Chapter I: The Elder Seneca: Orators and Rhetoricians

Rhetoric in operation—The elder Seneca’s life—Character and
tastes—His surviving _Controuersiae_ and _Suasoriae_—His
marvellous memory—Value of the prefaces—Their portrayal
of rhetoricians—Critical views—Unpractical nature
of declamations—Recollections—The academic and the
forensic—Seneca’s method—Cases criminal, civil, social—Immoral,
romantic, incredible elements—Sources—Literary ability—Effect
of the exercises—Ingenuity—Interest of digressions—Silly
arguments—Qualities of declamations in relation to Silver
Literature.

Speakers of two generations—The emperors Tiberius, Caligula and
Claudius—Some rhetoricians and orators of the time—Informers.

A study of the elder Seneca[86] is invaluable, not merely for the light which he sheds upon the methods pursued by professional speakers, but also for his knowledge (illustrated by a wealth of anecdote and reminiscence) concerning the individual literary qualities or even mannerisms of orators and rhetors both Augustan and Tiberian. Acquaintance with the system represented in his collection of _Controuersiae_ and _Suasoriae_ is indispensable for an appreciation of the position and prospects of oratory reflected in Quintilian’s treatise and Tacitus’s dialogue. But Seneca’s work is much more than an illuminating introduction to works about oratory: it constitutes the great exemplar of the Roman rhetorical education in operation, which must be grasped in order to estimate the stylistic merits or demerits of verse and prose in the Silver Age. Seneca is a gateway through which the history of Latin expression must pass towards Lucan as well as towards Tacitus, and to examine the academic exercises recorded by him is to go far on the path to understand the style of two centuries; for, like much subsequent prose and verse, they contain elements pointed to the degree of monotony, ingenious to the degree of unreality, and sometimes half-poetic in virtue of a spice of far-fetched romanticism.

L. Annaeus Seneca[87] was born at Corduba, an ancient patrician colony of Rome in Spain—a town with literary traditions in Cicero’s time, and by Martial’s days able to boast of having produced three noted members of a single family, namely, the two Senecas and Lucan.[88] This provincial family had attained equestrian rank, as we learn from words assigned to the younger Seneca.[89] The elder Seneca was prevented by the civil wars from hearing Cicero[90] declaim “with his great pupils in their _praetextae_,” _i.e._ during the consulate of Hirtius and Pausa in 43 B.C.; and, since the young Spaniard could not well have attended declamatory performances under the age of twelve, it is not likely that he was born later than 55 B.C. He was a boy (_puer_, _Contr._, I, _praef._ 3) when he first reached Rome, probably in 42 B.C., after the battle of Philippi. He may have come with his Spanish friend, Porcius Latro: in any case, they were classmates in the rhetorical school of Marullus,[91] who was perhaps recommended to them by his Spanish origin more than by outstanding merit. But Seneca did not restrict himself to one teacher. He had Arellius Fuscus for one of his early masters, and he evidently made a practice of listening to all available speakers, if we may judge from his wide acquaintance with their modes of argument and expression in the _Controuersiae_. This implies long residence in Rome, though there is no proof to support his frequent designation as a “rhetor.” Guess-work would assign to him the official duties of a procurator, and would by the call of such duties explain his return to Spain for a period. It was in Spain that he married Helvia, the mother of his three sons—M. Annaeus Novatus, who took the name of his adoptive father Gallio and, as pro-consul of Achaea, had the apostle Paul brought before him;[92] L. Annaeus Seneca, the philosopher; and M. Annaeus Mela, Lucan’s father.

Clearly Seneca was in Rome at a date between 29 and 24 B.C., when he heard Ovid declaiming under Arellius Fuscus;[93] and still later in 17 B.C., when he heard Latro’s embarrassing reference to the subject of adoption in the presence of Augustus and Agrippa.[94] He was back in Rome before Asinius Pollio died, A.D. 5; for he mentions having heard Pollio’s youthful oratory and afterwards the oratory of his old age.[95] The date of his death is to be inferred approximately. His allusion to the extinction of the Scaurus family (_Suas._ ii. 22) cannot be earlier than A.D. 34; and we can feel reasonably sure that he outlived Tiberius; for the account of that emperor’s death given by Suetonius[96] on the authority of “Seneca” is plausibly referred to the lost historical work, which, as we know from a fragment of the younger Seneca, his father composed. The outspoken criticism on the policy of burning books (_Contr._ X. _praef._ 7) suggests that publication did not precede Tiberius’s death in 37. On the other hand, when the younger Seneca was banished in A.D. 41, his mother was a widow;[97] so that the father can be presumed to have died at an age well over ninety, between A.D. 37 and 41.

A man of old-fashioned austerity,[98] the elder Seneca recalls Cato the Censor, whom he admired. It is provincial virtue more than a love of rhetorical commonplace that speaks when he censures the moral decadence of the times; and one cannot but admire the straightforward sincerity in his manner of addressing his sons for whom he put together the _Controuersiae_. Even if public service interested him for part of his life, he can confidently be described as a scholar by preference. Not modern enough in his tastes to sympathize with the higher education of women, he discouraged Helvia from devoting herself to those philosophical studies in which their second son was destined to see a remedy for most of the ills of existence. Yet the attraction of the past did not render him hostile to the imperial system, which, under Augustus, he found compatible with reasonable liberty:[99] and, while repressive book-burning stirred his anger, he declined to waste pity on speakers who would give utterance to treasonable words at the risk of their lives.[100] His patriotism burned strongly enough to give him pleasure in pitting the epoch of his model Cicero against the oratorical claims of “arrogant Greece.”[101] In general, he distrusted the smart levity of Greek rhetoricians,[102] and his occasional compliments to them were oftener than not accompanied with a qualification.[103]

Of his ten books of _Controuersiae_, five (III, IV, V, VI and VIII) are represented only by the headings and excerpts of a fourth-century epitomator,[104] with the fortunate addition, however, of prefaces to books III and IV. The other five books (I, II, VII, IX, X) survived in spite of being summarized and give a reasonably full presentation of the arguments used in different declamations, though gaps are especially noticeable in the transcription of the debating points made in Greek. The prefaces to these five books have also survived, except that the preface to IX is incomplete. The survival of excerpts for the fuller books enables us to survey the method followed in epitomizing. The total number of subjects debated is seventy-four, of which thirty-nine are represented by excerpts only. The number of _Controuersiae_ in a book varies from six to nine. There are seven _suasoriae_ (perhaps part of a larger collection), of which the first has lost its beginning. These exercises have been defined and illustrated in the chapter on Roman education: it remains to examine Seneca’s subjects, method and judgements.

This elaborate collection of arguments on rhetorical themes was the compilation of his old age, and evidence has been cited to show that some parts were written after A.D. 37. It does not follow, however, that the whole was put together at the beginning of Caligula’s reign by a man over ninety:[105] it is more likely that the author had begun his task years before when his sons would be practically interested in rhetorical exercises, and that he spread its composition over the later period of Tiberius’s reign without publishing until the emperor was dead. The _Suasoriae_ were composed after the _Controuersiae_.[106]

Seneca’s purpose is stated in his first preface, which is addressed to all three sons, and yet meant for the public at large.[107] It was to recall the manner and diction of declaimers of the older school, and to represent speakers whom his sons could not have heard. Impressing on these young men the wisdom of taking bygone rhetoric into account along with contemporary rhetoric, he is conscious of a decadence in oratory to be measured against the greatness of Cicero and his times. To the author the causes appear to be three: luxurious laziness; the fact that, since oratory came to offer fewer rewards, men turned to pursuits less honourable but more profitable; and a natural law of reaction. Realizing the scarcity of works representative of the greatest declaimers and, still worse, the circulation of forgeries (_quod peius est, falsi_), he declares it his duty to rescue noble names from oblivion. Hence it is natural to respond with pleasure to his sons’ request that he should undertake so extensive a task.[108] Only a marvellous memory could have achieved it; but Seneca possessed a Macaulay-like gift of remembrance, and, as he remarks with obvious truth, it was the distant past he recalled the more surely. There had been a time when he was capable of repeating a list of 2000 names read over once. This is partly the secret of his proficiency in citing arguments from about 120 different speakers, though one is not precluded from believing that he had preserved notes, and that he consulted published collections.

The seven prefaces possess great interest. One may weary of the seventy-four themes and the often scrappy arguments, even although they are genially diversified by criticism, digression and reminiscences; but the prefaces are eminently readable in respect of subject-matter and style. They are valuable for characterization of speakers, for critical judgements, and for their record of facts otherwise unknown to literary history: they are attractive for their entertaining stories. Besides, they give the best opportunity of weighing Seneca’s own literary qualities in contradistinction to the text of his _themata_, where he is for the most part professedly reporting the words of others. His Latinity, in its pleasant freedom from artifice, is worthy of an author who consistently revered Cicero and was aware that an inferior type of eloquence had emerged. This alone would constitute him an important link between the Golden and the Silver Age. Indeed, the first preface shows his realization of that change from oratory to declamation for which the principate was largely accountable. Commenting on the alteration of the Ciceronian _causae_ into the later _controuersiae_, he proceeds to draw the distinction between the public speaking of an orator (_uera actio_) and the private exercise (_domestica exercitatio_) of a declaimer. The new declamation, he notes, was a product of his own period.

Each preface, as a rule, treats one rhetor prominently, and in the succeeding book that rhetor’s arguments are reported with considerable fullness. Thus, the opening preface sketches a delightfully graphic picture of Seneca’s friend, Porcius Latro, his bodily strength and strong voice, his ineradicable Spanish ways, his passion for work in defiance of the laws of digestion, his memory for written notes, his mastery over historical detail, and his method of practising the artifices of his craft. Such realistic portrayal cannot but rivet our attention upon his advocacy in the _controuersiae_ which follow; and Seneca explains that the first controversy in his collection was so placed because he remembered it to be the earliest of Latro’s declamations in the academy of Marullus. Similarly, the next preface describes Fabianus, the teacher of the younger Seneca, and in Book II a special effort is made to recall his arguments. The preface to III deals particularly with Cassius Severus; that to IV deals with a pair, Asinius Pollio and Q. Haterius; that to VII is mainly on Albucius; that to IX considers why Votienus Montanus did not practise declamation; and the last preface, when Seneca is tiring of his subject, gives rapid impressions of various speakers—Mamercus Scaurus (a great orator spoiled by laziness); Labienus, nicknamed “Rabienus,” a Pompeian in spirit who had his books publicly burned; Musa, objectionable for unnatural rhetoric; a group consisting of Moschus, Pacatus, Sparsus, Bassus, Capito; and finally the Spanish declaimers Gavius Silo and Turrinus Clodius.

Seneca’s admirable criticisms are well seen in his second preface which contrasts Fabianus with his master Arellius Fuscus. Here he commends the study of rhetoric as a fitting pursuit for his favourite son Mela, whose talents he rated more highly than those of his two brothers, then preparing for public life. Among instructive features in the preface to III are the demarcation of forensic from academic speaking, and the explanation offered by Cassius Severus of his relative inferiority as a declaimer. Severus, it may be noted, was a good extempore speaker, and anger improved his pleading. After arguing that _non omnia possumus omnes_, that the individual’s gifts are often confined to a single field, that Cicero’s style was inferior in verse and Virgil’s in prose, he accounts for his success at the bar in words which implicitly censure the whole method of declamation:

“I have been accustomed to address not an audience, but a judge; I have been accustomed to answer not myself, but an opponent. I avoid superfluous words as much as inconsistent ones. In scholastic speaking what may not be considered superfluous, when the whole thing is a superfluous practice?... When I speak in court, I am doing something; when I declaim, I seem to be toiling in dreamland (_in somniis laborare_).... Declaimers are like hot-house plants that droop in the open (_uelut adsueta clauso et delicatae umbrae corpora sub diuo stare non possunt_).... There is nothing to be said for testing an orator in such a childish exercise. What would you think of judging a pilot on a fish-pond?”[109] Seneca, then, is by no means blind to the unpractical nature of declamation. Elsewhere he records instances of the absurdity of some rhetorical figures in a law-court,[110] and the inability of even a practised declaimer to plead in the forum under the open sky without the familiar associations of four enclosing walls.[111]

Part of the charm in the prefaces depends on random recollections. We grow familiar with Seneca’s _Memini_.[112] It is not the least of their merits that some of the reminiscences are humorous and satiric. He takes care to chronicle Severus’s amusing attitude to the conceited Cestius, whose modern declamations students got up by heart, though in Cicero they studied only speeches to which Cestius had composed replies. “One day I remember entering his lecture-room when he was to deliver a speech against Milo (_i.e._ a rejoinder to Cicero’s _Pro Milone_). Self-satisfied as usual, Cestius was saying, ‘If I were a Thracian gladiator, I should be a Fusius; if I were a pantomime-actor, I should be a Bathyllus.’ Unable to check my wrath I burst out, ‘Yes, and if you were a drain, you’d be the main drain!’—huge guffaws from everybody! The pupils gazed, curious to see what uncouth sort of creature I was. Cestius, ready to answer Cicero, had no answer for me!”[113]

Other interesting points occur in the preface to IV. They include a glance at the select audiences of Asinius Pollio, who was the first to give _recitationes_ before invited guests; Seneca’s recollection of Pollio’s instructing his grandson how to look on both sides of a declamation; and references to the extempore declamations by Q. Haterius, “the one among all Romans known to me,” he says, “who transferred Greek facility to Latin.” His speed of utterance made Augustus remark, “Our friend Haterius needs a brake put on” (_sufflaminandus est_). The sketch of Albucius in the preface to VII is diverting. He was fearless in his employment of ordinary words: “sour wine” and “flea-bane,” “fallow deer” and “rhinoceros,” “latrines” and “sponges” came all alike to him in speaking. A chameleon orator, for ever adopting fresh styles, he sometimes proved unlucky in his figures, as when he asked rhetorically “Why is a cup smashed if it falls, and why is a sponge not?,” on which Cestius commented, “To-morrow he’ll give a declamation on why thrushes fly and gourds don’t!” It was Albucius who, in the debate about a parricide set adrift in a boat, invented the far-fetched joke of calling the boat “the wooden sack” (_culleum ligneum_) instead of the real sack used in the punishment of parricides.

The incomplete preface to IX resumes the criticism of declamation as unpractical. Seneca recognizes the defects afterwards emphasized by Petronius and Tacitus,[114] when he points out that the dominant aim in declamation is to please, not to carry conviction (_non ut uincat sed ut placeat_). This is why it hunts for alluring ornaments (_lenocinia conquirit_) and avoids solid reasoning. Declamations composed on the assumption that one has only fools for opponents (_aduersarios quamuis fatuos fingunt_) must provide a poor training for a court of law. The conditions of practice are too easy in an academic exercise: gladiators, it should be remembered, train with heavier weapons than those with which they fight in the arena.

The final preface is notable for the author’s frank confession that he had exhausted his recollections and they him (_fatebor uobis: iam res taedio est_). Indignant at the governmental revenge taken on the writings of Scaurus and of Labienus, he yet thanks heaven that these punishments of genius did not begin until genius itself was deteriorating. Musa’s extravagance of language is illustrated and condemned:

I remember his saying “Birds that fly, fish that swim, beasts
that run, find graves in our insides. Ask now why we men die
suddenly—we live by deaths!”

Freeman though he was, Musa, in Seneca’s view, richly deserved flogging like the veriest slave for such artificiality. “Much, I consider, must be allowed to talent,” he adds; “one must allow faults, but not monstrosities.”

The traditional title _Oratorum et Rhetorum Sententiae Diuisiones Colores_ indicates the method. On a case propounded, the sentiments (_sententiae_) and contentions of a number of speakers for or against are given, often mere jottings; then a skeletonic mapping out (_diuisiones_) of _quaestiones_ involved; and, finally, a selection of more or less plausible conceptions (_colores_) designed to put a special complexion on certain acts under review. Invention and ingenuity find their best opening in the third group, but the ingenuity often overleaps itself into absurdity. A few extracts from II. i. may serve by way of illustration. A rich man who has already disinherited no fewer than three sons, asks for a poor man’s only son in order to adopt him: the poor man says “yes;” but the son says “no,” and is thereupon disowned by his father. Arguments from eleven speakers in favour of the son are cited, among them those of Porcius Latro and Arellius Fuscus, whose arguments on the other side are afterwards given. Latro opens for the youth: “And this is my fate—disowned and adopted at the same moment! The home that sheltered my father up to old age cannot admit me!... (_To the rich man_) You suppose gold and silver to be riches, but they are the playthings of fortune. I give you warning: even if I come to you, I shall take care—and it is a very easy thing in _your_ house—to get disinherited! Strange things do happen, but I never dreamt that my father would hate children, or the rich man want them. I desire no patrimony: happiness is a frail fleeting thing”—and he cites examples. Vibius Rufus makes the young man argue: “The very father that does not like keeping his children, judges it necessary to have children! I invited his disinherited sons into our humble abode. Am I going to rob them of their home after promising them mine? What am I to do? If I obey, I shall get disinherited: if I don’t obey, I shall get disinherited. I love my father: and that is my offence.” Among Fuscus’s points are these: “(_To the rich man_) You ask for a son: well, there are crowds of youths without a father! (_To his father_) Lay on me any command you choose: I shall go to sea, go on war-service, provided that, wherever I am, I remain yours”; and much of his oration turns on the perils of wealth. Then Fabianus also declaims against the corrupting influence of riches, and uses his noted gift of description to contrast domestic decoration with natural landscape scenery, which is the possession of the poor. When Latro in turn argues for the father, he represents him as saying: “If I did not know what an evil poverty is, I should understand it now: my son does not dread being disowned. Adoption amalgamated the families of the Fabii, the Aemilii and the Scipios. From the foundation of Rome to our own days our famous patrician nobility has depended on it. Adoption cures the wounds of fortune (_adoptio fortunae remedium est_).” The marshalling of arguments under the _diuisio_ follows: _e.g._ Pompeius Silo began, on behalf of the reluctant son, with the trite question, “Is a father to be obeyed in all things? And even if in all things, does this include an act that would make him no longer one’s father? Can a son be handed over for adoption against his will? If he cannot, can he be disowned for exercising his own will?” and so through logical alternatives on to his proof that the proposed adoption was, firstly, disgraceful; secondly, useless; thirdly, dangerous. When the _colores_ are reported, Seneca comments on their risky allurements and adduces warning examples of silliness. He does not mince words when he disapproves. This is a _color_ from Latro in defence of the young man, who is supposed to say: “I was always friendly with the three disowned sons: I am their friend still. When they were disinherited, I advised them to keep quiet and by yielding soften their father. I told them, ‘As soon as you think it the right time, my father will entreat yours.’ Well, now they assure me that the most favourable moment is here. They are right: my father cannot find any more favourable moment for the reconciliation: the rich man is seeking sons.” And here is Latro’s _color_ when he spoke on the other side: “This,” says the father to his son, “is my aim: I want to hand you over for adoption, so that the disowned sons may be by your means more readily reconciled to their father.”

While the exact point at issue varies greatly in the _Controuersiae_, the general question under debate falls into one of three types—criminal, civil, social. The fourth book may illustrate this division, as well as the unlikelihood of the themes. Of its eight cases, three are criminal, three civil, and two involve questions of public status. The criminal cases are: (IV. i.) A man is dragged from the grave of his three children by a wild young roysterer who plays upon him the prank of forcibly shaving him, dressing him in festal attire and compelling him to take part in a banquet; (iv.) During war-time a man who has lost his weapons in battle seizes weapons from a hero’s tomb, fights bravely and restores them: he is charged with sacrilegious violation of the monument; (vi.) A man’s wife dies in giving birth to a boy: the father marries soon after, and the boy borne by the second wife has a remarkable resemblance to his half-brother. Both are brought up in the country and become almost indistinguishable. After many years, on their reappearance in town, the father, who knows which is the elder, will not tell his wife which is her child: he is charged with cruelty. The civil cases are: (iii.) The ravisher of a girl secures from her exiled father a command that she shall elect to marry him, but her brother at home insists on her claiming the culprit’s death: the brother is disinherited for opposing his father’s will; (v.) A stepson, who is a doctor, declines to attend his stepmother, and his father disinherits him; (viii.) A proscribed master in time of civil war is sheltered by a faithful freedman to whom he promises remission of all future claims on his service; when he is restored to his belongings, he makes demands on the freedman, which the latter resists. The two cases of status are: (ii.) Metellus, in rescuing the Palladium from the burning temple of Vesta, has lost his eye-sight: as a blind man, he is refused the right to exercise the priesthood; (vii.) A man taken in adultery by a tyrant wrests his sword from him, kills him, and claims a public prize as a tyrannicide.

In the whole collection the criminal charges predominate: of the 74, there are 30 criminal, 26 civil, while 18 affect status. But many side issues are involved. There are about a score of cases concerning immoral relations such as adultery, seduction, outrage and prostitution: almost as many turn on the disinheriting of children; seven on poisoning; seven on tyrants, a theme more at home in Greece. Pirates add a mild flavour of danger to some, but again and again the imagined circumstances are hopelessly unnatural and bizarre, and encourage extravagance of treatment and style. Certain _controuersiae_ sound like sketchy novels with impossible plots, and must have been so handled in the _narratio_ of a clever rhetor, who aimed at the diversion of a leisured and _blasé_ audience. One instance[115] combines the following episodes: a tyrant is slain; an illicit _liaison_ results in homicide; a father’s intercessions are rejected by a son, who is afterwards captured by pirates; they demand a ransom, but the unforgiving father replies that, if they cut off their prisoner’s hands, he will pay twice the amount; the captive is eventually liberated by the gang; later the father falls into beggary; and finally his son refuses to help him. Anything may be expected in such a jumble—rhetorical outbursts, Homeric quotations, a plea of insanity, or the _color_ devised by a professor with a voice like a hundred nutmeg-graters (_centum raucorum uocem_) that the father’s offer to the pirates “You will be paid double for cutting his hands off” was merely a regrettable secretarial error (_librario una syllaba excidit ‘non’_) for “You will be paid double for _not_ cutting his hands off!”

The ultimate sources of most of the themes are undiscoverable. Many had become stereotyped in Greek rhetorical schools, and, with little or no modification, were transmitted through generations at Rome. Thus, actual Greek history supplied material for the _suasoria_ on Alexander’s entry into Babylon, and Greek tragedy for Agamemnon’s deliberation whether he shall immolate his daughter. Sometimes the historical kernel was of the smallest. It is, for instance, an invention that the Athenians deliberated about removing their Persian trophies under Xerxes’s threat to return with his army. Sometimes the law invoked was a genuine one from the Attic code: often, however, it was a figment of the schools. An example is the debate on whether the priestess convicted of immorality who was thrown from a rock and survived might be subjected to punishment a second time: by Roman law a guilty priestess was buried alive. From Sulla’s time onwards there had been a growing accumulation of material for the free use of declaimers either to thrash out on Greek lines or to fuse with Roman elements. The treatise _Ad Herennium_ and Cicero’s _De Inuentione_ supply a long list of themes drawn from Roman as well as from Greek history; but details were liberally altered in declamations to secure rhetorical effect; for a good point counted more than historical accuracy. Mythology was also a source: and fertile imagination yet another.

Seneca’s ability as a writer is shown both in his suggestive comments and in a Boswellian aptitude for reproducing the words and style of others. In criticism nothing could be sounder than his grasp of that psychological endowment which made Ovid successful in a _suasoria_, of the wilfulness which made that poet love the bizarre lines which others censured, and the quality in his lost oratory which made it poetic prose (_solutum carmen_, _Contr._ II. ii. 8). Most illuminating are the remarks on Montanus’s passion for repetitions: he was “the Ovid of orators” because he could not let well alone (_nescit quod bene cessit relinquere_, _Contr._ IX. v. 17). It argues a genuine feeling for style that Seneca, besides characterizing good and bad speakers, can also represent their actual manner, such as Latro’s exclamatory qualities in Book I or his outburst on Popillius’s barbarity in killing Cicero in Book VII. Similarly in the case of the Roman official who had a man beheaded at a banquet to satisfy the curiosity of a _fille de joie_, Seneca reproduces Murredius’s tetracolon which ended in nonsense “to complete the rhythm”—“Justice was subservient to the bed-chamber, a praetor to a harlot, prison to a banquet, day to night” (_Seruiebat forum cubiculo, praetor meretrici, carcer conuiuio, dies nocti_, IX. ii. 27). The heartlessness of the same scene is vividly brought home by Seneca’s illustration of Vibius Gallus’s realism, “A toast was drunk to the headsman for his deft stroke” (_lictori quia bene percusserat propinatum est_, IX. ii. 23).

The pernicious effect of some of the subjects upon the morality of pupils may easily be overstated. It is doubtful whether there was more of the violent and the illicit in them than is illustrated on a modern cinema film, which does not provide an equal stimulus towards thought and expression. Much, indeed, in ancient declamations was morally sound and bracing, even if rather commonplace: there was a healthy spirit in the denunciations of luxury and of tyranny, which might pass safely in an academic exercise, but might spell ruin in a historical work under the Empire. It is, besides, doubtful whether students altogether failed to realize the unreality of their controversial world; even the far-fetched elements may be said to have been attempts to satisfy the perennial human desire for romance. With so many stock subjects common to the successive periods represented by Seneca, Quintilian and the pseudo-Quintilian, by Calpurnius Flaccus,[116] and later in Greek by Libanius, it was inevitable that sensible arguments should run dry, and relief from the hackneyed should be sought either in artificial embroidery or in capricious invention. The incentive to invent operated often without the check of common sense: so that one is reminded of nothing so much as of the pedantically ingenious questions which were devised by the fantastic imagination of the Troubadours to be pleaded and decided in a Court of Love.

Ingenuity is so characteristic of the Silver Age that it deserves to be noted in the making. It is most observable in the cunningly contrived rebuttal of a charge. At first sight, one might condemn as beyond all excuse the scandalous practical joke already mentioned which was played upon a man at his children’s grave. Subjected forcibly to a fashionable toilette, the mourner had been presented by an unruly young reveller to his boon companions and coerced into attending their banquet in a neighbouring garden. What fair complexion shall an enterprising defence put upon such conduct? One answer to the prosecution follows these lines: Was it not reasonable to be touched by the old man’s mourning and loneliness? Was it not heart-breaking to notice that he had no kinsman to console him? Now when it is too late, the offenders, of course, can see that his friends must have deserted him, because they knew he was mad. In fact, “all was meant in kindness” is the explanation offered by this misunderstood young gentleman! “It was a festive occasion, and I was entertaining some of my good friends, when one of them said, ‘Why do we let that poor fellow in the cemetery kill himself with grief? Nobody can make up his mind spontaneously to abandon sorrow: people are bashful about it: they want compulsion....’” To prove the continuance of his friendly attitude, the defendant assures the complainant: “I’m perfectly ready to give you more consolation of the same sort—only, you’d just accuse me again!” The danger of such smartness in rhetoric and in literature is that it constantly tends to be overdone. Ingenuity of idea and phrase palls even in Ovid and in Lucan; but, indulged in by the smaller mind of a rhetorician in quest of specious argument or pointed epigram, it becomes grotesque, as Seneca shows by his censures.

The seven deliberative exercises, or _Suasoriae_, exhibit similar rhetorical qualities to those in the _Controuersiae_, and furnish continued proof of the attraction which digressive anecdotes, luckily for his readers, possessed for Seneca. At times he conscientiously pulls himself up (_longius me fabellarum dulcedo produxit; itaque ad propositum reuertar_, _Suas._ i. 7); but to his deviations from the strict lines of argument we owe interesting comments, _e.g._ on Virgil’s avoidance of bombast (i. 12); Pedo’s lines describing Germanicus’s voyage (i. 15); Arellius Fuscus’s description of the moon in contrast with Virgil’s simpler and happier words (iii. 4); Gallio’s amusingly nonchalant attitude towards impassioned oratory at which he jested as “plena deo” (iii. 6-7); the records of Pollio’s hostility to Cicero’s reputation (vi. 14); an extract from Livy on the death of Cicero (vi. 17); Cornelius Severus’s hexameters on the same subject (vi. 26); and Cestius’s praise of Cicero’s services in exalting the Latin language over Greek (vii. 10).

Seneca had not spared foolish arguments in the _Controuersiae_. Murredius, quoted in the seventh book for a foolish point regarding Popillius, the ungrateful murderer of Cicero, and for another ineptitude on a poisoning charge, is declared to be “as silly as ever” in the ninth book.[117] In the murder mystery, where a woman is found wounded, her husband killed, and a breach made in the wall between the house and the neighbouring one, Seneca justifiably stigmatized as fatuous the bit of description “My father had holes made in him as if he were the wall” (_pater meus tamquam paries perfossus est_).[118] So it is with absurdities in the _Suasoriae_. The deliberations of the 300 Spartans in the pass whether to retreat or face the Persian are marked both by excellences and by inanities. “Whither will you, hoplites, flee, who are yourselves the walls of Sparta?”—that, in four neat words,[119] is cited by Seneca as the best hit made by any Greek speaker in this _suasoria_. On the other hand, his strictures upon overstrained point are severe; for he says the prize-winner for puerility (_inter has pueriles sententias uidetur palmam meruisse_) was the speaker who played with the conceit that the inscription to the fallen Spartans was written in blood squeezed from their wounds—“ink,” he exclaimed, “worthy of a Spartan!” (where the Latin _atramentum_ gives a more violent contrast to the red blood). The last _suasoria_ concludes with two remarks from “that most likeable fool” Gargonius, “than which not even he had ever said anything sillier.” Turgid rhetoric receives corresponding castigation. The author, in making fun of his namesake Seneca “Grandio” (ii. 17), so called because he liked everything big from sandals to a sweetheart, recalls his handling of the 300 Spartans at bay. Lifting his arms and rising on his toes (that was his way of making himself bigger!) he declaimed in swelling accents a Spartan’s imaginary soliloquy: “So all Greece has abandoned us. So much the better, I am glad, I am glad.” We wondered, remarks Seneca drily, what there was to be glad about. “Why? Because I shall now have the Persian to myself. That monarch, Xerxes, who has stolen seas with his armada, who has confined the earth but extended the deep, whose orders impose a new aspect upon universal nature, that monarch may doubtless encamp over against the heavens; but I shall have the gods for comrades!” If the elder Seneca’s good sense had been more widely shared, such bombast would have been frowned out of existence.

From these exercises, then, one may take an inventory, as it were, for the literary stock-in-trade of Silver Latin. There are exclamatory and high-flown outbursts typified in the apostrophe to the monster of cruelty who maimed foundlings to make money out of their begging;[120] common-places on themes like the mutability of fortune,[121] or the effect of calamity on the mind; _sententiae_, embodying ancient wisdom in proverbial form, such as “The cure may be worse than the disease” (_quaedam remedia grauiora ipsis periculis sunt_), “There are many paths to death,” “Innocence is a protection in danger,” “Nature has given none the breath of life for ever”;[122] the purple patches in elaborate descriptions of ocean or tempest or natural scenery;[123] the brief and pointed epigram designed to surprise by ingenuity or paradox, “Weeping is a modest curse directed against human calamity” (_fletus humanarum necessitatum uerecunda exsecratio est_);[124] and the frequently allied antithesis, “the greatest runaways among the brave, the greatest laggards among runaways” (_inter fortes fugacissimi, inter fugaces tardissimi_).[125] The indictment which lies against rhetoric for extravagance in the use of these and other artifices, and for its frequent self-divorce from real life, must not blind us to the good services which it rendered. Though but a simulacrum of the old free oratory, it was cherished by the Romans with almost pathetic assiduity, and from their devotion to it as an end in itself they gained at least sharpened wits and facility of expression. The rhetorical training maintained in the Empire a high standard of ability in the use of language. This was not its sole advantage. Declaimers were not, as a rule, politicians, but the declamations afforded a safe outlet for a certain amount of social criticism and even a certain amount of republican feeling. Some of the themes, we have seen, gave the mind the satisfaction of entering upon mildly romantic adventures. The very fact that the law assumed in a case was not the actual law of Rome aided the growth of a new sentiment of equity. Further, there was ethical value in the moral and humane reflections of an experienced declaimer, while the attacks made upon luxury and riches were in keeping with a literary exaltation of the poor and the humble, which implied a broadening conception of the worth of the individual. To suppose that the declamations produced merely expert phraseology and did not stimulate thought is a profound mistake.

* * * * *

Seneca places before us the speakers of two generations in Rome, who by their various nationalities—Italian, Greek, Spanish and Gallic—indicate the cosmopolitan hold obtained by rhetoric. Most of the older generation, as Augustans, are outside our present limits; some speakers belong to both generations; and some definitely to the reign of Tiberius. Of the quartette (τετράδιον) placed by Seneca in the highest rank[126]—Porcius Latro, Arellius Fuscus, Albucius Silus and Junius Gallio—the first three had been recognized as eminent before the Christian era began. Ovid studied under Latro and Fuscus, and doubtless a subtle portion of their rhetorical influence descended through the poet to his imitators in the first century. Fuscus also had for a pupil Papirius Fabianus, a philosopher still more than a speaker, who taught the younger Seneca. Gallio, whose arguments are often exemplified in the _Controuersiae_, was noted for a jingle (_tinnitus_) of style in speaking. One of his writings was an answer composed to Labienus’s invective against Bathyllus, the favourite of Maecenas; and other publications of his were declamations and a treatise on rhetoric. He was exiled in A.D. 32. Though Cestius Pius from Smyrna was pre-Tiberian, his pupils, Surdinus, Aietius Pastor, Quintilius Varus (son of the general crushed by the Germans in A.D. 9), formed a group towards the beginning of Tiberius’s reign; and Argentarius, his assiduous ape (_Cestii simius_), belonged clearly to the same time. Cestius had a swarm of followers who, we have seen, learned by heart his speeches in preference to Cicero’s.

In passing to speakers definitely under Tiberius, Caligula and Claudius, it is worth while to remember that the emperors themselves were by education products of the rhetorical system. Tiberius,[127] as a student of rhetoric under Theodorus of Gadara, imbibed new principles—very different from those which his predecessor Augustus had learned from Apollodorus of Pergamum. The Apollodoreans, emphasizing _narratio_, stood for regularity in the division and structure of a speech, whereas the Theodoreans, eager for greater freedom, were content if the _argumentatio_ alone was adequately handled. Tiberius’s years of retirement at Rhodes, before he was emperor, had perfected his acquaintance with Greek rhetoric; and his skill in the diplomatic and even cryptic use of language is apparent in the reports of his senatorial speeches given by Tacitus.[128] In Latin, his tendency was to prefer archaic to foreign words and to base his oratory on the manner of Messalla Corvinus. Among his literary compositions were memoirs, while his verses showed the influence of Euphorion and other Greek poets. His successor, C. Caesar Caligula, from whose insane jealousy sprang his desire to annihilate the works of Homer, and his scathing attacks upon Virgil as well as Livy, did not publish works, though he was well trained in rhetoric, capable as a speaker especially when stimulated by anger, and critically contemptuous of the younger Seneca’s style as “sand minus mortar.”[129] His uncle Claudius, the next emperor, was a voluminous writer in Greek and Latin. An early taste which he evinced for history had been fostered by Livy; and his learning in other fields was extensive. Now a play, now a book on gambling, now an apology for Cicero against the strictures of Asinius Gallus, came from his pen. He even proposed three additional letters, the inverted digamma (Ⅎ) for consonantal _u_, antisigma (Ↄ) for _ps_, and the left half of H (Ⱶ) for the _y_ sound between _i_ and _u_.[130] Part of the speech delivered by Claudius before the senate in A.D. 48, supporting the admission of Gallic nobles to Roman offices, was found recorded on a bronze tablet at Lyons in 1524, and forms an interesting subject of comparison with the version by Tacitus (_Ann._ XI. xxiv). Claudius’s consort, Agrippina, wrote memoirs, which the elder Pliny and Tacitus consulted.[131]

Of rhetoricians at least partly of the time of Tiberius, like Asprenas, Bruttedius, Turrinus and Capito, it is enough to distinguish the last for his declamation regarding Cicero’s murderer Popillius, which remained in circulation and was erroneously ascribed to Latro.[132] Many speakers published collections of their speeches or manuals on speaking. Junius Otho, praetor in A.D. 22, was the author of four books on _Colores_;[133] and Rutilius Lupus, towards the end of Seneca’s lifetime, brought out an abridged translation of a work on figures of speech by Gorgias, who taught at Athens in the first century B.C. Alfius Flavus, one of Cestius’s pupils, wrote also in verse. Senatorial eloquence under Tiberius was (in addition to Junius Otho) represented by Asinius Gallus, son of Asinius Pollio, and inheritor of his caustic style; Aeserninus, Pollio’s grandson; Valerius Messallinus Cotta, younger son of the Augustan Messalla Corvinus, and consul in A.D. 20, a pleasure-seeker with gifts in verse-making and in pleading (Ovid in exile had read a speech which he had delivered in court); Mamercus Scaurus, the easygoing aristocrat whose friendship with Sejanus and authorship of a tragedy, _Atreus_, proved his ruin; Q. Haterius, who died an old man in A.D. 26 and whose startlingly rapid delivery called forth Augustus’s remark already mentioned, that he needed a brake put on;[134] L. Arruntius, a man of ability at once academic and forensic; Votienus Montanus, from Narbo, who made his mark in an inheritance case for Galla Numisia, and was exiled for treason in A.D. 25; and L. Calpurnius Piso, one of the most dignified characters of the day, who alarmed Tiberius on one occasion by denouncing the infamy of informers and threatening to quit Rome in disgust.

To the time of Caligula and Claudius belongs Crispus Passienus, son of the Augustan Passienus. His published speeches were among those familiar to students in Quintilian’s boyhood.[135] It is notable that Caligula allowed the condemned works of certain Augustan orators and historians, T. Labienus, Cremutius Cordus and Cassius Severus, to circulate again.[136] Of these Cremutius belongs to the annals of history. Labienus, more noted as an orator than as a historian, was disliked for exceeding the due limits of free speech, and his enemies were pleased when his books were given to the flames by senatorial decree about A.D. 12.[137] The blow was one which he refused to survive. Cassius Severus, another prominent orator in the _Controuersiae_, had offended Augustus by libels upon men and women of high station, and died in miserable poverty after twenty-five years of exile. There are reasons for believing that his death happened about A.D. 37, five years later than the date assigned by Jerome. Tacitus connects with his condemnation Augustus’s first attempt to repress literature.[138]

Many orators were occupied rather as political accusers than as literary creators, finding it lucrative to place delation at the service of any emperor whose aim was to ruin the potentially dangerous scions of aristocratic families, the so-called opposition under the Caesars. Some were unquestionably able persons, like Domitius Afer of Nemausus (Nîmes), who pleaded in the law-courts, occupied high positions in several reigns, and was known for legal writings _De Testibus_, and for published speeches mentioned by Quintilian. He had begun his career as an accuser by A.D. 26, and lived into Nero’s times (A.D. 59).[139] P. Suillius, one of the dreaded informers under Claudius, eventually fell himself under sentence of banishment. Vibius Crispus, already by Claudius’s time active in the nefarious intrigues of the delator, survived until about A.D. 90, one of many links between this period and the Flavian age.