Pantomime has finally been receiving its due and Zanobi has been part of this welcome direction in scholarship. Hall, Wyles and Zimmerman, among others, have edited books and published articles on the growth of this performative genre, but the book under review is the first to focus itself specifically on the question of the potential influence of pantomime on Seneca. This book, however, is a bit of a tease: the rubric to the Introduction (vii–xi) is ‘The Vexata Quaestio of the Dramaturgy of Seneca's Tragedies’ and seems to promise that the author will take a stand on the question of whether Seneca wrote his plays for performance and whether they were in fact performed in his lifetime. In the Conclusion (201–3), however, Z. retreats to safety allowing herself only the cautious statements that ‘pantomime … may have affected Seneca's writing, no matter what the destination for his tragedies he envisaged’ (202) and ‘it is unnecessary to assume that he [Seneca] wrote them [the tragedies] in a way that excluded the possibility of any of the forms of performance, whether rhetorical or theatrical’ (203). This is a very great pity for a more rigorous application of the implications of the material Z. has gathered would help settle the performance question. Her analysis of the connections between Deianira in the Hercules Oetaeus and jealousy as a theme in pantomime (118–20) holds great promise for addressing the authenticity of Senecan composition of the Hercules Oetaeus, which once again has found champions in Konstan and Filippi, among others, yet Z. demurs (239 n. 75). Hercules makes an appearance vis-à-vis madness as a theme in pantomime (Hercules furens 895–1053: 103–5); the Hercules Oetaeus, however, places him squarely within the tradition of the adultery mime.

The lost opportunities in this book do not eclipse its many great virtues. Z.'s background on the rise of pantomime as a genre (1–17) is concise and her headings for subjects such as cast, costumes, and musical accompaniment make the topics easy to follow. Her instinct (4) that pantomime must go back at least to the early part of the first century b.c., tied to the Latin root salt- in inscriptions about popular performance, is almost certainly correct; the games of Marcellus in 22 b.c. marked the ‘official entry’ (3) of pantomime into Rome. Pp. 17–51 establish the rhetorical color of emotion in late Republican and early Imperial writers. The disjunction between showing an objectified emotion and emotions based on personal experience is central to Z.'s critique of Seneca's tragedies (302) and so essential to her argument. Her examples for the influence of popular performance on Roman literature are extremely well chosen: pantomime on Catullus 63 on Attis (25–9), mime on Cicero's Pro Caelio (29–34), mime and pantomime in Ovid (34–8), the structure of Seneca's Apocolocyntosis as a mime (38–42), mime in the Satyricon (42–6), culminating with the pantomime of the judgement of Paris in Apuleius (46–51). Given that this is a book on Seneca, more attention might have been paid to the Apocolocyntosis.

In the introduction (vii), Z. distinguishes four features that set Senecan drama apart from Aristotle's categorization of classical Athenian tragedy. One would expect each of the four to be given its own chapter: ‘structural looseness’ (ch. 2) does, while ‘lengthy descriptive passages’ is considered over chapters on descriptive running commentaries (ch. 3), monologues of self-analysis (ch. 4) and narrative set pieces (ch. 5). ‘Freedom in handling the chorus’ and ‘showing of death onstage’ are largely ignored (pace 83–7) to the detriment of the book since the ways in which Senecan tragedy departed from Attic tragedy were fundamental to a modern scholarly notion that the plays of Seneca were conceived as closet dramas. J. G. Fitch in G. W. M. Harrison (ed.), Seneca in Performance (2000), 1–12, and now Kohn, have made a compelling case that at least some scenes in the plays were modular and could be performed or set aside. Pantomime would surely thrive in such a critical and performative environment and one can easily conceive that Z. could have made a compelling argument for a pantomime of death as an alternative to enacting death on stage, as also a pantomime substituting for a much more expensive and cumbrous chorus.

The four analytical chapters that Z. does present are ones that make the argument — and one apologizes for simplification — that the influence of pantomime is seminal in places where Seneca differs from his Athenian models. Although there are many other influences on Senecan drama, Z.'s argument is both timely and persuasive because it centres a re-appreciation of Seneca's work less on Greek prototypes than on Roman predecessors, crossing genres as well as travelling across a divide from Republican to Imperial literature that is far more permeable than has been suspected. Examples are chosen from almost all of the plays and Z. wisely chose to explore fewer passages in greater detail rather than making an exhaustive collection. So, too, the text is allowed to make her case while the footnotes are not a dusty clutter of every parallel passage. This book offers much for the specialist but perhaps even more for scholars of Eliot and post-Eliot successors of Seneca, who, like Seneca, celebrate their ‘newness’ while not losing sight of a past they posture to outrun.