Seneca’s Use of Exempla as Therapeutics for Fear of Death in Moral Epistles

This paper analyses the role of exemplarity in Stoic philosophical preparation for death called meditatio mortis and systematized in Seneca’s Moral Epistles. The author mainly focuses on how Seneca represents the death of Roman politician Cato the Younger to put forth three modes of exemplary therapeutics. First, Seneca uses the admirative sentiment of Roman exemplarity to instill courage against death by contemplating Cato’s brave stand. Second, the paper examines how the familiar exemplary figure becomes a source of imaginative spiritual exercise against the fear of death akin to Pierre Hadot’s contemplation of the ideal sage. The following discussion uses Martha Nussbaum’s ideas on the therapeutic potential of ethical theory and demonstrates how Seneca uses exemplary discourse and theory to combat a passionate response to the possibility of death. Finally, the discussion ends with the reconstruction of the outlined process within the literally and philosophical intentions of the Epistles. In this way, the different moments of exemplary therapeutics are presented as a coherent didactic progression while also supplying and, at times, replacing the essential modes of philosophical discourse that Seneca outlines in the Epistles.