Semina belli. Seneca il Vecchio e le cause delle guerre civili

The exposition of the causes of the civil wars was an historiographical topos, which had certainly to be treated in the proemial section of Seneca the Elder’s lost Historiae ab initio bellorum civilium, in connection with the idea of the political and social decline of the Roman republic (which emerges from a famous fragment trasmitted by Lactantius and ascribable to Seneca’s Historiae). Through a thorough analysis of a series of passages from the preface to the first book of Seneca the Elder’s Controversiae, from a declamation by Papirius Fabianus, from the first book of Lucan’s Bellum civile, and from Florus’ Epitome, all of which can in different ways be related to Seneca’s historical work, I try to reconstruct how the author could develop this topic, and I suggest in particular that he insisted on the moral causes of the conflict (the civil wars as a consequence of the spreading of luxuria and of excess prosperity). What results from this proposal of reconstruction is the image of a rhetorical historiography, deeply indebted to Sallust’s historiographical model, but also influenced by the rhetorical and declamatory tradition.