Ermanno Malaspina

The aim of the book is to encourage discussion among experts on De ira, a text of philosophical nature, by reading it page by page, from a philosophical, philological, and literary perspective (a multidisciplinary choice which is the conditio sine qua non of all judicious research on Seneca). Moreover, the way in which each of these close readings is conducted adds an additional value: they each deal with a section of the text, presenting all the data necessary for its understanding. All together, they cover the whole work. Each of them is also an attempt at a global interpretation of the treatise, examined through the particular framing of the textual passage around which the “Lectures plurielles” are conceived. Around this “polyphonic” analysis of the text, we have built a structure that aims to offer the reader a complete reference work on all the issues of the De ira. Sources, manuscript tradition, images, political and philosophical concepts, posterity – in short, all the aspects that a traditional commentary of the text would not have allowed us to distinguish so clearly – find their place here. This book is therefore aimed at specialists as well as students or anyone interested in the thought of emotions in antiquity.

This chapter takes up two topics. On one hand it examines the philosophical background of the historical genre in Rome and focuses on the “past-present” dialectic in the Prefaces of three Roman historians (Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus), examining the nature of their political theory. On the other hand, it deals with what is today called “political philosophy.” It first looks at Roman philosophical contributions to understanding the nature of the res publica and to healing its ills. It then turns to ethical approaches, predicated on the moral qualities of the citizen or ruler, and to the radical criticism of any commitment to public a????airs. In all these areas, consideration is given not only to recognized philosophical writers such as Cicero, Lucretius, and Seneca, but also, more broadly, to the philosophical elements recoverable in writers who were not professional philosophers.