pausing to find out that he was innocent. Seneca’s Oedipus shows us
the consequences of the Theban king’s anger at his father Laius, and
also his unyielding anger at himself, which makes him gouge out his
eyes from his sockets in a scene of unrelenting grossness: ‘Greedily
his nails dig into his eyeballs, | ripping and tearing out the jelly from
the roots’ (965 – 6). Seneca’s characters show no mercy, either
towards each other or to themselves. These plays create a world
where forgiveness seems all but impossible.
Seneca wrote another prose treatise, On Mercy, addressed to the
emperor Nero. In this work Seneca suggests that it is mercy (clemen-
tia) that distinguishes the just ruler from the tyrant. Conversely,
Seneca’s tragedies show us many terrible examples of figures who
step over this line, refusing mercy in favour of greater and greater
violence. Trojan Women provides the most thorough analysis of how
a whole culture can refuse to show mercy on another. The Greeks,
after their victory at Troy, insist that they must not only rape and
enslave the women, and rob the Trojan treasure-houses and temples,
but also kill the Trojan children. The Greek leader, Agamemnon,
makes a case that sounds strikingly similar to that of Seneca in On
Mercy: he tells Achilles’ sadistic son Pyrrhus that human sacrifice is
going too far: ‘there is an etiquette to victory, a limit to defeat.|Those
who abuse their power never stay powerful long’ (257 – 8). But as
always in Senecan tragedy, the moderate position loses. Calchas, the
priest, recommends that the children be killed, and the Greek leaders
comply: Polyxena, daughter of Priam and Hecuba, is slaughtered on
Achilles’ tomb, and Astyanax, baby son of Hector, is hurled from the
city walls. The play is all the more troubling because this apparent
brutality seems to be licensed by the gods.
Seneca’s tragedies include many allusions to Stoic doctrines. But
his tragic characters are never fully fledged representatives of a Stoic
ideal. In several cases Stoic language and Stoic concepts are used in
perverted ways. For instance, in Phaedra the Nurse tells Hippolytus,
‘follow nature as your guide to life’ (481). But to the Stoics life in
accordance with nature implied conformity to natural reason — not
yielding to lust and agreeing to have sex with one’s stepmother.
* * *
xviii
introduction
Megara’s resistance to the tyrant Lycus, in Hercules Furens, makes
her look temporarily very much like a Stoic sage; she implies, for
example, that the only real good in life is moral virtue (virtus, which
also means courage): ‘Courage means conquering what everybody
fears’ (435). But Megara’s outspoken defence of true goodness seems
undermined, in the dramatic context, by her fixation on death, and
her inability to believe that her husband could ever return from the
underworld. Rational philosophy, in this play, seems to come all too
close to suicidal despair.
Hercules was one of the greatest heroes of the Stoics, who revered
him for his courage and indifference to pain. But Seneca’s tragic ver-
sion of Hercules is hard to admire wholeheartedly as a philosophical
hero. Seneca presents him in much less favourable terms than did
Euripides in his version of the same myth, Heracles. Seneca’s play
throws doubt on the value of Hercules’ achievements, even those
performed when the hero is supposedly sane. Seneca’s Hercules is
less Superman
—
with his comforting Clark Kent persona
—
than
Batman or Spiderman: a hero who can hardly bear to take off his
mask, for fear of what it might reveal.
Those who try to advocate moderation in these plays are either
overruled or shown to be misguided. The weak-willed Thyestes — who
makes half-hearted and hypocritical gestures towards Stoic
asceticism — is only a foil for his gloriously savage brother, while the
Chorus and the ineffectual Attendant in the same play pose only
short-lived and futile challenges to the tyrant Atreus. Plays like
Thyestes show the folly of believing that passions can be controlled, or
that extreme conflicts can be amicably resolved. Atreus murders his
brother’s children, feeds them to him, and exults in his triumph.
Most disturbingly of all, we, the readers and spectators of the play,
are not only disgusted and horrified, but also seduced into sympathy
and even admiration for the murderer. The emotional weight of
Seneca’s tragedies lies not with the moderates but with those con-
sumed by monstrous passion. There is Atreus, with his insane desire
for the most horrible possible revenge on his brother. There is
Medea, the barbarian witch who will stop at nothing in her hatred of
her former husband. There is Hippolytus, whose resistance to pas-
sion is itself a form of passion. We may shudder at these characters,
but it is hard not to find oneself swept up by their energy.
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xix
Literary Form
Seneca’s tragedies are strikingly self-conscious about their own
status as drama. Several of his most memorable characters — such as
Atreus in Thyestes, and Medea — speak of their own plots in mark-
edly dramatic terms, as if they are conscious of creating their own
acts of theatre. The climactic scenes of these plays often draw atten-
tion to the notion of spectacle, and invite us, as readers or audience,
to compare our own responses with those of the characters on stage.
For example, Medea declares that she can achieve an even greater,
and more pleasurable, act of revenge by killing the last child before
Jason’s own eyes: ‘This was all I was missing, | that Jason should be
watching’ (992 – 3). Atreus, similarly, demands an appropriate audi-
ence as an essential element in his complete revenge: ‘If only I could
prevent the gods from leaving, | drag them down and force them all
to watch | this vengeance feast! — But let the father see it, that is
enough’ (893 – 5). At the end of Trojan Women the Messenger
emphasizes that the scene of Polyxena’s murder is ‘like a theatre’,
and describes the mixed motives of those who watch this act of sav-
agery: some gleeful or full of Schadenfreude, some full of pity, but all
unable to turn away their eyes: ‘The fickle mob hates the crime, but
watches anyway’ (1129). The passage implicitly raises a question that
applies to all of us, as readers or spectators of Senecan tragedy: what
is it that drives us to watch or read about such horrors?
Those who dislike Senecan tragedy have tended to dismiss it as
self-conscious — in contrast to the supposed naturalism of Greek
tragedy; and, a related term, ‘heavy’, in contrast to the sweetness and
light of the Greeks. ‘Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too
light’, says Hamlet,13 and he is right that Senecan style is heavy. The
word ‘rhetorical’ has often been flung at Seneca, as if it were
obvi-
ously a bad thing to use dense, elevated, artificial language. Seneca’s
style was controversial already in antiquity. Quintilian saw Seneca’s
unusual language as a bad influence on aspiring young writers or
speakers, commenting that ‘he has many excellent sententiae, and
much that is worth reading on moral grounds; but his style is for
the most part decadent, and particularly dangerous because of the
seductiveness of the vices with which it abounds. One could wish
that he had used his own talents but other people’s judgment.’14
13 Shakespeare, Hamlet, II. ii. 395.
14 Institutes of Oratory 10. 1. 129 – 30; trans. Donald A. Russell, Loeb Classical Library
(Harvard University Press, 2001), 321.
* * *
xx
introduction
Quintilian, like many subsequent critics, complained that Seneca’s
style is unnatural, both in his choice of expression and his fondness
for witty epigrams.
But Seneca’s combination of dramatic self-consciousness, bravura
stylistic excess, and sharply pointed wit was never meant to sound
natural. His language achieves something other than naturalism: a
poetic and dramatic form in which to show what happens when
people struggle against nature, and try to overcome all normal expec-
tations by sheer force of will. Excess is Seneca’s subject, as well as the
primary characteristic of his style.
Seneca’s plays share certain technical features with Greek tragedy.
They are composed entirely in verse, and the rhythms — like those of
most Latin poetry — are modelled on Greek metres. Most of the dia-
logue is in iambic trimeter, which is a fairly flexible pattern involving
twelve alternating long and short syllables, conceived as three metrical
building-blocks of two feet each — or some permitted variation of this
structure. The choral metres, as in Greek tragedy, are much more
varied, involving many different patterns and lengths of line, and were
presumably designed for musical accompaniment. Seneca makes
highly effective use of the Greek technique of stichomythia — where
characters alternately speak a single line as they debate with one
another — as well as hemi-stichomythia, where a single line may itself be
divided up between different characters. Seneca’s highly compressed
style of writing produces a more pointed kind of stichomythia than we
find in the Greek tragedians — more rich in quotable aphorisms.
There are also important formal differences between Senecan and
Greek tragedy. Most influentially for later drama, Seneca — like earlier
Latin dramatists — makes use of an implicit five-act structure in almost
all his plays. He also employs Greek dramatic devices in a very differ-
ent manner from the Greeks: for instance, his Choruses are usually far
less involved in the action than the Chorus of an Athenian tragedy.
In terms of mood and tone Seneca’s tragedies are strikingly unlike
our surviving Greek tragedies. The comparison with Aeschylus,
Sophocles, and Euripides draws attention to the stifling, claustro-
phobic atmosphere of Seneca’s world. His people are trapped inside
their own heads. Seneca has a far stronger obsession than any Greek
tragedian with the possibility that the whole universe may be at a
point of crisis, and a far greater interest in transgression and in
physical disgust. For instance, the centrepiece of Seneca’s Oedipus is
an extensive account of gruesome attempts by Tiresias to find the
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introduction
xxi
source of the plague by disembowelling an ox, and then summoning
the ghost of Laius, which has no counterpart in Sophocles’ Oedipus
the King.
Many of Seneca’s tragedies have a parallel in Greek tragedy.
Aeschylus, like Seneca, composed an Agamemnon; Sophocles, like
Seneca, composed an Oedipus; Euripides, like Seneca, produced a
Trojan Women, a Phaedra (= Hippolytus), and a Hercules Furens.
Readers who come to Seneca fresh from Athenian tragedy may miss
the lightness, the irony, the possibility of open-ended dialogues
between one character and another, or between human beings and
the gods. Above all, we miss the sense of community. Seneca’s tra-
gedies focus less on the relationships of people to one another, and
more on the relationship of individuals to their own passions.
These plays are far darker, but also often much funnier, than their
Athenian equivalents. Oedipus is, again, a good example. Seneca’s
play, like that of Sophocles on the same subject, plots the slow, pain-
ful process by which Oedipus finds out the truth about his past. But
the atmosphere of Seneca’s play is very different. Sophocles’ Oedipus
is, at the start of the play, self-confident and sure of his own powers
as a thinker and a king. By contrast, Seneca evokes, from the very
start of the play, a king uncomfortable with his own power and
frightened of dark forces he knows he cannot understand. Sophocles’
Oedipus is, at the end of the play, led off stage by Creon to begin his
exile from the city of Thebes; we are left with the image of Oedipus
as a loving father losing his children, and a loving king losing his city.
Seneca, by contrast, ends with a solitary man who staggers off alone,
with gruesomely bleeding eye-sockets, from a city which has been
ruined by plague since the very start of the play. Seneca pushes
against the limits of good taste by making his Oedipus warn himself:
‘Be careful, do not fall upon your mother’ (1051); the son risks yet
another blind sexual encounter with his mother’s corpse.
In comparison with Athenian tragedy, Seneca’s plays focus less on
the workings of the divine in human life and more on the conflicts
within human nature itself. For example, Seneca’s Phaedra is based
on the same story as Euripides’ Hippolytus. Euripides’ play is framed
by two goddesses: Aphrodite, goddess of love and sex, who speaks
the prologue; and Artemis, goddess of the hunt and of chastity, who
appears to the dying Hippolytus in the penultimate moments of the
play. It suggests that Phaedra’s incestuous passion and Hippolytus’
excessive chastity are two extreme sides of the same spectrum.
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introduction
Seneca removes the divine machinery, to create a drama about the
conflict between passion and self-control within the human psyche.
Seneca was writing at a period of cultural ‘belatedness’: the citi-
zens of Neronian Rome were often led to suspect that the time of
Roman moral and literary greatness was already past. The great his-
torians of the period — such as Tacitus and Suetonius — present the
time of Nero in terms of decline and degeneracy from the lost glory
days of the Roman Republic. Seneca’s characters constantly seem to
express the fear that the time of greatness may be over, and that their
culture may be bankrupt. The Chorus in Thyestes ask in despair: ‘Will
the last days come in our time?’ (878). Trojan Women evokes the despair
of a city with no future left. In contrast with Euripides’ plays on the
same mythic moment — his Trojan Women and Hecuba — Seneca’s
drama is less an analysis of the workings of a cruel or indifferent set
of gods than of the depths of human despair.
Although Seneca’s are the only surviving examples of Roman tra-
gedy, we know that there was a fairly extensive Roman tragic tradi-
tion which must certainly have informed Seneca’s understanding of
his own dramatic art. The first Roman tragedy we know about was
performed in 240 bce. The earliest Roman tragedies fell into two cat-
egories: the fabulae togatae (‘toga-wearing’ plays), which were based
on older Greek tragedies; and the fabulae praetextae (‘tunic-wearing’
plays), which were new plays with plots based on Roman history.
The only praetexta that survives is the Octavia, a play included in the
manuscripts of Seneca’s tragedies but believed by most scholars to
have been written by a later imitator. In the generation or two before
Seneca’s time writing tragedy became a fashionable activity: Julius
Caesar is said to have written a tragedy in his youth; Ovid wrote a
Medea which was much admired by contemporaries. So while it is a
pity that no other Roman tragedy survives complete, we need to
remember that it did exist, and that Athenian tragedy was by no
means Seneca’s only literary model.
We are certain that he also made extensive use of non-dramatic
poetic models. Seneca often adapts and alludes to the work of poets
from the time of the first emperor, Augustus — especially Virgil,
Horace, and Ovid. His allusions to these poets are not mere
plagiarism or pastiche; he often creates an extra layer of meaning by
referring back to Roman poetry of the past. For example, Juno at the
beginning of Hercules Furens expresses her outrage at Hercules’ suc-
cess in coming back from Hades, and comments ironically that now
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xxiii
‘coming back is easy’ (49). There is a clear reference here to a famous
passage in Book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid, where the Sibyl warns Aeneas,
before his own descent into the underworld, that:
going down to Avernus is easy.