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 51 Stobaeus, eclog. 1.79 says of Chrysippus, «67"%µ," !"#8µ%4,1ὴ" 4ὴ" οὐ3;%" 4ῆ0 #ἱµ%'µ(")0, 4=>#, 4οῦ !%"4ὸς 6,*,1)4,1@"» (SVF 2.913); the !"#ῦµ% is both a causal nexus and field of forces, cf. Rosenmeyer, pp.93-112; also, the «!"#ῦµ% 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, A73,0, is the material manifestation of the !"#ῦµ% in the world. Such dichotomy conception, in the heart of which lies the Stoic notion that the 1.3µ*0 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 52 «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) 53 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 fortitudo5 . 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 drama6 . 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 54 «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) 56 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». 57 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.