Cicerone e Antonio. Le suasoriae 6 e 7 di Seneca il Vecchio tra realtà storica e invenzione retorica

In Seneca the Elder’s suasoria 7 Cicero deliberates whether to burn his writings in change of his life, promitted by Antony. This declamatory subject finds no correspondence in the historical reality of Cicero’s death, and is clearly a product of rhetorical fantasy. But at the same time the treatment of this fictional case by the declaimers quoted in Senecan collection proves to have influenced the understanding and interpretation, by the same Seneca the Elder, but also by later authors, of real cases of book-burning occurred in the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius, concerning the writings of historians like T. Labienus and others.