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Six Tragedies

Page 2

by Seneca


  Tacitus, on the other hand, implies that Seneca may have been guilty.

  But contemporary observers were probably as much in the dark as we

  are; the truth may never be known. For readers of Seneca’s tragedies,

  the important thing about the affair is that Seneca had experienced, at

  first hand, exile, the anger of those in power, and the vicissitudes of

  fortune. He had been forced from his home as a criminal. Seneca’s

  plays, which deal obsessively with the theme of tyranny and the

  destruction caused by lust for power, were written by a man who had

  experienced social degradation at the hands of an emperor.

  While on Corsica Seneca presumably studied philosophy and got

  on with his writing: several of his prose works were almost certainly

  written in exile, and it is possible that many or most of the tragedies

  were also written on Corsica. The rhetorician and teacher Quintilian

  tells us that in his young days he heard Seneca debate whether a

  particular phrase was appropriate as tragic diction or not.7 If Seneca

  was interested in this question at the time of Quintilian’s youth, in

  the late 40s or early 50s, he had probably begun to write tragedy by

  this date. Seneca was brought back to Rome in 49 ce through the

  intercession of Agrippina. Agrippina wanted a tutor ( praeceptor) for

  her son Nero. Seneca could repay her for her mercy by training the

  young man in politics, rhetoric, and philosophy.

  Claudius died in 54 ce, probably poisoned, and Seneca, soon after

  the old emperor’s death, wrote a satirical account of his deification

  called the Pumpkinification of Claudius (Apocolocyntosis). As well as

  showing Seneca’s ability to poke fun at the pretensions of emperors,

  this work also provides an important clue to the dating of his tra-

  gedies, since a line from the Pumpkinification seems to be a comic

  rewriting of a passage of Seneca’s own Hercules Furens.

  On the accession of Nero, Seneca — as the old tutor and adviser of

  the new ruler — became a very powerful man. Tacitus tells us that he

  acted as Nero’s speechwriter. But being close to Nero was never very

  safe. Seneca’s role as adviser remained unofficial, and it is difficult to

  tell exactly how much power or influence he had over the young

  emperor. He may — as Tacitus suggests — have been responsible for

  the relative moderation of the early years of Nero’s rule, along with

  Burrus, the head of the praetorian guard.

  7 Institute of Oratory, 8. 3. 31.

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  introduction

  Many people, both contemporary and later, have been suspicious

  or critical of Seneca’s relationship with Nero. It has often been

  suspected that Seneca, far from restraining the emperor or guiding

  him by ethical philosophy, in fact colluded with, or even encouraged,

  his excesses. This critique began in antiquity: we learn from the

  Greek historian Dio that some contemporaries accused Seneca of

  a hypocritical failure to live his life in accordance with his own

  philosophy:

  For while denouncing tyranny, he was making himself the teacher of a

  tyrant; while inveighing against the associates of the powerful, he did not

  hold aloof from the palace himself; and though he had nothing good to

  say of flatterers, he always fawned upon Messalina and the freedmen of

  Claudius, to such an extent, in fact, as actually to send them from the island

  of his exile a book containing their praises — a book which he afterwards

  suppressed out of shame. Though finding fault with the rich, he himself

  acquired a fortune of 300,000,000 sesterces; and though he had censured

  the extravagances of others, he had five hundred tables of citrus wood with

  legs of ivory, all identically alike, and he served banquets on them.8

  But Tacitus, who is a more reliable source for the period, suggests

  that Seneca at least tried to give his pupil moral advice and train him

  to be a good man as well as a good emperor. In Tacitus’ account,

  Seneca and Burrus competed with Nero’s mother, Agrippina, for

  control of the uncontrollable young ruler. In 55 ce Nero arranged to

  have his stepbrother and main rival for imperial power, the fourteen-

  year-old Britannicus, murdered; Seneca failed to intervene, although

  his treatise addressed to the emperor, On Mercy, may have been a

  belated attempt to restrain Nero from further acts of violence.

  By 59 ce Nero — who was married to Octavia — was desperately in

  love with a married woman called Poppaea. Agrippina opposed

  the match, and Nero decided that the only solution was to kill her.

  The first attempt failed, and he tried to persuade Seneca and Burrus

  to help him finish the job. They suggested that he should, instead,

  ask the freedman who had first proposed killing her by a supposed

  boating accident to complete the murder. Nero was irritated by this

  defection, and the two advisers’ power over him waned from that

  point onwards.

  In 62 ce Burrus died — probably assassinated — and Seneca’s

  power declined still further. Seneca, according to Tacitus, tried to

  8 Dio, Roman History, 61. 10. 2 – 3; trans. Herbert B. Foster and Earnest Cary, Loeb

  Classical Library (Harvard University Press, 1968), viii. 57.

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  introduction

  xiii

  retire from the court at this point, responding in part to the criti-

  cisms of his enemies, who claimed that he had amassed too much

  private wealth for himself, that he was only interested in his own

  advancement, and that it was time for the adult emperor’s tutor to

  retire. Seneca asked Nero for permission to withdraw from public

  life. Nero refused to allow any official retirement on the part of

  his old tutor, but Seneca probably took a less active role in policy-

  advising from this point onwards. In 64 ce Seneca made a further

  request to retire and offered to return some of the money the emperor

  had given him; Nero was by this time in great financial difficulties,

  and accepted the money.

  In the following year, 65 ce, a group of prominent men plotted to

  kill Nero. The Pisonian Conspiracy — named after one of its instiga-

  tors, Gaius Piso — involved a plan to assassinate the emperor during

  a festival in honour of the goddess Ceres at the public games, which

  were held in April. But Nero uncovered the plot and set about killing

  all those who seemed to have been in any way connected with it.

  Seneca’s nephew, the poet Lucan, accused of being involved, was

  forced to kill himself, along with both of Seneca’s brothers. Nero had

  no firm evidence connecting Seneca with the affair, but it provided a

  useful pretext to have him killed.

  Tacitus provides a detailed account of his long-drawn-out and

  deliberately ‘philosophical’, Socratic suicide.9 After making various

  speeches, Seneca — along with his wife, Paulina — cut his wrists, but

  found his blood was too desiccated for him to bleed to death. He

  tried poison, but that too failed. Eventually Seneca got into a hot

  bath and suffocated in the steam. His wife survived.

>   The dramatic events of Seneca’s life, and the dramatic history of

  his times, are clearly relevant to a reading of his tragedies. But it is

  frustrating that we know very little about when exactly these plays

  were composed. The dating matters, because it makes a difference to

  our vision of the plays’ political and moral context. If they were writ-

  ten under Nero, it is possible to read these presentations of passion

  overwhelming reason, and power gone horribly wrong, as nightmare

  presentations of life in Nero’s court — or as warnings to the young

  emperor of what might happen if he allowed his evil tendencies to get

  out of control. But the evidence suggests that most, perhaps even all,

  of the tragedies were composed before Nero came to power. Stylistic

  analysis of the plays suggests that Agamemnon, Phaedra, and Oedipus

  9 Tacitus, Annals, 15. 60 – 5.

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  introduction

  are probably among the earliest written, Medea, Troades (Trojan

  Women), and Hercules Furens (Hercules Insane) form a middle group,

  and Thyestes and the unfinished Phoenissae (Phoenician Women)

  are probably later than the rest.10 If we accept this grouping, and if

  we also accept that the Apocolocyntosis — which was composed some

  time soon after the death of Claudius in 54 ce — parodies Hercules

  Furens, then it is likely that only Thyestes was composed under the

  reign of Nero.

  Seneca’s representations in the tragedies of ambition, tyranny, and

  cruelty reflect his own experiences under Tiberius, Caligula, and

  Claudius — as well as, in the case of Thyestes, Nero. As a provincial

  who rose to enormous influence, and who suffered exile as well as

  enjoying great wealth and prestige, he knew how quickly fortune can

  change, how easy it is for emperors to behave in cruel and savage

  ways, and how dependent people may be on the whims of those in

  power. Seneca’s complex relationship with the politics of his own

  time is one of the many reasons why his work is relevant today.

  Stoicism and Seneca’s Tragedies

  Seneca was not only a writer of verse tragedies, but also a philosopher.

  He was a Stoic — like Epictetus and, later, Marcus Aurelius — and

  his prose works are the most extensive works of Stoic philosophy

  surviving from antiquity.11

  The philosophical school of Stoicism was founded in Hellenistic

  Athens in the early third century bce, by a Greek philosopher called

  Zeno. Zeno seems to have taught that the main path to tranquillity

  lies through indifference to pleasure and pain. After Zeno, most of

  the major doctrines of the Stoic school were developed by later

  leader of the school, Chrysippus, who lived in the later part of the

  third century bce.

  Stoicism was a complete world-view, encompassing not only

  moral philosophy and psychology but also physics, cosmology, and

  logic. But in all of these areas Stoics gave a central place to reason;

  rationality lies at the centre of the Stoic universe, and at the centre of

  the Stoics’ ideal human life. The Stoics believed that the universe is

  10 See ‘Sense-pauses and Relative Dating in Seneca, Sophocles and Shakespeare’,

  AJP 102 (1981), 435 – 53.

  11 Recent introductions to Stoicism include John Sellars, Stoicism (California

  University Press, 2006), and M. Andrew Holowchak, The Stoics: A Guide for the

  Perplexed (Continuum, 2008).

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  introduction

  xv

  controlled by a reasoning power: God or Nature. Fate, associated

  with primordial fire, causes everything that happens. Human and

  animal souls, too, are emanations of the primordial fire.

  In modern popular usage being ‘stoical’ tends to mean suppressing

  one’s feelings and keeping a stiff upper lip, but the attitude towards

  emotion of the ancient Stoics was somewhat more complex, and

  more appealing, than this. The Stoics did not believe that all emo-

  tions should be repressed, or that all emotions were wrong. Rather,

  they taught that most of the feelings that trouble and disturb us in

  daily life are the result of false beliefs. For instance, one may fear

  death under the false apprehension that death is the worst thing that

  can happen; or one may feel an intense desire for money, possessions,

  a particular sexual partner, or worldly power, under the false belief

  that these things are really good. From a Stoic perspective, though,

  none of these things is genuinely beneficial.

  The Stoics took seriously Socrates’ maxim that ‘Virtue is knowl-

  edge’. They argued that the truly wise man is one whose feelings are

  in line with true belief: he will ‘live in accordance with Nature’. (The

  wise person is almost always imagined, by Stoic philosophers, to be

  male.) He will not suppress his feelings; rather, he will not even feel

  the passions aroused by falsehoods. True joy and tranquillity will

  subsitute for the roller-coaster of emotions based on delusion.

  The wise man’s virtue is, they argued, both necessary and suffi-

  cient for his happiness. Within Stoicism there was some debate about

  whether anything other than virtue was good, and whether anything

  other than vice was bad. The Stoics developed the concept of ‘indif -

  ferent things’, which were neither good nor bad but which might

  nevertheless, according to at least some Stoic thinkers, be worthy

  either of choice or rejection. On these grounds, Stoics such as Seneca

  could justify their choice to enjoy, and even seek, wealth, worldly

  honour, and power, even though, strictly speaking, such things could

  not be classified as ‘good’.

  The central problem faced by all readers of Seneca is how to

  reconcile the Stoic philosophy of his prose writings either with his

  life or with his wild, gory tragedies. Should we — as some contempor-

  aries certainly did — condemn him as a hypocrite, for combining a

  philosophical condemnation of material values and commitment

  to virtue with an intimate and very profitable relationship with

  the obviously un-virtuous emperor Nero? Even setting aside the

  biographical dilemma, what are we to make of someone who, in his

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  introduction

  prose writings, advocates moderation, life in accordance with nature,

  and control of the passions, but whose tragedies show us characters

  like the bloodthirsty Atreus, who are violently out of control?

  It was once commonly believed that the tragedies and the philoso-

  phy must be by two different people, ‘Seneca the tragedian’ and

  ‘Seneca the philosopher’. Scholars are now convinced that the same

  person wrote both prose and plays, but there is enormous disagree-

  ment about how to put the two together. Some have argued that,

  despite appearances, the tragedies are entirely reconcilable with

  orthodox Stoicism. According to this school of thought, the most

  manic tragic characters are presented to us as moral lessons, ex -

  amples of all the nasty things that happen to you if you let your pas-

  sions get out of control. Other
s suggest that the tragedies allow

  Seneca to play with the dark fears and possibilities that are repressed

  in his prose writings. One danger of the second type of interpretation

  is that it risks taking an oversimplified view of the prose, which con-

  tains its own contradictions and ambivalences.

  It is clear, however, that in both his drama and his prose works

  Seneca had a particular concern with intense emotions, and espe-

  cially with anger. Seneca wrote a prose treatise, On Anger, which

  argues that anger is the most intense and dangerous of all the pas-

  sions. It is the one that may seize hold of anybody, rich or poor,

  Greek or barbarian, man or woman, young or old; and it is the pas-

  sion which causes the most damage, both to the angry person’s vic-

  tims and to the one whose soul is maddened by this overwhelming

  emotion. Anger, Seneca tells us, is the feeling most likely to grow out

  of all measure, distorting rational judgement: ‘it makes no difference

  how great the source is from which it springs; for from the most

  trivial origins it reaches massive proportions’.12

  The tragedies show a whole range of out-of-control emotions:

  from Phaedra’s incestuous lust, or Andromache’s obsession with her

  dead husband, to the idleness and greed of Thyestes, the ambition of

  Hercules, the despair of Megara or Hecuba, or the cowardice of

  Jason. But anger is the passion that haunts each of these plays: all

  Seneca’s tragedies are concerned in some way with the massive con-

  sequences of unrestrained human aggression. It is anger, unbridled

  by philosophy, that creates catastrophe. Medea, enraged at Jason’s

  betrayal, is driven by her rage to kill her children; Atreus, furious at

  12 Seneca: Dialogues and Essays, trans. John Davie, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford

  University Press, 2007), 19.

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  introduction

  xvii

  the thought that his brother may have slept with his wife, plots to

  make Thyestes eat his own children; Juno, mad with rage at Jupiter’s

  adulteries and Hercules’ growing renown, fills him with madness and

  makes him kill his children. In Phaedra Theseus is overwhelmed by

  anger at his son, and calls down the god’s curse upon him — not

 

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