ARISTOTLE TO AUGUSTINE The Imperial Stoa Seneca was the most signiWcant philosopher of the Wrst century Born in Spain, at Cordoba, at the beginning of the Christian era, he was in 49 made tutor to the 12-year-old Nero When Nero came to the throne in 54 he became a senior adviser, and guided the emperor through a period of comparatively good government, which came to an end in the year 59 when Nero murdered his own mother Seneca lost all inXuence on Nero after 62 and gradually withdrew from public life In 65 he was forced to slit his veins for alleged participation in a plot against the tyrant, and died a Socratic death Seneca wrote a number of tragedies, and left a scrapbook of questions on physical phenomena, but his reputation as a philosopher rests on his ten ethical dialogues, and his 124 moral epistles, mostly written during the period of his retirement Seneca’s style is more exhortatory than argumentative; he prefers preaching to debate He was not interested in logic, and he had a philistine attitude to the liberal arts: he compared a person over-learned in literature to a man with an over-furnished house (Ep 88 36) He had a certain interest in the physical sciences, and wrote a treatise On Natural Questions, but he likes to draw a moral from natural phenomena, and of the three branches of Stoic philosophy it is ethics that is his main concern He urges us to strive towards liberation from the passions In the longest and best known of his dialogues, On Anger, he insists on the crucial diVerence between bodily turmoil on the one hand, and the false judgements which were the essential element from which we need puriWcation On this issue, earlier Stoics had not spoken with a single voice ‘None of those things that strike the mind fortuitously should be called passions: they are not things the mind causes but things that happen to it It is not passion to be aVected by the appearances of things that present themselves; passion consists in surrendering oneself to them and following up this fortuitous impact’ (2 1) Weeping, turning pale, sudden intakes of breath, and sexual arousal are not passions, but mere bodily phenomena: it is what happens in the mind that matters Seneca is able to conduct the Stoic crusade against the passions with greater clarity and energy once this distinction has been made Seneca was a materialist, accepting the Stoic doctrine that the human mind was a material part of a material divine world-soul (Ep 66 12) But 106