Seneca the Elder

Born around 54 BC to a wealthy equestrian family in Corduba, Hispania, Lucius Annaeus Seneca spent decades collecting reminiscences of the Roman schools of rhetoric, preserving how argument and persuasion were taught across generations. Six books of that collection survive in more or less complete form, five others only in summary. He also wrote a history of Roman affairs from the Civil Wars through his final years, but it's almost entirely lost. He lived through Augustus, Tiberius, and into Caligula's reign, dying around AD 39. His second son became Seneca the Younger, the Stoic philosopher and Nero's tutor; his third son fathered Lucan, the poet. The man who documented rhetoric left behind a family that would wield words as weapons and philosophy as a last defense.