Seneca's Tragic Passions in Context: Transgeneric Argumentation in Cicero's Tusculan disputations

In his prose works Seneca deals with passions central to tragedy, but he rarely quotes from tragedy and does therefore not provide a philosophical perspective on concrete examples of tragic passions. To shed light on the ways in which a philosopher may deal with tragic passions this paper turns to Cicero and examines the interplay between tragedy and philosophy in his discussion of grief in Tusculanae disputationes III . Quotations from tragedy in book III relate to the behaviour Cicero advocates in two different ways: either they express philosophical insights into dealing with grief or they evoke grief, sometimes effectively staging this passion. In using quotations from tragedy Cicero not only shows that grief is unreasonable and destructive, but also exploits powerful poetic representations of suffering to stress the intensity of this emotion in his polemic against Epicurus (Tusc. III 32-51).