Dialogues by Seneca (smallest ebook reader .txt) 📕

drive the chariot of the Sun. ↩

Compare Walter Scott:

“All⁠ ⁠… must have felt that but for the dictates of religion, or the natural recoil of the mind from the idea of dissolution, there have been times when they would have been willing to throw away life as a child does a broken toy. I am sure I know one who has often felt so. O God! what are we?⁠—Lords of nature?⁠—Why, a tile drops from a housetop, which an elephant would not feel more than a sheet of pasteboard, and there lies his lordship. Or something of inconceivably minute origin, the pressure of a bone, or the inflammation of a particle of the brain takes place, and the emblem of the Deity destroys himself or someone else. We hold our health and our reason on terms slighter than anyone would desire, were it in their choice, to hold an Irish cabin.”

—⁠Lockhart’s Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume VII, p. 11

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Xerxes. ↩

Scipio. ↩

The Stoics. ↩

Seneca here speaks of men wearing the toga as officials, contrasted with the mass of Roman citizens, among whom the wearing of the toga was already falling into disuse in the time of Augustus. See Macrobius, Saturnalia, VI, 5 extr., and Suetonius, Life of Octavius, 40, where the author mentions that Augustus used sarcastically to apply the verse, Virgil, Aeneid, I, 282, to the Romans of his day. ↩

See this note. ↩

Gertz reads “decet emere venalia,” “there is no harm in buying what is for sale.” ↩

Lipsius’s conjecture, “those who are dressed in white as well as those who are dressed in coloured clothes,” alluding to the white robes of candidates for office, seems reasonable. ↩

The Latin words are literally “to divide” their vote, that is, “to separate things of different kinds comprised in a single vote so that they might be voted for separately.” —⁠Andrews

“Sénèque fait allusion ici à une coutume pratiquée dans les assemblés du Sénat; et il nous explique lui-même ailleurs d’un manière très claire: ‘Si quelqu’un dans le Sénat,’ dit il, ‘ouvre un avis, dont une partie me convienne, je le somme de la détacher du reste, et j’y adhère.’”

Ep. 21⁠—La Grange

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Parentatur seems to mean where an offering is made to luxury⁠—where they sacrifice to luxury. Perfumes were used at funerals. Lipsius suggests that these feasts were like funerals because the guests were carried away from them dead drunk. ↩

The quotation is from the epitaph on Phaeton. See Ovid, Metamorphoses, II, 327. ↩

The “Pons Sublicius,” or “pile bridge,” was built over the Tiber by Ancus Martius, one of the early kings of Rome, and was always kept in repair out of a superstitious feeling. ↩

A metallic rattle used by the Egyptians in celebrating the rites of Isis, etc. —⁠Andrews ↩

Nobilis. ↩

The text is corrupt. I have followed Gertz’s conjectural emendation, mansuefactionis, but I believe that Lipsius is right in thinking that a great deal more than one word has been lost here. ↩

Pace. ↩

Tutum. ↩

Gertz reads sexagesimum, his sixtieth year, which he calls “the not very audacious conjecture of Wesseling,” and adds that he does so because of the words at the beginning of Chapter XI and the authority of Dion Cassius. The ordinary reading is quadragesimum, “his fortieth year,” and this is the date to which Cinna’s conspiracy is referred to by Merivale, History of the Romans Under the Empire, Volume IV, Chapter 37. “A plot,” he says, “was formed for his destruction, at the head of which was Cornelius Cinna, described as a son of Faustus Sulla by a daughter of the Great Pompeius.” The story of Cinna’s conspiracy is told by Seneca, “On Clemency” Book I, 9, and Dion IV, 14, foll. They agree in the main fact; but Seneca is our authority for the details of the interview between Augustus and his enemy, while Dion has doubtless invented his long conversation between the emperor and Livia. Seneca, however, calls the conspirator Lucius, and places the event in the fortieth year of Augustus (AUC 731), the scene in Gaul: Dion, on the other, gives the names of Gnaeus, and supposes the circumstances to have occurred twenty-six years later, and at Rome. It may be observed that a son of Faustus Sulla must have been at least fifty at this latter date, nor do we know why he should bear the name of Cinna, though an adoption is not impossible. ↩

See Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Act IV, Scene 1. ↩

An allusion to the title of “Father of his country,” bestowed by the Senate upon Augustus. See Merivale, Chapter 33. ↩

This whole comparison, which reads so meaninglessly both in Latin and in English, is borrowed from the eternal declamations of Plutarch and the Greek philosophers about βασιλετς and τύραυυοι. See Plutarch, Lives of Philopoemen and Aratus, Plato, Gorgias and Politicus; Arnold, Appendix to Thucydides, Volume I, and Dictionary of Antiquities, s.v. ↩

“On Anger,” Book II, Chapter 2. ↩

Vedius Pollio had a villa on the mountain now called Punta di Posilippo, which projects into the sea between Naples and Puteoli, which he left to Augustus, and which was afterwards possessed by the Emperor Trajan. He was a freedman by birth, and