PHRASIS ELECTA

Tastefulness in the choice of diction, in the elder Seneca's opinion, was one of the factors which ought to make for a good declaimer. It emerges from his reports of critical discussions about declamation that the scholastics of his time hedged themselves around with all manner of prohibitions about diction. It was not only the use of barbarisms and obscenities that was forbidden: any word with mundane associations, any archaism or neologism, was liable to be scrutinized with varying degrees of pedantry. Seneca tells us much of interest about these prohibitions, while himself adopting a fairly tolerant attitude towards all but the most monstrous breaches of the rules.

Even over the matter of barbarisms we have to distinguish between Seneca's attitudes and those of the stricter critics of his time. Seneca did not, of course, positively advocate barbarism, but he had nothing disparaging to say about the diction of Latro, of whom Messala, Latini … sermonis observator diligentissimus, once said on hearing him declaim, sua lingua disertus est (Contr. II.4.8). Yet he was evidently not completely deaf to the strangeness, by metropolitan standards, of Spanish Latin: at any rate he was reminded by some passages in Sextilius Ena's poetry of Cicero's reference in the Pro Archia to the rich and foreign resonances of Corduban poetry (Suas. 6.27).