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SENECAN PROSE
In either case, however — even in the Naturales quaestiones — his prime concern
is to explore its practical consequences for daily moral conduct, omnia ad
mores et ad sedandam rabiem adfectuum referens ' applying all to morals, and to
calming the fury of the passions' {Epist. 89.23). Seneca was by no means a
slavish follower of the Stoics. He would readily accept a moral hint from a Cynic,
or from Epicurus himself; 1 and in one important doctrinal matter, the ethics
of suicide, he seems to have made his own original contribution. 2 But on the
whole his mind dwells in the Stoic universe as naturally and securely as the
mind of a medieval thinker dwelt in the universe pictured by the Church. Its
splendours and terrors, its vastness, its periodic destruction by fire or water,
were ever present in his thoughts and his visual imagination; 3 but present
above all was the inseparable bond between it and the soul of any individual
man. The painter's saying, 'There are no lines in Nature', well applies to
the Senecan universe. Its unity is perhaps most simply grasped by a consideration
of the relations which exist in it between man and God. Quid est dens?
Mens uniuersl. Quid est deus? Quod aides totwn et quod non aides totum 'What
is God? Mind of the whole. What is God? All that you see and, of what you
don't see, all' (Q. Nat. 1 praef. 13). He is also Nature, Fate, and Reason (ratio)
as we learn from other passages. 4 Below the stars, visible reminders of his
majesty and peace, however, the universe is alive with apparent terrors: not
merely the physical terrors of thunderbolt, earthquake, and deluge, but also
those which surge out of the soul of man, the rabies adfectuum (' fury of the
passions') which may have an equally disastrous impact on the visible world.
Passion set free in the soul will distort features and gestures first, and then lay
waste the individual and his surroundings. It may destroy a vast region, above
all if it captures the soul of a prince (De ira 1, 2, Clem. 1.5.2). The individual
who seeks peace or freedom inside or outside himself has one hope only: all
men's souls contain a particle of the ratio which is God, and to perfect that
ratio, to purge it of all contact with the passions, is to become God's equal in
all respects save personal immortality (e.g. Constant. 8.2). And this way, Seneca
insists, is open to all human beings, whatever their external condition. To this
tenet we owe his famous and moving protests against the maltreatment of
slaves and the inhumanity of the gladiatorial games. 5 The noble mind, he
says, is a god that sojourns in a human body, deum in cor pore humano
hospitantem. That body may be a Roman knight's, a freedman's, or a slave's
(Epist. 31.11).
1
Motto (1970) 149 collects his admiring references to his friend Demetrius the Cynic; for Epicurus,
see ibid. 150-1.
2
Rist (1969) 246-50. 3 See below, p. 529 n. 1.
4
Motto (1970) 92 item 2.
5
On slaves, Epist. 47 is the locus classicus; the many further references are collected in Motto (1970)
195—6. For the games, see especially Epist. 7.3—5.
517
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