5. Seneca's Ideas and his World

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this module, we think about how Seneca's ideas about love and relationships (so far as we can tell what they were) would have been received in contemporary Roman society, focusing in particular on: (i) Seneca's views on marriage; (ii) his views on social equality; (iii) his philosophical 'strategy' in his letters; (iv) his criticism of sexual double-standards; (v) the extent to which Seneca's views undermine traditional family hierarchies, and especially the figure of the paterfamilias; and (vi) the extent to which Seneca himself was a doctrinaire Stoic.

Course

In this course, Dr Liz Gloyn (Royal Holloway, University of London) thinks about Seneca's attitudes towards love and relationships in a course designed for the 'Love and Relationships' option for OCR A Level Classical Civilization (H408/32). in the first module, we think about the figure of Seneca and the key principles of Stoicism. After, we think about the Stoic view of love, before turning in the third module to consider Seneca's attitude to marriage. In the fourth module, we think about Seneca's attitude to homosexual love, before turning in the fifth module to consider how Seneca's views on love and relationships might have been received in contemporary Roman society. To what extent, in other words, do Seneca's views on love and relationships represent prevailing attitudes at the time?

Further details on all the topics discussed in this course, including English translations of the surviving fragments Seneca's On Marriage, can be found on Dr Gloyn's blog Classically Inclined.

Lecturer

Dr Liz Gloyn is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Classics at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research focuses on the intersections between Latin literature, ancient philosophy and gender studies, with a particular focus on Seneca the Younger and his approach to Stoicism and family. Her previous publications include The Ethics of the Family in Seneca (2017), while her current book project explores the way that contemporary popular culture imagines and uses classical monsters, and will be published 2019.