Abstract

The coincidence in the tria nomina of Seneca the Elder and the Young, as well as inducing, until the Renaissance, a centuries-old misunderstanding of their respective literary identities, is also at the base of the vexata quaestio related to the attribution of the fragment, quoted by Lactantius, that revisits the history of Rome as bios and divides it in age groups up to the first imperial age. Do are confirmed the reasons that lead to assign it to the Historiae, the important work of Seneca the Elder which started from the beginning of the civil wars, unde primum veritas retro abiit, according to what witnessed by the small palimpsest piece transmitted of the De vita patris, the biography written shortly after the death of the parent by Seneca the philosopher. Already a more careful reading of the fragment transmitted by Lactantius helps to consider more probable that the Historiae devoted attention also to the first signs of the so-called ‘Roman revolution’; and confirmations in this sense come from a whole series of textual com- parisons, especially with the Suasoriae and Controversiae of Seneca the Elder, the De ira of the son and an initial section of the Bellum civile of the nephew Lucan. On the basis of these critical acquisitions we intend to deepen the interpretation of the polemic hint with which Seneca the Elder, in the Historiae, linked the first retreat of veritas to the beginning of the civil wars in order to leave the place, probably, within the social and political institutions of Rome, to error and mystification.