NERO’S CHOICE: SENECA’S DE CLEMENTIA AND THE CONCLUSION OF THE AENEID

My essay traces the suggestiveness of Seneca’s use of the rhetorical figure correctio at De Clementia 1.1.4. There the philosopher puts into the mouth of his protégé Nero the protestation that he “concealed, no rather sheathed” (conditum, immo constrictum) his sword (ferrum). I pursue the implications of Seneca’s comparanda by tracing earlier uses of condere, especially that by Vergil at Aen. 12.950 where it is also associated with the metonymy ferrum. I propose that teacher has student prominently abjure employment of the verb primarily because the Augustan poet had chosen it to help depict Aeneas’s furious killing of Turnus, an act notably lacking in the virtue that Seneca’s treatise would have Nero ponder and practice.