Chapter Three
Causes, Necessity, Gods

In the search for the Stoic identity of Senecan drama, I have looked at the function of Stoic topoi; at the use of paradigms and precepts to support or, often, undermine the authority of the topoi; at the reflection of the Stoic life-and-death struggle and its histrionic exuberance in choral disquisitions and in climactic scenes of heroism and villainy; and at other, less obvious links between the ancient dramatic tradition and Stoic insights or formulations. There is much here that is impressive or suggestive, and that gives some inkling of why and in what sense Roman imperial tragedy is different from its Greek ancestors. Certainly these are some of the elements that the Renaissance Senecans and the authors of German baroque Trauerspiel looked to in the fashioning of their own dramatic poems. Yet our findings leave something to be desired.

All serious drama, including Greek tragedy, exhibits many of the features emphasized, albeit in a less consistent and concentrated manner. Aeschylus is sententious. The Heracles of Sophocles' Trachinians perches perilously on the line dividing heroism from villainy. The life-and-death struggle is of the very substance of Sophoclean drama, though its artistic execution lacks Seneca's unusual talent for generating hysteria and near-madness. Those who say that Senecan drama cannot rightfully be termed Stoic tend also to minimize the systematic difference between Greek tragedy and its Roman successor. I would agree that it is difficult to pinpoint precisely where the differences lie between the ethical assumptions of, say, Euripides' Hercules Furens and those of Seneca's play of the same name. A close study of the literary structures and of the contingent formal characteristics would demonstrate the ideological and temperamental divergences that do indeed exist. A number of excellent analyses along these lines are available, not only for the Hercules plays but also for others that invite comparison.^[1]

[1] See, e.g., the pertinent chapters in Lefèvre 1972, and particularly the work of Friedrich.

As I now continue to search for the reasons that set Senecan drama apart from other theatrical traditions, and as I begin to focus more narrowly than before on a possible Stoic legacy, I turn to a topic that will, I suggest, bring us closer to our quarry, though the route will be slow and circuitous. I start with a quote from a recent study of genre theory. "To interpret a work as dramatic is to interpret the relation [sc. between mind and world in the work] in terms of causality," observes William E. Rogers.^[2] It is only because it is felt that one thing should follow unmistakably and disturbingly from another that the sequence of events, or the sequence of sufferings, is thought to be tragic. Aristotle made much of cause and effect and their psychological vagaries in drama.^[3] The plot he regards as the best owes its supremacy to the cogent force of its causal structure, to the compelling ligatures that, under the aegis of the probable and the necessary, make of every turn in the action a consequence or a result. Tragedy may well claim to be the principal literary and scenic demonstration of the causal compulsion, of the fiction that everything has a cause in conformity with a larger dispensation, even if that dispensation is intuited rather than clearly discerned. The commitment to causality remains paramount, by implication, even in those examples of modern dramaturgy in which special effects are achieved by the programmatic subversion or attrition of the principle.

Historians of science have argued that the earlier Greeks were beginning to gain an insight into the causal nexus predicated on a notion of natural law, but that the Stoics were the first to make a concerted and penetrating analysis of the cause-and-effect relation and its varieties; that they were the first to state the connection between causal law and induction, and to take the revolutionary step of distinguishing between an understanding of causes and an understanding of functions.^[4] The details of these advances are part of the history of logic and of the history of science, especially mechanics. In one of his Epistles (65; cf.

[2] Rogers 1983, p. 49.

[3] See Else 1957 on Poetics 1452a18ff.

[4] The principal evidence for the Stoic theory of causes is translated and discussed in Long and Sedley 1987, pp. 333ff. For a clear exposition, see further von Fritz 1972, p. 105, and Sambursky 1959, pp. 49ff. Also Christensen 1962, pp. 52ff. The fullest ancient formulation of the Stoic law of causation is found in Alexander of Aphrodisias's De fato, chap. 22; cf. Sorabji 1980, p. 64. For Chrysippus on causes, see SVF 2.336ff. and 945ff. Forschner 1981, p. 85, reminds us that our sources on this head are often defective or contradictory. But there is enough of a scholarly consensus to satisfy the needs of our discussion.

also 19.6), Seneca himself offers a discussion of the Stoic view of causes, dwelling on the delight to be derived from a study of their complexities, of their imperfect anticipation in the thought of Plato and Aristotle, and, in the end, of their coincidence under the one axiom of causality. He maintains that the active cause has a privileged status, with all other "causes" being necessary conditions rather than proper causes.^[5] His essay, not one of his better or more reliable commentaries on the thinking of his predecessors, terminates in praise of God, who, for him, evidently embodies the unitariness of the causal principle.

Underlying all thinking about this subject in Stoic theory was the hypothesis of the pneuma, the corporeal continuum first postulated by Aristotle and the physicians, but worked up into a universal explanatory canon by the Stoics (see chapter 4 below). The pneuma, the all-pervading stuff of divine coherence, came to be the material coefficient of the causal chain. Continuity or, with some allowance for our experience of discrete events, contiguity was recognized as the essence of causation; causes are bodies in motion, making contact and affecting other bodies. Of the Aristotelian causes, the efficient comes to absorb the rest.^[6] The material cause turns arche, originating principle, and virtually disappears from explanations of empirical experience. But that does not mean that the Stoics subscribed to the axioms of traditional mechanics. Their concept of body does not primarily turn upon dimensions or solidity. Rather, it is talked about in terms of acting and being acted upon; it is action that authenticates body.^[7] In Seneca's own words, quod facit, corpus est (Ep. 106.4). Note that God, the corporeal source of all action, has no fixed form.

But this is to anticipate. In the earlier Stoic examinations of cause, prior to Posidonius, who reopened the question and enriched the analysis, the aim is above all to elucidate human action and accountability, and less to explain natural phenomena. But this is a matter of emphasis and illustration rather than a categorical distinction. It goes against the grain of Stoic science to restrict causes, and action and being acted upon, to one realm or another. Issues of human responsibility called for criteria little different from those pertinent to relations within the physical world. Seneca's own imaginative procedure in the

[5] Frede 1980, pp. 227–28. Frede's contribution is superior to all previous discussions of the topic.

[6] Weil 1964, p. 564, of whose formulations I make liberal use.

[7] Cf. Long and Sedley 1987, pp. 272–74.

Naturales quaestiones shows everywhere how the natural cosmos is made to serve as a trope for movements within the psychological spectrum, and vice versa, and that the two form a sustained band of action and reaction.

Chrysippus's inquiry into the relation between fate and (free) will benefited particularly from the distinction, prominent in the Stoic sources, between an antecedent cause, whose effect persists after the cause has ceased its work, and an operating cause, which subsists along with its effects.^[8] Precisely what is involved in this distinction, and how it is made to bear on the vital issues of answerability and attribution, is not entirely clear. But it appears as if the former, the antecedent cause, might be illustrated by the pulling of the trigger that propels a bullet, while the latter, the operating cause, can be seen in the force or velocity that speeds the bullet on its course. In the terms accepted by Stoic thinkers, such a force, and in fact both factors, would have to be regarded as corporeal.

In the contexts of volition and of the play of emotions, the operating causes are carried by the horme, the drive or appetite, and it is they that form the nerve structure of tragedy. The Stoics do not recognize a causeless change; the continuum hypothesis guarantees that everything that happens, and everything that is done and thought and enunciated, is both effect and cause of another effect. In our daily lives the causes that make us act or refuse to act are not always apparent, and are often desperately hidden. It is the business of the dramatist, as it is that of the social philosopher, to employ the probe of his idiom, not so much to lay them bare, as to construct a likely model of their interaction. Our appreciation of the meaning of what characters say or do in a play is shaped by our sense of what makes them speak or act, and how the cause-and-effect filiation is distributed over the arc (or, depending upon the type of play, the vortex) of the aggregate action. (We are here talking about the sequentiality of an experience, or of a text, and not about the coherence of a character and its traits.) The pinpointing of a cause, either immediate or remote, often contributes to the shattering impact of the tragic exposition, especially where, as Aristotle recommends, the cause uncovered is found to be different from the one that had been tracked or suspected.

[8] Sambursky 1959, pp. 60ff., cites the ancient texts.

studious contemplation sucks the juice
From wizards' cheeks, who, making curious search
For nature's secrets, the first innating cause
Laughs them to scorn as man doth busy apes
When they will zany men.
(Antonio's Revenge 4.1.45–49)

That kind of surprise will be less important in Senecan drama than it is in some of the intrigue plays of Sophocles or Euripides. But, as we shall see, the dependence upon a scheme of constraining causality is, if anything, even stronger.

With Aristotle one has the impression that logic and psychology, questions of necessity and probability, are not forced into neat separation, and that some of his pronouncements in the Poetics owe their power and their suggestiveness to the unacknowledged friction between the two realms of consistency. In Stoic thought, the filiation of various kinds of causes becomes ever more complex. The assumption of corporeality, that all causes are bodies in motion, is taken so seriously that it is largely a lost hope to want to isolate the rules of logic and the patterns of psychology from the material behavior of physical masses. Causality, in the words of Johnny Christensen, turns "unitary, universal, and absolute, the basis of a methodological monism."^[9] The violent objection to Epicurus's atomic swerve is an index, among others, of the steadfastness with which the Stoics rejected the possibility of chance events.

Neither Plato's deflection of natural causes via the medium of the errant cause (Timaeus 48a) nor Aristotle's virtual subsumption of other causes under the umbrella of the teleological lent themselves particularly well to the moral and biographical paradoxes of serious drama. The Stoic formulations are more congenial. Everything that is enacted has a cause; the cause may not be apprehended by us;^[10] each cause is also, though we are unlikely to know precisely in what way, a result of a prior causation. This synthesis of dogmatic belief with admission of ignorance, without the derogatory implication of ignorance stipulated in Plato's metaphysics, is more or less what the needs of tragedy require. As one student of the problem puts it in his remarks on the inclusion of the possible in Stoic determinism: "Instead of

[9] Christensen 1961, p. 21.

[10] SVF 2.937. Cf. Edelstein 1966, p. 28.

seeing causation as a one-dimensional chain of actual occurrences they [sc. the Stoics] saw it as a many-dimensional network of potential occurrences . . . out of which, and in accordance with the rules of disjunction, only one course will be actualized."^[11] Here we find both the suspense of the moment prior to the actualization of the effect, insistence upon the need for a causal factor, and an understanding of the complexity of the system within which the operating cause is made to work, all of which call to mind the preoccupations and tensions of great drama. Chrysippus appears to have talked of a "swarm of causes," smenos aition (SVF 2.945). There is, in fact, a remarkable and ironic similarity between this kind of thinking and that of Nietzsche, who, in his Gay Science and elsewhere, protested against the very concept of causality.^[12] To cite a recent authority: "Nietzsche believes that every event in the world is inextricably connected with every other. . . . He thinks that the history of the whole world, or, in more modest terms, the history of each person, is totally involved in every moment."^[13] Starting from the same premise of a pervasive network of interrelation, Nietzsche and the Stoics arrived at opposite conclusions. Nietzsche abandoned the notion of cause as inadequate to the purposes of a life vigorously lived, while the Stoics ratified the pervasiveness as a scientific dogma.

The elevation of the causal principle to absolute rule is known as determinism. The enemies of the Stoics objected to the Stoic hypostases of Fate (heimarmene ) and Necessity (ananke ), and alleged them to signal an impossibly rigid conception of the workings of the world and of man's position in it.^[14] In the Stoic texts, we find subtle distinctions between Fate (what will be), Necessity (what must be),^[15] Providence (what God foresees and assigns), and Fortune (what happens, seemingly at random). For Chrysippus, these are merely different ways

[11] Sambursky 1959, p. 77.

[12] Friedrich Nietzsche 1966, pp. 119f.: "Ursache und Wirkung: eine solche Zweiheit gibt es wahrscheinlich nie—in Wahrheit steht ein Kontinuum vor uns, von dem wir ein paar Stücke isolieren."

[13] Nehamas 1985, p. 149.

[14] The most important ancient sources are, besides the Senecan texts: Cicero De fato 39 and De natura deorum 2.73ff.; Manilius 4.1–121; Plutarch De fato ; Alexander of Aphrodisias De fato . Among the recent modern discussions, I would single out Rist 1969, chap. 7, Sorabji 1980a (esp. pp. 70–88) and 1980b, Sharples 1981, Long 1971, chap. 8, and Long and Sedley 1985, pp. 340ff. For theories of determinism in the first and second centuries A.D. , see Theiler 1946.

[15] Sorabji proposes to distinguish further between Necessity, as it is generally understood, and exceptionless regularity.

of talking about one and the same fundamental state of affairs, and he may have been more latitudinarian than his critics allowed. Alternatively, he may not have been able to solve the difficulties posed by a strict determinism.^[16] Once again the difference between cosmology and psychology, between whether the causal system is viewed as covering all there is or whether the focus is on a human life and its coordinates, remains secondary.

By and large Seneca, in his prose writings, agrees, though on occasion he is intrigued by other ways of ordering the evidence, such as subordinating one of the hypostases to another, or breaking free of the constraints of the system and claiming that the soul is stronger than Fate (Ep. 98.2.). Cleanthes, for one, could not admit that evil as well as good was brought about by divine cause, and drew a line between events providential and fated on the one hand and events fated but not sanctioned by Providence on the other (SVF 2.933). Neo-Stoicism is given to similar scruples. Lipsius objects to the rule of immutable law—his revealing name for it is "Violent Destiny"—which he contrasts unfavorably with God's Providence and the destiny innate in the created world.^[17]

"Violent Destiny," perhaps inspired by Seneca's discussion of the immutability of physical laws (NQ 2.36), is a fitting label for the spirit of causal compulsion alive in Seneca's dramatic world.

quae nexa suis currunt causis.
(Oed 990)

Opponents of the idea that Seneca writes Stoic drama have argued that his tragedy eschews the benign Providence linked with heimarmene in the more mercurial passages of Stoic treatises, and that it repudiates the self-determination of man and the perfection of the gods or God, both of them axioms prominent in the Stoic texts, which we know from ancient attacks upon them. And Kurt von Fritz,^[18] as we have seen, though a supporter of the view that Senecan drama is Stoic, confesses his embarrassment by declining to call it tragedy. In his opinion, heimarmene and tragedy are irreconcilable.

The beauty of tragedy is precisely that the precise affiliation be-

[16] Von Fritz 1972, p. 107.

[17] Lipsius 1939, bk. 1, chap. 18 (p. 39). For the influence of Stoic determinism, from Petrarch to Zwingli's De providentia, see esp. Dilthey 1960, pp. 154–61.

[18] Von Fritz 1962, chap. 1.

tween the various partial perceptions of the principle of causality is not clear.

There is a deep nick in Time's restless wheel
For each man's good, when which nick comes, it strikes;
As rhetoric yet works not persuasion,
But only is a mean to make it work,
So no man riseth by his real merit,
But when it cries "clink" in his raiser's spirit.
(Bussy D'Ambois 1.1.134–39)

Chapman's implicit analogy between the forces that determine a man's life and the powers that shape a work of literature is instructive. Chapman follows this up with a deeply pessimistic sequel:

Many will say, that cannot rise at all,
Man's first hour's rise is first step to his fall.
I'll venture that; men that fall low must die,
As well as men cast headlong from the sky.
(ibid., 140–44)

There are here memories of the kind of thinking incorporated in The Mirror for Magistrates, according to which every casus has its causa, everything that befalls a man is likely to lead straight to his fall.

But seeing causes are the chiefest thinges
That should be noted of the story wryters,
That men may learne what endes al causes bringe . . .^[19]

The conviction that Necessity is operative also in the various clicks of Fortune may be found scattered through Seneca's writings, both prose and dramatic. Note the exchange between Clytaemestra and the nurse

Clyt.:  ubi animus errat, optimum est casum sequi.
Nurse:  Caeca est temeritas quae petit casum ducem.

Where the soul is adrift, it is best to follow fortune.
Blind rashness chooses Fortune as its leader.
(Aga 144–45)

Casus is, perhaps, a term from dice. In this case, with Clytaemestra deciding to let the chips fall where they may, casus is the chance direc-

[19] Campbell 1936, p. 12; the speaker is the ghost of Lord John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, in The Mirror for Magistrates (1559) fols. 64 v. and 65 r., lines 29–31 of Tragedy 15.

tion her feelings and actions will take, thus an inner dynamic rather than external cause. The nurse, however, interprets casus as inescapable Fortune.

Omnes cum fortuna copulati sumus ; all of us are fastened to Fortune (TA 10.3), is neither a desperate cry nor a shout of triumph but a gentle, open-minded admission that we are all in different ways wards of the same custodia, stewardship. Fortune can be many things, all the way from seemingly random chance to the strict pattern of metastasis into the opposite: in se ipsa fortuna ruit (BV 4.1), to the consolatory (and, one presumes, ultimately delusory) notion that the soul is stronger than any kind of fortune (Ep. 98.2). Seneca's thinking about Fortune and Fate and their relationship is unusually rich and varied, and much has been written about it.^[20] A fascinating index of Seneca's interest in the issue is his verse translation of four lines by Cleanthes (SVF 1.527) in Ep. 107.10, terminating in the notorious conclusion

Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt,^[21]

Fate gently guides you, if you consent; if not,
It drags you.

a formulation that recalls many similar conceits in the dramas. Man's proper relation to whatever Fortune has to give is illustrated by means of an image taken from Attalus (Ep. 72.8): like dogs, gulping down the scraps thrown them by their masters and immediately clamoring for the next scrap, many of us are not satisfied with the gifts of Fortune; only the wise man is content, or, as Seneca puts it, plenus: he accepts the gifts joyously, and is at rest with himself. Here we see that Fortune is easily accommodated within the ambit of the Stoic wise man. As Chrysippus said (SVF 2.973), what men call chance is really an aitia adelos, an illegible cause. Atreus's

quis influentis dona fortunae abnuit?

Who'd spurn the gifts of an accommodating Fortune?
(Thy 536)

is the villain mirror image of the saint's contentment.

The refusal of the drama to align itself unequivocally with a primer of tenets deflates any attempt to define the Stoicism of the tragedy in

[20] Pfligersdorffer 1961; Patch 1922.

[21] See the brilliant discussion by Dahlmann 1977, important also for an understanding of Seneca's style. See further, Setaioli 1979.

dogmatic terms. Seneca himself and many of his contemporaries were quite aware of the nice, if varying, differentiae, argued by a succession of Stoic writers, between Fate and Fortune, between Destiny and Chance, between the will of the gods and the constraints of nature. But the heavy pull of paradox and the manipulation of human aggression for a poetry of fullness, rather than clarification, blunt the distinctions, a process our own less sensitive ears help to complete. Let us return to Seneca's observation that "we are all fastened to Fortune" (TA 10.3). The whole passage is worth quoting because of its imagery of the puppet action that goes back to Plato's Laws (645a), but more particularly because of the almost playful imbalance of its details and the suggestion that the total picture counts for more than a specific affirmation.

omnes cum fortuna copulati sumus: aliorum aurea catena est, laxa, aliorum arta et sordida, sed quid refert? eadem custodia universos circumdedit alligatique sunt etiam qui alligaverunt, nisi forte tu leviorem in sinistra catenam putas. . . . quibusdam aliena supra caput imperia sunt, quibusdam sua . . .; omnis vita servitium est.

We are all fastened to fortune. In the case of some the chain is of gold and extended, with others it is short and mean. But what does it matter? The same guardianship has enveloped all; those who have strung the cable are themselves attached, unless perhaps you think that the chain on the left is lighter. . . . Some have their heads bowed down by the power of others, some by their own. . . . All life is dependence.

In this text Fortune is either a subspecies of Fate or identical with it. Chance is a general mischance. Similarly in the plays Fortune is not only the force that directs men and their affairs, but a collective term. for those affairs (Aga 88–89).^[22] The chorus of Phaedra (959ff.) appears to differentiate radically between nature and the supreme deity, controlling the regularities of the larger world from their distant seat; and blind Fortune, championing the cause of the worse among men. But the sequel of the action, with its dovetailing of the natural and the monstrous, and its intrusion of the Olympian into the terrestrial, shows up the untenability of the distinction. In fact that distinction is more absolute than comparable demarcations in the treatises and letters. It is a conventional index of the chorus's shortsightedness rather than a reliable commentary on the action.

Still, as might be expected, in the plays the qualifications of the radi-

[22] For the relation between fortune and guilt in Agamemnon, see the perceptive comments of Lefèvre (1966, 1973). My own views on guilt will be taken up below.

cal concept of Fate are richer than they are in the treatises. A moment such as the one in Hercules Furens where the chorus calls on Hercules to break the bonds of destiny—fatum rumpe manu (566)—to go against the law of nature, is not within the scope of the theoretical writings. Hercules' "rupture of fate,"—that is, his crossing of the boundary between life and death and back—in the end does not do the chorus's bidding, for it embroils him even more tightly in the meshes of another, more constricting fate. This is the kind of modulation some would call irony, which it is the special privilege of tragedy to arrange. A slightly different version of the same dislocation is found at Troades 360ff., the speech in which Calchas announces that the fata demand blood, even more blood than has been spilt by the heroes. This is Seneca's way of motivating the murders that are mythologically given and dramatically necessary. Thus the text and its requirements, the world of discourse, calls for its own species of determinism. Naturales quaestiones 2.34–38 raises the question: if fatum is immutable, what is the point of praying and supplication? and answers it by the seemingly specious solution that the results of prayer are also part of fatum (cf. also Pol. 4.1). The answer acquires a much stronger appropriateness in a dramatic setting whose outcome is largely fixed in the tradition.

Hercules, in Hercules Furens, is hardly a Stoic saint, but the world in which he is a player, and the challenges to which he responds, are most easily understood against a background of Stoic discussions of Necessity and Fate. The same is true of the many references to Fortune in the plays. If the fourth chorus of Phaedra (1123–53) pictures Fortune striking those most highly placed and sparing the lowly,

Raros patitur fulminis ictus
umida vallis

The verdant valley rarely attracts
The thunder's stroke
(1132–33)

the topos is not only a hoary property of the tragic idiom. It is also a ready reflection of the common Stoic idea that our perceptions are not capable of isolating each element in the swarm of causes, and that random chance is an unavoidable corollary of the inadequacy of knowing. Even the concept of an incremental Fortune, of a random shower of boons and benefits (Thy 536), should be appreciated as a signal of human blindness and not as an authorial rejection of Stoic determinism.

Fortuna vires ipsa consumpsit suas.
Fortune herself has swallowed up her powers.
(Aga 698)

Cassandra's resignation (Aga 698) converts the disabling force of fortune into a process destructive of itself. Often Fortune, as random chance, turns out to be a projection of the villainous hero insisting on his fiendishness and deluding himself into regarding it as a token of human freedom.^[23] Stoic pessimism, combining with its creed of causality a willing admission that we cannot hope to discern the various strands of the causal tissue and that we are reduced to manufacturing our own crude triangulations, was well suited to merge with Pauline Christianity as the Renaissance rediscovered it.^[24]

But historians of philosophy have also made clear, in a series of subtle and compassionate reconstructions of the fragmentary evidence, that "Stoic determinism does not exclude a coherent theory of voluntary human action," and further, "that the Stoic concept of moral responsibility . . . represents an advance on Aristotle in raising sharply the problems of heredity and environment."^[25] The latter is important. In Stoic thinking, ethics, theology, cosmology, biology, and psychology are closely intertwined because of the basic premise that the pneuma, the stuff of life of which all vital entities are manifestations, is corporeal. Hence an examination of moral action cannot be conducted without a full accounting of the various biological and environmental factors that enter into it. I shall return to that subject. For present purposes, however, the first part of the statement quoted above is crucial. It is only by hindsight, via the structured retrospective glance enjoyed by audiences in the theater, but rarely by anyone else, that a complex of actions and events and responsibilities can appear to be perfectly determined. Heimarmene as a working assumption makes due allowance for the contributions of the human will, which must be counted as particles in the causal swarm:

[23] Pfligersdorffer 1961.

[24] Schings 1966 and Stalder 1976 have much to say about the influence of Stoicism, and especially of the vagaries of Fortune, in German baroque drama.

[25] Long 1971, pp. 173f. See also Forschner 1981, p. 111, and van Straaten 1977. Sorabji (1980b, p. 282) distinguishes between hard and soft determinism, a distinction by which he means to express his doubts about the success of Chrysippus's project, thus putting himself in league with the ancient critics of the Stoics, especially Alexander of Aphrodisias, who, according to Long, did not give the Stoics a fair shake. See now also Frede 1982.

if the thing
Accomplished would seem to accomplish only its own
Inevitability, and the thing that exists
Would seem to fulfill only its own being,
And to be but the Q.E.D. of a fatal sorites,
Yet the accomplished was once the unaccomplished,
And the existing was once the non-existing,
And that transition was the agony of will
And anguish of option . . .
(Robert Penn Warren,
Brother to Dragons, p. 111)

The most celebrated Stoic text advocating modifications of strict external determinism and preparing the way for the recognition of an inner cause, and of human volition, is, characteristically, not about a human act but about a natural motion. If we want to savor the full implications of the passage, we must go to the parallels Seneca draws in the Naturales quaestiones between physical events (usually meteorological phenomena) and human experiences (usually passions). As reported by Cicero and Aulus Gellius (SVF 2.974 and 1000), Chrysippus said that if a cylinder rolls down an incline after it is pushed, the cause of this is not only the push but also the shape and the rollability of the cylinder. Thus antecedent and operating causes are jointly credited. What follows in Gellius's Latin text may be a somewhat garbled account of what Chrysippus actually wrote:

sic ordo et ratio et necessitas fati, genera ipsa et principia causarum, movet, impetus vero consiliorum mentiumque nostrarum actionesque ipsas voluntas cuiusque propria et animorum ingenia moderantur.

Thus order and reason and the necessity of fate, the very essences and principles of causation, does [sic! ]^[26] the moving, but the force of our intentions and minds and our very actions are governed by each person's will and by his native talent.

It is curious that the human will, participating in the complex of causes, but also, at least rhetorically, standing aside from it, should be illustrated by the image of the cylinder, with its native capacity for rotary motion. The Stoic axiom of universal corporeality presses for the use of examples from the world of physical objects. In any case, with this concession to the power of causes at home in the heart of our moral being, the Stoics, including Chrysippus, who is generally chided

[26] If movet is sound, the singular may reflect Gellius's understanding that the various causal factors cited are synonyms of a unitary principle.

as the most chillingly deterministic of them, come closer to Aristotle's argument (Nic. Eth. 1110b9ff.) against any position that implies that all action is involuntary because it is prompted by external causes. In its essence the Stoic concession is not a concession at all, merely a further assertion of the amplitude of a causal nexus whose strands may show up in the least expected quarters.

Without an acknowledgment of the role of human initiative, an important element in the moral and social sector studied by the philosopher would be missing. It has been claimed that Seneca, perhaps because he was a Roman, and for that reason not tied to traditional Greek ways of defining human motivation, was the first to import voluntas, an understanding of the contribution of the will, into the Stoic debate.^[27] Albrecht Dihle has modified this claim in important respects, though he too believes that it was the Romans, and especially the Roman lawyers, who fully opened up this dimension in our discussion of ethical and psychological realities.^[28] Though the Greeks did not quite have a word to correspond to the Roman voluntas (which is not exactly the same as the English "will" or the German Wille ), it would be difficult to deny that the Greek writers had a fair understanding of volition, in spite of the emphasis on logos and dianoia, reason and intelligence, as the prompters of human purpose and decision. In the protreptic of Seneca's philosophical writings, however, velle and voluntas play an unusually large role: Quid tibi opus est, ut bonus sis? velle : What do you require to be a good man? To have the will (Ep. 80.4). The emphasis is such that it is in Seneca's interest to soft-pedal the Chrysippean talk of heimarmene . True, the Stoics had from the very beginning wrestled with the problem of how the moral requirement of free choice is to be integrated within their larger vision of the causal network. Chrysippus had written on this (SVF 2.974ff.), as had Cleanthes and others.^[29] But where earlier Stoic authors had attached the greatest value to the human instinct for self-preservation, Seneca came to stress the will to live, and the will to make life worth living. Under the pressure of his ethical concerns, the old distinction between the

[27] Pohlenz 1948–49, 1: 319.

[28] Dihle 1982, pp. 134ff. But see the critique by Adkins 1985.

[29] Cf. what Furley (1967, p. 220) says about Aristotle: "the criterion of the voluntary act is not that it is 'spontaneous' or 'freely chosen' or that 'he could have chosen otherwise,' but that the source of the act cannot be traced back to something outside the agent." That is to say, voluntary action is not uncaused action.

wise and the fool is converted into one between two wills, the wills for good and for malevolence. In this respect Seneca may be said to have played into the hands of the ancient critics of Chrysippus and of the strict constructionists of Stoic determinism, and to have once again anticipated the neo-Stoics.^[30]

But leaving aside this particular development, if a tragedy can be said to achieve its effect by cultivating the obliquity of the relation between freedom and necessity, between voluntary action and external constraint, between the moral and the universal, then traditional Stoicism is beautifully equipped to provide the medium, and Senecan drama, with its strained, but programmatic, shuffling between contraries, exploits the tensions to the hilt. These tensions derive from the recognition that specific predicates, at home in the realm of the finite and the particular, can trigger surprising contradictions when fitted into a more comprehensive order. When Atreus says, scelus iuvat ordinare (Thy 715–16), we may freely, if circumstantially, translate it: there is pleasure and usefulness in an aesthetically pleasing, meticulous structuring of the crime. The two planes of ethics and aesthetics, or of law and art, are made to collide. Again and again in Senecan drama, through the dovetailing of irreconcilables, judgments and feelings are made to clash, and are compacted into a poetry of oppression. For in the drama the discordant strains are not serialized and disengaged, as they often are in philosophical prose, but are forged into an overwhelming tissue of syntheses. Arguments for this or that position, for or against wealth, or freedom, or death, will still put in their isolated appearance, but their isolation is not a matter of argumentative clarity or conclusiveness.

The example of Bellerophon cited above (p. 20) warns that a play must be taken complete, in one gulp, and not as a series of separate, or even sequentially unfolding, propositions. In the drama the Stoic alternatives are stripped of their explanatory or referential power and fused together to set up a field of energy within which the agents plot their moves (or rather, as we shall see later, within which the agents are conditioned to move). The language shifts back and forth between Fortune and Destiny, between random chance and the guiding hand of the

[30] Justus Lipsius, e.g., in his more mature works, the Manductio and the Physiologia (note esp. Phys. 1.12, "Fatum et Libertas"), sees no real difficulty in reconciling Stoic fatum with the Christian tenet of the free will of man, as ordained by God; see Saunders 1955, p. 54.

gods. The audience is not invited nor are the characters perceived to subscribe narrowly to one or the other of these categories or formulations, in spite of the patent commitments attached to them in Seneca's philosophical corpus. The effect of a speech on the subject of Fortune, of which there are many in Senecan drama (and which remains a favorite gambit in later drama, such as that of the Viceroy of Portugal in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy 1.3), is not to extend and harden our imagination along ideological lines, but to enrich our sense of the fullness and contrariness of the living scene. Thus the drama reasserts its claim to be an imitation of life.

Philosophically we distinguish between opposed stances and accord to one of them our (provisional) approval. The Senecan tragic vision, readied by the weighing of systematic alternatives, grants simultaneous asylum to Jealous Fortune and Blind Error, to Necessity and Will, to the angry power of the gods and the dispassionate functioning of causation. All are featured at a level of intensity that builds up their status as constraints without explaining anything. Fortune, random chance, is in these texts often little more than a sham perpetrated by a speaker who has his own interests at heart, and thus a perverted emblem of human freedom. This would explain Thyestes' remarkable line cited earlier:

Non pavidus hausi dicta, sed cepi nefas.
(Aga 31)

Fortune, he appears to be saying, was the originator of the crime, but he, Thyestes, drained or highjacked Fortune's dictates, and thus commandeered the unspeakable (nefas ) offense.

The drawing of unambiguously logical lines between conflicting assumptions is of merely local usefulness. Against the paradoxes and the fullness of the whole, such topical gains are doomed to insignificance. The Senecan scene is a nexus of seemingly dominant operational causes belying faith in an orderly system, voiced in a language that resolves into darkness. The diction is Stoic; it is the signature of Stoic thinking, stripped of an evident or lasting adherence. The individual terms and many of the ideas are taken from the Stoic canon; the burden of the argument—"argument" here taken in its technical sense, appropriate to drama—derides the more settled findings of the philosophical model.

The victim
Becomes the essential accomplice, provocateur—
No, more, is the principal—and the real victim

Is he whose hand was elected to give the stroke,
But is innocent.
(Robert Penn Warren,
Brother to Dragons, p. 139)

The Stoic paradoxes win out over the Stoic sermonizing.

I have argued that much that is valuable in Stoic thought comes to be carried over into the speech and thought of Senecan drama, though with a difference. Once such item is the Stoic interest in divination. Because of the doctrine of the interconnectedness of all fibers of the causal nexus, and of our blindness in the face of it, induction is readily sacrificed in favor of divination, mantike, educated guessing at probable effects, even far in the future, on the basis of signs.^[31] Cicero's De divinatione, especially book 1, is the principal document permitting us to glimpse Stoic thinking on the subject. Posidonius is said to have written a work in five books on mantike . Seneca's Naturales quaestiones 3.32.ff., on lightning bolts and bird omens, gives us his ideas about divination. We differ from the Etruscans, he says, in that we believe that only certain things that happen regularly, ratione, allow us to make the predictions of the future that come under the head of divination. But as he goes through his evidence, the gulf between himself and the Etruscans narrows. The discrimination between regular, or natural, events and chance events is clearly vitiated by his admission that we just do not know enough about the incidence of lightning and about birds' calls to make truly verifiable inferences from them. With greater knowledge, more links in the causal chains might be discoverable.

Of those associated with the Stoic succession, only Panaetius (second century B.C.E. ) disagreed with the acceptance of divination as a scientific technique faute de mieux . The conservatives assumed that the world is full of signs guaranteed by the benevolence of the gods, a notion repeated by Plotinus (3.3.[48]6.19), and that errors were caused by signs badly read, and not by the unreliability of the signs. Scenes of divination, such as the inspection of entrails for the purpose of reading the will of the gods or the prospects of the future, are turned in Seneca's hands into powerful vehicles of the macabre. Oedipus features

[31] For Chrysippus on divination, see SVF 939ff., 1187ff. Cf. Sambursky 1959, pp. 65ff., and now Long and Sedley 1987, pp. 263–66.

two sequences of divination. In Thyestes (755ff.) the inspection of the entrails of the slaughtered boys—tremunt . . . spirant . . . calentes —is, in its horrible way, a celebration of the vital spirit that infuses all creation, even where it is temporarily stunted. Why Seneca should be drawn to these scenes of black augury will become clear later.

Divination and hieromancy testify to the continuing importance of the gods in a philosophy otherwise committed to the search for natural causes, which deals with the gods under the rubric of physical science. The reading of signs, however mysterious, has been known to proceed without a belief in divine agents. The inspection of unusual signals for the purpose of extrapolating a distant cause or an equally distant effect has its own perfectly secular status. But because the signs deciphered are often taken from the realm of meteorology or planetary motion, areas traditionally associated with divine acts, the gods are absorbed into the inquiry. The Epicureans pushed the gods back to the frontiers of the empyrean, at most bringing them back into the picture as a trope for the sacredness of the bond of friendship. The Stoics preserved the divine metaphor, and indeed accepted both the traditional deities and the long-established unitary God of philosophy, as part of their acknowledgment of the interlocking forces of the universe. The Homeric model of political and social relations within the divine pantheon lent itself elegantly to the task of fixing the attractions and repulsions in the physical world, especially with audiences who needed to fall back on the familiar language of religion and myth.

In perusing the Stoic philosophical texts, one cannot escape the impression that the recognition of the gods is determined by a variety of contexts and designs. On the one hand, as we have seen, the gods are cyphers, publicistic necessities for the sake of interesting the masses, shorthand for more complex or abstract intuitions. The gods are introduced in human form to teach the uneducated that they, the gods, exist.^[32] At a higher level of sophistication, the word "god" was taken in various senses. God as ultimate principle is ontologically different from God as fire, for the latter has form and is capable of quantitative change. Both, in line with the demands of Stoic corporealism, are bodies, or body.^[33] Again, the sources suggest that the gods perpetrate no evil, but are responsible for some evil.^[34] Note the contemptu-

[32] DeLacey 1948, pp. 269–70.

[33] Weil 1964, p. 567 n. 26.

[34] Gould 1970, pp. 156–58. It should be said that Gould has not convinced all his peers of the validity of his thesis.

ous tone with which Cicero's Velleius, an Epicurean (De nat. deor. 1.15.39ff.), accuses Chrysippus of assembling a motley flock of divinities, including reason, nature, fate, necessity, fire, flux, the world itself, and many more. On the other hand, in Marcus Aurelius's notations, the god who counts is a personal divinity from whom he expects nothing but good.

The roots of this conceptual pluralism are found in the older Greek tradition from the Iliad on. Its elaboration in Senecan drama squares with the protean formulations in the Senecan treatises. In Naturales quaestiones 2.45 Seneca emulates the catholicity of Chrysippus by identifying Jupiter with the ruler of the universe; with the world soul, animus et spiritus mundi; with fate; with causality, causa causarum; with providence; with nature; and with the world. Comparable extensions of the semantic field of divinity are found elsewhere in his oeuvre, as in De beneficiis 4.7–8 where fortune is also brought in, and fatum is equated with Liber (= Bacchus), Hercules, and Mercury. There is, we are told in Epistle 41.1, no need to raise your arms in prayer: prope est a te deus, tecum est, intus est; your god is near, with, within you. But lest we put too spiritual an interpretation upon this piece of aculeate Senecanism, we also learn (NQ 6.3.1) that when the sky or the earth gets shaken, this is not owing to any wrath of the gods; there are natural causes; sky and earth are unbalanced by certain faults, just like our own bodies; when they seem to be doing harm, they are really receiving harm. The implication is that the gods can neither do nor receive harm, nor experience wrath. No wonder that Lipsius came to the conclusion (Const. 1.18) that in his remarks about God as a maker of destiny, Seneca did not really mean what he said.

In the drama the gods are endowed with a more formidable, though equally multiform, presence; the publicistic need has become generic necessity. In the epic the gods form an apparatus; they are a mirror in which men can recognize themselves, or they function as the levers of momentous change. But in contrast with the heroes who are the prime objects of the bard's attention, the gods lack a meaningful life of their own. In the lyric, the gods figure as ceremonial authorities, or as the tyrants of this or that passion. Only in the drama do the gods occupy a position and assume a variety of functions that render them indispensable. They represent the order or disorder, and hence the mystery, of the contingencies and the impediments without which the tragic action would be frivolous motion in an empty setting. They can be fellow

sufferers, or tyrants, or objects of inquiry. But above all they are the old dramatic mechanism for evoking the interconnectedness of causes in a resistant cosmos.

Occasionally, in the Senecan plays, we find rather pallid conversations about what constitutes divinity. Hercules Furens 448ff. features a debate between Amphitryon and Lycus. Ostensibly it is about what makes a hero, but mixed in, as a minor premise, is the question of the difference between men and gods. It is Lycus, the Machiavellian realist, who argues the complete separation of the two, while Amphitryon wants to efface the boundary line between them, citing gods who were temporarily men, and men who became gods. Unlike Amphitryon in Euripides' Heracles, Seneca's Amphitryon does not rail against the gods, perhaps because of his investment in the cause of his son, whom the tradition makes the arch-straddler of the line between the two species. Like Lycus, Amphitryon is capable of employing syllogistic reasoning in support of his conviction (445–46). But the conviction is authentic, and his response to the first hints of Hercules' return from the underworld,

audimur! est est sonitus Herculei gradus

Our prayer is heard! It is his step, the step
Of Hercules!
(HF 523)

has all the earmarks of the announcement of a divine epiphany, which indeed had been prayed for by Megara (279ff.). Hercules himself thinks he is, or wants to be, a god (958ff.).

But Hercules and the feelings expressed about him are unusual. Once in a while someone, like the nurse in Phaedra (195ff.), will try to humor or console a sufferer by suggesting that a god is a fiction invented to make sense of an inexplicable occurrence or passion. But as a rule the human agents view the gods as literature and philosophy have taught them to view them, at a distance from themselves and active or inactive in the various guises that human distress precipitates. Indeed, John Herington has argued that Senecan tragedy, like Aeschylus's, is religious theater. Seneca, he says, leaves no ultimate questions open. "Our earliest ancient tragedies, the first plays of Aeschylus, were composed when the Western world was just emerging into an era of free inquiry. . . . Our latest tragedies, those of Seneca, seem . . . to mark the beginning of the reverse process, the transition from free inquiry to an era of religion." But the two playwrights share between them a

"desperately urgent sense of the absolute reality of sin and virtue."^[35] I cannot subscribe to all the terms of this comparison. I do not think that either Aeschylean tragedy or Senecan drama "shows an unquestioning faith in the ultimate workings of the world." They would, in fact, not be tragedies if this were so. But there is some truth to the proposition that Senecan drama is religious drama, in the sense that the presence of the gods is not only taken for granted but exploited for powerful ends.

For "gods" we may also write "demons."^[36] With the exception of the fragmentary Phoenissae, all of Seneca's plays, including the spurious Octavia, have within them demons or, as we would call them, ghosts. In three of them, Troades, Medea, and Oedipus, messengers report the appearance of ghosts; in three, Agamemnon, Thyestes, and Octavia, a ghost or ghosts appear on the scene; and in one, Hercules Oetaeus, the voice of the hero at the end is that of a hero turned demon. It is true that many of these ghosts are revenant humans. But their survival in another world has given them the intermediate, quasidivine status to which the Greeks, from Hesiod on, have accorded the label "demon." Both Chrysippus and Posidonius are known to have written books on demons. As encyclopedic students of human experience they could not disregard the ubiquitous worship of the lesser divinities. The difference between gods and demons is largely one between remoteness and propinquity, between spirituality and incarnation. Demons were thought to be more concretely or devastatingly embroiled than gods in the affairs of men. They were appealed to in the matter of curses and defixiones . For the purposes of drama it is helpful that demons appear, and that their appearance is automatically disruptive and violent.

In Seneca, the distance between gods and demons is diminished. Drama can do little with the Stoic God, whom Cleanthes and Chrysippus and Posidonius identified with the life-giving pneuma . Where the gods are introduced in their own persons, as is Juno at the beginning of Hercules Furens, their malevolence shows them to be indistinguishable from demons. Gods and demons alike are conceived as visual manifestations of the engines of action, of the intractable causes, the unlucky coincidence of errant motives that circumscribe the road the hero has to travel.

[35] Herington 1966, pp. 460–61.

[36] Braginton 1933.

More properly, their horrific presence hints at a fundamental instability to which the world of Senecan drama is heir. Juno runs in her own person through all the changes of temper and of will that are subsequently exhibited in the violent turns of the hero's career. The ghost of Tantalus, in the prologue to Thyestes, embodies several contrary conceptions at war with one another. On the one hand, he is needed in, the palace to initiate and preside over the crime (62ff.); on the other, he must not tarry (105–6) because otherwise the whole world will be desiccated with the thirst of which he is the mythological guarantor; and finally (95) he expresses a desire to stay and prevent the crime, a desire he is incapable of translating into action because he will not enter the palace.^[37] The incongruities underscore both the enormity of what is afoot and the illegibility of the causal skein. And so the supposed engines of action are stripped of their power as intelligible initiators and turn into allegories of uncertainty and terror.

On the Tudor and the Jacobean stages, where Greek and Roman gods are admitted only in very special circumstances, the ghost survives to preserve the sense of divinatio, of the authority of the undecipherable.^[38] The entrance of the demon carries with it a glimpse of the future, of a more inclusive reality. In Seneca's Troades, the ghost of Achilles is merely mentioned; in Thomas Heywood's translation, the ghost appears and has a soliloquy of thirteen stanzas between acts 2 and 3, "in a tone which Peele could hardly outdo."^[39] But the irruptive vehemence of his entry also points up the weakness of those exposed to the apparition. In Ben Jonson's Catiline the two prologues of Envy and of Sylla's Ghost sound a lasting echo of the Stoic belief that the hazards of enforcing circumstance are most strikingly caught in a formulation that conserves, though in a censored shape, the old divinities of the genre. The ghost is a contribution of science rather than religion, the echo of a speculation about the world gone sour. In the absence of an ideological commitment, let alone a confessional identity, it is difficult to see how either Greek tragedy or Senecan drama can be called religious in the sense in which a medieval mystery play or baroque martyr spectacle or a work by Claudel is religious.

In Seneca the gods give themselves either not at all, as in the first

[37] Anliker 1960.

[38] Dahinten 1958. See also Whitmore 1915 and West 1939. Cf. Garton 1972, p. 199: "A drama substituting the merely supernatural for the numinous incorporated in its structure an increasing number of ghost scenes."

[39] T. S. Eliot 1932, p. 84.

chorus of Thyestes, or they parade their malignity for all to see, in the guise of demons and ghosts. Divination furnishes an imponderable link between Stoic science and Senecan dramaturgy. The ghosts document the Stoic awareness that the structure of the world is not completely amenable to methodical inspection, or rather that even the most complete inspection will have to allow for inaccessibilities and surprises. What the Senecan drama makes of this insight goes far beyond the careful adumbrations of a scientific skepticism, and comes down hard on the noxiousness of the inscrutable. Confidence in the face of complexity has turned into black magic. But the language continues to remind us of the vigorous exploration of the causal network that entangles man in a larger cosmic web. As Oedipus sees the ghost of his father, and wonders whether Antigone sees him too,

sequor, sequor, iam parce—sanguineum gerens
insigne regni Laius rapti furit;
en ecce, inanes manibus infestis petit
foditque vultus. nata, genitorem vides?
ego video.

I'll follow, yes, I must; and you, let go.
Look where Laius comes in rage, grasping
The bloodstained scepter of his ravished realm;
Look, with malevolent hands he seeks and tears
My empty sockets. Daughter, do you see
My father? I do.
(Phoe 40–44)

we recognize the source of the ghost of Hamlet's father. Euripidean ghosts, including that of Polydorus in Hecuba, are calm, narratively informative; they are little more than messengers of history, retailers of the antecedents or consequences of the text. Greek gods demonstrate a heavenly assurance. Aphrodite, in Hippolytus, and Dionysus, in Bacchae, can be cool and imperious because in the vision of the playwright they represent forces that, though by no means entirely legible, are thought to be dominant and unrefracted. In Senecan drama, gods and demons lack this assurance. They, like the men and women they can neither assist nor, of their own volition, destroy, are the furious, but impotent, prisoners of an inscrutable universe.

Finally, by way of a postscript to the chapter, a few words about freedom and its implications in Stoic thought and in Seneca, a topic to

which I alluded briefly above. Within the constraints of the causal and motivational machinery, the dialectic between heroism and freedom is unusually problematic. The Cynics, who elevated freedom into a policy of unconditioned liberation, had had no difficulty with the concept because they made it ride roughshod over all other obligations, including those of a civilized life and of the duties of leadership. By identifying heroism, as in the figure of their cult hero Heracles, with the license to act as one wishes, they dispensed with whatever worries attached to the relation between freedom and the challenge of social action. Cleanthes wrote a book entitled On Freedom, and other Stoics have things to say about the idea of an action that is unhampered by manifest constraint. Still, considering the importance we give to the notion of the freedom of choice in the history of philosophy and in the annals of political thought, it is remarkable, or rather understandable in the light of Stoic determinism, how rarely the Greek terms eleutheria and exousia have that meaning in the extant Stoic texts. The Stoic emphasis, where it is found, is on being able to act without being dependent on factors beyond one's control. Freedom means "doing one's own," that is, refraining from any act that would enmesh the agent in the foment of his environment.^[40] As we shall see later, Stoic physics stamps this aspiration as an irreclaimable hope.

Zeno and his successors, moreover, following Plato's identification of the ruler with him who rules over himself, equated the wise man and the "king," the responsible leader with his obligations (SVF 3.332, 617, 691), and thus perpetuated the political accent Greek ethics had borne from the start. This is an emphasis congenial to tragedy, where an affirmation of complete freedom, freedom of choice unchecked by obligations, can only debilitate the tragic passion. Further, in Greek and Roman Stoicism, the wise man is not, even outside of the political arena, completely free to act, but is bound to the logos, the code imposed by his insight into levels of controllability. The language of Origen belongs to a later era. Origen says that the wise man is free inasmuch as he has received the power of willing from the divine Creator.^[41] No such liberation by the grace of God is available to the Stoic. His notion of freedom is coupled with that of the observance of the law itself, and of the limitations thus imposed on the human agent. The Stoa expressly rejects the view that freedom, what is eph' hemin, allows

[40] For what the early Stoics had to say about the psychology of action, see Inwood 1985.

[41] Origen De principiis 3.1.19–20.

for the possibility that we could do the opposite. The good can only act well, the bad ill.

All Hellenistic philosophy, of course, shows a gloomy interest in the possibility of one supreme self-determined enterprise, the radical act of the free choice of death. But once again, this belief in the autonomy of suicide is hedged in by a whole battery of limiting conditions. Where suicide is not prompted by fear or desperation, it is dictated by a rational decision derived from the sanctions of the logos . In any case, such a decision can be made only by those who have steeled themselves by the constant practice of abnegation expected of the Stoic saint. Likewise in tragedy, a decision that is made freely, that might, in fact, have gone the other way, is useless or trivial. The dramatic concern with constraint and compulsion leaves freedom far behind. We must remember also that the Stoic wise man, or saint, or king, is a figment of the utopian imagination. Our world knows only prokoptontes, proficientes, men and women who are attempting to get closer and closer to that ultimately inaccessible state of wisdom.^[42] Even if Stoic kings were, by definition, free, which, in the strict sense of the word, they cannot be, the learners of this world, including those venerated by disciples, are not.

The topic of the Stoic king, of his rights and opportunities and obligations, is a constant one in Seneca, both in his philosophical writings and in the drama. Medea assumes that kings have power; they can be useful, and they can protect and save the weak:

hoc reges habent
magnificum et ingens, nulla quod rapiat dies:
prodesse miseris, supplices fido lare
protegere.

This is what kings can do,
A mighty privilege that time cannot extort:
To succor the afflicted, to provide a firm
Refuge for those in need.
(Med 222–25)

She might equally well have said that kings have the obligation, rather than the opportunity or freedom, to assist the helpless. In Epistle 73 Seneca condemns some radical Stoics for their opposition to monar-

[42] In VB 17.1ff. Seneca rehearses the accusations his enemies have levelled against him. In effect they say that he is a man given to luxurious living and to emotional indulgence rather than a true Stoic. His answer: he is a proficiens rather than a sage and wealth gives him a chance to benefit others. Here we have a portrait of the good, but imperfect, man such as is adumbrated in some of the choral essays.

chy, on the grounds that after all the institution guarantees communal well-being. Public service is, in his eyes, a Stoic demand; he acknowledges this even in the treatise in which he reviews the joys of retirement, De tranquillitate animi . His own forced retirement from politics is certain to have embarrassed him. Curiously, in the second chorus of Thyestes (336ff.), the portrait of the Stoic king is conceived in the terms of the Epicurean lathe biosas, of the call for a life away from the center of the storm. This coincides with the Sophoclean and Euripidean choral sentiment, diametrically opposed to the heroic temper, that it is better not to be exposed to the stresses of politics and leadership.

The Senecan plays and treatises abound in debates concerning the requirements of kingship, and concerning what makes a strong ruler as opposed to a Stoic king. This is particularly true of Thyestes, the play in which the temptations of kingship are graphically tested. Thyestes holds out against the crown, but is softened up by his son Tantalus (Thy 404–90) and yields before the siren call of Atreus's deceitful surrender (534–45).^[43] It is obvious that the term "king" can, under these circumstances, be invested with the most spectacular ironies. The Renaissance stage perpetuates the discussion and the ironies. Andrugio, the attractive victim in Antonio's Revenge, has a fine Stoic speech on kingship in act 4 of the preceding play, Antonio and Mellida . In the later play, act 2, scene 2, Piero and Pandulfo engage in a shuttle-speech on tyranny that is literally translated from Thyestes . A passage in The Spanish Tragedy (3.1.1–11), on the tribulations of being a king, is modelled on Seneca's Agamemnon (57–73). The new political constellations of the Renaissance helped to restore the relevance of those old debates. In Seneca's own plays, however, the Stoic message of what is expected of the perfect king is even more equivocal than it is in the treatises. The debates are conducted, not with the evident aim of helping one or the other view to acceptance, but to define the fluid social matrix within which human purpose and human welfare are buffeted.

One prominent thought stands out from the confusion of conflicting findings, and achieves prominence within the Senecan dramatic corpus: the thought that perfect wisdom imposes the recognition of ties and the willingness to live up to them, and that it is the tyrant's delusion and the source of his crimes that he considers himself free, without obligation:

[43] The process is well described by Seidensticker 1970, pp. 104ff.

Who to himself is law, no law doth need,
Offends no king, and is a king indeed.
(Bussy D'Ambois 2.1.203–4)

The couplet purports to stake out the privileges of true kingship; Bussy's own subsequent dereliction and failure demonstrate that the freedom of the king must turn into the license of the tyrant. And the tyrant necessarily develops a suicidal hunger for greater and greater license.

Wise men can be truly royal only if they cease aspiring to temporal power. Thyestes is made to think he can carry his newly discovered attunement to the simplicities of his sylvan retreat with him into the royal palace (542–43); he crashes in the attempt. But a sage who separates himself from the bonds of the community and refuses to respond to its demands has no business on the tragic stage. The tradition of the polis in Athenian tragedy paradoxically requires the presence of the king at the heart of the drama. Without the active role of princes and kings and temporal leaders and the ruling heads of households, tragic issues fall away. Aeschylus's Persae could not have been conceived as a tragedy if the playwright had put Athenian democracy at the center of the stage.

Stoicism gratefully adopts the old political orientation, along with the ancient myths to which the medium was attached. But Stoic drama also draws attention to the precariousness of the old tragic perception that a king is political man generalized and raised to his highest potential. It further collapses the established dramatic bond between royalty and passion, or rather it exaggerates the bond and makes the king over into a living incarnation of wrath, thus creating a paradigm to face the Stoic "king" from the opposite end of the spectrum. As Medea confesses:

Difficile quam sit animum ab ira flectere
iam concitatum quamque regale hoc putet
sceptris superbas quisquis admovit manus,
qua coepit ire, regia didici mea.

How hard it is to turn the soul from anger
Once it is roused, and how the seizure of
The sovereign scepter spurs persistence in
The sovereign path, I know: the crown has taught me.
(Med 203–6)

The more violent the king, the kinglier he is: this is a favorite conceit of the stage tyrants of Senecan drama. Thus heroism is questioned, and

reduced to the hard contours of parody. The Stoic philosopher-king merges with the tragic hero-villain. Some say that Greek tragedy, especially that of Euripides, is a poetic rebuttal of the pretensions to progress and perfectibility associated with the movement of enlightenment, the Sophists, in the second half of the fifth century B.C.E. Senecan tragedy is not a protest but a continuance. Its kings and queens exploit the warnings and the precepts that Seneca's own philosophical discussions of kingship have made available. But in their own tragic careers they confirm the insufficiency of those precepts and the doom dimly perceived in the warnings.

What should not be overlooked, in the end, is the usefulness of the royal cypher in a dramatic tradition that stresses the imponderability of causes. The royal ideal hints at a maximum of control, at an efficacy of will and determination that human society rarely concedes. The tyrant is the champion of the special presumption that claims freedom from the causal network. As the plays, with their repeated discussions of what it means to be a king, show unmistakably, the concept of the king is just as delusory as the assurance of the tyrant is vicious. Both of them belie the necessary truth that all of us are hemmed in by a swarm of causes that shape our very being and mold our actions. Many of the causes are internal to ourselves. But neither the king nor the tyrant is capable of exploiting this internality for lasting purposes of his own. Within the Senecan world, a clear sight or control of the causes of action is denied to all. Only in a very limited way can Polyxena or Antigone, much less Hercules, be said to be in command of their lives. The reason is not just that the complexity of the network defeats all hope of mastery, but that the causal system may itself be inescapably flawed and diseased, and intrinsically corrupt. The image of the Stoic king, carefully maneuvering between his own needs and the intuited forces of a lawful universe, is a mirage. Senecan drama appears, now and then, to hold out the comfort that the reins of our existence are within our grasp. But because it is tragedy, and clinical tragedy at that, the comfort is extended only in order to be thoroughly demolished. Mastery might be possible in a universe that obeys fixed laws, in a world that is healthy and theoretically analyzable. The universe of Senecan drama is diseased; its causes are those a physician rather than a governor is best qualified to attempt to track. It will be the task of the following chapters to establish that this vision is acceptable within a Stoic understanding of how the world behaves.