Chapter 9 - The Challenge of the Phaedrus

Summary

Chapter 9 assesses Seneca’s claim in the Letters on Ethics to provide moral benefits to his future readers. Although he may not have read Plato’s Phaedrus, Seneca is certainly aware of the arguments Socrates makes there concerning the efficacy of writing. In his own work, Seneca sometimes seems to echo Plato’s points that writing cannot improve the character of the reader because it lacks the immediacy, the adaptability, and the interactive possibilities of spoken discourse. At the same time, however, he comments both explicitly and implicitly on the means by which a written work can indeed take on some of those characteristics when it is presented in the novel format adopted for the Letters on Ethics. Invoking the commonplace that letters have the potential to make the absent present, he develops a variety of strategies for creating a lively sense of authorial presence, for training the reader in methods of application, and for engaging the reader in a quasi-dialogic interaction with the text. Further, he explores the emotional dimension of the reader’s experience in ways that are surprising for an author of his Stoic commitments.