Notes on the Text of Seneca's Letters

Extract

The text of Seneca's Letters, despite the attention it has received from scholars in the last fifty years, still leaves much to be desired in a large number of places. It is a field in which emendations can be proposed (and judged) with rather more security than is often the case in classical Latin prose, because Seneca was a very prolific writer, exceeded only by Cicero and Livy in the bulk of his extant work. The absence of a special lexicon for this eminent author constitutes a genuine difficulty of course, but it can be overcome in part at least by a constant reading and re-reading of his works, not excluding the dramas. The following suggestions are based on a more intense application to Seneca than Quintilian would be likely to have approved.