Ethics and Morality in Latin Philosophy

Roman philosophy is having a good moment (Williams & Volk 2016). At the fore is Cicero, who is receiving more attention as a philosopher in his own right (Woolf 2015), especially for his conception of philosophy as a mode of political engagement (Baraz 2012). His political philosophy is often approached from the perspective of ethics, but what about his physics? For Cicero, can natural philosophy speak to politics?

Much of the scholarship on the Senecan self has traced the relationship between the compromised position of the proficiens and the idealized (if almost unattainable) subjectivity of the sage [e.g. Bartsch (2015), Long (2009), Edwards (1997)]. In his relentless efforts to improve himself, the proficiens follows a teleological progression towards sagehood, generally envisioned in spatial terms as a straightening and a movement forward [Rimell (2017)].

This paper argues that Seneca’s De Beneficiis is a “formative fiction” (Landy 2012), a work of literature that imparts not just knowledge, but practical skills. Through its literary design, De Beneficiis actively trains the reader in hermeneutic capabilities that can be transferred to evaluating benefactors, beneficiaries, and beneficia (favors, gifts, or benefits).

In the first century BCE, the philosopher Antiochus of Ascalon revived a dogmatic version of Platonic philosophy against the skeptical New Academy. Cicero’s Academica depicts the debates between skeptical and dogmatic Academics. To defend his claim to be Plato’s true philosophical heir, Antiochus offered an interpretation of the history of the Academy. Cicero’s two Antiochian advocates, Lucullus in the first, unpublished edition (the Lucullus) and Varro in the second and final version (Academica Priora), argue that Plato was a dogmatist.

This paper argues that Pliny the Younger activates specific intertexts to the third book of Seneca’s Naturales Quaestiones (NQ) as part of his self-fashioning. While scholars have identified Seneca’s influence elsewhere (Cova 1997, Marchesi 2008: 14-20, Tzounakas 2011, Gibson and Morello 2012: passim), the NQ has not been subject of intertextual study. Seneca’s own epistolary and scientific prowess are recalled in Pliny’s careful and erudite letters, but Pliny also adds his own literary perspective to the genre of natural science.

The problematization of sexual activity in Senecan philosophy is marked by a notable discontinuity with Stoic tradition. Senecan sexual ethics were more stringent than their Zenoic or Chrysippean predecessors. This paper examines Seneca’s statements on the sexual use of slaves in order to argue that Senecan philosophy exhibits a retooling of Stoic evaluations of sex work.