Anger, mercy, revenge /

The second installment in Chicago's "The Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca" series, this volume provides Kaster's translations of two treatises--On Anger and On Clemency--and Nussbaum's translation of Apocolocyntosis (Pumkinification of Claudius the God), the only classical example of Menippean satire extant. The translations are faithful and lively. Kaster captures Seneca's abrupt, sententious Latin prose better than did John Davie in his Dialogues and Essays (2008), which includes some of the same material. And Nussbaum does an admirable job with the challenging Pumpkinification, with its frequent discursive shifts (from colloquial to literary Latin, prose to verse, even Latin to Greek). Although the translators take Seneca seriously as a moralizing philosopher, their introductions and annotations--though attentive to the literary and rhetorical qualities Seneca's writing displays--are not technical in terms of philosophy. Accordingly, they will be accessible to any intelligent reader. In her introductory essay on Pumpkinification, Nussbaum succeeds in situating even this strange work on an intellectual trajectory culminating in Senecan stoicism. The volume also includes a general introduction by the series editors. These translations are as close to critical editions of classical texts as one is likely to get. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. A. M. Busch College at Brockport, SUNY