Durham E-Theses Seneca's Natural Questions: Platonism, Physics, and Stoic Therapy in the First Century AD BENISTON, RICHARD,JOHN How to cite: BENISTON, RICHARD,JOHN (2017) Seneca's Natural Questions: Platonism, Physics, and Stoic Therapy in the First Century AD , Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/12361/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 – Abstract – Seneca’s Natural Questions: Platonism, Physics, and Stoic Therapy in the First Century AD Richard Beniston The combination of ethics and physics in Seneca’s Natural Questions has frequently puzzled scholars. Although a number of studies have attempted to reconcile the work’s ethical and physical parts, others maintain that there is no substantial connection between them. Both positions are problematic. The former glosses over the quite obvious ways in which these vivid accounts of vice are thematically at odds with the physics; the latter results in a bifurcation of the aims of the work. This study argues that the incongruous character of these passages plays an integral part in the work’s overall goal: to defend the Stoic account of the ‘the good’. This account was under attack from Platonist rivals. The Stoics argue that the good is grounded ultimately in the wellbeing of the cosmos as a whole; Platonists maintain that conceptualising the good as such is impossible because, as empiricists, the Stoics can only account for a subjective understanding of the good, grounded first and foremost in the wellbeing of the body. Seneca’s engagement with this debate is indicated by the frequent allusions to Plato in the work, particularly the idea of ‘separating soul from body’. Seneca suggests that a carefully structured study of nature can achieve this ‘separation’. This process helps agents to overcome the subjective, body-focussed perspective that the Platonists associate with empiricism. Seneca thus demonstrates a therapeutic means through which an empiricist agent could come to conceive of the good as the Stoics envisage it. This same process of separation from one’s body, however, also provides an ideal opportunity to reflect critically on the objects that we tend to misidentify as goods. It is here that the moralising passages prove useful. These arresting accounts of vice serve to jar us into critical reflection on where we ground our understanding of the good. 1 Seneca’s Natural Questions: Platonism, Physics and Stoic Therapy in the First Century AD Richard Beniston Ustinov College A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Classics and Ancient History Durham University 2017 2 Table of Contents Introduction 7 Seneca’s Natural Questions: the rehabilitation of a neglected work 7 The Natural Questions: a work of philosophy 10 The Natural Questions and post-Hellenistic Stoicism 13 – Post-Hellenistic Stoicism: not just practical ethics 14 – Seneca, Platonism, and ‘eclecticism’ 21 Summary: a dialectical reading of the Natural Questions 25 Chapter 1 – The Unusual From of the Natural Questions: Interpretive Approaches 28 Introduction: The unusual form of the Natural Questions 28 The Stoic tradition of physical writing 34 Literary convention 39 Philosophical approaches 42 –The Stoic framework 42 –The Platonist framework 43 –A Stoic-Platonist dialectical framework? 47 Chapter 2 – The Dialectical Context: A Debate about Grounding the Good 50 Introduction: Platonism and the ‘crisis’ of materialism 50 Empiricism and ‘the good’ 53 Seneca and the problem of the good 65 Separating soul from body 69 Chapter 3 – Separating Soul from Body: The Aetiology of the Natural Questions 73 Introduction 73 The structure of the aetiology: the example of book 3 74 From seen to unseen: Seneca’s ‘Platonising’ methodology 80 Seneca’s response to the Platonists 80 Appendix: The structure of the aetiology in the individual books of the Natural 97 Questions Chapter 4 – Re-evaluating False Goods: The Moralising Passages of the Natural Questions 115 Introduction 115 Characterising the moralising passages 116 – Differentiating the moralising passages 116 –Thematic and rhetorical discontinuity 119 –‘False goods’ and the portrait of empiricism in the moralising passages 122 –The positioning of the moralising passages in the work 128 The therapeutic role of the moralising passages 132 ‘Paradoxical’ natural phenomena 136 Conclusion 139 Chapter 5 – Studying Physics in the Hellenistic Stoa 141 Introduction 141 Stoic physics and Stoic ethics: the modern debate 142 3 Why study physics...at all? 146 Physics as therapy 154 Physics and ethics in the Natural Questions (revisited) 159 Summary and Conclusion 165 Summary 165 Seneca’s innovative conservatism 167 Bibliography 173 4 The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without the author's prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. 5 Acknowledgements Thanks go first and foremost to George Boys-Stones, whose advice and guidance throughout my extended time at Durham has been outstanding. Without his patient encouragement and support, this thesis could not have been written. It has been an honour to work with him. Thanks also to my second supervisor, Phillip Horky, for his comments on portions of this thesis, and for his unfailing willingness to take an interest in my work. I am deeply indebted to all who attended meetings of the Ancient Philosophy Reading Group. These vibrant weekly gatherings of Durham’s Ancient Philosophy community have brought the subject to life, and have been an invaluable source of discussion with like-minded colleagues. I shall miss them (and their subsequent pub trips) a great deal. A big thank you to Nicki Slater, who kindly offered to proof-read this thesis, and whose diligence and attention to detail in this task went above and beyond the call of duty. A debt of gratitude is also owed to all those who have allowed me to present my work over the past few years – the IDEA Centre in Leeds, the School of History, Classics and Archaeology in Edinburgh, not to mention the Department of Classics and Ancient History in Durham. Both the opportunity to speak, and the comments of those who attended, have been extremely useful and very much appreciated. I am sincerely grateful to the Art and Humanities Research Council for funding my time at Durham, without which this project would not have been possible. Special thanks, finally, to my family, my friends and, most of all, to Verity, whose patience, love, and support throughout the doctorate have been nothing short of miraculous. 6 – Introduction – 1. Seneca’s Natural Questions: the rehabilitation of a neglected work Seneca’s Natural Questions “has never been widely read or admired”, or so it has frequently been said.1 In fact, though, the text did not always suffer from such disregard. From the Middle Ages through even into the 19th century it enjoyed considerable standing as a scientific work, even if consistently outshone by the work of Aristotle and Pliny.2 It was really only the late 19th and early 20th centuries that saw the work fall into serious disrepute. Scholarship continued, to be sure, but mainly from the point of view of Quellenforschung,3 or else focussing on the knotty question of the work’s original book order (an issue which, more recently, may finally have been resolved).4 Little attempt was made to understand the work in its own right. Few, indeed, seem to have thought it worth bothering: the work was widely seen to be lacking a coherent sense of structure or purpose, philosophical understanding, and even seriousness of intent.5 In recent decades, though, there has been something of a renaissance of interest in the Natural Questions, with scholars returning to the text with a much more sympathetic eye. This trend began with a thesis (1960) and subsequent article (1964) by Stahl, followed by a monograph by Waiblinger (1977), and then a commentary on book 2 by Hine (1981). At the end of the 1980s there arrived another monograph, by Gross (1989), along with a lengthy and 1 Morford (2002), 9. 2 See Waiblinger (1977, 1-3) for a useful history of the early reception of the Natural Questions. 3 For a long time it was believed that Seneca drew on just one source for the Natural Questions, frequent candidates being Posidonius, Asclepiodotus, or Papirius Fabianus. Today, most scholars accept that Seneca drew on a variety of sources. See especially Hall (1977); Setaioli (1988) 375-452; Gross (1989), passim. 4 Two main book orderings have come down to us in the manuscripts, with the so-called Quantum order (so named because of the first word in the manuscript) running 1 – 2 – 3 – 4a – 4b – 5 – 6 – 7, and the other (the so- called Grandinem ordering) as 4b – 5 – 6 – 7 – 1 – 2 – 3 – 4a. Both orderings, however, result in internal inconsistencies (for discussion of which, see Hine (1981), 4-19). Beginning in the early 19th century, therefore, numerous attempts have been made to reorder the text coherently – as many as eleven, according to one count (Grecke (1895), 110).