Care of the Other: Seneca and the Work of Mourning

Prof. Victoria Rimell

Care of the Other: Seneca and the Work of Mourning (Leverhulme Research Fellowship. 2022-24)

In this book project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, I ask what it is to read the Senecan corpus from the vantage point of consolation - both the consolatory Dialogues and Epistles, addressed to a younger friend, a noblewoman who has lost her son, a freedman, and Seneca’s own mother, and the therapeutic approaches to dying, grief and loss that run through Senecan thought and poetics, including the tragedies. The question for me is how to engage with consolation’s particular affordances and risks as a public exercise in ethical exhortation that must also enter into the crisis of the uniquely wounded other. A significantly different Seneca emerges, I argue, in the speculative, relational dimension of the consolatory mode, which orients the Roman male subject towards the gendered pressures of vulnerability and dependency in the lag between human weakness and Stoic self-sufficiency.

In 2023-4, I gave several papers and lectures in which I presented parts of the book-in-progress, including the Housman Lecture at UCL, and the Fowler Lecture at the University of Oxford.

Housman Lecture 2024 | Department of Greek & Latin - UCL – University College London

Fowler Lectures - Jesus College (ox.ac.uk)

The resulting monograph, entitled The Question of Grief. Seneca, Consolation and the Solace of Antiquity, is now complete, under review, and should be published in 2026-7. A new research-led Honours module,The question of grief: Seneca's consolations and modern grief-writing, will run for the first time in 2026-7.

Other related ouputs

Books

(2024) A Commentary on Ovid, Remedia Amoris, Oxford University Press; Italian version (2022). Ovidio, Remedia Amoris. Introduzione, Testo, Commento. Lorenzo Valla, Rome.

Articles

(forthcoming 2026) ‘Psychoanalysis, philology, consolation: reading Seneca otherwise’ in R. Armstrong, P. Allen Miller, D. Orrells, V. Zajko (ed.) Psychoanalysis and Classical Reception. Bloomsbury, London.

(forthcoming 20256) ‘Seneca’s lifedeath’ in M.Telò and P.A.Miller (eds.) Thinking Antiquity Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Oxford.

(2024) ‘Philosophers’ stone: enduring Niobe’ in A.Benjamin and M.Telò (eds.) Niobes: Antiquity, Modernity, Critical Theory, OSU Press, 69-84

(2022) ‘About face: an inverse archaeology of Seneca Ep.115’ LAS 2: 225-52.