“You Must Change Your Life”: Theory and Practice, Metaphor and Exemplum, in Seneca’s Prose

Taught only by reality can reality be changed.

Bertolt Brecht, The Measures Taken

I. Introduction: Metaphor and Exemplum

Metaphor and exemplum are, to use a metaphor, two sides of the same coin in the prose of Seneca, philosopher and politician. In action, these exempla look like this: singula vicere iam multi, ignem Mucius, crucem Regulus, venenum Socrates, exilium Rutilius, mortem ferro adactam Cato: et nos vincamus aliquid (Many have conquered individual things a long time now—Mucius conquered fire, Regulus torture, Socrates poison, Rutilius exile, and Cato death at the point of the sword: let us also conquer something, Ep. 98.12). A series of examples illustrates a proposition and culminates in a pragmatic or executive injunction to do (vincamus).¹ What is the result of such a complex of proposition, illustration, and injunction? In Epistle 6, the first letter of the Moral Epistles to deal with exempla, Seneca answers this question: “I feel, Lucilius, that I am not only improved [emendari] but transformed [transfigurari].”² Why? A proposition: “Long is the road through precepts, but fast and effective through exempla” (longum iter est praecepta, breve et efficax per exempla, Ep. 6.5). So it is that Seneca both enacts and explains the force and function of exemplum—enacts, writing “let us also conquer something” (et nos vincamus aliquid); explains, comparing precept to exemplum in order to isolate the latter’s efficacy.

While it is generally recognized that Seneca uses exempla as a means of illustration or representation and of effecting change (efficax), even transformation (transfigurari),³ it is little recognized that Seneca’s metaphors function similarly.⁴ Moreover, few scholars have noted that Seneca actually explains the similarity of metaphor and exemplum himself. At the beginning of Ep. 38, Seneca provides a practical inventory of speech genres, explaining language through metaphor and expressing a conception of it similar to his conception of exemplum; he does this with reference to its efficacy (the first block quotation below) and by likening it to something else (the second):

plurimum proficit sermo, quia minutatim inrepit animo: disputationes praeparatae et effusae audiente populo plus habent strepitus, minus familiaritatis … philosophia bonum consilium est … aliquando utendum est et illis, ut ita dicam, contionibus … ubi vero non hoc agendum est, ut velit discere, sed ut discat, ad haec submissiora verba veniendum est. facilius intrant et haerent; nec enim multis opus est sed efficacibus.

(Ep. 38.1–2)

Conversation helps the most because it steals in the soul bit by bit: disquisitions prepared and developed on the listening crowd after much noise, but less intimacy. Philosophy is good advice … Sometimes one must make use of those, so to speak, public lectures … But when it isn’t a matter of making one want to learn but to actually learn, one must resort to this lower register of language. It gets in easier and sticks; nor, indeed, is there a need for many words, but for words that work

[efficacibus].

The stylist conducts a survey of language as it functions in various genres of discourse (sermo, disputatio, contio). As with exemplum in Ep. 6, efficacy is also the aim of the various functions here, as efficacibus in Ep. 38.1 answers efficax in Ep. 6.5. Seneca further explains the way in which this particular speech situation (haec submissiora verba) achieves the efficacy that he earlier associated with exemplum; he does so through that figure of likeness or metaphor called simile:⁵

seminis modo [verba] spargenda sunt, quod quamvis sit exiguum, cum occupavit idoneum locum, vires suas explicat et ex minimo in maximos auctus diffunditur. idem facit ratio.

(Ep. 32.2)

[Words] are scattered in the manner of seed, which, however scant it is, unfurls its capacities when it has taken hold of a suitable place and spreads from the littlest to the greatest dimensions. Reason does the same thing.

Idem facit ratio: a simile, which likens something abstract (reason) to something concrete (plant life) and signposts its likeness in addition (idem). Similar in form but harder to fix is the conclusion that Seneca draws from...