you brought it on yourself miss twiddle

Things I read over the last couple of days:

"Bitterly opposed as I am to anthologizing in general -- it is not only the history of the declining Roman Empire that teaches us how the epitomizers and anthologists move in not more than a century before the barbarian hordes -- I would make an exception of Seneca's prose works."-- C.J. Herington, "Senecan Tragedy"Arion 5.4 (1966), p. 433

"In AD 41, the year of his father's death and the first of Claudius' reign, he was exiled to Corsica for committing adultery with the Emperor's niece Julia. He spent his time there in philosophical reflection and writing, which is about all you can do on the island." Henry and Walker, G&R, 1963, p. 99.

"This is contemptuous in tone...but it is a reference of a kind so common in Tacitus that we may attribute it here largely to absent-minded malice" -- iidem, p. 101

"few would react with ready speech when woken in the middle of the night and told by an ex-pupil that he has failed to murder his mother and wants to have another try." --iidem (103)

"This reads as though Tacitus, feeling compelled to allow Seneca a proper appearance, had in the event been defeated by boredom. Stale similes, stale and conventional phrasing make Seneca's last attempt to escape the mesh a matter of indifference to writer and reader alike." --iidem (105 n. 1)

(on Tacitus on Seneca) "His sympathetic understanding reveals something of his own personality and ideals -- in short, the man of letters who serves the 'res public' to the best of his ability, without illusions and with little hope." (Syme, Tacitus, p. 582)

This is a nifty quote about the effect of reading history on the reader, and I can't believe I never came across it before!

Anger must be escaped with learned instructions; that is, the conscious fault of the mind, not the sort that occurs by some condition of human existence and therefore happens even to the wisest; chief among this sort of thing is that blow to the mind which moves us after becoming conscious of an injury. [3] This happens even at staged plays and while reading history. Often, we seem to get angry at Clodius when he is exiling Cicero and at Antony when he is killing him. Who is not stirred up against Marius's arms, against Sulla's Proscriptions? Who is not enraged at Theodotus and Achillas and 'that boy who dared no boyish crime'? [4] Sometimes even song incites us, and a stirring tune or the martial sound of the trumpet; the mind is disturbed by horrifying paintings and grim sight of even the most just executions. [5] This is why we smile at those who laugh and a crowd of mourners make us sad and we blow our tops at others' contests. This is not anger, no more than it is sorrow that makes us frown at the sight of an imitation shipwreck, no more than it is fear which runs through the minds of readers when Hannibal is besieging the walls after Cannae: rather, all of these are movements of minds that move not of their own volition: not emotions, but the first preludes of emotions. [6] So a veteran's ears, even when he is a civilian during peacetime, are sometimes aroused by the trumpet, and the clank of weapons stirs up army horses. They say that Alexander put his hand to his weapon while Xenophantes was reciting. (Seneca, De Ira, 2.2.2-6)

(NOTES: Theodotus and Achillas and that boy...: Ptolemy XII and his two advisers, who murdered Pompeius Magnus when he sought refuge in Egypt in 48 BC.

imitation shipwreck: slightly disturbing example of "fake emotion" in that a "mimicum naufragium" might well be a staged arena spectacle in which people were actually dying.

Xenophantes: A musician at the court of Alexander? Anyway, this passage is sort of interesting as an ancient reference to PTSD.)

I wonder if I could pitch an article to the Toast on the theme of "a partial list of people and things described as "sinister" in the works of Sir Ronald Syme." If there were a classics-themed The Toast, perhaps.