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This collection of essays by well-known scholars of Seneca focuses on the multifaceted ways in which Seneca, as philosopher, politician, poet and Roman senator, engaged with the question of ethical selfhood. The contributors explore the main cruces of Senecan scholarship, such as whether Seneca's treatment of the self is original in its historical context; whether Seneca's Stoicism can be reconciled with the pull of rhetorical and literary self-expression; and how Seneca claims to teach psychic self-integration. Most importantly, the contributors debate to what degree, if at all, the absence of a technically articulated concept of selfhood should cause us to hesitate in seeking a distinctively Senecan self - one that stands out not only for the 'intensity of its relations to self', as Foucault famously put it, but also for the way in which those relations to self are couched.
About the author
Shadi Bartsch is the W. Duncan MacMillan Professor of Classics at Brown University. Her most recent book is The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire (2006).David Wray is Associate Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. His publications include Catullus and the Poetics of Roman Manhood (Cambridge, 2001).
Summary
Many modern critics have treated Seneca as an innovator in historical understandings of 'selfhood' and self-awareness. This volume of essays by internationally well-known scholars promises to reshape our understanding of Seneca, and to establish once and for all his place as a student of the human psyche.
