The present thesis re-examines the reception of Seneca the Younger within the first hundred years after his death (60s–c. 160s AD), focusing particularly on the late first and early second centuries AD. It is the first concerted study on Seneca’s ancient reception in over fifty years, the first such study in English, and the first, too, to adopt a fully intertextual approach. Not content, that is, to stick with the explicit references to Seneca in the historical record that have already dominated so much scholarly discussion, this thesis unpacks the wealth of allusions – many of which have gone unnoticed – to Seneca’s works and takes these as a crucial part of the story of Seneca’s reception in antiquity. The principal consequence of this is that the period of Latin literature so often simplistically characterised as one of stylistic aversion to Seneca can now be appreciated as one that engaged frequently and closely with the philosopher’s work and thought. A second consequence is broader still: in focusing primarily on the reception of Senecan prose in later prose texts, this thesis functions as an object lesson in the allusive artistry and density of Roman prose.

The Introduction sets out the limitations of the scholarship so far conducted on Seneca’s ancient reception before delineating the intertextual methodology that will remedy these limitations. The subsequent three chapters then put this methodology into practice, analysing the rich Senecan intertextuality on show in some of the most important Latin prose texts of this period – chiefly Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria (Ch.1), Pliny’s Epistles (Ch.2), and Tacitus’ (Neronian) Annals (Ch.3), but also Pliny’s Panegyricus (Ch.3.4a), Suetonius’ Nero (Ch.3.4b), and Fronto’s letters (Ch.2.fin.). All of these authors exhibit a hitherto underestimated familiarity with Seneca’s works and often allude to them in a pointed, significant manner, thus using Seneca as a voice to think with, an interlocutor in their own meditations on various ethical and political issues. These interpretive findings are summarised in the Conclusion, which also broaches some further horizons opened up by the thesis: the reception of Seneca’s more technical philosophical writings, and, ultimately, the his reception among more strictly philosophical authors in both Greek and Latin (Epictetus, Plutarch, Dio Chrysostom, and Marcus Aurelius).