Six Tragedies Read online

  All nights, all days too, dark Dis’s portals lie open.

  But to recall those steps, to escape to the fresh air above you,

  There lies the challenge, the labour!15

  The allusion raises a number of important questions about the

  relationship of Hercules’ labours to those of Aeneas, founder of the

  Roman race. If coming back is easy for Hercules but hard for Aeneas,

  that might suggest that the Greek outdoes the Roman hero. Or

  Hercules’ lack of struggle, lack of ‘labour’, even over his most

  impressive labours, might somehow undermine his achievements.

  Or perhaps the Virgilian intertext functions as a reminder that

  Hercules takes far too rosy a vision of his own success — since the

  rest of the play suggests that it is much harder than he had thought

  to escape entirely from Hell.

  Examples could be multiplied of Seneca’s complex and thoughtful

  use of earlier Roman poetry in his tragedies — including the Odes of

  Horace in Seneca’s own choral odes, and allusions to Roman elegy,

  as well as many references to earlier hexameter poetry (such as

  Virgil’s Aeneid, Georgics, and Eclogues, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and

  Lucretius’ On the Nature of the Universe). Seneca’s dense style and

  dense use of allusion allow him to create some wonderful descriptive

  passages evoking the natural world — as in the first choral ode of

  Hercules Furens (125 ff.), which draws on Virgil, Horace, Lucretius,

  and others to evoke the rough but innocent life of the herdsman in

  the fields (144 – 52):

  Hard work gets up, creates anxiety,

  and opens everyone’s house. The shepherd drives

  his flock out to the field, and gathers up

  fodder icy-white with frost. The calf

  whose horns have not yet sprouted from his brow

  frolics free in the open meadow;

  the empty udders of the cows grow fat.

  The cheeky little kid wobbles about,

  his legs unsteady on the soft green grass.

  15 Virgil, Aeneid, trans. Frederick Ahl, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford University

  Press, 2007), 132, lines 126 – 9.

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  introduction

  Seneca spreads himself in the choral passages, developing rich and

  detailed descriptions of the sky, the sea, landscape, and far-flung

  places of the world.

  But despite the use of non-dramatic authors as models and refer-

  ence-points in Seneca’s tragedies, these plays are composed with a

  keen awareness of the demands of dramatic form. This same ode of

  Hercules Furens, for example, uses allusions to the lyric motif of carpe

  diem (a phrase coined by Horace, in Odes, 1. 11), to comment specific-

  ally on the action of the play. The Chorus’ generalizations about

  the wickedness of wealth and luxury, and the importance of living

  for the moment, have particular point in the context of Hercules’

  deliberate descent into the underworld.

  The performance of Seneca’s plays is a vexed question. We have

  no external evidence about their staging, so arguments one way or

  the other rely on internal evidence from the plays themselves, as well

  as speculation about what might have been plausible in the context

  of imperial Rome. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centur-

  ies it became the scholarly orthodoxy to claim that these plays were

  not composed for the stage at all, but for private recitation, by a

  single performer. Now the pendulum of opinion has swung back the

  other way, and most scholars agree that they were probably written

  for some kind of dramatic performance, though fairly certainly not

  for the public theatre; they may well have been used for private

  performances, for the enjoyment of the emperor and his court.

  Reception

  Seneca was one of the most prolific, versatile, and influential of all

  classical Latin writers. Arguably, no other classical writer except

  Virgil has had so deep, so widespread, and so long-lasting an influ-

  ence on European and British literature.

  During the Middle Ages and early modern periods Seneca was one

  of the most read and most imitated authors of antiquity. His plays

  had an enormous influence on European tragedy, particularly in Italy

  and France, and on Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy in England.

  The early modern revenge tragedy

  —

  including The Revenger’s

  Tragedy, Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, Shakespeare’s Titus

  Andronicus and Hamlet, and John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi — could

  hardly have existed without Seneca. Christopher Marlowe’s dramas

  about men who push for ever greater power or knowledge or world

  * * *

  introduction

  xxv

  domination — such as Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus — translate the

  Senecan tragic plot into Renaissance terms.

  Particular figures from his plays had an obvious impact on early

  modern literature: for instance, Seneca’s Hercules — the mad hero

  who turns on his own loved ones — has obvious affinities with such

  characters as Hieronimo from Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy and

  Shakespeare’s Othello. But Seneca’s style and the general mood of his

  works were equally influential. Thomas Nashe famously satirized the

  tendency of English tragedians at the time of Shakespeare to use — or

  plagiarize — techniques from Seneca in order to achieve a bombastic

  effect: ‘English Seneca read by candlelight yieldes manie good

  sentences — “Bloud is a begger” and so forth; and if you intreate

  him faire in a frostie morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets, I

  should say handfulls, of tragical speeches.’16 Seneca’s plays were well

  known in this period to all schoolboys, who studied them in Latin in

  class, but the tragedies also reached a much broader audience

  through a very popular set of vernacular translations, Seneca: His

  tenne tragedies, edited by Thomas Newton (1581).

  Even when British and European drama became more focused on

  the drawing-room than the bloodbath, and moved away from expli-

  citly Senecan models, Seneca’s tragedies continued to be closely read

  by all educated people. But in the nineteenth and for much of the

  twentieth century Senecan tragedy lost its central place in the

  European and Anglo-American canon. His work was dismissed as

  bombastic and melodramatic, crude in comparison with the work of

  his Athenian predecessors.

  Seneca’s work seems now, at last, to be back in academic vogue.

  ‘Rhetorical’ and ‘didactic’ are no longer dirty words. Senecan drama

  has suffered for too long from comparisons with Athenian tragedy; it

  is perhaps partly thanks to the recognition that Greek drama, too, is

  a messy, political, emotional, self-conscious, and unrealistic genre

  that Seneca’s plays can begin to be appreciated again. The upsurge

  of interest in Seneca coincides with a recognition that the term

  ‘Silver Latin’ — which implies that the writers of Augustan Rome

  constitute the Golden Age of Latin — is an unfairly derogatory way

  to refer to the rich literature of the empire.


  On one level, the current revival of interest in imperial Latin in

  general, and Seneca in particular, needs no explanation: an unjustly

  neglected and important oeuvre is beginning again to get its due.

  16 Thomas Nashe, Preface to Robert Greene’s ‘Menaphon’ (1589).

  * * *

  xxvi

  introduction

  But it is also striking how many of Seneca’s central themes seem

  particularly urgent and relevant in the current political and social

  climate. He is a writer for uncertain and violent times, who forces us

  to think about the difference between compromise and hypocrisy,

  and about how, if at all, a person can be good, calm, or happy in a

  corrupt society and under constant threat of death.

  Seneca’s tragedies can be read as a sustained meditation on various

  problems of evil. Why do people — and gods — do terrible things?

  How much depravity are human beings capable of ? What limits are

  there — if any — to our capacity for rage, hatred, self-promotion, lust,

  and violence? And what drives us to be our worst selves? These plays

  are the product of a sensational, frightening, and oppressive period

  of history; perhaps we are again ready to understand and appreciate

  their terrible cruelty, linguistic and psychological excesses, and their

  black humour.

  * * *

  NOTE ON THE TEXT AND TRANSLATION

  The critical edition used for this translation is the Oxford Classical

  Text, edited by Otto Zwierlein (Clarendon Press, 1986). In some cases

  I have used different punctuation from Zwierlein’s, and have included

  lines which his edition brackets. My lineation does not always exactly

  correspond to his in choral passages. In a very few cases, I have

  adopted a different textual reading from that of Zwierlein.1

  Translating Seneca into modern English, while staying faithful to

  the feel of the original, is a challenge. On the most basic level, verse

  drama is no longer a living form on the Anglo-American stage: mod-

  ern playwrights compose in prose. But Seneca was a poet, and it

  would be highly misleading to translate his carefully constructed

  lines into prose.

  Latin verse is entirely different from English verse, since it is a

  quantitative metre — based on a pattern in the length of syllables —

  rather than a stress metre, based on a pattern of stressed and

  unstressed syllables. Any choice of metre in which to render a Latin

  poet in English will therefore be approximate; English quantitative

  metre is more or less impossible.

  Most recent translators have assumed that iambic pentameter is

  the only possible metre for rendering the Senecan line. The argu-

  ment for pentameter is based primarily on the history of English

  verse: since Shakespeare, we assume that verse drama will be in iam-

  bic pentameter. But Seneca’s lines are actually longer than the

  English pentameter. His metre consists of three sets of two iambic

  feet, with a number of possible variations and substitutions. I have

  therefore used a line which is primarily, but not exclusively, iambic,

  and which varies in length from five to six, and occasionally seven,

  feet. I have tried to make my English correspond, line-for-line, to

  Seneca’s Latin. My hope in doing this is to give a better indication

  of the density of the language of these plays: Seneca crams a great

  deal of thought and information into a single line.

  I have not attempted to replicate Seneca’s choral metres in English

  except for one passage from Medea (‘Force of fl ame ...’), rendered in

  1 Phaedra, line 28: adopted Phyle not flius. Medea, line 23: adopted optet not opto.

  Medea, lines 659 – 61: text is corrupt here; in the interest of readability I have followed

  the text in Hine’s edition. Troades, line 586: I have adopted timens not tumens.

  * * *

  xxviii

  note on the text and translation

  English saphhics to give an example if Seneca’s rhythms; but I have

  varied the rhythms and line lengths in lyric passages, to give some

  indication of the varying verse forms. Shorter lines in my translation

  usually correspond to shorter lines in the original.

  Seneca has a highly allusive way of writing, which assumes a fairly

  well-educated audience or readership. The many mythological and

  geographical allusions pose a particular challenge for the modern

  reader, who is unlikely to have the same degree of familiarity with

  Graeco-Roman myth that the average educated Roman spectator or

  reader would have had. In order to re-create the ease with which a

  Roman reader would have understood Seneca’s terminology, I have

  erased or glossed some of his proper names: for instance, I have

  sometimes rendered ‘Boreas’ simply as ‘the north wind’.

  Capturing the tone of Senecan tragedy in modern English is also a

  challenge. I have aimed to make my version readable, speakable, and

  contemporary, but without sacrificing the essential features of

  Seneca’s tragic diction. Seneca himself is not always readable, not

  always easy, and certainly not always down-to-earth. I have kept

  some of the colourfulness in the style, trying not to clip the wings of

  the most purple and bombastic passages. I have also tried to stay

  faithful both to Seneca’s verbal fluency and to his concision. At

  times — as in the opening speech of Phaedra — Seneca creates a rhe-

  torical effect from verbal redundancy: he does not name one place-

  name where twenty will do, and he builds up an atmosphere by

  layering the components of a list. But at other moments he special-

  izes in putting complex thoughts into the minimum number of

  words. It is tempting for the translator who hopes to create readable,

  modern English to try to counteract both these tendencies: to cut

  back on the verbosity and to expand the dense witticisms. I have

  aimed for a lively version which will also allow Seneca something of

  his own weird voice, and invite new readers to have their own

  responses to these strange, dark plays.

  I have deliberately not added stage directions to my translation, on

  the grounds that to do so would be to pre-empt judgement on ques-

  tions of staging. But Seneca’s tragedies are certainly stageable, and

  there have been several successful recent productions. I hope that my

  translation may inspire actors and directors to create new stage ver-

  sions of these plays, and bring them to life for the new century.

  * * *

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Critical Editions of Senecan Tragedies

  Agamemnon, edited with a commentary by R. J. Tarrant (Cambridge

  University Press, 1976).

  Hercules furens, edited with introduction and commentary by John G.

  Fitch (Cornell University Press, 1987).

  Medea, edited with translation and commentary by H. M. Hine (Aris &

  Phillips, 2000).

  Medea, edited with introduction and commentary by C. D. N. Costa

  (Clarendon Press, 1973).

  Octavia, attributed to Seneca, edited with translation, introduction, and

  commentary by A. J. Boyle (Oxford University Press, 2008).
r />   Phaedra, edited by Michael Coffy and Ronald Mayer (Cambridge

  University Press, 1990).

  Phoenissae, introduction and commentary by Marica Frank (Brill, 1995).

  Troades, edited with translation, introduction, and commentary by

  A. J. Boyle (Oxford University Press, 1994).

  Seneca’s ‘Troades’: A Literary Introduction, edited with translation,

  introduction, and commentary by Elaine Fantham (Princeton University

  Press, 1982).

  Thyestes, edited with introduction and commentary by R. J. Tarrant

  (Scholars Press, 1985).

  Seneca’s Tragedies, edited and translated by John Fitch, Loeb Classical

  Library, 2 vols. (Harvard University Press, 2002).

  History and Cultural Contexts

  Braund, Susanna Morton, and Christopher Gill (eds.), The Passions in

  Roman Thought and Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

  Claassen, Jo-Marie, Displaced Persons: The Literature of Exile from Cicero

  to Boethius (University of Wisconsin Press, 1999).

  Eden, P. T. (ed. and trans.), ‘Apocolocyntosis’ — Seneca (Cambridge

  University Press, 1984).

  Elsner, Jasl, and Jamie Masters, Reflections of Nero: Culture, History and

  Representation (North Carolina University Press, 1994).

  Garzetti, Albino, trans. J. R. Foster, From Tiberius to the Antonines:

  A History of the Roman Empire, AD 14 –192 (Methuen, 1974).

  Fairweather, Janet, Seneca the Elder (Cambridge University Press, 1981).

  Graves, Robert, I, Claudius (Penguin, 1978).

  * * *

  xxx

  select bibliography

  Griffin, M., Seneca: A Philosopher in Politics (Oxford University Press,

  1976).

  —— Nero: The End of a Dynasty (Yale University Press, 1985).

  Hutchinson, G. O., Latin Literature from Seneca to Juvenal: A Critical

  Study (Clarendon Press, 1993).

  Massey, Michael (ed. and trans.), Society in Imperial Rome: Selections

  from Juvenal, Petronius, Martial, Tacitus, Seneca, and Pliny (Cambridge

  University Press, 1982).

  Sørensen, Villy, Seneca the Humanist at the Court of Nero (Chicago

  University Press, 1976).

  Stoicism

  Brennan, Tad, Stoic Life: Emotions, Duties and Fate (Clarendon Press, 2005).