SENECA’S <i>AENEID</i>: A STOIC READING OF VIRGIL?

ABSTRACT This paper offers a new perspective on a well-known topic: Seneca’s quotations from the Aeneid in his Moral Epistles . It takes as a starting point the commonly held view that Seneca uses Virgil, sometimes altering the text, sometimes decontextualizing it, to support his Stoic ideas, but without implying that this was originally in Virgil’s mind. An analysis of both the content and the form of the quotations shows that Seneca uses them not only to convey Stoic ideas but also to provide a narrative. Regarding the content, Seneca avoids descriptive passages, preferring instead passages focussed on a few key concepts: virtue and fighting, god and fate, death. These are at the same time the main themes of the epic poem and those of the Moral Epistles . The distribution of the themes throughout the collection and the contextualization of the quoted Virgilian lines reveal a narrative behind Seneca’s choices, which in the beginning aims at improving one’s virtue and then proceeds, toward the end, to an acceptance of death. As the author of his Epistles , Seneca uses the quotations from the Aeneid to describe his coming to terms with death. This is further stressed by the frequency of dialogic exchanges among the quoted lines: given the overlap between the fictive dialogue of the letter (author/reader) and that of the quoted lines, there is an identification of the two epistolary characters with the epic ones, and this contributes to Seneca’s self-portrayal as a master of philosophy and as an old man facing his approaching end.