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THE YOUNGER SENECA
Polyxena and Astyanax in the Troades. On the whole, however, although the
tragedies are no doubt related to Seneca's philosophical mission, their function
here must be considered as almost entirely protreptic. They rest not so much
on a philosophy as on the universal human experience of evil, typified in certain
familiar myths and conveyed primarily by the resources of contemporary
verse-rhetoric. They are addressed, in short, to unenlightened, non-Stoic,
man — to the common reader, whether of Seneca's time or of our own.
Yet if the positive side of Stoic doctrine is rare in the tragedies, Seneca's
Stoic habit of mind indirectly influences their composition at almost all points.
His imaginative vision of the universe as a moral—physical unity, and his almost
morbid sensitivity to evil, seem in fact largely responsible for that aspect of
his theatre which has most vexed his critics since the early nineteenth century:
the grotesque and often (to moderns) physically impossible exaggerations and
horrors. In these tragedies, when evil once takes control of a human being it
does not manifest itself merely in his features and walk, 1 or in bestial outrage
against other human beings. The surrounding landscape may feel and reflect
it (e.g. Oed. 569—81, Med. 785—6); and so, often, do the clouds, the sun, the
stars, the very universe itself (e.g. Phoen. 6—8, Med. 739, Ag. 53—6). Fecimus
caelum nocens ' we have put guilt into the sky!', is the cry of Oedipus at Oed. 36;
omnia nostrum sensere malum ' all things have felt our evil', echoes the Chorus
in line 159 of the same play, as it catalogues the ever-spreading horrors of the
Theban plague. All these things are consequences of the Stoic sense of the vast
power of evil, and of the Stoic vision of the universe as a whole interrelated in
all its parts, which are expressed equally clearly in the prose treatises and also
in Lucan. In the tragedies they seem to serve the same end as does Seneca's
use of the contemporary techniques of verse-rhetoric: the realization, in almost
palpable form, of evil.
Some consideration of a single tragedy in action (as it were) may help to
clarify and complete the above general account of Seneca's dramaturgy. It may
also suggest that a Senecan play, while obviously lacking in the Aristotelian
virtues of consistently drawn character and satisfying story-line, may yet
achieve a kind of unity peculiar to itself. The Thyestes has been chosen for this
purpose, as being a play that has been particularly coolly treated by most
critics later than the eighteenth century. The most recent full commentary on
the Thyestes is still that originally published by Gronovius (1661 and 1682).
Even Eliot 2 describes it as 'the most unpleasantly sanguinary' of Seneca's
plays. 3 The coolness was justifiable only on their literal-minded assumption
that the play's subjects were butchery and cannibalism photographically
1
See above, p. 523 n. 2., for examples from the Medea and Phaedra.
2
Eliot (1927) xxtii.
1
Sympathetic critics are much rarer; Gigon (1938) is a valuable representative.
524
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