Abstract

The familiar challenge of reconciling the scientific and moralizing aspects of Seneca's Natural Questions is here taken up in specific reference to Book 5—on winds. The familiar correlation drawn in Greco-Roman literature between wind and aspects of human character suggestively influences Seneca's procedure, in that his depiction of, for example, the uncontrolled violence of whirlwind offers an analogy for the human waywardness portrayed in the moralizing portions of the book. His broader systematization of the winds has important symbolic implications for moral limit and self-control at the human level. Seneca's experimental, highly "literary" mode of physico-moral investigation is thus to be distinguished from the narrower, more strictly technical focus that prevails earlier in the anemology tradition.