Philosophical Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Vol. 1

...it is already manifest from the education and upbringing of most, which we have received to have looked primarily to agriculture and military service. Cicero himself, to omit other things as being well known, has left a sufficiently clear testimony regarding this matter.

« Among them (the Greeks), » he says in Tusc. I, 2, « geometry was in the highest honor; therefore, nothing was more illustrious than mathematicians. But we have limited the scope of this art to the utility of measuring and calculating. »

Therefore, Aristotle had to act in one way when composing physics for the Greeks, and Seneca in another when writing for the Romans, to whom, consequently, the omission of mathematical proofs cannot in the least be blamed.

But it was by no means foreign to this study of his—especially for his fellow citizens—to prove his points by bringing forward the opinions and the very passages of the authors whose authority, experiments, and testimonies he might use, and by lingering over either proving or refuting them. For it was in this way that he won credibility for his statements among his readers and testified to his doctrine more richly and clearly to everyone, since there is hardly any writer of antiquity worth mentioning who was famous in this discipline, I believe, without Seneca knowing him and drawing him to his side. For he read and presented the inventions of Thales along with the books of his disciples and successors who committed those things to memory—since it is agreed that he himself wrote nothing—as well as the dogmas of the Pythagoreans, Heraclitus, Democritus, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Epicureans, etc., preserved in books, so skillfully that, although we wish he had left us a richer epitome of them, he still ought to be seen to have satisfied both his own plan and his contemporaries. Regarding the Stoics in particular, no one would doubt who knows that our author was himself a Stoic and also a most acute and learned one, but not so slavishly addicted to this sect that he thought he had to swear by every word of the masters. While he used the studies and observations committed to memory by the other supporters of the Stoa in polishing and explaining this doctrine, he especially and often called to his aid the precepts of later ones, such as Posidonius and others, since he knew that they did not depend solely on the teaching of Heraclitus, in the manner of the authors of the Stoa, but that they had examined with an accurate scale both the dogmas and experiments of others gathered from everywhere, and had observed the nature of things by their own study.