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THE YOUNGER SENECA
Evils enough, indeed, are involved in the events here; but none of them is represented
as the central, controlling force in the shaping of the plot. Thus it comes about -
possibly through the author's very incompetence in the creation of a truly Senecantype
drama —that his Nero, Poppaea, Seneca, and (above all) Octavia, however
imperfectly rendered, are the most vivid and credible human figures in the entire
Senecan tragic corpus.
The student of Seneca's works will perhaps be most interested by the representation
of Seneca himself in Oct. 377-592. Both in ancient and modern times Seneca's personal
character has been vilified by some critics, 1 although it needs to be said that the
peculiar practice of using his supposed morals as a criterion for the literary criticism of
his writings is comparatively recent. 2 At least the author of the Octavia, who may
well have known him, offers us a believable portrait of the man. This stage-Seneca
is strangely like the Senecan Thyestes in that he has learned from exile the true
delights of philosophy, but has adopted the fatal choice of returning to power when
power -was offered him (Oct. 377—90; cf. Thy. 404—90). Tet, having fallen once more
to the temptations of ambition, he still applies his philosophical insight as best he
may, under the foul circumstances, to the betterment of humanity. Seneca is seen
desperately attempting to convince a rabid Nero that the true model for imperial
behaviour is the mature, benevolent Augustus, that clemency and respect for the
opinion of his subjects are the only right way to rule, 3 that morality and piety forbid
the divorce of Octavia. All this is in vain; liceat facere quae Seneca improbat (Oct. 589:
' Be it my right to do •what Seneca condemns!') cries Nero; and the tragedy marches
on to its terrible close. This stage-character does not, after all, seem too remote from
the Seneca whom one reconstructs from his writings and the scattered testimonies to
his life. Here is a man tragic in his inconsistency: an eloquent moralist fascinated, even
to his own destruction, by power.
partisans of Octavia, and appears in the first and second of the play's three movements. The Chorus
of the final movement is of a very different fibre: it adores Poppaea's beauty (762—77) and condemns
(785, 806) the folly of the uprising perpetrated by the First Chorus (683-9, °f- 786—803).
1
The earliest recorded is Suillius, in Tacitus, Ann. 13.42 (year A.D. 58). Some of Dio Cassius'
sources were equally critical or more so (60.8.5,61.10.1-6,61.12.1,62.2.1). Yet they must be balanced
against another source, according to "which Seneca 'excelled the Romans of his time, and many others
too, in wisdom' (59.19.7); Dio himself, unfortunately, did not trouble to do this.
z
An example: 'Of [Seneca's] works the writer finds it hard to judge fairly, owing to the loathing
which his personality excites' — H. J. Rose ap. Motto (1973) 45.
J
Just so the prose-writer Seneca had argued in the De dementia.
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