Ten Letters of Seneca: Latin Text with Facing Vocabulary and Commentary Hardcover – Geoffrey Steadman

This commentary contains the Latin text and English notes to ten letters from Seneca's Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium: Letters 1, 7, 12, 18, 47, 51, 56, 86, 114, and 122.

These letters were selected from Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, “Moral Epistles to Lucilius,” a series of 124 letters written by Seneca to a certain Lucilius on a range of philosophical topics. For over a century Walter Summer’s 1910 commentary, Selected Letters of Seneca, shaped the syllabi and reading lists of Latin programs in the English-speaking world. I chose the ten letters in this book with Summer’s work in mind.

Each page of the commentary includes 10-12 lines of Latin text (Jeffrey Henderson’s Loeb edition) with all vocabulary and grammar notes below on the same page. The corresponding vocabulary contains all words occurring three or fewer times, arranged alphabetically in two columns. The grammatical notes are organized according to line numbers and likewise arranged in two columns. The advantage of this format is that it allows me to include as much information as possible on a single page and yet ensure that entries are distinct and readily accessible to readers.