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Stoic and Epicurean Consolations in Seneca’s 99th Letter
from Part III - Models of Emotional Experience
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 March 2023
Chapter 7 treats the consolatory letter to Marullus, which is provided as an enclosure in Epistulae morales 99. The latest of Seneca’s consolations, this work takes an unusually rigorous Stoic line. Although the deceased was a young child, Marullus is told not to grieve at all: Even the death of an adult friend would not truly be an evil, and the correct response to it is to rejoice in the goodness of the relationship that is now concluded. As elsewhere, however, Seneca concedes that an emotion-like reaction that does not depend on a belief that the loss is an evil is both natural and blameless. That pre-emotional reaction may include tears, as also may the eupathic joy of the Stoic sage. This last claim is paralleled in Philo of Alexandria, with interesting implications for the phenomenology of the Stoic eupatheiai. At the end of his letter, Seneca considers and rejects a consolatory tactic suggested by the Epicurean Metrodorus.
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