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Senecan Drama and Stoic Cosmology

University of California Press

In the last lines of the preface to his translation of Thyestes (1560), Jasper Heywood reports his feelings after waking up from a dream meeting with Seneca:

This said, I felt the Fury's force enflame me more and more,
And ten times more now chaf'd I was than ever yet before,
My hair stood up, I waxed wood, my sinews all did shake,
And as the Fury had me vex'd my teeth began to ache.
And thus enflam'd with force of her, I said it should be done,
And down I sat with pen in hand, and thus my verse begun.
(J. Daalder, ed., 1982, p. 21)

The fury is Megaera, who with some justice could be called Seneca's tragic muse.

Some sixty years ago Otto Regenbogen, in a remarkable essay published by the Warburg Institute, declared that Seneca was the first to write what is today understood by the term "tragedy."1 The Greeks of the fifth century B.C. wrote tragoidiai that continue to serve as models of significance and power. But their plays do not invariably exhibit the peculiar combination of elements that since the earliest Renaissance, and in the wake of Seneca, has embodied the tragic vision: an unhappy and mournfully moving end supervening upon an abrupt fall; the centrality of the hero and his failure; the prominence of nefas, iniquity;2 grandiloquence, ghosts, and magic; an appeal to learning; a measure of didacticism; and all the qualities summed up under the triad atrocitas, maiestas, and gravitas: vehemence, grandeur, and high seriousness.3 This is not to say that the Greek repertory does not also, within its varied compass, exhibit these qualities. But Aeschylus's Eumenides, Sophocles' Philoctetes, and a majority of Euripides' extant plays are

Regenbogen 192728, repr. 1961. Subsequent references to this seminal essay will he by the 1961 pagination.

Opelt 1972.

Regenbogen 1961, p. 451.

living proof that a Greek tragoidos could perform his task without many of the ingredients that the later European tradition considered essential in a tragedy. A play like Sophocles' Oedipus Rex may at first blush be thought to answer to the Renaissance demands, but it does not. The grandeur is not sufficiently selfconscious or spectacular, the vehemence sufficiently sensational or internalized, to authenticate the play as a paradigm of what the Renaissance critics, from Julius Caesar Scaliger to Johann Christoph Gottsched, required in high tragedy.4

Friedrich Leo thought that by the first century of our era serious drama had shifted from the exploration of ethos, character, to the treatment of pathos, passion.5 The formulation is only partly apt. Hellenistic criticism used the two terms to designate a range of emotion from gentleness to fury. But even if we understand the terms in their pre-Hellenistic sense, the precise function of "character" in Greek tragedy has been questioned,6 and it is doubtful that any tragedy can do its work without passion playing its part. Yet of the enormous difference between the two kinds of drama, the classical Greek and the Senecan, there can be no doubt. Of all the plays in the Greek corpus, the one that comes closest to the Senecan type in its emphasis on the lability of characters and the frivolity of the gods, and in its admixture of the macabre, is Euripides' Rhesus, hardly a cherished jewel in the classical crown, and a play whose marginal standing has driven scholarship to extreme positions about its date and its authenticity.7

The distance that separates Seneca from his Greek predecessors has been obscured by attempts to discover what unites the Roman versions with the Greek treatments of the myths on which they are based. Apart from Octavia, which is neither mythological nor Senecan, all the extant tragedies of Seneca have their analogues in the Greek repertory (though we have little more than the titles of some of the plays involved). Comparisons, though initially intriguing, tend to create the impression that Seneca meant to emulate or compete with his Greek

For a resum of Regenbogen's essay, see Coffee 1957. A representative list of the principal general discussions of Senecan drama in the modern period would have to include, at a minimum, the following: Klein 1865; Fr. Leo 1878; Herrmann 1924; Regenbogen 1961; Friedrich 1933; Pratt 1939; Zwierlein 1966; Herington 1968; Seidensticker 1970; Dingel 1974; Heldmann 1974; Pratt 1983; Braden 1985. For a brief discussion, with extensive bibliography, of the past century's work on Senecan drama, see Seidensticker and Armstrong 1985.

Leo 1878, p. 148.

Jones 1962.

Ritchie 1964.

forerunners. That, as an educated Roman with a documented interest in Greek letters, he knew the work of the ancient tragedians is certain. It is less certain whether as a dramatic poet he was more stimulated by the Greeks or by republican dramatists, such as Ennius and Accius, of whose writing we possess only unenlightening portions or fragments. The consensus is that Seneca probably owes most to his immediate predecessors, and especially to the dramatist Varius, who also wrote a Thyestes .8 Seneca's debt to the republican dramatists, and also his desire to rival the ancient Greeks, may currently be underestimated. Quotations from and references to tragedy are so rare in his prose work that no comparative inferences can be drawn with assurance.9 For our needs it will be best to leave aside questions of literary debt and comparison and to concentrate on what makes Senecan drama the peculiar phenomenon it is.

To see the issue in the proper light, we must devote some attention to Seneca's total literary output. In his prose writings Seneca considers himself a Stoic. He is, to be sure, an eclectic philosopher. Like bees, he says (Ep. 84.5), we must gather our readings from various sources and use our intelligence to make them over into one authentic essence. There are those who are reluctant to regard him as a systematic philosopher at all. In many of the Dialogi and Epistles, he cites Epicurus with great veneration. But he explains (Ep. 8.8) that the opinions cited are in the public domain, and that he could equally well have gone to the poets. Occasionally he questions or even pokes fun at the Stoics and their tenets (Ep. 83; NQ 4.6.1, 7.22.1). His opinion of Chrysippus or Zeno is not always positive, but it is clear from his criticisms (e.g., Ben. 3.8) that he read them in the original. What matters is that the Stoics are nostri ; they are the community of speculative thinkers in which he is confessedly at home (NQ 7.22.1; CS init.; Ot. 3.1). The chief desiderata listed in the preface of book 3 of the Naturales quaestiones control of vices, disregard of fortune, cheerful endurance of pain, authority over one's own life, purity, concentration on essentialshave an unmistakably Stoic look about them. Seneca's pronounced...