S. has written an entertaining and engaging introduction to Seneca's Medea. It is well suited for supporting undergraduate courses centred on this play, but there are plenty of interesting nuggets for more advanced readers, particularly in the treatment of Medea’s reception and in the details S. teases out of her close readings.
The book appears in the Bloomsbury Companions to Greek and Roman Tragedy series and is the third volume dedicated to a Senecan tragedy; the two previous volumes were devoted to Oedipus and Hercules Furens. S. covers a lot of ground in less than 200 pages, dealing with the play's context, earlier handlings of the myth, the themes and language of the play, and its subsequent influence.
The first chapter treats some of the most vexed questions of Senecan scholarship: the connection, if any, between Seneca's tragedies and Seneca's philosophical work, the political context in which he operated and the Roman theatre in the first century ad. S. rightly eschews easy answers, arguing against reducing the plays to Stoic exempla; but, presenting De ira and Medea side by side (pp. 8–11), she points out some of the compelling parallels at the textual and the thematic levels. S. mentions (pp. 11–12) some of the Stoic philosophical theory that scholars have suggested as links between Senecan tragedy and his prose writings, such as Stoic self-fashioning or sympatheia, though readers must wait until the third chapter before S. returns to critique such readings. On performance context (pp. 19–29), S. stresses the differences between the Roman theatrical space of the first century ad and that of fifth-century Athenian tragedy, highlighting the grandeur of the scaenae frons and the vivid costuming, and S. emphasises that modern dramatic prejudices towards naturalism are anachronistic for Roman theatrical practices. These points are vital for students, who are likely coming to Senecan tragedy already steeped in Attic drama, and a useful prod to any reader situated in an age where the assumption of realism is hard-wired into so many performative media. S. discusses thoughtfully the aural properties of the Roman theatre and pantomime: S.’s suggestion (p. 25) that the influence of musical excerpting is an explanation of the ‘segmented structure’ of Seneca's plays offers a solution (already suggested by J.G. Fitch in G.W.M. Harrison [ed.], Seneca in Performance [2000], pp. 1–12) for a long-standing topos in Senecan criticism, although, given the continuities in themes and ideas that S. herself later highlights, Medea is hardly disjointed compared to Troades, say, for which musical excerpting seems less convincing to me.
The second chapter offers a summary of the play (pp. 31–7), before tracing the Medea myth in its literary incarnations prior to Seneca's play (pp. 37–52). S.’s decision to proceed backwards from Seneca to Ovid to Apollonius of Rhodes (via Catullus and Horace) to arrive finally at Euripides, rather than simply beginning with the Greek playwright, is a great move, inviting consideration of the importance of earlier non-tragic Roman poetry and also linking Seneca to other Roman poets whom students will be more familiar with. A section on Medea in Roman art (pp. 52–60) demonstrates how aspects of Medea's characterisation in the tradition emerge and develop out of an ongoing dialogue between art, text and performance. However, a little more hand-holding would help. For example, S. introduces a couple of Pompeian frescoes depicting Medea from the House of the Dioscuri and the House of Jason, and notes that they may have taken their cues from Timomachus’ famous painting, put on public display by Julius Caesar. S. could have reminded the reader that the Tutor, a character included in these frescoes, is absent from Seneca's tragedy. Furthermore, since these frescoes were likely created after the probable date of composition for Seneca's Medea, this raises interesting questions about contemporary circulation and awareness of Seneca's play (contrasting with the graffiti [CIL IV, Suppl. 6698; see W.D. Lebek, ZPE 1985] of lines from Seneca's Agamemnon found in Pompeii) and about the degree of responsivity between individual artistic and literary interpretations against the role of traditions operating within genres, a topic S. handles adeptly for the literary texts earlier in the chapter.
The third chapter looks at three key themes in Medea: return, elemental violence and Medea becoming ‘Medea’. Each of these treatments is supported with close readings of the text. S. points out (quite rightly) the contradictions of reading the Stoic theory of sympatheia into Medea, but in introducing Stoic self-address via metatheatre, S. does not consider whether the former truly entails the latter. S. also presupposes pantomimic conventions for the nurse's third-act description and fourth choral ode (‘It is to be assumed that Medea is physically present’, p. 85), but why could these not be enargeic descriptions of an off-stage Medea? In addition, the possibility of epic influence, as well as pantomime, should be acknowledged (cf. e.g. A.M. Baertschi's balanced approach in Brill's Companion to Roman Tragedy [2015], pp. 171–95).
The second half of the book is excellent. Each of the chapters has a section concerned with reception, and through the comparisons S. greatly enriches her analysis of Seneca's Medea.
In the fourth chapter on Seneca's language and style S. highlights the strengths of Seneca's poetry, such as in her discussion of Seneca's linked vocabulary and use of repetition (pp. 95–7), although it would have been worth comparing terms such as nefas across Seneca's tragedies and with previous authors such as Ovid and Virgil, drawing on previous treatments (e.g. A. Schiesaro, Passions in Play [2003], esp. pp. 70–138). Describing the line quodcumque uidit Phasis aut Pontus nefas (Med. 44) as Medea referring to ‘the traumatic (nefas) events of her past’ (p. 94) is to understate Medea's awareness of her own criminality. Yet the detailed comparison between Seneca's language and that used by J. Studley in his translation of Medea is illuminating, inviting new ways of reflecting on Seneca's pointed style. The fifth chapter demonstrates how Corneille focuses on Medea the sorceress, but also that the representation of her magic differs from Seneca's Medea. S. also points out the strangeness of the Senecan Medea's movement, ‘akin to teleportation’ (p. 125), something important that I have not seen previously noted. The sixth chapter covers modern Medeas in opera, film and theatre and their relationships to Seneca's Medea. S.’s account of her own personal experiences (pp. 157–9) directing Seneca's Medea and watching Magelli's 2015 production stands out in its imagination of the dramatic possibilities of the Senecan text.
S. offers no dedicated introduction (or conclusion) and maintains a rapid pace throughout. The book is best read in its entirety: students dipping into a few pages for an assignment will not get nearly so much out of it. S. often breaks off from a topic or theme before returning to tackle it again from a different angle later. This does help the reader avoid becoming bogged down in more complicated issues like performance context while still covering them, but more signposting that a given discussion will not be the end of the matter would have been helpful. Overall, S. has struck out on stimulating paths through the material.
The end matter only includes a decent bibliography, notes and index, even though the book's blurb on the Bloomsbury Companions series promises that ‘a guide to further reading, glossary and chronology are included’. The hardback price also seems steep, although there is an e-book and, hopefully, a cheaper paperback version will follow (as with the other Companions in the same series). The book is well produced with minimal typos, although I noticed the following: mare > mari, sopite … cantibus meis > sopite … cantibus, serpens, meis, p. 72; omnenque > omnemque, p.106; ‘forfeit’ > ‘forfait’, ‘marriage’ > ‘mariage’, p. 133; the Latin text used appears to be J.G. Fitch's Loeb edition (2002), only alluded to at p. 173 n. 49.
