L. ANNAEUS SENECA

ON BENEFITS.




PREFACE

Seneca, the favourite classic of the early fathers of the church
and of the Middle Ages, whom Jerome, Tertullian, and Augustine
speak of as "Seneca noster," who was believed to have corresponded
with St. Paul, and upon whom [Footnote: On the "De Clementia," an
odd subject for the man who burned Servetus alive for differing
with him.] Calvin wrote a commentary, seems almost forgotten in
modern times. Perhaps some of his popularity may have been due to
his being supposed to be the author of those tragedies which the
world has long ceased to read, but which delighted a period that
preferred Euripides to Aeschylus: while casuists must have found
congenial matter in an author whose fantastic cases of conscience
are often worthy of Sanchez or Escobar. Yet Seneca's morality is
always pure, and from him we gain, albeit at second hand, an
insight into the doctrines of the Greek philosophers, Zeno,
Epicurus, Chrysippus, &c., whose precepts and system of religious
thought had in cultivated Roman society taken the place of the old
worship of Jupiter and Quirinus.

Since Lodge's edition (fol. 1614), no complete translation of
Seneca has been published in England, though Sir Roger L'Estrange
wrote paraphrases of several Dialogues, which seem to have been