Oberlin Classics

Seneca Naturales Quaestiones 3 Introduction

1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 Acknowledgements by Christopher Trinacty

2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 This project could not have been completed without the help of many scholars, friends, and institutions. Oberlin College provided travel grants to inspect manuscripts, present at conferences, and experience first-hand some of the waters that Seneca mentions. Gareth Williams read through a draft of the preface commentary and provided numerous helpful comments. Eph Lytle helped with the nitty-gritty of notes on fish, fishponds, and whether an octopus can cross land for food (it can!). David Christenson provided astute comments about the introductory material and specific lemmata. Christopher Star read the introduction with a critical eye and saved me from many errors. I had orginially hoped to publish this with Oxford University Press and Charlotte Loveridge and the readers were very helpful in their comments and support. My students at Oberlin College have assisted in many ways and I’d especially like to mention the work and insights of Michael Swantek, Shelby Raynor, Katharine Stevens, Lucy Haskell, and Rose Rosenthal. My colleagues at Oberlin have supported me in innumerable ways, whether puzzling out a textual crux or discussing why Seneca would begin the work with the topic of terrestrial waters. I can imagine no better colleagues than Kirk Ormand, Andrew T. Wilburn, and Benjamin T. Lee. I want to express special gratitude to the Cooper Fund for Faculty Research, which helped with research, travel, and production costs, and to the Loeb Classical Library Foundation Fellowship for providing funds for a sabbatical leave during the academic year 2017-18. Aspects of the material appeared in lectures for audiences at Ohio University, the University of Florida, the University of Arizona, the University of Cincinnati, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and George Washington University. Thanks to the audiences for their helpful questions.

3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 I decided to make this commentary open-access and free for all because I believe this is the right thing to do, and I wanted to take advantage of the resources that are available on-line. The text relies heavily on Hine’s 1996 Teubner text and I encourage all to read what he has to say about the textual transmission of the Naturales Quaestiones (Hine 1980, 1983, and esp. 1996b in the bibliography). I’ve learned much from the commentaries of Vottero 1989 and Parroni 2002, and my interpretations of NQ 3 have been shaped by the works of F.R. Berno, H. Hine, B. Inwood, G. Reydams-Schils, A. Setaioli, J. Wildberger and G. Williams (among others, see bibliography). I’d love to hear from scholars and students interested in the Natural Questions and I’m happy to make changes (additions and corrections) in the text and commentary to reflect new conjectures or interpretations of the material. In addition, I have also written an intermediate Latin commentary to selections of the Natural Questions for Dickinson Classical Commentaries. Please get in touch with me if you have material to share or questions about either commentary project.

4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0

5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 Overview

6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 Although Stoicism encouraged man to live “according to Nature” (nempe propositum nostrum est secundum naturam vivere, Sen. Ep. 5.4), the natural world often seemed to be a chaotic, dangerous, and inhospitable place, ruled by chance more than divine providence. Floods, earthquakes, tempests, and lightning could cause fear, destruction, personal injury, and even death. To truly follow Nature, one had to understand Nature, even in its most fearful aspects. Philosophers who taught about the natural world did so, in part, to dispel such fears and encourage their readers to search for the underlying causes of such phenomena. While these causes would differ – for Epicureans, atoms, void and a helpful swerve, for Stoics, a providential god – authors believed the search for truth in the physical realm would lead to ethical benefits as well. Seneca’s Naturales Quaestiones “Investigations into Nature” is part of a larger Greek and Roman tradition of philosophical works aiming to explain aspects of the natural world, in particular, meteorology. While Naturales Quaestiones Book 3 has traditionally been numbered the third book of this work, modern scholarship suggests it is actually the first book of the treatise, as the preface and internal references make clear. It discusses terrestrial waters (springs, rivers, lakes) and offers us a glimpse of Seneca’s thoughts on topics such as hot springs, the hydrological cycle, elemental transformation (i.e. air or earth can transform into water), fishponds, subterranean rivers, and the deluge that will eventually destroy humanity. Seneca continually references a larger “community of scholars” (Hine 2006: 53-60) and responds to previous views as part of his critical doxography, but he is also creating his own literary work from this material. As such, he is apt to quote Ovid and Vergil as often as cite the views of Aristotle or Theophrastus, and he continually exploits points of contact between scientific and literary texts. He rewards readers who pay attention to his own thoughtful composition and his spirit of investigation infuses not only the larger world that he describes, but also the words that he employs (and others have previously employed). As Williams clarifies, “If his brand of Stoicism promotes above all a form of self-conscious vigilance in his life, his style itself requires a constant alertness to verbal possibility, pattern and fine distinction, so that the audience is actively challenged by his word-craft as well as by his philosophical ‘message’” (Williams 2003: 30). He is a man of letters and it is impossible to separate his philosophical thought from its literary form. Naturales Quaestiones Book 3 hints at the proper methodological (i.e. one must move beyond the five senses and use one’s ratio) and hermeneutic framework for readers embarking on the work as a whole. This introductory material provides the necessary historical, philosophical, and structural context for readers approaching this work for the first time. This work discusses a topic, water, which allows Seneca to draw a holistic picture of Stoic philosophy in which humanity is part of the larger rerum natura, and questioning the workings of Nature will help readers question their own lives and actions, and discover some important and effective answers.

7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 Introductory Material

8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 1.) Seneca’s Life and Times

9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 2.) Senecan Stoicism and Works

10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0 3.) Naturales Quaestiones: Date, Organization, Overview, and Genre

11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 4.) Book 3: Water/Hydrology, Summary and Analysis of Specific Sections

12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 0 5.) Text, Transmission, Previous Scholarship, Note on Translation

13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 0 Seneca’s Life and Times

14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0 Lucius Annaeus Seneca, born in Corduba (modern Córdoba) near the turn of the millennium (c. 2 BCE), was the most important intellectual figure of the first century CE.[1] Orator, poet, politician, and philosopher, he made his mark on the Roman cultural and intellectual world in a myriad of ways. Writers emulated him during his life and beyond (Lucan, the writers of the Octavia and Hercules Oetaeus), so much so that Quintilian (the most famous teacher of rhetoric in the following generation) complains that in earlier days the books in the hands of his students were by Seneca, and only Seneca (I.O. 10.125). As a writer, Seneca clearly left his stamp on the literature and philosophy of the early Empire and age of Nero, and his various works, from large scale doctrines on clemency and gift-giving (de Beneficiis), to multiple books of Epistulae and Dialogi, to Tragoediae touch upon clear concerns of the day; the limits of “kingly” power (de Clementia), the importance of managing one’s anger (de Ira), the mindset one must have towards the many obstacles that stand in the way of achieving wisdom (de Constantia Sapientis) are just a sampling of the topics. Many of these works are ethical in nature, and Seneca’s reputation for millennia has hinged on the moral pronouncements found in these works (the early Christian author Tertullian pointedly writes that Seneca is “often ours” and for Dante he was “Seneca morale”).[2] His works denounce wealth, luxury and vice with particular ferocity and bite, which has led to the subsequent disparagement of Seneca as a hypocrite of the worst sort from antiquity to the present day.[3] After all, he was an incredibly rich senator, owner of vast vineyards of particular fecundity (Pliny Nat. 14.51, Col. 3.3.3), tutor to the vice-addled Nero, and then one of his primary advisors and chief speech-writer until his voluntary retirement from Nero’s court in the early 60s CE. Written after his retirement, the Naturales Quaestiones is also in many ways an ethical work, but it reflects on ethical matters (the proper attitude towards death, the importance of eliminating one’s own vices) within a larger framework of Stoic physics. If nature is often cast as the antipode of culture in certain anthropological and structural studies of the ancient (and modern) world, Seneca bridges this divide to show how natura must inform any proper conception of culture (ancient or otherwise).

15 Leave a comment on paragraph 15 0 In spite of the multiplicity of works, Seneca very rarely discusses the details of his own life. Most of our information about his biography and his direct involvement in the political world of Rome comes from the Annals of Tacitus and Cassius Dio’s Roman History, which view his role and influence with varying degrees of sympathy, suspicion, and disgust.[4] We do not know much about his early days in Corduba, but he came to Rome as a young boy and pursued his education there under the care of his father, also named Lucius Annaeus Seneca, and his mother, Helvia. The Elder Seneca, an eques, was a noted historian and follower of the declamatory rhetoric of the day: his extant Controversiae and Suasoriae detail the transition between the age of Cicero to that of the early Empire and reveal how the quest for stylistic point, bon mots (sententiae), and erudite argumentation led to a competitive declamatory environment filled with both highly skilled speakers and highly knowledgeable audience members.[5] In addition to his traditional education, Seneca also studied philosophy under Attalus the Stoic, Fabianus (who combined rhetorical and philosophical prowess in a way that made a deep impression on Seneca)[6] and Sotion, a Sextian philosopher with Pythagorean leanings. Their teaching stuck with Seneca, and, in his old age, he recalls studying at their feet with obvious nostalgia and affection (Ep. 49.2, Ep. 108.13-23). It appears he spent much of his 20s in Egypt with his aunt, whose husband (C. Galerius) was prefect of Egypt from 16-31 CE. Seneca was a sick youth, suffering from asthma and, possibly, a form of tuberculosis, and the dry climate of Egypt was amenable to his health. In Egypt, he studied the religious customs and topography, which informed a work that is unfortunately lost to us (de Situ et Sacris Aegyptiorum) and influenced his descriptions of the flooding of the Nile in the Naturales Quaestiones. After returning to Rome (and suffering a harrowing shipwreck en route), he began his political career under Tiberius, attaining the quaestorship around 33 CE, a relatively late start for one interested in advancing on the cursus honorum. The rise of Caligula spelled trouble for Seneca because of Seneca’s popularity as an orator and Caligula’s own pride in this area of study. Caligula’s jealousy of Seneca’s oratorical ability led to a sententia of his own (“[Caligula] used to say Seneca wrote mere schoolboy exercises and that he was ‘sand without lime’” harenam esse sine calce, Suet. Cal. 53). Dio writes that Caligula’s anger reached such a pitch that he would have sentenced Seneca to death if he wasn’t persuaded against this action by one of his mistresses (59.19). After Caligula’s death, Seneca quickly ran afoul of Claudius, probably because his close relationship with one of Caligula’s sisters troubled Claudius’ wife, Messalina, and he was exiled to Corsica. If the details at times are blurry about this period in Seneca’s life, what is clear is that he was moving in the highest levels of Roman society and had first-hand experience with the suspicion, wrath, resentfulness, and passions of those in power.[7]

16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 0 Exile on Corsica, if we can trust his Consolationes, was a difficult experience, but he claims to have found comfort in contemplating the natural world. As he writes in the Consolatio ad Helviam:

17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 0 [My mind] first seeks to know about the lands and their position, and then the nature of the sea that surrounds them, and its alternating ebb and flow. Then it investigates the expanse, full of frightening phenomena, that lies between the heavens and earth – this near space that is turbulent with thunder, lightning, wind blasts, and downfalls of rain and snow and hail. Finally, after traversing the lower reaches, it breaks through to the heights above and delights in the most beautiful sight of things divine; and mindful of its own immortality, it moves freely over all that has been and will come to be in every age across time. (Dial. 12.20.2, trans. Williams 2014)

18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 0 It is worth noting that many of these phenomena are found in the Naturales Quaestiones – a clear sign that his interest in the natural world was present throughout his life and could act as solace during troubled times.[8] In these years (41-49 CE) Seneca wrote the Consolationes ad Helviam and ad Polybium, and possibly the de Ira (published after he returned to Rome) as well as some of the tragedies.[9] These works surely increased his renown in Rome. After Claudius married Agrippina, she persuaded her husband to recall Seneca to Rome to tutor her twelve-year-old son, the future emperor Nero. While Suetonius tells us that Agrippina instructed Seneca to focus on rhetoric and the humanities, but exclude philosophy (Suet. Nero 52), it is possible that Seneca also attempted to slip in philosophical instruction, through the Dialogi he wrote at this time and, possibly, the tragedies that Nero might gravitate towards even more readily.[10] Regardless, for Seneca this change in fortune must have seemed as drastic as it was unexpected. Now a member of the imperial court, in charge of the education of the heir apparent of the Principate, Seneca’s influence and wealth were on the rise and his exile on Corsica was just a memory, although the lessons of such a quick change of fortune were not lost on him.[11]

19 Leave a comment on paragraph 19 0             Claudius’ death in 54 CE was a joyous occasion for Seneca, if the satire about his death (Apocolocyntosis) is any indication, and hopes were high for the young Nero.[12] With Seneca and the praetorian prefect Burrus as advisors, the first five years of Nero’s rule were, generally, considered to be a time of great prosperity for Rome (a.k.a. the famous quinquennium Neronis), and Seneca’s own writings, especially the de Clementia,[13] are hopeful, if admonishing at times.[14] Historians such as Tacitus and Dio, with the perspective of hindsight, find moments during these years that betray the violent and unruly behavior of Nero’s later rule, and it is true that Nero began to chafe at the power that his mother Agrippina possessed – his highly theatrical assassination of her points to limitations of Seneca and Burrus’ guidance (Dio 61.13, Suet. Nero 34, Tac. Ann. 14.3-10). The Senate chose not to censure Nero and, officially, bought the story of a conspiracy spearheaded by Agrippina, which ultimately increased Nero’s political power.[15] Nero’s behavior becomes more autocratic after the murder, and it is difficult to know how much influence, if any, Seneca wields at this time. Nero’s head soon was turned by the advice of Tigellinus and others more apt to condescend to the emperor and endorse his flights of fancy (e.g. the Neronia games, his divorce of Octavia). In 62 CE, Burrus died of throat cancer or possibly poison administered at Nero’s orders.[16] His passing impacted Seneca’s decision to request the ability to retire from court and to give up his vast holdings to help the imperial treasury. Although Nero refused him, Seneca frequently absented himself from Nero and Rome by claiming illness (Tac. Ann. 14.53-56). It was during this time that he began the Naturales Quaestiones and the Epistulae Morales as well as a lost work which discussed moral philosophy more systematically.[17]If Stoicism generally encouraged political involvement, it also could be used as a means of objecting to immoral decisions of those in power. Seneca is not one of the outspoken “Stoic Resistance” to Nero that we hear about in the pages of Tacitus, but these works do intimate his perception of Nero’s rule.[18] While they do not overtly mention the political turmoil in Rome and are strangely silent about certain events (e.g. the great fire in 64 CE), there are moments in which one can detect references to the emperor.[19] A final retirement from Nero occurred in 64 CE (after Seneca successfully bestowed his wealth to the princeps) and Seneca was free to devote himself to his studies and travel among his estates in Italy. Tacitus claims that Seneca believed he was in risk of being poisoned and restricted himself to a diet of wild fruit plucked by his own hand and water from running streams (Tac. Ann. 15.45). In the following year, however, he was implicated in the Pisonian conspiracy and was forced to commit suicide, which he did in a manner befitting his Stoic values and his many assertions about suicide and the proper attitude towards death.[20] He avowed that his followers had the imago vitae suae to follow and, while he himself imitated the examples of Socrates and Cato, it is true that later victims of Nero imitated Seneca, whether in seriousness (Thrasea Paetus, Tac. Ann. 16.34-35) or in jest (Petronius, Tac. Ann. 16.19). If there were moments in his life in which Seneca seemed not to live up to the high moral and ethical standards he preached, his death revealed a man willing to act in a manner commensurate with his professed values and principles.

20 Leave a comment on paragraph 20 0 Seneca’s Writings and Stoicism

21 Leave a comment on paragraph 21 0 Quintilian, no friend of Seneca, admits he was a special case in the history of Latin letters because of the wide variety and particular power of his writings. He claims, “[Seneca] treated almost every subject-matter; his speeches, poetry, letters and dialogues are all celebrated” (tractavit etiam omnem fere studiorum materiam. nam et orationes eius et poemata et epistolae et dialogi feruntur, I.O. 10.1.129). This large variety of works and subjects provides a number of different lenses through which one can view Seneca’s broad interests in the social, political, literary, ideological, and philosophical issues of the day. In fact, “Seeing Seneca Whole” is one of the more productive recent trends in Senecan scholarship.[21] Helpful points of connection can be made between various works, but it is also true that his writings often should be considered independently because of their genre (Apocolocyntosis), specific content and context (de Vita Beata), and even addressee (cf. de Clementia, Consolatio ad Polybium). For example, one should not expect that the key to understanding Senecan tragedy can be found in the prose philosophical treatises, but there are broad concerns and issues that overlap.[22] Seneca may not be to everyone’s taste, but his voice and style are distinctive: his blend of brevity with expansive rhetorical catalogues, colloquial language with elevated, poetic prose,[23] moments of spiritual reverie with everyday details creates a beguiling mélange.[24] Prose and poetic style link the works more closely than themes ever could.[25] In each work one can easily identify the Senecan voice with its desire for powerful aphorisms, wordplay, allusive indications of something more lurking for those attuned to hear it, figures of speech, anastrophe, alliteration, and chiasmus;[26] he wants his readers to pay attention to his language and foregrounds its expressive and sonorous qualities. In fact it is the “dangerous” nature of his style that most worried Quintilian (and attracted young speakers). This pointed quality can be seen in the preface to this book when he writes:

22 Leave a comment on paragraph 22 0 What is important? To be able to endure misfortune with a joyful mind. To bear whatever should happen as if you wanted it to happen to you. For you ought to have wanted it to happen, if you had known that everything happens by god’s command: to weep, to complain, and to groan is to disobey.

23 Leave a comment on paragraph 23 0 quid est praecipuum? posse laeto animo adversa tolerare, quidquid acciderit sic ferre quasi volueris tibi accidere. debuisses enim velle si scisses omnia ex decreto dei fieri. flere, queri et gemere desciscere est. (3.pr.12)

24 Leave a comment on paragraph 24 0 The opening phrase is repeated seven times in this section and helps to structure and redefine Seneca’s observations and teaching. The rhythm of the clausulae tend to the common cretic + spondee with various resolutions of the long syllables, but the dispondee of quid est praecipuum is a rather rarer rhythm and calls attention to itself.[27] Polyptoton of verbs (accidere, velle), repetition of sounds (debuisses…scisses, fieri…queri), verbal roots linking independent concepts in unique manners (scisses, desciscere), short powerful clauses, and asyndeton abound. Phrases such as laeto animo not only have possible allusive force (see Horace Carm. 2.16.25), but also the application of laeto in such adversity may be shocking.[28] In addition many of these phrases echo thoughts and phrases of his de Providentia, written contemporaneously and also addressed to Lucilius.[29] If Lucilius is the ideal reader, he will surely see the connections between ethics and physics even more forcibly demonstrated by such parallels – the question is whether you, dear reader, also are picking up on such similarities.

25 Leave a comment on paragraph 25 0 Seneca is a product of the Roman philosophical world in which he was educated.[30] He is, broadly-speaking, an orthodox Stoic, but is open to opposing viewpoints and will often assert his independence from the party line on issues as diverse as common ethical tenets with Epicureanism (Ep. 2, 8) to the true nature of comets (NQ 7.22.1). He is comfortable engaging with Plato (Ep. 58) and Aristotle (Ep. 65), and can draw upon an eclectic number of sources, as he writes in de Brevitate Vitae, “We may debate with Socrates, express doubt with Carneades, find peace with Epicurus, conquer human nature with the Stoics, surpass it with the Cynics” (Dial. 10.14.2).[31] The bulk of his writings are dated to the period after he returned from exile and represent the most complete expression of Stoic philosophy in Latin, even if they do not cover all facets of Stoicism equally. Stoicism was born in Athens under Zeno (335-263 BCE) and subsequently developed by writers such as the prolific Chrysippus of Soli (c. 280-207 BCE), who became, with Zeno, the primary proponents of the Old Stoa. Their ideas were further cultivated and changed by Panaetius (c.185-109 BCE), Posidonius (c. 135-50 BCE), and Asclepiodotus (1^st C. BCE) – these representatives of the Middle Stoa seemed to most directly impact Stoicism’s reception in Rome and some scholars have seen their hand behind many details of Seneca’s works.[32] In Rome, Stoicism struck a chord, especially because of its stress on political engagement and the duty of men to help their fellow men,[33] and it became the default ethical and moral stance for the civitas and was endorsed by thinkers and statesmen such as Cato the Younger (95-46 BCE) and Marcus Aurelius (121-180 CE).[34] As a system of thought, it underwent changes and Seneca’s own engagement with Stoicism shows his ability to draw upon writers of the Old and Middle Stoas in order to build his own arguments and discuss the issues that concerned him and his audience. Stoics posited the triad of ethics, physics, and logic for understanding the natural world and, while the predominate concern in Seneca’s works are with ethics, he can delve into physics and logic with easy familiarity and real élan.[35] The three aspects inform one another and create a whole without one necessarily being more important than the others, a common way to imagine the tripartite nature was the Stoic egg in which logic is the shell, ethics the albumen, and physics the yolk.[36] Like a three-legged stool, all three are needed to stabilize and support the individual.[37] Gone, however, are the logical syllogisms that earlier Stoics obsessed over, metaphysics and epistemology are primarily topics for another day; Seneca’s Stoicism repeatedly returns to the question of living an ethical life and progressing towards the highest goal of man, namely the life of a Stoic sage (even as he admits this is nearly impossible to achieve).[38] It should not be mere theory, but theory put into the active practice of moral improvement.[39] This life is one of pure ratio (“reason”) and it is ratio that mankind shares with god, who is pure ratio and can be identified with Zeus or Natura.[40] In fact, understanding the natural world will bring one closer to understanding god, as Seneca writes:

26 Leave a comment on paragraph 26 0 The virtue which we strive for is magnificent not because it is fortunate in itself to be free from evil, but because it liberates the mind, prepares it for knowledge of the celestial, and makes it worthy to become a companion of god. Then it has perfected and fulfilled the highest good of human destiny, when it has stamped out every evil and has sought the heights and come into the inner recesses of nature.

27 Leave a comment on paragraph 27 0 Virtus enim ista quam adfectamus magnifica est non quia per se beatum est malo caruisse, sed quia animum laxat et praeparat ad cognitionem caelestium, dignumque efficit qui in consortium <cum> deo veniat. tunc consummatum habet plenumque bonum sortis humanae cum calcato omni malo petit altum et in interiorem naturae sinum venit. (NQ 1.pr.6-7)[41]

28 Leave a comment on paragraph 28 0 God controls the cosmos and every action is governed by god; the rational Stoic will grasp this and will not rage against events that appear unfair, accidental, or negative in any way. In fact, these perceived roadblocks or traumas advance the purposes of the universe and must be actively understood as the work of god. These are ways in which the Stoic must demonstrate his virtus (“virtue, manliness”) and a rational life is, at its core, a purely virtuous life – there is no room for vice of any sort.[42] To live according to nature or according to god is to live in a rational and virtuous manner; it is a tall task, but one that Seneca and Stoics believe is the paramount task of human life.

29 Leave a comment on paragraph 29 0             Many of Seneca’s works encourage his audience or addressee to begin to live in a way corresponding with Stoic strictures, even as he realizes that he himself is fallible and the path is difficult. Written late in life, the Epistulae Morales provides a sustained engagement with various elements of Roman life from a Stoic point view – from bathing (Ep. 56, 86), to the amphitheater (Ep. 7), to slavery (Ep. 17, 31, 47), to the role of precept and exempla in teaching (Ep. 6, 94,95, 120),[43] to language and rhetorical style (Ep. 75, 114), to the role of the liberal arts in the pursuit of wisdom (Ep. 88), to fame (Ep. 21), to death (Ep. 12, 22, 26, 30, 70, 82, passim) – all in an epistolary generic form that evokes the letters of Cicero and Epicurus as well as the poetic Epistulae of Horace.[44] Epistolary theory stresses how letters offer the most thorough image of the self,[45] and Seneca often claims how the process of writing these letters offers him a chance to dissect the various facets of his own soul.[46] Seneca acts as an affable guide as he urges his addressee, Lucilius, to contemplate the world with a critical eye, and as he derives lessons from subjects as diverse as e.g. heavy drinking and logical syllogisms in two adjacent letters (Ep. 82, 83). The Dialogi address how to control passions such as anger (de Ira), how wealth and fame should be considered “indifferent” at best by the Stoic (de Vita Beata), and how to make the most of the time allotted in one’s life (de Brevitate Vitae). While the Dialogi are not in a dialogue form such as Plato’s works, there are often interlocutors present (whether the addressees or unnamed dissenters), who spur on further reflection, second-guess Seneca’s ideas, or offer new avenues for philosophical exploration. This is true in the Naturales Quaestiones as well, as different voices often break in to assert independent viewpoints and this tendency shows one of the ways that Seneca enriches his prose works with these additional points of view.[47] Such a variety of viewpoints allows Seneca to provide different facets of the argument, and models the introspection and self-questioning one must practice for self-improvement. The inner world of Seneca is always foregrounded in his letters and dialogues, yet that inward turn, paradoxically, can be most beneficially made only after the broadest outward contemplation of the cosmos. 

30 Leave a comment on paragraph 30 0             This cosmos is mortal and is periodically destroyed in a cosmic conflagration (ἐκπύρωσις), an important background idea for Naturales Quaestiones 3. Heavenly fire is identified with god and during the ἐκπύρωσις the universe as we conceive of it will become consumed in fire.[48] Seneca writes about it in Consolatio Ad Marciam as follows:

31 Leave a comment on paragraph 31 0 The time will come when the universe will extinguish itself in order to be born again, the heavens will smite itself with its own force, stars will run into stars, and with everything aflame with a single fire, and what now shines separately will burn altogether.

32 Leave a comment on paragraph 32 0 Et cum tempus advenerit, quo se mundus renovaturus extinguat, viribus ista se suis caedent et sidera sideribus incurrent et omni flagrante materia uno igni quicquid nunc ex disposito lucet ardebit. (Dial. 6.21.6)

33 Leave a comment on paragraph 33 0 Likewise in this book, he writes about this conflagration as the moment when fire “overtakes the universe and turns everything into itself” (qui occupet mundum et in se cuncta convertat, 3.13.1). Seneca expects the reader will understand this concept, but he is less interested in describing the end of the universe as the end of human, terrestrial life. While contemplation of ἐκπύρωσις and the cosmic viewpoint will suit him elsewhere (Dial. 6.21.1-2, De Otio, NQ 1.pr.5-13) and it underlies some of the comparisons of the flood (e.g. 3.28.5, 3.29.1), Seneca wishes at the opening of Naturales Quaestiones to keep the audience firmly grounded in human responses to water and the natural world. There is ethical perspective to be gained from the end of human life as Seneca’s describes it at the conclusion of Naturales Quaestions Book 3, and water, perhaps surprisingly for a Stoic thinker, comes to be “better to think with” than fire for both creation and destruction.

34 Leave a comment on paragraph 34 0             Seneca is, as Inwood states, “a philosopher in a hurry, as a man interested above all else in the concrete result of making his life better, as a man with no time to lose”,[49] and this comes out especially in his Epistulae and Naturales Quaestiones. Both of these works were begun after his retirement from Nero’s court and, from the prologue of the Naturales Quaestiones, it is clear that he looks upon his earlier life as valueless when compared to learning about the natural world:

35 Leave a comment on paragraph 35 0 Old age breathes down my neck and rebukes me that I spent my life in meaningless pursuits. Let me vigorously pursue this task all the more, let my work redeem my lost time badly spent. Add night to day, cut back on business concerns, get rid of anxiety over family estates lying far from their owner; let the whole mind be free for itself and let it contemplate itself at least near its own death.

36 Leave a comment on paragraph 36 0 premit a tergo senectus et obicit annos inter vana studia consumptos. tanto magis urgeamus et damna aetatis male exemptae labor sarciat. nox ad diem accedat, occupationes recidantur, patrimonii longe a domino iacentis cura solvatur, sibi totus animus vacet, et ad contemplationem sui saltim in ipso fine respiciat. (3.pr.2)

37 Leave a comment on paragraph 37 0 Self-transformation is possible and encouraged (cf. Ep. 6.1) – if previous works concentrated primarily on ethical scrutiny for such growth, now he expands the scope of inquiry and brings in the investigation of physics and natura. Seneca’s propensity to highlight the ability for man to contemplate his decisions, actions, and his sense of self has led to the theory that Seneca is expressing in his corpus an “Art of Living”. This is true, broadly speaking, and writers such as I. Hadot, Foucault, P. Hadot, Veyne, and Sellars have done much to illuminate the ways in which Seneca offers guidance to the individual who is proficiens, i.e. “making progress”, but not already a sage.[50] One must continually question one’s impressions, impulses, and desires and works such as de Tranquillitate Animi or Epistle 83 display the sort of introspection and self-scrutiny necessary for not just understanding but also molding one’s own psychological make-up.[51] Seneca’s teachings on these issues show his concern for the place of the individual in the larger spheres of influence on his life, not just intellectual spheres such as literature, rhetoric, and philosophy, but also the more tangible influences of family, friends, foes, the state, the environment, and the world.[52] The Stoic will continually and creatively seek to understand how his life is part of the larger cosmos and while Seneca may believe “it is easier to understand natura than to write about it” (facilius natura intellegitur quam enarratur, Ep. 121.11), his larger corpus can be seen as an attempt to do just that from his own personal perspective. As Foucault states about the Naturales Quaestiones:

38 Leave a comment on paragraph 38 0 [A]ll the objectives of traditional Stoic morality are in fact not only compatible with, but can only really be attained, can only be met and accomplished at the cost of the knowledge of nature that is, at the same time, knowledge of the totality of the world. We can only arrive at the self by having passed through the great cycle of the world.[53]

39 Leave a comment on paragraph 39 0 Seneca gives the blueprints to the natural world in the Naturales Quaestiones; these blueprints point explicitly to man’s modest place in the rational and providential universe, liberate him from earthly concerns, and insist that the divine spark of ratio links and inspires man’s exploration of the secrets of natura.

40 Leave a comment on paragraph 40 0 Summary of Seneca’s Naturales Quaestiones

41 Leave a comment on paragraph 41 0             As we have seen, Seneca reflects upon the natural world in other works and often features moments of reverie about how nature can be seen as an expression of god’s beneficence (Ben. 4.23.1-25.3), how it causes religious feelings (Ep. 41.3), and how contemplation of the natural world is part and parcel of living according to nature (Dial. 10.5.1-8).[54] His treatise, Naturales Quaestiones, is his most complete discussion of the natural world and is focused on how the knowledge of Stoic meteorology can impact the way one lives a fulfilled life. The treatise is broadly didactic and frequently pays heed to its addressee, Lucilius Iunior, a close friend of Seneca who is currently procurator of Sicily.[55] Lucilius often stands in for the general reader and is encouraged to adjust his way of life or muse upon the grandeur and sublimity of natura (as well as the miserable idiocy of human error) through learning more about meteorological issues. The topics of ancient meteorology moved well beyond discussion of the weather (although that was often part of it), and embraced issues such as earthquakes, the tides, comets, and extreme weather events. Aristotle claimed in his Meteorology that he would cover “events that occur naturally, but less frequently than that of the primary elements of bodies, in the region which borders closely the movements of the stars” (Mete. 338^b19-21). Aristotle looms large in Seneca’s work, but there were additional thinkers who touched upon meteorological topics or wrote full-blown works on meteorology.[56] Greek authors such as Theophrastus, Posidonius, and Epicurus also wrote about meteorological topics, and Seneca references their ideas on topics such as floating islands (3.25.7), earthquakes (6.20.5), and comets (7.20.1-3). Latin authors such as Lucretius in the sixth book of De Rerum Natura, Ovid in the first and last books of the Metamorphoses, and Manilius in his Astronomica discuss these phenomena from a variety of angles, and Seneca, fully aware of their works, fits his own discussion into the larger Latin literary framework.[57] Graver believes that by Seneca’s time the topic of meteorology was considered a particularly Epicurean topos;[58] if this is the case then Seneca’s response is forcefully meant to show that the physical foundations of Epicureanism are ultimately false (not atoms and void but the four elements), and the spontaneous or random development of the cosmos should be exchanged for an intricate set of causes woven by a providential Stoic god.[59] Both schools of philosophy may help to move the reader away from the fear that such meteorological phenomena can evoke, but do so from diametrically opposed views of the physical world and the ethical ramifications of that world. While Lucretius may be the most obvious source that Seneca is correcting in this work, the Naturales Quaestiones is in no way a simple response to Lucretius’ poem. Seneca’s interest in the natural world more broadly was manifest throughout his life,[60] and this work provides a summation of his views on this material in a creative and evocative manner that underscores the significance of such study for living a rational and virtuous life. If he thought it was a challenge to render such material in artistic Latin prose,[61] he clarifies frankly what he hopes the take away from such a work will be:

42 Leave a comment on paragraph 42 0 Something that furthers our well-being should be mixed into every matter and every conversation. When we have gone through the secrets of nature, when we have studied the divine, our mind must be liberated from its evils and constantly reinforced. This is necessary even for learned men who devote themselves solely to this activity; it is not in order to avoid the blows of circumstance (for weapons are being hurled at us from all sides), but in order to endure them with strength and with determination.

43 Leave a comment on paragraph 43 0 omnibus enim rebus omnibusque sermonibus aliquid salutare miscendum est. cum imus per occulta naturae, cum divina travavimus, vindicandus est a malis suis animus ac subinde firmandus, quod etiam eruditis ethoc unum agentibus necessarium est, non ut effugiamus ictus rerum (undique enim tela in nos iaciuntur), sed ut fortiter constanterque patiamur. (NQ 2.59.2).

44 Leave a comment on paragraph 44 0 Seneca asserts that ways that this study will help the individual; it is up the reader to take it to heart and live accordingly.

45 Leave a comment on paragraph 45 0             Naturales Quaestiones was written between 62-64 CE in eight books.[62] The dating is clear from references to the Campanian earthquake (62 CE) and mention of the comet of 60 CE that had caused some consternation among Nero’s supporters at Rome.[63] While the manuscripts preserve the text in three different orders, recent scholarship argues that the preferred order should be as follows:

46 Leave a comment on paragraph 46 0             Book 3: Terrestrial Waters – See infra.

47 Leave a comment on paragraph 47 0             Book 4a: The Nile – A fragmentary book lacking its conclusion, but it does preserve the preface about flattery and details various theories about the reason for its annual summer flood. This book should be read in tandem with Book 3 as the concluding flood of NQ 3.27.1-3.30.8 is consciously evoked in Seneca’s description of the Nile in flood, and the advice about flattery is likewise tied into the findings of Book 3.[64]

48 Leave a comment on paragraph 48 0             Book 4b: Rain, Hail, and Snow (“Celestial Waters”) – This fragmentary book is missing its introduction and doxography about rain. It discusses the formation of hail and snow, and features a concluding epilogue about the contemporary Roman trend for snow-cooled drinks as well as a humorous critique of the “Hail-Watchers” of Cleonae (4b.6.1-7.3).

49 Leave a comment on paragraph 49 0             Book 5: Wind – Definition and causes of wind. The moral excursus on mining features an underground lake of great expanse much like the subterranean waters of Book 3, and the epilogue criticizes the way mankind has utilized nature’s gift for profit and violent conquest.

50 Leave a comment on paragraph 50 0             Book 6: Earthquakes – Seneca begins by reviewing the recent Campanian earthquake before investigating possible elemental causes of earthquakes. The conclusion focuses on diminishing one’s fear and providing remedies for the traumatic aftermath of these natural occurrences.

51 Leave a comment on paragraph 51 0             Book 7: Comets – Various philosophers’ theories about comets are considered and Seneca concludes by commenting on the reverence one must show when investigating works of nature in contrast to the contemporary lack of interest in philosophical education.

52 Leave a comment on paragraph 52 0             Book 1: Atmospheric Fires (rainbows, coronas) – The preface discusses how the study of the natural world will lead to understanding god and Stoic theology.[65] The doxography of distorted visual phenomena in the atmosphere leads to the moral digression about Hostius Quadra and his bedroom of magnifying mirrors before a final epilogue on the role of mirrors in philosophy more generally.

53 Leave a comment on paragraph 53 0             Book 2: Lightning and Thunder – the final book is the longest of the Naturales Quaestiones. It opens by clarifying three branches of physics – terrena, sublimia, caelestia before detailing characteristics of air. Theories about lightning and thunder are reviewed and Seneca offers a long explanation on the role of lightning in divination and the concept of fate. The conclusion stresses not to fear lightning and to treat death with brave contempt.

54 Leave a comment on paragraph 54 0 Internal references (e.g. Seneca writes he will devote a separate book to the Nile after Book 3 at NQ 3.1.2), the strong language evoking the initiation of a new project present in the prologue of Book 3, and thematic considerations convince me that this is the original order.[66] It is noteworthy that when thinking about the larger cosmos, he immediately lands upon terrestrial waters as a natural topic to begin his discussion (as opposed to Aristotle’s systematic analysis of the four elements before moving on to the Milky Way, comets, etc…).[67] The four element grouping is important for Seneca and one can see how he moves from water to wind to fire in these books and, I would add, that water is important to all of the books, even those that deal with fire-based phenomena (e.g. rainbows are caused by the interaction between water and light; most lightning does not occur without storm clouds). Seneca begins with terrestrial waters because of the fundamental importance of water in the creation of life and its ability to manifest to the naked eye many of the elemental changes that are important for understanding the natural world (i.e. evaporation, condensation, and solidification). Presocratic philosophers such as Thales and Anaximander identified water as the foundational element, and Seneca implicitly asserts his independence from traditional Stoic orthodoxy by focusing so strongly on water (instead of fire) at this moment.[68] Seneca groups books by element (water, air, fire) as well as offering a “rising trajectory from ground level…a form of transcendence that replicates, in the work’s structure, Seneca’s increasing distance in the Natural Questions from the world of the here-and-now”.[69] He begins close to the earth, even venturing underground to explain the sources of terrestrial waters, before gradually moving into the atmosphere (Books 4b, 5, 6 – because wind is the cause of earthquakes), and then bursting into the celestial sphere (Book 7, prologue of Book 1), only to descend once again to the stormy realm of lightning and thunder (Book 2). In addition, operative reading strategies that Seneca espouses and models in the opening book reappear throughout the work; thus, when Seneca claims he is “rooting out [the world’s] causes and secrets” (causas secretaque eius eruere, NQ 3.pr.1), further instances of the verb eruere would evoke this opening and point out how such “rooting out” is part of the reader’s task in this work.[70] Seneca’s didactic strategy is not merely to report the findings of previous scholars and synthesize the information, but also, as Hine states, “to tease out the strengths and weaknesses of each theory with a degree of impartiality, instead of making his own views clear at the outset”.[71] In doing so, he models the creation of his own informed perspective, urges the reader to do likewise, and stresses that there is more to be learned about these topics.

55 Leave a comment on paragraph 55 0             The books broadly follow the same construction and are largely self-contained. There is often a prologue of varying length that can touch upon larger considerations (Book 1 on the theological pay-off for the study of physics) or ethical concerns (Book 4a on the dangers of flattery), before delving into the critical doxography of the subject at hand.[72] The presence of prefaces in a majority of the books should remind the reader of poetic works like Lucretius or even Vergil’s Georgics, which had proems of various length opening its individual books. Seneca juxtaposes this prefatory material with the doxography proper, but finds ways to unite these investigations whether through language, imagery, or philosophical considerations.[73] Critical doxography allows Seneca to review what has been discovered by past thinkers and to contextualize their findings. He does so with a generous spirit, recognizing that these first thinkers (possibly like the readers of Seneca’s own work) did not have all the information that Seneca currently possesses:

56 Leave a comment on paragraph 56 0 First I must say that old opinions were somewhat imprecise and rough: people were still wandering around the truth; everything was new to those who first were attempting to understand. Later those same views were polished, and if something has been discovered, credit ought to be granted nevertheless to those first investigators. It is a matter of great courage to flush out the hiding places of nature, and, not content with its exterior appearance, to peer inside, and to descend into the secrets of the gods. Whoever had hope that truth could be discovered made a great contribution to its unearthing.

57 Leave a comment on paragraph 57 0 illud ante omnia mihi discendum est, opiniones veteres parum exactas esse et rudes: circa verum adhuc errabatur, nova omnia erant primo temptatibus, postea eadem ista limata sunt, et si quid inventum est, illis nihilominus referri debet acceptum. magni animi res fuit rerum naturae latebras dimovere, nec contentum exteriore eius aspectu introspicere et in deorum secreta descendere. plurimum ad inveniendum contulit qui speravit posse reperiri…(NQ 6.5.2)

58 Leave a comment on paragraph 58 0 Seneca’s doxography references a wide variety of thinkers from pre-Socratic philosophers such as Thales (3.13.1, 6.6.1) and Anaximander (2.17.1) to Stoics like Posidonius (6.24.6) and Zeno (7.19.1), to possible contemporaries about whom little is known (Apollonius of Myndus, 7.17.2; Balbillus, 4a.2.13),[74] to poets like Vergil (5.16.2, passim) and Ovid (1.3.4, passim), to Nero himself (1.5.6), or his minions (6.8.3-5). These doxographies are not exhaustive but are created by Seneca in order to give a “state of the question”, to probe possible methodologies, and then to provide his own support for why certain phenomena occur or what their significance might be. For example, Book 6 on earthquakes surveys the different philosophical views of what causes an earthquake (underground waters? fires?) before settling on wind (spiritus) as the culprit, a finding that places him in wide agreement with Epicurus.[75] If the Campanian earthquake caused odd happenings (statues cleaved in half! flocks of sheep struck dead!), these are contextualized and explained with a conscious ring-composition (6.1.1-3 ~ 6.27.1-31.3) that provides consolation to the fearful survivors, as well as the shaken readers of this book. Book 1, in contrast, surveys a variety of atmospheric fires from rainbows to rods to parhelia to shooting stars, explaining them as distorted images before a show-stopping excursus on the distorted sexual mores of Hostius Quadra. Such variatio in book structure, tone (from heartfelt to outraged to jocular), length, and topics keeps the reader from boredom and allows Seneca to explore more fully the topics that appeal to him and that are important for the larger themes of the work (e.g. when he pauses to discuss fate at NQ 2.35.1-38.4, it can be seen as a final word on Stoic causation for the work as a whole).[76] If Stoicism often distinguishes between theory and practice, the doxography gives the primary theoretical background and the reader is expected, through critically evaluating Seneca’s evidence, to put this material into practice in her own (newly formed) opinions of such meteorological issues.[77] Seneca’s scientific method is based on his conception of science as part of philosophy and its primary concerns should be contemplation of the universe and the way such contemplation can better one’s life.[78]

59 Leave a comment on paragraph 59 0 Another, diverse sort of practice, can be seen in the digressions that the books feature. These digressions occur either within the body of the text or as epilogues and they allow Seneca to zoom out and place his discussions into larger societal, ethical, and political settings. These are the actions of those who are far from the Stoic ideals pronounced elsewhere in the work, even if they impersonate some of the epistemological or ethical concerns lauded at different times. While at times these digressions seem out of place (and are often marked by Seneca as digressions, see NQ 3.18.1), these are passages that Seneca clearly wished to make an impact on his reader and show him at his most scathing, rhetorically ambitious, and witty.[79] Because of the vibrancy, drama, and literary power of these passages, scholars have often wondered if they are the true subjects of concern with the doxographical material being marginal and ancillary, but it is clear that their very marked nature as “purple” passages are part of Seneca’s literary strategy in this work.[80] Vice is alluring, luxury is innovative, wealth is beneficial, power is intoxicating. To fight against such contemporary ills takes real work and the framing of such folly in his larger work helps to dowse such passions and desires, but it is important that he outfits these alluring vices with the glamor and flash that they deserve.[81] Topics such as the way mankind has used the wind for military exploitation instead of mere exploration and communication (NQ 5.18.4-16), the luxury trade of snow and ice (NQ 4b.13.1-11), and the perverted use of mirrors for sexual deviancy instead of self-knowledge (NQ 1.16.1-17.10) return to the way that humankind distorts and corrupts the gifts of nature. If Seneca models the wonder and gratitude one should give to god for the natural world and the wisdom that accrues from the pursuit of knowledge, the moral excurses give voice to how greed, luxury, and, especially, ignorance create diametrically opposed attitudes. His contemporary society comes under the microscope and its predilections and concerns are shown to be both petty and puny, especially in comparison with the workings of natura.[82] Even the deeds of famous leaders like Alexander the Great are dismissed and those that spend their time recording or reading about history (“what has been done” quid factum est) should be encouraged rather to contemplate philosophy, which concentrates on “what should be done” (quid faciendum est, 3.pr.7).[83] The past is in the past, what you should think and how you will act is what is essential. Seneca gives evidence in the doxographies and in his own responses to these vignettes that show how the correct viewpoint should delimit or influence the interpretation these phenomena, but mankind often will not be persuaded because of its fecklessness, recklessness, trepidations and aspirations. If such passions and faulty viewpoints influence the way one lives, it also bleeds into the way one conceives of death. Death is a common concern in the work, beginning with Seneca’s own impending death in the preface of the first book to various subsequent manifestations (red mullet NQ 3.18.1-7, mining NQ 5.15.1-4, death of a flock of sheep during the Campanian earthquake NQ 6.1.3). The concluding epilogues of Books 2 and 6 reassure the reader that their learning will make them more courageous in the face of death, which approaches the ethical pay-off of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, but from an opposing philosophical perspective.[84] Death is the law of nature (NQ 6.32.12: mors naturae lex est), and the NQ stresses how the law of nature controls both cosmic phenomena such as the flood (NQ 3.30.1) as well as the lives of men (3.pr.16) – if one understands this law that the NQ seeks to clarify again and again, then one will approach its workings without anxiety and fear.[85]The work involved in attaining the proper perspective is difficult, and Seneca at times despairs of attaining it,[86] but it is a worthy goal; indeed, it is the only goal that one should pursue because it will “inform all human actions and…transform so-called ‘ordinary’ life from within existing social structures and responsibilities”.[87] The learning and practice stressed throughout the NQ allows the reader to attain the proper view of the cosmos, which will lead to the proper view of herself and her actions.[88] Physics will inform ethics, and vice versa, and Seneca’s dialectic (one of the aspects of logic that Seneca highlights at Ep. 89.9) shows the creative dialogue between these topics and explores the tensions that can be produced by faulty outlooks and value systems. An overview of Book 3 will help show how this is the case.

60 Leave a comment on paragraph 60 0 Water & Hydrology

61 Leave a comment on paragraph 61 0 But first it is important to look at the subject under consideration. In ancient Rome, water was an essential resource. Look up aqua in the Oxford Latin Dictionary and one will find a myriad of definitions that speaks to its importance and ubiquity in the Roman world. Fresh water was used for drinking, in religious rituals, in medicine, in the baths, food preparation, magic spells, and, of course, the large-scale agriculture and viticulture of the empire. Roman “water culture” touched upon a variety of larger concerns from the morality of fishponds to the imperial benefactions of aqueducts and large-scale thermae.[89]Water was identified with instability, but also could be seen as one of the four foundational elements and the source of all creation.[90] To deprive someone of water and fire was to exile them from society, whereas a bride accepted fire and water in the wedding ceremony. To demand earth and water was a token of submission. Water was associated with time whether because of its use in water clocks (clepsydrae, see Ep. 24.20) or in the common analogy that time is like a river (e.g. Ovid’s ipsa quoque adsiduo labuntur tempora motu, / non secus ac flumen, Met. 15.179-80, and Seneca’s Ep. 58.22 where he references Heraclitus). Thus its polyvalence is particularly marked: proverbially violent, pure, deep, fluid, and indistinguishable.[91] Water coursed through the city of Rome: the yellow River Tiber (prone to flood and considered divine),[92] its tributaries, the underground Cloaca Maxima, the aqueducts, lakes, distribution tanks, open channels, and various pipes like veins carrying this precious resource to the homes and villas of the rich, to the reservoirs, fishponds, fountainhouses, and fulleries (click here for an interactive map showing many of these features).[93] Three famous “lakes” – actually wells or fountains – existed in the Forum Romanum (Lacus Servilius, Lacus Curius, and Lacus Juturnae) and were passed by Roman citizens daily. Strabo, comparing cities of Greece with Rome, writes how water is brought to Rome in such a great amount that rivers run through the city and almost every house has cisterns and fountains of their own.[94] Studies of the city of Rome have often pointed out how these water systems functioned, and recent scholarship has begun to contemplate in a more holistic manner how Romans interacted with and understood water.[95] The sea had its own associations, as did the ocean, springs, fountains, rivers and lakes.[96] The original Muse of Latin poetry, Camena, was associated with a spring near the Porta Capena, and the literary resonances of water can be found throughout Greek and Roman literature.[97] As Taylor writes, “Water connotes radical alterity — and so it mediates, on the one hand, poetic inspiration, and on the other, knowledge of dark and hidden things” (2009: 22). Seneca clearly associates the waters of this book with inspiration, and they act as a test case for the sort of knowledge that a Stoic must probe and uncover. Springs and water sources commonly held numinous associations, and temples and shrines proliferated around such waters; indeed Servius states, “every spring is sacred”.[98] Seneca gives us valuable insight into some of the associations that spring from his contemplation of water and these are wide-ranging; from death to life, the peaks of mountains to underground rivers, the size of the ocean to a drop of sweat on your skin, epic poetry to comedic fodder, his book evokes and embraces the importance and universality of water.[99] Seneca’s statement about water being the most powerful element (3.13.1) and its ability to create the world (in hoc futuri mundi spem latere. ita ignis exitus mundi est, umor primordium, 3.13.1-2) also encourages us to identify it as a suitable initial subject for the work. If the world begins with water, why not begin the work with water as well?

62 Leave a comment on paragraph 62 0 Water was not only important for daily life, but it was also, fundamentally, wondrous. Campbell stresses this fact:

63 Leave a comment on paragraph 63 0 Why did our authors find it difficult to disregard the fabulous? Modern readers need to see this question through the eyes of the ancients. Rivers and springs were very important for human existence; there were many unexplained aspects, such as disappearing rivers, the sudden appearance of streams, underground rivers, flash floods, damaging and ultimately uncontrollable inundations in Rome, the annual miracle of the Nile inundation, and springs of bubbling hot water, many of which did bring about odd things. In facts, springs represented an unusual, even turbulent part of nature that man could sometimes not control, exploit, or defend against…[100]

64 Leave a comment on paragraph 64 0 In addition, water undergoes the most obvious elemental changes to the naked eye, and everyone can observe this liquid become a solid or gas when cooled or heated. If water can become “air” (steam) or a solid that looks like a rock (and Seneca believes that hyper-cooled water becomes quartz crystal, see NQ 3.25.12), then the other elements can likewise undergo such transformations, even if they are not as readily observable. This is another vital reason for beginning this work with water and spilling so much ink on elemental transformations, since this is one of the keys to understanding the natural world. Stoic thinkers stressed such elemental transformations and one can look at the larger world cycle of destruction and creation by flood as a macroscopic “elemental” change – see Berno 2012 for more on this important rewriting of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Authors like Vitruvius recognize the importance of water, and he devotes a book to water because “physicists, philosophers, and priests alike believe that all things consist of the power of water” (a physicis et philosophis et ab sacerdotibus iudicetur ex potestate aquae omnes res constare, 8.pr.4).[101] Pliny likewise mentions how “in no part of Nature are there greater marvels” than water (Nat. 31.21) and devotes Nat. 31 to the significance of water. Capable of traveling up a wick or below the earth, salty, sweet, hot, cold, it appeared in a variety of forms and, while necessary for life, could also cause death. Its unique properties led to the various stories that make up the strong paradoxographical tradition about water, most obvious in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 15.259-360, as well as some of the more elaborated stories in the Metamorphoses (Arethusa, Niobe, Salmacis).[102] This tradition of cataloguing wondrous waters stretches back to Callimachus, and Seneca would be well aware of the long history of such tales.[103] From his childhood in Corduba, where the great Baetis river and its tributaries allowed for riverine trade, to his time in Rome and Italy, to his convalescence in Egypt, to his active interest in viticulture, Seneca would have been well-aware of some of dangers (e.g. flooding of the Tiber), myths (Lake Avernus and the underworld landscape of the Phlegraean Fields), wonders (the Nile in spate), and peculiarities of water.

65 Leave a comment on paragraph 65 0 Seneca’s understanding of the hydrological cycle, however, is compromised by his belief that the source of terrestrial waters could not be rainfall and other precipitation (NQ 3.7.1-4, 3.11.5). This is, ultimately, the cause of all such waters from the smallest spring to the mightiest river.[104] Seneca thought that, in addition to moisture that the earth exuded naturally, underground rivers and lakes existed, fed by elemental transformation of air and earth into water, which were the source of such terrestrial waters above ground.[105] The ability for waters to disappear, move underground, and reappear is a common feature of the karst landscapes of the Mediterranean, and Seneca utilizes myths like Arethusa or the Tigris’s peek-a-boo behavior to stress the existence of underground passages, the porous nature of the earth, and hidden connections.[106] He models his conception of the hydrological cycle on the human body, and his use of analogy works to explain not only how “veins” of water and “arteries” of air might exist below the surface of the earth (NQ 3.15.1), but also adds credence to the Stoic idea of the living cosmos.[107] Analogy is a common argumentative tool in meteorology, and Seneca’s use of it helps him not only to explain difficult phenomena, but also to link such phenomena to larger conceptions and ideas.[108] If the earth is like a human body, waters may be corrupted or “injured” (NQ 3.15.2-4), “scars” can appear (NQ 3.15.6), and the earth itself is destined to “die” at some point as with the flood at the conclusion of Book 3. If the correct way to understand the hydrological cycle is below:

66 Leave a comment on paragraph 66 0

67 Leave a comment on paragraph 67 0

68 Leave a comment on paragraph 68 0 Seneca’s view is closer to this:

69 Leave a comment on paragraph 69 0

70 Leave a comment on paragraph 70 0 Gone are the usual drivers of atmospheric condensation and oceanic evaporation as well as the dependence on precipitation to recharge the water table. The network of watery veins, underground caverns (where water can be created by condensed air), earth dissolving into water through elemental change, and subterranean bodies of water will be sufficient. Additionally, for Seneca, the fact that water is one of the four elements should be enough to explain the source of terrestrial waters. Because of the ubiquity and balance of elements, one should not wonder that there are copious amounts of water (after all, Seneca says, you do not question where the air comes from, why should you wonder about water? NQ 3.12.1-3). Seneca’s scientific model of the nature of terrestrial waters helps him to explain the various phenomena that he covers in the Naturales Quaestiones with the added benefits of creating a hypothesis that will be of use to explain additional phenomena (from the caverns and underground lakes uncovered by mining at NQ 5.15.1-4 to the causes of earthquakes in NQ 6). The presence and prevalence of water in these natural phenomena encourages the reader to see its intrinsic importance in the workings of the natural world. If man is part of this world, one needs to muse on the position and perspective of mankind – it turns out that the ways in which man can “live according to nature” (Ep. 5.4) may involve water in ways both concrete and metaphorical (and thus tie the physics of the book with Stoic ethical ideals).

71 Leave a comment on paragraph 71 0 It is notable what Seneca does not discuss in this book: aqueducts, monumental fountain architecture, and the Tiber itself all are passed over without a mention.[109] Although certain baths, villa accoutrements, and building projects are touched upon, Seneca does not focus on the Roman ability to manipulate and channel water for large scale irrigation, or public works.[110] This may be in part to delimit the power of mankind over this violent and powerful element (NQ 3.13.1, 3.30.6) and underscore how these projects are unworthy of wonder.[111] Although modern hydrologists may scoff at some of his findings, his blend of empirical observation (e.g. his experience with viticulture at NQ 3.7.1), analogical modeling, debating with his interlocutor, and literary and rhetorical flair allow him to construct a persuasive paradigm than can account for the variety of topics of the book.

72 Leave a comment on paragraph 72 0 Summary of Naturales Quaestiones Book 3

73 Leave a comment on paragraph 73 0 1.) Prologue: Ethics and Physics

74 Leave a comment on paragraph 74 0 The book begins with a statement of intent – although he is an old man, he will take up the immense project “to survey the world, to root out its causes and secrets, and to publish what should be learned by others” (mundum circumire constitui et causas secretaque eius eruere atque aliis noscenda prodere, 3.pr.1). Already here in the opening sentence, Seneca highlights the relationship between himself and his readers who have to actively learn this material in order to gain any larger insight. Instead of offering a survey of the subjects he will examine, Seneca proceeds to muse on the ethical ramifications for such a course of study. A quotation of the epic poet Vagellius stresses not only the effort that must be expended on the subject, but also the literary quality of this work; Seneca will enrich his work with quotations and intertexts from various poets and these should be taken as important voices that help to make up the “community of scholars” that aid in this investigation into nature. The Vagellian quotation most likely derives from an epic poem on Phaethon, another figure who attempted a cosmic journey, although with troubling results.[112] Time is of the essence and such research is more important than other possible endeavors. Certainly it is better than writing history, which is for Seneca a worthless compilation of sufferings inflicted by flawed individuals on undeserving populations.[113] An Alexander or Hannibal, even a Roman general (3.pr.10) may conquer land, but is unable to conquer his own vices.[114] More important and useful is philosophical study which will not only inform us what we ought to do (3.pr.7), but also clarify what is truly important in human life. Thus the very genre of historiography is shown to be inadequate to the education of the reader, and if Seneca engages in his own “historical” writing at times in the NQ,[115] he is quick to point out how the exempla found in historical accounts and even the longue durée of empire (3.pr.9) are of questionable importance.[116] The anaphora of the question “What is important?” (quid est praecipuum?),like the refrain of a prayer, not only calls attention to the particular answers that Seneca gives, but is indicative of his protrepic style in this section. While critics of Seneca’s rhetoric often harp on his repetitions and inability to leave well-enough alone,[117] here it reinforces the variety of ways in which the soul/mind can benefit from such philosophical exploration and growth. Theme and variation. He wants to keep the reader focused on what is important and hammer home that the contemplation of this material (in essence a way of communing with the divine, 3.pr.11) will grant the proper perspective for more worldly issues – whether misfortune (3.pr.12) or luxury (3.pr.13). This will give one control of their own fortune, in as much as one will understand fortune correctly as an attitude towards nature (3.pr.15) and freedom as what is granted by the law of nature, not Roman law (3.pr.16).[118] The conclusion exemplifies the ties that bind ethics and physics and the real benefits from such study:

75 Leave a comment on paragraph 75 0 In order to understand this, it will benefit us to study nature. First, we will escape from repugnant matters. Then we will separate the very mind, which must be elevated and great, from the body. After that our critical thought, sharpened on such hidden matters, will be better able to handle obvious problems. And nothing is more obvious than these remedies which are learned to combat our wickedness and madness, vices we disparage but do not defeat.

76 Leave a comment on paragraph 76 0 Ad hoc proderit nobis rerum inspicere naturam: primum discedemus a sordidis; deinde animum ipsum, quo summo magnoque opus est, seducemus a corpore; deinde in occultis exercitata subtilitas non erit in aperta deterior. nihil est autem apertius his salutaribus quae contra nequitiam nostram furoremque discuntur, quae damnamus nec ponimus. (3.pr.18)

77 Leave a comment on paragraph 77 0 Critical thinking about the larger cosmos not only affords the mind a respite from the sordid daily grind, but it also will influence the way one re-approaches that world.[119] Remedies exist for the wickedness and madness that plague mankind, Seneca has just catalogued a number of meditations that can help one’s outlook in the preceding section, but they hinge on the understanding that philosophical contemplation grants the individual.[120] This preface acts as a challenge for the reader – as one studies terrestrial waters and begins to understand the place of man vis-à-vis such wonders, one should find ways to apply these findings to life’s problems.

78 Leave a comment on paragraph 78 0 2.) Doxography I: The Source of Water and Operative Analogies (3.1-3.16)

79 Leave a comment on paragraph 79 0 While the preface does an admirable job drawing the reader into the work and explaining the wide benefits of the study of the natural world, it does not prepare the reader for the first topic of the work. In fact, it may seem surprising that Seneca connects the concluding sentiment of 3.pr.18 with the opening of the doxography proper: “Therefore let us investigate terrestrial waters…” (quaeramus ergo de terrestribus aquis, 3.1.1). Inwood helpfully points out that the connective ergo indicates that such moral improvement can even be garnered by “studying more specific phenomena, such as the terrestres aquae of book 3”.[121]  The explanatory force of ergo is meant to shock the reader into seeing that the study of these waters will likewise have a tangible ethical reward. What is more, Seneca does not offer a dry precis of the philosophical tradition behind water, but enlivens his opening with three quotations about water, from Ovid, Vergil, and Lucilius himself. These quotations strongly place the poetic connotations of water at the fore, which hints at the important continuity between water in Latin poetry and Seneca’s own concerns.[122] Ovid’s still pool foreshadows the problematics of reflection and mirroring of NQ 1, Vergil’s thundering river draws attention to the ever-present role of water in the Aeneid, and Lucilius’s Arethusa is linked not only to his current position in Sicily, but also Vergil’s own pastoral poetics. Poetic context and philosophical context inform one another, broaden the scope of the investigation, and hint that investigating literature itself will be part of this study.[123] A general overview of waters (origins, taste, temperature, benefits) grants the reader a skeleton table of contents for the upcoming book (3.1.2-3.2.2). Seneca’s quest to understand the origin of terrestrial waters leads to examples from Ethiopia to Germany, from the bottom of deep wells (3.8.3) to the heights of mountains (3.8.4) – indeed, he is fulfilling his promise to “survey the world” (mundum circumire, 3.pr.1). His argument touches upon observations that all can experience about rainfall (3.7.4) to his own specialized knowledge about vineyards (3.7.1). But in order to really comprehend the sheer volume of water, Seneca draws upon the Stoic conception of the elements and elemental transformation.[124] If one buys into the premise that the world is made of four elements and that water can become air and earth (and vice versa), there is no reason to wonder at the volume of water on the earth’s surface and coursing underneath, after all “nothing is wanting if it returns to itself” (3.10.3). Such elemental exchange and ideas that “everything is in everything” (3.10.4) approach Pythagorean tenets and allusions to Ovid’s Pythagoras in this section point to the larger literary and philosophical ramifications for such metamorphoses. Seneca’s conception of terrestrial waters often hearkens back to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, with the speech of Pythagoras and the flood of Metamorphoses 1 major intertexual sources that Seneca calls to mind in order to define his larger project. If Ovid’s use of Pythagoras is, in part, “to carry the central theme of metamorphosis out of the realm of mythology and into the natural sciences”,[125] then it is easy to see how Seneca’s account continues this movement and provides more grounding in elemental theory in praxis. As in Ovid’s epic, transformation is key to Seneca’s world-view, but his prose treatise continually vies with Ovid’s ingenious poetry to show how his explanations of this material trump Ovid’s both in depth, intellectual acumen, and in creativity.[126] If earlier sections of the doxography rely on anonymous groups of thinkers (quidam iudicant, 3.5.1; quidam existimant, 3.6.1, 3.8.1), Seneca starts to name names with details from Theophrastus (3.11.2, 3.11.4) and the Presocratic philosopher most identified with water, Thales (3.13.1, 3.14.1). It is notable that he agrees and disagrees with one statement from each of these predecessors, showing that he knows the philosophical tradition, but is willing to offer independent views from it. His larger analogy of the earth being like a human body springs from his personal view (“I especially support the following decree: the earth is ruled by nature, and, indeed, in the same way as our bodies…” hoc amplius censeo: placet natura regi terram, et quidem ad nostrorum corporum exemplar,3.15.1);[127] while still drawing upon common Stoic ideas, Seneca makes this the operative analogy for the remainder of the book and will evoke it frequently in order to explain the workings of terrestrial waters.[128] In doing so, the tenor and vehicle of the metaphor start to blur –one can start to see their own body as representative of the world, just as the world can be represented as a body.[129] Learning about the world’s waters is analogous to learning about one’s own body and the power of natura over both.[130] Seneca augments this way of understanding what cannot be directly observed with the premise “Believe whatever you see above to be below” (crede infra quidquid vides supra, 3.16.4). Rivers, lakes, and huge caves exist underground and behave much like those we can see on the surface of the earth because they are following the laws of nature. Even the fish that teem in the brooks of the Italian countryside can be found in bodies of water under the earth, which leads to Seneca’s moral excursus on the contemporary “foodie” trend of watching a red mullet die before consuming it.

80 Leave a comment on paragraph 80 0 3.) Red Mullet: Death and Spectacle (3.17-3.18)

81 Leave a comment on paragraph 81 0 Seneca begins this section by drawing attention to possible comedic responses the reader may have to the idea that fish live underground: “At this point many things come to your mind, which you wittily say about something unbelievable ‘Nonsense! That someone will go fishing not with nets and rods but with a pickaxe! I expect someone else will hunt in the sea!’” (3.17.1). Seneca signals his generic enrichment with the introduction of comic parallels from the first words of the section (Fabulae!, an interjection found in Terence), which will continue with the huffing-and-puffing fishmonger (like a servus currens), insistence on spectacle, and even possible identifications between fish and comic courtesans.[131] If the impressive dinners of the wealthy were a common topos in Roman satire (Horace Satires 2.8 is a natural intertext, but the tradition reaches back to Lucilius), here Seneca stresses how the contemporary craze for red mullet feed both the bellies and the senses of the diners, but also lead them astray from the correct understanding of the world.[132] This is not meant simply for laughs; Seneca embeds this narrative into his treatise in order to make a serious statement on the state of luxuria in Rome, its own creative power (almost an antipode to that of natura), and the faulty application of one’s senses for mere pleasure.[133]

82 Leave a comment on paragraph 82 0 Seneca brings the reader into the villa of a rich gourmand and displays how easily the convivium can become a spectaculum in the hands of the rich.[134] The garden setting or dining room with water features is a luxurious feature Seneca mentions elsewhere (Dial. 9.1.8-9), and Seneca contextualizes the experience within the larger macrocosm of natura, where fish can live underground and man can travel across the sea to establish new settlements.[135] The streams and tanks that the mullets inhabit in the dining areas of the rich are, in some sense, analogous to what can be found in nature, but luxury aims to replicate or surpass the natural world (3.17.2). The villas of the rich are the very monuments most associated with harnessing the power of water, as Purcell elucidates:

83 Leave a comment on paragraph 83 0 It is against this technological display that we should put the most important aid to intensification of all, the control of water. When we look at a Roman villa we should see it in a hydraulic landscape – in close association with springs and wells or lakes and rivers managed by dykes, culverts, sluices, bridges, dams; or defined by its place on an aqueduct network such as those in the Amiternum or Aquae Passeris inscriptions, and above all perched on vast cisterns which are often the storage area of the villa best preserved today. The villa represented a focus of water-management, of a specialized kind when it was for the control of water meadow or fishpond on the coast, sometimes as a gesture towards debonair uselessness for the maintenance of sterile ornamental plants or the proprietor’s bath, but always in the context of the environmental control which the owner of the building and the land exercised over this most precious of resources, the resource on which all the subsequent production and intensification depended.[136]

84 Leave a comment on paragraph 84 0 Seneca chooses this conspicuous locus of man’s management over water to overturn any authority or repute such luxuria might have manifested. This artificial world, a pale imitation of the real thing, may be incredible (quanto incredibiliora sunt opera luxuriae,3.17.2; quam incredibile, 3.17.3), but it leads to the wrong impressions. Like a stage on which actors project larger-than-life representations of “real” life, these players put on a culinary show that apes philosophical contemplation.[137] His narration, which offers flashes of the preparation of the dish, its ingredients, and dining accoutrements like a modern cooking television program, repeats in an interesting manner (3.17.2~3.18.4) as if presenting an encore of the “so beautiful spectacle” (tam pulchro spectaculo, 3.18.1) of the dying mullet (which changes color as it dies). This narrative strategy, which is replicated in the flood section, makes the reader fill in certain gaps and draws attention to the seemingly gratuitous death of the fish.[138] Here the narrative repetitions also represent Seneca’s own intrusion into the very comments of the red mullet aficionados and his desire to further clarify how there is nothing beautiful or fantastic about this show. In fact, it derails Seneca’s investigation, as he strikingly diverts the flow of his narrative to castigate luxury.[139] 

85 Leave a comment on paragraph 85 0  In spite of the technological prowess necessary to farm these fish and keep them fresh in the villa, Seneca stresses the paradoxical results of this luxury – now the rich can enjoy what the poor fisherman has always known (3.18.1). The observational acuity that Seneca has been stressing is now highlighted as operating solely on the surface and merely to feed the senses. Seneca writes how the diners believe “There is nothing more beautiful than a dying mullet” (3.18.1, 3.18.4, 3.18.6) and hone their skills of observation by contemplating the colorful kaleidoscopic death throes of this fish.[140] While appreciating the nature of color change is something Seneca praises and believes should spur philosophical contemplation,[141] their skills (peritior, 3.18.5) are wasted because it does not lead to the proper view of death. The observations of these diners fragment the fish into individual parts that undergo shifts in hue until it is “arraying itself into a one shade” (in unum colorem componitur, 3.18.5), which plays on the use of compono for “to lay out for burial” (OLD 4c). Incapable of deriving the proper ethical reflection from the spectacle, the diners will run to watch a mullet die, but they will not sit next to their dying father, brother, or comrade (3.18.6). The counterfeit world of the villa will lead to a counterfeit appreciation of natura. The idea of what is most beautiful will be corrected later in the work when Seneca writes about comets (7.27.6) and the order of the natural world (“than which nothing is more beautiful” 1.pr.14), but here he stresses how such behavior causes him to exceed literary propriety.[142] He claims:

86 Leave a comment on paragraph 86 0 I cannot hold myself back from using words too rashly now and then, and exceeding the rules of decorum: those men are not content with food for their teeth, stomach and mouth: even their eyes are gluttons.

87 Leave a comment on paragraph 87 0 non tempero mihi quin utar interdum temerarie verbis et proprietatis modum excedam: non sunt ad popinam dentibus et ventre et ore contenti: oculis quoque gulosi sunt. (3.18.7)

88 Leave a comment on paragraph 88 0 Seneca’s own bold sententia effectively denotes the quasi-synesthesia of these individuals who have been deluded to believe the sufferings of the red mullet are beautiful.[143] They hunger for sensory stimulation and become emblematic of a maddened epicureanism that finds pleasure and beauty worth any cost. Although Seneca marks this digression from the hydrological material, it springs from his larger concerns about utilizing ratio in order to understand that the laws of nature hold even underground. He shows how luxury has created marvels even more “unbelievable” (the root meaning of incredibile), but these only serve to confuse and pervert what is proper both in action (e.g. attending the deathbed of one’s father) and in language.

89 Leave a comment on paragraph 89 0 4.) Doxography II: Paradoxography to Doxography (3.19-3.26)

90 Leave a comment on paragraph 90 0 Seneca returns to his subject with the expectation that the reader will surely grant that underground fish must exist after the wonders of luxury he just described.[144] The digression is seen to act as a narrative hinge for the natural oddities that terrestrial waters manifest, and Seneca strives to offers rational causes for such phenomena. The fish that exist underground are often poisonous (3.19.2) and the example of eels (the delicacy of Roman pisciculture), which thrive in dark “underground” conditions, continue the links between the moral excursus and the doxography proper.[145] Seneca outlines in the following sections some of the characteristics that are typical of paradoxographies of water (peculiar tastes, special powers, temperature, and more), and finds ways to fit them into his world view and operative analogies.[146] The doxography he produces acts to circumscribe the oddity of these events and make them part of the larger totum of his explanation. Subterranean channels and veins of running water explain how rivers and Arethusa can disappear and reappear elsewhere (3.26.3-4), elemental transformation can explain sedimentary build-up around certain “hard” waters (3.20.3-4) and even floating islands of light rock (3.25.8), fires underground surely heat springs of water (3.24.1-4), and if waters expel waste at certain times, so does the human body (3.26.5-8). Water can be impregnated with foreign substances, which will lead to miraculous qualities such as the ability to float in the Dead Sea (3.25.5), sudden death (3.25.1-2), or even the ability to change the color of a sheep’s wool (3.25.3-4).[147] Authorities such as Empedocles and Theophrastus dot these chapters, but it is Ovid whom Seneca quotes and engages with most thoroughly. If intertexts to Ovid’s Pythagoras appeared earlier to underscore elemental fluidity, four quotations from Pythagoras’s speech help us to see Seneca’s desire to explain Pythagorean mirabilia and metamorphosisas the workings of the natural world. Seneca will provide the secreta and causas of Ovid’s text. This explanatory strategy is a common enough thrust in paradoxographical accounts (Aristotle Metaph. 982b11-28, Lucr. 6.760-61, Strabo 1.3.16), but Seneca highlights Ovid’s Pythagoras as an authority in order to make a larger point about the relationship of the Metamorphoses to the Naturales Quaestiones Book 3. Seneca accepts Ovid’s larger point “that wonder is embedded in nature on an everyday basis”[148] but he wants to assert his own authority over the largely unexplained phenomena that appear in Metamorphoses 15. Wonderful, yes; but also fully explicable in the larger workings of the natural world.[149] Ovid may write about these wonders in evocative hexameters, but Seneca has uncovered the secrets behind their workings and is able to make sense of them in a way that will be persuasive to the reader.[150] In fact, Seneca’s active aemulatio of Ovid’s great epic stresses his ability to encompass the entire Metamorphoses in the first book of his prose treatise.[151] This will come out more clearly in the flood at the book’s conclusion.

91 Leave a comment on paragraph 91 0 5.) The Great Flood and the End of the World (3.27-3.30) 

92 Leave a comment on paragraph 92 0 The analogy that the world is like the human body continues to influence the literary and philosophical make-up of Seneca’s book. Waters will expel impurities and, in fact, the world itself will do the same in the great flood that will destroy all life on earth in the future. While flood narratives are common in the ancient world they are usually in the distant past with Deucalion and Pyrrha the classical equivalent of Noah.[152] Seneca, however, makes the flood an event soon-to-come and keeps the moral element present in the mythological versions (especially with his corrupt contemporaries in mind), but also makes it fit with the larger Stoic conception of cyclical time.[153] It is fated and regular, but it also appears at a moment in which natura wants to purify itself in a cathartic purge. This passage is one of Seneca’s most well-wrought moments in the Naturales Quaestiones and Seneca pulls out all the stops to display the sheer force of water (celestial, terrestrial, and subterranean) as well as the ease by which natura can destroy all the works of men (3.27.2, 3.30.1) as well as the natural boundaries between land, sea, and sky.[154] There is a repetition to the larger structure of this passage with each section repeating the flood from a slightly different angle. This is purposeful and the structure works to unite various threads of Seneca’s book – the larger analogical framework, the rhetorical and literary concerns, Stoic philosophical tenets, the power and violence of water – and to do it from the larger perspective of eternal recurrence (see infra).

93 Leave a comment on paragraph 93 0 Seneca begins the passage by stressing that this flood is both fated and fatal (fatalis diluvii dies, 3.27.1) and that all the waters on earth will combine to bring an end to the human race (ad exitium humani generis, 3.27.1). Seneca is sure to continue stressing the mortality of the earth, drawing upon the now familiar world/body analogy as well as shedding light on the hopes and fears of parents:

94 Leave a comment on paragraph 94 0 How much time is necessary for an embryo to develop and be born! How much work goes into raising a toddler! By what diligent upbringing those young vulnerable bodies come to maturity! But how easily those bodies are torn apart! Cities take a lifetime to build, an hour to demolish. In the blink of an eye, ancient forests become ash. All things come to be and flourish with great care, but quickly and without warning disintegrate.

95 Leave a comment on paragraph 95 0 quam longo tempore opus est ut conceptus ad puerperium perduret infans! quantis laboribus tener educatur! quam diligenti nutrimento obnoxium novissime corpus adolescit! at quam nullo negotio solvitur! urbes constituit aetas, hora disturbat; momento fit cinis, diu silva. magna tutela stant ac vigent omnia, cito ac repente dissiliunt. (NQ 3.27.2)

96 Leave a comment on paragraph 96 0 So the earth itself will come to an end, quickly and inevitably, and Seneca draws upon the work of his teacher Fabianus as well as Ovid to depict the world ending by excessive rainfall, flash flooding, and the rising levels of rivers like the Rhine and Danube (3.27.4-10). Families are driven to the highest peaks (one of the only times Seneca mentions wives and children in this work), and all humanity is struck dumb by the scope of the catastrophe. At this point Seneca delves into criticism of Ovid’s flood passage, praising certain lines that befit the grandeur of the subject (e.g. “Everything was sea, and even the shores of the sea went missing”, omnia pontus erat, deerant quoque litora ponto, Met. 1.292 = 3.27.13), while finding others far below the criterion expected of epic (“the wolf swims among the sheep, the tide carries tawny lions”, nat lupus inter oves, fulvos vehit unda leones, Met. 1.304 = 3.27.14).[155] Seneca highlights his literary relationship with Ovid’s flood to point out how his flood description surpasses that of Ovid by obsessively rewriting and reimagining it at the close of his book. Ovid is clearly a force to be reckoned with in Seneca’s mind and he creatively recasts Ovid’s poetry throughout both to call attention to its original context and meaning, but also to forge something new from it. In this case, it is not enough to write about this cataclysmic event only once; Seneca approaches it from a number of different angles to blend his own interests and hint at the larger idea of eternal recurrence.

97 Leave a comment on paragraph 97 0             By blending his various interests and sources in this manner, Seneca is practicing what he preaches in Ep. 84.[156] There, Seneca writes how the author needs to digest various sources in order to produce his own writing:

98 Leave a comment on paragraph 98 0 We ought to imitate bees, and sift whatever we have compiled from our diverse reading, for such things are saved more easily if they are kept separate; then, by applying the craft and ability of our inborn skill, blend (confundere) those varied flavors into one taste that, even if it makes apparent from where it was taken, it is nevertheless clearly different from where it came.

99 Leave a comment on paragraph 99 0 nos quoque has apes debemus imitari et quaecumque ex diversa lectione congessimus, separare, melius enim distincta servantur, deinde adhibita ingenii nostri dura et facultate in unum saporem varia illa libamenta confundere, ut etiam si apparuerit, unde sumptum sit, aliud tamen esse quam unde sumptum est, appareat. (Ep. 84.5)

100 Leave a comment on paragraph 100 0 Seneca is revealing his sources (Ovid, Fabianus, Berosus), even naming or quoting them at times in the flood passage, but his own blend here is the confusion of waters making the flood (tantae confusionis imaginem, 3.27.14) and the various interests and concerns he has made manifest throughout the book.[157] Seneca’s literary criticism of Ovid stresses that the level of rhetoric and imagery must remain at a near-sublime level to fully realize the haunting extent of the devastation. In the following section, Seneca returns to his flood description by claiming that his first Ovid-inspired attempt at the flood was insufficient, hinting that “when it was pleasing for nature to transform the human race” (mutarique humanum genus placuit, 3.28.2), the seas would also have to rise well-beyond the typical ebb and flow of their tides.[158] The seas and oceans can increase in such a fashion because of their large stores of hidden water (as Seneca has stressed throughout the work), their elemental make-up (3.28.4), and the fact that the earth is spherical and, now zooming-out to a cosmic viewpoint, the differences in elevation are ultimately rather insignificant (3.28.5).[159] Proper perspective is key, as well as the learning that the reader has already accrued in making her way through this book. So, when god wants something better, the old order must be annihilated (cum deo visum est ordiri meliora, vetera finiri, 3.28.7). Then the revolution can occur (res novae, 3.28.7) and the sea will overwhelm mankind.[160]

101 Leave a comment on paragraph 101 0             The larger order of this event and its fated quality is brought out in the following section where Seneca mentions the astrological theory of Berosus (3.29.1) as part of a larger discussion about the cycles of nature. Berosus is the expert on Babylonian astrological matters, and Seneca brings in his authority here to hint at the antiquity of flood “forecasting” and the broad parallels between Babylonian astronomical lore and Stoic cosmology.[161] This flood is no different than the passing of the seasons which occurs because of the law of the cosmos (lege mundi, 3.29.3). Appeals to natural law, the cosmos as a living being (3.29.2-3, 3.29.7), and elemental transformation (maximam tamen causam ad se inundandam terra ipsa praestabit, quam diximus esse mutabilem et solvi in umorem, 3.29.4) anchor this section to the work as a whole and stress the conception of time. The flood is a natural part of a larger cycle of time, the Stoic “great year”, and life will spring up again after it passes – thus foreshadowing the conclusion of this book. At this moment, however, Seneca stresses how everything that mankind has created to explain the natural world, from stories (fabulas), to boundaries (discrimen), to names themselves (peribunt tot nomina), will be erased in the flood (3.29.7-9).

102 Leave a comment on paragraph 102 0 Seneca continues to build upon and repeat aspects of the flood narrative to stress that this is an event that will repeat on a larger scale as part of the Stoic idea of eternal recurrence.[162] This concept was rather controversial, even for Stoics, in that it promoted the idea that the same events happen on earth eternally after each ἐκπύρωσις. While this flood is not the cosmic ἐκπύρωσις, it is clear that Seneca envisions a similar recurrence with each flood. The more things change, the more they stay the same? This terrestrial destruction by water can be explained by the physics of water that he has elucidated in this book, but Seneca points out how man will return (much like rebuilding efforts after each flood of the Tiber) and vice will return with man. If god is rational and providential, everything is fated to happen in the same manner, and in the flood section Seneca gives a complex literary expression of this philosophical idea. As Long and Sedley summarize, “Everlasting recurrence, then, ensures that this world, the best possible, though finite in duration, will be for ever repeated”,[163] but the question is how philosophers can make this doctrine to be logically and ethically satisfying.[164] Seneca ends the world in a number of different manners associated with water in order to reveal the various facets of the eternal repetition of this event and his own ethical take-away from such an event.

103 Leave a comment on paragraph 103 0 This is not simply Seneca’s penchant for rhetorical elaboration of an idea or repeating himself for the sake of doing so, he is giving full expression to the multiplicity of influences on display throughout Naturales Quaestiones Book 3 as well as the larger philosophical idea of eternal recurrence. The end was fated from the first day (a primo die mundi…quando mergerentur terrena decretum est, 3.30.1), and it is easy for nature to cause the end by water. Water surrounds the reader, above her head and below her feet. As Seneca explains, the end of digging is water (eruendi finis a liquido est, 3.30.3), but it is also the “goal” of the search in some sense.[165] The end can be found in water, the same water that Seneca has been researching and rooting out in all its permutations. The end will come soon (nec longa erit mora exitii, 3.30.5), but after the waters recede, Seneca writes:

104 Leave a comment on paragraph 104 0 The ocean, driven back, will be expelled from our lands into its own haunts, and the ancient age will be resurrected (antiquus ordo revocabitur). Every animal will be born anew (omne ex integro animal generabitur), and man will come back to earth, but ignorant of crime and born with better fortune. But, aside from the first generations, even their innocence will not last. Quickly wickedness creeps in; virtue is difficult to find, it needs a mentor and leader, but vices are learned even without a teacher (sine magistro vitia discuntur). (3.30.7-8)

105 Leave a comment on paragraph 105 0 The rebirth of life on earth is endorsed by intertexts to Vergil’s Ecl. 4 where “The final age of Cumaean song has come; the great order of the ages is born anew” (Ultima Cumaei uenit iam carminis aetas; / magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo… Ecl. 4.4–5). This echo of Vergil shows how such intertexts can offer a pointedly pessimistic interpretation of Vergil’s lines.[166] If Vergil’s call is ultimately for a new golden age (complete with multicolored sheep, not multicolored fish for depraved gourmands to devour with eyes and teeth), Seneca writes of how the new age to come will give in to nequitia and vitia almost instantaneously. However, Vergil’s own poem stresses how the stories of heroes will repeat and even endorses such repetition with the poetic repetition of lines from Catullus (4.46-47~Cat. 64.327, 333, 337, etc.) and the mention of a second Tiphys and Achilles (4.31-36). Seneca has carefully incorporated the Vergilian material to hint in a poetic manner at the idea of eternal recurrence. The recycling of lines from Ovid or intertexts to Vergil suggest that the language used of the flood or recurrent time will repeat as well and create an eternal echo chamber. If the world will begin again, so will the (same) words. The people will need a “mentor and leader” and Seneca positions himself as just such a guide. After all, his own work aims to teach how to tame one’s vices (3.pr.10), how to overcome fortune (3.pr.7), and how helpful remedies can be marshalled against wickedness and madness (3.pr.18 also featured the form discuntur). Seneca has stressed the ease by which nature destroys the world (nihil difficile naturae est, 3.27.2). He riffs on this from an ethical perspective, writing “virtue is difficult to find” (virtus difficilis inventu est, 3.30.8), but he has also shown directly how he can help the reader discover such virtue.[167] Through the study of physics and the application of the findings to larger ethical questions one can derive a more conscious and self-aware appreciation of the present moment.[168] While the general tendency might be for mankind to become more debased as time goes on, philosophy and learning can lead to real progress both in understanding the true nature of the world, and in moral well-being.[169] Philosophy is born from wonder and can help one hone the ratio that brings us close to god. The end of the book is also the beginning of a new world and that world, then, takes form and inspiration from the concerns of Naturales Quaestiones Book 3. Such palingenesis is important for Stoic thinkers, it is embodied in the treatise, and may be important for political undertones running through the passage (see Berno 2019). In fact, one may posit that the following book (NQ 4a) offers a view of the new world, where Seneca’s prologue actively fights against another moral ill (flattery), and another flood occurs (the Nile), but without the attendant suffering and pain.[170]

106 Leave a comment on paragraph 106 0 Conclusion

107 Leave a comment on paragraph 107 0             Naturales Quaestiones Book 3 offers a view of the natural world that stresses connections between what can be seen and what must be rationally assumed to be true. Analogy, imagery, intratextuality, allusion, and the crisp rhetoric of his arguments and doxography create an ideal reader who is attuned to Seneca’s process of investigation, the workings of the natural world, and able to link the nitty-gritty of physics with broader ethical reflection. If the flood at the end of this book is the most dramatic disaster imaginable for mankind, it is also not to be feared per se. It is natural, fated, and like the later discussions of earthquakes and lightning, its causes and relationship to man needs to be understood for a better perspective (and consolatio) about death.[171] The reader is expected to have a different perspective than the stupor of the poor father who sees his family about to be overcome by the waves of the flood (3.27.12); Seneca has stressed again and again that such wonders are natural and consideration of them will lead to wisdom. This book, then, sets up the reader for the remainder of the work both from a methodological and philosophical perspective: the reader will know the scope of the project, appreciate Seneca’s dialectical ingenuity, and be conscious of the larger moral imperative of this type of study.

108 Leave a comment on paragraph 108 0 Text, Transmission, and Translation

109 Leave a comment on paragraph 109 0             The Naturales Quaestiones was known to contemporary writers such as Lucan, and in the following generations it would appear that the Octavia poet, Pliny the Elder, Tacitus, and others knew and utilized the work. Ammianus and Augustine drew upon Seneca’s work to emphasize traits like constantia and Stoic eschatology. John the Lydian had a full text in the sixth century, from which we can reconstruct some of the missing material from 4a. Its fortune, however, waned and the text resurfaces first excerpted in a florilegium in the ninth century, then in “full” in the twelfth-century.[172] The text of these manuscripts is often corrupt and leads to many difficulties. Hine has offered many fine explanations of the way the stemma should be understood, and I do not have anything to add to his reconstruction of the transmission of the text.[173] The archetype must have been missing the end of 4a and beginning of 4b because all subsequent manuscripts repeat this lacuna. There are two branches of manuscripts (ζ, Ψ) with ζ represented only in complete form by the manuscript Z (twelfth-century, northern France)[174] and the vast majority of remaining manuscripts deriving from the hyparchetype, Ψ. These fall into three groups (α, θ, π) with the primary manuscripts being A (twelfth-century), F (twelfth-century), and P (twelfth/thirteenth-century). The relative merits of theζ andΨ families must be determined on a case-by-case basis. The text spread after its rediscovery in northern France and was in Germany later in the twelfth-century before appearing in England and Italy in the thirteenth-century. Seneca florilegia are popular at this time period and Naturales Quaestiones excerpts appear in a number of these collections.[175] Naturales Quaestiones had to vie with the Latin version of Aristotle’s Meteorologica in the humanistic period and we see fewer editions of the NQ in the fifteenth century than the previous two centuries.[176] The first printed edition appeared in 1490 in Venice from a corrupt exemplar that was a compound of two branches of Ψ.[177]

110 Leave a comment on paragraph 110 0 It is clear that the archetype started with book 4b (the so-called Grandinem order, from the first word of that book), but the disorder in sequence can be easily explained, as Hine elucidates:

111 Leave a comment on paragraph 111 0 [I]nternal evidence indicates that the true book order is 3-7, 1-2, so at some stage a copy must have broken in two near the end of Book 4a, with the loss of some folios containing the end of Book 4a and the start of 4b; when the two pieces were put together in the wrong order, and the numeration of Books 3-4a was altered to suit their new position, the result was a copy just like the archetype.[178]

112 Leave a comment on paragraph 112 0 Hine and Codoñer Merino independently came to the same conclusion about the proper book order (the Non praeterit order, after the first words of Book 3), which is followed in this text, and I accept Book 3 as the first book of the Naturales Quaestiones.[179] I hope it has become clear from this introduction on a thematic level why this book is a fitting opening for the work as a whole, but I would stress that textual evidence also strongly supports such an arrangement.

113 Leave a comment on paragraph 113 0             If the role of the editor is to determine the correct reading and to recovery the original text that Seneca wrote, the Naturales Quaestiones has been well-served by editors in the past. From Erasmus’ editions of 1515 and 1529 to Lipsius’ 1605 edition and that of Gronovius in 1658 to Gerke’s 1907 Teubner and Oltramare’s 1929 Budé, the text has steadily improved in the quality of readings and the sanity of conjectures. My text follows Hine’s Teubner edition in large part, but I have benefited greatly from the editions of Corcoran, Codoñer Merino, Vottero, Parroni, and the recent Spanish translation of Bravo Díaz.[180] My apparatus criticus is not meant to be comprehensive, but rather to point out the significant variant readings and proposals of editors as well as the passages that I discuss in more detail in the commentary. More thorough textual criticism can be found in Vottero 1989, Hine 1996, and Parroni 2002, and I have learned much from their editions. The commentary itself owes much to the work of previous scholars. H.M. Hine, G. Williams, F.R. Berno, B. Inwood, P. Parroni, and D. Vottero have influenced my way of thinking about the Naturales Quaestiones profoundly. This book could not have been written without their insightful contributions to the study of this text. My commentary provides copious loci communes, but always with the desire to position Seneca in his larger philosophical, rhetorical, and literary contexts. I try not to list parallels for the sake of parallels. In writing the commentary, I have found myself interested more and more in the larger hydrological, scientific, geographic, and meteorological phenomena that Seneca details and the commentary often aims to provide information that will help the reader appreciate the current state of the question. As Seneca says about future knowledge:

114 Leave a comment on paragraph 114 0 The time will come when diligent research over a long period of time will reveal things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to investigation of the sky would not be sufficient for so vast a topic…And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. A time will come when our descendants will be shocked that we did not realize things that are so obvious to them. (NQ 7.25.4-5)

115 Leave a comment on paragraph 115 0 My commentary is meant to continue the investigations that Seneca began, with the same spirit of wonder and generosity.

116 Leave a comment on paragraph 116 0             My translation aims to produce a faithful and readable version of the Latin text. I hope to give a sense of certain aspects of Seneca’s style and wit, but always to remain as clear as possible and to keep to idiomatic English. I have benefited from studying previous translations in English (Corcoran 1971, Hine 2010), Italian (Vottero 1989, Parroni 2002), and Spanish (Bravo Díaz 2013). While I tried to be consistent with words that are repeated multiple times in the original Latin, certain words of the Naturales Quaestiones can be hard to render in the same manner throughout, e.g. mundus can sometimes denote the universe, but sometimes the earth itself. natura itself is slippery and can indicate the larger natural world, the cosmos, godhead, or one’s innate “nature”. In these cases I had to make decisions that would fit the meaning of the sentence and such decisions are explained further in the commentary.

117 Leave a comment on paragraph 117 0 SIGLA

118 Leave a comment on paragraph 118 0 Y         München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 18961-II (saec. ix; excerpta)

119 Leave a comment on paragraph 119 0 Z         Génève, Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire, lat. 77 (saec. xii)

120 Leave a comment on paragraph 120 0 R         El Escorial, Real Biblioteca, O.III.2 (saec. xiii)

121 Leave a comment on paragraph 121 0 ζ          consensus codicum Z R

122 Leave a comment on paragraph 122 0 A         Leiden, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, Voss. Lat. O.55 (saec. xii)

123 Leave a comment on paragraph 123 0 B         Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, Clas. 1 (M.IV.16) (saec. xii)

124 Leave a comment on paragraph 124 0 V         Città del Vaticano, Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. lat. 1579 (saec. xii/xiii)

125 Leave a comment on paragraph 125 0 δ          consensus codicum A B V

126 Leave a comment on paragraph 126 0 α          consensus codicum R A B V (1.pr.1 –1.13.1, 2.53.2 –3.pr.18, 7.15.2 –7.32.4)

127 Leave a comment on paragraph 127 0 ρ          consensus codicum P R (3.pr.18 – 7.15.2)

128 Leave a comment on paragraph 128 0 P          Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 6628 (saec. xii/xiii)

129 Leave a comment on paragraph 129 0 υ          consensus codicum U W

130 Leave a comment on paragraph 130 0 U         München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 11049 (saec. xv)

131 Leave a comment on paragraph 131 0 W        Venezia, Biblioteca Marciana, Lat. Z.268 (1548) (saec. xiv)

132 Leave a comment on paragraph 132 0 π          consensus ρ υ (3.pr.18 – 7.15.2) or P υ (1.pr.1 – 3.pr.18)

133 Leave a comment on paragraph 133 0 Ψ         consensus α θ π (or δ θ π orθ π)

134 Leave a comment on paragraph 134 0 Ω         consensus ζ π or Z π

135 Leave a comment on paragraph 135 0 Cam.   Cambrai, Bibliothéque Municipale, 939 (838) (1379 CE)

136 Leave a comment on paragraph 136 0 D         Dublin, Trinity College, 514 (saec. xiii)

137 Leave a comment on paragraph 137 0 E         Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, lat. oct. 9 (saec. xiii)

138 Leave a comment on paragraph 138 0 ς          reading found in one or more 13^th – 14^th century manuscript (except UW)

139 Leave a comment on paragraph 139 0 Map of Waters Mentioned in Naturales Quaestiones Book 3 (by Lucy Haskell)

---

140 Leave a comment on paragraph 140 0 [1] For more on Seneca’s biography, see Griffin 1974 and Griffin 1976, and the recent biographies by Romm 2014 and Wilson 2014. Even in Cicero’s time, Corduba was known for its poetry (Cordubae notis poetis, pingue quiddam sonantibus atque peregrinum, Arch. 26).

141 Leave a comment on paragraph 141 0 [2] An informative overview of his reception can be found in Star 2016: 117-69.

142 Leave a comment on paragraph 142 0 [3] See Dio Cassius (61.10): “Although he found fault with the wealthy, he acquired a fortune of three hundred million sesterces for himself; and although he reproached the extravagances of others, he had five hundred tables made of citrus wood and ivory”. In 58 CE, Tacitus reports (Ann. 13.42-43) that P. Suillius Rufus attacked Seneca in the courts for his lavish lifestyle, charges which de Vita Beata may be addressing.

143 Leave a comment on paragraph 143 0 [4] One could add the pseudo-Senecan Octavia as well for information about his dealings with Nero. In general, Tacitus appreciates Seneca’s difficult position in the court, while Dio gives us a darker picture of Seneca’s motives, appetites, and quest for power. See Griffin 1976: 420-44 for the prejudices and attitudes of the historians towards Seneca.

144 Leave a comment on paragraph 144 0 [5] Cf. Fairweather 1981 for a judicious survey of declamatio and the works of the Elder Seneca.

145 Leave a comment on paragraph 145 0 [6] Ep. 100 is a spirited defense of Fabianus in light of Lucilius’ depreciation of one of his works.

146 Leave a comment on paragraph 146 0 [7] Herington 1966 remarks on “his presence at the edge of that tiny group of men on which there bore down, night and day, the concentric pressure of a monstrous weight, the post-Augustan Empire…Seneca himself lived through and witnessed, in his own person or in the persons of those near him, almost every evil and horror that is the theme of his writings, prose or verse. Exile, murder, incest, the threat of poverty and a hideous death, and all the savagery of fortune were of the very texture of his career” (429-30).

147 Leave a comment on paragraph 147 0 [8] During his exile he wrote a cosmological work entitled de forma mundi, which is lost to us, but was part of Cassiodorus’s library (6^th C. CE), see Ferrero 2014.

148 Leave a comment on paragraph 148 0 [9] See the relative dating of the tragedies made by Fitch 1981.

149 Leave a comment on paragraph 149 0 [10] In the same section, Suetonius notes both that Seneca gave Nero his own works to read as well as Nero’s interest in composing poetry.

150 Leave a comment on paragraph 150 0 [11] Seneca muses on Fortuna throughout his prose and poetry, see Motto 1970: 45-49 and the ample note of Tarrant 1978: 181-84. For Fortuna in the NQ, see notes on 3.pr.7 and 3.29.6.

151 Leave a comment on paragraph 151 0 [12] The generic expectations for this work may have something to do with the debasement of Claudius and the exaltation of Nero, under whose rule a new “golden age” (aurea…saecula, Apo. 4)is expected.

152 Leave a comment on paragraph 152 0 [13] See Braund 2009: 53-57 for Seneca’s teaching strategy in Clem. and the two audiences to which he is appealing, “But Seneca is writing not only for Nero. At the same time, he wants to display his didactic efficacy to another audience too – that consisting of the members of the Roman elite, who are observing carefully his efforts to instill in the young princeps a proper sense of restraint and respect toward the Senate”.

153 Leave a comment on paragraph 153 0 [14] See Tac. Ann. 13.2 for the way Burrus and Seneca were able to guide Nero and limit Agrippina’s influence. I write “generally” because these years also saw the wanton behavior of Nero (if Tacitus can be trusted) and the murders of individuals such as Junius Silanus, Britannicus, and, at the close of these years, Agrippina herself.

154 Leave a comment on paragraph 154 0 [15] The fact that Seneca wrote the speech that offered this laughable pretense for Agrippina’s murder causes the public to be angry at him instead of Nero (Tac. Ann. 14.11).

155 Leave a comment on paragraph 155 0 [16] See Tac. Ann. 14.51-52 for Burrus’ death and Seneca’s reaction to it.

156 Leave a comment on paragraph 156 0 [17] See Ep. 56.9, 106.1-3, 108.1, Ferrero 2014: 208 for the date of the Libri moralis philosophiae.

157 Leave a comment on paragraph 157 0 [18] See Bartsch 2017 for more on philosophers under Nero.

158 Leave a comment on paragraph 158 0 [19] Letters such as Ep. 56.9 which relates how his retirement was due to fear and exhaustion and Ep. 73 discussing the relationship between philosophers and those in power are often cited as evidence. Additionally, his observations about the political career of Cato the Younger (Ep. 14, 24, 71, 104) may reflect his own political experience. In the NQ, Nero is mentioned by name a number of times (1.5.6, 6.8.3, 7.17.2 – one may question if these references are ironic), but he is often detected in mentions of Alexander the Great (see note on 3.pr.5, cf. 6.23.2-3) and may lurk behind additional references (see notes on, e.g., 3.pr.10, 3.19.4 in commentary).

159 Leave a comment on paragraph 159 0 [20] See Ker 2009 for the details and reception of his death as well as the prominence of death in his works.

160 Leave a comment on paragraph 160 0 [21] See the collection of this title by Volk and Williams 2006, Gunderson 2015, and Star 2016.

161 Leave a comment on paragraph 161 0 [22] While not didactic in the same manner, clearly one could draw lessons from the actions of tyrants like Atreus, or the unbridled passions of Medea and Phaedra. Topics and themes drawn from the Naturales Quaestiones such as cosmology (Rosenmeyer 1989) and the conception of nature in Phaedra (Williams 2017) show that, for Seneca, the genres may encourage different answers for certain tragic situations and themes, cf. Fischer 2014.

162 Leave a comment on paragraph 162 0 [23] See Hine 2005.

163 Leave a comment on paragraph 163 0 [24] For more on his prose style in the NQ in particular, see Vottero 1985 which gives copious examples of rhetorical figures, technical exposition, variatio, dramatic effects, and more.

164 Leave a comment on paragraph 164 0 [25] For Seneca’s prose rhythms in the NQ and possible connections with the tragedies, see Soubiran 1991. For his prose rhythm and utilization of clausulae more generally, see Hijmans 1976.

165 Leave a comment on paragraph 165 0 [26] See Summers 1910: xlii-xcv and Williams 2003: 25-32 for his prose style, and Canter 1925 for the rhetoric of his tragedies.

166 Leave a comment on paragraph 166 0 [27] For more on these clausulae and their frequency in the NQ and Epistulae, see Soubiran 1991 and Hijmans 1976: 110-17. Seneca’s prose rhythm is important for determining textual readings (see, especially, Alexander 1948), and for various literary effects (some of which are noted in the commentary).

167 Leave a comment on paragraph 167 0 [28] Although possible metathesis with tolerare might help to encourage how such happiness is possible.

168 Leave a comment on paragraph 168 0 [29] See commentary ad loc.

169 Leave a comment on paragraph 169 0 [30] See Larson 1992 for the schools of philosophy during Seneca’s time, Inwood 1995 for Seneca’s philosophical context, Reydams-Schiles 2005 for Roman Stoicism, Wildberger 2006 for the Stoic underpinnings of Seneca’s beliefs, and the collections of essays in Wildberger and Colish 2014 and Damschen and Heil 2014 for more on particular aspects of Seneca philosophus.

170 Leave a comment on paragraph 170 0 [31] For these letters (58, 65) in particular, see Reydams-Schils 2010a, Boys-Stones 2013, and the commentary of Inwood 2007b. For more on Seneca’s Platonism, see Donini 1979.

171 Leave a comment on paragraph 171 0 [32] For the Naturales Quaestiones, see the work of Hall 1977 and Setaioli 1988. For the position of the Stoic school in Seneca’s time, see Gill 2003 and Reydams-Schils 2010b.

172 Leave a comment on paragraph 172 0 [33] Seneca’s cosmopolitanism and conception of οἰκείωσις likewise stressed that man is part of the whole cosmos and that philosophical theory can lead to political action, see Dial. 8.3.5-4.2, Ep. 68.2, Vogt 2008: 65-110.

173 Leave a comment on paragraph 173 0 [34] Some of our best information about Roman Stoic beliefs can be found in Cicero (106-43 BCE), even if he is not an avowed Stoic.

174 Leave a comment on paragraph 174 0 [35] For Seneca’s understanding of the tripartite nature of Stoicism, see Ep. 89.9: “The greatest authors, and the greatest number of authors, have asserted that there are three parts of philosophy: moral (moralem), natural (naturalem), and rational (rationalem)”. For more on logic in Seneca, see Barnes 1977. For the proper exposition of physics and logic in particular, see Reydams-Schils 2010b: “There is a right and a wrong way of engaging in these inquiries, these authors make clear; the wrong way entails studying them for their own sake and indulging in technical details”. While NQ at times does indulge in such details, it also offers and interprets many differing views about the material and is enriched by meditations on poetic, ethical, and theological matters.

175 Leave a comment on paragraph 175 0 [36] D.L. 7.39. Cf. Cicero Fin. 3.72-74 for the way the three parts interrelate. See Hadot 1979, Hadot 1991, and Annas 1993: 159-79 for more on the interrelationship of these three aspects.

176 Leave a comment on paragraph 176 0 [37] Hadot 1998: 81-82 comments on the necessity to distinguish these three aspects when teaching them, but the way they blur in practice: “In philosophy itself… physics, ethics, and logic are mutually implicated within and interior to one another, in that act – at once multiple and unique – which is the exercise of physical virtue, ethical virtue, and logical virtue…Thus, logic, physics, and ethics are distinguishable when we talk about philosophy, but not when we live it”.

177 Leave a comment on paragraph 177 0 [38] He claims the Stoic sage is as rare as the phoenix (Ep. 42.1), but makes use of figures like Cato the Younger and Socrates as exempla for the proficiens to follow – such rarity should not cause despondency, but rather inspire the reader to act in an appropriately Stoic manner.

178 Leave a comment on paragraph 178 0 [39] For the movement from theory to practice in the Epistulae Morales and the educational process therein dramatized, see Schafer 2011 and Wagoner 2014.

179 Leave a comment on paragraph 179 0 [40] Stoic theology can be thorny: fine discussions are Algra 2003 for Stoicism generally, Setaioli 2007 for Seneca’s conception, the essays in Salles 2009 for specific aspects, and Adamson 2015: 66-72 for a very readable introduction. Long 1996: 150 writes eloquently about this: “Life according to reason is entailed by life according to Nature; but life according to Nature is not obligatory because it accords with reason. Nature stands to human beings as a moral law commanding us to live by rational principles, viz. those principles of thought and action which Nature, a perfect being, prescribes to itself and all other rational beings”. See Rosenmeyer 2000 for more on Seneca’s view of nature, and Boyle 1987: 22-24 for natura in Seneca’s Phaedra.

180 Leave a comment on paragraph 180 0 [41] For more on Seneca’s belief that the highest human activity is the contemplation of nature, cf. Dial. 11.9.3, 11.9.8, Ep. 65.16-17, Dial. 6.25-26, and Ep. 102.28.

181 Leave a comment on paragraph 181 0 [42] In fact, the study of philosophy is identical to living the good life in orthodox Stoicism, see Hadot 1969: 101. For the way that virtus and natura relate in Stoic thought, cf. Cic. Off. 3.13.

182 Leave a comment on paragraph 182 0 [43] See the work of Mayer 1991 and Roller 2018 on exemplarity in Seneca’s prose.

183 Leave a comment on paragraph 183 0 [44] For more on the Epistuale Morales as a whole see Wilson 1987, Wilson 2001, Edwards 1997b, and Edwards 2015; for Seneca’s use of the epistolary genre, see Inwood, 2007c, Wilcox 2012. Seneca self-consciously distinguishes between his epistolary topics and Cicero’s at Ep. 118.1-3. Epicureans were especially fond of disseminating their doctrine through letters, see Edwards 2019: 7.

184 Leave a comment on paragraph 184 0 [45] As Demetrios says, “everyone in writing a letter more or less composes an image of his own soul” (σχεδòν γde Elocutione 227).

185 Leave a comment on paragraph 185 0 [46] Cf. Edwards 1997b on how such self-scrutiny will lead to altered actions.

186 Leave a comment on paragraph 186 0 [47] Gauly 2004 explores this “Dialogizität” in the NQ. One might compare the more literal dialogue between characters in his tragedies as a correlative.

187 Leave a comment on paragraph 187 0 [48] See Long 2006: 256-82 for more on ἐκπύρωσις; Mader 1983, Armisen-Marchetti 2006, and Berno 2012 offer analysis of Seneca’s changes to the Stoic framework.

188 Leave a comment on paragraph 188 0 [49] Inwood 2007b: xxi

189 Leave a comment on paragraph 189 0 [50] Cf. Hadot 1969, Foucault 1986, 2005, Hadot 1995, Veyne 2003, and Sellars 2009.        

190 Leave a comment on paragraph 190 0 [51] Cf. de Ira 3.36.1-3 and the essay of Ker 2009b. The collection by Bartsch and Wray 2009 is especially good about conceptions of the self in his philosophical works, for the tragedies see Fitch and MacElduff 2002. I would stress with Inwood 2009b that there is a “literariness” involved in Seneca’s concept of the self.

191 Leave a comment on paragraph 191 0 [52] See Reydams-Schils 2005: 15-82. For connections between the knowledge of nature and knowledge of the self, see Foucault 2005: 278 “What is involved in this knowledge of the self is not something like an alternative: either we know nature or we know ourselves. In fact, we can only know ourselves properly if we have a point of view on nature, a knowledge (connaissance), a broad and detailed knowledge (savoir) that allows us to know not only its overall organization, but also its details”.

192 Leave a comment on paragraph 192 0 [53] Foucault 2005: 266.

193 Leave a comment on paragraph 193 0 [54] Cf. esp. Dial. 10.5.8: “Therefore I live according to nature, if I have given myself completely to nature, if I admire and cultivate nature. Moreover, nature wanted me to do both, both to act and to free myself for contemplation” (Ergo secundum naturam vivo, si totum me illi dedi, si illius admirator cultorque sum. Natura autem utrum facere me voluit, et agere et contemplationi vacare).

194 Leave a comment on paragraph 194 0 [55] See PIR² L 388 and my note on NQ 3.pr.1 for more on Lucilius, who is also the addressee of Episulae Morales and de Providentia.

195 Leave a comment on paragraph 195 0 [56] French 1994 and Taub 2003 are sure guides to the topic as a whole and Bakker 2016 recently examined Epicurean meteorology in particular. Wilson 2013 places Aristotle’s Meteorology into its larger philosophical context and has a fine section on hydrology (146-95).

196 Leave a comment on paragraph 196 0 [57] Asmis argues “Lucretius seeks to shift humans from their position in the Roman social and political order to a place in the natural order of things” (2008: 141), which is also, broadly, one of the larger goals of Seneca’s work.

197 Leave a comment on paragraph 197 0 [58] Graver 2000. Book 6 of Lucretius’ poem features many meteorological topics – for a recent description of Lucretius’ meteorological investigation as fluid mechanics, see Serres 2018: 89-124, esp. 112-13: “Nature fluctuates, physics is written in a hydraulic language, it is a mechanics of generalized fluids. The lesson we learn here in Book 6, which describes visible and tangible nature, confirms again the theory and the idea of the atomic river in which turbulence is formed…Everything is formed as a flood and is perceived as a flood”. One may wonder if Seneca’s own flood may be a response to this impulse in Lucretius.

198 Leave a comment on paragraph 198 0 [59] He argues against Epicurean materialism at 2.6.1-7.2, and their thoughts about the random creation of the world at 1.pr.15.

199 Leave a comment on paragraph 199 0 [60] In addition to the book on Egypt, he also claims to have written a work on earthquakes earlier in life (NQ 6.4.2), and Pliny mentions works of Seneca about fish and stones, see Vottero 1998: 87-92 and Beniston 2017: 15-16. For his general identification of the importance of natural science for the philosopher, see Ep. 117.19, Ep. 65.19-21, and for meteorological topics elsewhere in his prose, see Dial. 1.1.2-5, 6.18.2-7,12.20.2.

200 Leave a comment on paragraph 200 0 [61] Inwood 2005: 200 “Seneca chose to work these ideas out in a meteorological treatise for literary reasons. This, he must have thought, was a challenge worthy of his considerable rhetorical talents. If could pull this off, he would have an even stronger claim to fame as a writer, not just a philosopher.”

201 Leave a comment on paragraph 201 0 [62] Books currently numbered 4a (Nile) and 4b (precipitation) were separate books originally.

202 Leave a comment on paragraph 202 0 [63] While there are some questions if the earthquake was in 62 or 63 CE, see Hine 1984 and Wallace-Hadrill 2003, the general dating of the NQ to this time period is secure. For the comet, cf. Tac. Ann. 14.22.1, and Boyle 2008: ad 231-2.

203 Leave a comment on paragraph 203 0 [64] See Williams 2008 and commentary passim.

204 Leave a comment on paragraph 204 0 [65] See Inwood 2005: 190-92, and his Seneca-like sententia: “Man is not the measure of all things; god is”.

205 Leave a comment on paragraph 205 0 [66] For a recent evaluation of these issues, see Williams 2012: 12-14 and Hine 2010: 28-31.

206 Leave a comment on paragraph 206 0 [67] It is almost as if Seneca already intuited that the majority of the surface of the earth was covered in water.

207 Leave a comment on paragraph 207 0 [68] Stoics traditionally believed that fire was the fundamental element and was “creative” in its purest state, Lapidge 1978: 179-83 is a cogent overview of how such πὺρ τεχνικόν fits into the larger theory of ἐκπύρωσις and palingenesis.

208 Leave a comment on paragraph 208 0 [69] Williams 2012: 14. Also see Waiblinger 1977: 35-37 and Gauly 2004: 68-70 for more on the grouping of books by elements.

209 Leave a comment on paragraph 209 0 [70] See note ad loc. and Trinacty 2018b. A similar intratexual connection can be found with the phrase circumire mundum at 3.pr.1 and 1.pr.8.

210 Leave a comment on paragraph 210 0 [71] Hine 2010: 7.

211 Leave a comment on paragraph 211 0 [72] Limburg 2007 offers readings of every prologue in the work.

212 Leave a comment on paragraph 212 0 [73] One might see an analogue in Senecan tragedy with the way his choruses function within the larger dramatic material, see Mazzoli 2014.

213 Leave a comment on paragraph 213 0 [74] See Hine 2006: 60-61 for their date and Sellars 2013 for more on Seneca’s view and use of his contemporaries and predecessors.

214 Leave a comment on paragraph 214 0 [75] Graver 2000: details how Seneca’s findings put him at odds with orthodox Stoicism and questions just how “Stoic” of a work this should be considered because of his discrepancies from Stoic physical theories.

215 Leave a comment on paragraph 215 0 [76] See NQ 2.45.2-3: “Do you want to call Jupiter fate? You will not be mistaken: he it is whom everything depends, the cause of causes. Do you want to call him providence? You will be right: he it is by whose deliberation provision is made for this world, so that it can advance unhindered and unfold its actions. Do you want to call him nature? You will not be wrong: he it is from whom everything is born, by whose breath we live. Do you want to call him the world? You are not mistaken: for he himself is all this that you see, contained in his own parts, sustaining both himself and his creation.” (trans. adapted from Hine 2010). Cf. Hine 1981: ad loc.

216 Leave a comment on paragraph 216 0 [77] See Seal 2015 for more on this tension or blurring of theory and practice in Seneca’s prose. Griffin 2007: 100-02 notes how his pedagogic strategy will often distinguish between the doctrine (in this case the doxography) and the precepts which employ imperatives, gerundives, and the future tense. This is on display especially in the prefaces and conclusions of the books of Naturales Quaestiones.

217 Leave a comment on paragraph 217 0 [78] Seneca’s scientific method is often ridiculed in earlier scholarship (cf. Stahl 1962), but more sympathetic and nuanced explorations have done much to show how his modeling (Roby 2014), analogies (Armisen-Marchetti 1989), and methodology aims to put scientific learning to use in moral improvement (Parroni 2000).

218 Leave a comment on paragraph 218 0 [79] See Berno 2003, Gauly 2004: 87-134, Limberg 2007, Williams 2012: 54-92 for the rich issue of connections between the moralizing digressions and the book proper. For digressions in Seneca’s prose in general, see Grimal 1991.

219 Leave a comment on paragraph 219 0 [80] Williams 2016: 182 makes a parallel observation about “hot” moments in Seneca’s prose in contrast with the usual “coldness” of philosophical dialectic: “these purple passages suggestively function as ‘hot’ moments that throw off not just the quibblings of sophistic philosophical nicety, but perhaps also the ‘coldness’ of terrestrial normativity and restriction – moments in which Seneca’s literary elaboration, including his harnessing of the coefficients of sublimity, itself gives distinctive color and charisma to the sapiens”.

220 Leave a comment on paragraph 220 0 [81] See Leitão 1998, Berno 2003: 46-50, Bartsch 2006: 106-14, and Williams 2012: 54-92 on Hostius Quadra, especially, as a sort of anti-Stoic sapiens with his own unique “happy-go-lucky philosophy” and form of self-knowledge. Seneca admits a self-awareness about his style in certain digression, admitting at NQ 3.18.7 “I cannot stop myself from using words recklessly from time to time and crossing the boundary of propriety” before issuing a particularly biting aphorism.

221 Leave a comment on paragraph 221 0 [82] See NQ 1.pr.5-9. Cooper 1995 remarks on the importance of understanding cosmic nature for ethical calculations in Stoic thought, concluding that even the loss of a child must be accepted, “this is the very core of what ‘living in agreement with nature’ means for them. We are not just to accept but to welcome [these losses], and welcome them not just as what the universe needed, but as what we as parts of that universe needed too” (595).

222 Leave a comment on paragraph 222 0 [83] See note ad loc.

223 Leave a comment on paragraph 223 0 [84] See, e.g. NQ 6.32.2-3 “The mind gains strength solely from liberal studies and from the contemplation of nature…So we must challenge death with great courage…”, and NQ 2.59.1-3. For Lucretius’ work as an extended argument against the fear of death, see Segal 1990 and for the interactions between Seneca and Lucretius in the NQ see Williams 2016 and Tutrone 2017.

224 Leave a comment on paragraph 224 0 [85] See NQ 6.32.6-12 and, for a parallel in his letters, Ep. 104.23-25.

225 Leave a comment on paragraph 225 0 [86] See NQ 7.32.4: “Yet, by Hercules, if we set about the subject with all our might, if young people sobered up and put their backs into it, if older people taught it, younger people learned it, we would hardly get to the bottom where the truth is located; at the moment we are scraping at the surface with feeble hands in our search for it” (trans. Hine 2010). Also see Ep. 88 for Seneca’s view on education more generally.

226 Leave a comment on paragraph 226 0 [87] Reydams-Schils 2010b: 562.

227 Leave a comment on paragraph 227 0 [88] This “Cosmic Viewpoint” (the title of Williams 2012) or “view from above” (Hadot 1995: 238-50) is most powerfully expressed at 1.pr.8-17, but can be seen elsewhere in the work (e.g. the note on 3.28.4-5).

228 Leave a comment on paragraph 228 0 [89] For an overview of Roman “water culture” see Rogers 2018.

229 Leave a comment on paragraph 229 0 [90] This is Stoic orthodoxy, as Tielemen 2018: 688 describes: “a new world is created when the cosmic substance turns from fire through air into water. The moisture contains the logoi spermatikoi, the “seminal reasons” or “spermatic principles” of the world, just as in animal semen these principles…are enveloped by moisture. From then onward the other elements are produced through processes of condensation (earth) and rarefaction (air, ordinary fire)”.

230 Leave a comment on paragraph 230 0 [91] See Bachelard 1983 for similar ruminations about water.

231 Leave a comment on paragraph 231 0 [92] Aldrete 2007 thoroughly discusses floods of the Tiber and these flood undoubtedly influenced Seneca’s description of the flood at NQ 3.27.1-3.30.8. For more on the divinity of the Tiber, see Meyers 2009.

232 Leave a comment on paragraph 232 0 [93] For the way that the streams and natural drainage defined the seven hills of Rome, see Holland 1961: 343-50, and passim. Sallares 2002: 215 claims, “according to late antique catalogues of the feature of the fourteen regions of the city of Rome, there were no less than 1,204 lakes within the city”. Campbell 2012 is the best source on rivers in the Roman Empire, Walsh 2013: 68- 118 for fluvial and alluvial systems in the Mediterranean, Rogers 2013 for waterscapes in Roman Britain, and Irby 2016 is a good introduction to hydrology in the ancient world.

233 Leave a comment on paragraph 233 0 [94] Strabo 5.3.8.

234 Leave a comment on paragraph 234 0 [95] The essays in Koloski-Ostrow 2001 offer an overview of water use in Rome. For aqueducts in particular, see Frontinus’ treatise de Aquaeductu, Hodge 1992, and Aicher 1995. Rogers 2018 makes inroads into a more holistic consideration of water.

235 Leave a comment on paragraph 235 0 [96] An evocative tour of the springs of Greece can be found in Glover 1946: 1-29. There were over 30 famous mythological rivers in Greece, see Brewster 1997 and Salowey 2017. For expansive views of the Mediterranean see Horden and Purcell 2000, Beaulieu 2016 offers a survey of Greek ideas about the sea, and, for riverine areas, see the essays in Franconi 2017.

236 Leave a comment on paragraph 236 0 [97] See Volk 2010: 188-9 for a helpful overview of such metapoetic water imagery.

237 Leave a comment on paragraph 237 0 [98] Serv. ad Aen. 7.84. See Edlund-Berry 2006 for more on the use of water in religious ritual and Jones 2005 for the significance of rivers in Latin literature.

238 Leave a comment on paragraph 238 0 [99] In the early third century, Athenaeus will do the same with a focus on Greek literary and philosophical sources, see Deip. 2.40-2.46. See Strang 2004 for a modern analogue taken from one riverine system in Dorset.

239 Leave a comment on paragraph 239 0 [100] Campbell 2012: 341.

240 Leave a comment on paragraph 240 0 [101] See Courrént 2004 for more on Vitruvius’ exploration of the mirabilia of water.

241 Leave a comment on paragraph 241 0 [102] For more on this section, see Myers 1994: 133-66.

242 Leave a comment on paragraph 242 0 [103] Additional authors who wrote about such phenomena include Philostephanus, Antigonus, Nymphodorus, Sotion, and the collections of [Arist.] Mirabiles Auscultationes, Paradoxographicus Vaticanus, and Paradoxigraphicus Florentius. See Giannini 1965 for fragments, and Myers 1994, Beagon 2009: 292-94, Garani forthcoming for further discussion.

243 Leave a comment on paragraph 243 0 [104] See Rossi 1991 for comparison between Seneca’s view of certain hydrological phenomena and the modern understanding of these same events. Thomas 2000 provides more general information on the connections between hydrology, topography, and geology.

244 Leave a comment on paragraph 244 0 [105] Lehoux 2012: 88 sees such cyclical transformations as indicative of a larger cycle, “cyclicality is one of the key distinguishing features of Stoic physics, and change from one element into another is at the heart of the overall conflagration and rebirth of the cosmos. Even the fact of rain coming from clouds is brought round to this end, insofar as Seneca denies that cloud is moisture, insisting instead that it is air which changes to water in the critical moment of raining” (cf. NQ 2.15 and 2.26). Seneca claims that whatever exists on the earth’s surface can be found underground as well, NQ 3.16.4.

245 Leave a comment on paragraph 245 0 [106] See Irby 2016: 191-92 for more on such behavior of rivers and Clendenon 2009 for karst “hydromythology”.

246 Leave a comment on paragraph 246 0 [107] Hahm 1977: 174 “the Stoic cosmos had a biological as well as physical side. Though each side owed its existence to the ideas of others, the total integration of the physical and biological sides of the cosmos resulted in a totally new cosmology, one that can only be characterized as purely Stoic”.

247 Leave a comment on paragraph 247 0 [108] Aristotle often utilized it more for comprehension than for proof or argumentation, see Taub 2003: 98-102.

248 Leave a comment on paragraph 248 0 [109] This is part of his larger strategy to marginalize Roman power, as Hine 2006 points out: “The message is that when we have studied the whole universe in its amazing entirety, then we shall inevitably despise the trappings both of luxury and of earthly power and glory” (45). Some of these omissions would have struck his audience as notable, for instance, Pliny the Elder remarks on the aqueducts, “there is nothing more worthy of admiration throughout the whole universe” (36.123) and the Tiber was strongly identified with Rome itself, see Allen 2019.

249 Leave a comment on paragraph 249 0 [110] For more on the Roman ability to manipulate water for urban and rural needs, see Hodge 1992, Thomas and Wilson 1994, Purcell 1996, and de Kleijn 2001.

250 Leave a comment on paragraph 250 0 [111] NQ 1.pr.8: “the mind cannot scorn colonnades, and ceilings sparkling with ivory, and topiary forests and streams channeled into houses until it has surveyed the entire world (totum circumit mundum)”. The manipulation of nature for the sake of luxury is denigrated throughout Seneca’s works, cf. Dial. 9.1.8-9, Ep. 122.7-9for more on such water displays in the homes of the rich.

251 Leave a comment on paragraph 251 0 [112] The quotations of Vagellius in this work hint at the sublimity that Seneca aspires to reach, see Williams 2012: 228-30. Its position at the beginning of this book might also lead to thoughts of a cosmic conflagratio, which Seneca will allude to elsewhere (3.28.7, 3.29.1, 3.29.2).

252 Leave a comment on paragraph 252 0 [113] For Seneca’s critique of history and historians in the NQ, see Master 2015.

253 Leave a comment on paragraph 253 0 [114] If Alexander had Aristotle as philosophical advisor, Nero had Seneca, and it would seem that sections like 3.pr.10 are (not-so) veiled critiques of conquest as a sort of overcompensation for ethical failings: “Many men have ruled nations, many have ruled cities; only a handful have ruled themselves” (3.pr.10). For Alexander as a stand-in for Nero, see Spencer 2002: 72-73, 109-12, Gauly 2004: 204-06, and Hine 2006: 64.

254 Leave a comment on paragraph 254 0 [115] Seneca draws upon a variety of genres in this work, see Taub 2008: 25 “The Natural Questions is an excellent example of a text that shows affinities with several genres used to write about nature: question-and-answer text, letter, and treatise”. I would add that his generic hybridity also encompasses epic and didactic poetry as well as Roman drama and historiography.

255 Leave a comment on paragraph 255 0 [116] A quick biography of Hannibal (3.pr.6), rife with allusions to authors like Livy, leads to Seneca’s description of him as a senex (much like Seneca himself), who could not survive without an enemy, and certainly did not realize the importance of philosophical study. Seneca will stress elsewhere that all historians are liars (NQ 7.16.1-2). See Hutchinson 1993: 15-17 for a brief discussion of Seneca’s attitude towards history.

256 Leave a comment on paragraph 256 0 [117] Fronto complains that Seneca’s sentences “repeat the same thought, clothed in constantly different guises, over and over again” (Orat. 1.4).

257 Leave a comment on paragraph 257 0 [118] See French 1994: 161-63 and Lehoux 2012: 47-76 on natural law.

258 Leave a comment on paragraph 258 0 [119] Cf. Ep. 65.19-21 for a similar reverie about the importance of inspectio rerum naturae.

259 Leave a comment on paragraph 259 0 [120] For more on the connections between ethics and physics, see Hadot 1969: 111-17, Scott 1999, and Williams 2005 for NQ 1.

260 Leave a comment on paragraph 260 0 [121] Inwood 2005: 167n.31.

261 Leave a comment on paragraph 261 0 [122] Rogers 2015: 80-129 provides a synopsis of Latin literary sources on water. Seneca also quotes Lucilius early in his Epistles (8.10) and one might see a didactic strategy in his quotation here as well (i.e. you share your interest in this material with a number of famous Latin authors).

262 Leave a comment on paragraph 262 0 [123] See Trinacty 2018b for more on quotation and intertextuality in this book.

263 Leave a comment on paragraph 263 0 [124] Hahm 1977: 91-135 and Wildberger 2006: 60-79 explain Stoic elemental transformation more fully.

264 Leave a comment on paragraph 264 0 [125] Thibodeau 2018: 604.

265 Leave a comment on paragraph 265 0 [126] The four elements were often attributed to Pythagoras in Latin literature (Lucr. 4.712-721, Vitr. 2.2.1, Ovid Met. 15.237-51), but Seneca makes it firmly “ours” (i.e. Stoic) at 3.9.3 (placet nobis).

266 Leave a comment on paragraph 266 0 [127] Note the first person singular form of the verb.

267 Leave a comment on paragraph 267 0 [128] See Armisen-Marchetti 1989: 305-6 and Williams 2012: 62, 127-28, 241-42.

268 Leave a comment on paragraph 268 0 [129] See Richards 1936 for the tenor and vehicle of a metaphor (tenor = subject to which attributes are given and vehicle = object whose attributes are borrowed).

269 Leave a comment on paragraph 269 0 [130] There will be concrete applications of this during the flood when it is compared to excessive sweating or diarrhea (3.30.4).

270 Leave a comment on paragraph 270 0 [131] Bravo Díaz 2013: ad loc. has noted the comic feel of this scene. For more on the associations of fish with courtesans in Roman comedy, see Fontaine 2018: 40-42, citing Davidson 1997: 10. Antiphanes’ play She Goes Fishing (27 Kassel/Austin) features hetaeras given nicknames like “Red Mullet” and “Cuttlefish”.

271 Leave a comment on paragraph 271 0 [132] Gowers 1993 is still the finest exploration of representations of food in Roman literature.

272 Leave a comment on paragraph 272 0 [133] Berno 2003: 65-110, Gauly 2004: 96-103, and Williams 2012: 75-80 admirably analyze this section.

273 Leave a comment on paragraph 273 0 [134] See D’Arms 1999 for more on such conspicuous consumption during the convivium.

274 Leave a comment on paragraph 274 0 [135] “But what is the reason that fish will not cross onto land, if we have crossed the seas and have changed our residences? Are you amazed that this happens? (quid est autem aquare non pisces in terram transeant, si nos maria transimus, permutavimus sedes? hoc miraris acciere?, 3.17.1-2).

275 Leave a comment on paragraph 275 0 [136] Purcell 1995b: 171.

276 Leave a comment on paragraph 276 0 [137] For connections between food and Roman comedy, see Skwara 2014. Seneca also provides a tragic take on food, spectacle, and satiety in his Thyestes, see Boyle 2017: ad 903-7, 1065-68.

277 Leave a comment on paragraph 277 0 [138] It is striking that Seneca never lets his diners comment on the taste of the fish so it seems to have died merely for their viewing pleasure.

278 Leave a comment on paragraph 278 0 [139] While he will do so later in the NQ as well (and with similar language), here for the first time, it is a startling move from the measured and purposeful construction of the doxography.

279 Leave a comment on paragraph 279 0 [140] The repeated stress to “Look!” (vide) can be compared with the conclusion of the work, where observation of the waves and tide (non vides) will intimate the ease by which the flood will occur (3.30.2). The demonstratio that Seneca aims for there, can also be strongly seen in the mullet passage, see Mazzoli 2005.

280 Leave a comment on paragraph 280 0 [141] As with his discussion of the rainbow or the iridescence of a pigeon’s neck in NQ 1 (1.5.6-7, 1.7.1-3). Such color changes were common topics in Stoic and Epicurean phenomenological discussion (e.g. Cic. Acad. 2.19, Lucr. 2.795-809), see Ierodiakonou 2015. The mullets are observed under glass (vitreum), which elsewhere in Seneca’s work will lead to contemplation of optical illusions and the limits of the sense of sight (NQ 1.6.5).

281 Leave a comment on paragraph 281 0 [142] This concern with literary propriety will reappear in the flood passage and underlines how Seneca blurs the distinction between the medium and the message – shocking events must be described in shocking language and the sublime damage of the flood must follow suit.

282 Leave a comment on paragraph 282 0 [143] Hutchinson 1993: 151n.9 remarks on Seneca’s elegance and artifice, “The very close, oculis quoque gulosi sunt, deftly takes up the phrase before the introduction, oculos ante quam gulam pavit (17.3), and pointedly combines what it had kept separate”.

283 Leave a comment on paragraph 283 0 [144] His language, ad propositum revertar (3.19.1) will be revisited during the flood ad propositum revertamur (3.28.1) when he leaves off a discussion of Ovid’s ownpoetic propriety and decorum.

284 Leave a comment on paragraph 284 0 [145] Throughout the NQ it is important to recognize the way the scientific and philosophical context influences the interpretation of these moral “digressions” and makes the findings more universal (see Bartsch 2006: 103-14 for this contextualization in the Hostius Quadra episode). Williams 2012: 79-80 points out how the diners and these loathsome subterranean fish parallel one another, and the underworld associations with subterranean waters make these sort of fish also embody death in a tangible manner (see Baleriaux 2016 for the ways disappearing rivers evoked and explained the realm of the dead).

285 Leave a comment on paragraph 285 0 [146] For more on paradoxography more generally, see Geus and King 2018, who write: “The interest in paradoxa is motivated by the fact that they go against common experience, yet the basis for discussing them is not autopsy, but rather the historical and literary method of assembling testimony, organizing it thematically, topologically, geographically, and scrutinizing not only its consistency but also the reliability of its source. This historical approach to natural wonders may not be experimental, but it does reflect evolved practices in the treatment of testimony and a coherent hierarchy of epistemic values in its treatment” (442-43).

286 Leave a comment on paragraph 286 0 [147] While this latter example is common, it must be seen in the context of NQ 3 and the discussion of the mullet changing color – here such changes are useful to the shepherd and harmless to the flock.

287 Leave a comment on paragraph 287 0 [148] Beagon 2009: 297. Also see her nice characterization of Pythagoras “His role as cosmic showman did not extend to philosophical verification” (298), but that is precisely Seneca’s role.

288 Leave a comment on paragraph 288 0 [149] Toulze-Morisset 2004 explains how only the flood is truly marvelous in Seneca’s conception of nature, but even it can be explained as the product of natural causes.

289 Leave a comment on paragraph 289 0 [150] If Pythagoras’ speech was considered by the audience “learned, but hardly believable” (docta..sed non et credita, Met. 15.74), Seneca’s rational explication is effective and signposted as such (e.g. causa manifesta est, 3.26.3).

290 Leave a comment on paragraph 290 0 [151] For more on this, see Torre 2007 and Berno 2012.

291 Leave a comment on paragraph 291 0 [152] See Withington 2013: 9-32 for the flood narrative in a cross-cultural context.

292 Leave a comment on paragraph 292 0 [153] It should come as no surprise that Ovid’s flood narrative of Met. 1 looms large in Seneca’s account; there the flood is a punishment for the crime of Lycaon and the general violence, impiety, and bloodthirst of mankind (Met. 1.160-62, 209-43). The Stoics believed in cyclical destructions of the cosmos by fire (ἐκπύρωσις), but this food is clearly the end of a world-period and not cosmic dissolution writ large (3.28.7), as Seneca stresses that mankind soon appears again, see Long 2006: 256-82.

293 Leave a comment on paragraph 293 0 [154] See Degl’Innocenti Pierini 1984, Hutchinson 1993: 128-31, De Vivo 1995, Morgan 2003, and Limburg 2007: 159-67 for more on this passage and Seneca’s reception of Ovid. Williams 2016: 177 on the way “Seneca pictures the scene as if he is ‘there’ to witness it directly from a place of sublime privilege, even as a version of the rhetorical sublime here struggles to keep pace with the awesome dimensions of the event itself; Seneca rises in this episode, as Hardie’s Virgil does in his different way, to keep the rhetorical sublime in pace with the natural sublime”.

294 Leave a comment on paragraph 294 0 [155] Seneca stresses what lines conjure the most evocative image in the mind of the reader and encourages the reader not only to have effective Ovidian lines in mind (3.27.14), but also creates his own image that caps Ovid and stresses the impact of the flood more suggestively (“you have conceived the image in its appropriate magnitude if you imagine all lands overwhelmed and the sky itself crashing to earth. Continue: you will know what is right if you imagine that the whole world is swimming”  concepisti imaginem quantam debebas obrutis omnibus terries, caelo ipso in terram ruente, perfer: scies quid deceat, si cognitaveris orbem terrarum natare, 3.27.15)

295 Leave a comment on paragraph 295 0 [156] See Graver 2014 for more on this letter and Hine 2012: 43-44 for its application to Seneca’s sources in the NQ with the caveat “for him the important thing was to practice independent, critical thought. In the end one may accept the ideas of others, but if so, the important thing is that one has made them one’s own.” (43).

296 Leave a comment on paragraph 296 0 [157] And, of course, the strong metaliterary associations of water can be activated at any time by Seneca to evoke the varied “springs” of influence (see, e.g. Manilius’ complaint that the waters of Helicon are now confusi, 2.51).

297 Leave a comment on paragraph 297 0 [158] The use of mutari and subsequent quotation of Ovid Met.1.272-73 (NQ 3.28.2) highlights that the damage emphasized by Ovid’s flood is insufficient for the global scale Seneca evokes.

298 Leave a comment on paragraph 298 0 [159] This latter point may be counter-intuitive, but Seneca will use it again to discuss why mountaintops are not warmer even though they are closer to the sun (4b.11.1-5). In each case, part of the “problem” is our own limited and puny perspective, which is what Seneca fights against time and again in this work, see Williams 2012: passim, Reydams-Schils 2010a: 207-12.

299 Leave a comment on paragraph 299 0 [160] For the political ramifications of this phrase, see Star: forthcoming. It may be telling that Seneca mentions the Stoic conflagratio (the Latin equivalent of ἐκπύρωσις) at this moment because it is common for fires in Rome to be part of political revolutions, e.g. Catiline’s plan to burn Rome (Sall. Cat. 48.1-2).

300 Leave a comment on paragraph 300 0 [161] See Dillery 2015: 240-64 for more on Seneca and Berossus on the flood.

301 Leave a comment on paragraph 301 0 [162] See Hahm 1977: 185-99 for antecedents to the Stoic idea in Pythagoreanism, Plato, Aristotle, and Heraclitus; Long and Sedley 1987: 308-313 (Vol. 1) for the texts and discussion, Campion 1994 for an interdisciplinary treatment of the great year.

302 Leave a comment on paragraph 302 0 [163] Long and Sedley 1987: 311 (Vol. 1).

303 Leave a comment on paragraph 303 0 [164] This issue still vexes scholars of Nietzsche, who updated this idea and made it the cornerstone of his own philosophy, cf. Loeb 2006.

304 Leave a comment on paragraph 304 0 [165] Note the strategic reuse of eruere here as well as a form of circumire at 3.30.6 from the initial goal of his project: “to survey the world, to root out [nature’s] causes and secrets” (mundum circumire…et causas secretaque eius eruere, 1.pr.1). Seneca places a hermeneutic burden on his reader with such intratexts and encourages not just close reading, but also close rereading of his work.

305 Leave a comment on paragraph 305 0 [166] Parroni 2002: ad loc.

306 Leave a comment on paragraph 306 0 [167] Forms of invenio are important for the NQ as a whole, from the way that vices discover novel expression (7.31.1), to the way contemporary philosophical neglect is impacting future (and past) discoveries (7.32.2) to the way mirrors were discovered in order that man might know himself (1.17.4).

307 Leave a comment on paragraph 307 0 [168] Long and Sedley 1987: 313 (Vol. 1) comment on the impact of eternal recurrence on one’s life, “Just as Nietzsche probably regarded everlasting recurrence as a way of saying that any other life one had would always be just the same – for how else could it be your life? – so in Stoicism the doctrine may have served to underline the necessity of accepting one’s present situation. For that will be one’s situation time and again in the everlasting nature of things”. For Nietzsche’s conception, see The Gay Science 341 (“The heaviest weight”).

308 Leave a comment on paragraph 308 0 [169] The ignorant innocence of the first humans would not make them Stoic sages, such wisdom can only be gained through education and, in a real sense, the fight against vice, see Ep. 90, Motto 1984 and Maso 1999: 43-81. Seneca’s idea of intellectual progress is set against a larger tendency for moral decline.

309 Leave a comment on paragraph 309 0 [170] See Waiblinger 1977: 55-58 and Williams 2012: 93-135 for connections between the two books. On a linguistic level the seas will return within their own boundaries at 3.30.7 (intra terminus suos furere coget) and Seneca urges Lucilius to keep his duties as procurator within their limits (continere id intra fines suos, 4a.pr.1), while the elevated cities that survive the annual flood of the Nile appear like islands (4a.2.11), much like the mountaintops of the flood (3.27.13).

310 Leave a comment on paragraph 310 0 [171] French 1994: 176 “Whatever its source, the Final Disaster was entirely appropriate to Seneca’s Stoic message. It was the biggest thing possible not to worry about”. See Ker 2009: 107 on Book 6: “the natural science framework itself offers a sphere for consolation in which recovery is mediated exclusively in terms of nature”. In some way the flood acts as both a test of the reader and a form of praemeditatio so that the reader will be able to approach any of life’s difficulties with a knowledge of something that could be worse and that is destined to happen, see Ep. 107.3-4 for such a premeditation about death.

311 Leave a comment on paragraph 311 0 [172] That is, with the fragmentary books 4a and 4b. See Nothdurft 1963 for Seneca’s influence in the twelfth-century.

312 Leave a comment on paragraph 312 0 [173] Briefly in Reynolds 1983: 376-78, and more thoroughly in Hine 1980 and Hine 1981.

313 Leave a comment on paragraph 313 0 [174] For more on this manuscript and an image of it, see Fiesoli 2004.

314 Leave a comment on paragraph 314 0 [175] See Munk Olsen 2000.

315 Leave a comment on paragraph 315 0 [176] Stok 2000 examines the influence of NQ during this period.

316 Leave a comment on paragraph 316 0 [177] For more on this edition, see Periti 2004. The reception and influence of the NQ from antiquity to Foucault can be found in the fine survey of Nanni and Pellacani 2012.

317 Leave a comment on paragraph 317 0 [178] Hine 1983: 377.

318 Leave a comment on paragraph 318 0 [179] Codoñer Merino 1979: XXX, Hine 1981: 4-23.

319 Leave a comment on paragraph 319 0 [180] Corcoran 1971, Codoñer Merino 1979, Vottero 1989, Parroni 2002, Bravo Díaz: 2013.

320 Leave a comment on paragraph 320 0

---

321 Leave a comment on paragraph 321 0