I. STOICISM AND SENECAN TRAGEDY

The anonymous reader for CQ succinctly indicts the failed state of criticism on the relation between the two halves of the Senecan corpus:

The traditional application of philosophy to the plays, against which the reader reacts, might be summarized as follows: the neo-Latin humanists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries tended to see the plays as a warning against passion and a call to reason.Footnote ⁴ In the twentieth century, most attempts to describe the Stoicism of Senecan tragedy still focussed on the surface battle between ratio and furor, and argued that some scenes, characters or odes are rational and to be imitated, and others exhibit pathos to make us fear evil.Footnote ⁵ Berthe Marti saw a program of Stoic education behind the tragedies, but most of her evidence was shown by Croisille to be moral commonplaces rather than Stoic doctrine, and Dingel actually proposed that the tragedies are antithetical to Stoicism.Footnote ⁶ Rosenmeyer offers the most convincing case against a positivist approach to philosophy in the tragedies: whenever a character utters any semi-virtuous sententia, it either has no effect or is co-opted ironically to a villain's evil purpose. He suggests that principles of physics and metaphysics such as sympatheia, fate, contagion and mixture better explain the Stoic world of the plays.Footnote ⁷ In the new Brill and Cambridge Companions to Seneca, the entries on ‘Philosophical Tragedies’ are punctuated with question marks.Footnote ⁸ In the last twelve years, two superb monographs on the tragedies by Staley and Schiesaro have used Stoic epistemology and theories of critical viewership to suggest how Stoicism might allow for tragedy.Footnote ⁹ Neither, however, proposes a new way of applying Stoic ethics to the plays.

While it is certainly true that there is much more work to be done on Seneca's use of literary models, the great question remains how to answer the objections of Rosenmeyer and of the CQ reader that previous work on Stoic ethics in Senecan tragedy has been superficial and unpersuasive. I want to propose a third way, between the ratio / furor (didactic / apotropaic) approach and Rosenmeyer's pivot away from ethics, based on his argument that philosophy teaches the triumph of reason over passion, and tragedy shows the reverse, and thus it is all but impossible for a play to teach ethics didactically. Seneca was using Stoic doctrine in a witty and playful literary manner that we have missed, but which a Roman audience more steeped in Stoic thought might have perceived. Seneca was not making tragedy do the work of philosophy, to which it is ill-suited by nature; he was making philosophy do the work of literature, and in the process creating an interest in philosophy. In each play a relevant set of Stoic doctrines inspires the imagery and verbal fabric. The symbolism that is logically or imaginatively associated with the philosophical idea weaves through the physical, metaphysical and ethical layers of the play, where it is deconstructed, inverted and perverted until it brings about the fall of the protagonist. What I am calling ‘meta-Stoicism’ could be thought of as deconstructed Stoic ethical doctrines undergoing Rosenmeyer's sympatheia and contagion.

Since Stoicism accepted that all things in the universe (nature, we and our thoughts, and god) are interconnected by a material divine soul, which in us takes the form of a moist breath or pneuma, it also hypothesized that human emotions could affect the natural world and vice versa; so both the butterfly effect and the pathetic fallacy are possible.Footnote ¹⁰ Senecan tragedy is a medium ideally suited to portray sympatheia, where actions imagined in the minds of villains, metaphors and imagery can affect the physical world. The working of sympatheia in nature requires pneuma and has the appearance of magic. In the verbal fabric of a tragedy, however, the migration from a thought expressed in figurative language to a physical action described in realistic language requires only a change of interpretation from the metaphorical to the literal.

Seneca deconstructs Stoic ethical doctrines to suggest the fall of a philosophical idea, but in a way that involves wit and irony. An example would be the Stoic saying that ‘the wise man will subject himself to fortune’ (Sen. Prov. 4.12). In Agamemnon, the chorus sings a parodos on Fortuna, as Clytemestra enters the stage (57–107). The chorus describes fortune as tripping men up (fallax) by putting them in ‘excessively lofty’ places (excelsa nimis, 57–9, a reversal of the Delphic maxim μηδὲν ἄγαν, ‘nothing in excess’, and a play on Clytem[n]estra's name). The ode ends with an allusion to Horace's poem on the ship of political fortune (Carm. 2.10), but Seneca's chorus, unlike Horace, advises avoiding the open sea and sailing close to the ‘safe’ shore (103–7). The reason becomes apparent: the sea is Clytemestra (quid fluctuaris? 109).Footnote ¹¹ The centre of the play is occupied by the Messenger's description of the fortunes of the sea-crossing from Troy (421–578); and when Agamemnon is killed, Cassandra hails it as a reversal of fortune: uicimus uicti Phryges (869). Aspects of fortune migrate through the physical (the sea-crossing, the red carpet), the metaphysical (Clytemestra as metonymy for fortuna) and the ethical (fortuna as political justice for Cassandra), all of which seem to move toward the death of Agamemnon. The implication of calling it sympatheia rather than a system of imagery is to assert that metonymy and emotion, the sea and Clytemestra's axe are all causes of Agamemnon's fate. Since Seneca is writing tragedy and playing with Stoicism, there is no clear boundary between symbol and cause, the figurative and the literal. An audience that recalled the Stoic saying would smile to reflect that, in this instance, the wise man would be wiser not to submit himself to fortune, and it would notice the ways in which Agamemnon is unequal to the challenges of fortuna. Audiences would be amused by the ironies created from the explosion of such sayings, but the serious might reflect on what is happening to philosophy in the plays. The demise of Agamemnon as a king with only common sense is comprehensible, but what happens to the Stoic doctrine is curious.

II. SENECA'S THYESTES

To identify which philosophical ideas are most at issue in Thyestes, it is instructive to approach the play as one would a Horatian ode, by beginning with the significant imagery in the middle, and considering how the beginning and ending fit. The middle of Thyestes is occupied with the ritual sacrifice of Thyestes’ sons in a grisly ceremony meant as an inversion of pietas. The mock rite is conducted in ‘a place that lies hidden in the deepest recesses (of the imperial domus), surrounding an ancient grove in a deep valley—the inner sanctuary of the kingdom’ (arcana in imo regio secessu iacet, | alta uetustum ualle compescens nemus, | penetrale regni, 650–2). The locus horridus at the heart of the house of Atreus is perhaps meant to suggest the play of architecture and landscape in the heart of Rome, in Nero's Domus Aurea (Suet. Nero 31).Footnote ¹² In the prologue, the ghost of Tantalus is summoned from the underworld to become the appetite of the house (86); he is to strike first at the spiritual heart of the family, the penates (24). The play ends with the banquet to welcome home Thyestes, during which Atreus mocks the bonds of affection between him and his brother, and between father and son. The climax is a grim play upon the word ‘embrace’, as Atreus reveals the severed heads and hands of the boys: ‘open wide your embrace, father; they have come. Don't you recognize your sons?’ (expedi amplexus, pater; | uenere. natos ecquid agnoscis tuos? 1004–5). Atreus continues fifteen lines later: ‘Enjoy, kiss and divide up the embraces three ways’ (fruere, osculare, diuide amplexus tribus, 1021–3). We are perhaps meant to think not only of the ghoulish literal invitation to embrace, nor just of how the belly of Thyestes now physically embraces the boys (976) but also of the metaphysical or ethical dimension in which Atreus avenges himself for damage to three spheres of affection: as brother, father and husband.

Atreus prepares for this triumph of disaffection by slaughtering Thyestes’ sons in a sacrilegious manner that suggests his dissociation from all concerns human and divine. The Messenger compares him to ‘a maned lion in an Armenian wood’ (silua iubatus qualis Armenia leo, 732), and uses sexualized language to suggest the desire with which the lion ‘falls upon’ the herd (incubat, 733). The lion ‘chases the bulls and threatens the calves relentlessly even after his jaws are tired’ (tauros premens | uitulis minatur dente iam lasso inpiger, 735–6). Such is the bestial savagery of Atreus (non aliter Atreus saeuit, 737), as he drives a sword through the neck of Tantalus, beheads Plisthenes and skewers the third son (720–9, 738–43). The comparison to an ‘Armenian’ lion is not a superfluous detail: from a.d. 58–63 Rome was at war with Parthia, and wanted to secure Armenia as a friendly border state on its outer sphere. The Messenger's speech begins from the centre of the empire and ends with an allusion to the outermost reaches of its power (Rome's rather than Argos’). The expanding vista continues in the final choral ode, when the consequences of Atreus’ actions spread to the heavens and affect the sun and the constellations (789–884).

The Stoics conceived of concentric rings of affection spreading out from the self to the family, the city, the patria, the οἰκουμένη and finally the caelum. They associated this concept with their doctrine of οἰκείωσις, usually translated as ‘orientation’, ‘habituation’ and ‘appropriation’, meaning that nature has adopted us, and made us oriented toward ourselves and our constitutions. In accordance with our nature as human beings, which is rational and political, we have an instinct to embrace wider and wider affiliations until we are at home in the whole world. For Romans, one of the primary sources of this doctrine was Cic. Fin. 3.62–8, which begins with the assertion that ‘it is by nature's design that children are loved by their parents, and we [Stoics] trace the affinity of the human race for communal society back to this beginning’ (natura fieri ut liberi a parentibus amentur; a quo initio profectam communem humani generis societatem persequimur).Footnote ¹³ The force of oikeiōsis which draws us toward circles of friends, society and the formation of cities finally leads us to ‘the heavenly community of gods and men’—the universe governed by divine will in which we all participate by reason (commune urbem et ciuitatem hominum et deorum, 3.64).Footnote ¹⁴ Seneca was clearly aware of this text, not only in his own account of how all living things are ‘conciliated’ (conciliantur) to themselves and to their changing constitutions throughout life (Ep. 121.14–15) but also in this account of the Armenian lion. He alludes to a parallel simile in Cicero that describes how great statesmen protect human communities: ‘just as it has been given to bulls by nature to fight on behalf of their calves against lions with all their might and force …’ (atque ut tauris natura datum est ut pro uitulis contra leones summa ui impetuque contendant …, Fin. 3.66).

In Thyestes, the brave bulls are absent and there is no statesman to defend against the lion. Rather every aspect of the imagery of oikeiōsis is corrupted: ‘becoming at home’, ‘spheres of affection’, ‘evolving toward one's true nature’ and ‘taking one's place in the governance of the universe’.Footnote ¹⁵ Seneca envisions the doctrine as a poet might, beginning with its root sense of oikos, as he sets about depicting how the elements of oikeiōsis are perverted to become the disaffection of the ‘house’ of Atreus, and both the doctrine and the house are destroyed. The ghost of Tantalus is drawn by the Fury not just physically to the place of the Atreids but metaphysically into the nature of the family, to exert upon it an unseen pull of disaffection, driving its current occupants toward their natures. Thyestes is seduced by the allure of the palace and fellowship, into wider circles of family, city and empire, away from the solitude of exile (534–45). Atreus corrupts and perverts all aspects of nature's ‘conciliation, habituation and adoption’. He takes in the children of Thyestes as if adopting them to the royal family, and then butchers them like a frenzied animal. He welcomes his brother in a show of reconciliation, and feeds him his own children to prove who the father of Agamemnon and Menelaus is (325–30, 1104–9). He opens the final act by announcing that he is master of the universe in place of the gods, aequalis astris gradior … dimitto superos (885, 888). With Atreus, the Stoic spheres of affection are replaced by the expanding grasp of the tyrant.

In Act 1, as Atreus devises his insidious scheme, we think of the Stoic sage, who does all actions perfectly and views the world from the perspective of the heavenly community of gods and men.Footnote ¹⁶ Atreus is not a rational sage so much as he is performing a tyrannical inversion of the sage. He does not wish to join the heavenly community by perfecting his virtue, but to supplant the gods by perfecting his vice. To make the gods disappear from the heavens, he need only conceive an evil so divinely perfect that it will vitiate conventional definitions of the good (since the gods are good).Footnote ¹⁷ The thought of scaling the heights of Olympus like a Hesiodic giant may give him pause (audendum est, 193, 284), or may just reveal his gigantic ambition. As he musters his daring and defines his intentions, we see the first ring of disaffection—of Atreus from himself. He begins in monologue, addressing his soul in vocatives and commanding it with imperatives, like a second person (176–204). Then his Satelles enters to perform the role of feckless conscience (204–335). We imagine their amoebaean as a depiction of a soul attempting to expel mental inconsistency (cf. Juno in Verg. Aen. 1.37–49). For Atreus, it is the assertion of control over the first sphere of his own mind.Footnote ¹⁸ His search for a turn of phrase so perfect that the plan will be securely within his mental ‘grasp’ recalls another Stoic doctrine, the ‘graspable impression’. ‘Grasping’ then becomes Seneca's metaphor of the expanding ‘embrace’ of Atreus’ power.

The Stoics define a ‘cognitive or graspable impression’, φαντασία καταληπτική, as ‘arising from what is, and stamped and impressed exactly in accordance with what is’. It is their criterion for assent and acting based on reality rather than appearance.Footnote ¹⁹ This doctrine has applications not only to spectatorship but also to authorship and the way a Stoic artifex would create literature or art with a view to the mental impressions it might suggest.Footnote ²⁰ Language enters the Stoic theory of cognition when it is added to the mental impression or phantasia, which is not what the eyes see exactly but sensory data as seen by the mind's power of imagination. Then logos, the talkative aspect of thought, ‘renders in speech what it experiences from the impression’ through the addition of a lekton, which the Stoics define as ‘subsisting in a rational impression’, and making it possible ‘to express the content of the impression in language’.Footnote ²¹

Attaining a ‘graspable impression’ of reality requires thinking in language that corresponds to and represents reality. But in the dramatic irony of Senecan tragedy, the villain is searching for words that signify two opposite meanings at the same time, both to reveal the truth of an evil intention to the audience and simultaneously to hide behind a false meaning with a witless interlocutor—a formulation that is ‘perfect’ or kataleptic in its use of language and qua comprehended by the villain, but simultaneously akataleptic to the uninformed.

Seneca plays with the Stoic doctrine, turning ‘grasping’ into the organizing conception of his anti-sapiens. Atreus imagines ‘grasping at’ and ‘seizing upon’ crime as he pictures his revenge, which he tries to define in language so certain as to ‘catch’ Thyestes with the words themselves. Atreus is acting out the philosophical concept, as his ‘cognitive grasp’ migrates from the realm of fantasies toward reality, first as various metaphors of how a ‘real’ tyrant would seize the opportunity, and then as a decision of how to catch Thyestes in his trap (metaphorically) and seize his children (literally). His grasp becomes a physical action, when he captures the children for the sacrificial feast, and then returns to metaphor, as he gains a perfect grasp upon the soul of Thyestes by telling him that his protesting stomach is proof that his children are ‘in his embrace’.

As he ends his interior monologue, Atreus imagines ‘taking possession’ of the crime, in medio est scelus | positum occupanti (203–4). The Satelles tries various approaches to make Atreus think about his duty to the spheres of his rule. He should be concerned with what people say, think and honour (fama, gloria, laus, honesta, 205–15). The Satelles invokes the social virtues that encompass all relations of justice between men and gods, ‘where there is neither shame, nor care for law, the holy, the just and trust among men, a kingdom is unstable’ (ubi non est pudor, | nec cura iuris, sanctitas, pietas, fides, | instabile regnum est, 215–17). Atreus replies that these abstractions are ‘private’ goods, by which he appears to mean that they apply only to citizens, not to rulers, who must ‘go the way they please’ (priuata bona sunt, qua iuuat reges eant, 218). The idea that social virtues are private goods is an oxymoron, but it turns out that an oxymoron also defines the relationship between Atreus and Thyestes: ‘whatever is wrong in relation to a brother is right in relation to him’ (fas est in illo quidquid in fratre est nefas, 220).

After Atreus remembers all the relations of affection Thyestes took from him long ago—his wife in adultery, the golden ram and the throne, and finally the paternity of his children (222–43)Footnote ²²—he banishes pietas and summons in its place the Furies (249–53), that is, divine manifestations of violence perpetrated against those within kindred circles. He says that his soul burns with furor, but implies that a mere Fury has drives that are known and limited; he needs ‘a greater monster’ less easily satisfied by kindred blood (non satis magno meum | ardet furore pectus, impleri iuuat | maiore monstro, 253–4, playing on the imperial connotations of maius imperium). His monstrous conception affects all realms of the universe, from the underworld to the heavens, to the imperial domus and its lares (262–4). As his mental impression swells ‘beyond the boundaries of human morality’ (supraque fines moris humani, 267–8), to embrace ‘something grand / enormous’, he commands himself to ‘take possession of it’, that is, ‘appropriate it’ (sed grande quiddam est. ita sit. hoc, anime, occupa, 270). Atreus’ metaphorical hunger longs to ‘make his own’ (immane est scelus, sed occupatum, 273–4) another feast of Itys that he will watch his brother eat, by which point his monster of appetite will have become real.Footnote ²³ The complete satisfaction of Atreus’ desire is his perfectly vivid ‘graspable impression’ of Thyestes ‘eating the empty’Footnote ²⁴—the replication of the punishment of Tantalus: ‘Now the whole image of the slaughter wanders before my eyes, childlessness stuffed into the father's mouth’ (tota iam ante oculos meos imago caedis errat, ingesta orbitas | in ora patris, 281–3). Seneca employs prolepsis to dramatic effect: the slaughter imagined is not how he will kill the boys but the slaughter still further in the future, when Thyestes rends his children with his own teeth; but Atreus is thinking even further into the future, of the absence of descendants from the line of Thyestes. The line is also worded to suggest how the mental impression of Atreus will migrate from the metaphysical realm into the physical world: the sin (errat playing upon hamartia) spreads out ‘before his eyes’, as if externally visible. At the same time, the children of Thyestes are leaving the physical world and becoming the abstraction ‘childlessness’. Seneca may also be engaging in paronomasia on ‘empty-circles’ (orbus / orbis) with oculos, orbitas and ora, as if the line envisions the multiplication of them: ‘before the orbs of my eyes, I see the empty cycles of absent generations crowd into the circle of their father's teeth’. Atreus proves himself also a descendant of Tantalus, as his hunger is satisfied not by eating but by watching Thyestes eat food that is nefas to the gods (again suggesting negation stuffed into the mouth, even as nefas means a ‘negation of speaking’). Atreus’ cognitive grasp on the imagined revenge finally becomes the metaphor by which to understand the relationship between the brothers and the action of the play: ‘he could not be caught if his nature were not grasping’ (non poterat capi | nisi capere uellet, 288–9).

One may reasonably ask whether this literary play upon philosophical doctrine, or ‘meta-Stoicism’ is unique to Thyestes, which is arguably a late and especially philosophical play. If this thesis provides a new way of reading all the tragedies, we ought to be able to identify Stoic doctrines around which each one is designed, and formulate a persuasive interpretation from the sympathetic mutation of doctrine through the language of the play. To that end, it is worth considering how this mode of analysis might be applied to less obviously philosophical examples, such as Oedipus and Phaedra.

III. OEDIPVS

The plot of Oedipus suggests two Stoic doctrines as likely themes: fate and divination. These are linked, since the Stoics held that the gods in their benevolence have placed signs of certain fated events in the exta of sacrificial animals, lightning, the flights of birds and other phenomena, which can be understood correctly by an expert.Footnote ²⁵ If the play is interacting with Stoic theories of fate, we ought to be able to detect the involvement of their main doctrines: 1. heimarmenē, the conception of fate as a heirmon, a ‘concatenation’ or ‘inescapable binding together of causes in sequential order’;Footnote ²⁶ 2. suneimarmenē, that assents are ‘co-fated’ in the chain of causation, such as that I will be learned provided that I study, and therefore my assent to study becomes a cause of my becoming learned—a doctrine which refutes the lazy argument (ἀργός λόγος), for example that, if Oedipus will be born to Laius, it does not matter whether Laius has intercourse with a woman;Footnote ²⁷ 3. the compatibilist position that, while all things happen by antecedent causes, our actions still have a cause within our power. The Stoics argue that assent is the complete and primary cause of action, while fate serves as an auxiliary and proximate cause.Footnote ²⁸ The Stoics were famous for three sayings that illustrate these doctrines. The first is that, just as a cylinder or cone cannot move without a push, yet by their natures the one rolls and the other turns, so also assent is ‘stimulated’ by an external source through a mental presentation (phantasia), but how it reacts is determined by our nature.Footnote ²⁹ The second is that, if a dog tied behind ‘a cart’ (ὀχήματος) follows willingly, it cooperates with fate and proceeds smoothly, but if it is unwilling to cooperate, it will be dragged and suffer the pull of necessity (in the soul, passion).Footnote ³⁰ The third explains how we are to act before an inscrutable fate: Chrysippus used to say that ‘as long as what comes next is unclear, I always stick to what is more apt to secure the things in accordance with nature, for God fashioned me to select them. But if I knew with certainty that I was fated to be sick, I would seek even that; indeed even my foot, if it had rational faculties, would impel itself to be muddied’ [if that were fated].Footnote ³¹

The fall of Oedipus is a myth ideally suited to suggest the operation of sympatheia, since the sins in his soul are the cause of the plague in the physical world.Footnote ³² Seneca's play has a central divination scene in which Manto and Tiresias inspect the organs of sacrificial animals and find unusual corruption (288–383). The scene extends through the second choral ode, while Laius is summoned to interpret what it means (384–99, 530–98).Footnote ³³ The corrupted sacrifice is anticipated by the first choral ode, in which Stoic imagery of fate suggests connections between the sins of Oedipus and the sickness of animals in Thebes.

The plague first ‘touched’ (tetigit, 133) the sluggish sheep; as a priest prepared to immolate a bull, it ‘tottered, sluggish’ (labitur segnis, 138); when the blow finally landed, foul gore ‘poured forth’ (profusa, 141) rather than blood; then a horse, also sluggish, ‘fell in a circle and threw its rider over its sinking shoulder’ (concidit gyro dominumque prono | prodidit armo, 143–4). The unusual noun gyro is the key to interpreting the symbolism: ordinarily used of a ‘horse-track’, the great circle collapses down to the horse's motion within itself. It is meant to be connected to the sequence tetigit … labitur … profusa … concidit gyro, to point to Chrysippus’ cylinder of fate: the cylinder is set in motion by ‘contact’ and then ‘rolls forth’, whereas the cone, like the downward rotating collapse of the horse's shoulder, ‘turns in a circle’.Footnote ³⁴ The Delphic oracle reported by Creon ends with (disturbingly sexual) imagery of the cylinder of fate rolling backward. Phoebus says that the fugitive guest of Thebes has ‘foully returned [lit. ‘rolled / screwed back’] again to the maternal place of his birth’ (turpis maternos iterum reuolutus in ortus, 238).Footnote ³⁵ When Jocasta re-enters the stage after the consultation of Laius, the back-rolling motion takes over the thoughts of Oedipus (curas reuoluit animus et repetit metus, 764). In the final choral ode to fate, it shows up in the ‘decrees’ of Lachesis and her cylindrical distaff (seruatque suae decreta colus | Lachesis dura reuoluta manu, 985–6). The chorus sings that ‘no god may turn back threads that run on, woven by their own causes, and for each of us it goes as a fixed order, changeable by no prayer’ (non illa deo uertisse licet | quae nexa suis currunt causis. | it cuique ratus prece non ulla | mobilis ordo, 989–92). The Delphic oracle alerts us to watch reuoluo move through the play from the physical misdeeds of Oedipus to his animus, to the fabric of fate itself. In the final ode, we sense that the backward spinning of fate, like the plot of the play itself as it progresses in reverse to find the first cause, is weaving an ineluctable web of Nemesis to attach to the first link, Oedipus.

Seneca plays on the name of Oedipus so as to suggest Chrysippus’ description of fate as ‘uncertain’ (ἄδηλα): ‘to Oedipus alone has been granted a knowledge of words that can mean two things’ (like his name; ambigua soli noscere Oedipodae datur, 216).Footnote ³⁶ As the play opens, even the sunrise is indecisive (Titan dubius).Footnote ³⁷ A celestial cloud of gloom suggests the miasma of the plague that has claimed more victims in the night. Another kind of cloud has infected the palace, depriving Oedipus of any joy in ruling over a dying city, so that he describes his power in terms that apply equally to himself and his soul: ‘oh deceptive good, how many evils you hide behind a pretty façade’ (o fallax bonum, | quantum malorum fronte quam blanda tegis, Oed. 6–7). Uncertainty extends to all aspects of the kingdom from the natural to the supernatural. The oracle of Apollo makes Oedipus uncertain of his own nature and fate (24–7); the sun is exceedingly hot, but at night the stars and the moon are obscured by a thick fog (37–47); the wheat grows ripe and full, but then withers (48–51); funerals are ubiquitous, but produce no tears (52–6). As Jocasta enters at the word parentes,Footnote ³⁸ she instructs Oedipus about the kingly art of ruling in a crisis: the more ‘uncertain’ (dubius, 83) the foundation and mass of a falling kingdom as it totters, ‘the more firmly the brave man must stand sure-footed’ (hoc stare certo pressius fortem gradu, 85). Her words allude not only to the ‘swollen feet’ of Oedipus (οἰδέω-πούς), which prevent a firm stance (οἶδα δίποδα, ‘I know the two-footed’), but also to Chrysippus’ imagery of the ‘muddy foot’. Creon describes how Tiresias summons the ghost of Laius: beneath a great tree there was ‘a muddy swamp’ (limosa … palus); ‘as the aged priest set foot in it, he did not hesitate’ (huc ut sacerdos intulit senior gradum, | haut est moratus, 547–9). Epistemological uncertainty migrates from the metaphysical to the physical nature of Oedipus, when he rips out his eyes, revealing the conflicted face of one who knows but does not see (uultus Oedipodam hic decet, 1003).

The Stoic concept of fate as a heirmon, or ‘inescapable binding’ of causes, also shapes the play: Oedipus recalls how before coming to power he was an exile ‘unbound from his cares’ (curis solutus, 13); he plays on the name of the Sphinx (> σφίγγω), who ‘bound together … riddles of knotted words and nets of deceit’ (nectentem, 92; nodosa sortis uerba et implexos dolos, 101; see n. 36 above); the second choral ode, during the preparations to summon Laius, celebrates Bacchus as a god of ‘binding’, like his ivy (redimite, 403; cingi, 413; cohibere, 414; religare, 416, retinente, 421; ligat, 456; so also his attendants Silenus and the Bacchants—redimitus, 430; praecincta, 438; and his aunt Ino—cingitur, 446); Laius calls Oedipus a monster more ‘difficult to untangle’ than his Sphinx (perplexum, 641). The ‘chain, net, web’ imagery of heimarmenē migrates from the physical grasp of the Sphinx to the abstract tangles of her logoi, to the binding ivy of Bacchus’ divine nemesis, to the evils complexly interwoven in the soul and fate of Oedipus.

Seneca also uses language to suggest the Stoic image of the dog tied to the ‘cart’ of fate (ὀχήματος, see n. 30 above). Oedipus describes the Dog-Star Canis as ‘following closely [lit. ‘pressing upon the back of’] the Nemean Lion, Leo’ (leonis terga Nemeaei premens, 40); and Jocasta says: ‘it is unmanly to give one's back to Fortune’ (haud est uirile terga Fortunae dare, 86). The implication is that the Dog-Star is treating the royal Leo with sexual violence, as if Oedipus’ abuse of Laius (leonis, the king) is a foreshadowing of his sexual transgressions.Footnote ³⁹ In this context, it sounds as if Jocasta is telling Oedipus not to submit to fate (sexually) like a dog. The Thebans gossip that Cerberus must have ‘broken free of his chains of iron’ to roam through the city (uincula ferri | rupisse, 171–2). Oedipus, however, is not only the victim but also the agent of this fate. He has fled from the Delphic prophecies of Phoebus and his ‘cerulean cart’ (254–5), to become the dog of death running loose in Thebes. The ‘chained dog’ image recurs in the nekyia when Creon wonders whether the sound of Laius being summoned from the underworld is an earthquake or ‘Cerberus moving his heavy chains’ (catenas Cerberus mouit graues, 581). The end of the third choral ode, preceding Jocasta's re-entry, suggests that Oedipus will be undone by his appetites, just as Actaeon was attacked by his own dogs after beholding a forbidden nakedness (751–63, 930–2).

The first choral ode plays upon the ‘lazy’ argument (ἀργός): tardas, 132; segnis, 137; segnior, 142; prono, 143; deficit, 147; cessat, 150; lassata, 169; fessus, 170; grauior … piger … ignauos … languor, 181–3. The ironies created by this ode to Theban languor are many and layered. All the rest of Thebes is busy, but their activity is ‘dying’, occidis (110). Oedipus alone is idle (cui reseruamur malo? 31); but in calling upon Apollo to show his salvation, his one action assures his destruction (109). A lazy argument asserts that an effect may be present without a prior ‘co-fated’ cause (suneimarmenē). The Delphic oracle had warned Oedipus that his father would die by his hand and that he would pollute his father's bed (16–21). Oedipus is certain that he has not committed these crimes, yet he says ‘we have made heaven harmful’ (fecimus caelum nocens, 36). If he is not referring to the pestilential fog (79), he is implying that the plague is being caused by his presence because of future crimes he will commit. Oedipus seems to think that divination is at work (the plague is a sign of future sins), but, because he has already done the co-fated acts, he is ironically telling a lazy lie (that the plague has occurred without the necessary co-fated causes). In reality, this is a case of sympatheia (past causes that have migrated from the metaphysical to the physical). The final sympathetic irony is that the laziness of his erotic languor, the little death of the incestuous lover, has caused the city's dying languor.

IV. PHAEDRA

The question raised by the myth of Hippolytus is whether it is better, as the Nurse claims, for Phaedra to abandon virtue and follow the amoral promptings of nature, rather than commit suicide. The Stoics held a peculiar doctrine on suicide, that the decision about when and whether to exit life should be based not on questions of good and evil / virtue and vice per se (since the Stoics define the good as virtue, and say it is always in the power of the wise man), but on the continued availability of the ‘raw material’ upon which to practise virtue. Cicero says that, when one has a preponderance of ‘things in accordance with nature’ (quae secundum naturam sunt), it is the wise person's ‘proper function’ (or duty, officium) to remain in life, but not when the opposite is the case. The primary things of nature also form as it were ‘the subject matter of wisdom’ (materia sapientiae).Footnote ⁴⁰ Cicero's language shows that Stoic doctrine on suicide derives from their concept of ‘proper functions, appropriate actions, duties’ (καθήκοντα). Plutarch quotes a famous Stoic saying: ‘where shall I begin, and what shall I take as the origin of appropriate action (τοῦ καθήκοντος) and the material of virtue (ὕλην τῆς ἀρετῆς), if I leave out nature and what is in accordance with nature (τὸ κατὰ φύσιν)?’Footnote ⁴¹ Chrysippus said that the ‘first impulse’ (πρώτη ὁρμή) of any living thing is to self-preservation, ‘since nature orients it to herself from the beginning’ (οἰκειούσης αὐτὸ τῆς φύσεως ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς).Footnote ⁴² Happiness is living in accordance with nature (secundum naturam uiuere, De uita beata 7.8.2).

While nature exerts this force of orientation, and all things that accord with nature are ‘things one can take’ (ληπτά, that is, appropriate for rational selection),Footnote ⁴³ good and evil exert a completely different pull upon us. The good or virtue is ‘a thing one chooses’ (αἱρετόν), and doing good or having virtue (‘benefitting’ τὸ ὠφελεῖν) is ‘what must be chosen’ (αἱρετέον); evil or vice is ‘a thing one rejects’ (φευκτόν; and, one assumes, doing evil or living in vice—harming, τὸ βλάπτειν—is ‘what one must avoid’, φευκτέον).Footnote ⁴⁴ The possibility of having the good (virtue) stimulates an unlimited ‘desire’ in us to pursue it (ὄρεξις), and so also vice stimulates flight. Things that are merely in accordance with nature or the opposite do not incite an impulse, but are ‘indifferent’ in so far as ὄρεξις is concerned, even though we are oriented to them.Footnote ⁴⁵

All of this takes on a rather amusing aspect in Seneca's play, in which Hippolytus wants nothing to do with women and sublimates all of his erotic energy into the hunt, that is, the ‘pursuit’ of nature (ite, umbrosas cingite siluas, 1; lustrate, 3; scandite, 7).Footnote ⁴⁶ Phaedra wrestles with her obsession for the ‘manliness’ (uirtus) of Hippolytus, which she also sublimates as a longing for the ‘woods’ (siluas), that is, materia or ὕλη, as her Nurse tries to find a way for her to avoid vice, preserve virtue, follow nature and avert suicide.Footnote ⁴⁷ The philosophical wordplay is thick with ironies: the ‘manly’ world of Hippolytus is meant to suggest his uirtus, which he associates with the natural life in the hills, glades, trees and pastures of Attica (colles … nemus … alno … prata … herbas, 7–12; cf. 483–525). His deity is Diana, goddess of the hunt, whom he calls diua uirago, ‘the mannish goddess’ of uncorrupted virtue, whom he invokes with sexual imagery that suggests a repressed desire to hunt ‘in her waiting secret hollows’ (cuius regno pars terrarum | secreta uacat, 55–6).Footnote ⁴⁸ His manliness is clear, but his virtue is partly cloudy.Footnote ⁴⁹ When Phaedra comes on stage (probably at ades en comiti, 54), her self-description invites us to think of her as a personification of vice. As she envisions Theseus’ journey to commit adultery in Hades, her word-choice reveals her own desire to do the same with his son (illicitos toros, 97–8).

The form her imagination takes, moreover, begins the sympathetic evolution of materia through this play. Phaedra asks herself why she has a passion for ‘glades’ (saltus, 112), which makes her recognize the ancient ‘evil’ (malum) of her mother, Pasiphaë: ‘our love has known how to sin in wood(s)’ (peccare noster nouit in siluis amor, 114). Phaedra goes on to describe how the Cretan bull was wild, and Pasiphaë encountered it in the wild (117–19). But it becomes clear that Phaedra is not so much fantasizing about ‘woods’, as she is recalling how her mother had a Daedalus to make a way for her love; she even envies the Cretan bull, who loved ‘something’ (aliquid, that is, the cow of ‘wood’, materia). When she describes Daedalus as ‘he who shut up our monsters in a home impervious to sight’, she means not only the Minotaur, her half-brother in the labyrinth, but also the real monster, her mother in the wooden cow (qui nostra caeca monstra conclusit domo, 122). If there were any doubt that Seneca intends wordplay both sexual and philosophical on materia, in the middle of the play Hippolytus asks Phaedra: ‘for so great a crime, did I alone seem to you handy material? Did my hardness merit this?’ (scelerique tanto uisus ego solus tibi | materia facilis? hoc meus meruit rigor, 686–7). After materia has evolved from the things of nature to the metaphor for Phaedra's sin and the object of her imagination, to Hippolytus as the good wood that becomes the materia uitii, in the end, his body is reduced to bits of nature, materia. After the chorus sings its final ode to magna parens Natura (959), Hippolytus is rent asunder (1168–74); Phaedra longs to be joined with him in death (free of material constraint, 1183–4), and commits suicide (1200, no longer able to pursue the things in accordance with nature); and the play ends with the grisly contemplation of the material remains of Hippolytus: ‘what is this piece, no definition left, misshapen, wounded repeatedly, and everywhere torn and broken?’ (hoc quid est forma carens | et turpe, multo uulnere abruptum undique? 1265–6).

Throughout the play, ‘pursuit and avoidance’ have undergone similar sympathetic mutations to create ironies around the Stoic doctrine of virtue.Footnote ⁵⁰ Hippolytus pursues game (61) and thinks that it makes him ‘free from vice’ (uitio carens, 483). Phaedra says that Pallas’ loom stands idle and that she has no desire to attend the rites of the virgin goddess.Footnote ⁵¹ She longs to ‘pursue’ wild beasts and wield the ‘hard’ lance in her soft hands (consequi … rigida, 110–11). After the Nurse has done her best to persuade Phaedra to remain in virtue and turn her impulses away from incest (129–41), Phaedra reveals that passion is driving her toward the worse path (178), that is, the imitation of Pasiphaë (235–41). The Nurse is urging Phaedra to show constantia, but ironically that is what Phaedra is doing in remaining true to her natura. Phaedra finally decides upon a course of action that sounds like suicide, but may not be (253–60):

The surface meaning of line 254 is that she will follow Theseus to the underworld and avert vice by suicide; but the ambiguity of uirum and morte also allows it to mean what actually happens in the play—pursue Hippolytus and avert the charge of impious crime by contriving at Hippolytus’ death.Footnote ⁵² The Nurse's phrase dignam nece can also be taken ironically to mean not ‘deserve death’ but ‘deserve a murder’. Phaedra continues to be ambiguous about whether she means virtue and suicide or vice and manslaughter: laqueone uitam finiam can suggest setting nooses by which to kill small game with Hippolytus, even as ferro incubem suggests how suicide and sex alternate in her thoughts; and ‘throwing herself headlong from the citadel of Pallas’ also takes on a sexual meaning if we take Pallas as metonymy for ‘virginity’. After Phaedra reveals her feelings to Hippolytus and is rejected, the chorus suggests that the ‘pursuit of virtue’ has been turned on its head: ‘the rewards won by a luckless virtue have been subverted: an evil poverty follows the chaste, while the adulterer, powerful in vice, reigns in his place’ (tristis uirtus peruersa tulit | praemia recti: | castos sequitur mala paupertas | uitioque potens regnat adulter, 985–8). After migrating from the physical world (Hippolytus’ virtuous hunts) to the soul of Phaedra (tormented between virtue and the man), now to the political realm, finally ‘the pursuit of uirtus’ causes the fall of Hippolytus (1025, 1034, 1077). His avoidance of Phaedra as the embodiment of vice leads Theseus to call for Poseidon's bull to ‘pursue’ Hippolytus and attack his ‘manhood’ (1085–104). The play ends with Phaedra and Theseus both vowing to follow him to the underworld (1180, 1240).

V. READER RESPONSE

The one historical remark we possess about why he wrote tragedy, from Tacitus, comes from Seneca's detractors at court, who accuse him of ‘seeking to make the praise of eloquence his alone, and of writing carmina more frequently after a love of it came over Nero’.Footnote ⁵³ Henry and Walker interpret the malicious accusation to be that he was competing with Nero who had begun to write his own plays.Footnote ⁵⁴ Clearly, at court one competed in eloquence, and tragedy was important because it was Nero's passion. This implies that we should be reading the plays for their language, as well as considering how they were crafted with a court audience in mind.

The other piece of evidence we have is about the Stoic attitude toward poetry in the Roman era. Nussbaum cites Strabo's testimony that the Stoics thought of poetry as a ‘first philosophy’ that is taught ‘not for the sake of mere enticing diversion but to develop sophrosyne (moral character)’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Strabo goes on to say that poetry teaches ‘rhetoric’, which is ‘prudence concerning language’,Footnote ⁵⁶ and that poetry's fondness for myth is intended as a ‘prooemion to education’.Footnote ⁵⁷ But while Strabo's Stoics conceive of poetry as holding interest for children and the uneducated through depictions of mythical heroes combatting evil (the Labours of Hercules) and marvels and portents warning against vice, like the unjust struck down by Zeus's thunderbolt,Footnote ⁵⁸ Seneca offers a greater inducement to philosophy. Seneca invites the reader to imagine a world in which evil has triumphed and concepts such as justice, morality and the good have all fallen before the tyrant, leaving only a world of indeterminate grey and ambiguity; and the forces of nature that should draw us towards the good have been turned inside out to bring about evil and destruction.Footnote ⁵⁹ He prepares us to entertain the tragedy of philosophy by his relentless play upon its familiar images—the mirror of the prince, the monster of the tyrannical soul, the grasping impression, the drive of oikeiōsis toward a wider embrace, the lazy argument and the web of fate, acting in blindness before an uncertain future, the attraction of nature, the desire for uirtus.

There is humour in the thought of Oedipus’ ‘screwing’ himself back to where he was born, of Hippolytus reduced to materia uirtutis, and the disintegration of oikeiōsis in the house of Atreus. There is also a reason to react intellectually, to ponder how philosophy is inverted, and how common virtue is left to deal with an evil beyond its power. These reactions fit with our two pieces of evidence that suggest Seneca was writing in eloquent language for a court audience, and that he would be using myth in a moral way to interest an audience enough to want to take up philosophy. Set over against these reactions of humour and intellectual curiosity, there remains the problem of Senecan darkness, especially in scenes such as the slaughter of the children in Thyestes. Poe accuses Seneca and us of vicariously enjoying Atreus’ grisly sacrifice in Thyestes; Littlewood says that our ‘paralyzed horror gives way to sadistic pleasure’; and Schiesaro says not only that Stoic tragedy is impossible, since ‘the wise will have no interest in it and the progressor will be deceived by it’, but also that we must consider ‘whether enjoyment of this type of poetry is not also a form of collusion with it’.Footnote ⁶⁰

There is one more thing we know about the Stoic attitude to poetry that may be relevant: they were willing to allegorize anything, even to the point of using an obscene painting of Hera pleasuring Zeus to explicate the doctrine of the spermatikos logos.Footnote ⁶¹ It is improbable that Seneca was trying to scandalize us with gruesome depictions of evil, after denouncing the daily parade of death in the arena (Ep. 7.3–7). Rather, there ought to be some purpose to the way in which Atreus cuts up the children of Thyestes, and ‘joints’ them for roasting, reserving the heads and hands for display. The phenomenon is not limited to Thyestes. There is something equally ghoulish in nearly every play—the extispicium in Oedipus that forces us to imagine foulness in its physical expression; and Hippolytus in Phaedra who is so mangled that parts of him are unrecognizable. The accusation of critics that Seneca seems to take a perverse delight in these scenes does feel true. One wonders whether they were not for him a sort of sphragis on the name Seneca, as if from se / sua necat, ‘he kills himself / his own’. A search for the noun nex, necis suggests a relevant passage in every play (Thy. 693; Oed. 634; Phae. 854; Ag. 887–9; Med. 473; HF 1175; Pho. 103–7).

What is most Seneca's own—and dissected in every play—is philosophy. We consistently see the death of a philosophical doctrine accompanied by the demise of a flawed ‘philosophizing’ character. The dismemberment of oikeiōsis leads to the tragedy of Thyestes and his sophistical son, Tantalus; the rending of the relation between nature, virtue and constancy in Phaedra leads to the mutilation of Hippolytus; and introspection into the resected bowels of a sacrifice in Thebes reveals the corruption in Oedipus that prompts him to cut out his organs of inspection.Footnote ⁶² By the time of Thyestes, the inconsistencies in Seneca's situation as court philosopher must have made for a tortured inner dialogue. He no doubt felt a deep ambivalence about the wisdom of working for the imperial family after being exiled by Claudius, only to see the megalomania of Nero growing and himself ever more compromised by wealth in service to a tyrant. The fall of a philosophical fraud such as Thyestes may be directing us to see the play as Seneca's reflection on his own folly in returning to public service. What Atreus does to the children could stand as a fitting symbol of what Nero does to philosophy as imperfectly defended by Seneca.

Seneca would never admit that the virtue of the wise man can be compromised. But he would be the first to admit that he is not a sapiens, that there have been unforeseen consequences of his proximity to power, and that, while Stoicism has armour against evil, those merely on the road to philosophy are vulnerable. That is, Seneca's perverse delight in showing the mangling of philosophy alongside insufficiently philosophical characters in each play (in parallel with his ironic treatment of the sententious chorus) could be self-referential.Footnote ⁶³ It shows not only what the emperor and his family do to philosophy—reducing it to mangled elements that can be corrupted to evil purposes—but also what they do to flawed men like Thyestes. When service to the state becomes impossible, the only sensible response, short of suicide, is that of Odysseus at the end of Plato's Republic: choosing a private life of philosophy apart from politics (10.620c–d).

If we allegorize the darkest scenes in Senecan drama into depictions of the tragedy of philosophy at court, the plays take on a different aspect. There may even be reason to revisit some old ideas such as whether the plays show a systematic catalogue of Stoicism, such as Marti argued for in 1945.Footnote ⁶⁴ One would not wish to call it an education in philosophy, but in the three plays discussed here Seneca has shown the symbolism and operation (by ironic inversion) of oikeiōsis, fate, virtue, Stoic naturalism / rational selection and suicide. Viewed as ‘first philosophy’, one could see the plays fitting into an agenda very much like the Epistulae ad Lucilium, of prompting the intellectually curious and morally serious to take up philosophy.