• Abbreviations


• Introduction


• I. Interiority and Cosmic Consciousness in the Natural Questions


• II. Seneca's Moralizing Interludes


• III. The Cataclysm and the Nile


• IV. The Rhetoric of Science


• V. Seneca on Winds


• VI. Earthquakes, Consolation, and the Senecan Sublime


• VII. Seneca on Comets and Ancient Cometary Theory


• VIII. Seneca on Lightning and Divination


• Epilogue


• Bibliography


• Index of Passages


• General Index


• Index of Latin Words


• Index of Greek Words

Gareth D. Williams is Violin Family Professor of Classics at Columbia University. His most recent book, co-edited with Katharina Volk, is Roman Reflections.

Seneca's Natural Questions is an eight-book disquisition on the nature of meteorological phenomena, ranging inter alia from rainbows to earthquakes, from comets to the winds, from the causes of snow and hail to the reasons why the Nile floods in summer. Much of this material had been treated in the earlier Greco-Roman meteorological tradition, but what notoriously sets Seneca's writing apart is his insertion of extended moralizing sections within his technical discourse. How, if at all, are these outbursts against the luxury and vice that are apparently rampant in Seneca's first-century CE Rome to be reconciled with his main meteorological agenda?