Graver, Margaret. Seneca: The Literary Philosopher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2023, xii + 305 pp.

In this collection of twelve essays, Margaret Graver paints a detailed and insightful portrait of Seneca as a literary philosopher. The book is organized around four central topics: Seneca’s engagement with the older Stoic tradition (Part I, chapters 1–3); his engagement with Epicurus and the Peripatetics (Part II, chapters 4–5); his models of emotion (Part III, chapters 6–8); and his use of the written word to craft literary and ethical selves (Part IV, chapters 9–12). Ten of the essays have been previously published, but they have been revised to engage with recent scholarship and to draw out more clearly the thematic relationship among the chapters. As the organizing topics suggest, the book has much to offer a wide range of readers, from those who come to Seneca for purely philosophical purposes to those who are more interested in his literary side. Each chapter is relatively self-contained. Nevertheless, collectively, the chapters make a compelling case for the view that to understand Seneca, one cannot ignore either his philosophical or his literary ambitions. The result is a cohesive set of reflections that underlines Seneca’s Stoic credentials while at the same time illuminating his literary ingenuity and how it shapes his engagement with philosophy. I will focus my review on two theses that emerge from this broader discussion and that are helpful for conceptualizing the book’s overall argument.

The first thesis is that Seneca, despite occasional appearances to the contrary, is an orthodox Stoic, at least with regard to ethics. Four of the book’s chapters contribute to the defense of this thesis. In chapter 2, Graver argues that Seneca’s treatment of action and emotion remains thoroughly faithful to its Stoic precursors. In chapter 4, she shows that Seneca’s engagement with Epicurus does not support the view that he is philosophically eclectic; what Seneca borrows from Epicurus is not philosophy but therapeutic strategy. Chapter 5 offers an extremely helpful analysis of how and where Seneca engages with the Peripatetics. Seneca has sometimes been accused of heterodoxy on the grounds that his surprising tripartition of the soul in Letter 92.1 resembles the Peripatetic account of the soul. One important upshot of this chapter is that Seneca’s tripartition is importantly different from that endorsed in the Peripatetic Doxography “C” and so should not be seen as a departure from canonical Stoic ethics. Finally, chapter 6 investigates the contradiction between Seneca’s analysis of anger in On Anger and his proposed therapy for it. Graver concludes that the contradiction merely betrays a lack of philosophical maturity on Seneca’s part and not actual disagreement with early Stoics.

This is not to say that, on Graver’s view, Seneca does not have anything interesting to say. Seneca may not be innovating, but he nevertheless deepens our understanding of Stoic ethics. He draws our attention to aspects of the system that we might have been inclined to overlook and offers accounts of them that are richer in detail and philosophical depth than anything we have from other extant sources. Chapters 3, 7, and 8 focus on some of the areas that were of special interest to Seneca. Chapter 3 offers a reading of Seneca’s treatise On Benefits. Graver argues that although Seneca defines kindness or benefaction entirely in terms of intent, that does not preclude him from taking into account the effect that such acts have on the world and, in particular, on other people, and she shows that Seneca’s account of benefaction helps us better appreciate the nature of autonomy in Stoicism. Chapter 7 explores Seneca’s view of the affective responses of the wise and explains how he makes space within the Stoic framework for virtuous weeping, while chapter 8 takes the reader through his somewhat bewildering classification of kinds of joy, arguing that the variation within Seneca’s treatment of joy reflects the complexities of an earlier, open-ended discussion in Stoicism.

I am of two minds about Graver’s defense of Seneca’s orthodoxy. On the one hand, I think Graver is right to reject interpretations of Seneca as an eclectic – someone whose life’s work amounted to pasting a random selection of philosophical clippings into his commonplace book. As Graver shows, Seneca clearly thinks of himself as a Stoic, and his engagement with other philosophers is shaped by that self-identification. On the other hand, I think that Graver’s commitment to rendering Seneca an orthodox Stoic sometimes leads her to disregard alternative interpretations too quickly.

A central example of this occurs in chapter 3 (one of the volume’s new essays, though it is based on material from a previously published article), in her reading of Seneca’s On Benefits. According to Graver, Seneca’s account of benefaction is thoroughly Stoic in that it defines benefit entirely in terms of the mental activity of the giver: a benefit is an act of the giver’s good will (59). This account of benefit has two important implications. First, by identifying benefit with a mental activity, Seneca (in true Stoic fashion) makes the giver’s bodily movements, as well as the non-mental things (e. g., money) that the giver might confer on the recipient, non-essential to the act of benefiting. Second, by identifying benefit with the mental activity of the giver, the successful carrying out of a benefit is made independent of the (mental) response of the recipient; it is up to the giver alone (and specifically, up to her own willing) whether she succeeds in benefiting another.

Now, Seneca does occasionally say things that, prima facie, commit him to the independence of the benefit from the recipient’s response. For example, in Ben. 5.20.1–2 (the central passage to which Graver appeals to establish the independence of the benefit from the recipient: 68), Seneca says that the giver has given a benefit, even if the recipient is displeased, as long as the material token of his goodwill is something that is actually helpful to the recipient. The difficulty, however, is that Seneca also says things throughout On Benefits that undermine the independence of benefiting. In Book 2, Seneca considers a case in which the giver hands over a material token of his goodwill to the recipient but receives in return only the goodwill of the recipient (the recipient does not, in addition, reciprocate the material token). Seneca argues that “in the case we are discussing there is indeed a deficiency with respect to the thing given, which lacks its counterpart; but there is no deficiency with respect to the mind, for it has found another mind which shares its attitude and has achieved what it intended insofar as it was able to do so” (Ben. 2.32.4, trans. Griffin and Inwood 2011, italics mine; Graver discusses this passage in a different context in chapter 3, but she does not quote or discuss the italicized part: 64). Seneca’s claim is that genuine benefaction (understood as a mental activity) has indeed taken place in this scenario. But the reason he gives for why it has taken place is striking. Seneca says that the giver has been successful (his mind is not deficient) not merely because he has directed his goodwill towards another person but because the other person has reciprocated his good will. This implies that benefiting is not wholly up to the giver after all but requires, in addition, the reciprocated good intentions of the recipient. Indeed, for reasons that I develop and defend in more detail in my “Giving Gifts and Making Friends” (2023), I think that the bulk of the evidence supports this interpretation of benefit in Seneca’s treatise.

This way of reading On Benefits does not directly tell us how to understand Seneca’s relationship to Stoicism, but it does raise some interesting questions. Could this account of benefit somehow be the accidental product of Seneca’s therapeutic method? Is he instead deliberately departing from a core tenet of Stoicism (the self-sufficiency of the virtuous agent)? Or does Seneca’s analysis give us a window onto a matter that orthodox Stoics themselves were uncertain about? My own sympathies lie with the final option, but the point is that the urge to keep Seneca in line can prevent one from appreciating the depth of the challenge that some of his remarks pose for Stoic ethics, and this, in turn, may prematurely foreclose possibilities that should at least be explored.

The second main thesis that emerges over the course of Graver’s book is that Seneca’s central creative contribution to Stoicism lies in the way he marries the philosophical with the literary. The novelty of this union emerges in two main ways. First, Seneca develops distinctive rhetorical strategies to help convey the core ideas of Stoic ethics. The therapeutic program for ethical formation that Seneca develops in his Letters is an especially clear example of this (see chapter 9), but so too is the way that Seneca uses the program as a “rule of genre” that he then bends or breaks in order to allow discussion of a broader range of philosophical topics (see especially chapters 1 and 10). Second, Seneca uses his philosophical writing to craft a literary self, with the goal of establishing himself as a major talent and securing his literary legacy (see chapters 11 and 12). The discussions that establish the elements of this thesis are among the richest and most thought-provoking in the book. Especially noteworthy is chapter 9, newly written for the volume, which argues that Seneca’s therapeutic writing in the Letters contains a point-by-point response to the objections raised to the efficacy of written texts in Plato’s Phaedrus.

My only objection is that sometimes the discussions end just when the questions they raise have become most pressing. As a result, the connection between the philosophical and the literary is left less developed than one might desire, especially given the opportunities for elaboration afforded by the book format. I will mention two examples.

First, one goal of chapters 1 and 10 is to help us better understand Seneca’s relationship to theoretical philosophy and contemplation. The focus of chapter 1 is how Seneca uses rhetorical devices to “expand” the therapeutic frame of the Letters (5). The result, as Graver notes in the introduction, is that he can consider topics that do not have any practical application “without violating generic decorum” (6). Chapter 10 also focuses on rhetorical devices and shows how Seneca’s use of humor highlights the fact that he is himself transgressive, “prone to violate the boundaries he himself has established for philosophical literature” (12). There is no practical difference between expanding and transgressing boundaries for Seneca (either way, the result is the inclusion of abstract philosophical topics). Yet there is an important theoretical difference: when Seneca expands the genre to include new topics, he thereby legitimizes their inclusion; when instead his treatment of theoretical issues is marked as a violation of the genre, he is at most excusing their introduction. Graver does not remark on the difference between the two types of strategies. However, I would have liked some further discussion of the relationship between them. Does Seneca ever use both types of strategy on the same topic (i. e., does he sometimes legitimize and sometimes excuse the very same topic)? Or does he instead restrict the strategies to different philosophical topics, so that some topics are always legitimized while others are only ever excused? Settling this will be important for determining whether, and to what extent, Seneca thinks the investigation of theoretical issues is valuable and hence justifiable.

Second, the arguments of chapters 9, 11, and 12 raise a question about how Seneca’s therapeutic program for ethical formation fits with the development of the literary self. Chapter 11 discusses the relationship between thought and the ingenium (linguistic ability manifested in speech and writing). For Seneca, the two are so closely connected that one can infer things about an agent’s mind and character on the basis of speech. This suggests that the projects of crafting the literary and ethical self are one and the same (cf. 282–283). One piece of evidence in favor of this view is that, according to Graver, active reading plays a central role in both types of self-creation. In chapter 12 (which focuses primarily on literary self-crafting), we learn that what is read must be assimilated by the reader in such a way that she both unifies and is unified by the original material (275–276). Chapter 9 focuses on the difficulties that written texts pose for ethical development. One problem is that such texts cannot adapt themselves to the needs of individual readers. Seneca’s solution is to have the reader do this work herself, learning to apply what is written to her own circumstances (208–209).

Active reading thus promotes both ethical and literary development. But are all the techniques of self-creation equally applicable to the literary and to the ethical selves? We would expect them to be if the two types of self-creation are the same. However, surprisingly, some parts of chapters 9 and 12 push against this view. In chapter 12, Graver tells us that Seneca is more interested in how things are read than in what is read (267). This suggests that engagement with particular genres is of little importance to successful literary self-creation. By contrast, Seneca’s careful defense of the letter as a therapeutic tool suggests that he thinks genre does matter, at least for ethical development. It would be worth examining in more detail how the therapeutic aspects of Seneca’s writing might contribute to literary self-development, and, conversely, to what extent the literary techniques would need to be tempered by therapeutic strategy when applied to the ethical self. This would reveal just how unified the processes of literary and ethical self-creation actually are.

Newcomers to Seneca will find this book a useful introduction to an important figure in Roman philosophy. Those already familiar with Graver’s work will benefit from seeing how these articles, published over the span of twenty-seven years, collectively advance a unified reading of Seneca. Everyone will appreciate the lucidity and stylishness of Graver’s prose. As I have said, I am not persuaded that Seneca’s Stoic credentials are as straightforward as Graver sometimes makes them out to be. I also think that more should be said about the precise nature of the interaction between the literary and the philosophical in Seneca. But the way the book brings these issues to light is itself a testament to Graver’s success in uncovering the complexities of Seneca’s self-presentation.^[1]