Among Seneca’s contemporaries, it could be a source of pride to have climbed up the social ladder from modest beginnings to high rank (and even to association with the emperor).1 Seneca’s own father makes a speaker note, in one of his debate speeches (Controversiae), that the city of Rome itself emerged from humble origins, and uses this point to defend the central position of people who emerged from rural peasantry to the aristocracy of Rome. The context is a speech defending the idea that an aristocratic man could marry out of his station (focused on a typically lurid example: a fine man who has been captured by pirates marries the pirate chief’s daughter, to the disapproval of his own father).
What do you think of those who came from the plough to bless the republic? Unroll any aristocrat you like; you will come through to humble origins. Why should I mention individuals, when I could show you the city itself? Once, these hills were bare, and among the far-flung walls, there was nothing grander than a little hut. Now above it shines the Capitol, with sloping roofs and gleaming with pure gold. Can you blame the Romans for touting their humble origins, although they might cover them up? They think nothing big unless it seems to have risen from something small.
(Controversiae 1.6.4)2
The passage uses a metaphor based on ancient books, which were always scrolls: to flip back to an earlier part of a book and rediscover the previous part of the story, one had to “unroll” it. The image is used to assert that biographies of the elite are always easy to tell, because they are always the same. When we roll back the scroll of an aristocratic life, we read always the same story: a rise from humble origins to social greatness.
All cities were once nothing. But in many cultures, it is not common to mention the fact. In Roman society of the first century BCE, by contrast, the idea of social change was a constant preoccupation. Rome itself had risen particularly quickly to prominence as a world power, and for Rome’s inhabitants, with the sudden acquisition of empire, social change was a fact of life. We can see from this passage that there was a certain anxiety as well as pride in Roman attitudes toward social climbing. Those who had gained new positions of power tended to boast not of their precipitous rise to prominence but rather of their lost days of humility. The speaker in Seneca the Elder’s account acknowledges the possibility that somebody might want to criticize these upstart Romans who fail even to cover up their peasant past. But the passage can be read as much as a boast as a gesture of anxiety: the Romans are proud of their humble origins, and unlike other, hypocritical cultures (such as Greece—often seen as suspiciously dishonest), they acknowledge the real truth about where they came from. The speaker thus manages to have it both ways: on the one hand, the Romans are good (read: honest) for their resolute unwillingness to hide their (potentially shameful) lowly origins; and on the other, they have nothing to be ashamed of, no skeletons in the closet. On the contrary; the ones who “came from the plough to bless the republic” are the most illustrious members of the Roman political and moral canon—most obviously Cincinnatus, the Roman nobleman of the fifth century BCE, who worked his own farm, who was summoned to rule Rome single-handedly in order to fight off invaders to the city, but who insisted on returning to his farm after just sixteen days in power.3 Rising from humble origins to the center of imperial power was thus a biographical structure that went deep in the Roman cultural imagination. But few Romans rose so meteorically as Seneca or became so deeply entangled in the heart of the empire.
Seneca must have been formed in childhood by the experience of growing up in a city where the native Gallic languages and cultures were being edged out by the dominant culture of Rome.4 Seneca’s writings suggest a sense of tension and dialogue between multiple voices, a trait that some scholars have seen as essentially “theatrical.” One might just as well see this as a deep awareness of cultural and ideological difference, which likely developed in childhood. Corduba was a place divided along multiple fault lines in the first century BCE. It was divided between native Roman and native Hispanic inhabitants (Hispani and Hispanienses) and also between sympathizers with Julius Caesar and sympathizers with Pompey, since the civil wars made an enormous impact on the region.
But Corduba was no provincial backwater: it was in many ways just as close to the centers of Roman power as the smaller Italian towns. Corduba in the first century BCE was a flourishing Roman colony (Fig. 1.1). Indeed, it was the leading city of the Roman province of Lower Spain (Hispania Ulterior), and it was one of the earliest Roman colonies to have been established in the region.5 The city had great natural resources: it was built just below the Sierra Nevada range of mountains, on the Guadalquivir River, and just above a rich, flat plain, ideally suited for agriculture. It was also at a crucial trading location, in the southernmost part of Spain, just north of the Strait of Gibraltar and the ancient city of Carthage.
Figure 1.1 The modern city of Córdoba. The main tourist attraction is now the Great Mosque (built in the tenth century, when the Iberian peninsula was under Islamic rule), but marks of the long period of Roman occupation are still visible in the Roman bridge and remains of the Roman temple.
The city of Corduba was originally founded not as a colonia provinciae but as a colonia Latina, a title with a different legal implication: the inhabitants of a colonia Latina did not have Roman citizenship. But by the lifetime of our Seneca, the city’s status had been upgraded, and at least the elite class of Corduba—such as the Annaeus family—were full Roman citizens, with the same rights as any other Roman citizen in the empire.6
The inhabitants of the new city were a combination of native Iberians with Romans, drawn from the ranks of veteran soldiers. One might assume that a city founded by an imperial overlord government would be necessarily a place of enormous social tension. One might also assume that the native inhabitants (the Hispani) would be of a lesser social status than the Romans shipped in from Italy (Hispanienses). But the evidence suggests a surprisingly harmonious conjoining of the two populations, at least among the elite classes. The Greek historian Strabo tells us that “the Turdetani … who live around the Guadalquiver, have so entirely adopted the Roman life-style that they have even forgotten their own language. They have mostly become Latins, and received Roman colonists; so that in a short while they will be all Romans” (3.2.15). Names found on inscriptions in the early period of the city’s history are Latin and Iberian in roughly equal numbers, suggesting that the Iberians and their Roman overlords shared power and may well have intermarried.7 The Annaeus family from which the Senecas came is likely to have been the result of such an intermarriage: the name Annaeus seems to be non-Roman.8 Compromise between diverse social groups was thus an essential habit in the Annaeus family background.
Spain was fraught territory within the Roman empire. Gaul had been conquered by Julius Caesar in just ten years, but it took closer to two hundred before Spain was fully under Roman control. As one historian puts it, for most of the period from 218 to 16 BCE, “Spain was a war zone” (Keay 1988, p. 7). Spain was a highly desirable territory, rich in natural resources: as Pliny says in his Natural History, “Whatever life ought to contain is nowhere more present; grain, wine, oil, wool, flax, tissues, and oxen.” He goes on to compare Spain to Gaul and notes that, while both provincial areas are perhaps equally good at producing oil and wine, Spain outdoes Gaul in producing both luxury goods, such as dye for clothes, and in the “natural” resilience of human capital to be found there. He acknowledges that Spain is dry in certain areas, but in the parts that are near the coast, Spain exceeds Gaul and is almost as good as Italy itself