Four Tragedies and Octavia

F
OR
want of convincing evidence to the contrary, scholars have on the whole accepted the tradition that the dramatic works ascribed to
SENECA
were written by the same Lucius Annaeus Seneca (
c
. 4
B.C
.–
A.D
. 65) who was the author of a large collection of philosophical essays and letters, and whose life, more particularly the later part of it, as a minister closely and at last fatally involved in the turbulent affairs of the reign of Nero, is known in some detail from the pages of Tacitus and Suetonius. Dissent from this identification is prompted not so much by any ascertainable facts as by the sense which all readers feel of an astonishing incongruity between the humanity and dignity of the prose works and the bombastic extravagance, the passionate yet artificial rhetoric, of the tragedies. And not less has been noticed, and frequently commented on, the discordance between the high moral principles professed by the philosopher and the cynical time-serving behaviour of the emperor's adviser. A trace of the disgust which this paradox could arouse even in the seventeenth century, when Seneca's reputation in England stood higher than at any other time, appears in a line spoken by a character in Marston's play
The Malcontent
, who replies to the mention of Seneca's name: ‘Out upon him! He writ of temperance and fortitude, yet lived like a voluptuous epicure, and died like an effeminate coward' – not an entirely true statement but a typical plain man's summary judgement of an enigmatical personality.

The extant prose works
¹
include treatises on philosophical
subjects, personal addresses of consolation or advice to friends and relatives, and works on natural science, and are concluded by a series of letters to one friend, Lucilius, written in a few last years of precarious and disillusioned retirement. It is these letters, with their flashes of humorous self-revelation, their tolerance of human weakness though not of human viciousness, their zealous inquiry into all departments of thought and action, that have most retained the affection of modern readers and secured some sympathy for the ageing philosopher defeated by worldly wickedness. In the earlier works, prolixity and repetition even of the most unexceptionable sentiments can cloy the appetite and dull the effect of the occasional passages of true eloquence and epigrammatic brilliance. The Roman critic Quintilian
¹
pronounced the verdict from which few readers would dissent: ‘There is in Seneca much with which one can agree, much even to admire; but his work requires selection; one could wish that he had done the selecting himself.' Of the tragedies, with which we are here primarily concerned, the literary fate has been a peculiar one. Their reputation in the author's own lifetime, or immediately afterwards, can only be guessed, in the absence of any evidence of their actually having been performed; but at least their preservation is a reasonable ground for assuming them to have commanded some respect. Among scholars of the last two centuries, few have done anything but condemn the Senecan tragedies as horrible examples of literary and dramatic incompetence, travesties of the noble Greek drama, the last wretched remnants of declining Roman taste. The following extract from Schlegel's lectures on drama (published in English in 1815) is representative of the view which all but excluded Seneca the tragedian from the serious consideration of classical students:

The state of constant outrage in which Rome was kept by a series of blood-thirsty tyrants led to similar outrages upon nature in rhetoric and poetry… [the Senecan tragedies] are beyond all description bombastic and frigid, utterly devoid of nature in character and action, full of the most revolting violations of propriety, and so barren of all theatrical effect, that I verily believe they were never meant to leave the schools of the rhetoricians for the stage. With the old Tragedies, those highest of the creations of Grecian poetical genius, these have nothing in common but the name, the exterior form, and the mythological matter: and yet they set themselves up beside them in the evident intention of surpassing them, in which attempt they come off like a hollow hyperbole contrasted with a most heartfelt truth. Every common-place of tragedy is worried out to the last gasp; all is phrase, among which even the simplest is forced and stilted. An utter poverty of mind is tricked out with wit and acuteness…. Their persons are neither ideal nor real men, but misshapen giants of puppets; and the wire that sets them a-going is at one time an unnatural heroism, at another a passion alike unnatural, which no atrocity of guilt can appal.

By this and similar pronouncements the modern student will easily have been brought to the conclusion that to read the Senecan tragedies in the original language is an unrewarding task, and to read them in translation,
a fortiori
, a waste of time! They are, of all the Latin ‘classics' from Plautus to Pliny, probably the least familiar to the averagely well-informed student. Yet between the Seneca of the Roman Empire and the Seneca of today stands the Seneca of the Renaissance, a sage admired and venerated as an oracle of moral, even of Christian, edification; a master of literary style and a model of the purest principles of dramatic art. The well-known dictum of Francis Meres in his
Palladis Tamia
(1598) is a typical compliment to both the Roman and the English master-dramatist: ‘As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy
among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage.' (The writer was not troubled by the fact that there was no other known Roman tragedian for comparison with Seneca, and only one rival to Plautus:) The prestige of Seneca, in the moral sphere at least, was owed primarily to his prose writings, and especially to those passages
¹
in which he expressed his ideas about religion, worship, and man's attitude to the gods (or often ‘god') in terms acceptable to Christian minds.
²
But the tragedies, too, were valued for their moral lessons, and were put forward by their Elizabethan translators as works calculated to edify their readers or audiences:

And whereas it is by some squeymish Areopagites surmyzed, that the readinge of these Tragedies, being enterlarded with many Phrases and sentences literally tending (at first sight) sometime to the prayse of Ambition, sometime to the mayntenaunce of cruelty, now and then to the ratification of tyranny, cannot be digested without great daunger of infection; to omit all other reasons, if it might please them with no forestalled judgment, to mark and consider the circumstaunces, why, where, and by what manner of persons such sentences are pronounced, they cannot in any equity otherwise choose but find good cause ynough to leade them to a more favourable and milde resolution. For it may not at any hand be thought and deemed the direct meaning of Seneca himselfe, whose whole wrytinges (penned with a peerless sublimity and loftiness of style) are so farre from countenancing vice, that I doubt whether there bee any amonge all the Catalogue of Heathen wryters, that with more gravity of Philosophicall sentences, more waightyness of sappy words, or greater authority of sound matter beateth down sinne, loose lyfe, dissolute dealinge, and unbrydled sensuality: or that more sensibly, pithily, and
bytingly layeth downe the guedon of filthy lust, cloaked dissimulation, and odious treachery: which is the dryft, whereunto he leveleth the whole yssue of ech one of his Tragedies.
¹

… the most lamentable Tragedy of that most Infortunate Prince Oedipus, for thy profit rudely translated. Wonder not at the grossenesse of the Style… mark thou rather what is ment by the whole course of the History: and frame thy lyfe free from such mischiefes, wherewith the world at this present is universally overwhelmed, the wrathfull vengeaunce of God provoked, the Body plagued, the mynde and Conscience in midst of deepe devouring daungers most terribly assaulted, in such sorte that I abhorre to write: and even at the thought thereof I tremble and quake for very inward griefe and feare of minde: assuredly perswading myselfe that the right high and immortall God will never leave such horrible and detestable crimes unpunished…. For the which cause, so much the rather have I suffered this my base translated Tragoedy to be published…. Mine only entent was to exhorte men to embrace Vertue and shun Vyce, according to that of the right famous and excellent Poet Virgil:
discite justiciam moniti, et non temnere divos
.
²