The Application of Citations in the Prose Corpus of Lucius Annaeus Seneca: A Digital Approach

Abstract

The extant prose works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca constitute the largest pan-genre corpus in the early imperial era. In it, Seneca cites at least 124 authors a total of 599 times, a data set that comprises philosophical and non-philosophical authors. The amount and spread of citations has previously deterred comprehensive analysis, and the data set has never been investigated in its entirety. This, then, is the first attempt to interrogate the whole corpus for meaningful citation patterns in a time-efficient and accurate manner. The task has been accomplished by committing the entire corpus to a database originally created in MS Access and published online using MySQL. The inclusion of metadata fields adds a whole new analytical dimension to the research potential latent in Seneca’s corpus (and, by extension, to other ancient corpora). The results demonstrated in this thesis strongly endorse the power of the digital approach. The thesis explains the parameters of the database and explores specific data sets in detail to demonstrate their value to researchers. The data sets that have been chosen for in-depth analysis articulate and exemplify the scalability and flexibility of the database’s potential. The pan-corpus statistics of Epicurus and Demetrius are examples of Seneca’s use of individual philosophical authors, while the Peripatetics have been chosen to demonstrate Seneca’s attitude towards a particular school. For non-philosophical authors, the Ovid data set is used, and to illustrate the flexibility that metadata affords, Seneca’s author accreditation statistics with specific emphasis on the canonical Aeneid and Metamorphoses are analysed. Finally, Seneca’s dialogi provide a case study, the purpose of which is to explore whether any correlation exists between citation use and compositional incentive.