Seneca's work has always provided good pickings for those on the hunt for one-liners. Yet there has been no book-length study focused on the Senecan sententia. P.-R.'s important work discusses the surprisingly varied uses of the sententiae in Senecan drama. This is an important study of an important topic, which will be read by both Seneca specialists and those interested more generally in the intersections of Roman rhetoric and philosophy.
P.-R. acknowledges that the sententia has often been seen as a turgid and (apparently synonymously) non-dramatic mode of speech, and also that sententious lines have been seen as expressions of the author's own teachings. The notion that the sententia is essentially extractable from its context goes back at least to Quintilian, who defines it as ‘a general formula (vox universalis) that is praiseworthy in spite of any connection, or lack of it, to the case’ (8.5.3). But P.-R. argues that it is a mistake in the case of Senecan tragedy to see these lines as so readily detachable from context, and to neglect the aesthetic and literary craft involved in honing a sententious saying in verse, often making heavy use of alliteration and other sound effects.
The title points to a doubleness in the Senecan sententia as both a ‘flower’ within the tragic text – a literary ornament whose smooth, honed style will be immediately pleasing – and also a ‘point’ to pierce the mind. In a detailed analysis of the philosophical and literary history, P.-R. notes a contrast between the Epicurean and Stoic approaches. For the Epicureans, sententiae were supposed to be adornments for teaching that might otherwise be difficult for a beginner to absorb, equivalent to the Lucretian honey on the cup. For the Stoics, they provide a way for philosophical teaching to pierce the soul instantly. Seneca's usage in the tragedies, P.-R. argues, bridges these apparent opposites, providing both floral adornment and painful psychic skewering.
How exactly is a sententia different from various related things: a proverb, a witticism, an aphorism, a maxim, a generalisation, a paradox – or from a doxa, a gnome, an enthymeme? The book does not entirely answer the question, but it suggestively points to a slippage from the content-based generalisation (the gnome), to the Latin sententia, which becomes increasingly associated with a particularly pointed or punchy rhetorical style. But the relative weight given to form and content varies even in Roman discussions and uses: Seneca's sententiae tend to be especially honed in style.
Generalising about generalisations is futile without examples. One of the most useful parts of P.-R.'s work is her list of all the sententiae in the corpus of Senecan tragedies. Of course, it is difficult to collate an exhaustive list if the category itself has fuzzy edges, but there is a particular interest in testing when a generalisation feels aphoristic enough to count as a sententia. Some might want to withhold the title from such proverbial sayings as sequitur superbos ultor a tergo deus (HF 385), which has brevity and makes a didactic generalisation, and is neatly expressed, with a dash of alliteration, and with the god following behind in the line as in the idea; but it has none of the edginess of cogi qui potest nescit mori (HF 426), which feels more obviously sententious. It would have been interesting if P.-R. could have provided more analysis of whether Roman readers or listeners would have perceived these as the same or different in category, or would have been unhesitating in putting both in the same box.
The catalogue also makes one long for a sustained analysis of the prose alongside the drama, since some of the lines listed have very close analogues in Seneca's prose work (such as qui genus iactat suum / aliena laudat, HF 340, which is paralleled in Epistle 44.5). Perhaps a monograph of 431 pages is long enough, but it would have been good to allow for a more extensive discussion of the ways that the prose sententia might differ from those in the tragedies, and how those in the prose might also be embedded in interesting ways into their various literary contexts.
Sententiae are, of course, often based on tradition or cliché; it is generally difficult to invent an original generalisation. P.-R. provides an excellent analysis of the ways that Seneca draws both on the vast well of ‘tradition’, and on specific earlier composers of sententiae in Roman culture, most notably Publilius Syrus. She argues that even if the content is banal, Seneca manages to find new rhetorical means to freshen things up, for instance giving an original syntactical twist to the old adage that we are all born to die, by addressing it to death itself (tibi crescit omne, HF 870).
The second part of the monograph focuses on how sententiae are slotted into their dramatic contexts. Again P.-R. does useful philological spade-work, providing statistical analysis of which characters in the tragedies use the most sententiae, both as an absolute number of lines, and as a percentage of their total lines spoken. Interestingly, the most loquacious characters are not always the most sententious; Hercules, for example, says a lot, but not much of it is sententiae. By absolute high scores, the most sententious lines are spoken by the Nurse in the Phaedra; but as a percentage of total lines spoken, the winners are the Attendant in Thyestes and Eteocles in the Phoenissae (with a grand score of 50% sententiae per utterance). The main take-away here is that those who are most sententious tend to be minor characters – servants and nurses rather than kings or queens. One might think this somewhat undermines P.-R.'s main point, that the sententiae are an integral element in Senecan drama. But she insists that the sententiae provide a kind of subplot that often complements the main themes of the play. Another useful taxonomic set of data shows that sententiae are relatively rare in the first and fifth acts; they tend to be concentrated in the high arc of the dramatic action, and hence, in the second and third acts.
The third and final section of the book focuses on the function of sententious speech within Senecan drama, and covers four main functions: philosophical teaching; emotional expression; persuasion; and aesthetic beauty. On the first, there is an interesting discussion of the role of pointed maxims in Stoic theory and didactic practice. For the Stoics, the tradition of brief, punchy utterance and the love of paradoxes was motivated by the desire to oppose rhetorical flourish, since these brief punches were supposed to hit hardest into the soul of the listener. Seneca, as P.-R. rightly notes, was a somewhat eclectic thinker, not a fully paid-up Stoic, and she uses this fact to help explain why the maxims in Senecan drama do not seem to add up to a coherent ethical teaching and, indeed, sometimes seem to be in direct contradiction with one another. She argues that if there is teaching in the drama, it is not through the single knock-down of one brutally piercing paradox, but in the dust-up ensuing from their interaction. Again, it is regrettable that we do not hear more about how the same might or might not be true of sententious language in Seneca's prose.
It is a paradox, but not a Stoic paradox, that the same punchy rhetorical mode may seem to appeal to both the head and the heart. P.-R. traces the ways that impersonal language can mark and cause moments of emotional intensity within the tragedies, making the important point that this apparently neutral language is actually anything but. The final chapter pulls together many threads of the book, reiterating the still-unresolved puzzle of what a sententia really is (a figure of style, or a type of argument or idea?), and finally emphasising the formal qualities of the mode, at least in Senecan tragedy. She gives a fine account of the aesthetic qualities of these lines, marred only by a weirdly and unnecessarily gendered conclusion, that ‘le dosage subtil de mäle vigueur et de douceur féminine sert le sublime tragique’.
