‘Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out, armed, and relieve the idle stroller of his convictions.’ (W. Benjamin, One-Way Street)
1. Introduction
It is well known that the Stoics liked to enrich and support their reasoning with poetic quotations, and also that they offered several examples of allegorical readings of Homer and the tragic poets. Hence the famous statement about Chrysippus’ Medea—namely, that he included so many quotations from that tragedy of Euripides that it seemed like he himself had written it (Diog. Laert. 7.180).Footnote 1
Assessed against this background, Seneca’s quotations from poets are not in any way unusual. Still, unlike the early masters of his philosophical school, he never resorts to etymology and only rarely does he resort to linguistic analysis; he focusses, rather, on another mode of interpretation dear to the Stoics—namely, metaphoric or allegorical reading. It is remarkable that he focusses on Virgil (that is, on Roman epic) instead of tragedy; Cicero, by contrast, quotes Ennius’ Annals but also Accius and Republican tragedy.Footnote 2 Seneca does this, first, because Virgil is the Latin equivalent of HomerFootnote 3 who was also used by the Stoics to support their theories and, second, because the only Roman theatre in existence was archaic works, which were not appreciated in Seneca’s time,Footnote 4 and Augustan tragedies, which Seneca does not take into account. For instance, he explicitly dislikes Ovid, despite quoting several lines from the Metamorphoses and taking him as a model for his own theatrical plays.Footnote 5 Seneca replaces tragedy with mime, a minor genre to which he attributes a high moral function.Footnote 6 By these choices he not only Romanizes poetic authoritiesFootnote 7 but also passes literary and aesthetic judgements, both on stylistic appropriateness and on the moral implications of the authors and their works.
In this article, I would like to focus on Seneca’s favourite author by far, Virgil, maximus uates according to a famous passage in Dial. 10.9.2, and to discuss his treatment of the Aeneid in the Moral Epistles, the work in which most of his Aeneid quotations are gathered.Footnote 8 I wish to consider both the original context—Seneca’s favourite books and episodes of the Aeneid—and Seneca’s own context, that is, the Virgilian material’s relationship to the structure and content of Seneca’s letters. My focus will be on Seneca’s personal choice of Virgilian passages and on his interpretation of the epic poem. And I will reveal why I have ended my subtitle with a question mark: I do not believe that Seneca’s reading is sic et simpliciter Stoic. Scholars have recognized this, even if with some differences of interpretation, at least since Setaioli’s seminal paper of 1965,Footnote 9 which stresses how Virgil might be used for different purposes, and that Seneca is clearly aware that he is resemanticizing the quoted lines. Even when Seneca uses Virgil’s lines to support a Stoic view, this does not imply that he considers those lines to be Stoic. What I would like to add to this and to several other studies on the topic is a new perspective on the Moral Epistles. My aim will not be to distinguish between different kinds of interpretation of the quoted lines, or to determine whether Seneca had the whole text or only a portion at his disposal, which others have already discussed, but rather to focus on Seneca’s choices, both from a formal and from a content-related point of view, in order to attempt a general interpretation of the narrative they represent when taken as a whole. For the content I will list the quotation, outlining and exemplifying the key themes and their development; as for the form, I will stress the correspondences between epic and epistolary characters suggested by direct speeches in the quotations.
2. The quotations
Here is a detailed table of the quotations, reporting the references of Seneca’s letters, the quoted Virgilian lines (with cf. if altered from the tradition; original text in square brackets), the general subject of the passage, and the speaking character(s), in case there are any. In the first column, numbers in bold type correspond to Seneca’s letters that will be dealt with at length in this article; in the second column, words in bold, such as imperatives or vocatives, are those which highlight the dialogic form of the quoted passage (cf. below, section 6).
There are forty-five quotations,Footnote 11 forty-eight if we count separately the passages in which Seneca groups different lines together; they are generally placed close to the beginning or to the end of a letter. The quotations are also short, of one to five (only one case) lines, and quite uniformly spread over the 124 letters, with the exception of the first three books (Epistles 1–29), where there is a strong presence of sentences attributed to Epicurus, and of the last book.
Regarding the first books, Seneca’s choice may be stylistic—gathering too many references is inappropriate—but there may also be another reason:Footnote 12 Epicureans themselves did not quote a lot, so Seneca, in this section of his work, decides to do the same, thus offering examples not only of Epicurean moral precepts but also of their way of conveying them. As for the last section of the collection, we find a few quotations from the Georgics there. Quotations from that work, and certainly from the Eclogues, are fewer than those from the Aeneid but tend toward the longer side of the range, probably because Seneca assumed the readers’ knowledge of the Aeneid but not of the other Virgilian poems.Footnote 13
Seneca demonstrates an awareness of the original context, since he often echoes it in what precedes and what follows the quotation itself,Footnote 14 yet in most cases he rephrases, alters or even denies and contradicts the content of the lines, which is then used to advance his own agenda. So, even though Seneca considers Virgil to be the greatest Roman poet, he does not treat him as a philosophical authority but rather as a rhetorical tool. Sometimes his quotations support the Stoic view, sometimes they are offered as an example of the wrong way of thinking.Footnote 15 Virgil’s fame among Latin readers has a didactic implication: it is a means of conveying philosophical concepts and of illustrating them.
If we consider Seneca’s choices regarding the Aeneid, we notice a preference for Books 6 (twelve quotations), 1 (seven quotations), 3 and 8 (five quotations each), and a lack of interest in the last three books (one or two quotations each). In four cases, the same lines are quoted twice; a few times (four) the lines are contaminated or altered, but only in order to better fit the new context, not to manipulate the general meaning.Footnote 16 In several letters there is more than one quotation, even from other Virgilian poems (for example in Epistles 73 and 108). Simply from the list of quotations we may infer a preference for the first half of the Aeneid, the so-called ‘Odyssean’ one, but, if we make a sort of cento of the quoted lines and identify the key concepts, a different picture emerges.
Reading the quotations one by one, we see a lack of detailed passages. For instance, there are no quotations referring to places, such as the Campanian shoreFootnote 17 and Sicily, which we find both in the Aeneid and in Seneca’s letters; neither do we find detailed episodes or explicit references to specific characters, with only one exception (the quotation of Aeneas’ name in Epistle 82). This shows Seneca’s lack of interest in the concrete details of Virgil’s poem and his focus on its ideal purpose.
Indeed, Seneca shows a preference for only a few themes: gods, with their related concepts of fate and fortune (eight occurrences); death (seven occurrences); and virtue, linked with force and fighting (fifteen occurrences).Footnote 18 These themes, which are intertwined with each other, show that the ‘Iliadic’ subjects of the Aeneid are not neglected at all.Footnote 19 To these we may add references to travelling (four) and vice (three): indeed, travelling is an alternative metaphor for fighting adversities, and vices, of course, represent the main opponent to virtue. Two further passages are devoted to authorship.
Fighting, fate, death: these themes show that Seneca is using the epic poem for its basic purpose, which is to represent a heroic struggle imposed by fate, except that Seneca applies it to the interior life of a person. We may say that, even if Seneca’s reading often goes in a different direction from that implied in the original context, in most cases the basic subject remains the same.
To my knowledge, there are only five cases in which Seneca inserts a Virgilian line in a completely different context: aside from the instances where Seneca has the lines as part of a discussion about language, which include the quotation of the opening line of the Aeneid (Ep. 113.25), the most striking such instance is in Epistle 102, where Virgil’s description of Dido’s loving thoughts for Aeneas is applied to someone considering his dying soul (102.30, quoting Aen. 4.3–4). The quotation enriches the discussion about the probable mortality of the soul with a touch of sweetness and melancholy, depicting death as the end of a love story between body and soul.
In the large majority of cases, Seneca shifts from actual battles to moral ones; sometimes he might read a line in a surprising way, but he does not alter its context. I will present the three main groups of themes, and offer a case study for each one (sections 3–5); finally, after taking into account the dialogic form of several quotations (section 6), I will consider the development of the themes themselves, reading the quotations as a continuum (section 7).
3. MAIN THEMES 1: Gods, fate and fortune
Gods are naturally linked with fate in Stoic philosophy, and also in epic poetry, especially in Virgil’s Aeneid. There are many passages that would fit a Stoic discussion on the acceptance of fate. Seneca avoids easy choicesFootnote 20 and picks a few subtler ones. An example is Dido’s famous last words, uixi et quem dederat cursum fortuna peregi (Aen. 4.653), which constitute the first quotation of the Aeneid in the Moral Epistles (12.9). This passage has already been thoroughly studied;Footnote 21 I would like to stress that here the Punic queen is paradoxically quoted as a positive example of the acceptance of fate.
As a case study for this group of themes, I would rather propose Ep. 77.12, where we find Aen. 6.376:Footnote 22
in hoc punctum coniectus es, quod ut extendes, quousuqe extendas? quid fles? quid optas? perdis operam.
rata et fixa sunt et magna atque aeterna necessitate ducuntur: eo ibis quo omnia eunt.
You have been cast into this moment of time; you might extend it, but for how long? Why are you crying? What is it you want? You’re wasting your efforts.
Your fate is fixed, determined by a vast, eternal necessity. You will go where all things go.Footnote 23
Line 376, with the Virgilian expression fata deum, summons several Stoic ideas, and so it matches Seneca’s reasoning: the presence of an inescapable fate, the inopportunity of wishful prayers, the impossibility of changing one’s destiny. The words are spoken by the Sibyl, who is addressing Palinurus’ shadow in order to take away his hope for a proper burial. The prophetess consoles him only with the prospect of his name being given to the promontory around which he died. Seneca’s context is different: while in Virgil the words refer to an individual destiny, Seneca applies them to the death common to all humanity; the ‘you’ is indeed a generic addressee. The introductory image is a powerful, we may say Heideggerian, metaphor—namely, that of existence being ‘thrown’ (coniectus) into the present, which in turn is only a moment. What follows the Virgilian line is a consolatory commonplace, that of death as a universal destiny according to natural law. Seneca adopts some stylistic features of the Virgilian passage from which the line is taken, such as the use of the second-person singular and of direct questions, but he is also aware of the content, because what follows is a consolatory argument, like that of the Sibyl in Virgil (indeed, she says sed cape dicta memor, duri solacia casus, Aen. 6.377). Moreover, the purpose of Epistle 77 is to encourage an acceptance of our death whenever and however it comes, without concern for it: and this is what the Sibyl is telling Palinurus.
4. MAIN THEMES 2: Virtue, strength and fighting
Virtue as moral strength is always connected in Seneca with images of fighting. This lends itself to a metaphorical reading of epic lines, since epic is full of fighting imagery. It strikes me that the passages Seneca chooses are focussed on attack rather than defence, and that they are free of gore, which is quite frequent both in Aeneid Books 10 and 11 and in Seneca’s account of the battles of virtue.Footnote 24 Seneca, who often describes life as a defensive war against the violence of events, prefers to use Virgil in optimistic contexts, where he stresses human potential in winning battles against vice and disgrace. Since he avoids bloody images in the poem, in his selection of passages he also seems to share the aesthetic idea of sobriety and fine elegance associated with Virgil.Footnote 25
A few images are focussed on virtue’s seductive appearance, which contrasts with ugly physical exteriority. I would like to read one of these contrasting passages, in Epistle 66, a long letter about the evaluation of goods which starts with the image of Seneca meeting Claranus, an old and disabled friend, whose spiritual force transcends his physical limits. The image, clearly modelled after Socrates’ example in the Symposium, stresses the reality of a good hidden under an awful or disturbing appearance (66.2):Footnote 26
errare mihi uisus est qui dixit
non enim ullo honestamento eget: ipsa magnum sui decus est et corpus suum consecrat. aliter certe Claranum nostrum coepi intueri: formosus mihi uidetur et tam rectus corpore quam est animo.
I think the poet was mistaken when he said:
For virtue needs nothing to ennoble it: it is its own great ornament, and makes sacred the body it inhabits. Certainly I have begun to see our friend Claranus in a new way: he seems quite handsome to me, and as upright in stature as he is in his spirit.
The quotation is from the fifth book, where comeliness is represented by the young and charming Euryalus, who claims a prize in a footrace. The Virgilian context is focussed on physical appearance as worthy of honor; Seneca answers by denying the need of a physical honestamentum, a derivative from honor stressing the exterior appearance of nobleness, and insists on interior decus, a synonym of honor, in addition to the body (two repetitions of corpus, already in Virgil’s passage), while uirtus, which is the subject of the quoted line, remains implied in the following comment. Seneca also focusses on beauty, with the deliberate choice of formosus, an attribute that specifically refers to exterior appearance, instead of pulcher, Virgil’s word here, which can also have a mental connotation. These lexical choices emphasize the paradoxical nature of Claranus’ beauty, which is exclusively interior but is described with a physical exterior attribute, whereas in Virgil pulcher highlights the overlap between exterior and interior pleasantness.
Furthermore, the choice of honestamentum, a rare, heavy and prosaic word,Footnote 27 contrasts with the lightness of the quoted line, probably alluding to the contrast between the pleasant appearance of the young Euryalus and the more disagreeable appearance of the old and disabled Claranus, or to Claranus’ remarkable efforts to overcome his physical limitations.
Seneca’s comment is anticipated by the sharp introduction to the quotation: errare mihi uisus est. Virgil does not deserve anything more than a generic pronoun (qui), and this formula often introduces incorrect hypotheses in prose works.Footnote 28
5. MAIN THEMES 3: Death
Death is referred to in quotations seven times, although one might have expected more, given Seneca’s obsession with this topic. Indeed, most quotations about fate are followed by meditations about death, so we may add those references to our consideration. Moreover, it has to be noted that death is never mentioned as a concrete event in the quotations, despite the frequency of Virgil’s descriptions of it; Seneca prefers general statements or mythological references, such as the frightening personifications one might find in the underworld. Again, in his choices Seneca echoes Virgilian discretion and reticence. When dealing with death as a concrete event, Seneca prefers a low register and a satirical or diatribe-like tone. Coming from a playwright with a distinctive taste for bloody scenes, this sounds like an aesthetic adaptation to the present context.
We might take as an example Ep. 107.3, where Seneca quotes Aen. 6.274–5:Footnote 29
praeparetur animus contra omnia: sciat se uenisse ubi tonat fulmen; sciat se uenisse ubi
in hoc contubernio uita degenda est. effugere ista non potes, contemnere potes; contemnes autem si saepe cogitaueris et futura praesumpseris.
Let him prepare himself for all that lie ahead, knowing that he has come to the place where thunder resounds, where
This is the company in which you have to spend your life. You cannot escape those things, but you can rise above them, and you will succeed in doing so if you frequently reflect on and anticipate the future.
Seneca reverses Virgil’s underworld setting and places the personifications of evil on earth, where we meet them in real life. In the Aeneid, Aeneas is scared (trepidus, 6.290) and tries to fight them until he realizes that they are only shadows (6.290–4 corripit hic subita trepidus formidine ferrum | Aeneas strictamque aciem uenientibus offert; | et, ni docta comes tenuis sine corpore uitas | admoneat uolitare caua sub imagine formae, | inruat et frustra ferro diuerberet umbras). Seneca, who considers being scared typical of the unlearned ones (inparatus, Ep. 107.4), does not suggest fighting terrible events, which would be useless, but rather adopting some resilient strategies to avoid fear: despising them, diminishing their appearance, analysing their probability. This attitude resembles that of the learned Sybil (docta comes, Aen. 6.292), who instructs Aeneas about the evanescent nature of those figures (6.292–3).
It is interesting to note that also in his tragedy Oedipus, 591–6, where he imitates those lines,Footnote 30 Seneca places the shadows on earth: as in Lucan (6.654–830), it is the underworld that rises to the earth and not a living man who descends, so the deathly atmosphere of hell contaminates the world of living beings.
Life is a living hell, literally, not only in tragedies but also in real life.Footnote 31 Seneca concludes his letter by quoting his poetic translation of Cleanthes’ hymn to Zeus, a famous exhortation to accept fate (107.11). We can say that in Epistle 107, as in a few other places, Seneca quotes Virgil for an example of common behaviour, opposed to that of the wise person who is solemnly portrayed in the final sections of the letter. The Virgilian passage must indeed have had some effect on him, because he quotes it again, together with a few other lines from the Georgics on the passing of time, in the following letter, 108, where Seneca affirms that philosophers use poetic quotations to ease the understanding and memorization of their precepts (108.9);Footnote 32 it is a famous letter, in which he discusses the superiority of the philosophical interpretation over the grammatical and philological interpretations of poetry. The line he had quoted from the Georgics in Dial. 10.9.2, fugit inreparabile tempus (G. 3.284),Footnote 33 referring to busy men who waste their time, is repeated here (Ep. 108.24 and 108.26), with a universal and deathly echo of the lines from the Aeneid about the infernal shadows. It is evident that the lines from the epic poem, if compared to those from the didactic one, are used to highlight innate human fears. While in Epistle 107 the quotations from Virgil’s hell are mitigated by the solemn and peaceful words of Cleanthes’ hymn, in Epistle 108 we see a reversal: hell arrives at the end, after the philosophical reflection is enriched and inspired by the Georgics. If we leave aside the last quotations, aimed at mocking philologists (108.33–4)Footnote 34 in accordance with a typical Senecan technique of lightening the mood at the end of a letter, death has the final word, not as a natural phenomenon and universal law, as Seneca tries to show, but as the terrifying event that common men see.
6. Two embedded dialogues
We have just seen a few examples of Seneca’s use of Virgilian lines: a use that is at the same time free (Seneca declares Virgil wrong or reads him in a peculiar way) and respectful (he indulges his stylistic features and key themes). Now I would like to draw attention to a formal element in the quotations: most of them contain direct speech, which implies an I/you dialectic that coincides with that of the letters and thus involves the reader. Indeed, as everyone knows, the epistolary genre is characterized by an exchange between a first-person and a second-person singular.Footnote 35 In quoting direct speech in Virgil, Seneca formally parallels epistolary usage, but also dramatizes the context, in two ways. First, the exhortative tone in Virgil, expressed for example through the imperative mood and explicit allocutions, allows Seneca to dramatize his precepts without appearing rude or inappropriate. Second, there is an overlap between the characters of the dialogue. Attached is a table of the character correspondences.
If the I/you exchange in the Aeneid is, for instance, between Evander and Aeneas, as happens in three cases, and those lines are then quoted in a letter, that is, in an I/you exchange between Seneca and the reader, then there is an implicit identification of Seneca with the wise, old Arcadian king on one side, and of the reader with the wandering hero who needs advice on how to know and accept his fate on the other side. In nine cases, we find exhortations to a ‘you’, who is Aeneas, from Evander, the Sibyl, Venus or Helenus;Footnote 36 in one case, quoted twice, the addressee is Ascanius. In eleven cases, Aeneas speaks, as a narrator or when exhorting his companions or when revealing his feelings; in three cases, Turnus speaks. From this list we cannot spot any fixed overlap between characters, but some general trends are clear.
Let us start with Seneca. In some cases, there is an overlap between the author and one of Aeneas’ mentors, such as the Sybil, Evander and so on. Their words are comforting and exhortative. This matches the master/pupil relationship which characterizes the author and the reader of the letters.
The cases of overlap between Seneca and Aeneas, apart from some exhortations to fighting, are not heroic; rather, they show the weak or at least human side of the hero: his fear for his family (Epistle 56), bafflement in meeting his divine mother (115), being used to harshness (76),Footnote 37 complaint for dead friends (98), even a sort of melancholic attitude towards the past (78). Aeneas is a struggling hero, and Seneca, when he identifies with him, quotes the lines that emphasize his efforts.Footnote 38 Seneca’s Turnus is more heroic: he trusts fortune and despises death. The last quotation of Aeneas’ words is in Epistle 115, from Aeneas’ meeting with Venus (whom Seneca identifies with the wise person’s soul), and it expresses astonishment and bewilderment, while two of the three quotations referring to Turnus show him as a fearless warrior, determined to accept his destiny; these two are placed in the last third of the epistolary work (Epistles 94 and 98). We may infer that Seneca uses all these quotations to stress his role as a master of philosophy; that he proposes at the same time an overlap not only between himself as author of the letters and Aeneas as a proficiens, the Stoic person in progress, but also between himself and Turnus as a loser as well as a self-confident hero. This matches his own self-fashioning; indeed, he presents himself as a master but not a wise person, as someone who is only a few steps ahead of the reader and is still working on his moral improvement (34.2).Footnote 39
If we turn to the other party in the relationship, the you/reader, we find positive and quite optimistic exhortations to fight, to go on, to achieve, and this validates the author Seneca’s benevolence towards Lucilius, and more generally towards the reader, and his efforts to drive his occurrent self to rise to the level of his normative self, as Long puts it.Footnote 40 Nine times the addressee in the quotations is Aeneas: in those cases, it is not his weakness but his potential that is stressed; there is also, quoted twice, the famous sic itur ad astra, spoken by Apollo to Iulus after his first warlike enterprise (Ep. 48.11 and 73.15). In this way, the reader is twice gratified: first, by the identification with an epic hero—the epic hero of Roman tradition; second, by the optimistic view of his future, with gods on his side. Some quotations come from Aeneas’ narrative, in Aeneid Books 2 and 3, of his enterprises to Dido, who is not addressed explicitly but, as any reader knows, is listening with a loving attitude. The reader is never identified with Turnus, so the overlap with epic characters is entirely positive and free from the shadow of a doomed destiny. This is further emphasized by the one case in which Seneca identifies himself with Virgil—namely, when, quoting the famous lines about Euryalus’ and Nisus’ deaths, he promises Lucilius immortality by dint of the value of his own literary work (21.5). In this letter, Seneca also refers to Cicero’s and Epicurus’ letters, but with the aforementioned quotation, besides flattering Lucilius with the perspective of long-lasting fame, he presents himself as the Virgil of epistolography.
7. Conclusion
The presence of a thread or development in Seneca’s Moral Epistles is questionable. There are, of course, some key themes—death above all—and we may say that references to Epicurus tend to decrease as one reads along, while theoretical issues tend to increase, but there is no evident structure in the collection as a whole.Footnote 41 Conversely, if we read the Virgil quotations as a continuum, considering both their content and the implications of their oft-occurring dialogic form, we detect a narrative. We have already seen that, considered through the I/you relationship, the quotations depict, on one side, an author who plays his role of mentor without concealing his flaws and failures and, on the other side, a reader who is committed to his own moral improvement, and is exhorted to go on. Seneca’s dialogue with Virgil is developed through an overlap between Virgilian and epistolary dialogues.
There are further considerations regarding the content of the quotations. The groups of themes discussed above (fate, fighting, death) are not spread uniformly through the letters: references to gods, fortune and virtue tend to decrease toward the end of the collection, as do those to voyages, while references to death tend to increase: there are three of them in the last six quotations, where, as we have seen, Turnus’ words feature strongly. Seneca says very little about his personal life in his letters, and nothing about his political situation, while he presents himself as an urbane master of philosophy, yet his choice of lines from the Aeneid reveals an increasing pessimism in his view of life, as well as a focus on death in its most terrifying apparel. It is perhaps not a coincidence that Virgilian quotations are concentrated in Seneca’s last works, the Natural Questions and especially the Moral Epistles,Footnote 42 and that the last reference to divine providence is negative: dis aliter uisum (Aen. 2.428 in Ep. 98.4),Footnote 43 words that Aeneas pronounces on the premature death of a young and brave warrior, Ripheus. Even if Seneca does not share in the thought of those words, proposing instead the opposite di melius (Ep. 98.5), the hemistich is easily supplied in the reader’s mind, and it is hard not to be reminded of Seneca’s political ruin. The very last reference to the divine, which is also the last quotation from the Aeneid in the collection, refers to the wise person’s soul (115.5), in an atmosphere of detachment from earthly matters. So, contrary to what one may think at first sight, quotations from the Aeneid in Seneca’s Moral Epistles tell a story, moving from fighting against the difficulties of life toward accepting death.
To return to my title: it is undoubtedly the case that Seneca uses Virgilian quotations to support, as examples or as counterpoints, his Stoic arguments. Still, given the considerations presented here, it would in my opinion be reductive to present Seneca’s Aeneid as a Stoic reading of the poem. I would say, rather, that his choices are generally indicative of an intimate, somehow existential use of this poem. Indeed, he uses Virgil’s lines to describe his coming to terms with death. Even if he avoids bloody descriptions and tragic scenes, Seneca seems to express through the Virgilian quotations an increasing anxiety matching his self-representation as a frail and doubtful hero. The pacified master of philosophy, seen through the lines of the Aeneid, is still thoughtfully concerned about his pupil, but is nevertheless filled with his own uncertainties. Seneca chooses Virgil to express his intimate anxiety, or, more correctly, the intimate anxiety of the author of the letters; in doing so, he presents his own Aeneid.
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