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The Manhandling of Maecenas:Senecan Abstractions of Masculinity Margaret Graver Gaius Maecenas was many things: a magnet for wealth, a shrewd political player, a patron of exceptionally sophisticated taste, and to some, at least, a cherished friend. It is disconcerting, then, to see what a one–sided image of him appears in the philosopher Seneca. Although reasonably complete evidence was available, Seneca's account hardly gets beyond Maecenas' mannerisms of dress and deportment, "how he walked, how prissy he was, how he sought the limelight, how he refused to conceal his faults."1 And even these traits are boiled down, in the last analysis, to a matter of prose style: "isn't his prose just as loose as his tunic was unbelted?"2 The motive for this reductive treatment is well worth investigating. If Seneca passes too quickly over some aspects of Maecenas' character, it may be that his real object is not Maecenas himself but an abstract principle which Maecenas serves to illustrate. My aim here is to show that Seneca's literary thought does indeed become abstract in this way, and that the principle involved—essentially a point of hermeneutics—holds considerable interest both in literary studies and in moral philosophy. Speaking as a philosopher, Seneca uses Maecenas to explore from the negative side a conception of the ideal condition for the human psyche; speaking as both philosopher and critic, he comments as well on the means by which that condition is to be recognized from without. This ideal condition he calls by the name virtus, a word which retains its culturally determined associations with the male gender and norms of masculine behavior even while it invokes centuries of philosophical and especially Stoic thought on the ethical goal.3 The complexity of virtus can be traced also in his remarks on what he calls the "virile" style, and in other related metaphors extending well beyond those passages immediately concerned with Maecenas. The sometimes peculiar results can be seen as a by–product of the interaction between cultural mores of first–century Rome and serious philosophical thought on questions of character, action, and evaluation. The notion of a "virile" style does not, of course, originate with Seneca himself. Recent work by Gleason and Richlin in particular emphasizes the frequency with which terms borrowed from the realm of gender and sexuality are employed by rhetorical writers, as early as the Ad Herennium author and prominently in the works of Seneca the Elder.4 The younger Seneca differs from his predecessors, however, in that he consistently attaches gender language not to the deportment of speakers but to the style of written works.5 Terms which Cicero had applied primarily to the pitch and modulation of the voice or the grooming, stance, and gestures of the speaker (pronuntiatio), Seneca philosophus transfers confidently to discourse received exclusively by reading: passages from Maecenas' memoirs (Ep. 114.4–8) and Arruntius' histories (114.17–19), a book by his own interlocutor Lucilius (46.1–3), philosophical works of Epicurus and others (33.1–2), his own letters, and those of Lucilius (75.1, 115.1–2). This habit of imputing "virility" (or its absence) to writers, as opposed to speakers, requires Seneca to offer some further explanation of his thinking. For it is not at all clear that features of written style can be [End Page 608] reliably linked with personal characteristics of the author; in fact, there was at Rome a strong current of opinion which regarded this assumption as a particularly egregious fallacy.6 A theorist who insists upon it nonetheless must be either very misguided or very thoughtful. Seneca shows himself to be the latter sort of theorist in two ways: first, in specific passages of the 114th Epistle which attempt to justify the derogation of Maecenas through an unusually careful description of the role of the ingenium or literary talent; second, in a broad parallel between his stated views on propriety of style and his Stoic–derived position on probity of conduct. Given their manner of articulation, even his most derisive remarks on "effeminacy" commit Seneca to a positive notion of stylistic excellence which can be linked to a recognizably Chrysippan...
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