Retorica, immaginazione e autopsia. Seneca e il caso della colpevole luxuria (epist. 110.14 e benef. 7.10.2)

This article focuses on Seneca’s use of ‘visual’ rhetorical techniques and aims at illuminating the ways in which Seneca received, reworked and applied certain rhetorical tropes and techniques on his complex philosophical prose. In my opinion, in De beneficiis 7.9.3, the sermocinatio of Demetrius the Cynic against personified Luxuria and Avaritia can be read as a proper peroratio with Luxuria and Avaritia working as the guilty parties. The speech recalls the rhetorical figure of enargheia, stressed by the exploitation of an emphatically visual lexicon and the insistence on the action of «placing something before one’s eyes». Thus, by proposing a ‘vivid’ description of riches, Demetrius employs rhetorical phantasiai which, within the imagined setting of this trial, coincide with the argumenta against Luxury and Avaritia. I also take into consideration a passage from epist. 110.14, where the speech of Attalus (Seneca’s teacher) is particularly relevant to Demetrius’ speech.