Review: Seneca: Moral Epistles

Here is a handy selection of forty of Seneca's most important Epistulae Morales presented in an attractive format with running and end vocabularies, notes, and a brief introduction to the author's life, thought, and style. Designed as "a rapid reader", the volume is geared toward the college student and provides a well chosen sampling of letters illuminating Senecan epistolary technique, late Roman Stoicism, and the social history of the Neronian age. The book is very different in tone and purpose from Summers' edition of 1910 and does not mean to provide a commentary of either depth or sophistication. One will have to look elsewhere for discussions of problems or for compendia of parallels to other authors. This is a reading text designed to enable a student to get through the maximum amount of Senecan prose with a minimum of expenditure of effort on matters lexical or philological. This end is served quite admirably by the format which reproduces Reynolds' OCT text, with notes beneath, and a complete facing vocabulary-all presented in a refreshingly uncramped lay-out. The notes, in accord with the goal of rapid reading, tend to be short and limit themselves to points of grammar, technical matters, and identifications of proper names. In general, this minimalist commentary suits the purposes of the volume quite well, except in Epistle 114, where Seneca adduces a number of quotations from Maecenas as examples of the author's dissolute writing style. These fragments, whose abstruseness and preciosile have puzzled many a commentator and editor, will be utterly opaque in this text, as neither the vocabulary nor the notes address the inherent difficulties. This omission could have been easily remedied by a look at R. Avallone's brilliant explication of the fragments in his Mecenate (Naples 1963).