Emre Doğan

Seneca: Selected Dialogues

Five Dialogues Complete in Aubrey Stewart's Translation, Annotated — with an Argument Map of All 79 Chapters, a Glossary, a Biographical Index and a Chronology

In the spring of 65, on the emperor's orders, the richest private citizen in Rome opened his veins and took a very long time to die. He had been Nero's tutor, then his minister, then the man who drafted the public justification for matricide — and he had written, while doing all of it, the most quotable defence of the simple life in Latin. This edition prints five of Seneca's twelve dialogues, complete and unabridged, in Aubrey Stewart's 1889 translation: On the Shortness of Life, On Peace of Mind, On the Happy Life, On Providence and On Leisure. They are the five about how to live, and they argue with each other. Around them: a 3,000-word introduction that takes up George Long's refusal to discuss Seneca at all — Long, who translated the Meditations Valice publishes, said only that his writings and his life must be taken together — an introduction to each dialogue, an argument map giving a line to every one of the 79 chapters (Seneca wrote no headings; the numbers were added by later editors), a glossary of 14 working terms, a biographical index, a chronology that sets the essays beside Nero's reign, and an index of 30 subjects generated from the text. Two of the five are incomplete in the manuscripts. The edition says which, and where, and does not supply endings that do not exist. 154 pages, 6 × 9 in.

Pages

154

Language

en