It may be agreed that the character of Medea, one of the most intertextual heroines of the Graeco-Roman literary tradition,Footnote ¹ is a veritable crucible of the most disparate emotions, as the articles gathered in this issue aim to show. In Seneca's Medea, readers encounter a murderous mother who kills her own children, giving in to destructive anger or, rather, fury. This emotion has been widely and extensively studied both in relation to its Greek model, Euripides’ Medea, and in the light of the Stoic view on passions, so that it can be acknowledged as one of the most salient features of the Roman character's emotional profile from a literary and philosophical standpoint.Footnote ² Although both Medeas, while struggling within themselves in their famous monologues, debate whether they should or should not kill their children, Euripides’ heroine does not seem to murder them out of anger: she repeatedly claims that a pressing necessity urges her to do so;Footnote ³ by contrast, the Senecan Medea lets her anger literally lead the way (ira, qua ducis, sequor; 953). They both describe the filicide they are about to commit as a sacrificial act (compare Eur. Med. 1053‒4: ὅτῳ δὲ μὴ / θέμις παρεῖναι τοῖς ἐμοῖσι θύμασιν, ‘whoever is not permitted to attend my sacrifice’ and Sen. Med. 970‒1: uictima manes tuos / placamus ista, ‘with this victim we placate / your spirit’Footnote ⁴), but Seneca's character is pushed towards it by the dreadful hallucinations of the Furies and the shadow of her brother approaching (958‒66), which certainly contributes to heightening the disquieting atmosphere of the play: his Medea ultimately appears as a much ‘darker’ and bleaker version of the Euripidean counterpart, also emerging as a full-blown villain, by whom readers are both repelled and fascinated. In addition to this, the vocabulary of extreme passions recurring throughout the play and the heights of anger that the Senecan Medea reaches represent some of the most noticeable variations on the Greek model, not to mention a famous portrait of the heroine by the Nurse (382‒96), which strikingly resembles that of the angry man depicted by Seneca in De ira 1.1.3‒5. In these pages, however, instead of focusing on the notorious ira and furor of Seneca's Medea,Footnote ⁵ I intend to concentrate on another and yet quite strongly related emotion: joy. In general, it may be noted that the bodily felt responses brought about by both anger and joy have in common the category of expansion, unlike fear and sadness (or grief), in which there is a tendency towards contraction.Footnote ⁶ To my knowledge, the emotion of joy in Seneca's play has not received much attention thus far, owing perhaps to the fact that, as mentioned, anger literally steals the limelight. Therefore, I will here attempt to delve into this emotion, which appears to characterize Medea's criminal deeds, especially towards the end of the play, with a view to bringing to the fore its nuances and function. Although joy, at first glance, may seem to be extraneous to a tragic plot staging a filicide, since it is usually associated with good or positive events,Footnote ⁷ it will be argued that this emotion (also verging on pleasure) is particularly fitting for the Senecan character, in that it takes a ‘perverted’ and monstrous form in the play, even coming to distort some concepts central to the Stoic doctrine.Footnote ⁸

To do so, I shall start by comparing the relevant passages in Euripides and Seneca, for, as is well known, the Senecan play proves itself to be a clever rewriting of the Greek tragedy, without which it could hardly be fully understood.Footnote ⁹ I shall next consider the Stoic philosophical background against which, in my view, Medea's joy and pleasure are to be construed to make sense of the disturbing degree to which they are taken in the play, given that joy also figures as a pre-eminent emotion among those experienced by the Stoic sage.Footnote ¹⁰ My approach to the present topic follows in the footsteps of recent lines of research that, drawing on previous studies on the relationship between Seneca's plays and his prose, have demonstrated that the tragedies are un-Stoic, but not – or not just – in the rather simplistic sense that they negate or contradict Stoicism: the Senecan characters shed ambiguous light on the principles of that doctrine by wittingly applying – or, rather, misapplying – them to their own life and behaviour, thereby coming somehow to legitimize their evil actions, as I seek to show here specifically with regard to the character of Medea.Footnote ¹¹

Now to the play. After hearing the report of the Messenger concerning the death of Creon and his daughter, killed by her poisoned gift, and despite the Nurse's following advice to flee as soon as possible, Seneca's Medea is resolved not to leave: those deaths by no means suffice to let her be satisfied with her revenge (893‒904):

Medea does not hide her excitement resulting from the death of her enemies: she even seems to experience some kind of aesthetic pleasure in becoming – in a metatheatrical way – the spectator of her own ‘production’ (nuptias specto nouas, ‘I'm watching a novel wedding’; 894); however, this is only a pars ultionis, a small part of her revenge (quota), one that certainly has given her joy, but has still to be pursued (896) and, as we know, will culminate in the filicide. The emotions evoked by Medea clearly belong to the affective (and semantic) field of joy, as suggested by the terms felicem (895) and gaudes (896). The impetus felix she enjoins her soul to follow ironically plays with the double notion of felix, signifying both ‘joyful’ and ‘fertile’: her murderous impulse proves indeed fecund, since, after enabling her to achieve the first part of her vengeance, it will also allow her to bring her murderous plan to an end precisely through the death of those to whom she has given birth.Footnote ¹² But it is especially the verb gaudes that noticeably identifies the type of emotion aroused in her by the first set of deaths that occurred: as Boyle notes, ‘Medea is not shy about her pleasure in crime.’Footnote ¹³

As a matter of fact, it is not rare to come across characters rejoicing in the death of their enemies in tragedy (and in epic as well), primarily owing to the value attached to the notion of revenge in the ancient world.Footnote ¹⁴ Creon and his daughter indeed represent Medea's enemies, her ‘regular’ foes, so to speak, since the former has banned her from Corinth, whereas the latter has replaced her in Jason's bed. Medea's elation over the news that her revenge plan against themFootnote ¹⁵ went well is already to be found in Euripides’ play, especially at lines 1125‒35, where we read the words she exchanges with the messenger who has come to announce the deaths of the king and his daughter:

The joy Medea feels upon hearing how her enemies have perished is, therefore, already a prominent trait in the portrayal of the Euripidean character, as confirmed by the terms χαίρεις and τέρψειας. There seems to be nothing wrong, however, in Medea's excitement, at least from an Aristotelian viewpoint: in a well-known passage from his Rhetoric, Aristotle by no means stigmatizes those who become angry for suffering injustice or being despised, oppressed, or outraged. He observes that anger, being a passionate desire for retaliation, naturally brings about a pleasure that identifies with the sweetness of revenge (2.2.2):Footnote ¹⁶

Euripides’ Medea has indeed previously indulged in her φαντασία (‘fantasy’) in imagining different ways to punish her enemies (378‒80),Footnote ¹⁸ but at this stage of the plot she has already completed at least the first part of her revenge and can, thus, experience ‘real’ pleasure. As in Seneca's rewriting, her revenge will be fully carried out only by means of the filicide. At lines 1236‒7, Medea reveals to the chorus of Corinthian women, whom she evidently trusts, the final step of her plan: ‘My friends, my resolve is fixed on the deed, to kill my children with all speed and to flee from this land.’ She then invokes a necessity that requires their death, and finally addresses her heart and her wretched hand to spur herself on to action. In this touching soliloquy, she gets to the point of forgetting that they are her own children and that she loves them – she will mourn them afterwards – but even if she kills them, they are still dear to her (1242‒50).

The Euripidean Medea is no less resolute than the Senecan character in her decision to commit the most hideous murder. However, no trace of joy or pleasure is to be found either immediately before or after the children's deaths. Given that on this occasion she kills without rejoicing in her murder (appalling and yet, in her view, necessary), she is then perfectly capable of telling the two killings apart and consequently tailoring her affective responses to them. On the one hand, she is so delighted to hear that her enemies have died παγκάκως (‘in agony’, as she was hoping) that she can barely control her joy; on the other hand, she gets ready for her last crime in a sort of self-imposed emotional anaesthesia. After Jason has discovered that the children are dead, Medea appears triumphant in the Sun's chariot: she looks down on him and claims that the pain she is experiencing is worthwhile as long as Jason cannot mock her (1361‒2).Footnote ¹⁹ A similar concept has also previously been formulated in 811‒19, when the Chorus tries to dissuade her from her plan: she admits that she prefers to undergo great unhappiness, provided that Jason gets hurt.Footnote ²⁰ In the epilogue of the play, therefore, she is likely experiencing Schadenfreude, a pleasure resulting directly from Jason's falling into misery, not from the actual filicide.

If we go back to the last scene of Seneca's play, some conspicuous differences between it and the Greek model emerge. First of all, Medea is represented killing the children in full view and at two distinct moments (she even kills her second child before Jason's horrified eyes). However, I believe that it is precisely her affective state that marks a veritable turning point in relation to the Euripidean model: she appears to take pleasure in committing her ultimate and most heinous murder, thus outdoing her Greek counterpart through an ‘excess of emotion’, which she not only does not try to harness, but is also keen to put on display (this is consistent with the exhibitionist nature of her character).

At line 910, Medea makes a famous announcement about her identity (almost an act of self-fashioning): she proclaims that she has now become Medea and that her nature has bloomed in sin (Medea nunc sum; creuit ingenium malis), hinting at the fact that the process of identity construction, set in motion at the beginning of the play (Medea…fiam, 171), has reached its peak. She then proudly lists her previous crimes, which are described as providing an ideal ‘springboard’ for her killing spree (911‒15), as well as proving her unchanged tendency to iterate criminal acts:

She then adds (920‒4):

By disowning her own children and, thereby, circumventing the obstacle of the maternal commitment (a sort of taboo infringement), Medea cherishes the thought (see the repeated placuit) of having recourse to hoc poenae genus, that is to say the filicide, to exact her revenge. However, she is all of a sudden seized by a deep horror, which makes her tremble and recoil from her resolve (926 ff.). After undergoing a dramatic internal conflict dominated by two opposing sentiments (amor and pietas, ‘maternal love and duty’, versus ira, ‘anger’, and dolor, ‘pain’, 937 ff.), she eventually lets anger take over (953). The visual hallucinations of the Furies and her brother trigger the murder of her first child. As for the second, she plans to perform it before Jason's eyes on the roof of the house, so that she may overtly flaunt her uirtus (‘virtue’, 976‒7). It is precisely thanks to the killing of her own flesh and blood (the first son) that Seneca's Medea contends that she has regained her past identity as a Colchian princess, her realm, and her virginity (see 980‒4 and especially 984: rediere regna, rapta uirginitas redit).Footnote ²² But then, in the frantic moment between the two murders, her ira seems on the verge of withdrawing and she regrets the murder of the first child and feels ashamed (iam cecidit ira? paenitet facti, pudet, ‘has anger's force now gone? I regret my crime, I'm ashamed’; 989). It is just a brief hesitation, which she chases away by uttering the following disconcerting lines (990‒4):

Medea expresses her feelings in quite pointed terms: after accomplishing the first murder, she surrenders – despite her apparent unwillingness – to uoluptas, by which she feels pervaded. She adds that this great joy is, in fact, growing, as Jason has finally arrived as the unwitting spectator of her ultimate murder. Medea's uoluptas is thus both retrospective, in that she rejoices, after all, in her first crime, and prospective, as she looks forward to achieving her revenge before the eyes of her arch-enemy (she definitely espouses the idea that there is some kind of sweet pleasure in anger and revenge – see Sen. De ira 2.32.1: at enim ira habet aliquam uoluptatem et dolce est dolorem reddere).

A few lines later, while Medea spurs herself on towards her revenge, we come across a significative example of the so-called technique of self-command (1016‒17), by which she even seems to exercise control over her own emotions:Footnote ²³

Medea delivers these words right before the killing of the second child, revealing how her dolor aims not just at revenge, but also sadistically at taking pleasure from it (‘relish your crime slowly’): rushing into it would compromise the final result.Footnote ²⁴ Clinging to a sort of perverted perfectionism, she almost seems to vie with another Senecan evildoer: Atreus in the Thyestes complains about experiencing a defective kind of pleasure when his brother finds out that he has devoured his own children. He regrets having been too hasty, as he admits at lines 1056‒7: uerba sunt irae data / dum propero (‘my wrath was cheated by my haste’Footnote ²⁵): he could have done so much worse, as pouring warm blood from the children's wound into Thyestes’ mouth (1054‒5), if only he had not rushed into the end of the punishment.

Tellingly, Seneca's Medea makes no distinction between the deaths of Creon and his daughter, who are strangers to her, and those of her own children, showing that she is capable of taking pleasure from both and that she does not restrain herself from feeling joy during the filicide.Footnote ²⁶ She wants Jason to suffer, which is also the intention, as seen above, of the Greek Medea, who, however, is immune from either joy or pleasure when it comes to the children's deaths, as far as we can tell. This is certainly a noteworthy difference in Seneca's rewriting. Neither Procne nor Althaea abandons herself to joy or pleasure in killing her children (see Ov. Met. 6.640 ff. and 8.460 ff.). The former does, in fact, rejoice in seeing Tereus swallowing Itys’ bowels and asking afterwards for his son to join him,Footnote ²⁷ but does not betray any sign of joy in the actual killing, which thus appears to take place in a state of emotional anaesthesia that can be related, at least in this respect, to Euripides’ Medea.Footnote ²⁸ The latter is literally torn between her duties as sister and mother, between love and anger, but when she throws the log into the fire, her hand trembles and, again, she does not manifest any sign of joy. Therefore, the reaction of the Senecan Medea during and immediately after the filicide resembles, if anything, that of other tragic characters gloating over their victory against family members whom they have killed.Footnote ²⁹ Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra, for example, after Agamemnon's death, comes out of the palace covered in blood and still holding an axe in her hand, and glories in her crime before the chorus (Ag. 1384‒94), whom she invites to rejoice as well:

There are, of course, evident differences between the revenge of the Aeschylean Clytemnestra and that of Seneca's Medea, first and foremost in the fact that Medea's sons serve as a means to her revenge without being her real target. Moreover, there is an aggravating factor in Medea's murderous deed, since she is related by blood to her sons, which, from an ethical standpoint, makes the pleasure she feels much more problematic than Clytemnestra's joy.

Now, if Euripides’ Medea kills her sons in order to fulfil her revenge, thus surrendering to an unpleasant and yet necessary decision, Seneca's character, as far as we can tell, does not disdain the pleasure resulting from their deaths, thus revealing a (disturbingly) ‘hedonistic’ side: the gaudium she displays once her enemies have been proclaimed dead turns, after the death of her first child, into uoluptas, a very intense joy. Do these two terms therefore have a different meaning? Gaudium and uoluptas can be used as synonyms, as Seneca himself states in Ep. 59.1‒2, where he explains that, ‘in ordinary language’, the term uoluptas is employed simply to point to animi hilarem adfectionem (‘the contentment of the soul’).Footnote ³¹ However, according to the orthodox Stoic conception of joy, the two notions cannot be taken as equivalent, uoluptas being a uitium (‘vice’): it corresponds to the pleasure experienced by ordinary human beings, who are content with fleeting enjoyments, neither stable nor lasting, and also hinges on erroneous judgements – that is, on the consent given to false beliefs. By contrast, the sage is only subject to gaudium, which is not properly an emotion according to the Stoics, but a eupathic response: Seneca, for instance, in the same passage noted above, describes it as an elevation of the mind (animi elatio) towards goods that are real (bona et uera). Gaudium is thus, to quote Margaret Graver, the normative joy characteristic of the sapiens, a constitutive element of that person's nature: it is not brought about either by circumstances or by external objects, but is simply the good feeling experienced by a wise person when perceiving the presence of a good.Footnote ³² Moreover, as observed by Shadi Bartsch, gaudium arises from self-knowledge and therefore runs counter to a hedonistic conception of life.Footnote ³³ In strictly Stoic terms, pleasure can by no means be linked to the summum bonum (‘highest good’) promoted by that philosophy.Footnote ³⁴

I believe that the joy and pleasure that the Senecan Medea attributes to herself in her revenge plan may be construed in the light of such Stoic views, but in a contrastive way. It has been argued that the protagonists of Seneca's tragedies playing the role of villains, among whom Medea is obviously to be included, frequently appear to act against a Stoic backdrop: though they are far from behaving as ‘true’ Stoic sages, they nevertheless adopt Stoic behavioural models, especially that of constantia – consisting in the ability to be firm and coherent with one's own principles – in order to give shape to their totally un-Stoic criminal identities. As Star notes, ‘they cannot step outside of this linguistic system of Stoic self-creation as they struggle for criminal perfection and psychological consistency of vice’.Footnote ³⁵ Their claims often hint at values central to the Stoic doctrine: Medea, for instance, significantly manages to exercise control over her anger and pain, which she renders the instruments of her revenge by relying on a tenacious endurance that resembles Cato's constancy at the moment of his suicide.Footnote ³⁶

With this in mind, we can try to make sense of Medea's joy and pleasure in the epilogue of Seneca's play as well. There the Senecan character erases any distinction between gaudium and uoluptas from a Stoic viewpoint, as well as adjusting both emotions to her own set of values, in which uirtus regularly ties in with uitium. While going down her criminal path, characterized by a sort of pathological recidivism, she points to diversified degrees of joy by means of the terms iuuat, placuit, gaudet, up to the uoluptas magna of line 992, which marks the accomplishment of the first part of the filicide. But she aims to prolong that pleasure (perfruere lento scelere, 1016) until the final completion of her revenge:Footnote ³⁷ it looks as if she had treasured up in her memory the sort of advice that Seneca gives in some of his philosophical works, proving that she is not interested in some kind of ephemeral or fragile pleasure. In Ep. 23, for example, Seneca warns his addressee, Lucilius, precisely against sweet but fleeting pleasures, which do not secure true happiness (but see also De ben. 7.2.2). This is an important letter to understand the role of gaudium in the sage's life from a Stoic (or, at least, Senecan) perspective. In 23.6 the author elucidates the perils of pleasure, especially the fact that it tends to rush headlong into the abyss of sorrow, unless it has been kept within bounds (in praecipiti uoluptas ad dolorem uergit, nisi modum tenuit). On the contrary, true joy is solid (23.5): hoc de quo loquor, ad quod te conor perducere, solidum est et quod plus pateat introrsus (‘but the joy of which I speak, that to which I am endeavouring to lead you, is something solid, disclosing itself the more fully as you penetrate into it’Footnote ³⁸). It is constant and, since it comes from within, has inherent stability. At the outset of the same letter (23.2), Seneca states that those who know how to find joy and have not placed their happiness in the control of externals reach the heights of perfection (ad summa peruenit qui scit quo gaudeat, qui felicitatem sua in aliena potestate non posuit). To this passage a similar one may be added from Ep. 59, which is another letter focusing on joy: gaudium hoc non nascitur nisi ex uirtutum conscientia (‘this joy springs only from the knowledge that you possess the virtues’; 16).

Interestingly, Seneca's Medea highly values her uirtus, upon which she unwaveringly relies (numquam potest non esse uirtuti locus, ‘the time can never be wrong for virtue’, 161; non in occulto tibi est / perdenda uirtus; approba populo manum, ‘don't hide and squander / Virtue. Have the people applaud your deeds’, 976‒7). As Boyle rightly notes, she plays with the intrinsic ambiguity of this notion, implying both ‘moral virtue’ and ‘manly courage’, and also inverting the virtue paradigm of the Stoic sage.Footnote ³⁹ However paradoxical it may seem, she possesses indeed uirtutum conscientia (‘the awareness of one's virtues’) and perfectly knows how to get to the summa of her joy as well. She is also in full control of her own time, as she says at line 1017 meus dies est, tempore accepto utimur (‘it is my day: I used the time agreed’), hinting at the fact that, despite being allowed very little time in Corinth, she is going to make the most of it. Overall, she appears to comply with the piece of advice Seneca gives to Lucilius in Ep. 23.8: ideo constituendum est quid uelimus et in eo perseuerandum (‘therefore, we should decide what we wish, and abide by the decision’). In particular, the epilogue of the play proves that the Senecan Medea is an incredibly consistent character, capable of successfully (mis)applying Stoic principles to her evil nature and undertakings. Euripides’ Medea, too, displays remarkable perseverance, which, however, seems to stem from her obsessive belief that the children's death is an objective necessity. By contrast, the determination of Seneca's Medea can be ascribed, to a great degree, to an unquenchable desire on her part to punish her main enemy in a rather sensational way: she transforms the last phase of her revenge into a veritable spectacle, in which she immensely rejoices as it gets started and unfolds, almost regardless of the fact that on this occasion the victims are her own children.

As Seneca points out in Ep. 23.4, real joy (uerum gaudium) is a stern matter (res seuera), which, unlike its more cheerful but superficial counterpart, helps human beings to cope with the fear of death, the curbing of pleasures, or the endurance of pain (dolorum patientiam). Since pain is often caused by uoluptas, Seneca recommends that pleasure be repressed (see, for example, Ep. 121.4). The Senecan Medea is certainly not immune to pain, but she deals with her dolor in the usual ‘twisted’ way, namely by exploiting it to execute revenge and feel pleasure, as we read at line 1016: perfruere lento scelere, ne propera, dolor (‘relish your crime slowly, don't rush, my pain’).

Medea's sorrow ultimately paves the way to pleasure: the joy initially felt by her after the deaths of her ‘regular’ enemies progressively but rapidly turns into something greater and monstrous once the filicide has come to an end,Footnote ⁴⁰ to the point that she clearly draws satisfaction both from hurting her ex-partner (as in Eur. Med. 1361‒2) and from the killing of the children. Hers is a perfect and full-blown pleasure rooted in evil that gives a strongly hedonistic twist to her revenge, for she wants to savour to the full every moment of it, even a hideous deed against nature like the filicide. In my view, by doing so, she successfully manages to posit her joy, verging on sadism, both as an un-Stoic and distorted model of uerum gaudium and as the final end of her gory actions.Footnote ⁴¹ Her metamorphosis into a monstrum is now complete: Medea's unabashed and ‘unnatural’ joy thus contributes no less than her anger to the effect of alienation brought about by the Senecan play.Footnote ⁴²