To Seneca the Elder, the time of Cicero seemed the golden age of Roman eloquence; its glory had lingered on for perhaps one more generation – he was grateful for the illumination shed on his studies by the brilliant minds ‘born at that time’ (Contr. I pr. 7) – but since then rhetoric, in his view, had shown a rapid decline. The causes of this decline were to be the topic of much discussion throughout the first century A.D., just as the decay of Greek eloquence after the downfall of the democracies appears to have been the subject of earlier scholarly debate. Seneca's is one of the earliest of the Roman discussions, and it is interesting to consider which of the explanations for the decline that were to become more or less standard, he does, or does not, give.

In Contr. I pr. 7 he offers us three alternative explanations:

He then proceeds to give a highly coloured description of contemporary decadence, which owes much to the clichés of declamatory convicium saeculi (Contr. I.pr. 8–10).

According to Quintilian (III.3.4), Albucius had advanced the heretical view that the art of oratory consisted of only three, not five, parts: memoria and actio were to be excluded as being natural gifts. Quintilian disagreed with Albucius, though he had to concede that the opinion that actio was the product of natural endowments was nothing new, but even had the support of the sophist Thrasymachus. Seneca the Elder says nothing about this theory of Albucius, but his own position with regard to one side of the issue is clear enough. He was convinced that memory could be assisted by art: Latro's memory, for example, was natura guidem felix, plurimum tamen arte adiuta (Contr. I pr. 17).

As we have seen, Seneca claims in Contr. I pr. 2 to have been the proud possessor in youth of a memory which verged on the miraculous: he had been capable of remembering two thousand random names and reproducing them in the correct sequence, and of memorizing more than two hundred assorted lines of poetry and then reeling them back to his amazed school-fellows in reverse order. About Latro's memory too he makes claims calculated to astound his readers:

In the early years of the elder Seneca's life-time it appears that literary Latin had undergone a profound and rapid change. A startling indication of the rapidity with which it had come about is that he found it remarkable (Contr. IV pr. 9) that Haterius used words which were antiqua et a Cicerone dicta, a ceteris deinde deserta. Consequently, though he does occasionally distinguish between an old style and a new, for example in his descriptions of Scaurus and Labienus in the tenth preface, it is not to be imagined that men described as antiqui in his criticism, for example the declaimer named Crispus whom he calls an antiquum rhetorem in Contr. VII.4.9, were the kind of stylists whom Augustus would have referred to as antiquarii (Suet. Aug. 86.2). It is evident from his remarks on the old and new types of divisio in Contr. 1.1.13 that to the elder Seneca veteres meant the generation of Porcius Latro. For he promises, ‘ego exponam quae aut veteres invenerunt aut sequentes adstruxerunt’, and yet he never gives examples of the simple divisio controversiarum antiqua earlier than those of Latro and the rhetoricians active at the time when he rose to fame. Extreme archaism does not appear, from anything the elder Seneca says, to have been a strong force in early Imperial declamation. Even such a stylist as Pollio, of whom Quintilian was to write, a nitore et iucunditate Ciceronis ita longe abest ut videri possit saeculo prior (X.I.113), became extraordinarily self-indulgent when he declaimed.

Eduard Norden, who in his Antike Kunstprosa viewed the whole history of Hellenistic and Latin prose style as a centuries-long battle between the rival tendencies of Atticism and Asianism, was confident that what he called the new style (der neue Stil) characteristic of early Imperial declaimers, could in its entirety be regarded as a manifestation of Asianism. Various points emerge, however, from the elder Seneca's criticism of the declaimers which suggest that Norden's diagnosis was an over–simplification. First, it is evident that, however uniform in style declamatory sententiae as excerpted by the elder Seneca may seem to readers today, the sensitive ears of the anthologist himself detected many distinct genera dicendi in use among the declaimers of his time, not just one all-embracing type of modernity. Secondly, though the elder Seneca does use the term Asianus in his criticism, it is noteworthy that he does so very sparingly, applying this epithet only to four Greek declaimers and probably, though the text of the passage in question is doubtful, to one Latin declaimer, namely Fuscus, whose style, as we have seen, had certain characteristics which set it apart from that of Latro and the genus dicendi ardens et concitatum which was Seneca's ideal.

The elder Seneca mentions several reasons why he came to write about declamations and declaimers. First, he will have us believe that the theme of his work was suggested by his sons:

This request from his sons is perhaps fictional or semi-fictional. To claim that one was writing at the request of some person was, like the epistolary greeting, a standard convention among ancient writers of prefaces to works whose utility needed to be emphasized. To make out that one's purpose in writing was to give information to some member of one's family had been a cliché in classical didactic writing ever since Hesiod had addressed the Works and days to his brother. To take two Roman instances, Cato in, for example, the dictum quoted by Seneca in Contr. I pr. 9: orator est, Marce fili, vir bonus dicendi peritus, and Cicero in his Partitiones oratoriae, had addressed rhetorical precepts to their sons, the latter in a baby-simple catechistic fashion which his rebellious offspring can hardly have appreciated. Admittedly Cicero's son was only thirteen when it was written.

PHRASIS ELECTA

Tastefulness in the choice of diction, in the elder Seneca's opinion, was one of the factors which ought to make for a good declaimer. It emerges from his reports of critical discussions about declamation that the scholastics of his time hedged themselves around with all manner of prohibitions about diction. It was not only the use of barbarisms and obscenities that was forbidden: any word with mundane associations, any archaism or neologism, was liable to be scrutinized with varying degrees of pedantry. Seneca tells us much of interest about these prohibitions, while himself adopting a fairly tolerant attitude towards all but the most monstrous breaches of the rules.

Even over the matter of barbarisms we have to distinguish between Seneca's attitudes and those of the stricter critics of his time. Seneca did not, of course, positively advocate barbarism, but he had nothing disparaging to say about the diction of Latro, of whom Messala, Latini … sermonis observator diligentissimus, once said on hearing him declaim, sua lingua disertus est (Contr. II.4.8). Yet he was evidently not completely deaf to the strangeness, by metropolitan standards, of Spanish Latin: at any rate he was reminded by some passages in Sextilius Ena's poetry of Cicero's reference in the Pro Archia to the rich and foreign resonances of Corduban poetry (Suas. 6.27).

The extent of the elder Seneca's familiarity with the classics of Greek and Roman oratory and rhetorical theory cannot be estimated with any hope of accuracy but if, as seems probable, he had not nearly the same depth of knowledge as Cicero of the rhetorical traditions of Greece and the Roman Republic, this is nothing to be wondered at in view of the contrast between the kinds of education which the two men received in their youth. Seneca the Elder, confined in his formative years to a remote and war-torn western province, and unfortunate in having to learn the elements of rhetoric from the uninspired Marullus, had none of the educational experiences which were to enable Cicero to write about oratory with his air of incontrovertible authority. Not for him, unless our information is grossly misleading, anything comparable to the old-fashioned tirocinium fori, the prolonged study of Greek philosophy, the travels around the schools of distinguished rhetoricians in Greece and Asia Minor, which Cicero describes in the autobiographical section of the Brutus (89.304ff.).

Nevertheless Seneca the Elder was able to overcome to a certain extent the limitations of his formal education. As an adult enthusiast in the auditoria of the declaimers he had the chance to learn much, just by listening to the discussions and quips of the rhetoricians and distinguished members of their audience, which would sharpen his critical sensitivity. His study of history must have further broadened his outlook. On the other hand it is questionable whether he ever made any considerable study of the works which we consider the classics of rhetorical theory, or of the speeches of Greek, or pre-Ciceronian Roman orators.

A finished controversia normally consisted of four main sections: the principium or prooemium (e.g. Contr. I.1.24f.); the narratio (e.g. Contr. 1.1.21); the argumenta or argumentatio (e.g. Contr. 1.6.9; II.2.12) and the epilogus (e.g. Contr. IV pr. 8). A suasoria did not require a narratio, and so seems to have consisted simply of a principium (e.g. Suas. 7.14) followed by various quaestiones, and presumably some kind of conclusion (see e.g. Contr. VII.7.19, quoted below), though Seneca does not in fact mention any epilogus in his extant surveys of suasoriae. Seneca assumes a knowledge of the nature and functions of these sections of a declamation, and restricts his attention to details of treatment and departures from the norm.

About the prooemium he has little to say. There is an interesting reference, though, in Contr. VII.7.19, to the way Cestius criticized his pupils when they used an unsubtle trick which he called echo, that is, when they opened a declamation with a quotation which they would bring in once more at the end:

The English-speaking world was without a monograph on Seneca the Elder until the end of 1978. Now it has two, but I trust that no reader will consider this, the second to appear, wholly superfluous. Certainly the recently published book by Professor L.A. Sussman, The elder Seneca (Leiden, 1978), is in no way dependent on any work of mine. For my part, I have for a considerable time had access to Sussman's doctoral dissertation of 1969, but it only became available to me three years after I had begun my Senecan researches, by which time I had passed the stage when it might have had a formative effect on my views. Certain points of organization in Section III of this book were suggested to me by Sussman's dissertation, but I am not otherwise substantially indebted to it. As a consequence of the publication of Sussman's new book I have added many references to it in footnotes, but have made only three minor alterations to my main text. Inevitably our fields of investigation overlap, but we have to a surprising extent chosen to concentrate our attention on different aspects of the elder Seneca. Unlike Sussman, I have not attempted to say much about the Senecan historical fragments of the Nachleben of the declamatory anthology, but I have ranged over a number of areas outside the scope of his book. Some, it may fairly be alleged, are rather remote from the person of Seneca the Elder.

The elder Seneca had every reason to consider himself singularly well-equipped for the task he was undertaking when he compiled the work which has come down to us under the title Oratorum et rhetorum sententiae divisiones colores. This task was to provide a detailed record of the rise of the type of rhetorical declamation which had become a remarkably important feature of the literary life of Rome in the early years of the Empire, that is, the declamation of controversiae (speeches for the prosecution or defence in imaginary court cases) and suasoriae (speeches offering advice to mythical or historical figures as they face crucial decisions), in public as well as in private, by adult amateurs – often eminent men – as well as by schoolboys and professional teachers of rhetoric.

Born most probably in the fifties B.C., at any rate back in the days when Cicero had still been alive, by the time he came to write his work on the declaimers the elder Seneca was able to draw on an unusually intimate knowledge of his subject acquired over seventy years or more. He could remember the days before public declamation by non-professionals had become accepted practice (Contr. X pr. 4: …nondum haec consuetudo erat inducta), and he knew that it was in the last years of the Republic, when he was a child, that the word declamare had first been used as a technical term to describe the habit, newly popular among Roman orators, of delivering practice speeches in the privacy of their homes (Contr. I pr. 12).