Yet Claudius, like every individual named in this piece bar Nero, was dead at the time of writing, and Apocolocyntosis gives every reason to suppose that showing irreverence to him was, in the new regime, anything but irreverent Braund According to this common view, Seneca co-opts the Menippean genre for a new brand of political loyalism.
A contrary reading privileges the genre as interpretative determinant: My chapter will follow the mainstream, beginning with a review of political and other literary contexts which suggests that Apocolocyntosis adds up to a strong endorsement not just of Nero but of monarchy as an institution. Apocolocyntosis is just one example of a rising trend in first-century literature, of vilifying a dead emperor to praise a living one. Claudius is made a counterexemplary princeps, a monster with monstrous rule, while the beautiful boy Nero promises an idyllic golden age to come Braund and James Seneca was practiced in such techniques: Later authors would line up to denounce Nero to the benefit of Flavian emperors, Domitian to the benefit of Trajan Ramage So runs the familiar tale, though Nero, only 16 at accession, was surely not pulling all the strings.
It thus joins On Clemency as a prime witness of Neronian accession literature. Where Apocolocyntosis for the most part dwells on Claudius, exposing autocracy gone wrong, On Clemency presents the other side of the coin, focusing on the ideal ruler Nero should be. There is no reason to suppose Seneca thought of them as a diptych, but reading them together can be productive Leach ; Braund and James Take the motif of freedom which frames Apocolocyntosis. Silence is a right he claims only in principle: Whether or not Apocolocyntosis was written for the Saturnalia of December 54, this text revels in the paradox of making Claudius, the Saturnalicius princeps 8.
Having begun with the manumission of our narrator, Apocolocyntosis ends with the enslavement of Claudius. Condemned to the eternal torture of a perforated dice-box hell for a gambler like him, The task might seem appealing to this court-addict 7.
To be slave to your nephew would be bad enough, worse still when that nephew is Caligula; but by my reading Claudius goes one step further down the ladder, slave not just to Caligula but to his freedman. But how straightforward is the mirroring of Claudius and narrator? Claudius, in the fiction of the satire, will be a slave forever. Is the freedom of our satirist permanent? Fool is strictly confined to this one appearance. Whitton Libertas appears just once more in Apocolocyntosis. As Claudius passes by his funeral, we glimpse the celebrating crowd: Still, one may, like Robinson In withholding confirmation that the populus is indeed free, is Seneca challenging the rhetoric of freedom?
Nevertheless, even if we accept the possible implication that the Roman people is not really free even under Nero, to suspect subversion here seems to me misplaced. The vicissitudes of the late Republic had damaged Rome so badly and so permanently that enlightened monarchy was the only salvation: Monarchy is slavery, but a slavery to be embraced.
On this point even On Clemency, where Seneca is working hard to advertise autocracy, is forthright.
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But we should notice that in On Clemency 1. While not explicitly excluding the senatorial elite, defining enslavement in terms of the populus gives Seneca some wriggle room when the sticky question arises, are the people who really matter slaves to the emperor too? Yet reading in the context of other Senecan literature allows a view in which even denying freedom is, in crude terms, more regime-friendly than regime-hostile. In any case, Seneca is the regime. Little surprise, then, that in its relentless ad hominem attack on Claudius, not to mention the praise of Nero to which we will come later, Apocolocyntosis underwrites not just Nero as regent but the Principate as institution Kloft — But to speak of Seneca justifying monarchy invites questions of audience.
For whom was he writing? How was this text first performed? How far was it disseminated? Most have now moved beyond a crudely author-focused view of an Apocolocyntosis in which Seneca spits bile in revenge for his Claudian exile Currie Equally, the praise of Nero in Apoc. If that was his purpose, he hid it exceptionally well.
Despite the current scholarly mantra that imperial panegyric functions through protreptic, it is hard to neutralize Apocolocyntosis in those terms. Whether or not Seneca intends Nero as a primary reader or listener, it would be crass to make him the only one. Many scholars, like Eden, imagine an audience restricted to the imperial court, for two broad reasons. Further, the cynical handling of state religion, the very institution of apotheosis, would be unacceptable in society at large. Second, the text looks and feels like it was written for a recitation; especially if we take it to be a party-piece for the Saturnalia, the intimate setting of the court is a likely scenario.
It is certainly plausible that Apocolocyntosis was recited at the Saturnalia, as argued best by Nauta Yet Seneca takes no pains to be consistent about his second-person verbs: Whitton dissemination was one or more private recitations followed by wider circulation Kenney ; Johnson Recitation was a crucial first step, but not the only one.
Why make Apocolocyntosis an exception? Its sheer quality suggests a level of care which it is hard to imagine would be lavished on a one-off performance piece: Could Seneca have expended such efforts on a piece which only a handful of people would hear, on one night only? Of course these perceived echoes may and some surely do tell more about modern over-ingenuity than ancient reception, but you only have to buy one or two to accept that Apocolocyntosis had entered a broader circulation in the literary elite.
Society was far more complex: At the same time we can be sure that the Senate was no homogeneous group of identikit ideologues. He arranges his narrative so that the decree of consecratio which elevated Claudius to heaven Annals Who were those po-faced senators who, according to many scholars, could not see the funny side of making Claudius a god?
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Seneca, Apocolocyntosis Apocolocyntosis need not be directed minutely at Nero, or even at his immediate circle. Like Leach — but with less credence in irony and subversion — I suggest a broader readership including much or all of the senatorial order. But one large area of doubt remains to be confronted, concerning religion and skepticism.
Could Seneca really be so publicly irreverent to apotheosis? De-deification With its uniquely parodic treatment of deification, Apocolocyntosis exerts a fatal fascination on cultural historians. Is it proof that no one really believed all the mumbo-jumbo Eden 7 , or conversely of the stability of an imperial cult which could tolerate such satire Feeney —11? Is Seneca exploding the myth of apotheosis, or defending a nascent religion by legislating against an injustice like Divus Claudius Price 87—9; Cole ? The debate has been extensive, and the questions are intricate. The rules of the game are spelled out in the opening paragraph, as our narrator cites his authority 1.
On Tranquility of Mind The very first person named in Apocolocyntosis, then, and the woman with whom Claudius is aligned, is the exemplar of deification abused. But the sarcasm stretches to encompass ascension itself. That famous Virgilian image of Claudius limping his way to heaven a twist on Aeneid 2.
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Again, the joke lies in fusing the physical and the figurative. Both Augustus and Tiberius died in Campania, meaning that each departed Rome for his final journey south along the Appia pace Eden 66, Russo 49, Lund 62, and Green , who all take Seneca to mean the journey of the corpses back to Rome. He marks the absurdity by including Tiberius, an emperor who we all know was not deified. It is no more true that Tiberius went to the gods than that the Via Appia leads to heaven. Where does this leave Augustus? Is the veracity of his deification in question too? This looks like tricky interpretative ground.
For one thing Divus Augustus has a cardinal role to play in the satire to come: Will the internal logic of the satire not collapse if we deny him his own place in the divine council to start with?
To point out that neither Augustus nor Tiberius went to heaven down the Via Appia is not to deny that Augustus reached heaven at all. The axis of mockery is the notion of a physical journey to heaven. Outside the conventions of epic, the journey between mortality and immortality, earth and heaven or hell , is slippery — and so potentially funny — ontological ground. Lucian begins his Icaromenippus with Menippus tallying up the distance he travelled to heaven: Recounting tales of apotheosis with wide-eyed innocence, Ovid constantly threatens to destabilize these Roman and Julian myths by taking them just too literally.
Yet Ovid is by no means the only author to raise questions about apotheosis. On the contrary, credence in literal, physical ascension was no more the norm in imperial elite discourse than it was in that of the Republic. Comments on the death and supposed deification of Romulus, first king and first Roman deificand, make this plain: Plutarch, Romulus 27—8; Numa 2; for the extensive debate on Livy, see Sailor —8.
When Seneca jokes about the route to heaven, even in terms of the imperial cult, it is neither new nor shocking. In a nutshell, deification could be made palatable in elite literature by playing down the physical side and focusing on, let us say, the figurative: Godhead is not sitting on a cloud, but the reward for a life of virtue. I schematize, of course: So for the elder Pliny, writing in the AD 70s, belief in divine anthropomorphism is childish delusion, but that is not to deny the existence of divinity: Of course apotheosis was a fluid institution, especially in the early decades of the Principate, and elite discourse has room both for the loyalist rationalizing of a Pliny and for the bitter cynicism of a Lucan Civil War 7.
But Apocolocyntosis, I suggest, need not be rocking any institutional boat. It is precisely the flexibility of discourse which allows Seneca to disenfranchise Claudius without necessarily challenging Augustus and the institution exemplified in him. Of course, while poets might sing of gods claiming emperors for their own, everyone knew that imperial deification depended on human agency — a senatorial decree — and the obvious benefit to the successor of acquiring gods in the family left the process open to cynicism. No text can restrain all waves of implication though acknowledging human agency could be the basis for panegyric as much as for critique: This is not to isolate Claudius as interloper in an otherwise Julian line Kraft ; Wiseman Caligula and Tiberius hardly look preferable.
If Apocolocyntosis were an attack on Julio-Claudian apotheosis taken whole, the silence would be hard to explain: Instead Augustus, cleansed of that potential Julian blemish, is left to stand on his own merits as paradigm and justification for autocracy.
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There is nothing new about this: Some critics have gone further, reading the speech as an explosion of his auctoritas Alexander ; Jal —5; Wolf Others are less convinced: Most importantly, his place among the gods is never challenged: Exposing grades of divinity must threaten instability, but the text pushes to shift that danger onto Hercules and away from Augustus.
The result is a first emperor who resembles that of On Clemency. In both texts he is paradigm and legitimation for the Principate, but in both he is also imperfect: Nero can be not just another Augustus but a better one. In elite discourse acceptance is self-fulfilling: Satire is generically disposed to challenge authority. Whether you give free play to every uncomfortable implication in the text, or posit some effort on the part of the author to control such implications, is an open choice.
This is not simply or even primarily protreptic: Apocolocyntosis puts far less emphasis than does On Clemency on holding out to Nero a future, Augustan deification. By laughing Claudius away, Apocolocyntosis can sanitize as much as it satirizes imperial, Augustan apotheosis. Still, the boy-princeps is at least touched with the divine, in the challenging and crucial passage which will occupy the remainder of this chapter: Problems with Praise As Claudius gasps his last, the action moves to the divine plane 3.
Apollo urges them on, prophesying the advent of this rising star, an image of the Sun and of Apollo alike. Seneca was born in Cordoba in Hispania , and raised in Rome , where he was trained in rhetoric and philosophy. He was a tutor and later advisor to emperor Nero. He was forced to take his own life for alleged complicity in the Pisonian conspiracy to assassinate Nero, in which he was likely to have been innocent.
His stoic and calm suicide has become the subject of numerous paintings. As a writer Seneca is known for his philosophical works, and for his plays, which are all tragedies. His philosophical writings include a dozen philosophical essays, and one hundred and twenty-four letters dealing with moral issues. As a tragedian, he is best known for his Medea and Thyestes.
Seneca tells us that he was taken to Rome in the "arms" of his aunt his mother's stepsister at a young age, probably when he was about five years old.
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Seneca's early career as a senator seems to have been successful and he was praised for his oratory. It is noted for its flattery of Claudius, and Seneca expresses his hope that the emperor will recall him from exile. One byproduct of his new position was that Seneca was appointed suffect consul in However, the ancient sources suggest, over time, Seneca and Burrus lost their influence over the emperor.
In 59 they had reluctantly agreed to Agrippina's murder, and afterward Tacitus reports that Seneca had to write a letter justifying the murder to the Senate. After Burrus's death in 62, Seneca's influence declined rapidly. It was during these final few years that he composed two of his greatest works: Naturales quaestiones —an encyclopedia of the natural world; and his Letters to Lucilius —which document his philosophical thoughts.
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Although it is unlikely that Seneca was part of the conspiracy, Nero ordered him to kill himself. Cassius Dio, who wished to emphasize the relentlessness of Nero, focused on how Seneca had attended to his last-minute letters, and how his death was hastened by soldiers. Her wounds were bound up and she made no further attempt to kill herself. As for Seneca himself, his age and diet were blamed for slow loss of blood and extended pain rather than a quick death; he also took poison, which was also not fatal. After dictating his last words to a scribe, and with a circle of friends attending him in his home, he immersed himself in a warm bath, which was expected to speed blood flow and ease his pain.
Tacitus wrote, "He was then carried into a bath, with the steam of which he was suffocated, and he was burnt without any of the usual funeral rites. Seneca's writings were well known in the later Roman period, and Quintilian , writing thirty years after Seneca's death, remarked on the popularity of his works amongst the youth.
The early Christian Church was very favorably disposed towards Seneca and his writings, and the church leader Tertullian possessively referred to him as "our Seneca. Medieval writers and works continued to link him to Christianity because of his alleged association with Paul. Seneca remains one of the few popular Roman philosophers from the period.
He appears not only in Dante, but also in Chaucer and to a large degree in Petrarch , who adopted his style in his own essays and who quotes him more than any other authority except Virgil. In the Renaissance, printed editions and translations of his works became common, including an edition by Erasmus and a commentary by John Calvin. French essayist Montaigne , who gave a spirited defense of Seneca and Plutarch in his Essays , was himself considered by Pasquier a "French Seneca. Even with the admiration of an earlier group of intellectual stalwarts, Seneca has never been without his detractors.
In his own time, he was accused of hypocrisy or, at least, a less than "Stoic" lifestyle. While banished to Corsica, he wrote a plea for restoration rather incompatible with his advocacy of a simple life and the acceptance of fate. In his Apocolocyntosis he ridiculed the behaviors and policies of Claudius, and flattered Nero—such as proclaiming that Nero would live longer and be wiser than the legendary Nestor.
The claims of Publius Suillius Rufus that Seneca acquired some "three hundred million sesterces " through Nero's favor, are highly partisan, but they reflect the reality that Seneca was both powerful and wealthy. Cardano stated that Seneca well deserved death. Among the historians who have sought to reappraise Seneca is the scholar Anna Lydia Motto who in argued that the negative image has been based almost entirely on Suillius's account, while many others who might have lauded him have been lost. Think of the barren image we should have of Socrates , had the works of Plato and Xenophon not come down to us and were we wholly dependent upon Aristophanes ' description of this Athenian philosopher.
To be sure, we should have a highly distorted, misconstrued view. Such is the view left to us of Seneca, if we were to rely upon Suillius alone. More recent work is changing the dominant perception of Seneca as a mere conduit for pre-existing ideas showing originality in Seneca's contribution to the history of ideas. Examination of Seneca's life and thought in relation to contemporary education and to the psychology of emotions is revealing the relevance of his thought.
For example, Martha Nussbaum in her discussion of desire and emotion includes Seneca among the Stoics who offered important insights and perspectives on emotions and their role in our lives. Nussbaum later extended her examination to Seneca's contribution to political philosophy [52] showing considerable subtlety and richness in his thoughts about politics, education and notions of global citizenship and finding a basis for reform-minded education in Seneca's ideas that allows her to propose a mode of modern education which steers clear of both narrow traditionalism and total rejection of tradition.
Elsewhere Seneca has been noted as the first great Western thinker on the complex nature and role of gratitude in human relationships. Seneca was a prolific writer of philosophical works on Stoicism , mostly on ethics, with one work Naturales Quaestiones on the physical world.