as its own object).” In self-command the agent is both subject and object of exhortations (Inwood 2005: 146–47). And evaluation comes via (legal) spectatorship of the self as (potentially guilty) object: iudicium, arbitrium, iudex . . . (Inwood 2005: 152–53). A solution is “staged”: the formal character of the Last Judgement is embraced. The transcendental perspective then becomes an element of the self-relation. Progress is enabled, but it leaves all of us non-sages permanently guilty as we move along the road to improvement. Every man a last monster, then. 37. For the project, see Porter 2000.

Bibliography

Adorno, T. W. (1993) “Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel” in Hegel: Three Studies. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 89–148 Algra, K. (2003) “Stoic Theology” in B. Inwood (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 153–78 Anonymous (2009) Nox Philologiae: Aulus Gellius and the Fantasy of the Roman Library. Madison, WI, University of Wisconsin Press Armisen-Marchetti, M. (1989) Sapientiae Facies: Étude sur les Images de Sénèque. Paris, Belles Lettres (1991) “La Métaphor et l’Abstraction dans la Prose de Sénèque” in P. Grimal (ed.), Sénèque et la Prose Latine: Neuf Exposés Suivis de Discussions. Vandoeuvres–Geneva, Fondation Hardt, 99–139 (1996) “La Langue Philosophique de Sénèque: Entre Technicité et Simplicité” Antike und Abendland 42, 76–84 Asmis, E. (2009) “Seneca on Fortune and the Kingdom of God” in S. Bartsch and D. Wray (eds.), Seneca and the Self. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 115–38 Auvray, C.-E. (1989) Folie et Douleur dans Hercule Furieux et Hercule sur l’Oeta: Recherches sur l’Expression Esthétique de l’Ascèse Stoïcienne chez Sénèque. Frankfurt am Main, P. Lang Aygon, J.-P. (2004) Pictor in Fabula: L’Ecphrasis-Descriptio dans les Tragédies de Sénèque. Brussels, Editions Latomus Badiou, A. (2001) Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. London, Verso Bal, M. (1985) Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto, University of Toronto Press Barnes, J. (1997) Logic and the Imperial Stoa. Leiden, Brill Barton, C. A. (1992) The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the Monster. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press Bartsch, S. (1994) Actors in the Audience: Theatricality and Doublespeak from Nero to Hadrian. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press (2006) The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire. Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press (2009) “Senecan Metaphor and Stoic Self-Instruction” in S. Bartsch and D. Wray (eds.), Seneca and the Self. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 188–217 209

210

Bibliography

Bartsch, S. and D. Wray (2009) Seneca and the Self. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press Batinski, E. (1993) “Seneca’s Response to Stoic Hermeneutics” Mnemosyne 46, 69–77 Berno, F. R. (2003) Lo Specchio, il Vizio e la Virtù: Studio sulle Naturales Quaestiones di Seneca. Quarto Inferiore, Bologna, Pàtron Bersani, L. (1987) “Is the Rectum a Grave?” October 43, 197–222 Bickel, E. (1959) “Kant und Seneca: Der bestirnte Himmel über mir und das moralische Gesetz in mir” Rheinisches Museum fu¨r Philologie 102, 289–92 Billerbeck, M. (1999) Hercules Furens. Einleitung, Text, Übersetzung und Kommentar. Leiden, Brill Billerbeck, M. and S. Guex (2002) Sénèque, Hercule Furieux: Introduction, Texte, Traduction et Commentaire. Bern, P. Lang Bishop, J. D. (1966) “Seneca’s Hercules Furens: Tragedy from Modus Vitae” Classica et Mediaevalia 27, 216–24 Bobzien, S. (2003) “Logic” in B. Inwood (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 85–123 Bourdieu, P. (1990) The Logic of Practice. Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press Bourgery, A. (1922) Sénèque Prosateur: Études Littéraires et Grammaticales sur la Prose de Sénèque le Philosophe. Paris, Les Belles Lettres Boyle, A. J. (1983) “Introduction” in A. J. Boyle (ed.), Seneca Tragicus: Ramus Essays on Senecan Drama. Berwick, Vic., Aureal Publications, 256 (1997) Tragic Seneca: An Essay in the Theatrical Tradition. London, Routledge (2012) Seneca: Oedipus. Oxford, Oxford University Press Branham, R. B. and M.-O. Goulet-Cazé (1996) “Introduction” in R. B. Branham and M.-O. Goulet-Cazé (eds.), The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and its Legacy. Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1–27 Brunschwig, J. (1988) “La Théorie Stoïcienne du Genre Suprême et l’Ontologie Platonicienne” in J. Barnes and M. Mignucci (eds.), Matter and Metaphysics: Fourth Symposium Hellenisticum. Naples, Bibliopolis, 20–127 (2003) “Stoic Metaphysics” in B. Inwood (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 206–32 Busch, A. (2009) “Dissolution of the Self in the Senecan Corpus” in S. Bartsch and D. Wray (eds.), Seneca and the Self. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 255–80 Butler, J. (1997) Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York, Routledge (1999) Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. New York, Columbia University Press Cancik, H. (1967) Untersuchungen zu Senecas Epistulae Morales. Hildesheim, G. Olms, Chaumartin, F.-R. (1996) “La Nature dans les Questions Naturelles de Sénèque” in C. Lévy (ed.), Le Concept de Nature à Rome: La Physique: Actes du Séminaire de Philosophie Romaine de l’Université de Paris XII–Val de Marne (1992–1993). Paris, Presses de l’École Normale Supérieure, 177–90. Coffey, M. and R. Mayer (1990) Seneca: Phaedra. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press

Bibliography

211

Coleman, R. (1974) “The Artful Moralist: A Study of Seneca’s Epistolary Style” Classical Quarterly 24 n.s., 276–89 Copjec, J. (1994) Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press Cordoñer, C. (1989) “La Physique de Sénèque: Ordonnance et Structure des ‘Naturales Quaestiones’” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt 36.3, 1779–822 Costa, C. D. N. (1973) Seneca: Medea. Oxford, Clarendon Press (1995) “Rhetoric in Seneca’s Prose Works” in D. Innes, H. M. Hine, and C. B. R. Pelling (eds.), Ethics and Rhetoric: Classical Essays for Donald Russell on His Seventy-Fifth Birthday. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 107–15 Currie, H. (1966) “The Younger Seneca’s Style: Some Observations” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 13, 76–87 Davis, P. J. (1983) “Vindicat Omnes Natura Sibi: A Reading of Seneca’s Phaedra” in A. J. Boyle (ed.), Seneca Tragicus: Ramus Essays on Senecan Drama. Berwick, Vic., Aureal Publications, 114–27 DeLacy, P. (1948) “Stoic Views of Poetry” American Journal of Philology 69, 241–71 Deleuze, G. (1994) Difference and Repetition. New York, NY, Columbia University Press Derrida, J. (1976) Of Grammatology. Spivak, G. (trans.), Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press (1981) Dissemination. Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press (1986) Glas. Lincoln, NB, University of Nebraska Press (1988) “Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name” in C. McDonald (ed.), The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Texts and Discussions with Jacques Derrida. Lincoln, NB, University of Nebraska Press, 1–38 Dupont, F. (1985) L’Acteur-Roi, ou, le Théâtre dans la Rome Antique. Paris, Belles Lettres (1995) Les Monstres de Sénèque: pour une Dramaturgie de la Tragédie Romaine. Paris, Belin Edwards, C. (1997) “Unspeakable Professions: Public Performance and Prostitution in Ancient Rome” in J. P. Hallett and M. B. Skinner (eds.), Roman Sexualities. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 66–95 (2005) “Response to Shadi Bartsch” in S. Bartsch and T. Bartscherer (eds.), Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern. Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 84–90 (2008) “Self-Scrutiny and Self-Transformation in Seneca’s Letters” in J. G. Fitch (ed.), Seneca. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 84–101 Egermann, F. (1972) “Seneca als Dichterphilosoph” in E. Lefèvre (ed.), Senecas Tragödien. Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 33–57 Faggin, G. (1967) “Il Misticismo Astrale di Seneca” Atene e Roma 12, 23–37 Fantham, E. (2007) “Dialogues of Displacement: Seneca’s Consolations to Helvia and Polybius” in J. F. Gaertner (ed.), Writing Exile: The Discourse of Displacement in Greco-Roman Antiquity and Beyond. Leiden, Brill, 173–92

212

Bibliography

Feldstein, R. (1995) “The Phallic Gaze of Wonderland” in R., Feldstein, B. Fink, and M. Jaanus (eds.), Reading Seminar XI: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Albany, NY, State University of New York Press, 149–74 Ferrel, A. (1966) “Seneca’s Exile and the Ad Helviam: A Reinterpretation” Classical Philology 61, 253–57 Ferri, R. (2003) Octavia: A Play Attributed to Seneca. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press Fitch, J. (1981) “Sense-Pauses and Relative Dating in Seneca, Sophocles, and Shakespeare” American Journal of Philology 102, 289–307 (1987) Seneca’s Hercules Furens: A Critical Text with Introduction and Commentary. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press Foucault, M. (1973) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York, NY, Vintage Books (1988) The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, vol. 3. R. Hurley (trans.), New York, NY, Vintage Books (1990) The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, vol. 2. New York, NY, Vintage Books (1997a) “What is an Author?” in P. Rabinow (ed.), The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 2, Aestetics, Method, and Epistemology. New York, NY, New Press, 205–22 (1997b) “The Hermeneutic of the Subject” in P. Rabinow (ed.), Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 1. New York, NY, New Press, 93–106 (1997c) “Self Writing” in P. Rabinow (ed.), Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol 1. New York, NY, New Press, 207–22 (1997d) “Technologies of the Self” in P. Rabinow (ed.), Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 1. New York, NY, New Press, 223–51 Friedrich, W. H. (1972) “Die Raserei des Hercules” in E. Lefèvre (ed.), Senecas Tragödien. Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 131–48 Fuhrmann, M. (1997) Seneca und Kaiser Nero: Eine Biographie. Berlin, Alexander Fest Gauly, B. M. (2004) Senecas Naturales Quaestiones: Naturphilosophie fu¨r die Römische Kaiserzeit. Munich, C.H. Beck Gill, C. (2003) “The School in the Roman Imperial Period” in B. Inwood (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 33–58 (2009) “Seneca and Selfhood: Integration and Disintegration” in S. Bartsch and D. Wray (eds.), Seneca and the Self. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 65–83 Graver, M. (1998) “The Manhandling of Maecenas: Senecan Abstractions of Masculinity” American Journal of Philology 119, 607–32 Griffin, M. T. (1976) Seneca: A Philosopher in Politics. Oxford, Clarendon Press

Bibliography

213

(2003) “Seneca as Sociologist: De Beneficiis” in V. De Arturo and C. Lo Elio (eds.), Seneca, Uomo Politico, e l’Età di Claudio e di Nerone: Atti del Convegno Internazionale, Capri, 25–27 Marzo 1999. Bari, Edipuglia, 89–122 Grimal, P. (1963) “L’Originalité de Sénèque dans la Tragédie de Phèdre” Revue des Études Latines 41, 297–314 (1978) Sénèque: ou, la Conscience de L’Empire. Paris, Belles Lettres (1989) “Sénèque et le Stoîcisme Romain” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt 36.3, 1962–92 Gross, N. (1989) Senecas Naturales Quaestiones: Komposition, Naturphilosophische Aussagen und ihre Quellen. Stuttgart, F. Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden Gunderson, E. (1996) “The Ideology of the Arena” Classical Antiquity 15, 113–51 (1997) “Catullus, Pliny, and Love-Letters” Transactions of the American Philological Association 127, 201–31 (2000) Staging Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Performance in the Roman World. Ann Arbor, MI, University of Michigan Press (2007) “S.V.B.; E.V.” Classical Antiquity 26, 1–48 Habinek, T. N. (1998) The Politics of Latin Literature: Writing, Identity, and Empire in Ancient Rome. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press (2000) “Seneca’s Renown: Gloria, Claritudo, and the Replication of the Roman Elite” Classical Antiquity 19, 264–303 (2005) The World of Roman Song: From Ritualized Speech to Social Order. Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press Hachmann, E. (1995) Die Fu¨hrung des Lesers in Senecas Epistulae Morales. Münster, Aschendorff Hadot, I. (1969) Seneca und die Griechisch-Römische Tradition der Seelenleitung. Berlin, de Gruyter Hahm, D. E. (1977) The Origins of Stoic Cosmology. Columbus, OH, Ohio State University Press Hamacher, U. G. (2006) Senecas 82. Brief an Lucilius: Dialektikkritik Illustriert am Beispiel der Bekämpfung des Metus Mortis: Ein Kommentar. Munich, K. G. Saur Hegel, G. W. F. (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit. A. V. Miller (trans.), Oxford, Clarendon Press (1988) Phänomenologie des Geistes. Hamburg, Meiner Henderson, J. (1999) Writing Down Rome: Satire, Comedy, and Other Offences in Latin Poetry. Oxford, Clarendon Press (2004) Morals and Villas in Seneca’s Letters: Places to Dwell. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press (2006) “Journey of a Lifetime: Seneca, Epistle 57 in Book VI of EM” in K. Volk and G. D. Williams (eds.), Seeing Seneca Whole: Perspectives on Philosophy, Poetry, and Politics. Leiden, Brill, 123–46 Henry, D. and E. Henry (1985) The Mask of Power: Seneca’s Tragedies and Imperial Rome. Chicago, IL, Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers Henry, D. and B. Walker (1983) “The Oedipus of Seneca: An Imperial Tragedy” in A. J. Boyle, (ed.), Seneca Tragicus: Ramus Essays on Senecan Drama. Berwick, Vic., Aureal Publications, 128–39

214

Bibliography

Herington, C. J. (1966) “Senecan Tragedy” Arion 5, 422–71 Hill, T. (2004) Ambitiosa Mors: Suicide and the Self in Roman Thought and Literature. New York, NY, Routledge Hine, H. M. (1981) An Edition with Commentary of Seneca, Natural Questions, Book Two. New York, NY, Arno Press (1996) L. Annaei Senecae Naturalium Quaestionum Libri. Stuttgart, B.G. Teubner (2004) “Interpretatio Stoica of Senecan Tragedy” in W.-L. Liebermann et al. (eds.), Sénèque le Tragique: Huit Exposés Suivis de Discussions. Geneva, Fondation Hardt, 173–209 (2006) “Rome, the Cosmos, and the Emperor in Seneca’s ‘Natural Questions’” Journal of Roman Studies 96, 42–72 (2009) “Seneca’s Naturales Quaestiones 1960–2005 (Part 1)” Lustrum 51, 253–329 (2010) “Seneca’s Naturales Quaestiones 1960–2005 (Part 2) with Addenda Covering 2006” Lustrum 52, 8–160 Honderich, T. (2005) The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford, Oxford University Press Hutchinson, G. O. (1993) Latin Literature from Seneca to Juvenal: A Critical Study. Oxford, Oxford University Press (1998) Cicero’s Correspondence: A Literary Study. Oxford, Oxford University Press Hyppolite, J. (1974) Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press Ierodiakonou, K. (1998) “Introduction. The Study of Stoicism: Its Decline and Revival” in K. Ierodiakonou (ed.), Topics in Stoic Philosophy. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1–22 Inwood, B. (2005) Reading Seneca: Stoic Philosophy at Rome. Oxford, Oxford University Press (2007a) “Seneca, Plato, and Platonism: The Case of Letter 65” in M. Bonazzi and C. Helmig (eds.), Platonic Stoicism, Stoic Platonism: The Dialogue Between Platonism and Stoicism in Antiquity. Leuven, Leuven University Press, 149–67 (2007b) Seneca: Selected Philosophical Letters. Oxford, Oxford University Press (2007c) “The Importance of Form in Seneca’s Philosophical Letters” in R. Morello and A. D. Morrison (eds.), Ancient Letters: Classical and Late Antique Epistolography. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 133–48 (2009) “Seneca and Self Assertion” in S. Bartsch and D. Wray (eds.), Seneca and the Self. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 39–64 Irigaray, L. (1993) An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press Jakobi, R. (1988) Der Einfluss Ovids auf den Tragiker Seneca. Berlin, De Gruyter Kant, I. (1951) Critique of Judgement. J. H. Bernard (trans.), New York, NY, Hafner (1988) Critique of Practical Reason. L. W. Beck (trans.), New York, NY, Macmillan (1998) Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. M. Gregor (trans.), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press Ker, J. (2006) “Seneca, Man of Many Genres” in K. Volk and G. D. Williams (eds.), Seeing Seneca Whole: Perspectives on Philosophy, Poetry, and Politics. Leiden, Brill, 19–41

Bibliography

215

(2009a) “Seneca on Self-Examination: Rereading on Anger 3.36” in S. Bartsch and D. Wray (eds.), Seneca and the Self. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 160–87 (2009b) The Deaths of Seneca. Oxford, Oxford University Press Kugelmeier, C. (2007) Die Innere Vergegenwärtigung des Bu¨hnenspiels in Senecas Tragödien. Munich, C.H. Beck Küppers, J. (1996) “‘Kosmosschau’ und ‘Virtus’ in den Philosophica Senecas” Antike und Abenland 42, 57–75 Lacan, J. (1981) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. New York, NY, Norton (2006a) “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious” Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York, NY, Norton, 412–41 (2006b) “Kant with Sade” Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York, NY, Norton, 645–68 (2006c) “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York, NY, Norton, 75–81 Lampe, K. (2008) “Seneca’s Nausea” Helios 35, 67–87 Langlands, R. (2004) “A Woman’s Influence on a Roman Text: Marcia and Seneca” in F. McHardy and E. Marshall (eds.), Women’s Influence on Classical Civilization. London, Routledge, 115–26 Lavery, G. (1980) “Metaphors of War and Travel in Seneca’s Prose Works” Greece and Rome 27, 147–57 Lawall, G. (1983) “Virtus and Pietas in Seneca’s Hercules Furens” in A. J. Boyle, (ed.), Seneca Tragicus: Ramus Essays on Senecan Drama. Berwick, Vic., Aureal Publications, 6–26 Leeman, A. D. (1953) “Seneca’s Plans for a Work ‘Moralis Philosophia’ and their Influence on his Later Epistles” Memnosyne 6, 307–13 (1976) “Seneca’s Phaedra as a Stoic Tragedy” in J. Bremmer, S. Radt, and C. Ruijgh (eds.), Miscellanea Tragica in Honorem J.C. Kamerbeek. Hakkert, Amsterdam, 199–212 Lefèvre, E. (1969) “Quid Ratio Possit? Senecas Phaedra als Stoisches Drama” Wiener Studien 3 n.f., 131–60 (1981) “A Cult Without God or the Unfreedom of Freedom in Seneca Tragicus” Classical Journal 77, 32–36 Leitão, D. (1998) “Senecan Catoptrics and the Passion of Hostius Quadra (Sen. Nat. 1)” Materiali e Discussioni per l’Analisi dei Testi Classici 41, 127–60 Lévinas, E. (1998) Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other. New York, NY, Columbia University Press Littlewood, C. A. J. (2004) Self-Representation and Illusion in Senecan Tragedy. Oxford, Oxford University Press Lloyd, G. E. R. (1996) Aristotelian Explorations. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press Long, A. A. (1986) Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics. Berkeley, CA, University of California Press

216

Bibliography

(1996) “The Socratic Tradition: Diogenes, Crates, and Hellenistic Ethics” in R. B. Branham and M.-O. Goulet-Cazé (eds.), The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy. Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 28–46 (2005) “Stoic Psychology” in K. Algra et al. (eds.), The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 560–84 (2009) “Seneca on the Self: Why Now?” in S. Bartsch and D. Wray (eds.), Seneca and the Self. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 20–36 Long, A. A. and D. N. Sedley (1987a) The Hellenistic Philosophers. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press (1987b) The Hellenistic Philosophers. Vol. 1, Translations of the Principal Sources, with Philosophical Commentary. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press Malaspina, E. (ed.) (2005) Bibliografia Senecana del XX Secolo. Bologna, Pàtron Mangas Manjarrés, J. (2001) Séneca, o, El Poder de la Cultura. Madrid, Editorial Debate Manning, C. (1973) “Seneca and the Stoics on the Equality of the Sexes” Mnemosyne 26, 170–77 Mansfeld, J. (2005) “Sources” in K. Algra et al. (eds.), The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy. Cambridge/New York, Cambridge University Press, 3–30 Marti, B. (1945) “Seneca’s Tragedies: A New Interpretation” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 76, 216–45 (1947) “The Prototypes of Seneca’s Tragedies” Classical Philology 42, 1–16 Marx, K. (1906) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. New York, The Modern Library (1976) “Theses on Feuerbach” in Collected Works. Vol. 5, Marx and Engels 1845–1847. Moscow, Progress, 3–5 Mauch, M. (1997) Senecas Frauenbild in den Philosophischen Schriften. Frankfurt am Main, P. Lang Maurach, G. (1965) “Zur Eigenart und Herkunft von Senecas Methode in den Naturales Quaestiones” Hermes 93, 357–69 (1970) Der Bau von Senecas Epistulae Morales. Heidelberg, C. Winter Mazzoli, G. (1990) “Seneca e il Sublime” in T. Kemeny and R. Cotta Elena (eds.), Dicibilità del Sublime. Udine, Campanotto, 89–97 (2005) “La Retorica del Destino: La Demonstratio Diluvii in Seneca, Nat. Quaest. III 27–30” Pallas 69, 167–78 McAuley, Mairead (2008) The Representation of Motherhood in Seneca and Statius. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press McGill, S. (2013) Plagiarism in Latin Literature. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press Meinel, P. (1972) Seneca u¨ber seine Verbannung: Trostschrift an die Mutter Helvia. Mit einem Exkurs: Ducunt Volentem Fata, Nolentem Trahunt. Bonn, R. Habelt Michel, A. (1969) “Rhétorique, Tragédie, Philosophie: Sénèque et le Sublime” Giornale Italiano di Filologia 2, 245–57 Motto, A. (1972) “Seneca on Women’s Liberation” Classical World 65, 155–57

Bibliography

217

Motto, A. and J. Clark (1973a) “Seneca’s Epistle 57: A Journey to Wisdom” Classical Bulletin 49, 33–36 (1973b) “Descensus Averno in Seneca’s Epistle 55” Classical Journal 68, 193–98 (1981) “Maxima Virtus in Seneca’s Hercules Furens” Classical Philology 76, 101–17 Myerowitz, M. (1992) “The Domestication of Desire: Ovid’s Parva Tabella and the Theater of Love” in A. Richlin (ed.), Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome. New York, NY, Oxford University Press, 131–57 Nehamas, A. (1985) Nietzsche, Life as Literature. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press Nietzsche, F. W. (1967) On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. New York, Vintage Books (1997) Thus Spake Zarathustra. T. Common (trans.), Ware, Wordsworth Editions Ltd (1998) Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer. Oxford, Oxford University Press Nussbaum, M. C. (1993) “Poetry and the Passions: Two Stoic Views” in J. Brunschwig and M. C. Nussbaum (eds.), Passions and Perceptions: Studies in Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind, Proceedings of the Fifth Symposium Hellenisticum. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 97–149 Opelt, I. (1972) “Senecas Konzeption des Tragischen” in E. Lefèvre (ed.), Senecas Tragödien. Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 92–128 Ortega Muñoz, J. F. (1983) “La Metafísica y el Problema de Dios en la Filosofía de Séneca” Analecta Malacitana 6, 301–17 Poe, J. P. (1983) “The Sinful Nature of the Protagonist of Seneca’s Oedipus” in A. J. Boyle (ed.), Seneca Tragicus: Ramus Essays on Senecan Drama. Berwick, Vic., Aureal Publications, 256 Porter, J. I. (2000) Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future. Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press Pratt, N. T. (1963) “Major Systems of Figurative Language in Senecan Melodrama” Transactions of the American Philological Association 94, 199–234 (1983) Seneca’s Drama. Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press Quinet, A. (1995) “The Gaze as an Object” in R. Feldstein, B. Fink, and M. Jaanus (eds.), Reading Seminar XI: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Albany, NY, State University of New York Press, 139–47 Rabde Romeo, S. (1966) “La Metafisica de Séneca” in Estudios sobre Séneca: Ponencias y Comunicaciones. Madrid, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, Instituto Luis Vives de Filosofia, 131–52 Reydams-Schils, G. (2010) “Seneca’s Platonism: The Soul and its Divine Origin” in A. W. Nightingale and D. N. Sedley (eds.), Ancient Models of Mind: Studies in Human and Divine Rationality. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 196–215 Richardson-Hay, C. (2006) First Lessons: Book 1 of Seneca’s Epistulae Morales: A Commentary. Bern, Peter Lang Rist, J. M. (1969) Stoic Philosophy. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press

218

Bibliography

Robin, D. (1993) “Film Theory and the Gendered Voice in Seneca” in N. S. Rabinowitz and A. Richlin (eds.), Feminist Theory and the Classics. New York, NY, Routledge, 102–21 Roller, M. B. (2001) Constructing Autocracy: Aristocrats and Emperors in JulioClaudian Rome. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press Róman Bravo Díaz, J. (1991) “‘Spiritus’: Estudio de un Término Cientifico (Naturales Quastiones de Séneca)” in M. Carmen Codoñer and G. Ramos Agustín (eds.), Mnemosynum: C. Codoñer a Discipulis Oblatum. Salamanca, Universidad de Salamanca, 15–26 Rosenmeyer, T. G. (1989) Senecan Drama and Stoic Cosmology. Berkeley, CA, University of California Press (2000) “Seneca and Nature” Arethusa 33, 99–119 Sade (1990) Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings. New York, NY, Grove Weidenfeld Sambursky, S. (1959) Physics of the Stoics. London, Routledge and Paul Schafer, J. (2009) Ars Didactica: Seneca’s 94th and 95th Letters. Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Schiesaro, A. (2003) The Passions in Play: Thyestes and the Dynamics of Senecan Drama. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press Schmitt, C. (2005) Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press Schofield, M. (2003) “Stoic Ethics” in B. Inwood (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 232–56 Schönegg, B. (1999) Senecas Epistulae Morales als Philosophisches Kunstwerk. Bern, P. Lang Scott, J. (1999) “The Ethics of the Physics in Seneca’s Natural Questions” Classical Bulletin 75, 55–68 Sedley, D. (2003) “The School, from Zeno to Arius Didymus” in B. Inwood (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 7–32 (2005) “Hellenistic Physics and Metaphysics” in K. Algra et al. (eds.), The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy. Cambridge/New York, Cambridge University Press, 355–411 Segal, C. (1986) Language and Desire in Seneca’s Phaedra. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press (2008) “Boundary Violation and the Landscape of the Self in Senecan Tragedy” in J. G. Fitch (ed.), Seneca. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 136–56 Setaioli, A. (2000) “Seneca e l’Oltretomba” Facundus Seneca: Aspetti della Lingua e dell’Ideologia Senecana. Bologna, Pàtron, 480 Shelton, J.-A. (1978) Seneca’s Hercules Furens: Theme, Structure and Style. Göttingen, Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht (1983) “Revenge or Resignation: Seneca’s Agamemnon” in A. J. Boyle (ed.), Seneca Tragicus: Ramus Essays on Senecan Drama. Berwick, Vic., Aureal Publications, 159–83

Bibliography

219

(1995) “Perusasion and Paradigm in Seneca’s Consolatio ad Marciam 1–6” Classica et Mediaevalia 46, 157–88 Skidmore, C. (1996) Practical Ethics for Roman Gentlemen: The Work of Valerius Maximus. Exeter, University of Exeter Press Stahl, G. (1964) “Die ‘Naturales Quaestiones’ Senecas: Ein Beitrag zum Spiritualisierungsprozeß der Römischen Stoa” Hermes 92, 425–54 Staley, G. A. (2010) Seneca and the Idea of Tragedy. Oxford, Oxford University Press Star, C. (2006) “Commanding Constantia in Senecan Tragedy” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 136, 207–44 Stevens, J. A. (2006) “The Imagery of Cicero’s ‘Somnium Scipionis’”, Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History 13. Bruxelles, Latomus, 155–65 Steyns, D. (1906) Étude sur les Métaphores et les Comparaisons dans les Œuvres en Prose de Sénèque le Philosophe. Gand, J. Vuylsteke Tarrant, R. J. (1985) Seneca’s Thyestes. Atlanta, GA, Scholars Press (1976) Seneca: Agamemnon. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press (2006) “Seeing Seneca Whole?” in K. Volk and G. D. Williams (eds.), Seeing Seneca Whole: Perspectives on Philosophy, Poetry and Politics. Leiden, Brill, 1–17 Tieleman, T. (2007) “Onomastic Reference in Seneca: The Case of Plato and the Platonists” in M. Bonazzi and C. Helmig (eds.), Platonic Stoicism, Stoic Platonism: The Dialogue Between Platonism and Stoicism in Antiquity. Leuven, Leuven University Press, 133–48 Toulouze-Morisset, F. (2004) “Sénèque s’étonne-t-il dans les ‘Questions Naturelles’?” in O. Bianchi, O. Thévenaz, and P. Mudry (eds.), Conceptions et Représentations de l’Extraordinaire dans le Monde Antique: Actes du Colloque International, Lausanne, 20–22 Mars 2003. Bern, Lang, 199–220 Trovato, V. (2005) L’Œeuvre du Philosophe Sénèque dans la Culture Européenne. Paris, Harmattan Veyne, P. (2003) Seneca: The Life of a Stoic. D. Sullivan (trans.), New York, Routledge Volk, K. and G. D. Williams (2006) “Introduction” in K. Volk and G. D. Williams (eds.), Seeing Seneca Whole: Perspectives on Philosophy, Poetry and Politics. Leiden, Brill, xiii–xviii von Albrecht, M. (2004) Wort und Wandlung: Senecas Lebenskunst. Leiden, Brill von Fritz, K. (1972) “Tragische Schuld in Senecas Tragödien” in E. Lefèvre (ed.), Senecas Tragödien. Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 67–73 White, M. (2003) “Stoic Natural Philosophy (Physics and Cosmology)” in B. Inwood (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 124–52 Whitmarsh, T. (2001) Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation. Oxford, Oxford University Press Wilcox, A. (2005) “Sympathetic Rivals: Consolation in Cicero’s Letters.” American Journal of Philology 126, 237–55.

220

Bibliography

(2006) “Exemplary Grief: Gender and Virtue in Seneca’s Consolations to Women” Helios 33, 73–100 Wildberger, J. (2006) Seneca und die Stoa: der Platz des Menschen in der Welt. Berlin, W. de Gruyter Williams, G. D. (2005a) “Interactions: Physics, Morality, and Narrative in Seneca Natural Questions 1” Classical Philology 100, 142–65 (2005b) “Seneca on Winds: The Art of Anemology in Natural Questions 5” American Journal of Philology 126, 417–50 (2006a) “States of Exile, States of Mind: Paradox and Reversal in Seneca’s Consolatio ad Helviam Matrem” in K. Volk and G. D. Williams (eds.), Seeing Seneca Whole: Perspectives on Philosophy, Poetry, and Politics. Leiden, Brill, 147–73 (2006b) “Greco-Roman Seismology and Seneca on Earthquakes in ‘Natural Questions 6’” Journal of Roman Studies 96, 124–46 (2012) The Cosmic Viewpoint: A Study of Seneca’s Natural Questions. New York, Oxford University Press Wilson, M. (1987) “Seneca’s Epistles to Lucilius: A Reevaluation” Ramus 16, 102–21 (1997) “The Subjugation of Grief in Seneca’s Epistles” in S. M. Braund and C. Gill (eds.), The Passions in Roman Thought and Literature. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 48–67 (2001) “Seneca’s Epistles Reclassified” in S. J. Harrison (ed.), Texts, Ideas, and the Classics: Scholarship, Theory, and Classical Literature. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 164–87 Wittgenstein, L. (1922) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Wray, D. (2009) “Seneca and Tragedy’s Reason” in S. Bartsch and D. Wray (eds.), Seneca and the Self. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 237–54 Zintzen, C. (1972) “Alte Virtus Animosa Cadit: Gedanken zur Darstellung des Tragischen in Senecas ‘Hercules Furens’” in E. Lefèvre (ed.), Senecas Tragödien. Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 149–209 Žižek, S. (1993) Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham, NC, Duke University Press Žižek, S., E. L. Santner, and K. Reinhard (2005) The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology. Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press Zupančič, A. (2000) Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan. London, Verso (2003) The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press Zwierlein, O. (1966) Die Rezitationsdramen Senecas. Meisenheim am Glan, Hain (1985) L. Annaei Senecae Tragoediae; Incertorum Auctorum Hercules (Oetaeus), Octavia. Oxford, Clarendon Press

Index

as abstract 47 appeals to 58 authoring a sense of 59 fantasy of 130 fidelity to 37 image of 125 inaccessibility of 68 inside and outside the text 68, 70 intentions of 56, 59, 66, 97, 122 nature of 56 production of 63 authorship 9 as solution 2 metaphysics of 104 narratology of 63 philosophy of 63

absolutism, moral 118 abstraction 76, 151 and the concrete 47 movement towards 8 premature 9 actors, as metaphor 2 aemulatio 42 aër 63, 202 afterlife, the 85 agere 19 Alcestis 101 Alcibiades 24 alienation, self- 129 allusions 29, 31 alter ego 79 alter idem 65–66, 76 belatedness of 78 anachronism 6 analogy 64 animus 64 and “greatness of spirit” 102, 103 movement of 32 Antiope 116 antitheses, communication between 9 apathy 128, 157 appropriation 11, 33, 36 argumentum 12 Aristotle 44, 164, 170 artifex 66 god as 57 artistry, metaphor and metaphysics 146 ascent 40 moral 66 asilus 43 ataraxia, see “perturbation, freedom from” Atreus 155 Attalus 18 audience, perversity of 20 author as a generative genus 47

beata uita 5, 31 beautiful, the 146 as per Kant 122 beauty 111 beauty, and form 112 longing for 123 of the work of art 122 price of 147 being seen 110 by reason 129 seeing oneself 24 being, word for 43 benefaction, mutual 17 Bildungsroman 5, 88, 105, 150 body and death 95 maternal 95 repudiation of 96 bonum 38 bootstrapping 159 Borges, Jorge Luis 175 boundaries, see also “finis” 133 Bourdieu, Pierre 162 bricolage 163

221

222 care, self- 53, 69 categories, indistinction between 58 Cato 84 “Cato is walking” 38, 155 cave, Plato’s 39 chorus 135 as abstract 109 odes of 109 Chrysippus 10, 33 Cicero 31 appeal to 43 contrast with 8 On Friendship 60 On the Republic 31 citations 20 Cleanthes 22 Cloelia 81 cogitabile 47 Seneca as 47 coherence, of the universe 64 commentary as reductive 40 inadequacy of 40 complicity, as a reading strategy 8 concepts, simple 1 conclusions, insufficiency of 7 concord and discord 61, 62, 69 see also “machina concors” confusion, reader’s 6 consciousness self- 152 split 153 unhappy 152, 153, 155 content, and form 7, 37 contexts, as elective 8 conversation 7 Copjec, Joan 123 copyists, mere 20 Cornelia 100 cosmos as both rational and irrational 111 as orderly 110 as spiteful 111 as split 111 as sublime 130 rationality of 112 structure of 133 threat to 141 criticism literary, and its philosophical weight 36 theatrical 37 crowd, the 21, 77, 79, 114, 116 cupido 17

Index cupido discendi 17 Cynicism 10, 11 death, being towards 129, 148 definitions 1 Deleuze, Gilles 158 Democritus 79 Derrida, Jacques 150, 207 descent immoral 71 see also “ascent” desire for learning 19 object cause of 123 of Lucilius 34 transfer of 34 detour 16, 17, 42, 51 gender as 79 dialectics 151 dialogue embedded 78 lack of 90 Senecan vs. Platonic 90 diction martial 80, 93, 95 medical 80, 93 difference 1 indifference of 92 overcome 66, 72 sexual 90 Ding, Das 198 Dionysius 83 disambiguation 37 disciplina 92 discontinuity 25 disparity 8, 59 and identity 2 distance, enforced 135 dogma 40, 41, 57 drive 110 editor 78, 79, 87 eidos 49 emasculation 82 encounter philosophical 10 with philosophical writing 15 enjoyment, obscene 122 enlightenment 155 journey towards 93 poetics of 62 Senecan 2 Ennius 31 Epicurus 11, 16, 79

Index epistolography, poetics of 28 essence 54, 70 essentia 43 ethics and literary form 55 asymptotic approach to 144 definition of 2 Senecan 41 Stoic 3 structural 145 theatricality of 144 Euripides 108, 121, 138, 139, 141 exemplification 99, 100 fable 70, 152 fantasy 129, 144 fantasy, Stoic 147 fate 65 felicitas 5, 31, 80, 86 femininity 2 fertility 96 fidelity, ethical 142 figures, of speech 12 finis 31 focalization 60 form and contents 65 and ethics 130 mirroring content 23 over content 17 fortune 110 abuse of 111 her spite 111 Foucault M. 13 “What is an Author?” 62 framing 9 divine 9, 108 narrative 60 fugere 29 future perfect 79, 91, 135 futurity 34, 65, 100 and the reader 76 and the self 73 “you will see” 83, 84, 87 see also “philosophy, future of ” gadfly 43 gaudium 5, 144, 145 sublimity of 144 gaze gendered 86 reflexive 94 gender as problem 81 hierarchy 88

masculine as generic 82, 83, 91 non-spectacle of 80 genitor 121 genus 151 and generality 45 as Stoic primum genus 46 definitions of 45 general 100 gladiators 75 glosses, philosophical 30 god 69 as universe 69 knowledge of 69 grammar 5, 42 guilt 130 happiness, and perspective 86 Hegel G.W.F. 9, 72, 150–153, 182 helmsman 33, 37, 39, 65 Helvia, virility of 94 Hercules, as Stoic hero 128 hermeneutics 14, 27, 35 inculcation of 30 heterogeneity 47 and homogeneity 65 and narratology and unity 57, 61 of perspectives 65 of ratio 59 of the “I” 63 overcome 149 Homer 31, 46, 48 horror 122, 134 see also “sublime” Hostius Quadra 70–72, 75, 94, 125 “I had no choice” 143 “I know better but. . .” 114 ideas, history of 149 idos 49, 75 and idea 84, 105 images, mere 12 imperialism 97 psychic 97 Roman 11 indistinction 136 ineffable, the 4 informe 123 intentio 64, 157 intentionality 98 intentions 27 distinguished from intentio 28 of an artist 52 see also “readers” and “authors” interconnection 59

223

224 interpretation, metaphysics of 66 intertexts, see “allusions” intertextuality 67, 122 of the universe 62 introduction, lack of 9 Irigaray, Luce 91 irony 15, 43, 145, 149 journey as philosophical 9 fictional 83 Sentimental Journey 15 underworld 39 see also “detour” judgement last 129 transcendental 132 Kant, I. 6, 111, 128, 145 knowledge mere 113 performance of 19 self- 70, 74 theater of 2, 157 Lacan, Jacques 111, 123, 128, 185, 204 Latin poverty of 42 words missing from 42 Latinitas 43 lekton 56 doctrine of 38 lessons, in reading 6 letters and embedded genres 46 and life, symbiosis of 28 as a literary corpus 37 as repositories of metaphor 49 as stand-in 18 as theatrical 25 books of 14 dramaturgy of 41 heterogeneity of contents 14 literary structure of 15, 40 logic of 46 microcosm and macrocosm 16 narrator of 42 performative aspect of 37 rhetorical qualities of 42 sets of 14, 39 themes within 14 types of 14 life, as literary 101 literature and education 93

Index and litterae 3 and philosophy 150 and the “as if ” 9, 50, 146 as supplement 15 definition of 3 metaphysics of 156 philosophical consequences of 3 living, the 85 logic appeals to 58 Stoic 56, 106 logos and logic 128 and the sublime 154 as reason 153 as “sustaining tenor” 107 problem of 127 lust, see “cupido” machina concors 112, 138, 145 and the Senecan corpus 146 see also “cosmos” machina discors 112 Maecenas 94, 161, 171 Marcellus 92, 100 Marx, Karl 173, 205 masculinity 2 and impenetrability 94 maternity, and loss 96 me 49 and it 33 multiplied 152 meaning and being 98 double 8 everyday 5 non-technical 5 secondary 12 Medea 117, 118 mediation 54, 63 meonymy 144 metapherein 40 metaphor and death 103 and movement 39 and the concrete world 50 and theater 100 for the self 39 inept 31 interlocking 95 meta- 32 metaphysics of 84 mixing 24 movement of 32 of artistry 52

Index of authorship 53 of metaphor 40 of painting 49 of transfer 32 of travel 5, 40, 50, 105 metaphors, constellations as 138 metaphysics and literary figures 27 and physics 54, 58 and physis 4 definition of 4 idos of 50 of storytelling 41 Platonic 41 metatheater 136 mirror, and mirroring more generally 66 misreading, and commentaries 31 modality 56 monstrosity 120 see also “horror” monstrum 138 multiplicity 46 mundus 61, 65–66, 96 and text 73 as synthesis of antitheticals 73 see also “cosmos” narrative impossibilities of 73 metaphysical status of 149 narratology 6, 42, 47, 78, 130 and strategic blurring 57 as tool 57 metaphysics of 156 of logic 56 see also “you,” “me,” and “them” narrator 149 and author 57, 72 as philosopher 29 disingenuous 78 embedded 56, 57 Hostius Quadra as 72 identified with author 56 nature and beauty 112 and love 109 as author of universe 62 as guide 11 as knowing 112 as mere word 114 as speaker 83 as split 124 between reason and madness 118 her enjoyment 120

225

knowledge of 70 living in accordance with 11, 107, 119, 120, 151 Nietzsche, Friedrich 156, 202, 203 mundus 99, 114, 142 noumenology 128, 142 novel 152 object of thought 149 philosophical 149 objectification 142 objectivity, and the reader 122 objet a 181 obscenity 111, 144 observation, self- 13, 87 oestros 43 ontology and storytelling 2 Platonic 4 opus 64 universe as 62 order sacrifices made to 130 transcendental 140 see also “cosmos” originality philosophical 11 Seneca’s 10 orthodoxy, Stoic 57–63 other, as absent 89 Other, the 145 production of 143 Ovid 194 painting 84 paradox 16, 58, 77, 134 of the self 95 Pasiphaë 118 passion and horror 115 hate as a 117 rejection of 116 past perfect 93 see also “future perfect” paternity 139, 142 pathology 128 pathos, of apathy 144 pedantry, critique of 38 performance, literary 7 Persius 162 perspective 2, 74 and enlightenment 68 cosmic 76 divine 68 double 138, 139

226 perspective (cont.) enabling ethics 128 ethics of 106 external 13 multiple 60 of the author 146 of the Other 129 philosophy of 68 Scipio’s 186 subjective 13, 112 sublime 80, 106, 129 transcendental 108 perturbation, freedom from 106, 135, 152 petitio principii 28 Petronius 165, 183 philosopher anti- 59 as self-authoring 36 philosophy and aural delectation 19 and communication 89, 90 and literature 58 and philology 156 and representation 89 and storytelling 58 as commercial craft 33 as discourse 7 as experience 34 as mere rhetoric 32 as mere spectacle 19 as merely reported 44 contemporary 1 emplotment of 88 future of 35 history of 150, 152 illicit questions within 127 limits of 105 metaphoricity of 156 missed encounter with 19 modality of 57 of Seneca 59 possible relationships to 18 reading it as if poetry 35 rhetoric of 25 turned into philology 26–27, 31 voice of 32 writing of 44 plagiarism 34 Plato 10, 33, 149 Symposium 24 poetry, citation of 22 polyphony 156 Posidonius 34 possession, self- 39 precepts, precept of 34

Index preface 9, 27 pregnancy, psychic 95 presence 12 probatio 34 process, and product 9, 67 proficiens 9, 10, 15, 41, 77, 93 progress narrative 14 philosophical 14 pronouns 49, 60, 61 and images of selves 72 proposition 37 propositum 27, 151 propriety 115 providence 65 pudor 94, 141, 143 Pythagoras 25 questions, nature of 1 quotable-quote, see sententia quotation 29 see also “narratology” rainbows 67 ratio, of a mirror 70 rationes, of geometry 67, 76 reader 80 as a second Seneca 76 as implicit addressee 6 grammarian as 28, 29, 30 intentions of 27, 35 philologist as 28, 31 philosopher as 28 resistant 89 wary 43 reading good 30 in a targeted manner 8 modes of 27 philosophical 15 tendentious 29 reality, and the “as if ” 50 reason, and desire 2 and passion 106 as imperious 97 as mere cunning 113 living in accordance with 129 questioned 113 recognition and reversal 151 ethical and tragic 145 repetition 125, 131 endless 36 representation, nature of 70 res 27

Index respicere 81, 85 retroactivity 16, 135 rhetoric and philosophy, symbiosis of 23 collapse of philosophy into 17 of Attalus 24 self- 29, 93 Rutulia 100 Sade 145, 195 sage, Stoic 9 sailing 40 sapere 38, 39 scepticism 153 Scipio 84 seeing, self- 102 seriousness 150 self as object 13, 94 as project 148 as split 114, 115, 153 as written 149 semiviri 21 Seneca and “Seneca” 54, 59 and Senecan literature 100 and the Opera Senecae 34, 98 as a concrete individual 48 as absent 98 as author 37, 79 as character 25, 37, 76, 79, 98 as nomen 154 as object of knowledge 10 as problem 1 as reader and writer 100 as source of examples 26 as spirit 146 as subject and object 94 as sublime 104 biography of 7, 59 Books of Moral Philosophy 16 corpus of 58 methodological diversity of 58 the idea of 48, 54, 55, 73 thought of 9, 27 sense, and nonsense 106, 122, 123 sententiae 26, 67, 101, 113 seriousness 12 shame, see “pudor” short-circuits 145 sociology 5 Socrates 3, 10, 18, 24, 43 Soticism, rewritten 125 Sotion 25

soul and the cosmos 96 as spectator 68 sources and source-criticism 34 philosophical 10 space, metaphorical 27 species and genus, distinction between 44 definitions of 45 see also “genus” spectacle as re-staged 101 empty 26 life as 91 of Seneca 10 of spectacle 77 of the self 74 of the soul 70 of virtue 76 self as 102 spectaculum 74, 84 spectaculum meridianum 77, 86 spectator 134 sublime 85 spectatorship, apathetic 10, 69, 89, 91, 135 speculation 70 on the sublime 143 spirit 64 and gender 85, 91 and sustaining tenor 66 and universe 103 concept of 66 narratives of 88 see also “animus” spiritus 64 stenography 33 Stoicism conceptual divisions within 58 orthodox 5, 27, 105 storytelling 4 structure 156 narrative 14, 39, 76 students 18 and teachers, roles of 18 style 17 literary 4 Nature as stylist 62 non-professional 5 of Seneca 61 striking 5 subject as alienated 143, 144 soul as 146 split 131, 141

227

228 subjectivation 148 subjective, the and objective 13 and objective correllated 69 subjectivity 142 and subjection 128 subjects 151 sublime, the and sublimis 4 and the mundane 48, 144 correlated with the concrete 27 definition of 3 horror of 154 missed encounter with 154 sublimity 111 and ethics 52 and excess 112 and form 112 as divided 142 as imaginary 87 as sterile 152 convergence of philosophical and literary 40, 91 enforced 146 literal 85 philosophical 91 production of 138 Seneca and 112 supplement 3 as supplanting 15 discordant 146 ourselves as 86 via exchange 15 supplementarity 69, 71, 154 supreme genus, Stoic 4 syllogism 23, 113, 125 symbolic, and imaginary 181 synthesis 124 Syracuse 83 tenses 65 terminology, non-technical 5, 64 terminology, technical 37 text, mere 33 textbooks 6, 12 texts, dead 20 textualization 76 theater and public truth 22 of philosophy 37 of the profound 79 spectators at 22 them 21 Theophrastus 11 theoria 74

Index Thyestes 155 τὸ ὄν 43 tragedy and metatragedy 135, 154 as thought experiment 107, 127 sadism of 125 transcendental, sense of 124 transferre 40, 103 transfiguration 23 transformation, moral and literary 12 translatio translatio improba 32 translatio proba 53 see also “metaphor” translation 149, 151 abstract 32 as productive of difference 44 as supplanting 44 linguistic 28 of Plato 42 truth advocate of 23 as enslaving 24 truth-game 13 tutela sui 53 see also “care, self-” uirtus 81 Ulysses 46 uncanniness 124 unity, within diversity 8 universalism 11 universe collapse of 61, 86 see also “mundus” and “cosmos” unthinkable, the 118 unwriting 138 uoluptas 5, 144 uox 32 us 153 and them 65 as men 82 utterances, performative 34 vegetarianism 25 Vergil 31, 46, 49 Georgics 43 reading 28 virtue as masculine 94, 98 female 99 rhetoric of 21, 93 theater of 75 voices, proliferation of 43

Index whole, not- 123 wholes 68 wisdom as narrated 152 as performed 40 love of 127, 144 poetics of 156 Wittgenstein, L. 192 woman and maternity 97 as addressee 148 as mere designation 99 as non-spectacle 102 as problem 97 as symptom of man 188 words and texts 33 and things 33, 67 and works 31, 35, 36, 38, 41 power of to supplant things 19

work, philosophical 151 world and spirit 96 as work 65 writing philosophically 29 self- 13 you 21, 49, 57, 60, 65, 78, 149 and I 89, 90, 154 and I in dialogue 60, 152 as generic second person 60 as me 60 as Seneca 78 as spectator and spectacle 84 see also “pronouns” Zeno 10, 33 Zupančič, Alenka 112, 129, 144

229