Seneca the Elder

It was on the basis of his experiences in the schools and auditoria of the declaimers of Augustan and Tiberian Rome that the elder Seneca wrote, in his old age, the work on which his fame rests today, the Oratorum et Rhetorum Sententiae Divisiones Colores. This work, originally comprising ten books on the subject of Controversiae (fictitious lawsuits) together with at least one additional book on Suasoriae (fictitious speeches of persuasion), was written ostensibly at the request of his sons and ostensibly from memory. It is not a collection of his own declamations, or of complete fair copies of those delivered by any other declaimer but instead it presents representative extracts and analyses of the declamatory art of a considerable number of the rhetorical celebrities of his younger days. It certainly does not have the character of a theoretical treatise. The elder Seneca's own input is confined to pen-portraits of the famous declaimers whom he cites, plus analytical and critical comments about details of their work and anecdotes remembered from the literary chatter of long ago.

The declaimers of Augustan and Tiberian Rome professed admiration for Cicero, but their preferred oratorical style was not very Ciceronian and nor was the theoretical basis of their educational method. 'Declamation' of the sort that they practised, was, according to the elder Seneca, a new art, born after his own birth. So far as Rome was concerned, we must believe him. If its characteristic concentration on the bizarre kind of imaginary lawsuits known as controversiae had earlier precedent in the schools somewhere in the Greek-speaking world - as is likely, in view of the remoteness of the subject-matter and legal suppositions of these declamatory themes from the realities of Roman law-courts - Seneca the Elder seems to have been totally unaware of it. He was, however, aware of the activity of a number of Greek rhetoricians, teaching in Rome alongside those who taught their art in Latin.

It so happened that Porcius Latro, a great friend from the elder Seneca's Corduban childhood, became one of Rome's leading rhetoricians in the Augustan era. Together they had studied at the rhetorical school of one Marullus.[8] In his friend's view Latro's only serious rival for supremacy among Rome's declaimers was the orator Junius Gallio, another close family connection of the Senecas Latro cultivated the sort of 'fiery and agitated style' that Seneca particularly admired.[9] He was characterized by his friend as a man of both gravity and charm, pre-emininently worthy of the eloquence he possessed. But the end of Seneca's tribute to him [10] illustrates how both men inhabited a literary world far distant from Cicero's, one in which delight in neat contrasts and paradoxes had become all-consuming: 'no one' wrote Seneca of Latro, 'was more in command of his intellect: no one was more indulgent towards it'.

Not all the rhetoricians cited by Seneca were identical to Latro in their tastes. In the prefaces to the books of Controversiae Seneca took pains to identify their distinguishing characteristics and was by no means entirely dismissive of those who fell short of his Latronian ideal. At one point he refers to a primum tetradeum, meaning the four most distinguished declaimers he had known. One should note the inclusion, in this distinguished group, alongside Latro, Gallio and Albucius Silus, of Arellius Fuscus, about whose style he expresses serious reservations in his second preface, for its unevenness and, in particular, with regard to the descriptive passages (explicationes)[11] characteristic of it, which he considered 'brilliant, but laboured and involved, with a decorative finish too contrived, and word-positioning too effeminate, to be tolerable for a mind preparing itself for such holy and courageous teachings.'[12] But there was no denying the distinction of the school of Arellius Fuscus, whose pupils included the philosophical writer Fabianus[13] and the poet Ovid,[14] so it is understandable why, even in the judgement of a severe critic, he had to be ranked so highly. Albucius, too was influential, the author of a textbook which Quintilian was to cite several times.[15] The elder Seneca's declamatory anthology in fact presents a far-reaching critical investigation of the rhetorical substrata underlying the mannerist 'Silver Age' literature in which, after Ovid, the younger Seneca's sententious philosophical disquisitions and dramatic art and, in the next generation, Lucan's fiery and agitated epic poetry stand out as among the most striking examples.

Out of the ten books of Controversiae, in which extracts from declamatory treatments of seventy-four judicial themes were presented, only books 1, 2, 7, 9, 10 survive more or less in their entirety, with the names of individual rhetoricians and Seneca's critical comments included. Such information as we have about the remaining books is supplied by an epitome made in the 4th or 5th century for school use, which was to leave its mark on later European literature by supplying some of the stories included in the anecdote-collection called Gesta Romanorum

Each book was introduced by a preface in which the anthologist adopted an approach which he himself compared to that adopted by organizers of gladiatorial shows [16] Each preface presents pen-portraits of the famous exponents of the declamatory art either individually, or in pairs, before finally, in the tenth preface, Seneca offers his readers a group-presentation of declaimers previously overlooked.

After the prefaces came surveys of the treatment of particular controversia-themes by noted declaimers of the past. These surveys, in line with the title of the anthology, usually contain three main sections, the first presenting sententiae the 'ways of thinking'[17] adopted by the various declaimers about their set themes, while the second section is devoted to divisiones , outlines of their argumentation, and the third to colores, the specious interpretations which they gave to the actions of their imaginary defendants, with a view to excusing or vilifying them.

The books of Controversiae were supplemented by at least one devoted to Suasoriae (exercises in deliberative oratory), in which historical or mythological characters are imagined as deliberating on their options at crucial junctures in the career. In his extant book of Suasoriae, Seneca presents sententiae by the declaimers cited, followed by their divisiones, but no colores, as these have no place in deliberation, belonging exclusively to judicial rhetoric.

The elder Seneca's claim to the authorship of this declamatory anthology, generally ascribed to his son during the Middle Ages, was vindicated by the Renaissance humanists Raffaello Maffei and Justus Lipsius.

Seneca was also the author of a lost historical work, containing the history of Rome from the beginning of the civil wars almost down to his own death, after which it was published by his son. About this magnum opus we learn something from the younger Seneca's De vita patris (H. Peter, Historicorum Romanorum fragmenta, 1883, 292, 301) and from a large fragment of the History itself which was cited by Lactantius in Institutiones Divinae 7.15.14. This fragment is prefatory in character and pessimistic in outlook, likening as it does the history of Rome to the Seven Ages of Man, and comparing the reversion of Rome to monarchical rule with the 'second infancy' of senility. Also extant is his account of the death of Tiberius, cited by Suetonius in Tiberius 73.[18]

In 2017 the papyrologist Valeria Piano published a detailed study of P.Herc 1067, a charred papyrus-roll from Herculaneum first excavated probably in 1782, and partially unrolled in the early nineteenth century. In this study, published in Cronache Ercolanesi (47, pp. 163–250), she asserts, on the basis of traces of lettering on its final subscriptio, that the text which the roll contained was by one L. Annaeus Seneca, and that in view of the clear preponderance in what can be read of the text's contents, of historical and political matter relating to the first decades of the Roman Empire, it is most likely to have originated in the elder Seneca's Histories. Slight traces of a book-title following the author's name in the subscriptio are also judged to be more compatible with ab initio b[ell]orum [civilium] than with the title of the rhetorical anthology. Unfortunately, the text of the scroll legible now is very far from capable of being read as a continuous narrative since, in the process of unrolling, several layers of tightly rolled papyrus tended to remain stuck together and peeled away from each other unevenly.