Cat Lambert (Columbia University)
Scholars have long observed the centrality of enslavement in the works of Seneca the Younger (e.g., Bradley 1986, Edwards 2009). As Catharine Edwards notes, Seneca begins his Moral Epistles with an injunction to the reader to “liberate” himself from an ethical state of enslavement. Less accounted for, however, is the role played by enslaved literary workers within the Epistles, and in the collection’s production and circulation in antiquity. We know that the labor of enslaved people was crucial to literary enterprises such as the epistolary collections of Cicero (Beard 2002, Winsbury 2009) and Pliny the Younger (Blake 2016), who are quite upfront about enslaved or formerly enslaved secretaries and readers (e.g., Tiro, Zosimus). Seneca’s Epistlesseem quiet by contrast. I argue that, in fact, they are not. By bringing in feminist writer Sara Ahmed’s concept of “paperless philosophy” (2016), I consider these apparent absences as calculated erasures central to Seneca’s conditioning of his ideal, masculine, masterly reader.
In this paper, I show that to understand Seneca’s construction of the Epistles’ ideal reader, we must consider the labor that Seneca’s enslaved literary workers do–and, importantly, what they appear not to do. This requires vigilance on our part, first because Seneca shows himself (and others) reading the way he wants (them) to be seen and, as a result, enslaved literary workers “appear” in the Epistles mainly through their erasure. At the same time as he obscures the presence and labor of enslaved literary workers, Seneca tasks the Epistles’ reader, metaphorically enslaved at the start, with taking up a readerly pose that reproduces hierarchical power relations between enslaver and enslaved.
I begin by reading Ep. 27 as a critical turning point at the end of Book 3, where Calvisius Sabinus serves as a warning to Seneca’s elite reader about the dangers of reading badly–or rather, of improperly using enslaved readers and “books” (so often linked to the enslaved in Roman thought). Then, I show how the gendered and classed dynamics of the Sabinus episode ripple out into two letters (33 and 84) that anxiously cordon off the free, masterful, manly reader from the servile reader. Seneca achieves this by assimilating the ideal lector to the masterful, generative auctor. In Ep. 84 and elsewhere, the lector as auctor is directed to conceal everything he has been supported by (enslaved workers, tools like commentarii) and bring to light only what he’s produced (84.7), playing the part of the paterfamilias (64.7) and enacting a version of Ahmed’s “paperless philosophy.”