A recent, scholarly review of a translation of Seneca's De beneficiis comments on an introductory essay by Miriam Griffin and Brad Inwood as follows: "The essay continues by stressing the importance of Roman Stoicism, and Seneca in particular, for early Christian thought and even for some modern thinkers up to Kant, the founders of the United States and nineteenth-century American thinkers. As is common among classicists, the introduction skips over the Middle Ages. However, it is well known that, together with Cicero's Stoic account in the De officiis, Seneca's De beneficiis was one of the most widely read and copied classical texts from the eleventh century onward, with nearly 300 extant MSS (cf. L.D. Reynolds, Texts and Transmission)."
Oleg V. Bychkov's thought accords with my prejudice(s), but that doesn't make it true. (My revered teacher, Ian Mueller, certainly did not skip the middle ages, nor does his student Stephen Menn.) So, what do readers think, is such skipping common?
Recent Comments