spent the last three years of his life in study and writing: a retirement not unlike Cicero's, and perhaps modeled on it. His tragedies are discussed in Chapter 28. His
surviving prose works (some interesting pieces are only known indirectly) include 'consolations'-notably that to his mother Helvia on his own exile-and a number of 'essays'
on moral themes, some short, some (On Anger, On Benefits, On Clemency) elaborate treatises in several books. In his retirement he embarked on grander schemes: Natural
Questions, a rhetorically elaborate account of current theories about winds, earthquakes, lightning, and similar phenomena; and a comprehensive study of ethics from the
Stoic point of view, never executed, but reflected in many of the Moral Letters, which he addressed to his friend Lucilius and which are his most popular and readable work.
When Macaulay said that reading Seneca was like dining on nothing but anchovy sauce, he expressed something of the pleasure in witty detail and the dissatisfaction with
the whole that most readers experience; it is the smaller scale and more intimate tone of the Letters that saves them from the worst effects of Seneca's incontinent ingenuity.
So repetitive a writer seems made for the anthologist; and I cite two passages from which his manner may perhaps be judged.
In the first {Tranquillity of Mind 12-13) he adapts a theme from the end of the third book of Lucretius, on restlessness of soul; Stoic though he is, he has no compunction
about using the common stock of philosophic moralizing, even if it is of Epicurean origin. What he implies about taste in scenery in this passage is of interest; so is his
incidental attack at the end on the cruel fashion for gladiatorial shows.
Some things give the body pleasure and pain at once, like turning over before one side is tired, or tossing in one position after another. Thus Achilles in Homer, now on his
face, now on his back, makes himself comfortable in different ways. This is what sick people do, who cannot endure anything long and use change as medicine. Hence futile
travels and coastal excursions. The inconsistency that hates whatever is at hand experiments with the sea one moment, with the country the next. 'Let's go to Campania.'
Pretty scenery is a bore. 'Let's go to a wild place, let's head for the mountains of Bruttium (the Abruzzi) and Lucania.' But in the wilderness some softer charms are wanted,
something to relieve an eye sated with the grimness of a savage land. 'Let's make for Tarentum, the harbour everyone admires, the mild winter resort, the countryside that
kept even its ancient population in affluence.' 'Now back to town!' It is too long since he heard the applause and the uproar. Now he wants the pleasure of human blood!
Secondly, one of the shorter Letters (60). The theme is the vanity of human desire and the narrowness of our real needs. The technique is very characteristic: exclamations,
rhetorical questions, allusion to a classic (here Sallust), examples from the animal kingdom, personification of Nature, and a striking epigram at the end.
I've a grievance, I'm taking you to court, I'm angry. Do you still wish for what your nurse and your tutor and your mother wished for on your behalf? Don't you understand
how much harm they wished for? How true it is that our friends' prayers are our enemies! All the more so if they have been fulfilled. I no longer find it surprising if all our
troubles stay with us from childhood; we grew up amid our parents' curses. Perhaps one day the gods may hear a disinterested prayer from us! How long shall we go on
asking them for something, as though we could not yet feed ourselves? How long shall we go on filling the territories of vast cities with our crops? How long shall a whole
nation harvest them for us? How long will all those ships from many a sea supply the service of one man's table? The bull contents himself with a few acres' pasture; a
single forest feeds many elephants; does one man need earth and sea to nourish him? Has Nature, having given us so modest a physique, then endowed us with a belly so
insatiable that we surpass the greed of the hugest and hungriest of beasts? Indeed not. How small a quantity it is that is given to Nature! She is cheaply dismissed; it is not
our belly's hunger that costs dear, but our pride. So let us count 'the belly's obedient servants', as Sallust calls them, as beasts, not men-and some not even live beasts, but
dead creatures! A man who is of use to many is alive. A man who uses himself is alive. But for those who hide away in torpor, home is no better than a tomb. You might as
well inscribe on marble at their door 'They predeceased their death.'
Pliny: Uncle and Nephew
The Annaei suggest a comparison with a rather later literary family, the Plinii. The earlier man of note is C. Plinius Secundus, 'the Elder Pliny', born about A.D. 23. He had
a distinguished military and administrative career as an eques, serving in Germany under Claudius and Nero, but then retiring to a more private life until his friendship with
Titus and Mucianus assured a succession of procuratorships under Vespasian. He died, as commander of the fleet at Misenum, in the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79. He
was curious to observe it, and went too far.
Pliny was not only an active official but a tireless student and writer. He wrote a history of the German wars in which he had served, a narrative history of Rome from A.D.
47 to A.D. 70, and a life of one of his commanding officers, the literary man Pomponius Secundus. All this is lost. What survives is a Natural History, in thirty-seven books,
an encyclopedia of knowledge of the universe, the earth, man, animals, and plants, with large sections also on medicines and on the visual arts. It was a prime source of
belief about the universe in the Latin Middle Ages and later, 'an immense register', as Edward Gibbon put it, of 'the discoveries, the arts, and the errors of mankind'.