The Death of Seneca by Manuel Domínguez Sánchez

Therefore, we must cut away two things--fear of the future and memory of past unpleasantness; the latter no longer pertains to me, the former not yet. Circumcidenda ergo duo sunt, et futuri timor et veteris incommodi memoria; hoc ad me iam non pertinet, illud nondum. --Seneca the Younger, Epistles 78.14

some conspicuously not-in-pieces but very sexy hippolyti - joseph-désiré court, jean-baptiste lemoyne, peter paul rubens, and lawrence alma-tadema, and seneca’s phaedra 1085-1087 trans. myself.

“If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person.”

— Seneca, “Letters from a Stoic”

"If you have ever come upon a grove that is thick with ancient trees rising far above the usual height and blocking the view of the sky with their cover of intertwining branches, the loftiness of the forest, the seclusion of the spot, and your wonder at the unbroken shade in the midst of open space will create in you the feeling of a divine presence".

-Seneca the Younger on the numina.

Latin Literature Tournament - Round 1

Propaganda under the cut!

Seneca the Younger Propaganda:

Seneca my chronically ill beloved...

His tragedies are the rawest, most gut-wrenching, and visceral pieces in pre-modern drama. His Oedipus is so fucking gnarly and it's my favorite thing ever written

I think he's super underrated as an innovator of form and genre. Between his Epistulae Morales and his tragic corpus, he was really just fucking around in the coolest way

Jerome Propaganda:

While it gets kinda paraphrastic, the Vulgate a really cool work in the history of translation, and its simple style is really clear and balanced

Describes the occurrence and cure of a sever vitamin A deficiency in the Life of Saint Hilarion, which is pretty fucking cool

Worked on onomastica, which would frankly be my personal hell, but it shows that he was brave and had the patience of, well, a saint

The greatest man is he who chooses the right with the most invincible resolution; who resists the sorest temptation from within and without; who bears the heaviest burdens cheerfully; who is calmest in storms, and most fearless under menaces and frowns; whose reliance on truth, on virtue, and on God is most unfaltering.

— Seneca the Younger

The Cranes

"If the Head Gamemaker, Seneca Crane, had any brains, he'd have blown you to dust right then. But he had an unfortunate sentimental streak. So here you are. Can you guess where he is?" he asks

I nod because, by the way he says it, it's clear that Seneca Crane has been executed.

An "unfortunate sentimental streak" is an odd way of putting it. And that's the only description we get of Seneca Crane from the books, everything else is from the film.

I suppose we can guess he was more interested in the drama of the "show" since he's named after a playwright (I have only read Medea and that was a long time ago). Snow is Nero in this analogy, who was forced Seneca to commit suicide in Rome.

He and his ancestor, Arachne Crane, don't seem to have much in common except their extreme privilege. Well, that and they both seem to have irritated Snow. She's named for a mythological figure, and he for a historical one. Though I wonder if his family still made their money from building vacation homes?

hi jlrrt. sometimes i wonder, what Agrippa thought about Augustus exiling his daughter (and Agrippa's wife) Julia? exiling his and Julia's daughter Julia Minor and ordered her newborn baby to be exposed? also exiling and (allegedly) ordered Postumus' execution? i know he was dead at the time when all of that happened but i just curious. I bet he knew about how Augustus can be ruthless (considering he was Augustus' childhood friend and support him since beginning) but sometimes i wonder if a thought that Augustus could be ruthless to his own family crossed his mind. i just realized when i type this that none of Agrippa and Julia's children ended up having good ending (other two sons died young from illness or wound complication while their other daughter was exiled during Tiberius' reign) (it seemed that Agrippa's daughters from his previous marriages were luckier).

I'm going to start calling you Pliny Anon, because I'm pretty sure Pliny the Elder had the same thoughts!

Pliny, Natural History, LBL 352: 535-537

(I think Pliny's being a bit harsh on the girls here, and perhaps overstating the tension between Agrippa and Augustus.)

I believe Augustus actually said at one point that "If Agrippa and Maecenas had been alive, I wouldn't have [exiled Julia]". (Seneca, de Beneficiis 6.32.) That plus Agrippa's own decision not to call Julia out for her affairs leads me to think he would've been a moderating influence in Augustus' later years.

I also suspect Postumus would've grown up differently - perhaps much better - if Agrippa had lived to his sixties. It can't have been good for the kid to see his mother exiled, and his only father figure (Augustus) reject and exile him. This might have been exacerbated by Augustus' tendency to put a lot of pressure on his kids, while Agrippa appears to have been more easygoing. So, who knows? Maybe Postumus would've been named "Marcus" and never been exiled at all!

I’m finally reading Seneca’s plays and somehow he manages to make greek tragedies even worse. it’s just so bloody and awful. I like it.

If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.

Seneca the Younger

"We suffer in our imagination more than in reality"

The Dying Seneca, Peter Paul Rubens, 1612-13

i must not stop translating seneca. stopping translating seneca right now is the mind killer

While we are postponing, life speeds by.

Seneca the Younger

Me being a professional procrastinator ;-;

"I see crosses there, not just of one kind but made in many different ways: some have their victims with head down to the ground; some impale their private parts; others stretch out their arms on the gibbet."

-Seneca the Younger