Places Suburban and Serious

This chapter considers the role played by location in conditioning the meaning of Seneca's death. It looks first at the imagined location of his death in his suburban villa (as described by Tacitus), comparing this with the role played by the villa especially in Seneca's Epistulae morales 12. It also speculates on the associations of Seneca's supposed recent return from Campania: the epistolary Seneca had represented himself traveling around the Campanian moral landscape, and in letter 86 had recounted his visit to the ruined villa at Liternum where Scipio Africanus lived out the years of his exemplary exile. The chapter shows the role played by these locations in later receptions of the death, and looks at the appropriation of letter 86 by Petrarch, who repeatedly revisited Seneca's veneration of the dead Scipio.

Ancient history · Appropriation · Art · Epistemology · Literature · Meaning (existential) · Veneration · Classical Antiquity Studies · Historical and Religious Studies of Rome · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies · History · Philosophy

• The Road to Sicily

  Open Access•Emily Gowers•Ramus•2011

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