Seneca the elder

The references to the cult of Vesta included in numerous excerpts of Seneca the Elder’s collection of Controversiae offer a proof of the technical competence of declaimers in recalling the conditions prescribed by pontifical law for being admitted and kept in this priesthood, of which we are informed by the antiquarian tradition. Furthermore, these passages, which also show the importance recognized from an ethical viewpoint to values such as castitas and pudicitia in the time of Augustus and Tiberius, can be interpreted in light of some special episodes and dispositions stated by the historiographical tradition which reveal their interest in promoting and consolidating the cult of the Goddess Vesta protector of Rome’s Empire. Beyond the scholastic practice, the same interest is equally shared in the literary sphere by Seneca the Elder, as we can understand from the quotations within his work of excerpts from Controversiae dealing with Vestals

This paper focuses on the portrait of Miltiades in the sources between 4th cent. B.C. and 1st A.D., thus after Herodotus and before Plutarch and the Second sophistic. After the first paragraph, devoted to an introduction to the issue, the second one considers sources of the 4th century: the orators usually praise Miltiades and therefore they rehabilitate his reputation after he died in disgrace (par. 2.1); then his figure is analysed in authors like Plato, Aristotle (par. 2.2) and Theopompus and Ephorus (par. 2.3). The third paragraph focuses on the sources between 1st cent. B.C. and 1st A.D.: the only Greek-writing author is Diodorus (par. 3.1), but we have a number of Latin sources, like Nepos, Cicero, Seneca the Elder, Valerius Maximus and others (par. 3.2). In the fourth paragraph it is provided a list of rare pieces of information preserved by the sources, concerning the battle of Marathon (par. 4.1), the events after the battle (par. 4.2) and other episodes (par. 4.3): the aim of this section is not to ascertain the reliability of these pieces of news, that is usually very low, but to use them in order to understand which portrait of Miltiades these sources intended to provide. The fifth paragraph offers final remarks and suggests that, notwithstanding Miltiades’ rehabilitation, due both to Cimon’s propaganda and to the new conditions of 4th century Athens, his imagine remains at least partly controversial: criticisms are attested (e.g. by Plato), but also ambivalent judgments, such as that of Nepos, who wrote the only biography of Miltiades.

In the first decades of the fifteenth century, Alonso of Cartagena assumed the task of translating quite a few works written by or attributed to Seneca. One of them is the so-called Copilación, which is a romance version of a selection of texts extracted from Dominican friar Luca Mannelli’s Tabulatio et expositio Senecae, in its turn a fourteenth-century anthology of Seneca’s quotations (both authentic and spurious). Alonso of Cartagena, though, includes the translation of several fragments from Seneca the Elder’s Controversiae, which did not appear in Mannelli’s original. This paper proposes an explanation of one of the factors that might have made Cartagena take such a decision: the coincidences between ancient declamatory texts and the genre of ‘fazaña’ included in many legal texts of Medieval Castile.

Alonso de Cartagena abordó en las primeras décadas del siglo XV la traducción de un buen número de obras de Séneca o a él atribuidas. Entre ellas se cuenta la llamada Copilación, que es en realidad el romanceamiento de una selección de textos extraídos de la Tabulatio et expositio Senecae, a su vez una antología de citas de Séneca (y apócrifas) elaborada en el siglo XIV por el dominico Luca Mannelli. En su Copilación inserta Cartagena, sin embargo, la traducción de varios fragmentos de las Controversiae de Séneca el Viejo que no aparecen en el original de Mannelli: en este trabajo ofrecemos una explicación al menos parcial de la decisión de Cartagena, examinando ciertas coincidencias entre los textos declamatorios antiguos y algunas ‘fazañas’ incluidas en los textos legales de la Castilla medieval.

Seneca the Elder is the author of a collection of rhetorical extracts aimed to preserve from oblivion the traces of the most outstanding declaimers of his time. Although he claims to rely exclusively on his memories in composing his collection, evidence in his text leads to assume that Seneca has actually made use of several categories of written sources. This essay focus on the com- bination of memories and written sources on which Seneca probably grounded his collection, and eventually places this work in a tradition headed by Cicero’s rhetorical dialogues.

Oratory and rhetoric are the most appropriate fields to test the lexical specialization of the verbs declamo and recito: declamo describes preparatory exercises of oratory itself; on the opposite hand, recito is referred to the reading of speeches, which are definitely fixed in a written version. Indeed recito always presupposes the presence of a written text. The exam of the occurrences of the phrase orationem (et sim.) recitare provides a sample not only of the evolution of the meaning of such verb but also of the changes that oratory underwent.

Around the first half century B.C. the first Roman school of philosophy arose, which was called School of Sextii. The known members of the School were: Quintus Sextius the Elder, founding father of the School, Sextius Niger, Quintus' son, who became scholarch of the School after his father's death, Sotion, Papirius Fabianus (both teachers of Seneca the Younger), Crassicius Pasicles, a grammarian, and Celsius Cornelius, an expert doctor. The School followed the footsteps of the Hellenistic schools, and similar to these, the pursuit of happiness was its purpose. The school of the Sextii had taken to heart that part of the philosophy called physical, characterizing itself mainly as a philosophical-medical school, blending in its philosophy Pythagorean, Platonic, Cynic, and Stoic elements. The purpose of this paper is to underline the main features of the philosophical thought of the school, searching for possible new elements in its doctrine.

Abstract

Il saggio intende offrire riflessioni utili a iniziare una nuova messa a punto del concetto di ambiente e paesaggio nel mondo classico e in particolare in Seneca, soprattutto in relazione al concetto attuale di 'rispetto dell'ambiente'. La lettera 89 dell'epistolario senecano, poco indagata da questo punto di vista, si presenta utile per tracciare alcune linee di sviluppo del tema sia in rapporto con l'opera retorica del padre sia in relazione con la tradizione letteraria e filosofica greco-latina.

On Open Access at https://www.degruyter.com/view/title/572144. This paper examines the sources and methods of Appian and Cassius Dio and the likelihood that they used the Histories of Seneca the Elder as a source. It also considers the character of Seneca’s Histories.  The starting point of Seneca’s work was probably the war between Caesar and Pompey. It will have had the traditional character of a Roman history limited to the recent past, was probably organized by the consular year, and so had nothing in common with the innovative structures of Appian and Florus.

Seneca's tragedies are full of astronomical details. The astronomical pattern in these dramas has not only an ornamental fuction but it's also very important for the critical interpretation of the text. My thesis presents a catalogue of the astronomical passages from Hercules Furens, with a discussion of the critical apparatus and a literary comment. I have also added in the appendix the catalogue of the astronomical passages from Medea and Hercules Oetaeus as a preliminary work for a complete catalogue of the astronomical passages in Seneca's tragedies.

I
Analysis of two epigrams ascribed to Seneca (1 and 41 Prato) on time, active life and contemplative life; remarks on Seneca’s attitude towards poetry and on the problematic coexistence of Stoic moral rigorism and the allegedly frivolous nature of epigram.

This chapter focuses on reconstructing the portrait of Cicero as a humorist. Through a literary path from Seneca the Elder to Francesco Petrarca this paper will deal with a contrast: the opposition perceived by some authors between the ideal of wit declared by Cicero in his works and the irony displayed outside theoretical and programmatical contexts of his rhetorical corpus. An irony dangerously close to the kind of jesters and mimes.

The paper focuses on Seneca the Elder's Controversia 10,5. The text concerns the charge to the painter Parrhasius of torturing to death an Olyntian slave that had served as a model of a Prometheus. The interests of declaimers highlight the concept of realism in art, introducing a theme, that of the relationship between real and believable, which crosses several issues on which the rhetoric has produced deep and accurate reflections.

La diversité de l’univers du jardin n’échappe pas aux juristes romains. L’étude des dispositions juridiques relatives aux limites du jardin met en évidence la spécificité et la complexité de cet espace. Deux configurations juridiques sont distinguées et même opposées par la doctrine : conflits relatifs au statut du mur de séparation et aux servitudes qui peuvent le grever, ou actio finium regundorum. La réflexion des juristes à cet égard met en évidence l’ambiguïté de la qualification juridique du jardin, à la frontière de l’urbain et du rustique. Une des caractéristiques essentielles du jardin est sa tendance, parce qu’il s’agit d’un espace végétalisé, à outrepasser ses limites. Les problèmes ainsi posés par les racines ou par les branches des arbres sont pris en compte par le droit. La documentation disponible permet de vérifier l’ancrage de la réflexion des juristes dans le contexte urbain romain, mais aussi de saisir les modalités de diffusion et d’évolution du droit romain. Les textes qui témoignent d’une volonté de prévenir les conflits de voisinage par la prescription d’intervalles entre les plantations et la limite du fonds constituent un ensemble hétérogène au premier abord, mais qui témoigne de la circulation des normes et des modèles à travers le monde méditerranéen durant toute l’Antiquité.

For almost six centuries the culmination of any young Roman citizen’s education was the school of rhetoric: here, under the guidance of a professional rhetorician, he would spend his teenage years learning how to devise and deliver declamations on fictional themes. Because of their key role in the Roman educational system, these speeches afford an invaluable insight into the ways of thought of the political and intellectual class in imperial Rome. In this paper I explore the fictional world of declamation, with its set of characters, laws, and recurring situations. My aim is to show that, while teaching students how to concoct a fictional speech, Roman teachers exposed them to a broad range of debates on both ethical issues and questions posed by the daily life of their own society. As a case study, I focus on Latin declamations based on situations involving blind characters: I take into account the special rights granted to blind characters, the duties that every fellow-citizen is expected to fulfill towards them, and rules of pietas to be followed even when pleading a case against blind people. A comparison with Roman laws will shed light on what was actually mandatory for a Roman and what was added by the fictional laws of declamations, in order to assess to what extent the rhetorical training contributed to the ethical and moral education of the new generations of Roman citizens