Seneca establishes himself here as a real old-fashioned Roman patriarch: by law, the Father of the Household (paterfamilias) had the power of life and death over his whole household, including his wife and even his adult sons. By insisting that Mela is allowed to do as he wishes, Seneca is also underlining his own power to give or withhold permission. Moreover, there are some fairly obvious strings attached to the freedom granted. He encourages Mela in his desire to pursue philosophy, but also insists that he must be trained first in the father’s favorite skilclass="underline" declamation. The passage begins with an account of a man called Fabianus, who became a well-known philosopher in the Sextian school (and may have influenced the middle son, our Seneca), but who—as Seneca triumphantly emphasizes—trained in declamation in his youth. The explicit lesson is clear: “the practice of declamation will help you in the goals to which you are so wholeheartedly committed—just as they helped Fabianus” (2. Preface. 4).
The passage uses the stereotypical Roman trope of the exemplum: the “example” of some earlier historical (or, sometimes, mythical) person is invoked to point to a moral lesson in the present.16 But Seneca never gives any actual reasons why declamation might be useful as training for the future practice of philosophy. In fact, the story about Fabianus shows exactly the opposite: Fabianus’ early training in declamation was something he had to fight against. His teacher, Arellius Fuscus, taught him a highly florid, “effeminate” style of oratory, which he then had to struggle to cast off. Despite his efforts, his work even in philosophy remained tainted by the influence of bad declamation: he succeeded in becoming less long-winded, but “he couldn’t escape [his teacher’s] tendency to obscurity.” Fabianus, we are told, counteracted his teacher’s tendency to bloviate by cultivating a highly controlled, aphoristic style, but he is sometimes so concise as to be incomprehensible, and “some sentences stop so suddenly as to be abrupt rather than concise.”
The story bears two incompatible interpretations. Firstly, perhaps Fabianus’ interest in philosophy helped him become a better orator and declaimer. We are shown how Fabianus managed to curb some of the bad impulses of his teacher and become a more precise speaker and writer, and the suggestion of the narrative is that what makes this possible is not declamation but his philosophical interests and training. Alternatively, skill in philosophy has absolutely nothing to do with skill in declamation—and indeed, that early training might have inhibited his later professional development. Fabianus managed to become a good declaimer and a good philosopher despite bad early education.
The natural inference is that Seneca the Elder was not really concerned with constructing a story about the proper modes of education and intellectual training that made either logical or narrative sense. Rather, he was interested in promoting his own favorite practices. Declamation itself did not encourage clear thinking. Instead, it trained the memory and created facility in coming up with neat, aphoristic turns of phrase and, especially, a skill in telling a vivid set of stories from multiple points of view—regardless of whether they were consistent. The point of invoking Fabianus is to bless declamation by vague association with philosophy, and vice versa, without any intention of teasing out a precise relationship.
Anxieties about the moral status of rhetoric go back at least to the time of Plato, whose Gorgias indicts the moral turpitude of oratorial skill in favor of philosophy. But Roman intellectuals tried to defend oratory against philosophical attack by conjoining the two disciplines. They suggested that good moral character is an essential feature of the best orators: Cicero famously defined the orator as “a good man skilled in speaking.” Both elements in the definition are necessary for Cicero’s conception: unless the declaimer or orator has a good character, all the skill in the world will not make him a real orator. As we have seen, Cicero made significant contributions to philosophical writing in Latin. Philosophy provided an escape from the stresses and anxieties of political and legal engagement, but it also provided ways of approaching and understanding public life. Cicero had shown how it might be possible to combine the life of political engagement with the life of the mind—a possibility that clearly haunted Seneca the Elder and was of even more concern to his middle son.
Philosophy had once been seen as a foreign, Greek import, which had the potential to threaten good old Roman values associated with Roman traditions, examples, and the ways of the ancestors (the mos maiorum). Cato the Censor, also known as Cato the Elder, notoriously recommended dismissing from Rome an embassy of three philosophers who came from Athens in 155 BCE to spread philosophical education to the city (see Plutarch, Life of Cato). By the adulthood of our Seneca, Roman attitudes toward philosophy had mellowed as the discipline had assumed a central place in elite education, but it still was viewed with some suspicion, as a potential threat to old Roman moral values.
Seneca the Younger presents his father as an old-fashioned patriarch. He suggests that he was religious, traditionalist, and very hostile to philosophy. But this does not fit what we learn from the father himself.17 He expresses particular admiration for the “lofty and manly teachings” of Stoicism (2. Preface. 1). If he had hated philosophy, it is hard to explain why he encouraged his middle son to study it.18 We might also note that Seneca says nothing in his extant work about his father’s interest in rhetoric, nor does he comment on his successful career in business and finance. The obvious inference is that Seneca fictionalized his own relationship with the father, for two main reasons. First, the son bolsters his own claims to moral decency by presenting himself as the offspring of a man who was the salt of the old Roman earth. It would have looked bad for the author of the Moral Epistles to acknowledge himself as the son of a nouveau riche provincial, one who encouraged his sons to be highly ambitious, who enjoyed rhetorical exercises as a leisure-time activity, and who had some interest in (Greek!) philosophy, especially as a tool for social advancement.
The second reason for the fudging is more personal. Seneca was presumably comforted by presenting himself as the beloved son of a devoted father. This was a particularly important fiction since the father’s own writing suggests, quite to the contrary, that Mela, the youngest boy, was the favorite, and that Seneca the Elder may have been rather less impressed with his two older sons. In a complex and important passage, the father puns on the name “Mela,” suggesting a (false) etymological connection with melior (“better”): to be “Mela” is to be inherently superior to one’s brothers:
You [Mela] had greater natural talent than your brothers. You were the most competent in all the best fields of study. This is in itself a sign of your superior talent (melioris ingenii): not to be spoilt by its power into abusing it. But since your brothers have ambitious goals, and are preparing for the forum and a political career (fields in which one has to fear even the things one hopes for), even I, who am otherwise eager for such advancement, and encourage and praise such efforts—it doesn’t matter if they are dangerous, as long as they are honorable—even I keep you in port while your two brothers venture out.