Seneca - College of Stoic Philosophers

2 SENECAnon-existent rule of law being generally assumedfor the purpose of the pleadings — and the moredramatic and improbable the circumstancesimagined by the rhetoricians, the more crowdedwith pupils were their schools, and the greatertheir consequent renown.^In the great days of the republic, when thesovereign power at Rome was vested ultimatelyin the various assemblies of her citizens, the facultyof swaying these assemblies by eloquence wasalmost the one necessary qualification for asuccessful career, yet it was not till the generationimmediately preceding the establishment ofthe Empire that the art of rhetoric was taughtsystematically at Rome. Before that time ayouth who looked forward to a forensic careerwould be introduced by his father to one ofthe celebrated orators of the day, whose methodshe would study, whose pleadings he would neverfail to attend, and to whom he would render1Tyrants and pirates were favourite characters in thesedeclamations— tyrants who issue edicts ordering sons to executetheir fathers, pirates with lovely daughters who rescue and elopewith their father's prisoners. The art is to involve the actorson either side in a conflict between equally sacred obligations.In their beginnings, however, in the time recalled by the elderSeneca, the controversiae were less extravagant and more nearlyrelated to reality. Thus in a controversy declaimed before theEmperor Augustus with Agrippa and Maecenas in attendance,in which Marcus Seneca's chief friend, Porcius Latro, was theprincipal interlocutor, the case supposed relates to a father oftwo sons, one of whom he had disinherited. The disinheritedson forms a connection with a woman who bears him a son.On his death-bed he sends the woman to his father, and commendsto him his son. The father adopts the boy. The otherson disputes this arrangement, and pleads that his father is notof sound mind or capable of making such a disposition. Thecase is argued between them.