The Seneca book,[[297]] much more fragmentary, is also of its nature richer. It consists of one book of “Suasories”[“Suasories”] (examples |Seneca the Elder.| of the symbouleutic or epideictic kind), and ten (by no means completely extant) of “Controversies” (Forensic subjects), the latter sometimes including introductions of interest to the writer’s three sons—Novatus, afterwards Gallio, Seneca the Philosopher, and Mela, father of the poet Lucan—and usually concluding with a kind of résumé (called Excerpta) of their contents. The substance is made up of short extracts from the most celebrated declaimers of Rome, and a few Greeks, on the various subjects.
They give us a really invaluable abundance, in all kinds, of rhetorical loci communes, tags, pointes, with which, from early |The Suasories.| and late practice, the mind of every educated man at Rome was simply saturated, and which could hardly fail to colour his style, either directly in the way of imitation, or indirectly in that of repulsion, and preference of extreme severity.
For instance, the first Suasoria deals with the question, “Shall Alexander cross the Ocean?” though the exact statement of question is lost altogether, with the beginning of the piece itself. It seems to have opened with a sort of abstract of general commonplaces, and then come the quotations. Argentarius [perhaps Marcus the epigrammatist] addresses the conqueror: “Halt! the world that is thine calls thee back; we have conquered as far as it was lawful for us. There is nothing I can seek at the risk of Alexander.” Oscus said: “It is time for Alexander to leave off where the sun and the earth leave off likewise,” and endeavoured to describe the sea, “immense and untried by human experience, the bond of all the world and the keeper of its lands, the vastness unruffled by any oar, the shores, now harried by the raging tide, now deserted by its ebb, the horrid darkness brooding on the waves, and the eternal night oppressing what nature has withdrawn from human eyes.” And so many. Then there is a section (headed Divisio), on the particular kind of suasion to be used in such speeches, the devices which it is safe and proper for orators to address to kings, with gradations as before. It will readily be perceived from this example what sort of dealing is here on the other stock subjects—the deliberation of the three hundred at Thermopylæ, whether they shall go or not; of Agamemnon, whether he shall sacrifice Iphigenia; of Alexander, whether he shall enter Babylon; of the Athenians, whether on Xerxes’ threat of a second invasion they shall remove the Persian war trophies; of Cicero, whether he shall ask mercy of Antony, or burn his Philippics. The quotations are sometimes verse as well as prose, and give us specimens of poets otherwise lost, with an occasional literary anecdote of interest, such as the offence which Asinius Pollio[[298]] took at the praise given to Cicero in the recitation by a certain poet of Corduba, Sextilius Ena—
“Deflendus Cicero est Latiæque silentia linguæ,”
which Cornelius Severus borrowed, and improved into—
“Conticuit Latiæ tristis facundia linguæ.”
This anecdote is interesting in many ways,—first for the protest of Pollio, almost equally piquant whether it proceeded from critical severity, from personal jealousy, or from political feeling; and secondly, for the evidence it gives of the straining for point and rhetorical “hit,” in verse and prose alike.
The Preface of the First Book of the Controversies—addressed to the three sons—gives a rather interesting view of the scheme |The Controversies: their Introductions.| of these curious compositions, which seems to have been that Seneca the father should brush up his memory of the golden or nearly golden age of Latin Rhetoric which immediately followed Cicero, and illustrate it from more strictly literary sources. A good deal in the piece (as is usual in the better class of rhetorical writing) bears directly on our subject. The old rhetorician commends his sons for extending their view beyond their own age, for wanting to know what Roman eloquence there was to set against “insolent Greece”[[299]]—in short, for endeavouring to take that comparative view of at least one division of literature the want of which (as we have so fully set forth) was the crying sin and yet the inevitable weakness of Greek criticism. He has the usual complaint of luxury withdrawing men from literature, which was doubtless as true, and as little peculiar, then as at all other times. He lets us know that there were none (or no good) commentarii of the best declaimers, that he himself had heard them all except Cicero, whom, as far as chronology went, he might have heard,[[300]] but for the confusions of the state: he points out that the regular declamation was a rather late growth, and extols the character of Porcius Latro, one of its oldest practitioners. The Introduction to the Second Book is much shorter, and principally celebrates the ability of Arellius Fuscus. The Third (for the text of which we only have the Excerpts, not the full articles) has an important preface, which starts from the fact or assertion that Cassius Severus, a great orator on serious occasions, was not a good declaimer, though he had good bodily advantages, a voice at once powerful and sweet, a delivery with all the merits and none of the drawbacks of the stage, and an extraordinary faculty of improvisation. It seems that Seneca once asked him why these faculties failed him in set agonismata, and his answer (whether to the point or not) is of the very first interest, as illustrating that difficult point of the ancient conjunction of oratory and literature, and also as a counterblast to the Plinian idea (v. infra) of the poly-historic littérateur. “What great wit,” said he, “has ever been good at more than one thing [whereby, let it be observed, he separates declamation from oratory]? Did not Cicero’s eloquence fail him in verse? Virgil’s genius in prose? We read the orations of Sallust simply as a compliment to the historian: and the oration of that most eloquent man Plato, which is written for Socrates, is worthy neither of counsel nor of client.”
All these things invite comment—the last most of all. I put aside, as entirely irrelevant, certain modern dubitations as to the genuineness of the Platonic Apology. They rest upon no warranty of scripture, and opinion is simply opinion, to be received politely, and to be “laid on the table.” But it is worth dwelling on the point that the Apology as we have it, though to all competent judges of literature one of the capital works of antiquity, arch-worthy of Plato, more than arch-worthy of Socrates, might very well seem to a Roman lawyer unworthy of both, and might possibly have so seemed to Aristotle himself.[himself.] For of all recorded plaidoyers it is perhaps, in the temper of the jury and the circumstances of the case, the least likely to secure an acquittal, and the most likely to render condemnation inevitable. The other remarks do not matter so much; but it is of weight that a man should seriously put the difference between Declamation and practical Oratory on the same footing as the difference between poetry and prose. It shows how ill-adjusted, as yet, the grasp of literary criticism was, and also how necessary it is to keep an eye on everything that is said about Rhetoric, if we are really to master what was thought about Criticism. The introduction to the Fourth Book, again one of Excerpts only, gives the information that Asinius Pollio (whose works, if we had them, would probably be of the greatest possible value to us) disliked declaiming in public, but was, on the rare occasions when he could be heard thus exercising himself, more florid than in his actual orations. We can well believe it, and it shows that Pollio had the root of the matter in him. In the same way a man with critical sense will allow himself, in a rough draft, flowers which he cuts out in the most ruthless manner before he prints.
The Fifth and Sixth books, which are in the same fragmentary condition, have no introductions at all; but the seventh is in better case. Like the others, it is mainly devoted to the characteristics of a single orator—in this case Silius Albucius. Some of the things said about him touch us nearly, as, for instance, Pollio’s—the severe Pollio’s—description of his sentences (axioms, maxims, apophthegms) as “white”—that is to say, simple, clear, with nothing obscure or unexpected,—but “vocal” and “splendid.” It was impossible, continues Seneca, to complain of the poverty of the Latin tongue when you heard him: he was never in the very least in pain for a word. Yet, on the other hand, he was not equal. His language was at one moment magnificent, at another he would mention the most sordid things—"vinegar, and pennyroyal, and lanterns, and pumice, and sponges." He thought “nothing must not be named in a declamation [and the reason is valuable or invaluable] because he feared to smack of the Schools.” And yet further we get the important obiter dictum: “Familiar phrase is, among oratorical virtues, a thing which rarely succeeds.” And then there is a very luminous and jocund anecdote of the real trouble into which the devotion to Figures might even then bring men. Albucius had rhetorically proposed to administer certain oaths. His opponent, L. Arruntius, very coolly rose and said, “We accept the condition: he shall swear.” Albucius protested that this would do away with Figures altogether. Quoth Arruntius (very sensibly), “Let them go—we can do without them”: and the centumviri allowed the catch. The unlucky orator was so annoyed that he renounced actual pleading from that day, because of the insult done to his beloved Figures.