Figure 1.3 Seneca’s first journey to Rome, as a child traveling with his father and other family members, would have taken place in a coach like this one.
For a provincial child coming to Rome for the first time, the city would have seemed imposing and unimaginably huge. The population of Rome under Augustus has been estimated at around a million, although exact numbers are impossible to reconstruct.20 Augustus, who had been emperor since 27 BCE, had established an ambitious building program of public monuments. In his account of his actions, composed to be inscribed on his (marble) tomb, Res Gestae (The Accomplishments), he boasted that he found the city brick, and made it marble. A grand new marble altar to Peace, the Ara Pacis, had been set up in 9 BCE to celebrate Augustus’ victories over both Hispania and Gaul (Fig. 1.4). There were new hot baths (the Baths of Agrippa, named for Augustus’ favorite advisor and friend), new theaters, and many magnificent new temples, including the Pantheon. There was also a new civic center joined onto the main Forum: the Forum of Augustus. The need for an extra public space is a mark of how busy life in the capital was at this period. Most of the business of government still took place in the old Roman Forum, but the Forum of Augustus, adjacent to it, provided another area for public ceremonies and for legal discussions: the law was a growing industry in Rome in this period. The new forum was built around a new temple to Mars, god of war and father of the Roman people.
Figure 1.4 The Ara Pacis (“altar of peace”) was built in 13 BCE to celebrate Augustus’ return to Rome in triumph after his campaign to subdue Hispania and Gaul under Roman rule.
This would have been where Seneca first assumed his toga virilis, “manly toga,” a symbolic moment roughly equivalent to a Bar Mitzvah. Elite Roman citizens wore the toga for important public occasions. It was a long garment worn over a light tunic, consisting of a single woolen cloth, folded in half and worn over one shoulder. The toga was highly impracticaclass="underline" it required constant tweaking so as to keep it from flopping off; nobody could run or do any kind of manual work wearing it; and the white wool took enormous amounts of (slave) labor to keep clean. The impracticality was at the root of the toga’s symbolism. It represented the wealth and power of the male elite, as well as Rome’s distinction from foreigners (since no other culture would adopt such an odd style of dress), and it was the garment of peace (since one could not possibly ride to war wearing one). At the age of around fourteen or fifteen, Roman boys stopped wearing the toga with a purple stripe around its border and put on their first pure white toga. The ceremony represented their accession into manhood and simultaneously into the upper elite class of Rome.
This moment must have been one of the major highlights of Seneca’s youth. In looking back on the ceremony, in an epistle written in old age, Seneca tells his friend Lucilius, “I’m sure you remember how happy you felt when you put off your boy’s toga for the man’s toga, and were taken to the forum.” But he goes on to insist that this merely external mark of maturity is never what really matters: “you can expect even more joy when you put off the mind of boyhood and when philosophy has enrolled you among men. For it is not childhood that still stays with us, but something worse: immaturity” (Epistle 4). People wear out their bodies and even their togas in the pursuit of things that do not really matter at alclass="underline" “It is the superfluous things that wear our togas bare.” The toga itself, he insists in the following letter, must be simple, neither sparkling white nor conspicuously dirty, since wisdom is on the inside, not in a person’s dress. But he also acknowledges that clothing can be an important marker of one’s inner state.
Seneca’s intellectual growth from childhood to maturity was shaped by two main modes of education: rhetoric and philosophy. He would have begun from early boyhood to listen to the declamations of the type celebrated by his father, and soon would have learned to compose and perform his own. We know nothing in detail about Seneca’s rhetorical education, because—revealingly—he himself says nothing about it. He is keen to present himself as a philosopher (albeit one with a highly rhetorical and carefully crafted Latin style), as opposed to a rhetorician who happens to write on philosophical topics. But Seneca made extensive use of the rhetorical training of his day, transforming and exaggerating the kind of witty tropes used by his father and teachers into a barbed, pointed style, in which every line or two has a punch line. Declamatory training also helped Seneca hone the ability to see multiple sides to every question and to insert multiple voices into his prose. Moreover, even the desire to write in Latin—as opposed to Greek, the traditional language of philosophical prose—may have been influenced by Seneca’s early glimpse, in the halls of declamation, of the power and potential of the Latin language, which could make even a provincial like the Hispanic Latro into a major star in the big city. Seneca learned Greek in boyhood, presumably from a tutor who would have been a Greek slave, but he was not interested in writing in the language.
It was common for elite Roman teenage boys to be educated in philosophy. Many elite fathers sent their boys to Athens to study, which Seneca’s father did not do—perhaps because it was too expensive, but also because he wanted his sons to learn about Roman culture at the same time as studying the intellectual heritage of the Greeks. Roman attitudes toward philosophy had changed a great deal since the time of Cicero.21 As we have seen, there was a tendency to view it as a foreign and frivolous or dangerous pursuit, but philosophy had gradually begun to take hold in Rome, thanks in part to the work of Cicero himself, who labored, especially at times when he was excluded from active political life, to write up detailed summaries and assessments of Greek philosophy. Cicero hoped these would create an ethical synthesis between Greek theory and Roman moral practices. By the time of Seneca, philosophy was a reasonably well-respected field of study, and even profession; a career in philosophy was now a viable alternative to the life of politics (as the case of Mela shows).
In contrast to his silence about his rhetorical training, Seneca gives us a vivid picture of how eagerly he plunged into the study of philosophy—all too eagerly, he suggests with the wisdom of hindsight. He recalls being “the first to arrive and the last to leave” among the boys attending his philosophy class, and he paints a gently humorous, self-mocking picture of his relationship, as an obsessive and demanding adolescent, with his patient tutor in philosophy, the Stoic Attalus. Attalus was a Stoic philosopher chosen as the boy’s teacher by Seneca the Elder; the father makes many admiring remarks about the man’s eloquence and intelligence. None of Attalus’ work survives, although he obviously took an interest in natural science as well as in ethics; apparently he wrote a book about lightning.