Six Tragedies
Page 2
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.
* * *
xii
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.
* * *
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.
* * *
xiv
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).
* * *
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
* * *
xvi
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.
* * *
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