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SENECAN PROSE
Pensies — a paragraph here, a sentence there, each projecting its separate shaft
of light into the mystery of human existence. For in short, or momentary,
effects he is at his finest. He is a world master in the art of crystallizing a notable
thought in a few, lasting words; and the unexampled force of his great descriptive
passages has already been noted. Nevertheless, there remains a halfforgotten
way of appreciating the prose works even as they stand; which is to
hear them. Possibly the best advice yet given in modern times on reading Seneca
is to be found in the following paragraph:
It is interminable. As we go round and round like a horse in a mill, we perceive
that we are thus clogged with sound because we are reading •what we should be
hearing. The amplifications and the repetitions, the emphasis like that of a fist pounding
the edge of a pulpit, are for the benefit of the slow and sensual ear which loves to
dally over sense and luxuriate in sound — the ear which brings in, along with the
spoken word, the look of the speaker and his gestures, •which gives a dramatic value
to what he says and adds to the crest of an extravagance some modulation which makes
die word -wing its way to the precise spot aimed at in the hearer's heart. (Virginia
Woolf, The second common reader, pp. 9-10; she is actually referring here to the
Elizabethan stylist, Gabriel Harvey.)
4. SENECAN TRAGEDY
The Appendix on the tragedies will show that the external evidence concerning
Senecan tragedy is minimal — far less than exists for any other dramatic (or
supposedly dramatic) corpus of comparable importance in the history of
European literature. Above all, there is no indication, either in the manuscripts
or in the relatively few ancient allusions to the tragedies, 1 as to when or how
they were performed; or even whether they were performed at all. Until about
150 years ago the general assumption was that they were regular stage dramas.
Only after A. W. Schlegel's onslaught on them 2 did the opinion begin to
prevail that they were intended merely for recitation, either in the recitationauditorium
or by the solitary reader. The question is far more doubtful than it
is sometimes made to seem. Yet certain fundamental points may be agreed on.
First: in the later first century B.C. tragedies 'were certainly being performed
both in the live theatre and by simple recitation, but we have almost no knowledge
of the conventions obtaining in either category of performance. The most
concise of much evidence for the co-existence of both kinds of tragedy is
found in Quintilian, Inst. 11.3.73: itaque in its quae ad scaenam componuntur
fabulis artifices pronuntiandi a personis quoque adfectus mutuantur, ut sit Aerope
in tragoedia tristis, atrox Medea. . . 'Thus in those plays that are composed for
1 Collected in Peiper and Richter (1901) xxiv—xxx.
2 In his VorUsungen iiber dramatische Kunst unJ Litteratur of 1809; the relevant extract is reprinted
in Lefevre (1972) 13—14.
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