Fabio Tutrone, Filosofi e animali in Roma antica, ETS, Pisa 2012, (Book Review)

Healing Grief: A Commentary on Seneca's Consolatio ad Marciam

Both our view of Seneca’s philosophical thought and our approach to the ancient consolatory genre have radically changed since the latest commentary on the Consolatio ad Marciam was written in 1981. The aim of this work is to offer a new book-length commentary on the earliest of Seneca’s extant writings, along with a revision of the Latin text and a reassessment of Seneca’s intellectual program, strategies, and context. A crucial document to penetrate Seneca’s discourse on the self in its embryonic stages, the Ad Marciam is here taken seriously as an engaging attempt to direct the persuasive power of literary models and rhetorical devices toward the fundamentally moral project of healing Ma…

Venerari Contendere Adicere: Roman Emulation, Intergenerational Reciprocity, and the Ancient Idea of Progress

Over the past few decades, the successful emergence of intertextuality, with its careful investigation of the dynamics of imitation, allusion, and emulation, has effectively challenged the Romantic notions of creativity and individual authorship. In the wide-open field left by the postmodern ‘death of the author’, however, the territory of culture as a network of patterns hiding behind the text has often been restricted within the boundaries of literary culture. In this paper, I will attempt to enlarge such a text-centred perspective by highlighting the often neglected connections between family education, intergenerational reciprocity, and aesthetic thought in Roman culture. Indeed, long b…

Seneca on the Mother Cow: Poetic Models and Natural Philosophy in the Consolation to Marcia

Seneca’s Consolation to Marcia embraces the orthodox Stoic view that, when unduly protracted, grief reflects a logical misunderstanding of the natural world, human life, and the limits of the self. Seneca is aware that persuading Marcia to leave her false beliefs is the only way to reawaken her interest in communal life, family reciprocity, and constructive memory. He conceives his consolatory writing as an intellectually engaging didactic work tailored to the needs and disposition of his addressee. The main purpose of the present paper is to show that in this and several other respects the Consolation to Marcia makes a conscious move towards the different but evidently related genre of did…

Barking at the Threshold

Over the past few years, students of ancient Mediterranean societies have shown consistent interest in the cultural construction of dogs as reflected in texts, artefacts, and other media. However, whereas the cultural and literary implications of the Greek representation of dogs have been the subject of thorough investigations, Roman dogs have remained at the margins of the scholarly debate. By adopting an interdisciplinary methodology that combines cognitive theory, rhetorical analysis, and socio-anthropological research, the present paper discusses some affordances of dogs (in the terms of James Gibson’s 'ecological approach to visual perception') that are given special significance withi…

Evil, Progress, and Fall: Moral Readings of Time and Cultural Development in Roman Literature and Philosophy