Excerpta Controversiae
Rome
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Seneca the Elder
Seneca the Elder
c. 54 BCE–c. 39 CE · Rome
Seneca the Elder (c. 54 BCE – c. 39 CE), also known as Lucius Annaeus Seneca, was a Roman rhetorician and writer from Corduba (modern Córdoba) in the province of Hispania Baetica. He spent much of his life in Rome, where he attended the schools of the leading declaimers of the Augustan age. He is known for his Controversiae and Suasoriae, a collection compiled in his old age for his sons, which preserves excerpts from the practice speeches of contemporary orators and constitutes the principal surviving source on the rhetorical exercises (declamation) taught in early imperial Roman schools. He was the father of the Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger.
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RomeרומאItaly
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About Rome
Rome, on the Tiber in central Italy, grew from an Iron Age settlement into the capital of the Roman Republic and then of an empire that by the 1st century CE ruled the whole Mediterranean. Its Jewish community, attested from the 2nd century BCE, is among the oldest in Europe. Christian tradition holds that the apostles Peter and Paul died there, and the city became the seat of the popes. After the Western Empire ended in 476 it passed to Gothic kings, to Byzantium and then to papal rule as capital of the Papal States, until it became the capital of unified Italy in 1871. Vatican City, independent since 1929, lies within it.
In Rome at the same time
Posidonius of Apamea, Nepos, Cornelius, Cicero, Quintus Tullius Cicero, Sallust, Parthenius of Nicaea
Across the traditions, in Rome at the same time
In the same place & time
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Sages whose lives overlapped with Seneca the Elder’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
Across the traditions
The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Seneca the Elder’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.