The father’s name was Lucius Annaeus Seneca, like his middle son (or perhaps Marcus Annaeus Seneca: the first name is doubtful). He was born around 54 BCE and died around 38 or 39 CE, in extreme old age—over ninety. He thus lived through the civil wars, as well as the early years of the principate. He would have been a child in the crucial conflict between Julius Caesar and Pompey, which culminated in Caesar’s victory and brief term as Dictator for Life, before his assassination in 44 BCE. The Annaeus family probably supported Pompey, although they presumably switched over quickly and kept their old allegiances carefully under wraps in later years; they clearly did not suffer financially from the wars. The ability to bend with the political winds was one that Seneca the Younger mastered early, and it ran in his family.
It was traditional for elite Roman boys from the provinces to come to the city of Rome to be educated in rhetoric and philosophy. Seneca the Elder had a delayed start on his education because the civil wars made it dangerous to travel. But he was in Rome by 44 BCE, when he was around ten years old (he calls himself a preadolescent, a puer, at this time). He trained in rhetoric, and the experience of listening to the celebrity orators of the day was one that stayed with him all his life: he claimed to be able to remember, word for word, what was said by each speaker on those occasions, even recalling the debates some eighty years later. He suggests (in the preface to Controversiae 1) that even now, he can pluck out of it anything he entrusted to memory as a boy or young man. This claim has been doubted for obvious reasons, but even if it is not literally true, it is clear that the intellectual climate of the debating halls, with their fascinatingly diverse personalities, made an enormous impression on the boy and shaped his views about education and literature even in adulthood and old age. His idol was Cicero; he disliked the florid Asiaticism (a fancier style of speaking that was becoming fashionable).
His actual career was not in rhetoric (so that the usual title for him, “Seneca Rhetor,” is rather misleading); we do not know exactly what he did for a living, although it is likely that he made money from his various estates, and he probably also profited from moneylending (as his son was later to do) and other forms of trade. He had inherited money and increased his wealth by his successful business ventures. It was likely thanks to his wealth that he was able to marry Helvia, whose family may have been of somewhat higher class than his own; he may also have increased his wealth through marrying her. He also had literary aspirations: he was engaged, at the time of his death, on a work of history. His extant works are two compositions made ostensibly for the benefit of his three sons, although with a larger readership in mind. They consist of evocations of the declamations he had enjoyed so much in his youth: the Suasoriae (Persuasions) and Controversiae (Debates). Both these works are concerned with rhetoric, or rather, declamation.
“Declamation” (declamatio) was a kind of debating exercise in which a group of elite boys or men each in turn tried their hand at coming up with the best phrase or line of argument to take on a particular fictional topic. It played a central role in the Roman educational system, preparing boys for a career in politics or the law, but it was also practiced by adults (like Cicero) just for fun, or to keep their wits sharp for the real thing. Declamation was somewhat similar to the debating contests that are popular in some modern high schools and colleges in the United States and the United Kingdom, although it was far more culturally dominant. Declamation had a clear pedagogical and social function: it trained students for political and legal life, since—in our society as in ancient Rome—lawyers and politicians wield a great deal of social power, and to succeed in these fields, a person has to be competent at persuasive speaking.
But declamation had a larger cultural function as well. In a world without television, declamation was a form of middlebrow entertainment; it had something of the elements of modern soap operas. The popularity of declamation is easier to explain if we see it not as a prototype of C-SPAN but as the ancient equivalent of legal drama shows (like “Law and Order,” with all the salacious pleasure of contemplating sensational and violent crimes). It must have owed as much to the public performance spectacle as to the (inevitably very formulaic) topics that were actually discussed. There were celebrity declaimers, who gained the hearts of the audience as much by their skills in improvisational acting and gesture as by their fluent tongues.13
A group of speakers, all of whom would probably be well known to the gathered crowd, assembled in the center of the Roman Forum, the meeting place in the middle of town where almost all public business took place. Surrounded by the noise and bustle of street vendors, entertainers, lawyers, politicians, and shoppers, the display of declamation began. First came the premise of the day’s debate:
A wife is tortured by a tyrant to find out if she knew anything about her husband’s plot to kill him. She persisted in saying that she did not. Later, the husband killed the tyrant. He divorced her on the grounds of her barrenness when she bore no child within five years of marriage. She sues him for ingratitude.
(Controversiae 2.5)
Then each speaker in turn spoke, first for the wife, then on the other side. Often, the speakers would fully inhabit the various roles, speaking as if in the persona of the characters in the case: “Put her on the rack!” cry the torturers; “Apply the fire! The blood is almost dry right there! Cut her, whip her, tear her eyes—make sure she no longer pleases her husband as breeder of his children!” It is easy to see the melodramatic appeal of this kind of thing.
Roman declamation emerged out of a Greek tradition of public speaking for purposes of entertainment and education. Quintilian claims that it goes back to Demetrius of Phaleron (fourth century BCE: Quintilian 2.4.41), while Philostratus traces it somewhat earlier, to the first sophists of Greece like Gorgias of Leontini (Philostratus 481). The theory and practice of Greek rhetoric flourished in the third and second centuries BCE, the period after the death of Alexander the Great (323 BCE), when Greek cities were under the power of the Macedonian empire. The growth of rhetoric was closely associated in the minds both of Greeks and Romans with a decline in real political power for individual Greeks. At a time when Greek cities were relatively disenfranchised and cut off from real centers of political power, Greek men (always men) retained or gained a sense of cultural autonomy and masculinity through developing rhetorical and literary skills. Rhetorical display thus had much the same social and psychological function as Stoic philosophy, which, not coincidentally, grew in popularity in the same period. Both philosophical and rhetorical training allowed men who felt disempowered to hang on to a sense of control and self-worth. Elite gentlemen now found their “empire” not in government but in smaller social or intellectual worlds.
The Romans copied Greek models of education, including the practice of debate on set themes as both an essential feature of elite education and as a warm-up exercise for people in political and legal life. Cicero, as Suetonius tells us, “declaimed in Greek up until his praetorship, and in Latin even as an old man” (Suetonius, Gr. Rhet. 25.3). But Roman declamation in the time of the empire became something significantly different from its Greek predecessor. Seneca the Elder treats declamation as an entirely new phenomenon: “the thing itself was born after me: that is why it is easy for me to have known it in its cradle” (1. preface 12). Declamation in this time, if not entirely invented from scratch, became far more restricted in its scope (limited, in its primary usage, to purely educational contexts rather than including any loud speech on a specific topic). New technical terms were invented, including controversia (“controversy,” or “debate,” an exercise based on a legal case), suasoria (“persuasion,” an exercise based on the premise of giving advice at a public meeting, sometimes to historical characters, such as Alexander the Great), and various terms for components of the speeches, such as color (“color”—a particular angle taken on the topic) and sententia (“sentiment” or “opinion,” but usually used for aphorisms).14