[8] Seneca mentioned the poet Ovid as being a star declaimer; the works of the satirists Martial and Juvenal and the historian Tacitus reveal substantial declamatory influence.
It is not a theoretical treatise on declamation; Seneca's own input is limited to pen-portraits of the famous declaimers he cites, plus analytical and critical commentary on their work; and of anecdotes remembered from the literary chatter of long ago.
The declaimers of Augustan and Tiberian Rome professed admiration for Cicero, but their preferred oratorical style was not very Ciceronian; nor was it the theoretical basis of their educational method.
Porcius Latro was a close friend of Seneca—from their childhood together and as classmates at the rhetorical school of Marullus in Cordoba—who later became preeminent among Rome's rhetoricians in the Augustan era.
He refers specifically to a primum tetradeum, meaning the four most distinguished declaimers he had known, which included Latro, Gallio, Albucius Silus, and Arellius Fuscus.
He expresses serious reservations of Arellius' style, for its unevenness, and its descriptive passages (explicationes),[13] which Seneca considered "brilliant, but laboured and involved, with a decorative finish too contrived, and word-positioning too effeminate, to be tolerable for a mind preparing itself for such holy and courageous teachings.
Of this age, Ovid's work and the younger Seneca's sententious disquisitions and dramatic art, and later, Lucan's fiery epic poetry all stand out as striking examples.
Of the ten books of the Controversiae—there are declamatory treatments of some 74 judicial themes, with the names of individual rhetoricians, plus Seneca's critical comments—only five: 1, 2, 7, 9, 10, survive in entirety or nearly-so.
The books of Controversiae were supplemented by at least one devoted to Suasoriae (exercises in deliberative oratory), in which historical or mythological characters are imagined as deliberating on their options at crucial junctures in their career.
In the only extant book of his Suasoriae, Seneca provides sententiae by the declaimers cited, followed by their divisiones; but there are no colores, which belong exclusively to treatment of judicial rhetoric, and have no place in deliberative oratory.
The elder Seneca's authorship of the declamatory anthology Controversiae—generally ascribed to his son during the Middle Ages—was vindicated by the work of the Renaissance humanists Raffaello Maffei and Justus Lipsius.
We learn about this magnum opus from the younger Seneca's own work 'De vita patris' (H. Peter, Historicorum Romanorum fragmenta, 1883, 292, 301) and from a large fragment of the Historiae itself,[20] cited by Lactantius in Institutiones Divinae 7.15.14.
Further, she judges that traces of a book-title following the author's name (in the subscriptio) are more compatible with Seneca's own ' ... ab initio b[ell]orum [civilium] ' than with his declamatory anthology.
Unfortunately, the text of the scroll is now essentially unreadable as continuous narrative because, in the process of unrolling, several layers of tightly rolled papyrus remained stuck together and were peeled away from each other unevenly.