Music and Philosophy in the Roman Empire

"In the history of ancient philosophy there is a kind of fascinating black hole between Cicero's last philosophical treatises and the first works of Seneca and Philo. From this period very little has survived via direct transmission. The causes of this silence are multiple and complex. One of them is certainly the Roman civil war, the commune nefas, as the poet Lucan put it. Not only was it a major political trauma, but it had momentous consequences for Roman philosophy. The period before the war was that of Lucretius, Cicero, Cato and many other Romans with profound philosophical interests"--