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The epilogue briefly reiterates the rationale behind looking at Seneca's death simultaneously through the different ancient historical narratives, through Seneca's own writings, and through the numerous subsequent receptions. It also speculates on where future discoveries about Seneca's death are most likely to come. It closes by noting the heuristic limitations on the capacity of Seneca's death to inform our own individual experience of death.

Following an analysis of the economic and ecological bases of society in the pre-Christian Mediterranean world, this chapter studies how and why the pre-Persian Greek pólis-world evolved — charting the rise of Athens, the rise of Persian Greek kingship, then the rise of Rome and the gradual absorption of the entire Mediterranean region into the Roman empire. It discusses what pre-Christian Greek and Roman authors — such as Plátôn (Plato), Aristotle, Isokrátês (Isocrates), Polýbios (Polybius), Sallust, Seneca, and Tacitus — had to say on the mutual relations of autonomous actors in the Mediterranean world. A special section is dedicated to an analysis of Thukydídês (Thucydides), showing that contrary to received wisdom he was far from an ancestor of Realist International Relations thought. In particular, he did not believe and never said that the ‘Peloponnesian War’ broke out because of a shift in the ‘balance of power’.

What is the missing element in the analysis of emotion as value judgement which Posidonius tried to fill with his movements of soul capacities? Perhaps the bodily reactions, only sometimes noticed, set up by the amygdala or other parts of the brain. Joseph LeDoux has argued that in fear these can occur independently of, and even before, the judgement of danger. They may be triggered by perception of something that we do not recognize as having been associated with a past danger, so that our bodies are a-tremble without our knowing why, or continue even after we have disowned judgements of danger. They may also correspond to Seneca's first movements before any judgement of danger, and to William James' being sad because we cry. Stoic therapy for emotions is cognitive, and attacks judgements very effectively. But we can see why in some cases a physical therapy may be needed.

Except for committed Stoics, the Stoices do not include their idiosyncratic and unacceptable view in their therapy, castigated by Bernard Williams that everything is indifferent except character and rationality. Health and wealth, they concede, are naturally preferable objectives and must be pursued energetically for oneself and others. But their value lies not in themselves, but in the fact that good character, the only real good, is exercised in the right pursuit of natural objectives. Nor need the unacceptable Stoic view that most emotions include a wrong evaluation of indifferent things as if they were actually good be followed. But something can be learnt from the Stoics, because many of our emotions are unwanted, and for these, the effectiveness of their cognitive therapy is vividly illustrated in Cicero and Seneca.

The ancients offered a huge range of therapeutic exercises. Some ward off future emotion, some deal with emotion that has already arisen from a past occurrence. Chrysippus' emphasis on re-evaluating situations is a therapy for emotions, whereas Posidonius' reversion to Plato would have helped with moods as well. Pythagoreans, Democritus, Epicureans, Cynics, Aristo of Ceos (Aristotelian), Plutarch, and Galen all make contributions. The poet Ovid parodies the philosophers' therapies. All this is echoed in Christianity, but the Stoics are outstanding, Epictetus the ex-slave sterner, Seneca the aristocrat more adapted to ordinary discomforts. In recent times, Epictetus enabled Admiral Stockdale to withstand torture and solitary confinement, and his account shows how even the sterner therapies could work in practice.

The term ‘free will’ appears first in Lucretius' Latin, but will plays little role in accounts of freedom until Augustine, and that innovation was not clarifying. The concept of will was composed by Augustine out of elements that had flourished better in pagan philosophy when separate. ‘Will’ translates Greek boulêsis or thelêsis. Freedom and responsibility are treated together in Plato's Republic, but will power is treated separately, and none are discussed under the name boulêsis by him or until Posidonius. In Aristotle, boulêsis is a rational desire for end not means, and for good not pleasure or honour, but it is not closely connected with freedom, responsibility or will power. A connexion between will (voluntas) and responsibility (voluntarius) emerges in Seneca's Latin, but his will is not distinct from reason. Alexander (Aristotelian) follows Epictetus (Stoic), who first tied responsibility closely to Aristotle's prohairesis, rational desire for means.

Zeno of Citium, the Stoic founder, had tried out other definitions of emotion. One, defended by Chrysippus, was that emotion involves oscillating, like Medea, between accepting the right value judgement and disobeying it. But disobedience to reason is not the same as mistake. How can it be, and is it ever, combined with mistake? The Stoic Seneca (1st century CE) allows this by distinguishing three movements in anger. The first movement is the appearance that revenge is appropriate and the resulting shock to soul or body. The second is the mistaken assent to the appearance that revenge is appropriate. The third movement — the full emotion — moves from mistake to disobedience with the judgement that revenge is to be pursued, appropriate or not.

First movements of the soul for the Stoic materialists include bites, which are small contractions of the physical soul sensed in distress. First movements of the body include pallor, tears, and sexual irritation. All are involuntary shocks unlike the judgements which constitute emotion, and emotional therapy should ignore them as unimportant. First movements are first clearly described by Cicero, bites by Galen. For Seneca (1st century CE), Posidonius' revision of Stoicism around 100 BCE was wrong to say that emotion can occur without the relevant judgements in the case of animals, of disowned judgements, and of emotion changed by wordless music. In all three cases we have not emotion, but only first movements.

According to Seneca, the arts, including tragedy and music, can only produce first movements. So Aristotle's claim that tragedy and comedy produce catharsis by arousing emotion is wrong, as is Posidonius' belief in wordless music changing emotion without changing judgements. But, pace Seneca, there is a residue of cases of genuine emotion about the content of the play or about the melody, and a better defence of Stoicism in these cases would be that the relevant judgements are there. But when wordless music changes emotion, Posidonius prefers to say that the emotion is non-judgemental; Philodemus, his Epicurean contemporary, says that the emotion persists and one is merely distracted. The debate involved Pythagoreans, the Stoics Zeno and Diogenes of Babylon, and later Augustine.

For Posidonius, the value judgements proposed by Chrysippus are not sufficient for emotion because they can remain intact while emotion fades through exhaustion, and because emotion requires us also to imagine what is judged and to pay attention to it. Posidonius' explanation is that in exhaustion and without imagination, the movements of the irrational capacities are missing. These movements are spatial movements of physical soul, but not yet identified, like Seneca's first movements, with contractions and suchlike. Further, whereas Posidonius' emphasis is that in special cases the movements can be sufficient for emotion, Seneca's emphasis is that first movements need not lead on to emotion at all, because emotion is something of a very different kind, namely judgement.

This chapter offers a challenge to the classification of Seneca's tragedies as ‘rhetorical tragedies’ or declamations. Although the idea that Seneca's tragedies might have been partially danced had been suggested as early as the 1920s, the chapter argues that Seneca's tragedies contain several types of passage that point precisely to the character of a fabula saltata (‘danced story’), and that this suggests that even if Seneca did not write them specifically for pantomime performance, that is as libretti, he may have been influenced by the new aesthetics and conventions of the popular medium in the composition of these scenes. He may have been visualising, as he wrote, a theatrical performance with dance and music rather than a recitation. He may have hoped that his new kind of tragedy, suited to the taste of the Neronian period, could offer a substitute for the popular genres of theatre.

In the development of the study of the affinity between parts of Senecan tragedy and what we know about the texts (libretti) danced in pantomime, the author of this chapter (a trained dancer herself) looks at three features in the dramas that have often been criticised: their loose dramatic structure, running commentaries on another participant's actions, and lengthy narrative set‐pieces. In close readings of key texts from several plays, including Troades, Agamemnon and Hercules Furens, the chapter shows how apparently intractable problems related to the possibility of staging the plays disappear entirely if pantomimic performances formed part of the entertainment; moreover, the very verse construction, rhythm, and style display features that would offer great potential for choreographic realization by a dancer. This has important implications for our understanding of Seneca's dramaturgy.

Seneca used poetic vocabulary in his prose. Such statements seem ultimately to be based on the work of Summers and Bourgery. The work of Summers is the best short introduction to Seneca’s prose style. Bourgery spread his net rather more widely than Summers, listing first phrases in Seneca’s prose that are reminiscences of specific passages of earlier Latin poets. Five general observations on the methodology used by Summers and Bourgery are shown. The chapter also takes account of these observations as it first revisits the approach of Summers and Bourgery, and then shows how different approaches can be used to look for poetic elements in Seneca’s prose. The categories of word, namely (1) words absent from both Cicero’s and Seneca’s prose, (2) words whose absence from Seneca’s prose is probably accidental, (3) words that are common in earlier prose but not found in Seneca’s prose, and (4) words mainly found in poetry, but also in Cicero’s prose, are described. There have been a number of predominantly poetic words that are used by Cicero in his prose, but not by Seneca in his; and it is seen how genre and context are important for understanding Cicero’s uses of these words.

This chapter provides a general introduction to Roman Stoicism, especially in relation to the field of ethics. A brief overview is given of the historical setting of the Stoic school in Rome in the first two centuries CE. Some of the main philosophical characteristics of the school are described, such as the doctrine of universal humanity, and the close relationship between ethics and theology in Stoicism is discussed. The chapter also defines what is meant by the phrase ‘Roman Stoicism’, and lists its main sources, including Cicero, Seneca, Musonius Rufus, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. The Stoic sources which are specifically consulted in the present study are then determined. These include Seneca, Musonius, and Epictetus.