The Modern Age

The Edwardian Age
When queen Victoria died in 1901, her son became king as Edward VII. Edward embodied the new culture called “Edwardian Age” in the way he modernized the monarchy and brought new life and a new sense of fun to the royal court: he redecorated Buckingham Palace and took the motor car. Edward signed an agreement with France in 1904, the Entente Cordiale; it established a mutual agreement that Britain could pursue its interest in Egypt, and France in Morocco.
Similarities between Edwardian and Victorian England:
- class distinctions were preserved
- serious poverty
- the inability to provide themselves with food and clothing
The Liberals won the election of 1906.
They were divided into two groups: those who supported the traditional liberal values of laissez-faire and self-help, and those who supported New Liberalism.
Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George were two important New Liberals.
Reforms beginning of the Welfare State:
- the Children Charter was a series of laws helping children; free meals were given to poor children, regular medical inspection in school started, children were banned from public houses and not allowed to beg.
- old age, many old people had no choice but to go into workhouses, the introduction of old age pension for those with an annual income of under 21$ a year, partially changed that.
- unemployment. In 1909 minimum wages were fixed and in 1911 workers were given benefits such as medical treatment.
The House of Lords, which supported the conservative party, rejected George’s budget because its members would pay increase taxes. This caused a struggle in the Parliament, so Liberal decided with the Parliament Act to made it impossible to the Lords to reject a bill about money; it also stated that general elections would be at least every five years.
The suffragettes wanted women to have the vote and won massive publicity for their cause. They made much marches in London: many militants were sent to prison and went on hunger strike. Women aged 30 and over would gain vote in 1918.
One of the most important social changes was the appearance of popular newspaper: the Daily Mail was launched in 1896: it cost only a halfpenny, the articles were short, the vocabulary simple and the argument attractive. For transport, the Edwardian Age still relied on the horses and on the railway.

Britain and World War I                        
The reign of George V saws the years of World War I: Europe was divided into two rival camps: the Triple Alliance of Germany, Italy and Austria and the Triple Entente between England, France and Russia. The rivalry between Russia and Austria over the Slav state of Serbia led to the outbreak when the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914. Russia was forced to defend Serbia, while Germany came to the aid of the Austro Hungarian Empire. When Germany marched through Belgium, a neutral territory, in order to attack France, Britain declared war on Germany in August 1914. In Britain there was a great patriotic enthusiasm for the war because many people thought it was right and also had romantic ideas that it would be a heroic adventure. The government played an important part in persuading men to take part by using propaganda. By the end of 1915 so many men had been killed that more recruits were needed: the government introduce conscription for all men aged 18-41. Women replaced men in their civilian jobs.. The German expected a brief conflict; in fact German defeated the Allies in the first few weeks of war in 1914, but they were held up by the French resistance at the Battle of the Marne. By December 1914, both sides built a huge line of trenches on the Western Front. Trench war became the main method of fighting for the next four years. Soldiers suffered of Shell Shock: a form of obsessions in which the terror, anguish and the immobility of combat led to a variety of physical and emotional symptoms. The war at sea was vital for the outcome of the war. Britain received important supplies from USA. The Germans decided to use their submarines to sink the merchant ships carrying these supplies. With the US declaration of war on Germany in 1917, after the sinking of the British passengers liner Lusitania, the Allies receive troops an large supplies of munitions. Moreover they blockaded Germany causing a lack of food that led the country to ask for armistice. On 11 November 1918 the war ended. The Peace treaty was signed at Versailles in 1919. President Wilson proposed “Fourteen points” to write the peace treaty and prevent future wars, he set up the League of Nations.

Modernism
The first decades of the 20th century were a period of extraordinary originality and vitality in the history of art. The term ‘Modernism’ is used to refer to this international movement. Modernism expressed the desire to break with established forms and subjects.
In the novel it explored the character’s psyches through the flux of consciousness technique and the interior monologue. In poetry, it mixed slang with elaborated language, experimented with free verse, and often employed obscure symbols.
Common features:
- the intentional distortion of shape
- the demolition of limitations in space and time, and the disruption of the linear flow
- the awareness that our perception of reality is necessarily uncertain, temporary and subject to change: in writing the emphasis was on subjectivity, on how perceptions take place. New techniques: stream of consciousness.
- distinctions between genres weren’t deep, so that poetry seems ore documentary and prose seems more poetic
- the use of allusive language and development of multiple associations of words
- the importance giving to the sound of words
- the intensity of the isolated moment or image to provide a true insight into the nature of things
- the self conscious overturning of the conventions
- the importance of unconscious as well as conscious life
- the need to reflect the complexity of modern urban life in artistic form
- a rejection of elaborate formal aesthetics in favor of minimalist designs and a rejection of aesthetic theories, in favor of spontaneity
- a rejection of the distinction between high and low

Cosmopolitan literature: in the attempt to create a new system of references, writers and poets drew inspiration from different sources. Artists regarded the past as a source which they can change in a personal, original way. Absorbing the influences of the past and the contemporary ones coming from abroad, English modern literature was becoming cosmopolitan.

Modern Poetry
The poetry of the years preceding the First World War was characterized by two different groups:
- the ‘Georgian poets’ Brooke, De La Mare, Thomas, gave importance to English elements as the countryside as a place for idylls, and remained indifferent to the revolution in sensibility of Modernism.
- the ‘War poets’, whose values lies in the unconventional way they dealt the horrors of modern warfare; they used a violent, everyday language.

Modern poetry officially began with “Imagism” a movement which flourished between 1912 and 1917, name invented by Ezra Pound inspired by Hulme. The main aesthetic principles of imagism are:
- use of hard, clear and precise images
- use of a rhythm freed from the artificial of metrical regularity
- short poems, with no moral comment
- the aim of poetry was to achieve precision, discipline, hardness

French Symbolism started with Baudelaire’s “Les Fleurs du Mal”, that influenced the new poetry. The symbolists stressed the importance of the unconscious and the use of images to evoke rather than to indicate. They used free verse to exploit sound and musicality of words.
T.S. Eliot stated that poetry is an escape from an emotion, it is the escape from personality and the poet became the explorer of experience (reversion of Wordsworth’s emotions recollect in tranquillity).

The 1930s were characterized by a group of poets that joined together as undergraduates at Oxford and planned to devote themselves to left wind propaganda: Auden, Spender, Macneice, Day-Lewis. They were interested in social and political aspects of human life. This was partly because of unemployment, Nazism and Fascism, and partly because they belonged to a generation which had been encouraged by its teachers to develop a social conscience. They used slang and jazz rhythms.

In the 1940s was founded a group of young poets, the ‘new Romantics’, which appealed to emotions and rediscovered individual themes like love, birth, dead and sex.

The modern Novel
The English novel was essentially bourgeois in its origin, with the gain or loss of social status as its favourite theme. The novelist used to make digressions and he faced with an easy task, namely to mediate between his characters and the readers in an objective way. The accepted values created a familiar social pattern. The change was characterised by a transformation of British society, which in a few years passed from the Victorians and Edwardians age into the war years marked by unrest and ferment. This was an important period because the urgency for social change forced novelists into a position of moral and psychological uncertainty. They had to mediate between the solid past and the confused present. This ‘new realism’, influenced by French and Russian writers, tended to focus from society to man. Two other factors contributed to producing the modern novel: the new concept of time and the new theory of the conscious. The novelists rejected omniscient narrator and experimented new methods to drew the individual consciousness: the viewpoint became in the internal world of a character’s mind. The analysis of a character’s consciousness was influenced by the theories about the simultaneous existence of different levels of consciousness and sub-consciousness where the past experiences are retained and the existence of the past in the present determines the whole personality of a human being. The stream of consciousness technique or the interior monologue was introduced to reproduce the uninterrupted flux of thoughts of the mind’s activity.
There are three groups of novelists:
1) psychological novelists who focused their attention on the development of character’s mind and on human relationship. Conrad: mystery of human experience, Lawrence: conflicts of working-class people and liberating function of sexuality, and Forster: complexity of human relationships and analysis of the contrast between cultures.
2) Modernist novelists who choose subjective narrative techniques, exploring the mind of one character. The most important novelists are Joyce and Woolf.
3) The social and political problems of the ‘30s forced the writers’ attention back to the society around them: many British intellectuals had Marxist sympathies and tended to take a political stance. Orwell and Huxley in their novels attacked totalitarianism and the ideals of scientific progress.

The interior monologue
At the beginning of the 20^th century writers understood that it was impossible to reproduce the complexity of the human mind with traditional techniques: they adopted the interior monologue: the unspoken activity of the mind before it is ordered in speech, it is the verbal expression of the stream of consciousness, a psychic phenomenon. Main features: immediate speech, free from introductory expressions, two levels of narration: one external to the character’s mind, the other internal, lack of a chronological order, absence of the rules of punctuation, lack of formal logical order. There are four kinds of interior monologue: indirect, with two levels of narration, with the mind level of narration, extreme interior monologue.

William Yeats
Life  Born in Dublin in 1865 in to a middle class family; he felt Irish as much as British. The father, an artists, influenced William in his love for art. In 1889 he fell in love with Maud Gonne, letting him depper into the Irish Republican Brotherhood. In 1890’s he met Lady Gregory. Yeats believed that the role of the artist was the creation of a new culture, based on Ireland’s past. The British authorities were very heavy-handed in the Easter Rebellion in 1916 and after that he approached to the moderate line. In 1917 he married Georgie Hyde-Lees who indulge in ‘automatic writing’ dictated by mysterious ‘communicators’. In 1922 he became a senator. He won in 1939 the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in France in 1939.

The phases of Yeats’s art
Early period: Yeats reproduced the sensual atmospheres of the Romantics with the decadent mood. He combined the use of Irish folklore with an original symbolism.
Middle period: dates from the beginning of the 20th century: Yeats’s style became more modern and flexible and he started to plan his symbols. He also experimented with technical innovations in the theatre.
Later period covers the years of maturity. In “A Vision” he described his philosophy.

Art and history
The writer had to mediate the continuity of the national spirit and uncover common ground beneath conflicts so that Irish literature can form a social bond. The horror of the Easter Rising and the executions in 1916, haunts his imagination: he began to create his vision of history, a tragic vision of 2000 years cycles of civilizations growing from a bestial situation to intellectual, aesthetic and spiritual development before turning down to apocalyptic anarchy. This vision allowed him to deal with violence in his art and to believe in the superiority of art to history.

Yeats’s vision
In “A vision” the poet underlined a system which rejected the 20th century orthodoxies of Christianity, Marxism and psychoanalysis. He believed that every man and every civilization passes through all 28 phases of the wheel (a wheel of 28 spokes representing the 28 phases of the lunar month). One historical revolution of the wheel takes 2000 years, and the each successive revolution mounts toward the Great Year which will break out of the wheel completely.

Yealts’s occultism
The reading of Nietzsche and the growing loneliness of middle age increased Yeats’s search of completeness. He continued to elaborate the theme of mysticism. This interested had started in the youth when his father’s arguments against Christian belief had led him to investigate theories of the occult. He studied the Tibetan mystery and Buddhism. He learnt magic and esoteric symbols and began to create a vision of his own. His attraction to these doctrines and cults was probably due to his belief that they provided clues to the unconscious life of mind and spirit.

The gyre
A single gyre is a geometrical figure similar to a funnel, which begins at a fixed point. From this point the spiral grows wider and wider until it reaches a maximum growth. At this climax, the single gyre begins to retrace its path in the opposite direction. In contrast to this single vortex is the double gyre, where two vortices intersect and the apex of one is the centre of another. With this theory Yeats described the mind’s evolution as a process of circling (the double intersecting cones can be seen as extended over time)

The symbol as a theme in itself
Yeats distinguished into two kinds of symbols:
- the emotional symbols which evoke emotions
- the intellectual symbols which evoke ideas
He preferred the intellectual, because it connoted a multiplicity of meanings. The power of images can penetrate the Great Memory, inspired on Jung’s idea of the collected unconscious. Symbols have a role in shaping both the individual and the collective consciousness, but they are also themes in themselves, in which truths are embody, it offers a revelation.

A wide range of themes
- faith in the beauty and eternity of art
- relationship between the poet and the Irish people and tradition
- death: unlike the animal, which simply dies, man dies many times before his death because every defeat and every unhappy experience of love but also every victory are a series of death and rebirth prefiguring the end of life.
- the idea of heroic individual. Loneliness is a feature of his heroes because their superior qualities distinguish them to the common men.

Yeats’s verse
He employed the stylistic devices of antithesis, oxymoron and paradox. He paid attention to the order and construction of his sentences. Yeats’ vocabulary contains many words of sensual and sensory experience. His syntax is dynamic. Some of his most images include bird imagery: the falcon, which may stand for a violent and cruel avidity, or the grace and the beauty of a free spirit; the swan symbolised the perfect ideal or a violent divine force.

Easter 1916
The poem is written in response to the Uprisings against the British Rule in Ireland during World War I. Irish grievances were many, varied and longstanding; dating from the time of William the Conqueror and most involving brutal oppression and deprivation from the English. Before WWI, England had agreed to Home Rule for the Irish but because of the war England reneged on this promise. Many of the Irish did not support England in the European war. Yeats’ position is ambivalent; his preference is for order and tradition and at first does not identify with the rebels who wanted to overthrow the English. Some of his closest friends were involved in the 1916 uprising and Yeats grudgingly came to accept their cause.
Though successful at first when 1500 men took over Dublin, proclaiming an Irish Republic on the Steps of the General Post Office, the British, despite its commitments of WWI, brutally and ruthlessly put down the insurrection with the loss of over 300 lives. As well eleven leaders were summarily executed within a month.
Much of Yeats’ treatment of life is detached, global and general; however in this poem he reluctantly and somewhat grudgingly delves into a specific event and ponders its significance in the scheme of our existence. As is usual he reveals his compassion; yet counters this with his misgivings, his ambivalence – the poem fails to resolve the contrariness of life. He reveals historical events can easily morph into legend and even myth.
Yeats is a notable poet worthy of study, not because he provides objective historical answers we might ask about this period, nor does he provide an accurate detailed account of the historical process, but because of his brilliant yet singular visionary insights in our western culture and because of deep sympathy he expresses for the tragedy and pathos of human life.

The war poets
When the First World War broke out thousands of young men volunteered for military service; most of them regarded the conflict as an adventure for noble ends. But the number of deaths on the Western Front was terrible. For soldiers, life in the trenches was hell because of the rain and mud decaying bodies the rats fed on, the repeated bombings and the use of poison gas in warfare. The ‘War Poets’ were a group of poets who experienced the fighting and in most cases lost their lives in the conflict, who were able to represent warfare in a realistic and unconventional way and to wake up the conscience of the readers to the horrors of the war.

Different attitudes to war
The reaction to the war passed through different stages
1) the patriotic enthusiasm that led many to enlist – Rupert Brooke
2) the anger when many realized the lie of war rhetoric – Siegfried Sassoon
3) the compassion towards fellows – Wilfred Owen
4) the unsentimental view in the consequences of the war ‘lost generation’ - Rosenberg

Rupert Brooke
Brooke was born in 1887. He came to know many important political, literary and social figures before the war. He didn’t fought so much because during the war he contracted blood poisoning and died in 1915. Brooke’s reputation as a War Poet rests on the five sonnets of 1914, in which he advanced the idea that war is clean and cleansing. He tried to testify the safeness of war, in which the only thing that can suffer is the body, and even death is seen as a reward. The publication of Brooke’s war sonnets coincided with his death and made him popular, turning him into a symbol of the young romantic hero, who inspired patriotism in the early months of the war.

Wilfred Owen
Born in 1893, Owen was working as a teacher of English in France, when he visited a hospital for the wounded and decide in 1915 to return to England and enlist. He died in 1818, just seven days before the Armistice. In his poems there are an accurate accounts of gas victims, men who have gone mad, men who are clinically alive although their bodies are destroyed. Also the technique of ‘para-rhymes’ should be remarked. His poetry is full of moral force which make the sonnets adapted for any situation in which people must suffered and died.

Siegfried Sassoon
Sassoon was born into a Jewish family in 1886. He was maybe the most innocence of the War Poets, so his reactions to the realities of the war were violent and he expressed them through irony in his poems. Sassoon also protested publicly against the war. His friend Robert Greaves convinced that Sassoon was suffering from shell shock and he was sent to the military hospital, where he met and influenced Owen. Sassoon’s poems denounced the political errors and insincerities for which the soldiers were being sacrificed in various ways, for example, through anger and satire, but also recreated the physical horror of the war. Sassoon wanted to achieve the spontaneity of shocking. He was a resolute pacifist.

Isaac Rosenberg
Rosenberg was born into a working class Jewish family that had emigrated from Russia to England. He was a talented artist. He enlisted in 1916 and died in 1918. His poems may be regarded as Modernist in technique. His vision of the war was unsentimental and less interested with the pity of things. He presented realistic and shocking details, sometimes with a touch of irony or through paradox and contrast.

The Byronic hero
Byronic hero: a passionate, restless and mysterious man who hides some horrible secrets in his past. Proud individualism and rejection of moral rules.

Arrogant, Cunning and able to adapt, Cynical, Disrespectful of rank and privilege, Emotionally conflicted, bipolar, or moody, Having a distaste for social institutions and norms, Having a troubled past or suffering from an unnamed crime, Intelligent and perceptive, Jaded, world-weary, Mysterious, magnetic and charismatic, Seductive and sexually attractive, Self-critical and introspective, Self-destructive, Socially and sexually dominant, Sophisticated and educated, Struggling with integrity, Treated as an exile, outcast, or outlaw

Believed in individual liberty = wanted all men to be free and fought against tyrans.
Satirical man whose feelings are reflected in the wildest and in nature in general.
STYLE: 18^th-century-poetic diction in a witty style, from Spenserian stanza to ottava rima, with a predilection for colloquial language.

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
The first two stanzas are narrated in first person by the protagonist Childe Harold; he is probably on a ship near the coast of England . He has just woken up when he realizes that he is in the middle of a storm. After he sees how powerful nature can be he feels scared, and regrets to be in the middle of the ocean, where he can’t even see England’s shores. But on the other hand he is determined to continue sailing because he feels like he was born to do it, just like a weed that is flung from the rock on the Ocean’s foam.
In the other three stanzas there is a third person narrator, who continues to tell Harold’s story.During his life Harold travelled to mountains, oceans, deserts, forests and caverns.
He felt at ease with nature because he understood it better than a book while when he would spend too much time with men he would become restless, worn, stern and wearisome.
In the last stanza Harold has reached an interior peace and resignation, because he feels self-exiled, hopeless, and despaired in front of the power of nature, and he tries to contain his emotions. 
Natural elements provoke certain emotions in Harold. For example the waters (line 2) create excitement; the winds (line 3), melancholy; the tempest (line 11) sense of wonder in front of the power of nature; the mountains (line 15) loneliness; blue sky passion of seclusion; the desert, forest, cavern (line 19) seclusion; sunbeams on the lake (line 23) restlessness; boundless air (line 27) sense of freedom.
So Byron mainly describes nature as a powerful and wild entity which men can’t overcome.
Byron uses personification (lines 3, 7-8) to project his own feelings onto nature
One of the most important literary devices used by Byron in this poem is the simile. In fact he compares Harold to a weed that is flung from a rock to the ocean’s foam. This simile underlines how the protagonist’s littleness in front of a wild nature, but also his love for freedom and solitude. Byron also compares Harold to a falcon which tries to escape from its cage. This underlines the hero’s rebellious soul against social codes and customs; he can be considered a real fighter of freedom and lover of nature’s power and beauty.
Harold is restless and bored with the world, he feels affinity with nature; he is solitary and sensitive; he faces the hopelessness of life with a certain sense of humour or, perhaps, with cynical attitude.

Nature for Wordsworth, Coleridge and Byron
Romantic poets give a lot of importance to nature in their poems, but they all deal with it differently. For example Wordsworth treats it realistically, using his five senses, but he also uses feelings to underline how men can discover moral and spiritual values in nature. Coleridge, on the contrary, introduces supernatural elements, transforming nature into something magical and unreal in order to make people see the beauty of nature and creating in the reader a feeling of love towards all God’s creations. Byron sees nature in yet another way: as something so powerful that makes men feel so little and useless. Man can be both in harmony or against nature. For Shelley, nature is at the same time a veil that hides the truth of the Divine Spirit (it's never confined to a purely physical existence) a instrument since it provides him with symbolic images for his cosmic schemes, a refuge from the ordinary world and an interlocutor of his hopes for a better future.

The poet for Shelley and Byron
At the same time a prophet and a Titan that could challenge the cosmos and have to help mankind to reach an ideal world.

England in 1819
The speaker describes the state of England in 1819. The king is “old, mad, blind, despised, and dying.” The princes are “the dregs of their dull race,” and flow through public scorn like mud, unable to see, feel for, or know their people, clinging like leeches to their country until they “drop, blind in blood, without a blow.” The English populace are “starved and stabbed”in untilled fields; the army is corrupted by “liberticide and prey”; the laws “tempt and slay”; religion is Christless and Godless, “a book sealed”; and the English Senate is like “Time’s worst statute unrepealed.” Each of these things, the speaker says, is like a grave from which “a glorious Phantom” may burst to illuminate “our tempestuous day.”

Ode to the West Wind
The Ode was written in 1820 by Shelley,one of the most important English poets, in a wood near Florence. It is composed of 14 lines and is divided into five stanzas. In each stanza he describes the effects of the wind on the nature, a wind that is considered a cosmic power that affects the whole universe. In the first stanza the wind is described as an essence of seasonal change, as a destroyer and a preserver, and there are described its effects on earth. In the second stanza are described its effects on the air, and in the third stanza the effects on and under the sea. In the fourth stanza the poet implores the wind to lift him and rescue him from prostration. In the last stanza the poet identifies with the wind, becoming the prophet of an humanity’s moment of change. In the ode there are many similes, metaphors and symbols. Key-words of the poem are destroyer and preserver, which sintesize the main concepts of the ode: the death and the rebirth of human society. This concept of a new birth implies a negative view of society and underlines the prophetic role of the poet. Eventually in this ode the poet shows his desire for personal renewal and for the successful spreading of his revolutionary ideas.

Ode on a Grecian Urn
In the first stanza, the speaker stands before an ancient Grecian urn and addresses it. He is preoccupied with its depiction of pictures frozen in time. It is the “still unravish’d bride of quietness,” the “foster-child of silence and slow time.” He also describes the urn as a “historian” that can tell a story. He wonders about the figures on the side of the urn and asks what legend they depict and from where they come. He looks at a picture that seems to depict a group of men pursuing a group of women and wonders what their story could be: “What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? / What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?”
In the second stanza, the speaker looks at another picture on the urn, this time of a young man playing a pipe, lying with his lover beneath a glade of trees. The speaker says that the piper’s“unheard” melodies are sweeter than mortal melodies because they are unaffected by time. He tells the youth that, though he can never kiss his lover because he is frozen in time, he should not grieve, because her beauty will never fade. In the third stanza, he looks at the trees surrounding the lovers and feels happy that they will never shed their leaves. He is happy for the piper because his songs will be “for ever new,” and happy that the love of the boy and the girl will last forever, unlike mortal love, which lapses into “breathing human passion” and eventually vanishes, leaving behind only a “burning forehead, and a parching tongue.”
In the fourth stanza, the speaker examines another picture on the urn, this one of a group of villagers leading a heifer to be sacrificed. He wonders where they are going (“To what green altar, O mysterious priest...”) and from where they have come. He imagines their little town, empty of all its citizens, and tells it that its streets will “for evermore” be silent, for those who have left it, frozen on the urn, will never return. In the final stanza, the speaker again addresses the urn itself, saying that it, like Eternity,“doth tease us out of thought.” He thinks that when his generation is long dead, the urn will remain, telling future generations its enigmatic lesson: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” The speaker says that that is the only thing the urn knows and the only thing it needs to know.

300 O Tiresia, che osservi tutto, ciò che è insegnabile e ciò che non è comunicabile, le cose del cielo e quelle della terra, anche se non vedi tu comprendi tuttavia in quale male la città convive e di essa te solo noi troviamo come salvatore.
305 Febo, infatti, se non hai sentito dire qualcosa dai messaggeri, mandò a dire a noi, che avevamo mandato a consultarlo, che sarebbe giunta una sola liberazione da questa malattia se, venuti bene a conoscenza di coloro che uccisero Laio, li uccidessimo o li scacciassimo esuli dalla terra.
310 Tu dunque, non negando nè il responso degli uccelli, nè se hai qualche altra via di divinazione, salva te stesso e la città, salva anche me e allontana ogni contaminazione del morto, infatti siamo nelle tue mani: che un uomo sia utile con ciò che ha e può è la più bella delle fatiche.
316 Ahimè, come è terribile capire quanto non è utile per chi capisce: infatti io, pur sapendo bene queste cose, le eliminai; non sarei dovuto venire qui.
Che c'è? Come sei giunto scoraggiato.
320 Lasciami tornare a casa; assai facilmente sopporteremo tu il tuo e io il mio destino se mi darai ascolto.
Dicesti cose nè conformi alle leggi nè amiche nei confronti di questa città che ti allevò, privandola di questo responso.
Vedo che neppure per te le tue parole sono opportune: dunque, perché io non subisca la stessa cosa..
326 Per gli dei, non andartene se comprendi, poiché noi tutti qui supplici ci prostriamo davanti a te.
Tutti infatti, non comprendete: ma che io non riveli mai i miei mali, perché non riveli anche i tuoi.
330 Che cosa dici? Pur sapendo non parlerai, ma pensi di tradirci e di mandare in rovina definitivamente la città?
Io non farò soffire nè me nè te: perché invano mi interroghi su queste cose? Infatti non potresti venire a saperle da me.
O il più scellerato tra gli scellerati, e infatti tu indurresti alla collera anche una natura di pietra, non parlerai una buona volta, ma ti dimostrerai così crudele e intrattabile?
337 Hai rimproverato il mio temperamento, mentre non hai visto il tuo che abita insieme a te, ma biasimi me.
339 Chi infatti, udenddo tali parole non si adirerebbe, per mezzo delle quali ora tu disonori la città?
Le cose andranno da sè anche se io le copro con il silenzio.
Ebbene, è necessario che tu mi dica le cose che arriveranno.
Non intederei dire oltre: per queste cose, se vuoi, arrabbiati della collera più selvaggia.
345 E certamente non tralascerò nulla, nello stato di collera in cui sono. Sappi infatti che mii sembra che tu abbia contribuito a tramare il delitto e lo abbia attuato, per quanto non uccidendo con le tue  mani, ma se tu per caso ci vedessi, direi che anche questa azione sia opera solo tua.
350 Davvero? Ti ordino di rimanere fedele al bando che hai proclamato e a partire da questo giorno non rivolgere la parola né a costoro né a me poichè tu sei secondo me l'empio contaminatore di questa terra.
Così impudentemente haipronunciato questa parola e dove pensi di sfuggire a questo?
355 Sono già sfuggito: infatti nutro la verità che è forte.
Istruito da chi? Infatti non certo dall'arte profetica.
Da te: tu infatti mi hai indotto a parlare contro la mia volontà.
Quale discorso? Dillo di nuovo, perché io lo comprenda meglio.
360 Non hai capito prima? Oppure mi metti alla prova nel parlare?
Non l'ho capita in modo tale da poterla dire cosa conosciuta: su, parla di nuovo.
Affermo che tu sei l'assassino dell'uoo che cerchi.
Ma non gioendo in qualche modo dirai due volte sciagure.
Dovrei dire dunque anche qualcos'altro, perché ti adiri di più?
Quanto desideri: poiché sarà detto infano.
365 Dico che non ti accorgi di avere rapporti nella maniera più turpe con i più cari, e non vedi neppure in quale sciagura ti trovi.

Consolatio ad Marciam
37, figlia Cremuzio Cordo, storico di Tiberio subito damnatio, consola da perdita del figlio tre anni prima, motivazione = spronare imperatore a ricordare Cordo e perseguire ideale libertas, contenuti convenzionali tempo che fugge morte ineluttabile, finale simil. Somnius Scipionis di Ciceroe, nei campi Elisi, il figlio con il nonno materno che illustra universo, contrappone alla terra e mostra conflagrazione universale
De ira
41, dedicato a fratello Novato, 1,2 aspetti e casistica 3 necessità risoluzione, paragona Caligola, principe folle e Augusto esempio moderazione, divisione despota e buon imperatore
Consolatio ad Helviam Matrem (virtus prevale su fortuna)
41, primo periodo esilio, originalità consolando diventa consolatore, simil. Ovidio elegia triste a Tomi, con funzione consolatoria e funzione di autodifesa (innocente). Esilio non è un male perché legge cosmica mutamento di luogo e saggio autosufficiente, madre riprenda studi filosofici, Seneca si dedica alla contemplazione
Consolatio ad Polybium (fortuna prevale su virtus)
44, Polibio liberto molto influente nella corte di Claudio, gli era morto un fratello, vena adulatoria sia per Polibio che per Claudio, esaltate gesta militari, atteggiamento contraddittorio, adulare un liberto, blandire imperatore, figura del burocrate modello, fides probitas modestia attaccamento dovere dedizione completa, imperatore ideale = grande burocrate, limita l'imperium infinitum, ricerca di un compromesso, antecedenti augustei come Orazio
De brevitate vitae
49, dedicato a Paolino padre di Pompea moglie seneca, è un protrettico, politica contro negotia e concezione sbagliata otium, rimedio = contemplazione filosofica
De vita beata
dedicato a Novato, I PARTE: felicità=virtù il piacere non rende l'uomo autosufficiente vs.Epicuro II PARTE difesa contro la sua ricchezza, diritto di continuare a predicare i suoi principi anche senza metterli in pratica
De otio
62, ded. ad Anneo Sereno, diritto del saggio a non impegnarsi nella vita pubblica e a rifugiarsi nella contemplazione, il saggio deve giovare a rei publicae se no a multus se no a proximus se no a sibi, se autocrate non è buon re o sottomissione o ritiro.
De tranquillitate animi
62, ded. ad Anneo Sereno, rimedi per animo inquieto, moderazione parsimonia impegno, vita politica: filosofia stoica impone partecipazione anche se ostacola equilibrio interiore, funzione attiva dell'aristocratico a fianco del principe, spazio politico
De providentia
62 63, ded. a Lucilio, risposta a domanda su buoni colpiti dai mali: avversità in realtà sono prove per perfezione morale
De constantia sapientis
ded. a Anneo Sereno, impertubabilità del saggio = paradosso storico, invulnerabile, ritratto negativo di Caligola, vendetta colpisce sempre

DE TRANQUILLITATE ANIMI

3. Quanto a ciò verso cui tendi, è qualcosa di grande, di eccelso, di vicino a dio, l'imperturbabilità. Questa
fermezza dell'animo i Greci la chiamano euthimia, sulla quale c'è quel volume egregio di Democrito,
io la chiamo tranquillità; perché non è necessario imitare e trascrivere letteralmente un termine secondo
la forma greca: la stessa cosa a cui si fa riferimento va indicata con una parola, che deve avere
l'efficacia espressiva, non l'aspetto esteriore della dizione greca.
4. Dunque noi ci chiediamo in che modo l'animo possa seguire un percorso sempre uguale e felice ed essere in armonia con se stesso e guardare con gioia a ciò che lo riguarda, non interrompendo questa felicità, ma rimanendo in uno stato di benessere, senza mai esaltarsi o deprimersi: questo sarà la tranquillità. In che modo si possa pervenire ad essa vediamolo in generale: tu prenderai della medicina quanto vorrai.
5. il male intanto va denunciato nel suo intero, e in esso ciascuno potrà riconoscere l'aspetto che lo riguarda; subito capirai quanto minor imbarazzo provi tu con il disprezzo di te stesso, rispetto a coloro che, legati a
una professione di immagine e affaticati dal peso del loro alto prestigio, sono costretti a recitare una parte
più per un punto d'onore che per convinzione.
6. Tutti si trovano nella stessa condizione, sia coloro che
sono tormentati dall'incostanza, dall'ansia e dal continuo mutamento dei propositi, ai quali sempre piace
di più ciò che hanno lasciato, sia quelli che marciscono tra gli sbadigli.
Aggiungi quelli che, non diversamente da chi ha il sonno difficile, si rigirano e assumono ora questa ora
quella posizione finché non trovano pace per stanchezza: cambiando continuamente stile di vita da ultimo
si fermano in quello in cui li sorprende non il fastidio dei cambiamenti ma la vecchiaia poco propensa
alle novità. Aggiungi anche coloro che sono poco flessibili non per coerenza, ma per inerzia, e
vivono non come vogliono, ma come hanno cominciato.
7. Innumerevoli, quindi, sono le caratteristiche, ma
una sola la conseguenza del male, l'essere scontenti di sé. Ciò dipende dall'incostanza dell'animo e da
aspirazioni deboli o poco felici, quando, cioè, gli uomini o non hanno un'audacia pari ai loro desideri o
non li realizzano e sono tutti appesi alla speranza; sono sempre instabili e volubili, cosa che inevitabilmente
accade agli indecisi.
Tendono con ogni mezzo all'oggetto dei loro desideri, si addestrano in cose disoneste e complicate e
vi si sottomettono, e quando la loro fatica non ottiene i risultati sperati, li tormenta un'inutile vergogna, e
si addolorano non per aver voluto il male, ma per averlo voluto inutilmente.
8. Li prende allora il pentimento di quello che hanno fatto e il timore di ricominciare e s'insinua in loro quell'irrequietezza senza speranza, poiché non sono in grado né di dominare le proprie passioni né di abbandonarvisi, l'incertezza di una vita che non riesce a realizzarsi e l'inerzia di uno spirito che s'intorpidisce tra desideri frustrati.
9. E tutto ciò si aggrava ulteriormente quando, non riuscendo più a tollerare questa infelicità affannosa, si rifugiano nel riposo, nella solitudine degli studi, condizione insopportabile per un animo teso all'impegno
civile, desideroso di agire e naturalmente irrequieto, che, ovviamente, trova scarso conforto in se stesso;
perciò, tolte le distrazioni che gli impegni di per sé offrono a chi corre da tutte le parti, non sopporta
casa, solitudine, pareti, e mal si rassegna a vedersi abbandonato a se stesso.
10. Di qui quella noia e quell'insofferenza di sé, e l'irrequietezza dell'animo che non trova pace in nessun
posto, e la triste e angosciosa sopportazione della propria inattività, soprattutto quando si ha ritegno ad
ammetterne i motivi e il pudore ricaccia dentro il tormento, mentre le passioni, confinate in una angusta
prigione, senza sbocchi, si soffocano a vicenda; di qui la tristezza, la depressione e i mille ondeggiamenti
dell'animo incerto, che la speranza accarezzata tiene sospeso, la frustrazione rende triste; di qui
l'atteggiamento di quanti detestano il proprio riposo e si lamentano di non aver nulla da fare; di qui, anche,
l'invidia feroce per i successi altrui. Perché l'inattività insoddisfatta nutre il livore e, non avendo potuto
farsi avanti loro, desiderano la rovina di tutti; quindi, 11. per questa rabbia dei successi altrui e per la
sfiducia riguardo ai propri, l'animo si adira contro la sorte e si lamenta dei tempi in cui vive ritirandosi
negli angoli a rimuginare sulla propria pena, mentre prova fastidio e vergogna di sé.
Infatti l'animo umano è per natura attivo e portato al movimento. Gli è gradita ogni occasione di muoversi
e distrarsi, e ancor più gradita a quei pessimi soggetti che volentieri si lasciano logorare dalle occupazioni;
come certe ferite cercano le mani che recheranno loro dolore e godono d'essere toccate, e come
la scabbia ripugnante trova sollievo in tutto ciò che la irrita (il grattare dà sollievo alla scabbia deturpante),
non diversamente direi che per questi caratteri, in cui le passioni esplodono come ferite dolorose,
lo sconvolgimento e l'agitazione sono fonti di piacere.

DE VITA BEATA

1 I filosofi non offrono ciò che promettono. Offrono comunque molto per il fatto che parlano, perché coltivano pensieri buoni. E certo, se facessero anche le cose equivalenti alle loro parole: che cosa ci sarebbe di più felice di quelli? Intanto, non c'è altro motivo di disprezzare le parole buone e i cuori pieni di buone riflessioni: bisogna elogiare la trattazione di argomenti utili a prescindere dal risultato. 2 Che c'è di strano, se non arrivano in cima dopo aver iniziato una via difficile. Ma, se sei un uomo vero, guarda con rispetto coloro che tentano grandi imprese, anche se cadono giù. E' un'impresa grande sforzarsi, guardando non alle proprie forze ma a quelle della propria natura di cercare di raggiungere le vette e di concepire col pensiero mete più grandi di quelle che possono essere compiute anche da coloro che sono forniti di un animo grandissimo.

DE IRA

I,1 O Novato, hai voluto a tutti i costi che io trattassi del rimedio all'ira e, in effetti, mi pare che tu abbia decisamente temuto questa passione, ch'è - fra tutte - la più ripugnante e la più sfrenata.
Nelle altre, infatti, si mantiene comunque una certa temperanza; mentre questa, invece, è tutta un fuoco e brucia nel tormento furioso dello sdegno e del rancore, folle d'un delirio disumano di armi sangue supplizi, decisa a nuocere agli altri mentre di sé non si cura: con veemenza si espone impavida perfino alle armi, bramosa di una vendetta che pur trascinerà con sé il vendicatore.
I,2 Per tal motivo, certuni sapienti han definito l'ira una pazzia rapsodica; e infatti, allo stesso tempo, essa non è padrona di sé, mette da parte il decoro, trascura i rapporti sociali, testardamente presa e coinvolta verso ciò che ha cominciato, refrattaria al buon senso e ai buoni propositi, resa inquieta da futili motivi, incapace di discernere ciò ch'è giusto e ciò ch'è vero, in tutto simile alle macerie, che rovinano su ciò che hanno già travolto.
I,3 Allora, affinché ti sia chiaro che quelli invasati dall'ira non sono affatto individui normali, osserva già, di per sé, il loro aspetto; come, infatti, uno sguardo sfrontato e minaccioso, una fronte aggrottata, un volto truce, un andamento sconnesso, uno smanacciare frenetico, un colorito alterato, un respiro affannoso e veloce son sintomi manifesti di pazzia, così, praticamente identici, si delineano i sintomi dell'ira:
I,4 occhi accesi e strabuzzati, rossore diffuso per tutto il volto - per via del sangue che affluisce dal fondo dei precordi, labbra che fremono, denti che digrignano, capelli che si levano ritti, respiro forzato ed ansimante, stridente dinoccolarsi di articolazioni, gemiti sommessi e tenebrosi, una loquela precipitosa e sconclusionata, mani che non stan ferme un momento e piedi che scalpitano: insomma, tutto il corpo è un sol fremito, minacciosamente proteso ad esplodere nell'ira. E', dunque, orribile e pauroso a vedersi l'aspetto di coloro che l'ira rende alterati e deformi.
I,5 Non sapresti deciderti se definirla - l'ira - un difetto detestabile, o piuttosto brutto. Gli altri difetti c'è modo di dissimularli e di nutrirli nell'intimo; l'ira, invece, trapela e si manifesta in volto, e quanto più è grande, tanto più s'accende.