The practice of declamation in the first century AD was defined by its epigrammatic style: a reliance (some would say over-reliance) on pointed, punchy one-liner conclusions to every expression of an idea. These were called sententiae and they shaped rhetorical expression from declamation and oratory to historiography and epic. Earlier scholarship has seized on the negative comments from ancient sources and has seen in the sententia a symptom of decline, where speakers strive for extremes of style and distort the sense of what they say. But more recently scholars have revaluated declamation as a form of speaking which mediates important issues of power, authority, identity and justice. In this light, the sententia deserves reassessment as a way of packaging and disseminating thought.
In early imperial Rome, sententiae were valued as attractive, glittering expressions which encouraged the audience of declamation to gather them in personal collections of quotations. Sententiae therefore make a significant transition from performed speech to book culture. I set out to investigate a number of questions: can we retrieve the aesthetic qualities of the sententia which make it a desirable object; how might we connect its aesthetic qualities to the knowledge or insight that it conveys; what does the sententia and its excerption tell us about the dissemination of thought in imperial Rome and beyond?
For my visit to the BSR, I wanted to begin addressing these questions in relation to the elder Seneca, who collected excerpts from the declaimers of the first half of the first century AD. In thinking about the aesthetics of the sententia I started by considering its role as part of speech performance. This enabled me to connect the excerpted speeches with Seneca's descriptions of the declaimers’ voices and physiques in the prefaces to each book of excerpts. I will develop this connection further in future research, to consider how the performed and written sententiae work cognitively, so that the aesthetic encounter facilitates the expression, reception and processing of thought.
In thinking about the excerption and collection of quotations I used my time at Rome to make an initial foray into the early modern books at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, to see what the presentation of the elder Seneca's texts might tell us about how his collection was received in the age of florilegia and proverb-books. This question is complicated by the entanglement in early modern understanding of the elder Seneca, his philosopher son the younger Seneca and a number of pseudo-Senecan texts. That very entanglement is in itself interesting, as it attests to a generative impulse in the extraction, collection, ordering and even invention of ancient soundbites. In future research I shall return to the reception of the elder Seneca after the 1580s, when he is established as an individual author, but will continue also to explore the way in which the elder Seneca's reception has been shaped by his assimilation to his son's texts, whose sententiae have a more prominent status as generalized truths.
The productive research atmosphere of the BSR, which fosters conversations between scholars and artists, helped me to generate these questions and begin to pursue them. I am immensely grateful for all I have learned here.
