Seneca's 114th Letter and the Poetics of Decadence

Robert John Sklenár (University of Tennessee, Knoxville)

Seneca's 114th Letter is the closest thing to a literary manifesto that we have from this author.  Its ostensible thesis is talis oratio qualis vita (Ep. 114.1): a man's character and mode of life are inevitably reflected in his use of language.  If he is effeminate and dissolute, those vices of character will produce, as in the case of Maecenas, a decadent style (oratio corrupta).  Faults of style result from a diseased animus; for the Stoic Seneca, a healthy animus is one governed entirely by reason.  Hence, it follows that the style of a man with a healthy animus will be rational and coherent.  Letter 114 itself, however, is anything but coherent; as A.D. Leeman observes, "Seneca expresses his thoughts as they come to him, unorganized, spontaneous.  [Letter 114's] lack of composition [is] painfully evident" (Orationis Ratio: The Stylistic Theories and Practice of the Roman Orators, Historians, and Philosophers, Amsterdam 1963, I: 280-81).  This paper will argue that Letter 114 contravenes its own precepts and thus enacts the opposite of what it purports to instruct: a poetics of decadence.

The showpiece of Letter 114 is the carciature of Maecenas (Ep. 114.4-8), which depicts the patron of the Augustan poets as a mincing fop whose dandyish dress, libertine habits, and overripe style all express his essentially unmanly, hence unsound, character (M. Graver, "The Manhandling of Maecenas," AJP 119 [1998], 607-632).  Toward the end of the caricature, Seneca avers that Maecenas's literary and personal decadence were alike due to lack of discipline (Ep. 114.7-8); his initial enumeration of Maecenas's personal faults, however, attributes them to a deliberate striving for effect (quam vitia sua latere noluerit, Ep. 114.4).  This tension increases in the passage immediately following the caricature, where Seneca addces diligentior cultus corporum (Ep. 114.9) as an example of decadence in society.  This misdirected diligentia clashes with the neglegentia to which Seneca attributes the faults of Maecenas's style.  Indeed, contradiction and inconsistency are the hallmakrs of Letter 114, which, instead of setting forth a systematic argument, ultimately dissolves into incoherence.

In light of Seneca's assertion (Ep. 114.8) that vice is due sometimes to the individual himself, sometimes to the era in which he lives, two conclusions follow: first, in its failure to follow rational norms, Letter 114 is itself the expression of an unsound animus; second, its author is infected by the decadence of his own era, which he cannot avoid exemplifying even as he denounces it.