"Naufragium antequam nauem ascenderem feci": shipwreck, writing, and self-exemplarity in Seneca’s Epistulae Morales

Abstract

In this article we will analise two of Seneca’s epistulae, 53 and 87, which have in common the fact of beginning with a first-singular person narrative. The complex visual dynamics that these narrationes build will play a key role in the promotion of the epistolary ego’s exemplarity, since he will make a spectacle of his uneven progress on the path to wisdom, presenting himself as actor, spectator and judge of his own actions. We claim that through these narrationes, which involve shipwreck as a literary motif, the epistolary ego actively appropriates one Roman cultural device which plays a central role in memory building, the discourse of exemplarity. Taking into account the fact that there has to be a monumentum, a record, that makes visible the deed proposed as exemplary (Roller 2004), we will try to show that by writing these letters the epistolary ego directs the reader’s attention to his own exemplarity.