The English-speaking world was without a monograph on Seneca the Elder until the end of 1978. Now it has two, but I trust that no reader will consider this, the second to appear, wholly superfluous. Certainly the recently published book by Professor L.A. Sussman, The elder Seneca (Leiden, 1978), is in no way dependent on any work of mine. For my part, I have for a considerable time had access to Sussman's doctoral dissertation of 1969, but it only became available to me three years after I had begun my Senecan researches, by which time I had passed the stage when it might have had a formative effect on my views. Certain points of organization in Section III of this book were suggested to me by Sussman's dissertation, but I am not otherwise substantially indebted to it. As a consequence of the publication of Sussman's new book I have added many references to it in footnotes, but have made only three minor alterations to my main text. Inevitably our fields of investigation overlap, but we have to a surprising extent chosen to concentrate our attention on different aspects of the elder Seneca. Unlike Sussman, I have not attempted to say much about the Senecan historical fragments of the Nachleben of the declamatory anthology, but I have ranged over a number of areas outside the scope of his book. Some, it may fairly be alleged, are rather remote from the person of Seneca the Elder.