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SENECAN TRAGEDY
that the literate public of Seneca's time was already beginning to narrow its
reading in Greek tragedy towards the limits of the 'Selection' of the tragedians
preserved in the medieval Greek manuscripts. The major exception to this rule
is the Thyestes; its theme was enormously popular among both Greek and
Roman playwrights. Nauck 1 indexes eight Greek authors of a Thyestes, and
one of an Atreus; Ribbeck 2 indexes seven Roman plays (besides Seneca's)
named Thyestes, and four named Atreus. Of the Roman plays, no less than ten
are datable in the Roman Imperial period. But none of these other versions
survives, and it is impossible to be sure which of them Seneca may have
followed. Yet the Senecan tragedies cannot properly be called translations from
the Greek, any more than Virgil's Eclogues can be called translations from
Theocritean pastoral. There is hardly a line in which Seneca reproduces the
Greek word for word; there are very many scenes (including all the Prologues) 3
which have no parallel at all in the Greek; and even those scenes that do follow
the general shape of a Greek prototype are given new colours and different
proportions. The critic can make no more disastrous initial error than to assume
that Seneca is merely aping the Greeks, or that Attic tragedy can serve as a
point of reference for the assessment of Senecan tragedy.
Nor does it seem satisfactory to dismiss the tragedies out of hand, as so many
critics have done under the influence of Schlegel and above all of Leo, as
empty displays of rhetoric and nothing more. Leo 4 offers, indeed, a superb
statement of the observable facts; but the literary-critical principles there
applied require careful scrutiny. Leo's judgement on the subject is summed up
in a sentence on his p. 158, which may be translated: 'These are no tragedies!
They are declamations, composed according to the norm of tragedy and spun
into acts. An elegant or penetrating saying, a flowery description with the
requisite tropes, an eloquent narration — in these compositions that was enough:
the audience would clap, and Art's claims would have been satisfied.' Before
anyone adopts so easy an exit from his critical responsibilities, he should perhaps
take the following considerations into account. First: while Senecan
dramatic poetry is admittedly rhetorical, and indeed declamatory, it is hardly
more or less so than the great bulk of Imperial Roman poetry in other genres,
from Ovid to Juvenal. Ovid indeed, the founding father of this poetic manner,
a star of the late-Augustan declamation-halls, and a family acquaintance (above,
p. 513; cf. Seneca the Elder, Controversiae 2.2.8—12), was of enormous importance
to Seneca, as numerous quotations in his prose works testify. 5 In the
contamination of a surviving Greek prototype with one or more lost plays is reasonably posited; for
example the Phaedra, where elements of both the Euripidean Hippolytus-plays and of Sophocles'
Phaedra have been detected by some scholars.
1 3
TGF 964-5. * TRF 364-5. See Anliker (i960).
* Leo (1878) 1 147—59 (the chapter 'De tragoedia rhetorica").
5
Haase (1851) Index.
521
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