Seneca the Elder
Seneca the Elder | |
---|---|
Born | c. 54 BC |
Died | c. 39 AD (aged c. 92) |
Language | Latin, Greek |
Genre | Rhetoric, Silver Age of Latin, history |
Notable works | Oratorum et Rhetorum Sententiae Divisiones Colores Historiae ab Initio Bellorum Civilium |
Spouse | Helvia |
Children | Lucius Junius Gallio Annaeanus Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger Marcus Annaeus Mela |
Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Elder (
Biography
Seneca the Elder is the first of the
Growing up in Spain of wealth and equestrian rank, Seneca the Elder (here Seneca) was a young contemporary of the venerable Roman orator Cicero, whose voice of advocacy he might have sought out were he reared in Italy. Instead, he was confined by wartime conditions to 'within the walls' of his 'own colony',[3] and there, presumably, he received his first schooling from a praeceptor teaching more than two hundred pupils.[4]
When Rome became safe after the Civil Wars,[5] Seneca travelled for lengthy stays there. He assiduously attended public declamations by teachers of rhetoric and professional orators—the process in those days by which young men trained for pursuing careers in advocacy and public administration. There is no evidence, however, that he pursued such a career himself. And he avoided notice of his writing a history of Rome 'From the beginning of the Civil Wars' through his own times, during the regime of Caligula. Instead, by testimony of the son Seneca (from his De Vita Patris), his father remained all his life a private gentleman. Still, Seneca supported as honourable the political careers of his elder (two) sons,[6] and he spoke for the study of rhetoric as honourable even as he was fully aware of the dangers inherent in such careers: 'in which the very objectives sought after are to be feared'.[7] And he supported his youngest son, Mela, who remained content with his heritage as an equestrian.
Works
The declamatory anthology
In his old age, on basis of his experiences attending the schools and auditoria of the declaimers in the Rome of
Seneca's work here, however, is neither a collection of his own declamations nor fair copies of those delivered by other declaimers; it is an anthology. It provides extracts and analyses of the declamatory art issuing from the rhetorical celebrities of his (younger) days spent in Rome. It is not a theoretical treatise on declamation; Seneca's own input is limited to pen-portraits of the famous declaimers he cites, plus analytical and critical commentary on their work; and of 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; nor was it the theoretical basis of their educational method. The declamation they practised was, Seneca claimed, a new art, born during his lifetime—its characteristic concentration being on a bizarre set of imaginary lawsuits known as controversiae. So far as Rome the City was concerned, we must believe him. If the new art originated from schools elsewhere in the Greek-speaking world—which is likely, in view of the remoteness of those declamatory themes from the realities in then-Roman law-courts—Seneca seems to have been unaware of it. He was, however, well acquainted with the activities (in the City) of Greek rhetoricians teaching their art in Greek alongside those who taught it in Latin.
In the prefaces to his books of Controversiae Seneca identifies rhetoricians who were contemporaries of Latro but with different approaches and skills than his Latronian ideal. He refers specifically to a primum tetradeum, meaning the four most distinguished declaimers he had known, which included Latro, Gallio, Albucius Silus, and Arellius Fuscus. He expresses serious reservations of Arellius' style, for its unevenness, and its descriptive passages (explicationes),[13] which Seneca 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."[14] But there was no denying the distinction in Rome of the school of Arellius Fuscus, whose pupils included the philosophical writer Fabianus,[15] and the poet Ovid;[16] thus, even by his severe critic, Arellius was ranked highly. Albucius Silus too was influential—as the author of a textbook that Quintilian cited several times.[17]
Seneca's declamatory anthology presents a far-reaching critical investigation of the rhetorical basis of the mannerist,
The ten books of the Controversiae
Of the ten books of the Controversiae—there are declamatory treatments of some 74 judicial themes, with the names of individual rhetoricians, plus Seneca's critical comments—only five: 1, 2, 7, 9, 10, survive in entirety or nearly-so. Information from the missing books is supplied by an epitome written several centuries later for school use. Later, this same tome supplied stories for European literature of the late Middle Ages, namely the 14th century anecdotes-collection known as the Gesta Romanorum.
Each of Seneca's books was introduced by a preface, an approach he compared to that adopted by organizers of gladiatorial shows.[18] Each preface presents pen-portraits of famous declaimers, either as individuals or in pairs. In the tenth preface, Seneca provided a group presentation of declaimers previously overlooked.
Following the prefaces are surveys of the treatments of particular controversia-themes by noted declaimers. These surveys, in keeping with the title of the anthology—Oratorum et Rhetorum Sententiae Divisiones Colores—were usually provided in three main sections. The first section was sententiae, or 'ways of thinking',[19] as adopted by various declaimers about their set themes. The second section: divisiones, or outlines of their argumentation; and the third: colores, or specious interpretations of 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 their career. In the only extant book of his Suasoriae, Seneca provides sententiae by the declaimers cited, followed by their divisiones; but there are no colores, which belong exclusively to treatment of judicial rhetoric, and have no place in deliberative oratory.
The elder Seneca's authorship of the declamatory anthology Controversiae—generally ascribed to his son during the
History
The elder Seneca (Seneca) was also the author of a lost historical work that recorded a history of Rome from the beginning of the civil wars to (almost) his death, after which it was published by his son. We learn about this magnum opus from the younger Seneca's own work 'De vita patris' (H. Peter, Historicorum Romanorum fragmenta, 1883, 292, 301) and from a large fragment of the Historiae itself,[20] cited by Lactantius in Institutiones Divinae 7.15.14. The Lactantius fragment is prefatory (introductory) in character and pessimistic in outlook; it likens the history of Rome to the Seven Ages of Man, while comparing Rome's reversion to monarchical rule with the 'second infancy' of senility. Also extant is Seneca's account of the death of Tiberius, cited by Suetonius in Tiberius 73.[21]
In 2017 the papyrologist Valeria Piano published a detailed study of P.Herc 1067, a charred papyrus-roll collected from Herculaneum—it was buried by Mt. Vesuvius in AD 79. The scroll was first excavated probably in 1782, and partially unrolled in the early nineteenth century. Piano asserts in her study (published in Cronache Ercolanesi, 47, pp. 163–250), on basis of traces of lettering on its final subscriptio, that the text was written by one 'L. Annaeus Seneca'. And, from what can be read of the narrative—that is, of historical and political themes relating to the first decades of the Roman Empire—she proposes that it most likely originated in (the elder) Seneca's Historiae. Further, she judges that traces of a book-title following the author's name (in the subscriptio) are more compatible with Seneca's own ' ... ab initio b[ell]orum [civilium] ' than with his declamatory anthology.
Unfortunately, the text of the scroll is now essentially unreadable as continuous narrative because, in the process of unrolling, several layers of tightly rolled papyrus remained stuck together and were peeled away from each other unevenly.[20]
Editions of the declamatory anthology
- Nicolas Lefèvre (Nicholas Faber) (Paris, 1587)
- JF Gronovius (Leiden, 1649, Amsterdam, 1672)
- Conrad Bursian (critical edition) (Leipzig, 1857)
- Adolf Kiessling (Leipzig, 1872)
- Hermann Johannes Müller (Prague, 1887)
- Michael Winterbottom, (1974) Declamations, (Controversiae, Suasoriae. Fragments). 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library
References
- ^ Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, William Smith, Editor.
- ^ ISBN 9004057595.
- ^ Controversiae 1 pr 11
- ^ Controversiae 1. pr. 2
- ^ Controversiae 1 pr. 11
- ^ Controversiae 2 pr. 3–4
- ^ Latin: in quibus ipsa quae sperantur timenda sunt
- ^ Sussmann (1994), p. 4
- ^ Sussmann (1994), p. 5
- ^ Controversiae 1 pr. 22, 24
- ^ Controversiae 3 pr. 7; 2.2.8
- ^ Controversiae i pr. 13
- ^ Oxford Latin Dictionary sv. explicatio 4
- ^ Controversiae 2 pr 1
- ^ Controversiae 2 pr. 1
- ^ Controversiae 2.8
- ^ Quintilian 2.15.36; 3.3.4; 3.6.62. (Seneca's pen-portrait of Albucius is lost, but Suetonius' de Rhetoribus 30 describes him vividly as a greater success as a declaimer than as an orator.)
- ^ Controversiae 1 pr. 24; 4 pr. 1; Fairweather 29–30
- ^ Oxford Latin Dictionary s.v. sententia 1, cf. 3 'an opinion expressed in the senate in response to an interrogatio/
- ^ a b See M. Russo's review of Maria Chiara Scappaticcio, Seneca the Elder and his rediscovered 'Historiae ab initio bellorum civilium'. new perspectives on early-imperial Roman historiography. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2020, in BMCR 2021.01.23.
- ^ See M. Winterbottom, Loeb edition, Seneca the Elder Vol. 2, pp. 614–17, for the text and English translation of both these fragments.
Sources
- public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Seneca". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 24 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 637–638. This article incorporates text from a publication now in the
- Sussmann, Lewis A., ed. (1994). The Declamations of Calpurnius Flaccus: Text, Translation, and Commentary. Mnemosyne Bibliotheca Classica Batava. Vol. 133. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 9789004099838.
Further reading
- Bodel, John. (2010). "Kangaroo Courts: Displaced Justice in the Roman Novel". In Spaces of Justice in the Roman World. Edited by Francesco de Angelis, 311–329. Boston: Brill.[ISBN missing]
- Dinter, Martin T., Charles Guérin, and Marcos Martinho dos Santos, eds. (2020). Reading Roman Declamation: Seneca the Elder. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198746010.
- Fairweather, Janet. (1981). Seneca the Elder. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [ISBN missing]
- Fantham, Elaine (1978). "Imitation and Decline: Rhetorical Theory and Practice in the First Century after Christ". Classical Philology, 73(2), 10–116.
- Griffin, Miriam. (1972). "The Elder Seneca and Spain". Journal of Roman Studies 62:1–19.
- Gunderson, Erik. (2003). Declamation, Paternity, and Roman Identity: Authority and the Rhetorical Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Huelsenbeck, B. (2011). "The Rhetorical Collection of the Elder Seneca: Textual Tradition and Traditional Text". Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 106, 229–299.
- Imber, Margaret. (2008). "Life Without Father: Declamation and the Construction of Paternity in the Roman Empire". In Role Models in the Roman World: Identity and Assimilation. Edited by Sinclair Bell and Inge Lyse Hansen, 161–169. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
- McGill, Scott. (2012). "A Spectrum of Innocence: Denying Plagiarism in Seneca the Elder". In Plagiarism in Latin Literature. By Scott McGill, 146–177. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Richlin, Amy. (1997). "Gender and Rhetoric: Producing Manhood in the Schools". In Roman Eloquence: Rhetoric in Society and Literature. Edited by William J. Dominik, 90–110. London: Routledge.
- Roller, Matthew (1997). "Color-Blindness: Cicero's Death, Declamation, and the Production of History". Classical Philology, 92(2), 109–130.
- Stoffel. (2017). The Inter- and Intratextuality of Seneca the Elder’s Controversia 6.8: The Vestal Virgin Writer and her challenging persona. Philologus, 161(1), 162–177.
External links
- Quotations related to Seneca the Elder at Wikiquote
- Works by Seneca the Elder at Perseus Digital Library
- Seneca, Suasoriae – English translation by W.A. Edward