The Rise and Fall of Seneca Tragicus, c. 1365–1593

Abstract

Among Renaissance debates about the authorship of classical texts, relatively little attention has been paid to the reception of the entangled corpus produced by the rhetorician Lucius (or Marcus) Annaeus Seneca and his more famous son, the philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger.1 This historiographical lacuna is especially curious given the drawn-out nature of the discussion, which began with Petrarch and Boccaccio and involved prominent literati such as Justus Lipsius and Joseph Scaliger. The roughly analogous case of the two Plinys—the naturalist Pliny the Elder and his nephew Pliny the Younger—was successfully resolved in the early fourteenth century. In the Senecas debate, similarly, knowledge of the existence of a second author with the same name was lost during the Middle Ages but recovered during the early Renaissance. Unlike that case, however, no smoking gun (Pliny the Younger's account of his uncle's death during the eruption of Vesuvius) was available to clinch the argument.2 Instead, the modern consensus emerged only in the late sixteenth century, after two centuries of scholarly discus sion. That one Seneca was the philosopher forced to commit suicide under Nero was never in doubt, but the search for a second author did not settle on his father, instead producing a fictitious Seneca tragicus, whose identity and motives became the subject of fervent speculation. The recovery of contradictory and, for a time, incomplete testimony from antiquity first sparked off and then finally settled the confusion. In particular, two near-contemporaries of Seneca—Martial and Quintilian—played crucial parts in the story of the birth and demise of Seneca tragicus. Although Martial's role in first prompting the debate has been widely recognised, the way his evidence structured later positions has not—nor the ways in which it was sometimes purposefully hidden. The role of Quintilian's statements in deciding the question has thus far been largely ignored. The present article will, necessarily, sift through the witness testimony available to the disputants but will also pay careful attention to their personal motivations and philosophical commitments. The high esteem in which Seneca's philosophical