Sublime

Seneca was important in the time of the Renaissance in three sometimes interrelated but conceptually distinct ways. 12 First, his prose work—along with the philosophical writings of Cicero, which were even more widely read—was one of the primary sources for ancient Stoicism

Seneca has been dubbed the “conscience of the Empire,” 41 although it would be more accurate to see him as its unconscious—but an unconscious with a public voice and a beautiful literary style. His wide-ranging and contradictory body of work articulates the psychological contradictions and pressures of consumerism, globalization, and empire—all the

Seneca’s surviving work is voluminous, a far larger extant oeuvre than most ancient authors. We have his tragedies, his essays on a wide range of subjects, philosophical letters, one political satire, and an extensive treatise on scientific issues (the Natural Questions).

Columella (4–70 ce), was born and raised in Roman Gades (modern Cadiz). After a stint in the army, he returned to the Spanish countryside and eventually produced one of the most influential Roman handbooks on agriculture, the still-extant De Re Rustica (On the countryside). Columella and Seneca probably knew each other and bonded over their shared

Seneca’s time of power and influence was necessarily brief. It was a compromised death, full of second and third guesses, that follows a life of compromises and complex negotiations, between ideal and reality, philosophy and politics, virtue and money, motivation and action.