Seneca, Lucius Annaeus

Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (c.4BC-AD 65), Roman dramatist, philosopher, satirist, and statesman, the tutor, and later the victim, of Nero. Nine tragedies adapted from the Greek are attributed to him—the Hercules Furens, Medea, Phaedra (or Hippolytus), and Troades (all possibly based on Euripides), the Agamemnon (on Aeschylus), the Oedipus, Phoenissae (or Thebais), and Hercules Oetaeus (on Sophocles), and the Thyestes (on an unknown original). Octavia, based on the life of Nero's unhappy wife, was formerly attributed to Seneca, but is now considered not to be by him, though its author is still unknown.

As the only extant dramas from the Roman empire Seneca's tragedies are important historically, and their influence on the development of drama in modern times has been profound, in spite of the fact that they were closet dramas. In spite of the fact that Seneca's alterations of his Greek models are usually for the worse, it would be unfair to deny the dramatic power of many of his scenes or the beauty of some of his choral passages, which offset the atmosphere of gloom and horror, brutality and treachery, which pervades these plays and reflects that of contemporary life. When Seneca writes of the intrigues of countries, the instability of princes, the crimes of tyrants, the courage of men in peril of death, there is something more than literary artifice and imagination: he had experienced it all. Perhaps that is why, for the Renaissance, Seneca was the model writer of tragedy. His Latin was easily understood, his plays were divided into the five acts demanded by Horace, their plots, however melodramatic, were universally intelligible, and even his rant and rhetoric appealed to the taste of the time. His line-by-line exchange of dialogue, his chorus, his tyrants, ghosts, and witches, his corpse-strewn stage, all reappear in Elizabethan drama, and even if such effects had already been used by dramatists before Shakespeare, they were reinforced by the reading, and possibly the acting, of translations of the tragedies as early as the 1550s, long before the publication of Seneca's ‘ Tenne Tragedies’ in 1581. Their influence is already apparent in the earliest English tragedy, Gorboduc (1562) by Norton and Sackville; in Gascoigne's Jocasta (1566); in Shakespeare's early plays, particularly Richard III (c.1593) (which shows what splendid results can be achieved when Senecan material is used by a man of genius) and Titus Andronicus (c.1594); and in Jonson's two tragedies Sejanus (1603) and Catiline (1611).