Petronius has since Tacitus been read as a parodist of Seneca – of his writings and of his life's final performance. Differences of genre matter more than differences of authorship to S., who finds parody and critique but above all continuity in modes of self-fashioning across a range of literary forms. Philosophical letters and dialogues, tragedy and prosimetric satire converge from very different starting points on a common (if often contested) project of self-fashioning through self-command. Seneca's relocation of empire to the narrow confines of the self can be read as a response to Rome's new autocracy – the creation of a substitute imperium by and for an elite deprived of exercising the real thing (M.B. Roller, Constructing Autocracy [2001], pp. 97–108). But consistently for S. this inward turn does not represent philosophy's retreat from politics: it is a single element of a larger dialogue running through the Senecan corpus about the links between philosophy and empire, and about the philosophy of empire.

S.'s skill in harnessing teams of opposed texts (for example De clementia and the Apocolocyntosis) and in picking out the points of contact between them is very impressive. Sometimes one could wish for a conclusion or a critique to be developed yet further: the more convincingly connections are established between a tragic protagonist and a Stoic proficiens, for example, the more urgent it becomes to assess their implications (in this case the challenge for Stoic philosophy of an Atreus psychologically structured as a Cato). S. shares a recent scholarly determination to cross genres and disciplines to ‘see Seneca whole’ (K. Volk and G.D. Williams [edd.], Seeing Seneca Whole: Perspectives on Philosophy, Poetry and Politics [2006], especially J. Ker, ‘Seneca, Man of Many Genres’, pp. 19–41) and makes his own original contribution to the study of Senecan selfhood. The structure of the book is less a linear argument than a sequence of studies from which distinctive features of Seneca's Stoic psychology emerge. Typographical errors are few, but two which appear in translation of Latin should perhaps be noted: ‘simile’ for ‘smile’ (p. 93) and ‘discretely’ for ‘discreetly’ (p. 193).

The book is divided into two parts. The first, ‘Soul Shaping Speech’, offers three chapters concerned particularly with the rhetorical device of self-address and the imperatival operation of the human mind, how ‘the grammar of Senecan psychology takes on a specific rhetorical form’ (p. 50). The language of command, which may long have characterised a Stoic theory of action, meshes well in Seneca's writing with a ‘Roman ideal of military and political command’ (p. 47). Although Seneca contrasts the well-ordered soul of a proficiens with various ambition-driven commanders from Rome's Republican past, he takes pains, S. argues, to inscribe that soul within the Roman empire. The soul may soar with Epicurean disdain above political struggles, but in Seneca's philosophy is continually reminded of and implicated in the world that Rome has fashioned. The second chapter turns to Seneca's tragic protagonists and the passionate soul as a mirror of that of the sapiens: ‘commanding oneself to act “irrationally” … is … the central concept of his tragedies’ (p. 61). To S. Bartsch such perverse constantia reveals a fundamental flaw in autonomous self-legislation (The Mirror of the Self [2006], pp. 272–81). S. likewise writes of ‘a horrifying danger that lies at the core of Seneca's theory of self-command’ (p. 64) and notes the protagonists' ‘pathological delight in exploiting one of Seneca's key philosophical ideas’ (p. 73), but ultimately sees them as contained by the ‘linguistic system of Stoic self-creation’ (p. 83). Even if evil is now ‘mapped psychological territory’ (p. 83) this discovery of ‘the possibilities of Stoicism’ (p. 83) is surely more unwelcome than S. allows. Scenes from the Satyricon, including Encolpius' futile efforts to harden himself and Eumolpus' legatees striving to exercise continentia at a cannibal banquet, offer ‘a carnivalization of Stoic self-fashioning’ (p. 98). The shift from the soul to the body is not parodic in any simple way, for Seneca's holistic therapeutics accept the fragile body as defining our mortal condition and, sometimes at least, as part of the self. S. shows Seneca and Petronius using the same metaphor for the self, the vessel, though approaching it ‘from opposite directions’ (p. 109). One might usefully bring in here (with K.J. Reckford, ‘Reading the Sick Body: Decomposition and Morality in Persius’ Third Satire', Arethusa 31 [1998], 337–54) the Neronian and Stoic satirist Persius, an author whose absolute exclusion from this book I found strange. In Petronius the metaphor of the vessel reflects (or constructs) the acquisitive, consuming selfhood of an imperial people. Without underplaying the differences in Seneca's treatment S. insists on the similarities: ‘their construction of the self is similarly imperatival and economic’ (p. 104). This subject is revisited in the book's final chapter.

The second part of the book, ‘Soul-Revealing Speech’, gives a series of close readings which reflect on how the material Stoic soul manifests itself in a material (and often materialistic) world, and on the relationship between its outward appearance and inner nature. S. begins with De clementia and the verbal mirror Seneca holds up to Nero, the soul of the body politic (Clem. 1.3.5). This paradigm for a healthy and harmonious soul–body relationship between the emperor and his subjects is followed by ‘comic doubles’ in the Apocolocyntosis (Apocol. 4.3) and the Satyricon (Sat. 47.2–7) where Claudius' and Trimalchio's internal disorders are graphically and literally externalised. Common settings, metaphors and analogies draw the texts together. At first glance the metaphor of the body politic implies a passive role for the empire: inert itself, its actions reveal the single soul which directs and shapes it. But because appearances are deceptive and the same actions may be differently construed, De clementia is as much about fashioning a critically competent readership as it is about imperial self-fashioning: ‘What Seneca's readers need to learn … is the ability to differentiate between virtue and vice, in other words, the specific conditions of the ruler's soul’ (p. 122). Words may be a more reliable guide than bodies. S. brings together Trimalchio Maecenantius (Sat. 71.12) and the Maecenas whose eccentric speech reveals moral abnormalities in Seneca, Epistles 114. The culpable softness of Maecenas, vice-regent and substitute for the emperor Augustus, is also contrasted with the clemency of Nero – or more precisely with the clemency of the Nero that Seneca had scripted at the beginning of his reign. Repeated allusions in Seneca's writing to the bees of Virgil, Georgics 4 establish a continuum of political thought. As he moves between the microcosm of the soul and the macrocosm of the state Seneca, unlike Plato, ‘only sees monolithic forms of autocracy’ (p. 182). The book's final chapter addresses self-expression through economic and commercial power in the early Empire. Not only are financial metaphors prominent in Seneca's moral self-reckoning, but he is explicit that wealth is both ‘the gift of fortune and the fruit of virtue’ (Dial. 7.23.3) and that a philosopher will be rich (Dial. 7.23.1). How far does he diverge, then, from the freedmen of the Satyricon, who persistently take wealth as an index of virtue, or from Trimalchio himself, moved by desire for a boy who, though not superficially beautiful, already has the mind of a businessman (Sat. 75.4–6)? Trimalchio's bad faith is transparent but, S. argues, both Seneca and Petronius question clichés of virtuous poverty to offer ‘a serious, probing look at the relationship between money and the self’ (p. 201).