He wrote both tragedies and philosophic tracts until his death, producing masterpieces in both genres, without acknowledging, in either one, that he was simultaneously pursuing the other. Four centuries later, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, a Roman philosopher who took Socrates as his model to the point of trying to kill himself by drinking hemlock, composed, along with a series of treatises on the path to a virtuous life, verse tragedies more harrowing and bleak than any that Plato knew. Plato, in his Republic, spoke of an ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy he sought to ban tragic drama-in his eyes the purest, most destructive form that poetry could take-from his ideal state. Peter Paul Rubens: The Death of Seneca, circa 1612–1613
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