Five More Seneca Commentaries

I have been intending to update my list of commentaries on Seneca’s Epistulae Morales, especially since Jeremias Grau told me in a comment on my last update about three I did not know: two German PhD theses (one of them his own) that will be published as books in the next year or two, and a recent commentary on letter 104 that I had missed (Lemmens 2015). I have now (six months later – oops) added these three, plus two more, one that just came out (Li Causi 2019) and one that I had unfairly neglected (Trapp 2003). Pietro Li Causi’s is a collective commentary on 124, written with his students, only available as a free on-line PDF, which I know from John Henderson’s review in BMCR. Michael Trapp’s is the Cambridge ‘green and gold’ collection of Greek and Roman Letters, which includes detailed notes on two short letters (38 and 61) and the opening of a longer one (75.1-5), all three relatively neglected by full-time Seneca commentators.

If anyone knows of others I have missed, please let me know: I have a feeling I may have seen one more. The number of letters that get no love from any commentator or translator of selected letters is now down to eight, or will be when the three dissertations at the end of my bibliography come out in book form: 45, 69, 74, 81, 89, 98, 109, and 111. If someone is looking for a thesis topic, one or more of these would make a good one.

As I mentioned in my last update almost a year ago, some day I hope to find the time to transform my list of Seneca commentaries into a data base for easier and more flexible searching, allowing users to sort the bibliography by date (as it is now) or alphabetically, or to filter the results to include only one or a few or a range of letters, and to filter commentaries by language, or by level (scholarly vs elementary), by whether they include text, translation, both, or neither, and so on. If I’ve forgotten any important criterion for sorting or filtering, please let me know.

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