F. E. RUHKOPF, I

to amend the soul. Consequently, unless excellent resolutions for living a good life arise in the mind from reading these carefully—unless the right is approved while the worse is trampled and rejected, and the only good things, which are therefore the honorable ones, appear most eagerly to be sought and put into action—one might well fear that no sufficiently suitable fruit could be gathered from the reading of other books, however useful they may be. And if the cultivation of the intellect ought to be placed in this—that the faculties of the mind have the means by which they may be developed through meditating, comparing, thinking, and discovering—surely you would not say that these epistles lack excellent material by which those powers may be cultivated and formed. We therefore rightly congratulate ourselves that Seneca’s intention of writing for posterity, declared by him more than once¹, succeeded so well, and that by some trick of fortune this volume of epistles has been transmitted to us, esteemed highly for over seventeen centuries and counting².

When compared with the other epistles left to us from Antiquity, it will easily surpass all of them, if you except Cicero. For the letters of Cicero, besides many remarkable things, contain so many and such great indices and documents pertaining to the history of that time, which cannot be sought elsewhere or which are already of sufficient weight by themselves, since they proceeded from a man of such authority and such importance to the affairs of his time, that they would not be deferred even on that account, were it not that their elegance and other gifts of speech, in which Cicero surpasses all the writers of his nation, justly and deservedly grant him the primary place. Judgment must be passed far differently regarding the epistles of Pliny the Younger. Even if I were to grant that they snatch the palm from Seneca in the polish and elegance of their language, nevertheless the subjects themselves which they treat are so far from possessing the same excellence that they do not even permit a comparison.

Furthermore, Seneca’s moral epistles must be considered a unique specimen of their kind.

¹ See, for example, Ep. XXI, 5: What Epicurus could promise his friend, I promise you, Lucilius. I possess favor among posterity; I can produce names that will endure with my own.

² For it is clear that not all of Seneca’s moral epistles have survived to our time from Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights XII, 2, where he praises certain things from book XXII of the Epistles, which are among those lost. Regarding the division of the Epistles into books, cf. Fabricius, Bibl. Lat. Vol. II, p. 107, note q, ed. Ern.