Description
- Abstract:
- This dissertation explores how the science and ethics of Seneca’s Natural Questions support each other, as well as how the literary features of the work contribute to the overall effect. My approach combines philology and cultural history and takes as its beginning the element of water, which appears in various contexts throughout the work. Through an examination of this recurrent element, it becomes clear that the Natural Questions offers science (the understanding of nature) as a way for its reader to approach virtue (the understanding of himself and his place in the world). The majority of the dissertation is concerned with books 3 and 4A, a chunk of the work which deals with the water cycle, the deluge at the end of the world, and the rising of the Nile. These first two books of the Natural Questions set out a program that binds science tightly to ethics through a rhetorically and philosophically complex set of arguments, analogies, and examples that connect the flood to rivers, the water cycle, the Nile, and the element of water. When viewed as part of this network and therefore in the context of the elemental schema at the heart of the work, the flood passage represents not death but rebirth, and so presents not a problem for Seneca’s claims about providence, but a proof of them.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2025
Citation
Sappenfield, Fiona Ellingham,
"Water in Seneca's Natural Questions"
(2025).
Classics Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:3ctwnkvb/
