The Elder Seneca, Controversiae

As WikiPedia notes, "Lucius Annaeus Seneca, known as Seneca the Elder or (less correctly) the Rhetorician (54 BC – c. 39 AD), was a Roman writer, born of a wealthy equestrian family of Corduba, Hispania. He wrote a collection of reminiscences about the Roman schools of rhetoric, six books of which are extant in a more or less complete state and five others in epitome only. His principal work, a history of Roman affairs from the beginning of the Civil Wars until the last years of his life, is, sadly, almost entirely lost to us. Seneca lived through the reigns of three significant emperors; Augustus (ruled 27 BC – 14 AD), Tiberius (ruled 14 AD – 37 AD) and Caligula (ruled 37 AD – 41 AD). He was the father of Lucius Junius Gallio Annaeanus, best known as a Proconsul of Achaia; his second son was the dramatist and Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger (Lucius), who was tutor of Nero, and his third son, Marcus Annaeus Mela, became the father of the poet Lucan."

Below is a portion of the introduction to the Loeb edition of Seneca's Controversiae. Below that is Seneca's introduction. I'm quoting the translator's introduction because he gives an excellent rendition of what declamation was. I'm quoting Seneca at some length so you can get a flavor for his work. I encourage you to locate the book from which this material came. We have a copy in our library. You can subscribe to the digital version of the entire corpus of Loeb Classics for $170 The price as of 5/24/2020 for the first year, and 70 per annum subsequently.

Trans. Michael Winterbottom

INTRODUCTION

"The thing was born after me—that is why it is easy for me to have known it from its cradle." So Seneca the Elder (C. 1 pr. 12) on declamation. But he was thinking of the new emphases and recent popularity of something that went back well before his own time. Quintilian (2.4.41) knew that the treatment in schools of themes based on particular law-court cases and public debates had been practised as early as the time of Demetrius of Phaleron in the fourth century b.c.; while rhetorical exercises on generalised topics had been employed in the schools of the sophists much earlier. The real flowering of Greek declamation, however, will have been in the Hellenistic centuries, when Hermagoras of Temnos elaborated rhetorical precept and the Greek cities began to stagnate, their independence lost. When the Romans took over Greek education along with the rest of Greek culture, declamation naturally came too. Themes for both legal and deliberative declamation are mentioned in Cicero’s early work, the De Inventione, (dated to the 80s), and particularly in the related though anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium. Cicero himself " declaimed in Greek up till his praetorship [66 B.C.], and in Latin even as an old man " (Suet. Gr. Rhet. 25.3). He perhaps preferred the older general and philosophical topics,' but Seneca (C. 1.4.7) seems to prove that Cicero on occasion spoke in a full-blown legal exercise of the kind so familiar later. It is only during the second half of Cicero's century that the technical terms used by Seneca begin to crystallise. Declamare, earlier apparently used of loud and emphatic speech, begins to be restricted to school exercises. Controversia comes to be used for the exercise based on legal cases, suasoria for that based on the giving of advice in a public meeting. The cant terms, colores, sententiae and the rest, proliferated as the exercise became more and more an end in itself. It was already that for many of the speakers who appear in the pages of Seneca, men (some of them) who died before Augustus died. The development is often ascribed to the loss of freedom of speech and the decay of oratory in real-life courts and assemblies after the fall of the Republic. But that can only be part of the reason. Many important cases were pleaded, even some important debates held after the battle of Actium. Training was still needed for those proposing to take their parts on these public stages, and declamation was supposed to provide that. If it forgot that role and was taken to an excess of unreality, that was rather the fault of the academics, who ran the schools, and the parents, who paid to send their sons there. Neither academics nor parents had much time for philosophy, the other possible source of advanced training. Rhetoric was what everybody wanted, and it was still of practical use; declamation was not in principle absurd even under the Principate.

As if to signal the new era, Cicero and the consuls of the next year, Hirtius and Pansa, practised declamation together after the murder of Caesar in 44 (C. 1 pr. 11); and had it not been for political circumstances, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, a Spaniard of equestrian family from Cordoba, might have heard them (ibid.). That may imply that he was then of an age to appreciate such entertainment-born, in that case, as early as 55 B.C. Though he is often called Seneca Rhetor, he was never a rhetorician, perhaps not even an advocate; but he was a friend of rhetoricians, and an assiduous frequenter of their public performances. Hence a knowledge of declaimers from his teacher Marullus in the thirties B.C. to Quinctilius Varus under Tiberius declaimers not only in Rome but also in his native Spain, where he doubtless spent much time, looking after his estates. It was there that he married Helvia, there that at least one of his sons, the philosopher Seneca, was born at about the turn of the eras.

At one time, Seneca had had a prodigious memory (C. 1 pr. 2-3). And it was the remnants of this memory together at the request of his sons the best sayings of declaimers of his time, particularly those they had never seen. They were keener on epigram and the flashy side of rhetoric than he; and towards the end of his book he affects a disgust with the whole business (C. 10 pr. 1). But he kept his interest up long enough to give us what even in the truncated form now extant is our richest source of information on the rhetorical practices of the early Roman empire.

It is true that to supplement Seneca on the educational use of declamation we need to look at another source, the collection attributed to the great teacher Quintilian and known as the Minor Declamations. From this we learn that in a controversia the school teacher would propose a theme' (e.g." A rapist hung himself. The girl he had raped chooses his property"), often related to a stated law (in this case A girl who has been raped may choose her seducer's death or his property "). He would then give advice on the treatment (the sections entitled sermo), and a model speech (declamatio), put in the mouth either of one of the parties in the case or of an advocate, The schoolboys (of what we should call secondary age) would give speeches of their own, on one side or the other.

Declamation was intended to train for the law court, and it was natural that a school speech should be influenced in form by schemes dictated by the rhetoricians to real-life speeches. The sermo of the pseudo-Quintilian often alludes to the parts of a speech, proem and epilogue (beginning and end), the narration of the facts and the arguments over their interpretation. It was of course these arguments that had particular relevance to legal training.

Quintilian made his model speeches emphasize them. The poet Ovid preferred the suasoria because he found all argumentation boring (C. 2.2.12); but even in controversiae declaimers (according to the complaint of Votienus Montanus in C. 9 pr. 1) could leave aside argument and go for what appealed more to them and to their audience particularly and increasingly popular were epigrams, sententiae, short pointed sayings that carried a special punch when they neatly summarised an argument or concluded a section. But audiences gave applause too to the brilliant descriptive digression, and to apt (or inept) historical instances (exempla). The themes of declamations were later much derided; and even those in Seneca's collection often seem to stray far from reality. This is largely because many of them derive from Greek schools, which had manufactured them with the stock characters (rich man, poor man, good son, prodigal son) and implausible situations (pirates and poisons, coincidences and sudden discoveries) of New Comedy in mind. S. F. Bonner has argued in an important study that genuine parallels in Roman law exist for many of the laws on which the themes are based. And of course every now and again the whirligig of time threw up a striking similarity to even the most outré imaginings. The fact remains that declamation could have been far nearer to reality than it was. Boys were trained to argue about ancient lights and the government of the Roman empire by exercises on pirates and the battle of Thermopylae.

Roman schoolmasters kept their schools going because enough parents thought the education they offered worth while.

At this bread and butter level, as we have seen, "Quintilian " may be a more reliable guide than Seneca. For "the Senecan declamations were mostly delivered at gatherings of quite mature people. . . . Most of (them). . appear to have been based upon debates where rival professors used the school-subjects to exhibit their powers and win the plaudits,. . of their contem- poraries " (Bonner, 39), Latro is marked out as unusual (C. 9.2.23) because he " would never hear pupils declaim-he merely declaimed himself, saying was a pattern, not a school-teacher." That implies that the normal scholasticus did run a school of his own, very much like Quintilian did later. But like the sophists of fifth-century Athens, he was able to combine with his teaching a practice of display speaking (epideixis) that brought him before the public and might make him known to great men and even emperors. Latro (C. 2.4.12) declaimed in the presence of Augustus, Maecenas and Agrippa, very much as Virgil used to recite portions of his poems before imperial personages. The great men themselves sometimes condescended to join in, for example (behind closed doors) the consular historian Asinius Pollio (C. 4 pr. 2). We cannot be very sure how the system worked. Probably there was a whole range of possibilities, ranging from ordinary teaching behind closed doors through open lessons to the professorial debate envisaged by Bonner.

As we shall see, both the content and the style of declamation had a large effect upon the literature of the Silver age; and the extravagances recounted by Seneca were certainly not restricted to occasions when professors were trying to impress each other outside school. Ancient criticism makes it certain that the faults of declamation pervaded the whole set up. But certainly the rhetoricians were not at their most sober on the public stage, and Seneca has many criticisms to make. As to content, his sympathies lay with the down-to-earth Cassius Severus against the unworldly schoolman Cestius (C. 3 pr.) He often vemarks on foolish colores (see below), where the facts were absurdly represented.! And as to style, he is severe on the more ridiculous epigrams.. The luckless Saenianus “ said a very stupid thing " (C. 5.2), produced an epigram with the hallmark of stupidity " (C. 7.5.10), made a remark "with its own kind of insanity"(C. 9.2.28). Declaimers are said to display " bad taste " (cacozelia), their style is branded as "corrupt," they are unduly Asianic. These were to be the watchwords for critics of extremes of style as the century went on. ....

THE CONTROVERSIAE BOOK 1

PREFACE

SENECA TO HIS SONS NOVATUS, SENECA AND MELA GREETINGS

What you ask is something I find agreeable rather than easy. You tell me to give you my opinion of the declaimers who have been my contemporaries, and to put together such of their sayings as I haven't yet forgotten, so that, even though you were not acquainted with them, you may still form your own judgement on them without trusting merely to hearsay. Yes, it is agreeable for me to return to my old studies, to look back on better years, and simultaneously to remove the sting of your complaint against Time-that you were unable to listen to men of such reputation. But by now old age has made me regret the loss of many of my faculties. It has dimmed my eyesight, dulled my hearing, made my strong muscles tired: but among these things I mention it is memory, of all parts of the mind the most vulnerable and fragile, that old age first assaults. I do not deny that my own memory was at one time so powerful as to be positively prodigious, quite apart from its efficiency in ordinary use. When two thousand names had been reeled off I would repeat them in the same order; and when my assembled school-fellows each supplied a line of poetry, up to the number of more than two hundred, I would recite them in reverse. My memory used to be swift to pick up what I wanted it to; but it was also reliable in retaining what it had taken in. Now it has been undermined by age, and by a long period of idleness—which can play havoc with young minds too: to such an extent that though it may be able to come up with something, it cannot make any promises. It is a long time since I asked anything of it. But now, since you require it, I will see what it can do, and pry into its recesses with every care.

To some extent I am quite hopeful: whatever I entrusted to it as a boy or young man it brings out again without hesitation as though new and just heard. But things I have deposited with it these last years it has lost so entirely that even if they are repeatedly dinned into me, I hear them each time as new. Hence enough of my memory is left for your purposes—for you aren’t asking me about speakers you have heard yourselves, but about those who came before your time.

Be it as you wish, then: let an old man be sent to school. But I must ask you not to insist on any strict order in the assembling of my memories; I must stray at large through all my studies, and grab at random whatever comes my way. I shall, perhaps, distribute over a number of passages epigrams which were actually spoken in one controversia; I don’t always find what I want when I’m looking for it—but often what escaped me when I was searching for it comes to me when I am on some other tack. Some things, that I cannot quite catch as they hover before me only partly visible, suddenly come up clearly when I am relaxed and at leisure. Sometimes, even, an epigram that I have long hunted in vain comes at the wrong moment and is a nuisance when I’m occupied with some serious business. I have got, therefore, to adapt myself to the whims of my memory, which for some time has obeyed me only on sufferance.

Well, my dear young men, you are doing something necessary and useful in refusing to be satisfied with the models provided by your own day and wanting to get to know those of the preceding generation too. For one thing, the more patterns one examines, the greater advantage to one’s eloquence. You should not imitate one man, however distinguished: for an imitator never comes up to the level of his model. This is the way it is; the copy always falls short of the reality. Moreover, you can by this means judge how sharply intellectual standards are falling every day, how far some grudge on nature’s part has sent eloquence into a decline. Everything that Roman oratory has to set alongside or even above the haughty Greeks reached its peak in Cicero’s day: all the geniuses who have brought brilliance to our subject were born then. Since, things have got daily worse. Perhaps this is due to the luxury of the age (nothing is so fatal to talent as luxury); perhaps, as this glorious art became less prized, competitiveness transferred itself wholly to sordid businesses that bring great prestige and profit; perhaps it is just Fate, whose grim law is universal and everlasting—things that get to the top sink back to the bottom, faster than they rose.

Look at our young men: they are lazy, their intellects asleep; no-one can stay awake to take pains over a single honest pursuit. Sleep, torpor and a perseverance in evil that is more shameful than either have seized hold of their minds. Libidinous delight in song and dance transfixes these effeminates. Braiding the hair, refining the voice till it is as caressing as a woman’s, competing in bodily softness with women, beautifying themselves with filthy fineries—this is the pattern our youths set themselves.1 Which9 of your contemporaries—quite apart from his talent and diligence—is sufficiently a man? Born feeble and spineless, they stay like that throughout their lives: taking others’ chastity by storm, careless of their own. God forbid them to be blessed with eloquence—something for which I should have scant respect if it exercised no choice in those on whom it bestowed itself. That well-known saying of Cato was really an oracle—and you are wrong, my excellent young men, if you fail to appreciate the fact: for surely an oracle is the divine will given human expression; and what high priest could the gods have found more holy than Marcus Cato, not so much to teach mankind as to scold it? What then was it that the great man said? "An orator, son Marcus, is a good man skilled in speaking." Well, go and look10 for orators among the smooth and hairless of today, men only in their lusts. Quite properly, they have models as depraved as their intellects. Who cares for his future renown? Who is made popular—I won’t say by great qualities—but even by his own? Undetected by so casual a public, they can easily pass off for their own epigrams thrown off by the really able, thus constantly violating the holiness of an eloquence they cannot attain. So much the more gladly will I comply with your request, making a present to the public of all the eloquent sayings of famous men that I can remember, so that they aren’t mere private possessions of someone.

Indeed, I think I shall be doing a great service to the declaimers themselves, who face being forgotten unless something to prolong their memory is handed on to posterity; for in general there are no extant drafts from the pens of the greatest declaimers, or, what is worse, there are forged ones. So to prevent them being unknown, or known in the wrong light, I shall be scrupulous in giving each his due. I think I heard everyone of great repute in oratory, with the exception of Cicero; and even Cicero I was deprived of not by my age, but by the raging civil wars, which at that time were traversing the entire world, and which kept me behind the walls of my colony; otherwise I might have been present in that little hall where he says two grown-up boys declaimed with him,1 and got to know that genius, the only possession of Rome to rival her empire: and, to use a common saying that is particularly appropriate of him, I could have heard the "living voice."

Now Cicero used to declaim, but not the controversiae we speak nowadays, or even the kind called theses which were spoken before Cicero. The type of theme we now use for our exercises is so new that its name too is new. We speak of controversiae. Cicero called them "causes." A second name, scholastica, a Greek word to be sure, but taken over to serve as a Latin one, is much more recent than controversia: just as declamatio itself can be found in no old author before Cicero and Calvus. Calvus distinguishes declamatio from dictio, saying that he is by now not bad at "declaiming" but good at "speaking." The former he regards as to be used of exercises at home, the other of a real speech. The name has emerged recently, the practice itself having become popular not long ago: the thing was born after me—that is why it is easy for me to have known it from its cradle.

In general, I may—or may not—be doing you a service; in one respect I am receiving one. For I shall frequently have to revive memories of my dearest friend, Porcius Latro, and recall with the highest pleasure an intimate friendship that lasted from our early childhood to his last day. The man was uniquely serious and charming, uniquely worthy of being eloquent. No-one was more in control of his genius—yet no-one more indulged it.

This passionate man lacked moderation in two respects: he could not stop work—and could not start it again. When he had roused himself to write, day and night merged—he over-pressed himself ceaselessly, and stopped only when he was exhausted. But when he relaxed, he let himself go on all kinds of amusement and frivolity; yet when he had yielded himself up to the woods and mountains, he rivalled for endurance of hardship and skill in the hunt the country folk who had been born in those woods and mountains, and used to be so entranced with the idea of living like that that he could scarcely be brought back to his former pursuits. Yet when he had taken a grip on himself, and torn himself away from the allurements of leisure, he would throw himself into his work so energetically that he seemed to have lost nothing, even gained much, by his sloth. Of course, everyone is benefited by occasional mental relaxation; leisure rouses one’s energy, and all the melancholy induced by extended hard work is dispelled by the gaiety of a vacation; but no-one was more obviously so helped than Latro. When he spoke after a gap, it was much more keenly and vehemently; he would exult in the renewal of his mind and the perfection of his powers; and he would get out of himself as much as he wished. He had no idea how to husband his strength, but ruled himself ruthlessly—his zest had to be stopped altogether just because it could not be regulated. And so he himself, broken by constant and unremitting effort, used to feel a lassitude of mind that is as debilitating as bodily tiredness, though less obvious.

He had a body that nature had made strong and exercise hard, so that it never failed the impulses of his passionate spirit. His voice was strong but dull, thickened not by nature but by over-work and lack of care. But it was capable of being raised, thanks to the strength of his lungs, and though at the start of a speech it might be thought to have too little power in reserve it grew with the impetus of the speech itself. He never took any trouble to exercise his voice; he could not put off his steadfast, rustic, Spanish character: his motto was to live as circumstances suggested, without doing anything for the sake of his voice (such as gradually taking it up from low to high, and then going down again from the highest pitch by equal intervals), and without inhibiting sweat by means of oil or renewing his lungs by walking. Often, having stayed up all night, he would come to declaim straight from a meal. Again, he could just not be put off doing something very harmful to the body: he generally worked into the night after dinner,1 so that his food, instead of being smoothly digested in a restful sleep, was driven to his head, disturbed and scattered—hence his weak eyesight and bad complexion.

His memory was naturally good, and much improved by technique. He would never read over again what he was going to say in order to learn it off—he had learnt it off as he wrote: which is the more remarkable because he used to write not slowly and painstakingly but with almost the same impetuosity as marked his speech. Those who put their writings on the rack, holding debates over every word, inevitably end up by fixing in the mind what has so often engaged it; but those who write quickly are slower to remember. Not only had nature blessed Latro with a fine memory, but he had supreme technique for grasping and for retaining what he had to remember, so that he could recall all the declamations he had ever spoken. He had thus made books superfluous—he used to say he wrote in his mind. What he had mentally rehearsed he used to speak without his memory ever failing in a single word. He had vast knowledge of the whole range of history; he would ask someone to name a general to him, and then immediately detail his feats with fluency—so true was it that he had at his finger-tips whatever had once come his way.

I can see, my dear young men, that you are more astonished by this talent of Latro than you should be; I want you to admire other qualities in him—this one, which you make so much of, can be acquired by a technique that requires little trouble. Within the small space of a very few days, anyone can do what Cineas did: this man, sent as ambassador to Rome by Pyrrhus, next day, as a newcomer, greeted by their correct names the senate and the whole crowd of townspeople around the senate. Or he can emulate the man who, hearing a new poem recited by its author, said it was his own, and proceeded to recite it from memory, even though its author could not do the same; or Hortensius, who, challenged by Sisenna, sat all day at an auction, and then listed without a mistake and in the right order all the articles, their prices and purchasers, with the bankers authenticating the details. You want to learn straight away? I will keep your eagerness in suspense, and leave myself room to do you a second service; meanwhile I shall discharge my present debt to you.

You may think that I have given you more details about my friend Latro than you wanted to hear. I had myself expected that I should find it hard to tear myself away, whenever I had a chance to recall him. Nor shall I be content with what I have already said, but whenever my memory lures me on, I shall be very glad to make sure you get to know him—and I get to know him again—in the round. And one thing I shall say at once: a false idea has gained ground—men think that he spoke strongly but not acutely enough. In fact, if he had any quality, it was acuteness.

I don’t notice anyone nowadays doing what he always did: before beginning a speech he used, while still seated, to set out the points at issue in the controversia he was to declaim—a mark of supreme confidence. An actual speech gives much scope for concealment; if acuteness is anywhere lacking, the lack is not obvious, for the impetus of the speech prevents the audience judging—and hides the judgement of the speaker. But when the bones of the speech are set out in advance unadorned, it is obvious if anything is left out or misplaced. Well then, how did the story get around? Nothing is more unfair than to think that acuteness is only present when there is nothing present but acuteness. Latro possessed every oratorical quality, so that this foundation was obscured by the vast superstructure, and so, though present, was not obvious: indeed, perhaps the greatest fault of acuteness is to flaunt itself unduly. Plots that are hidden are more dangerous; the most useful sort of acuteness is the sort you hide—its effect is plain to see, its presence obscure.

So I shall put in at various places the points at issue in the controversiae just as he set them out: but I won’t add the arguments that went with them—that would be excessive and irrelevant, for it is the epigrams you want to hear, and any space I deprive them of will annoy you. My friend Latro, of course, was keen on epigrams too. Once we were studying together under the rhetor Marullus, a rather dry man, who said very little prettily, though his style was unusual. Marullus put the blame for the meagreness of a speech of his on to the theme of the cofitroversia, saying: "I am walking through a thorny place, and have to tread carefully." "To be sure, it’s not that your feet are treading thorns," said Latro. "The thorns are in them." And he proceeded himself to point out the epigrams which could have been interspersed in the arguments of Marullus, still in mid-declamation.

He practised another sort of exercise: one day he would write only "exclamations," one day only enthymemes, one day nothing but the traditional passages we properly call sententiae, that have no intimate connection with the particular controversia, but can be quite aptly placed elsewhere too, such as those on fortune, cruelty, the age, riches. This type of sententia he called his "stock." He also used to write out figures on their own, such as would go into a controversia. And yet people think he lacked this quality. In fact he had abundant natural talent here also; but his taste was pretty restrained—he didn’t like to twist language, to leave the straight and narrow path, unless he had to. or unless there was some great advantage to sway him. He said figures were not discovered to beautify but to aid, enabling something that, said openly, would offend the ear, to creep in from the flank, furtively. But he thought it the height of madness to distort language if it could be straightforward.

But I won’t delay you any longer; I know how tedious I find the procession at the circus.3 I shall begin with the controversia which was the first I heard my friend Latro declaim when he was quite a young man in Marullus’ school, but had already begun to lead the class.