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The so-called Pseudo-Seneca is a Roman bronze bust of the late first century BCE that was discovered at Herculaneum
Herculaneum

Herculaneum is an ancient Roman Empire town, located in the territory of the current commune of Ercolano. Its ruins can be found at the co-ordinates , in the Italy region of Campania....
 in 1754, the finest example of about two dozen examples depicting the same face. It was originally believed to depict Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger

Lucius Annaeus Seneca was a Ancient Rome Stoicism philosopher, statesman, dramatist, and in one work humorist, of the Silver Age of Latin literature....
, the notable Roman
Ancient Rome

Ancient Rome was a civilization that grew out of a small agricultural community founded on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 10th century BC....
 philosopher; however, modern scholars agree it is likely a fictitious portrait, likely of Hesiod
Hesiod

Hesiod was a Greek language oral poet, his date is uncertain but leading scholars agree that Hesiod lived in the latter half of the Eighth-century BCE....
.






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Seneca
The so-called Pseudo-Seneca is a Roman bronze bust of the late first century BCE that was discovered at Herculaneum
Herculaneum

Herculaneum is an ancient Roman Empire town, located in the territory of the current commune of Ercolano. Its ruins can be found at the co-ordinates , in the Italy region of Campania....
 in 1754, the finest example of about two dozen examples depicting the same face. It was originally believed to depict Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger

Lucius Annaeus Seneca was a Ancient Rome Stoicism philosopher, statesman, dramatist, and in one work humorist, of the Silver Age of Latin literature....
, the notable Roman
Ancient Rome

Ancient Rome was a civilization that grew out of a small agricultural community founded on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 10th century BC....
 philosopher; however, modern scholars agree it is likely a fictitious portrait, likely of Hesiod
Hesiod

Hesiod was a Greek language oral poet, his date is uncertain but leading scholars agree that Hesiod lived in the latter half of the Eighth-century BCE....
. It is thought that the original example was a lost Greek bronze of ca. 200 BCE. The bust is conserved in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples.

History

The type of this bust was first given its identification as a "genuine" contemporary portrait of Seneca by Gallaeus [Theodor Galle], in an Antwerp republication of Fulvio Orsini
Fulvio Orsini

Fulvio Orsini was an Italy humanist, historian, and archaeologist. He was a scion of the Orsini family, one of the oldest, most illustrious, and for centuries most powerful of the Rome princely families, whose origins, when stripped of legend, can be traced back to a certain Ursus de Paro, recorded at Rome in 998....
's Imagines et Elogia Virorum Illustrium et Eruditor ex Antiquis Lapidibus et Nomismatib[us]... at a time when the exemplary image of the great man was more inspiring than the quality and character of the work of art that embodied it. By the seventeenth century, about a dozen examples of the intense and haggard "Pseudo-Seneca" had been discovered, and as many more have been discovered since.

Following the example of Cicero
Cicero

Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Ancient Rome philosopher, statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and Constitution of the Roman Republic. Cicero is widely considered one of Rome's greatest rhetoric and prose stylists....
, who had decorated his study with busts, or of the imagines illustrium that peopled the villa at Sorrento
Sorrento

Sorrento is the name of many cities and towns:*Sorrento, Italy*Sorrento, Florida, United States*Sorrento, Louisiana, United States*Sorrento, Maine, United States...
 of Pollius Felix, described by Statius
Statius

Publius Papinius Statius was a Roman poet of the Silver Age of Latin literature, born in Naples, Italy. Besides his poetry, he is best known for his appearance as a major character in the Purgatorio section of Dante Alighieri epic poem The Divine Comedy....
, gentlemen and scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were avid to have examples of the great writers of Classical Antiquity
Classical antiquity

Classical antiquity is a broad term for a long period of cultural history centered on the Mediterranean Sea, comprising the interlocking civilizations of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome....
 constantly before their eyes: "the learned all over Europe looked with awe and devotion at the Stoic
STOIC

STOIC was a variant of Forth .It started out at the MIT and Harvard Biomedical Engineering Centre in Boston, and was written in February 1977 by Jonathan Sachs....
 philosopher, emaciated, even uncouth, disdainful of the luxury and corruption of Nero
Nero

Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus , born Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, also called Nero Claudius Caesar Drusus Germanicus, was the fifth and final Roman emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty....
's court, and soon to commit suicide".

Of the Herculanean version of the Pseudo-Seneca, as it is still widely known, the outstanding quality was quickly recognized by Winckelmann
Johann Joachim Winckelmann

Johann Joachim Winckelmann a Germany art historian and archaeologist, was a pioneering Hellenism who first articulated the difference between Greek, Greco-Roman and Roman art....
, though he already began to doubt that the bust was that of Seneca as early as 1764. An engraving of it was published in the magnificently-produced series of folios that appeared under the royal patronage of Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies
Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies

Ferdinand I was King variously of Kingdom of Naples, Kingdom of Sicily, and the Two Sicilies from 1759 until his death. He was the third son of King Charles III of Spain, later Charles III of Spain, King of Sicily by his wife Maria Amalia of Saxony....
, Le Antichità di Ercolano (vol. V, 1767).

In 1813 an image of Seneca was found on an inscribed herm portrait, which showed quite different features. Since then, the bust has been conjectured to represent many other people, including Aesop
Aesop

File:Aesop pushkin01.jpgAesop , known only for the genre of fables ascribed to him, was by tradition a Slavery in Ancient Greece who was a contemporary of Croesus and Peisistratos in the mid-6th century BC in ancient Greece....
, Archilochus
Archilochus

Archilochus was a Ancient Greece poet and supposed mercenary....
, Aristophanes
Aristophanes

Aristophanes , son of Philippus, of the deme Cydathenaus, was a prolific and much acclaimed comedy playwright of ancient Athens. Eleven of his forty plays have come down to us virtually complete....
, Callimachus
Callimachus

Callimachus was a native of the Greek colony of Cyrene, Libya, Libya. He was a noted poet, critic and scholar of the Library of Alexandria and enjoyed the patronage of ancient Egyptian Greeks Pharaohs Ptolemy II Philadelphus and Ptolemy III Euergetes....
, Carneades
Carneades

Carneades was a radical skeptic born in Cyrene, Libya and the first of the philosophers to pronounce the failure of metaphysics who endeavored to discover rational meanings in religious beliefs....
, Epicharmus, Eratosthenes
Eratosthenes

Eratosthenes of Cyrene was a Greeks mathematician, poet, sportsperson, geographer and astronomer. He made several discoveries and inventions including a system of latitude and longitude....
, Euripides
Euripides

Euripides was the last of the three great tragedy of classical Athens . Ancient scholars thought that Euripides had written ninety-five plays, although four of those were probably written by Critias....
, Hesiod
Hesiod

Hesiod was a Greek language oral poet, his date is uncertain but leading scholars agree that Hesiod lived in the latter half of the Eighth-century BCE....
, Hipponax
Hipponax

Hipponax of Ephesus was an Ancient Greek iambic poet.Expelled from Ephesus in 540 BC by the tyrant tyrant Athenagoras, he took refuge in Clazomenae, where he spent the rest of his life in poverty....
, Lucretius
Lucretius

Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman Republic poet and philosopher. His only known work is the epic philosophical poem on Epicureanism De rerum natura, translated into English as On the Nature of Things....
, Philemon
Philemon (poet)

Philemon was an Athenian Democracy poet and playwright of the New Comedy. He was born either at Soli in Cilicia or at Syracuse, Italy in Sicily but moved to Athens some time before 330 BC, when he is known to have been producing plays....
, and Philitas of Cos
Philitas of Cos

Philitas or Philetas of Cos was a scholar and poet during the early Hellenistic period of ancient Greece. A Greek associated with Alexandria, he flourished in the second half of the 4th century BC and was appointed tutor to the heir to the throne of Ptolemaic Egypt....
. Gisela Richter
Gisela Richter

Gisela Marie Augusta Richter , was a classical archaeologist and art historian.Gisela Richter was born in London, England; the daughter of Jean Paul and Louise Richter....
 suggested that Hesiod seemed to be the most acceptable, a suggestion that other commentators have endorsed. Erika Simon believed that it represented Hesiod and that the lost original was created in the circle of Krates of Mallos and the frieze-sculptors of the Pergamon Altar
Pergamon Altar

The Great Altar of Pergamon, a massive stone podium about one hundred feet long and thirty-five feet high, was originally built in the 2nd century BCE in the Ancient Greece city of Pergamon in north-western Anatolia, 25.74 kilometers from the Aegean Sea....
.