After centuries of neglect there is renewed interest in the life and works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca (or Seneca the Younger, c 4 BCE-65 CE). At one time an advisor at court to Nero, Seneca and his political career came to ruin when he was implicated in a later plot to kill the capricious and matricidal emperor, and compelled to commit suicide. Discredited through collusion, or at least association, with a notorious and tyrannical regime, Seneca's ideas were for a time also considered derivative of Greek stoicism and thus inferior to the real thing. In this first in-depth introduction to be published for many years, Christopher Star shows what a remarkable statesman, dramatist and philosopher his subject actually was. Seneca's original contributions to political philosophy and the philosophy of the emotions were considerable. He was a favourite authority of Tertullian, who saw Seneca as proto-believer and early humanist. And he is a key figure in the history of ideas and the Renaissance, as well as in literature and drama. This new survey does full justice to his significance.
From acclaimed classical historian, author of Ghost on the Throne a high-stakes drama full of murder, madness, tyranny, perversion, with the sweep of history on the grand scale. At the center, the tumultuous life of Seneca, ancient Rome’s preeminent writer and philosopher, beginning with banishment in his fifties and subsequent appointment as tutor to twelve-year-old Nero, future emperor of Rome. Controlling them both, Nero’s mother, Julia Agrippina the Younger, Roman empress, great-granddaughter of the Emperor Augustus, sister of the Emperor Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Emperor Claudius. James Romm seamlessly weaves together the life and written words, the moral struggles, political intrigue, and bloody vengeance that enmeshed Seneca the Younger in the twisted imperial family and the perverse, paranoid regime of Emperor Nero, despot and madman. Romm writes that Seneca watched over Nero as teacher, moral guide, and surrogate father, and, at seventeen, when Nero abruptly ascended to become emperor of Rome, Seneca, a man never avid for political power became, with Nero, the ruler of the Roman Empire. We see how Seneca was able to control his young student, how, under Seneca’s influence, Nero ruled with intelligence and moderation, banned capital punishment, reduced taxes, gave slaves the right to file complaints against their owners, pardoned prisoners arrested for sedition. But with time, as Nero grew vain and disillusioned, Seneca was unable to hold sway over the emperor, and between Nero’s mother, Agrippina—thought to have poisoned her second husband, and her third, who was her uncle (Claudius), and rumored to have entered into an incestuous relationship with her son—and Nero’s father, described by Suetonius as a murderer and cheat charged with treason, adultery, and incest, how long could the young Nero have been contained? Dying Every Day is a portrait of Seneca’s moral struggle in the midst of madness and excess. In his treatises, Seneca preached a rigorous ethical creed, exalting heroes who defied danger to do what was right or embrace a noble death. As Nero’s adviser, Seneca was presented with a more complex set of choices, as the only man capable of summoning the better aspect of Nero’s nature, yet, remaining at Nero’s side and colluding in the evil regime he created. Dying Every Day is the first book to tell the compelling and nightmarish story of the philosopher-poet who was almost a king, tied to a tyrant—as Seneca, the paragon of reason, watched his student spiral into madness and whose descent saw five family murders, the Fire of Rome, and a savage purge that destroyed the supreme minds of the Senate’s golden age.
Official records produced by the armies of the United States and the Confederacy, and the executive branches of their respective governments, concerning the military operations of the Civil War, and prisoners of war or prisoners of state. Also annual reports of military departments, calls for troops, correspondence between national and state governments, correspondence between Union and Confederate officials. The final volume includes a synopsis, general index, special index for various military divisions, and background information on how these documents were collected and published. Accompanied by an atlas.
Sixteen-year-old math genius Doro Campbell seizes the opportunity to join Seneca--a secretive, technologically advanced subterranean utopia dedicated improving the future--but soon she and biotechnology whiz Dominic Ambrosia uncover deceptions within the community.
From the hills and valleys of the eastern Confederate states to the sun-drenched plains of Missouri and "Bleeding Kansas," a vicious, clandestine war was fought behind the big-battle clashes of the American Civil War. In the east, John Singleton Mosby became renowned for the daring hit-and-run tactics of his rebel horsemen. Here a relatively civilized war was fought; women and children usually left with a roof over their heads. But along the Kansas-Missouri border it was a far more brutal clash; no quarter given. William Clarke Quantrill and William "Bloody Bill" Anderson became notorious for their savagery.
The central character of this story, Richard Beasley, was indeed a man of some prominence in the years just before and the decades after the creation of this province. A descendant has cast his ancestor's biography as a personal narrative - a drama with famous players indeed: Richard Cartwright, Major John Butler, Chief Joseph Brant and Isaac Brock as well as Family Compact members John Strachan and John Beverley Robinson along with radicals Robert Gourlay and William Lyon Mackenzie. Readers who enjoy fictionalized scenes with imaginatively created dialogue, all based on extensive research, will welcome this volume and its fresh approach to an important historical period.—OHS BULLETIN .
