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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Seneca called the past age?

2. What do the friends Seneca talks about in Letter LXV compare to concepts by Aristotle and Plato?

3. According to Letter LXXXVIII, how important is the knowledge of the liberal arts to Stoicism?

4. Which of Seneca's friends grieved the burning of the town discussed in Letter XCI?

5. What becomes of people who live a quiet, private life which incites neither anger nor envy?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does Seneca say about people who have an excessive concern with pain?

2. According to Seneca, what destroyed man's harmonic relationship with nature and what was the result?

3. List and explain three types of people who, according to Seneca, find philosophy attractive for the wrong reasons.

4. How, according to Seneca, are life and philosophy both the gifts of the gods?

5. What is Zeno's logic that a drunk man is not a good man?

6. How, according to Letter LXXXIII, does Seneca spend his day?

7. What is the Stoic concept of causation?

8. What advice does Seneca give Lucilius about coping with illness and the sometimes severe symptoms that accompany it?

9. What does Plato add to Aristotle's theory of causation?

10. What fault does Seneca find in Zeno's logic that a good man will not drink to excess?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

There are three types of irony: verbal, situational and dramatic. Define each and discuss at least two examples of irony in Seneca's letters.

Essay Topic 2

What is philosophy? What are ethics and what is the importance of ethics in philosophy?

Essay Topic 3

Discuss Zeno's life and his importance to Stoicism.

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