The Use of the Apostrophe and the Fictionality of Declamation

Building on van Mal-Maeder’s work on fictionality in Roman declamation, this chapter examines the poetics of declamation in Seneca the Elder’s compilations. When read from a literary standpoint, declamatory texts consist of two key components: the fabula (‘content’) and the discours (‘means of conveying said content’). The chapter concerns itself primarily with the latter, and specifically with the rhetorical concept of apostrophe (α‎̓ποστροφη‎́́), during which speakers address the subject about whom they are declaiming in direct speech. The analysis outlines the communicative strategies involved in this rhetorical technique, along with its implications on both the intradiegetic and extradiegetic narrative planes, and determines the extent to which apostrophe and its variants can be regarded as signs for the fictionality of a given declamation.