Seneca’s plays offer the unique opportunity to evaluate the import of Greek tragedy on Roman tragedies. Often characterized as adaptations of Greek originals, Seneca’s dramas have long been considered inferior to the tragedies of the classical period (see, for instance, Calder 1970). Recent work, however, has shown that Seneca’s methods of intertextual appropriation are highly sophisticated and complex, involving a radical reworking of the Greek tragedies, as well as elements from other genres, such as Hellenistic comedy and Augustan epic (Tarrant 1978, 1995). More specifically, Seneca’s Trojan Women is based on Euripides’ Trojan Women, Hecuba, and Andromache (Calder 1970; Fantham 1982, 71-75). But Seneca’s play is very different from those of Euripides, due to the mobilization of a number of other intertextual layers: Catullus 64, Aeneid 2 and 3, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses 12 and 13 (see M. Wilson 1983, 28-29; Boyle 1994, 27-28). As a result, in addition to an examination of the specific intertextual contact between Seneca’s Trojan Women and its Greek models, it may also be fruitful to explore the deployment of patterns and motifs more generally characteristic of tragedy. An examination of the tragic motif of marriage to death offers a lens through which we may reach a new appreciation ofthe play’s relationship with Greek tragedy.
The motif of marriage to death permeates Seneca’s Trojan Women, since the play’s climax is Polyxena’s sacrifice at the tomb of the dead Achilles. The perversion of marriage ritual is closely linked to the play’s major themes: the disintegration of a civilization, that is, of social, political, familial relations; the recycling of perverted rituals through time; and the continual process of dissolution extending over past, present, and future. The play also explores the callousness of those in power and the arbitrariness of the divine, both of which collude to implement barbarism (Boyle 1994, 21). Finally, it poignantly dramatizes the triumph of the victim and the defeated who find freedom and moral transcendence in death.
Polyxena’s ‘‘marriage’’ to the dead Achilles is not simply a private drama of a young virgin who dies prematurely, but the focal point of a play dramatizing the horrors of war and the callousness of those in power. The destruction of Troy is not only denoted by the destruction of its buildings, the killing of its men, and the enslavement of its women; it is also articulated through the disintegration of religious and social institutions. Marriage, a ceremony that is supposed to promote life, is shown to cause destruction and death. The devastation of the city is equated with the institution of marriage. Andromache eloquently ties the death of Polyxena to the destruction of Troy:
This one evil was lacking to the ruined Trojans, to rejoice. Troy’s ruins lie blazing all around: great time for a wedding! Would anyone dare refuse? Would anyone hesitate to enter a marriage that Helen proposes? You plague, destruction, pest of both peoples, do you see these tombs of leaders and the bare bones of so many lying all over the plain unburied? These your wedding [hymen] has scattered.
Who needs the marriage brands or the ritual torch?
Who needs fire? Troy provides the light for this strange marriage.
Celebrate Pyrrhus’ wedding, Trojan women,
Celebrate properly: let blows and groans resound. (888-902)
Andromache uses irony and paradox to underscore the link between marriage and war. Helen’s ‘‘marriage’’ to Paris caused the destruction of Troy. The term hymen, with its ritual implications, highlights the irony of Polyxena’s proposed union with Pyrrhus. At the same time, we see a reversal of the emotions appropriate to rituals, as Polyxena’s marriage becomes an occasion for lamentation (901-2).
Such ritual reversals and perversions create paradoxical familial relations: when Helen relates the advantages ofa marriage between Polyxena and Pyrrhus, she effects a ‘‘drastic reordering of kinship’’ (M. Wilson 1983, 38) naming Tethys, Thetis, Peleus, and Nereus as Polyxena’s family (879-82). As a result, Pyrrhus will be the son-in-law of his victim Priam and of Hecuba, before whose eyes he murdered her husband: leuiora mala sunt cuncta, quam Priamigener/Hecubaeque Pyrrhus [all evils are lesser than that Pyrrhus should be the son-in-law to Priam and Hecuba] (934-35).
Paradoxical family relations in times of conflict are common in narratives of war, and civil war in particular, and reflect crisis in social and political institutions. In Seneca’s play, the private and familial are linked with the public and the political (Lawall 1982, 252; Bishop 1972, 334, 336). The figure of Hecuba is a case in point: when Hecuba opens the prologue of the play, she speaks as a wife and a queen; the destruction of Troy is also the destruction of her family (M. Wilson 1983, 48). The Trojan War is not simply a metaphor for war in general but for a social and political reality in crisis.
Polyxena’s ‘‘marriage to death’’ serves to underscore not only the crisis itself but the lack of any resolution or restoration of the disrupted social, religious, and political order within which the play unfolds. Throughout the play, Polyxena’s death evokes two prior examples of perverted sacrifice: that of Iphigenia (248-49) and Priam’s murder at his own household altar (44-56, 310-13). These instances have also a rich literary pedigree: the former from Greek tragedy and the latter in a succession of Roman texts, the most celebrated ofwhich is Vergil’s Aeneid (2.501-2). This linkage of perverted rituals past and present is part of a rhetorical topos that sheds light on Pyrrhus’ character (M. Wilson 1983, 37). But it also suggests a process that repeats itself without any hope of end or restoration. The textual repetition and continuation achieved through an amalgam of literary topoi is thus manipulated to demonstrate the permanence of ritual perversion and, by extension, the ceaseless disintegration of civilized life. (On repetition throughout the play see Boyle 1994, 147-48.)
The recycling of perverted rituals is partly due to the callousness of those in power and the cruel arbitrariness of the divine. The agon (debate) between Pyrrhus and Agamemnon is an eloquent demonstration of the cynicism of the powerful victor (M. Wilson 1983, 37-38). Agamemnon, whose past experience and mistakes seem to have made him more compassionate, argues against human sacrifice (330, 334). Pyrrhus, on the other hand, is a cynic who dismisses the moral principles of compassion and mercy (329, 333, 335) and is quick to point out the irony of Agamemnon’s defense of Polyxena when he sacrificed his own daughter, Iphigenia (lamne immolari uirgines credis nefas? [So now you consider it a sin to sacrifice virgins?]; 331). While Agamemnon attempts to disassociate himself from his image as a father who slaughtered his daughter by offering the dubious excuse that he was acting for the benefit of his country (332), Pyrrhus dwells on Agamemnon’s past behavior in order to legitimize his proposed course of action. As a result, Pyrrhus and Agamemnon emerge as mirror images of each other, two leaders who have put their power to base ends.
Their agOn reaches a moral impasse that is resolved by the prophecy of Calchas. The seer represents a higher authority, a deus ex machina of sorts, who unlike his Eur-ipidean counterparts lays down a savage law and licenses the powerful Greeks to commit further atrocities:
Dant fata Danais quo solent pretio uiam: mactanda uirgo est Thessali busto ducis; sed quo iugari Thessalae cultu solent Ionidesue uel Mycenaeae nurus,
Pyrrhus parenti coniugem tradat suo: sic rite dabitur.. .
Fate grants the Greeks passage at the usual price:
A virgin must be sacrificed at the tomb of the Thessalian chief;
But in the usual dress of brides
From Thessaly, Ionia, or Mycenae,
Let Pyrrhus hand the wife to his father:
Thus she will be wed according to ritual custom... (360-65)
The use of solent (360) to describe fate’s role in times of war and crisis casts both the divine and the Greeks in the role of permanent aggressor. The reiterated solent (362), now referring to ritual custom, links the Greeks’ renewed aggression with ritual repetition. The violence of the divine causes ritual perversion and perpetuates a cycle of destruction that is not destined to end.
Calchas sides with Pyrrhus in dictating the barbarous sacrifice of Polyxena and Agamemnon does not challenge him. The arbitrary cruelty of the divine matches that of Pyrrhus. As a result, ritual acts, usually thought of as ensuring communication and exchange with the divine and providing hope and comfort in an uncertain world, have now lost their meaning. Their distortion reflects not only the disintegration of a society but also the callous nature of its gods.
Polyxena’s marriage to death (942-44) thus dramatizes both the problematic nature of a society on the verge of a breakdown and an extraordinary individual’s response to the ethical challenges placed before her. Polyxena goes to her death with a nobility and courage that contrast sharply with the passivity of those watching her end (M. Wilson 1983, 54-55):
The bold virgin did not step back.
Facing the stroke she stands fierce with a grim look.
Such a brave spirit strikes everyone’s heart and, a strange portent, Pyrrhus is slow to kill.
When his hand buried the sword thrust deep,
A sudden gush of blood streamed from the huge wound
As she embraced death. Not even in death
Does she lose her courage. To make the earth
Heavy on Achilles, she fell forward with angry force. (1151-59)
Polyxena’s self-control at the time of death and her last act of defiance, her angry fall, render her triumphant in this final moment of the play.5 Just as Hecuba in the opening of the play claimed control of her victimhood when she asserted that the fall of Troy is her responsibility (36-40; see M. Wilson 1983, 49-51), so Polyxena now controls her fate. The moral transcendence gained with death endows the individual with a secure sense of self and contrasts with the perverted nature of the ritual that takes her life. The description of Polyxena’s death concludes with an emphasis on ritual correctness (hic ordo sacri [this was the rite’s sequence]; 1162) paradoxically underscoring the fact that, despite the victor’s assertion to the contrary, these rites have been defiled and stripped of their meaning (Boyle 1994, 232).
Resolution or restoration are wholly absent from the play, which ends with the messenger’s order to the captive women repetite... maria [make for the sea once again] (1178). The idea of repetition points to the Trojan women’s previous journeys in other renditions of the story (Boyle 1994, 233), as well as to the repetition of the perverted sacrifices therein. In a world where the powerful are free to do as they please, the victim’s brave defiance of death is the only stance that offers stable moral ground.
Since Troy is a prototype for Rome, the resonances of the play for the Rome of the time of Nero are plain to see. As was the case in Vergil and Ovid, the victims of authority are women, who nevertheless find ways to resist or transcend the constraints imposed on them. Even in their final defeat, they exemplify an alternative attitude, which, ultimately futile though it may be, points to the flaws of the order that demands their demise.
The examples offered above may serve only as a point of departure for exploring the impact of Greek tragedy in Rome. We can find other instances where women and ritual acts serve as a site onto which ideological issues are mapped out in the Aeneid (Helen and Amata conduct bacchic orgies), the Metamorphoses (the story of Polyxena or of Orpheus and Eurydice), and other Senecan plays (Medea, Phaedra). Ritual representations are regularly employed by other Roman poets for a variety of poetic purposes. Lucan uses the vocabulary of sacrifice to mark the destruction of civil war, and Statius at the end of the Thebaid blends the women’s lamentations with his own poetic voice (Fantham 1999, 231). Epic, with its large scope, offered Roman authors fertile ground for the use of these tragic elements. Yet similar practices can be identified in other genres, such as elegy and the novel. When applied to Roman texts, the insights of recent criticism on Greek tragedy prove that the Romans found creative ways to incorporate a wealth of tragic material in their works in order to express the problems, anxieties, and ambiguities of their own times.
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