Seneca Scholarship

Anna Lydia Motto - Love

• “regarding love, Seneca maintains that this emotion is honourable, that it should be indulged.”

• “True love is, in many ways, analogous to an ideal friendship: both arise from mutual, genuine affection; neither is propelled by any ulterior motive stemming from greed, profit, ambition, renown.”

Catherine Edwards - Letters Addressed To

• “most scholars now agree that the letters make more sense viewed as a philosophical project, addressed to a specific recipient but written with an ‘external reader’ in mind”

• “addressed above all to its own author”

Catherine Edwards - Stoic Values

• “For Stoics, human happiness is wholly contingent on virtue, virtus”

• “ultimately only vituperative matters, only the pursuit of virtue is morally good, and everything else is a matter of indifference”

Emily Wilson - Views on Love

• “Marriage was presented in his works as a feature of the ideal life… a preferable indifferent”

• “The main reason for getting married is rather, for Seneca, to make one’s environment more conducive to living a virtuous life”