"Amanda Wilcox offers an innovative approach to two major collections of Roman letters - Cicero's Ad Familiares and Seneca's Moral Epistles - informed by modern cross-cultural theories of gift-giving. By viewing letters and the practice of correspondence as a species of gift exc…
"Amanda Wilcox offers an innovative approach to two major collections of Roman letters - Cicero's Ad Familiares and Seneca's Moral Epistles - informed by modern cross-cultural theories of gift-giving. By viewing letters and the practice of correspondence as a species of gift exc…
This is an extended meditation on ethics in literature across the Senecan corpus. There are two chapters on the Moral Letters, asking how one is to read philosophy or how one can write about being. Moving from the Letters to the Natural Questions and Dialogues, Professor Gunders…
Introduction -- Misreading Seneca -- Writing metaphysics -- The nature of Seneca -- The spectacle of ethics -- Losing Seneca -- The analytics of desire -- The last monster -- Conclusion: the metaphysics of Senecan morals -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.
Reads Seneca's philosophy and tragedy together, exploring the possibility of enlightenment and the human capacity for wisdom and knowledge.