ALL TOO HUMAN On Seneca’s Thyestes An essay written by Felipe de Medeiros Guarnieri, no. USP 5712278 In answer to theme no.2, ‘Discuss the internal conflicts of the central characters of Seneca’s Thyestes and the imagery associated with them.’ FLC6175 Literatura e Cultura Neroniana Profs. Martin Dinter, PhD & Marcos Martinho dos Santos, PhD DLCV, FFLCH, USP ______ «I am that insect, brother, and it is said of me specially. All we Karamazovs are such insects, and, angel as you are, that insect lives in you, too, and will stir up a tempest in your blood… Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed and never can be fathomed. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side.» - Dmitri Karamazov in Dostoievski's The brothers Karamazov (trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky) ΦΛΕΓΜΑ

The cosmos’ is a heart of darkness. From the cool light at its inner core, thence spreads the πνεῦµα, a fiery breath that fills the lungs of the universe therefrom. All there is is a manifestation of one single, corporeal, will-endowed fluid - a sentient blood flowing through universal veins - that permeates every thing living and inanimate: mankind, plants, rocks, the food we eat in order to survive, the excrements we expel, the animals living amongst us, the basic elements of fire, water, earth, air, our bodily organs, the environment, nature in motion, earthquakes and deluges, and even our emotions; they all strive from and contrive to a unique, boundless Great Chain, the movement of which is what the old philosophers named fatum, or εἱµαρµένη1 , not the individual's lot perpetrated by the µοῖραι, but the fate of the λόγος itself. It would be a misconception, however, to interpret fatum as the natural outcome of the imperfectability of a world wherein human action has no freedom to act: it is rather the dynamic aftermath in a chain of events to which our own choices bear great responsibility. In Stoic philosophy, fatum is not a deterministic unity, but a moving flow of cause-and-effect or, rather, of crime (scelus) and punishment (poena). As we shall be using Stoic vocabulary, to put it bluntly: the εἱµαρµένη is the movement of the πνεῦµα, whose chain is deemed κρᾶσις, the operating medium of which is called τόνος, albeit

1 Stobaeus, eclog. 1.79 says of Chrysippus, «δύναµιν πνευµατικὴν τὴν οὐσίαν τῆς εἱµαρµένης, τάξει τοῦ παντὸς διοικητικήν» (SVF 2.913); the πνεῦµα is both a causal nexus and field of forces, cf. Rosenmeyer, pp.93-112; also, the «πνεῦµα in a cosmic sense is a conscious, rational, material force, working like a craftsman on inert, formless matter and fashioning different substances of its own tension» (Long 1968, p.332) 1 all terms are to some extent synonymical2 . Nature, φύσις, is the material manifestation of the πνεῦµα in the world. Such dichotomy conception, in the heart of which lies the Stoic notion that the κόσµος is an organic, living and active body, is pivotal to Seneca, both the philosopher and the dramatist. In this essay, we will explore the inner conflicts of the central characters in Seneca’s Thyestes, that is, Atreus', Thyestes', and (to a lesser degree) the ghost of Tantalus’, and the external conflicts between the two brothers that structures the main plot. In so doing, we will expose the imagery associated with them, both as a means of dramatic description and of contextual association. In Seneca’s tightly organised drama, the figures of language are not merely ornamental but the very essence of text and the structural grounds of the drama, blocks that build the characters’ relationship to the universe in which they live. At last, we will tie the action and imagery to the main plot, so as to bring to light the concept of universe at work. ΧΟΛΗ From the inner struggle of the main characters and also that of the chorus (which heightens the drama, failing to resolve it) to the clash of wits between the characters, from the battle of man against nature and fatum to the very absurdity of the world, the Stoic cosmos is a chemical mixture of dichotomy forces and elements in which «contrary energies are best held in an equilibrium, and at worst engaged in a constant struggle for superiority, straining towards excess and explosion3 ». As all of Senecan drama lies upon a conception of the cosmos as the battleground of opposites (and seen that Thyestes is no exception to that rule), the action is enacted in a series of micro- and macrocosmic dichotomies to which distinct sets of imagery are associated. Seneca’s drama is played out in terms of biological reality, body and muscle, and animal energy. His imagery is strong, massive and gross, and mainly pairs opposite implications of positive and negative, resting upon the association of the beautiful, orderly, light, law-abiding and peacefully quiet to good, and the ugly, chaotic, dark, arrogant and destructively anxious to evil; similarly, the imagery may be condensed in two great sets: the human body, its organs, fluids and biological necessities such as hunger and thirst, and the food needed to quench these; and nature, be it

2 «So the Stoics assimilate traditional ideas to fit their theory of pneumatic nature. In effect, they create a glossary of nearly synonymous terms, approximate equations that refer to the one and only reality under different guises: Nature = Reason = Logos = God = Providence = Fate = Fortune. To them Fate is the system of causal nexus or Nature 'seen as the order of events in time’. Providence is the order of events seen as the product of divine personality. Fortune denotes the unceasing change going on in the universe, of which the true causation is not understood or cannot be understood by man.» (Pratt, p.51)

3 Rosenmeyer, p.100-106 2 manifested in animals, in phenomena as seastorms and nightfall, and in the basic elements of fire and water. To visual images of motion and tension usher verbal images of hyperbole, incrementum, comparatio, tortuous syntax, bombastic rhetoric, witticism, epigrammatic sentences cut out short in sententiae and exempla, as if the text was itself a body endowed with spasmodic muscles and leaking fluids4 . Similarly, what in one person is a positive virtue may be a negative vice in another, depending on the degree of the character’s behaviour: too much prudence may give birth to hesitation, ignavia, and metus, the case of Thyestes; duritia, which is resistance smudged by corruption, ira, and furor may all give us the illusion of fortitudo 5. Chiefly and evidently Stoical, Seneca’s use of imagery is, however, not so monotonous and expressionless; it is true that there is not much variation to it, but they are doubtless effective to the dramatist’s purposes. Should there be a fixed law to the imagery used in Senecan drama, it lies in the association of satis, equilibrium, to order, and egestas and nimietas to disorder; all the same, the latter two are changeable and are constantly shifting, as two sides of the same coin. Thus Tantalus’ pessimus scelus is punished by eternal hunger and eternal thirst; and Atreus's nimietas turns to the egestas of insatiableness, and Thyestes’ nimietas of his crime turns to egestas and hesitation to go back to the concluding satiaberis of the play. It is Thyestes and Atreus, the offspring of Tantalus, who are the central characters of Thyestes, the conflict between whom is the nuclear force of this Elizabethan-fashioned

Revenge drama 6.

Atreus, often associated with the tyrant7 , self-described as ignavis, iners, enervis, inultus, iratus (vv.176-180), is the personification of the will to dominate, and a victim of insatiable hunger. He is manipulative, believes in no gods, and has no moral standards whatsoever. He paints himself a god and moves

4 «Motion and tension circumscribe not only the wills of the agents and their tight pressure upon each other but, what is really saying the same thing, they define the rhetoric, with its explosive and often bizarre developments; they inform the themes and the precepts, jostling each other to the point of neutralization; and, foremost, they trigger the life of the passions, of plotting, and of man’s inhumanity to man» (Rosenmeyer, p.104).

5 So says Augustine when discussing the Stoic notion of the equality of virtues and vices, «sed haec fortitudo prudens non erat - mala enim pro bonis eligebat -, temperans non erat - corruptelis enim turpissimis foedebatur - iusta non erat - nam contra patriam coniuraverat - et ideo nec fortitudo erat, sed duritia sibi, ut stultos falleret, nomen fortitudinis [Catilina] imponebat» (ep. 167.7, in allusion to Sallustius’s Catilina 5,3)

6 The comparison of Senecan tragedy to Elizabethan drama was pointed out by T. S. Eliot (1927); moreover, the plot of Thyestes may be interpreted, in traditional criticism, as the revenge story of brother against brother, a family drama, the fable of the punishment due to the eponymous «hero».

7 Atreus attributes himself the title of tyrannus, quod maximum probum tyranno rebus in summis reor, but inasmuch as he is inultus: what is to say, he blames Thyestes’ crime for his own actions. Atreus as a doubtless nimis character notwithstanding, there is some truth to what he says; cf. fas est in illo [Thyeste] quidquid in fratre est nefas. / quid enim reliquit crimine intactum aut ubi / sceleri pepercit? coniugem stupro abstulit / regnumque furto; specimen antiquum imperi / fraude est adeptus, fraude turbavit domum (vv.220-224) 3 aequalis astris et cunctos super altum superbo vertice attingens polum. nunc decora regni teneo, nunc solium patris. dimitto superos; summa votorum attigi. (vv.885-888) In traditional Greek drama, Atreus would be the model of the villain blemished by ὕϐρις, an overpowerful dictator distinguished by fits of delusion and grandeur, a sort of mythological Xerxes. In the universe of Senecan drama, however, his portrait is not so one-sided. Atreus is sooner cunning than purely evil, in the sense that he is quite conscious of his acts and behaves so as to put his goals into motion, which seem to be also the hideous will of fatum: after all, the Fury, messenger of the µοῖραι, informs the ghost of Tantalus that ob scelera pulsi, cum dabit patiam deus / in scelera redeant, sintque tam invisi omnibus quam sibi (vv.37-39) and move on to paint a ghastly picture of a peius scelus whereby a brother, Atreus, shall consume (expavescat) his brother Thyestes, father his son, and son his own father. Later, Atreus murmurs to himself, scelera non ulcisceris, nisi vincis

(vv.195-196); still, SAT. maius hoc ira est malum. ATR. fateor. tumulus pectore attonius quatit penitusque volvit; rapior et quo nescio, sed rapior. […] nescio quid animo maius et solito amplius supraque fines moris humani tumet instatque pigris manibus - haud quid sit scio, sed grande quiddam est. ita sit. hoc, anime, occupa. (vv.1104-1105) To Atreus, a villain conscious of his role in the world stage, is often attributed the imagery of savage, violent, and unruly natural phenomena. Both nature and humanity should bow down to his power (vv.180-191), his vocabulary is aggressive and bleak (vv.249-254; 288-294), he is furor (vv.339-341), the bloody hound hunting after its prized boar (vv.497-506), he is ira, ferus and acer, a sword thirsting for flesh-flowing blood and shaking the foundations of nature (vv.546-622), a lion swelling with wrath and raging on, jaws reeking with gore (vv.732-741). Stung by nimietas, excess, his cruelty knows no limits, his hunger no satisfaction. nil quod doloris capiat assueti modus: nullum relinquam facinus et nullum est satis. (vv.255-256)

4 Vengeful, horrible, yet resolute, Atreus seems to have overcome his inner conflicts by evil. It has been fittingly suggested that Atreus embodies furor, but his is a furor that is the same as Iago’s, it is vicious mischief rather than madness. If guilty, his is the sin of a vindictive ira, pair to avaritia rather than dementia. He may indeed be seen as a shadow of a Nero relishing the great fire at Rome whilst playing his lyre8 . As much as Phaedra, and Othello for this matter, Thyestes may be interpreted as a character-driven play whose protagonist is Atreus: the cosmos has chosen him as the agent of the scelus, and he dutifully, willingly, (and nonchalantly,) plays out his role to the very end. On the opposite side of Atreus lies his brother Thyestes, deemed by traditional criticism as the representation of the Stoic proficiens9 , the philosopher in constant search of wisdom. His is not an encouraging portrait, however. Thyestes is broken down and driven by fear, modo inter illa, quae putant cuncti aspera, fortis fui laetusque; nunc contra in metus revolvor; animus haeret ac retro cupit corpus referre, moveo nolentem gradum (vv. 417-420) Frightened and halting, pigro incessu stupens, out of breath, Thyestes is introduced in the play as an indecisive, doubtful and skeptical character (vv. 404-490). He does recognise the nimietas of his timor, but he is too feeble to even try to master it. Progressively, as the curtains draw at the bloody feast, fugiat maeror fugiatque pavor, fugiat trepidi comes exilii tristis egestas rebusque gravis pudor afflictis (vv.923-925)

8 Much ink has been shed on the Nero-Atreus, and Seneca-Thyestes, association, a question into which we will not dwell in this essay. For such connotations, the reader may turn to Dinter’s and Buckley's forthcoming essays.

9 Pratt, pp.104-107 5 he later request the gods and the universe itself for piety (vv.1069-1096) in a long rage to embrace nature 10. Thyestes is so overcome by metus that he does not even know for certain what or why he fears, nihil timendum video, sed time tamen […] pro me nihil iam metuo; vos facitis mihi Atrea timendum (vv.435; 485-486) Does he fear Atreus, or does he fear his fate? Is he too prudent, also a victim of nimietas, that unquenchable thirst for power, as well as that which gives way to hesitation and credulity? Is his fear a lack, egestas? Accordingly, the imagery associated with Thyestes is that of predatory frailty, unreasonable fear and hypocrisy: he is the boar (vv.497-506), in constant self-doubt, at loss for words (vv.938-951), his body is all supplying hands (vv.517-518), obnoxious neck (v.931) and wailing tears (v.951), demens, he howls like a dog, cries and yet longs to rend the royal garments, rich dyed with Tyrian purple (vv.954-963) during the bloody feast, wherein the food he fills himself with is not cibum but dapes (v.973). As Atreus cannot put modus to his crime, Thyestes also cannot put restrain to his fears, TAN. quam tamen fraudem times? THY. omnem; timori quem meo statuam modum? (vv.482-483)

Or, is he rather trying to cheer himself up, as T. S. Eliot says of Othello11 ? For he knows frustra timentur dura (v. 447), and claims esse iam miserum iuvat (v. 427). It may be argued that his imposing metus is no more than an excuse for his idle and spoiled selfishness, whereby he refuses to accept his poena. … sed iam saevi nubila fati pelle ac miseri temporis omnes dimitte notas; redeant vultus ad laeta boni, veterem ex animo mitte Thyesten. (vv.933-937)

10 See Rosenmeyer’s brilliant analysis of the Schreirede effect in the closing chapter of his book, pp.160-205; «what does the Senecan hero do when he is trapped, immobilized in his expectations, and blocked by the obstacles that open before him? He launches cries all around him, or rather away from himself […]» (p.177)

11 Eliot, p.111 6 Nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of oneself. Is Thyestes regretful of his scelus? It seems not, for as much as Atreus, he is still taken by delusions of grandeur, occurret Argos, populus occurret frequens -

sed nempe et Atreus. (vv.411-412) Even though he declares that immane regnum est posse sine regno pati (v.470), even though he states that regiam capitis notam / squalor recusat noter et spectrum manus / infausta refugit (vv. 531-533), even though he offers his sons to his brother in admission to his wrongdoings (vv. 512-521), his are deeply selfish motives: his innocentes sons are obsides to be offered to fatum, in a vain attempt to escape the punishment he is due. He does so because he fears his own death, and not because he regrets what he has done. It is Thyestes as much as Atreus who bring together, through their mutual scelus, which is the scelus of the House of Tantalus, the collapse of the universe at the conclusion. dignum est Thyeste facinus et dinum Atreo; uterque faciat. (vv.271-272) This is not to judge Atreus one-dimensionally as the sly wolf in sheep’s clothing, as much as Atreus is not the personification of pure evil. The Stoic universe portrayed in Thyestes is reigned over by a flux wherein the fixity of self is illusory, its limitation within the human realm is swept out of court, and its tones are not coloured in black and white, but in shady hues of grey12 . Whilst Seneca does not deal with individuals, but with emotions, states and stances, we may describe Thyestes not exactly as a dramatis persona defined by inner conflicts, but the archetype of self- doubt himself. More credible than Atreus, who wears the gears of unflinching nature, Thyestes may be but a fallible and feeble human being, drowned in existential angst, in our own likelihood. We feel pity for his pathetic refusal to atone for his crime. At last, we should discuss briefly the inner conflicts and imagery associated to another character, the ghost of Tantalus, detestabilis umbra (vv.23-24). The grandfather of Thyestes and

12 Senecan drama is «a drama of heightened sensibilities, sharply focused passions, aphoristic moralism, and philosophical chiaroscuro» (Pratt, p.31) 7 Atreus, punished with arens sitis and fames hians, he is both a sentient being and the material embodiment of the scelus of his house, a thing and device which sets the plot into motion. Tantalus is the begetter of the primus scelus, an Adam to an original sin whose sempiternal fall is the metaphorical condition of mankind. His eternal hunger «manifests itself in Atreus’ insatiable hunter for revenge and his cannibalistic cookery and the frightening satiety that Thyestes experiences after eating his sons’ flesh13 .» Additionally, Tantalus’s words, … peius inventum est siti arente in undis aliquid et peius fame hiante semper? […] in quod malum transcribor? […] regione quidquid impia cessat loci complebo. (vv.1-23), and the biological vocabulary - ore, cibos, membra, visceribus, pascit, pabulum, rabies, expavescat - he and the Fury uses throughout the same passage are schemata of a caedis prodigium - he foresees that his crime shall be repeated, but peius. Such is the unflinching εἱµαρµένη held by the Fury. In so far as he crosses the boundaries between life and death, violating the laws of nature, the ghost of Tantalus is the nefas within which the struggling forces of egestas and nimietas clash together. Not only - unwillingly notwithstanding, he embodies the poena due to Thyestes. me pati poenas decet, non esse poenam. (vv.86-87) Wherefrom the universe’s law is an overflowing river of crime and punishment against the rapid current of which human freedom can little do. After all, the scelus of the House of Tantalus craves like hunger in the guts of his heirs. ΑΙΜΑ As some reference has been made above to the imagery of nature, food, corporeality and animals used by Seneca, we must now dwell upon and develop its implications in the inner workings of the play. Both Atreus and Thyestes are at different moments described as beasts - be it

13 Dinter, p.10 8 hounds, boars, lions - no sooner as to bestialize human beings, as if in the naturalist manner of a Zola, than because both humans and animals share what Joseph Conrad would term a «remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar14 ». Far from the Greek authors who strived to detach the human from the instinctively animal, Seneca takes the opposite path: his language unwillingly reminds us of the animal within: man is primarily a beast bound to natural laws, that is, he must cope with his necessities in order to survive. The prominence of the body and the bodily, the language of the body, and the language as body: these are the marks that link the vitality and despair of Senecan drama most closely to the

Stoa15 . Stoic cosmology brings biology fully on its own, for everything, from the orbit of planets to the muscle spasms of animals, from the bodily functions to the natural phenomena of hurricanes and seastorms, are brought upon by one and the same motion, whose operating medium of animation is the τόνος (latin intentio), the inherent tension responsible for attraction and repulsion, operating within and in-between the bodies, and therefore the means by which the πνεῦµα (latin spiritus)16 manifests itself in the world. The τόνος is nothing more than the πνεῦµα’s own voluntas, the movement of which, we have already seen, is the εἱµαρµένη (latin fatum). Correspondingly, humans, animals, the air, the bodily organs, nature, and the cosmos itself are all manifestations of a single πνεῦµα: we are all drenched in the same fluid and made of one and the same matter. Everything that is is connected and thus suffer together.

The concept of συµπάθεια («suffering together;» latin contagio17 ) is nuclear to understanding the internal and external conflicts at play and the imagery associated with them. As aforementioned, in so far as humans, animals, the wind and all that is share the same living and corporeal force of τόνος and are part of the same fiery fluid called κρᾶσις, it is a logical conclusion that spiritual dispositions and human actions might bring unmeasurable consequences in the texture of the universe. The Stoic universe in Senecan drama is a living organism that does not exactly reflect the inner state of the characters, but protests and reacts against them. Hence the strong attention to vocabulary, nouns and verbs, pertaining the eyes and ears - tota iam oculos meos /

14 Heart of darkness, p.36 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006); also, «the whole world can be visualised as a gigantic assemblage of beasts, of monsters that crowd the human agents who are thinly disguised exemplars of the same species» (Rosenmeyer, p.97)

15 Rosenmeyer, p.121

16 Here we use Seneca’s own vocabulary in NQ 2.6.1-6; «hoc quid est aliud quam intentio spiritus, sine qua nihil validum et contra quam nihil validum est?»

17 The translation is Cicero’s, «ut enim iam sit aliqua in natura rerum contagio, quam esse concedo» (De divin. 2.33; also, De fato 5); compare to «[…] ἐπι δὲ τῶν ἡγωµένον συµπάθειά τίς ἐστιν, εἴ γε δαχτύλου τεµνοµένου τὸ ὅλον συνδιατίθεται σῶµα» from Sextus Empiricus's adv. math. 9.78 (SVF 2.1013) 9 imago caedis errat (vv.281-282) and miserum videre nolo, sed dum fit miser (v.907), declares Atreus, for we truly see and hear the world as a struggle between (and through) them and nature. quidquid audire est metus illic videtur. (vv.670-671) «Nature is contagio itself; the sum of bonds between humans and their environment and to each other; the 'sympathetic,' biochemical, perhaps ultimately alchemical, discovery that everything is part of one body,» remarks Rosenmeyer18 . After all, in the larger-than-life world of Senecan drama, the natural forces do not serve as icons: they are human energies caught at a different angle. Nature can thus sicken through scelus and furor, and through them come asunder and hasten toward dissolution. In this world, men hold great responsibility for, enmeshed in fatum notwithstanding 19, they must answer for their misdeeds - for every crime, the universe plays as judge, jury and executioner of a due punishment. Reacting against the unsurmountable horror of Atreus’s furor, the entire universe comes at peril at the fourth chorus (v.789ff.), in which spectaculum, or καταστροφή, all things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, the Sun flees in terror, the Giants seem to be reborn to essay war upon the Olympus, mere anarchy is loosed upon the stars, trepidant, trepidant pectora magno percussa metu: ne fatali cuncta ruina quassata labent iterumque deos hominesque premat deforme chaos […] (vv.828-832)

The scelus of the House of Tantalus - not only Atreus’ whimsical insolence against the gods in preparing the bloody feast (and ipse est sacerdos, ipse funesta prece / letale carmen ore violent canit (vv.691-692) moreover!) -, but Thyestes’ stuprum, Tantalus’ nefas and Aegisthus’ future impietas against his cousin Agamemnon as well (vv.321-333)20 - for let the crime semper oriatur novum, / ned unum in uno, dumque punitur scelus, / semper crescat (vv.30-32) - all bring the disruption of the universal balance, provoking a succession of cataclisms, turning day into night,

18 Rosenmeyer, p.140; also Seneca, «omne hoc quod vides, quo divina atque humana conclusa sunt, unum est; membra sumus corporis magni» (ep. 95.52)

19 «omnes cum fortuna copulati sumus […] omnis vita servitium est.» (De tranq. an. 9.3)

20 Although Atreus seemingly tries to atone for his necessary crime on his own - quid enim necesse est liberos sceleri meos / inserere? per nos odia se nostra explicent -, he implies that the sin is bound to continue along the generation of Agamemnon and Menelaus, consili Agamemnon mei / sciens minister fiat et patri sciens / Menelaus adsit. (vv.322-327) 10 prompting earthquakes and deluges, and even disturbing the cosmic motion of the stars and planets in a richly stunning and breath-taking (dis)array of images. Far from the Greek tragedians who conceived divine justice as the overwhelming impulse to order, wherewith a set of fixed laws overlook human will, within the Senecan world a clear sight or control of the causes of action is denied to all, especially to the gods, noxiae supra caput animae vagentur nostrum et ardenti freto Phlegeton harenas igneus totas agens exilia supra nostra violentus fluat - immota tellus pondus ignavum iacet, fugere superi. (vv.1016-1020) Seneca is the first European author to bestow upon man the (Stoic, and Christian still) free will to act, but his is a freedom that consists in tuning one’s actions to one's own nature in relation to deterministic heredity and environment; a freedom that is a curse as much as a gift. (Man has free will to the extent that he can learn who he is, i.e. that he knows he is an actor in a play.) The reason is not just that the complexity of the network defeats all hope of mastery, but that the causal system of κρᾶσις may itself be inescapably flawed and diseased, and intrinsically corrupt. Mastery might be possible in a universe that obeys fixed laws, in a world that is healthy and theoretically analysable; the universe of Senecan drama, however, is ridden by plague, the agents of which are human beings and their passions21 . As Atreus reveals to Thyestes that sceleri modus debetur ubi facias scelus, / non ubi reponas (vv.1052-1053), there seems to be one and only unflinching and inexorable law to the universe, and that is vinditia, Νέµεσις. THY. scelere quis pensat scelus? ATR. scio quid queraris: scelere praerepto doles, nec quod nefandas hauseris angit dapes; quod non pararis. fuerat hic animus tibi instruere similes inscio fratri cibos et adiuvante liberos matre aggredi similique leto sternere. hoc unum obstitit - tuos putasti. (vv.1103-1110)

21 Rosenmeyer, p.90 11 Then again, its consequences and reasons are not for man to know, and even less for them to master. Thyestes refuses to admit the mad logic of a universe whose principles human reason cannot fathom, and in the face of which it breaks down. The tragedy of the Senecan hero comes from a moral and introspective struggle, whose life is that of the inner mind and heart - not καρδιά, but θυµός, latin viscera - the battleground of conflicting emotions. His tragedy comes not from the fall Aristotle attributed as the foremost element of Greek drama, but from the conscience that the fall is the very condition of man and he cannot help but strive towards it, invitus or nolens regardless, wherefrom springs his suffering. Drama is played out within the inner life of the mind, it is psychological rather than textual. Anguished and darkened22 , Seneca’s characters must bear responsibility for their scelera, like Sisyphus must bear his stone on his back. In an universe wherein suffering is the very condition of mankind23 , men are easily and quickly prone to fall prey to their own passions, that is, to their own selfish selves; it is an universe wherein evil is not the unfathomable decision of the gods, but the aftermath of their own failure. The irony of it all is that the grim, twisted universe chooses men, and not divine beings, as the executioners of poena. THY. vindices aderunt dei; his puniendum vota te tradunt mea. ATR. te puniendum liberis trado tuis. (vv.1110-1112) ΘΥΜΟΣ

Often has the «ostentation of Seneca’s prose» been criticised24 , but, whereas the criticism is the inevitable result of departure from a great tradition, which is that of Greek drama, Seneca’s athletic and muscular style was quite natural for him, creative in its innovation, and effective in his

22 «In a Stoic drama, the hero and his party owe the darkening of their characters to a variety of sources: the turbulence endemic in the classical models, the corrosive spell of the temptations and the dilemmas a tragedy cannot do without, and last, but not least, the debilitation with which radical Stoicism saddles both political necessities and human forbearance.» (Rosenmeyer, p.27)

23 «si velis credere altius veritatem intuentibus, omnis vita supplicium est: in hoc profundum inquietumque proiecti mare, alternis aestibus reciprocum et modo allevans nos subitis incrementis, modo maioribus damnis deferens adsidueque iactans, numquam stabili consistimus loco, pendemus et fluctuamur et alter in alterum illidimur et aliquando naufragium facimus, semper timemus; in hoc tam procelloso et ad omnes tempestates exposito mari navigantibus nullus portus nisi mortis est» (ad Polybium 9); also de prov. 4.12

24 Seneca’s style was deemed a series of declamation in dramatic form by Leo, 1878; character-static, incohesive, monotonously-versified, lifeless and structureless by Mackail, 1895; contemptible «Silver Age» doggerel by Summers, 1920; Stoic propaganda by Marti, 1945; artificial imitation falling short of Greek tragedy by Beare, 1964; unstageable recitation drama by Zwierlein, 1966; and «a tissue of hackneyed commonplaces» by Ogilvie, 1980. Regenbogen, 1961 seems to be the first, after Lipsius, to stress the particularities of Senecan drama and assess its literary value; Boyle, 1977 happily follows the same path. For those critics who object to Seneca’s extravagance, let it be reminded them that Shakespeare, as well, was guilty of the same charge, for he speaks the language of men, not of poets, cf. Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare (Oxford Major Works, 1984), p.436 12 purposes. Like Milton’s Paradise Lost25 , it is the product of a spectacular, histrionic, convoluted age: it is calculated - in all its maximalism, repulsive imagery, paroxism, discontinuity and rhetorical loudness - to provoke disgust as well as awe, horror and bliss, voluptas and dolor. Even T. S. Eliot, who did not like Seneca much, and was a harsh critic of his at that, is forced to admit that although he is «long-winded, he is not diffuse; he is capable of great concision; there is even a monotony of forcefulness… [Seneca] is wholly himself; what he attempted he executed, he created his own genre 26.» Rosenmeyer points out that «the invasion of the psychological realm by language originally devised to plumb physical and biological processes is the most important contribution Seneca made to the development of European drama27 ». The notion of a sympathetic spiritus mundi reacting to human emotion was an important ingredient in Shakespeare and Elizabethan drama, romantic poetry, and may be traced to our own time in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, Seamus Heaney, and Ted Hughes. Whereas Marcus Aurelius, himself a Stoic philosopher influenced by Seneca, is forced to conclude that a man endowed with greater sensibility and deeper insight into the workings of the Universe is led to admire even the gaping jaws of wild beasts28 , Thomas revels in aesthetic terror as soon as he fathoms that The force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees

is my destroyer 29.

The Welsh poet is yet again disclosing the Stoic conception of the πνεῦµα as the driving and crafting force of all that is. The force that drives the water through the rocks drives our red blood as well; where blew a flower may a flower no more lift its head to the blows of rain, and death shall have no dominion. Nature, the source of continuity, order, and life, is imperishable in its motion. Nature, the Great Chain of which, the κρᾶσις, makes us dumb to tell the lover’s tomb from the crooked worm. Everything that is bears the seeds of its own destruction within, as life bears death

25 I have in mind Dr. Johnson’s criticism of Milton’s style in his Life of Milton (Oxford Major Works, 2006), p.99ff

26 Eliot, pp.59-61. «Seneca writes a different, introspective kind of drama, a unique product of three major elements: the hypertensive mode of rhetoric as a form of expression, feeling, and thought; the Stoic, and specifically Neo-Stoic, conception of a rational moral order threatened by the human passions; and the personal experience of a statesman whose ideals were tortured by the moral savagery of his Rome.» (Pratt, p.10)

27 Rosenmeyer, p.132

28 cf. Meditations 2.2 from C. R. Haines’s 1916 Loeb translation; also, Rosenmeyer, p.119

29 The Poems of Dylan Thomas, p.90 (New York: New Directions, 2003) 13 within30 . What tells us apart from other beings, sentient and non-sentient, however, is that we know we are doomed, so we bear a unique and individual potential to conquer our fears, to surpass suffering in so far as we accept that we cannot but suffer. If there is a higher purpose for man to seek, it is precisely the socratic γνῶθι σεαυτόν, nosce te ipsum31 - which is to live according to one’s own nature and cease to battle fate. Is that not, Seneca argues, true happiness? not reason? to live according to nature, to know one’s own lot in the order of things, the same as to know the motion of the universe and to accept death32 . Amidst the bleakness of the universe, Seneca came to stress the will to live, and the will to make life worth living. Indeed, the world he builds in his plays is a gloomy one - no one can safely claim freedom from the Great Chain of Beings, as we are all bound to die and drown in the blood of πνεῦµα -, but all too human nonetheless. Death is the very condition of life. And death is no death, but an endless cycle of life, death, and rebirth, which the Stoics call παλιγγενεσία (latin regeneratio), the only hope, or else despair that lies in the choice of pyre or pyre following the ἐκπύρωσις, the redemptive conflagration brought from fire by fire33 . For Seneca, immortality is a given truth, but not of the individual soul, or the continuation of human life beyond, but that of the cyclical conflagration and regeneration of the soul of nature, the spiritus mundi, the πνεῦµα. Dismal as a scelus may be, as much as it may seemingly bring the most terrifying catastrophe of the aetas ultima, nothing can stop the flow of events. Such are the inner workings of the ever-enduring cosmos’ heart of darkness, within the cold and somber beats of which alone man may find solace. *

30 «[…] inaequalibus ista spatiis eodem natura dimittit: quidquid est non erit, nec peribit sed resolvetur. nobis solvi perire est… sic vitam mortemque per vices ire et composita dissolvi, dissoluta componi, in hoc opere aeternam artem cuncta temperantis dei verti.» (ep. 71.13-14)

31 In Thyestes, the chorus addresses thrice the prospect of death and its relation to fatum and self-knowledge: qui tuto positus loco / infra se videt omnia / occuritque suo libens / fato ned queritur mori (vv.365-368);» illi mors gravis incubat / qui, notus nimis omnibus, / ignotus moritur sibi (vv. 401-403); at last, vitae est avidus quisquis non vult / mundo secum pereunte mori (vv.883-884)

32 «vivere tota vita discendum est et, quod magis fortasse miraberis, tota vita discendum est mori» (de brev. 7.3); and «idem est ergo beate vivere et secundum naturam» (De vita beata 8.2)

33 «ipsius naturae opera vexantur et ideo aequo animo ferre debemus urbium excidia. […] enumerare omnes fatorum vias longum est. hoc unum scio: omnia mortalium opera mortalitate damnata sunt, inter peritura vivimus. haec ergo atque eiusmodi solacia admoveo Liberali nostro incredibili quodam patriae suae amore flagranti, quae fortasse consumpta est ut in melius excitaretur. saepe maiori fortunae locum fecit iniuria: multa ceciderunt ut altius surgerent» (ep. 91.11-13); also, Rosenmeyer, pp.113-159, esp. 149ff. 14 REFERENCES BOYLE, A. J. (1977, 1983). "Senecan Tragedy: Twelve propositions," In: Seneca Tragicus: Ramus Essays on Senecan Drama. Victoria. BUCKLEY, Emma (2012). "Senecan Tragedy" (forthcoming). DINTER, Martin (2012). "Introduction: The Neronian (Literary) ‘Renaissance’" (forthcoming). ELIOT, T. S. (1927, 1950). "Seneca in Elizabethan Translation," In: Selected essays. San Diego, pp. 51-90. ______(1927, 1950). "Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca," In: Selected essays. San Diego, pp. 107-120. GUASTELLA, Gianni (2001). L’ira e l’onore: Forme della vendetta nel teatro senecano e nella sua tradizione. Palermo. LONG, Anthony A. (1968). «The Stoic Concept of Evil,» In: Philosophical Quarterly 18, pp.329-43. ______. (1971). Problems in Stoicism. London. LONG, Anthony A. & SEDLEY, David N. (eds.) (1987). The Hellenistic Philosophers, 2 vols. Cambridge. MILLER, Frank Justus (1917, 1987). Seneca: Tragedies, vol. II: Agamemnon, Thyestes, Hercules Oetaeus, Phoenissae, Octavia. Harvard. PRATT, Norman T. (1983). Seneca's Drama. Chapel Hill. REGENBOGEN, Otto (1963). Schmerz und Tod in den Tragödien Senecas. Darmstadt. ROSENMEYER, Thomas G. (1989). Senecan Drama and Stoic Cosmology. Berkeley. SCHIESARO, A. (2003). "Seneca's Thyestes and the morality of tragic furor," In Elsner and Masters eds., pp.196-210. Stoicorum veterum fragmenta collegit Ioannes ab Arnim, 4 vols. (1964). Stuttgart. TARRANT, R. J. (1985). Seneca’s Thyestes, edited with Introduction and Commentary. [American Philological Association], Atlanta.

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