For many Elizabethan translators and dramatists, the attraction of Seneca’s plays grew out of their understanding of the role such works played in Seneca’s life and political career. It will be helpful first, then, to review some important aspects of Seneca’s biography and its relation to the tragedies.
Seneca was a philosopher, tragedian, and political adviser in first-century Rome. He was born sometime around or before 1 bce in the Roman colony of Corduba in Spain (modern Cordoba). When he was very young, he was brought to Rome, where he was educated to be an orator, philosopher, and lawyer. He was successful in these fields and became a politician, holding a magistracy about CE 33 and eventually entering the senate. Despite such accomplishments, Seneca suffered several reversals of fortune. In the reign of Claudius (41-54), he was accused of having an affair with a member of the royal family and was exiled to the island of Corsica for eight years (41-9). When he was recalled, he became a tutor to the future emperor Nero, who came to power in 54. Seneca became his close political adviser. Nero was an erratic ruler, but during the early years of his reign, the empire was governed relatively well, largely through the influence of Seneca and another adviser, Burrus (Fitch 2002-4: 11). In 62, when Burrus died, Seneca’s influence waned and Nero became an increasingly unpredictable ruler. For example, in the year Burrus died, against the objections of Seneca and other advisers, he divorced his wife, Octavia, and married Poppea, prompting a popular revolt. In addition, after the great fire of Rome in 64, he squandered public funds building a vast new imperial palace, the Domus Aurea (Golden House). Faced with these changes, Seneca withdrew from public life. In 65, when he was implicated in a conspiracy to assassinate Nero, he committed suicide. (Whether he took part in the plot is unclear.)
Sometime during this career, Seneca wrote the plays, although their total number and dating are matters of debate. Critics generally agree that he wrote eight tragedies, the earliest of which are Agamemnon, Phaedra (also titled Hippolytus), and Oedipus. These are followed by a middle group, consisting of Medea, The Trojan Women (also titled Troades and Troas), and Hercules (also called Hercules furens), and a last group, dating from after 62 CE, comprising Phoenician Women (also titled Thebaid and Thebais) and Thyestes (Fitch 2002-4:12; P. Davis 2003:15). Two other plays attributed to Seneca in the sixteenth century, Hercules on Oeta and Octavia, most likely were written by later Roman imitators of his work.
One of the most vexing critical questions about the tragedies concerns their relationship to other aspects of Seneca’s life. Seneca’s Stoic philosophy encourages indifference to things ‘external to the self—wealth, position, friendship, even health’ and supreme control of the emotions (Fitch 2002-4: 24). Yet he was very much a man of the world, one of the richest and most powerful men in Rome. His plays, moreover, present characters who are wholly overcome by emotion: Phaedra, who attempts to seduce her son-in-law Hippolytus; Medea, who kills her children in a jealous rage; Hercules, who slaughters his family in a fury; and Atreus, who murders his nephews, bakes them in a pie, and serves them to his brother at a banquet. Emily Wilson summarizes attempts to make sense of these apparent incongruities: in one view, the violent, angry, passionate characters of the plays are ‘moral lessons, examples of all the nasty things which happen to you if you let your passions get out of control’. In another, the tragedies allow Seneca to express ‘the dark fears and possibilities which are repressed in his prose writings’ (2004: 4-5). Whichever (or whatever else) may be the case, it seems clear that the plays reflect Seneca’s life in the imperial court, dealing as they do with acts he experienced or witnessed over his career: despotism, revenge, assassination, murder, incest, adultery, and sudden reversals of fortune (Herington 1966: 430; Sullivan 1985: 157). Yet, as Fitch observes, ‘we should [not] expect a one-to-one correspondence between the events of the dramas and the events of the court’ (2002-4:13). For the mythological subject matter ‘provided an opportunity for [...] distancing the ideas from actual circumstances and personal elements’ (Henry and Walker 1963:10).
With this background, we can look at Thyestes for an example of how Seneca’s experiences influenced his drama. While the play does not comment on a specific event, it seems to address Nero’s despotism in a general way, illustrating the psychology of a tyrant and the difficulty of recognizing and limiting the power of an increasingly tyrannical ruler.
Knowing the mythological background for the play is crucial. The two main characters, Thyestes and his brother Atreus, are descendants of a royal family doomed to repeat the crimes of murder, cannibalism, and adultery. This fate originates with their grandfather Tantalus, who sought to trick the gods by killing his son Pelops and serving him to them at a banquet. Discovering the deception, the gods restored Pelops to life and severely punished Tantalus, placing him in Hades to be tormented by perpetual hunger and thirst. When Pelops died, his sons Atreus and Thyestes battled over the kingdom. Atreus gained the crown, but Thyestes seduced Atreus’ wife and stole a golden fleece, which would secure the throne for him.
Seneca’s Thyestes begins at this point. Recalling this back story, Act i presents the ghost of Tantalus, who is forced by a Fury to curse Atreus and Thyestes to repeat his crimes. The next acts illustrate the effects of this curse. Atreus vows revenge, deciding that he will lure Thyestes and his children to the palace by pretending to want peace. Following in his grandfather’s footsteps, he tricks Thyestes, luring the children to a dungeon, where he kills and bakes them. He then feeds them to Thyestes at the feast. Atreus achieves what he set out to do, which is to dominate Thyestes completely. Unlike the gods with Tantalus and Pelops, Thyestes recognizes too late what Atreus has done and, demonstrating his powerlessness, begs the gods to punish his brother, who gloats in triumph.
The Tantalus family myth was one of the most popular sources for ancient drama, having been told in at least fifteen Greek and Roman plays before Seneca (Tarrant 1985: 40-3). Seneca’s version emphasizes a central theme, the legacy of crime in the house of Tantalus. Even so, he shapes the story to reflect his personal experiences, his attempts to understand and work with Nero, tailoring the plot to bring out a double perspective on tyranny. On the one hand, in Atreus the drama lays bare the psychology of the tyrant; on the other, in the Chorus it displays the difficulty of making sense of, and therefore reacting to, the increasingly bizarre actions of such a ruler. These two perspectives need to be understood, since (as we shall see) they subtly inform the political orientation of early and later Elizabethan adaptations of the plays.
When compared with their Greek precursors, Seneca’s tragedies, according to John Fitch, ‘have a greater inwardness, a greater focus on the individual and the psychology of the self’ (2002-4: 5). Thyestes, in particular, explores the psychology of the tyrant, showing his need and ‘capacity to enforce his will upon his victims’ (Mader 1988:37). Such psychology, as Gottfried Mader shows, is especially evident in a famous scene in Act 2 in which Atreus discusses his plans for revenge with an Assistant, who in turn urges the king to reconsider. In the end, Atreus prevails (there is never any sense that he will not), and the Assistant vows to remain silent. Under threat from Atreus, he promises to keep the plans secret:
Haud sum monendus: ista nostro in pectore fides timorque, sed magis claudet fides.
(I need no warning. Loyalty and fear will hide it in my heart—but chiefly loyalty.)
(Seneca ii. 258-9)5
5 References to tragedies by Seneca (as opposed to the early Elizabethan translations of them) will be to volume and page numbers in John G. Fitch’s edition, Seneca’s Tragedies (2002-4), referred to throughout as Seneca.
The Assistant’s assertion, Mader writes, ‘is just a shade too vocal to be taken at face value, and the perceptible accent on fides [loyalty] perforce redirects the reader/ auditor to the timor [fear] which it ostensibly disclaims’ (1988: 33). Such redirection underscores the import of the line, which is that the Assistant submits against his will. The line reveals the psychology of a tyrant, like Atreus, for whom ‘obedience is not enough’ (38). He needs to see the servant submit against his own good judgement. As Atreus says earlier in the scene: The ‘greatest value of kingship: that the people are compelled to praise as well as endure their master’s actions’ (ii. 247). He must see the moment when his subjects are compelled to endure and even support him, confirming that he has ‘destroy[ed] their psychological autonomy and integrity’ (Mader 1988: 37). The rest of the play develops this idea, repeating moments of tyrannical domination, beginning with the submission of Tantalus to the petty tyrant the Fury, and closing with the submission of Thyestes.
Seneca displays a deep concern about the psychology of the tyrant, but shows as well the difficulties of those around the tyrant, who must make sense of his motives and actions, a theme that Seneca develops in the Chorus. As in most classical tragedies, Seneca divides the acts of Thyestes with a chorus, speeches by a group of citizens who are anxious about the welfare of their country. As P. J. Davis (1989, 2003: 61-9) argues, throughout the play this group has difficulty understanding and responding to events. For instance, in Act 1 Tantalus curses his heirs, and the audience knows that, based on the mythology, his crimes will infect later generations. Yet, at the end of the act, the Chorus prays that the family strife will cease. The Chorus is obviously ignorant of the myth. In later acts such ignorance turns into misunderstanding. Davis observes that, at the end of Act 2, the Chorus describes the ideal king, noting especially that the ideal is ‘rid of fear’ and not influenced by the ‘shifting favour of the hasty mob’ (Seneca ii. 261; P. Davis 2003: 66). In doing so, they unwittingly describe Atreus, who is likewise not influenced by the favour of the people. As he says earlier in the play, ‘Righteousness, goodness, and loyalty are private values: kings should go where they please’ (ii. 247). Kings are not bound by conventions (as private citizens are) and can do what they want. As Davis comments (2003:66), the Chorus’s discussion of the nature of kingship is unwittingly inaccurate, making it possible for Atreus to meet their criteria. To be sure, through the play, the Chorus routinely displays its ignorance, creating instances of dramatic irony in which we know something that the citizens do not. Even so, such moments point to a larger issue, which is that their ignorance ‘is not limited to mere unawareness of facts but [...] extends to a more general and profound lack of understanding of the way in which the world they inhabit works’ (P. Davis 1989: 434).
Ultimately, Thyestes illustrates the situation faced by those subject to tyranny: the tyrant ignores conventional ideas (‘righteousness, goodness, loyalty’), seeking instead to impose his will on the people, who themselves ineffectually appeal to traditional values in order to make sense of events. In this way, Thyestes is typical of Seneca’s tragedies, which show (to varying degrees) the psychology of rulers (mainly kings, but also queens) who desire to dominate others completely, and the misunderstanding of those who are forced to submit to such domination. In Thyestes, Atreus is consumed by anger; in Hercules furens, the tyrant Lycus is merciless, and in Thebais, Eteocles, one of the feuding sons of King Oedipus, his ‘lust for rule’, is ‘willing to sacrifice his native land, his household gods, even his wife’ (Armstrong 1948: 20). At the same time, we see each king’s subjects’ corresponding inability to deal with such situations: the Chorus misunderstands Atreus’ motives; Hercules, mistakenly and against the petitions of his father, kills his own family, thinking them the family of Lycus; Jocasta in vain urges her warring sons Eteocles and Polynices to see reason.
Thus, overall, in his tragedies, Seneca analyses the psychology of tyrants and their subjects. One can see that anyone living under or concerned about a corrupt or even autarchic government might find his works especially relevant and intriguing. Renaissance authors were concerned about such issues, but did Seneca matter to them because of his analysis of tyranny?
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