directed upwards, striving for a vision of kindred things – what does it matter what ground I stand on?35
The mother and son are reunified as Seneca begins to write in the first-person plural, ‘let us hasten’. Here is the healthy version of the cosmology, rather than the fractured and infected cosmos of the tragedies where the system has failed. Individuals are able to reconnect the circuitry between one another and plug into the wide expanse beyond them, to think further than the limits of their own internal psychologies and to escape the limitations of the everyday, small world. The tensions of the cosmos are still visible here in the repeated formulation, ‘provided I may’ or ‘provided I can’, for the success of this system is dependent on a series of conditions or provisions which must be met. There is a fragility built into this worldview, and health and sickness, consolation and sorrow are all finely balanced. By mentally positioning himself within the cosmos, Seneca rejects the constraints and difficulties of this one particular spot of earth that he has been exiled to and enters into a vision of a much larger common space.
Notes
1Jules Evans, Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations (London: Rider Books, 2012), pp. 3–4; hereafter cited as ‘Evans’.
2Ibid., p. 60.
3Lucilius Annaeus Seneca, Epistulae Morales, trans. Richard M. Gunmere, The Loeb Classical Library, 3 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), ii, Letter LXXVIII, p. 189; hereafter cited as Epistles.
4Carl Baker, ‘Mental Health Statistics for England: Prevalence, Services and Funding’, House of Commons Briefing Paper, 25 April 2018.
5Evans, p. 8.
6Mind, ‘We Need to Talk: Getting the Right Therapy at the Right Time’ (2010), https://www.mind.org.uk/media/280583/We-Need-to-Talk-getting-the-right-therapy-at-the-right-time.pdf, accessed 12 February 2015.
7Joanna Cates, ‘Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Is Not Always the Answer for Anxiety and Depression’, Huffington Post, 10 March 2015, https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/joanna-cates/cognitive-behavioural-not-always-the-answer_b_6814562.html, accessed 20 March 2015.
8Tom J. Johnsen and Friberg Oddgeir, ‘The Effects of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy as an Anti-Depressive Treatment Is Falling: A Meta-Analysis’, Psychological Bulletin 141(4) (2015), pp. 747–68.
Lars-Goran Ost, ‘Efficacy of the Third Wave of Behavioural Therapies: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis’, Behaviour Research and Therapy 46 (2008), 296–321.
9Evans, p. 11.
10Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1984), p. 2.
11Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, Senecan Drama and Stoic Cosmology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 8; hereafter cited as ‘Rosenmeyer’.
12T. S. Eliot, ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’, in Essays on Elizabethan Drama (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956), pp. 3–55 (p. 3).
13Brad Inwood, Reading Seneca: Stoic Philosophy at Rome (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), pp. 5–6.
14Epistles, i, XXXIII, p. 237.
15Lucilius Annaeus Seneca, ‘Thyestes’, in Four Tragedies and Octavia, trans. E. F. Watling (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), pp. 43–96 (p. 81); hereafter cited as Thyestes.
16Ibid., p. 66.
17Rosenmeyer, p. 107.
18Ibid., p. 111.
19Thyestes, p. 87.
20Lucilius Annaeus Seneca, ‘Phaedra’, in Four Tragedies and Octavia, trans. E. F. Watling (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), pp. 97–152 (p. 108).
21Lucilius Annaeus Seneca, ‘Hercules’, in Eight Tragedies, trans. John G. Fitch, The Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), i, pp. 36–159 (p. 101); hereafter cited as Hercules.
22Ibid., p. 157.
23Ibid., p. 153.
24Emily Wilson, The Greatest Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 181.
25Epistles, i, VIII, 37.
26Ibid., i, VIII, 39.
27Ibid., i, VIII, 38.
28Ibid., ii, LXVIII, 49.
29Ibid., i, XIII, 75.
30Lucilius Annaeus Seneca, ‘Consolation to Helvia’, in On the Shortness of Life, trans. C. D. N. Costa (London: Penguin, 2004), pp. 34–67 (p. 34); hereafter cited as Helvia.
31Ibid., p. 37.
32Hercules, p. 65.
33Helvia, p. 67.
34Ibid.,
