Philosophical Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Vol. 3

Th. de Juges. Instructed by such resources, such men certainly ought to have done work worth the effort; and, for the most part, they undoubtedly did. For which reason it ought to seem less surprising that, after Gronovius, for a full century and more, the efforts of learned men devoted to Seneca had almost ceased: in which space of time you find only the edition of Gronovius repeated several times, with the occasional addition of a selection of those things which had been annotated on this author by previous editors. Finally, in most recent memory, occupying the province abandoned by others, Frid. Ern. Ruhkopf, Director of the Gymnasium at Bielefeld, began to publish The Works of Seneca the Philosopher, Newly Recognized and Illustrated at Leipzig in 1797, to be completed in six volumes; of which, to this day, only four have been brought to light (of which the second and third, which appeared in the years 1800 and 1805, contain the Epistles to Lucilius). The remaining two volumes are still awaited¹. Since these things are so, and since it may seem not without reason that it is asked of me by what arguments I was moved, or in what confidence I have trusted, that I should now, most especially, take up the plan of re-editing those same Epistles of Seneca, upon which all those most learned men I have named labored in correcting and polishing, it will be appropriate that I set forth in a few words both the occasion that was offered to me for undertaking this task and the rationale of our plan in general.

Among the remaining works of our Philosopher, these Moral Epistles, written to Lucilius, had always seemed to me to excel for many reasons; I freely profess that not only was I singularly delighted by reading them from my early youth, but that in many and various difficulties of times, which I have subsequently experienced, my soul was frequently refreshed and strengthened by them. Whence it had often come to my mind to wish that this book might be more frequently handled by the hands of young and old: that this was indeed customary in the past is understood both from the great number of surviving manuscript codices which contain Seneca’s Epistles, and from several...

¹ These were written in the year 1809; but now the fifth volume has been brought to light, and the sixth is still expected, as we noted in our preface prefaced to the first volume. ED.