Seneca, Natural Questions

Looking at motion in the NQ’s rather posthuman world, and in its physics, prevents too narrow an emphasis on humans and ethics. Yet entities like wind and sea are personified through movement. Transitive (imposed) and intransitive movement have hierarchical consequences; agency and causation enter. Motion runs through the treatment of people, both metaliterary, for narrator and addressee, and satirical, for the depraved. The work’s precision on motion is shown in its handling of verbs and especially preverbs; Seneca’s vocabulary expands for the NQ. The work does not treat the whole cosmos; it concentrates on things that move, especially in disruptive change. The regular movement of heavenly bodies contrasts; spiritus (wind, air) is quite different. Passages include: throwing stones into water, the possibility of fire falling, the journeying of old Hannibal and old Seneca, the types of earthquake, the madness of sailing to war. In them description of motion is both evocative and argumentative, argument on motion is organized and visionary; levels of motion differ pointedly; types of motion are conveyed with nuance; human motion is reproached through elaborate structures of thought, not just shouting. The NQ do not, like narrative works, present a single world to immerse the reader; argument is to the fore, and rival views are prominent (so Democritus on atoms, Epigenes on comets). Truth is reached through observation and understanding of movement (so on the roundness of drops). Motion is presented both with philosophical penetration and with literary richness.