Seneca - College of Stoic Philosophers

SENECA IN RETIREMENT 129self, to have refused to flatter the reigningfavourites, and to have risked his hfe throughfidehty to his friends. ^ Under Nero he becameProcurator of Sicily, and it was from that islandthat he corresponded with Seneca. Seneca warnshim so earnestly against ambition and the dangerof listening to flatterers,that we may fairly conjecturethat this warning indicates the presenceof corresponding infirmities in the man to whomit was addressed. But he praises his temperance,modesty, and disinterestedness.Lucilius from his youth gave much of histime to liberal studies, and especially to poetryand philosophy. While he was in Sicily he wrote,at the suggestion of Seneca, a poem on Aetna,which is still extant.^ In this poem Lucihus1Sen., Nat. Quaest. iv. in Praef.circumstances to which he alludes.Seneca does not explain the*The authorship has been disputed, especially by Lipsius ;but the identification seems almost established. It isprobablethat Cornelius Severus, a poet of the Augustan age, whomSeneca mentions together with Virgil and Ovid as havingtreated the subject, and to whom the poem has in consequencebeen attributed, like Virgil and Ovid only introduced a descriptionof Aetna into one of his poems and in any case he;cannot have been the author of the existing work which containswords first used in a later generation. On the other hand, thecoincidences with Seneca are so striking that those who holdthat the poem was written by Severus have been driven to thehypothesis that Seneca borrowed from it some of his ideas inthe Naturales Quaestiones. Here we have, on the one hand,a poem written on the subject of Aetna by a philosopher ofthe Epicurean school, and from the style and language bearingthe marks of the Neronian age and of the school of Seneca ;and on the other, a Lucilius Junior who is not only procuratorof Sicily, a poet, and an Epicurean philosopher of the age ofNero, but one to whom Seneca suggests that he should writea poem on this very subject. Such is a summary of part ofthe evidence.