In a letter written late in his life, Seneca observed that, ‘no one plays one rôle … we assume many shapes’ (Ep. 120.22). Famed orator, advisor to a mad emperor, philosopher, tragic and satiric poet, he assumed so many shapes that in antiquity and beyond he has appeared to be either a model hypocrite or an earnest actor searching for the right rôle. This ensemble of essays by distinguished scholars seeks to guide contemporary readers in finding the coherence in Seneca's shifting shapes.

The volume is organized into four parts: ‘The Senecan Corpus’, ‘Texts and Contexts’, ‘Senecan Tensions’ and ‘The Senecan Tradition’. In the first section, Susanna Braund sketches Seneca's biography, reading his life backwards from the dramatic story of his death. Seneca sought to create there, in a scene detailed in Tacitus’ Annals, a coherent ‘image of his life’ which might retrospectively make him whole. The subsequent chapters in this section look at the genres of Seneca's output, from tragedy, to philosophical epistles and dialogues, scientific works and the satiric Apocolocyntosis. Christopher Trinacty's chapter on the tragedies shows how the plays do what Greek tragedy had sought to do — reflect and critique the contemporary world — but in a completely different way as they blend rhetoric, poetry, philosophy and politics to portray a tyrannical world. Catharine Edwards’ chapter on the epistles examines their theme of friendship and their function as conversation with those absent in time or place. Matthew Roller explores the genre of dialogue, the label attached to ten of Seneca's prose works in the Codex Ambrosianus. In the De clementia Seneca created a new literary genre, the mirror for magistrates, and defined for Nero the nature of kingship, as Malcolm Schofield explores in the next chapter. Francesca Romana Berno treats Seneca's scientific works and shows that, like Lucretius, Seneca seeks to explain nature's seeming terrors to promote spiritual tranquility. Kirk Freudenburg places the Apocolocyntosis within the traditions of Roman satire and particularly of Lucilius’ first satire, with its heavenly council sitting in judgement of a potential initiate.

The second segment, ‘Texts and Contexts’, is less comprehensive and rather selective. The editors suggest that this section portrays Seneca as an interpreter of the past, working to honour a ‘golden’ Augustan past while constructing from it a grander Neronian future. We can see this process at work in James Ker's chapter on Seneca's reworking of Augustan literature and in Victoria Rimell's on the mirror Seneca creates of the emperor Augustus to guide Nero's self-formation. The subsequent chapters on texts, however, examine issues of style, the use of images and metaphors, theatricality and Seneca's theory of the emotions in ways that are not as connected to chronology and historical context. Here we might have expected some discussion of Seneca's relationship to Greek literary and philosophical traditions and of Seneca's rhetorical training and the legacy of his father's interests in the history of rhetoric.

Section 3, ‘Senecan Tensions’, explores the fault lines in Seneca's self-presentation and the chapters collected here have much in common. Shadi Bartsch notes the tension between Seneca the public figure acting a part imposed upon him and Seneca the private man seeking to shape his own self. David Wray explores Seneca's navigation of the tension between his society's positive valuation of shame and Stoicism's denigration of it as emotional surrender to externals. Carey Seal examines an issue which has been central to the long-standing doubts expressed about Seneca's status as philosopher: his rejection of theory in favour of practical rules for living. Elizabeth Asmis finds precisely in this tension between thought and action Seneca's originality as a philosopher. She explores some of the same ground that Konstan had covered earlier in his discussion of Seneca's treatment of the mind's structure and of the nature of the passions. Alessandro Schiesaro charts Seneca's complex relationship with Epicureanism, the school usually seen as antithetical to his own Stoicism.

Section 4 lays out in great detail the constantly varying but consistently significant reception of Seneca's works across the ages. Seneca's philosophy left little trace in later antiquity, as Aldo Setaioli observes, but occasional allusions in later poetry show that Seneca's tragedies were known. Because of his historical and chronological overlap with Peter and Paul, Seneca came to be a martyr in the eyes of Christians, who called him noster, one of their own, as Chiara Torre notes. Seneca's writings were distributed more widely in the Middle Ages and his tragedies were rediscovered in the late twelfth century. During this time, Roland Mayer demonstrates, Seneca became the model for tragedy and also an historical figure with the rediscovery of Tacitus’ Annals. Peter Tracey covers some of the same ground as Malcolm Schofield in tracing the influence of the De clementia on theories of monarchy. Francesco Citti's chapter on ‘Seneca and the Moderns’ covers the seventeenth century and beyond. Seneca's stature as a philosopher was thin during this period until Foucault inaugurated, especially among classical scholars, a renewed respect for his originality. The nineteenth century denigrated Seneca's tragedies in comparison with the Greek forerunners, but Eliot's essays on Seneca early in the twentieth century, critical though they are of the plays’ verbal veneer (a point Eliot shares with Nietzsche), gave the plays renewed respectability for their rôle in shaping Elizabethan drama.

The breadth of Seneca's work makes a companion of this sort invaluable for those approaching Seneca for the first time or from a different angle. The challenge of this genre, however, lies in connecting not just the different Senecas, in antiquity and beyond, but in connecting the voices of the different scholars interpreting Seneca. As is traditional, the editors seek in their introduction to integrate the chapters to follow but in this case, as often, the interrelationships seem more rhetorical than substantial. The ideal would be to have all the contributors read all of the contributions and then to create a sense of conversation between the chapters; some of that happens here but not as much as a reader might like. As a result, this is a work in which readers will want to look at particular chapters for their insights, or to read the whole for a sense of the range of Seneca's work; but Seneca's own shifting masks, combined with the shifting perspectives and interests of the authors who speak for him here, make it challenging to find a single thread to follow from beginning to end. In that sense, these essays are in some ways comparable to Seneca's Epistles; it is easy to read them individually but a challenge to find the narrative which connects them.

That said, I was regularly impressed by the freshness and enthusiasm with which the contributors, distinguished Senecans all, were able to digest their knowledge and particular subject into a small space. Many of the chapters here, such as Catharine Edwards’, Matthew Roller's, Kirk Freudenburg's and Alessandro Schiesaro's, manage to offer a survey along with a new insight and perspective on their subject.