L’ossessione della tortura in Seneca. una falla nella resistenza del sapiens?

[Obsession with Torture in Seneca: a Chink in sapiens’ Endurance?] Seneca’s emphasis on torture, which is supposed to be rooted in stylistic (the taste for the macabre at the time) and historical-personal factors (the real risk of being tortured, for members of the elite under the Principality), is explained in this article in a new way, based on the Epicurean maxim – adopted by Seneca – that pain, if acute, is short and, if chronic, is mild. Indeed, torture, by deliberately inflicting severe and prolonged pain, and even depriving the victim of the possibility of suicide, breaks the reassuring picture of the sapiens’ pain tolerance and puts him at risk of failure. Keywords: Seneca, torture, pain, death, suicide, sapiens.