Dr. Fabio Tutrone, Assistant Professor of Classical Philology, University of Palermo
The third talk in the 2024 Speaker Series of the NYU Department of Classics. In-person attendance at the NYU Department of Classics (100 Washington Square East, Room 503A New York , NY 10003). Non-NYU attendants should email ancient.studies@nyu.edu for building access.
Abstract
“Seneca’s consolations have long been regarded as essentially rhetorical pastiches, devoid of any philosophical consistency – and possibly politically motivated. Despite its key relevance to our understanding of Seneca’s conversion to the philosophical life, the Consolatio ad Marciam has not escaped this fate. However, the recent reassessment of ancient consolation literature in light of its place in the Greco-Roman tradition of moral psychagogy and self-formation has offered new and stimulating insights, which can help us see in clearer perspective the earliest of Seneca’s extant writings and its (characteristically Stoic) transformation of the rhetorical topos of ‘timely’/‘untimely’ death (εὔκαιρος/ἄωρος θάνατος). In this talk, Fabio Tutrone shall focus on the emblematic praise of death as ‘the best discovery of nature’ (optimum inventum naturae) containedin chapter 20 of Seneca’s Ad Marciam. Tutrone will attempt to show that, far from obscuring or jeopardizing the consistency of Seneca’s philosophical argument, the power of rhetorical structures and the reception of Roman cultural patterns (particularly of the exempla of Pompey, Cicero, and Cato) make a fundamental contribution to Seneca’s intellectual project of subversion of the traditional view of (un)timely death. Building on earlier literary models (such as Cicero’s philosophical dialogues and Consolatio ad se) and displaying an impressive array of figures of speech (such as antithesis, climax, anaphora, and alliteration), Seneca constructs a coherent picture of human life, agency, and history, which redefines the natural and moral meaning of death from the ‘paradoxical’ point of view of Stoic teleology – a picture in which philosophy, rhetoric, and cultural exemplarity neatly intertwine with each other.”