Four Tragedies and Octavia

by Seneca

  FOUR TRAGEDIES AND OCTAVIA

  ADVISORY EDITOR: BETTY RADICE

  LUCIUS ANNAEUS SENECA (c. 4 B.C.–A.D. 65) was born in Cordoba, Spain, the second son of Annaeus Seneca the Elder. His father had a great respect for the traditional virtues of republican Roman life, and brought his three sons up accordingly. As a young adult, Seneca studied intensively the Stoic and Pythagorean philosophies and resided in Egypt for a period because of ill health. By A.D. 33 he was married to his first wife, had held the office of quaestor, and was achieving success as an advocate and teacher of rhetoric; he was also attracting attention by his incisive style of writing. He was forced to retire into private life at one point because of the suspicions of the emperor Caligula. He returned on the accession of Claudius, but was exiled in A.D. 41 to Corsica, accused of adultery with Claudius’ niece. He wrote several works during the eight years in Corsica, including De Ira. He was recalled to Rome in A.D. 48 to act as tutor to the future emperor Nero, and became his principal civil adviser when he took power. The first five years of the reign were peaceful and moderate, for which much credit must be given to Seneca. However the feud between the emperor and his mother, Agrippina, weakened his position and he asked to retire in A.D. 62. Nero and Seneca parted on seemingly amicable terms, but the various political conspiracies which followed implicated Seneca, though probably on very flimsy evidence, so that his death was ordered in A.D. 65. Seneca anticipated the emperor’s decree by committing suicide after several painful attempts; his second wife, Paulina, who tried to share her husband’s fate, survived him by a few years.

  E. F. WATLING was educated at Christ’s Hospital and University College, Oxford. His translations of Greek and Roman plays for the Penguin Classics include the seven plays of Sophocles, nine plays of Plautus, and this selection of the tragedies of Seneca. He died in 1990.

  SENECA

  Four Tragedies and Octavia

  THYESTES

  PHAEDRA

  THE TROJAN WOMEN

  OEDIPUS

  WITH

  OCTAVIA

  Translated with an Introduction by

  E. F. WATLING

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published 1966

  32

  Copyright © E. F Watling, 1966

  All rights reserved

  The terms for performance of these translations may be obtained from the Society of Authors, 84 Drayton Gardens, London sw10 9SD to whom all applications for permission should be made

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN-13: 978-0-140-44174-1

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Acknowledgement

  THYESTES

  PHAEDRA (or Hippolytus)

  THE TROJAN WOMEN

  OEDIPUS

  OCTAVIA

  APPENDIX I, Elizabethan translations and imitations

  APPENDIX II, Passages from Seneca’s prose

  INTRODUCTION

  FOR want of convincing evidence to the contrary, scholars have on the whole accepted the tradition that the dramatic works ascribed to SENECA were written by the same Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 4 B.C.–A.D. 65) who was the author of a large collection of philosophical essays and letters, and whose life, more particularly the later part of it, as a minister closely and at last fatally involved in the turbulent affairs of the reign of Nero, is known in some detail from the pages of Tacitus and Suetonius. Dissent from this identification is prompted not so much by any ascertainable facts as by the sense which all readers feel of an astonishing incongruity between the humanity and dignity of the prose works and the bombastic extravagance, the passionate yet artificial rhetoric, of the tragedies. And not less has been noticed, and frequently commented on, the discordance between the high moral principles professed by the philosopher and the cynical time-serving behaviour of the emperor’s adviser. A trace of the disgust which this paradox could arouse even in the seventeenth century, when Seneca’s reputation in England stood higher than at any other time, appears in a line spoken by a character in Marston’s play The Malcontent, who replies to the mention of Seneca’s name: ‘Out upon him! He writ of temperance and fortitude, yet lived like a voluptuous epicure, and died like an effeminate coward’ – not an entirely true statement but a typical plain man’s summary judgement of an enigmatical personality.

  The extant prose works1 include treatises on philosophical subjects, personal addresses of consolation or advice to friends and relatives, and works on natural science, and are concluded by a series of letters to one friend, Lucilius, written in a few last years of precarious and disillusioned retirement. It is these letters, with their flashes of humorous self-revelation, their tolerance of human weakness though not of human viciousness, their zealous inquiry into all departments of thought and action, that have most retained the affection of modern readers and secured some sympathy for the ageing philosopher defeated by worldly wickedness. In the earlier works, prolixity and repetition even of the most unexceptionable sentiments can cloy the appetite and dull the effect of the occasional passages of true eloquence and epigrammatic brilliance. The Roman critic Quintilian1 pronounced the verdict from which few readers would dissent: ‘There is in Seneca much with which one can agree, much even to admire; but his work requires selection; one could wish that he had done the selecting himself.’ Of the tragedies, with which we are here primarily concerned, the literary fate has been a peculiar one. Their reputation in the author’s own lifetime, or immediately afterwards, can only be guessed, in the absence of any evidence of their actually having been performed; but at least their preservation is a reasonable ground for assuming them to have commanded some respect. Among scholars of the last two centuries, few have done anything but condemn the Senecan tragedies as horrible examples of literary and dramatic incompetence, travesties of the noble Greek drama, the last wretched remnants of declining Roman taste. The following extract from Schlegel’s lectures on drama (published in English in 1815) is representative of the view which all but excluded Seneca the tragedian from the serious consideration of classical students:

  The state of constant outrage in which Rome was kept by a series of blood-thirsty tyrants led to similar outrages upon nature in rhetoric and poetry… [the Senecan tragedies] are beyond all description bombastic and frigid, utterly devoid of nature in character and action, full of the most revolting violations of propriety, and so barren of all theatrical effect, that I verily believe they were never meant to leave the schools of the rhetoricians for the stage. With the old Tragedies, those highest of the creations of Grecian poetical genius, these have nothing
in common but the name, the exterior form, and the mythological matter: and yet they set themselves up beside them in the evident intention of surpassing them, in which attempt they come off like a hollow hyperbole contrasted with a most heartfelt truth. Every common-place of tragedy is worried out to the last gasp; all is phrase, among which even the simplest is forced and stilted. An utter poverty of mind is tricked out with wit and acuteness…. Their persons are neither ideal nor real men, but misshapen giants of puppets; and the wire that sets them a-going is at one time an unnatural heroism, at another a passion alike unnatural, which no atrocity of guilt can appal.

  By this and similar pronouncements the modern student will easily have been brought to the conclusion that to read the Senecan tragedies in the original language is an unrewarding task, and to read them in translation, a fortiori, a waste of time! They are, of all the Latin ‘classics’ from Plautus to Pliny, probably the least familiar to the averagely well-informed student. Yet between the Seneca of the Roman Empire and the Seneca of today stands the Seneca of the Renaissance, a sage admired and venerated as an oracle of moral, even of Christian, edification; a master of literary style and a model of the purest principles of dramatic art. The well-known dictum of Francis Meres in his Palladis Tamia (1598) is a typical compliment to both the Roman and the English master-dramatist: ‘As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage.’ (The writer was not troubled by the fact that there was no other known Roman tragedian for comparison with Seneca, and only one rival to Plautus:) The prestige of Seneca, in the moral sphere at least, was owed primarily to his prose writings, and especially to those passages1 in which he expressed his ideas about religion, worship, and man’s attitude to the gods (or often ‘god’) in terms acceptable to Christian minds.2 But the tragedies, too, were valued for their moral lessons, and were put forward by their Elizabethan translators as works calculated to edify their readers or audiences:

  And whereas it is by some squeymish Areopagites surmyzed, that the readinge of these Tragedies, being enterlarded with many Phrases and sentences literally tending (at first sight) sometime to the prayse of Ambition, sometime to the mayntenaunce of cruelty, now and then to the ratification of tyranny, cannot be digested without great daunger of infection; to omit all other reasons, if it might please them with no forestalled judgment, to mark and consider the circumstaunces, why, where, and by what manner of persons such sentences are pronounced, they cannot in any equity otherwise choose but find good cause ynough to leade them to a more favourable and milde resolution. For it may not at any hand be thought and deemed the direct meaning of Seneca himselfe, whose whole wrytinges (penned with a peerless sublimity and loftiness of style) are so farre from countenancing vice, that I doubt whether there bee any amonge all the Catalogue of Heathen wryters, that with more gravity of Philosophicall sentences, more waightyness of sappy words, or greater authority of sound matter beateth down sinne, loose lyfe, dissolute dealinge, and unbrydled sensuality: or that more sensibly, pithily, and bytingly layeth downe the guedon of filthy lust, cloaked dissimulation, and odious treachery: which is the dryft, whereunto he leveleth the whole yssue of ech one of his Tragedies.1

  … the most lamentable Tragedy of that most Infortunate Prince Oedipus, for thy profit rudely translated. Wonder not at the grossenesse of the Style… mark thou rather what is ment by the whole course of the History: and frame thy lyfe free from such mischiefes, wherewith the world at this present is universally overwhelmed, the wrathfull vengeaunce of God provoked, the Body plagued, the mynde and Conscience in midst of deepe devouring daungers most terribly assaulted, in such sorte that I abhorre to write: and even at the thought thereof I tremble and quake for very inward griefe and feare of minde: assuredly perswading myselfe that the right high and immortall God will never leave such horrible and detestable crimes unpunished…. For the which cause, so much the rather have I suffered this my base translated Tragoedy to be published…. Mine only entent was to exhorte men to embrace Vertue and shun Vyce, according to that of the right famous and excellent Poet Virgil: discite justiciam moniti, et non temnere divos.2

  The enthronement of Seneca in one particular century of European, and especially of English, culture is a phenomenon as remarkable as the chance which brought the humane philosopher himself to a position of dangerous eminence at the right hand of Rome’s most notorious tyrant.

  *

  Annaeus Seneca the elder was a native of Corduba in Spain, born about 54 B.C. His long life of some ninety years was devoted to the study and profession of rhetoric, and for this purpose he must have spent some time in residence at Rome, whence he took back to his native town a profound knowledge of his subject and a respect for the traditional virtues of republican Roman family life. Antiqua et severa are the words used by his son Lucius Annaeus, our tragedian, of the home into which he was born, about 4 B.C.; and he would no doubt have applied the same epithets to his father, who would be in his sixties by the time the boy was old enough to take notice of personal characteristics. The elder Seneca’s extant works, known as Controversiae and Suasoriae, were written for the instruction of his sons and consist of models and exercises in rhetoric – the art which was firmly established in ancient Rome as the indispensable basis of humane education and respectable advancement in public life: the exact equivalent of a classical education in imperial England. From such an upbringing the three sons of Seneca (of whom Lucius Annaeus was the second) proceeded to various degrees of public eminence, and to their deaths all in the same year of terror A.D. 65. The eldest, Annaeus Novatus, had become proconsul of Achaia; he had previously been adopted by, and taken the name of, Junius Gallio, and under this name he is known to history as having preserved an aloof indifference to a petty religious squabble in Athens.1 The youngest son Annaeus Mela prospered mainly in financial affairs, and was the father of the poet Lucan. Both these brothers were denounced as traitors, and committed suicide, in the purge which followed the anti-Neronian conspiracy of Piso and which ended the life of L. Annaeus Seneca.

  The adult education of the young Seneca began with intensive study of the Stoic and Pythagorean philosophies;2 an early enthusiasm for the vegetarian system of Pythagoras lasted for a while, until his father pointed out the dangers of becoming known as a ‘crank’, especially when such eccentricities were popularly associated with religious heresies of various kinds. His early years also included a period of ill-health (probably tuberculosis) and of residence in Egypt, where his aunt was the wife of the Prefect. By A.D. 33 he was married to his first wife (whose name is not known), had held the office of quaestor, and was achieving success in his profession of advocate and teacher of rhetoric and attracting attention by his incisive style of writing. He attracted also the jealous suspicions of the emperor Caligula, whose threats he was forced to evade by temporary retirement into private life. On the accession of Claudius he was able to return to his career, but a second setback occurred when in A.D. 41 he was accused, at the instigation of the emperor’s diabolical wife Messalina, of adultery with Julia the daughter of Germanicus, and was exiled to Corsica, where he spent eight years. He was by now the father of a son and daughter; a second son died on the eve of his exile, and his wife was dead before his return.

  Out of the lonely meditations of these eight years came two of the three works known as ‘Consolations’. One had already been written ‘To Marcia’, a bereaved mother,1 a second was addressed to Polybius, the powerful freedman of Claudius, and combined ‘consolation’ on the death of a brother with advice on public administration and servile flattery of the emperor and his entourage. The third, to his mother Helvia, on the subject of his own exile, is one of his most sincere and likeable compositions.2 He was probably also engaged at this time on the treatise De Ira (published about A.D. 49), a brilliant and eloquent plea for the stoical control of the baser emotions, and perhaps on some of his work on natural phen
omena, which was to appear near the end of his life. It is not unlikely that his experiments in the composition of tragedy began in this period of unlimited leisure.

  In A.D. 48 Messalina was executed for her illegal and treasonable marriage to Gaius Silius, and the emperor married Agrippina. The abilities of Seneca had not been forgotten at Rome during his exile; by Agrippina’s influence he was now recalled to be tutor to her twelve-year-old son Lucius Domitius, the future emperor Nero. He was also appointed to the office of praetor. By the time Nero was eighteen years old, his advancement to the position of heir-apparent had been secured by his adoption into the Claudian family and his marriage to Octavia, daughter of Claudius; it only remained for Agrippina to remove her husband, which she did, by poison, in A.D. 54. From that date Seneca became the emperor’s principal civil adviser, in association with Burrus who commanded the praetorian guard. The first five years of the new reign surprised everyone, and became proverbial among historians as a period of wise and moderate government; for which credit must certainly be given to Seneca’s ability to combine firmness and high principle with tactful indulgence in his direction of the young emperor’s tastes and ambitions – an influence extending, one would imagine, more widely than is grudgingly allowed by Tacitus:1 ‘Burrus’s influence lay in soldierly efficiency and seriousness of character, Seneca’s in amiable high principles and his tuition of Nero in public speaking.’ It is clear, however, that it was from Seneca that Nero learnt, not only how to speak, but what to say: ‘Nero pledged himself to clemency in numerous speeches; Seneca put them into his mouth, to display his own talent or demonstrate his high-minded guidance.’ It is uncertain whether among Seneca’s literary compositions should be included the ribald satire The Pumpkinification of the Late Claudius, a farcical fantasy on the reception of the departed emperor into everlasting life. But it is recorded that he wrote for Nero a tongue-in-cheek panegyric on Claudius, the recitation of which reduced the audience to helpless laughter.1 More to his credit are the works De Vita Beata and De Beneficiis, and, despite its tendency to offer flattery in the guise of instruction, the De dementia addressed to his royal pupil.