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SENECAN SIGNIFICATION. TROADES 1055

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 April 2017

T.S. Allendorf
T.S. Allendorf*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
*
tobias.allendorf@classics.ox.ac.uk
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The fourth choral ode in Seneca's tragedy Troades ends thus (1050–5):

      tum puer matri genetrixque nato
      Troia qua iaceat regione monstrans
      dicet et longe digito notabit:
      ‘Ilium est illic, ubi fumus alte
      serpit in caelum nebulaeque turpes.’
      Troes hoc signo patriam uidebunt.
This ending provides a powerful conclusion to the Chorus’ Epicurean-inspired philosophizing in the ode. The image of the Trojan women ‘seeing’ (uidebunt) the ‘smoke and squalid clouds creep[ing] high into the heavens’ (1053–4) recalls the Lucretian description of the soul, atomic in nature, leaving the dead body: compare especially et nebula ac fumus quoniam discedit in auras, | crede animam quoque diffundi … (Lucr. 3.436–7) and ergo dissolui quoque conuenit omnem animai | naturam, ceu fumus, in altas aeris auras (Lucr. 3.455–6). The image and the Lucretian resonance also create an intratextual link with the second ode of Troades (371–408). In that ode, the Chorus set out to develop a philosophical position about the question of death and the possibility of an afterlife. Their philosophizing is aided by Lucretian language and imagery, and the clear verbal echoes of Lucretius include the soul escaping into air like vapour: ‘the spirit, with fleeing breath, has mingled with the clouds and passed away into air’ (… profugo spiritus halitu | immixtus nebulis cessit in aera, 379–80), which recalls the Lucretian lines above. At the end of the fourth ode, the Lucretian intertext of the smoke image is linked to another startling element that may point to (Epicurean) philosophizing: Seneca's use of signum (1055).

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The Classical Quarterly , Volume 67 , Issue 1 , May 2017 , pp. 320 - 323
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Copyright © The Classical Association 2017 

The fourth choral ode in Seneca's tragedy Troades ends thus (1050–5):

tum puer matri genetrixque nato
Troia qua iaceat regione monstrans
dicet et longe digito notabit:
‘Ilium est illic, ubi fumus alte
serpit in caelum nebulaeque turpes.’
Troes hoc signo patriam uidebunt.Footnote 1

This ending provides a powerful conclusion to the Chorus’ Epicurean-inspired philosophizing in the ode.Footnote 2 The image of the Trojan women ‘seeing’ (uidebunt)Footnote 3 the ‘smoke and squalid clouds creep[ing] high into the heavens’ (1053–4) recalls the Lucretian description of the soul, atomic in nature, leaving the dead body: compare especially et nebula ac fumus quoniam discedit in auras, | crede animam quoque diffundi … (Lucr. 3.436–7) and ergo dissolui quoque conuenit omnem animai | naturam, ceu fumus, in altas aeris auras (Lucr. 3.455–6).Footnote 4 The image and the Lucretian resonance also create an intratextual link with the second ode of Troades (371–408). In that ode, the Chorus set out to develop a philosophical position about the question of death and the possibility of an afterlife. Their philosophizing is aided by Lucretian language and imagery,Footnote 5 and the clear verbal echoes of Lucretius include the soul escaping into air like vapour: ‘the spirit, with fleeing breath, has mingled with the clouds and passed away into air’ (… profugo spiritus halitu | immixtus nebulis cessit in aera, 379–80), which recalls the Lucretian lines above. At the end of the fourth ode, the Lucretian intertext of the smoke image is linked to another startling element that may point to (Epicurean) philosophizing: Seneca's use of signum (1055).

The meaning of signum here has not been fully understood. This is evident from Fantham's comments: she identifies this use of signum as ‘unconventional’, then cites four possible meanings,Footnote 6 ‘a sign sent by the gods […] or weather portent […] or a conventional signal or indicator established by men, the standard of the legion, the battle trumpet […]; it can also stand for physical or psychological symptoms’, before deciding that ‘here it must be a marker, pointing the way’.Footnote 7 But pinpointing the denotation of signum here as ‘marker’ may obfuscate one strong connotation of the word. While Fantham's reasoning for arriving at her preferred translation is perfectly acceptable and accords well with the spatial deixis of the lines (cf. monstrans, 1051; digito notabit, 1052; illic, 1053; and hoc signo, 1055), there is another explanation, not posited before, that accounts for Seneca's use of signum in the context of this Chorus.

An important resonance of signum at this point—in an ode, which, as I have noted, also otherwise engages with Lucretian-Epicurean elements—is as part of another of the Chorus’ attempts at philosophical reasoning. The Latin signum, I suggest, translates the Greek σημεῖον and carries with it the trace of its pervasive uses in philosophical debates about inference and the nature of evidence.Footnote 8 This discourse was a key issue of debate between Academics, Epicureans, Stoics and Sceptics.Footnote 9 The Epicureans were the only ones to hold on to an approach to signification that, essentially, relied on analogy,Footnote 10 a technique that, I shall suggest below, Seneca criticizes in this Chorus. Seneca, moreover, is also likely to have been aware of the proto-philosophical uses of the term σημεῖον in Greek tragedy.Footnote 11 At the end of the fourth Chorus in Troades, Seneca would thus restore the term from philosophical discourse to the tragic realm. That such a use of signum is significant in the context of our choral ode can be corroborated further: in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, smoke is already given as the characteristic of the conquered city Troy (καπνῷ δ᾽ ἁλοῦσα νῦν ἔτ᾽ εὔσημος πόλις, 818),Footnote 12 and such usage may be echoed in Seneca's nota at Ag. 459, Iliacus atra fumus apparet nota.Footnote 13 In the Epicurean-tinged ode in Troades, Seneca describes the same situation not with nota but with signum. It is worthy of note that Cicero had also used both nota and signum as translations of the Greek σημεῖον.Footnote 14 Seneca's use of the philosophically loaded terms, disambiguating the Aeschylean εὔσημος as σημεῖον, is not coincidental.Footnote 15

At Seneca's stage of intervention, the term signum is loaded with the preceding philosophical debates in epistemology, surrounding the nature of signs and evidence: as a key word among the Epicureans and the Stoics, signum/σημεῖον has special currency.Footnote 16 I suggest that Seneca, using this utterance, shows the Chorus of Trojan women to be mis-readers of philosophy: the Trojan women's attempt at making use of Stoic or Epicurean techniques of inference in their use of signum (by seeing the smoke, the Trojans will know where the home is) would be bound to fail as philosophical argument—but it works in their tragic world.

An example used in philosophical debates about inference that is very similar to the utterance of the Trojan women occurs in Stoic logic: for the Stoics, smoke is observed in conjunction with fire, so that smoke is a sign that is observed together with what it signifies. Such a sign is recognized by the Stoics as a so-called ‘commemorative’ sign.Footnote 17 The Senecan version, however, is not a Stoic ‘commemorative’ sign. Rather, it shows people, here the Trojan women, attempting to use philosophical logic—but their way of reasoning is neither tenable from a Stoic point of view nor as an Epicurean-inspired inference relying on analogues. Their sign has no referent: what it is a sign of is lost.

This is a further Senecan moment of expressing the failure of the Chorus’ philosophizing. More precisely, the Senecan use of signum concludes the allusions to Lucretius and Epicurean thought throughout the ode: one of the points of the Senecan example is as criticism of the Epicurean analogic method of inference. According to this Epicurean method, one can draw inferences from one's observations in the spatio-temporal world to the world of atoms.Footnote 18 Seneca's use of signum in the mouth of the Trojan women, then, may suggest that the Trojans’ homeland, marked by the signum, exists as little as the atomic world the Epicureans believe in based on their naïve—the Stoic voice of Seneca suggests—way of inference.Footnote *

References

1 Unless noted otherwise, the Greek and the Latin texts cited follow the respective Oxford Classical Texts.

2 Lucretian echoes are noted by Boyle, A.J., Seneca's Troades (Leeds, 1994), 220Google Scholar, ad 1009–12, and Keulen, A.J., L. Annaeus Seneca Troades – Introduction, Text, and Commentary (Leiden, 2001), 475Google Scholar.

3 See below, n. 18.

4 See Fantham, E., Seneca's Troades. A Literary Introduction with Text, Translation, and Commentary (Princeton, 1982), 364–5Google Scholar for the tradition of the image ‘smoke of Troy’, which goes back to Hom. Il. 21.522–3.

5 See e.g. the parallels noted by Fantham (n. 4), 262–71, and Boyle (n. 2), 172 (‘[t]his ode's view and imaging of death are decidedly Epicurean’). I will provide a fuller discussion of this ode's Lucretian presences elsewhere.

6 The OLD s.v. divides the lemma into thirteen subdivisions.

7 Fantham (n. 4), 365, ad loc.; Keulen (n. 2), 490, ad loc. understands ‘distinguishing mark or feature’.

8 See OLD s.v. signum 4, and LSJ s.v. σημεῖον 3, esp. 3b. Hacking, I., The Emergence of Probability. A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference (Cambridge, 2006 2), 31–48 CrossRefGoogle Scholar argues that the sign was transformed into the concept of (inductive) evidence in the late Renaissance.

9 See Allen, J., Inference from Signs. Ancient Debates about the Nature of Evidence (Oxford, 2001)Google Scholar, with Burnyeat, M.F., ‘The origins of non-deductive inference’, in Barnes, J. et al. (edd.), Science and Speculation. Studies in Hellenistic Theory and Practice (Cambridge, 1982), 193–238 Google Scholar (esp. on the origins of the debate) and D. Sedley, ‘On signs’, in J. Barnes et al. (this note), 239–72 (on the Epicurean treatise De Signis by Philodemus).

10 Allen (n. 9), 10–11. See also his chapter on ‘Epicurean sign-inference in Philodemus’, 194–241, esp. 234–41. On the (primitive) mode of analogy and its role in early Greek intellectual enquiry, see Lloyd, G.E.R., Polarity and Analogy. Two Types of Argumentation in Early Greek Thought (Cambridge, 1966)Google Scholar. A famous example is the Epicurean belief that the size of the sun, moon and stars is no greater than we see it: see Lucr. 5.564–91, with Bailey, C., Titi Lucreti Cari De Rerum Natura Libri Sex. Edited with Prolegomena, Critical Apparatus, Translation, and Commentary (Oxford, 1947), 1406–10Google Scholar, and Schiesaro, A., Simulacrum et imago. Gli argomenti analogici nel De rerum natura (Pisa, 1990), 67–8Google Scholar.

11 See Soph. OT 916 and frr. 574 and 811 Nauck2 (passages noted by Allen [n. 9], 1–2 with n. 2).

12 Fraenkel, E., Aeschylus Agamemnon (Oxford, 1950), 377Google Scholar, ad loc. notes that ‘it is by the smoke (and by that alone) that the conquered city is even now discernible’ (my emphasis).

13 Despite Tarrant, R.J., Seneca Agamemnon (Cambridge, 1976), 10Google Scholar and Tarrant, R.J., ‘Senecan drama and its antecedents’, HSPh 82 (1978), 213–63, at 215Google Scholar, it is not impossible that Seneca knew Aeschylus’ Agamemnon: cf. already C.J. Herington's observations in his review of Tarrant's commentary in Phoenix 32 (1978), 270–5CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, at 273–4, and see also Degiovanni, L., ‘Sui modelli nell’Agamemnon di Seneca: tre note testuali e interpretative’, SCO 50 (2004), 373–95Google Scholar, Lavery, J., ‘Some Aeschylean influences on Seneca's Agamemnon ’, MD 53 (2004), 183–94Google Scholar, and Hutchinson, G.O., Greek to Latin. Frameworks and Contexts for Intertextuality (Oxford, 2013), 21–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. n. 28. My pointing to the Aeschylean instance of εὔσημος as a precursor of the Senecan use of signum does of course not necessarily require direct use of Aeschylus’ play as a source. Note that wording and emphasis are very different in Virgil's use of the commonplace of smoke rising from captured Troy: saxa uides, mixtoque undantem puluere fumum (Aen. 2.609) and Ilium et omnis humo fumat Neptunia Troia (Aen. 3.3).

14 See Striker, G., ‘Academics fighting Academics’, in Inwood, B., Mansfeld, J. (edd.), Assent and Argument. Studies in Cicero's Academic Books (Leiden, 1997), 257–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 262 n. 7, with Cicero's free switching between nota and signum in Luc. 33–6.

15 See also Staley, G.A., Seneca and the Idea of Tragedy (Oxford, 2010), 134–6Google Scholar, who regards ‘signification’ as one of the key components of Stoic poetics and Seneca's idea of tragedy in particular.

16 Relevant occurrences of the term include its use in Aristotelian logic, and then Stoic and Epicurean philosophy as the basis of inference: cf. e.g. Epicurus, Ep. Pyth. 97 (p. 43 Usener),  τὰ φαινόμενα, ἃ δεῖ σημεῖα ἀποδέχεσθαι (on this passage, see further Allen [n. 9], 201–2), and Phld. Sign. 27 (p. 68 De Lacy), τὸ κοινόν, ὅτι τὰ φανερὰ τῶν ἀδήλων ἐστὶ σημεῖα.

17 On this, see Burnyeat (n. 9), 211.

18 The close proximity of signum and uidere in the Senecan line (hoc signo … uidebunt, 1055) is important: on the role of visual perception in the process of σημείωσις, see Fowler, D.P., Lucretius on Atomic Motion. A Commentary on De Rerum Natura, Book Two, Lines 1–332 (Oxford, 2002), 186–95Google Scholar (on Lucr. 2.112–41). Cf. esp. Lucr. 2.125–8, where the motion of dust particles is a visible signum for the motion of atoms: hoc etiam magis haec animum te aduertere par est | corpora quae in solis radiis turbare uidentur, | quod tales turbae motus quoque materiai | significant clandestinos caecosque subesse. Cf. also Seneca's own description of the dust particles at QNat. 5.1.2 (cited by Fowler [this note], 195), retaining the element of visual perception: quod ex hoc intellegas licet: cum sol in aliquem clausum locum infusus est, uidemus corpuscula minima in aduersum ferri, alia sursum, alia deorsum, uarie concursantia. Note, however, that Seneca uses the phenomenon for different ends: unlike the Epicurean Lucretius, he does not want to prove the motion of atoms; rather, he uses it as evidence of the air never being motionless even if it is ‘still’.

* I would like to thank CQ’s anonymous reader and editorial team as well as Tobias Reinhardt for their very useful feedback.