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THE YOUNGER SENECA
a style, like pupils in the eighteenth-century Royal Academy, by sedulous
imitation of the Old Masters, and delicate variations on them; Seneca both
neglected and despised the ancient models, substituting a manner of writing
that was all his own. "We may further believe Quintilian when he indicates
that the Senecan revolution might well have succeeded, had not Quintilian
himself laboured in the classrooms of Flavian Rome to recall Latin style to
the norms of antiquity.
So much is literary history. The rest is a matter of sympathy and taste, and
here Quintilian cannot be allowed the same absolute authority, any more than
any other critic. Style is his primary interest. For all his openmindedness he
cannot be expected to sympathize with the style which has dominated the
preceding generation, which violates all his principles, and which he has spent
a lifetime in eradicating. Still less can he be fairly expected to probe beneath that
style's surface, and to attempt a balanced evaluation of Seneca's literary achievement
in all its aspects. In fact, a very long time was to pass before anybody
attempted such a thing. The life-work of Seneca resembles many other artistic
and political phenomena of the later Julio-Claudian dynasty, in that it is
innovative, contemptuous of earlier categories and conventions, hyperbolic —
and shortlived, barely surviving the catastrophic collapse of the dynasty. In
the reaction towards classicism which followed (and is nobly represented by
Quintilian), it had little hope of sympathy. Almost the only later Roman
authors who show a genuine admiration for Seneca as a writer are the Christians;
and this is no accident, inasmuch as they themselves are anticlassicists and
revolutionaries in their way. 1 The era of his greatest influence on European
literature belongs, in fact, not to the classical period at all, but to the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. 2 Thereafter it declined, approximately pari passu
with the decline of Latin itself from the status of a major literary dialect to that
of a scholastic pursuit. With the exception of T. S. Eliot, 3 no literary critic of
the first rank has seriously occupied himself with any part of Seneca's work in
the twentieth century. Professional classicists, on the other hand, have been
paying ever-increasing attention to him; yet even among these there have been
relatively few attempts at a general literary-critical estimate, and nothing
approaching a communis opinio has yet emerged. There is, indeed, a general
disposition to take Seneca more seriously than was customary at any time between
the ideological upheavals of the seventeenth century and those of the
twentieth; but he continues to resist conventional literary categorization as
stoutly as he did in Quintilian's day. For these reasons the present survey,
1
For the pagan and Christian testimonia to Seneca, see Trillitzsch (1971) 11.
2
See, e.g., Eliot (1927), for his effect on dramatic poetry; Williamson (1951), for his importance
in the story of English prose style; and Regenbogen (1927/8) for a general summary of his influence
on continental .European literature.
3
Eliot (1927).
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