Margaret Graver’s contributions to the study of Seneca include a series of seminal articles published over the last thirty years; these are now made available in revised form, together with two new pieces, in this volume. G.’s rationale for presenting these studies as an interconnected whole is also the volume’s overarching argument: ‘Seneca himself offers one version, not many, of a life devoted to philosophical reading, writing, and teaching’ (ix). G.’s readings generally have the aim of rescuing Seneca’s writings from charges of internal incoherence, of philosophical ineptitude, or of deviation from Chrysippan orthodoxy. These arguments gain in force from being joined together in this volume: the cumulative evidence G. marshals for the immense care, subtlety and learning Seneca brought to the task of writing makes each individual argument for his sophistication easier to sustain.
As the book’s subtitle suggests, the relationship between philosophy and writing is a recurring concern in these studies. Sometimes this focus takes the form of showing how Seneca draws on the resources of the Latin literary tradition, as in ‘The Mouse, the Moneybox, and the Six-Footed Scurrying Solecism: Satire and Riddles in Seneca’s Philosophy’, which connects Seneca’s frequent self-caricature to Horace’s satiric and iambic personae. More often, though, G.’s concern is with the broader topic of how Seneca pursues philosophy through writing, and she argues in ‘The Challenge of the Phaedrus: Therapeutic Writing and the Letters on Ethics’ that Seneca’s claims for the therapeutic value of his writing are made not in defiance of the strictures laid on philosophical writing in Plato’s Phaedrus but rather in considered response to them.
Indeed, much of the book’s power comes from G.’s lucid reconstructions of the dilemmas posed for Seneca by his literary and philosophical heritage. An illuminating essay on De beneficiis carefully shows how, as often, Seneca’s intellectual background leaves him poised between two lines of thinking that might issue in contradiction — here, a desire to vindicate the independence of benefaction from circumstance, on the one hand, and the need to acknowledge the inherently intersubjective nature of benefits on the other — and then demonstrates the subtlety and dexterity with which Seneca responds to this dilemma. ‘Refuting the Peripatetics: Seneca and the School of Aristotle’ extends this project of understanding Seneca’s manoeuvres more clearly through a sharper appreciation of their context. Here G. shows that Seneca’s engagement with Aristotelianism runs far deeper than is suggested by his explicit references to Peripatetic philosophers. In particular, she demonstrates that Ep. 92 very likely responds in detail to, and follows the structure of, a Peripatetic ethical doxography similar to the Stobaean Doxography ‘C’. She tackles a more controversial question about Seneca’s relationship to rival philosophical traditions in a detailed examination of his treatment of Epicurus, concluding that Seneca is uncompromising in rejecting the core Epicurean doctrinal claims, while appreciating Epicurus’ psychological insight and therapeutic shrewdness. Readers who might feel that an over-neat distinction between the philosophical and literary aspects of Seneca’s writing is at work in this resolution of the ambiguity, or in the conclusion in ‘Action and Emotion: Seneca and the Stoic Tradition’ that Seneca’s moral psychology is fundamentally Chrysippan while his therapeutic and rhetorical concerns lead to novel emphases of presentation, are reminded that Seneca himself advances a similar distinction between core doctrines and therapeutic strategies in Ep. 64 (208).
G.’s commitment to showing us a coherent Seneca is deep — she addresses one obvious source of tension in the Senecan oeuvre by expressing scepticism about whether the philosopher and the tragedian are the same person (13–14) — but it is not absolute: after saving Seneca from a number of scrapes in a bumpy stretch of De ira, she declines to salvage his remarks on the possibility of arresting full-blown anger: ‘it is better to admit that in this passage Seneca is just inconsistent with his earlier stance’ (157). This inconsistency, though, reinforces another of G.’s recurring claims, that the letters represent a significant advance over Seneca’s earlier work in his command of his material and in the subtlety of his engagement with the emotions of his imagined reader.
The book’s final chapter, ‘Honeybee Reading and Self-Scripting’, investigates the connection between self and text from another angle. Here, as in the widely influential study of Seneca’s Maecenas that stands as the book’s penultimate chapter, G. shows the depth of the connections Seneca draws between moral self-formation and literary achievement. Starting from Foucault’s understanding of the honeybee image in Ep. 84 as representing a kind of self-fashioning, G. refines that reading by bringing out the adroitness with which Seneca plays on the conjoined literary and moral senses of the word ingenium. There remains a tension, though, between the distinctiveness proposed here as a moral and stylistic desideratum in the project of self-creation and the impersonality of Stoic normative reason, and not every reader will gauge Seneca’s success in reconciling these imperatives as charitably as G. does.
Closely argued bur refreshingly spacious and ambitious in its conception, deeply learned in each of the numerous strands of the intellectual heritage Seneca synthesised, this book will be indispensable not just to Senecans but to everyone interested in the special problems of reading and understanding philosophical writing.
