Tiffany Nguyen (University of Pennsylvania)
Though framed as dialogues between Seneca and his interlocutor, much of Seneca’s Consolations involve Seneca taking on the roles of many other distinct persons, including that of his addressee. In my paper, I will demonstrate how Seneca’s strategy of switching between personae particular to his addressee has a therapeutic effect for both his addressee and himself, with a focus on Ad Helviam and Ad Marciam. By taking on the role of his addressee he models his or her ideal self, in which they have overcome their grief, and indicates that they do not always have to be bound by grief.
The various roles are Seneca’s exempla, which “offer the reader role models who demonstrate correct patterns of behavior” (Shelton 1995). However, in a process Fantham (2006) calls “speaker displacement,” “Seneca goes well beyond this routine rhetorical figure…ventriloquizing or impersonating other men’s admonitions (prosopopoeiae) in the dialogues.” While Fantham uses “speaker displacement” to discuss Seneca’s response to his exile, I will show that these roles can also be therapeutic for Seneca’s addressee. In Ad Marciam, Seneca plays the roles of Marcia’s father Cremutius Cordus; the philosopher Areus; Octavia and Livia, with whom Marcia was familiar; and Marcia herself. According to Seneca, “each person perceives differently poverty, grief, and ambition, just as habit has accustomed him”(Marc. 7.4: paupertatem, luctum, ambitionem alius aliter sentit, prout illum consuetudo infecit). By making use of different roles to fit his addressee, Seneca acknowledges his addressee’s grief in the moment. At the same time, by changing roles, Seneca also suggests that they too can change their roles to a better one. After taking on the voice of Areus comforting Livia, Seneca tells Marcia to “change the role – it was you he comforted” (Marc. 6.1: muta personam – te consolatus est).
However, it is not merely a matter of taking on any role. Seneca underscores playing the right role through his exempla and his depiction of his addressee’s ideal self, a self, either in the past or in the future, who does manage her grief and act as Seneca advises. For example, in Ad Helviam, Seneca abruptly switches between two different versions of Helvia, a version who complains about Seneca’s exile and a version who urges him instead to find virtue in his circumstances. While Seneca rebukes the first version for having a “narrow mind that earthly things pleases” (Helv. 9.2: angustus animus est quem terrena delectant). He instead urges her to say that “no place is narrow that contains this crowd of such great virtues” (9.3: nullus angustus est locus qui hanc tam magnarum virtutium turbam capit).
Thus, Seneca not only takes on the voice of his addressee, but he impersonates different versions of them as a way of communicating with their grief. As a technique Seneca uses to appeal to his addressee, this kind of role taking belongs to a broader exploration of how Seneca positions himself in relation to his audience in the prose works and tragedies more generally.