Abstract

In his remedy for grief, Seneca rehearses familiar Stoic arguments regarding the need to reconcile oneself to Fortune yet is not content with the efficacy of these strategies. Seneca’s hortatory rhetoric and the models he recommends for appropriation emphasize not the exercise of reason but the need for courageous self-command as a fitting strategy for the repudiation of sorrow. In a departure from Stoic orthodoxy, Seneca concedes that loss constitutes an injury and locates well-being in a vulnerability to sorrow valorized by heroic endurance.