FRID. ERN. RUHKOPF

PREFACE.

It is just and right that we should boldly affirm that Seneca’s Natural Questions—which we now offer to you, kind reader, recognized, and as far as possible, polished and explained by our own study and labor, whatever they may be—is the only monument of physics left to us from the Romans, and that nothing similar to it was published by any of the Romans before it.

For if you put aside the works left behind in the most excellent writings of Lucretius, Cicero, and the elder Pliny, not even a trace of such inquiries as those instituted by Seneca is to be found among the Romans. And just as what Cicero and the elder Pliny contributed was brought forward briefly and in fragments, and never with the intention of composing a system, so Lucretius—who might enter into some comparison with Seneca—although he set forth this discipline according to the mind and precepts of Epicurus with the highest praise and no little study, nonetheless brought all these things forward adorned and distinguished by poetic colors, and presented the system of Epicurus alone, developed. He did not aim to laboriously collect matters that reveal care and manifold learning supported by every authority and witness, nor to submit and examine them with exact judgment. Nor is it possible to find, besides these writers, any who expounded on the nature of things learnedly and subtly, and whom Seneca might have used. For where domestic authors are praised by the elder Pliny in Book II of his Natural History (Seneca having been omitted, by I know not what fate), from whom he drew his own [materials], they are hardly to be counted among their number, since we read of no one among them, except Caecina, being called to participate in these questions. The rest, therefore, either only set forth or touched upon certain matters, drawing from Greek sources whose clarity and abundance Seneca is to be thought to have preferred to use. Unless, therefore, Seneca was the first of the Romans—which I am inclined to suspect is not far from the truth—to institute the arrangement of each exposition in its own order and place concerning the nature of things and its effects, as far as the series of his own questions required, he is certainly to be considered among the first who collected the discoveries of the Greeks and submitted them to accurate examination.