Seneca and the Past

In the preface to Book 1 of his Controversiae, Seneca claims to have written out his accounts of Roman declaimers and their speeches from memory. By attributing preternatural powers of recollection to himself, Seneca highlights that rhetoricians should have a good memory. Using this passage as a starting-point, this chapter delves into the intricacies of Seneca’s relationship with the past. It explores how Seneca upholds the illusion that his testimonies derive from off-the-cuff recollections by organizing his information using ordered lists, a mnemonic technique often recommended in pedagogical texts about oratory. In addition, by presenting each declamation session as a personal memory, Seneca ‘time-travels’: he transports his present audience into past declamations and inserts his own opinions into these past speeches. When read within a cultural-memory framework, these techniques build into Seneca’s overall self-fashioning as the sole commemorator and specialist of Roman declamation.