This study concerns the ability of texts to prescribe and enact human relations, such as attachment, friendship and dependency, in Seneca's Moral Epistles. The views that Seneca develops on these issues mobilize the literary qua textual and the textual qua material in ways informed by the Stoic theory of human relations called oikeiōsis, a process through which one's attachment to oneself as an embodied being gives rise to attachments to others. The study attempts specifically to reconcile Seneca's Stoic philosophical conception of matter and ethical-metaphysical relations with the new historicist and cultural materialist methods of interpreting Seneca's texts that have become widespread in modern Anglo-American philology. I suggest that understanding the complex philosophical currents brought together in Seneca's texts and in the recent traditions of interpreting Seneca's texts may contribute to our understanding of the ethical function that certain texts can have in human relations.

By considering Seneca's representation of (1) the major schools of ancient philosophy—particularly Platonism and Aristotelianism, in addition to his own Stoicism—and (2) the ethical quandaries raised by his specific social and political position, I argue that Seneca attempts to “solve” some of the ethical impasses of human experience through the destabilizing but also constructive resources of rhetoric and textuality. The end result is that Seneca's idea of oikeiōsis or human attachment is facilitated by an exchange of texts between reader and writer that makes text, reader, and writer constitutively reciprocal components of a material human practice shaped by ethics.