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SENECAN TRAGEDY
an Attendant; and the rest of the act is a debate between them on issues connected
with Atreus' revenge-plot. The Attendant at first opposes the plot as
contrary to the principles of right government, religion, and morality, but
finally submits to becoming the passive instrument of Atreus' rage. Such
scenes, often called 'dissuasion scenes', are a characteristic feature of Senecan
tragedy; in most cases they are placed, as here, in Act II. Fine shades of characterization
will be found neither in them nor elsewhere in the tragedies, with very
few exceptions. There are perhaps only two extensive scenes in which the modern
reader may feel something of that sympathetic interest in the characters as
human individuals which he feels throughout a Shakespearean play: Troades
524—813 (the confrontation between Andromacha and Ulysses) and Phaedra
589—718 (Phaedra's revelation of her passion to Hippolytus). The reasons
behind these two exceptions present a critical problem too great to be entered
into here; it need hardly be said that the customary response is to assume that
these superb scenes must be 'translations' from lost Greek 'originals'. But in
general Seneca's speakers are accorded no personal background, very few
modulations of tone, and no distinctive syntax or diction. They 'all seem to
speak with the same voice, and at the top of it', as T. S. Eliot justly remarked. 1
Atreus here presents himself bluntly as iratus Atreus (180), while his Attendant
is quite without fixed characteristics, being a conduit now for words of justice
and piety, now for words of tame assent.
The second Ode is the most overtly Stoic of all Senecan tragic passages,
setting up as it does the antithesis between the true kingship of the soul and
die false kingship of political power; even as an adolescent, Seneca had thrilled
to the discourse of Attalus the Stoic on this fundamental doctrine (Epist.
108.13, Ben. 7.2.5—3.3). It also coheres perfectly with the dramatic context,
for that is precisely the choice which Thyestes is to make before our eyes
in the ensuing act. The ode used to be one of the most admired poems of
Seneca; [chorus] Me divinus 'that divine chorus', the scholar Daniel Heinsius
called it. 2 The closing period (391—403) has become part of English poetry in
translations by Wyatt, Heywood, and Cowley, 3 and by Marvell. Simply
composed in lightly-running glyconics, the ode can be reproached only for the
usual diffuseness, the tendency to catalogue. Even that fault is absent from the
noble period at its close.
In Act III Thyestes arrives before the palace with his three sons. He has been
invited by Atreus, in accordance with the plans laid in the preceding act, to
share the throne of Mycenae. Yet exile and privation have taught Thyestes the
nature of true kingship: immune regnum est posse sine regno pati 'it is a vast
kingdom to be able to bear a kingdom's absence' (407). He would rather live
1
Eliot (1927) ix.
3
Mason (1959) 181—5.
5*7
2 Ap. Scriverius (1621) II 297.
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