Seneca: A Philosopher in Politics by Miriam T Griffin

Seneca: A Philosopher in Politics by Miriam T Griffin

For this Clarendon Paperback, Dr Griffin has written a new Postscript to bring the original book fully up to date. She discusses further important and controversial questions of fact or interpretation in the light of the scholarship of the intervening years and provides additional argument where necessary. The connection between Seneca's prose works and his career as a first-century Roman statesman is problematic. Although he writes in the first person, he tells us little of his external life or of the people and events that formed its setting. Miriam Griffin addresses the problem by first reconstructing Seneca's career using only outside sources and his de Clementia and Apocolocyntosis, whose political purposes are undisputed. In the second part of the book she studies Seneca's treatment of subjects of political significance, including his views on slavery, provincial policy, wealth, and suicide. On the whole, the word of the philosopher is found to illuminate the work of the statesman, but notable exceptions emerge, and the links that are revealed vary from theme to theme and rarely accord with traditional autobiographical interpretations of Seneca's works.

`Griffin's book is an outstanding contribution to our knowledge of the intellectual climate and the political history of the principate of Nero, and is bound to become a standard work on the complex and elusive personality of Seneca' Journal of Roman Studies
`This is a painstaking effort at reconstruction which surpasses in detail and penetration any previous biographical study ... Her work is a substantial contribution to the study not only of Seneca but of the whole Julio-Claudian period and should be required reading well beyond the circle of Senecan scholars.' Classical Review
'Miriam Griffin's book on Seneca has made a wecome transfer to paperback. This book provides useful material for those studying the history of the Principate in the first century AD. It is also useful for its exxploration of the philosophical background to matters that were important at this time. J. Hutchinson. JACT Review

John Davie is Lecturer in Classics at Trinity Collge, Oxford and former Head of Classics at St Paul's School, London. He has previously translated the complete plays of Euripides for Penguin Classics and has also translated for the Oxford World's Classics Seneca's Dialogues and Essays and Horace's
Satires and Epistles.

Miriam T. Griffin was born in New York and studied at Barnard College and Radcliffe before receiving a Fulbright Scholarship to Oxford, where she completed her DPhil under the supervision of Sir Ronald Syme. She was initially the Fulford Research Fellow at St. Anne's College, later being appointed
to a tutorial fellowship in Ancient History at Somerville College and a CUF Lectureship in the University, as well as holding a post as Langford Eminent scholar at Florida State University in 2008. She was the editor of The Classical Quarterly from 2002 until 2007 and was a long-standing editor of
the Clarendon Ancient History Series for Oxford University Press. In 2018, Dr Griffin was posthumously awarded a British Academy Medal for her lifetime's contribution to Roman history and ancient thought.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780198147749
ISBN 10	0198147740
Title	Seneca: A Philosopher in Politics
Author	Miriam T Griffin
Series	Clarendon Paperbacks
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Oxford University Press
Year published	1992-02-13
Number of pages	532
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.