The paper focuses on Seneca the Elder’s Controversia 10, 5. The text concerns the charge to the painter Parrhasius of torturing to death an Olyntian slave that had served as a model of a Prometheus. The interests of declaimers highlight the concept of realism in art, introducing a theme, that of the relationship between real and believable, which crosses several times issues on which the rhetoric has produced deep and accurate reflections
