The Mask of Power

Seneca's Tragedies and Imperial Rome

Bibliographic Data

ID9329147
AuthorsGeorge W M Harrison (0000-0002-2563-7695, corresponding author), Denis Henry, Elisabeth Henry
Year1987
Volume80
Issue3
Pages223-223
Publication date1987-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Classical World (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0009-8418 • E-ISSN: 1558-9234
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/4350027
OpenAlexW1507733610
LanguageEN
Citations received12

INTRODUCTIONNine complete Latin tragedies, and two disconnected scenes from another, survivenfrom the first century A.D. This is all the dramatic literature that remains fromnImperial Rome: for that period, there are no comedies. From Republican times, wenhave 26 comedies and fragments from about 100 Republican tragedies. These fragmentsnadd up to more than 1500 Unes - but most are only single lines, or even half-lines, andnno fragment is more than 12 lines long.Merely as bulk, this is not much to set beside the corpus of drama surviving fromn5th and 4th century Athens; and the unquestioned greatness of the Athenian dramatistsnmakes it impossible for us to compare Greek and Roman in terms o f bulk only. ThenLatin playwrights have in every sense been put in second place. From Renaissancentimes to the present day, readers and critics have almost invariably judged Roman dramanas altogether slighter than the Greek: a derivative, somewhat uneasy genre, in thenRepublic comparatively crude, and in the Imperial age already decadent.Derivative Roman tragedy certainly was in its origins, fo r both content and form;nbut the manner and style of our surviving Republican fragments can be called crude onlynif we assume that the writers must have worked with the same aims as those of earliernGreek dramatists, and imitated them badly. Similarly we can call the Imperial tragediesndecadent only if we employ an Attic yardstick to measure all their qualities.The critical assumption that an Attic yardstick is appropriate for Roman drama isnone that post-Renaissance Readers have found hard to avoid. The lineaments of thenwell-made play, la piece bien faite, can be seen in the work of European critics longnbefore Sarcey. This model was derived, as everyone knew, from Aristotle's Poetics.nThe derivation was not unassailable; what was erected into a canon of dramatic practicenwas frequently what Aristotle was thought to have meant rather than anything henis known to have said.To apply supposedly Aristotelian canons is not always appropriate even for Greekntragedies, some of which are not at all well made; but it is certainly true that thenRoman ones that we have are even less amenable to measurement by such standards.nThis comparison is, however, irrelevant to the real merits of the texts we are going tondiscuss. The Greek influence on Roman drama has to be recognised and defined, and itnproves to consist in elements surprisingly external to the plays themselves. An Atticnor Aristotelian yardstick cannot usefully be applied to them at all.What we wish to do, in this study, is to look directly at the surviving Roman tragediesnand appraise them as works sui generis.That so small a quantity of Latin tragedy has survived is a misfortune that mustnmake our judgments cautious; but we do know a good deal more than the fragmentsnthemselves would tell us.We know the names of more than 30 playwrights, and of about 150 lost tragedies,nwritten during the three centuries from 240 B.C. onwards. (240 was the year when thenfirst play in Latin, an adaptation by Livius Andronicus from a Greek original, was presentednat Rome).This production is recorded for us by Livy the historian (1), who describes Andronicus'nuse of a narrative structure as a bold innovation. Livy says nothing about whatnkind of plot the play of 240 B.C. had, but it must certainly have been a version of somenGreek text. Of the 8 or 9 titles of Andronicus' tragedies that are known to us, fivendeal with Trojan War subjects, and the rest with legends of raped or tormented womenn(Danae, Tereus, Andromeda, perhaps Ino). Livius Andronicus was, it seems a Greek bynbirth (2); but the themes chosen by native Roman writers such as Ennius, Naevius, andnPacuvius in the next century show a similar fidelity to the traditional Greek range ofnplots: Trojan War, the Theban cycle, and afflicted heroines (occasionally an afflictednhero such as Telephus). The few exceptions to the use of Greek material in tragedy werenthe plays known as praetextae, whose plots were drawn from Roman history. Legend andnmythology were at all periods the regular sources for tragic plots. The extant tragediesnfrom the Imperial age, with one exception, use the same kind of material.In form also it is clear that Roman dramatists followed Greek tragedy very closely,nthough there is reason to think that the lost plays of the Republican theatre used Greeknformal elements more flexibly than the writers of the early Empire did. The survivingnplays of Imperial date adhere strictly, at almost every point, to Greek forms. 'Episodes',nin iambic trimeters, using no more than three actors, alternate with Choruses innlyric metres. Sometimes the Chorus takes a minor part also in the dialogue of an Episode.nThere is regular use of traditional items such as the narrative messenger-speech, and thenAgon or scene of confrontation between two antagonists, often partly conducted innstichomythia (the rapid exchange of single-line speeches). Experiments in dramatic formnwere not of interest at this time, though to Naevius and Ennius, three centuries earlier,nthey evidently were (3). These men wrote for a theatre which was native and rapidlyndeveloping; in the first century A.D. this was no longer true.The Roman adherence to Greek models, in subject and form, suggests a continuity ofndramatic tradition, smoothly adapting itself to a different language and milieu. But innthe course of this adaptation the nature of the material, and o f the form, did change innessential ways. n n

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