All nights, all days too, dark Dis’s portals lie open.
But to recall those steps, to escape to the fresh air above you,
There lies the challenge, the labour!15
The allusion raises a number of important questions about the
relationship of Hercules’ labours to those of Aeneas, founder of the
Roman race. If coming back is easy for Hercules but hard for Aeneas,
that might suggest that the Greek outdoes the Roman hero. Or
Hercules’ lack of struggle, lack of ‘labour’, even over his most
impressive labours, might somehow undermine his achievements.
Or perhaps the Virgilian intertext functions as a reminder that
Hercules takes far too rosy a vision of his own success — since the
rest of the play suggests that it is much harder than he had thought
to escape entirely from Hell.
Examples could be multiplied of Seneca’s complex and thoughtful
use of earlier Roman poetry in his tragedies — including the Odes of
Horace in Seneca’s own choral odes, and allusions to Roman elegy,
as well as many references to earlier hexameter poetry (such as
Virgil’s Aeneid, Georgics, and Eclogues, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and
Lucretius’ On the Nature of the Universe). Seneca’s dense style and
dense use of allusion allow him to create some wonderful descriptive
passages evoking the natural world — as in the first choral ode of
Hercules Furens (125 ff.), which draws on Virgil, Horace, Lucretius,
and others to evoke the rough but innocent life of the herdsman in
the fields (144 – 52):
Hard work gets up, creates anxiety,
and opens everyone’s house. The shepherd drives
his flock out to the field, and gathers up
fodder icy-white with frost. The calf
whose horns have not yet sprouted from his brow
frolics free in the open meadow;
the empty udders of the cows grow fat.
The cheeky little kid wobbles about,
his legs unsteady on the soft green grass.
15 Virgil, Aeneid, trans. Frederick Ahl, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford University
Press, 2007), 132, lines 126 – 9.
* * *
xxiv
introduction
Seneca spreads himself in the choral passages, developing rich and
detailed descriptions of the sky, the sea, landscape, and far-flung
places of the world.
But despite the use of non-dramatic authors as models and refer-
ence-points in Seneca’s tragedies, these plays are composed with a
keen awareness of the demands of dramatic form. This same ode of
Hercules Furens, for example, uses allusions to the lyric motif of carpe
diem (a phrase coined by Horace, in Odes, 1. 11), to comment specific-
ally on the action of the play. The Chorus’ generalizations about
the wickedness of wealth and luxury, and the importance of living
for the moment, have particular point in the context of Hercules’
deliberate descent into the underworld.
The performance of Seneca’s plays is a vexed question. We have
no external evidence about their staging, so arguments one way or
the other rely on internal evidence from the plays themselves, as well
as speculation about what might have been plausible in the context
of imperial Rome. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centur-
ies it became the scholarly orthodoxy to claim that these plays were
not composed for the stage at all, but for private recitation, by a
single performer. Now the pendulum of opinion has swung back the
other way, and most scholars agree that they were probably written
for some kind of dramatic performance, though fairly certainly not
for the public theatre; they may well have been used for private
performances, for the enjoyment of the emperor and his court.
Reception
Seneca was one of the most prolific, versatile, and influential of all
classical Latin writers. Arguably, no other classical writer except
Virgil has had so deep, so widespread, and so long-lasting an influ-
ence on European and British literature.
During the Middle Ages and early modern periods Seneca was one
of the most read and most imitated authors of antiquity. His plays
had an enormous influence on European tragedy, particularly in Italy
and France, and on Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy in England.
The early modern revenge tragedy
—
including The Revenger’s
Tragedy, Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, Shakespeare’s Titus
Andronicus and Hamlet, and John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi — could
hardly have existed without Seneca. Christopher Marlowe’s dramas
about men who push for ever greater power or knowledge or world
* * *
introduction
xxv
domination — such as Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus — translate the
Senecan tragic plot into Renaissance terms.
Particular figures from his plays had an obvious impact on early
modern literature: for instance, Seneca’s Hercules — the mad hero
who turns on his own loved ones — has obvious affinities with such
characters as Hieronimo from Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy and
Shakespeare’s Othello. But Seneca’s style and the general mood of his
works were equally influential. Thomas Nashe famously satirized the
tendency of English tragedians at the time of Shakespeare to use — or
plagiarize — techniques from Seneca in order to achieve a bombastic
effect: ‘English Seneca read by candlelight yieldes manie good
sentences — “Bloud is a begger” and so forth; and if you intreate
him faire in a frostie morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets, I
should say handfulls, of tragical speeches.’16 Seneca’s plays were well
known in this period to all schoolboys, who studied them in Latin in
class, but the tragedies also reached a much broader audience
through a very popular set of vernacular translations, Seneca: His
tenne tragedies, edited by Thomas Newton (1581).
Even when British and European drama became more focused on
the drawing-room than the bloodbath, and moved away from expli-
citly Senecan models, Seneca’s tragedies continued to be closely read
by all educated people. But in the nineteenth and for much of the
twentieth century Senecan tragedy lost its central place in the
European and Anglo-American canon. His work was dismissed as
bombastic and melodramatic, crude in comparison with the work of
his Athenian predecessors.
Seneca’s work seems now, at last, to be back in academic vogue.
‘Rhetorical’ and ‘didactic’ are no longer dirty words. Senecan drama
has suffered for too long from comparisons with Athenian tragedy; it
is perhaps partly thanks to the recognition that Greek drama, too, is
a messy, political, emotional, self-conscious, and unrealistic genre
that Seneca’s plays can begin to be appreciated again. The upsurge
of interest in Seneca coincides with a recognition that the term
‘Silver Latin’ — which implies that the writers of Augustan Rome
constitute the Golden Age of Latin — is an unfairly derogatory way
to refer to the rich literature of the empire.
On one level, the current revival of interest in imperial Latin in
general, and Seneca in particular, needs no explanation: an unjustly
neglected and important oeuvre is beginning again to get its due.
16 Thomas Nashe, Preface to Robert Greene’s ‘Menaphon’ (1589).
* * *
xxvi
introduction
But it is also striking how many of Seneca’s central themes seem
particularly urgent and relevant in the current political and social
climate. He is a writer for uncertain and violent times, who forces us
to think about the difference between compromise and hypocrisy,
and about how, if at all, a person can be good, calm, or happy in a
corrupt society and under constant threat of death.
Seneca’s tragedies can be read as a sustained meditation on various
problems of evil. Why do people — and gods — do terrible things?
How much depravity are human beings capable of ? What limits are
there — if any — to our capacity for rage, hatred, self-promotion, lust,
and violence? And what drives us to be our worst selves? These plays
are the product of a sensational, frightening, and oppressive period
of history; perhaps we are again ready to understand and appreciate
their terrible cruelty, linguistic and psychological excesses, and their
black humour.
* * *
NOTE ON THE TEXT AND TRANSLATION
The critical edition used for this translation is the Oxford Classical
Text, edited by Otto Zwierlein (Clarendon Press, 1986). In some cases
I have used different punctuation from Zwierlein’s, and have included
lines which his edition brackets. My lineation does not always exactly
correspond to his in choral passages. In a very few cases, I have
adopted a different textual reading from that of Zwierlein.1
Translating Seneca into modern English, while staying faithful to
the feel of the original, is a challenge. On the most basic level, verse
drama is no longer a living form on the Anglo-American stage: mod-
ern playwrights compose in prose. But Seneca was a poet, and it
would be highly misleading to translate his carefully constructed
lines into prose.
Latin verse is entirely different from English verse, since it is a
quantitative metre — based on a pattern in the length of syllables —
rather than a stress metre, based on a pattern of stressed and
unstressed syllables. Any choice of metre in which to render a Latin
poet in English will therefore be approximate; English quantitative
metre is more or less impossible.
Most recent translators have assumed that iambic pentameter is
the only possible metre for rendering the Senecan line. The argu-
ment for pentameter is based primarily on the history of English
verse: since Shakespeare, we assume that verse drama will be in iam-
bic pentameter. But Seneca’s lines are actually longer than the
English pentameter. His metre consists of three sets of two iambic
feet, with a number of possible variations and substitutions. I have
therefore used a line which is primarily, but not exclusively, iambic,
and which varies in length from five to six, and occasionally seven,
feet. I have tried to make my English correspond, line-for-line, to
Seneca’s Latin. My hope in doing this is to give a better indication
of the density of the language of these plays: Seneca crams a great
deal of thought and information into a single line.
I have not attempted to replicate Seneca’s choral metres in English
except for one passage from Medea (‘Force of fl ame ...’), rendered in
1 Phaedra, line 28: adopted Phyle not flius. Medea, line 23: adopted optet not opto.
Medea, lines 659 – 61: text is corrupt here; in the interest of readability I have followed
the text in Hine’s edition. Troades, line 586: I have adopted timens not tumens.
* * *
xxviii
note on the text and translation
English saphhics to give an example if Seneca’s rhythms; but I have
varied the rhythms and line lengths in lyric passages, to give some
indication of the varying verse forms. Shorter lines in my translation
usually correspond to shorter lines in the original.
Seneca has a highly allusive way of writing, which assumes a fairly
well-educated audience or readership. The many mythological and
geographical allusions pose a particular challenge for the modern
reader, who is unlikely to have the same degree of familiarity with
Graeco-Roman myth that the average educated Roman spectator or
reader would have had. In order to re-create the ease with which a
Roman reader would have understood Seneca’s terminology, I have
erased or glossed some of his proper names: for instance, I have
sometimes rendered ‘Boreas’ simply as ‘the north wind’.
Capturing the tone of Senecan tragedy in modern English is also a
challenge. I have aimed to make my version readable, speakable, and
contemporary, but without sacrificing the essential features of
Seneca’s tragic diction. Seneca himself is not always readable, not
always easy, and certainly not always down-to-earth. I have kept
some of the colourfulness in the style, trying not to clip the wings of
the most purple and bombastic passages. I have also tried to stay
faithful both to Seneca’s verbal fluency and to his concision. At
times — as in the opening speech of Phaedra — Seneca creates a rhe-
torical effect from verbal redundancy: he does not name one place-
name where twenty will do, and he builds up an atmosphere by
layering the components of a list. But at other moments he special-
izes in putting complex thoughts into the minimum number of
words. It is tempting for the translator who hopes to create readable,
modern English to try to counteract both these tendencies: to cut
back on the verbosity and to expand the dense witticisms. I have
aimed for a lively version which will also allow Seneca something of
his own weird voice, and invite new readers to have their own
responses to these strange, dark plays.
I have deliberately not added stage directions to my translation, on
the grounds that to do so would be to pre-empt judgement on ques-
tions of staging. But Seneca’s tragedies are certainly stageable, and
there have been several successful recent productions. I hope that my
translation may inspire actors and directors to create new stage ver-
sions of these plays, and bring them to life for the new century.
* * *
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Critical Editions of Senecan Tragedies
Agamemnon, edited with a commentary by R. J. Tarrant (Cambridge
University Press, 1976).
Hercules furens, edited with introduction and commentary by John G.
Fitch (Cornell University Press, 1987).
Medea, edited with translation and commentary by H. M. Hine (Aris &
Phillips, 2000).
Medea, edited with introduction and commentary by C. D. N. Costa
(Clarendon Press, 1973).
Octavia, attributed to Seneca, edited with translation, introduction, and
commentary by A. J. Boyle (Oxford University Press, 2008).
University Press, 1990).
Phoenissae, introduction and commentary by Marica Frank (Brill, 1995).
Troades, edited with translation, introduction, and commentary by
A. J. Boyle (Oxford University Press, 1994).
Seneca’s ‘Troades’: A Literary Introduction, edited with translation,
introduction, and commentary by Elaine Fantham (Princeton University
Press, 1982).
Thyestes, edited with introduction and commentary by R. J. Tarrant
(Scholars Press, 1985).
Seneca’s Tragedies, edited and translated by John Fitch, Loeb Classical
Library, 2 vols. (Harvard University Press, 2002).
History and Cultural Contexts
Braund, Susanna Morton, and Christopher Gill (eds.), The Passions in
Roman Thought and Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Claassen, Jo-Marie, Displaced Persons: The Literature of Exile from Cicero
to Boethius (University of Wisconsin Press, 1999).
Eden, P. T. (ed. and trans.), ‘Apocolocyntosis’ — Seneca (Cambridge
University Press, 1984).
Elsner, Jasl, and Jamie Masters, Reflections of Nero: Culture, History and
Representation (North Carolina University Press, 1994).
Garzetti, Albino, trans. J. R. Foster, From Tiberius to the Antonines:
A History of the Roman Empire, AD 14 –192 (Methuen, 1974).
Fairweather, Janet, Seneca the Elder (Cambridge University Press, 1981).
Graves, Robert, I, Claudius (Penguin, 1978).
* * *
xxx
select bibliography
Griffin, M., Seneca: A Philosopher in Politics (Oxford University Press,
1976).
—— Nero: The End of a Dynasty (Yale University Press, 1985).
Hutchinson, G. O., Latin Literature from Seneca to Juvenal: A Critical
Study (Clarendon Press, 1993).
Massey, Michael (ed. and trans.), Society in Imperial Rome: Selections
from Juvenal, Petronius, Martial, Tacitus, Seneca, and Pliny (Cambridge
University Press, 1982).
Sørensen, Villy, Seneca the Humanist at the Court of Nero (Chicago
University Press, 1976).
Stoicism
Brennan, Tad, Stoic Life: Emotions, Duties and Fate (Clarendon Press, 2005).