| Summary: | A commentary on Book IV of Seneca's Epistles needs little justification. To date there is no commentary for the entire book and only brief commentaries for some of the individual letters. A commentary on Book IV would be of use to scholars of Seneca and join the recent commentaries on other books such as Richardson Hay's on Book I and Laudizi's on Book III. The thesis has three introductory chapters. The first of these looks at how Seneca's philosophical writing has been interpreted. It argues that the literary element in Seneca's writing and his use of Latin are integral to his philosophy and cannot be removed to leave some philosophical core that is readily pliant to reconstructing earlier Stoic thought from its fragmentary remains. Furthermore, Seneca' s own opinions on writing and style offer a more reliable guide to reading his work than forcing it to fit some modern literary theory. What emerges from Seneca's writing when such prior agendas and assumptions are put aside is a pragmatic philosophy written to appeal to the values of Seneca's Roman readers. The second chapter argues from Book IV that the book divisions are relevant to the organization of the Epistles. Firstly, one needs to be reminded of the sequential nature of the collection, which Book IV illustrates well, as it marks a shift from the use of quotes to end letters that had been a feature of the first three books. This is an aspect frequently lost in excerpting. Then, the evidence is presented for Book IV being a unitary composition, particularly through the thematic links between the two opening and two closing letters. The third chapter lays out the scope of the commentary. The commentary is organized with an introductory essay prefacing the commentary on each epistle; this serves to compensate for the fragmenting tendency of the commentary as a scholarly form. The emphasis in these essays and in the commentaries is to relate the letters primarily to the wider context of Seneca's thought, and then secondarily to the broader context of ancient philosophic and literary thought.
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