Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Twelve steps to haven
- 2 Dropping in (it) at SENECA'S
- 3 You can get used to anything
- 4 The long and winding mode
- 5 Booking us in
- 6 Now and then; here and there: at SCIPIO'S
- 7 Bound for VATIA'S
- 8 Knocking the self: genuflexion, villafication, VATIA'S
- 9 The world of the bath-house: SCIPIO'S
- 10 The appliance of science: SCIPIO'S
- 11 Shafts of light: transplantation and transfiguration
- 12 Still olive, still SCIPIO'S
- Appendix 1 Here to stay Places and persons named in the Epistulae Morales
- Appendix 2 From: Letter 86 To: A Dying Light in Corduba
- Bibliography
- Indexes
2 - Dropping in (it) at SENECA'S
With text and translation of Letter 12
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Twelve steps to haven
- 2 Dropping in (it) at SENECA'S
- 3 You can get used to anything
- 4 The long and winding mode
- 5 Booking us in
- 6 Now and then; here and there: at SCIPIO'S
- 7 Bound for VATIA'S
- 8 Knocking the self: genuflexion, villafication, VATIA'S
- 9 The world of the bath-house: SCIPIO'S
- 10 The appliance of science: SCIPIO'S
- 11 Shafts of light: transplantation and transfiguration
- 12 Still olive, still SCIPIO'S
- Appendix 1 Here to stay Places and persons named in the Epistulae Morales
- Appendix 2 From: Letter 86 To: A Dying Light in Corduba
- Bibliography
- Indexes
Summary
Gardening is not about those mythical ‘green fingers’. Gardeners know that the plants, the trees, the staff, and the grounds are the identity they create for themselves by doing every single thing that can be done, over and over, as the year wheels about. The peculiar boon of growing into your garden is, since time immemorial, that you live the life-cycle a million times, through the plants; you have the best chance of anyone to grab the moral for your own life, wherever you knock around. Ever since Homer wound up the Odyssey so touchingly with Laertes in his idyllic plot on Ithaca, ‘hoeing around’ the plants until his son came home to take care of his family, ‘getting to know vines and counting up the fruit-trees’ has imaged an idealized existence with hearts and values in the right place, an islet of self at one with life on the land, the ‘island’ politics of the self at one with itself.
Book 1 of the Letters ends by showcasing Seneca as senectus. (He had in fact recently retired in his mid sixties.) He proudly suppresses the location of the location of ‘my just-out-of-town property’ (in suburbanum meum, 12.1), where he comes to image ‘my senility’, in the form of ‘an ancient manor’ that ‘grew in my hands’, ‘its stone ∼ my age’ (uillam ueterem … haec uilla inter manus meas creuit … aetatis meae saxa, 12.1). But this opening tableau does showcase reportage, at l(e)ast.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Morals and Villas in Seneca's LettersPlaces to Dwell, pp. 19 - 27Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004