Four Tragedies and Octavia

by Seneca

  1. See Appendix II for some translated extracts, chosen mainly for comparison with passages in the plays.

  1. Cf. Appendix II, 8.

  2. The legend of Seneca’s acquaintance and correspondence with St Paul, and the possibility of his having been directly influenced by Christian teaching, are discussed in C. T. Crutwell’s A History of Roman Literature (Griffin, 1877).

  1. From Newton’s Preface to his edition of The Tenne Tragedies, 1581.

  2. From Neville’s Preface to his translation of Oedipus, 1563.

  1. Acts, XVIII. 12 ff.

  2. Cf. Appendix II, 3.

  1. Cf. Appendix II, 1.

  2. Cf. Appendix II, 2.

  1. Annals, XIII. 2. Grant’s translation (Penguin Classics), here and in other quotations.

  1. Tacitus, Annals, XIII. 3.

  2. ibid, XIV. 3–8.

  3. ibid, XIII. 42.

  1. Tacitus, Annals, XIV. 53–6.

  2. Cf. Appendix II, 9.

  1. F. L. Lucas, Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy, Cambridge, 1922.

  1. Suetonius, Nero, II. Graves’s translation (Penguin Classics).

  2. Ep. VII. I. Ad M. Marium, 55 B.C.

  1. Tristia, V. 7.

  1. W. Beare, The Roman Stage.

  1. And there will be almost none in my translations; there are few places, in fact, where the action is not implicit in the spoken words.

  2. J. C. Scaliger, Poetics, 1. 21, as quoted in English by Malone, Historical Account of the English Stage: ‘At present in France [c. 1556] plays are represented in such a manner that nothing is withdrawn from the view of the spectator…. The persons of the scene never depart during the representation; he who ceases to speak, is considered as if he were no longer on the stage. But in truth it is extremely ridiculous that the spectator should see the actor listening, and yet he himself should not hear what one of his fellow-actors says concerning him, though in his own presence and within his hearing; as if he were absent, while he is present.’ – Note that Scaliger finds the custom strange and absurd; but it may well have been a method used in the performance of Senecan tragedies, and it illustrates the lengths to which anti-realistic stage technique can go.

  3. NURSE: What ponderest thou in secret?

  1. Introduction to Newton’s Ten Tragedies of Seneca (see p. 27).

  2. The authorship of Octavia is, of course, extremely doubtful; see p. 38.

  1. Readers to whom the original is not easily accessible may like to have this example of the Latin:

  Stet quicunque volet potens

  aulae culmine lubrico;

  me dulcis saturet quies;

  obscuro positus loco

  leni perfruar otio;

  nullis nota quiritibus

  aetas per tacitum fluat.

  sic cum transierint mei

  nullo cum strepitu dies,

  plebeius moriar senex.

  illi mors gravis incubat

  qui, notus nimis omnibus,

  ignotus moritur sibi.

  Thyestes, 391–403

  1. See Appendix I.

  1. Seneca, His Tenne Tragedies translated into English, edited by Thomas Newton, 1581. Reprinted with an Introduction by T. S. Eliot, The Tudor Translations, Constable, 1927.

  E. M. Spearing, The Tudor Translations of Seneca’s Tragedies, Cambridge, 1912.

  Heywood’s Thyestes is reprinted in Five Elizabethan Tragedies, ed. A. K. Mcllwraith, Oxford, 1938.

  1. See Appendix I, 4.

  1. The instances noted, in the appropriate places, in footnotes to my translations, are derived from J. W. Cunliffe (The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy: Macmillan, 1893) who cites about twenty quotations.

  1. From this play Cunliffe quotes passages amounting to about 300 lines of translation or paraphrase from Seneca.

  1. ‘Seneca, let blood line by line and page by page, at length must needs die to our stage’ – Thomas Nashe, Preface to Greene’s Menaphon (1589).

  1. See Phaedra, 715. J. A. K. Thompson (Shakespeare and the Classics, 1952) finds in Macbeth the strongest evidences of direct classical influence and concludes that ‘Shakespeare, before writing Macbeth, must have been reading Seneca, being especially struck by the Hercules Furens.’

  1. By Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville; acted 1561 by the gentlemen of the Inner Temple at Whitehall before the Queen.

  2. Apology for Poetry, c. 1580. The whole passage is printed in Halliday’s A Shakespeare Companion, Penguin, 1964.

  1. Gascoigne’s translation of Dolce’s (Italian) version of Euripides’ Phoenissae; the Countess of Pembroke’s translation of Garnier’s Antonius; Kyd’s translation of Garnier’s Cornelia; the Meleager, Dido, and Ulysses of Dr Gager of Christchurch.

  1. For instance, The Rape of Lucrece, 764–77:

  O comfort-killing Night, image of hell!

  Dim register and notary of shame!

  Black stage for tragedies and murders fell!

  Vast sin-concealing chaos! nurse of blame!

  Blind muffled bawd! dark harbour for defame!

  Grim cave of death! whispering conspirator,

  With close-tongu’d treason and the ravisher!

  O hateful, vaporous and foggy Night!

  Since thou art guilty of my cureless crime,

  Muster thy mists to meet the eastern light,

  Make war against proportion’d course of time;

  Or if thou wilt permit the sun to climb

  His wonted height, yet ere he go to bed,

  Knit poisonous clouds about his golden head.

  1. Inst. Or., X. 1. 125.

  1. As if outside the supposed time of the play’s action, Fury ‘foresees’ the course of the feud which is now coming to a climax.

  1. The ‘Thyestean banquet’ has a precedent in the case of Procne (wife of the Thracian king Tereus) who killed and cooked his son Itys in revenge for the king’s outrage upon her sister Philomela.

  1. Phoroneus, son of Inachus, the first king of Argos; and so used for the name of the river which was also called Inachus.

  1. When Pelops raced his chariot against Oenomaus, King of Elis, for the prize of the king’s daughter Hippodamia, he bribed Myrtilus, the king’s charioteer, to tamper with the axle and cause an accident. Instead of rewarding Myrtilus, Pelops threw him into the sea (cf. 1. 660).

  2. This was Pelops, and this was Tantalus’s archetypal crime; but Pelops was restored to life by Jupiter, to continue the series of atrocities.

  1. Blinded, and tormented by harpies.

  1. Scelera non ulcisceris, nisi vincis. The Latin is quoted in Marston’s Antonio and Mellida (1599).

  1. See on 1. 56.

  2. Procne and Philomela. The atrocity occurred in Daulis, or Phocis, being under the rule of the Odrysian (Thracian) king Tereus.

  1. Atreus has not yet explained that he proposes to trap his brother by an offer of reconciliation; but the Minister obligingly makes that inference.

  1. That the Chorus, here and again at 546, appear to be ignorant of Atreus’s treacherous intentions, is a considerable strain on the dramatic convention. Some suppose that the Chorus is absent from the stage between the acts. But no realistic solution need be looked for; the Chorus may participate as much, or as little, in the action as is convenient; here they are assumed to be aware only of the ‘overt’ situation – the apparent reconciliation of the brothers.

  1. Qui notus nimis omnibus / ignotus moritur sibi. The Latin is quoted in Marston’s The Fawn (1605).

  1. Cf. Appendix II, 7.

  2. A passage in Seneca’s Letters, CXXII, inveighing against luxury, mentions consecutively ‘rooftop gardens’ and ‘turning night into day’. The speech of Thyestes is, of course, singularly anachronistic!

  1. Venit in nostras manus / tandem Thyestes; venit et totus quidem. The Latin is quoted, with variations, in Marston’s Antonio and Mellida (1599).

  1. Quem dies vidit veniens superbum, / hunc dies vidit fugiens iacentem. The Latin is quoted in Marlowe’s Edward II
.

  1. Castor and Pollux.

  1. See note on 1.140.

  1. The region of Phlegra in Macedonia was associated with the revolt of the Giants against Olympus.

  1. See note on The Trojan Women, 1034.

  2. Chiron the Centaur, in several myths a guardian and tutor of young demigods (cf. The Trojan Women, 830), is identified with Sagittarius.

  3. In the Latin ‘will break your urn, whoever you are’. There appears to be no myth explaining the origin of Aquarius.

  1. Or Ursa Minor.

  2. ‘Keeper of the Bear’, alias Boötes.

  1. Dimitto superos; summa votorum attigi. The Latin is quoted in Marston’s Antonio and Mellida (1599).

  1. Magis unde cadas quam quo refert. The Latin is quoted in Marston’s Antonio and Mellida.

  1. Meaning his own sons.

  2. Meaning his, Agamemnon and Menelaus, suspected of being begotten by Thyestes (cf. 1. 327).

  1. i.e. ‘mine’; but it is difficult to be sure whether this ambiguity was the author’s intention or only the result of the compression of the Latin, particularly in Thyestes’ exclamation gnatos parenti – sons to their father! An alternative interpretation is: THY. How were (my) children at fault? AT. In being yours. THY. (You could give) sons to their father (to eat)! AT. Yes, and I am happy to know that they were really yours. – Still the difficulty remains, why does Atreus now feel assured of his own sons’ legitimacy?

  1. Phaedra’s mother Pasiphae was a daugher of the Sun.

  1. Cf. Appendix II, 5.

  2. The prison, now empty, which contained the Minotaur.

  1. When he served as herdsman to King Admetus (cf. Euripides, Alcestis).

  2. The disguises of Jupiter: the swan which loved Leda – the bull which carried Europa into the sea (Neptune’s province).

  3. The Moon, descending to earth for love of Endymion.

  1. Hercules, sentenced to serve at women’s tasks for Omphale, queen of Lydia (cf. Ovid, Heroides, IX).

  1. If this is the meaning of Lucae boves, animals used by Pyrrhus in Lucania in his war against the Romans.

  1. Chinese.

  2. Moon.

  1. As Endymion; cf. above, 309.

  1. Compare this speech with similar thoughts in Thyestes, 446 ff. It may remind us also of Shakespeare’s 3 Henry VI, ii. 5.

  1. The legend of the ages of man, a commonplace of Latin poetry, appears again in Octavia, 397 ff.

  1. The Amazons were said to destroy all their male children.

  1. Curat leves loquuntur, ingentes stupent. The Latin is quoted in The Return from Parnassus (anon. c. 1600), in Sir Thomas More (anon. 1590–1600), and (with a variation) in Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607).

  1. Referring to Theseus as the abettor of Peirithous in the rape of Proserpine.

  1. Minos of Crete, who allowed him to court his daughter Ariadne.

  2. Ariadne.

  1. Magne regnator deum, / tam lentus audis scelera, tam lentus vides? The Latin is quoted, with a variation, in Titus Andronicus, IV. 1. See also Appendix 1, 28 and 30.

  1. Medea.

  1. This concept (repeated in Hercules Furens, 1323) has fathered a long line of imitations, of which Macbeth’s ‘Will all great Neptune’s ocean…’ is a sufficiently familiar example. Nor can it be credited to Seneca’s invention; cf. Sophocles, O.T., 1227.

  1. Ariadne, only when deserted by Theseus, unwillingly accepted Dionysus (Bacchus).

  1. As Hylas.

  2. As she did for love of Endymion (cf. above, 309 and 422); but a different explanation is suggested here!

  1. The horse, or centaur, ridden by Castor.

  1. The ward and pupil of Demeter, taught men the art of agriculture and was worshipped at Eleusis.

  1. The Amazons – but the indictment here is hardly justified or logical.

  1. Raros patitur fulminis ictus umida vallis. The Latin is quoted in Sir Thomas More (anon. 1590–1600).

  1. Aegeus, who died, deceived by the false signal of the black sails, on Theseus’ return from Crete.

  1. Per Styga, per amnes igneos aniens sequor. (Was the anagram intended?) Titus Andronicus, II. I quotes ‘per Styga per manes vehor’, but there is no MS authority for this variant.

  1. Sinis, the deviser of the pine-tree death, and Sciron, who hurled victims over the cliffs, were two marauders of the Megarid coast, both overthrown by Theseus in his younger days. They are alluded to above, 1169 and 1023.

  2. Ixion.

  1. The Amazons.

  2. Great-grandfather of Aeneas; one of the founders of Troy, with his brother Dos (hence Ilium) and father Tros.

  1. Hector.

  2. Cassandra.

  3. Ulysses.

  4. Diomede, his nocturnal exploit described in Iliad, X.

  5. The Greek pretended deserter who persuaded the Trojans to admit the Wooden Horse (Aeneid, 11).

  1. This fancy probably has reference to the legend that Hecuba in her pregnancy dreamed that she brought forth fiery torches.

  1. The place of the Judgement of Paris.

  2. Paris, coming to abduct Helen.

  1. First, when Hercules attacked Troy, in the reign of Laomedon; second, when Hercules’ arrows were used by Philoctetes.

  1. Cycnus, slain by Achilles on the island of Tenedos.

  1. When his mother, Thetis, hid him in the disguise of a girl at the court of Lycomedes, king of Scyros.

  1. Aurora, the Dawn, was the mother of Memnon.

  1. As told in Iliad, IX.

  2. When he came to ransom Hector’s body, and was kindly treated by Achilles (Iliad, XXIV).

  1. That of Achilles.

  2. Patroclus, fighting in Achilles’ armour (Iliad, XVI).

  1. Fata si miseros iuvant / habes salutem; fata si vitam negant, / habes sepulcrum. The Latin is quoted in The Spanish Tragedy, III. 13 (c. 1589).

  2. Ulysses, from the island adjacent to Ithaca.

  1. Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia.

  1. An equestrian exercise, attributed to Trojan tradition, was practised in Rome, and is recalled in Aeneid, V. 545 ff.

  1. The centaur who taught the boy Achilles.

  2. Distinguished from the Salamis in Cyprus, reputed to have been founded by Teucer.

  1. By Venus, as a reward to Paris.

  1. Phrixus and Helle, children of King Athamas of Thebes; persecuted by their stepmother Ino, they were rescued by the Golden Ram (cf. Thyestes, 225) which carried them, not quite successfully, over the Hellespont.

  1. The author has forgotten, or never envisaged, the stage setting; Hector’s tomb was presumed visible and accessible in the earlier part of the play.

  1. Two ogres destroyed by Hercules. Busiris, an Egyptian king, sacrificed immigrants to avert drought. Diomede (not the warrior of the Iliad), a Thracian, fed his horses on human flesh.

  1. Quisquamne regno gaudet? O fallax bonum. The Latin line is quoted, inaccurately, in The True Tragedy of Richard III (anon. 1594).

  1. As the son of Jupiter and Semele, daughter of King Cadmus, was claimed as a patron god of Thebes. His extensive travels (symbolic of the spread of vine-culture) form the subject of the next choral ode, following Act II.

  2. The celebrated tactic of the Parthian archers, shooting as they retreated.

  1. In some texts, Oedipus speaks this and following lines.

  1. i.e. of Delphi. Cirrha is a village on the coast below Delphi.

  1. North-west.

  2. South-west across the Isthmus and along the northern coast.

  3. South of Athens, joining the Cephisus to flow into the Bay of Phalerum.

  1. A variant name for Thebes: mythical king Ogyges? (Not the Homeric Ogygia, home of Calypso.)

  1. Sister of Semele, became a sea-goddess.

  2. Ino’s son Melicertes, drowned and deified as Palaemon.

  1. Thracian king, opposed Bacchus, and in madness killed his own son Dryas with an axe, in the belief that he was cutting down a vine.

  2. Like the
women of Thebes, the women of Argos, led by their king’s daughters, followed Bacchus, in defiance of Juno.