Senecae Naturales Quaestiones 4a Intro
1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 This fragmentary book provides Seneca’s doxography about the Nile River, especially the causes of its summer flooding. This was a topic that had fascinated thinkers from the Presocratics to Nero himself, who sent a group to soldiers to Egypt to explore the source of the Nile (see NQ 6.3-5). It is unfortunate that the book cuts off midway through his discussion of the Nile, although Hine believes we can get a sense of the lost discussions in the work of John the Lydian (de Mensibus 4.107). The expansive preface offers us an ethical analysis of the subject of flattery, which was rampant in Nero’s Rome. While at first glance this may appear to be unrelated to the physics of the Nile (Greek phusis = “nature”), Seneca enjoys juxtaposing ethics and physics throughout this work and clearly has a reason for doing so here.
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