Chapter IV: Senecan Satire and Poetry: Drama of the Age (2)

Can it be truth that we utterly die?
Is there no part of us left, when the soul
At the final breath-flicker soars into the air,
Mingling with cloudland so soon as the torch
Lays fingers of fire on the corpse lying bare?...
After our death there is naught. Death is naught
But the finishing goal of a race quickly run....
The way into Hell and the cruel King’s realm
And Cerberus guarding the Perilous Gate
Are idlest of gossip and meaningless words—
A fable that sounds like a feverish dream.
Dost thou ask where thou liest when death sets thee free?
Thou shalt lie where the things lie that have not been born.[759]

A familiar Stoic dogma suggested the lines upon true kingship in the _Thyestes_:

Treasures do not a monarch make,
Nor garb of Tyrian hue,
Nor diadem on royal brow,
Nor portals bright with gold.
A king is whoso quelleth fear
And curséd guilt of heart,
Who mid ambition’s wild caprice
And mid the wayward cheers
Of hot-head mob abides unmoved;

and a little later the sage’s serenity is limned:

Set in security of place,
He vieweth all beneath:
With a will he meets his fate
Nor murmureth to die.[760]

Similarly Stoic are the notions of freedom, of equality with monarch and with God, and of the right to abandon life at will, which are propounded in the _Agamemnon_:

All slavish bonds he’ll burst in twain
Who can capricious gods disdain,
Who on black Acheron’s countenance
And on the Stygian gloom can glance
Untouched by gloom himself, and dares
To fix the close of earthly cares.
Peer of a king—of gods, is he.
Know how to die and so be free![761]

It is this creed of the open door leading out of life on which Oedipus harps in the _Phoenissae_[762] and which the guilty queen proclaims in the _Phaedra_,

Death ne’er can fail the man who wills to die.[763]

As we should expect, it is stated in the prose works[764] of Seneca, and so brings him into touch with contemporary history; for it is but the theoretical formulation of that right to suicide which many of the Roman Stoics in opposition during the darkest days of imperial tyranny not only claimed but exercised.

While, however, much of the philosophic colour in the plays reflects their author’s Stoicism, Seneca is dramatist enough to introduce non-Stoic views also. He allows, for instance, the chorus in the _Phaedra_ to adopt an Epicurean and pessimistic attitude. It comes in an ode addressed to Nature and to “Olympus’s Lord,” beseeching a solution to one of the riddles of the universe—why it is that external nature is so regularly controlled by law, whereas the Ruler of all things appears to be indifferent to man, and human affairs appear to be a chaotic realm of chance.[765]

Philosophy, whether Stoic or not, is, after all, one of the personal notes imported by Seneca into his adaptations from Greek drama. Like his yet more pervasive rhetoric, it is of Roman cast, and, if anachronistic in its Hellenic environment, it is but an additional sign of his independence of his originals. He is not at pains to avoid national colour: and thus, reckless of inconsistency, he puts into the mouth of Mycenaean elders certain terms redolent of Roman political history; turns the thought of a Theban chorus towards the _clientes_ and _patroni_ of Rome, and, later in the same play, towards a Roman rather than a Greek holiday; represents the ex-king of Thebes as quoting, like a _paterfamilias_, his power of life and death;[766] and—more surprising still—not merely fuses into a Corinthian marriage-hymn elements in the bantering Fescennine spirit (“rarely against our lords is license legalised”), but actually, a few lines further on, where the metre has become hexameter, names that familiar feature of a wedding at Rome:

Let glib Fescennine hurl its merry gibes.[767]

Another national trait lies in his debt to Latin predecessors. This is especially observable in his relation to Virgil and Ovid. To the former he owes much in language and in idea: one cannot, for example, read Theseus’s description in the _Hercules Furens_[768] of his descent into the Lower World, nor Andromache’s account in the _Troades_[769] of her vision of the dead Hector, without noticing reminiscences of _Aeneid_ VI in the one case and of _Aeneid_ II in the other. Ovid, to whose rhetorical abilities Seneca’s early attention must have been directed by his father, is the ultimate inspirer of many of his epigrams and mannerisms as well as of some of his metrical characteristics. Seneca, however, though a borrower in most fields, remained in part original and inventive. This holds good of his choice of words. Such compounds as _luctificus_ and _fatidicus_ he would, like other poets of his century, inherit from Virgil; and similarly such words as _securiger_ and _multifidus_ from Ovid. But some compounds it would be hard to find in other authors, _e.g._ _incestificus_ and _superbificus_, and _nidificus_ too, although the verb _nidificare_ rises to the mind in connexion with a famous tale of Virgil’s readiness in verse-making. _Pacificus_, apparently used by Cicero once, Seneca seems to have originated in verse and bequeathed through his nephew and Martial for its most familiar use in the Vulgate version of the Beatitudes.

The iambic trimeter used by Seneca for dramatic speeches and dialogue is in his hands a finished line more akin to that of Greek tragedy than to the rugged senarius of the oldest Latin dramas. Like the Augustans, and in all likelihood under the influence of Ovid’s lost _Medea_, he would regard the verses of Ennius, Pacuvius and Accius as uncouth. Seneca, for instance, does not imitate the heavy Ennian line with its spondees in second and fourth feet, and at least before a cretic ending shows a preference for elision. But the general effect is a polished monotony, towards which contributing factors are scarcity of the more subtle elisions, want of varied pauses, and a pronounced liking for either spondee or anapaest in the fifth foot. According to Lucian Müller, in all Seneca there are only six examples of a double iambic ending to a line;[770] and statistics indicate that the anapaest in the fifth place, as a variant for the spondee, occurs rather oftener than once in every five lines. Seneca’s iambic trimeter is at its neatest, as it is at its sagest, in the _stichomythia_ of the dialogue. When in long speeches the sense too often closes with the end of each line, the sharp ring which is suitable in _stichomythia_ becomes mere jerkiness. His trimeters—indeed Latin trimeters as a whole—never attain the charm which can be illustrated from any Greek tragedy. Herein it contrasts with the Latin hexameter, which possesses a beauty and nobility rivalling any effect achieved in Greek. Trochaic tetrameter is used in three passages,[771] amounting to a total of 34 lines, based rather on the Greek model than on early Latin septenarii. But one departure is the admission of a dactyl in the sixth foot—a practice metrically analogous to the favour shown for an anapaest in the fifth foot of an iambic trimeter. Of choral measures he employs a considerable variety, some being feeble imitations of, others unfortunate departures from, Horace. The mixed metres in the _Agamemnon_ and _Oedipus_[772], are such failures that some, forgetting how much of an experimenter Seneca was in dramatic composition, have denied that he wrote those plays. The sum of the matter is that the choruses, lacking strophic arrangement and often dull in theme, suffer from the wearisome continuance of the same line without the break of a shorter closing one. Long passages in Sapphics without an Adonic, or in Asclepiadeans without a Glyconic, or in anapaestic dimeter without a monometer, almost madden the reader because of their sameness; and, unluckily, while Seneca declines to afford the relief of a Glyconic among longer Asclepiadeans, he has no qualms about perpetrating a run of Glyconics for seventy or eighty lines on end.

Time, however, has not judged Seneca by the monotony of his choral metres. In literature it is not too much to say that he has been a world-wide influence; for without him the history of the drama in most countries would have run an entirely altered course. By the fourteenth century his influence upon writers in Italy was evident—on Mussato, for example, whose iambic tragedy _Ecerinis_ was a literary triumph in 1314 or 1315.[773] Seneca’s historical function was to be a link between the incipient modern drama and Hellenism, which could not be directly accessible, or indeed intelligible, so long as Greek study was in its infancy. As a force at the birth of modern drama he completely eclipsed the other dramatists of antiquity: Sophocles counted for very little, Aeschylus for less, and Euripides mainly for as much of his spirit as operated through Seneca. When, therefore, Latin plays gave place to Italian tragedy in Cammelli’s _Filostrato e Panfila_, Seneca was reckoned an appropriate personage to pronounce the prologue. At the period of the revival of learning, his plays had become renowned over Europe—Scaliger, it should be noted, rated him above Euripides—and his authority, except for Trissino’s preference in favour of Greek models, was riveted on Italy. In France it was the Latin plays which Buchanan and Muret wrote for their scholars to act that introduced the Senecan model and pointed the way towards the French tragedy of the Pléiade. In contrast to comedy, over which Terence’s influence did not retain its hold, French tragedy continued for three centuries to follow the foreign classical exemplar with the strictness observable in Corneille and Racine.

The immense popularity of Seneca in England during the sixteenth century is illustrated by the production of his _Troades_ at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1551-52, as well as by frequent translation and frequent imitation. A reason is easily found. English playwrights, confronted with the task of shaping the amorphous native drama, saw in his plays orderly patterns to suit their purpose. Here was a type of drama which was a descendant of the ancient Greek, with still less action than in the Greek, with choruses even more divorced from the action, but conveniently demarcating the play into definite episodes or acts; while, in spirit, this type of drama exhibited what was for the Elizabethan playgoer an acceptable store of moral reflections and harrowing situations. One could accordingly combine the satisfaction of hearing good talk about rectitude one moment, and of revelling in horrors the next. Morality could be blended with melodrama. The leaven worked rapidly after Heywood began a series of translations of Seneca’s plays in 1559. Our first English tragedy, _Gorboduc_, 1561, is framed on the Senecan model, which had already captured the playwrights of Italy, France, and, in a measure, Germany. The division into five acts and the introduction of choruses (as lyric interludes rather than as integral parts in the drama) show Seneca’s influence upon the form of such plays as _Gorboduc_ and _The Misfortunes of Arthur_. Dramas, however, that can be called fairly and fully Senecan are not numerous in English; for the drama in England was turned into a freer course by Marlowe and Shakespeare, as it was in Spain by Lope de Vega and Calderon. The more lasting influence of Seneca on drama in France is largely attributable to the closer affinity between the Senecan and the French taste for rhetorical finish. But even where the model was not closely followed in England, the spirit of Seneca was operative; for it should be realized that it acted on the romantic drama no less than on the classical.

Thus, stock characters like the nurse, the ghost, the tyrant—each of them borrowed from Greek by Seneca, but each slightly modified—are handed on to the English drama. The nurse is a feature in five of the ten plays which Elizabethans ascribed to Seneca;[774] in a sixth, _Thyestes_, there is an attendant on Atreus who hears his secrets and gives advice, while in a seventh, _Oedipus_, Manto, daughter of the blind Tiresias, fills the office of trusted attendant on her father, like Antigone in the _Phoenissae_. Such figures are prototypes of the nurse in _Romeo and Juliet_ and the confidante of the French stage. Thyestes’s ghost designed in the _Agamemnon_ to personify a Spirit of Revenge is the ancestor of the murdered Andrea’s ghost in Kyd’s _Spanish Tragedie_ and the ghost of the hero’s father in _Hamlet_. The ruthless Lycus in _Hercules Furens_, Medea resolute in her contemplated barbarity, and Atreus openly avowing villainy, are types of character that descend to Elizabethan literature—to Barabas in Marlowe’s _Jew of Malta_, to Lorenzo in Kyd’s _Spanish Tragedie_, and to “Crookback the Tyrant” in Shakespeare’s _Richard III_. There is indeed much that is Senecan—as if we were to fancy that some old Spanish traits in Seneca were being revived—in _The Spanish Tragedie_, a ghastly medley of blood and thunder, ghosts and horrors. Its lurid description of the road to hell is after the manner of Seneca’s eeriest passages. This aspect is handed on to plays like _Titus Andronicus_, and persists in Webster’s _Duchess of Malfi_ and _The White Devil_. _Richard III_, too, has many Senecan lineaments besides that already mentioned. One of the tragedies of blood, it has a multiplicity of ghosts: it has even a Senecan tendency to that rant from which Shakespeare did much to rescue drama; while the old tones of repartee, subtly developed in Athenian tragedy and transmitted through Seneca to the moderns, ring out in the dialogue between Richard and the Queen Elizabeth in Act IV, Scene iv.

This stichomythia is the chief feature common to the popular playwrights of Shakespearean times and an author who represents a widely divergent line of Senecan tradition—namely, Sir William Alexander, Earl of Stirling. He followed the more classical Seneca, the Seneca of argument, description and apophthegm. Tyrannical wickedness and inflated bombast make room in his plays for discussions and reflections. When Ben Jonson’s _Sejanus_ and _Catiline_ had failed to keep Seneca on the boards of the playhouse, scholars turned to write dramas, as Seneca himself had done, for the study. Independent of popular taste, they were free to copy the quieter, the less wildly romantic, side of Seneca, to restore the chorus, to banish action, and create monuments of unreadable dullness. Works, however, like Alexander’s are interesting contrasts to such dramas of the theatre as displayed Seneca’s influence in almost hypertrophied vitality.

DRAMA OF THE AGE

The _Octauia_, in 983 lines, is the one surviving Roman historical drama. We have only more or less fragmentary traces of eleven other _praetextae_—Naevius’s _Clastidium_ and _Romulus_, Ennius’s _Ambracia_ and _Sabinae_ (if we can be sure these two were plays), Pacuvius’s _Paulus_, Accius’s _Brutus_ and _Decius_, Cornelius Balbus’s _Iter_, and, under the Empire, the _Aeneas_ of Pomponius Secundus and the _Domitius_ and _Cato_ of Curiatius Maternus. It is difficult to see why the traditional ascription of the _Octauia_ to Seneca ever deceived anyone. That Seneca should have introduced himself on the stage is barely credible; but that he, or anyone, should, during Nero’s lifetime, have ventured to portray the emperor as a heartless monster[775] to mother and wife, as well as a vindictive tyrant to his people, is absolutely incredible. It has long been recognized, too, that the dramatic prophecy of Nero’s doom is too circumstantially accurate to have been composed till after the event in A.D. 68; and Seneca had died three years before. The play no doubt recalls his manner. It has a ghost: it has a couple of nurses: it has, like the _Agamemnon_ and _Hercules Oetaeus_, a couple of choruses: but its doleful repetitions are too many and its epigrams too few for Seneca. Also, the metre, in spite of certain similarities, such as the liking for an anapaest in the fifth foot, shows significant differences; for example, though Seneca was not so careful as the Greek dramatists in linking lines together, he did not allow hiatus and a _syllaba anceps_ at the close of lines nearly so often as the author of the _Octauia_. This is a further reason, if further reason be needed, for repudiating Seneca’s authorship.[776]

Many conjectures have been made about the date of its composition, which has been put arbitrarily as late as the fourth century, not to speak of the absurd notion that the play was invented ten centuries later. The case for a date early in Domitian’s reign has been argued solemnly[777] with little regard to the likelihood of such a publication under such an emperor. So too critics have cast around for an author and lighted upon Maternus, who, we know, wrote _praetextae_. These guesses take us nowhere. The most that can be said is that the author is unknown, but that he plainly studied Seneca; and that an extremely probable, because suitable, date is one of the years immediately succeeding Nero’s fall.[778]

The scene is laid in Nero’s palace, and the time is A.D. 62. The play opens with a lyric lament by Nero’s neglected empress, Octavia, who “outwails the sea-bred Halcyons” in her grief over the criminal follies of her dead mother Messalina, and over the wickedness shown by her stepmother Agrippina (now also dead) in poisoning her imperial husband, Claudius, Octavia’s father, and in taking Octavia from her betrothed, Silanus, to marry her to young Nero. To these enormities and to the poisoning of Octavia’s brother, Britannicus, rightful heir to the throne, the melancholy heroine and her nurse repeat their sombre allusions until they cease to be artistically effective. Nero’s barbarity in murdering his mother, mentioned many times and once fully described,[779] and his maltreatment of his wife, leave the unhappy Octavia nothing to hope for but death. On one occasion she is goaded into half a threat, which the nurse, however, unable to take it seriously, answers with scorn:

OCT. Let Nero kill me too, lest I slay _him_!

NURSE. Nature hath not bestowed on thee such strength.

OCT. Pain, hate, grief, wretchedness and woe will serve.

NURSE. Nay, by compliance win thy cruel lord.

OCT. To give me back my brother, foully slain?

NURSE. To be thyself unharmed, and yet restore
Thy father’s tottering house with babes of thine.[780]

The nurse, like her mistress, is versed in mythology and endeavours to console Octavia for Nero’s infidelities by relating Jupiter’s misdemeanours as Swan or Bull or Golden Shower. The next choral chant recites a rumour that Nero has decided to espouse a new consort, and in the following episode Seneca enters soliloquizing on the dangers of prosperity, on his own greater safety as an exile “amid the cliffs of the Corsican sea,” and on the deterioration of mankind. Nero arrives blustering angrily and issuing orders to his prefect for two executions. Seneca’s vain appeal for clemency is succeeded by his equally vain expostulation against the projected marriage with the wanton Poppaea. Nero declares his resolution to make the morrow his wedding-day. On his departure, the ghost of his mother appears in order to symbolize the vengeance that must come, and her speech contains the prophecy of Nero’s doom (619-631), on which rests the conviction that the play is later than his death. Another choral ode precedes a scene between Poppaea, distraught by alarming dreams, and her nurse. Then to the chorus of Poppaea’s sympathizers enters a messenger reporting a revolt in favour of Octavia. The emperor reappears, breathing merciless fury and determined to revenge himself on Octavia, who in the final scene is exhibited under an armed guard bound for exile and death. She came with a wail and she goes with a wail.

Although one cannot withhold sympathy from the victim of Nero’s heartlessness, the many feeble repetitions, the tiresome lamentations, and a minimum of incident, make the _Octauia_ unforgivably dull. Even Agrippina’s ghost is unimpressive. If the reader wonders what business mythology has in this particular galley, he must remember the Senecan tradition. But, obviously, mythological lore removes all chance of making a historical drama realistic. It is grotesque when the nurse whitewashes Nero by giving a list of Jupiter’s lapses from connubial rectitude, or when Octavia herself, in railing against her wicked husband, opines that Mother Earth did not produce a worse monster in Typhon. Instead of all this, one would have liked a historical play to stir the feelings with abuse of Nero in good set terms and in plain Latin. And so with pity no less than indignation. If we are to sorrow with Octavia, she must first (as Horace would remind us) sorrow herself—naturally too, not uttering the artificial question, “What nightingale can match with plaints my tears?”[781] But the incubus of learning is sometimes historical as well. The chorus take occasion to cite, as instances of the disastrous results of popular favour, the Gracchi and Livius Drusus, regretting that present grief prevents them from giving additional examples—presumably by ransacking historical or rhetorical manuals like the collection of _exempla_ by Valerius Maximus. More perhaps than any other handicap, such misplaced erudition balks this tragic story in its intended emotional appeal.

The place occupied in the early Empire by _fabulae salticae_, _mimi_, _pantomimi_, and recitations excerpted from standard tragedies or composed for the occasion, has been already touched upon. Literary comedy fared no better than literary tragedy: mimes and Atellan farces had displaced it. The same thing holds good in the next period as in the Neronian age; such a comedy as the younger Pliny tells us[782] he heard Vergilius Romanus reading was modelled on classical lines and stood no chance of winning popularity. The mime, on the other hand, when it sketched ordinary life, had the spice of realism, united sometimes to that wisdom of experience which Seneca recognized as truly philosophic, and which, he suggests, it shared with writers of tragedy and _togatae_.[783] It is interesting, in this connexion, to note that Afranius’s old _togata_ of “The House on Fire” (_Incendium_) was played in Nero’s time, truth to life doubtless being enhanced by the permission granted to actors to keep any furniture which they saved from the flames.[784] The Atellan farce had the additional and dangerous spice of veiled jests at exalted personages; but Suetonius gives us to understand that Nero showed surprising indulgence towards offending authors, so that joking allusions to the deaths of Claudius and Agrippina involved no more serious penalty than exile.[785]

The variety of public amusements with which serious drama had to compete may be estimated from several passages in Suetonius’s _Life of Nero_. It was at best but a spurious drama that found its way to the boards. Nero liked appearing on the stage as a tragic character.[786] The matricide Orestes, the blinded Oedipus, the mad Hercules were parts that appealed to him;[787] and it may be inferred that, like Lucan, he wrote the words to be recited or chanted. The quinquennial contests of the “Neronia,” even if established from vainglorious motives, proved his interest in poetry and music, and stimulated production of a kind. The emperor’s final performance on the stage was in an iambic chant from _Oedipus in Exile_, a theme similar to that of the opening part of Seneca’s _Phoenissae_; in this piece, however, Nero used Greek.[788]

Pomponius Secundus, who had made his _début_ as author long before, as already recorded, lived far into Nero’s reign. Whether the riot in the theatre over his _carmina_[789] in Claudius’s reign implies that he merely wrote verses for actors, or whether he put complete tragedies on the stage, one cannot say. Curiatius Maternus,[790] a famous orator who renounced public life for poetry and whose house is the scene of Tacitus’s _Dialogus_, had written his first play in Nero’s time. One of his two _praetextae_, entitled _Domitius_, was concerned with an ancestor of Nero’s who opposed Julius Caesar and died fighting at Pharsalia. His other historical play, _Cato_, had just made a great stir in Rome at the time of the _Dialogus_, A.D. 79-81. Like Seneca he wrote tragedies on the Greek subjects of _Medea_ and _Thyestes_.

It is clear, then, that, whether or not complete tragedies continued to be represented on the stage, tragic poets at least continued to compose, if only in a dilettante manner. But no real survival of tragedy can be inferred from the shadowy list of names and titles yielded by allusions in Juvenal and Martial[791]—_Alcithoe_ by Paccius, _Thebae_ (or _Thebais_) and _Tereus_ by Faustus, _Atreus_ by Rubrenus Lappa, _Hercules_ and _Hecuba_ (or _Troades_) by Scaeva or Scaev(i)us Memor, who belongs to the reign of Domitian. It is one of literature’s little ironies that Memor should be addressed by Martial as “the glory of the Roman buskin” (_Romani fama cothurni_).