Abstract

This paper aims to offer a fresh reading about Seneca’s epistle 100 to Lucilius about the stylistic portrait of Papirius Fabianus. As we know, this portrait is drawn on the sketch that Seneca the father had already traced in the preface to Controversiae book 2. So, epistle 100 too could be read as a little ‘literary memoir’, just like Seneca the father’s prefaces should be interpreted. Two nodal points will be highlighted in this paper: 1) Seneca evaluates Fabi- anus’ eloquence from a technical point of view, that is his compositio; in so doing, he reuses some critical patterns that Cicero had applied to historical writings, as well as he sets a comparative judgement between philosophy and rhetoric in the same way Seneca the father had set the supremacy of history on the rhetoric. 2) Both the father and the son consider Papirius Fabianus as a sort of a ‘cultural icon’, useful to represent the crucial and changeable crossing of literary genres in the first imperial Age.