SENECA, LUCIUS ANNAEUS

(b. Córdoba, Spain, ca. 4 b.c.–a.d. l;d. near Rome, April A.D. 65)

physical science.

Seneca came from a distinguished provincial family of Italian origin; his father, for whom he was named, wrote on history and rhetoric. The younger Seneca was educated at Rome and then for a time devoted himself to philosophy, particularly to the teaching of the eclectic Sextians and the Stoics. Ethics was his main concern; but his interests extended to physics, for in his youth he produced a book, now lost, on earthquakes. In accordance with his father’s wishes he entered politics, beginning his senatorial career soon after A.D. 31 with the post of quaestor. During the next ten years he became established as one of Rome’s leading orators and writers and won influential friends within the imperial family. In A.D. 41 he was implicated in a court intrigue and banished to Corsica, a grave setback to his career; but eight years later his fortunes were restored when Agrippina, wife of the Emperor Claudius, recalled him and appointed him tutor to her son Nero. In A.D. 54 Nero, then aged sixteen, became emperor; and for the next eight years he governed with the assistance of Seneca and Sextus Afranius Burrus, the commander of the Praetorian Guard. Toward the end of this period of generally sound government Nero turned to different, less scrupulous advisers, so that when Burrus died in A.D. 62, Seneca withdrew from the court, his influence with Nero at an end. Three years later he was accused of involvement in the abortive Pisonian conspiracy against Nero. The evidence against him was weak. but Nero ordered him to commit suicide.

Writing and philosophy occupied Seneca’s leisure throughout his life. The tragedies and ethical works have always been his best-known writings, but also extant is one of his scientific books, Naturales quaestiones, written around A.D. 62. It is typical of Roman scientific writing, a popularizing work largely derived from Greek sources. Seneca shows the eclectic’s independence in choosing between rival theories, but he has no original ideas to contribute. He writes of the need for further careful investigation of natural phenomena but did not conduct any fresh research, although casual observation did provide him with some valuable new information.

The extant part of the Naturales quaestiones, which has survived incomplete, deals with meteorological phenomena, rivers, earthquakes, meteors, and comets, topics that all belonged to “meteorology” in the ancient sense. Apart from Aristotle’s Meteorologica it is the longest extant ancient work on the subject; hence it is the main source for the history of Greek meteorology after Aristotle, since it draws heavily on Greek sources and mentions the theories of many individuals whose works are lost. Admittedly Seneca had little interest in the historical development of the subject; knowing few of his predecessors’ works at first hand, he sometimes misunderstood or oversimplified their ideas and did not always sharply distinguish his own interpretations and cómoments. Furthermore, his characteristically terse and brilliant prose lacked the clarity and precision of expression needed for scientific writing. Yet despite these limitations the work greatly enlarges our knowledge of Greek meteorology after Aristotle.

The Naturales quaestiones owes more to the meteorolocial works of Posidonius than to any other single source, although the loss of these works prevents the extent of the debt from being known in detail. Posidonius had followed Aristotle closely, although he placed Aristotelian theories in the context of his own world system, a modification of the Stoic one. The main features of seneca’s world view were probably Posidonian. He thought that the stars and planets are nourished by vapors given off from the earth. An innate energy possessed by air, and the Aristotelian exhalations, account for most events in the atmosphere. (Aristotle had attributed most meteorological phenomena to the activity of moist and dry “exhalations” emitted from the earth’s surface, roughly equivalent to water vapor and radiated heat.) To explain earthquakes and rivers, Seneca assumed that the earth is like a living creature, permeated by channels for water and air analogous to veins and arteries. But he disagreed with Posidonius and Aristotle about the nature of comets, effectively criticizing their theory that these are a variety of meteor and using his own observations of the comets that appeared in A.D. 54 and 60 to support the view that they are heavenly bodies like planets, with regular orbits. Based on good evidence and well argued, this part of the Naturales quaestiones is in sharp contrast with the rest, which, like most Greek meteorology, abounds in untested speculation and analogy.

Certain broader issues also interested Seneca. As a Stoic he rejected Epicurean physics, particularly the atomic theory of matter, and the denial that the world was created and ordered by a rational God. Like most Stoics he accepted the principles of astrology and divination, and attempted to answer some of the skeptical arguments against them. The problem of relating science to moral life was of especial importance to him, for almost a third of the Naturales quaestiones is about ethical and theological subjects: Seneca thought that through the rational investigation of the universe, men may learn what their attitude toward the material world should be and may reach a true awareness of God’s nature, free from all superstition.

After the immediate popularity enjoyed by all Seneca’s writings, the scientific works were little read in the ancient world and never became established textbooks. The Naturales quaestiones survived the Middle Ages, contributing to the rediscovery of ancient science in Western Europe during the twelfth century, and was still read as a scientific work during the Renaissance. Today it gives an instructive picture of the state of Roman science in the first century A.D., and of the history of Greek meteorology, has considerable literary interest, and illuminates our knowledge of Seneca himself.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Modern eds. of the Naturales quaestiones are by A. Gercke (Leipzig 1907; repr. Stuttgart, 1970); P. Oltramare, with French trans. and notes (Paris, 1929; repr. 1961); and T. H. Corcoran, with English trans., 2 vols. (London—Cambridge, Mass., 1971–1972). For recent eds. of other works, see Motto’s bibliography (cited below).

II. Secondary Literature. Bibliographies are by W. Schaub, of works since 1900 relating to the Naturales quaestiones, in the 1970 repr. of Gercke’s ed., pp. xivii-ixi; and by A.L. Motto, or works on all of Seneca’s prose since 1940, in Classical World, 54 (1960–1961), 13–18, 37–48, 70–71, 111–112; 64 (1970–1971) 141–158, 177–186, 191. A few of the works are O. Gilbert, Die meteorologischen Theorien des griechischen Altertums (Leipzig, 1907; repr. Hildesheim, 1976); R. Waltz, Vie de S´nèque (Paris, 1909); and G. Stahl, “Die Naturales quaestiones Senecas. Ein Beitrag zum Spiritualisierungsprozess der rümischen Stoa,” in Hermes92 (1964), 425–454. The following articles in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encycloädie der classischen Alterumswissenschaft refer to Seneca; W. Gundel, “Kometen,” XI, 1143–1193; W. Capelle,” Erdbebenforschung,” supp. IV, 344–374; and ’Meteorologie,” supp. VI, 315–358: A. Rehm. “Nilschwelle,” XVII, pt. 1, 571–590; and R. Böker and H. Gundel, “Windle,” 2nd ser., VIIIa, pt. 2, 2211–2387.

H. M. Hine

Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (c.4BC-AD 65), Roman dramatist, philosopher, satirist, and statesman, the tutor, and later the victim, of Nero. Nine tragedies adapted from the Greek are attributed to him—the Hercules Furens, Medea, Phaedra (or Hippolytus), and Troades (all possibly based on Euripides), the Agamemnon (on Aeschylus), the Oedipus, Phoenissae (or Thebais), and Hercules Oetaeus (on Sophocles), and the Thyestes (on an unknown original). Octavia, based on the life of Nero's unhappy wife, was formerly attributed to Seneca, but is now considered not to be by him, though its author is still unknown.

As the only extant dramas from the Roman empire Seneca's tragedies are important historically, and their influence on the development of drama in modern times has been profound, in spite of the fact that they were closet dramas. In spite of the fact that Seneca's alterations of his Greek models are usually for the worse, it would be unfair to deny the dramatic power of many of his scenes or the beauty of some of his choral passages, which offset the atmosphere of gloom and horror, brutality and treachery, which pervades these plays and reflects that of contemporary life. When Seneca writes of the intrigues of countries, the instability of princes, the crimes of tyrants, the courage of men in peril of death, there is something more than literary artifice and imagination: he had experienced it all. Perhaps that is why, for the Renaissance, Seneca was the model writer of tragedy. His Latin was easily understood, his plays were divided into the five acts demanded by Horace, their plots, however melodramatic, were universally intelligible, and even his rant and rhetoric appealed to the taste of the time. His line-by-line exchange of dialogue, his chorus, his tyrants, ghosts, and witches, his corpse-strewn stage, all reappear in Elizabethan drama, and even if such effects had already been used by dramatists before Shakespeare, they were reinforced by the reading, and possibly the acting, of translations of the tragedies as early as the 1550s, long before the publication of Seneca's ‘ Tenne Tragedies’ in 1581. Their influence is already apparent in the earliest English tragedy, Gorboduc (1562) by Norton and Sackville; in Gascoigne's Jocasta (1566); in Shakespeare's early plays, particularly Richard III (c.1593) (which shows what splendid results can be achieved when Senecan material is used by a man of genius) and Titus Andronicus (c.1594); and in Jonson's two tragedies Sejanus (1603) and Catiline (1611).

Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (c.4 bc–ad 65), Roman Stoic philosopher, tragic poet, and, like his father the elder Seneca, a noted rhetorician, born in Córdoba. He was appointed tutor to the young Nero and, when the latter became emperor, acted as one of his chief advisers, but, finding this position untenable, he withdrew from the court in ad 62. Three years later he was accused of being implicated in a conspiracy and was forced to commit suicide. His writings consist of tragedies in verse, dialogues, treatises, and letters in prose, which in their different ways all aim to teach Stoicism. Most of his nine plays are on subjects drawn from Greek mythology and treated in extant Greek dramas, but his manner is very different from that of Greek tragedy. He uses an exaggerated rhetoric, dwells habitually on blood-thirsty details and introduces ghosts and magic, the plays were almost certainly not intended for performance but for reading aloud, probably by the author himself, to a select audience.

Seneca's prose writings consist of treatises, some of which are clumsily disguised as dialogues (De Clementia, De Ira, etc.) and a collection of what purport to be letters addressed to one Lucilius constituting a sort of elementary course in Stoicism. These writings were widely read in the 17th and 18th cents. L'Estrange's digest of them (1678) reached ten editions by 1711, so that there is an undercurrent of Stoicism in much of early 18th-cent. thinking, visible not only in Addison's Cato but also in a wide range of writers from Pope to Duck. (See Senecan tragedy, below.)

Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (c.4 BC–AD65), Roman moralist and tragic poet. He embarked on a senatorial career, was banished to Corsica (41–9), and then became tutor to the future Emp. Nero. After Nero's accession in 54, Seneca was the chief adviser of state, but he lost favour, retired from public life in 62, and in 65 was forced to take his own life. He wrote several tragedies, essays couched as letters, and various treatises. He was a professed Stoic and his writings are one of the chief sources of our knowledge of Stoicism.

There is an apocryphal correspondence between Seneca (8 letters) and St Paul (6 letters). Their manner and style show that they cannot be the work of either writer.

Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (ad 4–65) Roman Stoic philosopher, b. Spain. Based on Greek models, Seneca's nine tragedies, such as Phaedra, Medea, and Oedipus, had a lasting impact on European literature. His other works include 12 books of Moral Essays and many philosophical letters.