In the Natural Questions , Seneca says that nature has given us mirrors so that we may know ourselves ut homo ipse se nosset. Even this external means of seeing ourselves—which, Seneca deplores, is mostly put to less than virtuous uses—serves a purpose; for example, the young see the bloom of their youth, thus being reminded that this is the time for study and bravery NQ 1.
Williams Ultimately, however, coming to know oneself is a matter of reflective self-examination and philosophical study. At the same time, Seneca argues that the private life and the public life are cures for each other On Peace of Mind Inwood [12].
Gill Like St. In the Natural Questions , Seneca suggests that the reflective engagement with our own soul is but the first step. Even if we escape the violent emotions and disruptions of a public life, we might not yet have escaped from ourselves , that is, from an excessive concern with our own particular situation and needs. We must turn into ourselves in se recedendum , but then we must also retreat from ourselves a se recedendum NQ 4. From a care of ourselves that revolves around ethical questions, we must turn to the study of nature and theology NQ 1.
How does such study liberate us? By removing us from our localized concerns, and offering us a distanced, disengaged perspective on them. This is a thought that perhaps is rather foreign to modern psychotherapeutic techniques, and to Foucaultian ideas about self-care.
Questions relating to Stoic psychological monism have been most widely discussed with a view to the theory of the emotions—here, it makes a great difference whether we think that irrational desires can overcome reason, or are irrational acts of the rational soul. According to others, On Anger can be studied as a treatise on emotion that is basically in agreement with Stoic psychological monism, and appreciated for the detailed treatment that Seneca devotes to this, as he sees it, particularly violent emotion Cooper ; Vogt According to the Stoics, the ideal agent has no emotions.
Rather, it aims at a life without emotions. However, the Stoics do not suggest that the perfect agent is affectively inert. Rational affective reactions and dispositions replace emotion. Further, the ideal agent has proto-emotions, that is, initial affective and physiological reactions that do not depend on assent On Anger 2.
These responses which, for Seneca and early Stoics, do not count as emotions, have recently been a starting point in comparing Stoic and Chinese philosophy, and described in terms of self-emerging feelings Machek The conceptions of good or rational feelings i. But still, students of ancient theories of emotion have often felt that one simply must side with an Aristotelian position—with the view that there are adequate, measured emotions. Suppose someone commits a crime; are we not justly angry, and should we not react to the crime?
As Seneca puts it, will the ideal agent not be angry if he sees his father murdered and his mother raped? Yes, he argues, we should react, but not with emotions and emotional action revenge , no matter how curbed they might be through reflection. Emotions are irrational Emotions thus cannot be moderated—they must be replaced with rational responses. The ideal agent will avenge and defend others out of duty quia oportet On Anger 1.
Alternatively, Fournier argues that Ad Marciam displays a progression from the aim of moderate grief to the aim of elimination of grief According to the early Stoics, there are four generic emotions: pleasure in the sense of being pleased about something , pain in the sense of being distressed or feeling displeased , desire, and fear. Pleasure is directed at a presumed good that is present; pain at a presumed bad that is present; desire at a presumed good in the future; fear at a presumed bad in the future.
Since emotions are impulses, they result in action if there is no external impediment. Anger counts as a kind of desire.
In anger, the agent assents to the impression that she should take revenge. On Anger thus helps shed light on the way in which several judgments can figure in one emotion, and how emotion is tied up with irrational action Vogt ; Kaster , Introduction. On the Aristotelian account, the akratic agent acts contrary to her correct reasoning and based on desire.
This view seems recognizable to many. Stoic psychological monism can appear colorless and unrealistic in comparison. It cannot accommodate the sense that reason and desire are in conflict. For the Stoics, each motivational state is a thought. Recent Seneca scholars have asked whether Seneca adheres to the oscillation view of conflicted motivation, or whether his account is closer to Aristotelian akrasia.
According to Gartner , on the other hand, On Anger is fully in agreement with Stoic monism. Within the framework of Aristotelian theory, akrasia is worse than control enkrateia and much worse than virtue.
Other scholars pursue intermediate approaches. On his reading, On Anger develops a version of psychological monism that permits dualist imagery and that explains motivational conflict in part in terms of the physiology of inner turmoil on the physiology of anger in On Anger , see also Riggsby Next to anger, Seneca pays most attention to fear and grief, emotions that tend to dominate human life due to human mortality NQ 6.
Letters 26, 63, Fear of death is paradoxical: It wants to preserve life, but it spoils life 6. It is one of the key tasks for the progressor to come to terms with death Edwards ; Mann ; Letters 1. It is through changing our views regarding the presumed badness of death that we can overcome fear and grief. Death is a natural event, and understanding death is part of the study of nature.
We fear most what we do not understand; knowledge cures fear NQ 6. Seneca takes seriously two accounts of death: either death is a transition to a better afterlife, or it is a genuine end.
In his tragedies, Seneca explores more troubling scenarios see above. In On Peace of Mind Why does the ideal agent not deplore vice, and so feel in some way bad about it? This question bears on a key aspect of the Stoic theory.
Although there are four generic emotions, there are only three rational feelings; they replace pleasure, desire, and fear. There is no rational correlate to pain or distress, i. Of course, the wise person will not judge that illness or loss of money is bad; she knows that only vice is bad.
Seneca gives an answer that is in agreement with the fundamental Stoic claim that virtue benefits. The sage puts on a smile, rather than being saddened, because his cheerfulness gives hope.
Part of this argument might be that virtue does not allow for rational negative affective responses, since such responses would not benefit. In his discussion of how the virtuous person responds to weaknesses in others, Seneca extends the Stoic spectrum of rational feelings to include mercy clementia. Kaster for a brief introduction to the treatise. We cannot here enter into the question of whether Seneca chooses to ignore or did not know of the murder Nero had recently committed.
Perhaps the answer is simply that things look different in hindsight see Braund The Latin term for mercy, clementia , is difficult to translate; sometimes scholars opt for clemency, thus signaling that Seneca discusses a virtue that we are not immediately familiar with. In On Mercy , clementia is a virtue of a superior.
This is in itself a novelty within Stoic ethics. Earlier Stoics did not conceive of virtues for particular roles. Instead, virtue or wisdom is thought to translate into role-specific kinds of expertise whenever a virtuous person comes to have such a role. In Seneca, clementia is a kind of restraint in a powerful person who might otherwise lash out and act cruelly, and it is something like equity cf.
Braund Arguably, the first kind of clementia is not a Stoic virtue. A person whose savagery needs to be contained cannot count as virtuous Vogt Scholars also raise the question of whether equity, understood as the ability of a ruler to judge a case by all its particular characteristics rather than simply apply a rule fits into Stoic philosophy Braund Aristotle discusses a well-known problem: the law is general, but every case that needs to be judged is particular.
Equity is a juridical virtue; it aims to remedy an inevitable feature of the law understood as a set of rules: its generality. According to two doxographical passages, the Stoics do not ascribe equity to their wise person DL 7.
However, these texts are plausibly understood as making the claim that the Stoics do not ascribe Aristotelian equity —and that is, the equity that aims to remedy the shortcomings of general rules—to the wise person. The law, as the Stoics conceive of it, is not the positive set of laws in a given political community. Equity of a distinctively Stoic kind, understood as the ability to judge every case by fully appreciating all particular circumstances, fits perfectly into the larger framework of Stoic ethics Vogt So-called preferred indifferents—health, wealth, and so on—have value their opposites, dispreferred indifferents, have disvalue.
But only virtue is good. Again and again, Seneca discusses how health and wealth do not contribute to our happiness. Seneca approaches this issue not as an academic puzzle, as if we needed to be compelled by intricate proof to accept this point.
He speaks very directly to his readers, and his examples grip us moderns as much as they gripped his contemporaries. We tend to think that life would be better if only we did not have to travel for the lowest fare, but in a more comfortable fashion; we are disheartened when our provisions for dinner are no better than stale bread. By addressing these very concrete situations, Seneca keeps hammering home the core claim of Stoic ethics: that virtue alone is sufficient for happiness, and nothing else even makes a contribution.
It is important to note that preferred indifferents have value though they are not good in the terminological sense of the Stoics. Scholars sometimes suggest that, for Seneca, preferred indifferents are worthless and to be frowned upon for example, Braund In doing so, they pick up on the metaphors and examples that Seneca employs.
Accordingly, Seneca keeps giving vivid examples, aiming to help his audience become less attached to things of mere value. However, he does not suggest that things like health or wealth should be regarded dismissively, or not taken care of. A related and equally important aspect of Stoic ethics is the distinction between appropriate and correct action.
Appropriate action takes indifferents adequately into account. Both fools and the wise can act appropriately. But only the wise act perfectly appropriately , or correctly : their action is based on their perfect deliberation, and reflects the overall consistency of their soul. Seneca explains matters in precisely this fashion: while we should take indifferents health, illness, wealth, poverty, etc.
What is good is that I choose well Letter Attributing any real importance to indifferents, Seneca argues, is like preferring, among two good men, the one with the fancy haircut Letter A nice haircut, one might think, could be seen as entirely irrelevant. Compared to the good, preferred indifferents pale, and appear as insignificant as a fashionable haircut when compared with genuine virtue.
But preferred indifferents are valuable. In deliberation, we do not compare them with the good; we consider them next to dispreferred indifferents. In appropriate action, the agent takes things of value into account. This, however, does not happen in the abstract—she does not weigh the value of wealth against the value of health in a general fashion.
Rather, she thinks about the way in which a specific situation and the courses of action available in it involve indifferents—for example, putting on the appropriate clothes for a given occasion Letter Since the features of the situation in which one acts thus matter to appropriate action, the Stoics apparently wrote treatises now lost in which they discussed at length how this or that feature may bear on what one should be doing Sedley The very fact that such treatises are written testifies to the fact that indifferents are not simply irrelevant: they are the material of deliberation.
Since Kidd , Letters 94 and 95 have been read with a view to the question of whether rules figure in Stoic ethics for a discussion of the letters that is not framed by this question, see I. Hadot , 8—9. This question, in turn, is relevant to our interpretation of the Stoic conception of law. The Stoics have long been considered the ancestors of the natural law tradition Striker If the Stoics formulate rule-like precepts, then perhaps this means that the law, as the Stoics understand it, consists of a set of laws.
If we seek a good life by studying philosophy, do we need to study only decreta , or also praecepta? According to the first position, the only thing needed to achieve virtue is to immerse oneself in the core tenets of Stoic philosophy. It is these that Seneca calls decreta ; decreta thus are not practical principles or rules.
They are principles of philosophy, in the sense of being the most abstract and fundamental teachings of the Stoics.
According to the second position, which Seneca seems to endorse, studying the first principles of Stoic philosophy is not sufficient; we should also think in detail about the demands that specific situations in life might make on us and so, we should study praecepta relating to them. It may seem that these lower-level considerations involve rules: in such-and-such a situation, one should act in such-and-such a way Annas , ; Mitsis However, it is not clear whether Seneca indeed envisages such rules.
As students of virtue, we will benefit from thinking our way through a variety of situations that one might encounter in life, contemplating how the different features of these situations matter to appropriate action, and so developing a sharpened sense of the particular value of the various things that do have value or disvalue for a human being.
Such almost proverbial sayings, however, do not appear to be rules. As Seneca emphasizes in Letter If one needs advice, one is not asking to be told the correct rule to cover the situation; one is asking how to balance various considerations. Although the Stoics are, with respect to the good, most famous for the claim that only virtue is good, they define the good as benefit.
Seneca agrees with the early Stoic view that the good benefits. As we have seen, Seneca thinks that both public life and philosophy are good forms of life, if conducted right, precisely because both are of benefit to others. Her gait, her silent persistence, and the expression of her eyes, benefit. Just as some medication works merely through its smell, virtue has its good effects even from a distance On Peace of Mind 4.
Seneca devotes an entire treatise to the question of how one should benefit others, and how one should receive benefits, On Benefits or: On Favors , lat. De beneficiis. On Benefits is the longest extant Senecan treatise on one specific ethical topic. Though the treatise is firmly situated in the Roman social context, its detailed analysis and richness of examples make it more than an historical document. Seneca discusses good deeds and badly performed favors, graceful and ungraceful receiving, the joy or burden of returning favors, as well as gratitude and envy.
This mix makes for a rather difficult text. It is no surprise, then, that there used to be almost no helpful literature. This state, however, is ameliorated by recent translations with philosophical introductions, by John Cooper and J. Asmis, S. Bartsch and M. What, then, are benefits or favors as Seneca uses the term? Roughly speaking, one can think of beneficia as any kind of help a person might offer to another person qua member of a group, such that this strengthens the cohesion of the group and affirms or creates social bonds.
Benefits are given largely between those who do not belong to the same household. They thus differ from the responsibilities that attach to the roles of son or wife and from the services that slaves or employees are expected to perform 3.
What parents do for their children, however, counts as benefit and not as role-specific responsibilities. Sons are returning what they owe, thus fulfilling the obligations that attach to their role.
But it is important to Seneca that sons can also genuinely benefit their parents 3. Moreover, Seneca spends much of Book 3 arguing that slaves can benefit their masters, namely when they do more than they are compelled to do. Seneca thinks that, given how hateful compulsion is for anyone, benefits conferred by slaves reflect an admirable ability to overcome resentment for being in the position they are in 3. Lending as opposed to giving money is not a beneficium.
If money or wealth is involved in a favor, it must be freely given. Indeed, if one does not want to stand in the kind of social relationship that the giving and receiving of benefits creates, one can accept money only as a loan. If, say, a person whom you did not want in your life were to free you from captivity through paying the ransom, you might accept this, but you should quickly raise the money to repay her.
That way, no bond is established 2. The distinction between lending and giving runs through the treatise as a whole. It connects to two further ideas.
First, that the right attitudes of giving, receiving, and returning a benefit involve freedom 1. The addressee of On benefits is called Liberalis, a name that drives home a point that Seneca wants to emphasize. For something to count as a benefit it must not be given slowly, grudgingly, or in some other reluctant way; it must be given freely.
To be rightly received, the good deed should not be perceived by the recipient as a burden; it must be accepted freely. Indeed, the kind of emotion that reflects the appropriate attitudes on both parts is joy. Anything else would be suggestive of hesitations, concerns about undesired ties, and so on. Second, the distinction between lending and giving is reflected in a distinction between justice and beneficence 3.
Justice appears inferior to Seneca insofar as, in that sphere, we are putting faith in seals rather than souls 3. It is not the transfer of an object, or the return of a favor, that ultimately counts. Strictly speaking, a favor consists in the relevant state of mind of the giver that he wants to benefit someone and similarly in the grateful state of mind of the receiver. What we might call the intention to benefit, and the intention to gratefully repay the favor are the relevant actions of giving and receiving correctly.
As some scholars put it, it is the act of willing which counts as a correct action Inwood, [3]; cf. These arguments reflect core intuitions of Stoic ethics. Scholars traditionally judge Book 4 to be the part of the treatise that addresses more abstract philosophical questions, thus aiming to integrate a discussion about the norms pertaining to a historical practice in Rome with Stoic tenets in ethics.
However, this assessment is best seen as making a comparative judgment. There is more explicit Stoic theory in Book 4 than in the other books. Seneca discusses the benefits conveyed by God, drawing on Stoic theology and philosophy of nature see 5. Otherwise, one might argue that Book 4 is not all that different from the rest of the treatise. Indeed, one might even say that it is in considerable tension with central intuitions of earlier Stoic ethics.
For the Stoics, the good and the advantageous really are one and the same. Moreover, Book 4 does not, as one might expect, address the subtleties of the Stoic conception of the good, which would be a way of pushing the discussion to a more theoretical level.
The claim that what matters are intentions and attitudes was already established in ways that are relatively independent of Stoic premises about the good: by distinguishing benefits from obligations; by pointing to the dangers of burdening others with expectations they shall not be able to meet; by elaborating on the fact that there must be a way of repaying even for those who are without material means; and so on.
Cornplanter died on February 18, , and was buried at the Cornplanter Grant. In the cemetery where he was buried was moved to higher ground to make way for the reservoir that would be created by construction of the nearby Kinzua Dam.
Destroy Town Onondakai was a Seneca chief who signed the treaty of His name is also given as Gonondagie, and formally as Oshagonondagie. He was one of those whose remains were re-interred at Buffalo in The name was a favorite one, but, as applied to George Washington and some French governors, has a slightly different form.
Born into the Wolf clan, he was later adopted by the Turtle clan. Relatively little is known of his earlier life. Though the brothers initially argued for Seneca neutrality, they later fought alongside the British forces against the revolutionaries. In Cornplanter and his followers moved to the Allegheny Valley; for the next decade, he traveled extensively among his people, counseling peace with the thirteen states, and went to Albany and Philadelphia to meet with the new state and federal governments.
Also known as Governor Blacksnake Thaonawyuthe , Blacksnake was a man of rare intellectual and moral power. His home was on the Allegany River. He was a chief who fought with the British at the Battle of Oriskany during the Revolutionary War in Born into a leading Seneca family and steeped in the history and lore of the Iroquois Confederacy, Ely Samuel Parker was also educated in the white world in which he finally chose to live.
His mother was a granddaughter of "Sos-he-o-wa," the successor of Handsome Lake. No one argument or position is systematically defended or articulated throughout the Letters as a whole. Instead, philosophical discussions are more localized, sometimes occupying the space of one letter, other times spanning a group of three or four. Sometimes a question addressed in one letter is picked up again much later.
The letter begins with some advice to Lucilius. He is to continue his efforts in devoting time to philosophical study. The theme of the Letter is just this—that too much time is wasted on worldly pursuits.
Time flies, and as we delay what matters, life runs past. Still, as the letter continues, the philosophical point comes into view. Seneca confesses that though he, too, wastes time, he has come to recognize when he is doing so. He counts this as progress and advises that Lucilius do what he can to keep what is really his.
As is typical of the Letters , this letter has Stoicism in view but does not heavy-handedly address or engage in Stoic theory. As a Stoic, Seneca is committed to the view that much of what one does in life is of little value. This is the first step to living well. A defining principle of Stoicism is the claim that the mind is wholly rational, unlike Platonists and Aristotelians who posited a mind composed of both rational and non-rational parts.
The whole—unitary—mind is implicated in its actions. This feature of the Stoic theory has important implications for both its account of and its evaluation of emotions.
The Stoics view emotions as irrational movements of the mind. Anger is a state in which one is not guided by correct reasoning.
Fear is a state in which one is not guided by correct reasoning. And so on. Hence, emotions are states of mind that are contrary to right reason. One who is not angry would think and act differently than one who is. At least in the case of the perfect moral agent, these actions—that is, of someone who is not angry—would be fully guided by correct reasoning.
The Stoics explain that the emotions arise when one assents to certain kinds of false statements about the world. One first encounters some state of affairs, articulates it, and assents to it—S1.
One often goes on to form a secondary articulation, along the lines of S2, about the goodness or badness of this state of affairs. If one assents to this statement, one often continues to react in a way that somehow corresponds to the judgment reflected in S2. The analysis of anger is meant to capture via S3 this feature of anger and other emotions. According to Stoic theory, judgments of the form S2 and S3 are nearly always false.
The Stoics hold that the only good is virtue and that the only evil is vice. All else is indifferent. Similarly, since nothing bad has happened, the course of action sanctioned by S2 and S3 is illegitimate.
No emotional response is appropriate. Seneca devotes much of his philosophical work to advancing these aspects of Stoicism. The chief concern behind the Stoic theory of emotions and the theory of value is that until one removes such false beliefs about value, one will not succeed in living a happy life.
It is with this that Seneca concerns himself in his philosophical work. He aims, for example, in On Anger to help his readers avoid becoming angry, and offers what little advice there is to help those who are angry stop being so. In the Consolations , he is concerned with helping his readers avoid the life shattering effects of grief. Elsewhere, Seneca works to help people let go of their fear of death.
In his Consolations in particular, as well as in his treatise On Anger and other works, Seneca is clearly more often concerned with helping people avoid experiencing emotions. As a Stoic, he is committed to the idea that emotional experiences involve false judgments.
Still, Seneca does not typically concern himself with explicating the theory itself. While our reports from Greek doxagraphers and from Cicero preserve the outlines of the theory, Seneca feels no need to repeat it. Here in Book II. His explanation attempts to show that anger is voluntary despite the fact that one cannot entirely control the way things appear. The first movement, he says, is involuntary.
The Stoics claim that the wise person—the Sage—will not become angry or experience any emotion but cannot deny that the Sage will, for example, flinch at the loud bark of a dog or the sudden loud clap of thunder. Why, the objector may say, would the Sage flinch? To flinch is to assent to the proposition that something bad has happened. By separating the involuntary from the voluntary, Seneca answers this criticism. While Seneca occasionally addresses theoretical matters in this way, he more commonly focuses on an issue—in this case, the emotions—from a different perspective.
Seneca largely favors discussing issues from the perspective of the person who is making moral progress, rather than from the perspective of the wise person. Those texts often characterize the Sage in a way that sets her very much apart from normal human beings.
This orientation can be seen very clearly in passages or whole works like On Anger, Consolation to Marcia, and others where he aims to help those who are imperiled by emotions. The aim of these works is not to point out that the Sage does not experience anger or grief, nor is the aim even primarily to say why the Sage does not experience these emotions. Instead, the aim is to appeal to those who are not wise and to offer them advice, informed of course by Stoic theory, to help them re-orient their thinking about their circumstances.
In On Anger, for example, Seneca advises that an angry person look in the mirror. Clearly, this person will not find a Sage in the mirror. Instead, Seneca thinks, he will find something in his appearance that does not resonate well with his thinking about himself. Elsewhere, Seneca advises that the person who is grieving consider the difference an audience makes. When one finds that one grieves more in the presence of an audience, Seneca thinks this will force one to reflect on what the grief is really about.
These kinds of strategies for dealing with emotions are, in any case, very far removed from arguments about the value of the emotions and still further removed from theoretical accounts of the nature of the emotions. Seneca is convinced that the Stoic view is right, and he finds support for this conclusion in less theoretical, and more practical, aspects of human life.
The opening lines of the Natural Questions articulate a view about the importance of physics that shows Seneca to be a clear exception. For the Stoics, the study of physics, or natural philosophy, included the study of the divine. According to the Stoic view, full moral progress requires a complete understanding of the nature of the divine.
The outlines of Stoic physics are well documented in early sources. The Stoics are materialists, compatibilists, and theists. In the most general sense, the Stoics hold that the cosmos is entirely composed of matter but that certain forms of matter fire, aether are endowed with creative capacity. According to the Stoic view, the cosmos is a mind writ large, in the sense that the movements and developments in nature at the cosmic level are the result of guiding intelligence.
All refer to the active and creative element in the cosmos. To live according to nature ultimately requires that one come to adopt, or understand, the natural world from this cosmic perspective.
Though the discussions are often narrowly focused on particular meteorological phenomena and their explanation, Seneca occasionally pauses to take a wider view. He considers, for example, the role that reflective surfaces mirrors play—and are supposed to play—in moral improvement I.
He explains the Stoic view that reason is the same for both gods and humans Praef. In a discussion of the cause of lightening II. The Natural Questions is an unfinished work. Passages like those above suggest that Seneca may have been revising or finishing the work with the aim of more carefully connecting his findings about meteorological phenomena to Stoic physics.
The Stoic claim that the happenings of the natural world are guided by reason stands in stark contrast to the Epicurean view, articulated by Lucretius, that the world is generated and organized by chance. Seneca wrote much besides his philosophical texts; however much of his work has been lost. Lost are all of his speeches, including those he penned for Nero. Also lost are some philosophical treatises, though some fragments survive from a treatise on marriage.
The surviving non-philosophical works include the Apocolocyntosis , a work satirizing the deification of Claudius, and eight tragedies: Agamemnon, Hercules Furens, Medea, Thyestes, Oedipus, Phaedra, Phoenisse, and Troades. At one end of the spectrum, some ancient sources regarded the author of the tragedies to be a different Seneca altogether. While there is agreement now that our Seneca authored the tragedies, the relation between these works and his philosophical treatises is less agreed upon.
On the one hand the tragedies are clearly concerned with many Stoic themes that Seneca addresses in his philosophical works.
Despite this point of intersection, though, the tragedies do not seem to say the same about these themes. The most striking theme in this regard is the attention in the tragedies to the role of anger and other emotions.
While the philosophical works especially On Anger attempt to persuade the reader to avoid becoming angry, the tragedies sometimes seem to elicit our sympathies for those who are angry and acting in anger.
The Phaedra illustrates the second phenomena quite clearly. The title character, wife of Theseus, has fallen in love with her stepson, Hippolytus. The Stoic imperative to follow nature is ordinarily understood as an injunction to live a life according to reason, to be virtuous, and to shun the circumstances of fortune.
Here, though, the Nurse employs the phrase to encourage Hippolytus to do what most people do—namely, to pursue the pleasures of sex Wilson, Hippolytus himself in this play seems, initially at least, to come closest to the Stoic ideal. In a long passage in Act II, he explains his love for the countryside and mountaintops, places in which he can be truly free from anger and other passions and from the vices that corrupt those who spend their time in society.
Yet his peace comes at the price of seclusion and for the wrong reasons. The would-be sage seeks the isolation of the woods because of his hatred for all women. The focus in the tragedies on the destructive force of emotions especially anger is plain. Phaedra, whose advances were rejected by Hippolytus, has lied to her husband, accusing Hippolytus of raping her. While these portrayals of emotion forge a connection between the tragedies and the prose works, what that connection is remains unclear.
Passion, passion rules! Scholars have taken a number of positions on these issues. Some have argued that there is no connection between the tragedies and the philosophical works, while others have sought to show that the tragedies contain important philosophical lessons. Arguments of the latter kind are varied. These scholars emphasize the role of fate, providence, and divination in the tragedies.
Finally, one scholar has argued that the guiding philosophical concern in the tragedies is epistemological Staley, Scholars have rarely attempted a full account of all his works undertaken with the aim of clarifying or even producing an account of Seneca the author.
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