Morals and Villas in Seneca's Letters: Places to Dwell

MORALS AND VILLAS IN S E N E C A’ S LET TERS John Henderson explores three letters of Seneca describing visits to Roma...

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MORALS AND VILLAS IN S E N E C A’ S LET TERS

John Henderson explores three letters of Seneca describing visits to Roman villas, and surveys the whole collection to show how these villas work as designs for contrasting lives. Seneca’s own place is ageing drastically; a recent Epicurean’s paradise is a seductive oasis away from the dangers of Nero’s Rome; once a fortress of the dour Rome of yesteryear, the legendary Scipio’s lair is now a shrine to the old morality: Seneca revels in its primitive bath-house, dark and cramped, before exploring the garden with the present owner. Seneca brings the philosophical epistle to Latin literature, creating models for moralizing which feature self-criticism, parody, and reanimated myth. Virgil and Horace come in for rough handling, as the Latin moralist wrests ethical practice and writing away from Greek gurus and texts, and into critical thinking within a Roman context. Here is powerful teaching on metaphor and translation, on self-transformation and cultural tradition. j o h n h e n d e r s o n is Reader in Latin Literature at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of King’s College. His recent books include: Pliny’s Statue: the Letters, Self-Portraiture & Classical Art (2002), Telling Tales on Caesar: Roman Stories from Phaedrus (2001), Writing down Rome: Comedy, Satire, and Other Offences (1999), and Fighting for Rome: Poets and Caesars, History and Civil War (1998). Aesop’s Human Zoo: Roman Stories about Our Bodies and HORTVS: the Roman Book of Gardening are both forthcoming (2004).

MORALS AND VILLAS I N S E N E C A ’ S LET TERS Places to Dwell

JO H N H E N D E R S O N

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521829441 © John Henderson, 2004 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2004 isbn-13 isbn-10

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It’s down the end of lonely street . . . (Axton, Presley, Durden (1956) ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, Multimood Music)

Contents

Acknowledgements

page ix

Introduction

1

1 Twelve steps to haven Book 1: Letters 1–11

6

2 Dropping in (it) at s e n e c a ’s With text and translation of Letter 12

19

3 You can get used to anything Books 2–10

28

4 The long and winding mode Books 14–20+

40

5 Booking us in Letters 84–88

46

6 Now and then; here and there: at s c i p i o ’s Text and translation of Letter 86

53

7 Bound for vat i a ’s Text and translation of Letter 55

62

8 Knocking the self: genuflexion, villafication, vat i a ’s Letter 55

67

9 The world of the bath-house: s c i p i o ’s Scipio in Letter 86 with: Horace’s common scents

93

10 The appliance of science: s c i p i o ’s Aegialus in Letter 86 with: Virgil’s funny farm vii

119

viii

Contents

11 Shafts of light: transplantation and transfiguration Metaphorics and visuality in Letter 86

139

12 Still olive, still s c i p i o ’s Digging Scipio in Letter 86 with: the dirt on Seneca

158

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Here to stay Places and persons named in the Epistulae Morales

171

From: Letter 86 To: A Dying Light in Corduba

175

Bibliography Indexes Passages discussed General index

177 184 184 187

Acknowledgements

h ac i e n d e r s o n to f r i e n d s : g re e t i n g s Dear Landlord, This loco study contains home truths for me (13k p 3-y 7-g 04-68k rd). I really must thank my favourite hosts for epistolary stopovers at Ann Arbor, Columbia NY, Columbia Mizzou, NYU, OSU, Oxford CCC, Washu Missouri, and Yale, and, especially, Sue Alcock, John Cherry, Jas Elsner, Kirk Freudenburg, Holly Haynes, Dan Hooley, Cathy Keane, John Marincola, Susanna Morton Braund, Jim Porter, Gareth Williams (places and people); and thank, too, two caring readers for Cambridge University Press (anonymous and utopian), my copy-editor, Jan Chapman (eagle-eyed and unflinching), and my new editor, Michael Sharp (neatly named and well placed). The extracts in Appendix 2 come from ‘A Dying Light in Corduba’ by Lindsey Davis, published by Century. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. Fare well.

ix

Introduction

Dear Reader, Seneca’s Moral Epistles are no easy ride, no homogeneous concatenation, or sequence. Charm; irritation. Tormenting and tormented, they are a tease of technical quaestiunculae pursued to the death, amid casual notelets of worthy chat and ephemeresque self-caricature. They make generalizations, and they make them odious.1 Readers will first be acclimatized to a particular style of epistolarity, then weaned from it; teased with sudden signals of a reprise, only to find the repeat subjected to critical re-examination, and on occasion to outright theorization, deferred. Seneca piles in; checks us out. This is critical writing, it puts itself under pressure. The line of thought must cartwheel and career onwards, dogged and aleatory by turns; over before anything can settle, or unfurling exponentially into an ocean of fulmination. Catch as catch can. Collaterally, these intense bursts of philosophical fire are concentrated on the one single addressee, and fellow-disciple: enlightening Lucilius; more or less lucid, looking to mature towards the recessive goal, virtuous integrity. Seneca the ultimate senex cares for committed readers; out to cure them, more suo, from human cares with cold-turkey treatment. Intimidating, insinuating, everything in these Moral Letters is going to hurt bad. Bad enough to warrant Seneca’s emergency pack of never-ending salvation.2 Queror, litigo, irascor: ‘I grouch, sue, rage’ (Epp. 60.1). Locked in a lift with a booby! This genial ghoul implants annoyingly wry, recalcitrant, habits. It hurts him, too, this chummy ‘Teacher-and/as-Pupil’.3 1

2 3

For authoritative protreptic to rate the Letters’ epistolarity, see Wilson (1987) and (2001). Edwards (1997) presents a fine aggiornamento on the Epistles: her slogans ‘self-scrutiny’ and ‘self-transformation’ govern this essay. Schönegg (1999) brilliantly pioneers engaged investment with the Letters ‘als philosophisches Kunstwerk’. For Seneca’s complete image-repertoire: Armisen-Marchetti (1989). See Edwards (1999) for the logic and dynamics of Seneca’s teaching with torture. See Henderson (1999) 228–48, on Persius’ Satires.

1

2

Morals and Villas in Seneca’s Letters

Perverse as the author [could wish], my enquiry homes in on the strictly rationed moments when the Epistulae Morales let us glimpse the twinned lives of the correspondents within a spatialized environment. On more or less dry land, the main textual loci/loca are just three in number. In general, all modes of specification in the Letters are endangered species: in particular, the collection only very rarely partakes in descriptive location. Reading our triad of textual loci will be three special doses of vital immunization against folly. As therapy, with these three homes, these theorems, of Roman theory we can project for our selves a theatrical show house of uncanny philosophical self-positioning.4 But forget hype. You just won’t find any more intelligent writing to provoke intelligent reading anywhere. Seneca’s signposts always point traffic away from his point of departure, Rome, away from seething hordes of writhing hysteria in the ancient world’s vastest ever conurbation; but his soothing words of writing tranquillizer barely resort to showing us around his refuges, around oases in the epistolary world’s meanest ever collocation. Three goes, in all. In fact, a start and two real shots are all. Actually, a start, a zip past (a) folly, and one ideal habit(u)ation, all told. t h e to u r In this book, we will first get ready for off: Letters 1–11: chapter 1.

Then pop in and out of s e n e c a’s place [somewhere] ‘in suburbia’, once. Just in time to catch himself out. Seneca the gardening expert, past ripe for excruciation: Letter 12: chapter 2.

True, a couple of ‘late’ letters are simply postmarked from s e n e c a’s places. This had been the role of the out-of-town estate in Cicero’s correspondence, where his numerous uillae, and others’, played the indispensable part of ‘stopover’ (deuersorium) in the hectic round of a busy life. For epistolary description of an estate we turn to Horace’s Sabinum, the fullest appraisal coming in Epistles 1.16, where its land is offered up as hostage to fortune, staking out a considered, polished-up, self-promotion for Horace 4

‘Threeorhomes’: for exploration of the transferential and counter-transferential dynamics of ‘Advice Literature’, see Henderson (1999). To sloganize, the Epistulae Morales inculcate a philosophical brand of writerly ‘irreference’, persuasively drawing attention to the persuasive wiles of their own poetics – screening their screen (cf. Kinzie (1986–7)).

Introduction

3

as a (relatively) right-minded Roman of culture. He trades it in to earn the moral platform to take a severe look at his correspondent Quinctius’ reputation, and, getting into his manner, to challenge him on his right to own it. Elsewhere in Horace’s œuvre, the ever-mounting series of fragmentary glimpses of this selfsame estate builds it into a composite place for many-faceted autoportraiture. Pliny’s epistolary inductions to his row of mansions would take much much further the lead offered by Horace’s and Seneca’s rare moments of epideixis. With the villa poetry of Statius, the genre would truly take off in fully developed form.5 In the Epistulae Morales, once the visits to s e n e c a ’s, vat i a ’s, and s c i p i o ’s are done, ‘addresses’ are attached to a couple more letters, and that is all: a brace for s e n e c a, ‘at Nomentum’, and ‘at Alba’; and there is a bare hon. mention of lu c i l i u s ’ place ‘at Ardea’: Letters 104.1; 110.1; 123.1; 105.1: chapter 4.

But just twice we stop long enough to dwell on Roman ‘villas’ (‘farmhouse’ . . . ‘country estate’ . . . ‘out-of-town mansion’ . . . ‘manor’; cf. maneo, ‘I remain’): (1) Once to leer and jeer at a palatial dump from the outside, ‘along the bay from Cumae’, to shake up vat i a ’s: Letter 55: chapters 3, 8 be your guide (and see 12). Find text and translation on your way past at chapter 7.

(2) Once only to visit, make our selves a(t) home, and take an engrossed look inside: ‘at Liternum, on the shore of Campania’, for immersion in scipio’s: Letter 86: Introduction to the neighbourhood featured in chapter 5, on Letters 84–8. Text and translation await your arrival at chapter 6. Discussion of this prize property will check in at chapter 9, and out at chapter 12.

The rest of the going first gets rough: Chapter 11 must room with metaphor, and sleep-over metaprosaics.

Then flattens out: Most of what can be known about nominal reality at vat i a ’s and s c i p i o ’s is relegated, exiled, with some poetic myth-making, to a tight corner in chapter 12. 5

An exception to prove Cicero’s rule: Ad Q. fratrem 3.1, on Marcus’ interference with Quintus’ Manilianum. For Horace’s Sabinum: esp. Leach (1993). On Statius’ villa poetry: Newlands (2002) esp. 119– 53, 154–98, on Siluae 1.3, 2.2.

4


MORALS and VILLAS will, then, pick its way through the Letters’ figuring of metaphor and simile, working out from Seneca’s triple turn of localized expatiation as models of moralization: introduction and induction, extrapolation and education. They are here for us to see what we can get out of them, teach-ourself-ethics: r A flash into the hole in selfish Seneca’s head. r The vista outside wan Vatia’s cowardly priest hole. r The séance inside evergreen Scipio’s bracing bolthole. Pilgrimage to this last single-minded, solitary, shakedown is the destination. Where we try out for size a legendary shrine to Roman mores. In all three shots on location, imagery plumbs the depths to implant lessons in morality topicalized through mimesis. These are interior designs for living. o u t o n yo u r ow n So much by way of itinerary, and programme. Now to imagine a nichette for Morals and Villas in Senecan, epistolary, and classical (Latin) scholarship. There’s no denying that the Epistulae Morales have yet to prosper in modern literary scholarship in English.6 In France and Italy Seneca is still a strong spiritual guide and counsellor, ‘next stop Augustine’.7 In Germany he has not ceased to be a major intellect of Antiquity, a one-off masterthinker.8 Our analytic philosophers mostly process him, not very rivettingly so far, for his indispensable take on Stoicizing reason and Hellenistic doctrine, though Roman Philosophy shows signs of reclaiming its proper stature.9 Interest in the empire of Senecan prose has been recharged by recent focus on the body, and on emotions – on self-fashioning ‘after Foucault’.10 In general, epistolary writing in Latin (as well as in Greek)11 now enjoys critical attention and appreciation, sparked off by Ovid’s letters from exile and then his letters from abandoned heroines,12 and already featuring a rush of critical revaluation for Cicero’s, and Pliny’s, Letters of civility.13 Morals and Villas aims to wring the dynamics of ‘the philosophical letter’ from the Epistulae Morales, while losing none of Seneca’s literariness – his ‘epistoliterarity’.14 6 8 10 12 13 14

7 See esp. Armisen-Marchetti (1989); Maso (1999). See Wilson’s critical review (2001). 9 Esp. Barnes (1997); cf. Inwood (1997). E.g. Hachmann (1995), and esp. Schönegg (1999). 11 See esp. Rosenmeyer (2001). See n. 1 above: Edwards (1999); Wilson (1997); Edwards (1997). E.g. Williams and Walker (1997); Spentzou (2003). E.g. Hutchinson (1998); Beard (2002a); Henderson (2002a); Gibson and Morello (2003). See pp. 29, 45, 91.

Introduction

5

‘My’ Seneca will be a writer, whose Latin style is inextricably bound up in his Roman thinking, his Roman revision of post-Hellenistic reasoning.15 I shall underline from time to time that the writing of the Epistulae Morales has more than enough ‘reality’ to satisfy anyone, for here superannuated Seneca is indeed writing for his life – or (to get closer) for his death. Yes, mortality will close down these Letters at any moment, if court politics don’t suck him back in from retirement (and, as we know, exact more or less foreseen suicide). With this pledge, the drama, the project, the praxis huff and hustle after ‘Self Consciousness’ at every level of textuality. In order to show how this full-scale ensemble of writing weaves together an overall work of suasion and manipulation, I shall see if I can whizz the whole corpus of Epistles past, in suitable clusters and the right bunches (esp. in chapters 1, 3, 4): if the effect has an element of fast-forward vertigo in it, this will deliver Senecan ‘shock therapy’; and, in retrospect, the survey will prove to have prepared and pre-quelled the main business ahead. Yet, as I see it, the several parts of the collection are designed to interact, so that topics handled in separate compositions thicken, trouble, and reconceptualize one another, and I shall therefore focus on the letters that prop up my keystone, with readings strictly slanted toward thematic responsion (chapter 5, less hectic, on Epp. 84–8), before finally feeding in a run of frames for construal of the centrepiece (chapter 11, applying Epp. 58, 59, 100). But the core of this book will feature ‘close reading’ techniques of intense, even minute, interpretation, as those visits to Roman homes fuse into a triptych that shows up Senecan epistolary poetics as an exquisite experience in verbal-conceptual artistry: I shall expose in slo-mo each twist and turn of Epp. 12, 55, and especially 86 (chapters 6–12: the translations are gauged to accentuate my take on the didaxis). ‘My’ Seneca wants moral philosophers (Seneca makes philosophes manqués of us all) to take the scrupulous Self Criticism in exact rhetoric seriously. NB There are no dates. Not one. Translations are mine. The symbol [. . .] will indicate a person- or place-name finessed from Seneca’s text. 15

For the panorama, see Boys-Stones (2001).

chapter one

Twelve steps to haven Book 1: Letters 1–11

The impressive (indelibly imprinting) first book shuffles twelve compositions into a decisively disputatious, analytical mode.1 Referential moments are shockingly rare, as names, locales, dates, and events are either repressed or repeatedly, emphatically, anonymized.2 As we shall find, in fact this flight of letters will terminate with its most graphic episode: a charmingly selfsatirizing ‘at home’ with a rueful Seneca. A dose of chagrin d’amour propre, our first stopover, the shady uilla of Epp. 12, will model the moral topos in which manors make manners make Man. Mimetic writing takes us inside the owner to own up. By contrast, the rest of those textual apostles will by then have loaded the book in favour of principles, away from principals. Dicta, not data; eleven to one. Disorientation of the reader is the first objective of the correction programme. Scrubbing the interrogation clean of external coordinates is part of a sensory-deprivation therapy which aims to reconfigure and redirect the new recruit, inside, inside the mind, wherever morals live. In the first twelve-session course, we shall find, just one vignette is recounted, apart from a[n unlocalized] confrontation between tyrant and philosopher, which supplies extra ammunition in the real battle of wills, between philosophers (Demetrius Poliorcetes and Stilbon, 9.18: Stilbon besieged by Epicurus). The solitary geographical referent of any sort named in the book features in the sarcastic anecdote told on its last page, the first to involve a Roman – a dead Roman, in fact, and one who played a dead unRoman while he still 1

2

Book 1 is presented as a book by Scarpat (1975). Hachmann (1995) 19–123 reads it as a cumulatively administered warm-up course preparing access to the full-blown cursus philosophicus to follow (Epp. 13–29, ‘Die bona mens’; 31–65, ‘Die ratio als Führerin zur bona mens perfecta’). Maurach (1970) reads Epp. 1–32 + 60–80 hard, and spiritedly, as suites. With the exception of an analogy featuring Phidias’ sculpture (9.5), every proper noun in Letters 1–11 will be mentioned in this brief sketch. In this chapter, above all, you will need to bear in mind that material placed within square brackets will indicate the occlusion of a reference. Demetrius Poliorcetes’ intervention (9.18) will be considered at once: cf. Appendix 1, pp. 171–2.

6

Twelve steps: Book 1

7

lived (12.8). Here an eccentric stand-in legate [under Tiberius] ‘made s y r i a his own by squatters’ rights’ (qui Syriam usu suam fecit), in a caricature of Seneca’s interior rehabituation régime acted out in the de-moralized empire [of the Caesars]. This drop of mockery is the vaccine in our homoeopathy and is in line with a wholesale change of treatment for this last dose in Dr Seneca’s first course: for external onomastication only (see chapter 2). Accordingly, this understudy dropout from history sports the name Pacuuius – surrounded by contaminating orgy, accompanied by unphilosophical chanting in Greek, and choreographed for depraved pantomimic parody! Pacuvius meant to appropriate for him self from society the right to determine what his life meant, and what, if anything, it would mean as a memory in other lives to come. He would ‘hold his own funeral on a regular basis’!3 Now Seneca means to appropriate this mockery of social ritual into his own. We are to make our lives mean what we mean them to mean, only ‘from good, not bad consciousness’ (conscientia). As for Rome, forget it! Eliminate the very thought! Write your own epitaph (script yourself, act your life, don’t rehearse it . . .)!4 But let’s begin at the beginning.

letter 1 The stark ‘proem’ sets the trend by eliminating all proper nouns, as Time decants into life/death, day/hours, tomorrow/today. The venerable Seneca mood-sets, appropriates this as his principal topic,5 and culminates in a [Hesiodic] maxim, teasingly attributed to ‘our ancestors’.6 Tartly closing the piece with the proverbial last stare into ‘the bottom of the barrel’ (in fundo = in imo). ‘Late thrift’ – ‘too late for thrift’ – stamps the collection with the hallmark of the imminently ‘late’ Seneca’s look back at life’s mistakes (sera parsimonia). Such a dignified entrée. So spare. [So Spartan.]7 3

4

5

6 7

Seneca is telling us how we live our (dead) lives. He, and we, are here to save us. Cf. strange friend Bassus, ‘seemingly following his own funeral, and living his life as if he’d outlived himself and it’ (et uiuere tamquam superstes sibi, 30.5). See Tacitus, Annals 6.27. The name Pacuuius satirically leaves us with the taste of staginess, and honour besmirched: it functions as catachresis for the great tragedian of the Republic, M. Pacuvius (never named in the Epistles). See Armisen-Marchetti (1995), esp. 552–3; Motto and Clark (1987); for the pointed signal to reflect back on Epp. 1 at 62.1: Motto and Clark (1991b). For the developing explication of Time/Luxury through the course of the Letters, see Hijmans (1976) 160–6. See Scarpat (1975) 42. On Epp. 1, see Andria (1982) 7–16; Henderson (2002a) 84–5.

8


letter 2 Letter 2 parallels with Place. Changing place – the unsettling instability of travel. We are urged to ‘hang out with our (literary) selves’ (secum morari ∼ ingeniis immorari). Stay put in our reading-haunts and -habits, so the initial slogan will swiftly unpack: locorum mutationibus (‘with multiple change of places/passages’).8 For all that the topic is topography, not a single site is in fact situated [for this ‘utopia’], and even the map of the library starts and stops at just the one entry ‘e p i c u ru s’. This unStoic sage we shall, soon enough, love to hate to love: for this is Stoic Seneca’s first bad habit, he gibes, the mos in his morality, ‘transplanting himself’ into the enemy camp as spy not turncoat (soleo enim . . . transire, 2.5). Later we shall recall the details here, as Seneca underscores the motif of food for thought in book consumption by demanding ‘good digestion’ of a single chosen author (concoquas), and, in deploring readers who throughput everything with full throttle (transmittunt), intones: ‘No slip grows strong which is often transplanted, nothing is so gainful as to pay off in transit’ (transfertur . . . in transitu, 3).9 Stigmatizing spatial displacement is the core of the Stoic’s adamantine lifeplan, ‘We shall not be moved’, and this karma is the nucleus of his incessant campaign of internal resistance to Roman superpower, that swirl of the worldwide City in its fast-breeding Cosmos: Route 1, the ‘Journey – within’. The next two letters import incipient scenes from public life [in Rome. But without landmarks, without cityscape; no personnel, no Caesars].

letter 3 Letter 3 has Seneca receiving Lucilius’ letter delivered by an unnamed denamed, friend ——- [cut], but bucking at the warning (attached) not to blab to said —– r r r r [censored] about Lucilius’ concerns, any more than Lucilius habitually does (non soleas). These cannot, then, be ‘f r i e n d s’, who must practise total mutual disclosure. And the ‘g re e t i n g s’ that usher in this, as every other, Roman letter, including the present text, must rate as insincere as the formulaic ‘Heroes’ that Romans mouth indiscriminately for election candidates, or the formula of ‘Sirs’ that we resort to when their name eludes us . . . (3.1). Surely Seneca means us to ponder his own 8 9

This punceptry grounds further discursive play between reading (uolu-mina . . . euoluere) and living (discurris . . . inquietaris . . . iactatio, etc.). Add 2.5, transfuga. See Andria (1982) 19, 21–2, 24; cf. 50, 52 on 6.1, 6.4 (see below).


9

suppression of the data about these friends, as he weighs in to pressurize Friendship, topicalized as the nitty-gritty business of epistolary communication. Mentioning, all told, the sainted teachings of Theophrastus, and winding up with a quotation he has read in Pomponius (one Pomponius or another),10 about blind human moles. And, yes, these are the only coordinates provided.

letter 4 Letter 4 directs Lucilius to keep on keeping on (Perseuera = ‘perfect mores’ = ‘push Stoic austerity to the logical conclusion’ = ‘“watchword” of Senecan Letters’). A mind clothed in Philosophy’s purity and splendour. Greater joy than when he put on the toga of Romanness for the coming-of-age parade that officially certified him as duly transplanted into adulthood (in forum deductio . . . transcripserit, 4.2).11 Here we are formally introduced to the Senecan gimmick of the wind-up ‘Quote for the Day’ to sign off a letter, with a second shot of Epicurus [cued, but unnamed].12 And (as in Letters 2 and 7) shutdown comes with the self-reflexive watchword and compositional tic of Roman satire, as Seneca memorably images excess – ‘threadbare toga . . . senile soldiery under canvas . . . shipwrecks hammered onto foreign shores’ – before calling (for) ‘e n o u g h’ (sat, 4.11). A gang of famous Romans with cruel ends did obtrude in Letter 4, before Seneca ordered Lucilius and us to ‘Replay exempla of victims of domestic coups’ – only to make us do his will, by withholding all exemplificatory names (4.7–8). We should think this flash of Dread through: what would it be like for this material to occupy just an instant in our consciousness? To spell it out, as I shall now risk doing, is on one side to ruin the existential point but on the other to realize the thought, make it real, and push us through Senecan Angst. It is a matter of momentum within the moment. The ‘list of historical exempla’ was a prod at the reader that was all the more pungent because intense but rare – sudden bursts of names in rows; and all the odder because unusually oratorical for letters.13 10 11

12 13

Pomponius Secundus, L. Pomponius of Bologna, or . . .? Senatorial courtier and penman, Comic playwright, or . . .? Not Cicero’s best friend and perpetual correspondent . . . Lots in a name. ‘Seneca preferisce transcribere al ciceroniano adscribere perché vuol mettere l’accento sul componente trans-, che sottolinea cambiamento sostanziale, una conversione totale di vita; questo cambiamento e` ottenuto dalla filosofia intesa non come disciplina, ma come acquisito metodo di vita (= virtus); e` quella filosofia divenuta habitus animi’ (Scarpat (1975) 77–8). See esp. Hachmann (1996). Mayer (1991) esp. 153, 159, cf. Maso (1999) chapter 1; see Appendix 1, pp. 171–2.

10

Morals and Villas in Seneca’s Letters Here, the ‘fear of death’ concretizes in [thoughts of]:

‘Pompey – – Crassus – – C. Caesar’ [. . . But no. Halt or I fire. . . . Not that Gaius Caesar:

Dread instead his nominal caricature. Closer to home. Nearer the knuckling under:] ‘C. Caesar [Caligula] – – [Caligula’s] victim Lepidus – – tribune Dexter – – [Cassius] Chaerea, . . . who were the agents of both their . . . “deaths” [to equate tyrannous murder . . . with its rival, heroic/futile tyrannicide].’

Feel how thought hops down the genealogy. Follow how one name leads to another. Generating generational recapitulation and supplement, substitution and displacement, as the Roman naming system dictates it should and they should. Thinking in names, figuring out Roman futility.14 When the tricolon aborts, political competition over the corpse of the Republic yields to dynastic in-fighting for the throne of the Czar. The new world’s locus of power is the palace, and this is in Seneca’s day the primal scene for craven death-wish anxiety. This is what makes the second-string cast of co-stars tumble up out of the well of paranoia: between them they diagram a surreal scene of serial stabbing and stabbers stabbed now ingrained into the Roman psyche as the customary shorthand for modern normality ———– . Two Caesars in one, plus a triumvirate of bit parts. Between their names and their selves, they summarize a courtier’s phobia: (1) Welcome: ‘Messrs. Charming – – Right Hand (= Aue, = Well-omened, Righteous, Skilled) – – Joy (= Vale, So long, On your way, Welcome).’

(2) Seneca’s relay, from Big Names to small fry, also acts out his whole programme, writ small. Precisely. He writes small the Universe of Empire, 14

Henderson (1997a) 14–21, ‘Rome in the nomen: naming in Latin’.


11

degraded into write-off Mundanity. In its locus he inscribes the Cosmos of Self-Rule, Spirituality. Thus the First Triumvirate that originated imperial Roman History is (syntactically) broken up before it is completed, (rhetorically) beggared by the Caesars it hatched.15 The pivotal figure in this cosmology would have been C. Iulius Caes – [aposiopesis: cut.] In place of Civil World War epics of decapitation in Egypt, death and decapitation in Parthia, and multi-perforated assassination in the Forum, we are menaced with the truly upsetting stuff of imperial (Julio-Claudian) Roman History. In this familiar territory of the present, Seneca’s bogeyman Emperor has his hit-man eliminate a potential rival, and in a trice see what happens to ‘Rome’: The pride of the Roman army (tribunus) is barbarized into Newspeak Latin for (let’s say) a prototype of the ‘Waffen SS’ – – [L. Aemilius] Lepidus [no longer automatically M. Lepidus the lieutenant of the first C. Caesar, and later third-party in the Second Triumvirate] models for the fate of all peers of the Republican aristocracy too close to the Augustus–Antony machine, fed into the Caesar complex as the fall-guys whose destiny is to let down their homonymy with their forefathers, ‘putting their own necks on the block’ (4.7)16 – – Chaerea [another Cassius who killed another C. Caesar, need we remark?] is demoted from hero to instrument as Caligula ‘puts his own head in the noose’ (4.7).

Of course the Letters are one long exercise in [unspoken] ‘fear of death’. Seneca will meet his long-scripted Socratic death17 because he did not join in the attempted rerun of Chaerea’s blow [for ? Liberty? ], when the ‘Piso Conspiracy’ failed to rename ‘Nero’ as another exterminated Caesar. To repeat, there are no dates in the Letters. Only the practice of his project to get out of this nightmare, to get this nightmare out of his head, to find a Haven. Avant moi, la déluge.

letter 5 Letter 5 has Lucilius studying hard, but instead of a reading list, or at least an appetizer of [which?] Great Books in store, the willing horse is flogged with 15 16 17

Seneca explains the ambiguity of references to ‘C. Caesar’, at 83.12. The old formula survives at 104.29: ‘Pompey – Caesar – Crassus’. See Henderson (1997a) 47, unpacking the tell-tale plural at Juvenal, Satire 8.9, coram Lepidis. See Schönegg (1999) 19–24, on Tacitus, Annals 15.60–4.

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more mos, mores, and consuetudo, with satis and the nomen ‘philosophiae’ (5.1–2). With the back-reference ‘Not that splendid a toga, not a dirty one, either’ (non splendeat toga, ne sordeat quidem, 5.3), and, by way of a guru to study, only a tag from ‘our Hecato’, which is subtended as this epistle’s bonus track of ‘lucid lucre’ for Lucilius (huius . . . diei lucellum tecum, 5.7).

letter 6 This Hecato recurs in Letter 6, in the same role, after we have negotiated a quizzical congregation of Greek greats in philosophy (Zeno + Cleanthes, Socrates + Plato ’n’ Aristotle, Epicurus + Metrodorus ’n’ Hermarchus ’n’ Polyaenus, 6.6). The script releases Good News: Seneca is radically transformed, as new unrecognized flaws attest transplantation of self (transfigurari, translati animi).18 The instant conversion is down to something [or other] Lucilius (he ventriloquizes) now asks him to send along. Longing to transfuse the lesson into Lucilius (transfundere),19 he will forward the [mystery] book – the relevant passages marked. Yet, so he instantly objects to himself, to the power of writing, and to the institution of epistolary interaction, here is the rub – you really can’t beat live shared speech (6.5): longum iter est per praecepta, breue et efficax per exempla. Long is the journey through commandments, short and effective the journey through exempla.

Polarized routes, alternative routines. Those (named) classic philosophers were cited on this very, perverse, count: not for any stories they might bring us, nor for their ‘precepts’, but for what they ‘exemplify’. They learned to become great teachers through witnessing their great teachers teaching (learning). As the ‘postscript’ brakes, all in a day’s work, Seneca writes, as usual, as if there is no difference between enjoying Hecato’s mot in person or in book form (quid me hodie apud Hecatonem delectauerit dicam, 6.7).20 Between them, these philosophers preach on Friendship, that ‘a friend to oneself’ is ‘a friend to all’. Is Lucilius ‘with’ Seneca, already? Are we, readers of ‘Seneca’? We could never verify, only ever aver, it, but this Letter 18

19 20

‘[T ]ransfigurari corrisponde al gr. meta-schmat©zesqai, cioè mutare di sc¦ma, figura che e` termine sinonimo di forma, nel senso filosofico di causa formale della cosa . . .; transfigurari indica, quindi, un mutamento sostanziale. . . . translati . . . e` certamente intenzionale per il trans- . . .; il part. translatus serve a Seneca per insistere sul mutamento radicale’ (Scarpat (1975) 116, 118, following Bickel (1957)). ‘[A]ltro composto con trans-, dopo transfigurari, e translatus’ (Scarpat (1975) 121). Disciple of Panaetius: read first-hand by Seneca, not via a gnomology? (Scarpat (1975) 110.)


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itself mimes the shattering breakthrough text that it trumpets, in all its transfiguring glory. And its transferential relay on to its next convert. So to us. Seneca can change lives. Can epistolary writing transcend absence, as it proposes, and transpose Seneca into our lives? Half-way through the book, now. Letters 7 and 8 take two bites at the same cherry.

letter 7 The aptly named turba is billed, indeed nominated, as – disturbing – shibboleth (turbatur: the effect on mores, on bonis moribus, 7.1–2); plus reaffirmation. First Seneca goes out into the world in person. For his first scenario in the full glare [of imperial Rome]. Out into the lion’s den, for a narrative, exposed to the arena at noon. An incident must be imminent (casu . . . incidi, 7.3). But no, this was more bait: Philosophy and its heroes will feature in a theatrical three-fingers to the People, ‘a threat to the mos of Socrates, of Cato, of Laelius’ (7.6), plus a three-in-one technicolour postscript, where Democritus takes a bow, or two – ‘(but there is a dispute over the authorship)’ – to be followed by Epicurus ‘writing to one of his co-researchers [unnamed]’. Legitimated by humane revulsion at civic sadism, the moral crusade turns away from the spiritual ruination of attendance at a Roman show, to the autarchy of ‘inner retreat’ (recede in te, 7.8). So it is that the faceless medium impresses its faceless triply reinforced message: ‘One’s an army, an army’s one. That’s me’, and, ‘Few friends are enough, one is enough, none is enough.’ Not enough: add this: ‘You and I, we are to fill a theatre’ (7.10–11). Here, too, Seneca is miming some more. For the spectacle of Epistolarity is itself another scene where ‘Three’s a crowd.’ Seneca. Lucilius. The reader. Who needs those sights and stars, when we know that private viewing is the only cinema that counts? Not a gladiator, nor impresario, neither sensational anecdote nor imperial scandal: some visit to the superbowl. This censored panorama ———– is as close as we may come to Rome. Enough to put you off lunch for good. True Good is internal(ized). Psychic.

letter 8 Now Lucilius is put into the firing line. Next question: can a Stoic urge retreat, behind closed doors (secedere, 8.1)? Seneca can. For he has. Replacing any adventure out at the full house for the bloodbath, Seneca is in fact

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manoeuvring his addressee in order to elicit (i.e. contrive, motivate) a private apologia, for withdrawal to privacy. ‘Seneca’s business is with Posterity.’ Whatever his calculation may have been about his chances for a long retirement, he turns his back on the bustle of immediacy, uniquely among ancient epistolographers.21 And, instead, writes ‘Sermons that Save’, not least beneath every Letter’s ‘g re e t i n g s’ (salutares admonitiones, 8.2 ∼ Lucilio salutem). So The Voice booms out what resounds like a public harangue of the public, dinning full blast from the page at US (clamo . . . cum posteris loquor, 8.3): re c t v m i t e r, qvo d s e ro co g n ov i e t l a s s v s e r r a n d o , a l i i s m o n s t ro. t h e r i g h t e o u s j o u r n ey, t h at i h ave d i s cove re d to o l at e , wo r n o u t w i t h s t r ay i n g , i p o i n t o u t to ot h e r s .

Yea, the direct route, over the straits and shoals of life, across the Red Sea (tcnh st␫n xiv ¾dopoihtikE . . .).22 Straight-talking Seneca’s Jeremiad doth outshout the civic utility of a panoply of regular social duties (law, politics . . .). He dooms the masses to failure to escape the fate of all masses; they have been warned: v i tat e qva e c v m qve v v lg o p l ac e n t yo u m u s t a l l s h u n a l l t h at at t r ac ts t h e m o b! (8.3)23

And yet, Seneca’s never short of company. (Like his reader.) His apologia extends from the grand Mission Statement broadcast to reflection on the practice of appending the regulation ‘postscript’ maxim. Still reading Epicurus, not Stoics? Why not? – for anything in the public domain is Seneca’s oyster: ‘You must be slave to Philosophy in order to be blessed with true Freedom’ (Epicurus) performs its own truth; so it guides us to ‘Freedom is being slave to Philosophy’ (Seneca. 8.7–8). Simple, see? Go farther afield, out into the marketplace of Literature. Sample Publilius’ lowly pontifications, or Lucilius’ own versified dicta. Why not? In principle, poets do express, even supplement, Philosophy (8.8–10). So we have our threenames-in-one-clausula routine, and Seneca can ostentatiously economize 21

22 23

See Epp. 79.17; Lana (1991) 270–1; Schönegg (1999) 192–4. Did Seneca knowingly set out to write the Letters into the grave? Are they his praeparatio mortis for real? It was waiting just around the corner. (For praemeditatio in the Letters, cf. 63.15, 74.33–4, 91.3–4, 98, with Armisen-Marchetti (1986); Manning (1976).) Zeno apud Olympiodorum, In Gorgiam 53. ‘The journey metaphor’ in Seneca: Lavery (1980) 151–5. Schönegg (1999) 58–9.


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on his cast, finessing ‘so many poets’, all the ‘philosophers’ – ‘not to touch on high tragedians, or Roman tragic-comic playwrights’. Mention the odd name, but ration them (‘Epicurus – Publilius – [Lucilius]’, 8.8–10). For all Seneca’s sources feed Seneca’s mill.24 Philosophy enslaves and liberates wisdom. It is all Seneca’s now. All ours, Lucilius(es’).

letter 9 Letter 9 is the first piece to engross dramatically: twice the size of the rest. This is Seneca’s first intimation that scale will be a variable, a diagnostic, a performative figure of epistolarity. He makes a fundamental point, into the bargain, unpacking the predilection for Epicurus which makes him the third point of the Letters’ triangulation of their medium for the reader. He is now revealed as Seneca’s formal inspiration, for Epicurus, too, wrote letters (. . . in quadam epistula Epicurus, 9.1). We are introduced to a scrap between philosophizing epistolographer and his rival (Stilbon). We shall be reading a (pugnacious) reading of this pre-text. This, then, is the kind of prolonged disputation that the letter can stretch its stage to encompass, as it approaches the capacity of a modest disquisition, or mini-essay, approximating to a gospel for Rome after the pattern of those doctrinal missives to the (misguided, but at least guided) herds of Epicurean faithful. Here in Seneca’s spiritual struggle for the path of righteousness, reality concretizes as debate featuring classic texts – alongside Epicurus and Stilbon, there are quotes from Hecaton (for the third and last time in the collection), from Attalus, and from Chrysippus – before a[n anonymous] comic verse sets the seal by ventriloquizing Nature (natura scilicet dictante, 10.21):25 ‘Non est beatus, esse se qui non putat.’ ‘Think you’re blessed. Or you’re not.’

No place for a ‘postscript’ here. Because we have just put that ‘Epicurus tic’ under the magnifying glass, and found that it always codes in, not just philosophy to fill each day, but epistolarity, in concentrate.26 24 25 26

See esp. Schönegg (1999) 163–9. This Stoicizing figure of speech is espoused by Quintilian (Institutio Oratoria 3.4.12, 8 Praef. 26: Scarpat (1975) 232). So, more or less alone, Habinek (1992) 189, n. 10, ‘. . . a way of assimilating the philosopher’s influence to his own as well as a means of signalling generic competition with antiquity’s most famous writer of philosophical letters’.

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let ter 10 The point is reinforced as Letter 10 positions itself as further reaffirmation of 7 and 8, and (through explicit back reference) as continuation of 9. (An opening chreia (word of wisdom: 33.7) from Crates tells a boy walking along talking to himself [somewhere unspecified] that he’s ‘talking to bad company’, 10.1, en passant contriving to dub Crates (model) audience for Stilbon of 9.) Back to basics, at a regular magnitude: herein a philosopher’s quip, for kick-off; then a cameo memory of Lucilius’ promise; and the ‘regular’ (more meo) postscript – but this time a one-off from one Athenodorus [pax in the Letters]. Epicurus is the active absence here.27 Here. Now the book, this programmatic, precedent-setting, book, reels in.

let ter 11 In Letter 11 Seneca talks again to Lucilius ad hominem, back in the social frame [of the Roman panoptikon]. An [anonymous] ‘friend of yours’ was impressive well into his interview with the great (ex-)patron. Then, he blushed. A review of this sign of character (‘good blood’, puns Seneca) features ‘Sulla, Pompey, and – that rarity, a personal memory from Seneca’s days in power – Fabianus’, all reddening ‘in the public eye’ (in conspectu populi, 11.2).28 Even especially here, as [Papirius] Fabianus is both named and situated (‘before the senate’), we are told he was ‘there to be a witness’, precisely so that we must confront the point that we are not to be told what he was witness to, since the point we are to witness, and memorize, is that Fabianus was there to be witnessed by [his pupil] Seneca. Blush and all, Fabianus completes a trio of exempla; he has no call on our attention in his own write. No more than that other expository device, Lucilius’ hot-flushing protégé. Read on, and find Seneca teaming up with comrade Epicurus at the death, as they concur in recommending that we 27

28

See Motto and Clark (1968) esp. 40, n. 27, ‘Epicurus is mentioned, defended, and/or quoted outright in 27 of the first 33 epistles; often he is cited more than once in a single letter.’ They don’t add that Epicurus is named in only two of the last thirty-six epistles (= Books 14–20: at 92.25, 97.13, 15 (bis)). Cf. Setaioli (1988) 171–222, ‘Seneca e le lettere di Epicuro / Le sentenze delle prime 29 Epistole’. Plutarch, Life of Sulla 2.1 tells us that Sulla was named for the red and white blotches on his face (the etymology eludes us). ‘The skin of his face looked as if it had been partially flayed, most of it a raw and bloody crimson, some few places still showing their original whiteness’ (McCullough (1993) 52). For ‘The Roman blush’ see Barton (1999).


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‘pick’ Someone to be Our Hero. Nail this in your mind – the commandment, and the paradigm it commands, both (11.10): Elige itaque Catonem; . . . elige . . . uirum Laelium. elige eum cuius tibi placuit et uita et oratio et ipse animum ante se ferens uultus . . . May be a Cato, may be a Laelius, may be Someone that gets your vote for the way they live, speak, and their face displays their thoughts up front . . .

‘Somebody’, it is plain to see, well calculated to ‘keep true our morality’ (mores nostri, 11.10). How could Seneca promote more neatly his Epistulae, his Epistulae Morales? Where we skip names and games in favour of generalization and argument, sketching a possible Roman mind (to be) reclaimed from the engrained imperatives of fame and engagement. En passant, more than a hint of a flicker of a shadow of another reflex tricolon of exemplary figures in Roman thought: 1.

Cato – 2. – Laelius – 3. – [ ].

‘Cato + Laelius’ cannot but spell the Elder Cato’s rival-and-enemy s c i p i o and Laelius’ hero-and-friend, s c i p i o (Aemilianus). The pairing betokens Traditional Homegrown Sense and Progressive Hellenizing Theory, and leaves us to complete the triad with [the missing synthesis]. So if we are to complete the thought process, we already supply one extra name to add to the chosen few: a Senecan s c i p i o, or two. When one arrives, you could almost presume, the formula has been pre-set: ‘s c i p i o’ will be a match for severe, agricultural, Stoic-avant-lalettre c ato, rolled into the like-minded, inspirational, civilized Friend of l a e l i u s (legendarily nicknamed Sapiens, ‘The Wise’). Does it need saying? What could any such [‘s o m e b o d y’] be but a figure for [s e n e c a]? The more sinister reflex, a move which sums up in a millisecond the revisionary Rome of Seneca’s Nero, is to twin c ato [m a i o r] + s c i p i o [or s c i p i o n e s a f r i c a n u s / i] with their namesakes from the Civil War that handed the Republic over to [the] Caesar[s]: c ato [m i n o r] + [his lieutenant m e t e l lu s] s c i p i o.29 This suicidal pair summed up the existential response of [Stoic] heroes to the prospect of ‘enslavement’ to emperors: they inaugurated what became the Julio-Claudian dynasty that would ultimately enjoy Seneca’s suicide, as his pen quit over some last, missing, Letter. While 29

See 24.9–10, 71.10–11, with Mayer (1991) 154–5. See Appendix 1, p. 173.

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his nephew Lucan would die in the plot to stop the story of Augustus’ family, still writing his direct onslaught on Julius’ world conquest, the epic Bellum Ciuile. A political history of Rome could simply write: c ato m a i o r + s c i p i o m a i o r + m i n o r | | c ato m i n o r + m e t e l lu s s c i p i o | | s e n e c a + lu c a n.

let ter 12 The book’s finale takes us home from home chez Seneca, for his first epistolary journey out of Rome, for a shot of parabolic autobiographical narrative. Another flash down the pan? Let’s drop in.

c h a p t e r t wo

Dropping in (it) at s e n e c a ’s With text and translation of Letter 12

Gardening is not about those mythical ‘green fingers’. Gardeners know that the plants, the trees, the staff, and the grounds are the identity they create for themselves by doing every single thing that can be done, over and over, as the year wheels about. The peculiar boon of growing into your garden is, since time immemorial, that you live the life-cycle a million times, through the plants; you have the best chance of anyone to grab the moral for your own life, wherever you knock around. Ever since Homer wound up the Odyssey so touchingly with Laertes in his idyllic plot on Ithaca, ‘hoeing around’ the plants until his son came home to take care of his family, ‘getting to know vines and counting up the fruit-trees’ has imaged an idealized existence with hearts and values in the right place, an islet of self at one with life on the land, the ‘island’ politics of the self at one with itself.1 Book 1 of the Letters ends by showcasing Seneca as senectus. (He had in fact recently retired in his mid sixties.2 ) He proudly suppresses the location of the location of ‘my just-out-of-town property’ (in suburbanum meum, 12.1), where he comes to image ‘my senility’, in the form of ‘an ancient manor’ that ‘grew in my hands’, ‘its stone ∼ my age’ (uillam ueterem . . . haec uilla inter manus meas creuit . . . aetatis meae saxa, 12.1).3 But this opening tableau does showcase reportage, at l(e)ast. Crisp, emotional, specific, naming names, affixing relations, in a word graphic. Something to visualize. 1

2

3

Henderson (1997b) explores the pervasive thematics of ‘care’ in the poetics of the Odyssey, through the sign of the Father’s ‘I-land’ (= the Fatherland (as)) orchard (24.340–4). Cf. (2004) Preface, on Virgil’s figuration of [Tradition as] the ‘Old Man in the Garden’. See Harlow and Laurence (2000) 125–6, on this montage of dotage. ‘Epistel 12: Abschluss oder Neubeginn?’: Hachmann (1995) 99–116 (‘Ep. 12 ist aber nicht nur ein Einleitungsbrief, sonder sie ist der letzte Einleitungsbrief ’). ‘It may also have been the scene of his last philosophical discourse’ (Griffin (1976) 287, cf. Tacitus, Annals 15.60.4, his passion scene).

19

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Everything that we have been starved of, almost to the end, at first base. We shan’t forget it – Seneca’s flash of self-incriminating, ultimately selflacerating, bullying of the manor’s manager.4 His unphilosophical debacle of petulant rage: s e n e c a lvc i l i o s vo s a lv t e m Quocumque me uerti, argumenta senectutis meae uideo. ueneram in 1 suburbanum meum et querebar de impensis aedificii dilabentis. ait uilicus mihi non esse neglegentiae suae uitium; omnia se facere, sed uillam ueterem esse. haec uilla inter manus meas creuit: quid mihi futurum est, si tam putria sunt aetatis meae saxa? iratus illi proximam occasionem stomachandi arripio. ‘Apparet’, 2 inquam, ‘has platanos neglegi: nullas habent frondes. quam nodosi sunt et retorridi rami, quam tristes et squalidi trunci! hoc non accideret, si quis has circumfoderet, si irrigaret.’ iurat per genium meum se omnia facere, in nulla re cessare curam suam, sed illas uetulas esse. quod intra nos sit, ego illas posueram, ego illarum primum uideram folium. conuersus ad ianuam, ‘Quis est iste?’ inquam, ‘iste decrepitus et 3 merito ad ostium admotus? foras enim spectat. unde istunc nanctus es? quid te delectauit alienum mortuum tollere?’ At ille, ‘Non cognoscis me?’ inquit. ‘ego sum Felicio, cui solebas sigillaria afferre; ego sum Philositi uilici filius, deliciolum tuum.’ ‘Perfecte’, inquam, ‘iste delirat: pupulus, etiam delicium meum factus est? prorsus potest fieri: dentes illi cum maxime cadunt.’ debeo hoc suburbano meo quod mihi senecta mea, quocumque 4 aduerteram, apparuit: complectamur illam et amemus; plena est uoluptatis, si illa scias uti. gratissima sunt poma, cum fugiunt; pueritiae maximus in exitu decor est; deditos uino potio extrema delectat, illa quae mergit, quae ebrietati summam manum imponit. quod in se iucundissimum omnis uoluptas habet in finem sui differt. 5 iucundissima est aetas deuexa iam, non tamen praeceps, et illam quoque in extrema tegula stantem iudico habere suas uoluptates; aut hoc ipsum succedit in locum uoluptatium, nullis egere. quam dulce est cupiditates fatigasse ac reliquisse! ‘Molestum est’, inquis, ‘mortem ante oculos habere.’ primum ista 6 tam seni ante oculos debet esse quam iuueni (non enim citamur ex 4

‘L’kjrasiv (la descriptio) . . . divenne argomento epistolare’ (Scarpat (1975) 277).

At s e n e c a ’s : l e t t e r 12

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censu); deinde nemo tam senex est ut improbe unum diem speret. unus autem dies gradus uitae est. tota aetas partibus constat et orbes habet circumductos maiores minoribus: est aliquis qui omnis complectatur et cingat (hic pertinet a natali ad diem extremum); est alter qui annos adulescentiae excludit; est qui totam pueritiam ambitu suo adstringit; est deinde per se annus in se omnia continens tempora, quorum multiplicatione uita componitur; mensis artiore praecingitur circulo; angustissimum habet dies gyrum, sed et hic ab initio ad exitum uenit, ab ortu ad occasum. ideo Heraclitus, cui cognomen fecit orationis obscuritas, ‘Unus’, 7 inquit, ‘dies par omni est.’ hoc alius aliter excepit. dixit enim parem esse horis, nec mentitur; nam si dies est tempus uiginti et quattuor horarum, necesse est omnes inter se dies pares esse, quia nox habet quod dies perdidit. alius ait parem esse unum diem omnibus similitudine; nihil enim habet longissimi temporis spatium quod non et in uno die inuenias, lucem et noctem, et in alternas mundi uices plura facit ista, non alias contractior, alias productior. itaque sic ordinandus est dies omnis tamquam cogat agmen et consummet atque expleat uitam. Pacuuius, qui Syriam usu suam fecit, cum uino et illis funebribus 8 epulis sibi parentauerat, sic in cubiculum ferebatur a cena ut inter plausus exoletorum hoc ad symphoniam caneretur: ‘Beb©wtai, beb©wtai.’ nullo non se die extulit. hoc quod ille ex mala conscientia faciebat nos ex bona faciamus, et in somnum ituri laeti hilaresque dicamus, uixi et quem dederat cursum fortuna peregi. crastinum si adiecerit deus, laeti recipiamus. ille beatissimus est 9 et securus sui possessor qui crastinum sine sollicitudine expectat; quisquis dixit ‘uixi’ cotidie ad lucrum surgit. sed iam debeo epistulam includere. ‘Sic,’ inquis, ‘sine ullo ad me 10 peculio ueniet?’ noli timere: aliquid secum fert. quare ‘aliquid’ dixi? multum. quid enim hac uoce praeclarius quam illi trado ad te perferendam? ‘Malum est in necessitate uiuere, sed in necessitate uiuere necessitas nulla est.’ quidni ‘nulla sit’? patent undique ad libertatem uiae multae, breues faciles. agamus deo gratias quod nemo in uita teneri potest: calcare ipsas necessitates licet. ‘Epicurus,’ inquis, ‘dixit: quid tibi cum alieno?’ quod uerum est, 11 meum est; perseuerabo Epicurum tibi ingerere, ut isti qui in uerba iurant nec quid dicatur aestimant, sed a quo, sciant quae optima sunt esse communia. uale.

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Morals and Villas in Seneca’s Letters s e n e c a to f r i e n d lu c i l i u s : g re e t i n g s

Wherever I’ve been turning myself, I see proof upon proof that old age 1 is with me. I had come to my out-of-town place and was moaning about the cost of a collapsing building. The manager told me the defect wasn’t down to his neglect, he was doing all that could be done, but the uilla is ancient. This villa grew up in my hands: what’s to become of me now, if the stonework of my lifetime is crumbling so? Angry with him, I grab the very next chance for spleen. ‘It’s 2 obvious’, I said, ‘that these plane trees suffer neglect, they have no leaves. How knotty and shrivelled the branches are, how sad and squalid the trunks! This wouldn’t happen if someone was trowelling round the roots and watering them.’ He swears by my lucky star that he is doing everything that can be done, his level of care is not slacking in any area, but those trees are well ancient. Let this stay inside the pair of us, I planted them; I saw their first leafing. I turned to the door, and said, ‘Who is that? That wreck, quite 3 rightly stuck by the door, looking out. Where did you get him from? What kicks did you get from getting rid of someone else’s corpse?’ He said back, ‘You don’t recognize me? I am Felicio. You used to bring me trinkets for Xmas. I am son of Philositus the manager. Your wee playmate.’ ‘Perfect,’ I said, ‘perfect-ly deranged he is. Is my playmate infantilized? Straight up, it’s a possibility: his teeth are falling out sixteen to the dozen.’ I owe it to my place out of town that my old age was obvious, 4 wherever I turned. Let’s embrace it and love it. Old age is full of joy, if you can know how to put it to work for you. Fruit about to go off is at its nicest; a manchild’s grace climaxes on the way out; the wine slave’s thrill is the very last swig, the one that drowns him – puts the finishing touches to his drunkenness. Every turn-on has some peak of pleasure, and defers that for its finale. The time when life is at its pleasure zenith comes when it is over the 5 hill, yes – but not off a cliff. And my verdict is that that time – perched on the bottom row of rooftiles – also has thrills all its own, or else this is exactly what fills the place of thrills – not wanting any. How sweet to have worn out your cravings and left ’em behind! ‘It’s a drag’, you say, ‘to keep eyes trained on death.’ Point 1: an old 6 man’s eyes must lock onto it as much as a young man’s (because the call doesn’t come for us by working down some list). Point 2: no old man is so old that hope for one more day is a wicked hope. One day is a step in


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life. The whole of a lifetime has subdivisions; it has a wrap of rings, larger ones round smaller: there’s one that embraces, girdles, them all (this one relates to day one through the last day on earth). There’s a second that closes out on the years of youth; there’s one whose perimeter laces in the whole of childhood. Next there’s the year as such, boundarying inside itself all the time units which multiply up to make a life. The month is edged by a narrower circumference. The day owns the tightest orbit, but even a day travels from its in to its out, from sun-up to sundown. That’s why, quoth Heraclitus, nicknamed for the murk of his 7 rhetoric, ‘One day is equal to all.’ This received various interpretations: one said it’s equal to hours, and that’s no lie, because, as ‘day’ is the time unit of twenty-four hours, it’s necessarily true that all days are equal to each other, because a night gets what a day has lost. Another states that one day is equal to all by analogy, because the very longest duration of time ain’t got a thing you couldn’t come up with in a single day, too – daylight + night-time – and it multiplies these to swing the cosmic pendulum, sometimes shrinking, sometimes extending . . . So it is, every day must get in line, as if it rounded up the column, totalizing and filling up . . . Life. Pacuvius, who made Syria his own by squatters’ rights, used to 8 conduct his own burial, wine, funeral feast, and all; he would ride from dinner party to bedroom, just so, between rows of clapping rent boys, and this song backed by the band: ‘Sich auslebend, sich auslebend.’ Not a day went by and he didn’t give himself a send-off. A bad mental state made him do it – let a good one make us. And on the way to the big sleep, let’s be joyful and happy, and say: My life is lived. The trip ticketed by Fortune is done and dusted. If god hands us a bonus tomorrow, let’s be joyful and say thanks very 9 much. Most blessed among men, serene owner of his own self, is the one who awaits tomorrow without a qualm. Anyone who has said ‘My life is lived’ gets up each day further into the black. But I must draw a line under this letter. Right away. You say, ‘Is it 10 going to arrive like this, then, minus dividend?’ Never fear, it fetches something on board. Why’d I say ‘something’ – lots. For what beacon’s brighter than the following dictum which I’m handing to the letter to deliver to you? i t ’s b a d to l i ve i n n e c e s s i t y. bu t t h e re ’s n o n e e d to l i ve i n a dve r s i t y.

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And why shouldn’t there ‘be none’? Wide open to all points of the compass run roads to Freedom – and plenty of ’em, short, and easy access. Let’s thank god that no one can be detained in life. The necessities, the actual necessities, we can use our heels on. ‘Epicurus,’ you say. ‘His pronunciamento. What are you up to, 11 using someone else’s stuff?’ Anything true belongs to me. I’ll keep on firing Epicurus at you, so that that lot who take an oath of loyalty and evaluate not what is said, but who it is said by, can know that the best things are common property. Farewell. Seneca-the-senex fails to recognize anything. He goes off home and fails to recognize him self. As he now tells us. Why else does anyone go home? Patrolling his door, the decrepit servant trips him up: ‘Right now all, but all, his teeth are falling out’ (dentes illi cum maxime cadunt, 12.3). His toothless gums. Seneca has lost touch with his childhood, his own story. His bark is worse; his bite is worst. Something (embarrassment at his own inhumanity?) pulls him up short. It tugs at us. For the writing gets us into the scene; we don’t just ‘imagine’ it. Down tumbles your shack: you crumblies cost everyone you meet dear. ‘Dig round’ your roots before watering, and still you won’t see yourself, ‘turning yourself round’, before giving your mind a feed. No amount of bluster from you, or nursery care for you, can protect you from owning up to what you own (senectutis meae ∼ suburbanum meum, inter manus meas ∼ aetatis meae, per genium meum ∼ ego, 12.1–2, closing the ring set by the equivalence, suburbano meo ∼ senectus mea, 12.1). Thought bowls on apace, to unpack the letter’s opening slogan, ‘wherever I turn my self’. Weirdly opaque philosopher Heraclitus once declared, ‘One day is equal to all.’ Whatever he may have meant by this trope (this verbal ‘turning’), we may be able to make it mean for us that our last day completes the arithmetic of life. This might then make us live each day as if it is to be our last (12.7–9)? Stuff in, as the after-thought for the day, a final lesson of, for, from, old age, a rider on the maxim that ‘It’s bad to live in necessity, but there’s no necessity to live in necessity’, namely that we are always free to die . . . (12.10–11). Earlier, dropping in on his clapped-out farm to visit his own senility had made Seneca think hard about the good years before the final years; it had leapt to mind that, if the end is so important to us (death, dying, the shadow of death on our life), it would mean that a single day – the last – must, bizarrely, matter to us far too much. ‘No one is so ancient


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that it’s wicked for them to hope for one (more) day.’ (12.4–6) So could we think ‘life’ better if we thought ‘day’ through? [Someone’s] diagram occurs (who-knows-whence), with concentric circles expanding step by step with the units of: (1) day > (2) month > (3) year > + (4) childhood > (5) adolescence > (6) life time. What you can say of these circles drawn around each other is that they are homologous: the bands therefore enjoy equivalence in a definable sense; there is an equation between ‘one day’ and ‘all (of them)’ . . . (tota aetas . . . orbes habet circumductos maiores minoribus: est aliquis qui omnis complectatur et cingat . . . ambitu . . . circulo . . . gyrum, 12.6). So this is quite an image. A core image, this, of the image of a ‘core’.5 Certainly the image gets us where we wanted to go, seeing ourselves ‘turning our selves around’. For the chronogram does literally visualize, for our benefit, that chance idiom of colloquial Latin: ‘Wherever I’ve turned around’, and finds ‘in’ it a calculus of the life-cycle (∼ argumenta senectutis . . . uideo, 12.1). As we have seen, this has been a lively visit to s e n e c a’s lax atrium (to coin a phrase, for later reference: pp. 69, 81). One more, quite exceptional, detail is bound to focus our attention: among the staff, those slaves, these members of Seneca’s ‘family’, one seneschal (& son) gets named. For as master wheels at the mouth of his cave to round on the gummy doorman, this lump of manor finds a voice (12.3): ‘Non cognoscis me?’ inquit. ‘ego sum f e l i c i o, cui solebas sigillaria afferre; ego sum ph i lo s i t i uilici filius, deliciolum tuum.’ ‘Don’t you recognize me? I am lu c k y. You used to fetch me dolls. I am son of ph i lo s u p pe r the manager. Your wee playmate.’

Plain to see, those precious philosopher’s trees planted by Seneca’s own hand are children of his praxis; in a moment, they can speak volumes to us.6 But the human touch that out-Senecaed Seneca was the exquisite encounter with his abjected reflection. Those vernacular words touch(ed) the heart, to give the head a sound spanking. The misrecognized Speaking Figure of Speech vocalizes a lesson 5 6

See Habinek (1982). A type of evergreen plane for shade imported via Sicily from Asia was planted in Claudius’ reign by a eunuch freedman in a mansion outside Rome: sed quis non iure miretur arborem umbrae gratia tamquam ex alieno petitam orbe? platanus haec est (Pliny, Natural History 12.6–12: see Scarpat (1975) 286).

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about selfhood, selfishness, and the self as obstacle to self-perception. The vignette plays off actor against writer, inditing Seneca for undoing all those long years of hard work, and so giving us Seneca at his most blushingly likeable. A strategy to be husbanded, used sparingly: letting himself off lightly. Yet actually lowering the tone to name a s l ave is an acrid tactic: see how close Seneca-son-of-Seneca, ph i lo s o ph u s, comes to (t)his abject reflection, Felicio-son-of-ph i lo s i t u s. What a lightning stroke of lu c k y for us all. Plenty of food for thought, on a plate. On the way out. To recap, then, and make our exit. Characteristically, character-forming discussion of today’s topic in this latest version of the quest for teaching psychic invulnerability (‘teaching-by-learning’: 7.8) took for its keynote that Latin idiom: ‘Where’er I have turned myself . . .’ The domestic interiorcum-garden scene focussed on Seneca, for the first time, as the expert in relentlessly unpacking propriety from property. That momentarily rounded and personalized melodrama was both a high-point of his excruciation, and a perfect specimen of his modus scribendi. Next, we managed to visualize the master-figure inherent in the letter’s opening slogan as, exactly, that cranky two-in-one diagram, showing homologies between temporal units in the form of concentric rings: . . . Time round life round youth round childhood, round the year round the month round the day . . .

This [anonymous] schema evokes by association our aphorism from Heraclitus, whose fit nickname was ‘the Obscure’, and which itself requires multiple [anonymous] interpretation (alius aliter . . . alius . . .). This move bridged to that brief satirical sketch of the eccentric named Pacuvius, who kept staging his own funeral once a day, like some mystic initiate from the Orient.7 A thought that ushers in an [unattributed] line [from the Aeneid: the Letters’ first touch of Virgil]8 to make us take a look around, too, before signing off our lives (uixi . . .). Finally, the now habitual postscript quote from Epicurus signs off the letter and the book of letters. 7 8

‘Pacuvius is locked inside the circle that is his life, consigned to endless, tedious repetition of the same action’ (Habinek (1982) 69). In fact, Aeneid 4.653, one-hit-wonder Dido’s swansong; not to be missed: in the structure of the Aeneid, Dido represents a one-year-long circular voyage off the narrative map on which the line of history is set to chart the ages from olim Troy to nunc Rome: one epic life is wasted getting back to square one. Was a Carthaginian suicide relatively painless, or heroic beyond compare? Aeneas must persevere, recoup on Sicily, and sail the line to the next square in Italy, over the sacrifice visited by Deathstiny on his helmsman Palinurus.


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One last time, Seneca rubs it in. And promises Lucilius he will keep on keeping on, at Lucilius (in books to follow: perseuerabo, 12.11). For, wherever he turns, Seneca finds truth. To repeat, for Book 1 + for what follows. One last time, for now: what counts is ‘what is said, not who said it’ (12.11): . . . quae optima sunt esse communia. The best things are our common property. ([Seneca!])

The turn around his own garden has stimulated what must be the most memorable thought chain in the book. Who will forget that moment when lu c k y, that voice of gnarled abjection from deep in Seneca’s formation, precisely spoke that most heart-rending rebuke, in perfect innocence, for wisdom, authority, and for ph i lo s o ph y ? But now any reader should choose to read the parable as their own. Seneca may have said it, but this is not an item for his hagiobiography. Wherever you turn, we are to remember what the story said, what it is said to have said, what it said about saying, about parables. That is what representation contrived to teach, about what we would call symbolism, projection, identification, psychecology, when s e n e c a the gardener was spotted in Epicurus’ ———- garden, bringing it all back home.9 9

On Epp. 12: Henderson (2002a) 27–30.

c h a p t e r t h re e

You can get used to anything Books 2–10

In the course of the next nine books, the Letters revisit and revise the product. Variation and complexification play their part. But there are new departures, and old turns are dropped. Twelve letters fill a book once more (Book 4), but this ceiling is never exceeded. The format stays highly stable for a good while, but the proportions alter, until Book 10 is composed of just three letters. When the parameters of individual books become clear again (between Books 14 and 20), the bulk of the books will enlarge by around 50 per cent while the predominance of relatively enormous compositions (in correspondingly low-count book units) continues, until in the last two collections extant the pieces proliferate and shrink once again, back to something more like the first books.1 Naturally enough, these variations go hand-in-glove with subject matter and cultural purchase, across the spectrum between intense technical or analytical set-piece, and expert engagement with the staple business of Roman correspondence retuned to dramatize protreptic to Philosophy: Books 1–6: Books 7–10: Books 11–13: Books 14–20:

× 12; 9; 8; 12; 11; 10 (@ steady average of c. 28 pp. of Oxford Text) × 7; 5; 6; 3 (@ c. 32; 29; 30; 24 pp. of Oxford Text) ×5 (total of c. 38 pp. of Oxford Text) × 4; 3; 5; 9 in 2; 8; 7 (@ steady average of c. 45 pp. of Oxford Text)

It is infuriating, and so aptly self-convicting, that the Letters stop after Book 20, only for Aulus Gellius to quote at length snippets of a piece from ‘Book 22’ (= Excerpta) – thereby blessing the project with eternal 1

Lana (1991) 292–302 gives all the statistics: Epp. 55 is 79/124 in length (646 words); 86 is 34/124 (1115 words). Cf. Mazzoli (1989) 1823–5.

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Used to anything: Books 2–10

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open-endedness. It is yet more salutary pain that the transmission of the first half of the extant corpus carefully stipulates the suite of book divisions, only to lapse when the incipit to Book 11, before our Epp. 84, is succeeded by the explicit of Book 13, after our Epp. 88 (i.e. five pieces, to account for three books, in a total of only 38 pp. of Oxford Text). I say this with feeling, because this undercuts confident reception of the target Letter 86, at least in terms of assured contextualization within a definite book unit.2 I shall in fact grasp this nettle by pretending that 84–8 are a rather strongly interlinked sequence which responds to treatment as (if ) a book programmed at 84. This is not necessarily so self-satirizing a procedure as it seems. In this chapter, I shall indicate, at breakneck speed, at least some of the ‘story’ which linear ‘reading’ of the ‘journey’ or ‘voyage’ through Seneca’s text will accomplish between the foundation or baseline set by Book 1 and arrival at the close of Book 10. Book divisions are indeed part of the definition of the Letters as, more than epistolary writing, a monumental will to master ‘epistoliterarity’. As our sprint through Book 1 presumed to establish as a given for all that ensues (chapters 1–2), Seneca brings a strong element of ever-unfolding design to all aspects of his project. Reception of any later composition, of any group, run, or set, of Letters, will be the product of expectations, and their defeat or finessing, that arise from reception, and revisionist reinterpretation, of the tracts already read. However tied the epistolary genre may be to occasion and improvisation, to crisis and intermittence, the challenge is inescapable: to read is to react in the light of the reading experience, and to project the result into reading further. The unending work of indoctrination here is, so I claim, performatively to inculcate reading habits (mores). e p i c u ru s i n l e t t e r s 1 3 – 3 3 The introduction of mimetic parable at Epp. 12 is followed by the inauguration of Lucilius’ mundane circumstances as a prolific frame for instructive advice of general pertinence. In the next Letter (= Book 2.1) Seneca busies himself over the routine of inoculating each session with the tailpiece shot of Epicurus once more (13.16): ‘Stultitia . . . semper incipit uiuere.’ ‘Folly is always starting to live.’ 2

The problem reviewed: Cancik (1967) 9.

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The game runs hot, before running into the ground in the most piquant fashion you could imagine: in 13, Epicurus had to be named because this was one of his esoteric dicta; whereas in 14, the postscript is anonymous, (imaginarily) prompting Lucilius to request confirmation of the authority. But whether it was Epicurus himself or a colleague must not signify: ‘“he” said it to all’. In 15, the by-play – ‘You ask who provided the “PS”: same as above’ – rubs it in that this routine has become a constant. When an extra intrudes as an integral, the effect is to destabilize the whole package. 16 tells Lucilius he is literally preoccupied with the ‘PS’ – reading ahead for it. Yes, it’s from the Auld Enemie Epicurus again: but now it’s Seneca’s. The routine continues through into Book 4, interspersed with more reminders that Epicurus is the epistolary forerunner (18.9, Letter to Polyaenus; 21.3, 22.5, 7, To Idomeneus). The bottom line of Book 2 runs once more through the lesson of citation as appropriative liberation, before taking time out to underline the philosophy of visiting ‘Epicurus’ garden’ as the ideal method for dealing with the snares of Pleasure (21.9–10). The opening ‘PS’ in Book 3 calls for interpretation; the next is stressed as representing, still, Seneca’s current reading (23.9, 24.22). So it goes on, the constant drip of salutary virus, until the finale of Book 3, which lacks a postscript (29).3 The first three pieces in Book 4 next come and go without their ‘signature’ quotation. To make us notice, Lucilius is provoked into demanding more doses of final ‘mots from our leading lights’. Epicurus or A.N.Other (Epp. 33). But neither does this letter carry its own bonus maxim, nor do any others in this book, or the next, or the rest (with the exception of 36, which has ‘PS’, but without quotation). We must gather, as we go, that this initial obsession of the Letters has served its purpose, and that the protest at 33 is designed to oblige us to ruminate on the difference it has made, and its disappearance will be making.4 Certainly for a stack of pages thereafter, Epicurus is both missing, and missed. And I think he and his garden never do fade entirely from reading our way along Seneca’s path. For example, along his garden path. At the peak of fixation with Epicurus, he provides the vehicle for Seneca’s first declared spin on his own brand of Letters (21.3–6): Epicurus’ To Idomeneus told his addressee ‘My letters will make you famous.’ Likewise, 3 4

See Germani (1958) and Russell (1974) 78, for the widely supported thesis that Books 1–3 represent a first series of Letters, with ‘Death’ emerging as the thematic core of Book 3. See Maso (1999) chapter 4 for close reading of Epp. 33, and esp. Wilson (2001) 179–81, 183–4.


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‘Cicero’s letters do not allow the name Atticus to die.’ So too (21.5), hoc tibi promitto, Lucili: habebo apud posteros gratiam, possum mecum duratura nomina educere. My promise, To Lucilius, is this: I shall have influence with posterity, I can raise up names to last alongside Seneca.

As surely as ‘our’ (named) ‘Virgil’ keeps his promise to immortalize his two uniquely apostrophized epic characters (who are, however, named neither in the citation, nor in its frame). A cross between a gospel from Epicurus and the Best of Roman Friends’ exclusive file of confidences from Cicero, the Epistulae Morales generate fame for their two long-suffering characters, the ever-present Seneca and never-absent Lucilius. By implication, they pair as another [Nisus and Euryalus]. Failure as man, and failure as boy? Eternally acclaimed for the inspirational lessons of losers and loss.5 But further instalments of self-definition and explicit self-promotion on behalf of the Letters must wait their turn. Not before Seneca is good and ready.

l e t t e r s 1 3 – 4 8 : t h e e m e rg e n c e o f lu c i l i u s The arrival of ‘Seneca’ as his own theme in 12 was twinned, across the book division, with the emergence of ‘Lucilius’ in 13 (featured, outside titles, fifty-seven times in 1–69; thirty-five times in 70–124). One exploits its postscript from Epicurus to make that grim adversarial promise to keep on keeping on at Lucilius (12.11, perseuerabo). The other inaugurates Book 2, firing off a ‘magniloquent utterance’ at the newly dignified ‘Lucilius, best of heroes’: he must not be an old fool ‘always beginning to live’ (13.16). The volume had itself begun this way (13.1): Multum tibi esse animi scio. You have tons of spirit, I know it.

Letter 14 at once lives a little through Lucilius: off to Sicily, preferring proximity to Charybdis over Scylla. In Book 3, Lucilius is worried about the outcome of a lawsuit (24);6 but gets a ticking off for complaining that ‘such long travel, so many unique places’ have not lifted his mental depression, for all that he has crossed a vast ocean like Virgil’s hero Aeneas, on his way [to Sicily] (28). Book 4 just recognizes him as another Ulysses figure, 5

See esp. Schönegg (1999) 175–8.

6

See Russell (1974) 85–8.

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who sailed past Scylla and Charybdis, to reach his procuratorship (31.9);7 while Seneca gets news of him from arrivals ‘from his territory’ (32). Book 5 recoups this: rumour tells of Lucilius in his province (43); he complains of having no books with him, and Seneca would love to brave Scylla and Charybdis, cross the mythical strait, even swim over (45); and ‘Lucilius, best of heroes’ gets the sort of reply he hadn’t solicited in a letter ‘written on a journey, as long as the journey itself ’ (48). But this is the point in the collection where the more regularly brief and Epicurus-free missives that have come to typify and predominate issue in an unheralded and never-tobe-rivalled surge of mimetic narrative that bounces to and fro between the two correspondents.

l e t t e r s 4 9 – 6 2 : s e n e c a o n t h e coa s t o f c a m pa n i a The high point of the theme comes in Book 6 (Letters 53–62).8 En route, Seneca dragged us into Rome at large, to join in, the little we can bear, with their Christmas, December celebrations (18). First he had recalled being in sight of senectus; then he was leaving it behind him, and needed a new term for a ‘Seneca’ (26). Only then a pair of notelets had him shaking off age, in exultant mood, before urging Lucilius to make haste (34–5). Lucilius’ long letter written on the hoof suddenly uncorks Seneca’s bottle, too, as he scolds himself for letting territory jog his friend back into his thoughts (48–9). For Seneca has, to our surprise, quit Rome (49.1): ecce Campania et maxime Neapolis ac Pompeiorum tuorum conspectus . . . : totus mihi in oculis es. Look! Campagna. Above all, Naples. The sight of your Pompeii . . . : you, all you, fill my eyes.

After the delay of a reply to a just-arrived letter, which was delayed many a moon since posted, the pen-pal partners share a single composition, in a colourful reprise of the question of the (in)difference that geographical location makes, but should not (51.1): tu istic habes Aetnam . . . nobilissimum Siciliae montem . . . , nos, utcumque possumus, contenti sumus Bais. 7 8

Motto and Clark (1991a). The other journeys – to the Alps, trackless Candavia in Epirus, African Syrtes – look to stake out Lucilius’ military service: Vassileiou (1971). See Motto and Clark (1971) / Motto (1973) 117–19 on the suite Epp. 49–57. There is no generally accepted scheme for clumping these letters: Hachmann (1995) 238–62 reads together 31–41, 42–52, and 53–59 as clusters within his ‘dritte Briefkreis (ep. 31–65)’.


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You have Etna over there, Sicily’s grandest mountain . . . ; I am content with Baiae, any way I can be.

True, the name ‘Baiae’ at once repulses and repels its visitor, who left this ‘place to avoid’ the very next day. Seneca knows that no place is worth a declaration of hatred, but this ‘motel for vices’ cannot connote sane ‘retreat’, and instead demands ‘a long enough speech of indictment’. This very drunken, partying, cacophonous shoreline sapped and sank Hannibal. To think Freedom, you must choose (51.10): loca seria sanctaque a jokeless zone, consecrated ground.

But, turn this round the way a Seneca should, and this letter’s initial slogan is realized on the instant. He had struck up with (51.1): ‘Whatever way anyone can manage . . .’ Effete Baiae is bound to stir haunting thoughts of Romans building their manors, their castles, like forts, where tough terrain strengthens talent and readies for epic ambitions. Marius, Pompey, Caesar. But not Cato. Nor, in fact, the great Scipio, holed up in the not too distant (51.11): Literni honestius Scipio quam Bais exulabat: ruina eiusmodi non est tam molliter collocanda. At (litoral) Liternum, Scipio was in more honourable exile than at Baiae. Downfall of this sort should not be given such a floppy scenario.

This letter will indeed prove to be a milestone in the evolution of the world of the collection: truly, ‘our avalanche [of Seneca] should not be tucked up in such geophysical eiderdown’. As precedent, Epp. 51 establishes the constant possibility that epistolary relations between writer and addressee (the axiom of mutual ‘present absence’ that motivates correspondence) may be plotted in terms of their loci in the Roman empire. And its lesson is that this business of ‘comparing notes’ may at any point pile into one pole of this antithesis, while occluding the other. The ‘Sicily–Campagna’ correlation holds out the promise of further excursions into worldliness; tentative or sanguine, readers will anticipate more mundanity ahead, whether the synkrisis proves to generate a sustained series of frames for ratiocination, or to fade, all too soon, to a discomfiting (abashing) trace. Only one way to find out which: that character-forming reading habit.9 9

For the statistics on references to Sicily, Campania, and the rest of Italy: see Appendix 1, p. 171.

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As the opening sally of Book 6 now headlines, anything can happen next (sc. whether or not it will. 53.1): Quid non potest mihi persuaderi, cui persuasum est ut nauigarem? What can’t I be talked into when I’ve been talked into a voyage?

From Naples to Puteoli. Running the gauntlet of a gathering downpour and gale. Risking a dash over the deep, to cut out the bays. The world’s worst mariner begs for ‘a shore, any shore . . . Head for shore’ (53.2–3). We have waded through four emetic books since Seneca last played actordirector (in Epp. 12). Literally nauseating, this Ulysses manqué goes down a storm:10 here again is that engaging trick of first-person narrative, by which swelling animus against the preacher’s cumulative ascendancy is ‘talked into’ empathy, the instant that mockery capsizes into self-mockery. But this time, adventures in the shallows unroll into a strip-cartoon of representation unprecedented in the collection. Naturally the farce will buy more moral high ground, for ‘sea-legs’ (the land-lubber let down by his tummy) is just body, to be deplored by Philosophy, which fits out the mind ‘to blunt any chance assault’. Mind put that passenger in the drink: so that we can go on, ultimately, to enjoy a verbal glimpse of the wise man ‘dispelling and spitting back’ any hail of missiles hurled his way. For sure, that short cut gets us somewhere fast: at the very first hint of physical trouble, the body makes a noise (< nausea); whereas spiritual malaise anaesthetizes, sedates, tranquillizes, and sends the psyche to the bottom. The next post brings word of an asthma attack: ‘just like a gust of wind – wham-bam, and over in minutes’ (54.1). Followed by a diptych featuring Seneca safe ashore, and then aloft as the world takes the plunge below. First he traverses, by bumpy sedan, the ‘enticing shore between Cumae and a (legendary) landmark manor . . . with Baiae through the wall’; then he pictures himself enduring, then quitting, the annoyance of splashing customers making their decibels of noise in the public bathhouse below his hotel room (55 + 56).11 Villa + balneum: this doublebarrelled volley of caricature-forming first-person mimesis pulls together, for dialectical friction, Seneca’s first trip, to his manor (12), and the current saga of passengers immersed at the ‘seaside’. (Our visit will come in chapters 7, 8, 12.) We shall at length be relayed back to this memorable conjunction when we reach Letter 86 (chapters 6, 9–12). 10 11

On Epp. 53: Motto and Clark (1971) / Motto (1973) 117–24; Wenskus (1994). On Epp. 56: Motto and Clark (1970) / Motto (1973) 103–6.


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Next, however, the Ancient Mariner must at once ‘make the return leg from Baiae to Naples’ (57.1). Easily talked into forecasting a tempest, so as to deny us the pleasure of a second nautical debacle, he land-lubbed (∼ 56). But it might as well have been Voyage No. 2 (∼ 53). Instead of hurling a tempest or putting through the wash, Seneca makes himself an imagematrix of mud – travelling ‘a road of mud’, wading ‘a mud road’. Some of it sticks agreeably to this sedan-ridden butt of his own send-up, as his day does a double-take, and Seneca segues into the Olympics. Our ‘athlete’ dies an afternoon death in a tussle with metaphor – as the demoralized moralist treats himself to a roll in ‘oil ’n’ mud’: a hellish black-out of choking, roasting dust asphyxiates the asthmatic as he negotiates the prison of the Naples underpass.12 What a day’s rough ride – but (you guessed?) what a boon for the inner mind: the ideal sensory deprivation unit (obscuritas, 57.3). A melodramatically video-diaried bolt from the blue brings us searing agony by web-cam. In a scenario which he has word-painted, he comes clean / he cashes out, not for flawed, self-satirized, Seneca, not for any Seneca defective, but for The Sage.13 But only the Sage in those terms that don’t count, the inescapable embodiedness He shares with all the rest of us Senecas. Somatic so traumatic, the Sage can faint, too, and skyscraper vertigo et sim. are bio-physical events. Seneca plumbs the deaths to hand us our moment of primal experience: light at the end of the tunnel . . . , collapse . . . , heart of darkness . . . , the horror. Bodies crushed under masonry or mountain; crushed souls pulverized; spirit escaping through corpuscles, corpse, body, like a lightning bolt that flashes, then bolts back through a tiny sky-tube.14 De profundis. Subterranean subconscious sublimation stares out of every pore. And with this mimetic-imagistic effulgence, the Letters are spent, for pretty well a book’s respite.

l e t t e r s 6 3 – 8 3 : t h e o cc a s i o n a l f l a s h Seneca does have another equivocal yesterday, ill before noon, his own man after lunch (65).15 And decease of an alter ego – no chicken, but ‘verdant’ 12 13 14

15

In crypta Neapolitana (57.2): Maiuri (1937) 11–14. On this demystificatory unmasking of Seneca’s role-playing: Edwards (1997) 33–4. ‘The Tunnel’ vision: two-in-one synthesis of unmediated ‘Break-on-Through’ flash of insight experienced + re-imagined ‘Life-as-Hell’ metaphysics relocated, Plato’s Socratic parable in Greek translated into Seneca’s epistolary happening in Latin (cf. 58.1–2: pp. 130, 147–9). Poetics: Motto and Clark (1973) / Motto (1973) 124–8. Philosophy: Schönegg (1999) 73–6. This startling start leads swiftly into one of Seneca’s pithiest reflections on his project, the artistic imitation of nature as ‘transference from the cosmos to the code for Mankind’ (65.3): Scarpat (1965); Mazzoli (1970) 24–5; Schönegg (1999) 109–30, ‘causa und materia: ep. 65’.

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psychically (uiridem animo, 66.1) – spurs a new record for expatiation (complete with a nod to Epicurus that turns into connected discussion: 66.18, 46–8). Cue for spring, the lowest common denominator among symbols for ‘starting over’ (initium, 67.1). But even so, or as such, spring is the archetypally inconstant symbol of symbolic inconstancy. Spring is the play in the mechanism that makes symbols function (spring into life) the way they do. Summery spring, spring, wintry spring. Like . . . senectus, green through grey and back to black; pinning down bedridden Seneca (67.2). Time for a decision from Lucilius, about life, about time, and space (68.1): Consilio tuo accedo: absconde te in otio . . . I second your strategy: tuck your self away at rest.

A brace of terse and tense messages close Book 7 by talking Lucilius out of the active world at large and into spatio-temporal constancy (Epp. 68–9). The key concept of ‘retreat’ (secessus) is subjected to intensive critical scrutiny, and so articulated in extensive theorized protreptic. The picture shows off, in particular, a conceptual bridge between the manors we have visited and the one where this book means to stay. Passing reference to ‘hiding out at Tarentum, locking up at Naples, and decades without leaving your own front door’ is all the cueing we get: surely it is plenty (68.5). And as for ‘changing places’, we cannot allow Lucilius ‘transience’ (Mutare te loca et aliunde alio transilire nolo . . . , 69.1). Stop. Constantly. To spell out what we learned back then and there at s e n e c a’s manor (69.2, 4 ∼ 12.1): quocumque processeris, in ipso transitu aliqua quae renouent cupiditates tuas tibi occurrent . . . quocumque se uerterit [affectus], pretium aliquod praesens occupationis suae aspiciet . . . Where’er you promenade, in the actual transit some things to refresh your desires will bump into you . . . Where’er [emotion] has turned itself, its gaze will fall upon some immediate pay-off for getting busy with it . . . ∼ Quocumque me uerti, argumenta senectutis meae uideo. ueneram in suburbanum meum et . . . Wherever I’ve been turning myself, I see proof upon proof that old age is with me. I had come to my out-of-town place and . . .

Book 8 starts with a referential bang, like Book 6, and with a back-reference, too. Back to Seneca’s first foray to the coast in the middle of Book 5


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(70.1 ∼ 49.1, Pompeiorum tuorum conspectus): Post longum interuallum Pompeios tuos uidi. in conspectum adulescentiae meae reductus sum . . . After a lengthy gap, I have set eye on your Pompeii. It took me back to a sighting of my own youth . . .

Typical: this momentary rejuvenation of ——– Seneca will prove to be the book’s only sight of either of the friends or of the worlds they must be inhabiting. The letter works its ‘address’ into the cliché repertory of Life as Voyage, with Seneca thinking back and thinking over the ‘déjà vu / déjà lu’ effect of feeling that he has ‘pre-voyaged’ the long, post-Aeneid, voyage ‘of life’ that he charged against Lucilius’ Sicilian account back in Book 3 (praenauigauimus . . . uitam, 70.2 ∼ 28.1, with Virgil, Aeneid 3.72): quemadmodum in mari, ut ait Vergilius noster, ‘terraeque urbesque recedunt’ . . . ∼ licet uastum traieceris mare, licet, ut ait Vergilius noster, ‘terraeque urbesque recedant’ . . .

All Seneca will add, by way of Sitz im Leben, will be the matching act of separation between the two just superposed friends. Epistolary distance engulfs these lives (71.1): . . . oblitus uasto nos mari diuidi . . . . . . but you forget we are divided by a vast sea – in fact by that ‘vast sea’ [sc. of 28.1].

We will have visited most other parts of the Letters repertoire before, deep into Book 9, our eyes are pricked wide open (77.1–2): Subito nobis hodie Alexandrinae naues apparuerunt . . . gratus illarum Campaniae aspectus est: omnis in pilis Puteolorum turba consistit . . . cum intrauere Capreas . . . Suddenly, today, the ships from Alexandria appeared over the horizon. Campagna loves catching sight of them: the whole throng takes up position on the pier: Pozzuoli . . . Once they’ve negotiated their way in past Capreae . . .

Seneca’s joy is in not sharing the excited dash to the shore (magnam . . . sensi uoluptatem, 77.3). These are the ‘mailboats’ (tabellariae), and no news from the end of the world can matter to our grand master of indifference. Where all Campagna can read these packet-ships’ ‘(en)signs’ (insigne: their unique topsail), Seneca’s readers ponder Roman humanity as worldwide

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postal union. These ‘one-liners’ arrive first: to ‘announce the imminent arrival of the whole fleet’. Seneca’s Letters head, sign for, and update, the whole dashboard of Latin Literature. To bring us the news, the hour that the ship comes in. Next up, for a change, Lucilius is poorly; Seneca has (he forewarned us) been down that sea-road before, too. And how (78.1–2). Just take this Letter, give it time to take effect (he prescribes), and the dose of Thought medicine will make a new man of you (78.28).16 The time will come (he consoles), when Time will join and fuse the friends. But meanwhile, he awaits a map from Lucilius: a letter containing the logbook of discoveries made on his circular tour round all Sicily. Especially (since Scylla is just a rock and no danger to shipping, at that) the low-down on Charybdis – any connection with the actual Tauromenium shore purely mythical? (79.1 ∼ 14.8, 31.9, 45.2) Lucilius is dying to climb Etna, so Seneca obliges him by requesting that he does; but tells him that is what he is doing, and tells him off – it’s his ‘disease’, not down to Seneca, and is bound to result in yet another version of the topos in the form of a descriptio loci in a gobbet of Lucilius’ verse (79.2, 4–5; 7): aut ego te non noui aut Aetna tibi saliuam mouet; iam cupis grande aliquid et par prioribus scribere. Either I don’t know you at all or else Etna makes your mouth water. You crave right now to write something huge, something to match your predecessors [i.e. Virgil, Ovid, Cornelius Seuerus . . .].

Seneca disclaims responsibility. It is the doing of the place. But the locale at once transcodes into the metapoetic locus classicus for mountainous writing: playing at making out what his friend’s new Etna will be like, Seneca is himself already reworking the traditional image. And the lesson is in line with the strategy he is recommending to Lucilius: the method looks for a ‘well-dug but not exhausted’ topos ready for reappropriation to produce new effects. The volcano at once serves up the World’s Greatest Model for Innovation-through-Tradition, the impossible co-presence of dynamic ‘immanence + transcendence’. Always effluent / never diminished, eternally changing / forever the same . . .17 16 17

See Schrijvers (1990); Edwards (1999) 260–3. ¨ See Schönegg (1999) 179–94, ‘Der Atna als Bild für immanente und transzendente Schaffenskraft’, esp. 182–4.


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One characteristically bleak Senecan visit to another [Roman] show (80),18 plus a virtually unsituated sketch of his Daily Routine (83.5: once a dive in the Virgo aqueduct, then a plunge into the Tiber, but now – no, just a bracing bath al fresco . . .) – and not one further sliver of ekphrastic text (descriptio) will stake a referential claim on our memory-bank in the book-length trek of Letters between 79 and 86, from etna to scipio.19 18 19

Seneca on vacation: see Hijmans (1976) 151–7. For the roster of place-names in Epp. 13–83: see Appendix 1, pp. 172–3.

chapter four

The long and winding mode Books 14–20 + ( Letters 89–124 . . .)

The undistributed sequence bracketing Books 11–13 will prove to showcase only the one crucial locale, s c i p i o’s Liternum, twinned with a vivid but unreferenced ‘sub-Catonesque’ journey (86 ∼ 87). After this pinnacle of narration, the collection will feature just three significantly rounded vistas. First, the imperial colony of Lyons, born only a human lifespan before, burns to the ground. Empathize with its patriot, our [Aebutius] Liberalis – but be stoical (91: it does happen). Play the raconteur, and make a moralizing difference to, and with, this public topos of imperial Roman annals.1 Second comes the bare notice of a second manor of s e n e c a’s. He bolts by carriage to an estate of his ‘at Nomentum’. Away from fever, and for that reason from the City [of Rome]: from his wife, his wife, his brother, his health, his (Senecan) old age, his wife, his fear. From Pompeia Paulina. From Gallio. The moment he touched the vines, it was a case of ‘Once let into pasture, I went for my food’ (104.6), and recovery of his s e l f (full concentration on study). This letter cements the equation which condenses ‘his health’ into ‘his hearth’ (salutis suae ∼ domum tuam, 104.10 ∼ 11). Denunciation of journey and travel blasts us into the next message, where Lucilius is told to heed his starting orders ‘as if getting a prescription for keeping good health on lu c i l i u s ’ estate at Ardea’ (105.1). Book 19 begins and ends its orientation with ‘greetings from s e n e c a’s’ ‘Nomentum estate again’ (110.1).2 But the final shot of mimesis only just makes the cut of our paradosis: here we arrive at s e n e c a’s third estate, ‘at Alba’, after a disagreeable but short trip, late at night and ahead of cook, baker, any reception: a chance for our host to lighten his own heart with thought for food, now served up to us guests as food for thought (123.1). This matrix chases a bustling 1 2

Cf. Tacitus, Annals 16.13 for his transcription of conflagration at Lyons: Bedon (1991). Seneca’s contemporary, fellow-Spaniard, and farming expert Columella boasts three estates in Latium, at Alba, Ardea, and Carseoli (3.9.2). Statius inherited his estate at Alba from his father, with added water supply by imperial gift (Siluae 3.1.61–4).

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Long and winding: Books 14–20+

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account of his ‘declining days’, namely nights lengthening into winter, which prompted leisurely Roman tales of insomniac nightbirds. Featuring banter at a recitation over less than inspiring poetry (122.11–13), and a sparkling anecdote calculated to jog the memory. The story features living above another noisy downstairs (122.15–16 ∼ 56). The life below is logged through the night, with dinner ‘strictly guillotined at daybreak’. Here the storyteller is marked for attention (122.15): erat autem fabulator elegantissimus he was a superlatively suave raconteur.

So it is that, at last, Seneca comes out of his shell to focus on the function of vivid narration in the Epistles. Their occasional spurt of mimesis.3 This spate of villas, late arrivals in the collection as we have it, merely gestures at the potential for mythic resonance immanent in each ambience. None is spared an explicit thought, but they indicate the primeval Latin heartland ringing around early Rome. n o m e n t u m, a l b a, and a rd e a are one-word primary condensations of Romanitas, well-plumbed and deeprooted. These loca need explicitation for our benefit, not for Romans. Thus: (1) s e n e c a’s n o m e n t u m spells (congenial) desolation (twice). ‘Seneca’ as ruin. Plus the name as all-there-is-where-once-there-wasa-community (nomen). For ‘Rome, it has been said, re-jigs the force of “every Latin word”: tunc o-m-n-e Latinum | fabula n-o-m-e-n erit . . ., under the empire, the “names” of “all that once comprised the Roman state in its widest definition, will be just a string of empty nouns” (Lucan 7.390–1). “The whole Latin league” (o-m-n-e n-o-m-e-n Latinum, Livy 1.38.4) will be just a fringe of “ghost-towns” . . . “The Republic is but folklore . . . The map of Latium is blanked out.” So Nomentum featured at the head of the list, when Anchises blithely promised (Aeneid 6.773, 776):4 haec tum nomina erunt, nunc sunt sine nomine terrae These will then be towns in name only; in the now, in the Aeneid now, they are bits of planet Earth minus a name’ . . .5

Seneca has made it to Utopia. He can live Nowhere he likes. Naming no names. (2) s e n e c a n a l b a would advert to ‘Alba Longa and Mons Albanus. Matrix of Rome and destroyed by Rome, last of the Latin cities Rome 3 4 5

Thomsen (1979–80), esp. 152–71 on Epp. 122, with 174–82 on Epp. 56. Cf. Ovid, Fasti 4.905, 937, 942, Nomento . . . | tum . . . nil nisi nomen habet|. Henderson (2000) 10–11, citing Henderson (1998) 199–200 and n. 121.

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founded. The heartland of Roma, Latinitas, entrée to the Aeneid (Aeneid 1.5–7) . . . The magistrates and senate of the Roman Republic (would) travel the Via Triumphalis to spend the night of the feriae Latinae at Alba in the holiest and hoariest of state sacrifices, to Iuppiter Latiaris on the Alban Mount.’6 Before Rome, minus Rome, Seneca has ‘whited out’ the world. He can live in a [Blank] of his own. Avoid: a void. (3) lu c i l i u s ’ a rd e a would orient us to another crucial ‘sacrifice’ in the building of imperial Rome (Virgil, Aeneid 7.411–13): . . . locus Ardea quondam dictus auis, et nunc magnum manet Ardea nomen, sed fortuna fuit . . . Topical history of Ardea: hallowed by forefathers in bird legend, still today, as we speak, lives on Ardea, epic name – but the good days are done and gone . . .

‘As one of these hard luck stories, Ardea is always already a name on an outdated map, put in an epic text to mark a lost world of shrouded Latin myth . . . Ardea’s was not to be a beginning, but a suppressed end, the end that marks suppression – Ardea . . . was to burn itself out, for Rome . . . Ardea fades from the geopolitical map of Latin culture and from the semantic order of the proper name . . . Yes, the myth of Ardea – Ardea is a Roman myth of Italy – is a “great story” we cannot tell . . . So many towns are chewed up to found (this) Rome . . . so many homes are cleared away, so many Romes, too, are bulldozed . . .’7 The Letters explicitly confirm that it was a proverb, part of Roman Truth, that ‘Ardea got just as sacked as Rome’ (91.16). Poetaster Lucilius has somewhere to fly, a place to burn, he can run the gamut of passion. All on his own, this dwarf [‘Turnus’] manqué, can elude his fate as belittled catachresis for the father of free speech in Latin letters: the Lucilius, founder of Roman Verse Satire. In private, privation. But, let us not lose perspective. These are minimal, ‘bracketed’, moments marked as ripe for mimetic exploration, which Seneca nonetheless resists filling in. It would be out of place for him to spell out any of this [ ]. And meantime quite different concerns have dominated the vast bulk of the writing in the Letters. True, there are a few lively anecdotes: (1) ‘Once there was Calvisius Sabinus, I remember it well’, more money than sense (27.5–8: i.e. an apomnemoneuma, with quip by Satellius 6

Henderson (1998) 198–9.

7

Henderson (2000) 11–12.


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Quadratus, the ‘Full-Square Flunkey’); and there is prematurely senile Tullius Marcellinus, starving himself to death (77.5–9: a self-proclaimed ‘welcome fabella excursion’). (2) Piso the inebriate Prefect of Rome was implicitly trusted by both of Rome’s first two emperors (83.14–15). And (3) news of a series of named acquaintances motivates several Letters. Can Marcellinus be saved? (29); old Aufidius Bassus is sinking fast (30); Flaccus is dead – so is Annaeus Serenus (63); Metronax is dead at eighty (93); Cornelius Senecio’s death from angina was devotedly graphic (101).8 Also, a few stark cameos play closer to home, standing in for selfportraiture: (1) ‘Green with age’, crippled Claranus pops up after full many a year, not just to brighten the days, but to clarify the (Senecan) learning/teaching life-project, by mirroring his old comrade from student days (66.1–5). (2) A letter to Marullus, rallying him against the loss of his son, is forwarded, whole, to Lucilius: now it is for him, rallying him against any loss he may [soon?] suffer . . . For the consolatio is irrepressibly narcissistic, intrinsically transferential; and always about that – about transference. Vale lines up every reader into the queue, behind Seneca (99).9 (3) Whereas apology for less-than-scintillating Papirius Fabianus (remember his blush, in Epp. 10) sparks modelling of the (Senecan?) stylefree teacher of philosophy: teacher of Seneca’s teaching (taught through, and as, the reader’s reading of Seneca’s reading of his teacher; 100: see pp. 153–6). (4) Undone Maecenas bloats a tract: in order to unfrock writer, patron, and culture system, sketching (Senecan!) agenda-setting through put-down caricature (114).10 At the very least, the skilful variation of styles and trends has underlined just how pointedly the epistolary medium may incarnate its message – this imprinting course-work of spiritual bricolage. But virtually all else in this interminable monastic barrage of ribbing, nagging, and flaying of self, friend, and all humanity is scrubbed scrupulously bare of referents and ambient presence. As if these Letters are dead set on stigmatizing their genre’s attractions (as distractions from the war of self-purgation). In Book 15, for instance, the steadily growing length of most letters yields to a brace of truly gargantuan excursions which Seneca at once dubs, and 8 9 10

See Wilson (1997). See Wilson (1997) for the Letters’ theme of mourning as motivation for the repression of grief. See especially Graver (1998) for this grand rhapsody on the ‘abstraction of masculinity’.

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debates as, ‘epistolary bulk’ (94; 95.3, ingentem epistulam). To start Book 19, too, discussion is rigged to naturalize, at last, Seneca’s most stark and explicit discussion of his epistolarity:11 Seneca had planned on responding to Lucilius’ lead, but he’ll trust him and go first (118.1): nec faciam quod Cicero, uir disertissimus, facere Atticum iubet, ut etiam ‘si rem nullam habebit, quod in buccam uenerit scribat’. = I shall not do what Cicero, hero of heroes of eloquence, bids Atticus to do, so even ‘if he has not a thing, he should write whatever comes into his gob’.

Seneca can never dry up of topics, so skip all the themes that fill up Ciceronian letters, for example election news and money matters (see Epistulae ad Atticum 1.12).12 Instead, handle your own sins, give yourself a shake out, cover your own campaigning (118.2). Similarly, the Letters’ most direct declaration of their Morality only arrives in the run-in, when Lucilius complains at Seneca’s fiddling over today’s brainteaser (121.1):13 ‘hoc quid ad mores?’ ‘What’s that to do with mores?’

The (borrowed) answer: non quicquid morale est mores bonos facit. It is not the case that whatever is to do with mores makes good mores.

Different things, he explains, relate to mores differently, and so, for more than an example, research into human versus animal nature does not leave mores behind (121.2–3: in fact, such research is a necessary precondition). As these conclusive credos ultimately confirm, resistance to concern with the specifics of ‘Ciceronian’ investment in the grain of Roman public life is doctrinally vital, and paraded as morally inevitable. By the time he has finished with us, we friends are very alone with Seneca, with the texts of philosophy, with that voice buzzing round its hive in our skull. He has got us where he wanted us, seizure of the philosophical letter from Epicurus, for a Stoicizing imperial Rome.14 11

12 13 14

Book 9 had opened with the epistolary credo: Seneca would prefer, where possible, to show what he thinks rather than say it; and his words are not to delight but to benefit (75.1; 5). Cf. Russell (1974) 73–4. On Epp. 118: Schmidt (1958). See Habinek (1992) 190, n. 12. Epp. 97.2–10 rehearses the Clodius scandal made memorable by Cicero, Epistulae ad Atticum 1.16 (quoted). Seneca’s Cicero: Gambet (1970), esp. 174. Could only arrive in the run-in: Cancik (1967) 88. For the roster of place-names in Epp. 89–124: see Appendix 1, pp. 173–4.


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The other side of the coin is, as it must be, that the rare mimetic frames shot on location are bound to settle in the readers’ imagination all the more firmly. A proof of their deliberate design – their epistoliterarity – is to be found in their tight imbrication. The thesis of Morals and Villas is that simple. So I shall pressurize Letters 12, 55, 86 until they combine to teach us the teaching of Moral Philosophy as Spiritual Hydroponics: ‘Triple Bypass’ + ‘Three-pronged Trencher’.

c h a p t e r f i ve

Booking us in Letters 84–88

let ter 84: the beesness Book 11 opens with a shock that is meant to stay with readers reading: Itinera ista, quae segnitiam mihi excutiunt, et ualetudini meae prodesse iudico et studiis. The ‘journeys’ you mention, ‘shaking the sloth out’ of me, are in my judgement beneficial at once to my well-being and my studies.

We will for once recuperate travel by bracketing it with adventures across the page. Routes routinize. Bouts of physical-plus-mental ‘to-and-fro-ing’ integrate a productive self, while reading and writing phases reinvigorate by rotation (commeandum). ‘“We must”, as they say, “make like the bees”’ (84.3): go all round the garden for suitable flowers, then back home to sort out the combs, and ‘stuff their cells/rooms with sweet nectar’. Here Seneca journeys out to read-and-raid Virgil’s Aeneid (quoting 1.432– 3), only to collect a reprocessed Georgics passage, and message (after 4.163–4). As he says, reading is collecting readings, and when writing turns them into a corpus, we don’t know whether the human ‘honey’ is essentially found, and ready-made, or if it is the product of a conversion process (neglegentem corporis . . . lectionibus, . . . lectio . . . legere . . . lectione collectum . . . , redigat in corpus, . . . collegerunt ∼ collegerunt . . . colligendi ∼ lectione congessimus . . . in corpore nostro, 1–5).1 Our brief open-air sortie turns out to be already over. For we honey-bees have a different production-line. Our business is to internalize and process what we ingest until it is converted for incorporation (transeunt). We are here to ‘digest’ food for thought (concoquamus), which means, more than memorization, mentation, so that (for our example) Seneca can think honeyed Senecan thoughts from verse nectar after Virgil – not just quote him. We are to put our raw materials under wraps, and show 1

See Schönegg (1999) 71–2.

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Booking us in: Letters 84–88

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up our product instead. Even if ‘admiration’ fixes deep in you the ‘likeness’ of a paragon (similitudo, 8), similem esse te uolo quomodo filium, non quomodo imaginem; imago res mortua est. I want you to be ‘like’ like a son, not ‘like’ like a photograph – live imagery, not dead.

Far as that from flitting round the planet(ary library), Seneca wants you, sweetheart, to fill your head with the symphony of you – mixed (as his image puts it) by your synthesizer from a virtual orchestra of orchestras, to make customized Muzak from a computerized chorale. In fine (10): talem animum nostrum esse uolo: multae in illo artes, multa praecepta sint, multarum aetatum exempla, sed in unum conspirata. I want the Senecan mind to be like this: polymathic, multidisciplinary, transhistorical, but welded into a unity.

Those forays which were our jump-off point were left as anonymized as the quotation from Virgil. And they were put under wraps in favour of the heavily familiarized Journey Within of Senecan self-improvement. Take a reading of the Aeneid which brought home a simile that pointed silently to the process of processing within the same ‘corpus’ which silently incorporated the earlier project of the Georgics, so as to write a definitive v i rg i l. Take a Senecan reading which ‘gathered’ from Virgilian inspiration (technique + example) how to stuff his cell/self with similitudes that themselves represented many-faceted, multidimensional, omni-capacious ‘artscreeds-cultures’ in a live genealogy of thinking. With the aspiration of making s e n e c a ‘son, not clone’, of tradition. How else was (a) v i rg i l made? What else is the imaginary but a repertory of likenesses, plus the infolded imperative to make an exemplary likeness with them? To become the next exemplification of self made from fully digested, incorporated, unified, paradigms for digestion, incorporation, and spiritual well-being. OK, honey, plenty of adventures ahead – to mind, mind you, to write. The metaphorization of Seneca hops along apace. Who said ‘Those journeys you mention are beneficial’? Who meant by this, all along (11):

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relinque ista iamdudum, ad quae discurritur. Those things people scurry after to all points of the compass – drop them, it’s long since time.

Life out there is all a chase for things that bring envy back home (inuidia). Insults to clients outside palaces, then more inside (potentium domos, 12). Up the staircase, on the podium, up the slippery precipice, when the true path all along is the non-geophysical and non-sociocultural climb to the Everest of Dignity. End of epistolary journey. Now Macrobius was to purloin those reflections on ‘Making Like the Bees’ from Epp. 84, for his own Preface (5–10) [as unacknowledged and assimilated as Seneca could wish].2 The letter’s analysis and practice of the imaging of imaging in creating a trajectory for pedagogical style, and/as forming a unified self, emboldens me to treat it as (if ) ‘prooemial’ to an integrated ‘body of writing’, namely the sequence Epp. 84–8, for all that it is transmitted to us as (if ) ‘Books 11 through 13’ (pp. 28–9).

l e t t e r 8 5 : u n wave r i n g In outline, 85 ‘links’ 84 to 86 by going out to gather ‘syllogisms’ (collectio, 85.1), as Seneca protests his absence of disturbance by this traditional brand of Stoic argumentation (non delectari). It could fill a book, not just a letter (and perhaps it does). The example that emerges as today’s challenge for Senecan assimilation, as our topic for readers’ digestion, will be definition of The Sage as ‘Undisturbed Constancy’. There can be no disturbance or inconstancy in this definition, no unsettling or wavering play in applying it, for it’s all or nothing when it comes to Virtue facing up to valorous assault on machineguns and napalm ‘for Country, for Law, for Liberty’ (3, 16). The Sage is bound fast to the constitutive terms of his definition, he must ply Virtue in prosperity, or if not, in adversity – ‘if he can, in his country; if not, in exile’. ‘Exile’ comes last but not least in the list of horrors tamed by this immovable uncompromise (. . . exilium, ubique horrenda, 41). Setting himself to unpack the logic made Seneca act out its logic. As he transmuted reading to writing (to reading), he defined resistance to pleasure as the rigour of definition. Created a dour, one-issue, adamant ‘Seneca’. Linear sequence, contiguity, may imply carry-over, whether methodological or substantive, from Epp. 84 through 85, and into our negotiation 2

See esp. De Rentiis (1998).


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of 86. In general terms, that letter will cue a challenge to take, but recuperate, a particular, highly circumstantial, ‘journey’. On my reading, straggle between topics, plus struggle within its concluding topic, will invite commitment of energy to resolve the worrisome show of unvirtuous disunity apparently enacted as its message (especially chapter 11: pp. 143–5).

l e t t e r 8 7 : ro u g h i a n When we come away from 86, we’ll at once take another trip, not yet particularized and, initially, more than decontextualized, a paradox of unperformability (87.1): Naufragium, antequam nauem ascenderem, feci. My voyage was shipwrecked before my embarcation.

He refuses, too, to say how.3 You might think it one of those annoying Stoic logical paradoxes. But these aren’t as false or wondrous as appears prima facie (87.1): cum uolueris, approbabo, immo etiam si nolueris. interim hoc me iter docuit . . . I shall prove when you want, in fact, no, I’ll prove it even if you don’t want. Meanwhile the lesson this journey taught me is . . .

Two days of happy roughing it with my ‘Greatest’ friend (Maximus), minimum retinue and paraphernalia, ‘cushion on the ground and me on the cushion’, iron rations of figs (like New Year’s Day!) + notebooks.4 Good company, moral-sodden conditions, but without direction, landmark, or destination (4): uehiculum in quod impositus sum rusticum est . . . uix a me obtineo ut hoc uehiculum uelim uideri meum. The carriage I was put on is for peasants . . . I can hardly permit myself to let this carriage be seen as mine.

Because Seneca has yet to assimilate his own sermon. He blushes in shame and at his shame, caught in materialism by a ‘dirty carriage’ (sordido uehiculo, 4; 5): 3

4

Cf. 88.7, . . . uel naufragus nauigem. There is room for multivalence in this ‘motto’, to be explored through the letter, see Allegri (1999); Armisen-Marchetti (1989) 140–2, ‘La navigation, image de la condition humaine / de la vie intérieure’. For Epicurean frugal dieting on certain days: Avotins (1977), on esp. Epp. 18.9.

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parum adhuc profeci. Up to now I have got absolutely nowhere.

Imagining mundane riches (‘dream home’, etc., 6) is the reason for riding this shoddy mule-cart. We find our trail leads straight enough to the Elder Cato – ‘The Censor’ – (9): quem tam e re publica fuit nasci quam Scipionem, alter enim cum hostibus nostris bellum, alter cum moribus gessit. whose birth was as much of an asset to the Republic as Scipio. One made war on our foes; the other on our mores.

In 86 Seneca visited s c i p i o ’s at journey’s end; 87 now rides beside Cato ‘riding a donkey, with all his gear in the saddle-bags . . . – one pony-back, or in fact, a share of same’. Does money make people dirty or do they foul money (16, impurum . . . spurcauit)? ‘It falls into some hands like a penny into a sewer.’ As the journey lengthens (to match that of 84), the itinerary never wavers, the assault on wealth never falters.5 As this unitary vehicle of thought pays a visit to [somewhere in] the country, a long passage from the Georgics is in place (20 = 1.53–8), and dogma concretizes sympathetically at 25: non nascitur itaque ex malo bonum, non magis quam ficus ex olea. ad semen nata respondent, bona degenerare non possunt. Good can’t be born from Bad. Any more than a fig from an olive-tree. Things are born corresponding to their seed. Good can’t run to the bad.

Seneca’s trip through the countryside has therefore s(p)liced the imagery of Cato with the repertoire of farming (a drop of oleiculture). Read for its potential for useful integration with 84–6, this Travelling Light has a self-help course in anti-materialism tucked in the saddlebags of its clappedout mule: Seneca, cushioned on the ground, has revelled in his weekend jaunt toward Philosophy, a novice who knows enough to know that he is a novice. Almost ready to begin (proficiens ———–).6

l e t t e r 8 8 : l i v i n g ( a s ) p o e t ry Letter 86 was transient, bipartite, descriptive; 88 is the same expansive quasi‘book-length’ as 84, 85, 87 – it is, if anything, more systematically structured, 5 6

The Letters are, we could argue, one all-out assault on the fear of losing (material) wealth: see Rosivach (1995) esp. 96. Cancik (1967) 35–9 reads Epp. 82 : 83 and 85 : 87 as strong dialectical ‘interlocutors’.


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and at least as exegetic. It passes under review ‘liberal studies’. In fact, a sneer at formalism in the study of poetry, music, geometry, astronomy . . . (beyond words: art, sculpture, etc.; wrestling; parfumerie, cooking, etc.; military training). Reading Homer is not about tracking Ulysses’ wanderings in Lucilius’ land, between Italy and Sicily, but our wanderings, for Homer can teach me how to love my country, how to voyage even when my ship is wrecked.7 The Georgics afford a couple more gleanings (14 ∼ 1.336–7; 16 ∼ 1.424–6), and as critical review of Posidonius’ philosophical systematization of the Arts arrives, to process claims on civilization for Greek gurus,8 Seneca’s tirade turns his target progressively, for Goodness’ sake, into sceptical, cynical, nihilist Philosophy (38, in place of inauguration of that PhD summa cum laude): ‘O hominem litteratum!’ simus hoc titulo rusticiore contenti: ‘O uirum bonum!’ ‘My Professor!’ No, let’s find content in this peasants’ acclamation : ‘My Goodness!’

All that silent reading, behind all this writing, has integrated a particular simulacrum of ‘Seneca’, seemingly swapping his Epicurus for Virgil’s Farming, in a honeyed synthesis of the nectar bulging the combs in his hive:

7 8

Epistle 58.2 86.15, 16 87.20 88.14, 16 90.9, 11, 37 95.68 108.24 (bis), 34 114.23 122.2 124.1

Georgic 3.146–50 2.58, 1.215–16 1.53–8 1.336–7, 424–6 1.144, 139–40, 125–8 3.75–81 + 83–5 3.66–8, 284, 260–1 4.212–13 1.250–1 1.176–7

× 16

× 16

See Batinski (1993). For discussion: Boys-Stones (2001) 18–24. A reader points out that Seneca’s modelling of authorship and authority through Homer here supports the interpretation that Seneca’s dismissal of appropriations of Homer as Stoic, Epicurean, Peripatetic, or Academic (88.5) would prompt him also to ‘resist a postmodern appropriation of his own writing’; but (to act out the melodramatics of interpretation as appropriation of writing) doesn’t this argument ‘also’ point to such ‘resistance’ as precisely what would qualify any such ‘appropriation of writing’ as ‘postmodern’? On the whole montage of Epp. 88: Stückelberger (1965).

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Morals and Villas in Seneca’s Letters Georgic 1.53–8 1.125–8, 139–40, 144 1.176–7 1.215–16 1.250–1 1.336–7, 424–6 2.58 3.66–8 3.75–81 + 83–5 3.146–50 3.260–1, 284 4.212–13

Epistle 87.20 90.37, 11, 9 124.1 86.16 122.2 88.14, 16 86.15 108.24 95.68 58.2 108.34, 24 114.23

× 16

× 16

Now it must be up to the reader to assimilate the lessons (∼ rewrite your self ). Let us simmer.9 Before we steam open the next missive – for the sequel, the next instalment, adjustment, refinement – for revision, rejection, revulsion; in disavowal, denial, disposal. 9

For the roster of place-names in Epp. 84–8: see Appendix 1, p. 173.

chapter six

Now and then; here and there: at s c i p i o ’s Text and translation of Letter 86

The journey to the villa of Scipio Africanus, conqueror of Hannibal’s Carthage, is over before it is begun. Seneca is already (cushioned?) on the ground there as Epp. 86 begins (iacens).1 He has not left this manor; he will give us no hint that he has been this way before; he is still there, right now, at the eternal moment of epistolary address. But Letter 12 pre-primed us to ‘moralize’ the first-person narrative of the owner’s visit to his mansion, and interference in its gardening, for scrutiny of his imaged self. Everything we have learned about the Letters has told us to respond by working through intimate exchange with the writer and his presumptions about the reader. We always undergo manipulation; we always have the manipulator’s self-manipulation before us, as mirror of the terms for our own engagement. Where are we as we start on s c i p i o’s? Our approach, and gateway: we were handed a negative proof of the ideal mansion in the caricature of vat i a’s (Epp. 55). We were invited both to read the Letters as the transmogrified product of the reading of classic ‘liberal’ texts, and specifically to subsume gleanings from the philosophy of Virgil’s Georgics into our reception of Seneca’s deployment of rustic imagery in pursuit of Virtue (Epp. 84, cf. 87, 88). If reception of a ‘mansion’ could bridge to hubbub from a ‘bath-house’ once, then it can happen again. And why not within, rather than between, site or sites, Letter or Letters (∼ 55–6)? Of course a Neapolitan shoreline scenario must stir memories of both Senecan excoriation of all journeying away from Rome (from Epp. 2 on), 1

Most likely, Seneca means to promise a humble perspective, from Scipio’s tomb, in anticipation of his own: cf. Epp. 68.8, quid in otio facio? ulcus meum curo. si ostenderem tibi pedem turgidum . . . permitteres mihi uno loco iacere et fouere morbum meum . . . ; 71.21, iacere in conuiuio . . . iacere in conuiuio . . . iacere in eculeo. iacens also makes the metastylistic promise of ‘falling flat’ (e.g. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 4.2.119, caret enim ceteris lenociniis expositio, et nisi commendetur hac uenustate, iaceat necesse est, Krostenko (2001) 109).

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and the stages of his progressive refinement of the ideal of secessus, whether particularized in the locative or abstracted from all geodesic lines (esp. Epp. 7, 51, 55, 68, 69). Finally, self-conscious, knowing, reflexivity in the image systems of Senecan scenarios has been kick-started for the current spate of protreptic (at Epp. 84). Therefore, I propose, when this the most sustained stretch of mimetic habitus in the entire collection arrives, a long line-up of hermeneutic triggers have been readied for its homiletic reception (Epp. 86): s e n e c a lvc i l i o s vo s a lv t e m In ipsa Scipionis Africani uilla iacens haec tibi scribo, adoratis manibus eius et ara, quam sepulcrum esse tanti uiri suspicor. animum quidem eius in caelum ex quo erat redisse persuadeo mihi, non quia magnos exercitus duxit (hoc enim et Cambyses furiosus ac furore feliciter usus habuit), sed ob egregiam moderationem pietatemque, quam magis in illo admirabilem iudico cum reliquit patriam quam cum defendit. aut Scipio Romae esse debebat aut Roma in libertate. ‘Nihil’, inquit, ‘uolo derogare legibus, nihil institutis; aequum inter omnes ciues ius sit. utere sine me beneficio meo, patria. causa tibi libertatis fui, ero et argumentum: exeo, si plus quam tibi expedit creui.’ quidni ego admirer hanc magnitudinem animi, qua in exilium uoluntarium secessit et ciuitatem exonerauit? eo perducta res erat ut aut libertas Scipioni aut Scipio libertati faceret iniuriam. neutrum fas erat; itaque locum dedit legibus et se Liternum recepit tam suum exilium rei publicae imputaturus quam Hannibalis. uidi uillam exstructam lapide quadrato, murum circumdatum siluae, turres quoque in propugnaculum uillae utrimque subrectas, cisternam aedificiis ac uiridibus subditam quae sufficere in usum uel exercitus posset, balneolum angustum, tenebricosum ex consuetudine antiqua: non uidebatur maioribus nostris caldum nisi obscurum. magna ergo me uoluptas subiit contemplantem mores Scipionis ac nostros: in hoc angulo ille ‘Carthaginis horror’, cui Roma debet quod tantum semel capta est, abluebat corpus rusticis laboribus fessum. exercebat enim opere se terramque (ut mos fuit priscis) ipse subigebat. sub hoc ille tecto tam sordido stetit: hoc illum pauimentum tam uile sustinuit: at nunc quis est qui sic lauari sustineat? pauper sibi uidetur ac sordidus nisi parietes magnis et pretiosis orbibus refulserunt, nisi Alexandrina marmora Numidicis crustis

1

2 3

4

5

6

At s c i p i o ’s : l e t t e r 86

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distincta sunt, nisi illis undique operosa et in picturae modum uariata circumlitio praetexitur, nisi uitro absconditur camera, nisi Thasius lapis, quondam rarum in aliquo spectaculum templo, piscinas nostras circumdedit, in quas multa sudatione corpora exsaniata demittimus, nisi aquam argentea epitonia fuderunt. et adhuc plebeias fistulas loquor: quid cum ad balnea libertinorum 7 peruenero? quantum statuarum, quantum columnarum est nihil sustinentium sed in ornamentum positarum impensae causa! quantum aquarum per gradus cum fragore labentium! eo deliciarum peruenimus ut nisi gemmas calcare nolimus. in hoc balneo Scipionis minimae sunt rimae magis quam fenestrae 8 muro lapideo exsectae, ut sine iniuria munimenti lumen admitterent; at nunc ‘blattaria’ uocant balnea, si qua non ita aptata sunt ut totius diei solem fenestris amplissimis recipiant, nisi et lauantur simul et colorantur, nisi ex solio agros ac maria prospiciunt. itaque quae concursum et admirationem habuerant cum dedicarentur, ea in antiquorum numerum reiciuntur cum aliquid noui luxuria commenta est quo ipsa se obrueret. at olim et pauca erant balnea nec ullo cultu exornata: cur enim 9 exornaretur res quadrantaria et in usum, non in oblectamentum reperta? non suffundebatur aqua nec recens semper uelut ex calido fonte currebat, nec referre credebant in quam perlucida sordes deponerent. sed, di boni, quam iuuat illa balinea intrare obscura et gregali 10 tectorio inducta, quae scires Catonem tibi aedilem aut Fabium Maximum aut ex Corneliis aliquem manu sua temperasse! nam hoc quoque nobilissimi aediles fungebantur officio intrandi ea loca quae populum receptabant exigendique munditias et utilem ac salubrem temperaturam, non hanc quae nuper inuenta est similis incendio, adeo quidem ut conuictum in aliquo scelere seruum uiuum lauari oporteat. nihil mihi uidetur iam interesse, ardeat balineum an caleat. quantae nunc aliqui rusticitatis damnant Scipionem quod non in 11 caldarium suum latis specularibus diem admiserat, quod non in multa luce decoquebatur et exspectabat ut in balneo concoqueret! o hominem calamitosum! nesciit uiuere. non saccata aqua lauabatur sed saepe turbida et, cum plueret uehementius, paene lutulenta. nec multum eius intererat an sic lauaretur; ueniebat enim ut sudorem illic ablueret, non ut unguentum. quas nunc quorundam uoces futuras credis? ‘Non inuideo Scipioni: 12 uere in exilio uixit qui sic lauabatur.’ immo, si scias, non cotidie lauabatur; nam, ut aiunt qui priscos mores urbis tradiderunt, bracchia et crura cotidie abluebant, quae scilicet sordes opere collegerant, ceterum

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toti nundinis lauabantur. hoc loco dicet aliquis: ‘liquet mihi immundissimos fuisse.’ quid putas illos oluisse? militiam, laborem, uirum. postquam munda balnea inuenta sunt, spurciores sunt. descripturus infamem et nimiis notabilem deliciis Horatius quid ait? 13 pastillos Buccillus olet.

dares nunc Buccillum: proinde esset ac si ‘hircum’ oleret, ‘Gargonii’ loco esset, quem idem Horatius Buccillo opposuit. parum est sumere unguentum nisi bis terque renouatur, ne euanescat in corpore. quid quod hoc odore tamquam suo gloriantur? haec si tibi nimium tristia uidebuntur, uillae imputabis, in qua 14 didici ab Aegialo, diligentissimo patre familiae (is enim nunc huius agri possessor est) quamuis uetus arbustum posse transferri. hoc nobis senibus discere necessarium est, quorum nemo non oliuetum alteri ponit, ? quod uidi illud arborum trimum et quadrimum fastidiendi fructus aut deponere.? te quoque proteget illa quae 15 tarda uenit seris factura nepotibus umbram,

ut ait Vergilius noster, qui non quid uerissime sed quid decentissime diceretur aspexit, nec agricolas docere uoluit sed legentes delectare. nam, ut alia omnia transeam, hoc quod mihi hodie necesse fuit deprehendere, adscribam:

16

uere fabis satio est; tunc te quoque, Medica, putres accipiunt sulci, et milio uenit annua cura.

an uno tempore ista ponenda sint et an utriusque ‘uerna sit satio’, hinc aestimes licet: Iunius mensis est quo tibi scribo, iam procliuis in Iulium: eodem die uidi ‘fabam’ metentes, ‘milium’ serentes. ad oliuetum reuertar, quod uidi duobus modis positum: magnarum 17 arborum truncos circumcisis ramis et ad unum redactis pedem cum rapo suo transtulit, amputatis radicibus, relicto tantum capite ipso ex quo illae pependerant. hoc fimo tinctum in scrobem demisit, deinde terram non aggessit tantum, sed calcauit et pressit. negat quicquam esse hac, ut ait, ‘pinsatione’ efficacius. uidelicet 18 frigus excludit et uentum; minus praeterea mouetur et ob hoc nascentes radices prodire patitur ac solum apprendere, quas necesse est cereas adhuc et precario haerentes leuis quoque reuellat agitatio. rapum autem arboris antequam obruat radit; ex omni enim materia quae nudata est, ut ait, radices exeunt nouae. non plures autem super terram eminere


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debet truncus quam tres aut quattuor pedes; statim enim ab imo uestietur nec magna pars eius quemadmodum in oliuetis ueteribus arida et retorrida erit. alter ponendi modus hic fuit: ramos fortes nec corticis duri, quales 19 esse nouellarum arborum solent, eodem genere deposuit. hi paulo tardius surgunt, sed cum tamquam a planta processerint, nihil habent in se abhorridum aut triste. illud etiamnunc uidi, uitem ex arbusto suo annosam transferri; 20 huius capillamenta quoque, si fieri potest, colligenda sunt, deinde liberalius sternenda uitis, ut etiam ex corpore radicescat. et uidi non tantum mense Februario positas sed etiam Martio exacto; tenent et complexae sunt non suas ulmos. omnes autem istas arbores quae, ut ita dicam, ‘grandiscapiae’ sunt, 21 ait aqua adiuuandas cisternina; quae si prodest, habemus pluuiam in nostra potestate. plura te docere non cogito, ne quemadmodum Aegialus me sibi aduersarium parauit, sic ego parem te mihi. uale. s e n e c a to f r i e n d lu c i l i u s : g re e t i n g s Inside the actual manor of the Scipio dubbed Conqueror of Africa. 1 Here I am, flat out. Writing you this. After first paying respects to his shade and altar. This, I suspect, is the tomb of this great hero. As for his spirit, I am convinced myself that it returned to heaven whence it came. Not because he led great armies: Cambyses, you see, had armies too, and he was mad – but managed to make madness work for him successfully. Rather, in recognition of his restraint-cum-respect. Which by my judgement was marvellous in his case, still more when he quit his fatherland than when he protected it. When either Scipio had to be in Rome, or else Rome had to be free. ‘No way’, he said, ‘am I prepared to undermine law. No way, 2 procedure. Equality between all citizens must be their right. Fatherland, put my gift to work without me. I have been what made you free; I shall be the proof that you are. I am going away. In case I have grown beyond what is in your best interest.’ How could I not marvel at this greatness of spirit – retiring into 3 self-imposed exile, removing a burden from society? The situation had reached the point where either freedom would do Scipio harm, or Scipio would harm freedom. Neither alternative was right and proper, so he

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deferred to the law, gave ground, and withdrew to Liternum. He would debit the Republic for his own exile as well as for Hannibal’s. Both. I have seen a manor built high with dressed stone; a perimeter wall 4 around a wood; tall towers, too, underslung on both sides to fortify the manor; a water tank installed under the buildings and shrubberies, up to underwriting the needs of an army, even; a tight wee bath-house, dark as hell in the ancient fashion. No baths seemed to our ancestors hot that weren’t dark. So I underwent great joy. Beholding Scipio’s ways versus ours. Inside 5 this cranny, the famous ‘Carthage hair-raiser’,

to whom Rome owes the fact that it has been captured just the once, used to wash down his body, tired by hard graft out in the country. You see, he used to toil as his work-out, he trenched the earth underfoot, as was the way with the men of yore, in person. Under this roof, the great man stood tall – dirty as it is! This floor underpinned the hero, shoddy as it is! Today, though, who is there who would undergo taking a bath this a-way? One sees oneself as poor, as dirty, if the mirrors on the walls haven’t 6 been a dazzle of great big pricey discs; if marble blocks from Alexandria haven’t been set off against veneer slabs from Numidia; if the walls aren’t given a border by a wash all around – elaborately worked on all sides, and patterned like a painting; if the ceiling isn’t hidden away behind glass; if stone from Thasos, once upon a time a rare showpiece in any temple, hasn’t run around our pools, into which we lower bodies dehydrated by repeat sweats; if valves made of silver haven’t released the flow of water. And still I’m talking pipes for the working-classes . . . – how 7 about once I get on to baths belonging to guys fathered by former slaves? What a load of statues; what a load of pillars that undergird zilch, installed for decoration instead – to boost the cost; what a load of waterfalls, sluicing down the steps in a din! We’ve got on to the level of delicacy where we’ll tread nothing but jewels. Inside this, the bath-house of Scipio. There are the smallest chinks, 8 rather than windows, chiselled from the stone wall so as to let light in without harming the fortification. Today, though, they call them baths for moths, if any baths haven’t been designed so as to welcome in the sun all day long through the most generous-sized windows; if they don’t simultaneously bathe and tan; if they don’t look out over fields and sea from the hip-bath. So it is that baths that had drawn a crowd to marvel


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on the day of dedication are relegated to the rank of antiques, once luxury has dreamed up some novelty it can use to bury itself. Whereas, in olden times bath-houses were both few and with no 9 fancy décor. Why ever, you see, would something priced at a farthing get decorated, something invented for use, not for titivation? Water-flow didn’t keep welling up from under; water didn’t keep running forever fresh, as though from a hot spring; they didn’t believe it mattered how crystal clear the water was which they set their dirt in. But, good gods, what pleasure to enter those famous bath-houses: 10 dark, hooded with mass-market stucco, and you’d know Cato was your Housing Officer (or Fabius Maximus, or someone from the Cornelius clan . . .) who was in control, hands-on. Because this was also one of the duties that Housing Officers used to perform: to enter sites which admitted the public, and insist on cleanliness, plus a temperature both practical and healthy. Not the sort pioneered in recent times, a good imitation of a blaze – so much so, a slave found guilty of some crime ought to be bathed alive! It seems to me there’s no difference now between bath on fire and hot bath. What a load of country gaucherie people today convict Scipio of: he 11 didn’t let daylight into his sauna through wide windowpanes! He didn’t have his skin go brown floodlit, or wait in the bath for his din to go down! Ah – a human wreck: he didn’t know how to live! He wouldn’t bathe in specially filtered water. No, it was regularly clouded and, when it rained extra heavily, pretty well muddy. And it didn’t make much difference to him, either, if he bathed that way, as he went in order to wash away sweat, not scent. What do you suppose some people today would say? ‘I don’t envy 12 Scipio. He truly lived in exile – bathing that way!’ But no! If you knew it, he wouldn’t bathe daily. For as those responsible for handing on the tradition about the ancient ways of the City of Rome tell us, they would wash arms and legs off daily, as of course they picked up dirt through toil, but they bathed all over weekly. At this spot someone will say, ‘It’s crystal clear to me: they were as unclean as can be!’ What do you think they smelled of? Soldiering. Hard work. Hero. Since clean baths were pioneered, people are fouler. To portray a scandal notorious for o.t.t. delicacies, Horace says . . . 13 what? ‘Mr Gobulle smells of pastilles.’

Offer Gobulle today, and it would be just as if he smelled of ‘billy-goat’, he’d be in ‘Mr Gargonius’’ spot, the one Horace set up in antithesis,

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ibid. It’s not enough to put on scent if it isn’t freshened up two or three times a day, to stop it evaporating on the body. What of them pluming themselves on this smell as though it’s their own? If all this seems grim stuff to you, and o.t.t., you’ll debit the manor. 14 Inside it, I learned a lesson from Aegialus, the most conscientious head of household of them all. (Yes, he is the owner of this farmland today.) Namely: ‘h oweve r a n c i e n t t h e t re e , t r a n s p l a n t i n g i s p o s s i b l e.’ This lesson is essential for old men like myself to learn – every one of us sets an olive grove for the other fellow ? as I have seen ? that tree ? at three or four years ? have unpalatable fruit? or ? set in.? There will be shelter for you as well from the tree that 15 ‘comes on slow, for to grow late in the day grandsons’ shade,’

as our very own Virgil says. Though he focussed not on what is said most truthfully, but what is said most fittingly. Meant not to teach farmers, but to delight readers. E.g. – to skip all the other cases – here’s one where it was essential for me to catch him out today. I’ll jot it in:

16

‘Spring is sowing for beans. Then you as well, clover, crumbling furrows welcome in. And for millet there comes a year’s tending.’

Q.: Are these (a) to be set in at one and the same time, or (b) is ‘sowing’ to be ‘in spring’ for both? A.: You can figure it out from this: it’s the month of June when I’m writing you, already tipping into July: on the very same day I have seen ‘bean’ a-harvesting and ‘millet’ a-sowing. To return to the olive grove. I have seen two methods of setting it 17 in: 1. In the case of great big trees, he cut the branches right the way round, pruned them back to one foot, transplanted the trunks, with their very own ball and all, severing roots to leave just the actual head they were dependent on, and had dangled from. This he doused in dung and let down into a trench. Then he didn’t just heap up soil beside it but trod and flattened it. Says there is nothing more guaranteed to produce results than 18 this (as he says) ‘pounding’. To be sure it shuts out cold and wind. In addition, there is less disturbance and in consequence it lets the embryonic roots emerge and ‘take’ on the soil. Essentially, it’s inevitable that these roots, which are still flexi- (like plastic) and grip on precariously, should tear up at even a light shaking. The ball of the tree he gives a radical scraping before burying it: from all the wood that is


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stripped bare, so he says, out come fresh roots. The trunk must not stand proud above ground higher than three or four feet: since it will at once put on cover right from the very bottom, and there won’t be any great section of it left, the way it is in ageing olive groves, dry and scorched. The alternative method of setting in was this: 19 2. Strong branches, with bark that is not hard – the sort that fresh tree saplings generally have – he set in with the same technique. These gain height a little more slowly. But as they have stemmed from a quasi- ‘slip’, they have nothing hair-raising or grim about them. Another recent sight I have seen: a vine of many years’ standing 20 transplanted away from its very own tree. Its strands must, if it can be managed, be picked up too, then the vine must be given a pretty generous covering, so that roots form from its body as well. Also, I have seen them set in not just in the month of February, but also after March is over. They hold and have embraced elms which are not their very own. In fact, all those trees which, let me say, are ‘big-stemmed’, must, 21 he says, be given a boost with water from the water tank. If this does good, we have rainfall in our own control. No, I am not thinking of teaching you any more lessons. In case, just the way that Aegialus trained me to be his opponent, I may be training you to be mine. Like this. Fare well.

c h a p t e r s eve n

Bound for vat i a ’s Text and translation of Letter 55

To knock our selves into shape, we need the diversion ahead right hereand-now. It is not so much a detour away from s c i p i o ’s , as a retroversion, back to chapter 3. This will be a sample of ‘Making like the bees’. For if the bareback Catonesque jaunt of 87 forces the reader to relive the earlier jolt along the shoreline ‘between Cumae and the mansion of Vatia’, the bare bones of the ‘location’ of 86 already refer us back, no room for doubt, to the ‘manor’ contemplated there. Discussion of vat i a ’s comes next, then (chapter 8). After presentation of its text + translation: s e n e c a lvc i l i o s vo s a lv t e m A gestatione cum maxime uenio, non minus fatigatus quam si tantum 1 ambulassem quantum sedi; labor est enim et diu ferri, ac nescio an eo maior quia contra naturam est, quae pedes dedit ut per nos ambularemus, oculos ut per nos uideremus. debilitatem nobis indixere deliciae, et quod diu noluimus posse desimus. mihi tamen necessarium erat concutere corpus, ut, siue bilis 2 insederat faucibus, discuteretur, siue ipse ex aliqua causa spiritus densior erat, extenuaret illum iactatio, quam profuisse mihi sensi. ideo diutius uehi perseueraui inuitante ipso litore, quod inter Cumas et Seruili Vatiae uillam curuatur et hinc mari, illinc lacu uelut angustum iter cluditur. erat autem a recenti tempestate spissum; fluctus enim illud, ut scis, frequens et concitatus exaequat, longior tranquillitas soluit, cum harenis, quae umore alligantur, sucus abscessit. ex consuetudine tamen mea circumspicere coepi an aliquid illic 3 inuenirem quod mihi posset bono esse, et derexi oculos in uillam quae aliquando Vatiae fuit. in hac ille praetorius diues, nulla alia re quam otio notus, consenuit, et ob hoc unum felix habebatur. nam quotiens aliquos amicitiae Asinii Galli, quotiens Seiani odium, deinde amor merserat 62

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(aeque enim offendisse illum quam amasse periculosum fuit), exclamabant homines, ‘O Vatia, solus scis uiuere.’ at ille latere sciebat, non uiuere; multum autem interest utrum uita 4 tua otiosa sit an ignaua. numquam aliter hanc uillam Vatia uiuo praeteribam quam ut dicerem, ‘Vatia hic situs est.’ sed adeo, mi Lucili, philosophia sacrum quiddam est et uenerabile ut etiam si quid illi simile est mendacio placeat. otiosum enim hominem seductum existimat uulgus et securum et se contentum, sibi uiuentem, quorum nihil ulli contingere nisi sapienti potest. ille solus scit sibi uiuere; ille enim, quod est primum, scit uiuere. nam qui res et homines fugit, quem cupiditatum suarum infelicitas 5 relegauit, qui alios feliciores uidere non potuit, qui uelut timidum atque iners animal metu oblituit, ille sibi non uiuit, sed, quod est turpissimum, uentri, somno, libidini; non continuo sibi uiuit, qui nemini. adeo tamen magna res est constantia et in proposito suo perseuerantia ut habeat auctoritatem inertia quoque pertinax. de ipsa uilla nihil tibi possum certi scribere; frontem enim eius 6 tantum noui et exposita, quae ostendit etiam transeuntibus. speluncae sunt duae magni operis, cuiuis laxo atrio pares, manu factae, quarum altera solem non recipit, altera usque in occidentem tenet. platanona medius riuus et a mari et ab Acherusio lacu receptus euripi modo diuidit, alendis piscibus, etiam si assidue exhauriatur, sufficiens. sed illi, cum mare patet, parcitur: cum tempestas piscatoribus dedit ferias, manus ad parata porrigitur. hoc tamen est commodissimum in uilla, quod Baias trans 7 parietem habet: incommodis illarum caret, uoluptatibus fruitur. has laudes eius ipse noui: esse illam totius anni credo; occurrit enim Fauonio et illum adeo excipit ut Bais neget. non stulte uidetur elegisse hunc locum Vatia in quem otium suum pigrum iam et senile conferret. sed non multum ad tranquillitatem locus confert: animus est qui 8 sibi commendet omnia. uidi ego in uilla hilari et amoena maestos, uidi in media solitudine occupatis similes. quare non est quod existimes ideo parum bene compositum esse te quod in Campania non es. quare autem non es? huc usque cogitationes tuas mitte. conuersari cum amicis absentibus licet, et quidem quotiens uelis, 9 quamdiu uelis. magis hac uoluptate, quae maxima est, fruimur dum absumus; praesentia enim nos delicatos facit, et quia aliquando una loquimur, ambulamus, consedimus, cum diducti sumus nihil de iis quos modo uidimus cogitamus.

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et ideo aequo animo ferre debemus absentiam, quia nemo non 10 multum etiam praesentibus abest. pone hic primum noctes separatas, deinde occupationes utrique diuersas, deinde studia secreta, suburbanas profectiones: uidebis non multum esse quod nobis peregrinatio eripiat. amicus animo possidendus est; hic autem numquam abest; 11 quemcumque uult cotidie uidet. itaque mecum stude, mecum cena, mecum ambula: in angusto uiuebamus, si quicquam esset cogitationibus clusum. uideo te, mi Lucili; cum maxime audio; adeo tecum sum ut dubitem an incipiam non epistulas sed codicellos tibi scribere. uale. s e n e c a to f r i e n d lu c i l i u s : g re e t i n g s Back from a ride, right now, I’m on my way. No less tiring a sit than it 1 would have been a walk that far. It’s a struggle to be carried, too. Maybe a greater struggle, because it is contrary to nature: she gave us feet for us to walk for ourselves, and eyes to see for ourselves. Luxury has consigned us to weakness, and we’ve stopped being able to do what we long since refused. For me though it was essential to have a physical shaking, whether 2 to get bile sat on the throat shaken apart or to thin the actual breathing, extra-thickened for whatever reason, with a good chucking. (I’ve felt that do me good in the past.) I kept on going, a sustained excursion this, as the actual shoreline beckoned. Its curve between Cumae and the mansion of Servilius Vatia. One side sea. The other side lake. They are the doorway, so to speak, ‘barring a tight route’ for a strait journey. Because it was packed after a storm just over. Repeated shaking from buffeting waves, as you know, flattens level, whereas extra prolonged calm undoes, when the juice withdraws from the sand that is held fast by the wet. From habit though, my habit, I began to look around – was there 3 anything I could find there that could do me good? – and I trained eyes on the manor that was at one time Vatia’s. Inside this, that rich middle-rank senator, the celeb of rest, and rest alone, grew old, and on this one count got a reputation for good luck. You see, every time being friends with Asinius Gallus, or being Sejanus’ hate-figure (later on, make that love-), had sunk some people, folk used to exclaim, ‘My, Vatia, you’re the only one knows how to live!’ But he knew how to lurk, not live. There’s a vast gulf between your 4 life being restful and slothful. I would never, in Vatia’s lifetime, pass this

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mansion by without saying, ‘Vatia lies here.’ But, friend Lucilius, Philosophy has such Holiness and such Respect that even a Philosophy ————Likeness is a winner, for the con. Because the masses reckon retreat makes a person restful, anxiety-free, OK with himself, and ‘living for himself’ – and none of all that can bless anyone but the Sage. The Sage alone knows how to live for himself. Because he knows how to live, and that comes first. For someone on the run from reality, from humanity, someone 5 banished by bad luck in their desires, someone unable to watch others have better luck, someone like a cowering timorous beastie lurking in fear – that someone doesn’t live for himself, but, the ultimate disgrace, for stomach, sleep, and sex. He doesn’t live for himself, just like that, who lives for no one. That, though, is how big a deal consistency is, plus keeping on with one’s strategy: it empowers ongoing indolence, too. Data on the actual manor, nowt I can write for sure: I know just its 6 façade, plus the views it displays even to people in transit. There are two grottoes. Epic constructions. A match for any wide-open reception suite. Entirely man-made. One admits no sun, the other keeps it right till sunset. A brook diameter bisects an area of planes, with access to both the sea and Lake Acheron, like a tideway. Fish, for the feeding of. Up to taking even continual draining, but when the sea is open it is let off, whereas when a storm has granted a fishermen’s holiday, stocks are ready to hand. Yet the principal asset inside the manor is that it has Baiae through 7 the wall. Free from its downsides, enjoying the pleasures. I know this litany of its plusses first hand, and believe it’s a year-round thing, as it meets the west wind head on, so monopolizing it as to cut out Baiae. He was no fool, evidently, to pick this location, that Vatia, to take his rest, already a lazy, old man’s affair. But location is not much of a positive factor for gaining calm. It is 8 the mind that has to square everything to itself. I have seen distressed people in a cheery manor, I’ve seen workaholic lookalikes in mid-Sahara. That’s why there is no reason for you to think that you are less than well placed because you’re not in Campania. And why aren’t you? Do send your thoughts all this way. Talking with absent friends is on. Yes, as often as you want, as long 9 as you want. This pleasure, none greater, we enjoy more while we are absent. Presence makes us pernickety, and because we talk, walk, sit together any time, once we have split up, we don’t think at all of the people we have just seen.

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And there is a reason why we must bear absence even-tempered: no 10 one isn’t absent a lot from people even when they are present. Put here: (1) nights apart, (2) separate study projects, (3) trips out-of-town: you’ll see that what travel robs us of doesn’t amount to a lot. A friend is for owning mentally. A friend is never absent. Anyone he 11 wants, he sees everyday. So study with me, eat with me, walk with me. We were all along living in a tight cage if anything could be barred from our thoughts. I see you, my Lucilius, right now, I hear you. I am so with you, I’m not sure I shouldn’t start writing you, not letters, but memos. Farewell.

chapter eight

Knocking the self: genuflexion, villafication, vat i a ’s Letter 55

It sticks out a coastal mile that the two manors, s c i p i o’s and vat i a’s, speak specially intimately and intricately to one another. They are more than imbricated, they generate their significance from interaction. For they interlock, to the death and past it, in a showdown between conflicting ‘Philosophies’ of life. Seneca takes and makes two memories and memorials, and polarizes them as con and authenticity. Out with lapse into modernity, and in with modification of traditionality. Expose political to spiritual exposé. Explode popular views, introduce theorizing in tandem. In short, Seneca will lure out the Epicureanism lurking in his Stoicism. The Letters were so magnanimous, they got launched with clips from Epicurus’ greatest hits. But for all their generosity, they are working hard through the glitz to the metal. And the collection will wind up beaming out Thoughts for the Day from s e n e c a’s own website. Musing at s c i p i o’s will find a classic persona for Seneca in ‘retirement’. Not some latter-day Maecenas frivolité, but honourable autonomy to satisfy an Elder Cato. A political strategy due for reclamation as spiritual sanctuary. But first Epicurean sloth must be scraped and peeled away from Roman sublation. That is why we went to suss out vat i a’s first. Seneca takes us for a ride, so later he can catch us lying down.1 For if any of us escapists thought we might settle down and find rest that easily, then they were hawking hand-me-down dogma that as good as prescribes coma as remedy for living. Quitting on society may keep heads on necks, but the Moral Epistles will not, can not, let their addressee off the hook. We are not, today, reading – emulating – bland Cicero, who found the nerve to front the last instalment of his manual of Roman ethics with

1

The notion of a broadminded or magnanimous or amateurish ‘eclecticism’ or ‘anti-sectarianism’ in the encounter of Epp. with Epicurus does not cut it for me: see p. 15 n. 26 above.

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close alignment of his own retirement from politics with that of Scipio Africanus (De officiis 3.1–4).2 He would. No, as we (should) have learned long since, your friend Seneca never leaves you alone. There will certainly be no respite at vat i a ’s, whose punchline upshot will be precisely that theorem: that Friends never leave Friends alone. ow w t f o r r t h h e e d d d d a - y - y - y We go there to give ourselves a good shaking. Even taking a ride there in comfort, courtesy of Seneca’s Tours by Courier, Inc., will shake us up, put us on the road to s c i p i o ’s, thirty-one stops farther along Rome’s riviera. Here a cold bath of reason, plenty of healthy manure, and a good conceptual forking await us. (Em)bracing stuff: as we are told, to start us off, ‘Nature gave us feet for walking / eyes for seeing’ (55.1). Now Seneca is already ‘come back from his ride (gestatio) – ‘right now’.3 But so far as our traipse goes, he is ‘coming, right now, coming our way’. As we set out to accompany him, we must use our feet-and-eyes ‘for ourselves’ (55.1). When he showed us the far-out sight he saw along that bumpy shore, we were being dumped into a test of our (reading-moralizing) ‘habits’, to see if we ‘could find anything with the potential to benefit us’ (ex consuetudine, 55.3). That is the direction Seneca’s example is pointing us in.4 When he said, ‘I trained eyes on the manor of Vatia’ (derexi oculos, 55.3), he was jolting us into seeing that the place’s description which he had just written is designed to function as a protreptic, a turn-on. When he ‘directed eyes onto vat i a ’s’, he was jarring us into understanding our director. Who has been out videoing on moral location, to give us a passage to ‘train our eyes on’ (55.3). So we shall need to get the picture. And then, it will transpire, we will need to make it stick with us, imprinted on the retina so that later we can retain the details. This is why we lurched and ogled our way through the vista. To be seduced with a celluloid vision for us finally to trash and trample into the cutting-room floor. 2 3

4

Seneca squirming on the politics of ‘retirement from politics’: Epp. 68 (p. 36), Maso (1999) chapter 4. Gestatio ought to suggest a pun on the ‘gestation’ of the letter’s train of thought, but this gesture is scarcely in the Latin. Notice, though, that gestatio, ‘riding’, brackets ‘ride’ (verbal noun) with ‘ride’ (name of a dedicated space). Epp. 55 will take us on a ride through a ride. See Setaioli (1991b) 82–3.

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vat i a ’s is marked at once as a comparandum, whether sequel, or prequel, or both (cf. Epp. 12 + 86. 55.6): cuiuis laxo atrio pares A match for any wide-open reception suite you care to name.

‘Right then’, we shall be turning the visit we made into a reprise that we can relive ‘right now’, when we are tramping off to stare some place else. For ‘right now’ is the open epistolary moment which comprehends all extents and tenses, in that the writer always and everywhere ‘sees and hears’ the reader, ‘right now’, as their correspondence turns mere absence into real presence (uideo te . . . cum maxime audio, 55.11 ∼ cum maxime uenio, 1). w h e re o p p o s i t e s m e e t : 5 5 8 6 Reading Letter 86 before Letter 55 should communicate the spirit of Seneca’s co-present universe of relocation beyond the shrinking cage of mundane spatiotemporality. Past the future. It should also help our habituation programme bring to the surface the most salient features of vat i a’s for overdubbing with the meditative surrounds of s c i p i o’s . Just as Seneca’s writing of his manors presses us to register them as already a reinscribing, a rereading, of his own, so we are bumped along and stretched out flat in order to reread the journey through both manors. ‘For our selves’ (per nos, 55.1): VATIA’S Vatiae uillam / uelut angustum iter / uillam quae aliquando Vatiae fuit. in hac / exclamabant homines, ‘O Vatia, solus scis uiuere,’ / dicerem, ‘Vatia hic situs est.’ sed . . . philosophia sacrum quiddam est et uenerabile / solus scit sibi uiuere / scit uiuere / qui fugit, quem . . . relegauit / ille sibi non uiuit / non . . . sibi uiuit qui nemini / de ipsa uilla / frontem eius / speluncae sunt duae magni operis . . . manu factae, quarum altera solem non recipit, altera usque in occidentem tenet platanona medius riuus . . . receptus euripi modo diuidit / alendis piscibus . . . sufficiens / in uilla / trans parietem / uoluptatibus fruitur / manus ad parata porrigitur / has laudes eius / esse illam totius anni credo / non stulte uidetur elegisse hunc locum Vatia / sed non multum . . . locus confert / uidi ego in uilla / uidi in media solitudine / uoluptate quae maxima est fruimur / in angusto uiuebamus / . . . VATIA’S mansion / barring a tight route for a strait journey / the manor that was at one time Vatia’s. Inside this / folk used to exclaim, ‘My, Vatia, you’re the only one knows how to live!’ / I would say, ‘Vatia lies here.’ But . . . Philosophy has such Holiness and such Respect / alone knows how to live for himself / knows how to

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live / For someone on the run, someone banished / that someone doesn’t live for himself / He doesn’t live for himself, who lives for no one / Data on the actual manor / its façade / two grottoes. Epic constructions . . . Entirely man-made. One admits no sun, the other keeps it right till sunset. A brook diameter bisects an area of planes . . . like a tideway / inside the manor / Fish, for the feeding of. Up to taking / through the wall / enjoying the pleasures / this litany of its plusses / believe it’s a year-round thing / Vatia was no fool, evidently, to pick this location / But location is not much of a positive factor / I have seen in a manor / I’ve seen . . . in mid-Sahara / This pleasure, none greater, we enjoy / We were all along living in a tight cage . . . barred / . . . ∼ SCIPIO’S In ipsa Scipionis Africani uilla / adoratis manibus eius et ara, quam sepulcrum esse tanti uiri suspicor / in exilium uoluntarium secessit / locum dedit legibus et se recepit / suum exilium / uidi uillam exstructam . . ., murum . . . turres quoque in propugnaculum uillae utrimque subrectas, cisternam . . . quae sufficeret in usum / balneolum angustum / magna . . . me uoluptas subiit / in hoc angulo / exercebat . . . opere se / parietes / marmora . . . operosa / in aliquo . . . templo / piscinas / in hoc balneo Scipionis / balnea siqua non ita aptata sunt ut totius diei solem . . . recipiant / in usum, non in oblectamentum / non . . . diem admiserat . . . non in multa luce . . . / o hominem calamitosum! nesciit uiuere / uere in exilio uixit / haec si nimium tristia uidebuntur, uillae . . . in qua didici / uidi / uidi / uidi / etiamnunc uidi / et uidi / . . . Inside the actual manor of the Scipio dubbed Conqueror of Africa / After first paying respects to his shade and altar. This, I suspect, is the tomb of this great hero / retiring into self-imposed exile / deferred to the law, gave ground, and withdrew / his own exile / I have seen a manor built high; a perimeter wall; tall towers, too, underslung on both sides to fortify the manor; a water tank . . . up to underwriting the needs / a tight wee bath-house / So I underwent great joy / Inside this cranny / he used to toil as his work-out / the walls / marble blocks . . . elaborately worked / in any temple / [fish-]pools / Inside this, the bath-house of Scipio / if any baths haven’t been designed so as to welcome in the sun all day long / for use, not for titivation / he didn’t let daylight in! . . . He didn’t go floodlit / Ah – a human wreck: he didn’t know how to live! / He truly lived in exile / If all this seems grim stuff to you, and o.t.t. . . . the manor. Inside it, I learned a lesson / I have seen / I have seen / I have seen / Another recent sight I have seen / Also, I have seen / . . .

The axiom that our visit to a uilla, as to any other species of locus, is itself a journey – a reading journey through a textual journey, in a relay of moral reiteration – does not await reaffirmation in the writing of 87. It was reinforced by our ‘programme’ for Letters 84–8, by 84. But it was inculcated as a foundational theorem by 55, in the praxis of spiritual self-sublation by (t)reading that out-of-body trip out of Cumae.


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At s e n e c a ’s in 12, (first person) psychotherapeutic return to the primal scenes of his own infancy bonded mansion to owner as portrait to self: in Latin, this can read as ‘like praetorium, like praetorius’.5 By contrast, just visiting (third person) vat i a ’s presses home the philosophical-epistolary truth that calibration between show house and inspected alterity exposes the adjudicating letter-writer’s self to the inspection of the correspondent. For describing Vatia inscribes Seneca: for a viewing of his own. Plenty of room(s) for him and for us to reflect (in/upon). Everything significantly pre-shaped for reactive antipathy with the mores of s c i p i o ’s. do the strand For habitués, manners lie somewhere along the line betwixt and between Seneca’s tale of two manors. Both of them take us out of our world, out of Rome, out of our selves, to plunge us knee-deep in the mucky country. There, this pair of moral habitats will enshrine the last word in hydropathic urbanity. Cold showers and hot water are on tap, specially installed to do us good. Whether we know we need one (or two), or not, it’s for our own good. The journey to vat i a ’s was already done when we came in. But it was rehearsed for us so we could go too.6 Seneca had ridden there: ‘as tiring a sit as it would have been a walk. Maybe worse because unnatural: we have feet to walk for our selves, and eyes to see for our selves’ (ambulassem, sedi, ambularemus, uideremus, 1). Seneca, however, was, you should realize, bedridden; he needed ‘a physical shaking, to shake apart biliousness sat on his throat and to give thickened breathing a good chucking’ (concutere corpus, insederat, discuteretur, densior, iactatio, 2).7 What we are about to contemplate, the writing we are about to read, will be a psychic shaking, a good spiritual chucking. The journey will be a vision, for ‘I-of-the-sole’ trekkies. Seneca took to his boneshaker because he knew his needs and limitations; but he knew, too, that he must symptomize Modern Man in general, from Lucilius to our selves. Stoicism has written Seneca rugged: materialism has ridden us ragged. We all need to be zapped by satire, we have been so sapped by Sybaris (nobis . . . elegantiae . . . mihi tamen . . ., 1). In this spirit, 5 6 7

Cf. Epp. 55.3, in uillam . . . Vatiae . . ., in hac ille praetorius diues . . ., punning between praetorius, ‘former praetor’ and ‘[owner of a] praetorium (“mansion”)’. On Epp. 55: Motto and Clark (1972–3). On Vatia’s villa: Maiuri (1937) 87; D’Arms (1970) 157, 224–5. Celsus recommends for a ride (2.15): lenissima . . . naui uel in portu uel in flumine; uehementior uel in alto uel lectica; etiamnum acrior uehiculo.

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let us ‘go that extra mile’ with our trail-blazer, now at once our host and co-passenger, for this latest episode in our ‘keeping on keeping on, grim, austere, Stoicizing’ (diutius uehi perseueraui, 2). Epp. 55 will mean to carry our minds further down the track leading to mimesis as vehicle for inner transport. The bees’ knees, you’ll see. Hitching this ‘outsize extravaganza’ of a ride with Seneca picks (us) up at Cumae, delivering us from the Aeneid ’s oracular Sibyl of the Ages to our secular Stoic of this Sage. Wisdom is still wizened, but we are in the load to find ethics at home, not on the road to found politics at Rome. Access is vital for down-trodden vitality: if we can hear here, the approach will heel all (55.2): diutius uehi perseueraui inuitante ipso litore, quod inter Cumas et Seruili Vatiae uillam curuatur et hinc mari, illinc lacu uelut angustum iter cluditur. erat enim a recenti tempestate spissum. fluctus autem illud, ut scis, frequens et concitatus exaequat, longior tranquillitas soluit, cum harenis, quae umore alligantur, sucus abscessit. I kept on going, a sustained excursion this, as the actual shoreline beckoned. Its curve between Cumae and the mansion of Servilius Vatia. One side sea. The other side lake. They are the doorway, so to speak, ‘barring a tight route’ for a strait journey. Because it was packed after a storm just over. Repeated shaking from buffeting waves, as you know, flattens level, whereas extra prolonged calm undoes, when the juice withdraws from the sand that is held fast by the wet.

Surely, between – s(p)licing – sea and lake, we are invited to see, and look along this shore. Analysis of the freshly experienced sand-bar phenomenon taught or reinforced Seneca’s lesson that a good buffeting can firm something up (concitatus), whether the object of the exercise (fresh, sustained exercise: recenti, longior) is to dislodge or to disassemble (spissum . . . soluit). Or not. For insidious bile and clotted breath are neither of them unequivocally natural, nor for that matter resoundingly unnatural (ex aliqua causa), and between them these ‘frogs-in-the-throat’ certainly draw attention to this other, anatomical, ‘tight route’ (faucibus).8 Feel the pipeline of this prose draw us across the bay, draw us down the body’s respiratory tube. For today’s journey / journée /. And this one is going to run us into goo and gunge. It’s our own muck, some from down below, some the filth that gets into us from up out there. Yukkh! This sand spit is already good to traverse, good to think bad. 8

Feel the lump in your throat when reading Epp. 70.20, where the [nameless] German gladiator does away with himself by stuffing the arse-wipe sponge down his (faucibus). This word is the ‘key’ to Epp. 55, a plunge down every throat going, since fauces covers ‘jaws’, ‘sand bar’, ‘entrance to a house’ or to anything else, ‘entrée’ to any locus of meaning.


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We need it, not for its sound footing or solid reliability, but for its transient constitution, precariously dense-packed stream of ambivalences. This saline solution way, en route between an inner Scylla of a sitting of bile and a hawking Charybdis of asphyxiating gob draws us through echt Senecan imagery. Out to draw US. To heave our selves along, in his tracks, along this liminal route. Reading aloud, keeping on keeping on, we already give our bile a shaking and shake our rasp apart, chucking ourselves into the delivery of Senecan satire. The performance is itself, in itself, always mimetic, for language is physical, locked into the physique, our only way to be.9 And today we are going out of our way because we cannot resist the temptation to go weak at the knees, and undo Calm. Today’s ‘passage’ (locus) takes us ‘around’ the beach, in order to teach circumambience: mimetic imagination may be a circuitous rather than a direct method, but even ‘a crooked path’ around the ‘curvaceous bay’, where no (other) path can take us, can straighten out our thinking, if not our spines (curuatur).10 On occasion, instead of ramming ‘Tranquillity’ down your throat, you will need to play ‘Tempest’ and shift lumps of grot. See how you go. It may depend on whether. re t i re m e n t h o m e Here, as ever, we come to the door of today’s lesson in habituation, in morality (ex consuetudine mea, 3), so as to direct knee-jerk aggression against mundanity. Can the glare of satire inspire a new theme for our meditation toward self-amelioration (circumspicere . . . an aliquid illic inuenirem quod mihi posset bono esse, 3)? Knock before you enter, but don’t stop there. In the stocks, to shake things up for a change, is ‘Calm’. For this ‘location’ has spelled one thing: senescence in feet-up tranquillity (otio notus, consenuit). Until Seneca came along to vindicate his monopoly on this theme, to incarnate and pontificate. Even especially when he goes out of his way to rubbish this place as a safe haven from politics, from Rome, let alone as the paradigm of savoir vivre. ‘Far’ from introducing us, a` la s c i p i o, to some paradigmatic ‘shade and altar’, or ‘temple’, of inspirational heroism shown on the field of Senecan retreat (86.1), Seneca distances himself from unenlightened humanity in 9 10

Snyder (2000) 30–8 marshals the evidence for Seneca on the media of teaching (esp. Epp. 78.5, 15.7–8. Cf. 54.4). For this cultural cliché of the ‘bowed bay’ moralisé, see, for example, Statius, Siluae 2.2.14–15 and Virgil, Aeneid 1.159–61, with Scarpat Bellincioni (1986) 193–5. In stylistics, cf. Epp. 100.6, lege Ciceronem: compositio eius . . . pedem curuat lenta et sine mollitia mollis.

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order to flog a fake parody of ‘beatitude’ and ‘beatification’ (felix habebatur). Someone playing the palace-political power game of ‘Friendship’ must (as Seneca the long-time Neronian éminence grise knew only too well) hop between the perilous passions that ‘submerged’/‘drowned’ Human Bars like him (merserat): hate on one side, love on the other. But by plumping for withdrawal, he may have heard, but he was not heeding, Seneca’s gospel (4): adeo . . . philosophia sacrum quiddam est et uenerabile ut etiam si quid illi simile est mendacio placeat. Philosophy has such Holiness and such Respect that even a Philosophy ————- Likeness is loved, for the con.

This is the secret we travel here to uncover. Henceforth we can take for our own Seneca’s habit of reminding himself that the world is wrong. Gone wrong when it imagines that ‘knowing how to live’ lives any place where Philosophy sees only ‘lurking’ selfishness (latere, 4), self-isolation as self-protection:11 numquam aliter hanc uillam Vatia uiuo praeteribam quam ut dicerem, ‘Vatia hic situs est.’ I never passed this manor by in Vatia’s lifetime without saying: ‘Vatia lies here.’

For what will prove to be an interruption, but which any reader would take to mark the expected decoction of the generously prolonged provocatory tableau, Seneca lets the mimetic mask slip and his designing hand show (non minus . . . quam . . . labor est . . . et diu ferri . . . nescio an . . . maior . . . et quod diu . . . densior . . . diutius uehi . . . longior . . . consenuit . . . quotiens . . . quotiens . . . multum . . . interest . . . numquam aliter . . .). That persona of The Raconteur brought on the anecdotal scene as to the manor born (ex consuetudine . . . mea circumspicere coepi an aliquid illic inuenirem . . ., 3), so that we just knew we were being ferried to an incident, an accident, a pay-off event. But now (4) we learn that this seaside flâneur has long since habituated himself to passing this way. He is therefore relaying to us, for our first time, a route toward moral habituation which goes over the same ground as he had travelled for his founding routine. We have been led up the sandy path to repeat, not Seneca’s sortie by sedan, but his long-engrained ritual of repetition of the drive past this House of Temptation in deepest 11

Epp. 68 will go into the temptations of ostentatious, holier-than-thou, retreat and specifically ostracize ‘lurking’ (68.1): iactandi autem genus est nimis latere et a conspectu hominum secedere. For the Epicurean claim to own the image of the citadel of the soul overlooking the troubled seas of misguided lives in serenity, see Konstan (1973) 3–12, esp. 9.


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Lotus-Eating Territory. This way for prefab rehab. For ingrained mores, the old ’un’s are the best. No doubt Seneca and we should be struck by the difference it makes that the mantra of truth, once used to crush deluded opinion by exploding a colloquial bonhomie, is now decisively confined to a past time by its own rhetoric of rebuttal. Back when Vatia lived, they joshed (3): Solus scis uiuere You alone know how to live! (with intimations of: ‘You know how to live alone!’, and of: ‘You know that solitary confinement is the only way to survive Rome/Tyranny!’)

Which vivid pleasantry sounds so like a Senecan (anti-)political watchword to be proud of, it is for a second disappointing to find him counter with the limp and lame retort, ‘That wasn’t living, that was lurking!’12 Something with more life must be lurking. It is. Not in the quip that ‘Vatia is, far from living [sc. really living life to the full], [he isn’t even in the land of the living, but dead and] buried: here [and now: though he still breathes]’. But in the transient barb that ‘Vatia is indeed alone – he is buried [sc. alive]’, which has lost much of its point since Vatia’s death, Seneca’s savvy skit underscores that any grave may be accentuated positive or negative as ‘monument’ (moneo, ‘warn’): Vatia here is dead [sc. but when he died he left behind / took with him everything that ‘Vatia’ ever meant].

Dead concepts, bad habits. And, lurching still further, find Seneca insisting on dragging his feet, and making us stumble, too, into the words. As he decodes for us, Seneca had always skated past the point, never come at it head-on, but ‘curved around’ it to home in on his destined target (praeteribam): we are not getting so near yet so far so as to mutter disgust and drive a wedge between home and owner, after the example of the pudibund nouus homo Cicero (De officiis 1.139):13 nec domo dominus, sed domino domus honestanda est. . . . odiosum est enim cum a praetereuntibus dicitur ‘o domus antiqua, heu quam dispari dominare domino’. quod quidem his temporibus in multis licet dicere. 12

13

For a version of this routine, with superadded finality, cf. Epp. 60.4, uiuit is qui multis usui est, uiuit is qui se utitur; qui uero latitant et torpent sic in domo sunt quomodo in conditiuo. horum licet in limine ipso nomen marmori inscribas: ‘m o rt e m s va m a n t e c e s s e rv n t .’ uale, with Motto and Clark (1979) 212; (1990). Cf. Philippic 2.104, citing the same unattributed verse.

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Accreditation must be house by master, not master by house. . . . For it makes you sick when passers-by say: ‘O house – alas – so ill-matched the master you’re owned by!’ And, these days, this can be said in many a case.

Seneca, instead, now, after all this time, all those lost opportunities, has fetched and carried us this far and no farther, in order to hold the label up to the light and see/show what he is about (4):14 Vatia hic situs est. Vatia is dead, and now ‘Vatia’ is death, Vatia is this site and this site is ‘Vatia’, Now Vatia is a [literary] locus, This is the [moralizing] topos ‘Vatia’.

Lumber over to inspect still more closely, and totter into the cliché that anything like an epitaph included in a text serves (vatically) to emblematize the whole. In the competition for our attention, the villa-text equips itself with a ‘throat’, and gets to speak up – oyez. Just about standing for the Letter, the RIP tells (its metonymic, metalinguistic) ALL: Vatia hic situs est. This [satirical] topos figures decadence as decay (situs). [Try writing a] purple passage that has knock-knees (uatia). This bumpy write for tottery readers is a moralist’s rodeo of condemnation: a write-off.

For when a literary locus is aliased by situs, graveside black humour haunts a Roman epitaph. You see, whereas a written ‘topos’ constitutively reactivates, and may reanimate, a ‘site’ for reinscription of a meaning in the cultural habitus, let-it-be ‘neglect’ should mean obliviation (situs from sino).15 This, Seneca’s usual protocol for handling the locative, is precisely the point from which he is departing, for once. Even the half-way house of ‘praeterition’ 14 15

On this deadly motto: Motto and Clark (1979); see next note. For situs in Seneca: Armisen-Marchetti (1989) 165 and n. 238, esp. ‘word rot’ at Epp. 58.5, uerborum situs (p. 148). The most extravagant seashore topos in Latin poetry, by Seneca’s nephew, inscribes a triumphantly ephemeral epitaph on the instantly un-marked grave of the headless torso of Pompey the Great: inscripsit sacrum semusto stipite nomen: | ‘h i c s i t v s e s t m a g n v s ’ (Lucan 8.792–3): ‘Here lies Pompey the Great (Magnus)’ = ‘This is an epic locus of commemoration, of greatness’ = ‘This topos glorifies obliteration: Pompeian-Republican greatness is defunct. Epic must magnify the Caesars’ (cf. below, n. 16). At these points, Seneca and Lucan had virtually the same short stretch of time left to write and to live.


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would not be leaving Vatia(’s) to rot where it lurks. But, it dawns, the letter is precisely telling us that it displaces its usual calm dereliction of lapsed humanity by addressing this locus straight-up. The (traditional) shift is to turn the theme into the occasion for stigmatization, writing the place in so as to write it down.16 And when a topos is dubbed situs, we know we must be participating in iocus, jeering and sneering let out to play at stigmatization. n a m i n g n a m e s : vat i a ’s Now equating a fellow-citizen of some distinction with his cognomen was the most cliché topos in all Roman civic discourse (sermo), and their wonderfully rustic mos of cultivating peasant gibes at features of the body had even defined Roman liberty as levelling obloquy. Hung with glee, and worn with pride, round the necks of highest and lowest in society, this habitual ‘standing epithet’ was there ready to be trotted out, at any instant, in whatever context. The ‘informal’ pet name picking out a self, there to hug or to hurt its bearer, picked on a blunt and crude archaic image-repertoire of deformity and dysfunction to stamp them, stomp on them, stamp them into the ground.17 And this particular(ized) ‘rich praetorian’ sports a suitably portentous name fated to delight Sibylline Cumae: ‘servilivs vatia’.18 The gens Seruilia forever brandished the centrality of (un)civil liberty in Roman faces: these hombres were proof against any slurs about their social standing or moral worth; they paraded security in the name, as their fame. The uncultured description uatia, ‘knock-kneed’, makes for a misshapen, unruly, philological anomaly, as well as subjecting conversation to ugly thoughts on brute ugliness, and handing the moralist a chance to deplore more deviant ‘curvature’.19 16

17

18 19

Henderson (1991) 78: to end Ovid, Amores 1.12, ‘Ovid is about to pun again . . . in vv. 29–30, where he hopes time will “rot” the tablets, along with their “wax” (uos cariosa senectus | rodat, et inmundo cera sit alba situ ||, “may rotten old age | eat into you and your wax be pale from foul decay”). The last word of 12, situ, will replay the (common) pun between “decay” and “location” (esp. cf. Horace, Odes. 3.30.2). And so, at another level, the (common) sense of situs as “literary topos”: 1.12 is a “foul(-mouthed) locus”, an “exercise in abuse”, as its last line declares, inmundo . . . situ, 30.’ This is the subject of Henderson (1997a), on Juvenal, Satire 8 (see esp. 71–2); cf. (1998) 73–107, esp. 81–2, 89–90, on Horace, Satires 1.7. The arch-satirist Lucilius brackets the two extremes of aristocratic adnomination – he would – between ‘The Greatest’ and ‘The Splay-Footed’: ut si progeniem antiquam qua est Maximus Quintus, qua uaricosus Vatax (fr. 851 Warmington: suppressing the gentilician names Fabius and Servilius). So Pliny, Natural History 11.254, uola . . . et hinc cognomina inuenta, Planci, Plautii, Pansae, Scauri, sicut a cruribus Vari, Vatiae, Vatini, quae uitia et in quadrupedibus. So Varro, De lingua Latina 9.10, discussing ‘stumbles’ in Latin inflection (peccati genera), reaches for imagery: similiter . . . ac si quis puerorum per delicias pedes male ponere atque imitari uatias coeperit, hos corrigi oportere si concedant, contra si quis in consuetudine ambulandi iam factus sit uatia aut compernis, si eum corrigi non concedant. Spot on as analysis of Seneca, Epp. 55.

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As (an unusual) name, however, Vatia gave a Servilius distinctiveness, and the mark of distinction even gave its clan opportunities to feature in the public word and to stick in the social memory. To give just one example, from Seneca (De constantia sapientis 17.3):20 . . . Vatinium; hominem natum et ad risum et ad odium, scurram fuisse et uenustum ac dicacem memoriae proditum est. in pedes suos ipse plurima dicebat . . . . . . Vatinius, a human being born for laughter a(n)d nausea(m), has gone down in legend as wag, fun, talker. His own feet were the object of one quip after another from him . . .

At Seruilius Vatia’s, a shambles of a Senecan ‘amble’ is only to be expected, when the sermon addresses the satirical theme: ‘Homo Erectus ——– Enslaved’.21 Remember that where we came in was when Annaeus Seneca was reminding us, in line with his war of onomastic attrition and living up to the customized self given him by Roman culture, he must ride because, superannuated and senile, his poor old feet won’t work any more. Whereas the rest of modernity won’t use the feet nature has given us, because we are enslaved to luxury, we have forfeited (bodily) freedom, lost our footing along the way through. Succumbing to sloth, holed up in our solipsistic manors: letting down our genes, as woefully and as wilfully as this ‘wealthy hermit’ was letting down the line of Servilii Vatiae.22 Seneca’s day trip was homing all along on the con in his own Similitude. For the Letter refuses, precisely, to leave out ‘Knock-Knees’, and let him lurk, as if that was something to be proud of, or excuse enough for not trying to walk straight and tall to meet Rome on its own terms. This vat i a betrays his cognomen because his life is an exercise in vindicating the etymology of his name: the last flaw for a s e rv i l i u s to own must be to fit the bill, by degrading civility into decayed servility. That is why Seneca fetched us along for this unpleasant tonic of abuse, to this house of shame, for vilification. 20

21 22

Cf., e.g., an aside in Tacitus, Annals 15.34, Vatinius . . . corpore detorto, facetiis scurrilibus, a cruel Augustus time-and-motion ‘joke’ in Macrobius, Saturnalia 2.4.16, Vatinio . . . eleganter insultauit. contusus ille podagra uolebat tamen uideri discussisse iam uitium et mille passus ambulare se gloriabatur. cui Caesar ‘Non miror’, inquit, ‘dies aliquanto sunt longiores.’ ‘The Senecan amble’ is a ‘ridiculous notion’: Wilson (1987) 108. So it is. ‘Vatia is a virtual symbol of misapplied leisure. Descending as he does from a renowned and politically active Roman family, Vatia naturally suggests traditions’ (Motto and Clark (1972–3) 195). Our Vatia connotes if he does not denote the row of consular Servilii Vatiae Isaurici, raised up above the Quirites by the exceptionality of their triumphal agnomen, their permanent backwater contribution to world conquest (ibid. n. 9): the Sullan triumphator, and later censor, was ‘a slender and attractive man of medium colouring, . . . not one of the patrician Servilii, [but] related to everybody who mattered. Including, by marriage, Sulla’ (McCullough (1993) 176); father of Vatia the Caesarian consul, whose name marked for ever the advent of Roman autocracy | servility (Caesar, Civil War 3.1: 48 bce).


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b e t we e n a l a k e a n d a we t p l ac e Tripping through this musclebound text, we have all along been tripping over our own toes. Traipsing through dud Philosophy? Accept no substitute. Everything you have ever read, everything anyone has ever said, in recommending ‘disengagement’ from immersion in social being needs ‘dis-cussion’ and ‘ana-lysis’ – a disconcerting ‘shake-up’. All imagery, as such, may mislead. And it may lead us to see that imagery misleads. This may be what has been lurking between all the lines in all the letters to date. It has been lurking in this one. It might, so far as the Epistulae Morales are concerned, be the metaphor of all the Metaphors We Live By.23 They made it a high priority, and took enormous care, as we saw, to train us to inoculate our selves with Epicurean doctrine. This would prove the no-holds-barred scrupulousness of our combative crusade in confronting the challenges of existence, bold as Stoic novices can get it. Internalize the enemy – ‘We’ve seen the enemy; they’re us’ – for their stabs at truth show how thin is the carapace of Virtue: the more nearly the Epicurean resembles the Sage, the more clearly the temptation to relax vigilance must feature. The Siren in the Epicurean parody of Philosophical Disengagement sings through their dogma: Lqe biÛsav.24 By all means, let us find Truth in what this says, but ‘Lurk through Life’ may as easily poison vigilant self-vindication with the lure to live supinely as it can stiffen civilized recuperation into positive determination to live autarchy. In short, the watchword should operate as a model of reflexive selfmonitoring. In the play of live imagery (‘the son, not the photo’: see p. 47), there lurks space for lurking – and ‘lurking’ does unpack as ‘latent’ imagery, in which you can find a whole regimen both for living the informed life and, at the same time, for not really living at all. The Letter forces us to see life as a fine line, another ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ dilemma. No margin for error, a tightrope across the abyss, that ‘tight route barred by the strait betwen sea and lake’ (hinc mari, illinc lacu uelut angustum iter cluditur, 2). Seneca puts us through this katabasis, stuck between ‘the Acher-ontic lake on one side, and the storm-racked deep blue sea on the other’ (a mari et ab Acherusio lacu, 6), in order to lock us up for torture by metaphor, in ‘the shrinking cage of our unthinking lives’ (in angusto 23 24

The allusion is to the seminal work of Lakoff and Johnson (1980). Cf., e.g., Epp. 79.15, 17, (Epicurus) ignotus ipsis Athenis fuit, circa quas delituerat . . ., nulla uirtus latet; Horace, Epistles 1.17.10, nec uixit male qui natus moriensque fefellit; Ovid, Tristia 3.4.25, bene qui latuit, bene uixit. Plutarch found enough lurking to fuel an essay: De Vivendo Latenter.

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uiuebamus si quicquam esset cogitationibus clusum, 11).25 So think. Think your way out of this hole. Realize you have been dead . . . The very act of our reading Seneca rams us down our own throats. eve ry m o d co n Seneca takes no prisoners, and he takes no chances. He takes every precaution over his description of vat i a’s, out to engrave suspicion into our viewing. The surveyor’s report will be external inspection only: ‘just the façade – all I know’ (frontem . . . eius tantum noui, 6). ‘The views it displays even to people in transit’ promise us purely exterior rendering. Rather than locating hidden depths in this so-called ‘retreat’, we should be on our mettle. Weren’t we warned that there is no inside: ‘what you see is what you get’, plain to see (exposita)? Seneca found ‘nothing clearcut, no stability’, for transcription; just the one object of Knowledge (pistmh):26 this manor is nothing but a front, all surface and spin, a set-piece (exposita). We are shown on our way past that this dream home is a set-up, it is vulnerable to exposé, and offers itself up for exposure (exposita). All for show. Show-off. Shown up. This is a cover-up. It is a revelation. Teaching a transparent lesson about its subterfuge. The locus takes charge of the ekphrasis: this ‘plain prose’ comes already labelled ‘epideixis’, art text (exposita . . . ostendit). We knew from the start that this letter would be full of surprises. It is effete to resort to the litter (unless, of course, you are elderly and poorly. But you aren’t, are you?). Yet it is not effete to rattle along, and litter the resort of the effete. So long as the sedan does not sedate, we can launch into an unexpected tale of the unexpected, for once ready to praise somewhere real, only to recommend the last place on earth that can be real. Here, ‘between Cumae and the manor of Servilius Vatia’, are ‘two’ matching ‘grottoes’ (55.6). Mock caves, and such a ‘big deal’ that they work us up to match the ‘magnitude’ of their intended impact (magni operis). Our first impressions will last through the day. This redoubled ‘fabrication’ of underground overground is an irreducible symbol of the affluent society’s self-definition: this revision of the concept of ‘manufacture’ takes physical labour, craftsmanship, industry, and turns it into a Hollywood production 25 26

Motto and Clark (1972–3), esp. 195; (1979), esp. 213. Seneca need not say he is rereading Aeneid 6, that Avernus lies just ‘the other side’ of Lake Acheron. In geography as in myth. As a marker that Seneca’s Latin is constantly transposing theory-laden concepts from philosophical Greek into the register of Roman mundanity, the most pointed equivalences will be noted in parenthesis: cf. chapter 11, p. 149.


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set (magni operis . . . manu factae). Roman souls normally housed them selves behind portals that led into impressive interior reception areas, ready to be ‘opened wide for self-display without the least resistance’ (cuiuis laxo atrio pares). But at vat i a’s, there is neither door nor doorway, only ‘expansiveas-you-please fake caves’, which invite the inquisitive to speculate on the dark lair of dissolute ‘laxity’ lurking behind their front door, their front, and affront. Between these mock constructions of Hell on Earth, the pair of hellholes ‘bar or detain’ would-be guests (non recipit . . . tenet). If shutting out ‘the heat’ is in line with the function of this retreat as bolthole from the dangerous kitchen of the imperial court (solem non recipit), then ‘hugging it to death’ understudies the refugee’s attempt to prolong ‘the light’ of life to the bitter-sweet end (usque in occidentem tenet). Vatia had to think how to slide between friendship and hatred, then hatred + love. Between Asinius Gallus and Sejanus [the Tiberian prequel to Neronian Tigellinus, bane of Seneca’s existence]. The schizoid caverns of this solo soul act out his plight, caught on a tightrope of a lifeline along that treacherously shifting sand bar between the lake of Acheron and the deep blue azure. Seneca’s solution is to juggle two antithetical resources, to cover all eventualities. Cave + cave: + ? These dynamics cross over from architecture into topiary. Outside in the surrounds, we shun the light still, beneath another manmade counterfeit of nature, ‘the plantation of plane-trees’ (platanona). House + Grounds rhyme. Both tell us that the home that Vat built parades a fig-leaf of ‘Philosophy’; but the carapace just dramatizes a collusive dialogue between, up front, wilful resignation to captivity in the [Platonic] Cave of unlightened life, and, out front, effete skulking masquerading as sympathetic ambience for cool reasoning [à la Phaedrus].27 Sham(e). vat i a’s self-made course of life here invents something that could do us no good. To gain control, Vatia’s topiary has turned the world in on itself, taking inspiration from the freakish natural suspension of proper divisions between land and sea along the shoreline back to Cumae. A brook mediates between storm-ridden sea and lethal lake. This guest is doubly ‘welcome’, on both sides, and by it the heartland is not hugged but ‘riven’ (receptus . . . diuidit ∼ non recipit . . . tenet). This second, outdoor, miracle of technological mastery matches Greek platanon with Greek euripus, but, like those arch speluncae on the way in, this ‘quasi-maelstrom’ is ersatz simulation (euripi modo). Rushing water-race 27

Cf. Schönegg (1999) 74–6 on Epp. 57.

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and evergreen canopy both image a psychic economy that has solved to its own satisfaction the problem of mortal entropy by installing a selfregulating mechanism of continual self-replenishment. This self-sufficient brook derives its (n)ever-changing flow from siphoned sea + infernal loch. This is practical thinking, with unfailing ‘philosophical’ aura. For the role of inexhaustible fish farm casts this animated stream as a graphic model of ‘self sufficiency’, the ideal of autarchic autarkeia (sufficiens). Here the stocks never decline or run down. Magic; but also Strategy. When the coast is clear, there are plenty of fish in the sea, but no storms arrive at the brook. In the fluctuating politics of Tiberius’ [and now Nero’s] Rome, when the reigning Caesar [and now the Caesar’s former teacher, minister, and guru, Seneca] had taken off from Rome into self-imposed permanent ‘exile’, that outlasted [and now outrides] life, this would make [and now makes] convincing self governance. Go easy on the Golden Goose in the good times; in the bad, there will be eggs a-plenty. In Seneca’s Latin, however, the piscatorial image taps into an extensive metaphoric reservoir. Campanian resorts were full of ‘fish ponds’ in that piscinae included commercial fish farms and exotic toys on millionnaire ranches, but the same word was also used of tanks and vats in general, and in colloquial idiom and jeer stretched to cover swimming pools, containers for human fish, as in Seneca’s rant at s c i p i o’s: ‘if . . . stone from Thasos, once upon a time a rare showpiece in any temple, hasn’t run around our pools’ (nisi Thasius lapis, quondam rarum in aliquo spectaculum templo, piscinas nostras circumdedit, Epp. 86.6). Thus, ‘she rhapsodized the pools of her very own town of Baiae’ was a sneer from a stockpile (Baiarum suarum piscinas extollebat, Tacitus, Annals 13.21). And when Varro’s self-satirizing final book on contemporary post-agricultural hyperventilation winds up spouting on freshwater ponds (affordable-profitable-plebeian-inland-rational) versus saline ponds (showy-high-maintenance-snobbish-maritime-inane), he is talking cultural attitude, not just marketing (piscinarum genera, Res rusticae 3.17.2–9): Axius and Varro swap tales of addled Hortensius, who built costly ponds at Bauli but bought at Puteoli for the table, feeding rather than feeding on the pet fish he doted on; who kept lots of ‘fishermen’ to keep stocking up minnows so the mullet would never go hungry; who bought salt fish to throw in when stormy weather prevented the landing of a live catch; who fussed more over sick mullet than suffering servant. For the finale, Hortensius is made to tell tales on the Lucullus brothers: Marcus’ pools dispensed with tidal basins, so his aquarium stagnated; whereas the estimable piscinarius Lucius ‘tunnelled through a mountain near Naples to let seawater flow into his ponds so they would automatically run


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back and forth . . . and his fish friends would get refreshing coolant. Neptune got nothing on him, in the fishery department.’ Axius himself rubs it in, with bludgeoning detail: ‘When doing construction work on his Baiae property, Lucius Lucullus told the architect to spend as if it was his money to spend, with one proviso: he must sink a cavernous duct from ponds to sea, with a pier for partition, so the tide could enter and return back to the sea twice per day, from the rising of the moon till the next new moon – and chill out the ponds.’ Nos haec. The End. So much for this cursory round-up of ‘cropping at the villa’. (de pastione uillatica, 3.17.10)

Romans always had more than fish to fry in their caustic ranting on piscinae. With the dilation of, and on, his ponds, vat i a ’s is all over. No expense has been spared to buy topological mastery. In Seneca’s version the cornucopia is metallized – guilt-edged: Either: the sea is an open door, and exertions can ease down (patet . . . parcitur). Or: the nets take a break, and ‘stocks are ready to hand’ (dedit ferias, manus ad parata porrigitur).

Paradox mocks ‘the storm’, which wreaks no damage, only ‘granting the fishermen a day off work’ (tempestas piscatoribus dedit ferias). No one has to work any more. Manual labour, to save the day, takes the form of extending a palm to ‘take the fast food ready to hand’ (manus ad parata porrigitur . . . : t proke©mena). If imperial opulence set labourers to work digging skyscraper caves, it also turned self-fish self-ish Sybarites with the planet’s resources in the palm of their hand into a novel paradigm of hard graft. A revolutionary parody of labour, beside the seaside, all at sea. All . . . All those plosive initial p’s (-atet -arcitur . . . -iscatoribus . . . -arata -orrigitur)! The prose is winding up to unveil vat i a’s ‘principal asset’ (commodissimum). To stay here is to get the best of all worlds, since ‘Hedonism lives through the wall’ (= Baiae).28 A slick instant portrait of this local way of living has it all under wraps: the ‘principal asset’ turns out to be the ‘absence of liabilities’ (commodissimum . . . incommodis . . . caret), and ‘enjoying [its] pleasures’ must mean keeping it at arm’s length (uoluptatibus fruitur). No taking rough with smooth here. For Seneca is winding up all this rapture.29 28 29

Boesch (1920) went, saw, and knew this ‘wall’ has to be the crest of hillocks (Hohenzug) between villa and Baiae. Baiae as Rome’s erotic hunting-ground: Green (1996) 238–40. Rist (1972) 100–26, ‘Pleasure’, shows that Epicurean ‘absence of pain’ is to be supplemented by positive pleasures, in their place. But this is a gift to sectarian rivals (cf. Epp. 59.1–4: see pp. 130, 151). Rist (1969) 37–53, ‘Problems of pleasure and pain’, esp. 52–3, shows that Stoic apathy militated against unnatural pleasure, that secondary parasite on activity, not against rightly apprehended pleasure.

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As we noticed, he told us to find sage ‘knowledge’ here; now he tells us to find this ‘knowledge’ here and now (noui ∼ noui, 6–7). The locus in Campania was a ‘front’ and a ‘performance’; the locus in Letter 55 is its ‘epideictic encomium’ (frontem . . . eius, exposita . . . ostendit > has laudes eius). Mastery of rhetorical surface is Seneca’s forte; he can do complimentary writing, but philosophical penetration of fallacy is his purpose; he can do understanding compliments, too, and hold them up to the light where we have a fighting chance of resisting them. We were warned to shake it up, direct a critical gaze at this hollow Estate Agent’s jive, so now there is a rap for any of us who did not see through the hypocritical hype. The expert ekphrasis was, in deed, couched as a windup for the reader. If Uncle vat i a ’s came across as a customized ‘Great Gatsby’ of an ‘American Dream’ of a ro m a n s i o n, a jazzed-up variant on the standardized set of ‘features’ for the avant garde arriviste, the effect was wholly intentional. For this Senecan prose was a Senecan pose, a take-off, a parable in parody. And he wants us to congratulate him, too, on having drawn us along the sand bar of his caricature until we had nowhere to hide from facing its lesson in our superficiality, our vulnerability to cultural stereotyping. The tableau of Fabulous Calm did sap the moral fibre of this house of seduction, and now there is no firm foundation to stand on. To level out the landscape until there is a firm way to proceed, we need a storm. It was for this that we hitched a ride here beside the Phlegraean fields to dislodge that phlegm, and lighten the spirit. To wave vat i a ’s ‘hello– goodbye’ (salutem . . . uale) with just a touch on the brakes, ‘as you know’, we needed buffeting waves to break on the shore, because we need repeated shaking to be sure of our footing (ut scis, 2). Now we have been drawn to Seneca’s suave scenography, where sun is baffled and sea is bamboozled. Behind this screen, ‘through the wall’, neither Fire nor Flood Alert disturbs this vacation from living. Nature is disarmed by simulation, by supplement, by design. Everything is taken care of, in this well-stocked praise in prose. The paradisal effect distinguishes any brochure for The Lotophage. One owner: available, vacant possession. In the next display collection of Roman epistolography, the committed but civilized Roman success-story Pliny will make sure to headline his own take on the snares lurking in the trappings of Roman success. I would even suppose that he means to reprise the Senecan manners on show in Seneca’s manors. For us to appreciate, as metatextual compliment, the compliment of shaking up Senecan parody in order to reinvent his critical gesture (Epp. 1.3):


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c . p l i n i v s c a n i n i o rv f o s vo s . Quid agit Comum, tuae meaeque deliciae? quid suburbanum 1 amoenissimum, quid illa porticus uerna semper, quid platanon opacissimus, quid euripus uiridis et gemmeus, quid subiectus et seruiens lacus, quid illa mollis et tamen solida gestatio, quid balineum illud quod plurimus sol implet et circumit, quid triclinia illa popularia illa paucorum, quid cubicula diurna nocturna? Possident te et per uices partiuntur? an, ut solebas, intentione rei familiaris obeundae crebris 2 excursionibus auocaris? si possident, felix beatusque es; si minus, ‘unus ex multis’. quin tu (tempus enim) humiles et sordidas curas aliis mandas, 3 et ipse te in alto isto pinguique secessu studiis adseris? hoc sit negotium tuum hoc otium; hic labor, haec quies; in his uigilia, in his etiam somnus reponatur. effinge aliquid et excude, quod sit perpetuo tuum. nam 4 reliqua rerum tuarum post te alium atque alium dominum sortientur, hoc numquam tuum desinet esse si semel coeperit. scio quem animum, quod horter ingenium; tu modo enitere 5 ut tibi ipse sis tanti, quanti uideberis aliis si tibi fueris. uale. p l i n y to f r i e n d c a n i n i u s ru f u s : g re e t i n g s How is Como, your/my delight? How’s the loveliest out-of-town place 1 of them all, how’s that colonnade in eternal spring, how’s the plane-copse, shadiest around, how’s the canal verdant and jewelled, how’s the lake in its sway below and a slave to it, how’s that soft, and yet firm, promenade, how’s that bath-house that all the sunshine fills and circles round, how’s those dining-rooms for (a) one and all, (b) reserved for just a few of the few, how’s the bedrooms for (a) siesta, (b) nights . . .? Are you in their hands? Do they take turns to share you? Or, as per your habit, does concentrating on hands-on domestic 2 business mean that one trip after another call you away? If they have you fast, you are lucky and blessed; if not, ‘join the crowd’. Why don’t you assert yourself (it’s time), and delegate those lowly 3 and mucky cares to other people, and see to it yourself – self-liberation for your studies in that deep and fat retreat of yours? Let this be work for you and play; this your effort and your rest; may being awake and a sleep too find their given place in these studies.

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Shape and hammer something – something to belong to you for ever 4 and aye. Because what’s left of your other things after you will be allotted to one owner after another, and it will never leave off being yours, when once it has got going. I know the mind, the talent I am giving a push; you just press your 5 way to be worth as much as others will rate you, if you rate yourself first. ‘Here is a suburban paragraph of (joy in) infectiously ebullient rhetoric and seigneurial copia (1: nine posh properties in posh phrases). The syntax owns up that this home truly owns the owner; with automatic-pilot “poetic” matching of noun to epithet to feature to psychic profile. His idea of heaven is to pour all he has into the place, but the place is the perfect setting to sample in anticipation the fulsome regularity, the platitudinous poise, the perspicuous simplicity of untroubled transmission through “one owner after another”. Ten-a-penny authors this way, Pliny gently prods friend Caninius – and, after this pen-portrait, we know too “what mind, what talent” we are handling here (4). Here is Pliny’s programme for the correct alignment of “effort/peace”, “being awake/a sleep” recommended for an artist in the making, whether graphic or glyphic (3). ‘The “you” here gets to play the Pliny that he would love to be – if he could forget the difference between work and play (3), delegate the “lowering and mucky cares” of engaged life, throw himself into the “sit-down” life of full-time study, and take a short-cut to early retirement, before completing all his obligations to the socio-politically reponsible world. It would ruin his lean epistolary style, such “self-liberation in deep and fat withdrawal” (3); yet it would optimize the chances of “hammering and shaping something to belong to the author for ever and a day” (4). Something – something like the nine-or-ten-book classic before you, the Letters. Pliny’s Letters.’30 You see? In the maestro’s hands, ‘the most valuable asset’ of the Senecan ekphrasis is that it narrates, where(as) Pliny orates. At vat i a ’s, the syntax is prettily dovetailed into an itinerary through the pleasure palace. Those ‘grottoes’ twinned with that ‘plane grove’ as the topicalizing first words in their successive sentences, and the ‘Nominative + Passive Verb’ construction turned the interior into exterior by flipping the rival attraction inside-out, into ‘Accusative + Active Verb’ lay-out (speluncae sunt duae . . . manu factae ∼ platanona medius riuus . . . diuidit). The caves 30

Henderson (2002a) 105–7.


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were the doorposts, the brook was the centrepiece: they set out defences against external disruption (atrium ∼ sol); it set up dynamics for controlled internal disruption (riuus ∼ euripus). To spell this out, letter by letter through this Letter: (1) One sported elaborately fashioned rhetorical hendiadys, internally divided into polar antithesis, so as to double the well-formed parallel clauses of decisive intervention; and in the process achieving a balanced design of clearcut imperiousness: non recipit ∼ usque . . . tenet. Which acts out triumphant finality, in a telos of strong negative dismissal that prepares the ground for the culminating clausula of permanent self-possession. (2) The other would conjoin polar opposites into a mediated resolution of polar oppposites (medius . . . et . . . et . . . receptus), in order to insert a strong editorial line through the thought-locus (/ platanona . . . diuidit /). And this at once opened the stylistic sluicegates, as the sentence debouches in choppy uariatio, compactly forcing into synergy a refreshingly untidy gerundival phrase, unreal condition, and emphatically closural Nominative Participle to make an eternally Tense Present (alendis piscibus – etiam si . . . – sufficiens /). This water-splash concept at once delivers Fish for Thought, in the form of the ‘adynaton’ conceit of a ‘well-that-never-runs-dry’. We emerge with new angling on the churning business of life, with its constantly draining hand-to-mouth demands: Seneca undertakes to supply ‘Sufficiency’, proof against weather, flux, participation. But here, I fear, we have only canned Philosophy. Piped Self-Regulation. Automated ‘Enough’ (sufficiens). At this cue, our refined Nirvana-in-California-Campania relaxes into soothing euphony and rhyming lullaby. For ‘those plosive initial p’s’ babble between humming m’s, and, from a sparing storm-free phraselet, they stretch out into the fresh vallium of shapely and sign-posted telos, defined by isomorph + isometry: cum mare ∼ cum manus, cum . . . patet ∼ cum . . . dedit + parcitur / ∼ porrigitur /. If that was a ‘but’ (sed illi . . .), the following ‘however’ is an ‘if’ (hoc tamen . . .). For the promise to cap the story so far with the superlative which will beggar our stream of Phaeacian impossibilities in fact shatters the spell (hoc est commodissimum . . . quod . . .). Instead of accommodating readers within the mimesis, the shoot gestures at our viewing, to point out the point of channelling us into the vista. The hyperbole in the last image, of ‘fishalready-on-the-dish’ (ad parata, as if already part of the apparatus), pushed the rhetoric into self-elevating supremacy, once the uilla was exposed as the [name of this] set-piece of ‘advantageous’ invention (commodissimum).

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(Shake that kaleidoscope. NOW.) The climactic Endgame in the sequence needs shoring up against bathos, since it consists in just those four matt words: Baias trans parietem habet (‘Baiae through the wall, got it?’). The diminuendo is hardly recovered by the amplification which recoups the shape of the previous rhetorical structures of the epideixis, in order to assert its status as summary summation of the tableau. For ‘incommodis illarum caret, uoluptatibus fruitur’ rectifies the deviant structure of ‘hoc tamen est commodissimum in uilla, quod Baias trans parietem habet’, which loses the shape of the preceding twinset parallelism: patet, parcitur ∼ dedit . . . porrigitur.

After the ‘lapse’ of: [est —] . . . habet, this straightens out, via inversion, as: ‘caret . . . fruitur |’. And in this same move, that sequential trick of proceeding from ground-clearing negation to open-ended positivity is trotted out as we pass on, the same as when we rode in: caret . . ., fruitur | ∼ non recipit . . ., tenet | . . . The deformity in this last, ‘most valuable asset’ of the verbal mansion is at once marked as The Moment of Truth [in the semiotic chora]. Mention of the proper name places the [unnamed] villa site in the image repertoire of Roman culture. And, here and now, b a i a e ruptures the reverie. This was the point of withholding the [name] ‘between Cumae and vat i a ’s’. Because this Erewhon is ‘through the wall’ from Baiae, that is, between b a i a e and [Nutopia]. This spot instantiates the cosmopolitan creed of Epicurean Pleasure, ‘as you know’, and encomium is sweet-talking it into a paradoxical shrine to philosophical Dogma. Thus, ‘Pleasure’ at vat i a’s is canonized as catastematic ‘Absence of Pain’ (incommodis . . . caret), securely walled-off from vulgar hedonism, so that Holy ‘%tarax©a’ may enjoy a traffic-calmed proximity to the hurly-burly of the seaside resort. The simultaneous mix of retreat from officious obligations and palace terrors [in imperial Rome: see p. 81] with retreat from the false haven of hedonistic retreat itself sums up the most rose-tinted eulogy of Epicurean Knowledge that Seneca can manage to trumpet. But by now saccharine sarcasm has surely taken a firm grip of the litoral languagescape: the ‘most valuable asset’ of this Mansion is, apparently, that it is close, too close, all too close, far too close, to Baiae: the Harbour of Beast Intentions . . .


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The thought that ‘at least vat i a ’s isn’t actually IN Sin City’ ought to be cold comfort in a Property Profile. And the stark conclusion is just asking to be read as blowing the whistle on this up-market panegyric: for, in Seneca, ‘enjoying the pleasures’ (uoluptatibus fruitur) can only sound like an invitation to end up frankly ‘wallowing in desire’. High-minded retreat will then have lapsed into lurking under cover, lapsed into an open ‘swoon of carnality’. Whatever other ‘knowledge’ we may bring to this letter (to this Pleasure Dome), we shall not miss the rebuke in ‘this litany of its plusses’ (has laudes eius). Seneca has a surmise to add. Not that it is verifiable on a visit, but vat i a ’s is no temporary relief during crises when Rome gets too hot: ‘believe it’s a year-round thing’, this mansion for all seasons. All or nothing, this design for life. Moral Philosophy is, exactly, a holistic commitment, a ‘creed’ (credo). At the same time, Seneca believes that ‘belief ’ is the most that the Epicurean devotee can command. And, in context, he even breathes more sarcasm here: ‘believe this is The Answer to Everything (if you can)’. His reasoning follows, one last selling point for this real estate, as he takes us back down to the level of encomiastic image-mongering (7). In concrete terms, the masonry faces ‘west’, goes out and gets ‘the West Wind’, grabs ‘Spring before it even starts’: the villa heads for ‘Fauonius’.31 Seneca’s flicker of impressionistic description, however, has the Villa Vatia ‘go out to face the foe’, like some brave [would-be Stoic] soul, and ‘await the onset of the quarry’, with a hunter’s nerves of steel, or weekend huntsman’s [spoiled Epicurean] ‘let-it-come-to-me’ inertia (occurrit . . . excipit).32 And in satirical terms, this exclusive Beach House has a monopoly on Spring, so ‘cuts out’ Baiae.33 31

32

33

Fauonius was etymologized from foueo, ‘foster, help conceive, mollycoddle . . .’ (Pliny, Natural History 16.93, Maltby (1991) 226. ‘The approach of Favonius’ was a formula lodged in the heart of the Roman farming year: e.g. Cato, De agri cultura 50.1, cf. Columella 11.2.6, Pliny, Natural History 19.60, 105, 130, 153, 156, 163, 166, 173 in Henderson (2004). Favourable aspects for growing were ‘Favonius-facing’, e.g. Pliny, Natural History 15.21, spectare oliueta in Fauonium, etc.). For occurrere, ‘grasp the nettle’: Kenney (1979), on Tacitus, Annals 13.5, uenienti matri . . . occurrere. For excipere, ‘lie in wait for the drive of prey’, as a metaphor latent in a villa’s orientation to ‘catch’ the wind: Nisbet and Hubbard (1978) 250, on Horace, Odes 2.15.16, (porticus) excipiebat Arcton. Baiae was etymologized as Greek for ‘Nurses’ (¡ ba©a, Strabo, Chrestomathiae 5.39) or as archaic Latin for ‘Port’ (a baiolandis mercibus, Isidore, Origines 14.8.40), and mythologized as the foundation commemorating the burial of Baios from Odysseus’ crew, or of Boia, nurse of a mate of Aeneas (Maltby (1991) 73).

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At any rate, the upshot – the last word – is ‘say no to Baiae’ (neget Bais). If that sounds like a ‘wise choice’ to conclude the passage (and, I believe, it does), then consider, before it is too late in the year, that a preemptive strike on anything that Baiae wants is very likely to topicalize (not proaAresiv but) ‘folly’. There lurks in Seneca’s conclusion, from any point of view, at least a grain of derisive satire: ‘He was no fool, evidently, to pick this location, that Vatia, to take his rest, already a lazy, old man’s affair.’ For uidetur undermines non stulte: if not utter sarcasm, then at least an element of reservation has to be the effect. Under pressure (given a good critical shaking), the gesture of putative approbation collapses easily into back-handed compliment veering into insult: Vatia was not a fool to earth his own shortcomings to this location; he was only a fool to have these shortcomings, the shortcomings that prove folly. The manor did not, after all, take any active, virile, measures to secure itself any advantages, for it was exactly tailored to house ‘Sloth’s lazy, senile, inactivity’. In short, vat i a ’s is a locus that dramatizes ‘foolish choice’ of habitat. The narration of the topos should long since have given us a good shaking out of our folly, our sloth, our foolish reading habits, our philosophical mésalliance. Balmy or barmy – which is it to be? Were all the puffs for this vanity in vain? The more palpable the narcotic techniques of Seneca’s rhetoric of seduction, the more exasperating its psychagogic power should have proved? Such, at least, is our final warning. ‘But –’, Seneca breaks in, to dispel any lingering, lurking, misapprehensions that may have survived the rattling Seneca has given us. ‘But location is not much of a positive factor for gaining calm. It is the mind that has to square everything to itself.’ So the proof of the pudding is in the eating. We have just read the locus: did the rhetoric vouchsafe us to Epicurean h(e)aven, and vice versa? Or did the passage turn us purple? Were we putty in Seneca’s parodic hands? Or did we direct our own mind’s eye at his ‘video’ and take our own critical distance? The last thing Seneca is planning is to leave us up his stream without a paddle. He goes out of his way to spell out exactly what he has been engaged in: the genre has been [The Roman Letter of] ‘Recommendation’ (commendatio: 8). But he had already made it quite clear. Active reading habits must do their own dirty work, of the mind (animus, dinoia). It is up to us to


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think Seneca’s sponsorship deal through ‘for ourselves’. ‘Directing [our] eyes on vat i a’s manor’ has taken us on a sight-seeing tour round ‘caves’ to look at ‘wind ’ – as he warned, ‘nothing clearcut, no stability’ here, for transcription. (So much for ekphrastic nrgeia, set-piece deictic clarity.) Meantime, it is not the slightest impediment that we Luciliuses are not setting foot ‘in Campania’ (8). ‘The locus’, we are assured, ‘is not much of a positive factor’. So vat i a ’s may after all be dismissed as just one, particularized, site among an infinity, where our worldly witness would claim to have snapped [unlocalizable] human folly (uidi . . . uidi). Indeed, our epistolary guide wishes to leave us in no doubt that mimetic expatiation is bound to uncritical folly. For ‘being (present) there’ is only a way to lose ‘your own thoughts’ (cogitationes tuas, 8). More precisely, it is no way to ‘enjoy the greatest pleasure there is’ (uoluptate quae maxima est, fruimur, 9). Communing with the one that knows you best, the one you know the best, just has to be the way to escape living in ‘the shrinking cage of our unthinking lives’ (in angusto uiuebamus si quicquam esset cogitationibus clusum, 11).34 ‘But –’ . . . Seneca, notice, sponsors epistolarity. He commends correspondence to us with every word he writes. So we must beware of this: do we approve his epistoliterarity? That is the question I have all through been (re)commending to you. At home, out riding with Seneca. (At s e n e c a ’s ?) d i s re g a rd t h i s n ot i c e At a meta-critical level, this hellish katabasis of a visit through The Edge has crushed us with its demonstration that it is worth going out of our way to stigmatize any risk of buying into sloth masked as care of the self. To capitalize on the negative caution, what is needed is a positive recommendation. So, away from the blurry trauma of staring eyes out of Cumae: ‘Not a chance of certainty, no sure guide, there’ (de ipsa uilla nihil tibi possum certi scribere, 6). We’re off on a smoother ride, on a pilgrim’s excursion to Liternum, to co r n e l i u s s c i p i o, and Epp. 86. There, chapters 9–12 will put us in a better position to sort out the ‘hope-it-chokes-you’ amenities of vat i a’s claustrophobic cupboard of 34

Cf. Cancik (1967) 46–56, esp. 52. Saylor (2002) reads Epp. 55 for its disquisition on the topic of ‘friendship and how action and inaction of mind affect friendship’, seeing sections 9–11 as ‘the last and most important part of the letter’ (102). This certainly glues the excursion to its epistolary frame.

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slime + gunk. Hit by the contrast with the firm lines of s c i p i o’s healthfarm, and its latest product – sour sense from Seneca: Henderson explains: ‘This change may become especially important in the period between middle age and old age, which is the time when so many people are considering what to do in their retirement – whether to work or play, whether to stay at home or travel.’35 35

Motto and Clark (1972–3) 197 n. 14, citing Carl G. Jung et al., Man and His Symbols, ed. J. L. Henderson, New York, 1968, p. 151. Here to stay, Forever Jung. One hell of a cliché.

chapter nine

The world of the bath-house: s c i p i o ’s Scipio in Letter 86 with: Horace’s common scents The visit to s c i p i o’s is an inside job. Narrative breaks through the epistolary manner, to take us inside the chosen ‘historical exemplum’ for a whole rounded composition. In the next Letter, ‘Cato’ will shrink back into the usual parameters, as a momentary concretization of the argument (87.9– 10).1 Whereas we were safely guided past the exterior of vat i a’s Siren seduction, to shake us from comatose lethargy, we begin here, as we mean to go on, right there: In ipsa Scipionis Africani uilla Inside the actual manor of the Scipio dubbed Conqueror of Africa.

This is a place to be still, to lie there and think, to let this shrine infuse, implant, its spiritual message into our own inwards, into us (iacens). Our whereabouts? We are now in the grave; that is all the location we get and all we need: the ambience permeates this writing with holy miasma, as religious atmosphere pens today’s unorthodox praeparatio mortis (adoratis manibus eius et ara). Let us pray – for once the Letters take a positive turn, trusting to the legacy of (Roman Republican) Tradition for solid bedrock. For all that Seneca will shoot off shafts of morally energizing satire at the decadence of (Roman Imperial) Modernism. This is no place for the mannered selfironization of our visit to s e n e c a’s gardening, not the moment to run into superannuated staff and wallow in senile sentimentality. To be sure, we will find a comparability between the contemporary owner of s c i p i o’s and the recent owner of vat i a’s; but the original occupants haunt both loca and loci, and there is only disjunction between them, to the glory of s c i p i o, and the detriment of vat i a.

1

See Mayer (1991) 159–60.

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You could surely write a novel out of the materials compacted in Epp. 86. Lindsey Davis has: see Appendix 2.2 s c i p i o’s name already cues us to his fame, for a f r i c a n v s is a ‘triumphal’ title that signals the special place in Roman memory of the defeat of Hannibal’s Carthage. To apostrophize, te nunc alloquor, Africane, cuius mortui quoque nomen splendori ac decori est ciuitati . . . (Ad Herennium 4.22, ‘You are my vocative, Africanus – dead, but still your name brings lustre and grace to the state’). So this villa has an immediate connection to the vast edifice of Roman History, and all of Seneca’s Roman readers were in a position to plug into this. Before we are given any bearings on-site, Seneca presents his own version of the heroic saga (tanti uiri). He alerts us from the start to the creative intervention he is making to the received legend, as he puts his own response into mini-drama form. Thus he ‘suspects’ this is Scipio’s ‘tomb’ – there is an ‘altar’, where he just ‘paid his respects to the shade’. But his concern is to underline his own investment in this business of beatification, to the point of heretical apostasy from the canonical gospel: ‘I suspect . . . I am convinced myself . . . Not because he led great armies: . . . but . . .; by my judgement a wonder more when . . . than when . . .’ (suspicor . . . persuadeo mihi, non quia . . ., sed . . .; magis . . . admirabilem iudico, cum . . . quam cum . . .). Clearly the narrator pitches into a contested story, and wants us to feel the heat. The way he sees it, transfixed, is that, when Scipio quits Rome for the world at large, he has grown too big for Rome (exeo, si plus . . . creui, 2).3 The letter must go out too and grow into the part: expect exorbitance – crushed in a microwave. scipio and whose army? Two thoughts run together where we cannot miss either, as Seneca writes into his own updated idiom the primitive, very likely archaizing, apparatus of sainthood: thus raiding pirates close on determined defenders at the Liternum villa, but soften on meeting the great Scipio, in exactly the tale type we would posit (Valerius Maximus 2.10.2):

2 3

‘At least one reader seems to have spotted my joke about the Annaei’ (personal communication from the author). The verb promises epic inflation to Scipionic proportions (Ennius-style), cf. Statius, Siluae 1.5.28, crescit.

Scipio in Letter 86 (and Horace)

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postes ianuae tamquam aliquam religiosissimam aram4 sanctumque templum uenerati cupidine Scipionis dextram apprehenderunt ac diu osculati positis ante uestibulum donis, quae deorum immortalium numini consecrari solent, laeti quod Scipionem contigissent, ad naues reuerterunt. Honouring the door posts like some sainted temple-altar, eagerly grabbed Scipio’s hand, they gave it kiss after lingering kiss, setting the offerings usually consecrated to the godhead of the immortal deities before the hall. Overjoyed to have touched Scipio, they returned to their ships.

Whatever the shrine may have sold the pilgrim by way of customized ‘altar’, to concretize such yarns, we understand that the ultimate accolade is to escape the treadmill of mortality, when the exceptional ‘spirit’ makes it back to The Source, the Aether. But, second, the banal qualifications for sublimation are flatly scotched, and an acceptable reformulation espoused. Scipio is not a saint qua ‘Africanus’, because we have known, from the beginning of history (Herodotus’ Cambyses: Histories 3.25),5 that success in epic campaigns need not prove sanity, let alone spiritual excellence. Not that Seneca could openly identify with his test case from the zenith of the Republic, but ‘quitting on Rome’ could only take precedence over ‘defending Rome’ if imperial victory had become so passé that the cult of renunciation outranked that of conquest. ‘Leaving Rome’ sounds like treason (relinquit patriam), but paradoxography says otherwise: our saviour’s finest hour was when he ‘turned his back on home’, not when they were ‘backs to the wall’ (defendit). ‘Wonder’ cues us to get minds around the puzzle (admirabilem . . . admirer). On both counts Seneca’s tampering with Tradition is loudly trumpeted. The eschatology business, of tomb, shade, hero, psyche, and their whereabouts, will soon tie in with the Big Moment of Scipio’s Walk-Out. That mocking hit at Herodotus’ Cambyses tilts us toward historiography, and when Seneca slips crisply into his own animation of the legend of Scipio’s Farewell to Cruel Rome, this must be the direction in which our thoughts are led.6 The cameo energetically matches talking exemplum to moralist’s explication (1–2 ∼ 3): 4 5

6

This nails Bodel’s conjecture ((1997) 5, n. 2) of arca for ara, to pick out the Cornelii clan custom of putting their dead in ‘a box’. At about the time when Seneca wrote this, Lucan was writing Caesar up the Nile, in the tracks of mad Cambyses (10.320; and others’). For ‘Episodei Erodotei nell’opera Senecana’: Setaioli (1988) 485–503, esp. 490–500 on, for example, Cambyses in De ira 3.20–1; Castagna (1991). A dullard retelling: Scullard (1970), 210–24; more of a swashbuckling condottiere in Morretta (1937) 295–308, ‘Literno: tramonto d’una gloria’. For exonerare ciuitatem, cf., e.g., Livy 2.2.7; Scarpat (1975) 66 on Epp. 3.4.

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animum . . . eius . . . non quia magnos exercitus ∼ hanc magnitudinem animi, non quia magnos exercitus duxit ∼ Hannibalis; admirabilem iudico ∼ admirer; reliquit patriam ∼ in exilium uoluntarium secessit et ciuitatem exonerauit . . . se . . . recepit; aut Scipio Romae esse debebat aut Roma in libertate . . . causa . . . libertatis ∼ aut libertas Scipioni aut Scipio libertati faceret iniuriam; aequum . . . ius ∼ faceret iniuriam; Nihil . . . uolo derogare legibus ∼ locum dedit legibus; uolo ∼ uoluntarium; inter omnes ciues ∼ ciuitatem; derogare ∼ imputaturus; ius sit ∼ fas erat; exeo ∼ in exilium . . . secessit, . . . suum exilium; plus quam ∼ tam . . . quam; creui ∼ eo perducta res erat ut . . .

In short: The enthusiastic impersonation announces itself a bid for rhetorical glory: ero . . . argumentum. ∼ The ebullient improvisation works the topos of Scipio’s relocation into a declamatory set-piece: locum dedit.7

And this double volley of wonder-struck flamboyance gets us back to where we came in, installing Scipio ‘inside his actual manor’ at Liternum. We were found a way to shadow Africanus’ journey to his villa after all, and replay for ourselves Seneca’s rehearsal on the page of Scipio’s final expedition, from his Rome to his tomb. Feel how Seneca too recaps his own valediction to [Nero’s] cosmopolis, another one-way campaign to Campania. t h e t r i a l s o f s c i p i o : h i s to ry ‘Not because he led great armies . . . when either Scipio had to be in Rome, or else Rome had to be free’. Once we have taken our concentrated dose of admiring ekphrasis inside this villa, we will resume with ‘great joy’ at the contemplation ‘of Scipio . . . inside this cranny . . . to whom Rome has to owe . . .’ (1 ∼ 4–5: in ipsa Scipionis . . . uilla . . . non quia magnos exercitus . . . Scipio Romae esse debebat aut Roma in libertate ∼ magna . . . uoluptas . . . Scipionis . . . in hoc angulo . . . cui Roma debet . . .). Now this 7

As we shall see (p. 103), locum dedit legibus even reads as locum dedit Legibus – the promise that s e n e c a’s s c i p i o ‘affords a site for refashioning the self-immortalization through hero-worship in Cicero’s Laws’.


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frame for description of Scipio’s manor accounts for half of the appearances of Roma in all the Letters (3 of 6: see p. 159). Scipio’s manes borrow fresh lungs from a new acolyte to give Rome another burst of reproach, and keep the legend alive. Now the Man’s manner has rattled the rafters of his manor, the effect is to bind, more than owner to villa, true Roman to false City. The best of Rome had always, it could seem, taken themselves away on principle, and Seneca now follows suit. ‘All citizens’ must by rights have grown up themselves with all this baggage for their cultural heritage and habitus. Livy takes pains to impress this into us as the main objective of his own version. The Fall of Africanus had been coming from way back when. For example, to seize his chance to transport the war from Italy to Africa, over obstructionist oratory from Fabius Maximus, Scipio had had to produce winsome ‘modesty . . . and hold his tongue . . . to elude envy’ (28.44.18, modestia . . . et temperando linguae . . ., inuidiae).8 Years after his triumph over Hannibal, the chickens came home to roast the senior senator, when two tribunes impeached him (38.50.6–57.8):9 Some denounced not the tribunes of the people, but the whole state (ciuitatem), for putting up with this. The greatest cities in the world were found thankless toward their leaders at virtually the same moment – Rome the more thankless given that a conquered Carthage had expelled a conquered Hannibal into exile, but the conqueror Rome was expelling the conqueror Africanus. Others maintained that no single citizen ought to be so eminent as to be beyond impeachment by the laws (debere . . . legibus). Nothing so levels up freedom as the possibility that anyone with the most power has the chance of having to answer a case (aequandae libertatis).

Scipio faced down the envy with one last show of bravura, touring the temples on the anniversary of his final victory over Carthage, before withdrawing to Liternum, seeing envy and struggle with tribunes ahead. His spirit was too great (maior animus) to submit to prosecution. . . . He spent life at Liternum without missing the City; when he died, soon after, they say he ordered himself buried at that actual place, and a tomb built there, so his funeral would not be in the fatherland that had been thankless toward him (ne funus sibi in ingrata patria fieret). . . . Africanus’ enemies’ spirits grew through his death, and they yapped at his greatness into the grave (creuere . . . animi . . . magnitudinem eius). 8 9

Tedeschi (1998) 131–2. The best revisionary account of Livy’s ‘The Trials of the Scipios’: Jaeger (1997) 132–76; cf. Luce (1977) 92–104; Walsh (1961) 93–100; and Bodel (1997) esp. 6, n. 6. On ‘the Scipionic legend’: Walbank (1967).

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. . . Speeches from this feud [like others, both Scipio’s10 and his enemies’] were preserved. . . . A profusion of versions pull in different directions, in the case of Scipio’s departure – especially his capital impeachment, his death, his funeral, his tomb. So much so, I’m at a loss which tradition to assent to, which texts. There is no agreement about the prosecutor: some write X, some Y. None about the date of the prosecution. None about the year he died. Nor the place he died and took that last ride. Some say he both died and was buried at Rome, some say at Liternum. Both places have tombs plus statues flagged up: (1) at Liternum there was a tomb and statue surmounting tomb – I have actually seen it, not long since, toppled – and (2) at Rome outside the Capena Gate on the Tomb of the Scipios there are three statues, two of them said to be those of Publius and [his brother] Lucius, and number three that of the poet Q. Ennius. And the controversy is not only between historians. No: the speeches of Publius Scipio and of Tiberius Gracchus – if only they are by the people they are claimed for – are mutually incompatible . . . A completely different story has to be spun to fit in with Gracchus’ speech, and those authorities must be followed who hand down [a very different account, impugning] Scipio’s old acclamation for moderation and restraint (moderationis et temperantiae) . . . [The attempt to capsize Scipio’s reputation works as back-handed compliment from envy, for] These points would indicate, even if in the context of an encomium, the greatness of a spirit moderating honours in line with a citizen’s role (ingentem magnitudinem animi moderantis ad ciuilem habitum honoribus) – and here is an enemy conceding them, by turning them into slurs. . . . All this had to be set out before you: what a rainbow of views in the interpretations and written memorials concerning this great hero (de tanto uiro)!

This saga, the Envy of the Scipios (38.60.10), closes its book. It has broken Livy’s onward march toward the present with his longest extant derailment over proliferating traditions, rival authorities, suspect contemporary documents. When Seneca follows Scipio to Liternum, he also treads on the heels of Livy. Had he leafed through Livy’s definitive ‘despair’ of establishing a once-for-all myth? Had he consulted those variants that faced Livy in the writings of his predecessors? Had he dug up those racy orations supposedly surviving from the cut-and-thrust of political debate in the hey-day of the Republic? He would know that pilgrimage to Liternum was a vote against reclamation of Scipio for Rome, for the Tomb of the Scipios [in Rome] would spell conciliation and celebration of the fraternity and their control of poetic tradition, whereas the altar to exile perpetuates holier-thanthou principle: Seneca comes to the villa precisely in order to witness that Scipio’s only ‘return’, the only return that matters, is philosophicreligious ascension of his spirit to rejoin its source in the heavenly aether 10

Cf. Gellius 4.18.3, quoting a speech of Africanus from the Trials.


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(animum . . . in caelum, ex quo erat, redisse).11 He will not descend to argue the toss with any primitivesque paraphernalia of genius cult at the manor (see chapter 12, pp. 163–5). For Seneca is here to consecrate moral uirtus. To badger our souls with inspired psychagogia. Out to make a difference, in one more intervention on this hot property, to sort Roman heroism, to rewrite the mos maiorum: On the one hand, this was Traditionalism (Jaeger (1997) 133):12 [I]f . . . the goal of the Ab Urbe Condita is to teach its audience to adopt new perspectives on the past rather than simply to reflect the past ‘as it really happened’, it helps if we read the account of Scipio’s last days with this goal in mind.

And on the other hand, too many tales to simplify into a single myth is a sure sign of magnified importance.13 Scipio’s ‘decade’ in Livy had therefore climaxed with fuss over his unprecedented new title ‘Africanus’ (30.45.6): The nickname Africanus: was it the soldiers’ approval or was it the people’s whim that first spread it around – or . . . did it start from his intimates’ glad hand? I have not found out to any satisfaction.

t h e b i g g e r t h ey a re The Triumph/Fall of s c i p i o a f r i c a n u s had over centuries staged a fundamental exercise in the inculcation of Romanness, directing every re¨ cruit toward collusion in the project of lifting the Ubermensch above His fellow-citizens, in the very act of protesting his refusal to be so elevated. The shift from ‘great armies’ – trans-Iberian, transalpine Hannibal, battle, triumph, Africanus – to a spiritual elect of ‘restraint-cum-respect’ (egregiam moderationem pietatemque) had been inside the legend from the start. It had taken root when succeeding generalissimos had failed to renounce their exceptionality, ‘defending’ themselves rather than ‘deserting’ Rome. And then it had canonized the self-marginalizing genius as the superior form of role model that suited a post-imperial world which had no place 11

12

13

See, for example, Cicero, De re publica 6.13, Manilius 4.887; with Woodman (1977) 219–20 on Velleius 2.123.3; Brena (1999), 275–91, ‘La beatificazione di Pompeo (vv. 1–18)’, for the complex of manes-hero-Stoic saint-Roman uirtus at Lucan 9.1–18. ‘The narrative seems to suggest that in the end Africanus’ burial place and the date of his trial and death are not as meaningful as the replacement of his egocentric and transforming worldview with that of Gracchus the mediator’ (Jaeger (1997) 160). Cf. Livy 39.52.1–6, where neither Polybius and Rutilius nor Valerius Antias can be followed on the year Scipio died. Livy signals the hermeneutic overload of his hero already at 26.19.9, where popular wonder ‘goes beyond the bounds befitting a human being’.

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for ‘leading great armies’, and every incentive to find an honourable way out of invidious presence in the vicinity of Rome under its Caesars.14 Crawling away to lick wounds and keep head on shoulders may have been all right for the Tiberian courtier Servilius Vatia, with his fig-leaf of Epicurean respectability, but our fearless coach in Stoic crusading needs to find more rousing cover in Cornelius Scipio’s Republican pride. Seneca will shift the exemplum on into a developed rhapsody on location, which will explore just this process of shifting the exempla on into revitalized functioning (chapter 11, pp. 146–7). He can rely on readers already knowing, for themselves, the gusto of release in disgust at Rome that this topos licensed. He and they could know and would have produced their own version of Valerius Maximus’ bash at the locus (5.3.2b): Our last protest still resounds, and another arises to take its turn: The earlier/greater (superior) Africanus . . . . . . Counter-balancing his glorious achievements, his fellow-citizens made him denizen of a demeaning village, an abandoned swamp. He did not keep silent, and take to the folk down below the bitterness of his voluntary exile (uoluntarii exilii), but ordered the legend on his tomb (sepulcro suo): ‘t h a n k l e s s fat h e r l a n d , yo u d o n ’t eve n h ave m y b o n e s.’ (‘i n g r ata pat r i a , n e o s s a qu i d e m m e a h a b e s . ’) What is more shaming than the necessity, more just than the protest, more restrained (moderatius) than the retaliation? He refused her his ashes, after he hadn’t let her collapse into ashes. Accordingly, the city of Rome suffered just this one hit back from Scipio for its thanklessness of spirit (ingrati animi) . . . He did not tolerate even protesting about her – what a rock is true respect! (pietatis) – until after he had met his fate.

When we re-emerge from Seneca’s description of s c i p i o ’s manor (4–5), still ‘beholding Scipio’s manners versus ours’, we run into a sublime quotation tucked ‘inside the cranny’, as well as a wooden conceit: our Scipio has been, all along, ‘The one made famous as “the Carthage hair-raiser”’ (ille ‘Carthaginis horror’ ), and to him ‘Rome owes the fact that it has been captured just the once’ – the ‘debit’, this, called by Scipio (imputaturus, 3). The quotation is paraded (ille) [but unattributed]. Seneca is muttering loudly some more: if we know what he is burying in the decent obscurity of this ‘cranny’, we shan’t need to disinter it, in order to appreciate what he is doing to Roman Tradition – we shall move ahead 14

See Seneca, De otio 6.4, nos certe sumus qui dicimus et Zenonem et Chrysippum maiora egisse quam si duxissent exercitus, gessissent honores, leges tulissent, quas non uni ciuitati sed toti humano generi tulerunt.


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anyway. If we don’t, we shall have to become Romans by reading Seneca neat, and miss the precise way he has shifted, metamorphosed, ancient legend to make Roman Modernism. s c i p i o a n d p o e t ry We can see just enough to be sure that along with Livy’s monument to history and Valerius’ storehouse of rhetoric, the old world of pre-Catonian mores was sealed in the vast lays of Rome told by the greatest poet of the Republic. As we saw, the Tomb of the Scipios at Rome s(up)ported a stone Q. Ennius beside Africanus and his brother, the no less triumphal Asiaticus, on a neo-Atticizing architectural façade replete with arches and engaged Corinthian columns (probably a generation after Africanus’ death).15 Horace avers that Ennius’ verse brought Scipio more glory than any public inscription (Odes 4.8.13–15). There were not only epigrams and features in the national epic, the Annales, but a dedicated poem with the title ‘Scipio’. For s c i p i o’s shrine in Seneca, we have a serendipitous set of remarks from Cicero to link the topics of his burial, ascension, credit with Rome, exceptionality, and (impossibly) his polarity with Servilius Vatia. First – and I shall eventually suggest that this particular Ciceronian retooling of Ennius makes a likely matrix and spur for Seneca’s own self-heroization in Epp. 86 (pp. 165–9) – Laws 2.56–7: redditur enim terrae corpus et ita locatum ac situm quasi operimento matris obducitur. eodemque ritu . . . gentem . . . Corneliam usque ad memoriam nostram hac sepultura scimus esse usam. . . . declarat enim Ennius de Africano, ‘Hic est ille situs.’ uere, nam siti dicuntur ii qui conditi sunt. For the body is returned to the earth, and so, placed and laid to rest, it is cloaked, so to speak, by mother’s coverlet. And in the same style . . . we know that the clan of the Cornelii used this inhumation all the way up to my time . . . For Ennius broadcasts concerning Africanus, ‘Here lies the Man’ – truly, since those who have been interred are said to ‘lie’ in peace.

Lactantius (Institutiones diuinae 1.18.10) quotes from Ennius (Epigram 3–4 Warmington): apud Ennium sic loquitur Africanus, ‘Si fas endo plagas caelestum ascendere cuiquam est, | mi soli caeli maxima porta patet.’ In Ennius, Africanus says this: If it is lawful for anyone to rise inside the realms of heaven’s people, Then the greatest gate of heaven opens wide for me alone. 15

Holliday (2002) 33–5.

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Seneca, who champions Virgil above (hoary) Ennius, quotes the latter only very rarely, and then as a misguided hero of Cicero’s.16 When mocking the pedantry of grammarians in Epp. 108.33–4, he will collect a pair of Ennian citations from Cicero, the first containing a precious archaism (= De re publica, fr. 4 Keyes / Ennius, Epigram 5–6 Warmington), the second an intertextual stemma Homer–Ennius–Virgil, with the Ennius courtesy, again, of Cicero (= De re publica, fr. 3 Keyes / Ennius, Epigram 3–4 Warmington):17 deinde Ennianos colligit [sc. Cicero] uersus et in primis illos de Africano scriptos: ‘cui nemo ciuis neque hostis | quibit pro factis reddere opis pretium . . . . . . esse enim apud Ciceronem in his ipsis De re publica hoc epigramma Enni: ‘si fas endo . . . porta patet.’ Then [Cicero] collects Ennian lines, esp. the famous ones penned on the subject of Africanus: ‘that no one, citizen or foe | will be able to pay back a reward to match his deeds’ . . . . . . For in Cicero, in this same On the Republic, there’s this Ennius epigram: ‘If it is lawful inside . . . the gate opens wide.’

As he says, Seneca is in mortal danger of ‘sliding into The Scholar and Grammarian’ (108.35) . . . He has certainly set an irresistible trap for the likes of us, and when another Cicero quotation is put into the frame, from (another) Ennius epigram with Africanus for speaker, we have resurrected a whole quatrain to go with the other couplet on his ascension (Cicero, Tusculanae disputationes 5.49 / Ennius, Epigram 1–2 Warmington):18 Hic est ille situs + cui nemo ciuis neque hostis quibit pro factis reddere opis pretium. + a sole exoriente supra Maeotis paludes nemo est qui factis aequiperare queat. Here lies the Man + that no one, citizen or foe will be able to pay back a reward to match his deeds. + From the sun rising above the swamps of Maeotis, there is no one who could equal him in deeds. 16

17 18

This is the subject of the Book 22 Excerpta made by Gellius 12.2.2–13. See Mazzoli (1970) 150, 189–94 (esp. 190), citing Epp. 58.5, quantum apud Ennium . . . uerborum situs occupauerit (but see p. 148), Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 10.1.88, Ennium sicut sacros uetustule lucos adoremus in quibus grandia et antiqua robora iam non tantam habent speciem quantam religionem. Cf. Silius, Punica 15.77–8, . . . at quis aetherii seruatur seminis ortus, | caeli porta patet. See Mazzoli (1970) 190, n. 30; Setaioli (1991a) 38–40; Dominik (1993) 49–50.


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The pilgrim incubating at s c i p i o ’s could hardly block ears to echoes of Seneca’s refrain outside vat i a’s (55.4):19 vat i a h i c s i t u s e s t. h e re l i e s vat i a.

No wonder that Seneca’s awe took the form of separating out this interred Cornelius’ soul for elevation to ‘heaven’ (caelum). Perhaps the Scipio poem would bring us fresh angles on Seneca’s recycling.20 If we ever recover Ennius’ Annales, a tangle of points trounced by Seneca will surely come to light.21 We (pedant scholars) might be able to pick up traces of Ennian Scipio in Cicero’s spectacular ‘Dream of Scipio’, where the Elder is an epiphany to the Younger Africanus (see pp. 166–7).22 We will certainly convince ourselves that Seneca’s ‘deafeningly silent’ quotation ‘Carthage hair-raiser’ (ille ‘Carthaginis horror’ ) is from Ennius once we weigh up the context of Lucretius 3.1034–5:23 Scipiadas, belli fulmen, Carthaginis horror, ossa dedit terrae proinde ac famul infimus esset Scipiads: bolt of war, Carthage hair-raiser, gave earth his bones, just as if he were the lowest slave there be.

For in Lucretius, we had taken on board the point that [Scipio’s-Ennius’] Punic Wars can mean zilch to us (833), and throughout the ensuing satirical attack on funeral rites we knew that Ennius was providing the quotations as the scathing atomist hits out at our ‘Hellish lives’ (1023) – wheeling out Good King Ancus Martius (1025), then the famous [Xerxes] and his fellow generalissimo, Scipio (1034),24 magnis qui gentibus imperitarunt who commanded great nations. 19 20 21 22

23 24

Odysseus ‘closes his ears’ against Sirens: cf. Epp. 31.2, 123.9. See Scipio fr. 13 Warmington / Cicero, De finibus 2.106, beatior Africanus cum patria loquens . . . ‘nam tibi moenimenta mei peperere labores’ (cf. Livy 38.50.11, Seneca, Epp. 86.8, munimenti). See Annales 320–1 Warmington, libertatemque, ut perpetuassit | quaeque axim, from the end of the Hannibalic War. See Africanus Maior in Cicero, De re publica: passim, e.g. 6.13, quo sis, Africane, alacrior ad tutandam rem publicam, sic habeto: omnibus qui patriam conseruauerint, adiuuerint, auxerint, certum esse in caelo definitum locum, ubi beati aeuo sempiterno fruentur; 6.25, reditum in hunc locum [= caelum]; 6.26, Ego uero, inquam, Africane, siquidem bene meritis de patria quasi limes ad caeli aditum patet . . . Does the phrase ossa dedit terrae advert to Cornelian interment? Are these the bones that Scipio refused Rome (Valerius Maximus 5.3.2b, see above, p. 100)? Cf. Epp. 86.1, magnos exercitus duxit. How did Ennius’ elogium, or elogia, for Africanus put it?

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We are certain that the metre-saving Scipiadas + its etymological gloss fulmina are Ennian, because of the triangulation provided by Virgil, Aeneid 6.842–6, duo fulmina belli | Scipiadas, cladem Libyae. For the s c i p i o s’ true name speaks, two at a time, of sk¦ptra – as both ‘bolts of lightning’ (i.e. fulgemen) and ‘props’ (i.e. walking-sticks: fulcimen).25 The same goes for Silius, ceaselessly dusting off Ennius, Livy, and Virgil.26 His Marcellus in death trail-blazes – rivals Scipio (as Diomedes to Achilles. Punica 15.340–2): . . . iacet campis Carthaginis horror, forsan Scipiadae confecti nomina belli rapturus, si quis paulum deus adderet aeuo. . . . There lies on the field the hair-raiser of Carthage, perhaps soon to snatch Scipio’s title as war finisher, if some god would add a little to his lifespan.

Silius has his Africanus treated to a prophecy from the Sibyl of Cumae (Punica 13.514–15): . . . pudet urbis iniquae, quod post haec decus hoc patriaque domoque carebit. . . . I am ashamed of iniquitous Rome, because after these achievements this jewel will lose fatherland and home.

And when he has Africanus pitch into World Burial Customs (Punica 13.466–87), presumably as the Cornelian expert on against-the-grain inhumation, Silius weaves in Lucretius 3 or his Ennian penumbra, to fashion his supreme hero.27 On the other hand, he has his attention rivetted on Liternum as the locus where s c i p i o’s altar would preside for ever, and therefore billetted Hannibal there on purpose so that he could taste, eschew, and destroy epic representations of his father’s First Punic War lost to Rome, years before the ‘sand and swamp’ of the place could host the post-war Roman garrison colony there.28 25 26 27

28

See O’Hara (1996) 179–81: for example, Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.6.26 explains scipio as = baculum, ‘walking-stick’ (cf. chapter 11, pp. 141–2). Cladem Libyae of course = Africanus. Punica 7.106–7, ubi nunc sunt fulmina gentis | Scipiadae? For Ennius’ ‘Scipio’: Scholz (1984). Bassett (1963) esp. 75, cf. Fucecchi (1993), esp. 38; Ahl, Davis, and Pomeroy (1986) 2542–55, ‘Scipio Africanus’. Barchiesi (2001) 138–9 explains how Silius’ self-destructing ekphrasis stages epic metaplay between Naevius and Ennius on Punic War. E.g. Livy 22.16.1, Literni harenas stagnaque; cf. Pomeroy (1990) 129; Fowler (1996) 63–73; and Bodel (1997) 5, n. 2. For the site of stagnosi . . . Literni (Silius, Punica 6.653–4): Johannovsky (1976) 520. ‘Excavation has provided no trace of Scipio’s rustic mansion’ (McKay (1975) 103).


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h o l d i n g t h e f o rt i t u d e Such are the main lines of tradition which Seneca is out to revise. Now for his ekphrastic testimony. Seeing is believing: at s c i p i o ’s there is no hermeneutic gap between thing, percept, word, signification; what you see is what you get, the immediacy of witness: uidi (3–4). This is, I have seen, a sight for sore eyes. Not so much a mansion or farmhouse as a major military installation. This redoubt is ‘built high’, from stone drawn up like an army ready for allcomers in hollow-square formation (lapide quadrato): the very picture of the Stoic sage (quadrato agmine, 59.7).29 The ‘perimeter wall around a wood’ is the Roman army camp’s circumvallation turned inside-out: enclosing the forest rather than protecting troops from ambush out in the wild. Expect no interior garden at Liternum (bush, flower, bird, gnome . . .). This fastness is truly a castle: at the gate, ‘twin towers rear up to fortify the manor’. Not vat i a’s twin grottoes, that feat of Ego-engineering, but straight-backed Stoic marshals standing tall. Taking a firm stance. Based on well-founded suppositions: turres . . . subrectas. Bold aggression meeting trouble half-way. Before it arrives: in propugnaculum uillae. We were prepared to embrace these bracing barracks when Scipio’s Liternum trounced Vatia’s Baiae in a trice (51.11):30 seuerior loci disciplina firmat ingenium aptumque magnis conatibus reddit. Literni honestius Scipio quam Bais exulabat: ruina eiusmodi non est tam molliter collocanda. More austerity in the régime of a locale toughens the mind and makes it fit for great enterprises. Scipio spent exile more honourably at Liternum than at Baiae: a collapse of that ilk must not be eased into a location so wimpishly.

The first millionaire Romans built up mansions near Baiae, but stuck them atop high ground, military-style (51.11):31 aspice quam positionem elegerint, quibus aedificia excitauerint locis et qualia: scies non uillas esse sed castra. Look at the situation they chose, the locations where they raised up buildings – and the type of buildings: you will know they are not manors but outposts.

Seneca is frank about the siege mentality: the place was built to take on the combined forces of the universe, to keep out all the armies of sin. An 29 30 31

Where Seneca gives the reader clear instructions: mouit me imago. See Wilson (1997) 64 and cf. p. 152. See Lavery (1980), esp. 147–51. As I have remarked, praetorium, ‘C.-in-C.’s HQ’, had become a standard term for a Roman mansion before Seneca’s day: p. 71 n. 5. See Henderson (2001a) 22–3 on Phaedrus 2.5.

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impregnable fortress able to supply all its needs from within: ‘a water tank installed under the buildings and shrubberies’ is ‘up to underwriting the needs of an army, even (cisternam . . . quae sufficeret in usum uel exercitus).32 Pull up the drawbridge at Fort Self-Sufficiency – the dashing young ‘Alexander’ or ‘Hannibal’ figure at the head of legion legions has wizened into the guerrilla chief holed up in his lair, living off the land. With water safe in store below buildings and greenery, s c i p i o’s need never run out of all a place needs (usus): for drinking, cooking, washing, sanitation (inside); for home-grown food, fodder, shade, kindling, timber (outside, but brought inside the stockade). The invisible underpinning essential to any (psychic) economy. Nothing showy at this HQ, Systems Inc. Syntax says this is plain solid unvarnished Real estate: § uillam extructam, comprising: (1a) murum circumdatum (1b) turres . . . subrectas (2a) cisternam . . . subditam.

For the spartan list of munitions has one last item to issue, smuggled in as a pair with the water tank to match the brace of wall + turrets: (2b) balneolum . . .

‘A tight wee bath-house, dark as hell in the ancient fashion. No baths seemed to our ancestors hot that weren’t dark.’ As yet, no past participle to situate the featured noun. Instead, a flicker of deprivation takes off from the spark of subsistence thinking that was siphoned into the cistern: bare necessity supplies balneolum, diminutive and/as hypocoristic. Pleonasm insists on the cramped style, which is to turn the vast villa – forested, bastioned, reservoired indeed! – into a ‘tight spot’ for us to huddle up and rough it, for the good of our souls: here is the miniature locus we require, to fit the contours of a letter. Here we shall feel at home, make ourselves uncomfortable (1, 5, 8): In ipsa Scipionis Africani uilla > Scipionis . . ., in hoc angulo > in hoc balneo Scipionis

32

Cf. Varro, Res rusticae 1.11.2, si omnino aqua non est uiua, cisternae faciendae sub tectis; Columella 1.5.2, si deficiet et spes artior aquae manantis coegerit, uastae cisternae hominibus . . . struantur – quae tamen pluuialis aqua salubritati corporis est accommodatissima . . .


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At once, World Conquest and Cosmopolis, Epic and History, Military Genius and Grandes Armées, Mansion and Castle, shrink to one pinched cell. Here is right for the lean times, exile, basics, bedrock: ‘a tight spot, a cranny’ – plenty of room for throttling anguish from our favourite Jeremiah (angustum . . . in hoc angulo).33 Already, see, hear, say, the perfect description of the description we have just read: no tighter calculus of fort-itude in this austere régime of belttightening war on wealth. In fact, already so enthusing a celebration of Stoic Virtue that our guide is losing it as he jams it in. For the flicker of excess in balne-olum angustum is redoubled with two ponderous phrases of repetitive fat. Something of a choker, reading this struggle to repress exultant yelps of joy behind clenched teeth – or so we will be signalled, to ham up the sentence’s rising curve of pleasure as we are given our cupboard to crawl into and diet: Dark as hell ∼ dark. In the ancient fashion ∼ it seemed to our ancestors.

s c i p i o here unpacks as symbol of Roman Tradition-and-Rome as Tradition + Roman Morality-and-Roman Moralism (ex consuetudine antiqua + maioribus nostris). Before The Fall, our Roman selves were greater than us, but their greatness was squashed out of the limelight – in fact their Greatness was their crushing view that Heat depends on Dark. This steaming reverie is what the mind sees in this masonry, discovers, from a viewing, insight into an ethical design embodied in the way of seeing that was, and is, made concrete in this locus (from uidi to uidebatur). Morality maketh man(ors): ‘So I underwent great joy. Beholding Scipio’s ways versus ours’ (maioribus nostris > mores Scipionis ac nostros). As Seneca’s hot flush wells up from the depths (sub-iit), ‘great joy’ has gushed at once from the sight of that tiny, unlit, shower stall. In our case, from the very thought of it. Scipio’s booth is as complex an ideological site as its iconoclastic parody, former bakehouse (Petronius, Satyrica 73.2): balneum intrauimus, angustum scilicet et cisternae frigidariae simile, in quo Trimalchio rectus stabat . . . (‘We entered a bath-house, tight for sure, and just like a cold-water tank. In it, there stood Trimalchio, upright’).34 Languish, yes, and look back in anguish. 33

34

Cf. Propertius 4.9.65–6, angulus hic mundi nunc me mea fata trahentem / accipit, with Nisbet and Hubbard (1978) 102 on Odes 2.6.14. For the etymology: Varro, De lingua Latina 6.41, angulus, quod in eo locus angustissimus, Maltby (1991) 36. (Modern etymology points to ango(r).) See Courtney (2001) 117–18. Petronius’ editors find the spray of connotations too hard to swallow, and excise.

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Morals and Villas in Seneca’s Letters l i ta n y at l i t e r n u m

The strain to contain Grandeur within a Shoe Box plants a ‘cranny’ too angular to carry a quotation from Roman Epic, mass panic, Carthage versus Rome, shades of the sack of the City by barbarian Gauls . . . The effort is just too much for one hip-bath to bear. So description of this Booth for Reflection must yield, and Scipio set our example. The way to cope with s c i p i o ’s is to make like him: ‘take a bath’. Watch how he does it, and ‘contemplate’ that – in ‘joy (un)confined’: (1) The traditional regimen (mos fuit priscis): ‘Country toil’ is physically exhausting, so do some: ‘trench the earth underfoot, in person’. Then ‘wash down’. For stability, make this a steady routine (-ebat, -ebat, -ebat). Once bitten, twice shy: we don’t get fooled again: one sack of Rome is plenty. (2) The man in his manor (hoc ille tecto, . . . hoc illum pauimentum): Picture the fit of hero to shack, just managing to squash himself into (t)his rustic hole. There he stands tall, stooping under the filthy ceiling – an Atlas in a coop. There he steps proud, planting feet on crude flags – an Agamemnon on a mat. (3) The plot on the page – all subliminal sublime: Seneca is channelling us through s c i p i o ’s so that the infrastructure will deliver the crucial work of subtext: the battlements are subrectas, the tank is subditam quae sufficere . . . posset; pleasure subiit; Scipio subigebat; sub hoc . . . tecto; hoc pauimentum . . . sustinuit; qui . . . sustineat? To ‘understand’ an operational villa, first look ‘under Scipio’s roof, underfoot’ and find a subterranean organism (boiler and hypocaust, pipes and drains); then look into organic horticulture, for gardening is all about looking ‘underneath’ the surface. Look down in that hole Scipio is digging. s c i p i o’s is, when you get right down to it, supplying the suggestion that subsoil is where all growth stems from (subconscious). (Chapters 10–11)

The composition hitches a ride on the shameless pun contrived between ‘the floor underpinned the hero’ and ‘who would undergo this?’ (sustinuit . . . sustineat;35 add tam sordido ∼ sordidus). Ekphrasis at s c i p i o’s will boil down to just one further detail. A second floor to match a second ceiling (camera) will provide a symmetrical cue, presented as the ultimate destination in a mental tour of modern decadence: 35

Compounded by the correlative in(s)anity of columnarum . . . nihil sustinentium (7).


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adhuc . . . quid cum . . . peruenero? . . . eo deliciarum peruenimus ut nisi gemmas calcare nolimus. Still . . . – how about once I get on to . . .? . . . We’ve got on to the level of delicacy where we’ll tread nothing but jewels.

With this, we have internalized Scipio’s mindset, when he drew the line and jumped the Roman tracks (3): eo perducta res erat . . . ut . . ., neutrum fas erat. The situation had reached the point where . . . Neither alternative was right and proper . . .

This surge is over; we rejoin Seneca ‘inside the villa’ = ‘inside this cranny’ = ‘inside this cubicle of Scipio’ (1, 5, 8). The shaft of light penetrates the murk of s c i p i o ’s sauna (8): in hoc balneo Scipionis minimae sunt rimae magis quam fenestrae muro lapideo exsectae, ut sine iniuria munimenti lumen admitterent. Inside this, the bath-house of Scipio. There are the smallest chinks, rather than windows, chiselled from the stone wall so as to let light in without harming the fortification.

Here is that past participle that went missing in all the flutter of joy at squashing into s c i p i o’s balneolum angustum . . . (pp. 106–7): rimae . . . exsectae.

Still thinking tiny, thinking dark (minimae . . . rimae), but still thinking solid stone bastions and precision-hewn buttresses (muro lapideo exsectae . . ., munimenti).36 Not windows, but arrow-slits . . .

These chinks of righteousness give way at once to sheer bliss again – a second volley of abuse for lapsed morality: at nunc . . . ∼ at nunc . . . (8 ∼ 6; cf. quondam, 6; at olim, 9; quantae nunc . . ., 11; quas nunc . . ., 12; olim, 12; dares nunc, 13). The first whoop of disgust takes the form of a sustained string of six visions of unScipionic decadence topped off by an exclamatory triplet that splits and doubles the signal of impending climax in that fantastic ‘jewel-crunching’ conceit.37 36 37

Cf. Ennian Africanus’ moenimenta: n. 20 above. With muro lapideo exsectae, 8, cf. exstructam lapide . . . murum, 4. Cf., e.g., Epp. 12.10, calcare ipsas necessitates, and esp. 16.8, calcare diuitias. Statius finds a ‘surprise’ twist, when calcabam necopinus opes turns out to mean that the trompe l’oeil ‘Unswept Floor’ mosaic – asarota – had worked on him! (Siluae 1.3.53, 57).

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More heat than light, perhaps, but Seneca floors readers with a dousing of flattening rhetoric. Recall how he introduced terms for the maiores’ mores, ‘No baths hot that aren’t dark’ (non . . . caldum nisi obscurum, 4). Now he starts up a litany of conditions for an anti-Scipionic design for life, a truly ‘poor, dirty’ way of seeing the self (sibi uidetur . . . nisi . . . nisi . . . nisi . . . nisi . . . nisi . . . nisi . . . nisi, 6 ∼ uidebatur . . . nisi, 4). This carbolic-hyperbolic fantasia lines up: r Not ‘square-dressed stone, a perimeter wall around a wood’ + ‘a tight wee bath-

house, dark as hell, dark’ + ‘shoddy floor’.

But ‘mirrors on the (internal) walls, a dazzle of great big pricey discs’. (quadrato ∼ orbibus; tenebricosum . . . obscurum ∼ refulserunt; balneolum angustum ∼ magnis; uile ∼ pretiosis) r Not plain ‘built high with dressed stone’.

But exotic ‘marble blocks from Alexandria . . . set off against tawny veneer slabs from Numidia’.38 (exstructam lapide ∼ marmora . . . crustis distincta) r Not ‘a wall around, underslung on both sides, installed under’.

But ‘a border, a wash all around, on all sides . . . patterned’. (murum circumdatum, utrimque subrectas, subditam, . . . opere ∼ undique operosa . . . uariata circumlitio praetexitur) r Not ‘dark as hell, dark, dirty roof ’.

But ‘ceiling hidden away behind glass’. (tenebricosum . . . obscurum, tecto . . . sordido ∼ uitro absconditur camera) r Not ‘built with dressed stone, wall around a wood; our ways; in this cranny; for

needs; used to wash down his body; by hard graft out in the country; tired . . . used to toil as his work-out’. But ‘stone from Thasos;39 run around our pools; in any temple; showpiece; we lower bodies; by repeat sweats; dehydrated’. (exstructam lapide quadrato ∼ Thasius lapis; murum circumdatum siluae ∼ piscinas circumdedit; mores . . . nostros ∼ piscinas nostras; in hoc angulo ∼ in aliquo . . . templo; in usum ∼ spectaculum; abluebat corpus ∼ corpora 38 39

Cf. Statius, Siluae 1.5.36. Cf. Statius, Siluae 1.5.35: white stone excluded from Etruscus’ new bath-house: outmoded by the coloured marbles from across the empire (Pliny, Natural History 36.44).


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demittimus; laboribus rusticis ∼ multa sudatione; fessum . . . exercebat se ∼ exinanita) r Not ‘he trenched the earth underfoot, in person; dirty . . . shoddy’.

But ‘valves haven’t released the flow of water; made a dazzle, . . . made of silver’. (terram ipse subigebat ∼ aquam . . . epitonia fuderunt; sordido . . . uile ∼ refulserunt, argentea)40 r Not ‘this shoddy floor underpinned’.

But ‘tread nothing but jewels’. (pauimentum . . . uile sustinuit ∼ gemmas calcare)

At s c i p i o’s, however, we meet not just the great a f r i c a n v s , but ‘that mythical “c a rt h a g e h a i r - r a i s e r ”’ (1, 4). In consequence, the laceration of ‘our ways’ (mores . . . nostros, 4) has not reached his pitch, and to get there means descending past ‘pipes for the working-classes’, to reach the heady level of ‘guys fathered by former slaves’,41 and, finally, to that ‘jewel-crunching’ ultimate [of Roman Rajahs]. Seneca will turn out to have used this idea of our keeping on to the end of our journey to (the pay-off for visiting) s c i p i o ’s both to cap his first barrel, and to prelude his second. In its moment, however, indignation pits Herculean Samson against House of Shame: Under this roof, the great man stood tall – dirty as it is! This floor underpinned the hero, shoddy as it is! Today, though, who is there who would undergo . . . this a-way? ∼ What a load of statues; what a load of pillars that undergird zilch, installed for decoration instead – to boost the cost; what a load of waterfalls, sluicing down the steps in a din! We’ve got on to the level of delicacy where we’ll tread nothing but jewels. (tam . . . tam ∼ quantum . . . quantum . . . quantum; ille stetit ∼ statuarum; tecto ∼ columnarum; sustinuit ∼ nihil sustinentium; sordido ∼ in ornamentum; uile ∼ impensae causa; stetit . . . sustinuit . . . sustineat ∼ libertinorum: statuarum, columnarum . . . positarum, aquarum = deliciarum . . . calcare) 40 41

Cf. Statius, Siluae 1.5.48–9. Edwards (1993) 155 comments: ‘For Seneca, there was something “wrong” and “unnatural” about men who had money but no real status, just as there was . . . about pillars which masqueraded as structural features.’

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When the grand finale of the tricolon caps ‘statues’ and ‘columns’ with ‘waters’, the resounding rhetoric trumpets its own fanfare, and assures us we have made the grade:42 quantum, quantum, quant aquarum per gradus cum fragore labentium! What a load of waterfalls, sluicing down the steps in a din!

s p lu t t e r a n d b at h o s The main function of this second, more rambling and discursive, storm in a shower is to clinch the antithesis between s c i p i o ’s and vat i a ’s.43 In précis, we glimpse through the ‘arrow-slit’ chinks, or ‘baths for moths’, an exultant slamming of modern comfort, as Seneca’s plumbing reaches the depths of this favourite topic for a Roman rant.44 r Rhetorical amplification builds on sheer cumulation.

(abluebat corpus . . . sic lauari, 5 ∼ lauantur, lauari, lauabatur, sic lauabatur, non cotidie lauabatur, cotidie abluebant, nundinis lauabantur, 8–12) r Stocky ‘running style’ composition pays out the thread of essayistic thinking,

moving in and out of the line of sight. (fenestrae > fenestris amplissimis; admitterent > recipiant > deuitantur > reiciuntur > receptabant > admiserat;45 commenta > reperta > inuenta; exornata > exornaretur; usum > utilem; nec referre > nihil . . . interesse > nec multum . . . intererat; intrare > intrandi; quam > quam; temperasse > temperaturam; munditias > immundissimos > munda; aedilem > aediles; caleat > 42

43

44

45

Gradatio (= kl±max) was a rhetorical figure in which clauses were linked by ‘steps’ of verbal repetition, as in the ‘tralatician Latin’ example Africanus uirtutem industria, uirtus gloriam, gloria aemulos comparauit (Ad Herennium 4.34; Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 9.3.56, cf. Krostenko (2001) 96 and n. 18). See Bek (1976). Tossi (1974–5) contextualizes Seneca’s villas within a Catonian tradition of denigration of corrupting art. Roman riches as the formula ‘big house–gardens–hot baths’: Plutarch, Life of Sulla 31.5. See Nisbet and Hubbard (1978) 288–9, on Odes 2.18; Toner (1995) 54–64, ‘The baths’; Newlands (2002) esp. 199–226; Nielsen (1990) 207 (but the contrast proposed at 182, for Epp. 86, between new-fangled villa design and age-old agriculture, can only survive a superficial glance). Hardie (1983) 132–6 points out that Seneca may stand near the start of bath-house ekphrasis in Latin. Amplifying Scipio’s se recepit, 3. So, too, sine iniuria, 8 traces back to Scipio . . . faceret iniuriam, 3.


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calidum; uiuere > uixit; unguentum > unguentum; oluisse > ‘olet’ > oleret > odore; nimiis > parum > nimium, 8–13) r The sermon works to expand s c i p i o ’s to accommodate every last washroom

and water closet in the past history and present empire of Rome. (illa balinea intrare obscura . . . an caleat, 10 ∼ balneolum . . . caldum = obscurum, 4): r This en-suite echo chamber bounces off the walls of its ‘smallest room’ a stream

of verbal figures: superlatives, totalizations, pleonasms, multiplications, paradigmatic big names, tricola, ornamentation with mood-setting poetic quotation (with, and featuring, fuss and nonsense), and, to boot, a sarcastic puff of inanition in a closing harangue. (minimae, totius; amplissimis; et -antur simul et -antur; X ac Y, X et Y, X et Y, et X nec Y; X et in Y, non in Z; non X, nec Y, nec Z; X et Y; Catonem . . . aut Fabium Maximum aut ex Corneliis aliquem; nobilissimi; -andi . . . -endique X et A ac B Y, non C, adeo ut . . . nihil; quantae; latis; quod non in X . . . quod non in Y . . . ut in Z; X et Y, non saccata, sed saepe turbida et . . . paene lutulenta; uehementius; ut X . . . non ut Y; X et Y; toti; immundissimos; militiam, laborem, uirum; A et B, 8–13; Horatius Flaccus quid ait? . . . idem Horatius; ne euanescat . . ., quid quod . . . odore . . . gloriantur?)

This second fun jet of denunciatory vitriol catches up the energy of its predecessor, recapitulating, as we noticed, the ‘Now versus Once’ antithetics (at nunc – quondam ∼ at nunc – at olim, 6 ∼ 8–9), and resuming the checklist strategy of negative conditions with three more, two to open the score (non ita aptata . . . ut . . . nisi . . ., nisi . . ., 8), and an ace to round off the game, in the parting shot (parum est . . . nisi . . ., 13). For the Professor Emeritus of Roman Rhetoric is in his element, and enjoys telling us so, in running self-commentary. He has inflicted on himself the most miserable topic – ‘the smallest chinks’ – in the world for praise: how is he ‘to let light into’ (lumen) his prose ‘without harming’ his brief ? ‘Amplification’ works for the opposition (fenestris amplissimis). Seneca is barred from treating ‘bathing’ as an opportunity to indulge in oratorical ‘colours’ (lauantur ∼ colorantur). Out of the cityscape, he is denied graphic ekphrasis, where land meets sea, ‘receding fields, and changing sea . . .’, those staple loci of epideixis (agros et maria prospiciunt).46 He must back a once popular, formerly acclaimed thesis (concursum et admirationem), now shunned, long rejected (deuitantur et . . . reiciuntur). Our task is to 46

Cf. Statius, Siluae 2.2.74–82, omni proprium thalamo mare . . .

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plug something that is an absolute classic, a nightmare, the ultimate challenge: poverty-stricken (∼ luxuria), outmoded (∼ noui), uncreative (∼ commenta), undramatic (∼ se obrueret), many-times-attempted (∼ pauca), already encrusted baroque (cultu exornata), low-remuneration (res quadrantaria), utilitarian (in usum), anti-fun (non in oblectamentum), beyond replenishment and revitalization (non suffundebatur . . . nec recens . . .), clogged with detritus where it is least wanted – in the limelight (in quam perlucida sordes deponerent). The locus de balneis is, in short, exactly the theme of a Seneca’s dreams (quam iuuat). It is just like him, a prehistoric relic long written into the ground, still disgorging vitriol. Ripe for revival – rescue from obscurity (obscura). Ready for stripping down to the bare stone – peel away the patina of vulgarization (gregali tectorio inducta). For arcane lore has indeed been filed away under this topic (haec loca, 10). Our example will be that in old Rome the greatest heroes, whether a Scipio, a rival, or an opponent, took their first lessons on statesmanship by administrating The RePublic Baths. With these beginner aristocrats at the controls, the political temperature was gauged and set (temperasse), moderation prevented overheating (temperaturam; incendio ———), kept society clean and neat (munditias), efficient and functional (utilem), healthy and sane (salubrem), free and live (seruum ——– uiuum). Nice and hot (ardeat ——– . . . caleat). Link their ‘hands-on’ managerial style to s c i p i o’s domestic régime, as they test the water and he turns the soil (manu sua, 10 ∼ opere . . . ipse, 4). For the city’s ‘aediles’ took their name from the ‘aedes’ (‘house’), and their ‘homely’ role taught them to treat the populus Romanus as they should their guests.47 See modern ways as bad housekeeping – fire hazard, deathtrap, virtual arson (similis incendio, seruum uiuum . . . lauari; mihi uidetur; ardeat) . . . The tactic just used welded The Good Bath to The Good House to The Good City. But s c i p i o’s sauna puts him out of Rome (rusticitatis), in private (suum). A natural target for punitive satire – apt for ‘boileddown’ caricature, rich ‘food for thought ’ (non . . . decoquebatur . . ., ut . . . concoqueret, 11).48 A butt for Seneca to envy – this clown washes himself muddy.49 Ostracized for b.o., a magnet for malicious jokes (nesciit uiuere, lutulenta, sudorem, in exilio uixit, quorundem uoces . . . ‘Non inuideo . . .’ ). But Seneca mustn’t change his spots: he is agent, operator, and vehicle 47 48 49

Cf. Paulus chez Festus 13, ‘aedilis’ initio dictus est magistratus quia aedium non tantum sacrarum, sed etiam priuatarum curam gerebat, Maltby (1991) 10. Cf. Epp. 2.2–4, concoquas: p. 8. Does saccata aqua, 11, amount to treating water like wine?


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of Roman morality (mores urbis), and is duty-bound to hand over more antique lore, an absolute gift for ridicule: s c i p i o is a stereotype, a locus (12). It writes itself (dicet aliquis). For ‘o l i m ’ is redolent (oluisse). Its ‘liquid manure’ feeds that whole culture of the ‘National Service Fatigues Hero’ (‘liquet . . . immundissimos fuisse’ . . . militiam-laborem-uirum). Seneca knows: in writing the history of Rome as dialectic between material and moral hygiene (munda ∼ spurciores), the locus de balneis has handed Satire its lead role as evolving site of Tradition (loco). Does the sermon deserve its high-point of exultation (gloriantur?)? In strategic terms, the tirade first pretended its brief gave no room to work, then muscled in on the act with self-mockery, but finally turns the tables by relativizing modernism: if the argument is about deciding what is ‘too much’ and ‘too little’ (nimiis, parum), how should we rate Horace? And how should we rate Seneca? To view him as ‘too much austerity’ would be to take on both s t o i c i s m and s c i p i o (si tibi nimium tristia uidebuntur, uillae imputabis, 14; cf. mihi uidetur, 10). But it would be a sad misreading of the pleasure (any) Lucilius must have taken in this masterful splurge of opinionated melodrama (non in oblectamentum . . . sed, di boni, quam iuuat, 9 ∼ magna me uoluptas subiit, 4). And it would most likely wreck our introduction to the final scenario, ‘inside’ s e n e c a n s c i p i o ’s (14): . . . uillae . . . in qua didici . . . . . . the manor. Inside it, I learned a lesson . . . Inside this, the bath-house of Scipio: They call them ‘baths for moths’ if any baths haven’t been designed so as to welcome in the sun all day long. For use, not for titivation. Water flow didn’t keep welling up from under; water didn’t keep running forever fresh, as though from a hot spring. But, good gods, what pleasure to enter those famous bath-houses: dark, hooded with mass-market stucco, and you’d know Cato was your Housing Officer (or Fabius Maximus, or someone from the Cornelius clan . . .) who was in control, hands-on. What a load of country gaucherie people today convict Scipio of: he didn’t let daylight into his sauna through wide windowpanes! He didn’t have his skin go brown floodlit, or wait in the bath for his din to go down! Ah – a human wreck: he didn’t know how to live! What do you suppose some people today would say? ‘I don’t envy Scipio. He truly lived in exile – bathing that way!’ If all this seems grim stuff to you, and o.t.t., inside the manor, I learned a lesson . . . I have seen . . . I have seen . . . I have seen . . . Another recent sight I have seen . . . Also, I have seen . . . ∼ Two grottoes. Entirely man-made. One admits no sun, the other keeps it right till sunset. A brook, fish, for the feeding of. Up to taking even continual draining, but

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when the sea is open it is let off, whereas when a storm has granted a fishermen’s holiday, stocks are ready to hand. Yet the principal asset inside the manor is that it has Baiae through the wall. Free from its downsides, enjoying the pleasures. I know this litany of its plusses first hand, and believe it’s a year-round thing, as it meets the west wind head on, so monopolizing it as to cut out Baiae . . . I have seen . . . I have seen . . . (in hoc balneo Scipionis ∼ in uilla; balnea siqua non ita aptata sunt ut totius diei solem . . . recipiant ∼ esse illam totius anni credo; in usum, non in oblectamentum ∼ uoluptatibus fruitur; non suffundebatur aqua nec recens semper uelut ex calido fonte currebat ∼ alendis piscibus, etiam si assidue exhauriatur, sufficiens; manu sua ∼ manu factae; manus . . . porrigitur; non in caldarium suum latis specularibus diem admiserat . . . non in multa luce decoquebatur et exspectabat ut in balneo concoqueret! ∼ quarum altera solem non recipit, altera usque in occidentem tenet;50 ‘o hominem calamitosum! nesciit uiuere.’ quas nunc quorundam uoces futuras credis? ‘Non inuideo Scipioni: uere in exilio uixit qui sic lauabatur.’ haec si nimium tristia uidebuntur ∼ ‘o Vatia, solus scit uiuere.’ scit uiuere, non uiuit, non sibi uiuit; uillae . . . in qua didici . . . uidi . . . uidi . . . uidi . . . etiamnunc uidi . . . et uidi . . . ∼ uidi ego, uidi . . .)

I shall propose that the diatribe has another role in the construction of s c i p i o ’s , but this can only filter through in retrospect (chapter 11, pp. 139–41). On the surface, the bathroom rant was supposed to spend itself in bliss before finally running into the ground, as the roll-call of unpleasantnesses mounts: humiliating ‘moth-baths’ and ‘thrones’ (= hip-baths) with a view.51 Self-burying fashion. Some thing, priced at a farthing. How crystal clear was the water you set your dirt in (perlucida sordes)? Yukkh – what fun to dive into those bath-houses: ‘dark’, hooded with mass-market stucco. / The slave criminal bathed alive! / Scipio the human wreck. His mud bath. Sweat, not scent. His weekly bath. ‘Unclean as can be!’ / Stink: clean baths, foul people: Horace’s ‘Mr Gobulle smells of pastilles.’ Just as, if he smelled of ‘billy-goat’, he would be in ‘Mr Gargonius’’ spot, the one Horace set up in antithesis, ibid. / Scent needs freshening up two or three time a day, to stop it evaporating on the body.52 Grim stuff (nimium tristia, 14)? If so, ‘you’ll debit the manor’, and find yourself trying on the shoes of a bitter exile: Scipio Africanus (rei 50 51 52

Cf. Statius, Siluae 2.2.45–7. Cf. Petronius 73.5, 92.6, Maiuri (1950) on the solium with a view. Seneca wades a step further into this river at Naturales Quaestiones 1.17.7: cum antiqui illi uiri incondite uiuerent, satis nitidi si squalorem opere collectum aduerso flumine eluerent.


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publicae imputaturus, 3 ∼ uillae imputabis). But if you are in the swing of this declamatory purge, you will have entered into the caustic spirit of s e n e c a ’s s c i p i o’s . The revulsion is what we are here for, flat out, busted. H O R AC E ’ S C O M M O N S C E N TS The Horace citation is the first of three in the Epistulae Morales, all from the first stretch in Horace’s first book of poetry: Satires 1, and all with their author named (86.13 = 1.2.27/4.92; 119.13–14 = 1.2.114–16; 120.20–1 = 1.3.11–17).53 This first ornament is part of the structural design of the Letter (chapter 11, pp. 143–5), but it also calls for scrutiny in its own right. Firstly, Horace already cites his own line, picking it out from the bluff tirade on extremism in sex-object selection as an instance of the backbiting grudgery that proves Satire an outlet and alibi for sadistic envy. So this wonderfully vocal verse stands as a one-line essence of Horatian Satire, and is held up for our appraisal, to choose between (sadistic, envious, and wilfully ignorant) damnation or (witty, wise, informed) approval: a chiasmus that polarizes luscious liquids against grotty gutturals (pastillos Rufillus ol- ∼ -et Gargonius hircum), and hinges between artificial chemicals and animal pheremones through the tiny but all-embracing verbal hub (olet, ‘scent’). Trying to be sociable, we put on airs; trying to be natural, we pollute the air. Satire uses its favourite organ to sniff out disguise and posture, finding out extraneous accessories and gross bodies, dedicated to denying the middle ground it stands on:54 a trial for our own take on the satirist’s take (liuidus et mordax uideor tibi?). In this spirit, Seneca’s hit on this self-selected gem of rough-talking diatribe from Horace presents us with a specially ticklish challenge: what to make of his misquotation? For Horace gave us facetus | pastillos Rufillus . . . , and then ineptus | pastillos Rufillus . . . Seneca gives us pastillos Buccillus. This ‘improves’ Horace, in the sense that the image of ‘pastilles’ to kill bad breath precisely focusses on the bucca, ‘puffed cheek, gob’, which betokens the overdone bad-mouth slanging of Satire – of the Horatian satirist (Satires 1.1.20–1, Iuppiter ambas | iratus buccas inflet). And the improvement is at the cost of pious preservation of the tradition, even at the point where quotation 53

Mazzoli (1970) 233–8, esp. 234; Berthet (1979).

54

See Otto (1971) 252, s.v. olere.

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precisely honours tradition. Seneca adapts and updates? Seneca cares for the issue not the expression? Seneca makes mistakes – the right mistakes? We can only block out the light, lie flat, and ponder. Nothing less will do.55 55

An indefatigable reader presses for comment on the problem of construing Horace’s line – whether to punctuate before, or after, facetus | – and asks ‘What might Seneca’s text have done? Or what does he (mis?)remember it doing?’ The question leads toward its own pert answer – Seneca is fresh out of respect – and at 1.4.91–2, enjambment is inescapable: does Horace’s ineptus | there point to his (comically) ‘ill-fitting’ writing? But had usque facetus | in the first place signalled a jeu of enjambment at 1.2.25–6? Well, I am defatigable.

chapter ten

The appliance of science: s c i p i o ’s Aegialus in Letter 86 with: Virgil’s funny farm At the hinge between the two grand topics combined in Letter 86, we were given notice that disjunction in tone should feature in our reception of what lies ahead. By implication we may be promised a lightening of tone, as we move from Schloss s c i p i o, on to a lesson we can learn from the present owner (haec si tibi nimium tristia uidebuntur, 14). But this is not spelled out, and the letter of the text even locates the up and coming lesson firmly ‘inside’ the very selfsame ‘mansion’ wherein we have just learned our lesson in lugubrious revulsion (in uilla). If, or rather, since, as we just saw (in chapter 9: pp. 107, 115–17), it is a major test of the reader’s own orientation to suggest that they may not have wallowed in Scipio’s cranny and may not have exulted in Seneca’s diatribe (haec si tibi nimium tristia uidebuntur, 14), there is a firm underlying directive to anticipate something just as excessively ‘grim’ in store. This editorial hinge (diuisio) even amounts to a boast that what follows will live up to the mighty s c i p i o. We are cued to read as ‘conscientiously’ as we can (diligentissimo). Here, now, today, under present management, the site is Roman respectability itself (patre familiae).1 the field trip ‘Within’ the estate, Seneca learns to think of the locus as ‘farmland’ (huius agri). The abrupt introduction of, and to, Aegialus is, at base, insistently marked as the provision of a personification of Liternum, a transmogrification and paradigmatic acolyte of s c i p i o’s (chapter 12, pp. 160–3). Specifically, it is hard to miss that the complex Aegialus-nunc-huius agri is itself an instantiation, a rhetorical ‘operator’, of Seneca’s lesson. In literal 1

For the culture hero diligens paterfamilias, see, for example, Columella 1.1.3, 1.2, 1.8.18; he idolizes his Uncle Marcus as doctissimum et diligentissimum agricolam (2.15.4); in retirement, Seneca pictures himself as uinearum diligens fossor (Naturales Quaestiones 3.7.1).

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terms, naturally, ‘Ownership of trees, however ancient, is transferable.’ Aegialus has indeed acquired s c i p i o’s estate (possessor: Scipio even serves now as his rhetorical foil). Evidently he has preserved it religiously, in the full glory of its archaic pokiness, murk, and primitive plumbing. When Scipio went to Liternum, he made his own citadel, made it his own, and it has remained that way, however often it has changed hands. Could it have predated, trail-blazed, prompted Roman colonization of the swamp? Whether or not part of the original settlement, did the castle stand permanently aloof? Had it outlasted the outpost built on sand? s c i p i o’s villa had certainly conquered time, and collected the tree rings to prove it (chapter 12, pp. 163–4). Of course Seneca means more than the truism, but our job is to find a portentous lesson rooted in it, and the lesson has to match up to the hero’s mansion. The cue ‘farmland’ spells agricultural know-how. At the point of delivery, we are in no position to decide whether the lesson is formulated by Seneca, or was imparted to him already formulated: had Aegialus been an exemplum, or had he uttered a precept? Either way, the next sentence will confirm that the particular species of ‘transfer’ in question is to be ‘transplantation’ (transferri). seneca joins a team

s e n e c a appropriates the topic for himself, right away (uetus > nobis > senibus), and keeps it, too, since his lecture to Lucilius is based fair and square on his first-person witness: uidi . . . uidi, 14, 16). The thought-chain slides from the lesson of the trees, ‘an essential lesson for old men like myself to learn’, to an objection to Virgilian agronomy, ‘He meant not to teach farmers . . ., for example . . . here’s one where it was essential for me to catch him out today’ (hoc nobis senibus discere necessarium est, 14 > nec agricolas docere uoluit . . ., nam . . . hoc quod mihi hodie necesse fuit deprehendere, 15). As the thinking takes us away from Aegialus and the ‘inside’ of s c i p i o ’s, and into hunting down Virgil in his course on agriculture, this trajectory is marked by formal recognition of digression, ‘return to the olive grove’ (ad oliuetum reuertar, 17 ∼ oliuetum, 14), and a third pledge of personal testimony: uidi (17). Seneca had opened bizarrely, with a notion apparently prompted instantly by the lesson of Aegialus: ‘Old trees can transplant.’ But ‘oldster Senecas can only set an olive grove for the other fellow’. After his detour into poetry, he returns with ‘the olive grove. I have seen two methods of setting it in’ (quorum nemo non oliuetum alteri ponit, quod

Aegialus in Letter 86 (and Virgil)

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uidi illud arborum . . . deponere, 14 > oliuetum reuertar, quod uidi duobus modis positum . . ., arborum, 17). After another conclusive image of ‘heeling underfoot’ (calcauit, 17 ∼ calcare, 7), however, a e g i a lu s speaks, with a word all his own (negat . . ., ut ait, 18). The owner has not just been doing the gardening, as he will continue to do, but he talks us through his recommended technique, too (ut ait, 18, again). For the remainder of the letter, stereophony between Seneca’s recording eye and Aegialus’ vocal commentary both brings the pair together and pushes them apart (20–1): illud etiamnunc uidi, uitem . . . et uidi . . . positas . . . omnes autem istas arbores quae, ut ita dicam, ‘grandiscapiae’ sunt, ait aqua adiuuandas . . . Another recent sight I have seen: a vine . . . Also, I have seen them set in . . . In fact, all those trees which, let me say, are ‘big-stemmed’, must, he says, be given a boost with water . . .

The reinforcement, bonding, and transfer involved in teaming a e g i a lu s + s e n e c a model for the next phase of Tradition attested, secured, and taught, through Transition (chapter 11, pp. 146–7). We can catch the Elder Pliny dreaming the same dream for himself and his would-be avatar among herbalists, Antonius Castor, who taught a whole generation: ‘by the sight of his garden, in which he grew a huge variety of organic medicines, beyond his hundredth year of life, never having known physical suffering, neither memory nor vigour shaken by age’ (Natural History 25.9). The Letter just is this talismanic chain of transplantation: s c i p i o – a e g i a lu s – s e n e c a > lu c i l i u s . Hence its summation is its summary (21: cf. pp. 143–5): plura te docere non cogito, ne quemadmodum Aegialus me sibi . . . parauit, sic ego parem te mihi. No, I am not thinking of teaching you any more lessons. In case, just the way that Aegialus trained me to be his . . ., I may train you to be mine. Like this.

We are not to be told if Aegialus has old age on his side, to match Seneca’s. We are not told whether either instructor’s techniques are as old as the hills or are new-fangled science. We do shuffle between mimesis and paraenesis as two twin methods, or aspects, of instruction. For, to return to the olive grove before it went digressive, there is no doubt that Virgil is fetched in to supplement Aegialus in order to allegorize the transmission of

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knowledge from Senecas to Luciliuses: te quoque, 15 ∼ ‘te quoque’, 16 (see p. 145). n o t i m e to lo s e : o l i ve We must struggle undeterred past a sentence in the paradosis that we cannot decipher (quod uidi . . . deponere, 14), just at the point where Senecas are calibrated against Luciliuses. For it seems secure that the argument grounded the general lesson ‘However ancient the tree, transplanting is possible’ in the specific, loaded, instance of the ‘olive grove’. The olive had been proverbial for the lag between planting and harvesting that makes it a gift for posterity, as the initial tag from Virgil intimates; in the case of the very old, tree-planting must be an altruistic legacy. (Even a delay of ‘three or four years before first fruiting’ would see off a Seneca, as it did between the penning of Epistle 86 and suicide.) Whereas a Lucilius can turn the appliance of science into the opportunity to share in the rewards of our labour, along with generations of readers to come. Exploration of Virgil’s (initial) lesson leads us on to look at other plants, and at other growth-cycle principles, including both ‘setting in’ and ‘sowing’ (ponenda, serentes, 16). Here timing is about time of year, not time of life; time to plant according to the plant’s bioclock, so it seems, rather than the planter’s. Yet just as the text for the sermon equivocated between the ‘aged tree’ and ‘Seneca’, so that gardener figured both planter and their plant, so the quarrel with Virgil’s second lesson wrests planting away from a monopoly by spring. It opens up a more diversified calendar, to suggest that the human organism may find itself either ‘sowing late’ and ‘reaping early’ or ‘sown late’, ‘reaped early’, according to circumstance as well as type (16). re a d i n g t h e fa r m For Aegialus-Seneca, the message is of adaptability, not circumscription. Their eye ‘has regard’ for the ‘messiness’ of ‘Truth’: quid uerissime, non quid decentissime . . . aspexit (15: variable, malleable, capable of rescheduling; unbecomingly unruly, untidily relativistic, inelegantly capable of disaggregation). As the Letter has been dolefully teaching us all along, ‘teaching country living’ is not to be confused with ‘delighting readers’ in the ordinary sense (nec agri-colas docere, sed legentes delectare, 15); but we are readers, and we have learned to share Seneca’s ecstatic ‘sourness’ in teaching us ‘farmland’ truths at s c i p i o ’s (tristia, huius agri, 14).


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add the vine So it is that when we return to the olive grove after ‘the digression’ (17), we have been readied for the testing challenge to Plant Science of developing techniques for transplanting old wood to deliver early yield. And the prospect of ‘two methods of setting in’ the single species, olive, will prove to fit the parallel disjunction between superannuated Senecas who have to be in a rush to see any returns, and Luciliuses who have time to play with, and every expectation of enjoying their own payback. Whereas the introduction of a different plant culture will bring a divergent focus to the course of instruction – viticulture (20): uidi uitem ex arbusto suo annosam transferri. I have seen a vine of many years’ standing transplanted away from its very own tree.

Before Aegialus and Seneca finally wind up a double act again, combining for a sweeping joint statement to cover ‘all those trees’ (omnes . . . istas arbores, 21), Seneca’s own speciality, the vineyard, figures transplantation of a radically different kind from oleiculture.2 As we shall see, he is 2

Pertinent olive gen.: (1) Theophrastus, History of Plants 2.1.2: ‘grown by all the methods except from a twig . . . although many, or all, trees permit growing from a branch – be it smooth, young, putting on good weight’; 4, ‘grows, so to say, in the most ways of all: from trunk, sections of stock, root, twig – and even a stake’. (2) Cato, De agri cultura 28.1: ‘When you sow e.g. olives, or vines, or the like, remove them well, with roots, with as much of their own soil as possible (cum radicibus . . . cum terra sua quam maxima), and with ties right around them . . . Take care not to dig up or transport them during wind or rain . . . When you set them in the trench (in scrobe), put top soil beneath; afterwards, cover with earth, with the roots setting the limits, and then heel in well with feet, then heel in with rods and bars the best you can manage (calcato . . . calcato) . . . Trees thicker than five fingers’ width, chop short and sow, smear the tops with manure and tie up with leaves (fimo).’ Cf. 61.2, general orders: ‘The rest of the farming is, right on time, carrying as many roots as possible, together with the earth (cum terra); when you’ve well covered the roots, heel in well (calcare), so the water can do no harm.’ Quoting all this from Cato: Pliny (Natural History 17.125–6); De agri cultura 45.1, ‘olive truncheons (taleas = qal©av) for planting in the trench cut three feet long and handle carefully in chopping or cutting to go easy on the bark . . . When you put a truncheon in, press on truncheon with foot; if it doesn’t go down, force with mallet or beetle and take care not to split the bark in forcing . . . Truncheons at three years old are ready when the bark turns. . .’ (3) Varro, Res rusticae 1.40.4, ‘With an olive cutting one must see it is from a tender branch sharpened evenly both ends – some call them scions, others truncheons (clauolae, taleae), making them c. one foot long’; 41.6, ‘Since olive seed is a nut, because the stem grows out of it more slowly than from other plants, for that reason we plant truncheons in nurseries, as stated.’ (4) Columella 5.9.1–3, ‘When you have trenched three feet deep . . . let it loosen. Then take new branches tall and shiny (ramos), that a hand can grip and enfold (= a handle’s width), off the highest-yield trees, and cut off the freshest truncheons so as not to harm the bark or any other bit (except where the saw has gone) . . . Truncheons should be cut one and a half feet long . . .

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extraordinarily neat and brutally clipped about this, but still contrives to parade telling parallels with the reflections that had grown from his Virgil excursus, and even to start up hooking back to s c i p i o ’s bath-house (20: see pp. 140–1). d i rt y wo rk The olive grove comes first, matching ‘two methods of setting in’ (duobus modis depositum, 17 ∼ alter ponendi modus, 19): r (1) Transplantation involves the bodily transfer of live olive (transtulit).

Savage systematic brutalization is required. It comes across in two chunks: (A1) Take a ‘great tree’ (magnarum). Take the ‘trunk’ and ‘truncate’ the torso. ‘Chop right round’ the limbs. Hack them off down to one-foot long stumps (truncos circumcisis ramis . . .). Do not detach ‘their very own ball’ (cum suo rapo). Do ‘sever the roots’ (amputatis radicibus). ‘Leave just the actual head they depend on’ (relicto . . . capite ipso).

Give this horribly mangled remnant the treatment: ‘transplantation’ means the works:3 but it will be necessary to smear the truncheons’ heads and lowest parts with manure mixed with ashes . . .’; 8, ‘The small trees can transplant this way: before uprooting a baby tree from the soil . . . let a one-foot-long space be left in a circle and the plant be disinterred with its turf and all (cum suo caespite) . . .’ (5) Seneca had his teacher (the blushing, rough-and-ready stylist) Fabianus’ Causarum naturalium libri before him: Fabianus negat prouenire in frigidissimis oleam neque in calidissimis . . . (Pliny, Natural History 15.4). Relevant vine low-down: (1) Theophrastus, History of Plants 2.1.3: ‘grown from branches, though it cannot grow from the “prow” (= “head”)’. (2) Cato, De agri cultura 32.1, ‘Layer them into furrows’; 49.1, ‘if you want to shift an old vine, it’s on up to an arm’s thickness . . . Dig away well from the roots, chase up the roots all the way, take care not to wound the roots; then, just the way it was, set into the ditch or furrow, cover and heel down well’; and see on olive, above. (3) Columella 4.2.2, ‘The selfsame Atticus’ commandment is to propagate old vineyards with layers rather than to give them a covering whole (totas sternere), since layers soon root easily, in such a way that each vine rests on its own roots as if on customized foundations. A vine whose whole body is covered flat out, once it has criss-crossed and meshed the soil underneath, makes a mat and chokes on too many roots knotted together, and fails in the same way as it would if weighed down with lots of sprouts.’ 3

For olives and vines in competition, see pp. 129, 144 versus 164. See Pliny, Natural History 17.67, auolsi . . . arboribus stolones uixere; quo in genere et cum perna sua auelluntur partemque aliquam e matris quoque corpore auferunt secum fimbriato corpore. hoc modo plantantur . . . in primis . . . uites. Virgil’s young vines are tended until old enough to take the rough stuff (Georgic 2.362–70).


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(A2) Douse it in dung. Lower it down a hole. Heap soil on it. But don’t stop there: tread it down, flatten it (fimo tinctum . . . demisit, . . . terram . . . adgessit . . ., calcauit . . . pressit).

Now cut through the clutter of annotation, to locate the deferred core of the atrocity: (B) Before burying it alive, give said ball a radical scraping. Cut the truncated torso to three or four feet, max. (antequam obruat radit; non plures autem super terram eminere debet truncus quam tres aut quattuor pedes).

The two bunches of instructions carry assurances from the experts: (i) Embryonic roots emerge and ‘take’ on the soil (nascentes radices prodire . . . solum apprendere). (ii) New roots come from all the flayed wood (ex omni enim materia quae nudata est, ut ait, radices exeunt nouae).

The latter is vouched for by the owner, and the correct term for the sadistic torture was also a e g i a lu s ’ (ut ait ∼ ut ait): ‘pounding’ (pinsatio). We learn the correct word-and-thing at s c i p i o ’s, where it takes effect most productively of all, in our learning process. Inset, a double list of advantages is noted: (a4) (a2) (a3) (a4)

shuts out cold (frigus excludit); shuts out wind (excludit et uentum); lessens disturbance (minus . . . mouetur); not even a light shaking will tear up young roots, still flexi-, gripping on precariously (radices . . . leuis quoque reuellat agitatio). + (b1) puts on cover right away, from the very bottom (uestietur). (b2) there won’t be any great section of it left, the way it is in ageing olive groves, dry and scorched (nec magna pars quemadmodum in oliuetis ueteribus arida et retorrida erit).

So the strategy of renewal is blessed. As old wood gets a new lease of life, it rejuvenates (radices nouae . . ., oliuetis ueteribus). It is just as ‘essential’ to realize the new vulnerability as it was ‘for us Senecas to learn’ and ‘to catch out Virgil’ (necesse est, 18 ∼ necessarium fuit . . . necesse fuit, 14, 16). r (2) Use the same techniques of ‘setting in’ (deposuit). Report briefly,

enact non-violently (30 ∼ 124 words). Simulate a hypernatural process of growth. Axe verbiage, use minimalist figures of speech (quales . . . tamquam). Smoothe away from view all unpleasantness:

(A) Take strong branches, with pliant bark (ramos fortes nec corticis duri). (B) Set in ‘with the same technique’ (eodem genere).

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Now for expert reassurance: These gain height a little more slowly (surgunt).

Quietly ditch jargon. Once set, let the olives grow without visible assistance (by imagery). Twin advantages are listed: a. They are soft, so like new (young) saplings (quales . . . nouellarum arborum). + b. They have stemmed from a quasi-‘slip’, so they have nothing hair-raising or grim about them (cum tamquam a planta processerint, nihil habent in se abhorridum aut triste).

Again the strategy is holy renewal. Again old wood rejuvenates (nouellarum arborum . . ., a planta). There is no appeal to necessity; instead, it is a matter of habit (solent). But this arboriculture misses the urgency of the butchered torso option (statim): these brave new branches take time, and that is in short supply, if you’re a Seneca (paulo tardius surgunt). re pe at t h e d o s e No reader of Letter 86 trying to be as ‘conscientious a head of household’ as Aegialus (14) should miss the sense that this dyad of horticultural approaches re-produces diction, images, ideas, and values, that we have encountered not far from ‘this farmland’. Some items transfer us to s e n e c a ’s;4 others to vat i a ’s;5 most, however, to the mansion ‘inside’ whose grounds we now ruminate, with Seneca and Lucilius: s c i p i o ’s.6 4

5

6

Epp. 86: creui, terramque . . . ipse subigebat, aliquem manu sua temperasse, quamuis uetus arbustum . . . in oliuetis ueteribus, positum . . . ponendi . . . deposuit, truncos circumcisis ramis . . . truncus, retorrida, triste, tenent et complexae sunt, aqua adiuuandas ∼ 12.1–4: uillam ueterem esse . . . illas uetulas esse. haec uilla inter manus meas creuit . . . ego illas posueram, retorridi rami, tristes . . . trunci, circumfoderet . . . inrigaret, complectamur illam et amemus. Epp. 86: Scipionis . . . uilla, sepulcrum, locum dedit legibus et se Liternum recipit, utrimque, balneolum angustum, operosa, in aliquo . . . templo, ut totius diei solem . . . recipiant, manu sua, ‘nesciit uiuere’, excludit ∼ 55: Vatiae uillam, uelut angustum iter cluditur, scis uiuere . . . latere sciebat, non uiuere . . . scit sibi uiuere . . . scit uiuere, hic situs est, sacrum quiddam, magni operis, duae . . . quarum altera solem non recipit, altera usque in occidentem tenet, manus, totius anni, elegisse hunc locum Vatia in quem otium suum . . . conferret. Epp. 86.1–14: magnos . . . magnitudinem . . . magna . . . magnis, libertatis . . . libertas . . . libertati, omnes ciues, circumdatum . . . circumlitio . . . circumdedit, cisterna, caldum . . . calido . . . incendio . . . ardeat an caleat, horror, antiqua . . . priscis . . . priscos, corpus . . . corpora . . corpore, opere . . . operosa . . . opere, terram, sordido . . . sordidus . . . sordes . . . sordes, distincta, demittimus, positarum . . . deponerent, aquarum . . . aqua . . . aqua, calcare, exsectae, admitterent . . . recipiant, obrueret, plueret, lutulenta . . . spurciores, collegerunt, opposuit, tamquam suo, tristia ∼ 86.14–21: uetus, ponit . . . deponere . . . ponenda . . . depositum . . . ponendi . . . deposuit . . . positas, magnarum . . . magna, circumcisis, cum rapo suo . . . ex


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We shall explore the import of these didactic prosaics in chapter 11 (pp. 140–1). But first, there is more to come, in this bipartite oleaginous garden full of ‘precious little material that is dry and scorched’, and ‘nothing hair-raising or grim about them’:7 nec magna pars . . . a r i d [a] e t r e t o r r i d a ∼ nihil . . . . . . . . . . a b h o r r i d [um] a u t t r i s t e.

For we have yet to hear it through the grapevine (20). s ay i t w i t h g r a pe s Vintography. Our instruction on shifting a vine is formally presented as a second disquisition (illud etiamnunc: ‘another’ and ‘recent’ item) on today’s text from s c i p i o ’s - a e g i a lu s ’ - s e n e c a ’s gnomic locus (14 ∼ 20): h oweve r a n c i e n t t h e t re e , t r a n s p l a n t i n g i s p o s s i b l e (quamuis uetus arbustum posse transferri). ∼ A vine of many years’ standing transplanted away from its very own tree (uitem ex arbusto suo annosam transferri; . . . if it can be managed, si fieri potest).

We noticed already that this exercise in brachylogy will pack in miniaturized resumptions of previous themes, traits, and tropes from the body of the letter. Our instant vista of vine-clothed terraces flashes past, blurring away into the formal recapitulation of the entire lecture on agribusiness, which of course began from Aegialus’ general proclamation before focussing on Seneca’s example of the olive grove (21 ∼ 14): (b2) Vine . . ., [vines] . . . (a2) In fact, all those trees . . . must get a boost . . . (uitis . . ., [uites] . . . ∼ omnes autem istas arbores . . . adiuuandas . . .) ∼ (a1) However . . . the tree, the possibility . . . (b1) every one of us . . . an olive grove for the other fellow (quamuis . . . arbustum posse . . .∼ nemo non oliuetum alteri . . .)

As I have remarked already, the bold claim to authority for Seneca as witness leads once again to citation of Aegialus as expert, though his teaching is

7

arbusto suo . . . non suas, fimo tinctum, demisit, terram . . . calcauit, frigus excludit, obruat, abhorridum, triste, colligenda, liberalius, corpore, omnes . . . arbores, aqua . . . cisternina, pluuiam, aduersarium. Cf. Mucius Scaevola’s incinerated wrist: truncam illam et retorridam manum (Epp. 66.51). We saw Seneca imaged in his trees: retorridi rami . . . tristes et squalidi trunci (12.2; see Scarpat (1975) 286–7).

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reinforced by Seneca’s own voice and phrasing – and the pledge of allegiance may of course smuggle in his own extrapolation, within the amplification (pp. 120–1: 20–1): uidi . . . et uidi . . . ut ita dicam . . . ait . . . A sight . . . Also, I have seen . . . let me say . . . he says . . .

If the main point is to miniaturize the rhetoric used and reused for olives, nevertheless Seneca’s vines also contrive to connect back to the digression on v i r g i l ’s agronomy (20 ∼ 16): ‘Also, I have seen them set in not just in the month of February, but also after March is over. They hold and have embraced elms. (et uidi non tantum mense Februario positas, sed etiam Marte exacto; tenent et complexae sunt . . . ulmos) ∼ It’s the month of June . . . already tipping into July: on the very same day I have seen bean a-harvesting and millet a-sowing. (Iunius mensis est . . . iam procliuis in Iulium; eodem die uidi fabam metentes, milium serentes).

But our greatest marvel and joy as conscientious readers of Epistle 86 is surely reserved for the syncopated tailoring of the tailpiece on the vine to the mannequin provided by our double dose of oleography.8 r [(3)] Do ‘set in’ (positas). ‘No need to reiterate’ (huius quoque, 20 ∼ eodem

genere, 19). Instead: careful, loving précis (sixteen words; + eighteen words to decoct the earlier ‘digression’ of ninety-two words). Do not damage this tree. Bring care to each plant: gently. Generously. Holistically. Charm response from nearly dead wood:

(A) Pick up the strands too (huius capillamenta quoque . . . colligenda sunt). (B) Give the vine a pretty generous covering (liberalius sternenda uitis).

Now for expert reassurance: They hold and have embraced elms (tenent et complexae . . . ulmos).

Go on to bring in some characterful earthy jargon (grandiscapiae, 21 ∼ pinsatione, 18). Once set, let the vines take properly (tenent et complexae sunt, 20 ∼ apprehendere . . . haerentes . . . reuellat, 18). A crucial advantage: 8

I have not convinced a reader that ‘§20 on vines is not still part of what Seneca saw and heard on Aegialus’ farm’. Rather, ‘Aegialus has equipped Seneca to be as good a farmer as he is himself; Seneca will not do the same favour for Lucilius.’ Did(n’t) I mean to set up adversaries for myself all along?


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(a) [They root like other trees.] ‘No need to mention’ (etiam). + (b) They also ‘root from their body’ (ex corpore radicescat). The old wood rejuvenates, responding to the onset of spring, and subject to an obligatory technical schedule (-enda sunt, deinde . . . -enda), even under the pressurized time constraints of an April catch-up. No dismemberment, no ‘trunk’, no root-dangling ‘head’, only ‘strands’ (truncos . . . capite, 17 ∼ capillamenta, 20). No ‘chopping, amputating’, and so on, but instead ‘picking up, giving a pretty generous covering’ (circumcisis . . . amputatis, 17 ∼ colligenda, liberalius sternenda, 20).

c a re f o r o l i ve s a n d v i n e s Both Cato’s and Varro’s farms attend to vine and olive pretty well evenhandedly, intercut into each link in the chain of farming operations. ‘Bacchus’’ vine + ‘slow-growing olive’ are announced as the particular highlights of Virgil’s botany book, On Arboriculture (Georgics 2.1–9). But ‘melding vines to elms’ was the initial billing (1.2), and olives will occupy only six devoted verses (2.420–5), while viticulture amasses 160 (2.259–419, 454–7).9 Among Seneca’s contemporaries, Pliny gives almost all of Natural Histories 14 to Viticulture, and just 15.1–23 to Oleiculture (7–23 on oil), and Columella brackets vine and olive as ‘most complex and least demanding of all trees’ (5.8.1), but dedicates just 5.8–9 to the olive, as against Books 3–4, plus 5.3–7, to the Italian, and to the provincial vine (‘properly neither tree nor bush’, 3.1.2). Seneca’s dwarfing of vine by overshadowing olive is therefore a considerable surprise. This will bear pondering (pp. 143–4, 163–4). V I RG I L ’ S F U N N Y FA R M As we saw (chapter 5, pp. 46–7), the visit to s c i p i o’s garden inaugurated a strengthening habit of thinking through Virgil’s lessons in Farming which helps to replace Epicurus’ authority with Seneca’s revisionary clout. As it transpires, the final letter in the paradosis headlines the Georgics for a formal ‘epigraph’ (124.1 = 1.176–7): ‘Possum multa tibi ueterum praecepta referre, ni refugis tenuisque piget cognoscere curas.’ 9

Pliny, Natural History 15.4 objects to Virgil’s misrepresentation of olivage as ‘no-maintenance’ here.

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– non refugis . . . ‘I can relate to you many Commandments from the Elders – unless you do a runner, unless it’s a drag to study tenuous concerns.’ – No runner from you . . .

And this letter duly features agricultural images applied to human perfectibility – ‘root up, top-down’, ‘Goodness in tree or beast? . . . Not in the seed, or first leaf, or the like, not until the perfection of summer-ripened grain’ (nb, ‘just as our old age is doing well if it arrives at Goodness through long and focussed study’ . . .), but of course there can be no true Goodness where there is no reason, as in trees and grass, and dumb creatures, and such like . . .’ (8–13). Georgic imagery of course cropped up in the armature of Seneca’s argumentation from the first – ‘reap and sow’, ‘trees fruit, farmers are delighted’, ‘sowing seed, ripe corn, overladen branches’, ‘the old old grove’, ‘praise the loaded vine’, and so on (Epp. 9.7; 34.1; 38.2, 4; 41.3, 7), and significantly the first quote from Virgil’s poem introduced discussion of the problems of Translation, from Greek to Latin, from one code to another (58.2: cf. chapter 11, pp. 147–9). The longest quotation in the Letters sets out Seneca’s strongest lesson in metaphorical reading, when Virgil’s profile of Nobility is savoured at length (95.67–9 ∼ Georgic 3.75–81 + 83–5).10 Horse-fanciers rely on the animal’s good points, ‘How much more useful to know the marks of an exceptional spirit, when it is legitimate to translate (transferre) those marks from others to one’s self.’ Listen to Virgil; then reflect, explicitly: ‘In handling something other, our Virgil has picture-written (descripsit) The Brave Hero. For sure I wouldn’t give the Epic Hero an image any different’ (95.67–9: the application continues through to the end at 73).11 Admiration for ‘our Virgil’ (seventeen times in Epp.), however, must also take the form of ‘critique’, or this would not be severe Seneca: ‘When Virgil speaks of ‘the mind’s evil | joys’, he speaks eloquently, of course – but imprecisely as hell: no Evil is a joy. He pinned the name to pleasures, and did express what he meant, because his meaning was that their evil makes humans happy. Yet, all the same, I, Seneca, did speak with good cause when I said . . .’ (59.3–4, citing Aeneid 6.278–9). And, sparing the 10

11

Pliny grants that Virgil’s ‘form’ book here is ‘most beautifully done’, but – getting on his high horse – advertises the revise featured in his own first work, De iaculatione equestri (Natural History 8.162). Horse-flesh. We should recall how Horace played at drooling over appraisal of human fillies’ ‘good points’ in the meat-market of male desire in, precisely, Satires 1.2: Henderson (1989) 104–6.


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name, ‘It seems to me that he was going wrong, [the one] who said: ‘Virtue is all the more winsome when it comes from a beautiful body.’ Because she needs no recommendation, but is her own epic glory and hallows her own body. For sure it was on different principles that I began to survey . . .’ (66.2, minimally adapting Aeneid 5.344: ‘from’ for ‘in’). So when we turn from mansion to grounds at s c i p i o ’s, we are alert to the need to inspect Virgil citation for more than borrowed plumage (86.15–16):12 . . . te quoque proteget illa quae tarda uenit seris factura nepotibus umbram, ut ait Vergilius noster, qui non quid uerissime sed quid decentissime diceretur aspexit, nec agricolas docere uoluit sed legentes delectare. nam, ut alia omnia transeam, hoc quod mihi hodie necesse fuit deprehendere, adscribam: uere fabis satio est; tunc te quoque, Medica, putres accipiunt sulci, et milio uenit annua cura. an uno tempore ista ponenda sint et an utriusque ‘uerna sit satio’, hinc aestimes licet: Iunius mensis est quo tibi scribo, iam procliuis in Iulium: eodem die uidi ‘fabam’ metentes, ‘milium’ serentes. . . . There will be shelter for you as well from the tree that ‘comes on slow, for to grow late in the day grandsons’ shade,’ as our very own Virgil says. Though he focussed not on what is said most truthfully, but what is said most fittingly. Meant not to teach farmers, but to delight readers. E.g. – to skip all the other cases – here’s one where it was essential for me to catch him out today. I’ll jot it in: ‘Spring is sowing for beans. Then you as well, clover, crumbling furrows welcome in. And for millet there comes a year’s tending.’ Q.: Are these (a) to be set in at one and the same time, or (b) is sowing to be in spring for both? A.: You can figure it out from this: it’s the month of June when I’m writing you, already tipping into July: on the very same day I have seen ‘bean’ a-harvesting and ‘millet’ a-sowing.

The first quotation, Seneca’s only foray into Georgics 2, comes from the most complex section on Virgil’s farm, the section on complexity (2.9.34– 135: all assembled in Italy, 136–76. It therefore needs more than a hundred tongues in a ton of mouths, plus an iron implement of a voice, 2.42–4). The first point for Virgil to make about/with trees is that ‘nature comes 12

See Mazzoli (1970) 215–32, esp. 221; I have not seen Pasoli (1975).

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in all colours when it comes to producing them’ (2.9).13 For some grow spontaneously, under their own impulsion. Some spring from seed. Others from the root. Experience + utility have found supplementary methods: propagation by sucker, stem, layer, cutting, planted hunk of trunk, grafting and budding (2.22–34, recap in 42–72). Some plants, then, need no root, just plant a cutting; olive root, though, sprouts miraculously from chopped pieces of olive log (2.28–9; 30–1). But the rule is that spontaneous growth is low-yield but successful and strong, whereas farmed growth by grafting or transplantation in dug-over trenches domesticates and forces (scrobibus . . . mutata subactis, 2.50; haud tarda, 2.52). Take the case where (2.57): iam quae seminibus iactis se sustulit arbos, the tree raises itself from dispersed seed.

That variety ‘comes on slow, for to grow late in the day grandsons’ shade’. Run through the same range of technological shifts – growth from the trunk, layers, stems, suckers, grafting: all of it hard and specific work, speciesdetermined, for olives respond better via trunks, vines through layering (truncis oleae melius, propagine uites | respondent, 2.63), and so on. So Seneca’s first quotation is excerpted from a context that is all about unpacking infinitely nuanced care, and broadcasts that, loudly. Farming means response to what works best with each plant, what suits: the block headline ‘slow-growing olive culture’ seeds a rich education in husbandry.14 That is why it works, and increasingly suits, as a productive model for Seneca’s project of farming philosophical crops (see pp. 139–41). The run of Seneca’s thinking is obscured by our uncertainty about the sentence that sprouted the quotation, but it seems that his excerpt is both exactly in tune with the idea he is presenting and an item of knowledge consonant with his own. Where the gnomic tradition had held that olives just do take a generation or more before cropping, Virgil and Seneca knew that human technology could do better, accelerating the process by transplantation of olive stock. Much better: three or four years should do it. This is how Pliny introduces his olive section (Natural History 15.3): Hesiodus quoque, in primis culturam agrorum docendam arbitratus uitam, negauit oleae satorem fructum ex ea percepisse quemquam – tam tarda tunc res erat; at nunc etiam in plantariis ferunt, translatarumque altero anno decerpuntur bacae. 13 14

For what follows, see Thomas’ brilliant exegesis (1988), esp. the diuisiones at 1.157, 165, 170–1. For his section on Bacche + tarde crescentis oliuae (Georgic 2.2–3), Virgil had Varro before him (Res rusticae 1.41.4, ficus, malus punica et uitis propter femineam mollitiam ad crescendum prona, contra palma et cupressus et olea in crescendo tarda . . .


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Plus: Hesiod, who judged that life was above all the teaching of agriculture, declared that no grower of an olive had realized fruit from it, so slow a business it was back then. Whereas nowadays they fruit even in the nursery, and once they are transplanted there is berry-picking in the next year but one.

Seneca sits atop this tale of technological advance. His wrinkle arises from a e g i a lu s’ intervention. Even the oldest tree can bear with transplantation: very old humans must realize they still won’t see a return on their olives. How many months stretch out ahead of a Seneca? Other people, such as Lucilius, will see an end result even if they do not intervene to accelerate the process; they will see their olives crop. For when Virgil says grandchildren will get the benefit, he is telling us traditional wisdom, and it presumably holds still, for self-sown trees. But Virgil will next teach us (how) to shift and speed up our groves in order to finesse frustration. There is therefore plenty to ponder when Seneca comes out of his quotation with his one-liner about the intent of the Georgics, which has itself become one of the most cited interpretations of a classical text from Antiquity, and maybe one of the least pondered.15 (How) Does thinking through ‘our Virgil’s’ first quotation lead to the thought that ‘he focussed not on what is said most truthfully, but what is said most fittingly. Meant not to teach farmers, but to delight readers’? Was the point where Virgil neglected True for Fitting here? To read just the verse quoted might mean we should see Virgil harking back to the old ways, the works and the days of Hesiod, when humanity was sufficiently dominated by nature to be forced to go at the given pace, and when reconciliation with natural limits defined righteous living. But once we know that Virgil had invoked ‘generosity to grandsons’ in conjunction with self-sown trees, but only as preliminary to spelling out the improvements on nature available to latter-day farmers on a species-specific basis, including ideal methods to use on both olive and vine, it is hard indeed to see that he ‘downplayed Truth in favour of Decorum’, let alone that he was out to ‘delight readers rather than teach farmers’. If anything, it seems that Seneca grossly misrepresents Virgil, and so makes it clear that his take on rapid-pay-off techniques is far from a staple desideratum of a course in agronomy. To put it more strongly, even though mean old Cato flatly affirms ‘Old vines you can transplant’ (De agri cultura 49.1: uineam ueterem si in alium locum transferre uoles . . . : see p. 124 n. 2), shifting old trees, just to show it can be done, was not what farming, 15

E.g. Wilkinson (1969) 15, ‘Seneca said no more than the obvious when he remarked that Virgil was interested in what could be said decentissime, not verissime, and that he wrote not to teach farmers, but to delight readers.’

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even symbolic farming, had ever been about.16 Only Seneca’s special need to improve still more on the already radical transformation of arboricultural possibilities, so that Senecas on their last legs could enjoy their own success, could fantasize this transparent frame-up of the Georgics! Yet whatever avenue dwelling on the process of quotation of the first snippet of Virgil leads us to explore, we can be sure of two sticky facts: we are reading, with or without ‘delight’ (and for that, or not); and Seneca does mean to ‘teach’ his readers, to be ‘cultured’. We can feel that he would see himself as always putting Truth above Decorum, if obliged to choose. But how should that discomfit readers of Virgil? There is another possibility. Perhaps both aspects of the damning exposé of the Georgics look, not back, but forward – to the second quotation? In which case, Seneca’s rough handling of Virgil’s (age-old, symbolic, selfsown) olive will be another aspect of the drive to make Tradition work for today; no time to lose. As this stickler loved rubbing in, it can make for ‘grim reading’ (14); and ‘teaching farmers’ isn’t really in his sights. We reach the second Virgil quotation via ‘E.g. – to skip all the other cases –’ (nam, ut alia omnia transeam). Here, apart from meeting a rhetorical bid to gain credit for saving us time and effort (in praeteritio), we cross a structural bridge or modulation in the compositional design (‘transition’).17 The build-up stresses that the translocation from bathroom to nursery did not rupture the Letter, but transformed the coding of its business (pp. 139– 41). The staggered steps in turning the ‘hinge’ serve to displace immediate challenge to Aegialus by introducing the straw man Virgil, who can be given respect, and a let-out for non-existent failings on the part of poetic decorum, while he prepares the ground for Seneca to plant himself in the role of independent witness to horticultural realities (quod uidi . . ., uidi, 14, 16). As I have remarked (pp. 121–2, 125), the double wedge of Georgics turns the ‘essential lesson for old men like myself to learn’ into the test case ‘where it was essential for me to catch Virgil out today’, and transmission of knowledge from Senecas to readers is cued, and instantiated, by the rhyme between Seneca’s te quoque (15) and Virgil’s ‘te quoque’ (16). The negative critique of the citation is, unsurprisingly by this point, hard to endorse; or even to comprehend! Taken from Seneca’s (and/or everyone’s?) favourite patch (nine excerpts from Book 1), the two verses jotted in from the Georgics (1.215–16) come half-way through the instructions to synchronize ploughing and sowing 16 17

‘Shifting “late” elms’ is a paradisal touch in the old Corycian’s marvellous garden: Virgil, Georgic 4.144–7 (serus: vv. 122, 132, 138, 144). See Henderson (2002a) 126–9, on Pliny, Epistles 3.9.


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operations with the stellar calendar, as authorities have agreed from archaic Hesiod to Roman Varro (210–30): barley, flax, and poppy go in before winter soaks the soil (210–14); our ‘bean, lucerne, and millet’ wait for mid-April (217–18). candidus auratis aperit cum cornibus annum Taurus et aduerso cedens Canis occidit astro. when shining Taurus the bull opens the year with gilded horns, and the Dog sinks giving ground before the star bully. Wheat and spelt are for some time late in the year; vetch, eye-bean and lentil come in November (219–29; 227–30).

This paragraph does not present a farming calendar! The lesson of age-old reliance and obedience to the laws written into the cosmos is the point. The examples bracket the all-important ploughing and sowing of grain with marginal concerns (poppies, millet), and the order of exposition scatters temporal order and orders to the winds! We must internalize that sorting out all the crops to fit their own specific trajectories will take all the care we can find in ourselves as well as in the sum of human agroscience: all by reading the celestial signs on the face of Nature’s clock. Virgil’s perennial lucerne sows in spring (endorsed by Columella 2.10.25– 8: end of April; it then lasts up to a decade); so, too, its complement, the annual millet (endorsed by Columella 2.9.17–18: cannot be sown before spring; best in late March). And before this pair came Virgil’s vernal beansowing. So what’s Seneca’s problem?18 First, he prods, ‘do these things plant at one and the same time?’ Second, ‘do both of them “sow in spring”?’ When the appeal to the evidence of the eye against the text arrives, we will find he is blotting out one of the antithetical pair: forget lucerne (which farmers only (only!) have to remember to plant every ten years . . .), and go for the kill. There’s nothing wrong with millet in spring. It’s the half-baked bracketing of bean with millet + spring that is in our bad books (16): end of June, and ‘bean’ a-harvesting and ‘millet’ a-‘sowing’ on the very same day.

Columella’s spread on The Bean (2.10.5–14) comes when he has seen off most legumes-and-fodder (2.7.1: catalogue, with bean first; including lentil, eye-bean, millet, flax, barley(-grits), lucerne, vetch). His discussion begins with a pointed memo (2.7.2):19 18

19

Georgics scholarship goes too fast to let the quandary affect them: e.g. Wilkinson (1969) 271–2, citing Columella 2.10.9 and Pliny, Natural History 18.120: ‘Virgil may here be simply reporting what he knew from childhood.’ The antiquissimus just has to be Cato: De agri cultura 34.1, ubi quisque locus frigidissimus aquosissimusque erit, ibi primum serito; in caldissimis locis sementim postremum fieri oportet. (Which argues in favour of seramus in Columella.)

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memores antiquissimi praecepti quo monemur ut locis frigidis nouissime, tepidis celerius, calidis ocissime? metamus/seramus? . Never forgetting that most ancient Commandment which warns us to ? reap/sow? last in cold places, quicker than that in the warm, fastest in the hot.

‘His own Commandments will therefore now address as they would a temperate area’ (nunc autem proinde ac si temperatae regioni praecepta dabimus). His very next words invoke Virgil’s timing for corn and spelt (2.8.1 ∼ Georgic 1.219–21): placet nostro poetae adoreum atque etiam triticum non ante seminare quam occiderint Vergiliae. quod ipsum numeris sic edisserit: ‘At si . . . ... . . . abscondantur’. Our poet rules that spelt and even wheat do not sow before the setting of the [aptly-named!] Vergiliae [= Pleiades]. Here is how he promulgates this, in metre: ‘But if . . . ... . . . be out of sight’.

Upon which he adds the precise timing, fifty-six days from 24 October, before reminding us of his reminder (2.8.2 ∼ Georgic 1.214): nos quoque non abnuimus in agro temperato et minime umido sementem sic fieri debere; ceterum locis uliginosis atque exilibus aut frigidis aut etiam opacis plerumque citra Kalendas Octobris seminare conuenire, ‘dum sicca tellure licet, dum nubila pendent’ . . . Columella too accepts that sowing in temperate, minimally wet, land should be done this way; but in marshy and weak places, or in cold, or even shaded, places, it usually suits to sow this side of 1 October, ‘while dry soil permits, and the rain-clouds hang fire’ . . .

The ensuing discussion, of grain, never does lose grip of geophysical and climatic differences. Soon enough, however, he introduces a retrospective proviso (2.9.4): So far I have been speaking of autumn sowing, as I consider this most important. But there is another, when needs must, called ‘half-monthly sowing’ by farmers. This is rightly attempted in extra cold and snowy places, where the summer is wet and low on evaporation; other places hardly ever respond significantly.

Sowing topics run past, featuring seed-selection a` la Virgil (2.9.12, citing Georgic 1.197–200: in full recognition that ‘Virgil was dealing with other


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matters when he made this perfectly clear proclamation on seeds’, Vergilius cum et alia tum et hoc de seminibus praeclare sic disseruit). Then we roll on towards legumes, and The Bean feast (2.10.8–9): Part must sow at mid sowing-season, part at the end . . . Early is the more usual practice; sometimes, however, late sowing is better. After midwinter it doesn’t sow right, in spring, worst of all.

But farming with Columella never excerpts well, and his next words add a modification (2.10.9): – although, there is a three-monthly bean, too, which sows in February; taking 20 per cent more than the early bean, but yielding little straw and not much podding. So I hear wizened countrymen saying often enough that they take the bean-straw of the early sort over the beans of the three-monthly (malle se maturae fabalia quam fructum trimestris).

Georgic 1.195–6 are cited on seed-protection: ‘Countrymen of yore, plus Virgil, were on the same side . . .’ and the team sheet is completed with ‘Columella, too’ (nos quoque . . .). Then beans are through. To an enquirer who comes from Seneca, it must appear that Columella is comically skirting round Virgil’s ‘vernal bean-sowing’: quoting the lines after and the line before, as he grubs for usable material from this scattered passage,20 before rustling up an ‘out’ for Virgil’s at first sight springfever gaffe. ‘Ah – those “three-monthlies”.’ . . . And, lest we forget, all these practices are dependent on local conditions. Pliny goes one step further, in his entry for ‘the legume with the highest honour: beans [of the world]’ (Natural History 18.117–22). Bean-sowing takes two sentences, one on the Vergiliae, the other on Vergilius (120):21 seritur ante Vergiliarum occasum leguminum prima, ut antecedat hiemem. Vergilius eam per uer seri iubet circumpadanae Italiae ritu, sed maior pars malunt fabalia maturae sationis quam trimestrem fructum; eius namque siliquae caulesque gratissimo sunt pabulo pecori. It sows before the setting of the Vergiliae, the first of the legumes, to get in before winter. Virgil bids sowing it through vernal spring, in the manner of Italy in the Po valley, but most folk take the bean-straw of the early sort over the beans of the 20

21

See de Saint-Denis (1971) and Henderson (2002c) 116. The Georgics are quoted forty-nine times in Columella (forty-three times in agreement, twice in dispute or disagreement: 3.12.5; 4.11.1; 9.2.4; 9.14.6); eleven times in Res rusticae Book 2 = four from Book 2 and seven from Book 1, including the concentration 2.8.1 ∼ 1.219–21; 8.3 ∼ 1.214; 9.12 ∼ 1.197–200; 10.11 ∼ 1.195–6 (cf. 11.1.31 ∼ 1.204–7). After 2.13.3 ∼ 1.77–8, on flax and poppies, Virgil takes long leave. Cato just tucks bean-sowing in with transplanting olives, and the rest of ‘seed-time’ (De agri cultura 27). Varro crisply notes: fabam optime seri in Vergiliarum occasu, which must read as a ‘provocation’ to Virgil (Res rusticae 1.34.1).

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three-monthly (malunt fabalia maturae sationis quam trimestrem fructum). For its pods and stalks make the animals’ favourite fodder.

This boffin is pretty obviously singing from the same sheet as Columella, but comes up with one more ‘out’ for ‘our poet’. Over-protected Virgil? Pliny is in general inclined to criticize Virgil’s grasp of facts,22 but isn’t it tempting to imagine that the three mid first-century writers are reacting to some early commentator picking over the Georgics’ momentary hill of beans? Does Seneca ape a critical scourge, whereas Columella and then Pliny come up with answers, whether from more commentary or from their own research? However this may have been, Seneca’s ‘once-for-all refutation’ of Farmer Virgil’s Truth quotient amounts to a roughing up of Holy Tradition. And its purpose may not lie in convincing us that the Georgics is a has-been. Rather, Seneca’s abuse of the teaching text of Augustan morality looks to serve as a model for his bruising approach to transplanting Tradition into fresh life (chapter 11). For Seneca, the suggestion might go, to ‘see with his own eyes’, wherever it may be, people busy ‘sowing and reaping’ their crops according to the season that suits their circumstances, amounts to a vindication of the anti-dogmatic ethical strategy articulated through the Epistulae Morales, where control is wrested away from cut-and-dried formulae, and handed back for embedding in the thick texture of ongoing life? Te quoque . . . i t h a d to b e v i rg i l r Horace > Virgil. ‘Two halves of one soul’ (Odes 1.3); now dual ‘hinge’ of

one Letter.

r Tomb of Scipio on the Campanian coast > Virgil. For the poet’s tomb

became another shrine for first-century acolytes, above all his clone Silius Italicus (Pliny, Epistles 3.7.8):23 monumentum eius adire ut templum solebat. His habit was to approach his tomb as a temple. 22 23

See Bruère (1956) esp. 240–1, ‘a mild protest’ on Virgil’s beans in spring. See Henderson (2002a) 116–17.

c h a p t e r e l eve n

Shafts of light: transplantation and transfiguration Metaphorics and visuality in Letter 86

Composition at s c i p i o’s featured spine-snapping interruption of the sermon on ablution at its satirical zenith (13): parum est sumere unguentum nisi bis terque renouatur, ne euanescat in corpore. quid quod hoc odore tamquam suo gloriantur? It’s not enough to put on scent if it isn’t freshened up two or three times a day, to stop it evaporating on the body. What of them pluming themselves on this smell as though it’s their own?

With this flourish, we are meant to have had enough (rupture/rapture), and plenty. Grafting on the topic of arboriculture in the grounds brought us first to the agony (17): magnarum arborum truncos . . . cum rapo suo transtulit, amputatis radicibus, relicto tantum capite ipso ex quo illae pependerant. of full-grown olive trunks transplanted, with their very own ball and all, roots severed to leave just the actual head they were dependent on, and had dangled from.

And the nursery brought us, too, at the death, to a second, matching, climax, when ‘transplantation for a long-established vine meant being shifted away from its very own tree’ (20, uitem ex arbusto suo annosam transferri), and their peak attained saw (20):1 [uites] tenent et complexae sunt non suas ulmos. [The vines] hold fast in their embrace elms which are not their very own.

1

Cf. Virgil, Georgic 2.367, on young vines, ualidis amplexae stirpibus ulmos; Epp. 4.5, uitam . . . complectuntur et tenent (with Scarpat (1975) 37–8, on 1.2, complectere, ‘ha in sé qualche cosa di aggressivo, sia in senso buono (affettivo), sia in senso ostile; e` sempre un “avvinghiare” . . . ; e` più che un semplice “tenere”’, comparing 12.4, [senectutem meam] complectemur . . . et amemus).

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Virgilian wonder at implanted fruition through the miracle of grafting presents a quite different image of altered relation to self (Georgic 2.82: end of the subsection on grafting, 73–82):2 . . . arbos miratast nouas frondes et non sua poma. . . . the tree marvelled at strange leafage and fruit not its own.

For here at Liternum Seneca dwells on transformation of self and selves, by whatever means – from brutal through violent to careful handling. Rub it in. The lesson of s c i p i o ’s is finally one of empowerment through seizing control of the means of self production. Letter 86 even runs this theme, ‘subliminal/underground’, through the whole course of its thinking. Just go with the flow, from Jupiter’s sky into our soil. Follow the water: . . . cisternam aedificiis ac uiridibus subditam quae sufficere in usum uel exercitus posset, balneolum angustum . . . . . . abluebat corpus laboribus rusticis fessum . . . . . . quantum aquarum per gradus cum fragore labentium! . . . . . . non suffundebatur aqua nec recens semper uelut ex calido fonte currebat, nec referre credebant in quam perlucida sordes deponerent . . . . . . non saccata aqua lauabatur sed saepe turbida et, cum plueret uehementius, paene lutulenta . . . . . . bracchia et crura cotidie abluebant, quae scilicet sordes opere collegerant . . . + . . . [caput] fimo tinctum in scrobem demisit . . . . . . omnes autem istas arbores quae, ut ita dicam, ‘grandiscapiae’ sunt, ait aqua adiuuandas cisternina; quae si prodest, habemus pluuiam in nostra potestate. A water tank installed under the buildings and shrubberies, up to underwriting the needs of an army, even; a tight wee bath-house . . . . . . He used to wash down his body, tired by hard graft out in the country . . . . . . Our pools, into which we lower bodies dehydrated by repeat sweats; if valves made of silver haven’t released the flow of water . . . . . . What a load of waterfalls, sluicing down the steps in a din! . . . Water-flow didn’t keep welling up from under; water didn’t keep running forever fresh, as though from a hot spring; they didn’t believe it mattered how crystal clear the water was which they set their dirt in . . . 2

Cf. Ovid, Heroides 14.90, [Io] cornua . . . non sua uidit; Metamorphoses 3.303, [Actaeon] lacrimae . . . per ora non sua fluxerint; with Tissol (1997) 52–61, ‘Self-cancelling and self-objectifying witticisms’, at 60, ‘Here the very elements of one’s proper self, one’s definitive identity, become their opposite, paradoxically alien to oneself.’ (Education –

Metaphor and visuality in Letter 86

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. . . He wouldn’t bathe in specially filtered water. No, it was regularly clouded and, when it rained extra heavily, pretty well muddy . . . . . . They would wash arms and legs off daily, as of course they picked up dirt through toil . . . + This [olive ‘head’] he doused in dung and let down into a trench. . . . In fact, all those trees which, let me say, are ‘big-stemmed’, must, he says, be given a boost with water from the water tank. If this does good, we have rainfall in our own control.

In this hydropathic groove, God’s rain is envisioned ‘in our power’, and we get to play autarchic masters of our own selves, transported to Philosophical renaissance (= t j’ ¡m±n).3 big stick scipio The textual pipework even plumbs straight from epic hero to husbanded trees. For that [unsignalled] Ennius sobriquet ‘Carthage hair-raiser’ (‘Carthaginis horror’, 5: p. 103) can respond figuratively, transfiguratively, with the doubly authorized marked locution, ‘big-stemmed’ trees, in the final sweeping gesture of Mastery (arbores . . . ‘grandi-scapiae’, 21: let me say, . . . he says). As we saw (p. 104), by the grace of etymology / traditional fame, ‘s c i p i o’ bespoke ‘stick’, ‘sceptre’, ‘bolt’ – and ‘branch’ (skpov). It is very likely, in addition, that ‘co r n e l i u s’ specified ‘cornel-tree’, so ‘spear’, so ‘stick’ again, although this is not attested in our word-hoards. Silius, for one, surely demonstrates the association, twice (13.235, 15.441):4 effudit lacrimas pariter cornumque s o n a n t e m Scipio. Scipio by zeugma released tears and (l i s t e n !) cornel both.

and audax Scipiadae s t r i d e n t e m Sabura cornum excepit. Sabura the Bold took in Scipio’s (zoom – l i s t e n !) cornel.

Shock, horror: the stock ‘frisson’ of heroic aura around the very thought, or word, ‘s c i p i o’ translates straight into our family-tree diagram as the 3 4

E.g. Arrian, Epictetus 1.1.17, de± t j’ ¡m±n bltista kataskeuzein, to±v d’lloiv cr¦sqai Þv pjuken. Cf. Virgil, Georgic 2.447–8, bona bello | cornus (cf. Aeneid 3.23).

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shiverish ‘bristling’ of foliage, horror, as in Lucan’s horrific poetic grove (3.409–10):5 non ulli frondem praebentibus aurae, arboribus suus horror inest. As they offered their leafage to not one waft, the trees come out with their own bristling.

Those Spear Shafts of Rome, ‘c o r n e l i i s c i p i o n e s ’, would truly make horrentia tela uirorum fit for classic Ennian warfare (Annals 280 Warmington): sparsis hastis longis campus splendet et horret (Satires 6 Warmington: nb, cited by Macrobius (Saturnalia 5.6.46) as from Ennius . . . in ‘Scipione’). One pax, ‘nothing hair-raising here’(19, nihil habent in se abhorridum aut triste), may squeeze out extra juice from another, when we reach the other pax ‘grandi-scapius’ (grandis, ‘outsize, long’, cf. magnos exercitus, 1, maioribus . . ., magna . . . uoluptas, 4–5, magnarum arborum, 17, magna pars, 18; + scapus, ‘stem, stalk, esp. long, straight sort’, cf. sk¦ptron, Eng. ‘shaft’).6 Which draws itself up to its full height to match our towering hero, cramped between his ceiling and floor like some human column (5, stetit . . . sustinuit). Maybe we scent, simultaneously, the sweat of sermo rusticus from Aegialus (akin to makro-kaul»teron or makrokaulwdsteron, Dioscorides 2.175.1, pax, of a kind of wild parsley?), and the perfume of a para-epic solecism from Seneca: grandiscapiae = ‘s c i p i o ’s–e p i c g r a n d e u r’. And, finally, to stick my neck right out before the magic fades, poetic symbolism conjures the ghostly trace of the mythic scipio/sk¦ptron passed on, time out of mind, from poet to poet . . . . . . undercurrent, undertone . . . . . . the baton of Tradition . . .7 g e n e r at i n g f r i c t i o n The mimetic scenario at s c i p i o ’s plays epistolary host to two distinct units of teaching. First, epideixis shows us the ethically soaked sight/site indoors, prompting a stentorian blast of diatribe. Second, a gnomic lesson 5 6 7

So Santini (1999) 214–17; cf. Ovid, Metamorphoses 9.345, tremulo ramos horrore moueri; Seneca, Oedipus 576, totum nemus concussit horror. Cf. Charisius, Ars grammatica 1.57.5, abhorride (also pax). abhorridus in Seneca has, of course, often been emended away. True, it starts as ‘leaf-stripped sceptre of bay’ in Hesiod (Theogony 30), but becomes a wild olive ‘hare-boomerang/club’, exactly fit gift for a ‘scion fashioned for Truth from God’, by the time it hits Theocritean bucolic (7.43–4, cf. Goldhill (1991) 232).


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is reported, prompting empirical exploration, proving, and contestation.8 Filling the visual field with striking objects and their designs impacts on the reader (in hoc angulo . . ., sub hoc . . . tecto, hoc . . . pauimentum in hoc balneo, hoc loco (pun), 5, 6, 8, 12); and demand for moralized response materializes in a succession of ‘impressions’ attributed to sender or receiver (suspicor, uidi, non uidebatur, contemplantem, sic . . . pauper sibi uidetur, spectaculum, prospiciunt, mihi uidetur, si tibi . . . uidebuntur, uidi, uidi, uidi, uidi, 1, 4, 6, 8, 10, 14, 16, 17, 20: a bombardment with fantas©a).9 Ekphrasis triggers joyous reaction, expressed in its writing, and the ensuing sermon fully rehearses, operates, and models, the process of response. This induces repetition, in and through our reading and processing of Seneca’s readings in ours, and as ours. As the Letter winds up telling us, the visual impressions that lead to readerly impressions make up a chain of replication that breeds difference. The eyes that register the bath appointments see all the views that Romans behold and express of all the bathing establishments that ever were the world over; and they stir Seneca’s polemical blood to eristic disputation. Then Seneca’s antagonism stimulates emulation – he must set out to set us against him, to implant critical habits as we grow (21): plura te docere non cogito, ne quemadmodum Aegialus me sibi aduersarium parauit, sic ego parem te mihi. No, I am not thinking of teaching you any more lessons. In case, just the way that Aegialus trained me to be his opponent, I may be training you to be mine. Like this.

The locus on the bath spurted lusty declamation that transmuted from Scipionic Martyrdom into ‘post-Horatian’ Satire. Discussion took the telltale form of interrogation (quidni ego . . .?, 3; at nunc qui est . . .?, 6; adhuc loquor; quid cum . . . peruenero?, 7; cur enim . . .?, 9; quas nunc . . . uoces . . . credis?, 12; quid putas . . .?, 12; quid quod . . .?, 13). The locus on the trees grows quarrels, first with the textual expert Virgil, playing quarrelsome, it may seem, for the sake of it; and second with Aegialus, our ‘garden Scipio’, whose general pronunciamento on trees is probed, but whose general pronunciamento on watering is instantly 8 9

The place of praecepta and decreta in psychagogic activity is discussed in Epp. 94 + 95, cf. Dihle (1973); Newman (1989) 1489–90. Admirabilem . . . quidni admirer? . . . admirationem; uoluptas . . . quam iuuat . . . tristia; in usum, non in oblectamentum? ? (1–3, 8; 4, 10, 14; 9) (Stoic) Theorizing of visuality-conceptualization-imagination-textualization: Goldhill (1994) esp. 208 and n. 23, and (2001) esp. 168, 175–6.

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endorsed, just when Seneca is on the point of finally exposing the dynamic which makes dis-cussion lead to dissension, and conflict. By then, Aegialus’ demonstrations of oleicultural methods have impelled Seneca into rivalry, armed with his matching cameo on viticultural method. As he trains up this straight-up paradigm for his lesson in the logic of education, Seneca is at the same time clearly displaying a meta-paradigm for the set of such lessons, by (re-)deploying a topic of traditional disputation through botany. For ‘olive versus vine’ had always stood for rivalry in the figuration of Culture. Thus, Theophrastus argues himself into a percipient knot when pitting vine against olive as the ‘longest-lived’ tree in the wood (History of Plants 4.13.4–5: makrobiwttav): Since if it is true, as some at least say, that the vine is the longest-lived of trees by always filling itself up from its roots, not by growing more, perhaps the comparative judgement may seem ridiculous, if the trunk does not keep on going (this being the basis, the nature, of trees). Whichever way this should be put may not make any difference for present purposes, and maybe the longest-living is the one that has the power of overall self-sufficiency, for example the olive, by stem, sidegrowth, and having near-indestructible roots. . . . Olives can last two hundred years. As for the vine: If what some say of vines is so – that the trunk can keep on going when the roots are partly removed, and the whole nature is the same, bearing the same sort of yield, for however long a time – it would be the longest-living of all.

We have seen how Virgil and other authorities lined up olive and vine (p. 129). Can we help thinking of the immemorial folk-genre of The Dispute between Species?10 The classic instance of Callimachus’ ‘Bay versus Olive’, for example, finds closure when Bramble intervenes, pointing up the logic of the idiom by pretending to deplore it (Iambi 4.98–100): Let’s stop and not bring joy to our enemies, let’s not shamelessly utter cheap gibes at each another.

t h e a rg u m e n t h e ats u p ‘A friend is for owning mentally. A friend is never absent. Anyone he wants, he sees everyday. So study with me, eat with me, walk with me . . . I see you, my Lucilius, right now, I hear you. I am so with you, I’m not sure I shouldn’t start writing you, not letters, but text-message memos’ (55.11). 10

‘Oriental’: see Kerkhecker (1999) 86, n. 15.


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Precisely because this correspondence is unidirectional, the shadow of its other half falls on every directive.11 In Letter 86, epistolary dialogism insistently outcrops into the text, as one ‘adversary’ after another looms up to obstruct Seneca’s thought path. Seneca’s (= s c i p i o ’s) visible disputants begin with Rome (its ‘liberty’ and ‘laws’, versus Liternum, 2–3), positioned as its own worst enemy, as next in line after Hannibal, just as Carthage spelled the second coming of the Gauls (3, 5).12 Then he-and-the-maiores front up to ‘us’ (5); those of us ‘who call baths’ a` la s c i p i o ‘strictly for the moths’, voice of ‘Luxury and its dreamed-up novelty’ (8). Seneca-Cato-Fabius Maximus-one of the Cornelii (nobilissimi) sponsor the right ‘temperature’ versus ‘the sort pioneered in recent times’ (10). ‘People today convict Scipio – some people today’ (11, 12). ‘Those responsible for handing on the tradition about the ancient ways of the City of Rome’ versus ‘someone will say’ (12). Seneca’s Horace, twitting ‘Messrs Gobulle’ and ‘Gargonius’ (the one he set in polarity, opposuit; 13). The pair Seneca and Aegialus recedes behind Seneca versus Virgil (14–15), and then we champion Aegialus’ ‘pounding’ method for olives (and his alternative method) against allcomers; add the ‘generosity’ of Seneca’s way for vines, and watch us win control of the rain with our tanks (18–21). But the keynote recurs last: ‘just the way that Aegialus trained me to be his . . . I may train you to be mine. Like this.’ (21) Seneca conjured up memorable sneers at Scipio in terms of ‘envy’ (12): non inuideo Scipioni. uere in exilio uixit, qui sic lauabatur. I don’t envy Scipio. He truly lived in exile – bathing that way!

This was where we came in. For in grand Roman Myth, [here masked] ‘envy’ was the core of the parting of the ways between Scipio and his opponents, crystallized in the polarity Liternum versus Rome (1–3: cf. Livy 28.44.18, inuidiae, see p. 97). In recalcitrant Senecan Myth, ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ includes Seneca versus Lucilius. Setting writer against reader. te quoque (15,16).13 11

12 13

See Saylor (2002), who finds modelling of a ‘forceful and beneficial’ approach to friendship in the letter’s thinking with the human body, geographical landscape, and – lotus-eating mansion economy (104): ‘In making itself so available to the eye, the villa is doing what it is, or being what it stands for.’ This traditional notion of a tradition of enmity passed down between the enemies of Rome structures Lucan’s epic, starring Caesar(s) as their ultimately triumphant heirs (Henderson (1998) 202, n. 126). Seneca rounds on his ‘friend’ on principle, e.g. 25.1, non amo illum nisi offendo; 75.5, non delectent uerba nostra, sed prosint; 87.1, . . . cum uoluerim approbabo, – immo, etiam si nolueris; 60.1: see p. 153.

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Liternum is once again a place to crawl off and die (iacens, 1). Urgency surfaces when Aegialus’ gnome promises new life for ‘however old trees’ (14): faced with ‘a three or four year’ wait, at once ‘Senecan senility’ diverges from Lucilius’ outlook on life. In t/his Plot of Anxiety, ‘slowcoach’ olive must be hustled into ‘at once’ putting on cover (tarda . . ., 15; statim, 18). Alternatively, olives ‘gain height a little more slowly, but have nothing hairraising or grim about them’ (paulo tardius, 19). Senecan vines will even force on, though planted ‘after March is over’ (20). The composition busies itself from the start with taking up attitudes to Tradition (see pp. 93–5, 107). s c i p i o ’s altar, and tomb? History of Rome, Histories of Herodotus – not that myth, but this one (1). Bad modernity practises perverse models of Tradition (8, 13): So it is that baths that had drawn a crowd to marvel on the day of dedication are relegated to the rank of antiques (in antiquorum numerum reiciuntur), once luxury has dreamed up some novelty it can use to bury itself. Offer Horace’s Mr Gobulle today, and . . . he’d be in ‘Mr Gargonius’’ spot . . . It’s not enough to put on scent if it isn’t freshened up anew two or three times a day (renouatur), to stop it evaporating on the body.

In short, s c i p i o’s mansion harbours a brace of instructive loci: first, the stock dinosaur of the archaic bath-house, a stick to beat decadence; second, the stocked cynosure of the state-of-the-art arboretum, a stake to seat resurgence. We have noticed that ‘transition’ is signalled from shower unit to nursery trench (transeam, 16: p. 119), and proposed that connection is provided by the transfusion of rain water from tank to bath to bed (pp. 140–1). So the structure of s c i p i o’s Letter is a hendiadys, where the twinned topoi unite as transformations of each other.14 The languages of civil and arboreal culture double up at s c i p i o ’s-a e g i a lu s ’ place, as mutual translations (pp. 119–20). Transmigration of Scipio, from Rome to exile at Liternum, opens out into transmission of his story as the tradition of Roman morality (priscos mores urbis tradiderunt, 12). Whereupon the Scipio-bionic topic of Tradition as the contestation of tradition is abruptly transfigured as Aegialus’ agronomous locus of ‘The Transplantability of However Old a Tree’ (quamquam uetus arbustum posse transferri, 14). This 14

See Henderson (2002a) 126–9 on Pliny, Letters 3.9, as a dramatized ‘theory of description’. The events are plural and heterogeneous. Handling them in the story, and handling them as the story, fold into each other, and must double up as one. The goal is . . . escape from vertiginous chaos, plus a neat final full stop. It takes Pliny roughly three rough bites at the cherry.


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image for the transfer of character conditioning encoded and effected in reading was introduced to Seneca’s textual armature at Epp. 2.3, where ‘transplantation’ was aligned with other manifestations of ‘transmission’ to fashion a ‘trans-itive’ image of teaching/learning (transfertur > transmittunt, transitus, transire, transfuga, 2.2–5: see p. 8). When we reach Epp. 86, we have negotiated the ‘transience’ of our textual ‘transit’ past vat i a’s (transeuntibus, 55.6: p. 80). We have experienced and studied ‘transition’ from Greek to Roman wisdom as ‘translation’ from Greek to Latin, not least in rendering Epicurus into Seneca (transire, 26.8). And we have a generous Letter devoted to the topic of ‘translation’ between the languages as the crucial vector of Tradition, at Epp. 58, where ‘today’s problem in rendering Plato’ at once led to the first introduction of Virgil’s Georgics to the Epistulae Morales, as analogue for Seneca’s Socratic ‘gadfly’ of a project (see p. 130. Plato, Apology 30e5).15 The poem was ushered in both as a site of translation, and as a space of explicit promulgation for Translation as the nub of didaxis (58.2–5 ∼ 3.146–50):16 hunc quem Graeci ‘oestron’ uocant . . . ‘asylum’ nostri uocabant. hoc licet Vergilio credas: 15 16

See esp. Schönegg (1999) 78–83. Seneca’s ‘terminologia del tradurre’: Setaioli (1988) 453–67. ‘La Transposition directe de la terminologie Stoicienne’: Armisen-Marchetti (1989) esp. 215–20. See Thomas (1982); (1988) 2.66–8 ad loc., explaining, after Nigidius Figulus (as cited by Servius on Georgic 3.146), that Aeschylus’ gloss that Egyptians call the (Greek) mÅwy ‘o²strov’ (Supplices 307–8) shifted round in the Alexandrian gloss that the o²strov is called ‘mÅwy’ by herdsmen (Callimachus, Hecale fr. 301 Pfeiffer/Apollonius 3.276–7); so ‘Virgil, too’, is following Tradition in making a shift, but a Roman shift, which implicitly involves ‘a passing rejection of the normal Latin word for the gadfly, tabanus, Varro, R. R. 2.5.14 – in the very section from which V. has been adapting’ ((1988) 2.68). Note that Virgil is thus aping Varro’s characteristic innovation on Cato, grafting his habitual logophily onto the culture of agronomy. The paradosis prompts the thought that the poet is also aping Graeco-Roman philology in suggesting that asilus is so-called because of its buzz (in any language); because this buzz is venomous (Lucretius’ asper, acerba tuens is the mythic dragon’s unsleeping gaze, 5.33); because this is a Latin gem set in Italian rock (between the groves and oaks a-growing beside the Silarus [= Siler-us, ‘Brook-Willow’] and the [sickly] ‘Whitish’ [green-covered] mountain Alb-urnus [∼ alburnum, ‘white sap-wood’], and all the sylvan places (lucum/lucos) that could ever host classical poetry’s locus de asilo; because the poet and the philosopher of Rome, whose start was Romulus’ asylum (Virgil, Aeneid 8.342–3, lucum ingentem quem Romulus acer asylum | rettulit), are bound to see that this natural plague, the ‘asilus’, has the surreal effect of starting the herds to seek refuge, leave the jungle behind, and seek ‘asylum’ (that naturalized Grecian word for the grove of sanctuary in Rome). Seneca’s scribes duly present us with asylum and asylo; and switch locum for Virgil’s lucos: the play with the scene-setting formula est locus . . . is already in Virgil’s design. The paradosis also gives us iuxta for Virgil’s circa, underlining juxta-position of the alliterating tree species siler and ilices, to reiterate the buzz of asili that hovers through the words of its set-piece. The paradosis’ pluribus for Virgil’s plurimus is presumably assimilated to ilicibus: here is a place to mean what I say. Essentially, I have suppressed pluribus for just one reason, in order to pun ‘There is a plague . . .’ in place of ‘There is a place . . .’

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Morals and Villas in Seneca’s Letters e s t l u c u m Silari iuxta ilicibusque uirentem plurimus Alburnum uolitans, cui nomen ‘asylo’ Romanum est, ‘oestron’ Grai uertere uocantes, asper, acerba sonans, quo tota exterrita siluis diffugiunt armenta.

puto intellegi istud uerbum interisse . . . id ago . . . ut ex hoc intellegas quantum apud Ennium et Accium uerborum situs occupauerit, cum apud hunc quoque, qui cotidie excutitur, aliqua nobis subducta sint. The Greeks call it ‘o²strov’ . . .; our folk would call it ‘asylus’. You can trust Virgil on this: There’s a plague, beside Siler’s grove and oak-green Mt Auburn, a hovering zillion whose gadfly name ‘asylus’ Is Rome’s: in calling it ‘o²strov’ Grecians made their shift. Asp buzz, acid assonance; stampedes from the woods, Whole herds on the run. I think the understanding here is that that word has died the death . . . My point here is . . . for you to understand to what extent word decay has taken over in Ennius and Accius, considering that several items have been confiscated from us in Virgil, too, who is scoured every day.

This sting on myopia about linguistic entropy by way of ‘build-up’ (praeparatio) to discussion of essentia as (Ciceronian + Fabianus’) transcription of oÉs©a, the indispensable and foundational term for the indispensable and foundational ‘essence’ of all ‘being’ (res necessaria, natura continens fundamentum omnium, 6)!17 Seneca’s attack on the poverty of Latin is concentrated in this one quintessential, universal, mundane, cosmogonic example (7): magis damnabis angustias Romanas, si scieris unam syllabam esse quam mutare non possum. quae sit haec, quaeris? t¼ Àn. You’ll curse the Roman Cage of Quibbles once you find out it is one single syllable that I can’t switch. What is it, you ask? t¼ Àn.

Just one syllable, that is, which names the unswitchable essence of immutability! The usual rendering, ‘quod est’, shifts part of speech, which is more than a matter of wording (7, sic transferri). And so we are ‘prepared’ for full discussion of Plato’s sixfold categorization of t¼ Àn / t Ànta, and, in good time, for pressure to ‘capitalize on this subtlety’ – serious 17

To say what I mean, the essence: here the paradosis enters the dispute on language and reality; for essentiam dicere is conjectured by ‘Mur[et].’ against quid sentiam dicere w (= omnium codicum consensus)!


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entertainment that can carry ethical impact, by shifting morality (reformatione morum), if Platonic denigration of the sensory world leads us to worship divine eternity and scorn corporeal pettiness. How did Plato manage to reach a ripe old age, dying on his eighty-first birthday? By the ‘broad’ chest that gave him his name (< platÅv), plus frugality . . . [sc. How did Seneca manage to reach his ripe senectus? Something more than his name . . .!] (8–24, 25–6, 30–1). But this is epistolary Ethics, or ph i lo s o ph y i n t r a n s l at i o n And translation is a graphematic project – a matter of Philosophy, not Lexicology; in question, the philosophy of Philosophy. Seneca in general, and the Moral Epistles as particulars, are a continuous problematic of Translation. The registration of resistance in the word and the world to translation from Greek to Latin is the general form of the specific challenge to relearn living as the transference of philosophical theorem to realized instance, metaphorized as pre-philosophical Rome versus Hellenized Rome. So all Seneca’s writing is a double shift between Stoic terminology and Roman perspective. He is forever locked into and onto the hermeneutic heuristics, or interpretative inventiveness, of transposing Philosophy into Culture, as well as between the classical cultures. We (Latinists) can even transvalue his work as the discovery that Philosophy only realizes its essence as a(n im)possible project of ‘Translation’, beyond the confines of a particular language and its culture, once it is necessary to feel yourself inside that ‘Roman cage’ of Latinity. Seneca’s intervention (and Cicero’s; alas for lost Fabianus) constitutes the original challenge to Philosophy to transcend its Greekness. To face the otherness to its own conceptualization that is necessarily and foundationally built into the language, and the Language, in which it operates (a politics of epistem-ontics). In the less sublimated, pragmatic, terms of moral reformation, the challenge is to prove that the world through Roman eyes is indeed always already philosophized – in conformation with, and in confirmation of, Stoic Hellenism, beyond the imperative to Transliterate-or-Neologize.18 Reification is brought in by Romans to check, and chuck, out Filosoj©a, in the name of philosophia. 18

See Armisen-Marchetti (1991) 106.

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The Grecians had a word for it: metajuteÅw, ‘transplant’ (Theophrastus, History of Plants 2.5, 4.13). Seneca will neither transliterate nor neologize:19 as we have ‘learned’ (heard) and ‘seen’, a e g i a lu s ’ d»gma, his dictum, spoke of ‘transfer’, whether of chunks of olive, or of carefully entire vine (14, 20; cf. 17, transtulit): didici . . . quamuis uetus arbustum posse transferri. h oweve r a n c i e n t t h e t re e , t r a n s p l a n t i n g i s p o s s i b l e ∼ uidi uitem ex arbusto suo annosam transferri. I have seen a vine of many years’ standing transplanted away from its very own tree.

The advantage of a circumscribed lexikon, the linguistic ‘cage of Latin’, is of course that it allows multivalence to proliferate, or rather makes discourse radically, ineradicably, polynomial. Seen as a stab at policing their language, the Romans’ celebrated cult of simplificatory integrity, their ideology of transparent sincerity, attests the essential impossibility of their ever contriving to speak of one thing at a time – without also necessarily speaking of many other things, too. Translatio imports to Latin the semiotic maximization of metajor. And then some. Transferre constantly patrols Latin discourse on the quis uiuit for translation, sc. Translatability from Greek to Latin. How much could a Roman ever say without heading or falling into a stream of calques on what Hellenes would say? How much of their sapientia, ‘savvy’, consisted in refusing catachresis on non-transferable Greek hangups and vices? Romans even refused to call them Hellenes, preferring to label the whole of the civilized world after the raiko© of Thessaly, rarely rated as Hellenes by Hellas! All along, Tradition at Rome, nomothetically ideologized as synonymous and coterminous with Rome, handed down its stock of exemplary metaphors, and this metaphoricity imposed – implanted – itself into the grain of Latin word and thought: metaphor ‘proper’ could be categorized as cases of necessity – interlingual loan signings to cover gaps (i.e. catachresis on Greek terms), or translingual appeal to imagery to take us places neither our words nor ourselves can go (e.g. talk about 19

See Armisen-Marchetti (1991) esp. 125–8.


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our – metaphorical – ‘insides’); or as the technology of mimesis – designed to summon before our very eyes what literal, unmarked, familiarized language risks leaving the mind’s eye/I as good as shut (demonstrandae rei causa).20 t r a n s l ata b i l i t y The Epistles’ prime discussion of metaphorics is tellingly juxtaposed, suo more (∼ moribus nostris), to their shake-up of Translatability (59 ∼ 58). Seneca starts by scrutinizing his own remark. Imagine Lucilius’ raised eyebrows as anticipated in Seneca’s mind as he writes: he must at once check over his opening gambit (59.1): Magnam ex epistula tua percepi uoluptatem. I felt a feeling of great pleasure from your letter.

He was talking ordinary Latin of the bus-stop variety, off the Stoic semiotics leash for a moment of release. In the same way, appreciating the words of a poet like Virgil may mean you pawn doctrinal correctness for eloquence (3 ∼ Aeneid 6.278: see p. 130). Seneca’s ‘pleasure’ was, mind, triggered by a [doctrinally correct] appraisal of his pupillage (4: cf. 86.21): habes uerba in potestate. You have your words under control.

Lucilius has not been diverted by the charms of language: ‘everything is battened down shipshape’ (5: unlike my bus-stop English, pressa sunt omnia et rei aptata): loqueris quantum uis et plus significas quam loqueris. hoc maioris rei indicium est; apparet animum quoque nihil habere superuacui, nihil tumidi. You say as much as you want and signify more than you say. This is the indicator of something really huge: it’s plain to see that your mind, too, has not a jot of superfluity or puffery.

This ominously upbeat report is not yet done – it motivates next the crucial position-statement on metaphoricity (6):21 inuenio tamen translationes uerborum ut non temerarias ita quae periculum sui fecerint. inuenio imagines, quibus si quis nos uti uetat et poetis illas solis iudicat esse 20 21

See below, with Armisen-Marchetti (1991) 102–9 and 109–18; 118–24, respectively; and cf. ArmisenMarchetti (1989) 23–9. See Mazzoli (1970) 82–3 and Armisen-Marchetti (1991) 125. Wilson (1987) 102 begins his important position-statement on the Epistulae from this locus classicus.

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concessas, neminem mihi uidetur ex antiquis legisse, apud quos nondum captabatur plausibilis oratio. Illi qui simpliciter et demonstrandae rei causa eloquebantur, parabolis referti sunt, quas existimo necessarias, non ex eadem causa qua poetis, sed ut imbecillitatis nostrae adminicula sint, ut et dicentem et audientem in rem praesentem adducant. Sextium ecce cum maxime lego, uirum acrem, Graecis uerbis, Romanis moribus philosophantem. mouit me imago ab illo posita: ire ‘quadrato agmine’ exercitum, ubi hostis ab omni parte suspectus est, pugnae paratum: ‘Idem’, inquit, ‘sapiens facere debet.’ However. I discover textual metaphors which are by the same token not reckless and have passed their probation. I discover images, and if anyone bans us from using them, thinking that only poets are allowed them, to my way of thinking t h ey h ave n ’t re a d c l a s s i c s: with them, style that puts hands together wasn’t yet carped at. The old writers, they spoke out simply and demonstratively, and are stuffed with Figurality, which I reckon necessary, not on the same basis as for poets, but to serve as props for our feeble limitations, so they can take both speaker and audience to water and splash them with presence. Sextius. I’m right now reading him. Human acid. The lexikon is Greek, the mores are Roman: Philosophy. An image planted by him physically moved me: an army, on the go ‘in hollow-square formation’, when the enemy is anticipated from any quarter. Prepared, ready to fight. ‘The very same thing’, he said, ‘the [Stoic] Sage must do’ . . .

Notice here that Seneca equivocates between the metaphoricity planted by the writer Lucilius and uncovered by the reader Seneca: inuenio . . . inuenio cover both. Necessarily, since we have just met with Seneca’s graphic demonstration that writing can both carry unintended messages and imply more than what is said. Straddle between Sextius and Seneca. Discovering – inventing – passion and feeling pathos through texts transcends unidirectional intentionality. Our self-reflexively self-conscious reading of reading through reading writing at once runs into exponential saturation of text with metaphor (9): nos multa alligant, multa debilitant. diu in istis uitiis iacuimus, elui difficile est. non enim inquinati sumus, sed infecti. ne ab alia imagine ad aliam transeamus, hoc quaeram, quod saepe mecum dispicio: quid ita nos stultitia tam pertinaciter teneat? Many things truss us. Many disable us. For so long have we lain flat out inside those Vices. It’s tough to wash them away: we have not been stained. We have been permed. – Not to transpose one image into/onto another, I shall set myself a Question – I often spot it in myself: ‘How come Stupidity gets such a stranglehold on us?’


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As he is saying, while he is saying it, spot the chain of metaphors and their stranglehold on the argument, posing but at once transposing the Question even as we attempt to break away from the self-scrutiny and make sure we don’t get carried away by the verbal charms that we claimed Lucilius avoided (sc. by playing safe; by writing dull copy, risk-free, house-style, sanctioned by usage). With a heave, the sermon sets in, shifting via our ‘superficiality’ to the congenial topic of ‘adulation’ (10–11). Flattery of course satisfies the ‘pleasure-seeker’ in us (si appetis uoluptates, 14), whereas ‘The Sage is full of Joy’ (plenus est gaudio, 14). So we come round the spiral to pay for Seneca’s unbuttoned opening. Seneca is now talking hard Stoic, forbidding us even to ask if ‘Fools and sinners are joyless’ (17), condemning them to more Virgilian hell, as they tell us how ‘they spent their last night on earth among transports of false joy’ (falsa inter gaudia, 17 ∼ Aeneid 6.513–14). Stoic Joy emerges from the genial pussy-footing with Lucilius as no topic for loose talk: ‘it is not for someone else to give. It is not even for someone else to control. What Fortune did not give, Fortune does not steal. Farewell’ (18). Back in the groove, Epp. 60 instantly thunders out (1: see p. 1): Queror, litigo, irascor . . . I grouch, sue, rage.

s t y l i s t i c s i n ph i lo s o ph y Seneca’s mansions have proved to demonstrate (as he told Lucilius a` propos his aim to write a poem on, or at least about, Aetna) that the latecoming writer ‘discovers/invents a supply of words which, when given a different design, wear a new look’ (Epp. 79.6, parata uerba inuenit, quae aliter instructa nouam faciem habent. t proke©mena). Design – compositio – comes into Seneca’s sights at Letter 100, which cuts straight to the quick by querying the call for anything approaching design, or stylistics, in the practice of Philosophy, and so extracts from himself an outline sketch of a philosophy of Style. Since Seneca is clearly not not writing here about his own writing, and what it should teach us, about writing and teaching, this is the most rewarding communiqué to digest. As will soon become clear, Letter 100 even stakes a strong claim to read as the authorized commentary on Letter 86. Seneca’s pupil has been reading disquisitions by Seneca’s teacher on ‘Sociality’ (Ciuilia). Lucilius’ feeling of let-down is because he is forgetting that

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Papirius Fabianus is a philosopher (100.1). No compositio, then, because avatar Fabianus ‘designs habits, not words’ (mores ille, non uerba composuit, 2). But Seneca has already conceded that even false first impressions matter, and initial discussion of Fabianus’ delivery in terms of ‘flow’ (effundi uerba, non figi, exciderit an fluxerit, non effundere . . . orationem, sed fundere, 1–2) is challenged by talk of his ‘[stance]’ (sollicita . . . timet versus fortis et constans, 4–5). The philosopher’s compromise is unmarked style treading every thin line in the book: in ‘stance’ (non neglegens in oratione, sed securus, 5); in choice of sociolect (electa uerba . . . , non captata, splendida tamen, quamuis sumantur e medio, 5); in phraseology (sensus honestos et magnificos, non coactos in sententiam, sed latius dictos, 5); and in style, for which Seneca splashes colour on the page (5–6): uidebimus quid parum recisum sit, quid parum structum, quid non huius recentis politurae; cum circumspexeris omnia, nullas uidebis angustias inanis. desit sane uarietas marmorum et concisura aquarum cubiculis interfluentium et pauperis cella et quicquid aliud luxuria non contenta decore simplici miscet; quod dici solet, domus recta est. We shall see what has not been pruned enough, or built enough, or lacks our modern polish. When you have looked right round everything, you’ll see no tight corner of empty quibble. By all means do without a rainbow of marbles, a water-distribution system connecting up the rooms, a ‘slum-it’ suite, and whatever else Luxury puts in the brew, because simple grace is never enough. As the cliché has it, the house stands upright.

This graphic bridge delivers us to the destination: ‘design’ (compositio, 6). And dispute: ‘should it have hair-raising shag combed out, or roughness shoved in’ (ex horrido comptam, aspera, 6)? Cicero or Pollio, smooth or staccato? ‘Everything in Cicero ceases; everything in Pollio crashes’ (desinunt versus cadunt, 7). A rider takes the portrait of our ‘non-non-stylist’ guru on some more, denying he doesn’t ‘stand tall’ enough (erecta), just does without an orator’s ‘buzz ’n’ kick’ (uigor stimulique), along some more of that thin line (non . . . humilia illa sed placida, nec depressa sed plana), rising to a triumphant mot: ‘His “oratory” does not own, but will grant, Dignity’ (non habet oratio eius, sed dabit, dignitatem, 8). He may well only rank somewhere in the Classics Top 10, but why should his ‘oratory’, his delivery, be the complete package? ‘Not heroic, though uplifted; not forceful or torrential, though a flood; not crystal clear, but clean’ (fortis versus elata, uiolenta . . ., torrens versus effusa, non perspicua, sed pura, 10). In short, no good at all for the all-important crusade against Sin, Evil, Vice. But neither ‘stance’ nor the rest – sociolect, phraseology, style – should


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outweigh ‘being clear that he means it’ (liqueat tibi illum sensisse quae scripsit, 11). Such is the general tone (color) of Seneca’s teacher as recalled by his pupil: ‘not solid, but full’ (non solida, sed plena, 12). In teaching, the best guarantee of results is to call the young to do better, and not despair of it (adhortatio . . . efficacissima, 12). With all the finality at his disposal, Seneca settles the question once and for all: grant Fabianus ‘a tide of words, overall greatness minus approval of its individual components’. This key discussion must trigger a flood of connections with the ? stylish? mimetic performances we are studying. Seneca’s pupils must judge whether he has taken up Fabianus’ challenge – and whether he leaves us room to appreciate his ‘greatness – with reservations’. He invokes a model of Tradition extended through Emulation, and browbeats us into assent. He does mean what he says – what he writes. He treads the same ‘not X, but Y’ line, but – let’s argue – with the debater’s ‘buzz ’n’ kick’. As in the locus de balneis of Epistle 86, the thought will occur, and its ‘flood’ of satirical invective.22 An early Letter mentioned this jaded millionaire’s trick of keeping a Luxury ‘“slum-it” suite’ (pauperis cella, 18.7): hasn’t Seneca inveigled us into one of these by inviting us to lie on the bed of nails thoughtfully provided at s c i p i o’s shrine? Catering for the hair-shirt flagellant tourist trade . . . with the fig-leaf of Sainted Antiquity. The vivid passage on ? style? is crying out to run as commentary on the architecture, décor, plumbing, and agriculture on show at Liternum: pruned, built, polished, tight corner, rainbow of marbles, water-distribution system. All the individual components that add up to a magnificent mythical Luxury ‘slum-it’ suite. Where ‘the house stands upright’.23 As Roman cliché had it. By habit (solet).

22 23

Cf. subrectas, 86.4; suffundebatur, 9; perlucida, 9; efficacius, 17; abhorridum, 19. Add nihil . . . sordidum, 100.5 ∼ sordido . . . sordidus, 86. 5–6. recisus ∼ circumcisis, 86.17; structum ∼ exstructam, 4; recentis politurae ∼ refulserunt, 6; exornata . . . exornaretur . . . recens, 9; angustias ∼ angustum, 4; uarietas marmorum ∼ marmora . . ., uariata, 6; concisura aquarum ∼ aquarum per gradus . . . labentium, 7. All the individual components that add up to a magnificent mythical Luxury ‘slum-it’ suite: pauper, 6; luxuria, 8. A house standing tall: erecta ∼ subrectas, 86.4 (cf. 46.2, grandis, erectus). Thus, at De oratore 1.160–2, Cicero has Crassus end in a breakneck dash through his speech: Cotta protests, ‘Just as though I had entered some rich, packed domus, with none of the treasures out on view – cloth, silver, art collection, statuary . . .’ Scaevola pleads: ‘Why don’t you do what you would if you’d come into some house or villa full of objects? . . . You wouldn’t hesitate to ask the master to have them fetched out . . .’

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In particular, what may catch the eye is that ‘water-distribution system’, as a principle of Stylistics en route to Design. The tussle for unity despite abruptness (‘smooth versus staccato’) is on at s c i p i o ’s. But the question remains, how much we are meant to notice.24 If Senecan Style services ‘clear, thinking’ Philosophy, it should matter how Rome bathes; but should it bother us if his prose runs as ‘muddy’ as satirical Horace dared to satirize Design in the father of Satire, the great Lucilius (Satires 1.4.11)?25 cum flueret lutulentus, erat quod tollere uelles. since his flow was muddy, there was some you’d want to get rid of.

His satisfyingly encrusted digressive reactionary rant on Baths can strike us so, in its unfiltered ‘flow’ from sky to tank to bath-house to fields (9, 11): non suffundebatur aqua nec recens semper uelut ex calido fonte currebat, nec referre credebant in quam perlucida sordes deponerent . . . non saccata aqua lauabatur sed saepe turbida et, cum plueret uehementius, paene lutulenta. Water flow didn’t keep welling up from under; water didn’t keep running forever fresh, as though from a hot spring; they didn’t believe it mattered how crystal clear the water was which they set their dirt in . . . He wouldn’t bathe in specially filtered water. No, it was regularly clouded and, when it rained extra heavily, pretty well muddy.

s t ro n g ro ots As demonstrative paradigms of written reality, Seneca’s mansions make their habit-forming (moralizing) mark on the Epistulae. But they also represent his most sustained analyses of mimesis as a form of cultural transmission. At once a performance and an analysis of tradition, translation, transfer, metaphor, transcription, transfiguration and transplantation, the derivation of nursery from bathroom at s c i p i o ’s tells its own story (see pp. 140–1, 143–4, 146–7).26 24

25

26

Statius notes the piped water in every suite at Manilius Vopiscus’ mansion, carrying the river Anio, which specially tames itself from torrential flooding spate to play cooperative ‘divider’, through the rooms to reach the baths (Siluae 1.3.35–7, 43–6, Newlands (2002) 131–2). When the river transects, splits and doubles, this mansion into symmetrical twins (nec . . . diuidit, 24–5; geminos . . . Penates, 2) we should note that uopiscus means ‘the survivor of baby twins’. The Romans had a word for that. See Freudenburg (1993) 158: ‘Without discarding the Hellenistic allusion [sc. to Callimachus’ jibe against the writers of epic in the grand style at Hymn to Apollo 108], one should also grasp the analogy’s more immediate referent in the contemporary rhetorical debates centering on word arrangement [where] the river analogy was a favorite.’ For turbidus of ‘style’: e.g. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 3.8.60. The most famous verbal icon in Roman poetry, Horace’s fons Bandusiae (Odes 3.13), presents us with the classic self-mirroring poem of metapoetics, where the programme of this ‘instrument for


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We began inside s c i p i o ’s , to plumb the depths. In the arboretum, we take ‘Tradition’, in one form or another, as appropriate, to us and to the specific material. We prepare a fresh ‘setting’, and put the old down in the ditch so it will grow anew. The stock projects – it projects its planter. The treatment we give the plants transcodes the turn that the Letter gives to s c i p i o , metaphorizes the teaching of s e n e c a at work in this revision of Tradition, and images the project of breeding strong reader disciples. s c i p i o’s shower-room reeked of sweat. Modern baths reek of perfume; the trenches are smeared with manure. The fort is built four-square. s c i p i o’s cubicle may be hooded with mass-market stucco, but Luxury is all flash veneer slabs, rainbow wash all around a border, decoration, fancy décor, decorated. The apostle-growing factory is all root-and-branch radicalism, all ‘ramifying, roots, abrasion, and rooting’ (ramis, radicibus, radices, radit, radices, ramos, radicescat, 17–20).27 w h i c h o n e i s yo u ? If we are to distribute the arboricultural archetypes, we might decide that the rough-hewn olive trunk takes its pounding for Seneca, would-be ‘immovable’ sage (minus . . . mouetur, 18).28 His slower-growing but unshaggy, jolly, alternative, the branchlet, sticks up for relatively ‘young sapling’ Lucilius (nouellarum arborum, 19). This leaves Seneca’s old vines, the strands, if possible, picked up too, before the vine gets a generous covering, so that roots form from its body as well: they must cling to, embrace, supports which are not their very own (20). They look remarkably like – – us.

27

28

presenting images’ is itself a flow of ‘poetic metaphors – flowers, springs, wine, the concept of withdrawal’ . . . (Smith (1976)). Cf. Isidore 17.6.14, alii radicem . . . dictam putant . . . quia si eradicatur, non repullulat. (Add: rapo, rapum, 17–18; and the abrasive noises: arida et retorrida . . . abhorridum, 18–19.) Pliny, Natural History 17.206 reports a recent breakthrough in viticulture: take a draco, an old branch hardened through many a year, and sow near the tree as a support; ‘shave off the bark’ for the three-quarters of its length ‘that will be buried’, and push it down in a furrow (deraso cortice quatenus obruatur). Hence its name: ‘razored’ (rasilem). Cf. Epp. 35.4 (sapiens perfectus versus proficiens) hic commouetur quidem, non tamen transit, sed suo loco nutat; ille ne commouetur quidem (t¼ metptwton).

c h a p t e r t we lve

Still olive, still s c i p i o ’s Digging Scipio in Letter 86 with: the dirt on Seneca The Letters never mention [Nero]. When vat i a’s villa was sited ‘through the wall from Baiae’, Seneca deafeningly muted out history, avowing only the cultural infamy of the place (see p. 88). Writer, addressee, and [Neronian] reader could scarcely forget one fateful day just past, when (as the decade before Seneca’s retirement closed, Tacitus, Annals 14.1–8):1 [Nero] ‘put off the long-pondered abomination no more’ . . . His mother and kingmaker [Agrippina] just had to go. Bizarrely as you please, it was the feast of virgin goddess Minerva: ‘he was holidaying at Baiae, lured mother there . . . welcomed, hugged and led her to Bauli, which is the name of a villa that is lapped by a kink in the sea between Cape Misenum and Lake Baiae’ (id uillae nomen est quae promunturium Misenum inter et Baianum lacum flexo mari adluitur). The plot was leaked, everyone agrees, and ‘not sure whether to believe it, she rode to Baiae as sedan freight’ (an crederet ambiguam, gestamine sellae Baias peruectam). [Agrippina] escaped the booby-trapped and scuttled boat across the bay, swam for it, made it ashore, got a lift to her villa by the Lucrine Lake, and there awaited brain-bashing, womb-sticking, wounds a-plenty. The mother of Oedipal erasures.

An eery reminder that Seneca is indeed writing for his life as author of the Epistulae Morales, in preparing himself for death on its inexorable way (p. 14 n. 21), inheres for us, at least, in this very same place to dwell (Annals 15.52): The bungled plot to assassinate [Nero], which would fatally tar Seneca, ‘agreed to get a move on with the killing at Baiae, in the villa of their ringleader [Piso], as the Emperor had so fallen for its loveliness that he was a frequent visitor and used to enter baths and banquets without bothering with bodyguards’. What can you do 1

Perhaps the cartoon story of Seneca’s desperate bid to jump ship, swim for it, and wade ashore in the Bay of Naples mimics, or at least echoes, his former protectress’s last voyage: Epp. 53 (p. 34).

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Digging in Letter 86 (and Seneca)

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with a high-minded assassin? (apud Baias in uilla Pisonis, cuius amoenitate captus Caesar crebro uentitabat balneasque et epulas inibat omissis excubiis . . .)

Apart from the three mentions in the course of Epp. 86, all the collection has to say about the City of Rome by name is this: r Someone owned up: ‘No one can live any other way at Rome (than by climbing)’

(50.3).

r The bitter foe Timagenes would say ‘I only hurt when Rome burns because I

know it will rise all the better for it’ and, proverbially, ‘Ardea got just as sacked as Rome’ (91.13, 16).2 r The Meta Sudans [in the Circus Maximus], once, and the Capitol, thrice (never as a locale), are the only metropolitan landmarks named (56.4; 21.5 (from Virgil), 95.72, 98.13).3

As we have seen, Seneca tells us virtually nothing about even the properties he deigns to mention as his own: does he reckon there is no chance, or every chance, that we ‘Luciliuses’ will be told stories of Seneca by the fame industry? We cannot fill out his addresses ‘in reach of Rome’ and ‘at Alba’, let alone Lucilius’ ‘at Ardea’, but, whereas Seneca tells us zilch about his estate ‘at Nomentum’, Columella (friend of Seneca’s brother Gallio) and Pliny both want us to know that Seneca purchased fine vineyards there from Remmius Palaemon, and between them recount that he paid an exorbitant price, but maintained the remarkable yield there.4 Seneca at the former (?) ‘sand ’n’ swamp’ of Liternum (p. 104) does give us a peek at his expertise in viticulture, and later he will even come out and declare this (112.1, nostrum artificium); but in the Letter the symbolic potential of this transfer at evocative Nomentum, from notoriously unlikeable ‘grammarian’ to world-famous minister-turned-moralist, remains an 2 3

4

Ardea: evocative site of lu c i l i u s ’ estate, Epp. 105.1, cf. p. 42. Perhaps add the Via Latina (77.18). As we saw (pp. 8–9, 13), metropolitan scenarios such as the electioneering of 3.1, 8.6, and the arena of 7.1–5 cluster at the outset of the collection; they are skimped of mimesis and starved of presence in the telling; summoned up to be dismantled in favour of inner drama, they are soon dismissed from the repertoire. For the next wave of publi-city, we go out on location, to the townscapes of coastal Campania (pp. 32–5). Columella 3.3.3, Pliny, Natural History 14.49–51: see Suetonius, De grammaticis 23, with Kaster (1995) 228–32 (esp. 240–1, on 23.6, the miraculous productivity of a vine planted by Palaemon’s own hand) and Griffin (1976) 289–90, esp. 289, n. 4, and 434. In Pliny, the Remmius Palaemon/Seneca story seems to stem from hagiography of Acilius Sthenelus, son of a freedman, who takes the plaudits for one farm of his at Nomentum, and sold another to Remmius; the item on Aegialus fills their sandwich.

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unrealized resource, a characterful asset unexploited.5 Perhaps we are meant to know anyhow, and need no reminder. Or perhaps this material comes uncomfortably close to materialism (commerce, Seneca’s billions, imperial politics . . .)?6 No such prudence can lie behind Seneca’s elision of a e g i a lu s’ full name at Liternum.

a e g i a lu s ’ We also know from Pliny that this present proprietor of the villa was the socially mobile v e t u l e n u s a e g i a lu s , and we are specifically told that he was a celebrity, not the nonentity we have met, as he wanders into a private encounter with Seneca (Natural History 14.49): . . . magna fama et Vetuleno Aegialo perinde libertino fuit in Campania rure Liternino, maiorque etiam fauore hominum quoniam ipsum Africani colebat exilium. . . . Great fame also attached to Vetulenus Aegialus, likewise the son of a former slave, in the countryside at Liternum in Campania – greater in fact, since people really appreciated the fact that he was tending Africanus’ actual place of exile.

Which report faces us with the possibility-or-probability that ‘we’ might recognize – might be expected to recognize – that Seneca’s visit was in no way a casual drop-in. Not only is this a planned tourist swoop, it is a devotional pilgrimage to a principal locus of ‘Exile’.7 But it was never a simple matter of Seneca ‘sleeping in s c i p i o’s bed’, to feel as one with a saint by incubation, and come to terms with his own calling through meditation. There was also Vetulenus Aegialus. This current occupant was worth a visit, too. In his own right, as rightful owner: Literninus libertinus. Pliny’s notice witnesses his availability as a widely celebrated success in ministering to the physical and spiritual ‘estate’ of the great World Conqueror. His tending the shrine at Liternum is already ad rem, a locus in Roman culture that calls for a call, to check out mos 5 6 7

The grammaticus as the type of intolerable pedant: e.g. Epp. 88.3. ‘Seneca Praediues’: Rozelaar (1976) 97 and n. 18; Griffin (1976) 286–314, esp. 287–92. For property as a Roman drama of propriety: Henderson (2002a) 24–30. Seneca focuses on Rutilius as his referent for ‘exile’: 24.4 (bis), 67.7, 79.14, (82.11), 98.12, Mayer (1991) 156. As we have seen, Seneca readies the reader for the mimetic tableau on exilium to follow (at 85.40–1).


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maiorum and locate its proper place in the market of contemporary mores.8 And, ad hominem, taking the measure of v e t u l e n u s is poetically just for a n n a e u s s e n e c a , and topicalizes this site for interaction between the pair of them, as authority figures in their chosen fields of expertise. Which linked them as major players in the vineyards of central Italy. In short, the letter’s linkage between Villa + Gardening may have been an obvious turn to the composition, after all. Perhaps even expected by a good number of contemporaries. Thus when Seneca veils the nature of his sojourn: ‘Here I am, flat out’ (iacens), he so finesses Aegialus from the scene, that we cannot watch the business of negotiating and calculating hospitality, very likely effected through tact-full, well-mannered, correspondence between guest and host. Aegialus will just pop up unheralded, one more stranger on the shore, for citation of his oracular watchword, and will then play silent sparring partner for today’s strenuous spiritual work-out, before he is left behind at his station, unglossed (86.14–21). Yet this libertinus was more than a walking monument to upward mobility in the social landscape of imperial Rome. (Meritocracy or lottery? Worth or wealth?) Certainly, a freedman’s son had crossed the divide between servile non-existence and the freedom to be a person in a way that his father never could. How could any free-born citizen ever experience the difference that liberty made to living?9 And yet . . ., a e g i a lu s ’ name stereotypes him permanently as forever short of absolution from alienation, the shadow of ? slavery? .10 With or without his ascription to the clan Vetulena, the Greek label figures his cultural identity as originating outside 8

9

10

Silius Italicus’ cult(ivation) of Virgil’s memory through dedicated appropriation and preservation of his estate near Naples becomes the example of this heritage phenomenon best known to us: Henderson (2002a) 102–24, on Pliny, Epistles 3.7. Pliny’s Silius is his version of Seneca’s paragon of politically expedient sloth, Servilius Vatia: they manage their style of residence very similarly indeed, while the lessons they incarnate for their diarists are chalk and cheese (cf. Henderson (2001b) 74–8, (2002b) 283–4). Bodel (1997) 13 presents other examples, especially Augustus’ numinous and loreinfested cradle near Velitrae (Suetonius, Life of Augustus 6, cf. 94.6–7). Statius’ tale of Pollius Felix’s expansive rebuild of the tight wee shrine of Hercules on his estate reminds us, however, not to be too sure that Seneca was emoting over a genuine, unrestored, ‘shrine’ at s c i p i o ’s (Siluae 3.1.82, 88, stabat dicta sacri tenuis casa nomine templi, angusta . . . aedes). See Henderson (1998) 184, for a rosy view of ‘libertine’ status as the inverted ‘birthright’ that authorized an upstart up-and-coming satirist to speak out frank and free, for liberty: but Horace’s Daunian-Venusian-Apulian identity was not impugned or queered by his personalization as Flaccus – only his manhood, his virility as his worth, the rigidity of his moral frame, the upstanding character of the views he voices and the causes he presumes to espouse . . . : Mr Floppy may be written down as incorrigibly soft, but he is not excluded from Latinity, neither blessed nor cursed with Hellenism, badge of hyper-culture and infra-status (Henderson (1999) 104, on Epode 8). Cf. Epp. 27.5, Caluisius Sabinus memoria nostra fuit diues. et patrimonium habebat libertini et ingenium.

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the gentilician system of citizenship policed by endogamy. Slave-born or slave-born-at-one-remove? You cannot tell. But no Vatia or Seneca? That’s for sure. For an Aegialus has been given his name to mark him indelibly, incorrigibly: ‘UnRoman ——– ’. Take p u b l i u s c o r n e l i u s s c i p i o by way of contrast, and of comparison. His classic inheritance of ‘three names’ had marked him from cradle to grace as a pre-eminent scion fully bedded into [the upper echelons of ] the ciuitas. Then, however, his own triumphant achievements had fastened upon him one of the first new-style imperial titles, Africanus. This triumphal agnomen set him apart from the body of Quirites, too.11 Marked out for envy, for levelling, he became a Roman myth of overachievement as threat to liberty, and provocation for civil dissension. Cast as World Conquering imperator, so lined up to play scapegoat. By winning new territory on faraway foreign shores, Africanus had saved Italy, from the hub of Rome to the rim of its seaboard. It would cost him his home in his city, land him at Liternum, all washed-up. This, however, saved his soul (ask Seneca), and blessed him with the hero’s martyrdom of ‘voluntary exile’. Brushed-up for eternal exemplarity. Fate the poet bonded a e g i a lu s to a f r i c a n u s through geotectonic as well as l-i-t-e-r-a-l symmetry, since slave-owning domination ordained the ex-ex-slave ‘Master Shore’, where world-domination rechristened its one-and-ownly super-hyper-patriarch ‘Niggeratus from Nigeria’. For Afer spelled, not ‘black’ like ater, but ‘black-and-as-alien’,12 and the title Africanus was a monstrous neologizing extravagance that risked consecration to catachresis: ‘Afroesquean’. Like libertinus, it would never be clear that the new-fangled label ‘Lord Africa’ could catch the positive without netting the negative. Adnomination by geographical classification ships off Africanus to Campania, and it digs in a e g i a lu s at Liternum, too – so they can come together courtesy of victorious transgression + victimized transfiguration, courtesy of linguistic translation + imagistic transubstantiation. Pliny’s report brings out that Seneca has dignified Aegialus with the honorific rank of ‘the most conscientious head of household of them all’: the paterfamilias as purest of Roman authority figures (14). Calling him ‘the owner of this farmland today’ both semi-detaches the agricultural role he will play from his vocation as self-appointed sacristan, and covertly cements him into the position of modern equivalent of the 11 12

Africanus: Henderson (1997a) 35–6. Cf. Suetonius, Life of Terence 5, fuisse dicitur . . . colore fusco, reading the life from the name Terentius Afer.


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original father-figure s c i p i o, back in pre-cosmopolitan peasant Days of Yore.13 As the nominal equivalent of Liternum (sounds like litus, ‘shore’), 14 A I G I A L O S (Greek for ‘shore’) instantiates by perfect integration the governing formula which condenses owner + property into a single signal ‘personification’. ‘s c i p i o - a e g i a lu s - l i t e r n u m ’, at one. re d e co r at i n g s c i p i o Reading between Seneca’s lines to see how they arise from the rewriting of the Scipionic legend shows us how he is transforming the ‘Villa + Garden’ complex by reconfiguring its story as the product of a ‘legend + visit’ synthesis: behind the scenes, he is remoulding a ‘tradition + experience’ hendiadys. This, we are privileged to document, arises from rewriting the Aegialus legend, too. Courtesy of the Letter, we are challenged to integrate, and internalize for our selves, the drama of Seneca’s effort to adapt him self to the assimilation of tradition, to make a tradition which contrives both to reduplicate the old as the new (s c i p i o = a e g i a lu s ) and to displace the old with its renewal (s c i p i o > a e g i a lu s ). s e n e c a is the right name for this process of ‘Wave + Particle’ correlativism. And not only does his bricolage make the example work for acolytes, but his critical discussion also impacts on its beneficiaries: ‘practice + theory’ (see p. 146). t h e c ave at l i t e r n u m Thanks to another remarkable fact that is again showcased by Pliny, we can feel very clear indeed that Seneca is deliberately covering his tracks in 13

Compare and contrast Martial’s hero-worshipping Silius (11.48): Silius haec magni celebrat monumenta Maronis, iugera facundi qui Ciceronis habet. heredem dominumque sui tumuliue larisue non alium mallet nec Maro nec Cicero. Silius’ acclaim: this is Virgil’s tomb. Silius owns fluent Cicero’s patch. For heir and master of their grave and home no other choice to be made, Virgil and Cicero.

14

Here literary heroism assigns tomb to poet, farmland to statesman/orator, as a binary definition of an ‘estate/legacy’: it could only outmatch and mock Silius’ – but that is his humility . . . Cf. Pliny, Natural History 4.12, Achaia antea Aegialos uocabatur propter urbes in litore per ordinem dispositas, Maltby (1991) 11–12.

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another vital respect. This time there is no need to speculate on hidden depths. The occlusion in question confronts us with an astonishingly spectacular level of perverse subterfuge and narratorial violence (Natural History 16.234): . . . durauit in Liternino Africani prioris manu sata olea, item myrtus eodem loco conspicuae magnitudinis – subest specus in quo manes eius custodire draco traditur. . . . On his estate at Liternum, there lasted long an olive planted by the hand of the Elder Africanus; likewise a myrtle of spectacular size at the same spot – underground, a cave in which tradition tells that a serpent guards his shade.

Seneca has so dislocated his on-site visit that this memorable bipartite fact about The Oldest Trees in the Roman World is well and truly buried in the villa’s midden. Many readers must have taken the bait which disaggregates villa from garden, to the point where the composition bifurcates as under: It is curious that the information as to the transplanting of olives and vines at the end of the letter is given apparently for itself, and not, as it might so easily have been, as the text of some moral lesson. (Summers (1910) 289, Introduction to Epp. 86)15

It is not, as we have seen (p. 157), that Seneca makes no visible effort to bridge from his initial rapture over the manor to his straggling finale in horticultural enthusiasm. Indeed the Scipio letter starts by ‘first paying respects to his shade (manibus) and altar. This, I suspect, is the tomb of this great hero. As for his spirit, I am convinced myself that it returned to heaven whence it came’: Seneca is whiting out throwback lore that made Scipio an undying genius loci, and he marks the suture by narratorial interventions on the storyline. And this corrective (as he soon makes clear) is but a first instalment in Seneca’s campaign to relocate the grounds of heroism by rewriting the traditional legends (chapter 9, pp. 94–104). So now we must take on board that the back-grounded detail of ‘Scipio Out Digging’, which is motivated as his back-grinding way of working out, and so working up a sweat that would call for healthy ablutions (86.5), must represent a further stage in the same bid to revise the saga.16 To be sure, as we noticed, the fact that the same unfiltered rainwater tank supplies both bath-house plant and garden plantation serves as a conduit 15 16

Selections have even cut, suppressed, the horticulture as impertinent. When Scipio ‘trenched the earth underfoot, as was the way with the men of yore, in person’ (86.6, terramque (ut mos fuit priscis) ipse subigebat), his stance was that of Virgil’s farmer waging his ‘war’ on the soil (cf. Georgic 1.125, ante Iouem nulli subigebant arua coloni, as in Ovid’s parody, Metamorphoses 11.31, boues presso subigebant uomere terram).


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through the wall between the two halves of the composition (cisternam, 4 ∼ aqua . . . cisternina, 21; cum plueret, 11 ∼ habemus pluuiam, 21. See pp. 140–1). And I (in my Scipionic ‘-sub-Brando’ solitude) did find mighty s c i p i o lurking in the etymological landscape of ‘long-stemmed species’ (grandiscapiae; pp. 141–2).17 But, however potent the mix of ‘Fusion + Transfusion’ we can spread around, to deny Scipio his olive grove, and forfeit his gift to posterity of marvels among long-lived plants . . . – surely the perverse obliteration of that storyboard must radically de-couple uilla from hortus? Root + branch. Just recall how Seneca burst imperiously into his suburban garden to reclaim the hand-set plane-trees of his youth, so he represented to us, for his very own self(ishness) (Epp. 12: chapter 2). What are we to make of this audacious bouleversement? Are we meant to take it on the chin?18 Of course we paused at Liternum to reflect on the point of cancelling the Roman myth of the Last Days of Scipio, as Philosophy steels itself to metaphorize and/or displace Politics. The question remains: are we to ponder, or be spared, the cut which supplants Scipio’s Green Fingers with rivalries between Seneca and Virgil, and between Seneca and Aegialus? For myself, I am persuaded that this is a case of Seneca suppressing the reading that lurks behind his writing, on principle, and that we are meant to appreciate how Scipio does still watch over (in fact, under) this site, albeit in the modernized form of s e n e c a n s c i p i o .19 t h e b at t l e h y m n o f t h e re p u b l i c rev i s e d In general, instances of the RoMan mirrored by his mansion abound. Centred, focal, to the praxis of Rome: ‘Gabinius is now building for all to see a palace of such dimensions that L. Lucullus’ Tusculan villa would look 17

18

19

Inevitably, Scipio Africanus’ Punic victory tied him for ever to heroic Roman ascension (RomulusQuirinus) and to the pomegranate (‘Punic apple’): ‘the Vicus ad Malum Punicum, the street which led to the temple of Quirinus on the Alta Semita. There in the lovely precinct of Quirinus stood the Punic apple tree itself, planted by Scipio Africanus after his victory over Carthage’ (McCullough (1993) 445). If we knew what we now know, courtesy of Pliny, about s c i p i o ’s when we were rereading vat i a ’s , might we have even jolted from those ‘twin grots’ (speluncae . . . duae, 55.6) to that spooky ‘cave’ under Liternum (specus, Natural History 16.234)? Cicero’s idealized Scipio already ‘appears to his grandson not as he remembers him in the flesh but “in that form which was more familiar to me from his imago than from the man himself”’ (Penwill (1995) 74, citing Cicero, De re publica 6.10).

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like a shack in comparison – but when he was just starting in politics he showed the people as their tribune a picture of that villa . . . to arouse your indignation against as brave and good a citizen as can be’ (Cicero, Pro Sestio 93). But according to the reading I have now transplanted into writing, plumbing the depths, the legacy of s c i p i o’s estate, the ‘Olive that Never Died’, must now reconfigure as a highly specific matrix for ‘Moving On’.20 The culture myth of s c i p i o as the Man who planted Trees, hidden by Seneca where we can still see it, must also stand as a remapping of the culture myth paraded by the greatest writer of Latin prose before the Caesars, in memorialization of another grand hero of the Republic – likewise the selfprojection of the encomiast.21 As we shall now see. I have noted already that, in its discussion of funeral rites and tomb monuments, Cicero’s Laws showcases a re-elaboration of Ennius’ consecration of s c i p i o Africanus, featuring the formula uncannily brandished by Seneca at vat i a ’s: ‘Here lies the Man’ (see pp. 101–3). I also found cause to recall the revisionist representation of ‘The Dream of Scipio’ after Ennius, the climax of the whole Republic (p. 103). When the earlier work, mounted as holiday discussion between Scipio Africanus Aemilianus and friends, in the great man’s garden, gives way to its sequel, it is true to say that the Republic receives, and ‘makes room for Laws’ (p. 96 n. 7). Here, too, Cicero takes up the format rejected for Republic for the Laws’ discussion between another great Roman and his circle, and books himself to star in the ‘Scipio’ role, flanked by his brother and his (other) best friend.22 Immediately set in Cicero’s grounds at his Arpinum homebase, Laws opens by picking out a grove with a very special tree, and a mighty warrior for the Roman Republic, and delivers an audacious plug for the writer’s renewed efforts to recondition and recycle his memory – both their memories (1.1–3 / Cicero fr. 15–16 Courtney; Scaevola fr. 1 Courtney):23 A. Lucus quidem ille et haec Arpinatium quercus agnoscitur saepe a me lectus 1 in Mario. si manet illa quercus, haec est profecto. etenim est sane uetus. Q. Manet uero, Attice noster, et semper manebit. sata est enim ingenio. nullius autem agricolae cultu stirps tam diuturna quam poetae uersu seminari potest. A. Quo tandem modo, Quinte, aut quale est istuc, quod poetae serunt? mihi enim uideris fratrem laudando suffragari tibi. 20 21 22 23

Cf. Henderson (2002c) 124–5 on the metaphorics of the preservative in the production-model villa of Columella 12. I owe this clinching argument to George Pepe. The classic treatment: Pohlenz (1965); cf. Feeney (1991) 258–60, Wiseman (2002) 339–40. The boy Marius caught in his sinus seven eaglets from a falling nest, so he would collect seven consulates (Plutarch, Life of Marius 36).


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Q. Sit ita sane. uerum tamen, dum Latinae loquentur litterae, quercus huic loco non deerit, quae Mariana dicitur, eaque, ut ait Scaeuola de fratris mei Mario, canescet saeclis innumerabilibus – nisi forte Athenae tuae sempiternam in arce oleam tenere potuerunt 2 aut, quod Homericus Ulixes Deli se proceram et teneram palmam uidisse dixit, hodie monstrant eandem. multaque alia multis locis diutius commemoratione manent quam natura stare potuerunt. quare ‘glandifera’ illa quercus, ex qua olim euolauit nuntia fulua Iouis miranda uisa figura, nunc sit haec. sed cum eam tempestas uetustasue consumpserit, tamen erit his in locis quercus, quam Marianam quercum uocabunt. A. Non dubito id quidem. sed haec iam non ex te, Quinte, quaero, uerum 3 ex ipso poeta, tuine uersus hanc quercum seuerint, an ita factum de Mario, ut scribis, acceperis. M. Respondebo tibi equidem, sed . . . at t i c u s . The grove there, the townsfolk of Arpinum’s oak here. Familiar to 1 me. Read, over and over, by me, in the ‘Marius’ poem. If the oak there abides, it’s the one here, for a fact. It sure is OLD. qu i n t u s c i c e ro. It does abide, dear Atticus, and shall always abide. It was planted by the mind. No farmer’s care can plant stock to live as long as a poet’s lines. at t i c u s . How can you mean, Quintus? What is that – ‘poets a-planting’? In blessing your brother, you seem to me to be plugging yourself ! qu i n t u s . Sure thing, so be it. But still, so long as Latin literature shall have a voice, an oak will never go missing from this spot, to be called ‘Marius’’, and it will, as Scaevola says about my brother’s Marius/Marius, ‘grow old and grow through aeons beyond counting’ – unless, maybe, your home, Athens, has managed to keep an eternal 2 olive tree on the Acropolis, or, given that Homer’s Ulysses told that he saw a tall young palm on Delos, they still point to the selfsame tree. And many other things in many spots abide longer by being memorialized than have managed to stand tall by being alive. So the ‘acorn-laden’ oak there, from which once upon a time there flew away ‘Jupiter’s golden herald, wondrous profile beheld’ can be the one here, and vice versa. But when weather or age have eaten it up, still there will be an oak in the spot there, and they will call it ‘Marius’. at t i c u s . Of that I have no doubt. But this question I put, not to you, Quintus, but to the poet himself: did your lines plant the oak here, or did you inherit the story of Marius the way you write it? m a rc u s . I will give you an answer, but . . .

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The plot thickens. Writing at about the same time as he wrote the Republic, and using the mouthpiece of brother Quintus, Cicero contrives in his work on Roman manticism to quote the chunk from his Marius poem where augur Marius observed the legendary auspicium of another eagle as it flew from a tree (De diuinatione 1.106 / Marius fr. 17 Courtney, 1–2):24 hic Iouis altisoni subito pinnata satelles arboris e trunco . . . Here high-rumbling Jupiter’s winged messenger of a sudden from out of the trunk of the tree . . .

. . . as an insertion intruded within his excursus on the primal augur of Rome: pre-Roman Romulus, as immortalized in a chunk of verse by Ennius, taking the founding auspicium in the first book of the Annales (De diuinatione 1.105; 107 / Annales fr. 80–100, Warmington, at 95–6):25 . . . et simul ex alto longe pulcherrima praepes laeua uolauit auis . . . . . . and right then from on high, far and away the fairest straight-ahead bird flew on the left . . .

Here is Rome regenerating Rome on the page, big time. Cicero the archpoet eulogist and multiple patriotic myth-maker – Cicero the Ennius of his day. Cicero the second saviour of the Roman state to emerge from nowhere, from Marius’ Arpinum, and third in line from the founder himself, and from Romulean apotheosis. Cicero the statesman of the Republic/Republic, lawyer and writer of Laws. One mind, one tree. A tradition, an intervention. Marius-Cicero, Marius ——– > Cicero. Politicized philosophy, politics philosophized. An imaginary Rome must redress the times; a (pragmatically futile, morally inspirational) call to the future enshrines the man of peace. To believe, enthuse, imagine, too. A century on, Seneca pits philosophy against his state, his legality. The saving grace of another, adjusted, philosophical ‘Dream of Scipio’ takes an epistolary turn. Braves the inner heroics of skulking in the subterfuge of another, reclaimed, ‘Disgrace of Scipio’. Seneca leaves it for his long-lived contemporary Silius Italicus, the survivor of Julio-Claudians, Civil War, and 24 25

This eagle pecked to death, in mid-air, the snake that had bitten it, portending Marius’ ‘wellomened . . . return’ to rid Rome of Sulla’s partisans (Marius v. 11). Romulus watches the birds for a favourable omen to bless his fledgling Roma, not Remus’ Remora.


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Flavians, too, into the Ulpian dynasty,26 to return ‘Scipio’s Dream’ to the sublimity of national epic. As we have seen, in life as in text, Silius tended the memory of the greatest poets of Rome, bracketing Ennius and Virgil by honouring the fame of Scipio, hero of the Annales, in the Punica, and Virgil’s tomb in Campania, alike (see pp. 104, 138). Silius will have his Sibyl foretell the Fall of Scipio (p. 104); but will point to the transcendence his poem effects by recounting his perpetual triumph: as Rome debates whether to entrust its fate to so young a hero, epiphany paid him a visit. Virtus and Voluptas came for their tug of war, Vice luring him to a life of [Vatia], before Virtue promises a sainted soul ascension to the aetherial source (pp. 101– 03). This fateful moment for Romanness stamps this Scipionic scion, once again, as the arborescent bearer of dendrophilous, dendritic, dendriform, Tradition. For this [Herculean] myth of [philosophical-political] Choice is framed between the lines (Punica 15.18–20, 118–20):27 has, lauri residens iuuenis uiridante sub umbra, aedibus extremis uoluebat pectore curas, cum subito assistunt dextraque laeuaque . . . The boy sat beneath the verdant shade of a laurel, in a far corner of the mansion, rolling these concerns around his heart – when suddenly there stood by his side, to right and to left . . . ... . . . sed dabo, qui uestrum saeuo nunc Marte fatigat imperium, superare manu laurumque superbam in gremio Iouis excisis deponere Poenis. . . . But it shall be my gift, that you overcome the foe who now exhausts your people’s empire, and with the selfsame hand take the laurel of pride and lay it on the lap of Almighty Jupiter after deforesting Carthage.

Scipio’s olive, Scipio’s legend; Scipio’s laurels, Scipio’s legends. Roman mores were continuously reaffirmed in, as, through, this continuing story of dendrogram(matology). 26 27

In Epistles 3.7 Pliny underlines how to read the drawn-out saga of the occlusive career/life of Silius: see p. 161 n. 8. All the many ‘Hercules’ culture-heroes of Rome, with his ‘Greatest of all Altars’ homing the political city on worship (Ara Maxima; e.g. Galinsky (1972) 131–49), while his ‘philosophical self ’ consecrates the Stoicized soul to the struggle to ascend to the Aetherial Source (‘Hercules at the crossroads’, grafted onto [Ennius’?, Cicero’s?, and Silius’] Scipio; the classic study by Alpers (1912)), reduce to just one single, subordinated, naming in the Letters (94.63), where Alexander the Great Maniac goes for aggression unlimited, indignatur ab Herculis Liberique uestigiis uictoriam flectere, and so, into Latin, to Pompey the Great Maniac, and through Caesar, &c., ad infinitum.

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Morals and Villas in Seneca’s Letters t h e co n c lu s i o n f o l low s

Everything says it. Seneca’s preferred model for teaching (as) the Transposition of Old Stocks into New Shares incorporates and embodies a progressively adaptive series of implanted images for the transformation of the self.28 That is the burden of his massive missive, the long and short of the Letters. See you. PS we’d rise post-obstacle more defined more grateful we would heal be humbled and be unstoppable we’d hold close and let go and know when to do which we’d release and disarm and stand up and feel safe. (Morrissette (2002), ‘utopia’) 28

But – I may have been training up an opponent for myself. You.

a p pe n d i x 1

Here to stay Places and persons named in the Epistulae Morales

NB Places and persons named in Epp. 12, 55, and 86 appear in bold; likewise the other villas named in the collection. Items discussed in the text are enclosed in square brackets. 1. References to Rome in the collection. See pp. 96–7, 159: Epp. 50.3; 86.1 (× 2), 5; 91.13, 16; cf. Meta Sudans (56.4), Capitol (21.5: from Virgil), 95.72; 98.13).

2. References to Sicily, Campania, Italy in the collection. All these references which have any locative function are discussed in this book: (a) References to Sicily in the collection: Aetna: Epp. 51, 79 (× 3); Charybdis: 14, 31, 45, 79 (× 2); (Panhormitani: 114); Scylla: 31, 45, 79, 92 (× 2); Sicilia: 14, 51, 79, 88, 90, (115); Sirenes: 57; (Syracusani: 114); Tauromenium: 79. NB These references are from Epp.: 14 (× 2), 31 (× 2), 45 (× 2), 51 (× 2), 57, 79 (× 8), 88, 90, 92 (× 2), (114 × 2), (115).

(b) References to Campania in the collection: Acherusius lacus: 55; Baiae: 51 (× 4), 55 (× 2), 57; Campania: 49, 51, 55, 77, (83); Capreae: 77; Cumae: 55; Liternum: 51, 86; Neapolis: 49, 57 (× 2), 68, 76 = Parthenope: 53; Pompeii: 49, 77. NB These references are from Epp.: 49 (× 3), 51 (× 6), 53, 55 (× 4), 57 (× 3), 68, 76, 77 (× 3), (83), 86.

(c) References to the rest of Italy in the collection: Alburnum: 58; Apulia: 87; Italia: 88, 90; lucus Silari: 58; Tarentum: 68; plus those villa sites: Alba: 123; Ardea: 91, 105; Nomentum: 104, 110. NB These references are from Epp.: 58 (× 2), 68, 87, 88, 90, 91, 104, 105, 110, 123.

3. EPP. 1–12 (= 29 pp. of OCT) Almost every proper noun is mentioned in the text: 171

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Appendix 1

Place named: Syria (12)

Persons named (showing clumps): (i) Philosophers Stoics: Attalus (9), Cleanthes-Zeno-Plato-Aristotle-Socrates-Epicurus-Metrodorus-Hermarchus-Polyaenus (6), Chrysippus (9). Epicureans: Epicurus (2, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12), Hecato (5, 6, 9). Others: Athenodorus (10), Heraclitus (12), Socrates-Cato-Laelius (7), Stilbon (9, 10)-Demetrius Poliorcetes (9)-Crates (10), Theophrastus (2). (ii) Other Greeks: Phidias (9). (iii) Romans Early Rome: none. Punic Wars: none. Civil Wars: Sulla-Pompey-Fabianus (11), Pompey-Crassus-Parthian-C. CaesarLepidus-Dexter-Chaerea (4). Others: Cato-Laelius (11), Felicio, son of Philositus (12), Pacuvius (12). Writers: Pomponius (3), Publilius (8).

4. EPP. 13–83 (= 254 pp. of OCT) Places named (excluding items in 1): Africa (24, 71), [Alexandria (77)], Alps (51), [Aqua Virgo (83)], Argos-HellespontIonian Sea-Isthmos (80), Asia (53), Athens (58), Canopus (51), Carthage (24), Egypt (51, 71), Germany (36), Hephaestion in Lycia (79), Parthia (17, 36), Pennine-GraiaeCandavia-Syrtes (31), Persians-Medes-Dahae (71), Scythians-Sarmatians (80), Spain (71), [Tiber (83)].

Persons named: (i) Philosophers Stoics: Ariston of Chios (36), Attalus (63, 67, 72, 81), Cleanthes (33, 44, 64), Chrysippus (22, 33, ? 56? ), Panaetius (22), Posidonius (33, 78, 83), Zeno (22, 33, 64, 82, 83). Epicureans: Epicurus: [13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 33, 46, 52, 66, 67, 79, 81], Hermarchus (33, 52), Metrodorus (14, 18, 33, 52, 79, 81), Polyaenus, (18), Pythocles (21). Others: Ariston (29), Aristotle (58, 65), Demetrius the Cynic (20, 62, 67), Democritus (79), Diogenes (29, 47), Fabianus (52, 58), Heraclitus (58), Metronax (76), Petrodorus (52), Plato (44, 47, 58, 64, 65), Pythagoras (52), Serapio (40), Sextius (59, 64, 73), Socrates (23, 28, 44, 64, 67, 70, 71, 79). (ii) Other Greeks et sim.: Alexander (53, 59, 83), Clitus (83), Croesus (47), Leonidas + 300 (82), Phalaris (66). (iii) Romans Early Rome: Decii Mures (67), Fabii (82), Mucius Scaevola (24, 66), Porsenna (24, 66), Regulus (67, 71). Punic Wars: [Hannibal (51)], Regulus (71), Scipio (24, [51], 70).

Places and persons in the Epistles

173

Civil Wars: Agrippa (21), Antony (82, 83), [Atticus (21)], Augustus (83), D. Brutus (82), Caesar (14, 24, [51], 83), Cassius (83), Cato [Minor] (14, 24, [51], 58, 64, 67, 70, 71, 79, 82), Cicero (17, [21], 23, 40, 49, 58), Cleopatra (83), Juba (71), Maecenas (19), Marius (47, [51]), Metellus Scipio (24, 71), Pompey (14, [51], 71, 83), Tillius Cimber (83). Others: [Annaeus Serenus (63)], Asinius Gallus (55), [Aufidius Bassus (30)], Caligula (77), Callistus (47), [Calvisius Sabinus (27)], Cato [Maior] (24, 25, 64, 70), [Claranus (66)], Cossus (83), Drusus (21), Drusus Libo (70), [Flaccus (63)], Geminus Varius (40), Haterius (40), Iulius Graecinus (29), Harpaste (50), Laelius (25, 64), M. Lepidus (29), [Marcellinus (29)], Metellus [Numidicus] (24), Pharius (83), [L. Piso (83)], Rutilius [Rufus] (23, 67, 79), [Satellius Quadratus (27)], Sattia (77), Scaurus (29), Scipio [Aemilianus] (24, 25, 66), Scipio [Nasica], 70, 71), Scribonia (70), Sejanus (55), Sulla (23), Tiberius (21, 83), Timagenes (91), [Tullius Marcellinus (77)], Vinicius (40). Writers: Accius (58), [Cornelius Severus (79)], Ennius (58), Homer (58), Livy (46), Lucretius (58), Messalla (51), [Ovid (79)], Sallust (60), Valgius (51), Virgil ([21], 28, 58, 59, 67, [70], 73, 77, 78, [79], 82).

5. EPP. 84–88 (= 39 pp. of OCT) Places named (excluding Rome, Sicily, Italy). Almost all are discussed in the text: Alexandria (86), Apulia (87), [Carthage (86)], Ethiopia (85), Numidia (86, 87), Thasos (86), Tmolus-India-Sabaei-Chalybes (87).

Persons named: (i) Philosophers Stoics: Antipater (87), Posidonius (87, 88). Epicureans: Epicurus (85). Others: Nausiphanes (88), Parmenides (88), Protagoras (88), Speusippus (85), Xenocrates (85), Zeno of Elea (88). (ii) Other Greeks et sim.: [Cambyses (86)], Ladas (85), Phidias (85). (iii) Romans Punic Wars: [Fabius Maximus (86)], [Hannibal (86)], [Scipio (86, 87)]. Civil Wars: Maecenas (87). Others: [Aegialus (86)], ‘Buccillus’ (86), Caligula (88), [Cato [Maior] (86, 87)], Chelidon (87), [Cornelii (86)], [Gargonius (86)], Maximus (87), Natalis (87). Writers: Apion (88), Aristarchus (88), Didymus (88), Dossennus (89), Hesiod (88), Homer (88), [Horace (86)], [Virgil (84, 85, [86], 87, 88)].

6. EPP. 89–124 + Excerpta (= 214 + 2 pp. of OCT) Places named (excluding Rome and Italy):

174

Appendix 1 Achaea (91, 104), Adriatic-Ionian-Aegean (89), Africa (94, 104, 114, 115), Alexandria (102), Alps (95), Argolid (104), Armenia (94), Asia (91, 94), Athens (90, 94), Cyprus (91), Egypt (115), Germany (124), Greece (94), Hyrcania (113), India (113, 119), [Lyons (91)], Macedonia (91), Maeander (104), Nile (104), Numidia (123), Paphos (91), Parthia (124), Persia (94, 113), Scythians (90, 124), Spain (94), Sparta (94), Syria (91), Syrtes (90), Tibur (119), Tigris (104).

Persons named: (i) Philosophers Stoics: Antipater (92), Ariston of Chios (89, 94, 115), Archedemus (121), Attalus (108, 110), Cleanthes (94, 107, 108, 113), Chrysippus (104, 108, 113), Panaetius (116), Posidonius (90, 92, 94, 95, 104, 108, 113, 121), Zeno (94, 95, 98, 101, 102, 104, 107, 108, 114, 115, 122, 124). Epicureans: Epicurus (97), Metrodorus (98, 99). Others: Anacharsis (90), Demetrius the Cynic (91), Democritus (90), Diogenes (90), Fabianus (100), [Metronax (93)], Nausiphanes (88), Parmenides (88), Phaedo (94), Plato (94, 108), Protagoras (88), Pythagoras (90, 94, 108), Sextius (98, 108), Socrates (98, 104), Sotion (108), Speusippus (85), Xenocrates (85), Zeno of Elea (88). (ii) Other Greeks et sim.: Alexander (91, 94, 113, 119), Charondas (90), Darius (94, 119), Lycurgus (90), Philip of Macedon (94), Pyrrhus (120), Solon (90), Zaleucus (90). (iii) Romans Early Rome: Ancus Martius (108), Coruncanius (114), M’. Curius Dentatus (120), C. Fabricius (98, 120), Horatius [Cocles] (120), Mucius Scaevola (98), Pyrrhus (120), Romulus (108), Servius Tullius (108). Punic Wars: Regulus (98, 114), Scipio (108). Civil Wars: [Atticus (118)], Agrippa (94), Augustus (114), M. Brutus (95), Caesar (94, 95, 97, 104, 118), Calvus (94), Cato [Minor] (94, 95, 97, 98, 104, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122), Cicero (97, 100, 107, 108, 111, 114, [118], Excerpta), M. Crassus (104, 119), Maecenas (92, 101, [114], 120), Marius (94), [Marullus (99)], Plancus (91), Pompey (94, 95, 97, 104, 118). Others: Apicius (95, 120), [Acilius] Buta (122), Caecilius (118), Caelius (?) (113), Cato [Maior] (95, 104), Catulus (97), Appius Claudius (114), P. Clodius (97), L. Crassus (114), [C. Scribonius] Curio (114), [Annaeus] Gallio (104), [C. Sempronius] Gracchus (114), Jugurtha (94), Laelius (95, 104), Licinus (119, 120), [Liberalis (91)], Mithridates (94), Natta (122), P. Octavius (95), S. Papinius (122), [Pompeia] Paulina (104), Rutilius [Rufus] (98), Scipio [Aemilianus] (95), [Cornelius Senecio (101)], Sertorius (94), Themison (95), Tiberius (95, 108, 122), Timagenes (91), [Q Aelius] Tubero (95, 98, 104, 120), P. Vatinius (94, 118, 120), Vinicius (122). Writers: Arruntius (114), Asclepiades (95), Cethegus (Excerpta), Dossennus (89), Ennius (108, Excerpta), Euripides (115), Fenestella (108), Hippocrates (95), Homer (90, 108), Horace (119, 120), Livy (100), Lucretius (95, 106, 110), Montanus (122), Naevius (102), Ovid (90, 110, 115), Albinovanus Pedo (122), Pollio (100), Publilius (94, 108), Sallust (109, 114), Sotericus (Excerpta), Tanusius (93), Terence (95), Themison (95), Varus (122), Virgil (89, 90, 92, 101, 104, 108, 115, 122, Excerpta).

a p pe n d i x 2

From: Letter 86 To: A Dying Light in Corduba

Lindsey Davis’ twelfth ‘Falco’ novel, A Dying Light in Corduba (1996), spreads the detective’s net all the way out west, to the Spanish homeland of Seneca’s clan, the Annaei, caught in the after-shadow of his disgrace, not ten years past. Watch his homage to s c i p i o in Letter 86 disaggregate and recombine here, hosed down and rerooted.1 Falco persuades downtrodden honest smallholder Marius Optatus to tour the estate (120–2): We set off to inspect the olive trees that all the fuss was about. ‘Then we have the olive trees – suffering badly.’ . . . He showed me where he was himself stripping back the soil to expose the roots, then removing young suckers. Meanwhile the upper branches were being severely pruned to reduce the trees to a manageable height. ‘Will this harsh treatment set them back?’ ‘Olives are tough, Falco. . . .’ ‘Is that how they can live so long?’ ‘Five hundred years, they say . . . The new cuttings I have planted this month in the nursery will not bear fruit for five years; it will take at least twenty for them to reach their best. Yes, the olive business is long-term.’

Nux the Falco dog digs disastrously in the nursery, so Optatus finds he has a trained-up rival gardening expert on his hands (125): I picked off the damaged leaves, checked the stem for bruising, redug the planting hole, found the supporting stake, and firmed in the little tree in the way my grand-uncle had taught me when I was a small boy. If Optatus was surprised that a street-pounding Roman knew how to do this, he showed nothing.

The plot thickens. The hunt takes in (259) ‘the oldest Roman town in Hispania’: Italica, ‘founded by s c i p i o as a colony of veterans’. Optatus, the tenant with a grievance, reports a terrible accident – the dodgy young hopeful with a secret crushed by the oil-press on his grandfather’s estate (306), as Falco hastens back, himself severely battered and bruised, to his lady, Helena, at her senatorial father’s mansion on his family estate out in the province (308): 1

‘Only I will know’ – quoth our friend the author (per epistulam electronicam).

175

176

Appendix 2

The bath-house at the villa was designed for hardy old republicans. I won’t say it was crude, but if anyone hankered for the unluxurious days of dark, narrow bathing places with mere slits for windows, this was ideal. You undressed in the cold room. Unguents were stored on a shelf in the warm room, which was certainly not very warm at night; you got up a sweat by vigorously shaking an oil jar to try to dislodge the congealed contents . . . The promised hot water had been used up by someone else. ‘That’s just typical!’ Helena stormed moodily. ‘I’ve had three days of this, Marcus, and I’m ready to scream.’

In a Didius who-did-it, description has to be suspect. Under pressure of literary genre. As ironic as, less tart than, under Seneca’s direction at vat i a ’s in Epp. 55, we home on the villains of the piece (356–7): The Quinctius estate was much like others I had visited, though it bore signs of the absentee landlord at his most astute: abundant flocks, tended by the fewest possible shepherds, and secondary cereal crops growing below the olive trees. Everything looked in respectable condition. Moneymakers don’t neglect their land. Believe me, there was a great deal of land. The house had charm and character. Thick walls to keep it cool in summer and cosy in winter. Vine-clad pergolas leading to statues of coy maidens. A separate bath-house. A terrace for airy exercise. It spoke of wealth, yet wealth possessed by an honest country family. Long harvest lunches taken with the tenantry. Girls with pink cheeks and boys who were keen on horseflesh. Life lived with a constant supply of fresh fodder and an old earthenware jug of home-produced wine always ready to hand. Amazing. Even their damned house lied.

True and false. Olives + bath-house. Two morals and two villas. Between them, Seneca. One old letter and one new novel. Yes, Aegialus-Optatus, ‘Old trees can transplant.’

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Index of passages discussed

Ad Herennium 4.22: 94

3.1.2: 129 3.3.3: 159 n. 4 4.2.2: 124 n. 2 5.3–7, 8–9: 129 5.9.1–3, 8: 123–4 n. 2

Callimachus, Iambi 4.98–100: 144 Cato, De agri cultura 27: 137 n. 21 28.1, 32.1: 123 n. 2 34.1: 135 n. 19 45.1: 123 n. 2 49.1: 133, 124 n. 2 61.2: 123 n. 2 Celsus 2.15: 71 n. 7 Charisius, Ars grammatica 1.57.5: 142 n. 6 Cicero Ad Atticum 1.12: 44 16: 44 n. 12 De diuinatione 1.105–7: 168 De finibus 2.106: 103 n. 20 De legibus 1.1–3: 166–7 2.56–7: 101 De officiis 1.139: 75–6 3.1–4: 67–8 De oratore 1.160–2: 155 n. 23 De re publica 6.10: 165 n. 19 13, 25–6: 103 n. 22 fr. 3–4 K: 102 Marius fr. 15–16 C: 166–7 fr. 17 C: 168 Pro Sestio 93: 166 Tusculanae disputationes 5.49: 102 Columella ∼ Virgil, Georgics: 135–7, 137 n. 20 1.5.2: 106 n. 32 2.7.1–2: 135–6 2.8–10: 136–7 2.9.17–28, 10.5–14, 25–8: 135 3–4: 129

Davis, Lindsey, Dying Light in Corduba: 175–6 Dioscorides 2.175.1: 142 Ennius Annals 80–100 W: 168 95–6 W: 168 280 W: 142 320–1 W: 103 n. 21 Epigrams 1–2 W: 102 3–4 W: 101 5–6 W: 102 Scipio fr. 6 W: 142 fr. 13 W: 103 n. 20 Gellius 12.2.2–13: 102 n. 16 Herodotus 3.25: 95 Hesiod, Theogony 30: 142 n. 7 Horace Epistles 1.16: 2–3 Odes 1.3: 138 3.13: 156–7 n. 26 3.30.2: 77 n. 16 4.8.13–15: 101 Satires 1.1.20–1: 117 1.2: 130 n. 11 1.2.27: 117, 118 n. 55 1.2.114–16: 117 1.3.11–17: 117

184

Index of passages discussed 1.4.11: 156 1.4.92: 117–18, 118 n. 55 Isidore, Etymologiae 14.8.40: 89 n. 33 17.6.14: 157 n. 27

17.125–6: 123 n. 2 17.206: 157 n. 27 18.117–22: 137–8 25.9: 121 Propertius 4.9.65–6: 107 n. 33 Quintilian 10.1.88: 102 n. 16

Lactantius, Institutiones diuinae 1.18.10: 101 Livy 1.38.4: 41 28.44.18: 97, 145 30.45.6: 99 38.50.6–57.8: 97–8, 103 n. 20 38.60.10: 98 Lucan 3.409–10: 142 7.390–1: 41 8.792–3: 76 n. 15 Lucilius 851 W: 77 n. 17 Lucretius 3.833, 1025, 1034–5: 103 5.33: 147 n. 16 Macrobius, Saturnalia Praefatio 5–10: 48 2.4.16: 78 n. 20 Martial 11.48: 163 n. 113 Ovid Amores 1.12.29–30: 77 n. 16 Fasti 4.905, 937, 942: 41 n. 5 Metamorphoses 11.31: 164 n. 16 Paulus ap. Festum 13: 114 n. 47 Petronius, Satyrica 73.2: 107 Plato, Apology 30e5: 147 Pliny Epistles 1.3: 85–6 3.7: 138 Natural History ∼ Virgil, Georgics: 137–8 8.162: 130 n. 10 11.254: 77 n. 18 12.6–12: 25 n. 6 14: 129 14.49–51: 159 n. 4 14.49: 160 15.1–23: 129 15.3: 132–3 15.4.4: 124 n. 2, 129 n. 9 16.93: 89 n. 31 16.234: 164 17.67: 124 n. 3

Scaevola fr. 1 C: 166–7 Seneca De constantia sapientis 17.3: 78 Epistles ∼ Horace, Satires 1: 117–18, 138 ∼ Virgil, Georgics: 51–2, 129–38 1–11: 2, 6–18 2.2–5: 8, 147 12: 2, 19–27 13–33: 29–31 13–48: 31–2 18.7: 155 27.5: 42–3 35.4: 157 n. 28 49–62: 32–5 51.11: 33, 105 53: 158 n. 1 55: 3, 62–92 55.11: 144–5 58: 35 n. 14, 130, 147–9, 151 58.2–5: 147–8 58.5: 76 n. 15 59: 151–3 59.3–4: 130, 151 59.7: 105 60.1: 1, 153 60.4: 75 n. 12 63–83: 35–9 66.2: 131 68: 36, 74 n. 11 70.20: 72 n. 8 79.6: 153 83.14–15: 43 84–88: 3, 29, 46–52 86: 3, 53–61, 93–138 89–124: 40–4 91.16: 42 94.63: 169 n. 27 95.67–73: 130 100: 43, 153–6 104.1: 3, 40 105.1: 3, 40 108.33–5: 102 110.1: 3, 40 112.1: 104 122.11–13: 41 123.1: 3, 40

185

186

Index of passages discussed

Seneca (cont.) 124.1: 129–30 Excerpta: 28–9 De otio 6.4: 100 n. 14 Silius 7.106–7: 104 n. 26 13.235: 141 13.466–87, 514–15: 104 15.18: 169 15.77–8: 102 n. 17 15.119–20: 169 15.340–2: 104 15.441: 141 Statius, Siluae 1.3.2, 24–5, 35–7, 43–6: 156 n. 24 1.3.53–7: 109 n. 37 2.2.14–15: 73 n. 10 3.1.82, 88: 161 n. 8 Strabo, Chrestomathiae 5.39: 89 n. 33 Suetonius Life of Augustus 6, 94.6–7: 161 n. 8 Life of Terence 5: 162 n. 12 Tacitus, Annals 6.27: 7 n. 4 13.21: 82 14.1–8: 158 15.34: 78 n. 20 15.52: 158–9 Theocritus: 7.43–4: 142 n. 7 Theophrastus, History of Plants 2.1.2: 123 n. 2 2.1.3: 124 n. 2 2.5: 150 4.13: 150 4.13.4–5: 144 Valerius Maximus 2.10.2: 94–5 5.3.2b: 100 Varro De lingua Latina 6.41: 107 n. 33 9.10: 77 n. 19 Res rusticae 1.11.2: 106 n. 32

1.34.1: 137 n. 21 1.40.4: 123 n. 2 1.41.4: 132 n. 14 1.41.6: 123 n. 2 2.5.14: 147 n. 16 3.17.2–10: 82–3 Virgil Aeneid 1.5–7: 42 1.159–61: 73 n. 10 1.432–3: 46 3.23: 141 n. 4 3.72: 37 4.653: 26 n. 8 5.344: 131 6.278–9: 130 6.513–14: 153 6.773, 776: 41 6.842–6: 104 7.411–13: 42 9, Nisus and Euryalus: 31 Georgics 1.53–8: 50 1.125: 164 n. 16 1.176–7: 129–30 1.195–6: 137 1.197–200: 136–7 1.210–30: 135 1.214: 136 1.215–16: 134–5 1.219–21: 135, 136 1.336–7, 424–6: 51 2.1–9: 129 2.2–3: 132 n. 14 2.9–176: 131 2.57: 132 2.73–82: 140 2.362–70: 124 n. 3 2.367: 139 n. 1 2.420–5: 129 2.447–8: 141 n. 4 3.75–81, 83–5: 130 3.146–50: 147–8, 147 n. 16 4.144–7: 134 n. 16 4.163–4: 46

General Index

NB Persons and Places named in Epp. 12, 55, 86 appear in bold; likewise the other villas named in the collection. abhorridus, -e: 142, 142 n. 6 Acherusian lake: 79, 80 n. 25 aedilis: 114 Aegialus, Vetulenus: 119, 160–3 Aetna: 32–3, 38 Agrippina: 158 Alba: 3, 40 n. 2, 42 Alburnus: 147 n. 16, 148 Alexander: 106, 169 n. 27 ango, angulus, angustus: 106–7, 107 n. 33 Annaeus Serenus: 43 Ardea: 3, 40 n. 2, 42, 159 asilus/myops/oistros: 147–8, 147 n. 16 Asinius Gallus: 81 Baiae: 32–3, 83, 83 n. 28, 88, 89 n. 33 bath-house: 34, 53, 106, 112 n. 44 bay: see laurel bean: 135–8 bees make/find honey: 46–7 blush: 16 Buccillus (for Rufillus): 117 Caesar. C. (Julius Caesar / Caligula): 10–11 Campania: 32–5, 37 Cassius Chaerea: 10–11 Cato Maior: 13, 17–18, 50, 67, 93 Cato Minor: 17–18 choke, on reading: 72–3 Cicero: 165–8 Letters to Atticus: 31, 44 consuetudo: 68, 73, 107 copia: 86 Cornelius, cornus: 141 Crassus: 10 Crates: 16 Cumae: 72

Demetrius Poliorcetes: 6 n. 2 Dexter: 10 ekphrasis: see epideixis Ennius, tomb of: 101 Epicurus: 8, 9, 13, 15, 67, 67 n. 1, 79 epideixis: 80, 90–1, 113–14, 142–3 epistolarity, ancient: 4 Epicurus: 15, 16 n. 27, 26, 29–31, 67 ∼ epistoliterarity: 4–5, 43–4 ∼ mail-boats: 37–8 postscript, Quote of the Day: 9, 14–15, 16 n. 27, 26, 29–30 Senecan: 5 triangle of reading: 15, 69 Etna, see Aetna excipio: 89, 89 n. 32 exonero ciuitatem: 95 n. 6 Fabianus, Papirius: 16, 43, 124 n. 3, 154–5 Falco, M. Didius: 175–6 fauces: 72 n. 8 Favonius: 89, 89 n. 31 Felicio: 25–6 fish stocks, private: 82 food for thought: 8, 46–7 fulmen: 104 gardening: 19 gestatio: 68, 68 n. 3 gradatio, gradus: 112, 112 n. 42 Graeci: 150 grandiscapius: 141–2 Hannibal: 106, 145 Heraclitus: 24, 26 Hercules: 161 n. 8, 169, 169 n. 27

187

188

General Index

Homer, Odyssey: 19, 51 horror: 103, 141–2, 142 n. 5

Publilius: 14–15 Puteoli: 34, 37, 82

Italy: 33 n. 9

radix, rado, ramus, rasilis: 157, 157 n. 27 Remmius Palaemon: 159, 159 n. 4 retorridus: 127 n. 7 Rome: 8, 13, 39, 159 Romulus: 168 Rutilius: 160 n. 7

journey, of reading: 32, 46–7, 48–9, 53–4, 70 Laelius: 13, 17 ‘lathe biosas’: 73–5, 79, 79 n. 24 laurel: 169 Lepidus (L. Aemilius/M. Aemilius): 10–11 Liternum: 33, 104 n. 28, 105, 120, 160 live, know how to: 75, 79–80 Lucan: 18 Lucilius: 31–2, 32 n. 7, 38, 42 lux: 12 lucre: 12 Lyons: 40 mail-boats: see epistolarity Marius’ oak: 166–7 metaphor(icity): 150–2 mos, mores: 17, 29, 44, 107–8, 115, 154 see consuetudo; soleo names, Roman: 77, 160–3 Naples: 32, 35–6 Nero: 81, 82, 158–9 Nomentum: 3, 40–1, 41 n. 5, 159 occurro: 89, 89 n. 32 olive: 50, 122, 123–4 n. 2, 124–6, 129, 164 Pacuvius: 7, 7 n. 4, 26 pauperis cella: 155 perseuero: 9, 27, 31 Philosophy, and politics: 67, 73–4, 149, 165, 168–9 Roman: 149–51 sacred: 74 Philositus: 25–6 pinsatio: 125 piscina: 82 place: 8, 73–7, 91 plane-tree: 81–2 Plato: 35 n. 14, 81, 147–9 longevity: 149 politics and politics: see philosophy Pompeii: 32 Pompey: 10, 16, 37 Pomponius: 9, 9 n. 10 praeparatio mortis: 14 n. 21, 93 praeteritio: 73, 76–7, 134 praetorium: 71, 71 n. 5 precepts vs exempla: 12, 143 n. 8

Satellius Quadratus: 42–3 satire: 71–3, 89–90, 114, 143–4 Scipiadas: 103–4 scipio: 104, 141 Scipio P. Cornelius Aemilianus: 17–18, 166 P. Cornelius Africanus: 17–18, 33, 93–138, 162–4; epitaph: 100, 102; legend: 94–5, 96–104, 145, 164; re-mythologized: 93–104, 164; tomb: 93–4, 97–8, 100–1, 138, 164–5 Metellus: 17–18 Scylla and Charybdis: 31–2, 38 secedo, secessus: 13, 36, 54, 87–8, 96 Sejanus: 81 Seneca anecdotage: 42–3, 74 Annaeus: 78, 161 asthma: 34–5 bedridden: 36 blacks out: 35 commends: 90–1 consoles: 43 declaims: 110–15, 116–17 lying down: 53, 93 ‘misquotes’: 117–18, 133–8, 147 n. 16 necrologizes: 43, 76–7 preparation for death: 5, 14 n. 21, 93 roughs it: 49–50 = senex: 32, 73–4, passim storyteller: 40–1, 74–5, 86, 164 teacher-as-pupil: 26 utters Jeremiad: 14, 107 viticulturalist: 159 witness: 105, 120–1, 142–3 Seneca’s Epistles location, rare in: 2, 19–20, 44–5 proper names (persons and places) in: 171–4 shape and extent of corpus: 28–9 Senecio, Cornelius: 43 Servilius Vatia: 62–91, esp. 78 n. 22 shaking, physical, as therapy: 46, 71–2, 79, 84 shipwreck of life: 34–5, 49 Sicily: 31–2, 38 Silarus/siler: 147 n. 16

General Index situs: 76–7, 76 n. 16 hic situs est: 74–7, 76 n. 15, 101–3 Socrates: 13 soleo: 8 solium: 116, 116 n. 51 Spring: 36 Stilbon: 15–16 stylistics ‘flow’: 154 ‘house’: 155, 155 n. 23 ‘pruning’: 155 ‘water system’: 155–6, 156 n. 24 sub-: 108 Sulla: 16, 16 n. 28 teaching as filiation, not cloning: 47 Tiberius: 81–2 time: 7, 24–6 chronogram: 25, 26 tradition: 93–5, 107, 146, 150, 156 trans-: 8, 9 n. 11, 12 nn. 18–19, 146–7, 150, 156, 170 transcribo: 9 n. 11 transeo: 8, 46, 147 transfero: 8, 12, 12 n. 18, 120, 127 transfiguro: 12, 12 n. 18 transfundo: 12

transilio: 36 transitus: 8 translation: 149–51 transmitto: 8 transplantation: 120, 146–7, 150 see metaphor(icity) turba/turbare: 13 Ulysses: 31–2, 34 uatia: 77 nn. 18–19, 78 Vatinius: 77 nn. 18, 20, 78 Vetulenus, see Aegialus uilla as castle: 105–6 euripus: 81–2 grottoes: 80–1 as self-portrait: 19–20 stopover: 2 as tomb: 138, 164, 166 water-splash: 81–2, 87 see also bath-house; praetorium vine: 123–4, 124 nn. 2–3, 127, 128–9 uopiscus: 156 n. 24 voyage of life: 34, 37, 49 n. 3 zzz: see asilus

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