Seneca wrestled all his life with the issue of otium or nonparticipation, expressing different views in different works and even in different sections of a single work. He devoted an entire treatise to it, De Otio, only part of which survives. In a modern scholarly study, an analysis of Seneca’s views on otium runs to fifty dense pages and even then comes to no firm conclusions. “It is difficult, if not impossible, to give an account of Seneca’s views which, while remaining faithful, would produce a consistent and coherent system,” concedes Miriam Griffin, the author of that study. The problem
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