Seneca The Elder - Background

Background

His praenomen is uncertain, but in any case Marcus is an arbitrary conjecture of Raphael of Volterra. During a lengthy stay on two occasions at Rome, Seneca attended the lectures of famous orators and rhetoricians, to prepare for an official career as an advocate. His 'ideal' orator was Cicero, and Seneca disapproved of the florid tendencies of the oratory of his time. A passage in Controversiae expresses a critique of the Asiatic style of Arellius Fuscus, calling "his ornament too contrived, his word arrangement more effeminate that could be tolerated by a mind in training for such chaste and rigorous precepts" (2 pr. 1). Yet Seneca's own writing for fictitious speakers and situations aims above all at a striking effect on the audience and is characterized by "mannerism", "exaggerated use of the colores" and "use of a brilliant, precious style, one that has recourse to all the artifices of Asianism, from the accumulation of the rhetorical figures to densely epigrammatic expression to care over the rhythm of the period."

During the civil wars, his sympathies, like those of his native place, were probably with Pompey, as were those of his son and his grandson (the poet Lucan). By his wife Helvia of Corduba, he had three sons: Lucius Annaeus Novatus who was adopted by his father's friend, the rhetorician Lucius Iunius Gallio and was subsequently called Lucius Iunius Gallio Annaeanus; Seneca the Younger; and Annaeus Mela, the father of the poet Lucan.

As he died before his son Seneca the Younger was banished by Claudius (41; Seneca, ad Helviam, ii. 4), and the latest references in his writings are to the period immediately after the death of Tiberius, he probably died about AD 38.