Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BCE–65 CE) was a Roman Stoic philosopher, dramatist, statesman, and adviser to the emperor Nero, all during the Silver Age of Latin literature. The Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca is a fresh and compelling series of new English-language translations of his works in eight accessible volumes. Edited by world-renowned classicists Elizabeth Asmis, Shadi Bartsch, and Martha C. Nussbaum, this engaging collection restores Seneca—whose works have been highly praised by modern authors from Desiderius Erasmus to Ralph Waldo Emerson—to his rightful place among the classical writers most widely studied in the humanities.
Written near the end of Seneca’s life, Natural Questions is a work in which Seneca expounds and comments on the natural sciences of his day—rivers and earthquakes, wind and snow, meteors and comets—offering us a valuable look at the ancient scientific mind at work. The modern reader will find fascinating insights into ancient philosophical and scientific approaches to the physical world and also vivid evocations of the grandeur, beauty, and terror of nature.
Following nature in pursuit of ethics.
Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, born at Corduba (Cordova) ca. 4 BC, of a prominent and wealthy family, spent an ailing childhood and youth at Rome in an aunt’s care. He became famous in rhetoric, philosophy, money-making, and imperial service. After some disgrace during Claudius’ reign he became tutor and then, in AD 54, advising minister to Nero, some of whose worst misdeeds he did not prevent. Involved (innocently?) in a conspiracy, he killed himself by order in 65. Wealthy, he preached indifference to wealth; evader of pain and death, he preached scorn of both; and there were other contrasts between practice and principle.
We have Seneca’s philosophical or moral essays (ten of them traditionally called Dialogues)—on providence, steadfastness, the happy life, anger, leisure, tranquility, the brevity of life, gift-giving, forgiveness—and treatises on natural phenomena. Also extant are 124 epistles, in which he writes in a relaxed style about moral and ethical questions, relating them to personal experiences; a skit on the official deification of Claudius, Apocolocyntosis (in LCL 15); and nine rhetorical tragedies on ancient Greek themes. Many epistles and all his speeches are lost.
The treatises on natural phenomena, Naturales Quaestiones, are collected in Volumes VII and X of the Loeb Classical Library’s ten-volume edition of Seneca.
Emanuel Swedenborg understood the city of New Jerusalem--as described in the book of Revelation--to mean not a physical city but an epoch of history, a new spiritual age that was just beginning to take shape during his lifetime in the eighteenth century.
This short work, presented as a series of teachings that characterize this spiritual age to come, is also one of Swedenborg's most concise and readable summaries of his own theology. Building on fundamental concepts such as good, truth, will, and understanding, he describes the importance of love and usefulness in spiritual growth. In the second half of the volume he focuses on how this new theology relates to the church of his day and to church teachings about the Bible, the Lord's incarnation on earth, and rites such as baptism and the Holy Supper. Each short chapter is followed by extensive references back to his theological magnum opus, Secrets of Heaven.
This volume is an excellent starting point for those who want an overview of Swedenborg's theology presented in his own words.
Isaac Newton’s classic writings on light and optics are the heart of this volume in the series, Masterworks of Discovery: Guided Studies of Great Texts in Science. The innovative series is aimed at making the great works of scientific discovery accessible to students and lay readers. For each volume, distinguished historians of science have carefully selected original texts (or extracts) and accompanied them with interpretive commentary, explanatory notes, and bio-bibliographical material. These volumes are not synopses or histories to take the place of the original works. Instead, they enable non-specialists to read these classics for themselves and take an active part in discovering the excitement of scientific discovery.
Newton first revealed his scientific genius in his pathbreaking work on optics and the properties of light. Through Newton’s early 1672 letter to the Royal Society and long extracts from his mature work, Opticks (1704), the reader can follow Newton’s own descriptions of his experiments on prisms and films, his arguments about white and colored light and the “particle” nature of light, and his influential remarks on scientific method. Dennis Sepper’s deft commentaries, diagrams, and notes help clarify difficulties that modern readers are apt to encounter in Newton’s language and science. Sepper also provides an engaging sketch of Newton’s life, the scientific background to these discoveries, and their aftermath.
Antiquity’s most influential account of life’s Supreme Good.
Aristotle, great Greek philosopher, researcher, reasoner, and writer, born at Stagirus in 384 BC, was the son of a physician. He studied under Plato at Athens and taught there (367–347); subsequently he spent three years at the court of a former pupil in Asia Minor. After some time at Mitylene, in 343–342 he was appointed by King Philip of Macedon to be tutor of his teen-aged son Alexander. After Philip’s death in 336, Aristotle became head of his own school (of “Peripatetics”), the Lyceum at Athens. Because of anti-Macedonian feeling there after Alexander’s death in 323, he withdrew to Chalcis in Euboea, where he died in 322.
Nearly all the works Aristotle prepared for publication are lost; the priceless ones extant are lecture-materials, notes, and memoranda (some are spurious). They can be categorized as follows:
I Practical: Nicomachean Ethics; Great Ethics (Magna Moralia); Eudemian Ethics; Politics; Economics (on the good of the family); On Virtues and Vices.
II Logical: Categories; Analytics (Prior and Posterior); Interpretation; Refutations used by Sophists; Topica.
III Physical: Twenty-six works (some suspect) including astronomy, generation and destruction, the senses, memory, sleep, dreams, life, facts about animals, etc.
IV Metaphysics: on being as being.
V Art: Rhetoric and Poetics.
VI Other works including the Constitution of Athens; more works also of doubtful authorship.
VII Fragments of various works such as dialogues on philosophy and literature; and of treatises on rhetoric, politics, and metaphysics.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Aristotle is in twenty-three volumes.
A new English translation of the first text translated from Arabic to Armenian for research and classroom use
Robert W. Thomson translates this ninth-century commentary defending the miaphysite theological position of the Armenian church against the chalcedonian position of the Greek Byzantine church. Nonnus’s exegesis of the gospel falls in the context of trends in Eastern Christian biblical exposition, primarily the Syrian tradition. Therefore, Thomson emphasizes the parallels in Syriac commentaries on the book of John, noting also earlier Greek writers whose works were influential in Syria. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the Armenian church and church history.
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