Commentaries to individual books of Seneca Epistulae Morales are scarce. Aside from commentaries to Book 1 and 6,[1] scholars have preferred to offer commentaries to a selection of Seneca’s letters in the recent decades.[2] What is gained by deep engagement with an individual book of Seneca’s Epistulae Morales? Soldo’s welcome commentary shows how important it is to think of Seneca’s epistolary corpus book by book and how Seneca weaves this second book together with interlocking language, imagery, metaphors, and themes. While Seneca will look back to the first book often, Soldo is right to point out the different motifs that pepper these letters. Primary themes include the causes of fear and how to alleviate its insidious influence, the true nature of poverty, problems of fame and fortune, and the actions that define a philosophical way of life, especially the question of withdrawal (i.e. should one withdraw from politics in order to study and practice philosophy). Perhaps surprisingly, Epicurus looms large in these letters as well, and each letter closes with an Epicurean quotation that is redefined or interpreted in a novel manner by Seneca. While Soldo often questions the connections between quotation and letter, it is clear that Seneca is working through important larger connections between his brand of Stoicism and teaching and the underlying message of Epicureanism. Soldo’s commentary is helpful throughout and the lemmata provide guidance on a variety of issues from textual transmission, the niceties of Stoic doctrine, intratextual echoes with other letters of the Epistulae Morales, and grammatical as well as syntactical help.
This volume includes a general introduction, Latin text with facing English translation, commentary, up-to-date bibliography, and an index locorum. The introduction offers strong sections on “Senecan Language and Terminology” and “Stoicism and Epicureanism in the Epistulae Morales” but less exhaustive takes on the manuscript tradition and the question of whether it is a genuine or fictional correspondence. Paradoxically, Soldo’s section on the primary topics of Book 2 and its careful architecture is not as thorough as I expected it to be (xxi–xxiii). As one makes one’s way through the commentary, it is clear that there are convincing links and a real emphasis on certain matters that intimate Seneca’s own conception of these letters as a book unit. Soldo’s overview in her introduction feels a bit too general when the reader would expect more concrete and convincing examples of the benefits of reading these nine letters as a connected whole. She claims, “The present commentary … acknowledges the importance of reading the EM sequentially in the order in which they were arranged and in the context of their book units. The letters develop their full meaning only when they are read with an appreciation of the book and the interactions with other letters” (xxxvii). The evidence for this reading is found in the pages of the commentary, but the general reader would benefit from some compelling and eye-opening examples in the introduction itself.
The text is based on Reynold’s OCT with a limited apparatus criticus, which primarily points to moments that are discussed in the commentary. The translation is not as readable as Graver and Long’s recent translation (reviewed here), but it suffices. The commentary is the meat of this volume (almost 250 pages of commentary for the nine letters) and it rewards close reading. Soldo begins the commentary for each letter with an introductory essay pointing out the major themes and concerns of the epistle. These fertile expositions allow Soldo to further develop topics such as Seneca’s indebtedness to Cicero for vocabulary (Ep. 17), his ability to evoke fear in his writing through his vivid descriptions (Ep. 14), and his philosophical exegesis of quotations, such as that of Epicurus (Ep. 20). Each subsection of the letter is given its own description, ranging from one sentence to a paragraph. These are clear and concise and help the reader form a better sense of the letter’s flow and Seneca’s manner of constructing an argument.
In the commentary, one finds many examples of the way in which these letters work together to form a strong whole, especially with the positioning of Ep. 17 about poverty in the center of the book, and the placement of Ep. 21 as the concluding quasi-sphragis of the book. For example, when Seneca writes in Ep. 13 that investigating the fear of the future will not be covered today (hodie, 13.7), the implication is that they will be discussed in the following daily letter, i.e. Ep. 14, which duly occurs. Soldo is strong in pointing out these connections and traces the complicated and subtle web of intratexts in the commentary. She is sensible when discussing Seneca’s word choice as well as manuscript variants and conjectures. Here is her explanation of Seneca’s description of voice training exercises in Ep. 15.8:
cum recipies illam [vocem] revocarisque: we must assume that both recipies and revocaris describe the lowering of the voice, but the vocabulary is very unusual. We must interpret these general verbs in such a way as to fit them into the context; see OLD s.v. recipio 11a: ‘withdraw’; and OLD s.v. revoco 5a: ‘cause (a thing) to return to its original position.’ Note the figura etymologica in vox…revocarisque, perhaps the reason why revocare was chosen.
The truncated future perfect revocarisque has a variation in MS group ς, which reads revocabisque instead. Reynolds remarks that it is difficult to decide which reading is better (fort. recte) but revocarisque is definitely to be preferred. The future perfect describes the process of lowering one’s voice more exactly: first one has to give the order, revocarisque, before one actually lowers it, recipies. The exact temporal sequence matches the highly technical description of the voice in 15.7 and 15.8…
There are also ways in which the teaching of this book looks backward to Book 1 and forward to subsequent books. Epistle 19 reformulates language found in Ep. 1 and Soldo postulates that this letter becomes a sort of “second proem of the collection” (226), which will then be trumped by the “third proem” of Ep. 33. Seneca’s penchant for fresh starts at different times in the collection may be indicative of real progress that he imagines Lucilius (and himself) making, even if these moments occur mid-book. Likewise, in the first letter of the book (Ep. 13), Seneca implies that Lucilius is not ready for the Stoic practice of praemeditatio futurorum malorum, but by the next book (in Ep. 24), he will deem Lucilius ready for such an advanced “spiritual exercise”.
It may be useful to compare Soldo to Edwards’ recent Cambridge commentary (which also features Ep. 18 and Ep. 21). Soldo’s notes are much more detailed and touch more often on issues such as textual transmission (e.g. ad 18.1), punning language, and intertexts. Soldo brings in more secondary sources and is generally more expansive in her lemmata. Edwards, however, often provides, in my opinion, more searching introductory essays; her introduction to Ep. 18 has much more to say about possible satiric undertones in that letter and strong connections to Horace’s Satires, whereas Soldo highlights the way it connects with previous letters in Book 2. It must be said, however, that it appears Soldo and Edwards had access to one another’s commentaries and, thus, they often defer to one another and try not to cover the same ground. Here is a sample of the ways they tackle Seneca’s quotation of the Epicurean tag “Excessive anger produces insanity” (inmodica ira gignit insaniam, Ep. 18.14). Soldo writes:
Inmodica ira gignit insaniam: Epicur. Frg. 484 Us. = 246 Arr., not attested elsewhere. The quotation itself is not specifically Epicurean but can be adapted to any philosophical school (Graver 2016a, 200), a stark contrast to the Epicurean example in 18.9-11. The close link between anger and insanity is a commonplace; cf. e.g. Enn. inc. 18 (= Cic. Tusc. 4.23.52): ira initium insaniae; Verg. Aen. 7.461-2; Hor. Ep. 1.2.62; Petron. Sat. 94.6; Sen. Ira 1.1.2. The quotation may form a loose ring composition with the beginning of the letter, as insania might refer to the excesses of the Saturnalian festival in 18.1-4. Note the accumulation of ‘i’ in the Latin translation. Gignit contains igni, already anticipating the elaborate fire metaphor in 18.15. Philodemus’s De Ira informs us on the Epicurean conception of anger which distinguishes between a positive and a negative aspect of anger; θυμός is a self-destructive form of anger while ὀργὴ κατὰ φύσιν even befalls the sage; see the commentary by Indelli 1988; Erler 1992; Harris 2001, especially 99-105; Asmis 2011; and Tsouna 2011.
Edwards is more concise:
Inmodica ira gignit insaniam: fr. 484 Usener ( = 246 Arrighetti). Epicurus advises against uncontrolled anger. S usually endorses the more orthodox Stoic position that all anger is a form of madness. While all the passions were to be extirpated by the would-be philosopher, S often treats anger, which becomes the focus of this letter’s conclusion, as the most dangerous (cf. his lengthy treatise De ira, composed some years previously). The reference to anger also picks up on S’s characterisation of fortuna as irata in 18.7.
I enjoyed reading Soldo’s commentary and it forced me to read Seneca’s letters in new ways. Her command of the primary and secondary sources as well as her close reading of these texts as literary documents (underscoring Seneca’s careful deployment of metaphor, word-play, and allusive depth) reveals many details that could be easily overlooked. The commentary makes one appreciate the care Seneca devoted to his letters and to the creation of this book. I can only hope it will lead to more commentaries of this sort. Book 3 anyone?
Notes
[1] C. Richardson-Hay First Lessons: Book 1 of Seneca’s Epistulae Morales—A commentary (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006). In addition, F. Berno’s Seneca: Lettere a Lucilio. Libro VI: le Lettere 53-57 (Bologna: Pàtron, 2006).
[2] Most recently C. Edwards’ Seneca: Selected Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), but also see B. Inwood’s Seneca: Selected Philosophical Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), reviewed here, and E. Berti’s Lo stile e l’uomo (Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore, 2018) on Eps. 40, 84, 100, and 114.