Six Tragedies Read online

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  oxford world’s classics

  SIX TRAGEDIES

  Lucius Annaeus Seneca was born some time between 1 bce

  and 4 ce, in Corduba, in southern Spain, to a Roman equestrian

  family. Seneca’s father (‘Seneca the Elder’) had a successful rhet-

  orical career, and educated his sons in Rome, in rhetoric and phil-

  osophy. Seneca was a life-long adherent to Stoic philosophy.

  In the year 41 ce Caligula was murdered, and Claudius took over

  as emperor. Soon after the new ruler’s accession Caligula’s sister,

  Julia, was accused of committing adultery with Seneca. They were

  tried before the Senate and sentenced to death, but Claudius altered

  the sentence to exile. Seneca was sent to Corsica, where he spent the

  next eight years, and where several of his prose works were probably

  written. Perhaps many or most of the tragedies were written on

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

  intercession of Agrippina, who wanted a tutor for her son Nero.

  On Nero’s accession in 54 ce Seneca became a very powerful

  man. He was Nero’s speechwriter, and perhaps political adviser.

  Along with the praetorian prefect Burrus, he may have been respon-

  sible for the relative restraint of Nero’s early years as emperor. Their

  power diminished after 59 ce when they refused to help Nero

  kill his mother, Agrippina. In the early 60s ce Seneca officially

  retired from pu blic life. In 65 ce there was a plan to assassinate the

  emperor the (‘Pisonian Conspiracy’). Nero accused Seneca of

  involvement in the plot and forced him to commit suicide; he died

  in a hot steam-bath.

  Emily Wilson is Associate Professor in Classical studies at the

  University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Mocked with Death:

  Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton (2004) and The Death of

  Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint (2007).

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  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  SENECA

  Six Tragedies

  Translated with an Introduction and Notes by

  EMILY WILSON

  1

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  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  vii

  Note on the Text and Translation

  xxvii

  Select Bibliography

  xxix

  Chronology

  xxxiii

  Mythological Family Trees

  xxxiv

  PHAEDRA

  1

  OEDIPUS

  39

  MEDEA

  71

  TROJAN WOMEN

  103

  HERCULES FURENS

  139

  THYESTES

  179

  Explanatory Notes

  213

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  INTRODUCTION

  Biography and History

  Seneca’s tragedies are intense. They show us people who push

  themselves too far, beyond the limits of ordinary behaviour and emo-

  tion. Passion is constantly set against reason, and passion wins out:

  as Seneca’s Phaedra asks: ‘What can reason do? Passion, passion

  rules’ (184). Seneca’s characters are obsessed and destroyed by their

  emotions: they are dominated by rage, ambition, lust, jealousy,

  desire, anger, grief, madness, and fear. The literary style of these

  plays, too, is intense: they use dense, witty, hyperbolic language and

  imagery to evoke an endless struggle for more and more absolute

  power.

  Seneca’s tragedies reflect the emotional and political intensity of

  the time in which they were written. Lucius Annaeus Seneca was a

  contemporary of Jesus, born some time between 1 bce and 4 ce.1 He

  lived in one of the most interesting and dangerous periods of Roman

  history, under the emperors Tiberius, Gaius (Caligula), Claudius,

  and Nero. The Roman Republic was long dead. Over the course of

  Seneca’s lifetime the empire expanded, while Rome’s rulers grew

  ever more corrupt.

 
; Seneca was born in Corduba, in southern Spain, at a distance from

  Rome, the centre of imperial power, and both his parents had also

  been born in Spain. Seneca’s tragedies have many passages that

  evoke the vast size of the Roman empire: lists of the most far-flung

  regions lying at or beyond the borders of Roman power. The fact

  that Seneca came from an outlying part of the empire may have made

  him particularly aware of the scale of Roman dominance in the west-

  ern world of his time.

  But Corduba was not a provincial backwater; it was an important

  centre of Roman culture. Moreover, Seneca came from a privileged,

  educated, and wealthy background. His family was upper class,

  belonging to the equestrian order. Equestrians (or ‘knights’ — the

  word literally suggests horse-rider or cavalryman) were traditionally

  1 The best overview of Seneca’s life, and his interactions with the political circum-

  stances of his times, is Miriam Griffin’s Seneca: A Philosopher in Politics (Clarendon

  Press, 1976).

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  viii

  introduction

  focused on business rather than politics — in contrast to senatorial

  families, but Seneca was to rise to enormous political prominence.

  According to Tacitus, one of our main sources for this period,

  Seneca expressed to Nero, towards the end of his life, his amazement

  at his own social rise: ‘Am I, born of an equestrian father in the prov-

  inces, actually numbered among the leaders of the state? Has my

  newcomer presence achieved distinction amongst noblemen who can

  put on display a long series of glittering decorations?’2 But there is

  some rhetorical disingenuousness in the implication that Seneca’s

  rise to prominence from humble family origins was due entirely to

  the benevolence of the emperor Nero. In fact his success owed a great

  deal both to his own literary talent and to the influence of his family.

  Seneca did not come from nowhere.

  Seneca’s father (‘Seneca the Elder’) had a successful rhetorical

  career. He spent most of his life in Rome, studying oratory. He wrote

  a history of Rome (which has not survived), and also two sets of

  textbook examples of rhetorical exercises, called the Suasoriae

  (Persuasions) and Controversiae (Controversial Issues), sections of

  which are extant. These were written at the request of his sons,

  towards the end of his life.

  Seneca the Elder had three sons; Lucius Annaeus was the middle

  child. Their father brought all three to Rome to be educated. All the

  brothers became intimately involved, in very different ways, with the

  workings of Roman imperial power. The elder brother, Annaeus

  Novatus, became the governor of southern Greece. He is mentioned

  in Acts (18: 12 – 16), since it was under his rule that the Jews brought

  an accusation against Paul for persuading people to ‘worship God

  contrary to the law’. Annaeus Novatus, referred to in Acts under the

  name Gallio, dismissed the case, arguing that the issue was a matter

  of religious law, outside the realm of Roman legislation.

  The youngest brother, Annaeus Mela, did not undertake an official

  political career. He became a successful businessman, and eventually

  helped to manage Nero’s finances. He was the father of the poet

  Lucan — author of the Civil War, a great Republican epic poem

  about the war between Julius Caesar and Pompey.

  We do not know much detail about the life of Lucius Annaeus

  Seneca, the middle brother, as a teenager and young man. These

  must have been the years in which he was educated in rhetoric.

  2 Tacitus, Annals 14. 53: trans. J. C. Yardley, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford

  University Press, 2008), 330.

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  introduction

  ix

  The influence of Roman rhetorical training is evident in all of his

  work. He also trained with several different tutors in philosophy. A

  Stoic named Attalus emphasized the importance of ascetic habits: he

  recommended always sleeping on a hard bed, and avoiding luxurious

  foods such as oysters and mushrooms. Seneca became a life-long

  adherent to Stoic philosophy.3 He also studied at the school of

  Quintus Sextus, another primarily Stoic philosopher. From Sextus

  he seems to have learnt the moral practice of daily self-examination.

  He also became a vegetarian, but was talked out of it after only a year

  by his father, who thought the meatless diet was weakening his son’s

  health.

  Seneca’s health was certainly bad. He was a lifelong sufferer from

  chest problems, which may have been caused by cardiac asthma or

  angina. In his Epistle 78 to Lucilius, Seneca tells the story of how, in

  his early years, he was able to ‘adopt a defiant attitude to sickness’:

  But eventually I succumbed to it altogether. Reduced to a state of complete

  emaciation, I had arrived at a point where the catarrhal discharges were

  virtually carrying me away with them altogether. On many an occasion

  I felt an urge to cut my life short there and then, and was only held back

  by the thought of my father, who had been the kindest of fathers to me

  and was then in his old age. Having in mind not how bravely I was capable

  of dying but how far from bravely he was capable of bearing the loss,

  I commanded myself to live. There are times when even to live is an act

  of bravery.4

  After this episode, which perhaps took place when he was in his

  twenties, Seneca seems to have recuperated in Egypt. His aunt —

  his mother’s stepsister — was the wife of the prefect of Egypt at this

  time, and probably cared for him in his illness.

  Seneca returned to Rome in 31 ce. His father wanted him to begin

  a political career, and his aunt’s connections were also useful in

  achieving this aim. At some point after his return to Rome — but per-

  haps as late as 37 ce, after several more years devoted to study — he

  took his first step on to the ladder of the traditional Roman political

  career (the cursus). He was appointed as a ‘quaestor’ (a financial

  officer), and enrolled in the Senate. It was a comparatively late start

  for a political career: Seneca’s peers would have already begun to

  3 For more on Stoicism, see ‘Stoicism and Seneca’s Tragedies’, below.

  4 Epistle 78. 1 – 2: Letters from a Stoic, trans. Robin Campbell (Penguin Books, 2004),

  131.

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  x

  introduction

  climb the ladder in their twenties, while he had spent those years

  being ill and studying philosophy.

  After his return to Rome Seneca quickly became a well-known

  public figure. His success was as much due to his literary and rhet-

  orical skills as to his family background. He began writing: we know

  that during the reign of Tiberius he wrote the Consolation to Marcia,

  a philosophical work addressed to a woman whose son had died.

  Seneca puts Marcia’s grief in the context of universal mortality, sug-

  gesting that if she can take a larger perspective she may be able to

  accept her individual loss. The treatise shows Seneca’s conceptual


  and stylistic energy at work even at this early stage of his career.

  Seneca became famous as an orator as well as a writer. But the

  growing admiration for Seneca among the Roman elite was not

  shared by the emperor himself. Gaius Caligula did not like him;

  perhaps he was wary of his influence among powerful people. The

  Greek historian Dio Cassius tells us that Caligula threatened to force

  Seneca to commit suicide, on the grounds that he had pleaded too

  well before the Senate. He was spared only because one of Caligula’s

  mistresses argued that Seneca was tubercular and likely to die soon

  anyway.5 The story may well be false, or at least exaggerated. But

  Seneca’s rhetorical fluency does seem to have aroused the annoyance

  of Caligula, even if he did not threaten him with death. The Roman

  historian Suetonius tells us that the emperor had ‘so much contempt

  for more subtle and refined kinds of writing’ that he said of Seneca,

  ‘then very much in fashion’, that his compositions were ‘mere school

  essays’, and that his work was ‘sand without lime’.6 The implication

  of the metaphor is that there is no binding agent in Seneca’s rhetoric

  to cement all the pointed witticisms together.

  In the year 41 ce Caligula was murdered, and Claudius took

  over as emperor. Soon after the new ruler’s accession the two sisters

  of Caligula who had been in exile, Julia and Agrippina, were allowed

  to return to Rome, but some months later Julia was accused of com-

  mitting adultery with Seneca. They were tried before the Senate

  and sentenced to death, but Claudius altered the sentence to exile.

  Seneca was sent to Corsica, where he spent the next eight years.

  He had to leave behind his whole family, including his wife and

  young son.

  5 Dio, Roman History, 59. 19.

  6 Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, ‘Caligula’, 53: trans. Catharine Edwards, Oxford

  World’s Classics (Oxford University Press, 2000), 163.

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  introduction

  xi

  It is not clear whether there was any truth in the accusations. One

  of our sources, Cassius Dio, suggests that the charges were trumped

  up by Claudius’ wife Messalina, because she was jealous of Julia.