Mapping Roman Declamation: Towards a Network Analysis of Seneca the Elder’s Anthology

With his Sententiae, diuisiones, colores rhetorum et oratorum, published around 30 CE, Seneca the Elder, father of the Stoic philosopher Seneca, produced an anthology of excerpts from declamations (forensic or deliberative mock speeches) by 116 different declaimers (teachers, students and non-professional practitioners) who lived during the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius. By citing these declaimers, Seneca intended to offer an informed and critical view of their qualities and shortcomings, and to memorialize the emerging literary genre of declamation. But his text also lends itself to a more social reading. By mining the Sententiae, diuisiones, colores for mentions of direct contact between declaimers, and by applying the methodology of network analysis, it becomes possible to read the anthology as a depiction of a structured intellectual milieu. The aim of this article is to identify and reconstruct a set of social relationships within the declamatory world described in the anthology, using mentions of criticism (where one declaimer comments on the performance of another) as markers of relationships. After explaining the goals and biases of Seneca and their impact on his depiction of the declamatory milieu, this article expounds a method for: 1) identifying concrete links between declaimers with a reasonable degree of certainty; 2) building a set of usable data based on these findings; and 3) assessing the significance of the expected results given the incompleteness of the anthology. It then reconstructs and plots this particular declamatory network, identifying its central figures and mapping its main relational structures.