In this book G. offers an intense and expansive tour of Seneca's writings in prose and tragic verse, carefully laying the groundwork for his claim that Seneca offers the reader ‘a sublime order that has purchased its beauty and its privilege at a dreadful price’ (p. 147). Each chapter concentrates on one or two texts, in a series of close readings that address not only the nature of the sublime in Seneca but also the relationship between the three terms of the subtitle (ethics, literature, metaphysics) and other key themes, especially gender, spectacle and self-other relations. Chapter 1, ‘Misreading Seneca’, uses Epistulae morales 108 to demonstrate Seneca's explicit entangling of philosophy in the philological dynamics of language, writing and reading. Chapter 2, ‘Writing Metaphysics’, spotlights Seneca's engagement, in Epistulae morales 58, with the challenges of translating into his literary Latin such Platonic concepts as ‘being’; ultimately both metaphysics and ethics are inseparable from the literary-rhetorical apparatus of the letter – particularly translatio in all its senses. The title of Chapter 3, ‘The Nature of Seneca’, wittily signals G.'s next task, that of showing how nature and theology in Natural Questions are intricately caught up with Seneca's figuration of his authorship, making sense of (or giving sense to) something that would otherwise be viewed as disorder. Chapters 4 and 5 are dedicated to Seneca's two consolations addressed to women: the first, ‘The Spectacle of Ethics’ (prefaced by a reading of Seneca's amphitheatre-visit described in Epistulae morales 7), considers how Consolation to Marcia consoles by promising a sublime spectacle predicated on the suppression of Marcia's female gender; the second, ‘Losing Seneca’, offers a comparable analysis of Consolation to Helvia in the context of exile and the mother–son relationship, concluding that ‘[o]nce we stop mourning the loss of the terrestrial Seneca, then we can ourselves become the sublime one, a self-siring and self-authoring realer-than-real virile essence’ (p. 104). The last two chapters shift to the tragedies; the plays are committed to topics of profound philosophical significance but now in ‘thought experiments’ (p. 105) beyond the limits of doctrine. These chapters extend further the prior analyses of subjectivity and suppression by considering ‘The Analytics of Desire’ in Phaedra (Chapter 6), with its disturbing outcomes for love and revenge, and ‘The Last Monster’ (Chapter 7), focusing on problems in mortal–divine heroism in the protagonist of Hercules Furens. A conclusion, ‘The Metaphysics of Senecan Morals’, recapitulates G.'s emphasis on literature's role in mediating ethics and metaphysics and also offers a comparison with Hegelian and other accounts of sublimity. In the end, Seneca's sublime is distinctive in that Seneca ‘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’ (p. 154).

The dominant rhythm of the book is precisely that signalled by its title, including its application of the term sublime to characterise not only the rhetorical–ethical telos of Senecan writing but also the author himself. In his analysis of the sublime, G. seeks to draw Seneca into an engagement with such contemporary theorists as Kant, Hegel and Lacan. So as to facilitate, I think, an intentionally gestational approach to locating the sublime in Seneca's writings, a presentation of the basic analytics of the sublime – modern, ancient, or Senecan – is not foregrounded, and the reader is provided with the equipment to assemble this only passim and in the notes (such as n. 5 to Chapter 6, p. 192). Another emphasis that gives a more specific edge to the claims about literature's superordinate status here is the recurrence of narratology (who is speaking? to whom are they speaking? what language is used?) as the heuristic that can best reveal Seneca's literary techniques. In conjunction with this, Foucault's ‘What is an author?’ essay provides the fuel for taking apart and reassessing the Seneca figure. The book is also distinctive for its equal interest in Senecan prose and tragedy without any privileging or oversimplification of one or the other side – following through on some of the best suggestions broached by T. Rosenmeyer in his groundbreaking Senecan Drama and Stoic Cosmology (1989). Indeed, G. shows an intimate familiarity with all the areas of Senecan literary and philosophical studies, which allows him to build constructively on prior observations while also revealing shortcomings, offering salutary critique, or maximising the potential for further application. From its own qualified vantage point, then, the book presents one cogent attempt to ‘see Seneca whole’. G. is upfront about his own proprietary interest in discovering what Seneca can offer to a modern critical reader already committed to specific methods of theorising subject-formation in Latin literature. As a corollary to this, he also concedes the limits of the book's scope in his adoption of a ‘synchronic’ approach to the Senecan corpus (p. 154). So the book offers a narrative of the phenomenology of Seneca's author-function as we can learn about it from moving from one selected example to another, rather than a historicising account of Seneca's authorial career. The payoff, though, is an especially thorough account of the critic's presuppositions and inferences concerning what Seneca and his writings are, and how Senecan writing supports or complicates or undermines these, phrase by phrase and layer by layer.