Les lettres 79 et 84 de Sénèque à Lucilius : un art poétique ?

Abstract

By addressing the question of poetic imitation in Rome, Seneca’s letters 79 and 84 to Lucilius extend in many ways the Poetic Art of Horace : following the Horatian path, the philosopher uses the image of the bee making honey from many flowers as a symbol of the creator who assimilates his predecessors. This leads him to question the way in which the poet, using his ingenium, creates a unique whole from a diversity of sources. Not only this analysis perfectly fits to the Augustan poets, particularly to Horace in his lyric poetry, but it can give us new clues to read Seneca’s tragic corpus. By bringing together the three Greek tragedians in a single work in Latin, Seneca repeats Horace’s strategy consisting in the appropriation of Greek prestigious predecessors. By this refoundation of a Greek genre in Rome, Seneca may be seen as the “ last Augustan poet”.