Philosophical Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Vol. 4

us, and that God has an interest in us: but since it pleases [us] to pluck a particle from the whole, and to solve one contradiction while the main controversy remains intact, I shall do a thing not difficult: I shall plead the cause of the gods. It is superfluous for the present to show that such a great work does not stand without some guardian, nor that this...

work on Providence is mentioned. But what follows from that? Either this was prefixed to the work before it was finished, as a prelude, a programma; or it was added after the work was published, as an appendix and a garland.
1. When we were proving that Providence presides over all. Pincianus proposed: where... we prove. But this is a Stoic decree, taken from the school of Socrates. Cf. Tiedemann, Geist der Spekul. Philosoph. T. II, p. 553, ff. It is also a dogma of the Academics which Cicero defends, Nat. Deor. ch. 71, etc.
2. While the controversy remains intact. I.e., other questions about Providence, e.g., does it exist? Is it perpetual? Is it everywhere? Does it embrace even the smallest things, and as it cares for the wealth and disasters of cities, and the prosperous and adverse affairs of princes, so does it care for the hopes, fears, angers, hatreds, and loves of private little men, and finally for their entire life? Then, if you turn yourself to more remote things, nor are they, however, discordant, whether God Himself is it, or a power of God? Whether it is to be believed the same as fate? And very many things of that kind. See these in Proclus' Ten Doubts on Providence.
3. I shall plead the cause of the gods. A mere man will plead the cause of the gods? Some detractor of Seneca says at this place: "O proud and arrogant impiety!" But what, pray, is more arrogant here, what more impious than the much-talked-of epiphonema in the verses of Claudian just praised: "Did the punishment of Rufinus finally remove this tumult, and absolve the gods?" Which men of the best reputation imitated with great applause, Lebrun, in the didactic poem la Nature, lib. I:

"Until the day when, breaking an odious sleep,
The thunderbolt must finally justify the gods."

and Loyson, Ode on the Russian Campaign:

"The Eternal receives it (the blood) in the urn of vengeance
And meditates in silence
The blow that must absolve Him in the eyes of the universe."

And the most pious Racine did not fear to bring forward more in his Andromache (Act III, scene 1), when Orestes bursts out into these:

"I know not what unjust power, from all time,
Leaves crime in peace, and pursues innocence.
Wherever I turn my eyes upon me,
I see only misfortunes that condemn the gods."

That is, it is one of the rhetorical figures, rare indeed, but not insipid or ineffective, which the best writer of such things, Fontanier, called a paradoxism, because it leaps out from an unusual and unexpected association of words. As that of Lucan about Ptolemy, almost the last: "The boy king rejoices in the unusual honor, and because his servants permit him to command such great things"; or that of the Aquinate poet in the famous episode: "The Augusta harlot dared to take the nightly hoods"; or finally that of the Bilbilite [Martial], lib. I, Epigr. L, vs. 34: "Have pity on the happy"; which one of our countrymen emulated and said:

"Take pity on our glory!"

4. Not without some guardian, etc. He touches on the opinion of Epicurus. Cf. Tie-