Ironically again, tragedy was an active industry in Rome from the earliest times to the end of the republic and even a new genre, the historical drama (fabula praetexta) also emerged, taking its themes from Roman history but very few of them survived: we mostly know about them from references by such authors as Horace or Cicero. Fragments remained only from four of the greatest Roman tragedians: Naevius (d. ~200 BC), Ennius (239-169 B.
C.), Pacuvius (220-130 BC) and by Accius (170- ~ 85 BC), the last of these being the most versatile figure of the late republic, with great rhetorical skills, an immense output and equally immense popularity. Revivals of his plays are attested to 57-44 BC (e.g. Brutus, Clytemnestra, Tereus). After Accius’s death, tragedy seems to have become a plaything for the aristocracy:
Cicero’s brother, Quintius is reported to have composed four tragedies in sixteen days for diversion, Julius Ceasar wrote an Oedipus and Augustus attempted an Ajax but there was the notable tragedian Varius Rufus (with a Thyestes in 29 BC), and we also know that Ovid wrote a Medeia. In the 1st c. AD the ludi scaenici became dominated by the “popular theatre”
(coarse and indecent mime, pantomime and spectacle). Seneca had a notable contemporary who wrote drama: Pomponius Secundus, with whom, according to Quintilian, Seneca even had an argument over tragic diction. The question whether Seneca’s tragedies were written for the stage or not is still hotly debated since then tragedies were often recited by a single speaker in the recitation-hall (auditorium) or in private-houses or even in the theatre itself either as a virtuoso individual recital of tragic speech, or as a preliminary for theatrical performance. Earlier, many considered Seneca’s tragedies to be book-dramas; today critics seem to agree that at least parts of them were designed for some kind of performance (recital by Seneca and/or performance by actors)70.
4. 6. Seneca
4.6.1. Seneca: lifer and work
Lucius Annaeus Seneca (the Younger) (~4/1 BC – AD 65) was first and foremost a Roman statesman, second a philosopher-essayist, and, third, a writer of tragedies. He was born in Corduba (Cordova) in southern Spain, the second of three sons to educated Annaeus Seneca (the Elder), an author of a (lost) history of Rome and of a rhetorical manual. Seneca was brought to Rome as a child, went through the standard education in rhetoric (then these schools were mushrooming in Rome) and he developed a keen interest in Stoic-Pythagorean philosophy (including vegetarianism). Throughout his life, he was suffering from a tubercular condition and for a while he was sent to Egypt to his aunt. In 31 AD he returned to Rome and entered the Senate via questorship. From that time on he had first-hand experience of
“political tragedy” and a bloody, treacherous, cruel and ultimately very claustrophobic state-mechanism. He held the office of tribunus plebis (tribune of the people) and gained fame as an advocate, teacher of rhetoric and an excellent stylist He arose the jealousy of the emperor Suetonius Gaius (better known as Caligula, princeps (emperor) 37-41 AD) and temporarily retired to private life but when Claudius ascended to the throne, Seneca was soon exiled to Corsica for eight years under Messalina’s (Claudius’s wife) charge of adultery with Caligula’s
70 Cf. A. J. Boyle, Seneca’s Phaedra, Introduction, Text, Translation and Notes. Liverpool and New Hampshire:
Francis Cairns, 1987, pp. 7-8.
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sister, Julia Livilla. He was a married man at the time (to Pompeia Paulina, who survived him, or to a first wife – this is uncertain) and lost his son around the year of his exile. In 48, Messalina was executed, Agrippina, Claudius’s new wife called Seneca back to Rome and he became the tutor of Agrippina’s son, Nero (Lucius Dominius). Agrippina poisoned Claudius, and Nero ascended to the throne in 54 AD. This was a period of immense influence and power for Seneca; with Afranius Burrus he was chief minister and political counsellor. Nero killed his mother in 59 AD (in which most probably Seneca was not privy but to which he wrote a justificatory post factum), Burrus died (most likely poisoned) and Seneca went into semi-retirement in 62 AD. He was accused of involvement in the Pisonian conspiracy against Nero and he was ordered to kill himself, which he did (both his brothers met the same death).71 4. 6.2. Seneca and politics; the prose works and the tragedies
Seneca never knew the republic: he witnessed to an age when political and personal freedom and safety ‘in high circles’ were nullities and power resided essentially in one man, often a vicious psychopath (Caligula, Nero). Servility, hypocrisy and corruption ruled (at least according to Tacitus). Hatreds, fears, lusts, cowardice, self-interest, self-abasement, abnormal cruelty, extravagance vice, violent death and perversion reached such a degree that recent critics suggest that Seneca did not even read the ‘original’ Greek authors (e.g. Sophocles for his Oedipus) – as his “quotations” from earlier sources are mostly proverbial, known by every educated member of Roman society72 – but he simply put down in his tragedies what he saw with his own eyes, what was the very stuff of his life, composing these contemporary horrors into (and thus disguising them as) stories which were told, at that time, by mothers to their children (including the story of Oedipus!) and circulated as part of folk-mythology73.
Seneca wrote a satire on Claudius’s deification (‘The Pumpkinification’) and several philosophical works, among them Naturalis Questiones (“Natural Questions”) and the Epistulae Morales (“Moral Epistles” to Lucililum) are the most famous, both composed in his last years, in self-imposed exile. (Other philosophical works include ten Dialogi (Dialogues), De Beneficiis (On Benefits), De Ira and De Clementia (On Clemency)). They represent Stoic ethical ideas: the advocation of virtue, endurance, self-sufficiency, true friendship, condemnation of evil, condemnation of wealth and power, praise of wisdom, reason and poverty and contempt for the fear of death. They stand in such striking contrast with the tragedies and the day-to-day reality that surrounded Seneca that some critics charge him with cynicism, some read them as an intellectual’s escape into a dream-world, some as the ideal set by an instructor to a former pupil who ran amok and some tried to reconcile the tragedies and the moral teaching by claiming that the tragedies, in one way or another, are even
‘popularised versions’ of his Stoic doctrines. It is clear that there is a kind of schizophrenia, although when Seneca wrote, genre (tragedy, comedy, ode, epistle, etc.) was a fact of literature with relatively strict rules, dictating a tone and a structure (e.g. comedy could not be mixed with tragedy), so then the question is why he turned to tragedy at all, and not why the ethical elements of his philosophy are so difficult to be found in them. This seems to explain why Seneca never mentions his tragedies in his prose-works, though his Choruses sometimes touch upon philosophical issues.
71 C.f. A. J. Boyle, op. cit., pp. 2-3 and p. 5
72 Cf. R. J. Tarrant, “Senecean Drama and its Antecedents”, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 82, 1978, pp. 213-63, a highly influential article.
73 “The Oedipus-legend was well known: mothers taught it, probably in a variety of versions, the their children, who later would have learnt it at school, it would have been included in histories and handbooks of mythology (like those of Diodorus, Apollodorus, and Hyginus) which have not survived, and in works in art.” (Marcia Frank, Seneca’s Phoenissae: Introduction and Commentary, Leiden, New York and Köln: E. J. Brill, 1994, p.
28.)
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In his prose works Seneca says that philosophy is above everything, even history and poetry (as the age loved to show genres as if they were rivals), because philosophy deals with the sprit and the system of the universe while history often shows the interest of a group of people an in poetry value can be in purely imaginative enjoyment while philosophy is concerned with reality. But, according to Seneca, “the Truth” can never be known: he combines professional credulity with frivolous scepticism (“we think things are great because we are small”). His intellectualism is never cold, he is never dogmatic in his Stoicism and he is magnificently inclusive, embracing the whole range of a hierarchical universe. The truly virtuous man is described as a “citizen and soldier of the universe” (cf. “wrap all the universe / In awful darkness, let the winds make war”, Thyestes, Act V).74
In his tragedies, we seem to leave behind the sense of an ordered universe so fundamental to the Stoic world; in tragedies the grim mythological deities destroy the virtuous, and wicked characters (e.g. Thyestes or Medeia) are joyfully triumphant, physical events are vividly unreal and vastly claustrophobic and greatness is not only admitted in virtue (which is destroyed anyway) but in vice as well. The great debate of Seneca’s age over the relationship between realty and illusion is settled in the tragedies when grandeur in rhetoric (the actual expressions of the characters) rises with the imagined and unseen: e.g. a visible child is sacrificed for the unseen ghost in Medea and Seneca’s best rhetorical skills serve the justification of this move. In Thyestes we, too, can witness to perverted loftiness, with an immense extension of ordinary language, totally in the service of mythological unreality.
Seneca is simply fascinated with his evil characters (Atreus, Clytemnaestra, Medea, etc.) and the ghosts, the underworld, hereditary evil, the atmosphere of disorder and hopelessness stand in striking contrast with a Stoic universe. 75
4.6.3. Seneca: Thyestes
The tragedy of Thyestes is one of compulsive, repetitive mimesis: Tantalus (who in Seneca’s play returns as the Ghost), a son of Zeus, served his son, Pelops as food at a banquet of the gods. Tantalus’s punishment became his famous ‘pain’: he had to see water and food but could never satiate his hunger or thirst. Zeus restored Pelops to life and Pelops obtained a kingdom and a wife by treachery, so the doom lingered on: his two sons, Atreus and Thyestes could never settle the question of heritage; they constantly fought for their father’s throne.
Periods of banishment alternated with periods of prosperity for each boy, and their fate continued in Agamemnon (son of Atreus), in Aegisthus (son of Thyestes, by his own daughter Pelopia) and in Orestes, who killed Clytaemnestra, murderer of her husband, Agamemnon.
Seneca’s mimetic activity does not find its expression over the plot (as Aristotle would recommend) but with respect to generations, which cannot but imitate one another incessantly.76
It seems that at the beginning of the play Fury decides everything, urging Tantalus’s Ghost to fill the place with his curse, foretelling the events to come. The topic thus becomes the ‘ever-repeated alternation / Of crime with crime’ (Chorus in Act I), and that “law is powerless” (ibid..) Atreus consciously plans the repetition of Tantalus’s deed, trying to outsmart his father but the ‘beauty’ in the paradoxical horror is that this presupposes an almost total identification with his brother: “some black and bloody deed must be attempted /Such as
74 Cf. G. O. Hutchinson, op. cit., pp. 42-50., pp. 101-104, pp. 127-131, 151-156, 159-2160, pp. 160-164, pp. 222-239, pp. 273-287
75 Cf. G. O. Hutchinson, op. cit., pp. 82-85, pp. 124-127, pp. 160-164, pp 208-216.
76 Cf. Seneca: Thyestes, Phaedra, The Trojan Women, Oedipus, with Octavia, trans. and introduced by E. F.
Walting, Penguin Books, London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1966, pp. 17-38, pp. 306-312
my brother might have wished were his”; “This is a deed / Thyestes could be proud of, as can Atreus; / Let them be partners in the doing of it” (Act I). Even at the end of the play he will accuse Thyestes of two things: that Thyestes is grieved not by the loss of his sons but by the fact that he could not do the same with Atreus and that he is not sad because he still has sons, and they are precisely Atreus’s children: “ ‘tis your grief / That you were cheated of the crime you proposed. You weep, not that you ate this loathsome meal, / But that you had not cooked it! / ... And would have done it (with Atreus’s children), but for one thing only: You thought you were their father” (Act V). Atreus compulsively mirrors both Thyestes’s suggested desire and their father’s deed, as young Tantalus is a reincarnation of his grandfather, enticing Thyestes into the trap. The Chorus expresses general maxims, nice moral truths (“A king is he who has no ill to fear / Whose hand is innocent, whose conscience is clear” (end of Act II),
“No man should put his trust in the smile of fortune”, end of Act III) but of course this is not the ‘purpose’ of the tragedy. The tragic here is inevitable Fate (the doom on the family), the fact that union is only possible trough treachery and through the literal and grotesque irony of eating one’s own flesh (“Consider them already with you here / In your embrace”, Act V), as if the acknowledgement of one’s children were not be complete until they are one body with you again through cannibalism, or as if the father could rival the mother by putting his children into his own stomach, from which they will even ‘speak’. Fighting one’s fate will only produce repetition of the same fate, the same sin – even outdoing it will not help to break the boundaries. Atreus’s tragedy is precisely this: he thinks he will get rid of the family’s doom by doing something even more horrible but his joy is not complete since “There are bounds / To limit wilful sins; but sin’s requital / Acknowledges no limits. I have done / Too little yet. I should have drained their blood / Warm from their wounds into your open mouth;
You should have drunk it from their living bodies. (...) I should have made the father do all this! / His torture came too late; he never knew / What he was doing when he cursed teeth / Gnawed at those bones! His children never knew it!”. Fate is insatiable, like Tantalus’s thirst and hunger, there is still a place to go for even more cruelty in the imagination and the only obstacle is, once more, the lack of knowledge.
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