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

SENECAN PROSE
You tell me {you say) to shun the crowd, to withdraw, to find my satisfaction in a
good conscience? What happened to those famous [Stoic] doctrines of yours which tell
us to die while doing? Really/ Do you think that I am advising you just to be lazy?
I have hidden myself away and barred the door for one reason only; to help more
people. No day of mine expires in idleness; I claim possession of part of the nights for
my studies. I leave no time for sleeps I only collapse under it. My eyes weary, they
drop with sleeplessness, yet still I hold them to their work. I have withdrawn my
presence not just from mankind but from business, my own business above all. My
deals are done for our posterity.
The reader fresh from Cicero on the one hand, or from Quintilian on the
other, will at once be struck by the staccato effect of this typical sample of
Seneca's prose (Epist. 8.1-2). The sentences are short and grammatical subordination
is avoided. The insistence of most earlier classical prose writers
that a sentence should seem to glide logically out of its predecessor, the transition
being smoothed by a connective particle or relative pronoun, is no longer
to be felt (as it happens, this passage contains not a single instance). Senecan
prose, although no less contrived than its predecessors, depends for its effect
on a series of discrete shocks: paradox, antithesis, graphic physical detail,
personification (here the nights, sleep, and Seneca's own eyes all become transient
aggressors or victims), and metaphor or simile (most often drawn from
military life, medicine, law, or - as in the final sentence here-commerce). 1
There is great insistence on metrical clause-endings, all the more evident to the
ear because the clauses are so short, and Seneca's range of clausulae 2 is rather
limited (his favourite, — w , occurs half a dozen times in this passage).
But perhaps the most significant single characteristic of Senecan prose style is
the relative infrequency of the third person in it. The grammatical persons natural
to Seneca are the first and second. In the Letters, of course, this phenomenon is
to be expected (although even here one is struck by the heavy emphasis: Tu
me! Ego tibif). But the fact is that it is universal in Seneca's prose works, whatever
their nominal genre or subject. Each of these works is addressed to an
individual, and the direct 'I—thou' relationship thus established is maintained
throughout the book.
To sum up: Senecan prose stands to the prose of Cicero or Livy much as
pointillism stands to the style of the Old Masters. Instead of a clear-lined,
integrated design, Seneca relies on the abrupt juxtaposition of glaring colours.
For the real or apparent objectivity of the periodic style, depicting in the third
person a situation that is out there, he substitutes the subjectivity - or the
egocentricity — of the first person imposing himself on the second. Well might
Quintilian disapprove! This is an intellectual as well as a stylistic revolution.
1 Summers (1910), Introduction, offers an excellent characterization of Seneca's prose style. The
metaphors and similes of Senecan prose are catalogued by Steyns (1906).
1 Norden (1898) 1 310-12; Bourgery (1922) 145-9.
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