INTRODUCTION xlvii 



astronomical and physiological, subjects. Diels (pp. cit. 

 65) scouts the idea of the genuineness of the &quot;wretched 

 epitome,&quot; and assigns it to the middle of the second 

 century. Whether this be so or not does not much affect 

 its value for us. The existence of the work shows the 

 nature of the material which was available in Seneca s 

 age. The work is a kind of distant echo of Theo- 

 phrastus lost treatise and preserves many opinions of the 

 older philosophers, of which, to say the least of it, we 

 should otherwise have been less fully informed. The 

 parallelism of the Placita to the Q.N. will appear from 

 a few of the titles. Books II. and III. of the former 

 reproduce a long array of opinions of Thales, Empedocles, 

 Anaxagoras, Diogenes, Anaximenes, Democritus, Xeno- 

 phanes, Xenocrates, not to mention Plato, Aristotle, the 

 Pythagoreans, the Stoics, etc., etc., regarding such sub 

 jects as Eclipses, the Milky Way, Comets, Earthquakes, 

 Clouds, Winds, Thunder and Lightning, etc., etc. 



Plutarch also has questions regarding Aratus Prog 

 nostics, and a Miscellanea of discussions on allied sub 

 jects. 



Of Latin writers two have special bearing on Seneca. 

 Lucretius (95-51 B.C.), in his great poem on Nature (De 

 Rerum Natura\ has expounded the Epicurean view of the 

 universe. In so far as science is capable of metrical and 

 poetical exposition, he ranks high among scientific writers ; 

 while the recent resuscitation of the atomic theory lends 

 special interest to his views. The Romans were always a 

 practical and not a speculative nation, and any deviation 

 from the type, such as Lucretius or Seneca, becomes 

 especially noteworthy and valuable. Numerous parallelisms 

 between them have been brought out in the Commentary 

 and Notes appended to this Translation. 



Pliny the Elder stands in respect of date in much the 

 same relation to Seneca as Plutarch does. His great 

 work on Natural History, which was addressed to the 

 reigning Emperor, Vespasian, was published in the year 

 77, that is, about a dozen years after Seneca s death. 

 We have already glanced at the bearing of this date upon 



