324 ilaria l. e. ramelli
citizen, and concludes with the following statement: nam qui meus tuus
apud te locus, qui tuus velim ut meus. Jerome interprets: [Seneca] optare
se dicit eius esse loci apud suos, cuius sit Paulus apud Christianos (Vir. Ill.
12). according to Pascal, Jerome understood the purported original greek
and rendered it well into Latin, whereas the “medieval barbarian”—the
purported translator of the correspondence in greek into Latin—blurred
everything.17 but Jerome probably read exactly what we also read now,
and paraphrased the second colon of seneca’s sentence (qui tuus [est
locus], velim ut meus). what seneca means is in fact clear: “i would like
that my place were yours among your people, and that yours were mine.”
moreover, seneca, in his certainly authentic works, notoriously presents
concise and elliptic sentences built on strong verbal parallels and similar
to the sentence at stake here.
The argument of the “bad style” of these letters, used by Pascal and von
harnack to postulate an original greek, and by erasmus to demonstrate
the pseudepigraphic nature of this document, is rather weak and even
liable to being overturned, since the “bad style” only concerns the letters
of Paul and graecisms do not necessarily point to a now lost greek origi-
nal. it is precisely the conviction that these letters are “badly written”—
and therefore it is unthinkable that they may have been composed by
seneca—that induced harnack as well to postulate, not only their spu-
riousness, but also their original redaction in greek.18 indeed, traces of
greek do appear in these letters, but this does not seem to imply a greek
original redaction, subsequently translated. For, first of all, it is striking
that all graecisms, both lexical and syntactical, emerge only in Paul’s let-
ters, which is all the more significant in that his letters are by far fewer
and shorter than those of seneca. as for lexical graecisms, for example,
in Letter ii Paul calls seneca censor, sophista, magister tanti principis, thus
inserting among the Latin words censor, magister, and princeps a clearly
greek term, sophista—it was not entirely unknown in Latin, but it had a
different meaning19—instead of sapiens.
17 Pascal, “La falsa corrispondenza,” 129.
18 “es ist nicht wohl denkbar, daß briefe, in denen auf den guten stil ein so hoher werth
[sic] gelegt wird, selbst so schlecht stilisiert gewesen sind, wie sie hier vorliegen. auch
von hier aus wird ein griechisches original wahrscheinlich, welches in den uns erhaltenen
briefen einer lateinischer bearbeitung vorliegt.”
19 a few attestations of sophista do exist in Latin, but these either have a negative con-
notation (e.g., in cicero), unlike here in Paul’s letter, or mean eloquentiae doctor, dicendi
peritus (cicero, Or. 19; Juvenal 7.167; gellius 7.15). a negative meaning is also conveyed by
sophistice, sophisticus, etc.: see egidio Forcellini, Lexicon totius Latinitatis (Patavii: Typis
eminarii, 1940 reprint), 421, and the CD-Rom of the Packard humanities institute. in Paul’s