The subjugation of grief in Seneca's Epistles

Abstract

The consolation is perhaps the paradigmatic instance of the therapeutic mode of philosophising. Grief, like a disease, corrodes the soul which must be restored to its proper state of healthy equilibrium by applied remedies in the form of appropriate arguments and encouragements calculated to expel the disruptive passion. While the therapeutic metaphor serves to highlight an essential facet of Hellenistic and Roman philosophy, some of its implications are potentially misleading, in particular, the dichotomy it sets up between the sick, helpless patient and the healthy, proficient therapist. It presupposes a physician sufficiently calm and detached to make accurate diagnoses and offer apt and salutary counsel; a patient whose needs are primarily negative, to obtain release from pain and illness; a one-way process from which the sufferer, but not the healer, emerges healthier; a relationship of a basically professional type, a characterisation which may, in some cases, overshadow other aspects equally or even more philosophically significant (such as friendship). Another dimension of the consolatio overlooked by the therapy analogy is that it is also a literary form. Since its intended audience is wider than the immediate addressee, its function is commonly not purely therapeutic; through allusion to other texts the context in which the advice is delivered may be stretched; the medical imagery may be diversified with other kinds of comparison; the language may not be precise and consistent but suggestive and ambiguous; tone may shift from composed to animated and vice versa; generic conventions may not be followed so much as exploited or even remodelled; in suppressing one strong emotion, others may be vented or provoked.

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