SENECAN SATIRE AND POETRY: DRAMA OF THE AGE
_Apocolocyntosis_—A summary—Title and conclusion—Spirit and purpose of the skit—Menippean qualities—Style and metres.
Seneca’s short poems—The nine tragedies—Authenticity—When written—Not intended for the stage—Contrast with Greek spirit—Sources of the tragedies—Deviations in plot from Greek originals—Influence of previous Latin dramatists—Influence of Euripides—Outstanding defects—The unintentionally ludicrous—Effective qualities of style—Thrust-and-parry lines—The epigrammatic—Poetry—Philosophical passages—Stoicism—Roman colour—Metre—Seneca’s influence on Italian and French drama—Seneca and Elizabethan tragedy—Transmission of stock characters and horrors—A quieter stream of influence.
The _Octauia_ play—Date and authorship—Historical content—Misplaced erudition.
Comic drama of the age—Emperor and theatre—Curiatius Maternus and other tragic poets.
SENECAN SATIRE, POETRY AND DRAMA
The _Apocolocyntosis_,[693] or “pumpkinification” of the Emperor Claudius, being, as a Menippean Satire, to some extent in verse, is a convenient link between Seneca the prose-writer and Seneca the poet. Many light and flippant touches in this skit, coupled with the metrical facility shown when prose is dropped, enable us to believe that he could have also written the verse-epigrams ascribed to him. A summary may convey some notion of its contents and spirit.
“I wish,” he begins, “to record the proceedings in heaven on October 13th in the new year which opens this fortunate era. No concession is to be made to malice or favour. It’s simple truth.” Then the author pokes fun at historians, philosophers and poets. One may inquire if this is to be a true story of Claudius’s translation? But who ever demanded witnesses from a historian? The exact hour of day? Well, you may expect philosophers will say the same thing before clocks will! Was it afternoon? Oh, these poets! not content with raving about a sunrise or a sunset, they must interfere with our noontide:
Now Phoebus’ car had passed its mid career.
That was the very time when Claudius lay dying, and he was an unconscionable time over it. Mercury had to remonstrate with one of the Fates: “Isn’t the poor wretch ever to have a rest? Why, it’s sixty-four years since he started gasping. What grudge have you got against him and the nation?” But Clotho remarked, “I wanted to give him a tiny bit of time longer, till he should confer Roman citizenship on the two or three left without it!...” However, she consents to leave a few foreigners in the world, just as a kernel (_in semen_):
Round the foul spindle then she twined the thread And snapped the life-span of Prince Dunderhead.
Meanwhile Lachesis has a new golden thread to manipulate—Nero’s; and Apollo is there to chant approval:
Ye Fates, cut not this short: let him outlive The span of mortal life, like me in face, Like me in grace, my peer in voice and song....
“Nothing loth to look kindly on a handsome man, Lachesis went on spinning by the handful, and presented Nero with many extra years, on her own (_annos de suo donat_). Just then Claudius bubbled forth (_ebulliit_) the ghost, and consequently ceased to convey even the impression of being alive! He breathed his last as he was listening to a company of comedians, so there’s good reason for dreading _them_!”
(_The scene shortly after changes._)
“Now listen to what took place in heaven. My informant will guarantee my accuracy (_fides penes auctorem erit_). Jupiter had got word that a person had arrived—a rather tall person and rather grey: he was threatening something or other, it was thought, for he was constantly shaking his head: he dragged the right foot. They’d asked what his country was, but couldn’t make his answer out. He wasn’t a Greek; he wasn’t a Roman—didn’t belong to any known race, in fact.”
So, at Jupiter’s suggestion, Hercules, who had travelled the whole world over, was told off to interview this outlandish stranger. Greatly troubled, Hercules thought a thirteenth labour was upon him! Still, as the new arrival looked like some sort of human being (_uisus est quasi homo_), he tried him with Greek—a line from Homer. Claudius was delighted to find savants (_philologos_) in heaven; there would therefore be some room for his own works on history! So he answered in Greek, and, Roman-like, claimed Troy as his place of origin. Unluckily for this remark, the Goddess Malaria, who had attended him from Rome, interrupted with a flat contradiction, “It’s an absolute lie. He was born at Lyons: he’s a genuine Gaul: so, of course, he took Rome—the proper thing for a Gaul to do!” Thereat Claudius blazed out in anger and (like the Queen of Hearts in _Alice in Wonderland_) shouted, “Off with her head!” But you might have fancied the bystanders were his own freedmen for all the notice they took! Thereupon Hercules called him to order: “You just mark my words. Drop playing the silly ass. You’ve come where mice nibble iron. Make a clean breast of it—else I’ll bang the _sottise_ (_alogias_) out of you.” And to look more awful, Hercules assumed the tragic rôle, and declaimed:
What place of birth you vaunt, be quick to show; Else felled to earth this club shall lay you low. This club has often butchered fiery kings! Why babble these uncertain murmurings?...
Claudius’s reply, as far as it could be understood, was an attempt to mollify Hercules, reminding him of days spent by the emperor on law-cases near his temple.
His success in this attempt must have been described in a passage now lost; for we are suddenly present at the debate in heaven concerning Claudius’s eligibility for deification. Some deity is quizzing Hercules on his proposal:
“Only do tell us what sort of a god you want that creature made. He can’t be an Epicurean god; for such a one _ne dérange ni soi-même ni les autres_ (οὔτε αὐτὸς πρᾶγμα ἔχει τι οὔτε ἄλλοις παρέχει). There’s a bit of the Stoic deity in him, I can see; for he’s got neither heart nor head.... Is this person to make our crooked ways straight? Why, he doesn’t know what to do in his own bedroom, and now he ‘scans the purlieus of the sky’—wants to be a god! He’s not content with having a temple in Britain and with savages for worshippers!”
At this point Jupiter “spies strangers” in the House, and in accordance with the rules Claudius has to retire. Janus, on being asked to express his views, makes a long speech too fast for the shorthand writer to keep up with (_quae notarius persequi non potuit_). Arguing that the honour of being a god must not be given to the _canaille_, he proposes a motion of exclusion in general terms. The next speaker, Diespiter, moves that Claudius be made a god in view of his relationship to Augustus and Augusta, and in view of Romulus’s need for a comrade in devouring boiled turnips! Many speeches are made and Hercules canvasses the gods in Claudius’s favour; but Augustus opposes in an oration of scathing irony:
“I call you to witness, Conscript Fathers, that since I was made a god, I have never uttered a word. I always mind my own business. But I can no longer disguise my feelings. Was it for this that I secured peace on land and sea?... Words fall short of my indignation.... This man, Conscript Fathers, who looks as though he couldn’t disturb a fly, used to kill folk as readily as a dog squats down.”
Claudius is then denounced as a murderer of Augustus’s descendants, and is apostrophized with the question why he passed death-sentences in cases that were untried:
“Where is this usual? It’s not done in heaven. Look at Jupiter. He’s been ruler for ever so many years, but Vulcan’s the only person whose leg he has broken. He lost his temper with his wife and hung her up, but he didn’t kill her, did he?... Who’s going to worship Claudius as a god? Who’s to believe in him? Make a god of such as he is, and nobody will believe you are gods yourselves!”
Augustus’s motion for deportation is carried, and Claudius is haled off to the lower regions by Mercury. As they pass down the Via Sacra, they can see Claudius’s funeral in progress—a lovely (_formosissimum_) funeral and an extravagant one, obviously the obsequies of a god (_plane ut scires deum efferri_). And now Claudius realizes that he is dead, since there is din enough for him to hear the anapaestic dirge:
Pour out your weepings, your sorrows make known: Deafen the forum with many a groan!... O weep for the dead, for none had the head To settle suits faster, and every point master, Tho’ only one side of the case had been tried, And oft he had heard from neither a word! Who now will be drudge, and thro’ the year judge?
All this was most enjoyable. Claudius would have liked to watch his funeral longer, but he is hurried off below. Now, who should be in the lower world to meet him but his freedman Narcissus, spick and span, fresh from his bath? He had got ahead by a short cut (_antecesserat compendiaria_), and says he, “What have _gods_ to do with mere mortals?” But Mercury breaks in: “Be sharp and tell them we’re coming.” Narcissus flies off faster than you could say the word. Everything slopes in hell, you must know: it’s easy going down. So Claudius, gouty though he was, arrived at Pluto’s door in a twinkle. Cerberus, “the hundred-headed brute” to use Horace’s phrase (_ut ait Horatius, belua centiceps_), was on the scene; and it was a little trying to face a shaggy black monster-dog after being used to a small whitish pet-bitch (_subalbam canem in deliciis habere adsueuerat_). But Narcissus shouted the announcement “Claudius is coming!” and immediately there was a throng of his victims to give him a reception! Then, as they crowd round, consuls, prefects, relatives and freedmen, the absent-minded emperor remarks, “_Voici mes amis partout!_ How did _you_ come here?” to which they answer, “Who but yourself sent us, you assassin of all your friends? To court with him!” So he is brought before Aeacus, and statistics are produced of those he had put to death: and Aeacus, being a person of perfect fairness, judges Claudius on Claudian principles; that is, he hears only the case for the prosecution! The verdict is “Guilty.” What should the sentence be? A new sort of penalty is wanted, and, after discussion, Aeacus decrees that Claudius must rattle dice for ever in a box with no bottom. The convict had already begun this fruitless task, when all of a sudden Caligula appeared on the scene to claim him as a slave. Witnesses prove that they had seen Caligula thrashing him: so clearly he must have been in servitude, and is therefore assigned to Caligula, who gives him as a gift to that most righteous judge, Aeacus: and Aeacus hands him over to his Greek freedman Menander to be a law-clerk in attendance upon cases for evermore.
So the satire ends. Some critics will not allow the author to be funny in his own way, and they express dissatisfaction. They gravely point out that Claudius is not turned into a pumpkin, a metamorphosis which they understood was promised in the title: therefore they urge that perhaps the real conclusion is lost, or perhaps the real pumpkinification belonged to another pamphlet altogether.[694] There is no need to be so literal: Claudius, an imperial applicant for divine honours, is sufficiently metamorphosed when he is degraded from heaven to a trumpery post in hell, and when throughout the satire he is treated as a silly pumpkin-head[695] of a man. The title in the best MS. (Sangallensis) is _Diui Claudii incipit Apotheosis_ (spelt Ἀποθήοσις) _Annei Senece per satiram_, which does not, at first sight, square with the title _Apocolocyntosis_ recorded by Dio Cassius.[696] Yet, on examination, the MS. title betrays a confirmatory corruption. It is tautological, as it stands, for one does not deify a deified emperor; all, however, is intelligible if it be, as Bücheler guessed, a contamination of an original superscription _Diui Claudii Apocolocyntosis_ with a gloss, _Apotheosis per satiram_, to explain the parody implicit in the rare word.
The conclusion has been otherwise impeached.[697] Some have thought the Caligula episode illogical after Claudius had been sentenced to perpetual dice-playing: others have thought the end too abrupt to be effective. Logic, however, is not to be demanded from a merry jest, and the fun lies exactly in its inconsequent suddenness. So far is the _dénoûment_ from being pointless that in reality its point is double. Firstly, it represents a ruler who had yielded excessive power at his court to freedmen, as being now adjudged a slave, and transferred, like the veriest chattel, to be a freedman’s underling; secondly, it represents one who had a passion for acting the judge on earth as doomed to remain a mere law-clerk (_a cognitionibus_) in the infernal regions till the end of time. Several references to Claudius’s freedmen in the body of the satire are in keeping with this conclusion, especially the ironical gibe at their contemptuous disobedience;[698] similarly, there are previous references to his performances in law which make the finale perfectly appropriate.[699]
The question of Seneca’s authorship involves different problems. Is the satire a likely product of his genius? How could he consistently write such an attack after his grovelling adulation of Claudius in the _Consolatio ad Polybium_,[700] and after composing the funeral laudation for Nero to pronounce at the ceremonial sanctification of Claudius?[701] The two questions of ability and consistency must be kept separate. About Seneca’s versatility and control of brilliant style there can be no doubt, while humorous and satiric qualities are not wanting in his _Letters_: about his consistency it must be allowed that this never was his strong point. Few philosophers are more vulnerable than the Stoic who amassed wealth and the moralist who drafted exculpatory orations to be delivered by a tyrant. Modern feeling cannot but see indecency in this bitter invective against a deceased sovereign. Seneca laughs mercilessly at the dead emperor’s frailties, mental and physical—his pedantic stupidity, offensive absent-mindedness, capricious temper, unreasoning tyranny, shambling gait, and stammering utterance. The unprepossessing picture is painted with increasing bias until in Augustus’s denunciation of Claudius the author takes full opportunity for venting his spleen. There is no intention of being any fairer than Aristophanes was to Euripides or Socrates. One must expect nothing about the better aspects of Claudius’s policy or scholarship, or about the building schemes of his reign, nor any pity for the deep damnation of his taking off. Cunningly his contemptuous dismissal by the Fates is set in juxtaposition with Apollo’s praise of his young successor. A feeble dotard had gone: with the new _princeps_ a golden era would return. Ignoble we may call it, but it can at any rate be explained. Years before, to suit his own longings for recall from exile, Seneca had resorted to gross flattery of Claudius in addressing Polybius; he had by request composed a formal speech on the dead emperor to suit the immediate state-occasion; but now, shortly after, he was quick enough to see that no reverence was shown to Claudius’s memory. His own oration, spoken by Nero, had been received with undisguised merriment when it mentioned “the foresight and sagacity”[702] of the departed prince; and Nero’s conscience over the poisoning of Claudius troubled the emperor so little that he came to joke[703] about mushrooms as food for the gods—had not Claudius gone by that means to heaven? On the whole, however, it suited the poisoners, Nero and Agrippina, that Seneca should take an opportunity of adopting their official version of the death and say nothing awkward about mushrooms. At the same time, if he depreciated Claudius and magnified Nero, so much the better: the predecessor would be the less missed, and the successor the more commended on the threshold of his reign. So at last Seneca’s chance came for unmasking his true attitude. He detested Claudius:[704] he had an old score to wipe out: he probably felt a sincere contempt for his pedantry: and thus a clever and venomous pasquinade was written by a man of flesh and blood, a Spaniard who could let his feelings—especially those of hatred—go. It rings as if it must have been written very soon after the official deification which it burlesques, _i.e._ soon after the middle of October, A.D. 54.[705] The latest occurrence to which the author refers is the death of the imperial freedman Narcissus, whose removal followed hard upon that of his master.
The idea of a visit to the other world was familiar in ancient epic and drama, and could be made to serve either a serious or a comic purpose. The gods are treated by Seneca cavalierly; but Lucilius, Lucretius, even Cicero, had accustomed readers to such literary irreverence, and in Seneca no systematic attack on state religion was contemplated. Combined with the spirit and form of Menippean satire, such a framework and such an attitude gave excellent promise of burlesque effect; for the Menippean satire, thanks to Cynic traditions, encouraged the outspoken, the abrupt, the inconsequent, the startling in manner. Inherited from Menippus of Gadara and transmitted through Varro, it could be employed as an irresponsible and defiant medley. Seneca’s satire is less akin to the generally good-natured outlook of Varro[706] than to that Cynicism in Menippus which is the secret of the Gadarene’s attraction for Lucian.[707] But while Seneca shared in the spirit and conventions of the traditional Menippean, his place in this succession must not obscure his originality. The _Apocolocyntosis_ is far too fresh and lively, too direct in its satiric bearing upon an actual personality, to be anything but work of an individual stamp. Obviously it is in many respects a contrast to the contemporary Menippean of Petronius. It had its own descendants, too: long after the classic age, two definite imitations of Seneca’s satire appeared; one, Lipsius’s _Satura Menippea_ towards the end of the sixteenth century; the other Cunaeus’s _Sardi Venales_ in 1612.
Critics have differed about the style of the _Apocolocyntosis_ in comparison with that of Seneca’s philosophical works. But two things have to be remembered: Menippean Satire does not claim the finish of style that suits philosophy; on the other hand, so expert a writer as Seneca had the ability to produce a fresh type of prose, if necessary, and to sprinkle it with homely proverbs, colloquialisms, slang plebeian grammar and a plebeian want of syntax.[708] Adroitness in turning from higher to lower style is nowhere better seen than in his contemporary Petronius.
The versification is that of a skilled hand. The interspersed hexameters are comparable in quality with those of the epigrams and minor poems ascribed to Seneca. Behind the anapaestic dirge on Claudius lies the author’s facility gained in writing choral odes for his tragedies,[709] and even the fourteen iambic _senarii_ exhibit the same fondness for anapaests[710] which marks his dramatic speeches and dialogues.
* * * * *
Seneca as poet must be judged not only by his dramas but by a collection of brief pieces[711] in the _Anthologia Latina_ compiled at Carthage in the sixth century. Of the opening seventy-three poems three are assigned by the MSS. to Seneca; but most, or indeed all, of the seventy-three may be his. Except a few in hendecasyllables, the poems are elegiac. They touch on miscellaneous themes—the mutability of things, a quiet life, the hardships of exile, republican heroes like Cato and Pompey, the true friendship of such as Crispus (presumably Passienus Crispus, the able orator who was consul a second time in A.D. 44), the false friendship of the great, imperial victories, luxury, riches, and the evils of civil warfare. While the reader is prepared for Stoic lines on simplicity of life and the dissolution of the universe, he is perhaps surprised to find erotic poems in the collection, until he realizes that Seneca was no exception to the common practice whereby Romans amused themselves with composing verses inferior in morality to their authors’ actual behaviour.[712] Even in the amorous pieces, however, it is a moralist that professes to speak—he sets limits to immodesty, and admires the fair one who relies on natural rather than artificial charms (_naturae simplicitate ualet_). There is, at the same time, in other poems much that fits the true Seneca—lines to his native Corduba (xix.), a reference to his two brothers (v. 14), and, elsewhere, to his little nephew, plausibly identified with Lucan:
Our sweetly prattling Marcus will, I pray, Challenge both uncles’ eloquence some day.[713]
He curses Corsica, the island
That terrifies at summer’s earliest glow,[714]
and can be yet crueller as the season advances. Amidst a plentiful lack of blessings, there are only two things to find there, “the place of exile and the exile’s self” (_exul et exilium_). He asks merely for an undisturbed existence: “Let the praetorship fall to those who wish it,” he says, and it is significant that Seneca had not risen higher than quaestor before his banishment. His fulsome and repeated eulogies on Claudius’s victories are partly redeemed by their romantic association with distant Britain “severed by the dreary sea” (_uasto disiuncta Britannia ponto_),
Where the chill constellation of the North Outshineth aye the stars that do not set.[715]
The nine plays[716] ascribed to Seneca in the Codex Etruscus and other MSS. of the same family are given in the following order: _Hercules_ (_Furens_), _Troades_, _Phoenissae_, _Medea_, _Phaedra_, _Oedipus_, _Agamemnon_, _Thyestes_, _Hercules_ (_Oetaeus_). Inferior MSS. give the alternative titles of _Thebais_ for _Phoenissae_ and _Hippolytus_ for _Phaedra_. They add the _Octauia_, which cannot be by Seneca for reasons to be mentioned later.
The testimony to the manysidedness of Seneca[717] is so strong that there is no need to pay attention to Sidonius Apollinaris’s blunder in separating Seneca the dramatist from Seneca the philosopher. It is true that Quintilian does not give Seneca’s name in his list of dramatists; but he certifies his interest in tragic diction (VIII. iii. 31), and quotes part of a line from the _Medea_ as Seneca’s (IX. ii. 8). Six plays, _Medea_, _Hercules Furens_, _Troades_, _Phaedra_, _Agamemnon_ and _Thyestes_, are cited by Latin authors or grammarians. The remaining three, _Oedipus_, _Phoenissae_ and _Hercules Oetaeus_ are, like the others, regarded in the MSS. as by Seneca. These three have had their authenticity attacked, but scholars generally accept all but portions of the _Hercules Oetaeus_. This last play extends, as we have it, to nearly 2000 lines, and its very length, along with echoes of previous plays, arouses suspicion: further investigation into such a feature as its double chorus (in which it resembles Seneca’s _Agamemnon_) or into its change of scene leads to the conclusion that it is a patchwork due, in part, to other hands than Seneca’s. The attribution of the plays as a whole to Seneca is confirmed by internal evidence. The short pointed _sententiae_ both in form and in expression resemble his prose: and there are frequent parallels in thought, especially if, as often occurs, the thought assumes a Stoic cast.[718]
The question when Seneca wrote the tragedies is one which has received various and inconclusive answers. It has been dogmatically asserted[719] that most of them were composed after 54 and none before 49. Recently,[720] fresh emphasis has been laid on Quintilian’s recollection of hearing _praefationes_ in which the propriety of a phrase for tragedy was discussed between Seneca and Pomponius Secundus. The plausible suggestion is made that these _praefationes_ were spoken, not written, introductions to public readings of tragedies. Quintilian mentions the incident as a reminiscence from his youth, and, as he was born about A.D. 35, this implies a date in the early fifties of the first century. The point bears on the two problems whether Seneca’s dramas were meant for the stage and when they were composed. It may be that some of Seneca’s plays, like some by Secundus, were read, if they were not written, in the early fifties, and a desire to foster in his pupil Nero an interest in Greek adaptations might explain why Seneca should give tragic readings about that period; but it does not follow that all the plays are to be so dated. Pomponius Secundus had been in Germany in 50 and 51, and his debate with Seneca may therefore have followed his return. He had, however, produced plays or at least some kind of dramatic compositions before, as we know from the storm raised against him in the theatre in A.D. 47.[721] So too Seneca, who returned from banishment in 49, may have written plays during his years of enforced leisure in Corsica. It is not surprising that this is the period of his life to which prevailing guess-work has ascribed the tragedies. But the problem appears insoluble: there was abundant time for Seneca to have written tragedies even before he was exiled, a man of over forty, and there are elements in the tragedies more nearly akin to a clever student’s rhetoric than to philosophical maturity. Nor would it be easy to disprove a contention that some at least of the plays consisted of early material worked over and touched up at a later date.
That Seneca intended his dramas for the stage is incredible. No doubt there were still in the Neronian period tragic representations, but many of Seneca’s elaborate speeches would have been unsuitable in a theatre, and some scenes would not act as they stand. It was one thing for Seneca merely to imagine Medea slaying her children in public, but another thing to have this shown before actual Roman audiences, accustomed though they were to horrors. The author’s retention of three actors is not so much an attempt to meet theatrical conditions as an adherence to Greek convention. On the other hand, the rhetorical dexterity and descriptive power exhibited in the tragedies suited the taste of literary coteries before whom dramatic compositions could be read with effect.
As an adapter of Greek tragedy, Seneca was attracted most to the blend of realism and romance which characterises Euripides. Out of nine plays his model is definitely Euripides in four, _Hercules Furens_, _Troades_, _Medea_ and _Phaedra_. Besides, in the imperfect and inconsistent remains of the _Phoenissae_, Euripidean material is drawn from the Greek play of that name, though there are also contributions from Aeschylus’s _Seven Against Thebes_ and Sophocles’s _Oedipus at Colonus_. On Aeschylus was based the _Agamemnon_, and on Sophocles the _Oedipus_ as well as the drearily long _Hercules Oetaeus_, whose authenticity has most been called in question. The _Thyestes_ has no equivalent among extant Greek plays. These Latin plays are in no sense versions of the Greek: Seneca did not feel himself bound to adhere to the original plot in detail, but either introduced departures or followed Roman predecessors in their departures.[722] The essential contrast, however, is one of spirit, which no reader can fail to realize, if he turns from Aeschylus’s _Agamemnon_, Sophocles’s _Oedipus Tyrannus_ and Euripides’s _Medea_ to their Senecan descendants. In the Latin plays one has entered a new world, where genius has been replaced by cleverness, and an eminently classic directness of expression by rhetoric. Despite the recurrence of philosophical sentiments, there is no longer felt, like a pervasive force, the old Aeschylean preoccupation with fundamental themes of life and destiny, an atmosphere of altitude in thought and emotion whence a poet can survey the deepest problems concerning God and man, sin and suffering; there is no longer that combination of serenity and of tense drama which makes the _Oedipus Tyrannus_ one of the greatest of plays; nor is there any longer the wide Euripidean humanity to win full sympathy for the outraged wifehood of Medea.
The most cursory comparison of Seneca’s plays with extant originals will indicate the nature and sometimes the object of his alterations. The _Hercules Furens_ dramatises the hero’s madness which is with terrible irony turned upon his own wife and children after his triumphant return from the underworld in time to rescue them from the tyrant Lycus. For the sentence of death against the absent hero’s sons in Euripides the Roman dramatist has substituted a compulsory, and defiantly refused, offer of marriage from the tyrant to Hercules’s wife Megara; and he has introduced Theseus, not towards the close, as in the Greek play, but much earlier, so as to facilitate a long description of adventures shared by Theseus with Hercules during their raid upon the infernal regions. Another significant contrast is that Seneca treats Hercules’s slaying of wife and children as an exhibited part of the dramatic action, and not as material for narration in accord with Greek usage.
The _Troades_, on afflictions which befell the captive dames of Troy, combines material from the play of the same name by Euripides with parts of his _Hecuba_. In fact, Seneca’s play is cited under the title of _Hecuba_ by Probus. The sacrifice of the princess Polyxena, which the ghost of Achilles demands shall be made at his tomb before the Greeks sail away, is based on the _Hecuba_. To it Seneca adds from the _Troades_ the Greek precautionary execution of Astyanax, the little son of Hector and Andromache. The extent of Seneca’s originality in what is one of his best plays could not be absolutely assessed without more knowledge than we are ever likely to obtain of two lost plays by Sophocles—the _Polyxena_ and the _Captive Women_ (Αἰχμαλωτίδες).
The presence among Accius’s plays of an _Astyanax_ and a _Troades_ raises the question of a possible influence of the older Roman tragic writers upon Seneca. It is certain that in his prose works Seneca occasionally cites them, either from direct knowledge or indirectly through Cicero. Some doubt may be felt whether earlier Roman tragedy retained all the prestige ascribed to it by Ribbeck; for, though it may not have entirely vanished from the stage, the taste of the Neronian age was even more pronounced than that of the Augustan in regarding it as old-fashioned and uncouth. If the fragments of Accius indicate departures from Euripides in which Seneca resembles him, this does not prove positively the influence of the earlier Latin poet: they may have used a common source in Sophocles. At best, however, all this is conjecture, though it has been gravely made material for learned tractates.[723] There remains the obligation to remember that one need not find a source for every departure made by Seneca from extant Greek plays. He is entitled to credit for a measure of originality and a desire to entertain readers or hearers with inventive variations of his own on a familiar plot as well as with ingenious rhetorical points. This is his express theory of literary borrowing; for he advocates, it will be remembered, a bee-like diligence in blending borrowed materials into a new and distinctive flavour, so that even if the original source is manifest, the product shall be something different.[724]
The fragmentary _Phoenissae_ presents puzzling features. The title suggests that Seneca contemplated importing from the Greek a chorus of Phoenician damsels. Its 664 lines fall into two portions. The earlier portion presents, as in Sophocles’s _Oedipus at Colonus_, the self-blinded and self-exiled king wandering under the guidance of his daughter Antigone, who has vowed never to desert him. With a rhetorical echo of Roman Stoicism, he claims volubly the right of self-murder, a right which, during three years of misery, he has not exercised and which Antigone is at pains to refute by argument. A sudden break, where a choral ode might have been expected, leads to a brief episode in which Oedipus bitterly prays that his sons, Eteocles and Polynices, at war with each other, may act worthily of such a miserable father. From l. 363 a new episode, partly akin to the situation in Aeschylus’s _Seven against Thebes_, represents Antigone as now in Thebes, no longer with her father, but with her mother Jocasta, who has not committed suicide as in Sophocles’s _Oedipus Tyrannus_ or in Seneca’s _Oedipus_, and whose feelings are torn between the two brothers at enmity:
But though I love both sons with equal warmth— Where pulls the stronger cause and poorer luck, There bends a heart that ever aids the weak. Woe makes the sufferer dearer to his kin.[725]
The hopelessness of her attempt to conciliate the pair is seen in Eteocles’s theory of power which is propounded, and in Senecan manner expanded, towards the close of the fragment:
Who fears being hated wills not to be king.[726]
A reference to the literature[727] on the _Phoenissae_ shows how some have held these passages are excerpts from one or more completed dramas; others that they are fragments of one or more dramas never completed; others again that they are only dramatic studies or sketches not designed to be worked up into play-form.
The main differences of plot-construction which distinguish Seneca’s _Medea_ from Euripides’s play are that, for the chance visit of King Aegeus to Corinth when he promises to protect Medea during her imminent exile, Seneca substitutes a scene in which Medea’s wonder-working powers are described; and that, while in the Greek play the children of Jason and Medea are sentenced to exile along with their mother, in the Latin she begs in vain to be allowed to take them with her. Jason’s confession that he could not live without his children suggests to her the most terrible part of her revenge:
Thus doth he love the boys? ’Tis well. He’s caught. The spot for wounding him hath been laid bare.[728]
How far these and other changes either in plot-management or in expression are due to Seneca himself is past finding out. Medea’s story, dramatized half a dozen times in Greek, was a theme that attracted several Latin writers. Long after Ennius and Accius it had been handled by Ovid, both in the _Heroides_ and in a play now lost; later, in Seneca’s time, it occupied the attention of his nephew, Lucan, and of Curiatius Maternus. Seneca’s admiring imitations of Ovid, demonstrable elsewhere in his writing, render it likely that here too he owed him much.
A subject not nearly so congenial to Roman tastes as Medea’s revenge was the guilty passion of Queen Phaedra for her stepson Hippolytus, an almost Puritanic devotee of the chase, for whom life in the open air meant everything and woman nothing. The extant version of this romantic theme by Euripides is his famous _Hippolytus_ of 428 B.C., which has been designated _Hippolytus Crowned_ (Ἱππόλυτος στεφανηφόρος or στεφανίας) to distinguish it from his previous and less successful drama _Hippolytus Veiled_ (Ἱππόλυτος καλυπτόμενος). It is an interesting literary point that Seneca seems to have been attracted to the earlier version;[729] for he restored in the plot of his _Phaedra_ what Euripides apparently cancelled in deference to Athenian censure—the personal avowal of her love by Phaedra to her stepson. In the extant play by Euripides the nurse takes it upon herself to open Hippolytus’s eyes to the Queen’s feelings; and, after his horrified recoil, the shame-stricken Phaedra strangles herself, leaving a note with false charges against the innocent youth. But in Seneca, as she has in person confessed her love, so in person does she malign him to her husband Theseus; and so again, when Hippolytus has met an undeserved death, it is Phaedra in person (not, as in Euripides, the goddess Artemis) who reveals her crime and clears Hippolytus.
In incidents, structure, and spirit, the _Oedipus_ is a woeful falling off from Sophocles’s thrilling development of the steps in the revelation of the king as the unwitting murderer of his father. In Sophocles the seer Teiresias is sent for in time of crisis, and, when forced to speak, declares, though he is not believed, that Oedipus is the criminal sought for: in Seneca much space is laboriously wasted upon the description of gloomy sacrifices and necromancy. Instead of announcing, as in the Greek, the suicide of the queen, Seneca towards the close brings face to face the two chief victims of tragic circumstance, before Jocasta openly kills herself. But the very construction of the play is inferior. Devoting over 300 lines to lyric portions and over 200 to details of sacrifices and necromancy, the Roman writer has left himself only some 500 lines for the disentanglement of a complicated dramatic story.
Equally disappointing, when contrasted with its renowned Greek original by Aeschylus, is the _Agamemnon_. The disproportion of 1012 Latin lines to 1673 Greek could be compensated for by nothing short of vastly superior literary power; and of that there is no sign. The prevailing absence of genuine thought and feeling in choric songs and invocations based on a frigid mythology is in strong contrast to the profound reflections in the choruses of Aeschylus. It may be that, as Leo thinks,[730] this was Seneca’s first essay in drama, and the _Oedipus_ his second. In any case, the deviations from Aeschylus are noticeable. Instead of the watchman, who in the Greek announces the beacon-sent tidings of Troy’s capture, there is substituted a much more typically Senecan figure—the ghost of Thyestes, filled with the spirit of revenge against his hated brother Atreus, father of Agamemnon, and therefore urging Aegisthus, the queen’s paramour, to perform his destined part in the hour of Agamemnon’s triumphant return from war. Clytemnestra, in the episode which follows, seems disposed to listen to the advice of her nurse—another typically Senecan figure—and abandon the design of murdering her husband. Less strong-willed than the Aeschylean Clytemnestra, she is confirmed in her purpose by Aegisthus. A further Senecan trait is the detailed description by the herald of the appalling storm which overtook the Greeks on their homeward voyage. Appearing late in the play (l. 782)—considerably after the band of captive Trojan women led by Cassandra—Agamemnon makes his exit less than 30 lines further on. One misses the famous and symbolic scene of the purple carpet in Aeschylus: it is replaced by brief and unheeded warnings of Agamemnon’s impending death from Cassandra. One misses too the single line of final anguish from the victim within. The Latin play represents Cassandra, not as murdered along with her captor, but as relating outside the palace the crime that is being perpetrated. An exciting moment occurs when Electra hurries from the palace and succeeds in sending her young brother Orestes, the future avenger, away into safety under the care of King Strophius, who has opportunely arrived in his chariot on his way home from an Olympic victory. Aeschylus represents the boy as already staying at the court of Strophius. His sister Electra, who at the close of Seneca’s play is sent to imprisonment while Cassandra is sent to her death, makes no appearance in the _Agamemnon_ of Aeschylus. Some of these variations are foreshadowed in the fragments of Livius Andronicus’s _Aegisthus_, and Accius’s _Clutemestra_[731]—a coincidence which suggests either Seneca’s knowledge of the older Latin plays, or his use, in common with Andronicus, of a Greek play by a dramatist junior to Aeschylus.
There is no surviving Greek original with which to compare Seneca’s _Thyestes_, a gruesome play on the fiendish revenge wrought by Atreus upon his ambitious and adulterous brother Thyestes. But some parts at least of this dark story touching the accursed house of Pelops, son of Tantalus, had been dramatized by Sophocles and Euripides in plays entitled _Thyestes_. It was a common theme for Roman writers. Three at least had handled it before Seneca: Ennius in his _Thyestes_; Accius in his _Atreus_, containing the cynical words _oderint dum metuant_; and, more famous still, Horace’s contemporary Varius in his _Thyestes_, which was praised by Quintilian as worthy to be set beside any of the Greek tragedies.[732] Whether the earlier Latin plays influenced Seneca or not, it is barely conceivable that he should have missed reading Varius. But even after Seneca the subject continued to attract. Under Vespasian, Curiatius Maternus composed a _Thyestes_ as he did a _Medea_, and in the _Dialogus de Oratoribus_ is rallied by Aper for wasting his time on such material. Presumably the Ligurinus addressed in Martial III. 45, and certainly the Bassus twitted by him in V. 53, had handled the theme of Thyestes.
Occasional brilliance in expression and occasional loftiness in thought fail to outweigh those bombastic utterances and those innovations in incident or character-drawing which rob the _Hercules Oetaeus_ of the delicacy exhibited by Sophocles in the _Trachiniae_. As we have it, patched by Seneca himself or another,[733] it runs to a length of almost 2000 lines—over 700 more than there are in Sophocles’s play. In particular, the character of Deianira has suffered under Roman hands. From a heroine who was in the beginning tenderly attracted with Hellenic sweetness towards the captive Iole, and who was only by degrees tempted into jealousy, she is transformed by Seneca into one who hates at first sight—“like to one maddened and with lowering gaze,” in her uncontrollable anger “a tigress” or “a Maenad,”[734] full of malevolence towards rival and husband. It is impossible to give to Seneca’s Deianira the sympathy felt for the broken-hearted wife in Sophocles when she realizes too late that the promised love-charm must mean death to Hercules. Other additions are the introduction of the hero’s mother, Alcmena, to bewail his sufferings, and the incorporation into the play of his deification at the burning pyre on the summit of Oeta. There are, besides, signs that Seneca drew from Ovid’s _Heroides_ and _Metamorphoses_.[735]
Even the brief glances here directed at Seneca’s deviations from well-known Greek originals serve to suggest many of his characteristics. His affinity with Euripides already indicated is significant. In truth, Seneca may be said to have, in great measure, although with inferior dramatic genius, pursued the path along which Euripides led. There was much to link together those two spirits, separated though they were by four centuries. There was above all a common interest in speculative philosophy and in live humanity. Already in Euripides there is the same craving after variety and effect, betrayed in situations intended to be telling, in pathetic or even harrowing detail, in picturesque descriptions, in smart argument, in sententious reflections. Here, if in any field, Seneca’s rhetorical training equipped him. Even when he breaks away from Euripides, he is but following his example in the quest of variety. The more he changes, the more he imitates. It would, therefore, be difficult to overrate the Euripidean influence upon him, and this should be remembered in any estimate of Senecan influence upon the literature of the Renaissance. On the other hand, while historically carrying on a late development in Greek drama, Seneca is the child of his own age, imbued with Latin rhetoric, and capable of using it alike with imposing and with futile effect. It cannot be contested that in his free treatment of borrowed material he leaves his individual impress for good or bad upon his plays. There is a Senecan ring, for which he must himself accept credit or discredit, in his curtailment or expansion of plots, his elaboration of descriptions, his choice of impressive dramatic moments, and in that aim at heightened colour which is betrayed by his fondness for the weird, for ghosts, for incantations, and by his introduction of death as an integral part of the action.
His faults lie on the surface. Mythological conventionality in plots which were already, despite variations, fully exhausted in Greece; feebleness of moral significance; monotony of character; lack of nature’s infinite variety and lack of fidelity to much of the human nature selected for portrayal—such defects hinder the plays from powerfully enchaining the interest. The positive influence of rhetoric too is responsible for many far-fetched dialogues, high-flown declamations, and pedantic recitals. Seneca’s Medea may be regarded as an epitome of his method. Barbaric though she is by hypothesis, she is yet in Seneca too little a woman and too much a sorceress: we miss the more natural evolution of character given in Euripides: from the outset her fury is rhetoric, and, while we loathe the craven ingratitude of Jason, her wrongs fail to move us fully, because her transports of insane hatred are demonstrably manufactured. Medea can pause to weigh her anger mythologically:
What Scylla, what Charybdis swallowing Italian or Sicilian tides, or what Mount Aetna o’er a gasping Titan poised, Shall boil with threats like mine?[736]
Mythology is one of Seneca’s besetting perils. Jason is extravagantly praised as handsomer than Bacchus or Apollo;[737] and the choric song praying that he may never be a victim of misfortune like his Argonautic comrades is too learnedly allusive,[738] though not so irrelevant as the chorus upon the labours of Hercules which follows the tardy and brief appearance of Agamemnon in the play bearing his name. One mythological group of which Seneca never can have enough is that of the familiar sufferers of punishment in Hades—Ixion, Sisyphus, Tantalus and Tityos: mentioned in the _Medea_ without Tityos, they recur in at least four other plays, and are taken over for literary ornament by the author of the _Octauia_.[739] This may be a little tiresome, but nothing to the dreary boredom which reigns over long speeches like Medea’s catalogue of the charms needed for her murderous purposes, in which the author is determined that his acquaintance with ancient geography and legend shall be unmistakable. Some such over-elaboration, some such inability to tell a plain and simple tale, explains the account, too ludicrous to be pathetic, of the piecing together of the mutilated remains of Hippolytus as if they were a jigsaw puzzle:
CHORUS. The scattered limbs of that torn frame do thou, His sire, in order set, and straggling parts Put duly back; here for his strong right hand Is place; here set the left, skilled guide of reins; Of his left flank I recognize the marks. How great a part is missing for our tears!
THESEUS. My nervous hands, be firm for task of woe: Be dry, my cheeks, and stay the flowing tear, The while a father portions to his son His limbs and makes a body. What is this— Shapeless and ugly, maimed with many a gash? What piece of thee, I know not: yet ’tis thine. Here put it—not in place, but where there’s room.[740]
It is a dangerous realism which produces unintentional comicalities. What shall we say about the ghost of Thyestes who, because during his life he had been served with the hideous meal of his slaughtered children, could grotesquely claim to be “full of three sons buried in me?”[741] No less peculiar is the chorus on the universal sway of love which reaches the climax of absurdity among enamoured whales and elephants:
Love holds the raving sea’s leviathan, Love holds the Lucan kine.[742]
A similar desire to be at once literal and smart leads to the silliness of Hercules’s words on recovering his wits after he has slain his family: “I have lost all,” he cries, “lost soul, arms, honour, wife, children—and madness too!”[743] A deeper sense of humour would have made Seneca more tragic. Further, more self-criticism in the light of common sense would have spared us much of what fatigues us in him—the pedantry, the senseless bombast,[744] the epigrams which so inevitably come, no matter who is speaking; for a nurse will talk like a manual of rhetoric or like Seneca the moralist.[745] When Phaedra’s nurse sagely reflects on love-madness and on inordinate desire as the companion of high estate, she adorns her remarks about luxury with semi-proverbial wisdom, and proceeds, through a contrasted picture
Why dwelleth hallowed love in lowly homes?
to her epigrammatic conclusion
Excessive power seeks power beyond its power.[746]
As in set speech or soliloquy, so too in dialogue, there is displayed an allied and wonderful cleverness, but it is preternatural. The reader is not captured, as he should be, by the dramatic illusion: he never quite forgets that beings of real flesh and blood are not so ingenious in tragic situations. He is, besides, positively wearied with Ovidian elaboration of the same picture by fresh strokes, or choral platitudes ringing changes on the same idea.[747]
Yet all is not exaggeration in sentiment and style. When the worst has been urged against Seneca, there remain speeches that are spirited, descriptions that are effective, and thoughts that are memorable. The style is in general lucid, and, if epigrammatic, is founded on pure Latin and on harmonious versification. Perhaps no better example of the dramatic speech in Seneca can be given than that from the _Troades_ in which Agamemnon pleads against the proposed sacrifice of the Trojan maiden Polyxena at Achilles’s tomb. The arguments, put with clearness and vigour, are characteristically fortified by _sententiae_ and antitheses:
Why stain with murder foul the noble shade Of that famed chief? First shouldst thou learn What victor ought to do, what vanquished dree. None keeps a sway of violence for long: ’Tis self-restraint endures. The higher Chance Hath raised and magnified the power of man, The more ’tis fitting he should curb his joy And quake at chequered circumstance, afraid Of gods too kind. Conquest hath taught me how A moment ruins greatness. And doth Troy Swell us with over-daring pride? We Greeks Stand on the spot Troy fell from. Once, I own, Self-willed I bore my kingship haughtily. But Fortune’s smile, in others cause belike For pride, hath tamed in me such arrogance. Thou, Priam, mak’st me proud—but frightened too!... I will confess, (thy pardon, Argive land, For these my words!) I wished our Phrygian foes Mastered and crushed; but ruin, that hath laid Their town in dust, I fain had warded off ... Enough, and more, of penalty is ta’en. That now a royal maid should fall, a gift Given to a tomb, and with her blood bedew Dead ashes, yea, that crime so hideous Be called a marriage, I will ne’er allow. On Agamemnon comes the guilt of all. Who stops not crime, tho’ able, orders it.[748]
A few other illustrations chosen from the same play are the more appropriate because nowhere so much as in the _Troades_ does he hold his own in rivalry with his Greek sources. It is characteristic that the agonized mother, Andromache, concealing her boy in her husband’s sepulchre with the hope of eluding the murderous foe, should make the antithetic point:
If fate helps misery, here is escape: If fate deny thee life, here is thy tomb.[749]
There is plausible rhetoric in the alliterative excuse which Helen proffers for luring Polyxena into an expectation of marriage when she is really to be executed:
Death without dread of death is welcome death;[750]
and Helen’s own plea for her guilty self is a clever appeal suggesting that she was more sinned against than sinning:
Was I the cause of wars and all the wreck That came on Troy?... Yet if triumphant Aphrodite gave Helen to be a guerdon to her judge, Then pity that poor prey;[751]
nor does one lightly forget the single utterance by the doomed boy—_miserere, mater_.[752] One wonders, too, whether Seneca was thinking of his own almost miraculous rescue from Caligula’s death-warrant when he declared:
This cause alone hath fended many a man From doom—belief that he was dead.[753]
Another dramatic feature often dexterously managed consists of the thrust-and-parry strokes in single lines—the Greek _stichomythia_. A suitable example comes from the passage where the nurse urges Medea to drop her daring resolution:
MEDEA. Fortune doth dread the brave: cowards she quells.
NURSE. Courage that finds its hour must win applause.
M. Never can courage fail to find its hour.
N. For ruined cause no hope reveals a way.
M. With naught to hope, of naught should one despair.
N. Thy Colchians are gone; thy lord is false; Of thy resources naught is left to thee.
M. Yet is MEDEA left: in her thou hast Sea, land, sword, fire and gods with thunder-flame!
N. Beware the king!
M. My father was a king.
N. Fear’st thou not arms?
M. Not though from earth they rise.
N. ’Tis death!
M. I wish it.
N. Flee!
M. Flight I’ve forsworn.[754]
An allied neatness of expression, not uncommonly strengthened by antithesis, marks the sententious epigrams found in isolated verses throughout. The following are a few from three plays:[755]
Crime ever finds its safest path through crime. What reason cannot, oft delay hath cured. Best follow hazard when the mind’s at fault. Nor throne nor bridal bed brooks rivalry. Too late to be on guard in peril’s hour. To wish for healing is the half of health. Success gives certain crimes the stamp of right. Light pangs are eloquent: deep pangs are dumb.
Sometimes the whole of a character’s attitude in a given dramatic situation is summed up in a single line, as in Medea’s words,
My crime-won home I must in crime forsake,
or her appeal to Jason later in the play,
Hold thou her sinless who has sinned for thee![756]
Compared with such a plethora of ingenious epigram, the flights into poetry are rare. Yet Seneca’s eye was not closed to nature. He paints daybreak in its colour and its human significance:
Dawn sprinkles red on thorny brake And Phoebus’ sister doth forsake Till night the sky: Hard toil uprises and doth wake A world of cares and housefolk make Their work to ply.[757]
Some instinct, too, as of a seer, may have inspired his well-known prophecy:
Late in the years an age will dawn When Ocean must all things unseal, And earth lie ope like one great lawn, When Tethys must new worlds reveal And Thule be Earth’s End no more.[758]
In view of the doubt sometimes needlessly cast upon Seneca’s authorship of these dramas, it is of importance to note the strong tincture of philosophic thought which colours many of the speeches and choral odes. The _Troades_ presents us with a chant on the doctrine of utter annihilation:
Can it be truth that we utterly die? Is there no part of us left, when the soul At the final breath-flicker soars into the air, Mingling with cloudland so soon as the torch Lays fingers of fire on the corpse lying bare?... After our death there is naught. Death is naught But the finishing goal of a race quickly run.... The way into Hell and the cruel King’s realm And Cerberus guarding the Perilous Gate Are idlest of gossip and meaningless words— A fable that sounds like a feverish dream. Dost thou ask where thou liest when death sets thee free? Thou shalt lie where the things lie that have not been born.[759]
A familiar Stoic dogma suggested the lines upon true kingship in the _Thyestes_:
Treasures do not a monarch make, Nor garb of Tyrian hue, Nor diadem on royal brow, Nor portals bright with gold. A king is whoso quelleth fear And curséd guilt of heart, Who mid ambition’s wild caprice And mid the wayward cheers Of hot-head mob abides unmoved;
and a little later the sage’s serenity is limned:
Set in security of place, He vieweth all beneath: With a will he meets his fate Nor murmureth to die.[760]
Similarly Stoic are the notions of freedom, of equality with monarch and with God, and of the right to abandon life at will, which are propounded in the _Agamemnon_:
All slavish bonds he’ll burst in twain Who can capricious gods disdain, Who on black Acheron’s countenance And on the Stygian gloom can glance Untouched by gloom himself, and dares To fix the close of earthly cares. Peer of a king—of gods, is he. Know how to die and so be free![761]
It is this creed of the open door leading out of life on which Oedipus harps in the _Phoenissae_[762] and which the guilty queen proclaims in the _Phaedra_,
Death ne’er can fail the man who wills to die.[763]
As we should expect, it is stated in the prose works[764] of Seneca, and so brings him into touch with contemporary history; for it is but the theoretical formulation of that right to suicide which many of the Roman Stoics in opposition during the darkest days of imperial tyranny not only claimed but exercised.
While, however, much of the philosophic colour in the plays reflects their author’s Stoicism, Seneca is dramatist enough to introduce non-Stoic views also. He allows, for instance, the chorus in the _Phaedra_ to adopt an Epicurean and pessimistic attitude. It comes in an ode addressed to Nature and to “Olympus’s Lord,” beseeching a solution to one of the riddles of the universe—why it is that external nature is so regularly controlled by law, whereas the Ruler of all things appears to be indifferent to man, and human affairs appear to be a chaotic realm of chance.[765]
Philosophy, whether Stoic or not, is, after all, one of the personal notes imported by Seneca into his adaptations from Greek drama. Like his yet more pervasive rhetoric, it is of Roman cast, and, if anachronistic in its Hellenic environment, it is but an additional sign of his independence of his originals. He is not at pains to avoid national colour: and thus, reckless of inconsistency, he puts into the mouth of Mycenaean elders certain terms redolent of Roman political history; turns the thought of a Theban chorus towards the _clientes_ and _patroni_ of Rome, and, later in the same play, towards a Roman rather than a Greek holiday; represents the ex-king of Thebes as quoting, like a _paterfamilias_, his power of life and death;[766] and—more surprising still—not merely fuses into a Corinthian marriage-hymn elements in the bantering Fescennine spirit (“rarely against our lords is license legalised”), but actually, a few lines further on, where the metre has become hexameter, names that familiar feature of a wedding at Rome:
Let glib Fescennine hurl its merry gibes.[767]
Another national trait lies in his debt to Latin predecessors. This is especially observable in his relation to Virgil and Ovid. To the former he owes much in language and in idea: one cannot, for example, read Theseus’s description in the _Hercules Furens_[768] of his descent into the Lower World, nor Andromache’s account in the _Troades_[769] of her vision of the dead Hector, without noticing reminiscences of _Aeneid_ VI in the one case and of _Aeneid_ II in the other. Ovid, to whose rhetorical abilities Seneca’s early attention must have been directed by his father, is the ultimate inspirer of many of his epigrams and mannerisms as well as of some of his metrical characteristics. Seneca, however, though a borrower in most fields, remained in part original and inventive. This holds good of his choice of words. Such compounds as _luctificus_ and _fatidicus_ he would, like other poets of his century, inherit from Virgil; and similarly such words as _securiger_ and _multifidus_ from Ovid. But some compounds it would be hard to find in other authors, _e.g._ _incestificus_ and _superbificus_, and _nidificus_ too, although the verb _nidificare_ rises to the mind in connexion with a famous tale of Virgil’s readiness in verse-making. _Pacificus_, apparently used by Cicero once, Seneca seems to have originated in verse and bequeathed through his nephew and Martial for its most familiar use in the Vulgate version of the Beatitudes.
The iambic trimeter used by Seneca for dramatic speeches and dialogue is in his hands a finished line more akin to that of Greek tragedy than to the rugged senarius of the oldest Latin dramas. Like the Augustans, and in all likelihood under the influence of Ovid’s lost _Medea_, he would regard the verses of Ennius, Pacuvius and Accius as uncouth. Seneca, for instance, does not imitate the heavy Ennian line with its spondees in second and fourth feet, and at least before a cretic ending shows a preference for elision. But the general effect is a polished monotony, towards which contributing factors are scarcity of the more subtle elisions, want of varied pauses, and a pronounced liking for either spondee or anapaest in the fifth foot. According to Lucian Müller, in all Seneca there are only six examples of a double iambic ending to a line;[770] and statistics indicate that the anapaest in the fifth place, as a variant for the spondee, occurs rather oftener than once in every five lines. Seneca’s iambic trimeter is at its neatest, as it is at its sagest, in the _stichomythia_ of the dialogue. When in long speeches the sense too often closes with the end of each line, the sharp ring which is suitable in _stichomythia_ becomes mere jerkiness. His trimeters—indeed Latin trimeters as a whole—never attain the charm which can be illustrated from any Greek tragedy. Herein it contrasts with the Latin hexameter, which possesses a beauty and nobility rivalling any effect achieved in Greek. Trochaic tetrameter is used in three passages,[771] amounting to a total of 34 lines, based rather on the Greek model than on early Latin septenarii. But one departure is the admission of a dactyl in the sixth foot—a practice metrically analogous to the favour shown for an anapaest in the fifth foot of an iambic trimeter. Of choral measures he employs a considerable variety, some being feeble imitations of, others unfortunate departures from, Horace. The mixed metres in the _Agamemnon_ and _Oedipus_[772], are such failures that some, forgetting how much of an experimenter Seneca was in dramatic composition, have denied that he wrote those plays. The sum of the matter is that the choruses, lacking strophic arrangement and often dull in theme, suffer from the wearisome continuance of the same line without the break of a shorter closing one. Long passages in Sapphics without an Adonic, or in Asclepiadeans without a Glyconic, or in anapaestic dimeter without a monometer, almost madden the reader because of their sameness; and, unluckily, while Seneca declines to afford the relief of a Glyconic among longer Asclepiadeans, he has no qualms about perpetrating a run of Glyconics for seventy or eighty lines on end.
Time, however, has not judged Seneca by the monotony of his choral metres. In literature it is not too much to say that he has been a world-wide influence; for without him the history of the drama in most countries would have run an entirely altered course. By the fourteenth century his influence upon writers in Italy was evident—on Mussato, for example, whose iambic tragedy _Ecerinis_ was a literary triumph in 1314 or 1315.[773] Seneca’s historical function was to be a link between the incipient modern drama and Hellenism, which could not be directly accessible, or indeed intelligible, so long as Greek study was in its infancy. As a force at the birth of modern drama he completely eclipsed the other dramatists of antiquity: Sophocles counted for very little, Aeschylus for less, and Euripides mainly for as much of his spirit as operated through Seneca. When, therefore, Latin plays gave place to Italian tragedy in Cammelli’s _Filostrato e Panfila_, Seneca was reckoned an appropriate personage to pronounce the prologue. At the period of the revival of learning, his plays had become renowned over Europe—Scaliger, it should be noted, rated him above Euripides—and his authority, except for Trissino’s preference in favour of Greek models, was riveted on Italy. In France it was the Latin plays which Buchanan and Muret wrote for their scholars to act that introduced the Senecan model and pointed the way towards the French tragedy of the Pléiade. In contrast to comedy, over which Terence’s influence did not retain its hold, French tragedy continued for three centuries to follow the foreign classical exemplar with the strictness observable in Corneille and Racine.
The immense popularity of Seneca in England during the sixteenth century is illustrated by the production of his _Troades_ at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1551-52, as well as by frequent translation and frequent imitation. A reason is easily found. English playwrights, confronted with the task of shaping the amorphous native drama, saw in his plays orderly patterns to suit their purpose. Here was a type of drama which was a descendant of the ancient Greek, with still less action than in the Greek, with choruses even more divorced from the action, but conveniently demarcating the play into definite episodes or acts; while, in spirit, this type of drama exhibited what was for the Elizabethan playgoer an acceptable store of moral reflections and harrowing situations. One could accordingly combine the satisfaction of hearing good talk about rectitude one moment, and of revelling in horrors the next. Morality could be blended with melodrama. The leaven worked rapidly after Heywood began a series of translations of Seneca’s plays in 1559. Our first English tragedy, _Gorboduc_, 1561, is framed on the Senecan model, which had already captured the playwrights of Italy, France, and, in a measure, Germany. The division into five acts and the introduction of choruses (as lyric interludes rather than as integral parts in the drama) show Seneca’s influence upon the form of such plays as _Gorboduc_ and _The Misfortunes of Arthur_. Dramas, however, that can be called fairly and fully Senecan are not numerous in English; for the drama in England was turned into a freer course by Marlowe and Shakespeare, as it was in Spain by Lope de Vega and Calderon. The more lasting influence of Seneca on drama in France is largely attributable to the closer affinity between the Senecan and the French taste for rhetorical finish. But even where the model was not closely followed in England, the spirit of Seneca was operative; for it should be realized that it acted on the romantic drama no less than on the classical.
Thus, stock characters like the nurse, the ghost, the tyrant—each of them borrowed from Greek by Seneca, but each slightly modified—are handed on to the English drama. The nurse is a feature in five of the ten plays which Elizabethans ascribed to Seneca;[774] in a sixth, _Thyestes_, there is an attendant on Atreus who hears his secrets and gives advice, while in a seventh, _Oedipus_, Manto, daughter of the blind Tiresias, fills the office of trusted attendant on her father, like Antigone in the _Phoenissae_. Such figures are prototypes of the nurse in _Romeo and Juliet_ and the confidante of the French stage. Thyestes’s ghost designed in the _Agamemnon_ to personify a Spirit of Revenge is the ancestor of the murdered Andrea’s ghost in Kyd’s _Spanish Tragedie_ and the ghost of the hero’s father in _Hamlet_. The ruthless Lycus in _Hercules Furens_, Medea resolute in her contemplated barbarity, and Atreus openly avowing villainy, are types of character that descend to Elizabethan literature—to Barabas in Marlowe’s _Jew of Malta_, to Lorenzo in Kyd’s _Spanish Tragedie_, and to “Crookback the Tyrant” in Shakespeare’s _Richard III_. There is indeed much that is Senecan—as if we were to fancy that some old Spanish traits in Seneca were being revived—in _The Spanish Tragedie_, a ghastly medley of blood and thunder, ghosts and horrors. Its lurid description of the road to hell is after the manner of Seneca’s eeriest passages. This aspect is handed on to plays like _Titus Andronicus_, and persists in Webster’s _Duchess of Malfi_ and _The White Devil_. _Richard III_, too, has many Senecan lineaments besides that already mentioned. One of the tragedies of blood, it has a multiplicity of ghosts: it has even a Senecan tendency to that rant from which Shakespeare did much to rescue drama; while the old tones of repartee, subtly developed in Athenian tragedy and transmitted through Seneca to the moderns, ring out in the dialogue between Richard and the Queen Elizabeth in Act IV, Scene iv.
This stichomythia is the chief feature common to the popular playwrights of Shakespearean times and an author who represents a widely divergent line of Senecan tradition—namely, Sir William Alexander, Earl of Stirling. He followed the more classical Seneca, the Seneca of argument, description and apophthegm. Tyrannical wickedness and inflated bombast make room in his plays for discussions and reflections. When Ben Jonson’s _Sejanus_ and _Catiline_ had failed to keep Seneca on the boards of the playhouse, scholars turned to write dramas, as Seneca himself had done, for the study. Independent of popular taste, they were free to copy the quieter, the less wildly romantic, side of Seneca, to restore the chorus, to banish action, and create monuments of unreadable dullness. Works, however, like Alexander’s are interesting contrasts to such dramas of the theatre as displayed Seneca’s influence in almost hypertrophied vitality.
DRAMA OF THE AGE
The _Octauia_, in 983 lines, is the one surviving Roman historical drama. We have only more or less fragmentary traces of eleven other _praetextae_—Naevius’s _Clastidium_ and _Romulus_, Ennius’s _Ambracia_ and _Sabinae_ (if we can be sure these two were plays), Pacuvius’s _Paulus_, Accius’s _Brutus_ and _Decius_, Cornelius Balbus’s _Iter_, and, under the Empire, the _Aeneas_ of Pomponius Secundus and the _Domitius_ and _Cato_ of Curiatius Maternus. It is difficult to see why the traditional ascription of the _Octauia_ to Seneca ever deceived anyone. That Seneca should have introduced himself on the stage is barely credible; but that he, or anyone, should, during Nero’s lifetime, have ventured to portray the emperor as a heartless monster[775] to mother and wife, as well as a vindictive tyrant to his people, is absolutely incredible. It has long been recognized, too, that the dramatic prophecy of Nero’s doom is too circumstantially accurate to have been composed till after the event in A.D. 68; and Seneca had died three years before. The play no doubt recalls his manner. It has a ghost: it has a couple of nurses: it has, like the _Agamemnon_ and _Hercules Oetaeus_, a couple of choruses: but its doleful repetitions are too many and its epigrams too few for Seneca. Also, the metre, in spite of certain similarities, such as the liking for an anapaest in the fifth foot, shows significant differences; for example, though Seneca was not so careful as the Greek dramatists in linking lines together, he did not allow hiatus and a _syllaba anceps_ at the close of lines nearly so often as the author of the _Octauia_. This is a further reason, if further reason be needed, for repudiating Seneca’s authorship.[776]
Many conjectures have been made about the date of its composition, which has been put arbitrarily as late as the fourth century, not to speak of the absurd notion that the play was invented ten centuries later. The case for a date early in Domitian’s reign has been argued solemnly[777] with little regard to the likelihood of such a publication under such an emperor. So too critics have cast around for an author and lighted upon Maternus, who, we know, wrote _praetextae_. These guesses take us nowhere. The most that can be said is that the author is unknown, but that he plainly studied Seneca; and that an extremely probable, because suitable, date is one of the years immediately succeeding Nero’s fall.[778]
The scene is laid in Nero’s palace, and the time is A.D. 62. The play opens with a lyric lament by Nero’s neglected empress, Octavia, who “outwails the sea-bred Halcyons” in her grief over the criminal follies of her dead mother Messalina, and over the wickedness shown by her stepmother Agrippina (now also dead) in poisoning her imperial husband, Claudius, Octavia’s father, and in taking Octavia from her betrothed, Silanus, to marry her to young Nero. To these enormities and to the poisoning of Octavia’s brother, Britannicus, rightful heir to the throne, the melancholy heroine and her nurse repeat their sombre allusions until they cease to be artistically effective. Nero’s barbarity in murdering his mother, mentioned many times and once fully described,[779] and his maltreatment of his wife, leave the unhappy Octavia nothing to hope for but death. On one occasion she is goaded into half a threat, which the nurse, however, unable to take it seriously, answers with scorn:
OCT. Let Nero kill me too, lest I slay _him_!
NURSE. Nature hath not bestowed on thee such strength.
OCT. Pain, hate, grief, wretchedness and woe will serve.
NURSE. Nay, by compliance win thy cruel lord.
OCT. To give me back my brother, foully slain?
NURSE. To be thyself unharmed, and yet restore Thy father’s tottering house with babes of thine.[780]
The nurse, like her mistress, is versed in mythology and endeavours to console Octavia for Nero’s infidelities by relating Jupiter’s misdemeanours as Swan or Bull or Golden Shower. The next choral chant recites a rumour that Nero has decided to espouse a new consort, and in the following episode Seneca enters soliloquizing on the dangers of prosperity, on his own greater safety as an exile “amid the cliffs of the Corsican sea,” and on the deterioration of mankind. Nero arrives blustering angrily and issuing orders to his prefect for two executions. Seneca’s vain appeal for clemency is succeeded by his equally vain expostulation against the projected marriage with the wanton Poppaea. Nero declares his resolution to make the morrow his wedding-day. On his departure, the ghost of his mother appears in order to symbolize the vengeance that must come, and her speech contains the prophecy of Nero’s doom (619-631), on which rests the conviction that the play is later than his death. Another choral ode precedes a scene between Poppaea, distraught by alarming dreams, and her nurse. Then to the chorus of Poppaea’s sympathizers enters a messenger reporting a revolt in favour of Octavia. The emperor reappears, breathing merciless fury and determined to revenge himself on Octavia, who in the final scene is exhibited under an armed guard bound for exile and death. She came with a wail and she goes with a wail.
Although one cannot withhold sympathy from the victim of Nero’s heartlessness, the many feeble repetitions, the tiresome lamentations, and a minimum of incident, make the _Octauia_ unforgivably dull. Even Agrippina’s ghost is unimpressive. If the reader wonders what business mythology has in this particular galley, he must remember the Senecan tradition. But, obviously, mythological lore removes all chance of making a historical drama realistic. It is grotesque when the nurse whitewashes Nero by giving a list of Jupiter’s lapses from connubial rectitude, or when Octavia herself, in railing against her wicked husband, opines that Mother Earth did not produce a worse monster in Typhon. Instead of all this, one would have liked a historical play to stir the feelings with abuse of Nero in good set terms and in plain Latin. And so with pity no less than indignation. If we are to sorrow with Octavia, she must first (as Horace would remind us) sorrow herself—naturally too, not uttering the artificial question, “What nightingale can match with plaints my tears?”[781] But the incubus of learning is sometimes historical as well. The chorus take occasion to cite, as instances of the disastrous results of popular favour, the Gracchi and Livius Drusus, regretting that present grief prevents them from giving additional examples—presumably by ransacking historical or rhetorical manuals like the collection of _exempla_ by Valerius Maximus. More perhaps than any other handicap, such misplaced erudition balks this tragic story in its intended emotional appeal.
The place occupied in the early Empire by _fabulae salticae_, _mimi_, _pantomimi_, and recitations excerpted from standard tragedies or composed for the occasion, has been already touched upon. Literary comedy fared no better than literary tragedy: mimes and Atellan farces had displaced it. The same thing holds good in the next period as in the Neronian age; such a comedy as the younger Pliny tells us[782] he heard Vergilius Romanus reading was modelled on classical lines and stood no chance of winning popularity. The mime, on the other hand, when it sketched ordinary life, had the spice of realism, united sometimes to that wisdom of experience which Seneca recognized as truly philosophic, and which, he suggests, it shared with writers of tragedy and _togatae_.[783] It is interesting, in this connexion, to note that Afranius’s old _togata_ of “The House on Fire” (_Incendium_) was played in Nero’s time, truth to life doubtless being enhanced by the permission granted to actors to keep any furniture which they saved from the flames.[784] The Atellan farce had the additional and dangerous spice of veiled jests at exalted personages; but Suetonius gives us to understand that Nero showed surprising indulgence towards offending authors, so that joking allusions to the deaths of Claudius and Agrippina involved no more serious penalty than exile.[785]
The variety of public amusements with which serious drama had to compete may be estimated from several passages in Suetonius’s _Life of Nero_. It was at best but a spurious drama that found its way to the boards. Nero liked appearing on the stage as a tragic character.[786] The matricide Orestes, the blinded Oedipus, the mad Hercules were parts that appealed to him;[787] and it may be inferred that, like Lucan, he wrote the words to be recited or chanted. The quinquennial contests of the “Neronia,” even if established from vainglorious motives, proved his interest in poetry and music, and stimulated production of a kind. The emperor’s final performance on the stage was in an iambic chant from _Oedipus in Exile_, a theme similar to that of the opening part of Seneca’s _Phoenissae_; in this piece, however, Nero used Greek.[788]
Pomponius Secundus, who had made his _début_ as author long before, as already recorded, lived far into Nero’s reign. Whether the riot in the theatre over his _carmina_[789] in Claudius’s reign implies that he merely wrote verses for actors, or whether he put complete tragedies on the stage, one cannot say. Curiatius Maternus,[790] a famous orator who renounced public life for poetry and whose house is the scene of Tacitus’s _Dialogus_, had written his first play in Nero’s time. One of his two _praetextae_, entitled _Domitius_, was concerned with an ancestor of Nero’s who opposed Julius Caesar and died fighting at Pharsalia. His other historical play, _Cato_, had just made a great stir in Rome at the time of the _Dialogus_, A.D. 79-81. Like Seneca he wrote tragedies on the Greek subjects of _Medea_ and _Thyestes_.
It is clear, then, that, whether or not complete tragedies continued to be represented on the stage, tragic poets at least continued to compose, if only in a dilettante manner. But no real survival of tragedy can be inferred from the shadowy list of names and titles yielded by allusions in Juvenal and Martial[791]—_Alcithoe_ by Paccius, _Thebae_ (or _Thebais_) and _Tereus_ by Faustus, _Atreus_ by Rubrenus Lappa, _Hercules_ and _Hecuba_ (or _Troades_) by Scaeva or Scaev(i)us Memor, who belongs to the reign of Domitian. It is one of literature’s little ironies that Memor should be addressed by Martial as “the glory of the Roman buskin” (_Romani fama cothurni_).