L. Annaeus Seneca on Benefits
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~81,100 words · 385 passages
Cite this work
- APALucius Annaeus Seneca. (n.d.). L. Annaeus Seneca on Benefits. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/seneca/l-annaeus-seneca-on-benefits
- MLALucius Annaeus Seneca. "L. Annaeus Seneca on Benefits." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/seneca/l-annaeus-seneca-on-benefits.
- ChicagoLucius Annaeus Seneca. L. Annaeus Seneca on Benefits. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/seneca/l-annaeus-seneca-on-benefits.
What it is about
Seven books on how a favour is given and received, and why a badly given benefit humiliates instead of helping.
Context and history
The longest ancient treatise on reciprocity, and the one that fixed the vocabulary of obligation and gratitude we still use. Seneca argues that what counts is not the thing given but the intention behind it: a benefit is an act of mind, not an object.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
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 a body in it Which might be felt: that we, the poorer born, Whose baser stars do shut us up in wishes, Might with effects of them follow our friends And show what we alone must think; which never Retu
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