PART TWO
THE NEW COSMOLOGY

Chapter Four
Body, Tension, and Sumpatheia

Namque canam tacita naturae mente potentem infusumque deum caelo terrisque fretoque ingentem aequali moderantem foedere molem, totumque alterno consensu vivere mundum et rationis agi motu, cum spiritus unus per cunctas habitet partes atque inriget orbem omnia pervolitans corpusque animale figuret .

I shall sing of the God supreme with the still Wisdom of nature, one with sky and land and sea, Steadying the bulk by means of a balanced compact. The universe is alive with reciprocal harmony And is driven by the motion of reason; one spirit Inhabits all its parts and animates the orb Throughout and shapes and ensouls its body .

(Manilius Astronomica 2.60–66)^[1]

These lines, from the pen of a poet who lived about a generation before Seneca, give creative expression to a body of thought about the cosmos that originated with the early Stoics, based on suggestions supplied by Aristotle and his immediate successors, and older traditions on which they drew. Aristotle distinguishes between soul and the inborn pneuma; Zeno collapses them and makes of his soul-pneuma the unifying stuff that guarantees the working (and the frequent misoperation) of the organism. Chrysippus extended the notion of the bodily pneuma to cover the whole world, with important consequences for the nature of the cosmos, of which man, the character in the cosmic drama, is a consenting or dissenting member.^[2] He defined heimarmene as a dunamis pneumatike (SVF 2.913), a pneumatic power, which means that the pneuma is both causal nexus and force. "Pneuma in a cosmic sense is a conscious, rational, material force, working like a craftsman on inert, formless matter and fashioning different sub-

[1] Ironically, Manilius's lines argue stability, on premises that point in a different direction, as the argument of this chapter will attempt to show.

[2] For an excellent summary of Stoic cosmology, see Lapidge 1978, from whom I take the lines of Manilius. See also Hahm 1977, esp. pp. 158ff.

stances by variations of its own tension."^[3] Chrysippus's pneuma was a refinement of the "craftsman fire" of Zeno and Cleanthes,^[4] "a cool fire, sun's breath, the solar wind," to fall back on the language of a modern poet-philosopher.^[5]

We are now broaching the heart of our study, the cosmological analysis for which everything discussed up to now has been preparatory, and which, I hope, will clarify important issues our earlier remarks have had to skirt. Significant aspects of Seneca's dramatic practice, including the language of the plays, the nature of the action, and the character of the agents, can be appreciated more fittingly once it is understood that Senecan drama is the beneficiary of a new cosmology, of a new way of looking at the world and its parts and the manner of the interaction of these parts. Occasional hints of the new perspective have already been given in the preceding chapters. It remains to explore more fully, and with explicit documentation, how the Stoic world picture scores in the dramatic practice of Seneca and of some of his successors.

The Stoic presumption is that, with few—according to most accounts, four—exceptions,^[6] all that exists is corporeal, or physico-biological. Hence ethics and theology are subjects rooted in the findings of the natural sciences. This was held by Chrysippus and by Marcus Aurelius. It is also the view of Seneca, as emerges clearly from his encomium of sapientia in Epistle 90.28ff. God is corporeal; so are

[3] Long 1968, p. 332.

[4] Lapidge 1979, pp. 346ff.

[5] Doris Lessing 1971, p. 31.

[6] For the incorporeals, see Bréhier 1928. The evidence is found above all in SVF 1.90, 2.331, 2.341. From the point of view of dramatic theory and the application of Stoic principles to the interpretation of drama, the most puzzling inclusion among the incorporeals is that of the lekta, the signifieds of words and verbal sequences. The lekta are one of the constants in all ancient accounts of the Stoic incorporeals. Since the dramatic critic must assume that the listeners are affected not merely by the obviously somatic factors of verbalization, the acoustic thrusts and the motions through the air of the sounds (cf. DeLacy 1948, pp. 245ff.), but also by what the words say, we must conclude that in this instance the Stoic tenet was laid down in an isolation dictated by the demands of linguistics, without taking into account the imperatives of an ecology of human speech. As Swift says in a passage about the Aeolists in The Tale of a Tub, words "are also bodies of much Weight and Gravity, as it is manifest from those deep Impressions they make and leave upon us." Seneca (Helv. 5.6) says that the popular connotations with which words are invested increase the force with which they strike our ears: verbum quidem ipsum persuasions quadam et consensu iam asperius ad aures venit et audientes tamquam triste et exsecrabile ferit: ita enim populus iussit. Or again, in Ep. 94.53: Nulla ad aures nostras vox inpune perfertur.

justice, passion, reason, truth, virtue, vices, judgments, the soul. All of them are bodies, not in the sense of exhibiting specifically defined surfaces, but in the sense of sharing in the materiality of the whole. That materiality is, thanks to the pneuma, in large measure animate rather than inert. Events are corporeal, and so are their causes. "Chrysippus' affirmation of the corporeal nature of causes is a flat rejection of the incorporeal causes of Plato (the Ideas) and Aristotle (the unmoved mover)."^[7]

As we have seen, Stoic corporealism is argued along three different lines.^[8] First, the definition of body is "that which is extended in three dimensions with resistance [met' antitupias ]." This pertains to the objects of our daily sensory experience, though by no means to them alone. Second, a body is "that which either acts or is acted upon," a way of talking about the effective constituents of a living whole that goes back to Platonic precedents (for example, Theaetetus 156a and Sophistes 247c–e).^[9] Within the cosmic dimension, that which acts is the logos or the god, and that which is acted upon is the hule, the elementary material of which the four elements are specific manifestations. Finally, on the strength of their larger commitment to a totally material universe, the Stoics can ascribe the term "body" to any item that shares in the vitality of that universe. This accounts for the statements that most perplexed or enraged the opponents of Stoic corporealism, including some of the Renaissance neo-Stoics. In his chief commentary on Stoic physics, the Physiologia of 1604 (2.4ff.), Lipsius touches upon what he considers to be the inconsistencies and irrationalities of the Stoic claim that everything that is is corporeal.

With reference to the emotions and ethical perceptions of men and women, Plutarch gives a picture of Stoic beliefs that vibrates with outrage at the intellectual extravagance that could have devised so foolish and absurd a philosophy.^[10] In his acrimony he talks interchangeably of bodies and animals (or, more properly, animate beings), somata and zoa, a conflation that, in the light of the relevant Stoic concerns, carries a certain justice. Here are a few sentences from Plutarch's account:

[7] Gould 1970, p. 108.

[8] Hahm 1977, chap. 1, "Corporealism." Also Mansfeld 1978, and now Long and Sedley 1987, pp. 272–74.

[9] Solmsen 1960, pp. 353ff.

[10] For Plutarch as an enemy of Stoicism, see Pohlenz 1965.

They assert . . . that not only are the virtues and vices animals, and not only the affections, cases of anger and envy and grief and spiteful joy, or apprehensions and mental images and cases of ignorance . . . but besides these they further make the activities bodies and animals—taking a walk is an animal, dancing, putting on one's shoes, greeting, reviling.

In the end he cites Chrysippus:

It is not the case that the night is a body but the evening and the dawn and midnight are not bodies; and it is not the case that the day is a body but not the first day of the month and the tenth and the fifteenth and the thirtieth and the month and the summer and the autumn and the year.
(De comm. not. 1084bff.,
tr. H. Cherniss, modified)^[11]

Chrysippus is on record (SVF 2.307) as having said that the virtues are animate bodies: virtutes esse animalia . The fire in the soul is the same as that in the sun; it is also pneuma, and is fed by blood (SVF 1.140). Plutarch's talk of animals, zoa, in discussing mental activities is, therefore, not far from the mark. Hence Marcus Aurelius's disjunctive harangue (9.39): "either acknowledge [Stoic] reason or believe in [Epicurean?] atoms. [But the former is obviously right; hence, if you want to show your stupidity] go ahead and say to the hegemonikon [that is, the central control station of the mind]: 'You are dead, you have perished, you have turned into a wild beast, . . . you are one of the herd, you take fodder!'" With the brackets in place it would indeed appear as if Marcus stood up against the notion, which curiously enough he derives from atomism, that the central intelligence is (an) animal. But the brackets are mine; and if the text is read without them, it is by no means clear that the (animation =) animalization of the mind could not also be derived from a Stoicism of corporeality that differs from Epicureanism chiefly in not allowing the cutting asunder and dispersion of bodily particles, and that substitutes living energy for the intrinsic inertness of the atomic corpuscles.^[12]

[11] Cf. also Seneca Ep. 113.1–26. In this case Seneca qualifies the Stoic argument. He concedes that man is animal, but refuses the further consequence that the parts of man, including the virtues, are animal. The refutation, proceeding slowly and circumstantially, is prompted by a sort of timidity that pronounces against Stoic radicalism. In the dramas, as we shall see, the timidity is cast aside, and Stoic radicalism comes into its own. And elsewhere in the Epistles, such as at 56.5, Seneca adopts the dramatic mode as he talks about the various mental faculties striving with one another and creating a hubbub: quid prodest totius regionis silentium si adfectus fremunt?

[12] The problem of how Marcus could expect his atomist adversary to regard the hegemonikon as either dead or a species of animal remains.

If animation can, as Plutarch shows, be read as animalization, and theatricality identifies animals with beasts of the wild, the relevance of this to Senecan drama is obvious. The whole world can be visualized as a gigantic assemblage of beasts, of monsters that crowd the human agents who are thinly disguised exemplars of the same species. As the third chorus of Oedipus (709ff.) rehearses the foundation story of Thebes, the old animal mythology, the tales of the dragon teeth and of the dismemberment of Actaeon, is reinforced by Stoic concerns until the very genes of the city are shown to be beastly. The relation between Hercules and his lion (HF 30–74) is welded into near-identity, and the conflation of the Nemean lion skin with the zodiacal sign of Leo imports the animal dimension into the whole, richly peopled world.^[13] Hercules's own powers are reanalyzed as the ancient legacy of infernal, zoomorphic powers. Medea's witchcraft (Med 670–848) feeds lovingly on snakes, dragons, and all manner of beasts representing the hellish forces loose in the world. It is, once again, the living throng of the zodiac that Medea harnesses for her awful purposes. It is characteristic that in Euripides' version of the tale there is none of this. There the space occupied in Seneca by the cosmic monsters and the voodoo animal ingredients is taken up with the report of what the magic clothes do to Creon and Creusa. Modern criticism of Seneca has poked fun at the disproportion between Medea's kolossale Fähigkeiten —Medea herself catalogues the cosmic disturbances caused by her magic incantation (752ff.)—and the trifling result: ein leider ziemlich alltäglicher Giftmord .^[14] What matters, however, is not the witchcraft as a dramatic incident, but the totalization of the Stoic insight that the world, qua corporeal, is also animal, and an aggregate of animality. The causes, the imprecations, the whole world picture count for more than the specific consequences of an intrigue or a character formation.

The dramaturgy of Oedipus is particularly revealing. In Sophocles' version of the tale, the inquiry addressed to the higher powers is limited to Creon's consultation of the oracle, the report of which occupies some seventy lines, a smallish portion of the text. The drama, qua drama, is enacted on a plane that accommodates only the purposes of men and women, and the relations between them. In Seneca the drama encompasses a larger world, brimming with vital and threatening ani-

[13] Mette 1966.

[14] Friedrich 1967, p. 88.

mal substances (291–658). Not knowing the truth, and with the agreement of Oedipus, Tiresias organizes an extispicium, which is reported by Manto, the pretext being that Tiresias is blind. Two victims with gilt horns, an expanse of smoke, the lowing of animals, and much else is made available to the audience's sensory imagination; the slaughter of the beasts is recounted in great detail, as is the condition of the flesh upon inspection. As if this were not sufficient, the results are declared to be inconclusive in order to make room for yet another drama of inspection: an act of necromancy, reported by Creon. Only after these various scrutinizings of the animate world and its animal population is the quarrel between Oedipus and his associates permitted to begin. The effect of the dramaturgy is to strip Oedipus of his lone, towering standing, and to engulf him in a cosmos of which he is shown to be a pulsating, but feeble, constituent. He carries within him the beastly genes of his city; it is only fitting that he cannot be seen save against a background of monstrous animality. Likewise the golden ram, the totem of the clan in Thyestes 225 ff., is not just a mythological curiosity but a fitting exemplification of the fortuna of the royal house, a fortune that is alive, concrete, and freakish. Greek drama had occasionally wandered in this direction, as in Euripides' Bacchae . In Seneca the language of animality is not tied to the requirements of a particular plot, but extends throughout the dramatic repertory.

As Seneca tries to fit shapes to the events and abstractions that call for pictorial analogues (cf. tamquam pictor in Epistle 113.26), the animate universe furnishes him with an inexhaustible storehouse of organic energies. The Stoic belief in pervasive corporeality, with the pendant belief in pervasive animation, creates some remarkable challenges, and not only for the logic of classification. There is no fundamental distinction, in terms of substance and motor behavior, between body and soul. "There is no difference for Seneca . . . between physical and moral light and darkness."^[15] Not only are "the mental/moral disposition and the physical state of the human psyche one and the same," but ultimately "Stoic ethics is . . . parasitical on physics."^[16] In his Naturales quaestiones Seneca documents the interdependence and the virtual identity of the physical and the spiritual, or of the cosmic and the personal, by ending a number of the books on a note of per-

[15] Herington 1966, P. 433.

[16] Long 1968, P. 341.

sonal application, by bringing science and ethics together. Thus the final chapter of book 4, which is on (the Nile and) snow and hail and heat, presents an attack on superstition and effeminacy, a characteristic combination of the social, the moral, and the aesthetic. On the literal level Seneca chastises the dissipated Romans for cooling their distemper and tempering their indigestion with snow and ice. But it is hard to escape the impression that Seneca is, however cumbrously, saying something about the more than figurative identity of cosmic and human disturbances. Similarly, at the end of book 5, Seneca establishes a link between the winds and greed. Though once again the ostensible thought is less startling—winds, in themselves indifferent, are converted to evil purposes by human vice—the juxtaposition creates its own presumption of affinity.

The meteorology promulgated in the Naturales quaestiones is, for the most part, in close imitation of Aristotle's Meteorologica^[17] (though Seneca cites a fair number of other authorities). But where Aristotle is single-mindedly concerned with cosmic phenomena, from shooting stars to earthquakes to lightning and thunder to the processes of liquefaction and consolidation, Seneca is "Stoic enough by habit to draw little or no distinction between spiritual, moral and material realities. . . . (and) treats all phenomena as belonging to the same order of being. His discourse slips, without warning or break, from the vastness of the soul to the vastness of the starry sky."^[18] The explanation lies, once again, in the pervasiveness of the pneuma, the spiritus without which, Seneca says (NQ 6.16), the world could not live.^[19]

In the plays we find the same subsumption of ethical and psychological concerns within a medium that stresses the dynamics of the body, of the corporeal, and of the energy that defines bodily functions. Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, but also the earlier Stoics, including Zeno and Chrysippus, and indeed Seneca himself, are on occasion willing to talk about the life of the soul, the moral life, as if it registered its claims in isolation from the material sum total to which it be-

[17] But see the doubts of Sandbach (1985) regarding the dependence of the Stoa on Aristotle's esoteric writings. Note also Longrigg (1975), who details the disagreements between Aristotle, his successors in the Lyceum, and the Stoics.

[18] Herington 1966, P. 433.

[19] Stahl (1964) argues that the Stoicism of NQ is tempered by the Platonizing of some of Chrysippus's successors. I prefer to think, with Lapidge (1979, P. 355), that "Seneca . . . faithfully reproduces the vocabulary of Stoic cosmology," and further, that the Chrysippan stamp upon cosmological speculation was binding for his successors.

longs. In this respect Stoic ethics and psychology have the option of proceeding in channels initiated by Aristotle's separation and specialization of inquiry. The dramatist, however, rarely chooses that option. The needs of his genre, as he sees them, induce him to take the demands of Stoic corporeality literally. In Senecan drama the moral emerges, in its own right, only fitfully and tangentially, in choral essays and the occasional abortive sermonizing by a character, often a nurse or an attendant. In a manner of speaking, the exclusively moral statements in a Senecan drama are exo tou dramatos, outside of the drama proper, to use Aristotle's phrase. The drama itself is played out in terms of the prior biological reality, in terms of body and muscle and animal energy.

But more of this later. Let us look once more at the Stoic conception of "body." The Platonic and the Epicurean worlds, and, with some qualifications, also the world of Aristotle, may be said to be fundamentally stereomorphic. Their cosmos is a structure of crystals, together forming the cosmic crystal, which is spherical only by a violent shift of the imagination. The material world as a whole, and its constituent parts, are measurable and irreducible. In Plato's words:

Fire and earth and water and air are bodies. And every sort of body possesses volume, and every volume must necessarily be bounded by surfaces, and every rectilinear surface is composed of triangles.
(Timaeus 53c, tr. Jowett)

Plato's stereometric analysis of the natural world derives from the minima of the Eleatic school and rivals the atomism of Democritus and Epicurus in its confident reliance on the permanence of primary physical bodies. In the Renaissance, John Dee and Robert Fludd, and the Italian Platonists who inspired their writings continued to see the world as a cluster of measurable shapes. The remarkable diagrams that embellish their texts are eloquent testimony to the survival of the stereometric plotting of the cosmos.^[20] The measurability is also, in the wake of Pythagorean impulses, perceived in musical terms. Both music and stereometry presuppose the existence of stable quanta constituting a world that is, in its natural state, orderly, complex, and beautiful.

Contrast the Stoic cosmos, which is one of dynamic tension, fluid, soft, a biological and chemical field in which contrary energies are at

[20] See the material in Heninger 1977, PP. 71ff., 144ff., and especially Fludd 1617–19.

best held in an equilibrium and at worst engaged in a constant struggle for superiority, straining toward excess and explosion. I said earlier that in Stoic discussions of corporeality, causes and bodies are described in terms of acting and being acted upon. But paradoxically, in their talk about how the world gets on with itself, the Stoics are far less body-minded than their predecessors, if by "body" we mean a measurable quantum. They emphasize the physical continuum of space and matter, a consequence of the agency of the pneuma . As Chrysippus says in his work On Motion (SVF 2.550): "The cosmos is a perfect body, but the parts of the cosmos are not perfect in that they have a relationship to the whole and do not exist by themselves." True, as they make their distinction between ultimate principles, archai, and the pneuma, on the one hand, and the four material elements—fire, air, earth, and water—each of which has a specific form or bodily condition, on the other, the Stoics may be thought to compromise their rejection of limiting boundaries. But the recognition of a constantly changing mixture of elements points up the precariousness of the concepts of "form" and "shape" in Stoic thought.

It is tempting to characterize Stoic thinking about the natural world as an analogue of modern field theory, by contradistinction with the corpuscular theory of the atomists.^[21] As long as one does not press the analogy, the comparison is instructive. In their analysis of the behavior of the natural world, the Stoics found they could not avoid the language of their predecessors. and they spoke of shapes as well as bodies. And it ought to be repeated that Zeno, in inaugurating a new way of looking at the unity of the cosmos, took much from Aristotle and his successors in the Peripatos, as well as from Plato and his disciples. But though Aristotle's achievement in the various disciplines of biology is remarkable, cosmology is, for him, largely tantamount to physics, the disposition of constants and the plotting of orderly forces and spatial configurations.^[22] It is only in Stoic cosmology that biology comes fully into its own. Aristotle's discovery of the coordinates of potentiality and actualization is itself indebted to a biological model.^[23] But while Aristotle's biological system was one of evolution and the final cause, and

[21] Christensen 1962, p. 31.

[22] Edelstein 1966, p. 31: "In contrast to Aristotle, for whom astronomy is the most outstanding and paradigmatic science, the biological analogy for the Stoa is the analogy par excellence."

[23] Grene 1963, pp. 100ff.

focussed on the life curve of organisms, the Stoic model transcends the level of individual organisms and the life of the species and takes its incentive from a more radical understanding of life forces. That is why it is appropriate also to refer to it as a chemical model. The varied and unstable fusion that animates the cosmos is played out in a matrix that is both pure "acting and being-acted-upon" and pure fluidity, extending from the elements to the smallest inanimate objects, bringing everything under the influence of the pneuma . The ethical paradoxes of the Stoa are paralleled in the ontological dimension. The ontological paradoxes derive from the fact that the customary predicates, applying to the realm of the finite, of bodies as our senses experience them, and of elements, lead to insoluble contradictions when applied both to the Whole and to the archai .^[24] The pneumatic constitution of the cosmos assures its incalculability; the archai, the organizing principles of that world, are disarmed and virtually obliterated by their reanalysis as pneuma .^[25]

The medium of animation operative within the realm of pneuma, and responsible for both unification and variation, is tonos, tension. The term was apparently introduced by Cleanthes (SVF 1.563), who spoke of it as a "thrust of fire," plege puros .^[26] But it was fully developed by Chrysippus, who distinguished between an inward and an outward movement characterizing the tonos .^[27] The emphasis on tension and on the balance of tensions is a leading feature in Stoic accounts of the material world. Seneca devotes chapter 6 of the second book of the Naturales quaestiones to an encomium of intentio . Tonos displaces the Aristotelian explanation that some elements are heavy and pull toward the center. In Stoic thinking, also, each element has a natural motion of its own. But once we look at the cosmos in its primary biological aspect, the picture is different. Radical Stoic cosmology has some considerable difficulty with the notion of free fall, or of any inherent tendency toward gravitation or levitation.^[28] All parts of

[24] Weil 1964, p. 571.

[25] Forschner 1981, pp. 54ff.

[26] Hahm 1977, pp. 153f., also refers to SVF 1.502 and 503: the sun is the plektron of the universe; it conducts it on its progression of harmony. Here the musical sense of tonos is paramount; it produces a harmonia, with the heat of the sun as the player. For Chrysippus on the natural movement of bodies, see Long and Sedley 1987, pp. 195–97.

[27] For the details, see Hahm 1977, p. 166. Alexander of Aphrodisias (SVF 448) saw correctly that the Stoic concept of tonos implies the constant operation of simultaneous contrary motions.

[28] Hahm 1977, pp. 140ff.

matter are connected by continuous forces, both in space and time. Motion is primary in the sense that there is nothing that is not in a state of tension with other parts, not to mention the fact that tonos is built into the very pneuma that constitutes creative life. As Seneca puts it in an argument against atomism, air is not composed of discontiguous particles, otherwise it could not be in tension; and tension is the agency whereby the divine spirit (spiritus, Seneca's term for pneuma ) holds everything together (NQ 2.6.2–4).

Tonos operates within entities as well as between them.^[29] What is not clear from the sources, but is logically inevitable, is that the tension between things must have the effect of altering the tensions within them, and vice versa. In the tradition, the qualities of an object are equated with pneumatic tensions (SVF 2.449). Chrysippus looked upon the tensional motion as a force guaranteeing stability.^[30] But the conclusion is problematic. To be sure, iron remains iron, but it also turns into rust. Thus tonos shares in the uncertainties that, as we shall see, the doctrine of the pneuma raises for the dominant optimism of the Stoa.

The tension is sometimes, especially in the allegorizing interpreters of poetry, defined as a bond or chain that integrates the universe. The Great Chain of Being, though indebted also to Platonic antecedents, is a latter-day version of the Stoic tonos, hardened in defiance of the fluidity of the original, as when Philo says that the pneumatic tension is an unbreakable chain.^[31] It is as if the Stoic allegorizers, in their eagerness to substitute fixed units of interpretation for a language that embarrassed them, strove to recover a stability that Stoic science proposes to abolish. Aristotle and the Epicureans look upon motion as a quantifiable process that occurs between fixed points. The Stoics, with their tonos, build motion into the physical state itself, and thus discover the modern idea of force. The physician-philosopher Galen, living in the

[29] Forschner 1981, pp. 57–58.

[30] Long and Sedley 1987, pp. 280ff.

[31] De incorr. mundi chap. 24 (SVF 1.106), cited by Lapidge (1979, p. 353), who also refers to Chrysippus's quasi-literal use of desmos . For further details, see Wolff 1947, whose basic text is Macrobius Comm. in somn. Scip. 1.14; and Lapidge 1980. For the literary usefulness of Stoic physics, see especially the exemplary summary in Long 1985, pp. 20–21: "Stoic physics . . ., just because it lacks any precisely established concepts of dynamics or quantifiable measures of change, is a theory whose explanatory power is partly metaphorical; it can be compared to a translation system whereby physical processes are converted into terms which are wider in their significance than the physical domain that they primarily name."

second century of our era, adapted the Stoic tonike kinesis, tensional force, for his explanation of muscular action (SVF 2.450). This was anticipated by Chrysippus, who in his work On Passions talks about tonos in the musculature and then transfers the same concept to the soul:

As in running, clinging to something, and similar activities, which are accomplished through the muscles, there is a certain effective state and an ineffective state, depending on whether the muscles are tensed or relaxed, so also analogously in the soul there is a sort of "muscle" according to which we speak metaphorically of people being either with or without "muscle."
(SVF 3.473 )^[32]

Renaissance anatomy is firmly indebted to this aspect of the Stoic imagination.

It should be evident that the idea of tonos and tonike kinesis, which Philo uses metaphorically to refer to the word of the Lord (SVF 2.453), is brilliantly relevant to the dramatic mode, though it might be rash to establish a one-to-one equation between Stoic tonos and what we call dramatic tension, the tonos in the body of the drama. Aristotle's call for the interrelatedness of the parts of the artifact has a closer philosophical analogue in the Stoic energy field than it has in Aristotelian perfectionism or Aristotelian physics. As the New Critics made us see again, one way of unlocking the secrets of a drama is to appreciate the pressure of the various parts upon one another, and the strains between them, via irony, duplication, counterstatement and other principles of structural dynamics. In the spirit of the Stoic model, motion and tension are the primary realities, not any fixed units or forms from which the tension takes its origin. Beyond this, in the spirit of Galen and Chrysippus before him, action conceived as strained physical motion, muscle pressing upon muscle and ligament upon bone, weight tugging against weight, is an almost emblematic realization of what distinguishes above all Senecan drama. Motion and tension circumscribe not only the wills of the agents and their tight pressure upon each other, but, what is really saying the same thing, they define the rhetoric, with its explosive and often bizarre developments; they inform the themes and the precepts, jostling each other to the point of neutralization; and, foremost, they trigger the life of the passions, of plotting, and of man's inhumanity to man.

[32] Quoted from Hahm 1977, p. 169.

To be sure, in the majority of Stoic accounts tonos, tension and countertension, equilibrium, are associated with health; sickness is atonia, the absence of tension, flaccidity or imbalance. The manifest incongruity between the violence and aberrations on the Senecan stage, on the one hand, and Stoic reflections upon health and regularity, on the other, is not the least of the reasons that have led critics to shy away from acknowledging the Stoic identity of Senecan drama. But, as I shall try to show, Stoicism entails a recognition that the achievement of a perfect balance is in constant peril, and that tonos has built into it the capacity for derailment. The dynamism of tonos is forever on the verge of catapulting itself into dislocations. In muscular terms: exertion and spasm are contiguous, and only the (utopian) wise man known exactly how far to take the tonos that constitutes his maintenance of harmony and health.

In Seneca's prose writings, suggestions of cosmic disorder are in the minority. In the letters, and even in the Naturales quaestiones, the implications of Stoic cosmology are blunted by the overriding need to discover, within a labile universe, the fixed position that will enable man to live at relative peace with himself. To realize this goal, Seneca often talks, informally, about the body being a burden and a prison house of the spirit fighting against it (Ep. 65.16; Ep. 92.33), as if the bodiliness of the soul were not also a major Stoic tenet (Ep. 106).^[33] It is only fair to concede that there is a difference between "body" as the flesh-and-blood structure clothing the human soul, and "body" as a physical or biological substance defining the composition of what exists. The notion of the human body as a prison house cramping the life of the soul goes back to Socrates and the pre-Socratics. Characteristically, Seneca argues that it is only the faith in an all-powerful deity (= necessitas ) that equips him to understand why he himself, with his "vulnerable and fluid and perishable body"—the word for "vulnerable" is causarium, literally: enmeshed in causes or subject to chance—should be alive.

Throughout the introduction to the first book of Naturales quaestiones, of which these lines are a part (4), the point is that by investigating the cosmos and the gods (theology being simply another mode of cosmology), we recover a perspective and an optimism that the terrestrial experience is bound to distort and demolish. Nothing is more

[33] For a lucid statement of the relation of soul and body in Stoicism, see Long 1982b. For the differences between Stoics and Neoplatonists in this regard, see Ruesche 1933, p. 55. Sandbach (1985, pp. 46ff.) questions the Stoic debt to Aristotle.

beautiful or more enduring or better organized than the cosmos; but men think of it, in their silliness, as fortuitous and disorganized and liable to disintegrate. Seneca declares himself not to be frightened by portents. At the beginning of book 7 of the Naturales quaestiones, he has an eloquent plea for regarding the routine operations of the universe with as much attention as the deviations from the norm. He shrugs off the fears of men who wonder whether a comet is a prodigy or just a star. Seneca's showy optimism, his declaratory conviction that the universe is a body of beauty and regularity, and that the spirit by comtemplating it may ensure its own well-being and increase its chances for wisdom,^[34] is helped along by the direction Stoicism had taken under the Platonizing guidance of thinkers like Panaetius and Posidonius. But the insistence on beauty, regularity, and fixity is at crucial moments crossed by an understanding that is more in tune with the original Stoic insight into the cohesion of man and the world, and into the inevitable consequences of physicality. In the drama, which does not answer to the psychological needs satisfied in the prose writings, the full consequences of Stoic thinking about the cosmos are more naturally incorporated. Stoic drama, obedient to the demand for disorder, without which drama cannot exist, reduces even further the chances of the wise man succeeding. It catches the process of debilitation at the critical point where the tension goes wrong, the balance is queered, and the narrow confines of order and reason are burst apart.

I return to a passage that has concerned us before, apropos of the inconclusiveness of praecepta . The third chorus of Thyestes, 546ff., starts out with an equable recital of the clean opposition between war and peace, as the restoration of a state of normalcy after the heinous turbulence of slaughter.

Otium tanto subitum e tumultu
quis deus fecit?

What god has fashioned this sudden lull
In the midst of loud alarms?
(Thy 560–61)

But as the choral essay, one of the most compelling in the corpus, continues, the evenly weighted tension, and the promise of the practicability of peace, are left behind, or rather transmogrified into a Heraclitean

[34] Cf. Ep. 95.10 on the scope of philosophy: magna me vocant supraque vos posita. Seneca goes on to cite four lines from Lucretius's De rerum natura .

oscillation, truer to our experience than the tidy opposition that forms the point of departure. From logic and temporary sanity we have moved to a world in confusion, in which peace and war, pleasure and pain, fortune and misfortune are no longer kept apart, but have come to imply one another.

miscet haec illis prohibetque Clotho
stare Fortunam, rotat omne fatum.

Clotho mingles good and ill; she whirls
The wheel of fate, nor suffers it to stand.
(Thy 617–18)

It is not enough to say that the chorus moves from an appraisal of tonos and balance to a description of atonia, the lack of proper tension. Rather, the mutuality of fortune and misfortune that the chorus of Thyestes deplores, a common theme of many of these choral essays, is itself a powerful version of a tension whose primary battlefield is to be looked for in the Stoic cosmos. This version signals the deep pessimism of the Senecan stage, according to which all tonos, because of the fluidity of the medium upon which it is premised, is more likely than not to score disastrously. Atonia, slackness, the lack or privation of tension, is hardly the right term for the convulsive consequences that the transformation of tonos carries in its wake. Both Cicero and Galen have a number of discussions in which tonos and its congeners are analyzed, with interesting results for an understanding of the complex interplay between health and sickness, and of the ease with which tension can lapse from harmony into friction and ruin.

Tonos is the energy system that, for better or worse, welds the Stoic cosmos into a unity. The tensional relationship between the constituents of the cosmos, including the incorporation of man and his life in the larger world, Posidonius called sumpatheia .^[35] It is probable that Chrysippus himself subscribed to this view of cosmic sympathy, or of universal interaction, guaranteed by the pneuma that pervades and subtends all, which forms the organic support of the causal network

[35] Reinhardt 1926, pp. 118 and passim; Edelstein 1936. For the antecedents of Posidonius's sumpatheia, see Graeser 1972, pp. 68–69 and the sources cited there. Tarrant (1976, p. 344, on Aga 908f.) and Fantham (1982, pp. 227–28, on Tro 106–13) are skeptical of the appeal to the theory of sumpatheia .

discussed earlier.^[36] Stoic sumpatheia has its roots in earlier Greek thinking, notably in some passages of Plato's Timaeus . But in its refined and explicit form it was recognized as a specifically Stoic contribution. One of the principal differences between Aristotle and the Stoics is that in the thinking of the former, the heavens are exempted from change, while Stoicism recognizes no radical separation between the terrestrial and the celestial spheres in this regard. The Stoic character of the theory continues to be evident even in its adaptations in some of the later philosophical schools, as in the teaching of Plotinus,^[37] and it was under Stoic auspices that Renaissance science rediscovered the mutability of the heavens.^[38] Seneca's own citation of the idea of cosmic sympathy is couched in unmistakably Stoic terms, though he substitutes aer, air, for the more abstract spiritus or pneuma in the interest of illustrating the power of sympathy in a natural setting:

numquam enim nisi contexti per unitatem corporis nisus est, cum partes consentire ad intentionem debeant et conferre vires. . . . intentionem aeris ostendent tibi . . . voces, quae remissae claraeque sunt prout aer se concitavit. quid enim est vox nisi intentio aeris, ut audiatur, linguae formata percussu? quid cursus et motus omnis, nonne intenti spiritus opera sunt?

For there can never be internal effort in a body held together in any other way than by unity, since the elements must be in agreement in order to contribute their united strength toward the tension. . . . The tension of the atmosphere . . . is proved by the sound of voices sinking or swelling according to the stirring (= vibration) of the air. For what is voice save tension of the air moulded by a stroke of the tongue so as to become audible? What is all running and motion? Are they not the effects of tense air?
(Naturales quaestiones 2.6.2–4, tr. John Clarke)

A modern critic defines the notion as follows: "For every differentiation D at region R, there will be some, however small, differentiation, d _i , at any region, r_i , in the world."^[39] This doctrine of universal

[36] Hahm (1977, p. 163) characterizes Chrysippus's thought as follows: "Pneuma makes the cosmos a living, organic whole, with each single part grown together (sumphues, cf. SVF 2.550) in living sympathy (sumpnoia, sumpatheia ) with all the rest (SVF 2.473, 912; cf. 475, 546)." See also Sambursky 1959, pp. 1ff., on pneuma and coherence.

[37] Reinhardt 1926, pp. 119ff. See esp. Plotinus 4.1.4.32 and 5.29.4. But see also Graeser 1972, p. 47n. 2, and 68–72.

[38] See Foucault 1970, pp. 23–24 on "sympathies" as one of the energizing categories under the heading of resemblance up to the end of the sixteenth century, the others being convenientia, aemulatio, and analogy. Foucault's language itself constitutes a powerfully poetic evocation of sumpatheia .

[39] Christensen 1962, pp. 37–38.

interaction not only pertains to the most disparate parts of the universe but embraces the moral and the spiritual aspects of our world as well (VB 8.4–5). We should remember, of course, that in the Stoic view much that we consider immaterial shares in the corporeal nature of the universe. "In Seneca, the passions, the tides and the orbits are phenomena of the same kind, are causally interrelated, and can be discussed in interchangeable terms."^[40] "All things are united together . . . and earthly things feel the influence of heavenly ones," as Epictetus (1.4.1) puts it. Some Stoic sources, falling back upon the ready mechanism of a divine nomenclature signalling cohesion, refer to sumpatheia as Aphrodite, or Love.^[41] The cohesion of the cosmos, primarily conceived of in strictly physical terms, can also be regarded as evidence of the feelings and the desires of the godhead. Lucan, who refused to endow his epic with the conventional divine apparatus, thinks of sympathy as a proof of divine immanence, an active working of the gods throughout the world, which finds egress at certain places, such as Delphi, or through certain souls, the prophets or the philosophers.^[42] In Seneca, compare Agamemnon's words to Calchas:

arte qui reseras polum,
cui viscerum secreta, cui mundi fragor
et stella longa semitam flamma trahens
dant signa fati, cuius ingenti mihi
mercede constant ora: quid iubeat deus
effare, Calchas, nosque consilio rege.

Who by your mystic art can open heaven,
And read with vision clear the awful truths
Which sacrificial viscera proclaim;
To whom the thunder's roll, the long, bright trail
Of stars that flash across the sky, reveal
The hidden signs of fate; whose every word
Is uttered at a heavy cost to me:
What is the will of heaven, Calchas; speak,
And guide us with your counsel.
(Tro 354–59)

The prophet affords a point of entry into the global signa of the divinity.

Cicero translates sumpatheia as consensus naturae, or, more fully, as rerum consentiens conspirans continuata cognatio, the kinship of

[40] Herington 1966, p. 433.

[41] Lapidge 1979, p. 366.

[42] Morford 1967, p. 65, concerning Phars. 5.86–101. He continues: "The disturbance and the violent outburst . . . is like a volcanic eruption."

things united in feeling, in aspiration, and in extension.^[43] The proponent of sumpatheia with whose views Cicero largely identifies himself is the Stoic Balbus. It will be useful to quote the whole paragraph from which the formulation above is taken.

Again, consider the sympathetic agreement, interconnexion and affinity of things: whom will this not compel to approve the truth of what I say? Would it be possible for the earth at one definite time to be gay with flowers and then in turn all bare and stark, or for the spontaneous transformation of so many things about us to signal the approach and the retirement of the sun at the summer and the winter solstices, or for the tides to flow and ebb in the seas and straits with the rising and setting of the moon, or for the different courses of the stars to be maintained by the one revolution of the entire sky? These processes and this musical harmony of all the parts of the world assuredly could not go on were they not maintained in unison by a single divine and all pervading spirit.
(Cicero De natura deorum 2.7.19,
tr. H. Rackham)

Balbus mentions the behavior of the sun, the moon, the planets, the fixed stars, heat, light, and moisture, especially the latter, the atmospheric and terrestrial conditions enveloping men's affairs, as evidence of the unity and the cohesiveness holding the universe together. Balbus is the hymnodist of universal harmony, of the way nature at its best cooperates for the good of all.

Sumpatheia is both state and process. On the one hand it signals connection, bonding, integration, and kinship;^[44] on the other it indicates the operation of one and all parts of the whole on each other. In the latter capacity, which is the one that rules supreme in the dynamics of drama,^[45] the concept has medical origins. The holistic outlook of Hippocratic medicine and its successors emphasized the impact of

[43] De div. 2.34 and De nat. deor. 2.7.19. Cf. the further passages cited in the edition of Pease 1955–58. In the former passage Cicero also uses the term concentus, which, along with other similar expressions, introduces a Platonic-Pythagorean touch, reflecting the language of Posidonius. Heninger (1974, p. 325 and passim) puts the topos of "cosmic correspondence" in the Pythagorean camp, and so do many other critics of the Renaissance. But the material cited often answers to Stoic biological-chemical, rather than Pythagorean harmonic-astronomical, demands. The Stoic, as against the Platonic-Pythagorean tradition, has no interest in the poet as maker, in the poem as cosmos, or in the music of the spheres. For Chapman as a Pythagorean, see Heninger 1974, pp. 176–78, 224, 289, and passim. To the Stoic legacy in Chapman Heninger pays no attention.

[44] This is the sense that prevails in Marcus Aurelius; e.g., see 9.9, on the affinity and association of like-minded units.

[45] Kaufmann (1967) has some excellent remarks on the operation of sumpatheia in Senecan drama. Further remarks on this head will be found below, pp. 140–48.

various constituents of the body upon each other: "There is one confluence, one common vitality, and all things are in sympathy within the human body."^[16] Significantly, another term by which Cicero chooses to render sumpatheia (De divin. 2.33; De fato 5) is contagio, which is contact, in the medical sense, hence, sadly, infection.^[47] Certainly medicine, though supportive of the notion of harmony and balance and healthy tension, is fully alive to the variety of causes that may trigger a breakdown of the harmony, and to the extremely narrow scope within which tension can be expected to operate successfully. The concern with bodily weakness and disease, paramount in the medical treatises, is also one of the prominent themes of the Stoic writers; arrostema, debilitation, is a surprisingly common term in the Stoic fragments. Thus sympathy turns into vulnerability; it entails the uncontrollable and potentially invidious operation of the swarm of causes.^[48] In this respect a passage like the first chorus of Seneca's Oedipus, reporting the plague with a love of detail far in excess of the symptoms cited in its Sophoclean counterpart, converges in interest with the Stoic condemnation of weakness in all its forms, but also confirms the Stoic recognition that sickness is an inevitable implication of sumpatheia . Note also the second chorus of Phaedra (736ff.), on Beauty and its imperilled estate, because it cannot isolate itself, even in the sylvan retreat Hippolytus favors.

The time has come for us to make a distinction between Stoic perfectionism and Stoic realism; or rather, we need to recognize that they coexist and form a powerful complex, signified respectively and jointly by the names of Epictetus and Galen. In Epistle 95, on the inadequacy of praecepta unsupported by prior doctrinal preparation, Seneca confesses, in a generally optimistic context (52): membra sumus corporis magni, we are all the limbs of a large body. And, we conclude, we have little control over a distant part that may suffer some damage. Rabelais, a later Stoic, physician and moralist, "ties into one grotesque knot the slaughter, the dismemberment and disembowelling, bodily life, abundance, fat, the banquet, merry improprieties, and finally childbirth."^[49] In Rabelais the spirit is comic, with the final accent on salvation and

[46] Hippocrates On Nourishment, cited by Lapidge 1978, p. 176. Some of the later Hippocratic writings were in turn influenced by Stoic ideas: see Diller 1936.

[47] Cf. Thy 104: contactus = infection.

[48] Here I take issue with Forschner (1981, p. 106), who contrasts Plato's admission of the "errant" into cosmology with the Stoic insistence on absolute necessity. I prefer to think that within Stoic thought necessary is reanalyzed to absorb the errant cause.

[49] Bakhtin 1968, p. 222, cited by Greenblatt 1982, p. 7.

continuance. But, as we shall see, the implosive mixture of health and decay, of vitality and ugliness, is precisely what the Stoic concept of sumpatheia, with its built-in expectation of the constant danger of disarray and infestation, openly implies.

On the surface, and especially in evangelistic contexts, sympatheia encourages a delight in the physical, which is to say the biological richness of the world. Again and again Cicero's Stoic champion, Balbus, even in his hymn to reason and speech (De nat. deor. 2.59.147ff.), communicates the joy in the interlocking and continuousness of physical parts.^[50] Where he advances empirical proofs for the existence of the gods, he propagates the well-known deist argument from the clock-work functioning of the cosmos. But the bulk of that speech is an encomium on the beauty and the serviceability of the natural world. His showing how everything in nature is marvelously adapted for the use of man results in an essay on the mouth, the gullet, the stomach, the lungs, and the bowels, whose fleshly physicality is pictured in a manner that should satisfy the most committed sensualist, which has its closest analogues in Senecan rehearsals of sickness, lust, and cannibalism. Sumpatheia inspires both jubilant praise of the organic beauty of the order created by the divinity and grisly catalogues of that order gone wrong. Cicero's contagio points to a dimension of sumpatheia that becomes extraordinarily fruitful in the conception and language of post-Greek tragedy, that is, in the perception that when one constituent of the cosmos is disturbed or off balance, the whole world, because of the total interconnectedness, is affected. As one of the texts puts it: if a person is cut in his finger, the whole body suffers.^[51]

[50] Cf. the same joy in Galen's On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body (May 1968).

[51] SVF 2.1013. Cf. Nehamas 1985, on the thinking that led Nietzsche to the postulate of the eternal return: Nietzsche "accepts the stronger view that if any object in the world were at all different, then every object in the world would also have to be different." And again: "Properties of each thing are nothing but its effects on other things, the properties of which are in turn nothing but still further such effects" (p. 155). Here the link between the theory of causes and sumpatheia is beautifully illustrated, in a thinker whose debt to the Stoa has not yet been fully explored.

Chapter Five
Krasis , the Flame and the Moist

"A drop of wine penetrates the whole ocean."^[1] This is Chrysippus's. way (SVF 2.479 and 480) of illustrating one of the extreme consequences of the Stoic doctrine of cosmic cohesiveness. He taught that bodies could be combined in one of three different ways: by mechanical juxtaposition, parathesis; by the generation of a new body from two old ones, sunchusis; or by a blend in which the identities of the two blended substances persist, krasis (SVF 2.473, 475, and passim).^[2] Of the three species of combining substances, the last, krasis, coextension, is the most radical development of the idea of sumpatheia . In Chrysippus's example, it is not just the case that there is not a single molecule of sea water that is not bonded with wine, but the reverse is also true: every particle of wine is mixed with water. This completes the lesson that may be drawn from other formulations of sumpatheia: on one interpretation, body, in Stoic physics, has neither extremity nor beginning nor end but infinite extension (SVF 2.485), and there is no contact between bodies, only krasis and interpenetration (SVF 2.487).^[3]

Senecan drama is replete with extraordinary demonstrations of krasis . Here is one example. The nurse tells Medea that she is alone and defenseless; Medea answers:

Medea superest; hic mare et terras vides
ferrumque et ignes et deos et fulmina.

Medea is alive. In me you find both sea
And land and fire and sword and gods and thunderbolts.
(Med 166–67)

[1] Compare Pascal (1962, sect. 656): "The slightest movement affects all of nature; the whole sea changes for the cast of one stone. Likewise, with grace, the slightest action has consequences for everything." Thus Pascal's Stoicism supports his faith.

[2] The discussion by Stobaeus in SVF 471 proposes a further distinction between mixis, here used as a synonym for what elsewhere is called krasis, and krasis, here used of the coextension of liquid bodies only.

[3] Weil 1964, p. 569. Weil, while introducing the parallel of field theory, la théorie des champs (cf. also Sambursky 1959), is skeptical of such modern analogies, but brings it in by way of illustration, to indicate that Stoic thought is not absurd, as its ancient critics and their modern successors thought, but thinkable.

One modern critic speaks of Seneca's literal and figurative running together of sea and land.^[4] He distinguishes this from Euripides' less conflationary practice. I would stress "literal" over "figurative." Krasis, coextension, removes the need for figurality and comparison, though the poetic speech often appears to retain the traditional forms of linkage. In any case, the dramatic figurality is based on the literal acceptance of krasis in the Stoa. Another example, which will come up again in another context,^[5] is the brief hubristic career of the lesser Ajax in Agamemnon 532–56. Here we have a Herculean character built into a storm, to enhance our sense of its fury. Ajax embraces the lightning and becomes lightning himself:

dirimit insanum mare
fluctusque rumpit pectore et navem manu
complexus ignes traxit et caeco mari
conlucet Aiax; omne resplendet fretum.

he breasts the raging sea;
Head-on he breaks the waves. Grappling the ship
He trails a burst of fire on the lightless brine:
Ajax burns bright, and the ocean blazes back.
(Aga 540–43)

The storm itself is relevant. It is the cosmic counterpart both to the Trojan War and, more significantly, to the inner war in Clytaemestra. For the time being, the storm is a surrogate for the queen's fury; the two occupy the same imaginary space. R. D. Laing's "engulfment" and "implosion," categories explored in his The Divided Self, are modern analogues to the psychological and aesthetic implications of krasis .^[6] The craving for fusions, seemingly at odds with literary and dramatic selectivity, is part of the power of the Senecan vision.

Coextension would seem to fly in the face of the Aristotelian, commonsense assumption of identity, according to which no two bodies can occupy the same space, an assumption argued with great force and much rancor by the most important of the ancient critics of Stoic krasis, Alexander of Aphrodisias (ca. 200 of our era).^[7] Logically, there is also a distinction between coextension and that aspect of sumpatheia according to which one body or substance influences or affects

[4] Segal in Boyle 1983, p. 239.

[5] See chap. 6, p. 155.

[6] Laing 1965.

[7] Todd 1976.

another. But the formula "body passes through body"—soma dia somatos chorei (SVF 2.469)—indicates the affinity of sumpatheia and krasis (and, consequently, change). However distinct in terms of logical definition, the two models are mutually supportive, as we shall see when the various concepts we have been discussing are tested against the Senecan material. Stoic tonos further authenticates the assumption that one and the same unit of space can be occupied by more than one object.^[8]

The most celebrated and most discussed homogenization of this sort is that of body and soul, both of them corporeal, though the soul is a more rarified substance.^[9] But in addition to this ancient challenge to the mind-body dualism, the imperial Stoic texts insist on the coextension of all sorts of pairs of seeming opposites and irreconcilables, including life and death, the special condition always being that in this integration the two merged identities or substances are preserved as identities. Coextension was to bear marvelous fruit in much of the mannerist writing of the Stoic Renaissance. This is how Chapman describes two lines of swordsmen lining up against each other:

Every man's look showed, fed with either's spirit,
As one had been a mirror to another,
Like forms of life and death; each took from other;
And so were life and death mixed at their heights,
That you could see no fear of death, for life,
Nor love of life, for death . . .
(Bussy D'Ambois 2.1.45–50)

To be sure, in the next line Chapman cites as the authority for the thought that life and death "in all respects are one" the Skeptic Pyrrho. But in fact Pyrrho could also be quoted for the opposite opinion, or for the opinion that nothing meaningful could be said about either life or death. The possibility of thinking that life and death are consubstantial goes back to Heraclitus, but finds its classical confirmation in the krasis texts of the Stoics.^[10]

Krasis is the most powerful manifestation of sumpatheia, especially of what we might call "affective" sumpatheia, the force that not only

[8] In some writers, not within the Stoic mainstream, such as Cleomedes, Vitruvius, Manilius, and Ptolemy, krasis and Latin equivalents are used in the sense of "attunement," especially of heavenly bodies, and not of coextension or fusion. For them, therefore, krasis equals sumpatheia in its weaker sense. See Reinhardt 1926, pp. 342–43.

[9] Long 1982b.

[10] Cf. Long 1975–76, esp. pp. 145ff.

binds the particles of the universe together, but in fusing them affects, confuses, and disturbs them. Susceptibility to being affected extends to inorganic matter as well as organic. When the Stoicizing Philo says that the structure of inorganic matter is a bond, not unbreakable, but hard to dissolve, the statement confirms the bondedness but also leaves room for the element of disorder that the ubiquitous interconnectedness and affectability, the contagio, entails.^[11] This is the philosophical grounding—hinted at in the Stoic writings but usually smothered by a missionary optimism—for the remarkable flourishing of contagio and arrostrma in Senecan drama. Where the imbalance has its origin—what small flaw it is that initiates the toppling of the harmonious structure and induces the rippling effect of havoc and suffering—is passed over in silence. Whether it is a minute deviation in the course of one of the planets that sets off the wider disaster or a piece of human stupidity or indulgence that triggers a cosmic turbulence is hard or impossible to discover. What is clear is that the potential and desirable, but never demonstrable, harmony can be upset from both directions, through the agency of krasis, the irritation induced by confluence, and that human and environmental disturbances go hand in hand. Krasis, the fusion or coextension of entities that a well-designed harmony would keep apart in friendly discreteness, completes the work of sumpatheia, and substantially guarantees a spoilage of that harmony.

To appreciate the difference between the Greek tradition and the new focus of Senecan tragedy, it is useful to look at a passage in Euripides' Hecuba (592–602). The ancient queen develops the precise moral calculus that has always guided her action: contrary to what we see in the case of the soil, where it is a matter of chance whether the harvest is good or bad, a good person will always be good, and a bad person bad, no matter what the circumstances. This is a distinction, not only between adventitious luck and innate quality, which has recently been the subject of much discussion,^[12] but also between an ethically indeterminate world around us and morally determined humanity. Stoic science is not at liberty to allow this contrast between material and spiritual values. To be sure, there is no scarcity of statements in the Stoic writers alleging, like Euripides' heroine, that a good person will do good, and a bad person the opposite. But the implications of cosmic sumpatheia countermand the simplicity of that faith.

[11] Philo De aeternitate mundi 125.

[12] E.g., Nussbaum 1986.

The graphic detail of the plague in the first chorus of Oedipus, mentioned earlier, is anticipated by a remarkable speech by Oedipus himself, which highlights the impossibility of any member of the collectivity being excepted from the general malaise:

cui reservamur malo?
inter ruinas urbis et semper novis
deflenda lacrimis funera ac populi struem
incolumis asto—scilicet Phoebi reus.
sperare poteras sceleribus tantis dari
regnum salubre? fecimus caelum nocens.

For what new horror
Am I reserved? Amidst my city's woes,
Amid funeral pyres kept streaming with fresh tears,
Amid the piles of the dead, I stand unscathed,
Apollo's felon? Could you have hoped to gain
A wholesome kingdom for your deadly deeds?
I have spread my guilt to the sky.
Oed 31–36)

About the rapid pendulation between "I" and "you" and back to "I," I shall have something to say later (see chapter 7 below). Here Oedipus, at the center of a diseased world, knows that the disease will translate itself to him also. But he also knows that in some mysterious way he is himself responsible for the cosmic sickness. Man and the world have become linked, with infection the inescapable accessory and coextension the dreaded consequence.

The pestilential double bind recalls Artaud's theater as plague, from which streams the contagion of all the plagues buried in the soul.^[13] Perhaps we are also reminded of the Jacobean revenge play in which the virtuous revenger cannot but take on the viciousness of the tyrant. When Antonio and his allies, in Marston's Antonio's Revenge, cut out Piero's tongue, and serve him a dish of Julio's flesh, before stabbing him to death, only to be praised as saviors by their fellow citizens, the automatism of the spreading evil and its outrageous physicality point back to the same insight that Cicero's contagio catches in a word.^[14] (One wonders what effect the performance by the boy actors might have had on the audience!) Seneca himself, in his philosophical writings, leans on the medical trope to throw the spotlight on, but also

[13] Artaud 1958, chap. I. Artaud claims that the theater, at its most powerful, rivals the sickness and viciousness of life: "Like the plague, the theater is the time of evil" (p. 30). Cf. also Fumaroli (1973), whose discussion is not, however, entirely reliable.

[14] There is no need to bring in the countless parallels from sixteenth-century plays, from Gismond of Salern to Titus Andronicus .

apologize for, the spread of corruption. In a characteristically overwrought passage in the Epistles (95.22ff.), he chalks up the increasing complexity of the physician's art to diseases caused by the manner and nature of what people eat. But this thought sequence turns out to have been an extended simile for the decay of philosophy in the wake of the corruption in the hearts and bodies of men and women. We recall that the body is causarium ac fluidum periturumque, vulnerable, unstable, and destined to perish (NQ 1 prol. 4). In Seneca's drama the medical aspect of sumpatheia turns into obsession, a fervid fixation upon the malignant interlocking and fusion of cosmic constituents. Compare Donne:

Is this the honour which man hath . . . that he hath these earthquakes in himself, sudden shaking; these lightnings, sudden flashes; these thunders, sudden noises; these blazing stars, sudden fiery exhalations; these rivers of blood, sudden red waters? . . . O perplexed discomposition, O riddling distemper, O miserable condition of man!
(Devotions, 1st meditation)

We have seen that the radical corporealism of the Stoa gives poetry a chance to express its insights in a language that emphasizes physicality. Before moving on to other poetic and dramatic entailments of sumpatheia and krasis, I would like to spell out further the importance of physicality in the Senecan scheme. Joy and horror, approval and disgust, are voiced so as to elicit the vision and feeling of massed bodies and sensory impact. The official, evangelistic impulse is one of marvelling at the material appropriateness of the physical world. Balbus's hymn to reason and speech in Cicero's De natura deorum 2.59.147ff. starts with empirical proofs of the existence of the gods, along with passing observations on cosmic behavior, the consensus of men, recorded divine manifestations, and divination. The bulk of the speech is an encomium on the beauty and suitability of the natural world, detailed in somatic, even anatomical terms. Similarly, the same Stoic speaker, at 2.54.133ff., after rehearsing the variety, fullness, and harmony of the elements, and of the heavenly bodies, and appending a translation of verses from the astronomer-poet Aratus, launches into a paean of how everything in nature is beautifully adapted for the use of man. We recall that he celebrates the mouth, the gullet, the stomach, the lungs, and the bowels, and the machinery of the intake of food. Marcus Aurelius's reflections often carry the same message. As he talks

about the life of the mind (10.35), the emperor proceeds not only to vision and dentition but also to digestion to vindicate the excellence of the divine design. He articulates his delight in corporeal attractions, even ugliness:

If a man has sensibility and deeper insight into the workings of the Universe, scarcely anything . . . but will seem to him to form in its own peculiar way a pleasing adjunct to the whole. And he will look on the actual gaping jaws of wild beasts with no less pleasure than the representations of them by limners and modellers; and he will be able to see in the aged of either sex a mature prime and comely ripeness. . . . And many such things there are which do not appeal to everyone, but will come home to him alone who is genuinely intimate with Nature and her works.
(Meditations 2.2, tr. C. R. Haines)

Physicality is the key word for these capital exhibitions of the good that Stoic optimism finds in all the workings of a harmonious world visualized as a cooperative body. Our earlier observation that "Stoic ethics is ultimately parasitical on physics"^[15] can be focussed more narrowly to declare that Stoicism pushes its language toward the experience of physicality, and especially of the physicality of living bodies and their parts and their relations. This is not the same as Nietzsche's panegyric of physics as a foundation for rejecting outworn moral values.^[16] Rather, moral values and physical experience are felt to be coextensive and identical.

But physicality, because of the implications of krasis and contagio and the uncontrollable potential of dislocation and arrostema, can (and, ultimately, must) work in the opposite direction and challenge the most resolute optimism. The same Marcus Aurelius also recommends (6.13) that the experience of the physical be realistic; that as one eats pork one should think: this is a dead pig; as one makes love, one should think: this is rubbing a bit of flesh and spasmodically excreting a bit of mucus. For delusion, he explains, is unwarranted; the physicality must not be mistaken for a source of beauty and enjoyment only. Disgust must be a close neighbor of delight; only in that way can the corporeality of all that is be fully appreciated.^[17] Thus the cleavage of the human and the cosmic is erased under the aegis of the coexten-

[15] The words are those of Long (1968, p. 341).

[16] Fröhliche Wissenschaft 4.335, in Friedrich Nietzsche 1966, pp. 194–97.

[17] For a short history of disgust in Latin poetry, see Fuhrmann 1968; on Seneca, pp. 45–50. Cf. also the chapter "The Grotesque Image of the Body and its Sources" in Bakhtin 1968. Bakhtin deals with Rabelais as a comic analogue to what I see in Seneca.

sion of the aesthetic and the physical, the healthy and the sick, the corporeal and the limitless. In the words of M. Bakhtin about Rabelais (with some acknowledgement also of the contributions of Pico, Giambattista Porta, Giordano Bruno, and Campanella): "The grotesque body has no facade, no impenetrable surface. . . . It contains, like Pantagruel's mouth, new unknown spheres. It acquires cosmic dimensions, while the cosmos acquires a bodily nature.^[18]

In modern and postmodern criticism, physicality has come to be ranged closely with figurality and allegory, with language furnishing its own body alienated from the plane of reference and burgeoning into pure signification. "Allegories are in the realm of thoughts what ruins are in the realm of things."^[19] The victory of the signifier over the signified generates the materiality, the physicality, sometimes the paresis of speech and literatures.^[20] The aims of these modern critics are vastly different from what Seneca and Marcus Aurelius (and, for that matter, Rabelais) had in mind. Stoic radicalism and Seneca's own apocalyptic vision shy away from the allegorical uses of a nature that, because of the demands of krasis, takes its identities au pied de la lettre . The Stoic allegorizers are at pains to relocate human affairs in the cosmic edifice where they are truly at home. But the postmodern emphasis on physicality spilling over into a language that approaches autonomy in regard to its customary usages bears some faint resemblance to the linguistic power of the body in Senecan verse.

For the autonomy of the body speaking its own language, we could cite no finer example than the drunken ditty—or is it a serious rejoicing at the recovery of good fortune?—chanted by Thyestes (Thy 920ff.) as he feasts on his children's flesh. He wants to be merry, but the very roses on his head wither, he sweats and groans, sadness and tears overcome him, and ululare libet, he has an urge to howl. He thinks these are signs of impending trouble; he wonders an habet lacrimas magna voluptas, whether great joy has its store of tears. But then:

nolunt manus
parere, crescit pondus et dextram gravat;

[18] Bakhtin 1968, p. 339.

[19] Quoted from Walter Benjamin by Jameson (1971, p. 71). Benjamin associates allegory with melancholy, subjectivity, fragmentariness, satanic creatureliness (Rumpf 1980).

[20] See, e.g., Jameson 1971, pp. 71–73, with acknowledgments of the debt to Walter Benjamin. Here also, it seems to me, Stoic corporealism and melancholy form an important, if largely unrecognized, source.

admotus ipsis Bacchus a labris fugit
circaque rictus ore decepto fluit,
et ipsa trepido mensa subsiluit solo.

The hands will not obey; the cup—
How heavy it has grown, how it resists
The grasp! And see how now the wine itself,
Though lifted to the mouth, avoids the touch,
And flees the disappointed lips. Behold,
The table totters on the trembling floor.
(985–89)

And later:

Quis hic tumultus viscera exagitat mea?
quid tremuit intus? sentio impatiens onus
meumque gemitu non meo pectus gemit.

What is this tumult torturing my bowels?
Why do my vitals quake? I feel a load
Unbearable, and from my inmost heart
Come groans that are not mine.
(999–1001)

The body owns a knowledge of itself that, temporarily, is beyond the control and understanding of the remedial mind. As Walter Benjamin asserted about the character of German baroque drama: history is victimized by physical nature, and thus secularized and spatialized; man is a creature, on the same level as animals and plants, and thus not a candidate for salvation.^[21]

The prominence of the body and the bodily, the language of the body, and language as body: these are the marks that link the vitality and the despair of Senecan drama most closely to the Stoa. Amphitryon recognizes Hercules by his body:

agnosco toros
umerosque et alto nobile in trunco caput.

I recognize the limbs
And shoulders and the noble head upon
Its mighty trunk.
(HF 624–25)

The man is identified by his muscles and by his viscera.^[22] In Epistle 11.1 Seneca dwells on the automatism of the body; prompted by the

[21] Benjamin 1928, pp. 259ff.

[22] Segal 1983b, p. 186.

blushing of a young man, he admits that the natural behavior of the body cannot be regulated by intelligence. People blush, sweat, tremble, even intelligent and well-disciplined people, and there is nothing they can do about it.^[23] In Epistle 120.15–16 he associates the complaints of the body with our universal lack of stability and then cites Horace on fickleness (20).

Thyestes' agonized comments on the children in his maw (Thy 1041ff.), Atreus's details of the cooking of the children, earlier reported by the messenger (1057ff., 641ff.); the grandiose description of the sea monster that prompts the death of Hippolytus (Phae 1035–49) and of the mangling of Hippolytus's body by the horses (1093–1104), and Theseus's abortive attempt (1254ff.) to collect the pieces that might reconstitute Hippolytus's body: these are just a few of the numerous passages in which bodies assert their rights and the language of the body flowers and seethes. Melancholy and despair tied to the body can reach virtually Shandyesque proportions, as when Oedipus talks about his intrauterine predestination for evil:

videram nondum diem
uterique nondum solveram clausi moras,
et iam timebar. protinus quosdam editos
nox occupavit et novae luci abstulit:
mors me antecessit.

Even before I saw the light, while still
Delayed within the prison of the womb,
I was a thing of dread. The night of death
Lays hold of many at the hour of birth,
And snatches them away from dawning life.
But death anticipated birth in me.
(Phoe 245–51)

The messenger's account of the killing of the children by Atreus (Thy 717ff.) seems stylized and almost restrained: one corpse continues to stand, and then falls on the killer; a head, complaining indistinctly, rolls aside; the third corpse, struck by two wounds, falls and quenches the altar fires. These zigzag enactments of death are Hellenistic in origin; parallels may be found in Apollonius's Argonautica (3.1380ff.). The authentic ugliness is reserved, as a surprise (744–48), for the account that follows (755ff.): the intestines are pulled out, and the bodies are cut up for the stewing and frying. The fire, the water, and the smoke are all reluctant to collaborate.

[23] For Stoic portraiture in Seneca, see Ep. 95.65ff., and E. Evans 1950.

Amphitryon's description (HF 991ff.), in spurts, of what happens to Hercules' children and to Megara is delivered in the noisome physical terms we have come to expect. Roman literature, from Ennius on, delights in scenes where heads or limbs cut off continue to have a life of their own.^[24] In the Greek repertory that has come down to us, Philoctetes and Rhesus are the only plays that have any claim to showing something equivalent to the physicality and the ugliness of Seneca's scenic art. Once again, baroque drama, such as Garnier's Porcie and Gryphius's Katharina von Georgien, furnishes the closest parallels to Seneca's obsessive somatic particularity.^[25] When Porcie learns that Brute has fallen, she invokes the infernal tortures of old: she wants to have her heart torn by fiery tongs; she begs for her heart, her sinews, her bones, her lungs to be burned, cut, broken, pulverized (1638–51).^[26] In Garnier's Antigone, Oedipe is disgusted with his body:

Il faut que tout mon corps pourisse sous la terre
Et que mon âme triste aux noirs rivage erre,
Victime de Pluton. Que fay-je plus ici
Qu'infecter de mon corps l'air et la terre aussi!
(lines 149–52)

Ugliness, aimless motion, victimization, revulsion: contagion here turns synecdoche for the reciprocality that sumpatheia demands.

The raw dramaturgy of the body spreads effortlessly, but methodically, across all parts of the cosmos. Where the universe and its manifestations are felt to be uncontrollable—that is, where evil is feared to be automatic and mandatory—the Stoic scientist and sentient, deprived of choice or responsibility, can revel in its aesthetic horror.^[27] We must remind ourselves that the graduation from "ugly" to "evil" and vice versa is possible only at the level where the moral and the aesthetic have been redefined in the terms of cosmic corporeality. Elsewhere the preferred term of Stoic ethics is to cheiron, "the worse," a comparative that magnifies the power of intelligibility in the scale of things.^[28]

[24] Fuhrmann 1968, pp. 36–37.

[25] For Garnier, see especially Frick 1951, pp. 43ff.

[26] Cf. Frick 1951, p. 40. Cf. also Garnier's Antigone 231–36. Frick remarks further (p. 77) that Garnier's men and women live in an oppressively closed space; the sky is so close to them that Oedipe can actually touch it with his arm. This spatial limitedness is experienced as bodily sensation. Compare HF 64ff.: Juno expresses a fear that Hercules will occupy heaven. This is exactly what he proposes to do (958ff.). Himmelsstürmer are made more plausible within the schema of sumpatheia .

[27] There are good remarks on this head in a 1984 Berkeley dissertation by C. Barton: "Vis mortua: Irreconcilable Patterns of Thought in the Works of Seneca and Lucan."

[28] Graeser 1972, p. 56.

Chrysippus is said to have stated that, by analogy with the human head, which as the seat of reason needs to be delicate and therefore also vulnerable, flaws occur not by nature, but by certain unavoidable consequences of nature.^[29] The logic of this statement is tortuous, but the implication seems to be that as nature develops ever subtler forms, it surrenders some of its defenses. There is this difference between dominant Stoic doctrine and what we find in Senecan tragedy: Chrysippus and other Stoics, including Seneca in most of his prose works, make allowances for a world that is fundamentally admirable, and whose basic goodness, though shot through with the untoward effects that come with sumpatheia and contagio, can still be divined, lived up to, and praised. In Senecan drama the scope for decency and goodness is greatly narrowed, and the consequences have rendered the world awash with a degree of instability and ugliness that can be read into the very definition of the cosmos.^[30] To revert to an earlier topic, ugliness is easily linked with self-dramatization; the hero's insistence on his suffering and on the physicality of that suffering, and the disgust with the self that is thinly disguised by the boasting, cannot but issue in a kind of heroic vulgarity.

There is virtually no trace left of that other explanation of evil, parallel to the argument from consequences, that is eloquently expressed by Epictetus: after proposing that snot and running noses give the hands a chance to show what they can do, he continues: "What do you think Heracles would have amounted to, if there had not been a lion like the one he encountered, and a hydra . . .?"^[31] This is the accounting for evil as assisting the good, or as forming a foil to it. The ugly is a corollary of the beautiful, as Marcus Aurelius tells us (6.36); they have the same origin, and deserve the same reverent contemplation. This is an old position, found as early as Plato, if not earlier. It is more optimistic and less subtle than the argument from consequences, which in Plato appears in the guise of the errant cause. The role of the former in early Stoicism, and in Senecan drama, is virtually nil. The example

[29] SVF 2.1170.

[30] In isolating Ovid as a forerunner of Seneca in the handling of ugliness, Fuhrmann (1968) stresses the Ovidian Stimmungskontrast, the structural principle whereby scenes of ugliness are set off against idylls and tales of virtue or intimacy. Cf. also Segal 1969. This procedure is dropped in Lucan and Silius, except for what Fuhrmann calls the "stoische Kontrapost ": the greatness of a man is highlighted by the cruelty of what he suffers. In Seneca, I feel, pace Fuhrmann, the stoische Kontrapost is given very little scope, and ugliness attaches itself to all, without considerations of difference or merit.

[31] Epictetus 1.6.31f., tr. Oldfather.

of Phaethon, the Ovidian treatment of which is cited in De providentia 5.10–11, demonstrates that the testing of bravery results in dislocation and perdition. "Per alta virtus it, " Seneca's melancholy comment on the youth's daring, is virtually identical with the fuller formulation which I have cited as the quintessential motto of Senecan heroism (above, p. 7).

The argument from consequences is not very different from, and perhaps a subspecies of, the argument from infection. The second chorus of Phaedra, on Beauty (736ff.)—both the beauty of Hippolytus and Beauty in general; the progress of the choral essay weaves the two together in a flexible tissue—zeroes in on the imperilled state of a splendor that cannot isolate itself from danger and inroads, even in the benign isolation that Hippolytus has chosen for himself. Once again, it is merely a short step from this pinpointing of vulnerability to the dramatization of full cosmic disorder, as sampled in the fourth chorus of Thyestes (789ff.); or to the Roman theme of exilium, the threat to the commonwealth and the purgation of the city by removing the contagious and potentially lethal intruder, a theme that is exploited in Seneca's Medea as powerfully as in Cicero's Catilinarians, except that Seneca's urging of sumpatheia negates the possibility of removal and purgation.

I have already noted that at the end of each book of the Naturales quaestiones Seneca chooses to bring science and ethics together under the aegis of the life of physicality. Book 4, on the Nile and on snow and hail and the effects of heat, terminates with an attack on vicious Romans who cool their distemper and indigestion in snow and ice. At the end of book 5, a disquisition on winds is closed off with a denunciation of greed. And book 3 furnishes a transition from talk about waters and rivers and their fertile abundance to the superfluities of luxurious living. The tertium comparationis is fish. They are plentiful in nature; contrast this, Seneca complains, with the extravagance and idiocy of cultivating fish for gourmet food.^[32] It is clear that at these moments Seneca does not find in the observation of the order of the cosmos the consolation that he looks for elsewhere, as, for example, in Ad Marciam 18. By the same token, Senecan drama is a repudiation of

[32] For a good catalogue of passages in which Seneca parallels or contrasts nature, especially meteorology, with human misbehavior, see Owen 1968. In this fine article Owen explores symbolic connections. I would argue that "symbol" is a weak term to describe the intimate linkage of cosmic and human corporeality.

Balbus's argument in support of the beauty and the stability of animal and vegetable life. Seneca accepts the Stoic preoccupation with physicality, but balances the joy of it with sadness and disgust. Within the rubric of dramatic action the special quality of deeds is that they tend to be crimes; and such crimes must be open for all to see and feel and smell within a setting commensurate with them. Their openness is a function of their physical and biological essence and impact, of their bodiliness.

But corporeality must not be confused with solidity. Senecan drama conceives of process not only as the action of muscle and vigorous animal tissue; it puts a large premium also on blood, bile, entrails, storms, earthquakes, and conflagrations, with special attention to those viscous and mucous and putrescent elements that document the fluidity and the proneness to disease of all that is, which are calculated to incite our disgust. As we have noted, the sumpatheia of the world body carries in its wake a constant confrontation with dissolution and corrosion, a tendency to decompose and melt. Critics have remarked on the heavy emphasis on slime and rankness in the writings of some of the contemporaries of Seneca, such as Lucan and Persius, writers who are equally obsessed with the inclination of their world to go to pieces in a manner likely to offend our sense of smell or sight. This tendency of Stoic drama and Stoic poetry to go for corruption was as pronounced in the Renaissance as it was in the first century of our era. In a telling chapter entitled "The Transmutation of King Lear, " a recent critic has spelled out the prominence of the agents of decay and putrefaction, of dew and solvents, as part of the process defining the man.^[33] Repulsion comes to be the authentic answer to the experience of a world rotting away. The pregnability of bodily nature helps to certify the inexorability of evil; hopelessness becomes drama's gain.

In act 4, scene 1 (154–58) of Bussy D'Ambois, Montsurry says to Tamyra, whom he suspects of misconduct with Bussy:

I know not how I fare; a sudden night
Flows through my entrails; and a headlong chaos

[33] Nicholl (1980), who uses the term "participation mystique." On p. 220 Nicholl cites a telling passage from Thomas Tymme's Chymicall Physicke, published the year when Shakespeare was writing King Lear, about "vapours and exhalations Sulphurous" defining the nature of the world and of man. For the possible influence of Stoicism on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century physics and alchemy, see Dobbs 1982 and Barker and Goldstein 1984. For a convenient summary of Greek alchemy, see Taylor 1930; also Gundel 1979, based on Gundel 1950. Neither refers to the Stoics.

Murmurs within me, which I must digest,
And not drown her in my confusions,
That was my life's joy, being best informed.

Such language, putting night and chaos into the human frame, specifically into the entrails, which figure so importantly in the accounts of religious divination, is light-years removed from Greek dramatic speech. The language emphasizes the volatility, one might even say: the liquidity, of everything that aspires to be substantial—note the words "flows," "digest," "drown." We recall Velleius, Balbus's opponent in Cicero's dialogue on the gods (De nat. deor. 1.15.39), who complains that Chrysippus brings in his gods higgledy-piggledy, in a confused swarm, among them "all those things which by nature flow and stream."^[34] We have already had occasion to cite the lines of Bussy:

My sun is turned to blood 'gainst whose red beams
Pindus and Ossa, hid in endless snow,
Laid on my heart and liver, from their veins
Melt like two hungry currents, eating rocks,
Into the ocean of all human life,
And make it bitter, only with my blood.
(5.3.182–87)

Bussy D'Ambois is the story of a natural volcano that an intriguer, Monsieur, thought he could use for his own purposes. The elementary power proves too strong, the intriguer turns against his tool, the volcano erupts, and in doing so blasts the Machiavel. The lines body forth a krasis of astounding scope.

Critics have complained that much of the language in the play is overblown. To be fair to Chapman, we must acknowledge that the play of liquid masses, and the interaction between vital cosmos and biological man, descend from a larger perspective, related to the alchemical model that, as mentioned above, has been recognized also in King Lear .^[35] In the Senecan realm of dramatic experience, dryness and light have only a short duration before they are overwhelmed by mist

[34] Cf. Varro's extended discussion and varied nomenclature for moisture in De lingua latina 5.23–30.

[35] The literature on alchemy is large. Cf. above, note 33. For its relevance to the theater, see Nicholl 1980; Knapp 1980; Orenstein 1975; and Artaud 1958, chap. 3. Evans (1965, pp. xvii, xxv–vi) derives Chapman's conceits, especially the language of the passions and of "exhalations," from Platonic and Aristotelian sources, notably from the Meteorologica . This is certainly right. But we know that Chapman had read the Stoics; that part of his heritage has not been allowed sufficient credit.

and darkness and by the fluid medium that signifies life both in its vitality and in its decomposition.^[36] Even fire, the corporeal analogue and embodiment of wrath, is a kind of fluid.^[37] The meteorological and seismological speculations in Naturales quaestiones turn on fire as a rolling, volcanic substance, rather than on its function as a pure, dry emitter of light. Throughout Hercules Furens there is talk of burning, heating, scorching; when Hercules awakes after the terror of his rampage, he wants to burn himself. The Stoics distinguished between productive fire, the vital element co-substantial with the rational seed that is also God;^[38] and destructive fire, "lacking skill," the fire that stands for the negative volatility of the world, and that periodically erupts in an act of total conflagration. Cataclysm and conflagration are merely two different ways of talking about the world consuming itself by the logic of its indigenous contagion (see also below, pp. 148f.). Fire and water jointly form the corporeal matrix within which mutability, a constant theme in Seneca's writings, expresses itself.^[39]

More typically, ruin is embodied in clouds, smoke, and chaos. Book 3 of Naturales quaestiones is entirely about fluids and veers back and forth between the cosmic and the human, between the physical and the (supposedly) spiritual. At one point (3.15.4) we read: As in our bodies, so in the earth it is the humors that often generate the flaws: humores vitia concipiunt . Liquidity is both the setting and instigator of everything that is wrong with the world. It is the sensible index of contagio . Life is a "sea of troubles," as we learn in the Consolatio ad Polybium, written to console a freedman of Claudius when Seneca was in exile in Corsica:

omnis vita supplicium est: in hoc profundum inquietumque proiecti mare, alternis aestibus reciprocum et modo adlevans nos subitis incrementis, modo maioribus damnis deferens adsidueque iactans numquam stabili consistimus loco. pendemus et fluctuamur et alter in alterum inlidimur et aliquando naufragium facimus, semper timemus in hoc tam

[36] The very idiosyncratic argument of Serres (1977), viz. that in reading Lucretius we must abandon the notion of solids and think of a mechanics of fluids, is better applied to Seneca.

[37] For the imagery of furor in Seneca's dramas, see Trabert 1953.

[38] Long 1985, p. 15: Stoic fire is a "principle which is closer to elementary thermodynamics than to anything resembling a fire that burns."

[39] Seneca's emphasis on mutability receives support from his occasional citation of the Platonic devaluation of the body. In Ep. 58, e.g., he asks (23–24): Why do we love this evanescent thing so much? De homine dixi, fluvida materia et caduca et omnibus obnoxia causis; mundus quoque, aeterna res et invicta, mutatur nec idem manet. . . . ordinem mutat. He reaches the conclusion that everything that excites our senses derives from unreal sources, an inference scarcely to be squared with his usual Stoic convictions.

procelloso et in omnes tempestates exposito mari navigantibus nullus portus nisi mortis est.

All life is a mortification. Cast out on that deep and restless sea, a variable, fluctuating seesaw that raises us high with sudden windfalls only to take us down again with tremendous losses, we are never sure of a firm foothold. We remain suspended and are tossed about and bruise one another. Shipwreck is not uncommon; fear is constant. As we sail along on this ocean pounded by squalls and exposed to storms from all quarters, there is no haven save that of death.
(9.6)

The fourth chorus of Thyestes dwells on this ruin:

trepidant, trepidant pectora magno
percussa metu,
ne fatali cuncta ruina
quassata labent iterumque deos
hominesque premat deforme chaos,
iterum terras et mare et ignes⁴⁰
et vaga picti sidera mundi
natura tegat.

Our hearts are trembling, battered with fright
That all the world collapse in ruin,
And shapeless chaos as before crush down
Both gods and men, and nature bury once more
All land and sea and fire and the coursing stars
Of the firmament.
(Thy 828–35)

Ruin itself, etymologically, is a "flowing," a rush and a collapse like that of overly wet clay.^[41] Cosmic flux is a favorite theme or image in the Stoic poets of the first century of our era; the imagery of dissolution, that is, contagion and liquefication, is pervasive in many places in Lucan's Pharsalia:

membra natant sanie, surae fluxere . . .
. . . et nigra destillant inguina tabe.

The limbs swam in corruption, the calves began
To flow . . . the groin dripped with black flux.
(Pharsalia 9.770–72)

Liquidity need not be catastrophic; again and again it enters the text as a token of the locus in which human affairs are precariously anchored. Men must understand that

[40] Against Leo and Zwierlein, I retain the manuscript reading et ignes .

[41] Cf. the prominence of mud and dust as the materials of life in Ep. 57.1–2, prompted by the experience of going through a dust storm in Naples and feeling, not fear, but depression.

vitam mortemque per vices ire et conposita dissolvi, dissoluta conponi

Life and death alternate: where joined, they dissolve, where dissolved,
they are rejoined.
(Ep. 71.14)

Troades, Seneca's most subtle and most sensitive dramatic composition, unfolds against the backdrop sketched early in the play. Hecuba comments on the collapse of Troy, and on her own situation:

nec caelum patet
undante fumo: nube ceu densa obsitus
ater favilla squalet Iliaca dies.

The face of heaven is hid
By that dense, wreathing smoke; our city's day,
As if beset by some thick, lowering cloud,
Grows black and foul beneath the ash.
(Tro 19–21)

Undante, "billowing": once again the deluge furnishes the imagery for the moment of disaster and for the sense of desolation that ensues.

In a passage which has something in common with Bussy's "I know not how I fare," Phaedra says of her suffering:

pectus insanum vapor
amorque torret. intimis saevus furit
penitus medullis atque per venas meat
visceribus ignis mersus et venis latens
ut agilis altas flamma percurrit trabes.^[42]

My maddened heart with vaporous love is scorched;
My inmost marrow rages with the fire.
Concealed within my vitals it travels through
The veins and, hidden there, it races like
The flame that guts the highest timbers.
(Phae 640–44)

The crucial word here is vapor . In this particular instance vapor and love form one single element, a hendiadys, as is indicated by the verb in the singular, torret . In line 102, vapor is the word used of Phaedra's suffering. In Hercules Oetaeus 1613, vapores is a synonym for flammae . The shade of Tantalus, at the beginning of Thyestes (87–89), refers to himself as crime personified, in the guise of vapor and pestis .

Vapor is exhalation. It is a fugitive, but potent, substance, sharing

[42] The text of these ungainly lines is corrupt; I adopt Giardina's reading without excising line 642. My argument is not affected by the various proposals of other editors.

in the moist and the dry, in heat and chill. It serves as a pregnant fixing of the Stoic perception that the world, both in its quotidian state and at critical junctures, is "vaporous":

This brave o'erhanging firmament . . . appeareth no other thing to me
than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
(Hamlet 2.2.316–18)

Vapor is common in Naturales quaestiones, as are its derivatives vaporans, vaporarius, vaporatio . In book 6, on earthquakes, Seneca has the vapors either causing the quakes (chapter II) or being a poisonous side effect of them (chapters 27 and 28). As exhalations, they nourish the celestial bodies, including the sun. But vapores can also kill.^[43] The sun draws up the vapors of the earth and the sea, with important consequences for the equilibrium of the environment. Exhalations are held responsible for material changes early in Greek literature and philosophy, from Hesiod and Heraclitus to Aristotle. But it was in Stoic cosmology that the focus on fluidity and contagio made talk of vapors unusually fruitful. Here vapor is both the stuff of the world, a stand-in for the pneuma, and a manifest sign of fluctuation and instability. The earth and the human body are compared for their vessels of fluids, and for the corruption spread by them.^[44] Just as, Seneca says (NQ 3.15.2ff.), there are within us many kinds of humor, not only the blood, but the brain, the marrow, mucus, spit, tears, and the lubricant that moves our joints, so the earth contains its own varieties of humor . Some are necessary, others are contaminated and more gelatinous. In the sequel Seneca elaborates the dire consequences that ensue from the operation of the fluids. Once again, contagio and putrefaction are the well-nigh automatic corollaries of the world's vaporous identity, in which even the gods (all but Zeus, who equals the pneuma ) are subject to change and dissolution (SVF 2.1049ff.).

The plays are the beneficiaries of this kind of thinking, including Hercules Oetaeus, which Chapman mined for Bussy D'Ambois . The playwright combines Greek scientific topoi about liquefaction and cloud formation with the Stoic concept of the energy field to herald the

[43] Cf. Donne's Devotions, 12th meditation: "We . . . kill ourselves with our own vapors."

[44] Cf. Marcus Aurelius 2.17: "Summing up, the body is all river, and the soul is all dream and vapor." In the end, however, Marcus holds out the promise of salvation by philosophy. Still, the potential for pessimism and disgust is ever present; cf. 5.10: change and corruption are the only realities we know.

critical moments when the precarious balance is, as it must regularly be, evaporated, with incalculable consequences for the health and the sanity of the characters and their designs. The invasion of the psychological realm by language originally devised to plumb physical and biological processes is the most important contribution Seneca made to the development of European drama. Such language is unthinkable on the stage before the advent of a philosophy that envisages life, not as an orderly system of stable and mutually exclusive schemata, but as a complex of energies and tensions defining the relations between entities that constantly threaten to metamorphose into one another. Chapman and Marston fully exploit this impetus provided by a new integrating science of meteorological flux:^[45]

O now it nothing fits my cares to speak
But thunder, or to take into my throat
The trump of Heaven, with whose determinate blasts
The winds shall burst, and the enraged seas
Be drunk in his sounds; that my hot woes
Vented enough, I might convert to vapour,
Ascending from my infamy unseen,
Shorten the world, preventing the last breath
That kills the living, and regenerates death.
(Bussy D'Ambois 5.1.41–49)

This is once again the voice of Montsurry, to whom, through the last act of the play, the most "cosmic" speech is given. It is instructive to compare the third chorus of Seneca's Medea (579ff.), in which the jealousy of the deserted wife is said to be more potent—nulla vis tanta, quanta cum —than fire, wind, rain, a river in flood, and snow melting. The force of "more," which appears to cancel the identity of the heroine's feelings with the meteorological correlates, is undone, not only by the power of the imagery in the lyric, but by the scene of witchcraft that follows, in which the magical coextension of the psychological and the cosmological is ritually clinched.

Or take Massinissa in Marston's Sophonisba:

[45] Heninger 1960, p. 183: "Chapman of all his contemporaries brought into his poetry the purest meteorological theory"; and p. 195: "With Chapman, images are no longer mechanical devices from a handbook of rhetoric. . . . Nor are they useful as merely physical and emotional description. Instead, they are integrated segments which taken together make the poetic statement." For the language of meteorology in Marlowe, see Kocher 1946, pp. 235ff.

Thou whom, like sparkling steel, the strokes of chance
Made hard and firm, and, like wild-fire turn'd,
The more cold fate, the more thy virtue burn'd,
And in whole seas of miseries didst flame;
On thee, loved creature of a deathless fame,
Rest all my honour.
(5.4.49–54)

The temporary hardening for which Massinissa admires Sophonisba is, by virtue of the poetry, drowned in the rush of conflagrations and "whole seas of miseries." The cosmic energies, far from merely forming the setting within which the agent maintains his own solid integrity, turn into a trope for the volatility of all natural behavior. Indeed, "trope" is the wrong word; they come to occupy the very heart of the human endeavor. In the Senecan world, the natural forces do not serve as icons; they are the human energies, caught at a different angle.

From the plays of Seneca, I choose, at random, two characteristic passages. Near the end of the first chorus of Oedipus, the pestilence is apostrophized:^[46]

O dira novi facies leti,
gravior leto:
piger ignavos alligat artus
languor, et aegro rubor in vultu,
maculaeque caput sparsere leves;
tum vapor ipsam corporis arcem
flammeus urit
multoque genas sanguine tendit,
oculique rigent et sacer ignis
pascitur artus.^[47]

O cruel, strange new form of death,
And worse than death!
A weary languor seizes the sluggish
Limbs, a sickly redness marks the face,
The head is blotched with subtle stains.
Soon fiery vapor burns the body's
Secret citadel

[46] For the whole section on the plague, Oed 110–201, Cattin (1963a, pp. 40–51) offers a comparative tabulation of relevant passages in Thucydides, Lucretius, Vergil, and Ovid. It is significant that Sophocles' two Oedipus plays have nothing comparable. Cattin does not note the singularities of Seneca's account, especially the importance of vapor and its analogues. Contrast Owen (1968, p. 309), who, in commenting on lines 37–49, speaks of "atmospheric contamination."

[47] I use Giardina's text, but follow Zwierlein's colometry (1986b).

And throbbing temples swell with blood.
The eyes turn rigid; a cursed flame
Devours the limbs.
(Oed 180–87)

Here both vapor and ignis, the two vital manifestations of pneuma, are made symptomatic of the plague.

In act 2 of Seneca's Agamemnon (108ff.), Clytaemestra addresses herself and her animus, her soul, as if that animus were the equivalent of the Greek anemos, "wind," though the principal burden of the imagery comes from the sea and from fire rather than from the air. In her wavering between plans of aggression and thoughts of secret flight, the imagery of motion and of flux comes naturally, though the pervasiveness of the environmental language is remarkable. After the initial quid fluctuaris? "Why do you [= I] waver [= act the wave]?" and after the nurse's recommendation of delay, Clytaemestra develops a self-portrayal of flaming and watery uncertainty:

Maiora cruciant quam ut moras possim pati;
flammae medullas et cor exurunt meum;
mixtus dolori subdidit stimulos timor;
invidia pulsat pectus; hinc animum iugo
premit cupido turpis et vinci vetat;
et inter istas mentis obsessae faces
fessus quidem et deiectus et pessumdatus,
pudor rebellat. fluctibus variis agor,
ut, cum hinc profundum ventus, hinc aestus rapit,
incerta dubitat unda cui cedat malo.

My heavy torments will not brook delay.
My heart, my very marrow is aflame;
Panic has joined its sting to fierce despair,
My breast is lashed with jealousy, ugly lust
Harnesses my soul and tells it to stand fast.
And yet, within this torching of a mind besieged,
Shame makes a stand, though weary and despondent
And all but crushed. By shifting seas I am tossed,
As when the wave, torn between wind and tide,
Stands unresolved which scourge to follow.
(Aga 131–40)

In the last line, Clytaemestra identifies her irresolute self with the sea in motion. Unlike the cross-action of the surge in the simile about Nestor's thinking (Iliad 14.16–19), the attack of the wind and the action of the surf are both seen as mala; the environmental processes are drawn into the orbit of the moral life and receive their moral rating

accordingly. In the end Clytaemestra surrenders herself to the flux: "It is best to follow chance," optimum est casum sequi (144). Thus pain, terror, jealousy, lust, conscience, anger, and hope are, like the bodies in which they are experienced, made over into functions of winds and flames and waves. They are struck and pressed and floated and piloted as if the only sea and the only fire that counted were those found in the soul. Flux rules supreme; the imbrication of the wavering soul within the tide of waves and winds makes cruel demands upon the self. The Stoic sensibility, regarding everything as impermanent and evanescent, fixes on the present with a frantic and parodic obsession. The Senecan selves and their actions are so often exaggerated and their motives distorted precisely because from a true philosophical vantage point their fixity is illusory, their limitation within the human realm is swept out of court, and the benevolent tolerance that the essayist Seneca and the memoirist Marcus Aurelius call for is, especially for the purposes of drama, not an available option.

Chapter Six
Sickness, Portents, and Catastrophe

utrum poetae Stoicos depraverint an Stoici poetis dederint auctoritatem non facile dixerim; portenta enim ab utrisque et flagitia dicuntur.

Whether it is the poets who have corrupted the Stoics or the Stoics who have given the license to the poets is hard to say. But it is a fact that both of them have things to say that are monstrous and appalling.

This is Gaius Aurelius Cotta speaking, orator, politician, and spokesman for the Academy in Cicero's De natura deorum (3.38.91). The time has come to recapitulate and to expand some of our earlier findings, preparatory to focussing more narrowly on some of Seneca's literary techniques. To begin with, a reminder that the Stoic obsession with contagio, krasis, humors, and sickness has to be squared with the undoubted truth that in their ethical deliberations, undisturbed by questions of cosmology and the natural sciences, the Stoics professed a stiff-lipped optimism, summarized in the famous commandment that the wise man, or the man who aspires to wisdom, or happiness, must seek to homologoumenos zen, to live in harmony.

Interpretations of this prescript differed, but it was commonly understood to mean: to live in conformity with nature.^[1]Idem est beate vivere et secundum naturam: it is the same to live happily and according to nature (VB 8.2); and beata est ergo vita conveniens naturae suae: the life that goes together with one's nature is happy (VB 3.3). The idea of an adaptive health, of an eudaimonia achieved by the proper direction of one's physical and spiritual being, was inherited from the Sophists, whom Plato had criticized for their shallow creed of adjustment. The optimism implied in the notion of a successful adaptation or integration is the principal feature of the power of positive thinking that most people associate with Stoic ethics. The interest of the Stoa in a harmonic order is supposed to be satisfied with the

[1] For the difficulties of the formula "conforming to nature," see White 1979; also Long 1983. In the quotation from VB 3.3 given in the text, the implied tautology of suae immediately raises a difficulty.

thought that even evil actions and their consequences can be understood to fit intelligibly into a context determined by divine nature.^[2] Under such auspices, the perfectibility of man and society takes on the semblance of an accessible desideratum. Hence Seneca's sense, voiced at several points in the Naturales quaestiones, that a contemplation of the cosmic order helps a man to rise above what is base and to be at peace with himself. Again and again we find him saying things like "Nothing is more beautiful or more enduring or better organized than the cosmos" (I proleg. 14); or, earlier in the same section: "The full consummation of human felicity is attained when, all vice trampled under foot, the soul seeks the heights and reaches the inner recesses of nature" (tr. John Clarke).

Seneca is at his most mercurial in De vita beata, especially in chapter 8, where he develops the picture of the intelligent man who lives according to the rules of nature, and therefore happily:

hoc modo una efficitur vis ac potestas concors sibi et ratio illa certa nascetur non dissidens nec haesitans in opinionibus comprehensionibusque nec in persuasione, quae cum se disposuit et partibus suis consentit et, ut ita dicam, concinuit, summum bonum tetigit.

In this manner [sc. by imitating the self-reliance and solidity of the mundus and of the rector universi deus ] there comes into being one controlling power in harmony with itself, a confident intelligence unswayed and unhesitating in its views and perceptions and invulnerable to temptation. When it has taken up its position and ordered its forces and, as it were, rings true, it has achieved its highest good.
(VB 8.5)

The perfectionist optimism of this mood fuels a more abstract utopianism. In De providentia 2.1, we read:

nihil accidere bono viro mali potest; non miscentur contraria.

A good man cannot have any bad happen to him; contraries do not mix.

Seneca knows that the bonus of this platitude belongs to a zero-class; like Hecuba's erroneous calculus of the divisibility of mankind (cf. above, p. 116), Seneca's distinction between good and bad has its justification only in its context—that is, as a stratagem of consolation or circumscribed persuasion. But the context is an insecure foundation for the assurance of the mood. For within a brief space of the same treatise, Seneca says, first, that

[2] Forschner 1981, p. 162.

boni viri . . . non trahuntur a fortuna, sequuntur illam et aequant gradus. Si scissent, antecessissent.

Good men . . . are not pulled along by fortune; they follow her and accommodate their steps to her. If they had known, they would have preceded her.
(5.4)

and

grande consolatium est cum universo rapi.

It is a great consolation to be caught up in the movement of the universe.
(5.8)

It won't do to say that the difference is between fortuna and universum . The words sequuntur and aequant demonstrate that in the former case as well as in the latter we are dealing with the basic Stoic prescript of "living in harmony." But Seneca appears uncertain whether the harmony is to be sought actively or passively; whether we should allow ourselves to be moved and indeed propelled by the rhythm of the universe, or whether we are to seek out ways of insinuating ourselves and our conduct into that rhythm,^[3] a procedure that might well produce unforeseen ripples in that harmony. More than a hint of the risk is shadowed in the lines addressed by the nurse to Hippolytus:

proinde vitae sequere naturam ducem:
urbem frequenta, civium coetum cole.

Thus follow nature as you shape your life:
Go into town, mix with the citizens!
(Phae 481–82)

We are very close here to the worldly melancholy of Pier Hein's jingle:

The road to wisdom?—Well, it's plain
And simple to express:

Err
and err
and err again
but less
and less
and less.^[4]

[3] Grimal (1950, p. 256) comes out on behalf of Seneca's support of an active participation in the harmony.

[4] Piet Hein, Grooks (Garden City, N.Y., 1969), p. 34.

The third choral essay of Thyestes (546–622) clearly exposes the difficulties inherent in the demand to arrange one's life in conformity with nature. The essay sets out in praise of true pietas and true amor:

nulla vis maior pietate vera est.

No force is greater than true affection.
(Thy 549)

Significantly, however, the chorus spends more time detailing the troubled state temporarily remedied by the arrival of harmony, and at the end concludes with lines quoted before, to the effect that there is a constant vying of trouble and calm:

dolor ac voluptas
invicem cedunt; brevior voluptas.

Despair and Joy, each in turn,
Depart; Joy leaves the sooner.
(Thy 596–97)

It is of some interest that amor and pietas have in the progress of the essay been changed into their corporeal-aesthetic analogue, voluptas, in the teeth of the mainstream Stoic effort to keep the moral and the emotional faculties distinct. More important, the soft credo of the impregnability of virtue has been given up for the hard admission that in the world as we know it, pleasure, or joy, or happiness (if this is how we may translate voluptas ) is invariably victimized. If it is true, as Seneca says in one of his consolations, that

quidquid optimum homini est, id extra humanam potentiam iacet,

Whatever is best for a man, lies beyond his power,
(Helv. 8.4)

then nature, or the mundus, or whatever designation we want to use of the context in which we live, carries an intolerable burden. And that burden is both inexhaustible and morally ambivalent. As the chorus of Thyestes, horrified by the messenger's report, asks:

an ultra maius aut atrocius
natura recipit?

Is nature capable of even
Greater horrors?

the messenger replies:

sceleris hunc finem putas?
gradus est.

You think no worse is possible?
This is the prelude.
(Thy 745–47)

In the plays, natura tends to be brought in along with the idea of overthrowing its laws; vertere is the verb usually associated with it. As the ghost of Thyestes says:

versa natura est retro:
avo parentem, pro nefas, patri virum,
gnatis nepotes miscui—nocti diem.

Nature has been subverted:
I have worked damnable confusion, so
Father equals his  father and both the son,
Grandsons turn into sons, and day turns night.⁵
(Aga 34–36)

How should we explain this enormous gulf between the routine command to live in harmony with nature, and the vulnerability, and indeed potential monstrousness, of that nature? Strictly speaking, it makes no sense to distinguish between a natural order and an overturned order; there is, in Seneca's frightening world, no uninfected, unimpaired nature to be inverted. The formulation versa natura est is dictated by the need of language to describe change and process as starting from a standard position.

In Senecan drama, and not only there but also in his essays and letters, men and women reveal themselves to us as sensing bodies, visceral aggregates, constantly in touch with the impulses of a materially conceived environment. The environment is not restricted to the immediate setting of the action. It is a structure of layered levels. Above the locale where the agent is at home or has strayed, we find the successive strata of cosmic mobility, such as the winds, the constellations, and finally the perpetually changing divinities, while below one's feet the subterranean phenomena, which Seneca scrutinizes in the Naturales quaestiones, contribute their own dynamism. The "sympathetic," biochemical, perhaps ultimately alchemical, discovery that everything is part of one body, whose inner tensions generate ever-new configurations, enables Seneca to dramatize men and women in the cross fire of

[5] For similar pessimistic statements about natura, see Thy 745–46, Oed 24ff., 371, 942–43, Phae 176, Phoe 84ff.

their habitat, and at the same time to picture the habitat as colored by human dynamics. Human beings and their world are constantly working on each other under the auspices of contagio and krasis . Together they form the complex known as "nature."^[6]

The Stoic moralist knows that there is no such thing as a limited or moderate flaw. The most negligible frailty is inevitably transformed into gross peccability.^[7] All vices are equal.^[8] The resonance of ethical relations vetoes the quarantine of a merely venial fault. In the fuller and more integrated sphere of experience, in which ethics and physicality mesh, the contagion is compounded. The close proximity and virtual interchangeability of imperfection and agitation and malady and vice is explored in Epistle 75 (esp. 11–12). In that context Seneca labors to keep the sickness (morbus ) of the soul distinct from passion (adfectus ). But the reader senses, and other prose texts verify, that Seneca is here fighting a rearguard action against Stoic radicalism. The preamble of the Fury's speech to the ghost of Tantalus at the beginning of Thyestes is an exemplary text for the inescapable link between passion and transgression:

certetur omni scelere et alterna vice
stringatur ensis; nec sit irarum modus
pudorve, mentes caecus instiget furor,
rabies parentum duret et longum nefas
eat in nepotes; nec vacet cuiquam vetus
odisse crimen; semper oriatur novum,
nec unum in uno, dumque punitur scelus,
crescat.

Be drawn the deadly sword
To every crime upraised, by every hand;

[6] Cf. Segal 1986, p. 99, on natura in Phaedra: "equivalent of reason on the one hand, and of madness on the other." See also John Stuart Mill on "Nature" (1874, pp. 3–65), and August 1975, pp. 246ff.: nature is irrational and monstrous, and the command to follow nature is meaningless. Mill makes no reference to the Stoics, and in fact mentions few philosophers in this, his most pessimistic piece. But see Long 1983, p. 196. Contrast natura as a term for the event of being born, as in Ep. 22.15: "Nature says she brought us into the world without covetousness, without fears, without obsessions, without dishonesty and the rest of the scourges: so leave the world as you entered it." This "localized" understanding of natura, answering conveniently to the optimist strain in popular Stoicism, must be distinguished from natura as the designation for the sum total of physical processes.

[7] Cicero Paradox. Stoic. 3.20; 26. The distinction between emotions, diseases, vices, and crimes proposed by Motto 1970, p. 218, on the basis of Epistles 85 and 116, seems to me excessive. The texts argue or imply a vital continuity between these manifestations of disorder.

[8] Rist 1969, chap. 5.

Of angry passions let there be no end,
No shame of strife; let blinded fury's sting
Prick on their souls; seared by their breath of rage
May parents' hearts grow hard, and endless crime
To children's children draw their impious trail.
No time be given to hate their former crimes;
But let the new in quick succession rise,
Not one alone in each; and may their crimes,
Even while they suffer punishments, increase.
(Thy 25–32)

All the key words are there: scelus, ira, furor, rabies, nefas, crimen, odisse . They are fused in a spirit of precipitancy; one metamorphoses into another in an irresistible rush of malign enlargement, with dire social consequences (32–48) and an eventual infection of the cosmos (48–51). With all this as background—the Fury uses imperatives and jussives, but we understand that what are being presented are the natural expectancies in a sinful world, where libido is triumphant (46)—the particular offenses of Thyestes and Atreus appear merely normal and unsurprising. The tyrant divines in his heart and in his convulsed innards that his misdeeds can, and must, dislodge whole armies of tempests and portents, and that, conversely, the displacement or collapse of the zodiac, so often conjured up in the dramas, will stir up and destroy his own life. But the tyrant is not the only one faced with the incalculable consequences of his nature. The slightest stir of emotion, even with decent figures like Andromache in Troades or Hippolytus in Phaedra, must—and that is the tragic gain of the doctrine of sumpatheia —generate wholesale perdition. In Senecan drama, and the same insights press for recognition also in the essays and letters, there is no room for prudent men or women who manage to dissociate themselves from external ferment, just as there is no room for a nature that is untouched by the turmoils of the human condition.

The ideal of the Stoic saint who stands off by himself or who harmonizes his being with that of the larger world is just that, an ideal, and a blind one at that, in the light of what Stoic science tells Stoic ethics. It is an ideal conceivable only in terms of a partial understanding of what Stoic cosmology mandates. Epistle 85, the document in which Seneca turns on the moderates and rebukes them for their belief that the prudens and imperturbatus (= beatus ) is not entirely without some such affections as sadness, serves as a temporary hardening on the part of an author who elsewhere adopts a more tolerant pose, and who in his dramas turns up the full pitch of affective realism. Hercules'

prayer for peace and regularity (HF 926ff.), that is, for the proper functioning of a lawful nature, is our best evidence for the abortiveness of the hope. As we know from Amphitryon (918–19), Hercules utters the prayer without first cleansing his hands of the blood of Lycus. This smallish ritual reminder is the palpable dramatic means of suggesting the inevitability of pollution, given the frailty of man. The prayer

stet suo caelum loco
tellusque et aether; astra inoffensos agant
aeterna cursus . . .

May heaven, earth, and air
Remain in place, and the everlasting stars
Pursue their paths unchecked . . .
(HF 927–29)

is barely ended before Hercules begins to register the irregularities (939ff.), and the impossibilia are for once made possible: the onset of darkness at noon and the dislocation and re-animalization of the constellation Leo. Amphitryon surmises that Hercules is imagining these horrors. But is not Hercules' vision more authentic than that of Amphitryon? His deeds prove his authority. In any case it is significant that Hercules first experiences his furor in the guise of cosmic convulsions. He describes and lives through a war of the heavens, with himself at the center of it, both seemingly disengaged and, more profoundly, its unmistakable and deeply responsible source.^[9]

The natural consequence of a Stoic concern with the power of contagio is, as we have already seen, the prominence of the theme of sickness. Under the rubric of Stoic science, it does not matter whether the sickness is mental or physical. Seneca uses the language of sickness to talk about virtue and vice:

serpunt enim vitia et in proximum quemque transsiliunt et contactu nocent.

The vices creep along and cross over to anyone within reach and damage him with their touch.

He continues: try to have contact with healthy people, that is, the wise.

[9] The grammar of the passage is unique in that it lacks imperatives, jussives, and questions. Nor is the first person singular of the speaker shunted aside (contrast the phenomena discussed on pp. 177–87). All is descriptive, with the "I" of the speaker freely deployed. Comparatively speaking, one might conclude that Hercules is, at this point, awed rather than overwhelmed or desperate.

Ubi enim istum invenies, quem tot saeculis quaerimus? pro optimo est^[10] minime malus.

Where will you find him for whom we have been looking throughout the centuries? In his place we are content with the one least bad.
(TA 7.3–4)

There is an incongruity here. On the one hand, you may wish to protect yourself against vice by associating with virtuous people; on the other, the best we can hope for is the people who are least vicious. But vice is infectious, so we cannot really protect ourselves. The conclusion is implicit, but unassailable. The linkage of sickness and vice usually prompts a language of compulsion and rapidity: vice is quick, crime precipitous:

Rapienda rebus in malis praeceps via est.

The path of sin is headlong and abrupt.
(Aga 154)

The canons of tonos and krasis, the corporealism, the tenet that cause and effect are action and being acted upon, compel a radical linguistic dynamism and the substitution of violence and speed for more abstract characterizations.

The language in which sickness is reported and described always pays its dues to the sufferings of the body and to the material decomposition of which the sickness is a local symptom.^[11] More than any Roman literary models upon which Seneca might have relied, Epistle 78, on diseases and pains, comes close to the acknowledgment that all human life is a vale of sickness, or, as the astonishing condolence in the Consolatio ad Marciam 11.1 has it:

Tota flebilis vita est. . . . mortalis nata es, mortalesque peperisti. putre ipsa fluidumque corpus et causis repetita sperasti ram inbecilla materia solida et aeterna gestasse?

All of life is lamentable. . . . You are born destined to die; you have given birth to children so destined. Had you hoped, a body corrupt and fluid and buffeted by chance, to bear solid and lasting matter out of weak?

[10] Against Reynolds, I prefer the manuscript reading.

[11] Ep. 53.6ff. distinguishes between physical and mental sickness; with the latter, the worse off one is, the less one knows it. But Ep. 94.17 narrows the gap between the two. See also Segal 1983b, p. 181: Seneca "develops two complementary types of physiological sensations for emotional disturbance: entrapment . . . or implosion on the one hand, and dismemberment, invasion, penetration, or mutilation on the other." Segal illustrates this with extended analyses of scenes from several plays.

Montaigne or the Manichaeans could not have put this more bleakly.

The grounding in sumpatheia further makes for an automatic surge of exponentiality.^[12] Just as in other contexts Seneca favors the emotional effect of increment and amplification,^[13] so disease is not permitted to run on an even keel. In the words of Donne: "Diseases themselves hold consultations, and conspire how they may multiply, and join with one another, and exalt one another's force so" (Devotions, 7th meditation). Everything in the world in which we live pulls together to augment the sicknesses that are our lot. In Oedipus the ghost of Laius considers, but fruitlessly rejects, the alliance of what we would today call air pollution with the criminality of his son (631–33) and promises to the citizens an end to their suffering of

Letum Luesque, Mors Labor Tabes Dolor

Destruction, Pestilence and Death, Distress, Disease, Despair
(652)

if he, the father, can force the son into a cramped and lingering exile. His last line clinches the picture of an errant sinner whose condition is worsened by the hostility of the space in which he is condemned to move:

eripite terras, auferam caelum pater. 

Deny him the land: I'll take away his heaven.
(658)

Vice and crime and sickness know no natural limit; progressive compounding is their God-given mission.

Mittor ut dirus vapor
tellure rupta vel gravem populis luem
sparsura pestis?

Do you have me come
like deadly vapor from the shattered earth
Or like the plague, poisoning the nations?
(Thy 87–89)

[12] Herington 1966, p. 433: "The important word is total ." Cf. Braden 1970, pp. 22f.: "Magnus is an important word in Seneca; after all, the need to perform deeds progressively paulo maiora . . . is an important psychological component of a heroic culture." My own sense is that Herington comes closer to the truth than Braden: the incrementalism of Seneca's dramatic speech is a function, not of the heroic stance, but of the exponentialism of sumpatheia .

[13] For amplification in elementary imagery, see Henderson 1983.

The ghost of Tantalus compares his arrival to the eruption of a volcanic vapor or to the coming of a plague, speaking of the latter as attacking, not men or natives or some similar select body, but populi, whole nations. All the means of amplificatio that Quintilian lists (8.4.3) are copiously employed.^[14] Note Quintilian's mechanism of congeries in Oedipus's lines from Phoenissae:

me fugio, fugio conscium scelerum omnium
pectus, manumque hanc fugio et hoc caelum et deos
et dira fugio scelera quae feci innocens.

Myself I flee, I flee my heart conscious
Of all my crimes; I flee this hand, this sky,
These gods; I flee those heinous crimes that, guiltless,
I have done.
(Phoe 216–18)

The whole speech in which these lines occur reveals both inwardness and an awareness of linkage between the man and the cosmos. The conceit of the possibility of flight—from his own body, from the environment, and from his crimes—merely accentuates the tenacity of the bonds. The graduation from the human body to the cosmic body, from the microcosm to the macrocosm, is itself an example of Quintilian's amplificatory devices of incrementum and comparatio. Epistle 95, the principal text about the insufficiency of precepts, contains a paragraph (19) that implements the devices with a vengeance:

vide, quantum rerum per unam gulam transiturarum permisceat luxuria, terrarum marisque vastatrix. necesse est itaque inter se ram diversa dissideant et hausta male digerantur aliis alio nitentibus. nec mirum, quod inconstans variusque ex discordi cibo morbus est et illa ex contrariis naturae partibus in eundem conpulsa redundant.

See how large a quantity of stuffs designed to pass through one gullet luxury, the despoiler of lands and seas, mixes together. It is inevitable that, in their diversity, they disagree and, once swallowed, strain in different directions and are poorly digested. It is not surprising that the consequence of food at odds with itself is an unsettled condition of ill-health, and that materials forced together from disparate parts of nature refuse to stay put.

In passages like these Seneca comes close to saying that, on all levels of the life we know, there is no health that is not subject to disease and therefore effectively and incrementally diseased.

[14] Cf. also Quintilian 10.5.11: fundere quae natura contracta sunt, augere parva, varietatem similibus, voluptatem expositis dare et bene dicere multa de paucis (my emphasis).

At Phaedra 144 the nurse compares her mistress with Pasiphae and finds her worse:

nam monstra fato, moribus scelera imputes.

Horrors chalk up to fate, crimes to human nature.

This is a disjunction that Senecan drama as a whole does not validate. Nurses and retainers have the mission of laying the groundwork for the truth by temporizing with the kinds of adages that fit more comfortably into the neat maneuvers of consolations and exhortations. The distinction between monstrum and scelus is moot, because monstrum is merely a cosmic augmentation of scelus, and mores and fatum are two comparable ways, even in doctrinaire Stoicism, of talking about the same nexus of causes. Phaedra, in her own choices and dependence, demonstrates the interchangeability of the terms, and the easy ascent from chance peccadillo to universal upheaval. Hotspur's lighthearted commentary is like that of Phaedra's nurse; he wishes to deny all connection between heavenly portents and human experience:

Diseased nature oftentimes breaks forth
In strange eruptions; oft the teeming earth
Is with a kind of colic pinched and vexed
By the imprisoning of unruly wind
Within her womb, which, for enlargement striving,
Shakes the old beldame earth and topples down
Steeples and mossgrown towers.
(1 Henry IV 3.1.27–33)

Glendower is furious at this, and insists:

at my birth
The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes,
The goats ran from the mountains, and the herds
Were strangely clamorous to the frightened fields.
(3.1.37–40)

Glendower's linking of cosmic imbalance with human incident and his sense that that human event (an ominous birth?) is made to reverberate exponentially in a cosmic echo chamber are in tune with many passages in the Naturales quaestiones and, of course, in Senecan drama. For that drama does not content itself with deriving well-defined social or civic consequences from a specific error of judgment or a flaw of character. It does not deal with consequences, but with identities, the identities of error and crime and sickness and passion; and it achieves

its special power by accumulating the identities in a rising curve of terror and despair.

In De beneficiis Seneca draws a picture of the social setting in which good deeds are to be attempted:

Non expectant uno loco vitia, sed mobilia et inter se dissidentia tumultuantur, pellunt invicem fuganturque: ceterum idem semper de nobis pronuntiare debebimus, malos esse nos, malos fuisse, invitus adiciam et futuros esse.

The expectation is not to find vices in one location only; they are quickfooted, hot in pursuit and in flight, as their mutual hostility embroils them with one another. Ultimately we must always pronounce the same judgment about ourselves: that we are bad, have been bad, and, I will add against my wishes, will be bad.
(Ben. 1.10.3)

In such an environment, surely, belief in good deeds must turn out to be as utopian as all of Seneca's dogged assurances about the feasibility of virtue and wisdom. In a world of physicality and krasis, sickness is the norm, and its special mode is aggravation, not relief. There is no gainsaying Alexander of Aphrodisias who summarizes the consequences of what he regards as the Stoic creed as follows:

They must agree that man is of all animate beings naturally the worst . . .; for if men are the only ones who have virtue and vice, and virtue is good, and the other bad, . . . (and if) the majority of men are bad, or rather one or another is fabled to be good, like some wondrous being, rarer than the phoenix of the Ethiopians, but in fact all are bad and act equally badly toward one another . . . and (if) all who are not wise are mad, how can we avoid the conclusion that man is the most miserable of all creatures, and that he has iniquity and madness bound up with him by birth and fate?
(De fato 28.199.11, tr. Bruns)

Enumerare omnes fatorum vias longum est. hoc unum scio: omnia mortalia opera mortalitate damnata sunt; inter peritura vivimus.

It would take too long to tabulate all the ways of the fates. I do know this: all mortal works stand under the curse of mortality; we live among beings destined to die.

Seneca writes on the occasion of the news of the burning of Lyon (Ep. 91.12). But then (13) he catches himself: perhaps Lyon was burnt in order to be reborn for a better fate?

Saepe maiori fortunae locum fecit iniuria.

Deprivation often creates room for a more splendid fortune.

The combustion of the city reminds him of the idea of the conflagration of the world. Some reference has been made to this above, but it must now be brought into the picture on its own.

The Stoic schematization divides world history into immense ages, each of which is terminated by a catastrophe. This happens when the corporeal continuum ceases to allow even momentary consolidations and the whole natural order is reduced to, or exalted into,^[15] homogeneity, after which a new beginning is made. Catastrophe, by fire or inundation, the total dominance of the pneuma in its fiery or fluid state, may be regarded, as it was in the Empedoclean paradigm, as the triumph of harmony or Love over the puny efforts of formative nature and Promethean man. Or the word may be given its modern sense, and signal the total destruction of everything that makes life worth living. In Seneca's writings, both prose and dramatic, catastrophe is a pervasive memory and fear, a thought that colors all thinking about the constitution of the cosmos. It is as if nature in all its functions had catastrophe embedded in it. A proper vision of that nature can only be an apocalyptic one. It casts its shadow over even the most sanguine homilies of consolation and encouragement. In the drama, its imperatives are at the heart of the tragic mood.^[16]

Cornutus, in chapter 17 of his Summary of Greek Mythology, a Stoic document roughly contemporary with Seneca's works, says that the elements are held in tension, and that without this tension the world would collapse in flood or conflagration. Our fragments tell us that from Zeno onward, there was talk of ekpyrosis, conflagration, and palingenesia, regeneration (SVF 1.107, 2.596, 2.1064, and passim). How early kataklysmos, inundation, was added as an alternative materialization of the Weltumbruch is now impossible to tell. But we have already had occasion to discuss the mutual implication of fire and moisture as the material (and vulnerable) avatars of the pneuma .^[17] It is,

[15] Mansfeld 1979 argues that conflagration is the best possible state of affairs. Long (1985, p. 25) comments, perhaps ironically, that "whatever state of affairs obtains at any given moment is the best state as viewed from a divine perspective." Analogous comments are supplied by Seneca in his more sanguine and defensive arguments.

[16] The best recent treatment of the topic is in Long 1985. See also Cancik 1983, p. 261. I have some difficulty, however, with Cancik's reading of regeneration and altera natura as lying within man's power to affect nature.

[17] For this implication, see also NQ 3.13.

therefore, not unlikely that both versions of the catastrophe were available to Stoic writers from the beginning, especially since Plato, in his account of the breaks in world history, had put the major emphasis on great floods (Laws 677a).

Some of Chrysippus's successors came to have doubts about the doctrine of periodic catastrophes, but it remained part of the mainstream of Stoic teaching. The cosmos, it could be argued, is everlasting, but it is wrenched by intermittent crises during which it reverts to its simplest form of pure pneuma or soul, prior to rebuilding its varied somatic constitution. In the course of the period of conflagration, one must conclude, the two kinds of fire, the atechnon, destructive, and the technikon, productive, are subtly re-balanced so as to transform the catastrophe into regeneration.^[18]

The last four chapters of book 3 of Naturales quaestiones are entirely devoted to the final destruction, which Seneca thinks of as a diluvium . He contrasts the quickness and ease of the inundation with the snail's pace of the regeneration:

nihil difficile naturae est, utique ubi in finem suum properat. . . . momento fit cinis, diu silva.

Nothing is difficult for Nature, especially where she hastens toward her end. . . . Ashes are produced in a second; trees take a long time to grow.
(27.2)

He proceeds to describe in detail the progressive deterioration and liquefaction of nature and the human world. The deluge is compared to a conflagration; both set in when God decides that the old must give way and a better world begin. Just as a young man already has the seeds of future senescence within him, so the origo mundi harbors the seeds of its own annihilation. At the end of the inundation, new land and a new human civilization emerge; but

[18] On the two varieties, see von Fritz 1972, p. 108. The distinction goes back to Aristotle Gen. anim. 736aff. A similar distinction would have to be made between destructive and productive moisture. The language of Senecan drama suggests that if Seneca thought along those lines, he believed his age to be moving inexorably toward the moment of destruction. Long (1985, p. 22) argues, against Lapidge (1978; cf. also Lapidge 1979, p. 368, and Syndikus 1958, pp. 76ff.), that the conflagration is a consequence of God's design; "it is not an antecedent which sets constraints in advance on that design." The theological perspective was no doubt paramount in some of the ancient discussions; the fact, however, that many of the fragments are preserved in Philo and the Christian writers must give us pause. I assume that other discussions were framed in purely materialist terms, and it was those, presumably, upon which Lucan and Seneca, in his dramas, drew.

illis quoque innocentia non durabit, nisi dum novi sunt. cito nequitia subrepit: virtus difficilis inventu est. rectorem ducemque desiderat: etiam sine magistro vitia discuntur.

With them, too, innocence does not endure, except while they are new. Soon iniquity creeps in, and virtue becomes difficult to find. Virtue requires a teacher and guide; vices are learned even without a master.
(30.8)

The last three clauses, constituting the end of the book, furnish the more hopeful accents Seneca is always able to muster. But the scenario he has just been describing tells another tale.^[19]

The process of regeneration is regarded as an eternal recurrence. Nietzsche's pessimism^[20] is anticipated by the Stoic belief that the eternal cycle of destructions and rebirths produces carbon copies of the only world and the only history we know. Regardless of any assurance the possibility of regeneration could inspire in the heart of one contemplating the cycle, the impression of the ultimate sterility of the series taken as a whole could not be shrugged off. An awareness of the inescapability of destruction, and of the probable imminence of it in a generation dominated by Nero and his court, was bound to darken the spirits of sensitive writers.^[21] The Stoic doctrine of cosmic catastrophe is in radical conflict with Stoic perfectionism. True, Stoic natural history, like Stoic ethics, is capable of emphasizing more cheerful themes. Stoicism would not have been able to set itself up as an ecumenical philosophy if its advocates had not also tendered the other side of the picture, the belief in the power of reason and in the regularities of nature and the achievability of wisdom and the periodic rebirth of all that is good. But as we scan the writings of the Roman Stoics and watch out for the telltale signs of a deep pessimism, a kind of rogue Stoicism, gnawing away at the strained assertions of a grim confidence, we are not disappointed. To a tragedian, needless to say, this aspect of the Stoic conception of natural history could not be more welcome.^[22]

[19] Other descriptions of or extended references to the world catastrophe are found at Marc. 26.6–7, the end of the essay; Pol. 1, the beginning of that treatise; Ben. 6.22; and elsewhere. Cf. Herington 1966, pp. 439ff., on Seneca's extraordinary visual imagination stimulated by the theme.

[20] But see the interpretation of Nehamas (1985, pp. 149ff.) and chap. 4, n. 51, above.

[21] For the fear of disintegration, see also Henry 1985, pp. 40ff.

[22] For the creative uses in literature of Stoic catastrophe, see Bühler 1964, pp. 26–27, based in part on Regenbogen 1961. Bühler complains that two terms associated with catastrophe, anatrope and diastasis, are not listed in von Arnim's SVF.

The too huge bias of the world hath sway'd
Her back-part upwards, and with that she braves
The hemisphere . . .
(Montsurry in Bussy D'Ambois 5.1.163ff.)

In the plays, the presentiment of cosmic catastrophe is ever available to shape the despair of speakers and choruses alike. Its favorite variant is the collapse of the celestial order, though other versions abound. The fourth chorus of Thyestes (789ff.) offers an exemplary rendition of the ruin of the world. Following the messenger's account of the slaughter, boiling, and eating of the children, the chorus addresses itself to Jupiter and Apollo: day has turned to night prematurely and permanently; is this caused by a new insurrection of the Giants? All stellar normalcy will be abandoned. These complaints are developed with a great display of mythological and astronomical learning. The third and longest section, on the dislodging of the constellations, is cast in the future tense. It is not only the future of apocalypse but, which is the same thing, the future of (scientific) necessity: seeing the enormity of the present crimes, the collapse of the world is inevitable. The chorus's last lines are also their last utterance in the play, anticipating the gruesome climax of the action between Atreus and Thyestes:

Nos e tanto visi populo
digni, premeret quos everso
cardine mundus?
in nos aetas ultima venit?
o nos dura sorte creatos,
seu perdidimus solem miseri,
sive expulimus!
abeant quaestus, discede, timor:
vitae est avidus quisquis non vult
mundo secum pereunte mori.

Have we, above all men, been chosen
To crash beneath a world dislodged?
Is this the final moment of our age?
Pity the fate that gave us life,
Only to lose the sun, or banish it ourselves.
But cease, complaints, and leave us, fear!
Eager for life is he who does not wish
To die as the world around him perishes.
(Thy 875–84)

It is one of the ironies of the conjuring up of the cosmic cataclysm that the speakers pretend they have the option of surviving the general

collapse. In the Hippocratic literature, a vision of celestial disorder is marked down as evidence of insanity.^[23] In the fictive world of the drama, the inflamed rehearsal of the ancient myths transforms madness into commonplace. Each play is, in its way, a dramatization of the final catastrophe, and the actors identify themselves and their speech with that dread reality.^[24]

We started this section with a reference to the burning of Lyon. In De beneficiis (7.27) Seneca finds in the sacking of a city a true image of our existence. In Troades 14–21 the physical horrors of Troy's collapse, climaxing in the billowing of the black smoke, are invoked by Hecuba in a speech redolent of the apocalyptic mood informing even this, Seneca's most Aristotelian play. But echoes of catastrophe are found in a multitude of settings and landscapes. In the second chorus of Hercules Furens (533ff. and 554ff.) the cessation of life is caught in the counterpoint of two worlds, one frozen and one melting. Theseus's description of the entrance to the underworld and the immediate realm beyond it, with its ecology of compressed ventilation (662ff.), combines features of Cocteau and Ovid into a grand design of barrenness. But the prominence of fire, burning, and heat throughout the play is more important.

When Hercules wakes up from his murder-induced blackout, he wants to burn himself (1216ff.). Unless you give me my arms, he says to Theseus (1285ff.), I will use my body to engineer an environmental death that will lead to the collapse of the whole world. The stages of the tirade lead us from conflagration to entombment to the tumbling down of the gods from heaven. Possessed by an exorbitant awareness of the might of his own body even in death, Heracles threatens to convert himself into the lever that will dislodge the center of the universe. Earlier (955ff.), in his madness, the overreacher has stated that he has conquered the earth, the sea, and the underworld; now he must conquer the heavens. He is another Titan, come to battle the gods. The compound effect of these visions of the ruin of the universe is gently anticlimactic. Redde arma, Amphitryon says: "Give him his arms," that is, take Hercules back to where he was before his madness launched him on the road to threatened catastrophe, let him be an ordinary hero of the old, conventional kind. The Stoic science of passion has no

[23] Friedrich 1967, p. 102.

[24] For the function of the vision of cosmic catastrophe in the plays of Garnier, see Frick 1951, p. 6, and passim.

room for such a creature, and so the play ends with a whimper, disengaged from further links with the Stoic outlook on what the rule of the sword must lead to. In the follow-up to Hercules Furens, analogous to the position of Oedipus in Colonus vis-à-vis Oedipus Rex in Sophocles' career, the story ends differently. The third chorus of Hercules Oetaeus (103 1ff.) contrasts the song of Orpheus about the lawfulness and the regularities of the universe with the chorus's own prediction: Orpheus was wrong; the world will go under. The burning of Hercules, now riotously apostrophized, is the hero's strident, if unwilling, reenactment of universal ekpyrosis .

Elsewhere the liquid alternative is given the nod. In Agamemnon, Eurybates' bravura report of the great storm (421–578) carries the central message that the gods, pace the pieties of the second chorus (310–407), are not benign.^[25] The report, the longest in Seneca's dramatic oeuvre—contrast Aeschylus's storm of thirteen lines (Agam. 648–60)—comes at a time when we are looking forward to a meeting between Clytaemestra and Agamemnon, a meeting that is long delayed and in the end held to a very few lines, as if Seneca wanted to outdo even Aeschylus's surprising curtailment of Agamemnon's appearance. Earlier (p. 114) I ventured to see in the violence of the storm an analogue or reformulation of the turbulence in Clytaemestra's shifting heart. Now, coming at the passage from a different angle, it transpires that its signals of cosmic cataclysm are unmistakable, and that this helps to draw Clytaemestra into the vortex beyond her limited station at court. Because the report is unusually revealing, it will be helpful to present a sequential summary of its parts.

First Eurybates details the preparations and the start of the journey home. The winds are mild, the rowing is eager; after a stiffer breeze comes up, the rowing ceases. Twice in this section the narrator dwells on the act of seeing; the sailors take delight in looking back toward the, denuded shore of Troy (435–36 and 444–45). The men aboard exchange memories of the war; dolphins perform their cheerful dances around the ships. Once more the eyes of the sailors are turned back

[25] For the report, see Thomann 1961–69, 2: 467–68, and Tarrant 1976, pp. 248–49, 254–84. Note especially the textual difficulties at Aga 545ff. Though I recognize the seriousness of the objections to the lines as transmitted, I am reluctant to accept the deletions proposed by Tarrant and others. For storms in Lucan, see Morford 1967, chaps. 3 and 4. Cf. also the narrative of a storm, in trochaic tetrameters, in Pacuvius fr. 45 in Ribbeck 1871, pp. 132–33.

(455–59): the sight of land turns uncertain, and only the smoke over Troy remains as a small smudge on the horizon. The day ends; the setting sun is blocked out by a spreading cloud. With the coming of night, there is a roaring and a swelling; the moon and the stars disappear. The winds are in contention with one another; the surf contends with the winds; the sea contends with itself. The sailors cannot see because of the darkness (491–94); in this gloom lightning bolts provide a measure of relief. The contention of winds and seas translates itself to the units of the navy; ships ram and break each other and are sucked down into the deep. Those that continue afloat, their rigging laid low, turn into sites of fear and paralysis. The men envy those who died at Troy, including the Trojan defenders, and in their invocations of the gods they lower themselves (or begin to restore their moral standing) by pleading on behalf of the Trojan prisoners on board. But the gods turn a deaf ear to their prayers. Pallas attacks with her father's thunderbolt; twice she strikes the remarkably resistant Ajax, son of Oeleus, who becomes charged with the radiance of lightning and distributes the blinding luminescence all over the sea. A hateful vessel briefly filled with the shining power of the goddess, he delivers himself of a gloating speech, claiming to have defeated sea and fire and heaven and Pallas herself, just as earlier he had vanquished not only the Trojans but the gods standing by their side. But as he challenges Jupiter to oppose him, Neptune dislodges him and hurls him into the sea. Those who yet survive are faced with a final, man-made obstacle. Nauplius, the father of Palamedes, who had been stoned to death by Greek trickery, sets misleading flares as the ships approach Euboea. Further units of the fleet are run up on the rocks or scattered. Only the dawn brings a subsidence of the horror, and

postquam litatum est Ilio, Phoebus redit
et damna noctis tristis ostendit dies.

The recompense for Ilium complete,
Phoebus returns, and daylight shows the losses
Of the funereal night.
(Aga 577–78)

As the light of day, and natural sight, return, the disaster is interpreted as a sacramental offering, a libation, on behalf of Troy. Eurybates, a herald and thus a man of international sympathies, is the proper person to propose such an interpretation, which helps Clytaemestra, for

the moment, to acquiesce in her husband's return, itself further delayed, with dire consequences for Clytaemestra's mood, by the arrival of Cassandra and her retinue.

The storm sequence of Agamemnon, with its violent play of fire and water and its melancholy notices of the feebleness of sight (the dramatic equivalent of reason), is the most emphatic illustration of our claim that the catastrophe of cosmic conflagration and inundation is deeply embedded in the structure and mood of Senecan drama. Only the great messenger speech announcing Hippolytus's undoing (Phaedra 1000–1114) comes close to it in its sounding of the apocalyptic overtones of the threat of the deep.^[26] There, the storm from which the death-bringing monster emerges is entirely the sea's, without the help of sky or winds, aimed not at ships but at land. The tidal wave and the apparition put all to flight, save Hippolytus, who prepares to fight them but is undone, in a series of segmental stills, by his own horses. The monster, a huge bull with a tail borrowed from Vergil's Scylla, is accorded a minutely particularized portrayal (1035–49), whose details might strike us as comical if we were not reminded of those other apocalyptic beasts from the water, behemoth and leviathan, and their messages from another god who has the power to destroy and create. The beast is both bull and dragon, a specimen of krasis whose dire unity can, in obedience to the linearity of speech, be suggested only in agglutinative fashion. The sculptured meticulousness of the description of the monster, with its varied pigmentation and its hybridization of land and sea, adds its own force to a scene that enacts a world out of joint and hastening toward dissolution.

Finally, we might mention a special development of the topos of celestial disarray that Seneca builds into Thyestes (789–884): the retrogression of the sun. The chorus addresses Sol: Why have you left your path? and follows this up with a monumental inventory of astronomical debacles. On several other occasions Seneca brings in the motif of darkness at noon as an orchestration of tragic catastrophe.

[26] Cf. Pratt 1971 and Segal 1984 for a comparison of the treatments of the death of Hippolytus in Seneca, Ovid, and Euripides; see also similar sunkriseis in Heldmann 1974, Friedrich 1967, and esp. Fuhrmann 1968, whose pp. 46–49 are unusually helpful. In Seneca Segal stresses the impersonality, the expansiveness, and the remoteness of what in Euripides is controlled, personal, even familiar. Segal's account of Seneca notes the "spirals of increasing violence and intensity," and the "baroque" effects of "overwhelming massiveness, agitated and decentered movement, disorienting vastness, and emotional turbulence."

Here the dramatist has the chorus catalogue all the particularities of such a cosmic upheaval. The Götterdämmerungspsychologie is supported by a host of questions and predictions about what the reversal of the sun will mean for the rest of creation, particularly for the signs of the zodiac. The invocation of the sun, the father of all, is located between the description and the dramatization of the ghastly meal. It is a choral reaction to the viciousness of Atreus's sacrifice, and serves to hold the climax before it is capped by the presentation of Thyestes devouring the flesh of his children. Taken by itself, the choral essay may be regarded as a particularly grating species of "learned" verse, of the kind of poster art that propels itself at needless length on a minimum of artistic inspiration. At a later point in this essay I hope to be able to show what the motivating factors of such a procedure are. Here it is worth pointing to the mythological antecedents that lie behind this version of the topos of the solar reversal.^[27]

As we know from other versions of the sun's change of course, it was an important part of at least one strain of the tale of the sons of Pelops, where it may have been associated in some fashion with the dynastic talisman of the golden ram. It is referred to in three of Euripides' plays (Electra 726ff., Iphigenia Taur. 816, Orestes 1001ff.). Scholars differ on the role the reversal played in the tradition of the quarrel between Atreus and Thyestes, and whether the reversal was conceived as a temporary portent, cancelled when the fraternal quarrel came to an end, or whether it initiated the present trajectory of the sun, which prior to that event had always risen in the west.^[28] That even the ancients were confused about the nature and the purpose of the reversal in the legend of the Pelopids is clear from the scholia, and from treatments of the story in the handbook of mythology that goes under the name of Apollodorus (Epit. 2.12) and in Philoponus's sixth-century commentary on Aristotle's Meteorologica 345a13ff.^[29] A scholion on Euripides' Orestes 812 informs us that in Sophocles' lost Thyestes the sun retrogressed out of disgust at the grisly banquet, and it is hard to resist the conclusion that in this case Seneca followed in Sopho-

[27] Cf. Mayer 1936, pp. 667–70.

[28] Hübner 1976; Rosinach 1978; Biehl 1975, and Di Benedetto ad locum. The views of the critics are in part guided by similar accounts in Herodotus 2.142 (four reversals in the course of the 11,340 years since Egypt had her first kings), and Plato Politicus 269aff.

[29] Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca 14, pt. 1, ed. Hayduck (Berlin, 1901), 102.1–3.

cles' footsteps. Ovid's virtuoso drama of the fall of Phaethon (Metam. 2.161–271), itself based on a number of famous models,^[30] includes an upheaval of the constellations and a conflagration of the earth, especially the mountains and the water courses, and of the whole cosmos. Ovid's Sun-god is not so much reversed as temporarily driven off course. But from Aristotle (op. cit. ) we know that the so-called Pythagoreans explained the origin of the Milky Way as the path taken by a star that fell on the occasion of Phaethon's mishap. Summing up, we may say that ancient traditions about the sun changing its course were closely linked to notions about the possibility of a Weltumbruch, that Seneca avails himself of this link in featuring the motif, and that it strengthens the part ekpyrosis plays in the mood and the texture of his plays.

Both the golden ram and the retrogression of the sun have been called portents or prodigia, unnatural and counternatural events or apparitions boding disaster. Could it not be argued that the well-attested Roman fascination with prodigia^[31] is sufficient to explain Seneca's partiality to the disturbing materials discussed in this chapter? Does not Ovid's accomplished manipulation of monstra point in the same direction? Among the prodigia Julius Obsequens, probably in the fourth century of our era, compiled from his reading of Livy, we note a hail of stones, torches falling from the sky, heaven and the sea in flames, fire-breathing bulls, a two-headed pig, a three-headed ass, a five-legged horse, a horse-legged sheep, an elephant-headed boy, a celestial chorus, and multitudinous other monstra . The scrambling together of cosmic disturbances with minor biological freaks is significant. Seneca has little interest in the smallish sports of nature with which Roman priests liked to busy themselves. One or two further differences might be noted. Prodigia, as understood in the public lan-

[30] Aeschylus's Heliades, Euripides' Phaethon, Lucretius 5.397ff.; cf. Bömer 1969, pp. 220ff. Equally relevant, perhaps, are the tragic trimeters from Accius's Brutus cited by Cicero De div. 1.22.44 ( = fr. 1 in Ribbeck 1871, pp. 283–84), reporting a dream of Tarquinius Superbus's: a herdsman brings a herd of beautiful sheep and picks out two rams of which he, the dreamer, sacrifices one; the other ram attacks him, and as he lies wounded on the ground, he beholds a marvellous sight: the sun is on a new course, from west to east. Later the dream is interpreted: it presages a popular uprising.

[31] See Luterbacher 1904; Händel 1959; Bloch 1963; Schmidt 1968. Cf. also Grassmann-Fischer 1966. A few passages in Senecan drama, such as Manto's report at Oed 314ff., are in conformity with prodigia texts. Luterbacher thought he could recognize in the relevant passages of Livy a "Prodigienstil, " marked by series of polysyndeta and asyndeta, which might perhaps go back to pontifical lists. If so, Seneca's own style does not seem to me to be indebted to it.

guage of Roman religious life, were thought to antedate, to threaten, a misfortune still in the future. More important, the omen could be averted; it was the task of the priests to recognize the meaning of the signal and to carry out an expiation or lustration to neutralize the threatened effect.^[32]

True, in the popular consciousness such neutralization, in bonum vertere, was probably looked upon as unlikely. The superstition that certain signs are inevitably followed by the calamities they herald is deeply rooted in human thought, both primitive and sophisticated.^[33] It is the sequentiality, the temporal relation between omen and ruin, that constitutes the chief difference between superstition and the fear of prodigia, on the one hand, and Seneca's dramaturgy of cosmic sickness, on the other. It is significant that at about the time when prodigia ceased to have a standing in public policy, Cicero (De divin. 2.58) attempted to provide non-religious explanations for what others regarded as prodigia . Bloodied images of the gods, for instance, do not presage anything, he argues, but are one symptom of the contagio terrena, of the natural proclivity of terrestrial nature to mix it up. Thus Cicero breaks the sequential code and insists on the autonomy and parity of all such phenomena. If they are symptoms, they do not foreshadow, but combine with other symptoms to reflect the existence of a larger condition of frailty and indisposition. Cicero's allowance for a pathology of nature is undeveloped. Ovid develops it further, with special and, in part, humorous emphasis on the transmogrifications an integrated, but labile, nature makes possible. Seneca's dramatic work offers the most generous exploitation of these insights, buttressed by the Stoic belief in a world both compacted and fluid, bearing within it the seeds of its destruction.

[32] Händel (1959) argues that with the advent of Augustus public attention to prodigia ceased almost entirely, though we know from Tacitus and others that the people continued to fear them.

[33] For German and French compilations of prodigia, many of them deriving from Polydorus Vergilius's De prodigiis (1526), see Schenda 1962

Chapter Seven
The Rage to Embrace Nature

Some years back Hugh Kenner published an elegant volume entitled The Stoic Comedians about Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett, three writers of epic each of whom, Kenner argues, attempts in his own fashion to prepare an exhaustive inventory of the environment.^[1] In the case of Flaubert Kenner goes, predictably, to the two collectors Bouvard and Pecuchet, with their tapeworm lists of data and events. In Flaubert's distancing and ironizing treatment, the lists get the better of their originators. The rhythm of the enterprise is that of a cold-storage plant; the dynamism of the natural life is stultified in the interest of progressive completeness and seriality. In Joyce's Ulysses, the collector's work is quite different. The world of Dublin is turned into a living encyclopedia, but the impetus in charge is lyrical. There is little doubt of the intimate, vital, though not unironical, relationship between the heroes of the story and the myriads of details absorbed into their lives. In Beckett's novels, on the other hand, the task of the collector becomes the task of clearance. The paralysed hero, stripped of any trace of agility or intensity, ticks off the fragments of an inert world with a view to attaining emptiness and silence. All three authors, Kenner argues, attend to the variety and the copiousness of the world around us. They, or their characters, for their own moral or aesthetic satisfaction, endeavor to master the riotousness of nature, or to make it part of themselves. And that, Kenner believes, is the comedy of their Stoicism.

Perhaps Kenner was influenced by Wilhelm Dilthey, who, more than any other intellectual historian, has insisted on the Stoic legacy in

[1] Hugh Kenner 1962. It should be said that Kenner's slant on Stoicism is entirely different from the one argued in this essay: "The Stoic is one who considers, with neither panic nor indifference, that the field of possibilities available to him is large perhaps, or small perhaps, but closed. Whether because of the invariable habits of the gods, the invariable properties of matter, or the invariable limits within which logic and mathematics deploy their forms, he can hope for nothing that adequate method could not foresee. He need not despair" (p. xiii). For Kenner, the Stoic works like a laboratory technician.

the modern interpretation of the world in which we live and of its history.^[2] Of the Stoic contributions, from Chrysippus to Posidonius and beyond, to the exploration of the various domains of the natural world there can be no doubt.^[3] From Varro to Nigidius Figulus and A. Cornelius Celsus, the Roman encyclopedists worked in the tradition initiated by Chrysippus and his followers. The elder Pliny's Natural History is, in many of its formulations, a transmitter of Stoic research,^[4] largely based on the work of Posidonius, though also indebted to many other scientists. The inclusiveness of that research, stretching all the way from psychology and zoology and aesthetics to the study of the moon's phases, would in Seneca's day have been recognized as Stoic rather than representative of one of the other Hellenistic schools.^[5]

In any event, Kenner's model of the Stoic inventory, the rage to control nature by means of catalogues and serial logging, is a valuable contribution. In the novelists he discusses, it is the characters who devise the lists and itineraries in measuring themselves against their surroundings. With Seneca, the incorporation of man into an enumerative lexicon of the world is a necessity of the genre. a characteristic of Stoic tragedy. Or, to put it in another way, in Seneca the triumph of the extended syllabus is so overwhelming that the agent surrenders his role as enumerator (or discarder) and is himself pulled into the whirlpool of the inventoried universe. It is a universe in which he is both at home and an alien. Cataloguing is his strategy of distancing and familiarization. With his catalogues, the threatened hero declares both his control and, more profoundly, his capitulation before the enormity and the changeableness of that which he cannot master because he is an inseparable part of it and it is part of him. The meteorological and celestial systems spin their cycles through the resistant souls of Hercules and Atreus and Medea.^[6] Humanity and its environment can no longer be said to confront each other. In the face of the threat of cosmic imbrica-

[2] Dilthey 1960.

[3] But see Dihle 1986: among the Stoics, the sciences are not epistemai, authoritative knowledge, but useful parts of the propaedeutic that feeds into philosophy proper.

[4] Kroll 1951, p. 301. Cf. also Kroll 1930 and Sallmann 1975, who emphasizes Pliny's eclecticism but also characterizes the mixture of science and popular philosophy as "letztlich Stoisch ."

[5] Cf. now the recent attempts to demonstrate the importance of Stoic science in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century philosophy and science: Shapiro 1974; Schmitt 1978; Barker and Goldstein 1984.

[6] Cf. Segal 1983b.

tion, of all being in all, the catalogue furnishes the poet with a saving grace, with the chance of maintaining a seeming separation and a working transparency.

The generic pressure exacts catalogues from both choruses and individual speakers.^[7] Catalogues are, of course, an ancient literary legacy. From Homer's familiar checklists of troops and clothing and lines of descent to Aeschylus's roll calls of barbarian leaders in Persae and beyond, the device of the inventory, both choral and monologic, had served a variety of purposes. But in the earlier traditions the catalogue had been, if not incidental, at least sufficiently isolated to be savored in its place, as a move of retardation or climaxing. In Seneca no such specialization is in evidence. Senecan dramatic language realizes itself most fully in the catalogue. One might go so far as to say that the catalogue is the principal building material of the drama.

But the catalogue also forms a grave obstacle to the shaping of a dramatic structure in need of tension, mass, and weight. For each item in the catalogue strains against its neighbors as if it were the only one that counted. In their togetherness, the assembled units crowd against one another and defy the expectation of hierarchic shapeliness. To quote Hannah Arendt:

The collector's passion . . . is not only unsystematic, but borders on the chaotic, not so much because it is a passion as because it is not primarily kindled by the quality of the object—something that is classifiable—but it is inflamed by its "genuineness," its uniqueness, something that defies any systematic classification.^[8]

In Seneca's examination of the vastness of nature, the fluidity of that nature chokes off the instinct for classification. The passion of the speakers puts the emphasis where Arendt says it belongs: on the unique particulars, the fleeting objects snatched from the vortex and exhibited in the rolling registers of the Senecan tirade.

In the preface to the third book of Naturales quaestiones (5–7) Seneca says that it is better to study nature and ethics than to write of the exploits of kings and nations; it is better to study the future rather than the past. The figures upon whom on this occasion he turns his back are Alexander, Philip, and Hannibal. In the tragedies, however,

[7] The topics dealt with in choral catalogues are conveniently surveyed in Cattin 1963a.

[8] Benjamin 1969, p. 44.

he trains his sights upon legendary heroes who are cut from the same cloth as Alexander and Hannibal. The truth is that neither in his treatises and letters nor in his dramas does he concern himself with either the future or the past. Both of them come in as auxiliaries to support the principal focus, which is entirely upon the here and now, in the form of either a despotic present or an equally burdensome philosophical generality. Together they make up an aggregate vision that ties in with every facet of the Stoic scientific tradition. The catalogues are the indispensable instrument of that vision.

The system of coordinates turned to profit by the essayist and poet to install his inventories extends both vertically and horizontally. Rather than ticking off the textual evidence in laborious detail—no one who has studied or, better, recited the dramas can have missed the vehemence of the protracted inventorying—it will be useful to summarize the copiousness of this dimensional expanse. The vertical perspective is announced at the beginning of book 2 of the Naturales quaestiones: Seneca proposes to divide cosmology into the three strata of coelestia, sublimia, and terrena: the things in the heavens, the things more directly above us, and the things on earth. The division and the particulars are explained in what follows. In the drama the stretch of verticality is at least as wide as it is in the books on natural science. It spreads from Jupiter and Apollo in their Olympian heights to the gloomiest specters of lowest Tartarus. Between these supernatural termini, important to the Stoics, with their attachment to traditional religious credence, lie the zones that interest the scientists: the astral vault studied by the astronomers; the winds and the atmospheric phenomena of the meteorologists; the geographers' surfaces of land and sea, along with the plants and the beasts surveyed by the biologists; and, finally, everything that is located below the surface of the earth, investigated by experts in matters of mining, earthquakes, and the conjuration of the ghosts. Medical and psychological concerns also find their way into the registers; they too come under the rubric of the vertical articulation of spatial plenitude.

Horizontally, the fullness of experience is gathered along a historical axis, extending from the distant past to the cataclysmic future, via mythology and historiography and sociology and eschatology, with lists of notorious ancestors and their exemplary misdeeds, and anticipations of future disasters endemic in the Stoic dogma of cosmic periodicity. Compressed between the frightful past, with its litany of he-

roic crimes, and the horrors of the future, the mundane present (that is, the Roman reality) leads a meager and fitful (but equally cadastral) existence, shadowed despairingly in the choral essays and in the inferences to be drawn from the pronouncements of the characters. As I have said, both past and future are, dramatically speaking, drawn into a larger, non-topical present. Medea, Oedipus, and Lycus are with us now just as overwhelmingly as is the doomsday of ekpurosis . But as we scrutinize the reign of the catalogue in Seneca's art, diachrony helps us to sort out the materials.

Some catalogues are severely limited dimensionally and in their field of speculation. The drama of the collapse of the zodiac (Thy 844ff.) lists, in unrelenting sequence, the various disorderly motions of fully fifteen constellations and their major stars. More typically, verticality and horizontality are, in obedience to krasis, combined into compound structures. Astronomy and mythology, history and meteorology, anatomy and apocalypse support one another.^[9] Jointly they form ensembles of references cited by the Senecan enumerator, or engulfing him in the moments when he feels himself going under. The Stoic tragedian, building his characters into an imposing network of environmental causes and restraints, has that network express itself in vast tallies of personal and contextual associations. On several occasions, for instance, Seneca pictures somber groves in which the portrayal of human trepidation or villainy is enlivened with catalogues of trees. Oedipus 530ff. names cypress, oak, laurel, linden, myrtle, alder, and pine to anticipate the horrified response of the woods and the whole earth to the success of the necromancy, itself liberally endowed with catalogues enumerating the legendary troops of hell (585ff.). The cursed copse in which Atreus is reported to be performing his heinous business (Thy 650ff.) is similarly alive with a particularized awareness of the data of the environment. Elsewhere Seneca chronicles great maritime undertakings, in which history, mythology, geography, and meteorology combine to form aggregate scenarios.^[10] In his Epistles Seneca

[9] Compare the analogous phenomenon in Posidonius's work studied by Schmidt (1980).

[10] Cf. the elder Pliny NH 2.167–70. For geography, see also Cattin 1963b. Walter (1975, p. 26) speaks for the majority of scholars when he talks of the "unnatürliche Vielzahl " of the items in a Senecan geographical catalogue, and of their Alexandrian ostentation of learning and their "klanggewaltiger, pathetischer Sprach- und Versprunk ." Walter's further notion (p. 146) that the geographical catalogues reflect the ideas of peace, leisure, and security seems to me remarkably shortsighted.

deprecates journeying: animum debes mutare, non coelum; change your spirit, not the locale (28.1).^[11] But he continues, not insignificantly:

licet vastum traieceris mare, licet, ut ait Vergilius noster, "terraeque urbesque recedant": sequentur te quocumque perveneris vitia.

Though you manage to cross a vast ocean, though, in the words of the great Vergil, "lands and cities vanish in the distance," your vices will accompany you wherever you stop.

And he secures the authority of the warning with a reference to Socrates' notorious reluctance to leave the limits of the city. In the Greek dramatic tradition, choruses frequently express the wish to fly from the scene of suffering or horror before them, a wish necessarily aborted by the convention that the chorus remain in place. In Seneca escape from suffering is equally futile, and where he features a change of scene, as in the dramatic catalogues of sea voyages, the vitia return us, as it were, to the point of departure. It is not that the vices accompany the Argonauts and the expedition to Troy across the waters; rather, the voyages are a confirmation of the voyagers' fallibility, and the stages of the journey, painstakingly catalogued along with the mythological motives that prompted them, duplicate the rungs on the ladder of their decline.^[12]

For Marlowe it has been demonstrated that all the journeys of Tamburlaine and his friends were planned, route by route and place by place, on one of the best atlases available, the Theatrum orbis terrarum (1584) of Ortelius.^[13] And, characteristically, the journeys planned are not in England or nearby France, but in distant Africa and Asia during a bygone age. Likewise, Seneca's geographical lists rarely touch on Italy. But the maps on which he relied were not those of the cartographers. They were the creations of the mythographers and the poets who drew on the myths, reinforced by the imperial propaganda of conquest and colonization, and by the common belief that heaven and hell may be reached if only you travel far enough.

At Troades 814ff. the catalogue of Greek destinations awaiting the Trojan captives is in some ways much like that of a Greek dramatic chorus; it is in fact an analogue to Euripides' Trojan Women 205ff.,

[11] Cf. also TA 2.13,and Lipsius 1939, bk. 1, chaps. 2–3.

[12] I suspect that the prominence of journeys and cosmography in Marlowe's dramatic work derives from similar impulses.

[13] Boas 1940, pp. 88ff.

though the initial question, Quae vocat sedes? Where shall we be going? echoes another Euripidean passage, Hecuba 444ff. Thirty-three destinations, the Senecan count, constitute a series long enough to try anyone's patience, and the form, an insistent cannonade of questions (is this where they are going to take us?) underlines the artificiality of the exercise. Here the challenge of flagging the totality of the Greek world, starting in the northeast and ending with the southwest, appears to have proved irresistible to Seneca. Still, the essay conveys an obvious message of man's inhumanity to man. And that message is further darkened by the skilful dovetailing of gloomy mythological memories and ritual references, by derogatory comments on many of the sites listed, and above all by the language of variability and hatred and ruin—of Pleuron virgini inimica divae, a foe of the virgin goddess; Pelion where Chiron ingentes acuebat iras, kept whetting the immensity of his wrath; restless Euripus; and the various localities vulnerable to the winds—that marks this characteristic passage. The choral essay is, in this instance, all catalogue and nothing else. The Aeolic meters of the sequence, largely sapphics and a few irregularly placed adonics, add their own formal irony to an inventory that allows no scope for the sentiment with which sapphics were originally identified.

The third chorus of Medea (579ff.) finds the odium of a wife spurned more devastating than flame, wind, thunderbolt, the violence of the east wind, the Danube and the Rhône in full spate, and the snows melting on Haemus. For each of these comparisons a literary antecedent could easily be found; the pastoral source of the last item is obvious. It is their linkage in a compound catalogue that counts. The construction is skilful. Of the briefly cited entities at the start of the catalogue—fire, wind and water, the hurled bolt—the central meteorological items are subsequently expanded into the tabulation of a specific wind and specific rivers. The disarray and the destructive power of the several meteorological and geographical entities are brought into the compass of Medea's growing passion. The catalogue then modulates into an essay on excessive deeds that invite divine punishment: the first maritime undertaking, the astral tripping of Phaethon, Erysichthon's (?) despoliation of the groves of Pelion, and, finally, the voyage of the Argo (cf. also Med 301ff.), a crowning expansion of the motif of dangerous waters, with eight of the participants listed as the deserving victims of their own folly, and four additional sufferers, only loosely connected with the crew, brought in to round off the roll

call of legendary characters who have found themselves at odds with the natural order. That is the viewpoint of the chorus, timid women who fear for their mistress. Within the larger scheme of the play, the effect of the multiple catalogues is to weave Medea's purpose into a world experienced on a plurality of levels and to emphasize the integration of the human and the cosmic. In this mosaic of sumpatheia and contagio, the ostensible theme of divine punishment is lost from sight.

The nurse's catalogue of the sources from which Medea obtained her poisons (Med 670ff.), followed by Medea's invocation, in her own voice, of the hellish powers, combines geography with the exotica of botany and zoology. Moreover, this exercise in the importation of farflung resources is said, at the start (674), to be a maius monstrum, a greater demonstration of prodigious power, than an earlier exploit in which Medea had merely attacked the gods by pulling down heaven to her level. From the perspective of the exploitation of sumpatheia, reaching into the furthest corners of the known world for the horrors of a witch's brew is indeed a greater achievement than the mere act of joining heaven and earth, a juncture given in the very premises of Stoic cosmology.

Once again, Seneca's catalogue is based on an Ovidian model, Medea's elaborate arrangements for the rejuvenation of Aeson (Metam. 7.179ff.). In the Ovidian account her preparations include a real journey, lasting nine days and nine nights, to the various districts whose simples she needs, just as later, after the death of Pelias, she is shown travelling long distances to escape to Corinth. Seneca's version is distinguished by the feature that Medea does not travel; from the command station of her penetrale funestum, her sanctuary of death, she unfolds her powers and calls upon the various regional ingredients to come to her of their own volition. As the nurse describes it, and as Medea refers to her past successes in overturning the laws of nature (752ff.), Medea's conjuration of the noxious powers of the earth is an execution, in performance, of that rage to control the cosmos in which we have recognized the dramatic equivalent of the Stoic scientific impulse. Toward the end (817ff.) mythology is brought in, in the shape of Prometheus, Hephaestus, Phaethon, Chimaera, the Colchian bull killed by Jason, and Medusa, to invest the caustic agent in the gift for Creusa with polygenetic potency.

The prologue of Phaedra falls under the same heading. Medea's

combinatory magic carries the stamp of ugliness and monstrosity; Hippolytus's call upon his huntsmen to spread out is designed to provide a foil of confidence and cheerfulness against which to read the subsequent disasters. The catalogue of the localities where the men are to do their hunting stretches across northern Greece, and, with an invocation of Diana, goes transoceanic. It might be argued that the old Greek tension between natural peace and the bloody implications of hunting is alive here also. On the whole, however, the spirit of joy prevails. The summons gives us the picture of a young man's mind, free and vital and untainted, happy in the beauty and the variety of a world to be tracked. The address is preposterous only if we apply to it the standards of a realism that would run afoul of any theatrical standard save that of the cinema. The expansive run-down of the various kinds of hounds going after their specific prey, of the different weapons and techniques used by the huntsmen, and of the Attic demes most promising for the pursuit of game, followed by the invocation spelling out Diana's power over a multitude of regional beasts: all this is orchestrated to suggest a nature to be grasped, a nature that appeals with its color, diversity, and sheer physical impact. Hippolytus, too, is a Stoic comedian, another Balbus, eager, not only to take inventory, but to conquer an environment that appears to open itself up to him with the help of the divinity. We are here closer to Joyce than to Flaubert or Beckett; the impulse is one of panoramic lyricism. Dramatists like Hardy and Claudel have worked in the same medium.

The eventual spuriousness of the sense of security and well-being implied in Hippolytus's hunting summons is brought out fully, if briefly, in the geographical chart of Hercules' last speech, a series of questions at the conclusion (1321ff.) of Hercules Furens . In spite of the offer of hospitality extended by Theseus, Hercules knows that his grand adventure in conquering nature has failed. The awareness of that failure awakes in him, for one last time, the old pattern of geographical itemizing, both as an expression of the hopelessness of the ambition, and, perhaps, as a signal of submission. The rhetoric is interrogatory; but the influence of Theseus, that rare Senecan figure, a man capable of moderate emotions and not sickened unto crime or self-destruction, helps Hercules, and us, to disregard the questions and convert them into an appeal for shelter and a possible salvation. The catalogue ends delicately with a hidden reference to Attica, the traditional refuge and cleanser of sinners. Nevertheless, Hercules, mythol-

ogy teaches us, was not to be its beneficiary. The mood of Hercules is more persuasive than that of Theseus.

Contrast the earlier report of Hercules' journey through the underworld, delivered by Theseus in conversation with Amphitryon (658–829), and anticipated in the second chorus (524–91). The choral passage offers us the contrasting of two worlds, one heroic, occupied by Hercules, and one musical, the domain of Orpheus.^[14] The two worlds are one, seen from different vantage points; they are both Hades, once visualized as the frozen north, and again conceived of as a region of vapors and melting fusion. From Theseus's later rhetorical masterpiece (762ff.),^[15] we can take it that in this play Hades stands for the world as a whole. Hercules' harrowing of Hell is a grim recapitulation of all the travels that have filled his working life. As John Herington and others have seen, this Baedeker tour through the various stations of the underworld is not an interminable display of misplaced topographical virtuosity but an extended surrogate account of what Hercules is and stands for, and thus, especially in the overcoming of Cerberus, a doublet of the multiple killing that is to follow.^[16] Its position before the murders, and its mistakenly triumphal touches

iam nullus superest timor:
nil ultra iacet inferos.

At last all fear is vanished;
There is no world beyond Hades.
(HF 891–92)

are dramatically effective. Its synthesis of infernal topography, Hesiodic-Ovidian personifications of social ills, sluggish streams and gloomy swamps, mythological exempla of rewards and punishments (with the punishments receiving the lion's share of attention), and the spectral appearance of the various monsters previously vanquished by the hero, climaxing in the confrontation with the generously polymorphous Cerberus, a trivialized equivalent of Hippolytus's sea monster: all these details work together, by a process of coextension, to acquaint us with what it means to be a traditional hero in a Stoic uni-

[14] Cf. Segal 1983a.

[15] A good analysis may be found in Dingel 1974, pp. 121ff.

[16] Herington (1966, p. 199) takes issue with T. S. Eliot 1927. Cf. also the mixed feelings of Lessing concerning Theseus's report: "Endlich aber . . . fängt er eine lange und prächtige Beschreibung an, welche an einem jeden andern Orte Bewunderung verdienen würde" (Lessing 1890, p. 179; my emphases).

verse that closes itself off to the sectarian bidding to live in harmony. Just before the catalogue of criminals in Hades begins, there is a transitional maxim:

sanguine humano abstine
quicumque regnas: scelera taxantur modo
maiore vestra.

You who wield power do not
Spill human blood; your crimes will be computed
A hundredfold.
(HF 745–47)

The rhythm of Theseus's exposition matches the rhythm of Hercules' story: the quiet detailing of the antechambers and of the judges is analogous to the quiet calm of Hercules' return, before the convulsions of his madness set in. The conquest of Cerberus is the mythological and magical equivalent of the killing of Lycus and, more important, an index of Hercules' murderous nature.

The instances I have cited come under the general heading of geography, though they have much else, especially mythology, mixed in with them. Mythology provides one of the principal horizontal ingredients in Seneca's compound itineraries, especially, but not exclusively, in choral essays. The labors of Hercules (Aga 808ff.), the curse on the Labdacids (Oed 709ff.), Tantalus and his house (Thy 122ff.), and the fates of the Argonauts (Med 579ff.) are ever available to intensify the resonance of the choral contribution. The multiple filiations of the families and the kingdoms of myth are an analogue of the dovetailed cosmos. What is more, Seneca was able to count on an educated audience, on cognoscenti. In cursing the unknown killer of Laius, Oedipus (Oed 260ff.) goes far beyond the discretion of Sophocles and says: may he contract an awful marriage, may he produce disgusting children, and may he kill his parent, and thus do what I have successfully avoided doing! The irony, if such jackhammer obviousness can be honored by that name, is of the winking, conspiratorial kind. Again, Seneca has the knack of combining two or more strands of mythology into meaningful patterns. In the same play, the ghost of Laius is reported to call on the Theban women to conduct their orgies and mutilate their sons:

vibrate thyrsos, enthea gnatos manu
lacerate potius—maximum Thebis scelus
maternus amor est.

Brandish your sacred staffs; and with your hands,
God-driven, tear your sons—in Thebes no crime
Is greater than a mother's love.
(Oed 628–30)

The implied moral of Laius's advice is that Jocasta would not now be in trouble if she had gone the way of Agave.

Often the surface relevance of the legends chosen is questionable. What do the labors of Hercules have to do with the death of Agamemnon and the vision of Cassandra? The initial claim that Hercules, too. is an Argive, and the terminal hint (Aga 865–66) that Hercules once defeated Troy, seem embarrassing in their apparent design to manufacture a makeshift relevance. These substitute linkages may be regarded as sops to conventional expectations of structural tightness. The same is true of the rhetorical ploy of "Why should I mention . . .?" that, in imitation of Greek models, sometimes breaks up the sequential monotony.^[17] The artifices do not deceive; the overriding impulse is one of unapologetic accumulation. Narrow pertinence is, in the spirit of Hannah Arendt's aperçu, sacrificed to a more broadly conceived affinity. Seneca's larger purpose allows a grander frame of reference and the collection of distant materials. In a world governed by sumpatheia, the relevance of precedent is buried under the need for plenitude.

Mythology extends into the paradigmatic past, in the guise of human masks, the wealth of biological life, of cosmology, geography, psychology, and sociology. The bloodthirsty figures of myth, Seneca tells us in an extraordinarily strident paragraph of his prose (Ira 2.35.5), can be used for philosophical purposes, to show up the ugliness of the monster passion, wrath. In Octavia the empress compares herself, to her own disadvantage, to Electra (59); the nurse compares Octavia, Poppaea, and Nero to Juno and Jupiter and his many paramours (201ff.). Later Nero is said to be another Typhon (238). Because Octavia is a fabula praetexta, a historical drama, it can use mythology in a way that is not available to a play about legendary characters. Comparing of one mythical persona with another is not unknown on the Greek stage; but the constant doubling employed in Octavia, clinching the moral standing of a character by means of an identification with a mythical figure and a well-defined legend, is a new and, on the whole, disappointingly constrictive device. The drama-

[17] At HF 386–89, for example, the chorus has four such quid? s.

tist's practice reminds us of Nero's predilection for the acting out of mythical parts; he was famous for his interpretation, or dancing, of the characters of Orestes and Alcmaeon, to flaunt the mythological antecedents (and quasi-justifications) of his own matricide.

It is of interest, however, that even in this new medium the catalogue remains in force. History may be more dreadful than myth; but the full sounding of that dreadfulness is left up to the tried mechanism of the inventory. Thus Octavia goes back to the techniques of Agamemnon, the prologue of which, spoken by Thyestes, "explains" the crimes of the characters who are about to appear by an enumeration of the vices of their progenitors. The richer the inventory, the more forcible the impression that the personae of the present drama cannot help their viciousness. It is the inescapable consequence of circumstances lodged in the past and thus beyond their control. Or, to put it more forcibly, the multiple catalogue helps to establish the plenitude of the destabilization in which the agents of the tragedy are inevitably caught up.

In this respect the mythological catalogue has an effect that runs counter to the supposed aim of the paradigms and maxims discussed in an earlier chapter. Sickness and crime, embodied in powerful and serial precedent, put moral exhortation in the shade, hostage to a large range of literary erudition. The dwelling on the colorful plenitude of a "sympathetic" environment allows the aesthetic to gain a clear ascendancy over the moral. Hence the serial indulgence, the frequent unwillingness to leave well enough alone and to hold the catalogue entries to a decent modicum. A squeamish intelligence, bound to an earlier tradition of decorum and economy, will object to the seemingly endless stringing together of parallels. One may wonder why the Trojan chorus in Agamemnon (670–90) must touch, not only on the legend of Philomela and Procne, but on swans, halcyons, and the priests of Attis, as the captives voice their view that not even the most notorious mourners in mythology and zoology could cry enough to do justice to their and Cassandra's sufferings.

Similar objections may be, and have been, raised to a host of over-extended rehearsals of analogues. When Hercules returns to his country, with Cerberus somehow in tow, he asks Apollo to hide his face so that he, the god of purity and artistic refinement, will not have to look upon the beast (HF 592ff.). Thereafter Seneca has Hercules continue with the same plea to Jupiter, Neptune, and anybody who might be

looking, though the original motive is barely applicable to these more rugged witnesses. This kind of fullness answers to the formulaic "If any god . . ." (of which a fine example occurs in the first chorus of Thyestes [122ff.], with its multiple repetition of si quis . . . ). That invocation combines a geographical catalogue with a learned, because anonymous and periphrastic, list of divinities. The effect is one of great formality. The sentence is long, too long, even self-indulgent; a champion of succinct communication is likely to snort, "Rhetoric!" But it should be remembered that this is the chorus speaking, and the chorus is, traditionally, a ceremonial instrument. What is more, the chorus here has the task of voicing moral outrage at the crimes committed in the house with which they are associated. There is some justice, both in their appeal to a plurality of gods, and in their not naming the easily identified divinities, as if the crimes were such that even the gods ought to be protected from them by a circumvention of their appellative vulnerability.

But consider the remarkable use to which Seneca puts mythological plenitude in Juno's prologue in Hercules Furens . After wondering how the object of her hatred can be defeated, and concluding that Hercules can be undone only by himself:

quaeris Alcidae parem?
nemo est nisi ipse: bella iam secum gerat!

You seek a match for Hercules?
There is none but him; so he must face himself!
(HF 84–85)

she offers an inventory of the hellish powers needed for such a war (and presumably available in Hercules' own heart, as they are in hers): the Furies, Styx, unnamed savage spirits, the goddesses Discord, Crime, Treason, Flaw, Rage, Megaera (one of the Furies, here singled out above the others), and in the end—a shock—Juno herself:

nobis prius
insaniendum est: Iuno, cur nondum furis?

but we must lead
The round of madness. Juno, where is your rage?
(HF 108–9)

In the course of her inspection of all the forces of turmoil located both in the world at large—earth, sea, air, hell, and heaven—and in Hercules' heroic bosom, which are needed to bring about the fall of her

enemy, Juno comes to realize that she is Hercules' clone, and that by activating what is disruptive within her she can ignite the desired process. There is no better passage in Seneca to illustrate the reciprocity, the irrationality, and the transferability of passion. By the same token, the formal use of the mythological inventory gives it the freighted power, the lumbering grandeur, that the Stoic tragedian, like the Stoic comedian, embraces.

That Seneca is in full control of his uses of mythology is shown by such a passage as Phaedra 435ff., the nurse's first speech to Hippolytus, in which an encomium of sex is developed without the slightest recourse to obvious mythological precedent, except for a few allegorical labels—Bacchus, Venus, Mars, Styx—that are part of the language of philosophy as found in Empedocles and Lucretius. When Seneca does "indulge," as he does in the first chorus of Phaedra (274ff.), where the power of love is exemplified in the experiences of Apollo, Jove (as bird and as bull), Diana, Hercules, the Nereids, and a motley collection of animals, the secret lies with this courage to go beyond the bounds of an antiquated decorum, and to let abundance find its own proper limits. The choral series ends upon a note of shocking anticlimax:

quid plura canam? vincit saevas
cura novercas.

No need of more examples; the pain of love
Defeats the hate of stepmothers.
(Phae 356–57)

The last beasts mentioned in the catalogue, the Lucae boves (elephants?), are outdone in their susceptibility to love only by women like Phaedra. Phaedra turns out to be the crowning cap of a protracted and heterogeneous praeteritio on the power of Cupido and Venus .^[18] The amor pleni of the Senecan dramatic style, which finds its fullest expression in the catalogue, is not a mark of willfulness, bad taste, or lack of discipline, but a deliberate shock mechanism in the service of his Stoic commitment. Like the amor pleni of archaic vase painting, Seneca's procedure limns the aggregate nature of a crowded and often gro-

[18] Strictly speaking, Senecan dramatic speech does not recognize praeteritio or priamel, since it lacks unitary referents. The catalogues are selective, even precariously selective, essays in the intimation of total nexus and sumpatheia . Nor, again, is there an art of the encomium, but only a glancing off the immediate (human) focus to the larger environment.

tesque world. The archaic horror vacui was an expression of joy and exuberance; the Senecan fullness carries a very different stamp. The gain in aesthetic variety and cosmic exhaustiveness is also, in the end, a gain in moral insight. Ultimately the moral wins out, not in the shape of exhortation but in the subtler format of the enumerative specification of horror.

One difficulty with this approach to Seneca's art of the catalogue is that we cannot tell whether the dramatist ever constructs a catalogue in such a way as to suggest significant irregularities. After defeating the tyrant Lycus, Hercules proceeds (HF 900–918) to worship Minerva, Bacchus, Phoebus, Diana,

fraterque quisquis incolit caelum meus
non ex noverca frater.

And any brother of mine who lives in heaven
Not born of Juno.
(HF 907–8)

The reference to brothers not born of his stepmother, implying that Hercules is the equal of the divinities he has named, is certainly peculiar, and hubristic. As he prepares for the sacrifice to be conducted jointly by himself and Theseus, he mentions Jupiter, Minerva, Vulcan, Zethus, Dirce, and Cadmus, some of them via periphrasis. There is something erratic about the catalogue; can Zethus and Dirce, mortal figures of local legends, appear side by side with the great divinities for purposes of cult, and what does Cadmus, the founder of Thebes, have to do with Theseus? Amphitryon's declaration that Hercules' hands are covered with blood shows that the hero is polluted. The pollution is spiritual as well as physical. With

preces
love meque dignas

prayers
worthy of Jove and me
(HF 926–27)

the disease is patently rampant: Hercules is unable to separate himself from the level of Jupiter's divinity. Here then we seem to have a case of Seneca building inconcinnity into a catalogue, or rather two connected catalogues, with the intention of telling us something about the condition of the speaker. But we cannot be sure.

A proper investigation of the art of the catalogue would also have to

inquire into the details of the composition: the incidence of circumlocutions, the spatial disposition of the various units, the use or non-use of descriptive adjectives, of narrative elaboration, and so forth. Here it is my intention only to suggest that the longueurs and internal disparities of these inventories should not be shrugged off as so much misdirected facility. Each of them may, with some ingenuity, be discovered to answer to a specific dramatic need, whether of retardation, build-up, characterization, consolation, and much else. Many of them will, on the face of it, appear jejune and mechanical, and it is notorious that the same series, or very nearly identical series, occur irritatingly often in a number of plays. Others produce a resonance that moves and fires the imagination; as an example of the latter I would cite the list of grievers who mourned alone and, for that reason, derived no satisfaction from their grief (Aga 670ff.).

We must disregard, for our present purposes, the important question of how we might distinguish the successes and the failures in this kind of dramatic writing. What calls for an explanation is the compulsive frequency of the catalogues. It is futile to suppose that a play heavily endowed with the spirit of enumeration, like Phoenissae, is for that reason alone a work of inferior quality. Inventories smother and infect all the texts, until their function as dramas is very nearly undone. This is part of Seneca's design. For the loyalty of the speakers is, above all, to the task of making contact with an overwhelming universe, more so than to the requirement of fitting elegantly into a well-crafted plot.

In the light of the importance of this species of rhetoric, the rhetoric of enumeration rather than the rhetoric of confession, in the texts, it is not improper to speak of Senecan drama as one kind of epic drama. The propensity to take stock by means of catalogues and serial elaborations marks a special way of looking at what matters in life. To be sure, that way of looking is very foreign to the purview of the Greek epic poet, who had virtually no interest in the manifold macrocosm shrouding the hero. But the paratactic rhythm of enumeration, the tendency to run the motor before starting to drive and keep on driving, the stylization of the verbal body through formulas and iteration: in all these and similar respects the procedure of the Senecan dramatist shares more with the epic bard than with the writer of action drama. That Seneca has some inventories that are less compelling than oth-

ers; that on occasion he can mislead his audience by throwing in details that fail to promote the larger causes he favors, cannot be denied. But unless its intrinsic need of the catalogue, and the latter's broad usefulness, are recognized, a true appreciation of the value of Senecan drama is beyond our grasp.

Under the aegis of sumpatheia, a Senecan character is largely a bundle of drives found elsewhere in the world, each of them ready to receive the signature of other drives and materials and to adapt its complexion. If that is true—if, that is, the dramatic agent is no more fixed in his bearings than the encompassing world of which he is a part—how is the character to maintain the special position granted him by the history of drama? Is not one of the fundamental conditions of serious drama the integrity, if not the isolation, of the tragic hero in his stand?

When a television gangster is cornered and at his wit's end, he draws his Saturday-night special and sprays bullets all around him. He continues shooting until the chambers are empty. Desperation cancels the limits of discipline and calculation. What does the Senecan herovillain do when he is trapped, immobilized in his expectations, and blocked by the obstacles that open up before him? He launches cries all around him, or rather away from himself, just as the criminal tries to give himself some elbow room with his bullets. But this broadside, clothed in the elevated speech of traditional iambs, fails in its task of clearing maneuvering space.

We are here turning to a very specialized use of the inventory, the Senecan hero's Schreirede or Schreikatalog .^[19] The trapped hero, abandoned by his fellows or alone with his dismal victory and conscious of its insufficiency, turns away from himself and zeroes in on the various

[19] Heldmann (1968) speaks of quiritatio, an old Roman term signalling the call of a citizen to other citizens to help him. Quiritatio, or Heldmann's translation Zetergeschrei, does not quite fit my purposes, since he associates it chiefly with invocations by the chorus, and since the move I am interested in, the Schreirede of the cornered hero, is most definitely not addressed to his fellow citizens, who in fact have no standing in Seneca's largely uncivic drama. The characteristic forms of Schreirede are found, in brief compass, in some of the choruses (example: Tro 122ff.). This is not surprising; the communal grief voiced in Greek choruses exhibits similar traits. But the Schreirede of the individual speaker is Seneca's special contribution to dramatic speech.

targets of his environments.^[20] He reflects upon his ancestors; he draws imaginary pictures of ravenous animals and poisonous plants; he envisages masses of earth, the waves of the sea, and the contest of the winds. A special preference leads him to the celestial sphere, with its gods, its sun, its stars, and the zodiac, the most authentically animal zone of the heavens, usually pictured in a state of derailment. Often the ticking off of the environmental plenitude is interminable; as in the catalogues discussed above, there is no natural limit to the variety of cosmic constituents to be brought in. The despairing hero is even less motivated than the choruses or secondary characters to arrive at a terminus. He directs his attention to all corners of the universe, as if he wished to draw out as long as possible the furlough from his own distress. Theoretically the tirade should be unstoppable. There are always further powers of nature to turn to for comfort and instruction in this cruel implementation of the Stoic command to "live in harmony." It is cruel because there is not the slightest hope of satisfaction. Given the premises of sumpatheia, the world, far from having anything to teach, conspires to assist the hero in his crash.

But even where the Schreirede, the tirade, is not strictly in catalogue form, its serial extension, the details of its syntax, and especially what I would call the technique of deflection, speak to the same point: the rage to turn to nature and entreat her, hopelessly, to annul, and at the same time enhance, the speaker's isolation.

sustines tantum nefas
gestare, Tellus? non ad infernam Styga
te nosque mergis rupta et ingenti via
ad chaos inane regna cum rege abripis?
non tota ab imo tecta convellens solo
vertis Mycenas? stare circa Tantalum
uterque iam debuimus: hinc compagibus
et hinc revulsis, si quid infra Tartara est
avosque nostros, hoc tuam immani sinu
demitte vallem, nosque defossos tege
Acheronte toto. noxiae supra caput
animae vagentur nostrum et ardenti freto
Phlegethon harenas igneus totas agens

[20] Cf. Frick 1951, p. 39, apropos of Garnier's Thésée: "He invokes heaven and hell to slay him. This storm of furies, snakes, and lightning-bolts is the concrete visualization of the disaster that has struck the soul. Garnier's characters are unable to grasp pain and suffering in the language of the soul" (my translation). The final proposition seems to me implausible. Garnier prefers the environmental formulation to the purely psychological or introspective mode.

exitia^[21]  supra nostra violentus fluat—
immota tellus, pondus ignavum iaces?

Earth, can you bear this dread atrocity?
Why not plunge us, with you, down into Styx
And violently, vastly, sweep both king and kingdom
Into the yawning void? Why not uproot the homes
And raze Mycenae? Both of us have long
Deserved to stand with Tantalus. Let all
The globe be unhinged; if life exists below
Hades and our fathers, in that bottomless
Embrace lodge us, and bury us in Acheron.
Let noxious specters roam above our heads,
Let fiery Phlegethon with his seething silt
Extend his fury over our undoing—
But, Earth, you stay inert, a slumbering mass?!
(Thy 1006–20)

These are Thyestes' lines, immediately after he has contributed his famous Senecan version of the Aristotelian anagnorisis: agnosco fratrem, "I recognize my brother," or, to draw out the implications, "Now I know who and what my brother is." Let us call the speech a declamation.^[22] Declaiming allows both the maximal voicing of passion and a cushioning of the spontaneity of that passion through the employment of certain rhetorical devices. In Thyestes' speech the "I" of agnosco is immediately deflected by the address to Tellus, the earth (both a goddess and the material fundament), who remains the addressee throughout this segment of the declamation. Deflection, the sustained suppression or attenuation of the first-person focus, is an important element of the Schreirede .

As Hieronimo, in The Spanish Tragedy, imagines grief to spread outward and to color the world at large, only to be stopped by the heavenly walls where Justice and Revenge are imprisoned, so Thyestes, after recognizing the severed heads of his children, immediately launches into an oration rebuking the earth for not swallowing him (Thy

[21] Against Zwierlein, but with Giardina, I retain the manuscript reading.

[22] The standard discussions of declamation are Bonner 1949 and Winterbottom 1980. Cf. also Russell (1983), who defines "declamation" in a way—"firm organization"—that might make its applicability to the Senecan tirade doubtful (p. 2). In the present context, I have in mind "declamation" as a mode of delivery, i.e., "declaiming" or "rant." For Senecan rant in particular, see Specka 1937 and Wanke 1964, pp. 117ff. On this topic, as on all questions pertaining to the formal aspects of Seneca's dramatic art, Canter 1925 provides much useful material but little in the way of an analysis of how the rhetorical stratagems are used to further the drama. Canter's treatment of declamation, singling out nine modes or procedures and illustrating them with texts from HF and Tro, is found on pp. 55ff.

1006ff.). This is dramatically and psychologically acceptable. It is also symptomatic of a sensibility that takes refuge from painful privacies in a longer view and thus, as it were by dissociation, confirms the larger unities. It can take the form of accusing a god or the gods for their share in the disaster, a move that is vastly more common in Senecan tragedy than in its Greek predecessors. It can take the shape of a general disinclination on the part of heroes and heroines to talk about themselves in the first person. "Was't Hamlet wronged Laertes? Never Hamlet . . ." gains some of its third-person clarity from its nature as an enthymeme, but the Senecan depersonalization has something to do with it also. In general, Shakespeare does not favor this particular legacy. It is instructive to compare a passage from Thyestes with one from Richard III, a play that is, of course, in some ways heir to the Senecan tradition. First the Shakespearean example. Richard says:

I am determined to prove a villain,
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots I have laid, inductions dangerous . . .
(1.1.32–34)

The strongly concentrated first-person reference can be paralleled in other British intrigue plays, from the moralities to Jacobean revenge drama. Contrast Seneca:

aliquod audendum est nefas
atrox, cruentum, tale quod frater meus
suum esse mallet.

It is time to commit a flagrant,
A murderous transgression such as my brother
Would wish to be his.
(Thy 193–95)

The Aristotelian requirement of an agent bending his mind upon himself and his needs and structuring the future so as to conform to his wishes is abandoned in favor of a virtual dissolution, if not of the intentional self, at least of simple self-reference.

This temporary angling away from private experience to externalization would seem to be at odds with the phenomenon of self-dramatization discussed earlier. But in fact, as we shall see, the deflection is merely another way of measuring and plotting the distance between the suffering ego and the gallery before which the ego acts out its needs. And often the devastated ego is brought back into the pic-

ture, after the summons of aid or endorsement from the larger world has, predictably, come to naught:

quas miser voces dabo
questusque quos? quae verba sufficient mihi?

How shall my suffering express itself?
Will lamentations serve? Will words avail?
(Thy 1036–37)

Thyestes recognizes his earlier imprecations for what they are: words, facundity, the transformation of powerful, but mute, feelings into a speech that by its very forms betrays its helplessness. The hero has turned into a messenger of his own fate. As messenger, he adopts a perspective in which the locale, the antecedents, and the divine powers count for at least as much as the motives of the agent. But the messenger is also a demon; his rage to be in tune with the world also comes through as a powerful delusion that he is in control of the world and can address plausible commands to its various constituencies. In the workings of the tirade, there is no appreciable difference between the utterances of a Juno (HF 1ff.) or a Fury (Thy 23ff.) and the speeches of Atreus or Oedipus. Atreus's first speech (Thy 176ff.) starts with a rebuke to himself, and then, via the nominative iratus Atreus, glides off into directives addressed to a cosmic armed force that includes his own animus (192) as one of its soldiers.

Both ancient and Renaissance rhetoricians interest themselves in the figurae associated with the expression of the passions, the figurae patheticae or affectuosae: apostrophe, interrogatio, exclamatio, hyperbole, and many more. All of them help to engineer the deflection. They serve to turn the speaker away from himself, in the direction of a universe that, he hopes, will respond sympathetically to his personal agony.^[23] This turning away is precisely the move Hercules counsels each of the gods to make in the face of the monstrous Cerberus:

aciem reflectat oraque in caelum erigat
portenta fugiens.
(HF 602–3)

The eyes must be averted and turned to the sky, the earth, or any one of the large cosmic sectors privileged to represent the environment.

[23] For "Anrufungen an die Dinge der Natur" in Greek drama, see Schadewaldt 1926, pp. 64ff.

The syntax of deflection is an extraordinarily interesting topic.^[24] I said earlier that Seneca's supposed rant is not a matter of diction but a function of his syntax and the emotional energies heralded by that syntax. The character of that syntax may be summarized by saying that it forsakes assertion or description for modalities. Of the many striking modes of the grammar of the tirade, six may be singled out and illustrated by pointing to the lines in the outburst of Thyestes cited above. First, there are the imperatives (1015), addressed to gods, to environmental bodies, and to the speaker's own organs and faculties as if they were independent of his control and cognate with the cosmic faculties (which, of course, as we have seen, they are). The vast bulk of imperatives in Seneca are not practicable orders or requests urged upon plausible executors, but "rhetorical" imperatives, that is, imaginary, inoperable, and channelled toward levels of authority unresponsive to the speaker's wishes, precisely because the distance between speaker and addressee is unfathomable.^[25] Second, there are the jussives and injunctives (1016–19), third-person imperatives directed at the same addressees as the second-person imperatives, and equally unpromising, but by dint of the impersonality of the construction investing less of the agent's ego in the pronouncements. The third variety is one signalled by words like debet or decet, in the present or the past tense (1011–12), a formulation marking off the speaker's sense of what moral or esthetic standards would seem to demand. Like the other moves it pleads a demonic decorum: a monstrous event is invoked as befitting a sense of monstrous passion.

Next we find what is perhaps the most frequent syntactical move, the exclamatory question (1006–7, 1020), often in the negative (1007-

[24] Cf. Fantham 1982, pp. 92–103, "Senecan Syntax and Features of Diction," and especially p. 97: "Every use of the subjunctive is represented, but independent subjunctives and usages with conditional and concessive force are particularly common." Madeleine Doran has done important work on the syntax of dramatic speech; see her 1976 book, especially her essays on if-clauses in Othello (chap. 3) and on the rhetoric of command in Lear (chap. 4). Her characterization of the language of Lear as a "rhetoric of fiat, pronouncement, objurgation, imprecation, petition, interrogation" is appropriate also to most of Seneca. It fits Lear because that play features a degree of cosmic sumpatheia in its language and its conceptions that affiliates it more than other Shakespearian plays with the Senecan drama of the period. It is evident, however, that where Shakespeare knows how to calibrate and vary the syntax of expostulation in tune with the specific schema of the drama, Seneca shows less suppleness, less due timing, a smaller range of the pitches of intensity. The aggressiveness of Thyestes and the defensiveness of Clytaemestra are cast in roughly the same syntactic and stylistic mold.

[25] For a highly sophisticated treatment of syntactical moves in dramatic speech, see Mastronarde 1979, esp. chap. 1.

11), professing the surprise or resentment of the speaker at the failure of the world to have noticed his distress or to have moved in sympathy with it. Series of questions bundled together are a common occurrence in Greek choruses (for example, Eur. Hipp. 141–60), but their frequency in the speeches of individuals is a Roman innovation. The exclamatory question may also appear in the form of a pure exclamation: shame upon the external powers for not responding in condign fashion! The response hoped for is one of resonance or companionship in destruction. Finally, though less commonly, this dissatisfaction may be voiced in the form of future indicatives, predictions against hope that the powers will, in the end, respond fittingly after all.^[26]

These are the basic rhetorical moves. Each of them may be constructed in its own subtly variant fashion; all, or at least some of them, are usually combined into the larger compound structure that constitutes the Schreirede, the heightened speech whereby the character (or the chorister) deflects his glance from his own person and frantically looks for sympathy in the presumptively "sympathetic" universe. The modal constructions are eminently suitable to express the angling away from the focus on the "I" that deflection demands. Troades is, as in so many other ways, distinctive in Seneca's dramatic corpus in that one of its characters, Ulixes, makes it his business to pinpoint and puncture the defensive maneuvers of Andromache, his frantic and inventive adversary.

Invocations of deities or cosmic powers are common enough in Greek tragedy, both on the part of the chorus and on the part of suffering individuals. They are usually brief, rapidly hurled at three or at most four addressees, and the deflective momentum is caught short by a steady insistence on the complaining or supplicatory "I." Calling out to the gods or to the cosmic powers is a beneficial cliché for one trying to master his emotion or trying to gain a distance from the enormity of his complaint. If often suffices to remind the speaker of the sheltering bond that ties him to the larger universe and legitimates his self-respect.

Euripides' Hekabe (Hec. 68ff.) invokes Zeus's lightning, Night, Earth, and the gods of the nether regions. The appeals are combined with references to the queen's own feelings; they form a comment on her dream of Polydorus, and a request to save him. By the same token,

[26] For such future constructions, see Westmann 1961.

a series of interrogatives and exclamations (154–76), constituting Hekabe's response to the news that Polyxena will be sacrificed, and addressed, first, to herself, and then to potential helpers, to her Trojan companions in trouble, her aged foot, and Polyxena, clearly move within a narrow radius. The cries, objurgations, and appeals of Sophocles' Heracles (Trach. 983ff.), perhaps the model for Hercules Oetaeus 1131ff., are self-referential, and integrated into the dramatic action, in a way that the later writer's are not.^[27] An appeal to the powers of heaven and earth, like those of Prometheus (Aesch. Prom. 88ff., 1091ff.), is a climactic indication of the speaker's momentary sense of abandonment. But, like its peers in other Greek plays, it tends to be brief and unadorned. And there are always those on the Greek stage who are ready to find fault with a language that is excessive. As the Euripidean Theseus (Hipp. 916ff., 925ff.) challenges mankind, complaining that there is no reliable index to separate the just from the unjust, Hippolytus criticizes his interrogative and exclamatory extravagancies (934–35), with no allowance for the substantial amount of plain argumentation embedded in Theseus's utterance.

The only figure in extant Greek drama whose speech resembles that of the Senecan heroes in their hour of anger or desperation is Aeschylus's Cassandra. But her role as a visionary puts her in a special class. What is more, her invocatory language is, at regular short intervals, spelled by the chorus's questioning, and thus never reaches the sustained pace of the Senecan tirade. Finally, we should remember that in Euripides the lyric outbursts of heroes and heroines are almost invariably followed by reflective and argumentative logoi, demonstrating that the imprecation or the complaint is merely a partial documentation of the sum of the character's feelings. The combination of aria and speech, or of passionate speech and discursive argument, keeps the cumulative utterance firmly within the boundaries of a stable self.

Contrast the monologue of Seneca's Clytaemestra (Aga 192–202). The series of commands, impersonal observations, questions, and third-person jussives in the passive voice successfully screens out any

[27] Clemen 1961, pp. 216ff.: Sophocles expresses what goes on in Heracles' mind; Seneca catalogues suffering and decay. Sophocles' Heracles wants to die; Seneca's wants the world to collapse. Clemen has an interesting analysis of how Tudor laments differ from the Senecan analogues (pp. 211ff.). See also Borgmeier 1978, pp. 306–7, a comparison of Thy 192–94 with Shakespeare's Richard III 1.1.30–32. In Seneca, the address is to the animus and the statement is impersonal; in Shakespeare, the "I" holds center stage.

intimation of the first person. Even in the climactic vision (199–202) of her own and Agamemnon's deaths, the incorporation of her own self is hidden behind the use of the second-person tuum, just as Juno, in Hercules Furens (75–88), runs through her imperatives, questions, and jussives not to goad herself, but her ira, the fury she shares with the hellish forces swirling about her. Only the end of Juno's speech (109ff.), after she has raised the external powers to assist her, or rather to act in her place, settles down to an unrefracted sequence of first-person accents.

With the substitution of the second person for the first at Agamemnon 192–202 we may compare Phaedra 1183–90, part of Phaedra's death speech.

non licuit animos iungere, at certe licet
iunxisse fata. morere, si casta es, viro;
si incesta, amori. coniugis thalamos petam
tanto impiatos facinore? hoc derat nefas,
ut vindicato sancta fruereris toro.
o mors amoris una sedamen mali,
o mors pudoris maximum laesi decus,
confugimus ad te: pande placatos sinus.

There was no leave to join our hearts, But now
Our destinies may meet. Die for your lord,
If you are guiltless; if you have sinned, for love.
Am I to claim my husband's chamber, stained
By what I have done? All that is lacking now
Is that you pledge your innocence and savor
Your wedded bliss! No! Death, we turn to you;
You alone provide the cure of a desperate love,
The splendid refuge of an injured shame:
Death, spread your soothing arms!

Here the first person is not entirely bracketed, but the acrobatics of the personal grammar are equally impressive. Within the succession of a few brief lines, the queen hides her concerns behind the impersonal licet, the second-person imperative, the first-person singular deliberative, the second-person conditional, and the first-person plural. The same variability of personal reference marks the Senecan tirade in many other instances, and on occasion has worried scholars.^[28] At Medea 397ff. and 426ff. the heroine's pronouncements alternate be-

[28] Tarrant's rejection of Aga 545–46 and 548 (1976, pp. 278–79) is in part owing to his dissatisfaction with the change from indirect speech to direct speech, from se to me .

tween the first and the second persons, a remarkable departure from Medea's singular preoccupation with her resolute and scheming "I." This shifting back and forth between the first and second persons,^[29] between the singular and the plural, and between various modes of the verb is the Senecan way of promoting, even in the case of the purposeful Medea, the lesson that fixity is eroded in a drama answering to sumpatheia . The referential grammar signals the inevitable lack of stability, das Zerrissene, in the lifeforce of the agent. Stoic psychology and Stoic science meet, as they should, on the common ground of the proposition that a passionate soul is at odds with itself. Euripides furnished the tools for dramatizing internal conflict, including, on occasion, the hero's or, more likely, heroine's apostrophe of her (or his) spirit or heart. Seneca universalizes the tendency and builds it into the cosmic panorama of his Schreirhetorik .^[30]

Deflection is the common standard of the Senecan tirade. Phaedra's beautifully controlled confession (Phae 592–671) is set off by the flare-up of the astounded Hippolytus (671–97), a succession of exclamations, jussives, and the other figures I have mentioned: Jove, send down your thunderbolt! May the world collapse and go retrograde! Sun, hide your face! and so forth. Again, after invoking various divinities and spirits, and picturing Jason's exile abroad, Medea (Med 37ff.) girds herself for action: she will slaughter the victims on the altar. What follows are various deflective moves. It may be useful to log the sequence and label the moves (the possessive pronouns in brackets are not in the Latin):

[My] Heart, inspect the entrails, cast off fear. [imperative]
Corinth will see Colchian crime. [future third person]
[My] Mind is stirring up evils. [present third person]
I have mentioned trifles, what I used to do as a girl.
Let a heavier grief rise. [jussive]
Motherhood warrants a greater crime. [decet;  cf. above, p. 182]
Rage, gird up for death. [imperative]
Let the tale of your rejection match that of your wedding. [jussive]
How will you leave the man? [question; future second person]
Break [your] idleness. [imperative]
Let the home won by crime be left by crime. [jussive]
(Med 40–55)

[29] In a different context, of greater epistemological consequence, compare the play between je and moi in modern French thought coming out of Diderot.

[30] Tarrant (1976, p. 195, on Aga 108f.), concedes: "Philosophical overtones are perhaps not to be ruled out . . .: S. may be alluding to the assent of the animus required."

This is the final section of a much longer speech, Medea's first in the play, relatively subdued because of its initial position, but already marked all the way through with the signatures of deflection. As we have mentioned, Medea, of all of Seneca's heroines, is more likely to speak in her own person, to be unsqueamish about the "I," than others. The fourth line of the summary presented above (48–49) is one such reminder of her capacity for introspection and prideful revelation of self. Even so, she lets her animus or her mens speak for her. The addresses to herself in the second person suggest that this is not a simple matter of rhetorical synecdoche but part of the Senecan rhythm of heroic deflection. It is as if the heroes have to assure themselves of the vitality of a world external to themselves, or at least not initially identified with themselves, and presumably controlled from the outside, before they can face up to their own troubles. Personal interests are weighed off against larger concerns, and enveloped in them before their rawness is ready for exposure. When Theseus employs jussives to dispose of Phaedra:

istam terra defossam premat,
gravisque tellus impio capiti incubet.

Let her be plunged deep in the ground,
And may the earth crush down her villainous head!
(Phae 1279–80)

he is arranging for a concrete and lasting envelopment of the sort the Senecan heroes call for again and again as they bid nature and the natural elements to come to their aid or bury them.

It would be otiose to cite further instances. We should mention, in passing, that deflection, the dramatized interaction between the struggling or decomposing self and the living cosmos, is at the bottom of another feature of Senecan dramatic writing that has often been commented on: the slowness of the action.^[31] There is, properly speaking, no room for action, but only for anticlimactic events stipulated to occur after the language of "let there be" has created its own peculiar effect. One line of criticism has explained the poverty of the action by arguing that Stoicism values the will more than the deed;^[32] hence Senecan drama favors analysis of mental operations over action and a substantial plot line. This seems to me mistaken. Greek drama and Senecan drama do not really differ in this respect. Both of them em-

[31] Herrmann 1924, p. 537.

[32] Knoche 1941.

phasize motivation, intention, value judgment, the proclamation of a human commitment. In both traditions, action, the performance of deeds and their consequences, is kept at arm's length from the center of the stage and is largely narrated rather than staged. What makes Senecan tragedy so special, and so slow, is not the focus on the human will but the evaluation of the pressure of the environment upon that will.

In Greek drama, action is suggested, and at the same time displaced, by the author's play with intentions, with memories, and with the clash of contrary wills. In Seneca, the intentions, the memories, and the wills are themselves subjected to the bodily stricture of a universe that is felt to be both kindred and hostile, both responsive and diseased; hence the promise of action is infinitely delayed. Critics have spoken of the futility of action,^[33] the disconnectedness of the drama, the dissolution of the dramatic body.^[34] The usual explanation is to put the blame on the rhetoric, on an irresponsible or at least excessive recourse to declamatory speech, as if speech were an impediment to the dramaturgy.^[35] But in Seneca the rhetoric is our most telling clue for an understanding of the dramatic design. The slow-motion reel of Deianira's account of how she received the drugged blood from Nessus (HO 491ff.) gets its stationary quality, if not from the language, from the vision of the world expressed by that language, a world in which wild nature, myth, and human feelings jostle each other in frightened conjunction. The interest is not in temporal sequence but in spatial thronging and accumulation.^[36]

Seneca does not give us the progression from beginning to middle to end. His prologues preempt the plot; his choruses are only in the rarest cases organized with a view to what comes before and after; and he

[33] Henry and Walker 1965.

[34] Regenbogen 1961, p. 430: "Der Dramenkörper löst sich . . . auf." Cf. Friedrich 1933 (who, however, exempts Med from the charge of Auflösung ), and Tarrant 1976, pp. 3ff., 217. Attempts to assert the unity of the plot structure of individual Senecan dramas have, by and large, been unsuccessful. It should be said, however, that plot structure, the causal filiation of human design and action, is not a necessary feature of dramatic quality. The approach of Marx (1932, pp. 57ff.), followed or modified by others, dividing the Senecan drama into predictable blocks defined by mood and psychological dynamics, does not, to my mind, carry greater conviction. Perhaps the closest modern analogue to Seneca's dramaturgy is to be found in Maeterlinck's early work, the drame statique, about man waiting to be caught up by death.

[35] Altman 1978, chap. 8, in its own way an informative discussion of the uses of rhetoric in Senecan drama. Heninger (1960, p. 183) finds that Chapman is keenly sensitive to speech but inattentive to larger structure.

[36] Owen (1970) has some good remarks on the collapsing of time distinctions to gain dramatic ends.

permits himself revealing inversions, as when the raging Hercules desires first to storm heaven and afterwards to take the Mycenaean fortress: a proteron husteron that makes no sense as a structural unit.^[37] It is discontinuities and inversions like these, and the disregard of action per se, that have facilitated the traditional view that Seneca did not mean his dramas to be performed. What more plausible proposal than to say that these plays are to be savored as lyric poems, as moving pictures for the imagination, rather than as staged dramas, inasmuch as a staged drama (so the conventional wisdom holds) depends on an orderly and compelling chain of purpose and action. It need hardly be pointed out, at this point in the twentieth century, that the modern experience of drama has dealt a death blow to this legacy of Aristotelian functionalism and nineteenth-century realism.

The slowing down and disassembling of the machinery, then, are part of the Senecan tragic vision. The speakers are detached from their moorings in a dramatic curve because the space that embraces them means more to them than their developing relation to other speakers. I said earlier that every speaker is his own messenger. Messengers are best equipped to reflect the disregard of dramatic momentum. Whether it is Talthybius rehearsing the epiphany of Achilles (Tro 168ff.), Theseus dwelling on Hercules' triumph in the underworld (HF 662ff.), or Eurybates detailing the storm that overtook the victors at Troy (Aga 462ff.), the grinding slowness of the report, and its brake upon anything that might be regarded as the plot line, are part and parcel of a grand system of deflection.

That the hero wishes nature to experience the same turbulence that he suffers in himself is symptomatic of the purpose of the outward glance. Greek heroes and choruses seek from the cosmic powers cited the assurance they have fleetingly surrendered. Whether marked as prayers or as laments, the Greek invocations are mechanisms of contemplation and of composure. The established cadences of choral inventories, often listing cult centers and cult areas, generate a mood of certitude. Preferably they constitute the troughs between dramatic climaxes. In entreating the far-flung potencies of their world, including the vengeful demons of the underworld, a Senecan Hercules or Oedipus, or a Juno, can no longer hope for the recourse the cry is designed to elicit. Nature is no more reliable, no more powerful, than the agent

[37] Friedrich 1967, p. 104, commenting on HF 955ff.

who appeals to it. In a sense, these appeals are now superfluous, or tautological. The imperatives and subjunctives might equally well be indicatives, descriptive rather than incantatory. For after all the world cannot do other than conspire with the shattered human life. This the hero knows, or divines. But the modal constructions are demanded by the tragic vision of loss. Seneca is unthinkable without the menacing fervor, the enervating length of the inventory, and the extraordinary surge of expressive means, with its imperatives and the subjunctives and anaphoras that mark the abortiveness of the appeals. The syntax of the vain hope of salvation is a kind of atavism, underscoring the impression of turbulence by the factitiousness of the ritual gesture. In his impotence the speaker takes refuge with an equally impotent nature. The congeries of futilities sharpens the impression of a tragedy that is cosmic as well as personal.

The abortiveness of the desire to embrace nature is endorsed even in the more limited strategies of the rhetoric. The art of the trope, of emblems and similes, is a case in point. Walter Benjamin says of Daniel von Lohenstein, one of the authors studied in his book about the German baroque dramatists, that "No other writer approached him in his use of the technique of blunting any tendency to ethical reflection by means of metaphorical analogies between history and the cycle of nature."^[38] Benjamin believes that Lohenstein, like others of his period, had large compendia of analogies and emblems at his disposal for extensive and often random use in his works. Such compendia go back to Andrea Alciati's seminal compilation of 1531, which itself has its roots in ancient theory and practice.^[39]

When Balurdo in act 1, scene 3 of Antonio's Revenge speaks of "an abominable ghost of a misshapen simile," this is an acknowledgment that the sympathetic imaginings of Antonio can, in a spirit of mockery,

[38] Walter Benjamin 1928, p. 90; the translation is that of Osborne 1977, p. 89. For an early critique of the indiscriminate use of comparisons by baroque dramatists, see Breitinger 1740, p. 224. For "exaggerated comparisons" in Seneca that influenced Elizabethan drama, see Cunliffe 1893, p. 19, who cites six passages from the Senecan corpus that served as models.

[39] Mario Praz 1964. Praz cites more than six hundred authors of emblem books. For some criticisms of Benjamin's view, see Schöne 1968, pp. 14, 130. The ancient theories of the simile are studied in McCall 1969.

be understood to amount to nothing more than formal embellishments. Seneca's management of comparison and analogy has been studied by a number of critics,^[40] many of whom accept the perspective of Balurdo. One scholar comes to the conclusion that Seneca's imagery, though grandiose, systematic, and forceful, is not intrinsic to the specific thoughts and feelings it is designed to illustrate. But he grants that it furnishes a comprehensive commentary upon the action.^[41] He glosses its systematic quality by dividing the material along three lines, into "conceptual images," "natural or concrete images," and mixed types. The taxonomy is debatable, but the conclusion that Seneca's pictorial imagination is deployed in aid of a larger dramatic vision is persuasive and squares with the picture I have been developing. It is not my purpose to add to the large literature on the Senecan simile, but simply to indicate, in summary fashion, that in this matter also, sumpatheia exacts its toll.

Not that this should cause much surprise. The art of the simile in Seneca derives from the conventions of the epic. At Troades 794ff., for instance, Andromache, talking to Astyanax just before he is taken from her, compares his position in relation to Ulixes and herself to that of a calf pressing against its mother to escape the fangs of a lion. This Olympian expansiveness, making Andromache into an epic poet rather than a frantic mother, is characteristic of the medium. In his capacity as his own messenger, every major Senecan character tends to be both lamenter, introspector, essayist, and epic poet.^[42] Ulixes is, in this respect, a more narrowly conceived, more purposeful agent, analogous to the nurses and retainers who seek to confine the heroes and heroines to a pacific course of action. The hallmark of his speech is argument, fortified with exhortation. He has less need for comparisons and tropes whose function it is to broaden the perspective beyond the

[40] Pratt 1963; Zwierlein 1966, pp. 117ff.; Landfester 1974; Liebermann 1974, chap. 2; Primmer 1976; Henry 1985, pp. 141ff.; cf. also Owen 1968 and the beautiful comments of Herington (1966, pp. 436ff.), on Seneca's visual imagination. See also the splendid remarks of Tarrant (1985, pp. 46–48) on the imagery of Thy. Once again Canter 1925 collects a mass of materials.

[41] Pratt 1963; see now also Pratt 1983, pp. 32–33. Tarrant (1976, p. 184) finds the simile of Aga 63ff., "essentially decorative; like other extended comparisons in Seneca, however, it is allowed to develop beyond the needs of the context and must in the end be choked off with an awkward reminder of the object of comparison." This reads like a parodic evaluation of the Homeric simile; what is more, can decorativeness and excessiveness go hand in hand?

[42] Good remarks on messengers in Seneca in Liebermann 1974, pp. 58ff.

terms of the business at hand. Choruses, on the other hand, are master employers of whole sequences of comparisons as they comment on their understanding of the dramatic situation. One of the most elaborate series of this sort is found at Thyestes 577–95, where the chorus of Mycenaeans hymn what they conceive to be the calm after the storm by means of a long string of maritime images.

Earlier (p. 45 above) I had something to say about the use of the simile by Stoic philosophers. It was found that the earlier Stoics favored imagery taken from ordinary affairs, especially the life of the household.^[43] In this respect Senecan drama departs from the Stoic model, for a very good reason. The imagery of Stoic philosophy proper, in all its branches, is designed to illustrate points of doctrine or phases of an argument without at the same time opening up wider horizons of interest. Its art of the simile is, to use a common classification, centripetal; it aims to confine the imagination of the learner tightly to the contours of the item discussed. The epic simile as fashioned by Homer in the Iliad is, at its most characteristic and powerful junctures, centrifugal.^[44] Its effect is to draw the thinking of the listener into a global reality, of which the event or item in the narrative is felt to be an organic (or, occasionally, recalcitrant) part. There are moments in the epic when the impression is gained that the point of the comparison is not one of subservience, to assist us in seeing the comparandum more clearly or more poignantly, but that the link between comparatum and comparandum, the simile and the narrative item, is one of parity, and functions to make us intuit a more inclusive truth. The famous passage in Iliad 4 (141–47), where Menelaus's skin is grazed by an arrow and the light trickle of blood generates a picture of Oriental women coloring ivory cheek pieces for horses, conjures up an ineffable sense of preciousness and delicacy that is, as it were, caught in two of its possible manifestations. Here the illustration brought in is one from household activities rather than the larger natural scene. The idea communicated is one of calm beauty rather than of shared energy. But the principle of the widening horizon, of transcending the specific contours of the comparandum, is the same.

More than his predecessors, Seneca inundates his drama with epic

[43] Rolke 1975.

[44] The best book on the Homeric simile is still Fränkel 1977. See also Riezler 1936 and Moulton 1977.

similes and analogies. There are as many from inanimate nature as from the life of the animals. The winds and other meteorological phenomena are obvious candidates for exploitation. Scroop's

Like an unseasonable stormy day,
Which makes the silver rivers drown their shores,
As if the world were all dissolv'd to tears;
So high above his limits swells the rage
Of Bolingbroke . . .
(Richard II 3.2.107–11)

is Senecan (including the small touch of pathetic fallacy in the third line), as is the nervous cataloguing of social and political unrest that follows upon these lines. Just as the comparisons in the Iliad, the Aeneid, and Lucan's Pharsalia complement the scenic limitations of the battlefield or the council chamber with their enlarging vistas, so Seneca's similes, probing, serial, supercharged, back up the vision of a world doomed to integration.

They differ from Homer's subtly allusive ventures in their combination of contrivance and obviousness. The images introduced are usually transparent in their relevance, models of demonstration that a Stoic scientist would have accepted for his own purposes, for the illumination of the objects of ethics, physics, and anthropology. As Atreus (Thy 497–504), in an aside, compares his anger at seeing his brother to the controlled fury of a hunting dog, the details of the extended simile may remind us of the elaborate constructs whereby Homer achieves his decentralization of focus. But in Seneca transparency remains the rule; as the dog trails his quarry the emphasis rests throughout on the very same ira that Seneca, and his Atreus, have difficulty defining. Likewise, when Ulixes (Tro 537–45) points out the dangers of leaving Hector's son, a future Hector redivivus, alive, the force of his similes, citing the parallels of bulls, trees, and embers, all of them coming alive again in the second generation, is cumulative and unmistakable. Seneca can be more skilful. At Thyestes 707ff. and 732ff., the vicious animal similes that go with the murder scene take us from initial indecision to the unleashed madness of wholesale slaughter. The mirroring of the progression of the event in the development of the similes is, once again, a Homeric legacy. But because it is inherited, and because its realization rarely rises above convention, and because of the frequency of the maneuver, the Senecan simile does not always, on the face of it, elicit our admiration.

We should note, however, that it takes its place within Seneca's greater purpose of portraying a world imperilled, and knowing that it is imperilled, by the effects of sumpatheia . The very frequency of the device is an index of its importance in the construction of a world of somber unity. In the few examples of similes I have cited, I have restricted myself to the animal world. Elsewhere many of the facets of the horizontal and the vertical dimensions of which I have spoken are taken up in the similes, and once again meteorological and astronomical phenomena are prominently represented. And because of the contexts in which they are developed, the similes share in the apocalyptic tenor of the tragic impulse. Whereas in Homer the simile contributes to the appreciation of the beauty and the vitality of a stable and meaningful order, in Seneca it is drawn into the cataloguing of an environment in which energy has come apart and meaning is dismantled by the running down of a world clock driven by misunderstanding, passion, and crime.

This is true even when the manifest purpose of the simile is to evoke the abatement of motion and danger, as in the elaborate sequence at Thyestes 577ff. We are meant to behold the calm after the storm; the effect of the compound series, technically the old Homeric scheme, is to increase the sense of unease and fear by the ingenious expedient of featuring the storm along with the calm that is supposed to have taken its place. Wild nature and human society, legend and commerce, meteorology and politics are brought together in a frightening mixture, within a choral ode (for once the musical term is more appropriate than the usual "essay"). The interfacing of reality and trope in this baroque structure is exceptional, but the basic pattern is one that generally defines Seneca's use of the simile. For, as I have suggested earlier, Senecan rhetoric does not recognize tropes as tropes; comparison does not pit a primary reality against a merely illustrative prop. The world of the vehicle joins with the world of the tenor in a complex of coextension. Sumpatheia endorses both the tension and the virtual identity of comparatum and comparandum, and encourages the proliferation of the mechanism of analogy. Like the catalogues, the similes crowd in upon the speakers as reminders of an environment in which man is both at home and an alien, and which is himself and his powers writ large.

An even more important rhetorical index of Seneca's undertaking is

his unusual handling of the old figure called ex adynatou, or more simply adynaton; in Latin, impossibile.^[45]

The chiefest God, first mover of that sphere,
Enchas'd with thousands ever shining lamps,
Will sooner burn the glorious frame of heaven
Than it should so conspire my overthrow.
(Marlowe, 1 Tamburlaine 4.2.8–11)

The impossibile is the figure that associates the likelihood of an action or an event with the impregnability of natural law. The famous paradigm is the affirmation of Achilles in Iliad 2.234–41; he points to the speaker's scepter: by this dry staff, which will never again grow leaves or shoots . . . and then proceeds to the prediction sanctioned by the appeal to immutable nature: there will come a day when you will need me. The certainty of the prediction or avowal is rooted in the assurance that a living piece of wood, once it has been stripped of life, will not germinate anew. In Homer and in all the early authors who use this rhetorical flourish, the effect of the figure is secure; the natural law and the impossibility of breaching it are unquestioned, and the world of man derives a measure of security from that higher power.

This reliance on the unbreakability of natural law is not entirely unknown in Seneca. A number of cautionary choruses contrast the orderly nature of the cosmos with the disorderly morals of man. More typically, however, Seneca withdraws the certainty. On the contrary, the stronger the appeal to the supposed fixity, the more alarming becomes the suspicion that a terrible irony is at work, and that the oath, hope, or imprecation is misguided from the start. The energy read into the cosmic analogue is felt to be so sweeping as to spill over and dislocate the affairs of this world. Once again, the law is destabilized by the consequences of sumpatheia and krasis .^[46]

Let me begin with a choral passage at the center of Hercules Oetaeus,

[45] See Henry 1985, pp. 14–20, 197–200, where various types of adynata are discussed and tabulated. If we call the action or event contemplated x, the following are the main types of the impossible (1) x will no more happen or is no more true than the impossible; (2) x will happen when the impossible happens; (3) x is like the impossible; (4) the impossible will happen before x comes about. Related to the figure, though of slightly weaker force, is its positive congener: (5) as long as natural regularity prevails, x will remain true.

[46] For something like an impossibile —in this case a cumulative sequence of similes—aborted in the Stoic manner, see Troilus and Cressida 3.2.165–88.

recited after Deianira has rushed off to die, and before the expiring Hercules is brought on stage. The chorus memorializes the rule, said to be the rule of Orpheus, that nothing lasts forever, by demonstrating what would happen if the rule were overturned. The basic scheme is the conventional one: just as it is impossible for the natural order to be subverted, so what is born, is mortal:

quod natum est, properat mori.
(HO 1099)

The impossibilia are given, not as conditionals, but in the future tense, with awed questions terminating the series.

iam, iam legibus obrutis
mundo cum veniet dies,
australis polus obruet
quidquid per Libyam iacet
et sparsus Garamas tenet;
arctous polus obruet
quidquid subiacet axibus
et siccus Boreas ferit.
amisso trepidus polo
Titan excutiet diem.
caeli regia concidens
ortus atque obitus trahet
atque omnis pariter deos
perdet mors aliqua et chaos,
et mors fata novissima
in se constituet sibi.
quis mundum capiet locus?
discedet via Tartari,
fractis ut pateat polis?
an quod dividit aethera
a terris spatium sat est
et mundi nimium malis?
quis tantum capiet nefas
fati, quis superos locus?
pontum Tartara sidera
regna unus capiet tria?^[47]

Soon when the day arrives on which
The laws of the world are overthrown,
The southern sky will fall upon
The vast expanse of Africa
And lock the natives into place.
The northern sky will fall upon
The lands that lie beneath the pole

[47] In line 1125 I read Leo's superos against Zwierlein's superi.

Parched by the icy Boreas.
And once the sky is gone, the sun,
Alarmed, will put the day to rout.
The celestial palace will collapse
And with it east and west will drown.
A thrust of death and chaos will
Destroy the crowded host of gods;
And in the end death will devise
A final ruin for itself.
What space will domicile the world?
Will Tartarus open its doors
To host the broken firmaments
Or is the space that separates
The heavens from the earth enough,
Too large indeed, for the world's ills?
What station will welcome the horror
Of destiny, and house the gods?
Shall one terrain hold three great realms,
The sea, the stars, and Tartarus?
(HO 1102–27)

I have cited the passage at length because its poetic aridity shows with unusual sharpness what the Senecan scheme can become in the hands of a fussy imitator. Ostensibly the chorus develops the picture of the world going under as a window into the horrors attending upon the cancellation of the truth that all must die. But poetically, the cataclysm, designed to be counternatural, a necessary consequence of the breaking of natural law—legibus obrutis (1102)—veers from its objective and turns into a cosmic corollary of the deaths of the heroes. The impossibles have become possibles, not to say necessaries. The Senecan view of the world simply cannot accept the fixity of the natural law upon which the figure of the impossibile is founded.

A similar use of the figure, though in a minor key, and with the cosmic impossibles converted into human implausibilities, is found in Phoenissae . After a vigorous denunciation of his sons, on whose behalf Antigone has been pleading with him, Oedipus confesses that nothing else could move him but his daughter's entreaties

hic Oedipus Aegaea transnabit freta
iubente te, flammasque quas Siculo vomit
de monte tellus igneos volvens globos
excipiet ore seque serpenti offeret,
quae saeva furto nemoris Herculeo furit;
iubente te praebebit alitibus iecur,
iubente te vel vivet.

If you command, your father Oedipus
Will swim the Aegean sea; will drink the flames
Which the Sicilian mountain belches forth
Along with molten lava; will breast the serpent
Which, mindful of the golden apples stolen
Persists in its rage; will, if you so command,
Offer his liver to the vultures, or even—live.
(Phoe 313–19)

The reference to himself in the third person, the bizarre inventory of near-impossibles, their extraction from myths that have nothing to do with the tale of Oedipus, and the shock effect of the final conceit, all of these mark the passage as a further attestation that the old appeal to natural fixities has become fatefully undermined.

In his own witty way, Ovid anticipates the move by playing with the wonders of mythology in Tristia:

credam prius ora Medusae
Gorgonis anguineis cincta fuisse comis,
esse canes utero sub virginis, esse Chimaeram,
a truce quae flammis separet angue leam,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
haec ego cuncta prius, quam te, carissime, credam
mutatum curam deposuisse mei.

I would rather believe
That Medusa's face was ringed with serpent locks,
That a virgin's belly trails with cubs, and that
Chimaera lives, a flaming tanglement
Of defiant snake and lioness,
. . . . . . . . . .
All this, my friend, I would rather believe
Than that you have changed your feelings toward me.
(Tristia 4.7.11–20)

Credam, used in both movements of the figure, is the operative word. Which is the more believable truth, that his friend will stay true to him, or that the creatures of myth are endowed with unusual shapes? After all, in Ovid's poetic world mythology carries an authority that is hard to gainsay. In its fashion, Ovid's use of the impossibile is just as subversive as Seneca's, though less frightening. But compare this Senecan instance. At Phaedra 418ff., which is part of the nurse's prayer to Diana-Hecate-Luna to help her make Hippolytus accede to Phaedra's desires, she argues: may he fall in love, just as you will always be unclouded in the night, and as you will never be brought down by Thessalian magic, and as you will never grant your favors to a herdsman. The combina-

tion of mythological playfulness with the illusoriness of magic and the airy effacement of the reality of clouds has its own charm. Together these instances of counter-reality do not suffice to set up the impossibile that would lend vigor to the nurse's wish. And in fact their very counter-reality is in question.

Thyestes gives us a more characteristic handling of the figure:

amat Thyesten frater? aetherias prius
perfundet Arctos pontus et Siculi rapax
consistet aestus unda et Ionio seges
matura pelago surget et lucem dabit
nox atra terris, ante cum flammis aquae,
cum morte vita, cum mari ventus fidem
foedusque iungent.

Does Atreus love his brother? Sooner does
The Ocean swamp the celestial Bears, sooner
The rampant flood of Sicily stand still,
A full-grown harvest rise from the western sea,
Black night light up the earth; and sooner will
A covenant come to pass between fire and water,
Between death and life, or hurricane and sea.
(Thy 476–82)

Thyestes, reluctant to return to the court, but weakening before his sons' cajoling, doubts that Atreus could be favorably disposed toward him. On the surface it looks as if Thyestes were trying to say, in the old manner, that a reconciliation between his brother and himself is unthinkable. But the Stoic substance of his pronouncements, the cumulative dissolution of natural polarities, the grim joy in the apocalyptic neutralization of regularity, augur the very opposite, and one imagines that somehow, latently, we are given to understand that he clings to a paradoxical hope. The singular conceit that the Sicilian turbulence might be congealed, coming as it does within a series of images pointing in the opposite direction, compounds the overwhelming sense of disruption. Because the hero, or at least his speech, knows that nature can, and in the end must, leave its grooves and turn in upon itself, the impossibilia virtually guarantee reconciliation. At the same time this reconciliation, should it come about, takes on a monstrous coloring. Thus the figure of the impossibile documents the ability of sumpatheia to give with one hand what it takes back with the other. It enriches the perceptions and expands consciousness, but invalidates assurance and lays bare secret hopes and fears. The crumbling psyche communes with its surroundings, on a proposed level of parity that turns

out to be quite true, but not in the sense intended on the surface. In the present instance, the suspicion that the impossibles are indeed possibles allows Thyestes to hope against hope that Atreus does indeed love him. The ironical reversal, the brutal revelation of Atreus's hatred, returns the figure to the dimensions of its conventional usage, as if cosmic contagio were, despite all contrary indications throughout the text, inoperative.

Seneca seems capable, as I have said, of employing the figure in a straightforward, traditional manner. The positive formula termed version (5) in note 45 above comes into play in Medea:

dum terra caelum media libratum feret
nitidusque certas mundus evolvet vices
numerusque harenis derit et solem dies,
noctem sequentur astra, dum siccas polus
versabit Arctos, flumina in pontum cadent,
numquam meus cessabit in poenas furor
crescetque semper.

While, centrally poised, the earth will yet support
The floating heavens, and the brilliant world
Threads forth its constant seasons, and the grains
Of sand are numberless, and day is paired
With sun, and night with stars; and while the sky
Revolves the thirsting Bears, and rivers drain
Into the sea, my wrath will grow forever
And strive for punishment.
(Med 401–7)

Here Medea, relying on the regular behavior of the astronomical and meteorological entities studied by the scientists, asserts the enduring quality of her fury. But again, is this procedure as innocuous as it looks? The rarity of assertions of cosmic normalcy in the dramas exerts its pressure upon the present semblance of confidence. Since the texts, in their totality, fall far short of certifying that normalcy, what is Medea telling us? Medea is a more consistently resolute character, less given to self-doubt or hallucination, than other Senecan principals, but perhaps there is a hint that she has not yet quite reached the final authority that identifies her furor with a world in collapse, visually demonstrated by the miracle of the snake chariot and confirmed by Jason's last words:

per alta vade spatia sublime aetheris,
testare nullos esse, qua veheris, deos.

Ride through the aerial spaces of the sky
And mark that, where you go, the gods are dead.
(Med 1026–27)

Megara's use of the figure also appears to come close to the standard mold:

egone ut parentis sanguine aspersam manum
fratrumque gemina caede contingam? prius
extinguet ortus, referet occasus diem,
pax ante fida nivibus et flammis erit
et Scylla Siculum iunget Ausonio latus,
priusque multo vicibus alternis fugax
Euripus unda stabit Euboica piger.
patrem abstulisti, regna, germanos, larem
patrium—quid ultra est? una res superest mihi
fratre ac parente carior, regno ac lare:
odium tui, quod esse cum populo mihi
commune doleo: pars quota ex illo mea est?

Am I to touch the hand soiled with the blood
My father and my brothers shed in their twin deaths?
Sooner the east will quench the day, the west
Will light it; sooner will fire and snow make peace
And Scylla join her southern shores with those
Of Italy; sooner will the alternating
Euboean current cease and stand transfixed.
You have taken from me all I cherish: my father,
My kingdom, brothers, my ancestral home.
Could you do more? One thing is left, dearer
To me than brother, father, kingdom or my home:
My hate for you, which, I regret, I have
To share with all. How small a part is mine!
(HF 372–83)

Once again, the passionate sufferer appeals to the invariability of natural processes, in the realms of astronomy, of geography, and the play of the elements, to ratify the survival and permanence of her hatred of the tyrant, her only regret being that she has to share that hatred with the general populace. In what follows she assures Lycus of the certainty of his defeat by a god, reminding him of the miseries and cruel deaths of earlier rulers of Thebes. This is a risky proceeding, since it appears to invest him with an authority analogous to theirs. But disregarding the political awkwardness of that gambit, Megara's odium, and her resentment at having to share it, depart wildly from her traditional role as a virtuous and dignified sufferer. Seneca has recast her in the role of a

hater, and a jealous hater at that. Does such a character, unstable and torn as she must be by Stoic and Senecan principles, have the moral right to call to witness the solidity of natural law? And since we know that the sanction invoked is moot, that the course of the sun is not eternally fixed and that the perpetuity of the currents of the Euripus is subject to the perils of contagio, what remains of the conventional force of the impossibile?

A very special instance of the abortiveness of the reliance upon impossibles is presented in Thyestes . Just after the chorus has conjured up an extraordinarily extended and formidable picture of the collapse of the celestial system and the breakdown of the zodiac (Thy 789–884), Atreus steps forward and declares:

aequalis astris gradior et cunctos super
altum superbo vertice attingens polum.
nunc decora regni teneo, nunc solium patris.
dimitto superos; summa votorum attigi.
bene est, abunde est, iam sat est etiam mihi.
sed cur satis sit?

. . . . . .
utinam quidem tenere fugientes deos
possem, et coactos trahere, ut ultricem dapem
omnes viderent.

My reach equals the stars, and higher yet
My head proudly abuts the lofty sky.
The royal emblems, the paternal lands are mine.
Who needs the gods? I have reached my life's desire.
It is good, yes, more than good; I have all I want.
But truly: all?

. . . . . .
I wish I could retrieve the gods in flight
And force them all to view the bloody feast.
(Thy 885–95)

This is not, strictly speaking, a case of impossibilia . But the principles involved in this richly informative sequence are the same. The crimes reported have moved the chorus to announce that the world, especially the stars, are out of joint. This is a canonical declaration of the workings of sumpatheia . Immediately thereafter Atreus states, pridefully, that he is now on equal footing with the stars, and in fact stands above them, with his head touching the summit of the cosmos. Such a declaration takes it for granted that the order over which he affirms his superiority, or with which he matches himself, is stable enough to serve as a basis for comparison. He proceeds to equate his cosmic eminence

with his secure possession of the land of his father, but also with a summary rejection of the gods. This remarkable jumble of premises, dimensions, and emotions is bare of any logical consistency, and immediately resolves itself in an admission that perhaps all is not as it should be (890). And he proceeds to wish that the gods, whom he has just rejected, could be compelled to witness his impending act of vengeance. To any audience privileged to watch this drama, the successive steps of Atreus's speech must make it clear that his certainty of himself is a sham, that the authorities to which he appeals are equally unreliable, and that the man and his world are caught in a reciprocal web of fallibility and corruption.

Hyperbole, restlessness, arrogance, delusion, malfunction, and despair are the obligatory expressions of the relation between man and the world in which he is condemned to live, which duplicates his own being. Schreikatalog, deflection, simile, imprecation, and impossibile work together to remind us that in a drama motivated by the assumptions of Stoic science, man has lost his freedom to chart his own moral course. The Stoic scientist undoes the Stoic sage. Against the background of the more commonly accepted version of what Stoicism means, the conclusion is inevitable: Stoic drama, as Seneca writes it, must be tragic drama. The tragedy is fired by motives different from those at work in certain Greek and eighteenth-century plays in which the principals are given a chance to determine their own fate. Nor is the admiratio with which Renaissance theorists invest the heroes matched by the "better than average" moral standing of the agent prescribed in Aristotle's Poetics . But if Aeschylus's Clytaemnestra can be the principal of a tragedy, and if the subtleties of the interaction between man and his environment as drawn by Seneca can deepen our sense of risk and struggle without suggesting easy solutions to moral quandaries, the label "tragedy" cannot, I feel, be withheld.