Self-representation and Illusion in Senecan Tragedy

Abstract

Abstract This book argues that in both literary and ethical aspects, Seneca's tragedies are products of the Neronian age and of a Latin literary tradition. Their relationship with Attic tragedy is mediated, through allusion, by non-dramatic Augustan literature. It is a feature of Neronian literature to engage closely, sometimes destructively, with the texts and ideology of Augustus' golden age. Phaedra finds a rhetoric of desire in elegiac poetry while Hippolytus, innocent of such texts and tropes, finds a pattern for vulnerability in Roman pastoral. Virgil and Ovid inform Seneca's tragic sensibility. The deliberate criminality of many of Seneca's protagonists shows the influence of the Aeneid's Juno, but a more ambivalent heroism for Hercules is fashioned from competing models of human transgression in the first two books of the Metamorphoses. In his philosophical prose works, Seneca repeatedly uses the stage as a metaphor for the illusions we mistake for reality. This ethical context is a product frame of reference for interpreting the strange artificiality of Senecan tragedy: the consciousness that its own dramatic worlds, events and people are literary constructs. In Troades, Achilles' ghost and its vengeance are represented both as an inexorable dramatic reality and as a fable to be dismissed as a malignant fiction.

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