Abstract

This dissertation argues that the younger Seneca uses food and eating throughout his corpus as a way of teaching Stoicism in the Latin language within his first-century Imperial Roman environment. Eating, a popular theme in much Latin literature of the Republic and early Empire, is a way of bridging philosophy and literature; since Seneca authors the first Stoic pedagogical project written in the Latin language, he needs to find ways to relate to his Roman readership. Writing about eating thus helps makes Stoicism attractive and accessible to a Roman literary audience. In order to incorporate eating within his own brand of Stoicism, I argue that Seneca must provide a gloss on Republican moralists, especially Cato and Sallust, who view the human belly as a wholly negative thing, since in Seneca’s revamped version of Roman eating the belly is a digesting organ with a job to do. I build on Seneca’s rehabilitation of the Republican belly by arguing that he revises the Roman cultural institution of the exemplum, a concept of great importance to Roman norm-setting, in order to emphasize its appropriateness to eating. There are limitations in highlighting exemplary eaters in order to teach proper eating habits, however, since the exempla that Seneca details all eat either extremely excessively or only very simple foods. So that he can address foods that are popular in contemporary literature, Seneca turns to the genre of satire, which has an intrinsic connection to food and eating, in order to revisit the concept of eating in Roman literature and make it aid his Stoic philosophical message. Lastly, since Seneca emphasizes the need of his reader, the aspiring Stoic, not only to read his text but also to be literarily and philosophically productive themselves, I argue that Seneca uses the Latin literary trope of “literary consumption” (that is, the theme of eating literature) in order to inculcate proper habits in his readers, who consume Seneca’s text (including the subject matter detailed throughout this dissertation) and must productively reproduce the Stoic life lessons that he encourages. Seneca’s relationship with eating in Roman literature is thus one of reception and revision, as his goal in writing is to reconcile Stoicism with Roman literature and Roman literature with Stoicism.