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Seneca
Lowes argues that Coleridge probably read Lucius Annaeus Seneca's book on natural science
sometime before 1798. If so, Coleridge would have heard of a river Alpheus,
that sank into the earth, going into a vast subterranean sea, so far
underground that the sun might never shine on its waves, and came up again,
elsewhere, in a fountain.
As a philosopher, Seneca took a Stoic point of view, which was probably
necessary in his other occupation, serving as an official under Emperor
Nero.
But he was also a playwright, even though the results are a bit stiff.
And all his writing suggest an imaginative, if a bit repressed, artist.
This particular book, the Quaestiones naturales, is a series of explorations, or
investigations, following various speculations to see where they will take
him;.
The mood probably appealed to Coleridge, if he read the book, so Seneca
may have been another voice suggesting Alph, the sacred river that plunges
into caverns measureless to man, into a sunless sea.
Seneca, Quaestiones naturales.
Translation: John Clarke, Physical Science in the Time of Nero, London,
1910, p. 142)
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 Other sources
William Bartram |