Stoische Doktrin in römischer Belletristik

This study contests the widespread view that Seneca's tragedies and Lucan's epic on the civil war express their authors' disappointment at the failure of Stoic doctrine to provide convincing answers to the problems of evil in human behaviour or the inescapable blows of Fate. The works of both writers, parallel in treatment, aim at the representation in literature of the tensions between human free-will and determinism.