Jula Wildberger

Addressing classicists, philosophers, students, and general readers alike, this volume emphasizes the unity of Seneca's work and his originality as a translator of Stoic ideas in the literary forms of imperial Rome. It features a vitalizing diversity of contributors from different generations, disciplines, and research cultures. Several prominent Seneca scholars publishing in other languages are for the first time made accessible to anglophone readers. (See also the attached file with ToC and Introduction)

Reconstructs the original Greek version of the confatalia-argument that Cicero attributes to Chrysippus in De fato and misrepresent in crucial ways. Compares this argument with Seneca's discussion of determinism in the Naturales quaestiones. Clarifies that Seneca makes a different distinction from that attested in Cicero's De fato. Argues that problems with interpreting both accounts derive from disregarding terminological distinctions harder to spot in the Latin versions and, related to this, insufficient attention to the ontological distinction between bodies (such as Fate) and predicates (e.g. "what is fated"), which unfortunately does not square well with the modern ontological category "event." Contains some corrections to the author's earlier discussion of the topic in Seneca und die Stoa: Der Platz des Menschen in der Welt, De Gruyter 2006, ch. 3.3.4

This dissertation in classics might be of interest for gender studies as well since it is a sustained demonstration how one social and literary sterotype (the elegiac lover -- der elegisch Liebende) is systematically transformed into another (the artist of love -- der Liebeskünstler) as part of generic transformation (turning Latin love elegy into didactic poetry). The counterpart of these stereotypes is the "harsh lady" (dura domina), who is domesticated in the third book of the Ars amatoria. The copyright for the book belongs to the author, who has uploaded it to the site. Please feel free to use it for non-profit purposes.

Relates Stoic changing conceptions of time to these philosophers’ theology. Roughly speaking, we can distinguish a first phase in which the original definition by Zeno was developed and refined, and a second phase, beginning with Posidonius at the latest, in which new concepts of both objective and subjective time were introduced that turned out to be incompatible with the strictly "corporealist" ontology into which the original definitions had been embedded. The early Stoics defined time in dependence of moving bodies in such a way that the subsistence of times, their structural coherence and unity within the whole time of the cosmos's movement as well as the division of time into past, present and future were a consequence of god's activities. It was god who determined time and what it was like. Maybe under the influence of Aristotle, some middle Stoics and in particular Posidonius seem to have become dissatisfied with the idea that there are only times of single movements but no time as a universal temporal dimension. They introduced a distinction between objective time and - both perceptually and conceptually - subjective time as well as the concept of a now that implies both a point-like division between past and future and a defined location for the present within objective time. As a consequence, God's activities are now structured by a temporal dimension that does no longer depend of God in all its aspects. Now, God too has a past and a future, and his activities can be analyzed in terms of necessity and possibility. This raises questions about divine agency similar to those discussed in order to define human responsibility and freedom of action. Reflexes of such a debate about the determinedness of god's activities can be observed in the imperial Stoic Seneca.