Seneca the Philosopher and Hi Modern Message

by Richard Mott Gummere

Excerpt from Seneca the Philosopher and Hi Modern Message
The library, "Our Debt to Greece and Rome," should reveal the inherited permanent factors in the civilization of the twentieth century which have resisted the effects of chance and time and outlived the ephemeral experiments of man. Those classifications of our intellectual, moral and spiritual life, which have had their origin in the Greek and Roman world and which have steadied human life and thinking ever since, are today of enormous importance for determining the aim and direction of life and for creating a sense of unity in life. These elements in our life are the bases of civilization, upon which the fancy and imagination of the human mind may build, but without which or without knowledge of which, life sails upon an uncharted sea.
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170 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 1963

About the author

A very outgoing and friendly man, Richard Mott Gummere was primarily a Latinist and administrator in three different important institutions where he exerted considerable influence on college student selection and admission, setting standards that always kept in mind the role of the classics, especially Latin. Always conscious of the role of the classics in American life, late in his career he wrote especially on the impact that Greece and Rome had on American colonial history, opening up a mostly unexplored and unrecognized field of investigation whose importance is only now beginning to be mined for the new perspective it provides for a more accurate understanding of American colonial history. Despite his “biographical, discursive, exaggerated claims of classical influence,” Gummere “demonstrated that the Founding Fathers were familiar not only with English and French writers on government but also the classical sources; and he introduced the concept of refraction to characterize how early Americans selected and adapted classical theory and practice of politics and government to their own needs” (Meyer Reinhold).

Reviews

[Jacqui · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book talked very little about Seneca's actual philosophy, instead running through all the various thinkers down through the ages who respected or disregarded his works. Not what I was hoping for.