Review: Senecan Drama and Stoic Cosmology

This is a difficult book, at times distracting in style and organization and at others brimming with original insights. The dust-cover announces a double goal: to explore stoic cosmology in the tragedies of Seneca and to relate these dramas to subsequent European theater. The book is in two parts. The first, perplexingly entitled "The Canon at Risk" (what canon? what risk?), reviews earlier studies of stoicism in the plays of Seneca, while the second analyzes in the tragedies themselves elements of stoic cosmology such as sumpatheia, krasis, and ekpyrosis. Rosenmeyer provides a needed balance to earlier studies that have focused almost exclusively on stoic ethics and psychology, and his often acute analyses of cosmological passages in the dramas succeed in illuminating the character and Weltanschauung of Senecan tragedy.