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Title: L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits

Author: Seneca

Editor: Aubrey Stewart

Release Date: February, 2003 [Etext #3794]
Posting Date: December 3, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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L. ANNAEUS SENECA, ON BENEFITS

By Seneca

Edited by Aubrey Stewart

PREFACE

Seneca, the favourite classic of the early fathers of the church and
of the Middle Ages, whom Jerome, Tertullian, and Augustine speak of as
"Seneca noster," who was believed to have corresponded with St. Paul,
and upon whom [Footnote: On the "De Clementia," an odd subject for the
man who burned Servetus alive for differing with him.] Calvin wrote a
commentary, seems almost forgotten in modern times. Perhaps some of his
popularity may have been due to his being supposed to be the author
of those tragedies which the world has long ceased to read, but which
delighted a period that preferred Euripides to Aeschylus: while casuists
must have found congenial matter in an author whose fantastic cases of
conscience are often worthy of Sanchez or Escobar. Yet Seneca's morality
is always pure, and from him we gain, albeit at second hand, an
insight into the doctrines of the Greek philosophers, Zeno, Epicurus,
Chrysippus, &c., whose precepts and system of religious thought had in
cultivated Roman society taken the place of the old worship of Jupiter
and Quirinus.

Since Lodge's edition (fol. 1614), no complete translation of Seneca has
been published in England, though Sir Roger L'Estrange wrote paraphrases
of several Dialogues, which seem to have been enormously popular,
running through more than sixteen editions. I think we may conjecture
that Shakespeare had seen Lodge's translation, from several allusions to
philosophy, to that impossible conception "the wise man," and especially
from a passage in "All's Well that ends Well," which seems to breathe
the very spirit of "De Beneficiis."

"'Tis pity--
That wishing well had not