Seneca the Elder

Biography

Seneca the Elder is the first of the gens Annaea of whom there is definite knowledge. During the renaissance his name and his works became confused with his son Lucius Annaeus Seneca. In the early 16th century Raphael of Volterra saw that there must be two different men. He noted that two of the elder Seneca's grandsons were called Marcus and since there was a Roman custom for boys to be given the name of their grandfather, Raphael adopted the name of Marcus for the elder Seneca. Until the 20th century this was used as the standard praenomen. However it is now accepted that this naming custom was not rigid, and since in the manuscripts he is referred to as Lucius, many scholars now prefer this praenomen since it would also help explain why their works became so confused.

Growing up in Spain of wealth and equestrian rank, Seneca the Elder (here Seneca) was a young contemporary of the venerable Roman orator Cicero, whose voice of advocacy he might have sought out were he reared in Italy. Instead, he was confined by wartime conditions to 'within the walls' of his 'own colony', and there, presumably, he received his first schooling from a praeceptor teaching more than two hundred pupils.

When Rome became safe after the Civil Wars, Seneca travelled for lengthy stays there. He assiduously attended public declamations by teachers of rhetoric and professional orators—the process in those days by which young men trained for pursuing careers in advocacy and public administration. There is no evidence, however, that he pursued such a career himself. And he avoided notice of his writing a history of Rome 'From the beginning of the Civil Wars' through his own times, during the regime of Caligula. Instead, by testimony of the son Seneca (from his De Vita Patris), his father remained all his life a private gentleman. Still, Seneca supported as honourable the political careers of his elder (two) sons, and he spoke for the study of rhetoric as honourable even as he was fully aware of the dangers inherent in such careers: 'in which the very objectives sought after are to be feared'. And he supported his youngest son, Mela, who remained content with his heritage as an equestrian.