Frantumare la vita. (Lucrezio, Seneca, l’etica delle virtù)

The fragmentation of life, i.e. the inability to live one's life as a whole, is an important theme in Hellenistic ethics, as witnessed in Lucretius and Seneca. From Aristotle onwards, the task of ethics is to construct a unitary life, in which the continuity of the 'good life' is identified with the stable presence of virtue (Stoicism) or pleasure (Epicureanism). This basic problem is related to well-known topics such as the uselessness of travel or chaotic reading: a particularly important theme is the imaginary observation of one's own corpse.