Four Tragedies and Octavia

by Seneca

  But it was not long before a growing feud between Agrippina and her son disturbed the security of Seneca’s position; and the part played by him in Nero’s atrocious matricide appears, at the best, ambiguous; he certainly failed, or had no desire, to curb the emperor’s violence, and he provided him with the letter of justification which was sent to the senate.2 There is reason to believe that he condoned, and possibly profited by, many of Nero’s attacks on his enemies; and in return his own acquisition of enormous wealth brought him into disrepute. A senator prosecuted for extortion and embezzlement while governor of Asia retorted: ‘What branch of learning, what philosophical school, won Seneca three hundred million sesterces during four years of imperial friendship? In Rome, he entices into his snares the childless and their legacies. His huge rates of interest suck Italy and the provinces dry.’3 With the death of Burrus in A.D. 62, his position became still more precarious, and he himself chose this moment to ask for retirement. In a dignified interview he thanked Nero for his kindness over fourteen years, and offered to surrender all his superfluous property. Nero replied that the obligations were all on his side – adding, ambiguously, ‘Your gifts to me will endure as long as life itself; my gifts to you, gardens and mansions and revenues, are liable to circumstances’ – and they parted with ceremonies of mutual affection.1 Before the year was out – the year of the events concentrated into the tragedy Octavia – Nero had removed Burrus’s successor, Rufus, retaining the reliable services of his colleague Tigellinus, and had discarded his wife Octavia for his new love Poppaea. At the same time Seneca had been denounced for association with the anti-Neronian conspiracy led by Piso, for in fact Seneca’s name had been put forward as a possible successor to the throne. His nominal withdrawal into private life and into the resumption of his literary pursuits could not save him from the consequences of his public career; Nero was not likely to leave for long at large a potential opponent so well acquainted with his own dark secrets. In A.D. 65 (the year after the fire of Rome) the Pisonian conspiracy came to a head, and Seneca was implicated, on the slender evidence of a letter expressing friendly compliments to Piso. His death was ordered, and Seneca made preparations to meet it in the manner which he had often contemplated, and advocated in his letters, as the only one befitting a man of dignity.2 After painful attempts to end his life by incision of the veins, he had recourse to poison, which still failed to have the desired effect; finally, a hot bath hastened the loss of blood, and a steam bath brought his life to an end by suffocation. His wife Paulina attempted to share his fate, but on Nero’s orders her suicide was arrested and she survived her husband by a few years.

  Of the earliest assessments of Seneca’s character, that of Dio Cassius is perhaps the most uncompromising, which describes him as totally unscrupulous and inconsistent, preaching liberty and encouraging a tyrant; condemning flattery and courtship, enjoying luxury and contributing to flattery of the court; and sexually libertine. A modern critic has a more charitable view:1.

  Seneca, with his high brain-power and the low vitality of prolonged ill-health, with his clever, subtle mind and his lack of solid commonsense, with his amiable but not passionate temperament, is perhaps after all not so hard to understand. He desired more than most to do the right things; but he hated more than most the unpleasant things, especially unpleasantness with other people. In a perfectly desperate position, with only one path before him, he could tread it finely; but it was a desperate position indeed when that agile brain could not find a way round and justify to itself the same. Less clever he would have proved a great deal more edifying.

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  The tragedy of violence and intrigue in the real life about them, as well as in the organized spectacles of butchery in the amphitheatres (against which Seneca made his protest), seems to have blunted the taste of the Roman people for tragedy as a dramatic art. It is generally agreed that the tragedies of Seneca were intended for reading or recital at private gatherings and could never have appeared in what we should call public performance; partly because in many of their scenes the implied condemnation of autocracy would have had too dangerous a topical application; and partly because there were, so far as we know, no public opportunities for such performances. What we do know of the nearest approach to tragic acting in Nero’s time suggests something between ballet and opera, with the emphasis on the individual virtuoso’s art of evoking, in song and mime, the passions and torments of a Hercules or an Oedipus – an art of which Nero fancied himself both as connoisseur and exponent. Of what passed for dramatic performance some glimpse can be gathered from scattered references such as this from Suetonius:1

  He gave an immense variety of entertainments – coming-of-age parties, chariot races in the Circus, stage plays…. At the Great Festival, as he called the series of plays devoted to the hope of his reigning for ever, parts were taken by men and women of both Orders; and one well-known knight rode an elephant down a sloping tight-rope. When he staged ‘The Fire’, a Roman play by Afranius, the actors were allowed to keep the valuable furnishings they rescued from the burning house…. In the ‘Daedalus and Icarus’ ballet, the actor who played Icarus, while attempting his first flight, fell beside Nero’s couch and spattered him with blood….

  A generally lively programme, with amateur enthusiasm contributing, and plenty of realistic, preferably dangerous, and often unseemly, action. Even a hundred years earlier Cicero, at the festival celebrating the opening of Rome’s first permanent theatre, complained2 of the pathetic performances of old-fashioned actors past their prime, and of the spectacular ostentation which had been imposed upon the old tragedies: ‘Who wants to see six hundred mules in Clytaemnestra or three hundred goblets in The Trojan Horse, or a battle between fully equipped armies of horse and foot?’ A rhetorical exaggeration, no doubt, but an indication of the way things were going. Even so, a tradition persisted for the composition of tragedy on the Greek pattern, and if such works made little impression on public audiences they were regarded as worthy employment for the pens of erudite authors or even of men of business in their spare time. Knowing little or nothing of the public fate of most of these works, we do at least know that Cicero himself, and his brother Quintus, wrote tragedies; Julius Caesar wrote one, Oedipus; Ovid’s Medea was esteemed as highly as any of the varied works for which he has become known to posterity; and there is record of a performance of a tragedy Thyestes, by L. Varius Rufus, at the festival in celebration of the victory of Actium. To have a play performed, for some special occasion, was an accident that none of such authors counted on, or particularly desired – if they were of the same mind as Ovid, who writes from exile:1 ‘You tell me that my poetry is being performed to full houses and winning much applause; as far as I am concerned, I never wrote with the theatre in mind, as you very well know, and my Muse was always indifferent to applause.’

  Nor did Seneca, we may be quite sure, have anything like public performance in mind when he wrote his adaptations of Greek tragedies. To appreciate the purpose and achievement of this rather curious branch of Latin literature, so far as we can from the isolated group of specimens available to us, we must first remember that Roman drama, such as it was, grew up in social and artistic conditions far different from those which produced the drama of Athens. The practical, busy cosmopolitanism of the rising republic took kindly to the comic legacy of the declining Greek theatre, but, though tragedies were translated and imitated from the same period onwards, the diffuse Roman society and the increasingly sophisticated Roman mind could never recapture the singleness of spirit which in a Greek city-state found expression in the ritual of tragedy. In its comparatively short season of flowering, Greek tragedy itself had moved from the religious intensity of Aeschylus, through the more humane art of Sophocles, to the sceptical rationalism of Euripides; and it was here that Roman tragedy began, where the Greek left off. In Euripides the Romans found their example of drama used as a medium for the exercise of the human voice and brain in debate, in the opposition
of conflicting interpretations of the mysteries of life, and the art of picturesque and exciting narrative. They found also examples of the creation of types of character corresponding to human experience, the autocrat and his obedient or recalcitrant minister, the poor at the mercy of the rich, the woman rebellious against the mastery of man or pitifully bruised and bereaved by the cruelties of man’s world; and they found those useful adjuncts to drama, the ghost arising to threaten or foretell calamity, and the confidant, usually known as ‘Nurse’, to console or advise the distraught heroine. The Roman devotion to rhetoric found a stimulating example in Euripides; his lines were quotable, and his sententiae appealed to the Roman artist in verbal dexterity. Consequently, although Seneca, and presumably others unknown to us, took the subjects of their tragedies widely from the whole field of Greek drama, their adaptations reflect the manner of Euripides more nearly than that of Aeschylus or Sophocles. At the same time, the form of drama was changing; the synthesis of dramatic dialogue and choral song in a single poetic structure was falling apart, until the function of the chorus lingered on only as a conventional ornament contributing nothing to the theme of the play. This development was accompanied by a modification of the form of the theatre itself, when the reduction of the circular orchestra to a semicircle or less, together with the increasing elaboration of the architecture of the stage, transferred the emphasis from the poetic ritual of the chorus to the display of ‘acting’ on the stage. Some doubt must remain as to what sort of theatre would accommodate Cicero’s ‘six hundred mules’; but probably the larger amphitheatres were used for a debased form of pageant-tragedy.

  With these considerations in mind, by what criteria should we judge the value of the Senecan tragedies as drama? The historical question as to whether they were in fact ever ‘performed’ is not of great importance and involves in any case only a hair’s-breadth distinction of terms. If they were ever ‘recited’, without the book, in dialogue form by two or more persons, to however private an audience, and on however simple a stage, then they were ‘performed’ in all essential meanings of the term and in a sense which must be perfectly intelligible to a modern playgoer with experience of the infinitely wide range of technique, from the most realistic to the most imaginative or ‘abstract’, that the theatre can accommodate. It was only the influence of the realistic theatre of the nineteenth century, and early twentieth, that drove critics to the conclusion that Senecan drama not only was never acted but never could be – and this, oddly enough, despite the example of the equally ‘unrealistic’ Greek tragedies, not to mention the whole history of English poetic drama. Thus the stagecraft of Seneca has been dismissed as impracticable for no better reason than that he represents persons talking in a way in which no living person ordinarily talks, and suggests events which could not literally take place before the eyes of an audience (such as the sacrifice in Oedipus). On such grounds Professor Beare1 finds that ‘the internal evidence… shows that the author has not visualized the actions of his characters. The usual technique of bringing characters on or taking them off is ignored’ – so it is by many modern dramatists, if by usual is meant the technique of Pinero or Shaw – ‘We often realize that a person is conceived as present only by the fact that a speech is put into his mouth; we cannot tell when he leaves the stage except by the fact that no more words are attributed or addressed to him’ – of course, there are no stage directions,1 but a stage-director could supply them; and this surely suggests that the author did visualize the presence or absence of his characters, though he may have sometimes omitted to supply clues for the reader.2 ‘A long speech,’ Professor Beare continues, ‘is attributed to Clytaemnestra (Agamemnon, 108–24), yet it appears from the remarks of the other person present3 that Clytaemnestra has been silent; the speech must therefore represent her thoughts’ (why not? ‘Look how our partner’s rapt!’ Macbeth, 1. 3).

  It is not by such an approach that we can appreciate what Seneca was trying to do. ‘Action’ in the realistic sense is not the mainspring of his technique; it could be described as the illusion of action evoked by words – or, if that is no more than a definition applicable to all drama, let us call it the creation of dramatic tension by words with the minimum of visual aid. As long ago as 1927, T. S. Eliot1 noticed that ‘Seneca’s plays might be practical models for the modern “broadcasted” drama’. Where in other writers action, or activity in the prosecution of the plot, might be looked for, Seneca will cheerfully suspend the action for the recital of a monologue which may be quite inappropriate, on any realistic basis, to the time and situation, but entirely relevant to the character of the speaker or his mood at that moment in the drama. In the application of this technique, Seneca’s choice of dramatic speech is confined to a very narrow range; almost the only alternative to monologue (in which the speaker delivers his thoughts with equal freedom either with or without regard to the presence of any other person on the stage) is the formal ‘stichomythia’ – a line-for-line fencing match between two opponents. Not only do these styles of speech recur persistently but their subject-matter also tends to be repeated, so that certain speeches or dialogues might almost be transposable from one play to another. There is the ‘simple life’ speech (Phaedra, 482 ff., Thyestes, 446 ff., Octavia, 377ff.); the ‘haunted grove’ speech (Thyestes, 204 ff., Oedipus, 530 ff.); the ‘king must be obeyed’ dialogue (Thyestes, 204 ff., Oedipus, 509 and 699 ff., Octavia, 440 ff.).2 The speeches of the messengers, usually to report the culminating atrocity or disaster, fall into a stereotyped pattern – the description of the place, the horror of the act, the stoical courage of the sufferer; and the isolation of the speech as a narrative almost detached from the action becomes the more conspicuous when the messenger, as in Thyestes, begins with a detailed description of the place, which must have been perfectly well known to those whom he is ostensibly addressing.

  Seneca’s use of the Chorus is for the most part flaccid and unconvincing. A traditional farrago of mythology – the labours of Hercules, the loves of Jupiter, escapades of Bacchus, and torments of the damned in Hades – is served up in slightly varied forms, at more or less appropriate occasions. Yet at its best the Senecan chorus supplies examples of his best writing, in the concise lapidary style for which the Latin language is so perfect an instrument – and translation so unsatisfactory a substitute. These peaks occur when the author, restraining his exuberant verbosity and the habit of using all the possible synonyms of one word (wrath, anger, rage, ire; fear, terror, dread – to do the best we can in English) in close proximity, or quoting a string of mythological examples for one idea, brings himself to say one thing only and say it simply – as in the ode on death in Troades, 371 ff., the reflections on fate in Oedipus, 980 ff., or the thirteen lines on humble life in Thyestes, 391 ff.1 It may be noticed, however, that such passages of philosophical reflection are often inconsistent with the attitudes adopted, even by the Chorus itself, in the main current of the play. If death is the end of all, and the legends of Hades no more than idle fictions, to what purpose is all the harping on the tortures of Tantalus and Tityos, and whence come the ghosts to disturb the lives of men on earth? If fate is immutable and inevitable, why should the violence of tyrants and murderers be shown as the effective cause of tragic disasters?

  If we look among the idiosyncrasies of Seneca’s tragic style for ‘faults’, we can find plenty: excess of rhetoric, irrelevance, iteration, banality, bathos (how could he have passed that line where Oedipus, blindly groping for his final exit, with Jocasta lying dead beside him, pauses to say ‘Mind you don’t fall over your mother’!). Such lapses are the by-product of the labour of striving to extract the utmost effect from the spoken word; and in the effectiveness of the spoken word was all that mattered in Seneca’s conception of drama. He was not a constructor of tragic plots; his plays are not concerned with the moral conflict between good and good which is the essence of ‘true’ tragedy; he only recognizes the power of evil to destroy good. He does not delay or complicate
the issue by any moral dilemma exhibiting the conflict of justifiable but mutually incompatible ambitions; his tragedy is simply a disastrous event foretold and anticipated from the start, and pursued ruthlessly to its end. But nothing can be more horrifyingly final than the Senecan tragic climax. The swift and merciless destruction of Hippolytus, as the result of his father’s hasty verdict, with no word spoken between them, has a more awful grandeur than the same event in Euripides’ play, where the father and son confront each other in a forensic wrangle over the issue.

  With their strong individuality of style, but limited range of dramatic invention, the plays of Seneca, on their arrival in renaissance England, made a powerful but superficial impression. As plays, and models for plays, on the boards of the theatre, they soon dropped dead; but their language, flamboyant with every rhetorical ornament, remained as a compost-heap to enrich the soil of English dramatic verse for a couple of generations.

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  The first printed edition of Seneca’s tragedies came from the press of Andreas Gallicus at Ferrara in 1474. Others followed during the next hundred years from all the leading continental presses. Translation or imitation has been traced as far back as 1315, when a tragedy in the classical manner, Eccerinis, was produced by Albertino Mussato for the University of Padua. The introduction of the texts into English schools and universities must have been accompanied almost simultaneously by their appearance in acted form, but the earliest identifiable landmark is the performance of Troades at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1551, and of Oedipus and others in the next few years. For the decisive impact of Senecan tragedy on the vernacular theatre we must note two events in the years 1559–61: Jasper Heywood’s translation of three plays, and the performance of Gorboduc, the first original blank-verse tragedy on an English theme; to which we may add, for its importance in the history of English blank verse, the Earl of Surrey’s translation of the Aeneid.