Seneca Tragicus and Stoicism

chapter 3 Seneca Tragicus and Stoicism

Christopher Star

Four of the great philosophers of the ancient world, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, each engaged with drama, and tragedy in particular, in unique ways. Plato banned the poets from his ideal city, but offered the challenge that poetry’s defenders, who are not poets themselves, but simply lovers of poetry, come to its defense and show that it not only gives pleasure but also befits human beings and society (Republic 607d). Plato’s most famous student, Aristotle, provides an analysis of tragedy in his Poetics; his discussion of com- edy is unfortunately lost. Cicero quotes copiously from Roman Republican drama throughout his philosophical works, often to illustrate or critique a point he is making.1 Only Seneca composed dramas, and thus is in the unique position of being a philosopher and a tragic poet. The question of the relationship between Seneca’s tragedy and philosophy has exercised readers’ ingenu- ity for nearly two millennia. In the past few decades, it has become a growing area of study and one that has yielded several, often contradictory, answers. What are the reasons for this lack of scholarly consensus? One answer lies in the fact that there are a variety of avenues for studying Seneca’s plays: investi- gating their relationship with his philosophy is only one option among many. It is up to the reader to decide whether to look primarily at the plays’ pos- sible Stoic content, or to choose other paths, such as the plays’ engagement with the literary tradition, questions of performance, or the political world in which Seneca lived.2 This multivalent quality of Seneca’s writing contributes to the wide range of opinions and approaches to his plays. This is not to say that one method or level should necessarily take precedence over another, or will provide the “right” interpretation of Seneca’s drama. Rather we should be attuned to how each of these levels of meaning and methods of interpretation can work together and thus bring us to a fuller understanding of the polyse- mous nature of Senecan tragedy. His plays are often simultaneously involved with problems of literary history and composition, the politics of autocracy, as well as the passions, virtue, and vice.

1 For an overview of the relationship between Roman drama and philosophy from the Republic through Seneca and the post-Senecan Octavia and Hercules Oetaeus, see Star 2015. 2 See also Ker 2009, 126–29.

If one does choose to read Seneca’s plays with an eye to his philosophy, an immediate problem is that Seneca does not explicitly tell us how we might apply a Stoic reading to his plays. When Seneca does discuss drama in his prose, he frequently does so in a simplistic way that cannot be seamlessly applied to the ethical complexities of his tragedies. To take only examples from his Moral Epistles, written in the last few years of his life, and almost certainly after he composed the bulk, if not all, of his tragic corpus, Seneca offers three strate- gies for interpreting drama. He advises us to read drama for philosophical and morally uplifting maxims (Ep. 8.8). In another, he notes that we should wait until the end and see how vice is punished (Ep. 115.14–15). Seneca also advo- cates for critical spectatorship (Ep. 80.7–8), which involves understanding the Stoic theory of the passions and how our responses to drama and literature fit in. This information is most fully provided in On Anger. As we will see, each of these methods opens up further problems, but also possibilities, for understanding the relationship between Seneca’s prose and poetry. These problems and possibilities are enhanced by the fact that a given passage, theme or entire play can work on several levels, of which the philosophical is only one.3 The richness of interpretive levels—literary, political and philosophical—should serve as a reminder that, when approaching Senecan philosophy and tragedy, we should not presuppose that Seneca’s philosophy is the gateway to understanding his tragedies, and that if we look closely enough at Seneca’s philosophy we will gain unequivocally orthodox Stoic answers to the perplexing and horrifying world that his plays present. Indeed, what binds Seneca’s two bodies of work together may not be a simple desire to espouse Stoicism, but rather an overarching rhetorical style that is a powerful medium to describe the dev- astating effects of human passion. Furthermore, Seneca was not blind to the problems of his chosen philosophical school, as he critiques Stoic ideas in his prose works.4 This critical impetus may even be more powerful in his plays. The question of the relationship between Seneca tragicus and Seneca philosophus is not a new one, but one with a long and complex history.5 The poet Martial, a fellow Spaniard who benefitted from Seneca’s high position,

3 On the “overdetermined” nature of passages from Phaedra, see Croisille 1964, Armisen- Marchetti 1992, on lines 130–35, and Ker 2009, 126–29 for a general discussion of the problem. 4 E.g. Ben. 1.4.1, which critiques Chrysippus’s work on favors; Ben. 3.18.1–4, which critiques Hecto for claiming that slaves cannot perform favors; Ep. 33.7–9, against simply repeating what earlier Stoics have said; Ep. 88.42–46, against superfluous studies by philosophers; and Ep. 113 against overly subtle questions by Stoics on whether “justice, courage, prudence, and the other virtues are living things” (113.1). 5 See Bocciolini Palagi 1987, and Ker 2009, 197–206.