The editors of this companion hoped to produce ‘a well-ordered, concise presentation which places [Seneca's] philosophical works and the tragedies on an equal footing and deals with them accordingly’ (xi). Yet its fifty-five chapters are arranged in six unequal parts: ‘Life and Legacy’ comprises five chapters, ‘Philosophy’ twenty-six, ‘Tragedy’ nineteen, ‘Apocolocyntosis’ one, ‘Other Works’ two and ‘Synthesis’ two. A large whole-Seneca project was always destined to be messy, but further factors here make this an unnecessarily frustrating volume. First, the book has no introduction by the editors. Habinek's opening chapter highlighting ratio and societas in Seneca's thought will, as it happens, be echoed at various points in the volume, but such interconnections are unacknowledged (the authors generally appear not to have had the chance to read one another's contributions), and so it goes. Between its limited opening orientation and closing synthesis, the book labours under a bifurcating taxonomy (philosopher and dramatist), with ‘Apocolocyntosis’ and ‘Other Works’ as disparate loose ends. The chapters are variable in nature, especially between the handbook-entries on works and the discussions of ‘topics’, and this is jarring when a one-page entry on Seneca's fragmentary biography of his father (Winterbottom) is followed by a forty-five-page chapter on ‘Seneca's Language and Style’ (von Albrecht). Perhaps the major misstep was to assign each work its own chapter, which — absent editorial care — yields an unnecessarily atomizing approach. One outcome is repetition: the principles for dating Seneca's works are already nicely elucidated in an early chapter by Marshall on precisely this question and did not need to be rehearsed in each chapter. It appears that rubrics such as ‘Chronology’, ‘Sources’ or ‘Reception’ were imposed from above and thus prompted contributors to reinvent the wheel or to come up with something to say even when it was not so relevant to the work in hand. (Some contributors, understandably, threw these rubrics out and wrote more cogent accounts of their given work — thereby, however, introducing further inconsistencies in presentation.)

The atomizing approach also generates distinctions that are counter-productive: for example, the separate chapters on Seneca's three consolations, all written by the same scholar (Sauer) but discontinuous in the volume, make it harder, rather than easier, to compare those works with one another. A further problem is inconsistency. Some instances are purely cosmetic (‘Martinus Bracarensis’, ‘Martin of Braga’, ‘Martinus of Braga’), while others are more consequential, such as slightly different accounts of the titles of Phoenissae/Thebais and Troades/Troas (435, 449, 598). The chapters do not cohabit the volume so much as coexist each in their own bubbles.

The reader is also given little opportunity to correct for this by connecting dots. There is no index locorum (!) and the general index is of dubious value, with not a single entry for clementia or De clementia (not even as sub-entries of ‘Seneca’). Some of the sub-entries are apparently nonsense: ‘Seneca > Seneca's conception’ and ‘Seneca > Seneca's concept’ point to nothing recognizable on the given pages as either a ‘conception’ or a ‘concept’ of anything. This does not mean that the volume lacks detailed information and interesting interpretations, but neither the index nor indeed the table of contents could help a reader to learn of their existence or locate them without reading the book cover-to-cover. Presumably a companion ought to flag the things that previous research has demonstrated as important to the topic — the topic here being ‘Seneca’. Yet you will find scarcely a trace in the index or in the title of any chapter or section of unambiguously important ideas in Senecan studies such as exemplarity, women's capacity for virtue, the notions of ratio or conscientia or the influence of Seneca the Elder and declamation. As if this were not enough, the editors allude to a ‘time of crisis’ (xi) in the process of preparing the volume, and the authors were apparently unable to update their contributions and bibliography after submission in 2007 or 2008. Enough said. Yet ultimately it is not the volume's slowness to appear, but its failure to be a good ‘companion’ that may prevent it from being the ‘valuable standard work for the purposes of international Seneca research’ that it could have been (xi).

Even so, I will certainly still send readers of Seneca here to get relatively up-to-date coverage of given works and topics. The volume is notable for the sheer number of excellent discussions by individual contributors, including some whose work has not appeared much in English before. Only a few highlights can be singled out here. Chapters by Aldo Setaioli and R. Scott Smith are so numerous in the volume (nine chapters between them) that, thanks to the thorough and balanced presentation characteristic of both these scholars, this fact alone lends some coherency. The chapters on individual works give useful basic details and often also interpretive footholds; the strongest include those on Natural Questions (Williams), Moral Letters (Setaioli), Phoenissae (Frank), Apocolocyntosis (Roncali) and the Epigrams (Dingel). Seneca the philosopher is compellingly introduced by Sellars, who animates Seneca's education effectively. Ethical topics are examined from helpful angles: along with Setaioli on therapy and on free will, Graver considers Seneca's interest in theoretical psychology and therapeutic writing, Wildberger brings virtue together with Roman manliness and Edwards considers death and time (from physics of time to time's literary dynamics). On the tragedies we receive some equally rewarding analysis — Schmidt on space and time, Heil on vision, sound and silence, Mader on the ‘rhetoric of rationality and irrationality’ and Mazzoli (lucid and invaluable, as always) on the chorus.

As will already be clear, the editors' goal of putting the philosophical works and tragedies on an ‘equal footing’ is more about ensuring that both these components of Seneca's corpus receive air-time than it is about explaining their interrelationship. But the chapters that indicate ways of reading the two together are in their own way quite successful: Mayer does this to some extent in his Phaedra chapter, while Chaumartin spells out the ways in which some of the tragedies have been understood as ‘apotropaic’ and others as ‘parenetic’; von Albrecht usefully maps out (to an extent he has not previously done in English) his view of various tendencies and patterns in Seneca's ‘language and style’ overall; and Fischer, without imposing a stoicizing interpretation, looks at thematic overlaps (such as a concern with ‘good kingship’) that recur across Seneca's writings.

All in all, then, there is much to be gained from persisting with this volume and getting familiar with many of its individual contributions, even if the book as a whole leaves something to be desired.