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Seneca and the Letter Form
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Seneca: Letters
In this course, Dr Liz Gloyn (Royal Holloway, University of London) explores Seneca’s Epistulae Morales. We begin by providing a brief overview of Seneca’s life and literary output, before focusing in more detail on the letter as a literary form. In each of the five modules that follow, we focus on a single letter, providing close-reading, drawing out the key themes, and making links to Stoic philosophy more generally – including the Stoic theory of ‘indifferents’, the theory of the passions (or pathē), Stoic moral psychology, and Stoic views on the immortality of the soul.
Seneca and the Letter Form
In this module, we provide a brief overview of Seneca’s life and literary output, before focusing in more detail on the letter as a literary form. In particular, we think about other famous letter collections – whether political (e.g. Cicero, Pliny), poetic (e.g. Ovid) or philosophical (e.g. Epicurus) – as well as some of the opportunities afforded by the letter form.
Hi.
00:00:02My name is Dr Liz Gloin of the
00:00:03classics Department at Royal Holloway University of London.
00:00:05My lecture series is looking at Seneca and the epistolary Morales.
00:00:09The first lecture looks at Seneca and the letter form in general.
00:00:13And in the following five lectures,
00:00:18I take each of the letters on the current level specification
00:00:20and talk a little bit about the themes and stoic ideas
00:00:23that are underpinning them.
00:00:27So who was Seneca?
00:00:29He was born in four BC
00:00:31roughly,
00:00:33and he died in 65 a. D.
00:00:34So that means he was politically active under the emperors Caligula
00:00:37and Claudius
00:00:41and Nero.
00:00:42He was sent into exile under Claudius on a
00:00:43charge of adultery with one of Caligula sisters.
00:00:47This was because of hostility between him and Claudius, his then wife,
00:00:51the Empress Messalina,
00:00:56who, when Claudius came to power,
00:00:57after Caligula was sort of trying to clear out the court for her her own interests.
00:01:00And Seneca came up on the wrong side of that.
00:01:04He was later recalled from exile because the Empress Agrippina was
00:01:06looking for someone to be a tutor for her son,
00:01:12Nero, who would then go on to become emperor.
00:01:14and the process of moving from being a tutor to being an advisor
00:01:17to Nero as emperor
00:01:23meant that Seneca found himself right at the heart of the Imperial court.
00:01:25Um, however, alongside being a politician, a speechwriter,
00:01:30all of those kinds of things, uh, Seneca wrote an incredibly wide, diverse genres.
00:01:34Diversity of genres. He wrote philosophical works. Uh, he wrote tragic plays.
00:01:40His tragic plays are our best corpus of tragedy in the Roman world.
00:01:45He wrote a satirical poem on the death and supposed
00:01:49densification of the Emperor Claudius called the Pumpkin ification,
00:01:54which is very rude and sort of features Claudius being kicked out of heaven
00:01:57after the Council of the Gods decides he shouldn't be there after all.
00:02:01So
00:02:04only Cicero really rivals him in the amount of genres that he's covering.
00:02:05The epistolary Morales are his last work.
00:02:10So they were written while he was in retirement from Nero's court.
00:02:12He really had to fight to get to retire,
00:02:18and there was sort of quite a lot of argument about whether he should be able to or not.
00:02:20Uh, and Nero sort of put it off a couple of times,
00:02:24but finally he managed to be allowed to
00:02:26go off into the retirement office into seclusion.
00:02:28And he wrote the epistle Morales when he was in sort of
00:02:31this retired, taken away life,
00:02:37and he really gave himself over to philosophy in the last years of his life.
00:02:41And these letters, which are written to his friend Lucy Lius, was sort of the last,
00:02:45as it were the last big big fling, maybe his big legacy
00:02:50as a philosophical thinker.
00:02:53There was a tradition of letter writing in the Roman world.
00:02:56Letters were seen as didactic, educational, perhaps,
00:03:00and they sort of allowed you to imitate the letter writer
00:03:04in by following what the letter writer said or did,
00:03:07or their personality.
00:03:10Particularly good examples of this are Cicero's letters
00:03:12and the idea in which he wanted to present himself as this wonderful statesman.
00:03:16The interesting thing about Cicero's letters is
00:03:21that they were published after his death.
00:03:23He's clearly thinking about the process of publication during his lifetime,
00:03:26but obviously his assassination for his assassination,
00:03:31his death and the prescriptions and ordered by Marc Antony
00:03:34it means that he never actually gets to carry out that literary project himself.
00:03:37So somebody else does it for him,
00:03:42so we don't actually know what Cicero would have wanted
00:03:43his persona to look like in these letter collections.
00:03:46It's entirely driven by his editor afterwards and what they
00:03:49wanted to present as the Cicero who comes from it.
00:03:53So you sort of get this idea of the portraits
00:03:56of a politician that come through these letter collections.
00:03:59And that was clearly something that political figures did
00:04:02during their lifetimes published versions of their correspondence.
00:04:04Pliny also offers in his letters very
00:04:09finely crafted literary constructions of himself,
00:04:12but also with elements of truth.
00:04:15So there's this combination of sort of historical fact and literary presentation,
00:04:18and in Clinton's case, you sort of get his last book book.
00:04:2311 of his letters is all about correspondence that he has with the
00:04:26emperor Trey Shin while he is off being governor of the Thenia,
00:04:30so presenting very much his formal political work as part of his letter collection.
00:04:34On the other side, you have people like David,
00:04:39who uses the letter format for poetic ends.
00:04:42He writes a collection of epistolary X pronto letters from Pontus,
00:04:45which he writes when he's in exile, essentially going, I would like to come home,
00:04:49please, Quite a lot.
00:04:52And then there are the heroic days, which are sort of paired letter in response,
00:04:54poems from heroines to their lovers, some happy, some not.
00:04:59And so these are all uses of the letter for poetic ends.
00:05:04So it's really it's a format that works from Zeneca's perspective.
00:05:08There's also a background of philosophical letters,
00:05:13and the greatest example of these are the philosophical letters of Epicurious,
00:05:15founder of the Epicurean School sort of the opposition,
00:05:19as it were to Seneca Stoic position
00:05:23and the choice of him that Seneca makes to go and do letters
00:05:25links very much into the way that Seneca uses Epicurious in the collection,
00:05:30particularly at the beginning of the collection,
00:05:36to explore the similarities that the parrot is
00:05:38perhaps between the two systems of philosophy,
00:05:43even though a lot of the time so it's an epicurean
00:05:45czar essentially at loggerheads about what they think is important.
00:05:48So what does doing
00:05:52writing letters? Let Seneca do? What does it allow as a format?
00:05:54First of all,
00:05:58it allows you to have bite size treaties is you can
00:05:59sort of have a little a little bit of philosophy.
00:06:02You don't have to do it all at once, so it lets him write a much bigger collection.
00:06:05There are 100 and 24 letters in the A pistol in Morale is overall,
00:06:09but you don't have to do them all at once.
00:06:13You can do it. So the letter by letter,
00:06:14um, it lets Seneca hop around topics he can pick what he fancies doing and expand,
00:06:16or more or less, and come back to themes and ideas.
00:06:22He gives him some structural freedom.
00:06:25Um, he can develop threads, um,
00:06:27and sort of draw ideas together throughout the wider collection.
00:06:30He's not sort of stuck as it were with 11 topic.
00:06:33One idea and sort of lets him meander a little bit.
00:06:37It also makes them, in some ways less dry and more conversational in style.
00:06:41It allows them to have an immediacy and an intimacy and immediacy because you're
00:06:45reading them as if they're written to you because they are addressed to somebody.
00:06:51That's that's kind of personal connection there that you don't necessarily
00:06:55get if you're reading sort of a more strictly logical,
00:06:59constructed kind of text treaties.
00:07:03Now,
00:07:07the intimacy of the addressee it's addressed to Lucy Lius
00:07:08nominally and Lucy Lius does feature, but it's designed for a wider audience.
00:07:12Seneca isn't writing these letters,
00:07:17thinking that only Lucy Lius is ever going to read them.
00:07:19He knows that they're going to go and be published more broadly.
00:07:22Um, so what he does is he uses loose Ilias experiences
00:07:25and his identity as a springboard for much bigger discussions,
00:07:31much bigger philosophical questions, as it were.
00:07:35And that also allows Seneca himself to talk about his own progress, his own status,
00:07:38you know, he never pretends that he is a perfect stoic.
00:07:44He never pretends he's got the hang of all of this stuff.
00:07:49He and Lucy Lius very much profit.
00:07:53He entities disciples sort of approaches, as it were towards
00:07:56wisdom towards the stoic perfection.
00:08:00And
00:08:03it's critically important that he never claims that he is a sage.
00:08:04Now, SAGES the stoic Wiseman is the person who's perfectly grasped and
00:08:08taken on board all of stoic concepts and
00:08:13is fully embedded in the philosophy and has got it everyone else
00:08:16who Professor Stoicism is trying to get to that perfect stage.
00:08:21So there are certain things that the stage will do that the stage can perform.
00:08:25The rest of us can only aspire to, but that doesn't mean we can't aspire to.
00:08:28Then we can't have a go with them.
00:08:33And that's quite important because one thing that scholars thinking about
00:08:36the letters often sort of ask is How real are these?
00:08:39What actually is going on in terms of whether these are actual letters or not?
00:08:43Now we only have Senecas side of the correspondence,
00:08:49which does suggest this is probably literally literary rather than sort of real
00:08:52letters that were ever actually put in the post as it were.
00:08:56And the fact that it's in notionally chronological order
00:08:59also marks it out because ancient letter collections tend to
00:09:03be organised thematically if they're real real correspondence rather
00:09:06than via from beginning to end as this is.
00:09:10So the way to think about it is that it's not completely fictional.
00:09:13Lucy Lius is actually a real person. He is interested in services, Um,
00:09:17but Senecas goal is writing for a broader public for you, for the reader,
00:09:22um,
00:09:28with that goal of helping people understand how to be a stoic by reading through this
00:09:29collection and following along with loose Ilya Santana
00:09:36on their journey towards virtue and towards wisdom
00:09:39
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Gloyn, L. (2018, August 15). Seneca: Letters - Seneca and the Letter Form [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/seneca-letters-liz-gloyn/letter-54-ab70a91d-58b0-479f-9d69-4ba4ba240905
MLA style
Gloyn, L. "Seneca: Letters – Seneca and the Letter Form." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 15 Aug 2018, https://massolit.io/courses/seneca-letters-liz-gloyn/letter-54-ab70a91d-58b0-479f-9d69-4ba4ba240905