Dialogues by Seneca (smallest ebook reader .txt) 📕
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Seneca the Younger was a statesman and philosopher who lived in Rome around the dawn of the Common Era. Though he wrote a large amount of tragedies and other works, today he’s perhaps best known for his writing on Stoic philosophy and principles.
Seneca didn’t write books about Stoicism; rather, he composed essays and sent letters over the course of his lifetime that addressed that philosophy. Since these essays and letters are addressed to his friends and contemporaries, they’re written in a conversational style, and thus referred to as his “Dialogues.” Some were written to friends on the death of their loved ones, in an effort to console and comfort them. Others were written to help friends with their personality flaws, like anger. One, “On Clemency,” was addressed to the emperor Nero as an effort to guide him on the path of good statesmanship.
This collection contains all of his dialogues, including the longer “On Benefits.”
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- Author: Seneca
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Pulvinaria. See this note. ↩
Merivale, following Suetonius and Dion Cassius, says: “He declared that if any man dared to mourn for his sister’s death, he should be punished, for she had become a goddess: if anyone ventured to rejoice at her deification, he should be punished also, for she was dead.” The passage in the text, he remarks, gives a less extravagant turn to the story. ↩
“On croit que ce Paulin étoit frère de Pauline, épouse de Sénéque.” —La Grange ↩
“L’un se consume en projets d’ambition, dont le succès dépend du suffrage de l’autrui.” —La Grange ↩
“Combien d’orateurs qui s’épuisent de sang et de forces pour faire montrer de leur génie!” —La Grange ↩
“Pour vous, jamais vous ne daignâtes vous regarder seulement, ou vous entendre. Ne faites pas non plus valoir votre condescendance a écouter les autres. Lorsque vous vous y prétez, ce n’est pas que vous aimiez a vous communiquer aux autres; c’est que vous craignez de vous trouver avec vous-même.” —La Grange.
“It is a folly therefore beyond Sence,
When great men will not give us Audience
To count them proud; how dare we call it pride
When we the same have to ourselves deny’d.
Yet they how great, how proud so e’re, have bin
Sometimes so courteous as to call thee in,
And hear thee speak; but thou could’st nere afford
Thyself the leisure of a look or word.
Thou should’st not then herein another blame,
Because when thou thyself do’st do the same,
Thou would’st not be with others, but we see
Plainly thou can’st not with thine own self be.”
↩
“Dans une lettre qu’il envoya au Sénat apres avoir promis que son repos n’aura rièn indigne de la gloire de ses premières années, il ajoute: Mais l’execution y mettra un prix, que ne peuvent y mettre les promesses. J’obeis cependant à la vive passion que j’ai, de me voir a ce temps si désiré; et puisque l’heureuse situation d’affaires m’en tient encore éloigné, j’ai voulu du moins me satisfaire en partie, par la douceur que je trouve à vous en parler.” —La Grange
“Such words I find. But these things rather ought
Be done, then said; yet so far hath the thought
Of that wish’d time prevail’d, that though the glad
Fruition of the thing be not yet had,
Yet I,”
etc. ↩
The rods carried by the lictors as symbols of office. See Smith’s Dictionary of Antiquities, s.v. ↩
See Smith’s Dictionary of Antiquities. ↩
Xerxes. ↩
“Sénéque parle ici du pont que Caligula fit construire sur le golphe de Baies, I’an de Rome 791, 40 de J. C. … Il rassembla et fit entrer dans la construction de son pont tous les vaisseaux qui se trouverent dans les ports d’Italie et des contrées voisines. Il n’excepta pas même ceux qui etoient destinés a y apporter des grains étrangers,” etc. —La Grange ↩
For vis tu see Juvenal V, vis tu consuetis, etc. Mayor’s note. ↩
As those of children were. ↩
Virgil, Aeneid, IX, 612. Compare Sir Walter Scott, Lay of the Last Minstrel, canto IV:—
“And still, in age, he spurned at rest,
And still his brows the helmet pressed,
Albeit the blanched looks below
Were white as Dinlay’s spotless snow,”
etc. ↩
Cf. Juvenal II, 150. ↩
The chief magistrate of the Greeks. ↩
The chief magistrate of the Uscans. ↩
The chief magistrate of the Carthaginians. ↩
“Livy himself styled the Alexandrian library elegantiae regum curaeque egregium opus: a liberal encomium, for which he is pertly criticised by the narrow stoicism of Seneca (‘On Peace of Mind,’ Chapter II), whose wisdom, on this occasion, deviates into nonsense.”
—Gibbon, Decline and Fall, Chapter LI, note↩
Haase reads “Ptolemaeus.” ↩
Caligula. ↩
It was the duty of the executioner to fasten a hook to the neck of condemned criminals, by which they were dragged to the Tiber. ↩
Caligula. ↩
The Romans reckoned twelve hours from sunrise to sunset. These “two hours” were therefore the two last of the day. ↩
Honestior is opposed to the gladiator—the loftier the station of the combatant. The Gracchus of Juvenal, Satires II and VIII, illustrates the passage. ↩
Par, a technical term in the language of sport (worthy of such a spectator). ↩
Vidirint—Let them see to it: it is no matter of mine. ↩
That is, to triumph over.
“Two spears were set upright … and a third was fastened across them at the top; and through this gateway the vanquished army marched out, as a token that they had been conquered in war, and owed their lives to the enemy’s mercy. It was no peculiar insult devised for this occasion, but a common usage, so far as appears, in similar cases; like the modern ceremony of piling arms when a garrison or army surrender themselves as prisoners of war.”
—Arnold’s History of Rome, Chapter XXXI↩
He was a mirmillo, a kind of gladiator who was armed with a Gaulish helmet. ↩
E lorica. ↩
The lines occur in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, II, 63. Phoebus is telling Phaethon how to
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