322 ilaria l. e. ramelli
and albertino mussato, of the Padua pre-humanistic circle.10 Toward the
end of the fourteenth century domenico de’ Peccioli, in the introduction
to his commentary on seneca’s Epistulae ad Lucilium, claimed that seneca
learned Paul’s divine teaching. gasparino barzizza, also from Padua,
before 1408 in his Vita Senecae 16 described seneca as an occultus discipu-
lus of christ, like nicodemus.11 giovanni boccaccio in his commentary on
dante’s Commedia, 403, characterized seneca as a christian believer as a
result of Paul’s preaching. These pre-humanistic and humanistic authors
very probably knew a redaction of the seneca-Paul correspondence that
included Letter XiV. and there are some earlier attestations of this tra-
dition. an eleventh-century bernese accessus to seneca, discovered by
the milanese philologist marco Petoletti, regards seneca as a christian
on the basis of our correspondence, which by then included Letter XiV.
an anonymous poem preserved in the eleventh-century codex metz 300
fol. 124v declares seneca a believer (fidelis), albeit one who was unworthy
of baptism. Johannes von hildesheim in his poem Laus Pauli et Senecae
depicted seneca and Paul as having “one and the same mind” (l. 5), and
associated them as martyrs under nero and as teachers of “many doc-
trines of salvation” (l. 24). he was surely acquainted with a version of the
correspondence that included Letter XiV. but in the Patristic era, this let-
ter was not yet included in our pseudepigraphon, and no Father of the
church believed that seneca had become a christian. Jerome, who read
the original pseudepigraphon (i.e., the correspondence without Letters XiV
and Xi; see below), was no exception.
Pascal interpreted Jerome’s sancti as “saints,” and this is why he had to
suppose that Jerome read something different from what we read now,
which induced him to deem seneca a “saint.” but sancti, in Jerome’s
expression, does not mean “saints,”12 nor even “christian authors,”13 but
nunc in Italia primum (Padua: antenore, 1994): 213–32, esp. 229–30; ramelli, “note
sull’epistolario,” 225–37.
10 agostino sottili, Albertino Mussato, Erasmo, l’epistolario di Seneca con San Paolo,
in a. bihrer and e. stein (ed.), Nova de veteribus: Mittel- und neulateinische Studien für
P. G. Schmidt (munich/Leipzig: saur, 2004), 647–78, esp. 667–78.
11 Letizia a. Panizza, “biography in italy from the middle ages to the renaissance: sen-
eca, Pagan or christian?” Nouvelles de la république des lettres 2 (1984): 47–98, esp. 74–75.
12 P. Faider, Études sur Sénèque (ghent: van rysselberghe & rombaut, 1921), 89–104
(91–92). That Jerome deemed the correspondence authentic is maintained by corsaro and
gamberale (Francesco corsaro, “seneca nel catalogo di santi di gerolamo [Vir. Ill. 12],”
Orpheus 8 [1987]: 264–82; Lepoldo gamberale, “seneca in catalogo sanctorum. consider-
azioni su hier. Vir. Ill. 12,” InvLuc 11 [1989]: 211–15).
13 This is, for instance, the translation in mario erbetta, Gli apocrifi del Nuovo Testa-
mento (Turin: einaudi, 1969), 3:86; and Luigi moraldi, Apocrifi del Nuovo Testamento (Turin:
einaudi, 1971), 2:1730.