Chapter One
Paradigm, Precept, and Message

In the last lines of the preface to his translation of Thyestes (1560), Jasper Heywood reports his feelings after waking up from a dream meeting with Seneca:

This said, I felt the Fury's force enflame me more and more,
And ten times more now chaf'd I was than ever yet before,
My hair stood up, I waxed wood, my sinews all did shake,
And as the Fury had me vex'd my teeth began to ache.
And thus enflam'd with force of her, I said it should be done,
And down I sat with pen in hand, and thus my verse begun.
(J. Daalder, ed., 1982, p. 21)

The fury is Megaera, who with some justice could be called Seneca's tragic muse.

Some sixty years ago Otto Regenbogen, in a remarkable essay published by the Warburg Institute, declared that Seneca was the first to write what is today understood by the term "tragedy."^[1] The Greeks of the fifth century B.C. wrote tragoidiai that continue to serve as models of significance and power. But their plays do not invariably exhibit the peculiar combination of elements that since the earliest Renaissance, and in the wake of Seneca, has embodied the tragic vision: an unhappy and mournfully moving end supervening upon an abrupt fall; the centrality of the hero and his failure; the prominence of nefas, iniquity;^[2] grandiloquence, ghosts, and magic; an appeal to learning; a measure of didacticism; and all the qualities summed up under the triad atrocitas, maiestas, and gravitas: vehemence, grandeur, and high seriousness.^[3] This is not to say that the Greek repertory does not also, within its varied compass, exhibit these qualities. But Aeschylus's Eumenides, Sophocles' Philoctetes, and a majority of Euripides' extant plays are

[1] Regenbogen 1927–28, repr. 1961. Subsequent references to this seminal essay will he by the 1961 pagination.

[2] Opelt 1972.

[3] Regenbogen 1961, p. 451.

living proof that a Greek tragoidos could perform his task without many of the ingredients that the later European tradition considered essential in a tragedy. A play like Sophocles' Oedipus Rex may at first blush be thought to answer to the Renaissance demands, but it does not. The grandeur is not sufficiently selfconscious or spectacular, the vehemence sufficiently sensational or internalized, to authenticate the play as a paradigm of what the Renaissance critics, from Julius Caesar Scaliger to Johann Christoph Gottsched, required in high tragedy.^[4]

Friedrich Leo thought that by the first century of our era serious drama had shifted from the exploration of ethos, character, to the treatment of pathos, passion.^[5] The formulation is only partly apt. Hellenistic criticism used the two terms to designate a range of emotion from gentleness to fury. But even if we understand the terms in their pre-Hellenistic sense, the precise function of "character" in Greek tragedy has been questioned,^[6] and it is doubtful that any tragedy can do its work without passion playing its part. Yet of the enormous difference between the two kinds of drama, the classical Greek and the Senecan, there can be no doubt. Of all the plays in the Greek corpus, the one that comes closest to the Senecan type in its emphasis on the lability of characters and the frivolity of the gods, and in its admixture of the macabre, is Euripides' Rhesus, hardly a cherished jewel in the classical crown, and a play whose marginal standing has driven scholarship to extreme positions about its date and its authenticity.^[7]

The distance that separates Seneca from his Greek predecessors has been obscured by attempts to discover what unites the Roman versions with the Greek treatments of the myths on which they are based. Apart from Octavia, which is neither mythological nor Senecan, all the extant tragedies of Seneca have their analogues in the Greek repertory (though we have little more than the titles of some of the plays involved). Comparisons, though initially intriguing, tend to create the impression that Seneca meant to emulate or compete with his Greek

[4] For a resumé of Regenbogen's essay, see Coffee 1957. A representative list of the principal general discussions of Senecan drama in the modern period would have to include, at a minimum, the following: Klein 1865; Fr. Leo 1878; Herrmann 1924; Regenbogen 1961; Friedrich 1933; Pratt 1939; Zwierlein 1966; Herington 1968; Seidensticker 1970; Dingel 1974; Heldmann 1974; Pratt 1983; Braden 1985. For a brief discussion, with extensive bibliography, of the past century's work on Senecan drama, see Seidensticker and Armstrong 1985.

[5] Leo 1878, p. 148.

[6] Jones 1962.

[7] Ritchie 1964.

forerunners. That, as an educated Roman with a documented interest in Greek letters, he knew the work of the ancient tragedians is certain. It is less certain whether as a dramatic poet he was more stimulated by the Greeks or by republican dramatists, such as Ennius and Accius, of whose writing we possess only unenlightening portions or fragments. The consensus is that Seneca probably owes most to his immediate predecessors, and especially to the dramatist Varius, who also wrote a Thyestes .^[8] Seneca's debt to the republican dramatists, and also his desire to rival the ancient Greeks, may currently be underestimated. Quotations from and references to tragedy are so rare in his prose work that no comparative inferences can be drawn with assurance.^[9] For our needs it will be best to leave aside questions of literary debt and comparison and to concentrate on what makes Senecan drama the peculiar phenomenon it is.

To see the issue in the proper light, we must devote some attention to Seneca's total literary output. In his prose writings Seneca considers himself a Stoic. He is, to be sure, an eclectic philosopher. Like bees, he says (Ep. 84.5), we must gather our readings from various sources and use our intelligence to make them over into one authentic essence. There are those who are reluctant to regard him as a systematic philosopher at all. In many of the Dialogi and Epistles, he cites Epicurus with great veneration. But he explains (Ep. 8.8) that the opinions cited are in the public domain, and that he could equally well have gone to the poets. Occasionally he questions or even pokes fun at the Stoics and their tenets (Ep. 83; NQ 4.6.1, 7.22.1). His opinion of Chrysippus or Zeno is not always positive, but it is clear from his criticisms (e.g., Ben. 3.8) that he read them in the original. What matters is that the Stoics are nostri ; they are the community of speculative thinkers in which he is confessedly at home (NQ 7.22.1; CS init.; Ot. 3.1). The chief desiderata listed in the preface of book 3 of the Naturales quaestiones —control of vices, disregard of fortune, cheerful endurance of pain, authority over one's own life, purity, concentration on essentials—have an unmistakably Stoic look about them. Seneca's pronounced admiration for Cato, the saint of the imperial Stoicizers, confirms the impression.

[8] Tarrant 1978; cf. also the summary in Tarrant 1985, pp. 16–19. But cf. Dingel 1985, pp. 1053–54. For the prehistory of Thyestes in particular, see Tarrant 1985, pp. 40–43.

[9] Dingel 1974, pp. 48ff.

Both in his letters and in his treatises, Seneca demonstrates again and again that his knowledge of the history of thought is extensive, that he is familiar with the rules of logic and argumentation, and that he has been relatively successful at carving out his own decently consistent position from among the conflicting views available to him. He is not an original thinker in the strictest sense of that idea. But like Lucretius and Cicero, the only Roman writers with whom he deserves to be compared, he has made the thinking of his sources and his teachers his own. He convinces us with the earnestness of his inquiry and the firmness of his choices, and he advances his arguments with an engagement of self, and with a sense of drama, that are often exhilarating.

Between Chrysippus, the third head and dominant intellect of the Stoa in the third century B.C.E. , and Seneca, in the first century of our era, a number of forceful and relatively independent Stoic thinkers enriched the ideological storehouse of the school. "Among the Stoics, from the founders till today, opinions differ," was the view of Numenius, a scholar who lived a century after Seneca (Hans von Arnim, Stoicorum veterum fragmenta [henceforth SVF ] 2.20). Stoicism was the only branch of Hellenistic philosophy that did not sanctify or try to congeal the founder's positions. Still, by comparison with the achievement of Chrysippus, in the area of thought with which we are going to be concerned, the innovations and adjustments introduced by his successors relate to details rather than substance. On points of ethics and of psychology, Seneca can be shown to have adopted or modified the teachings of Posidonius and of Panaetius where those differ from the pronouncements of the Old Stoa. But Chrysippus remains the principal inspirer of the aspects of Stoicism crucial to our understanding of Senecan drama. Seneca introduces the name Chrysippus again and again. And though his own flexible and humane genius does not, at first, appear to have much in common with the tough intellectualism ascribed to Chrysippus, I shall have occasion to argue that the difference between the two, and especially the so-called intellectualism of Chrysippus, must not be magnified.^[10]

As with Marlowe, or Chapman, critics have responded to the power of Senecan drama with a sense that it harbors a striking measure of

[10] Hall (1977) demonstrates that Seneca is not given to exactitude in quoting from his sources. This is an important caveat in any attempt to recover the precise wording of the writing upon which Seneca relies. But we are more interested in the broader affinities between Stoic science and Senecan thought.

authorial self-revelation. If we had the theoretical writings on the stage with which the tradition credits Sophocles, or if Aeschylus and Euripides had left us such inquiries, it is unlikely that those documents would make it easy for us to connect the preoccupations, much less the speech, of their plays with the private passions of the writers. In Seneca's plays, on the other hand, every character is felt to offer a bit of the author himself as he stands revealed, or wishes to have himself thought of, in his prose writings.^[11] And that exposure of personality stands in the closest relation to the characteristic ways of analyzing conduct that Zeno and Chrysippus had made available.

At one level, the Stoic nature of the concerns is obvious. Amphitryon in Hercules Furens tries to console his son by calling his crime a mistake:

Quis nomen usquam sceleris errori addidit?
Who is so bold to call an error "crime"?
(HF 1237)

Hercules replies that, generally speaking, there is no difference:

Saepe error ingens sceleris obtinuit locum.
A major error usually ranks as crime.
(HF 1238)

This is orthodox, mainstream Stoicism, though qualified by temporal modifiers—usquam, saepe —that might not have satisfied the more doctrinaire members of the school. With one stroke the old Aristotelian conundrum of whether hamartia is an error or a vice becomes irrelevant: under the exacting rules of Stoic ethics, the two are indistinguishable. Another line in the same play, the last line of the first chorus (201), provides a near-emblematic instance of the Stoic reinterpretation of an old Greek moral: alte virtus animosa cadit . Various translations are possible. We should probably put considerable emphasis on the force of the adjective: "Heroic manhood plummets deep." It is difficult to imagine a more pregnant formulation of the need for the traditional hero, with his great soul and his exalted virtue, but also with his aggressiveness and his passion to lord it over others, to fall. These chiselled phrases are easy to fit into the Stoic canons of moral and social conduct. That they bespeak a larger and more intimate engagement will, I hope, become clear in the course of this essay.

[11] Shelton 1979.

Nonetheless, critics have always been readier to acknowledge the Stoicism of Seneca's essays and letters than to recognize the same principles at work in the dramatic corpus. Superficially, to compare Seneca's prose with his drama might seem like comparing the writings of the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale with the Grand Guignol of Titus Andronicus and similar dramatic documents of terror. Indeed, soon after Seneca's lifetime some readers decided that the two bodies of work were so different in their ideological orientation that they could not be the work of the same man.^[12] One scholar who argued this position was the fifth-century churchman and public verse orator Sidonius Apollinaris, who wrote (9.229), in one of his many praises of unworthy emperors, that there were two or even three Senecas, one of whom was the philosopher, and another the dramatist. Similar statements are found among the Renaissance humanists, including Erasmus. Justus Lipsius, one of the key figures in late Renaissance neo-Stoicism, thinks that only one or two of the plays are by the philosopher, and that the rest are by various other Senecas. Lessing, also, in the youthful work entitled Von den lateinischen Trauerspielen welche unter dem Namen des Seneca bekannt sind, engages in similar speculations, as did Diderot before him.^[13]

The cutting in two of Lucius Annaeus Seneca is the most radical step taken by those who are embarrassed and irritated by their own failure to find anything essentially Stoic or philosophical in Senecan drama. One of the latest critics to come to this conclusion—though he does not go all the way but keeps the man Seneca unsplit—is F. H. Sandbach, the author of an authoritative handbook on Stoicism. Sandbach has a brief section on Senecan drama, in which he refuses to see any appreciable trace of Stoicism, except for Hercules Oetaeus, which, he thinks, exhibits a Stoic saint in action. The antinomies Sandbach establishes will continue to occupy our attention. The plays, he says,

are concerned with the effects of the passions and the blows of Fortune. For the Stoic, Fortune was to be identified with Fate and Providence, for the dramatist it is a blind and hostile power; for the Stoic the passions are sequels of faulty judgment, for the dramatist they are independent

[12] For the ancient and medieval periods, the separatist hypothesis is best traced in Trillitzsch 1971 and 1978. With variations, it continued to be widely argued well into the ninteenth century. See also Häuptli 1983, pp. 77–105, for testimonia, from Suetonius to Stravinsky.

[13] Erasmus 1934, pp. 37–38. Lipsius 1611, intr.: only Medea is by the philosopher; the other plays are by various other Senecas. Lessing 1890, pp. 167–242. Diderot 1821, bk. 1, chaps. 125ff.

forces that fight with reason and pervert it for their own ends. Seneca's characters are not so much human beings as simplified exponents of anger, jealousy, cruelty . . . and the no less dangerous love, passions which brush aside the arguments of those who speak for reason and morality.^[14]

The burden of this contrastive analysis is, it seems, the following: if the drama were truly Stoic in complexion and intent, it would feature believable human beings in action, and reason would win out; that is to say, it could not be tragic, and would have considerable difficulty being drama. Similar objections have been raised by others. Joachim Dingel, the author of a searching analysis of this question, finds that the plays do not conform to Seneca's thinking as it emerges from the philosopher's remarks about aesthetics and education: "Der Dichter Seneca ignoriert die Kritik des Philosophen Seneca."^[15] Senecan drama realizes all the horrors the philosophical writings repudiate: scenes of hell, the topos of the double night, Jupiter's adulteries, and much more. His conclusion is that the plays show us the real Seneca, while the philosophical writings give us a mask, an official pose, feeding copiously and facilely upon the ready-made materials of the philosophers.^[16] His hesitant suggestion that the dramas document a "negative Stoicism," dwelling on what we do not understand about the gods and Fate, seems to leave the door open for the conclusion that they involve some kind of Stoicism after all. Yet that insight is not developed.^[17]

Today, Sandbach and Dingel represent, each in his own way, a minority position. The majority of readers and interpreters (not to mention producers), though equally unwilling to look at the plays as Stoic documents, are not troubled by the scruples that worry them.^[18] But the difficulties they have spelled out remain, and one is bound to admire the courage with which the modern questioners have turned against the received opinion, particularly where the received opinion is based on a sense, found even among critics who ought to know better, that Stoicism cannot really be taken seriously as philosophy (for example, see R. A. Brower 1971, p. 143). As I have indicated, I have consider-

[14] Sandbach 1975, pp. 160–61. In this judgment Sandbach agrees with a number of scholars, including students of later tragedy who look upon Hercules as a prime model for Corneille and others: see Wanke 1964, pp. 176ff., and Sokel 1964, p. 23f.

[15] Dingel 1974, p. 65.

[16] For a similar position, see also Henry and Walker 1963.

[17] For a brilliant review of Dingel's position, see Timpanaro 1981, pp. 117–18 n. 6.

[18] Among the critics who maintain and emphasize the Stoic identity of Senecan drama, see especially Regenbogen 1961; Egermann 1940; Knoche 1941; Marti 1945; Lefèvre 1969; Cacciaglia 1974.

able sympathy with the view that we must be on our guard against a criticism that insists that a literary text conform to a specific philosophical thesis. But the case of Seneca is a special one. The writer whose name is attached to the dramas in the manuscript tradition is a self-confessed Stoic. What is more, the point is to show, not that Seneca was trying to be a Stoic in his dramas, but that the dramas make better sense, or come across more powerfully, if understood as emanating from a Stoically trained perception.

But again, among those who are willing to accept the philosopher as the author of the majority of the plays, and who recognize a moral function in the drama, there is little agreement about the nature of that function. Some believe that Seneca tried to fashion the myths into moral fables—and stumbled. Kurt von Fritz, a subtle critic of the history of dramatic theory and a leading connoisseur of the fragmentary tradition of Stoicism, finds that Seneca's Oedipus represents an attempt to construct a moral-exemplary tale, and that it fails.^[19] According to another view, everything in the action of a Senecan play tends to confute the claims of Stoics, but the choral sequences show a way out of the impasse.^[20] They are the lessons that bring home to us the way of redemption; they may be irrelevant to the immediate aims of the particular plot they embellish, but they furnish the therapy whose need the drama demonstrates. On the face of it, as dramatic criticism, this is a desperate proposal. But it is one that would have been understood by many of Seneca's later imitators, who cared less about drama than about salvation, and it is not so very different from an interpretation of Senecan drama in terms of crime and punishment.

Those who wish to dissociate the philosopher from the dramatist cite the denunciations of poetry in the prose writings.^[21] There at one

[19] Von Fritz 1962, pp. 21–26. This curiously circumscribed judgment of von Fritz, which in effect says that Senecan drama is melodrama, is surprising in the light of his mature understanding elsewhere of what Stoicism, in all its varied aspects, may contribute to the experience of serious drama. But the notion of crime and punishment is at the root of most analyses of Senecan drama as Stoic manifesto.

[20] The choruses most often put under this obligation are Aga 589ff., Oed 882ff., 950ff., Phae 959ff., 1123ff., Thy 336ff., Tro 371ff. Cf. Marx 1932.

[21] For Seneca's discussion of poetry and of the liberal arts in general, see Mazzoli 1970; Dingel 1974; Stückelberger 1965. Mazzoli provides an intelligent and accurate introduction, but goes too far in constructing a Senecan poetics out of the disjecta membra of Seneca's remarks. Dingel recognizes that Seneca has no consistent philosophy of poetry. In his view, the tragedies give us the authentic voice of Seneca, while the discussions of poetry in the prose writings are subject to the limitation of those prose writings, which constitute a mascheratura, an attempt to rationalize and render innocuous the evil in the world. Cf. also the pertinent discussions in Berger 1980, and Hadot 1984.

point or another Seneca berates scenes in hell, legends of the gods misbehaving themselves, the concept of Chance working at random, and other topoi favored by the dramatists and prominent in Senecan tragedy. One might object that Zeus's rape of Io hardly exhausts the full range of significance of Aeschylus's Suppliants, or Apollo's constraint of Cassandra that of his Agamemnon, or even Hercules' raking of Hell that of Seneca's Hercules Furens . But that is too easy an answer. Seneca himself says in one of his Consolations (Pol. 11.5): "There is no book among the writings of the poets that does not furnish you with a great many paradigms of the varied nature of men and of the uncertainty of events and of the many causes that make tears flow." The causes are crucial (as we shall see again later in this essay); the philosopher can extract his evidence from literature, and will find ready-made grounds to fit into his argument. The inherence of causes in the literary complex gives to that body of writing the potential for philosophical development and a philosophical base of its own. In fact, a thorough study of Seneca's pronouncements on the uses and risks of reading shows a variety of often conflicting responses, some of which will be taken up directly. The philosopher cannot think about poetry without a passionate interest in its effects.

It is true that in his treatises and letters, Seneca's thinking about poetry and the liberal arts mostly cleaves to ethical concerns. Seneca rejects disinterested philological or historical inquiry (where did Ulysses go in his travels?) in favor of the sort of questions moral philosophy asks, so we will not stray ourselves (Ep. 88.7). We are all Ulysses, tempted by vicious stimuli to roam and blunder. The writer must teach us how to navigate, especially when we are temporarily shipwrecked, and to love everything that is honestum, respectable and civilized. Reading and listening are legitimate and profitable only if out of the words there come to be works: ut quae fuerint verba sint opera (Ep. 108.35). The paradigms must come to rest in the blood of the listeners. Philosophy is to be tested against the substance of life as recorded in the poems, a life that demands action. The Stoic debate concerning the virtues of quiet wisdom and its realization in the active life can still be heard in Antonio's rejection of Alberto's counsel of patience:

Patience is slave to fools, a chain that's fixed
Only to posts, and senseless log-like dolts.
(John Marston,
Antonio's Revenge 1.5.36–37)

In all endeavors to assess the nature of the Stoic share in the plays, the sights are trained on moral doctrines, the values that are most effectively communicated via exempla, the cautionary figures and actions of prominent men and women, and via precepts and sententiae, the often moving, but always safe, generalities offered by the characters and particularly by the chorus.^[22] Is this what Seneca has in mind when, in one of his Epistles (20.1), he asks his correspondent to "plunge the philosophy into the bedrock of his heart"—ut philosophiam in praecordia ima demittas —and to test his progress, not through speech or writing, but by the experience of his soul? Stoic choruses, a modern critic says, are "pitched to inflame rather than exorcise,"^[23] a remark that mirrors Scaliger's (and, before him, Quintilian's) insistence on the emotions, the affectus, of the audience as the target of the dramatist's persuasive power.

Let me anticipate and say that if precepts and paradigms were all that Stoicism had to contribute to the dramatic construct, the conclusion would have to be, not only that Senecan drama is only intermittently Stoic, but that the whole question is skewed, and that the drama as drama, particularly in its tragic aspect, is incompatible with genuine Stoic belief.^[24] Diogenes the Cynic, a spiritual ancestor of some of the more radical Stoic moralists, wrote an Oedipus in which he sought to show that it was silly of Oedipus to be exercised over the marriage with his mother, on the grounds, presumably, that events beyond our control should not be permitted to disturb us. Diogenes' genial (or brutal?) confection, whether it was a drama or not, is unfortunately lost. But the Stoic potential for serious drama cannot be shrugged off quite so easily. If the Stoic moral is merely a conclusion e contrario, an ethical or religious message suspended, like a Brechtian placard, in the interstices of demonstrations of human misery, we might as well admit that Senecan drama is best defined in the narrow terms heralded by Nietzsche's slogan, at the head of his Streifzüge eines Unzeitgemässen: "Seneca or the Toreador of Virtue."^[25]

There is some irony in the spectacle of Nietzsche falling a victim to what must be regarded as a Christian narrowing of the Stoic legacy.

[22] For Aristotle on exempla and sententiae, see Rhet. 2.20.1393a28ff. and 2.21.1394a19ff.

[23] Braden 1970, pp. 38–41.

[24] Hence the speculation of Marti (1947) that Senecan tragedy may be derived from earlier tragedies composed by Stoic philosophers has not found acceptance.

[25] Friedrich Nietzsche 1966, p. 991.

The neo-Stoicism of the Renaissance and of the Baroque, of Erasmus and Justus Lipsius, of Monchrestien and J. du Vair and Andreas Gryphius, has usually been studied as a momentous exercise in merging the postulates of Christian morality with those of Stoic ethics, under the guidance of a post-Reformation consciousness of sin.^[26] Christianity and Stoicism meet on the plane of stubborn resignation. Papinianus, the hero of Gryphius's play of the same name, is an avowed Stoic as well as a messenger of unmistakably Christian obligations. Justus Lipsius's De constantia, arguing that all men are guilty in the sight of God (2.16), reinforces the point that the Christianization of Stoicism, or the Stoicizing of the patristic tradition, is most keenly observed where the subject is sin and sinners. The easy acceptance, through the centuries, of a spurious exchange of letters between Seneca and Saint Paul endorses the tradition.^[27]

But Lipsius himself expounds a body of thought that goes far beyond the tight strictures of a moral code. Wilhelm Dilthey^[28] and others have demonstrated that much of the European philosophical and literary tradition, from the late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century and beyond, may be interpreted as the working out of Stoic impulses, and that the Stoic seeds survive in the most varied sectors of human thought. What is more, even if we restricted ourselves to tracing the echoes of Stoic ethics and psychology, it would be a mistake to look only for direct and positive signals. The success of a play, and the identification of the elements that have gone into its creation, are gauged by more encompassing questions than the plotting of an intermediate maxim or a terminal moral openly carried into the field. Here is an excerpt from Lipsius's De constantia (2.13), in the translation of Sir John Stradling. The speaker is Langius:

Tell me, in beholding a tragedy, will it stomacke thee to see Atreus or Thiestes in the firste or second acte walking in state and maiestye uppon the scene? To see them raigne, threate and commaund? I thinke not, knowing their prosperitie to be of small continuance; and when thou shalte see them shamefullie come to confusion in the last Acte. Nowe then in this Tragedy of the World, why art thou not so favourable towards God, as to a poore Poet? This wicked man prospereth. That Tyrant liveth. Let be awhiles. Remember it is but the first Acte, and consider aforehande in thy mind, that sobs and sorrowes will ensue uppon their

[26] Zanta 1914; Simon 1955; Dilthey 1960; Abel 1978.

[27] Sevenster 1961.

[28] Dilthey 1960.

sollace. This Scene will anon swimme in bloud, then these purple and golden garments shal be rowled therein. For that Poet of ours is singular cunning in his art, and will not lightly transgress the lawes of this Tragedie. In musicke, doo we not allowe sometimes disagreeing soundes, knowing that they will all close in consent? But the parties iniured doo not alwaies see the punishment. What marvels is that? The tragedy commonly is tedious, and they are not able to sit so long in the theater: yet others do see it, and are worthily stricken with feare when they perceive that some are reprived before the severe throne of justice, but not pardoned: and that the day of execution is prolonged, not wholly taken away.

It is difficult to know what to make of this notion of God as a tragic poet, though there are some Plotinian texts canvassing its implications.^[29] It is the converse of the contemporary Platonist elevation of the poet to the rank of divine maker. But the idea that tragedy can have a moral effect only if the viewer can supplement its meaning with his own historical and eschatological imagination is one that runs counter to the demand that Stoic tragedy carry its message upon the sleeve. Marcus Aurelius said (11.6) that tragedy was invented to teach you to regard the untoward events in life with the same unruffled feeling or even pleasure as their imitations on the stage. But Marcus comes to this insight from a direction opposite to that of Lipsius: dramatic performance has its place in a wonderfully contemptuous catalogue of meaningless and frivolous activities (7.3), in the midst of which we are asked to maintain our good humor; a philosopher stands at an enormous distance from those who strut tragically across the stage of life (9.29). Lipsius, on the other hand, is fascinated by tragedy. But the reader senses that Lipsius is impressed with tragedy for reasons that have little to do with an overt ethical didacticism. Whether in his graphic description of what happens on the stage, as on the larger boards of the world, he has in mind Seneca or one of his sixteenth-century imitators is uncertain. What he finds impressive about this kind of drama is difficult to accommodate to a simple calculation of sin and punishment duly apportioned.

The time has come to look more closely at the role of paradigm and precept in Senecan drama, and to show why they are, by themselves,

[29] Plotinus 3.2.16–17 discourses upon the world as a space created for dancers and actors.

incapable of explaining the power of the plays, or of vindicating their standing as Stoic documents. Seneca says (Ep. 95.65) that according to Posidonius, paradigms, or exempla, are part of a larger machinery of moving the listener, called paraenetic in Greek, which also includes precepts, consolation, persuasion, and exhortation. Zeno stated (SVF 1.84) that a paradigm is "the recollection of a past action by way of approximation to what is now being sought," a complicated formula designed to cover a wide usage of the term, particularly within the medium of ethics. In the psychology of drama, the effect intended is not so much recollection but the vivid presentation of an act or an agent on the stage. The paradigmatic figure or action may itself be linked with anterior (mythical or philosophical) paradigms. Terpnos, the celebrated actor of Nero's time, "sang" lamentations of Priam, imprecations of Oedipus, the madness of Orestes, the death of Icarus, and much else,^[30] and Nero himself delighted audiences with similar evocations of past figures. But the great tragic character does not follow an exemplum so much as create one.^[31] If the dramas are, as the moralists believe, suasoriae, moral briefs of a kind, what is the function of the paradigms in them? In what follows, I shall at first present my argument as if it were a foregone conclusion that Senecan drama means to be educational, and that the focus of this educational mission is in the area of moral and political behavior.

To begin with, a paradigm can work either positively or negatively.^[32] In the former case, it is intended to produce a fruitful message, a hortatory or suasive signal. The noble hero or the wise king relying upon his healthy understanding and acting sensibly, or suffering without breaking, contributes a model calculated to improve the audience, or at least to sway them from a course of folly. Jupiter as a governor is a paradigm for rulers (NQ 2.43): let them follow his reasonableness and his clemency.

To turne to our domesticke hystories, what English blood seeing the person of any bold English man presented and doth not hugge his fame, and hunnye at his valor. . . . so bewitching a thing is lively and well spirited action, that it hath power to new mold the harts of the spectators and fashion them to the shape of any noble and notable attempt.

[30] Note the sources given by Cattin 1963a, pp. 101ff.

[31] For the whole subject, see Egermann 1940, and Hadot 1969.

[32] On the importance of exempla of vice as well as virtue for acquiring moral awareness, see Ep. 120.3–11.

Thomas Heywood's words (in An Apology for Actors )^[33] reflect a long tradition of the dramatic use of paradigms, a tradition of which Seneca, with such figures as Polyxena and Astyanax in Troades, was one of the principal architects. When Oedipus, in his bitterness and despair, marvels at the miracle of a woman as great-hearted as his daughter Antigone

Unde in nefanda specimen egregium domo?
How does a vicious house come by this singular model?
(Phoe 80)

his speech records the impact a public figure, from history or legend, should have upon a miscreant society. This is what Albertino Mussato, the re-founder of Senecanism in the early Renaissance, in his first Epistle hoped for among the projected effects of the tragic models: to produce constancy and assurance in the face of flux and adversity. And this is a tradition that remained powerful into the eighteenth century, at which point the "ironic" cast of enlightenment historiography killed the easy reliance upon the authority of positive paradigms.^[34]

With Mussato, we have already lighted upon the other variety of exemplum, the cautionary paradigm. At the conclusion of Seneca's De constantia sapientis the emperor Caligula is brought in, by way of a supplementary playlet, to cement the positive lesson with a demonstration of the inadmissibility of its converse. Many of the old Greek heroes and heroines, with their lives of passion and torment and the disastrous consequences of their choices, were eminently suitable as warning examples. Those who feel that it is the business of the theater to teach, and that includes the vast majority of critics over the past two millennia, advertise a policy of keeping the categories, the suasive and the deterrent, clearly distinct.^[35]

In Senecan drama, the cautionary prevails. Atreus in Thyestes and Clytaemestra in Agamemnon teach us, if teaching is the word, how not to live. The tragedy appeals, not to our crudely imitative instincts—

[33] Heywood 1941, p.7.

[34] Koselleck 1967.

[35] The distinction may be effaced by the critical compendium "fear." Some Stoic sources cited by DeLacy (1948, pp. 249, 270) suggest that the poet uses fear to influence the listener. In the case of cautionary paradigms, the fear would be a negative force; in the case of hortatory exempla, fear equals awe and admiration. This is the background against which Corneille developed his concept of admiration as the principal intended effect of high tragedy.

what Freudians call the repetition compulsion—but to a discriminating moral sense that shrinks from the severity of the vices acted out and belabored. Antigone and Polyxena move us less through the manner of their action than through the admiring reports about them. Some profess to see Hercules in Hercules Oetaeus in the same light, as an elaborate instance of the imitabile exemplum, but the difficulties with that proposition are insurmountable. He, like all the central figures of Senecan drama who interest us, illustrates the cautionary, if not the repellent, mode. Generally speaking, positive paradigms are, if cast in major roles, dramatically unpersuasive. In George Chapman's The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois, Bussy's brother Clermont is conceived as a Stoic sage, as is Cato in the same author's Caesar and Pompey . They are embroiled in the Machiavellian troubles of their times, and go under while maintaining a principled stance. Clermont takes his own life rather than yield to the impulse for revenge. The result is a dramatic letdown and embarrassment.

Most critics would agree that where the suasive paradigm carries the weight of the action, the play's intensity suffers. In several chapters of the third book of his Manductio ad philosophiam Stoicam (1604), Justus Lipsius demonstrates, by implication, the uselessness of a Stoic saint on stage.^[36] And this is often interpreted to mean that such plays go wrong because they preach a Stoic message—that is, because their hortatory mission is the chief office their commitment to Stoicism is designed to convey. "The failure of Chapman's tragical drama ever to achieve fully the stature of great tragedy is in large measure due to the fact that Stoicism negates the premises from which such tragedy develops. Mere chance did not determine that Bussy D'Ambois, Chapman's outstanding success in tragedy both on the stage and in the acclaim of literary history, proves to be the only play on which the ethics of Stoicism exerted so slight an influence," observes J. W. Wieler.^[37]

With his "the ethics of Stoicism," the critic is half right. But it is a reasonable assumption that what he means by this phrase is the whole

[36] Chap. 5, 3rd paradox; chap. 6, 4th paradox; chap. 7, 5th paradox; chap. 10, 8th paradox; etc. For a useful survey of Lipsius's Stoicism, see Saunders 1955. In spite of Lipsius's earnest attempt to reconcile Stoicism and Christian faith—in Physiologia 1.18ff. he argues that the many gods permitted in Stoicism are really no different from Christian angels, and that even their corporeality ought not to be pressed—his understanding of the major tenets of Stoic science was extensive.

[37] Wicler 1949, p. 163. Most modern studies of Chapman refer to Stoicism or Seneca only in discussing style.

range of what Stoicism could offer to a dramatist; and here I hope to suggest that Bussy D'Ambois is a gloriously Stoic drama through and through.^[38] Leaving aside this particular play, it is wrong to jump to the conclusion that the cautionary paradigm, with all its packed freight of murder and lust, is less indebted to Stoic impulses than the admired image of nobility. Even a casual reading of the canonic Stoic texts reveals a constant preoccupation with the seamy and the sinister, an almost luxuriant dwelling on the vices the Stoic hopes to avoid. Quintilian (10.1.129) calls Seneca an egregius insectator vitiorum, a rare compliment that, though meant to characterize his philosophical prose, is equally applicable to the drama. Evil, Chrysippus said (SVF 2.1175), is an instrument whereby God educates men.

For obvious psychological reasons, the dividing line between the suasive and the cautionary is, in practice, not as neat as the classification tends to promise. From the point of view of his father, Amphitryon, the infant Hercules, remembered in a wistful speech, is an accomplished Stoic, facing the fiery snakes with a calm countenance (HF 215ff.; cf. also 1200–1201). Ideally, as a vanquisher of monsters, the Hercules of myth should have an easy enough time making himself over into a Stoic saint, and indeed, many Stoics, like the Cynics before them, adopted him as their patron hero. But in the dramas—both Hercules Furens and Hercules Oetaeus —the auspicious features are blotted out by the recognition that the monsters the hero is fated to overcome are largely in his own breast, and that they vanquish him more devastatingly than his legendary self ever defeated them. The dusdaimon of Euripides, the hero brought low by divine forces beyond his control, turns into a nocens, an authoritative destroyer of what is good. Lower down on the scale of significance, Agamemnon, in the second act of Troades (250ff.), counsels Stoic moderation. But as his opponent, Pyrrhus, gathers the character evidence against him, and casts in his teeth his fickleness, his fear, his weakness for women, and his greed, Agamemnon's credibility as a Stoic sage, never very compelling, is demolished, and the suasive and the cautionary are once again brought into collision, or better, into fateful convergence.

Taking another look at Chapman, even the noble Clermont is an equivocal symbol of Stoic virtue. The challenges of blood, of personal loyalty, and of the cosmic catastrophe invoked by the ghost of his

[38] Haydn (1950) has some discriminating comments on neo-Stoic elements in Renaissance drama. But his distinction between doctrinal and bastard Stoicism seems to me unpersuasive.

brother Bussy speak to him so urgently that his Stoic orations, largely Epictetan rather than Senecan, appear destined not so much to voice his nobility as to help him find his balance and hold his crumbling world together. It must be said that without a large amount of adulteration, so that the saintly nobility comes to be marbled with streaks of fretfulness or distemper, if not downright madness, the virtuous hero leaves us cold. The Renaissance martyr play, such as Gryphius's Katharina von Georgien (1647), in which the heroine is put through a series of murderous and revolting tests, demonstrates that our interest in the saint is pleasingly fanned by his palpable torments.^[39] But pure suffering linked with shining virtue is not a promising foundation for tragic empathy. The conflation of the saintly with the questionable is imperative, far beyond Zeno's delicate limits quoted in Seneca's Ira: "In the mind of the sage also, even after the wound is healed, a scar remains, and so he will experience certain suspicions and dark hints of passions, though of the passions themselves he will be free."^[40] The hortatory and the deterrent must enter into a potent fusion. As it has been put recently with regard to the titular hero of Seneca's Oedipus, hardly a paragon of Stoic virtue, but not for that another Atreus: if Seneca was interested in providing a lesson, he did so by hinting at the possibility of salvation even for Oedipus, and not by insisting that Oedipus, in falling short of that salvation, automatically assumed the character of a villain.^[41]

But does this glancing away from the mutual exclusiveness of the negative and the positive not put the whole idea of an educative Stoicism in doubt? Doesn't Seneca's dramaturgy prove that the cautionary paradigm reigns supreme, and that the lesson conveyed by it is easily discernible? As Atreus, near the end of Thyestes, rings down the curtain on his pleasure in the crime, only to turn around and prick the bubble of that very pleasure:

bene est, abunde est, iam sat est etiam mihi.
sed cur satis sit? pergam . . .

It is enough, more than enough, and I
Am satisfied. Or am I? No, I will go on . . .
(Thy 889–90)

[39] For an excellent appreciation of Gryphius and the Dutch and German Senecans who preceded him, see Regenbogen 1961, pp. 426ff.

[40] 1.16.7: In sapientis quoque animo, etiam cum vulnus sanatum est, cicatrix manet. Sentiet itaque suspicion quasdam et umbras adfectuum, ipsis quidem carebit.

[41] Heldmann 1974, p. 194.

the warning about ravenousness, the major theme of the play, is obvious enough. Atreus resembles Hannibal, who, when he saw a ditch full of human blood, exclaimed over the beauty of the sight; or Volesus, who went into similar raptures as he walked among the corpses of three hundred victims of execution (Ira 2.5.4–5). A staging of such ferocity, such amoral indulgence, portending the loss of all civilized control, cannot but turn the audience in a salutory direction. The severity of the vices makes us shrink and think again. The later branches of the Senecan tradition, both the gory Italian and the slightly less sanguinary French, draw their satisfactions and their social legitimacy at least in part from their adherence to the Stoic view transmitted by Horace: tragedy, in featuring an exemplary deterrence, educates. If in Marlowe the moral lesson is undermined by the hero not coming a cropper as the moral would demand it, but crashing in unexpected circumstances, the reason lies with the greater complexity of the dramatic issues. But the audience is likely to disregard the aesthetic and psychological dislocations and take the warning straight.

Yet the example of Marlowe raises a principal question. If the suasive or the subtly mimetic is dovetailed with the cautionary, can we be certain of the appropriate response? Compare Corneille's Auguste:

Ces exemples récents suffiroient pour m'instruire,
Si par l'exemple seul on se devoit conduire:
L'un m'invite à le suivre, et l'autre me fait peur;
Mais l'exemple souvent n'est qu'un miroir trompeur;
Et l'ordre du destin qui gêne nos pensées
N'est pas toujours écrit dans les choses passées.
(Cinna 2.1.31–36)

Seneca tells a fascinating anecdote about the performance of a play by Euripides, Bellerophon, now lost, in the course of which much was said on behalf of the possession of wealth, to the apparent detriment of the standing of innocence, fair health, and good reputation (Ep. 115.14ff.). To what extent the arguments pro and con were conveyed by the lives of exemplary characters or were developed through more or less detached maxims (for this topic, see below), is now impossible to say.^[42] At a certain point in the performance, Seneca tells us, the spectators rose in disgust and chided Euripides for what they conceived to

[42] For an attempt to reconstruct the contents of the play, see Webster 1967, pp. 109–111.

be his campaign on behalf of filthy lucre. It took all the playwright's authority to get the audience to resume their seats and to look at the remainder of the play, at the end of which they would realize, because of the fall of the hero, that a delight in wealth for wealth's sake has dire consequences. It is conceivable that Seneca did not know the play, and had the anecdote from somebody else; the fragments that have come down to us do not make it likely that it was Bellerophon himself who was the devotee of affluence. But the tale, like Lipsius's remarks about the divine playwright, scores a significant point. A complex dramatic structure, featuring a seemingly positive or, worse, innocuous paradigm subsequently shorted into a negative moral, can be counted on to spark the right reaction only if allowed to do its work slowly, without interruption, and perhaps with a surprise twist toward the end. There is a lesson here about timing, a lesson Seneca's plays can hardly be said to certify. If, in a play that offers models both for imitation and for eschewal, the relation and the timing of the elements are not expertly handled, the consequences for the drama can be disastrous. What if Euripides had not risen to reassure the fans, and the misleading inchoate signals of the exempla had so taken root in their tempers that the final reversal had no chance to rally them?

Though Seneca says that "nothing is as useful as first to look upon deformity, and then upon the danger" (Ira 2.35.3), he is himself alive to the risk inherent in conflicting signals and their combination, whether arranged in sequence or not. Stoicism is keenly aware of the precariousness of a morality that is preached or implied e contrario . "Evils sometimes offer the aspect of the good. . . . vices border upon virtues; the incorrigible and the sinful have the likeness of the righteous" (Ep. 120.8).^[43] Seneca warns that we must watch closely to make the necessary distinctions, not only between virtue and vice, but also between the agent and his quality or, to put it more pertinently, between the choices made and the issues made to triumph. Two similar lines of conduct can be morally at odds. The ingredients of action are so finely calibrated in their nexus that, in a forceful stage presentation as in life, it is usually hard to separate what is imitable from what is to be avoided. And perhaps, from the point of view of the intel-

[43] Mala interdum speciem honesti obtulere. . . . sunt enim, ut scis, virtutibus vitia confinia et perditis quoque ac turpibus recti similitudo est. Dingel (1974) argues unsuccessfully against Knoche 1941, Mazzoli 1970, and others that this text proves that we cannot extract the notion of a cautionary paradigm from Seneca.

ligent playgoer who prefers moral opacities, radical separation is counterproductive.

The poets, conjuring up Jupiter's amorous exploits, could be thought to be excusing human errors; lustful characters certainly avail themselves of the precedent. It is said that hellfire and brimstone preachers are depressingly familiar with the experience of building up the challenge of the demon rum, only to have the parishioners, overwhelmed by the attractions of the build-up, storm out to the nearest bar. The danger is greater in the literary artifact, and especially in drama, because the supposedly cautionary tale is invested with formal and psychological allurements that get in the way of the moral. The theatricality, the sparkling rhetoric, and the proud vitality of the Senecan villain stand ready to transform the cautionary, if not into a positive model, into a new compound whose educative dimension is inscrutable. Lessing's early essay on Senecan drama makes much of this difficulty, an interesting by-product of Lessing's enlightenment attempt to strip away the didactic incrustations upon Aristotelian theory.^[44]

In philosophical Stoicism, in the treatises and letters aimed at unencumbered reflection and persuasion, the purity of virtue and the interdependence of virtues is taken for granted, and virtue is allied with reason. "Virtue is according to nature; the vices are contrary and inimical [sc. to nature]" (Ep. 50.8), a remark that does not stop Seneca from pointing out the rampant currency of vices. Virtue is coupled with fortitude, justice, prudence, temperance, all of them issuing from, and ultimately identifiable with, the rational principle in man, which Seneca calls ratio . A man or woman truly possessing one virtue is, by associative implication, endowed with all of them. Like stones in a vault, they support one another. On rare occasions, at brief moments of a delusory reflectiveness, drama subscribes to the same postulate. In Hercules Furens (737–47) Theseus distinguishes between sinners and saints, and terminates his account with an address to kings squarely based on the premise that the Stoic king is an achievable reality. Theseus's philosophical reductionism is short-lived; the premise is undone by the tragedy that passes him by.

The philosophical texts also know another, quite different, story. Taking his cue from Plato's Timaeus, Chrysippus declares (SVF 2.1170) that in nature's production line, the most valuable commodities are

[44] Lessing 1890; cf. also Barner 1973. Braden 1985 is largely concerned with the issue sketched above.

often also, because of their delicacy, most vulnerable to corruption. In the words of Aulus Gellius, who reports this:

morbi quoque et aegritudines partae sunt, dum salus paritur.
sicut hercle . . . dum virtus hominibus per consilium naturae
gignitur, vitia ibidem per adfinitatem contrariam nata sunt.

Disease and illnesses are born as health is being produced.
Indeed, . . . while men are endowed with virtue by the design of
nature, vices are generated alongside by an adverse affinity.
(Noct. Att. 7.1)

Another explanation of evil, also associated with Chrysippus, and akin to the one just cited, says that it exists to show off the good. In the world we know, virtue and vice are functions of each other, with the latter encompassing and harrying the former. Now and then, on rare occasions, the confinement of the good works to its advantage. The encirclement by the forces of evil gives it a strength that allows it to shine forth, in brief flashes, and establish a precarious authority.

Virtue is
Only the irremediable logic of all the anguish
Your cunning could invent or heart devise.
(Robert Penn Warren,
Brother to Dragons, p. 30)^[45]

Or, as Samuel Butler has it more wittily:

The devil, in fact, when he dresses himself up in angel's clothes, can only be detected by experts of exceptional skill, and so often does he adopt this disguise that it is hardly safe to be seen talking to an angel at all.
(The Way of All Flesh, chapter 19)

Whatever the various formulations, experience teaches us that an individual life is a paradigm case of the mutual implication of good and evil. The tragic entailment is a position to which Seneca returns again and again in his philosophical writings, and to which I shall return be-

[45] When Robert Penn Warren's Brother to Dragons was first published, Leslie Fiedler greeted it with a remarkable review entitled "Seneca in the Meathouse," repr. in No! In Thunder (1960). Some of Fiedler's remarks are worth quoting here: "It is a Senecan tragedy that Warren has composed, a play that cannot be played, a poem that must be imagined as acted in the high, ranting style, complete with ghosts and prophecies and dire forebodings, shakings of the earth and raw skulls, suicides and obscene murders and crimes too horrible to define. . . . We have come somehow to believe that bombast and melodrama are hopelessly corrupted, that these shrill, honorable means are in themselves despicable. But we need them to complete ourselves, to do justice to the absurdity of terror, its failure to be well-behaved" (pp. 129–31).

low. Drama, with its temporal limitation and its thematic compression, but also with its age-old call for a pity and a fear responding to human ambivalence, does not run counter to the philosophical expectations. It supplies pregnant vignettes in evidence of their truth. A Stoic king on the stage, if there is such a commodity, must have his faults along with his excellences, orthodox Stoic assumptions about the achievability of pure virtue notwithstanding.

Again, philosophical Stoicism cannot sidestep the inevitable tension between the demand for excellence, with its Homeric implications of strenuous living and the exacting needs of the performative self; and the challenge of social awareness, of humanitas, to philanthropon, which Seneca discusses in De clementia . The debate is continued by the Christian Stoics, who, from Montaigne (Essays 1.1) on, worry over the dubious status of compassion, regret, and other humane stirrings in the heart of the man who wants to be at peace with himself and with the world.^[46] The canonical intellectualism of Chrysippus, already tempered by some of his successors, is shunted aside to leave room, in Seneca's more tolerant taxonomy of morals, for the saving grace of selected emotions. I cannot, Seneca writes, produce a wise man who, like a rock, has no feelings whatever (Ep. 71.27–28). Man consists of two parts, one irrational, the other rational. Seneca's difficulty with this problem shows up in a degree of inconsistency. On other occasions (e.g., Ep. 116; also Ep. 85), he goes along with Posidonius, and perhaps Chrysippus himself: let us stifle the irrational part as much as is in our power.^[47] But the programmatic emphasis on clementia, mildness, in the tract devoted to that political and social disposition, marks his reluctance to "suffer the soul's energy to decline and freeze" (Ep. 16.6).^[48]

And yet, in the prose works, Seneca's view that a good man, even under Stoic auspices, is not devoid of all feeling does not, strangely, extend to misericordia, the compassion a human being feels for the sufferings of another. On this score the plays show a much greater openness for the feelings that bind men together. Note the great choral

[46] The history of the discussion is traced by Dilthey 1960, p. 37 and passim.

[47] For Chrysippus, see SVF 3.431, and Long and Sedley 1987, pp. 419ff.

[48] Ne patiaris inpetum animi tui delabi et refrigescere. For Seneca's view of clementia, and its difference from venia of which he disapproves, see Griffin 1976, pp. 154ff. Cf. also Cicero's contrasting of the Platonic-Aristotelian gratia (tolerance) with the unforgiving hardness prized in the Stoic saint (Pro Murena 61ff.).

odes, or essays, on the sharing of grief, in Agamemnon (esp. 664–69) and Troades:

Dulce maerenti populus dolentum,
dulce lamentis resonare gentes;
lenius luctus lacrimaeque mordent,
turba quas fletu similis frequentat.

It is sweet for one in grief to know
That he but feels a common woe:
And lighter falls the stroke of care
Which all with equal sorrow bear.
(Tro 1009–12)

In effect, the signals built into Senecan drama take us back to an Aristotelian compassion that the early Stoics had rejected as a basis for healthy human intercourse. Seneca also defies Stoic radicalism by coming out for a graduated scale of punishments (NQ 2.44). Meanwhile, more simply, Seneca accepts the special contribution of Stoicism to the old tension: a blackening of the Homeric ideal. On the one hand, Stoicism commends heroism, particularly the Odyssean heroism of patient fortitude. On the other hand, Stoicism turns its back on the heroism of bloody exploits celebrated in the Iliad and the bulk of Greek mythology. As I have mentioned, both Cynics and Stoics on occasion refashioned the figure of Hercules into a model of patience and self-sufficiency. But the Hercules of serious drama usually embodies violent aggression and self-centered pride. In his De tranquillitate animi (2.12), Seneca deplores the character of Achilles: a maladjusted and changeable delinquent. In Hercules Furens, Hercules is the overreacher, the remover of natural restraints (279–93, 955ff.), the destroyer of barriers that guarantee civilized life.^[49] To Amphitryon, who tries to make apologies for his son, the tyrant Lycus, a curious choice for the expositor of the Stoic arraignment of heroes, cites as examples of Hercules' "relaxations":

Hoc Euryti fatetur eversi domus
pecorumque ritu virginum oppressi greges;
hoc nulla Iuno, nullus Eurystheus iubet:
ipsius haec sunt opera.

[49] See especially the good remarks of Owen 1968, pp. 302–8. Also Zintzen in Lefèvre 1972. Zwierlein 1984 now offers an interesting, but in the end unpersuasive, argument in support of the thesis that Hercules, in HF and elsewhere, is an admirable hero, unhubristic, a Stoic saint.

Look at the house of Eurytus uprooted, and flocks
Of innocent girls subdued like helpless sheep.
No Juno gave these orders, or Eurystheus:
These are his  works alone.
(HF 477–80)

Stoic drama continues to throw the spotlight on those whose greatness spells their doom. Caesar, in Caesar and Pompey, and Bussy have persuaded themselves that, in their craving for greatness, they can flout the laws that apply to ordinary men and women. In Seneca's own plays the laws count for less. The polarities that articulate his dramas are dictated by the guiding principles of an individual life, not by the needs of the commonwealth. The human failures are enacted within the area of private contentions. Hippolytus, clearly designed to charm us with his purity and his thoughtfulness, is not a sage, or even a proficiens, a man attempting to train himself in the good. The corollary of his purity is a loathing of women sealed with a fourfold argument from impossibility:

ignibus iunges aquas
et amica ratibus ante promittet vada
incerta Syrtis, ante ab extremo sinu
Hesperia Tethys lucidum attollet diem
et ora dammis blanda praebebunt lupi,
quam victus animum feminae mitem geram.

And sooner shall you scramble fire and water;
Sooner shall dangerous quicksands offer safe
Anchorage to ships; and sooner yet
Shall Tethys from her utmost western bounds
Bring forth the shining day, and savage wolves
Smile fondly on the timid does, than I,
Subdued, will melt in kindness before women.
(Phae 568–73)^[50]

The ineradicability of his hatred of women is endorsed by a reach into unthinkable disruptions of nature. In the same play the nurse, the stock figure designed to frame heroic excess with popular shrewdness or timidity, delivers a Stoic sermon, shot through with aspersions cast on popular mythology, soft living, and indulgence in one's passion (195ff.). But before long the nurse surrenders principle and offers her support to her mistress, out of fear that she might kill herself. Thus

[50] For Seneca's partiality to the argument from impossibility, see chap. 7, pp. 194–203.

decency tempers her resolution. Fellow feeling issues in corruption and sin just as surely as in that ultimate reductive specimen of philosophical tragedy, Brecht's The Measures Taken . In a Stoic drama, the hero and his party owe the darkening of their characters to a variety of sources: the turbulence endemic in the classical models, the corrosive spell of the temptations and the dilemmas a tragedy cannot do without, and last, but not least, the debilitation with which radical Stoicism saddles both political necessities and humane forbearance. In Oedipus it is the environment that closes in on the hero and lays him low; in Troades it is Andromache's fear for her child and Ulixes' obedience to reasons of state that tilt the complexion of heroism toward the black.

At its worst the old Sophoclean hero, legatee to Homeric arete, becomes, under the pressure of the Stoic insistence on the life of reason, a hero-villain, a Satan as much as an Adam. By a potent anticipation of Dante's insight into the near-identity of punishment and crime, the Senecan hero-villain creates for himself a life of greed or lust or fear that is both his dereliction and his penalty. In Seneca's words: sceleris in scelere supplicium est; the punishment is in the crime (Ep. 97.14). The miasma draws the gods into its fold. Juno proposes to inflict mighty suffering upon her stepson Hercules (HF 110ff.); in the process she ravages herself. In using Thyestes as an instrument for his own chastisement (Thy 259), Atreus unknowingly prepares his own person for the same experience. The outward flow of evil is irreversible. "Senecan characters . . . do not commit evil out of calculation for specific gain but because they feel they ought to";^[51] or, which is saying the same thing, because the Stoic experiment in rationalizing and taming the soul makes excessive demands on them. Because victims as well as victors share in the passions—Megara's hatred of the oppressor (HF 380ff.) is a case in point—everybody who counts for something in the plays is, on the Stoic scale of values, a delinquent, if not a villain. The refined verse and the glitter and the subtlety of the psychological analysis refract the sense of radical evil and suffer us to continue to talk of heroes. The imperatives to which the Senecan characters respond are difficult to accommodate within a clearly weighted scheme of moral differentiae. But the larger than life impression of tragic achievement remains.^[52] And it is because of this that the didactic force,

[51] Braden 1970, p. 17. See also Pack 1940 on the terms for guilt, sin, and error in what Pack calls Senecan "melodrama."

[52] This is ably argued by Braden 1985.

the discriminability between models, and the very possibility of translating them into temporal action, must remain in doubt. The conceit of the ghost of Tantalus, that he would rather be in hell than on the Atreidae's earth (Thy 68ff.), and his advice to the dwellers in the underworld to love their tortures—amate poenas! —are the logical consequence of a radical Stoicism echoing the old Socratic conceit that an unjust man being punished is happier, or at least better off, than one who is not. The ghost poses as the warner (90ff.), but the ingrained fallibility that informs his own past life cancels the warner's voice. Stoic ethics stipulates an enormous distance between the ideal Stoic king and the king of past history and myth.^[53] Stoic drama obliterates the distance. A leader, whether in legend or in contemporary experience, is nothing without his vitality, his passion to lead. To appeal to him to strangle his passion, or to expect of him that his smallish foibles will not grow into massive ills, is to defy the deepest political instincts and the stage traditions that feed on them.

"The road through precepts is long; short and productive the one through paradigms."^[54] For the purposes of his philosophical prose, Seneca considers vivid paradigms to be more readily appropriable and economical than the ubiquitous obbligato of commonplaces and aphorisms and precepts, what a modern writer, citing Bertolt Brecht, calls "reach-me-down sloganeering" or plumpes Denken .^[55]Ep. 95, indeed, in tandem with Ep. 94 Seneca's most extended consideration of the usefulness of precepts, finds that for the acquisition of wisdom the "preceptive part" of philosophy is powerless unless the listener's soul is already battened down by doctrinal certainty. The large bulk of the letter, by way of showing what it means not to be properly secured, enlarges on the grossness of modern culture, particularly in the matter of eating and drinking. The language is concrete, the tableaux are vulgar, and one is reminded of scenes in Senecan drama where, presumably, precepts would fall on the same infertile ground.

The conventional distinction is between precepts, intended to stimu-

[53] For a portrait, roughly contemporary with Seneca, of the Stoic king, see Musonius chap. 8 in Lutz 1947, pp. 60ff.

[54] Ep. 6.5: longum iter est per praecepta, breve et efficax per exempla. Herington (1966, p. 443) speaks of "This truly Roman principle."

[55] Eagleton 1981, pp. 62–63.

late thinking about action or the mental equivalent of action, and maxims, pithy formulations of recognized (or paradoxical) truths, from which the precepts derive their value. In his prose Seneca often talks about the relation between sententiae, the adages of tribal wisdom, or decreta, the dogmata of a philosophical creed, on the one hand, and precepts, exhortations, dictates, and injunctions, on the other.^[56]Decreta, Seneca says (Ep. 95.12), are designed to fortify us and to guard our security and tranquillity. It is obvious that, by themselves, they have no business in tragedy; their usefulness depends on how they are blended with other maneuvers coming out of the arsenal of wisdom literature. In philosophical discourse, the plumpe Gedanken, comprising both maxims and precepts, stand out from their environment. Though Seneca habitually uses both maxims and precepts to initiate and endorse his arguments, they are, by virtue of their condensed and self-sufficient form, detachable. The first full-size English commentary on Senecan drama, Sir William Cornwallis's Discourses upon Seneca the Tragedian (1601), is a set of reflections upon eleven Senecan sententiae . In his case they are drawn from the plays, but for all that Cornwallis does with them they might equally well have come from the Dialogi or the letters. The same is true of Fulke Greville's Treatises of Monarchy, which were originally intended as choral songs for tragedies, units built up of maxims and precepts, and then proved too long and were brought out separately.^[57]

In the plays, maxims and precepts are as common in dialogue as they are in the choral essays, often the dramatic equivalents of Seneca's philosophical writings. The interesting difference from the prose writings is that in the plays the categorical separation of the premises—that is, the maxims—and the conclusions—that is, the precepts—is effaced. One is reminded of Paul De Man's showing that in Nietzsche's theatricalized philosophy the distinction between constative and performative is suspended.^[58] In addition, the dividing line between paradigms and sententiae turns problematic. In Senecan drama, as in all tragedy bearing on the great issues of life, it is difficult to distinguish between a proposition that carries its weight by virtue of the person

[56] Bellincioni 1978, pp. 87ff. Note, however, that Seneca's flexible system allows the relations between sententiae, praecepta, and decreta a certain fluidity: Ep. 94.27–18, 95.9–10, and passim.

[57] Charlton 1946, pp. clxxxiif.

[58] De Man 1979, chap. 6.

who offers it, and a truth or a briefing or warning that has no such backing. In the last analysis, because of the play of characters acting upon our imagination, drama contains few statements that are not geared to choices associated with the dramatic agents. What is more, as a dramatist Seneca endows the rhetorical commonplaces with an excitement and a stylistic elegance that sets them far apart from the sober premises of the prose essays.^[59]

We all have a gift for virtue (Ep. 108.8). Even a vicious person, Seneca warns, is capable of rising to the stirring sounds of noble sentiments in the theater. A scoundrel may have enough vestigial goodness in him to respond in his heart when the appropriate virtue is eulogized. But equally so, and more profoundly, Seneca's reliance on encapsulated precepts points in quite another direction: the miscreant applauds the call to rectitude because its respectability permits him vicariously to live a life from which his own diseased counsels should by right exclude him. The converse would also be true: a moderately good soul may be expected to thrill to the fiendishly immoral maxims delivered by an Atreus or an Aegisthus, vouchsafing a proxy admission to a realm of forbidden feeling. Thus every pronouncement, every clever aphorism or urgent piece of advice, is potentially counter-productive. The more impressive the formulation, or the more astutely positioned within the psychological curve of the scene or the drama, the more corrupting it could be. The question discussed at length in Epistles 94 and 95, whether, in emergency situations that leave no room for both, the palm is to be given to decreta, doctrine, without precepts or to precepts without doctrine,^[60] is, as we have noted, moot in drama, where the two merge on the level of the characters' intentions, and where the missionary effect of the pregnant formulations is at best uncertain. In Renaissance drama, which operates with a different understanding of the human individual, an excessive appropriation of maxims may have the effect of reducing that individuality; in the course of Marlowe's The Jew of Malta "the effect of their [sc. the maxims'] recurrent use by Barabas is to render him more and more typical, to de-individualize him."^[61] At the same time, an audience can be roused to a great height of enthusiasm by a proper concatenation of

[59] For Seneca's creativeness on this score, see Owen 1968, p. 313. For the use of commonplaces in a particular play, Phaedra, see Croiselle 1964.

[60] For this, see Macl. Currie in Dudley 1972, pp. 45ff.

[61] Greenblatt 1980, p. 107.

the fragments of tribal wisdom as in Gaunt's great speech in act 1, scene 2 of Richard II, where the maxims carry a patently implied prescriptive message for his son, Bolingbroke.

The urgency with which Senecan drama harps on the pitfalls and perversions of wealth does not sit well with modern readers, and it is doubtful that Roman listeners or readers would have allowed it to move them closer to vows of poverty. In the choral utterances and the dialogue of the older tragedians, such hectoring was incidental, and its import was often structural as much as ideological. In Aeschylus, or Pindar, gnomai served as devices of segmentation. In Seneca they are pervasive; they assume the prominence given to them by the Cynics, the systematic foes of a cultivated social order. Counsels concerning kingship, war, love, fortune, the golden mean and the middle way, death, and sundry other Stoic themes resist dramatic plausibility, whether reflectively delivered by the chorus or shot back and forth in anger between contestants. But their implausibility does not deprive them of a certain grandeur, because they are the themes to which a responsible member of the commonwealth must always return. Seneca's own estimate of the value of wealth, for example, crops up repeatedly in his writings. Characteristically, it varies; at one point (VB 22.4, 23.3) he finds that wealth is not needed for happiness, but that it is capable of making a contribution to it; at another (Ep. 84.11) he stresses its inherent threat.^[62]

Amphitryon and Megara, while waiting for Hercules to return from the underworld and rescue them from the scheming of the tyrant Lycus, engage in a dialogue in which they test the strained relations between wish and belief, between fear and assumption, between faith and fright, between fortune and goodness, between danger and safety, between luck and being caught (HF 309ff.). The series of propositions and repartees is elegant and witty; they have also been regarded as dramatically dead. It has been argued that the same nice distinctions might have been put in the mouth of just about anybody in the play; that, because the truths are self-evident, they defy a linkage with character. But that is underrating the complex affinity between maxim and paradigm, and the special ironies that stamp the Senecan character. Note what the tyrant Lycus, characterized by his opponents as saevus, savage (329), says a little later (402ff.) about war. He promulgates a

[62] Cf. Motto 1970, pp. 225–27.

little essay about fighting and its effect that stamps him, temporarily, as a man of sound understanding. He offers less rant, more reflexion, more sense, and even more sententiae than his adversaries. He concludes: war is wrath; let us put aside hatred. We might have looked to the innocent sufferer, Megara, for these innocent reputable sentiments. It is a sign of Seneca's mature exploitation of the problematic standing of paradigm and precept that, temporarily and ironically, he engages Lycus in their service. Megara, meanwhile, is busy with the full unfolding of her hatred.

It might be argued that the tyrant's lecture is a piece of sophistry. Euripidean antecedents show the way; Jason, Helen, Menelaus pronounce fragments of wisdom gainsaid by their personal ambitions, but convenient in their passing difficulties. In Euripidean drama, however, the deceitful nature of the sermonizing is apparent and an enjoyable part of the intrigue pattern. In Senecan drama, where the hero is stigmatized and the martyr has a share in the world's sinfulness, where the chorus is radically removed from the arena of the action, the dramatist has greater license to attach the shorthand thoughts to the agents of the moment. The looseness is compounded by yet another factor. Seneca is fond of bundling maxims together in staves of five or more, with the not unexpected result that the immediate import gets clouded in the aggregate, with occasionally interesting aesthetic and dramatic results.^[63]

Let us say that where sentiments are introduced in apparent compliance with the speakers' temporary needs, the total picture is, didactically speaking, impenetrable. In the first act of Phaedra (186ff.) the heroine extols the power of Love, who defeats even the gods. The nurse counters with an explanation that Love is nothing but a projection of purely human drives. The chorus, introducing the second act, reverts to the perspective of Phaedra and acclaims the tangible lordship of the god Amor. In this case we are dealing not so much with brief maxims as with fully orchestrated points of view. But, like the shorter formulations, these extended arguments lack lasting resonance, and at the end we are left to wonder, not only what to believe, but whom to credit. In each case the coupling of speaker with what is

[63] For examples, see Canter 1925, pp. 87–89. Canter's collection of materials, though assembled under the auspices of an obsolete understanding of what is meant by "rhetoric" and relatively innocent of analytic development, still has considerable usefulness.

said is, for the moment, authentic and dramatically persuasive. But, fortunately for the tragic substance of the play, the prescriptive momentum lapses into illegibility.

We conclude that sententiae and their combinations, no less than paradigms, lend themselves to a kind of mannerism, a pointed display of literary effects, with little overall relevance to the Stoic burden of the dramatic experience.^[64] Not surprisingly, those who doubt the Stoic complexion of Seneca's plays have pounced on precisely this kind of evidence, even though, as they admit, there are many choral essays that fit smoothly enough into a handbook of Stoic teachings: on the advantages of the simple life, on life as a preparation for death, and so forth.

Near the end of Oedipus, the messenger's speech detailing Oedipus's blinding is framed by two brief choral passages (882–914, 980–97):

Fata si liceat mihi
fingere arbitrio meo
temperem Zephyro levi
vela . . .

If it were mine to shape my fate
To my own pleasure, I would trim my sails
To the gentle breeze . . .
(882–85)

Fatis agimur: cedite fatis;
non sollicitae possunt curae
mutare rati stamina fusi.

By fate we are driven; then yield to fate.
No anxious care can change the thread
Spun by the unswerving spindle.
(980–82)

The refusal of drama to limit itself to an adequately defined lesson is unmistakable. Assuming that for once the chorus are deeply concerned about their king, Oedipus is made to stand as a paradigm for both positions: he failed to take the middle way, and Fate got the better of him. He serves both as a cautionary and as an exemplary model for the thoughts his sufferings stimulate in the hearts of his people. Or take Troades . In the second chorus we are told, in elaborate detail, that the

[64] For mannerism in Seneca, see Shelton 1974, chap. 5, and 1979, and, earlier, Burck 1971. The standard discussion of mannerism is by Hauser 1964 . Cf. also Segal's "Senecan Baroque" (1984). For the difficulties of the term "mannerism" as applied to literature, see Barner 1970, pp. 33–46, and Weitz 1973, pp. 15ff.

underworld is a myth no right-minded person will accept: the stories about hell are "empty noise and hollow words, and a nightmarish tale" (405–6). This is an age-old intellectualist stand, issuing in the precept to keep one's mind healthy and fearless by not accepting the eschatological fables about Hades and Orcus and punishment and rewards. The stand is voiced again and again in the treatises and letters. But then Seneca turns around, and his drama achieves some of its most telling effects by the loving care with which it dwells on the horrors of the netherworld. Once again, the charge is shorted, and reflection or incitement within the drama are stripped of their decisiveness. Seneca himself, in several notable passages of his prose writings, makes no bones about the slipperiness of sententiae and chains of sententiae:

Petis a me, ut . . . scribam tibi, an haec pars philosophiae, quam Graeci paraeneticen vocant, nos praeceptivam dicimus, satis est ad consummandam sapientiam. scio re in bonam partem accepturum, si negavero.

You ask me to . . . write to you, whether the field of philosophy called paraenetice by the Greeks and praeceptiva by us is sufficient for the achievement of wisdom. I know you will take it in the proper spirit if I say it is not.
(Ep. 95.1; cf. also 108.8–9)

Like the paradigms, precepts forfeit a too easy legibility by remaining true, in their aggregate, to the fullness and the caprices of life, and to a philosopher's perception of that fullness. One might ask where this leaves, if not pity and fear, then the moral effect upon the audience, of which the chorus is the built-in representative. The answer is: in the position of the soul, which is most attuned to man's misery and least equipped to help him in his need.

"Some things, we say, recoil from custom, but then, by another route, they return to custom."^[65] No persuasion, in the full sense recommended by the Socrates of the Phaedrus, is to be expected. The rhetoric is, technically speaking, imperfect, because it is not aimed at a defined target. Drama arouses a different kind of persuasion, which has nothing to do with the rhetoric of the school books; and that persuasion is not primarily dependent on precepts or paradigms or lectures for its success. To the extent that they come in, that they fit into the mosaic of the drama's rhetorical energies, they serve such momen-

[65] Ben. 2.35.2: A consuetudine quaedam quae dicimus abhorrent, deinde alia via ad consuetudinem redeunt.

tary purposes as irony, frustration, enrichment, iconographic amplification, and, intermittently, psychological relief. Does this mean that the Stoic cast of the drama is thereby compromised? I doubt that it is, for in their dispersion, in their failure to engage the purposes of an integral agenda, they are not completely unlike the loosely organized topoi of the prose writings, not only of Seneca, but of other Roman Stoics also.

The third chorus of Thyestes, one of the most remarkable constructions in Roman literature (546–622), starts with a praise of fraternal amity, and then proceeds to develop the opposition between war and peace, with a full orchestration of the contrast through scenes from the land, from the larger world, and from mythology. Insensibly, however, logical contrast, designed to throw into relief the loveliness of peace, metamorphoses into the movement between contraries and into the Heraclitean interdependence of opposites. The essay terminates with a voicing of the Herodotean moral of mutability:

Nulla sors longa est: dolor ac voluptas
invicem cedunt; brevior voluptas.

No lot endures. Grief and Joy, each in turn,
Depart; Joy leaves the sooner.
(Thy 596–97)

Like some of the choral odes of Aeschylus, the chorus opens on a note of joy and closes on a note of despair. Unlike Aeschylus, Seneca manages the trajectory smoothly, without the jagged turns that define the Greek dramatist's vision of life. The line of thought is something like this: (1) war has ceased: Atreus loves Thyestes; (2) the cessation is an instance of mutability; (3) (not expressed, but understood by the audience as a likely consequence) mutability will cause Atreus and Thyestes to fall out once again. Individual segments of the Senecan passage are notorious sententiae: nothing is constant, pleasure is short-lived, Fortune and her wheel are in control. Some of the aphorisms cancel each other. The whole poem has a range and a power that far exceed any narrow discursive orientation. But the elements absorbed into it can be traced also in the treatises, and individual letters to Lucilius exhibit a similar smooth restlessness.

To sum up: Stoic drama incorporates components that we associate with orthodox Stoicism, including the suasive and the cautionary use of exempla and the rhetorical use of maxims, aphorisms, and injunc-

tions, without necessarily in each case pledging itself to canons championed by Stoic philosophers. The reason for this is to be found not only in the special conditions of drama, but also in an insight of which Seneca, along with others, is richly aware in his own philosophical writings: that both paradigm and maxim can lead lives of their own, defying the ostensible matrix from which they spring, and that this freedom is not entirely alien to the function of paradigm and maxim in Stoic thought.

If this were all, we might perhaps be allowed to say that Senecan drama, in these instances, draws upon the materials of Stoicism. But we would hardly be entitled to conclude that Senecan drama, as an instrument of moral appeal, is Stoic drama. As long, that is, as we measure the Stoic component in Senecan drama only by glancing at the moral and educative contribution of the instruments of persuasion, the Stoic thesis must remain in doubt. For the neo-Stoics of the Renaissance, as for most of the Roman Stoics (but not for Seneca), Stoicism was a matter of ethics and of psychology, with some attention paid also to the relation between man and the gods. But the great shift from Greek tragedy to Senecan drama of which I spoke earlier is hard to account for solely in terms of how the Stoics defined moral man and his conduct and his religion. For a better understanding, we shall have to explore other aspects of the teachings of the Porch.