ABSTRACT
Seneca’s Epistle 49 is a quite short letter, which fills only three pages in the Oxford edition: nevertheless, it deals with key issues such as memory, poetry and dialectic, and it contains a significant number of citations, plus, as we will see, allusions. The main topics of this letter, and in particular the critic of dialectic, 2 were already present in Epistles 45 and 48: the critique of subtilitas as rhetorical skill was already in Epistle 45 and 48; the paradox of the horned man 3 comes from Epistle 45, the employment of the rare term vafer/vafritia for ‘cleverness’ from 48. So, the three letters have a sort of thematic unity, in which Epistle 49 represents the final stage of Seneca’s considerations. My aim in this chapter is to offer an analysis of this text from the point of view of intertextuality: in other words, an interpretation based on citations and allusions.
