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