Seneca's Natural Questions has been dismissed as a dry meteorological work which fails to fulfil its promised integration of the physical and ethical components of Stoicism. W. addresses these criticisms and argues that Seneca has constructed a cohesive text which creates a philosophical holism tracing a progression towards understanding the cosmos, enabling the mind to find release from the restrictions of life. Expanding on studies of Seneca's artistry in the last twenty years, W. provides a comprehensive reading of the Natural Questions as he examines the fusion of the artistic and scientific which sets it apart from the conservative meteorological tradition. The overarching structure of the work traces a progression following the conventional tripartite division of the world – terrena, sublimia and caelestia – reflecting Seneca's hierarchy of perception from literal meaning to cognitive insight. Fundamental to this development, W. follows Hine and Merino and relocates Books 1 and 2 after Book 7. However, W. states that his interpretation is not guided by this reorganisation, and readings of individual books are self-contained.
W. begins with an examination of Seneca's worldview and self-representation. Seneca's catalogues of previous scientific theories have long fostered source analysis and questions about his accuracy in transmitting them. W. demonstrates that Seneca establishes his credibility by refraining from comment, but does not simply respond mechanically to his predecessors. Comparing Seneca with Pliny, W. demonstrates Seneca is not simply a compiler of facts and received ideas. Instead, there is an integrating tendency which W. identifies as idiosyncratic for Seneca's world perspective. He is separated from his predecessors by his focus on internalisation which signals the consolidation of scientific investigation and ethical development articulated in the preface to Book 3. Chapter 1 not only introduces the reader to Seneca's worldview but also reveals how W. works. He is a careful and judicious reader who examines Seneca within intellectual and cultural contexts.
After this introductory chapter, W. focusses on recurring figures of aberrant behaviour and the interlocutor. How is it possible to reconcile the moralising passages peopled by deviants with the focus on understanding the cosmos? W. convincingly argues that they function as a counterweight to the struggle to rise to a higher consciousness, creating a unifying tension between perceptions of the world identified with the terrena and sublimia levels. The infamous Hostius Quadra becomes an anti-sapiens, fascinated by his mirrored reflection in the mirror; he is a parody of the philosophic ‘know thyself’. Similarly the interlocutor emerges as a comparable counterweight to the progress towards a higher understanding of the cosmos. Although this intrusive speaker may appear as a rhetorical device, W. demonstrates that he is no mere straw man, but displays a consistent character who provides dramatic opposition to Seneca's scientific observations and theories; he is a literalist grounded in details and incapable of speculation necessary for a higher understanding.
Beginning with Chapter 3 W. devotes a chapter to each individual book of the Natural Questions. Seneca's discussion of the Nile and hail in Books 4a and 4b is problematic as they are incomplete. However, W. persuasively argues that the harmony between the Egyptians and the Nile contrasts with the catastrophic deluge concluding Book 3 and creates a world-body analogy which in contrast with the Stoic tradition is implicitly moral. With Book 4b W. analyses with dexterity and clarity Seneca's assessment of earlier theories about hail. He argues that Seneca tests the ‘rhetoric of science’ as he experiments with techniques of the scientific argument. This testing functions as a pause in which Seneca provides an introspective analysis of his own task and a warning against impersonal objectification science and abandoning his physico-ethical agenda. This conjecture is compelling, but as W. acknowledges, too little remains of 4b to permit certainty of Seneca's purpose.
W. persuasively argues that Seneca's examination of the winds in Book 5 is less about nature than advancing his physico-ethical agenda, supported by his creation of a prose drama serving to contrast nature's regularity with human aberration. With detailed attention to language, W. successfully demonstrates that Seneca creates a wind–man analogy between the personified winds and marauding mariners who exhibit qualities of the destructive winds. Seneca normalises even the most violent winds by focussing on their temporal regularity, and this is reinforced by his structured classification of them and by mapping their origins. In contrast, the exempla of Xerxes, Alexander and Crassus intentionally utilise the winds to further their arrogant excesses.
With Chapter 6, ‘Earthquakes, Consolation and the Senecan Sublime’, W. enters new territory as he explores Lucretius' influence on Seneca's consolatory strategies to disabuse people of their fear of earthquakes. After defining consolatory strategies elsewhere in Seneca as a progression from a particular incident to a more common event, W. demonstrates the influence of comparable rationalising techniques in Lucretius which move from fear of the specific to understanding nature – a sublime superiority over the acts of nature. W. convincingly argues that Seneca's catalogue of earlier scientific investigations of earthquakes forms a subplot from the visual to abstract theorising, reflecting the progression in Book 6 and the Natural Questions as a whole from literal understanding to mental insight.
W. offers a bold reading of Book 7 which is grounded firmly on his careful reading of the text, assessment of theories about comets and understanding of Seneca's use of the deviants and interlocutor. Seneca's theory of comets represents the high point in the trajectory of (self-)knowledge to which the Natural Questions has been leading. Rejecting Aristotelian and Stoic theories, Seneca speculates that their orbits extend past the sublimia and belong to the celestial realm. W. astutely observes that Seneca's arrangement of theories adheres to an artistic, not purely technical, agenda. Comets become symbolic of the movement of the Natural Questions to a higher level of perception. The deficiency of human observation, impaired even at the sublimia level, gives way to speculation and insight. Study of the comets brings the reader to a perspective which enables the mind to look downwards and comprehend the cosmos, the goal stated in the preface to Book 1. The return to the sublimia in Books 1 and 2 represents Seneca's focus on the process of ascent and a return to the intermediate level which is the focal point of his work.
In the final chapter, W. turns to lightning and divination in Book 2. Employing Wallace-Hadrill's model of Rome's cultural revolution in the first century c.e., W. agrees that Seneca reflects this rationalising movement, but he challenges the view that Seneca discredits religion. Rather, in his reading, Seneca emerges as a mediator between Etruscan divination and Greek philosophy. W.'s careful analysis of the text demonstrates that Seneca maintains neutrality on this issue. He seeks communality while he asserts the differences between religion and philosophy. Seneca's concern is with the process of integrating Greek and Roman culture. This is the final example of Seneca's unifying mindset which pervades his examination of the cosmos.
This volume is an important contribution to Senecan studies. W. has successfully provided a thoughtful and insightful reading of the Natural Questions. Translations following the Latin passages make it accessible to those with little or no Latin. Attention to the artistic/scientific fusion raises the Natural Questions beyond a meteorological treatise. W. never evades or obscures what may be problematic. Although some of his readings may not convince, they are always well argued and provoke re-examination of the text.
