G. D. KOELER

DISQUISITION

L. ANNAEUS SENECA’S

NATURAL QUESTIONS.

If anyone who intends to explain an ancient author does not look into his work as a whole with the same, or indeed greater, diligence than that with which he interprets individual parts, or if he entirely neglects this higher part of his duty—which one might call the hermeneutical part—as happens so often, he is like a man curiously inspecting the interior of some house, yet not knowing what form that house takes, not having viewed it from the outside, nor what relation its parts have to one another. Such an interpreter of the ancients is not properly nourished by the antiquarian larder; he is not inspired by the spirit of antiquity: the genius of that man certainly does not reside deep within his veins and marrow. What wonder, then, that his reason and hermeneutical power, which operate within those lower and narrower regions, along with his critical judgment—when, not perceiving the context of the whole, he overlooks lacunae and gaps, and fails to detect interpolations and foreign matter—are not as vigorous, stable, constant, and circumspect as they ought and deserve to be. A vain study of vain things has almost absorbed their natural vigor; they have nothing more important than