Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

THE STYLISTIC REVOLUTIONARY
while it endeavours to respect both the ancient texts and the enormous variety
of modern opinions, must necessarily be tentative, and in some degree
personal.
2. LIFE AND WORKS
Seneca was no more free of extremes in his life than in his writings, and his
biography is as dramatic in its vicissitudes as any in the story of Rome. Here,
however, we are to consider only the aspects of it that seem directly related to
his education as a writer. Broadly speaking, these are three: his family connexion
with the declamation-schools, his early-acquired enthusiasm for philosophical
studies, and his prolonged, intimate experience of despotic power.
His father Seneca (usually distinguished as 'the Elder' or — inaccurately —
'the Rhetor') has recorded his vivid memories of the Augustan declamationschools
in the Suasoriae and Controversial. The latter work was composed in
about A.D. 37, at the express request of his three sons Novatus, our Seneca, and
Mela. They were passionately interested, the father informs us, in the declamatory
skills of the generation that had just passed, and above all in the sententiae
uttered by the declaimers: that is, the concisely formulated generalities tamquam
quae defortuna, de crudelitate, de saeculo, de diidtiis dicuntur ' such as those which
are pronounced about Fortune, cruelty, the times we live in, and riches'
{Controversiae i praef. 23). Among those who were present at such exhibitions
the elder Seneca records many of his most able contemporaries in all fields :
statesmen, from Augustus himself downwards; historians such as Livy and
Cremutius Cordus; poets, most notably Ovid; and the philosophers Papirius
Fabianus and Attalus. With some of them he formed close personal ties. For
example, L. Junius Gallio, a senator and a friend of Ovid's, later adopted his
eldest son, Novatus. This inherited familiarity with the declaimers seems to
have been decisive in the formation of the younger Seneca's prose style; all the
major characteristics of that style can already be discerned in the elder's
verbatim accounts of the extemporary debates.
To the same cause, no doubt, the younger Seneca owed his special interest
in Ovid and his poetry (below, section 4); and also his abiding enthusiasm for
philosophy. Two out of the three philosophers whom he mentions as having
inspired him in his youth were in fact also declaimers — Fabianus and the
Stoic Attalus. 1 Fabianus in particular was admired for his dulces sententiae, his
attacks on the wickedness of the age, his copious descriptions of rural and
urban landscapes and of national customs (Seneca the Elder, Controversiae 2
praef. 1—3). In these men's oral discourses on philosophy, therefore, Seneca
may already have noted that application of school-rhetoric to moral instruction
1 Motto (1970) 187 collects Seneca's references to his philosophical teachers; the most extensive is
Epist. 108.
513
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