Senecae philosophi opera Naturalium quaestionum libros

The Naturales Quaestiones have had a more precarious survival than Seneca's other prose works. Apart from some very brief ninth-century excerpts, the surviving manuscripts are from the twelfth century or later, and the lost archetype had an incomplete and very corrupt text. This new critical edition of Seneca's Naturales Quaestiones replaces the old Teubner edition of Alfred Gercke (1907). The new edition is founded on the same principles as the editor's previous edition of Book 2 (New York, 1981); it is based on an examination of all the surviving manuscripts, and gives a complete collation of the Geneva manuskript Z, which is shown to be the sole complete representative of one of the two branches of the manuscript tradition. Besides drawing on this reappraisal of the manuscripts, the edition also corrects the attribution of a number of earlier conjectures, and draws on recent work on the text. The introduction describes the manuscript tradition and the survival of the Naturales Quaestiones through the middle ages, and discusses the question of the original book order. There is an apparatus fontium, and an index nominum completes the work.