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From: "James M. Pfundstein" <jmpfund@bgnet.bgsu.edu>
Subject: Snickering at Seneca (Was: Wheelock quotes)
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At 3:03 PM -0400 5/29/2000, Fred Zimmerman wrote:

>  There are quite a few pronouncements in Wheelock along these lines,
>attributed to Seneca:
>
>	--Nulla avaritia sine poena est.
>	--Nulla copia pecuniae avarum virum satiat.
>
>  But I have to say that what class discussion I recall them provoking
>mainly had to do with Seneca's hypocrisy in deploring the acquisition of
>wealth while acquiring as much of it as possible. That hypocrisy is not
>mentioned by Wheelock, and to take this thread full circle, I'd argue that
>a Seneca-as-hypocrite footnote would be just as appropriate as a
>Caesar-as-militarist footnote. (I'd ban the prose of neither, though.)

There's something to this, but it's worth noting that the tradition of
Seneca as money-grubber derives from self-evidently biased sources (e.g.
the speech Tacitus attributes to Publius Suilius "is... imperitante Claudio
terribilis ac venalis" Annales 13.42; see also Cassius Dio 61.10). The best
case for Seneca as hypocrite can be found in all the accomodations he made
to Agrippina and Nero. He had the virtues and vices of a good politician,
maybe, rather than a philosopher-- certainly not those of a saint.

In any case, Seneca, though an eminently quotable moralist, doesn't set
himself up as a moral standard. He's a proficiens, not a sapiens.

	"Aliter" inquis "loqueris, aliter vivis." Hoc, malignissima
	capita et optimo cuique inimicissima, Platoni obiectum est,
	obiectum Epicuro, obiectum Zenoni; omnes enim isti
	dicebant non, quemadmodum ipsi viverent, sed
	quemadmodum esset [et] ipsis vivendum. De virtute, non
	de me loquor, et cum vitiis convicium facio, in primis meis
	facio: cum potuero, vivam, quomodo oportet.
		--Seneca, *De Beata Vita* 18

JMP("'Proficiam cras,' Crassus crasse clamavit")

P.S.

There's some Seneca on-line, since Sotiris Sotiropoulos asks, at the major
Latin e-text archives:

The Latin Library:

http://patriot.net/~lillard/cp/sen.html

Camden's great Forum Romanum-- LatLit page:

http://www.geocities.com/~stilicho/literature.html

There was a project afoot to put a comprehensive bibliography on Seneca
on-line, but I don't know if it's come to anything yet. You can read the
message about it here:

http://omega.cohums.ohio-state.edu:8080/hyper-lists/classics-l/99-03-01/0222.htm
l

JMP("Postscriptor")



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