I vizi, indimenticabili amanti. La lettera 69

Abstract

Letter 69 deals with the commonplace of the uselessness of travelling for moral improvement. This text includes a detailed simile between vices and lovers. The literary model of the image is Ovid’s poem Remedia amoris – a text which is never recalled elsewhere by Seneca – as plenty of lexical and thematic details show. The philosophical model may be spotted in Plato’s Phaedrus, with special reference to the comparison between the soul and a winged chariot. Seneca shares Ovid’s radical suggestions to get rid of love, and applies them to vices in general, refusing Plato’s view of a psychagogical potential of love. Ovid is thus turned into an instrument to demonstrate Stoic orthodoxy on passions.