Seneca - A Thinker for Our Times

Continued from page 1

"Seneca cannot be too heavy not Plautus too light"
(Hamlet 2.2. 395).

Seneca seems to have re-cast traditional forms. His "dialogues" weren't Platonic exchanges between characters, but treatises, and his drama (Hercules Furens, Agamemnon, Thyestes, Oedipus, Medea, Phaedra, The Trojan Women, and The Phoenician Women*) leaves viewers and readers wondering if the plays were ever meant to be staged. He adheres to the division of plays into five acts with choral interludes, mentioned by Horace, and adapts Greek originals, but instead of leaving violence in the background as was done in the Greek versions, it's part of the performance.

In Heavy Seneca: his Influence on Shakespeare's Tragedies, an article for Classics Ireland (1995 vol. 2), Brian Arkins says Seneca's plays are more sinister than the Greek originals:

Which brings us to the crucial point about Seneca's tragedies: the Roman dramatist uses Greek material to comment obliquely on the outrages of Nero's court and describes a world that is radically evil. These plays are therefore much more pessimistic than most Greek tragedies and might almost be termed religious drama. Typically in a Senecan tragedy, we begin with a Cloud of Evil, then witness the defeat of Reason by Evil, and finally experience the Triumph of Evil - as in The Trojan Women. [Italics added.]

Seneca is eminently suited for twentieth century man, Arkins says, because of the unspeakable evils we, like the characters in the drama, have perpetrated: the Holocaust, Gulags, Hiroshima, Bosnia, and more. While the renaissance of Seneca is yet to come to the Internet, he was signally important during the sixteenth century (another era of great uncertainty and evil in the form of "Tower, the bear-baiting, the mob") when the writing of the Greek dramatists was known only as it was transmitted through Latin drama, to wit, Plautus and Seneca.

From Encyclopedia Britannica: "Of the 10 "Senecan" tragedies, Octavia is certainly, and Hercules Oetaeus is probably, spurious."

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The Life, Philosophy and Tragedy of Seneca

• Seneca's Life
  
• Practical Philosophy
  
• Seneca Resources
  
• Stoicism
  
• Pythagoreanism
  
• Timeline of the Emperors
  
• Philosophy
  
• Tragedy

Tragedies of Seneca

Senecan Tragedy	Greek Original
Hercules Furens	Euripides' Heracles
The Trojan Women	Euripides' Trojan Women, Hecuba
Phoenician Women	Euripides' Phoenician Women
Medea	Euripides' Medea
Phaedra	Euripides' Hippolytus
Agamemnon	Aeschylus' Agamemnon
Thyestes	Sophocles Thyestes
Oedipus	Sophocles' Oedipus

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