Part 2 (1/2)

ad patrem victor non potes ire tuum.

sed potes ad fratrem: nunc fort.i.ter utere telo!

impius hoc telo es, hoc potes esse pius.

vivere si poteris, potuisti occidere fratrem!

nescisti: sed scis: haec mora culpa tua est.

viximus adversis, iaccamus partibus isdem (dixit et in dubio est utrius ense cadat).

ense meo moriar, maculato morte nefanda?

cui moreris, ferrum quo moriare dabit.'

dixit et in fratrem fraterno concidit ense: victorem et victum condidit una ma.n.u.s.[163]

What had been valour now is made a crime. The soldier halts by his foe and fears to launch his shafts. Then his courage rekindled. 'What! coward hand, dost thou delay _now_? There is one here whom thou shouldst slay sooner than the foe. Naught can a.s.soil of the guilt of a brother's blood save only death; 'tis thy death must atone. Shalt thou bear home to thy father's halls rich spoil of war? Nay, victor thus, thou canst not go to meet thy sire. But victor thou canst go to meet thy brother; _now_ use thy weapon bravely. This weapon stained thee with crime, 'tis this weapon shall make thee clean. If thou hast heart to live, thou hadst the heart to slay thy brother; thou _hadst_ no such murderous thought, but _now_ thou hast; this thy tarrying brings thee guilt. We have lived foes, let us lie united in the peace of the grave.' He ceased and doubted on whose sword to fall.' Shall I die by mine own sword, thus foul with shameful murder. He for whom thou diest shall give thee the steel wherewith to die.' He ceased, and fell dead upon his brother, slain by his brother's sword.

The same hand slew both victor and vanquished.

This is not poetry of the first cla.s.s, if indeed it is poetry at all.

But it is trick-rhetoric of the most brilliant kind without degenerating into bombastic absurdity. There is, in fact, a restraint in these epigrams which provides a remarkable contrast with the turgid extravagance that defaces so much of the dramas. This is in part due to the difference of the moulds into which the rhetoric is run, but it is hard to resist the belief that the epigrams--written mainly during the exile in Corsica--are considerably later than the plays. They are in themselves insignificant; they show no advance in dexterity upon the dramas, but they do show a distinct increase of maturity.

The plays are ten in number; they comprise a _Hercules Furens, Troades, Phoenissae_ (or _Thebais_), _Medea, Phaedra_ (or _Hippolytus_), _Oedipus, Agamemnon, Thyestes, Hercules Oetaeus_, and--sole example of the _fabula praetexta_--the _Octavia_. Despite the curious silence of Seneca himself and of his contemporaries, there can be little doubt as to the general correctness of the attribution which a.s.signs to Seneca the only Latin tragedies that grudging time has spared us. The _Medea, Hercules Furens, Troades, Phaedra, Agamemnon_, and _Thyestes_ are all cited by late writers, while Quintilian[164] himself cites a line from the Medea as the work of Seneca. The name Seneca, without any further specification, points as clearly to Seneca, the philosopher, as the name Cicero to the great orator. The absence of any further or more explicit reference on the part of Quintilian to Seneca's achievements as a tragedian is easily explained on the supposition that the critic regarded them as but an insignificant portion of his work. Yet stronger confirmation is afforded by the internal evidence. The verse is marked by the same brilliant but fatiguing terseness, the same polish and point, the same sententiousness, the same succession of short stabbing sentences, that mark the prose works of Seneca.[165] More remarkable still is the close parallelism of thought. The plays are permeated through and through with Stoicism, and the expression given to certain Stoical doctrines is often almost identical with pa.s.sages from the philosophical works.[166] Against these evidences the silence of Seneca himself counts for little. We may charitably suppose that he rated his plays at their just value. In any case a poet is under no compulsion to quote his own verses, or even to refer to them, in works of a totally different nature.[167]

A more serious question is whether Seneca is the author of all the plays transmitted to us under his name. The authenticity of four of these dramas has been seriously questioned. That the _Octavia_ is by a later hand may be regarded as certain. Seneca could hardly have dared to write a play on so dangerous a theme--the brutal treatment by Nero of his young wife Octavia. Moreover, Seneca himself is one of the dramatis personae, and there are clear references to the death of Nero, while the style is simple and restrained, and wholly unlike that of the other plays. It is the work of a saner and less flamboyant age.[168] The _Agamemnon_ and the _Oedipus_ have been suspected on the ground that certain of the lyric portions are written in a curious patchwork metre of a character fortunately unique in Latin lyric verse. The _Agamemnon_ further has two choruses.[169] But in all other respects the language, technique, and metre closely resemble the other dramas. Neither objection need carry any weight. There is no reason why Seneca should not have introduced a double chorus or have indulged in unsuccessful metrical experiments.[170] Far more difficult is the problem presented by the _Hercules Oetaeus_. It presents many anomalies, of which the least are a double chorus and a change of scene from Oechalia to Trachis. Imitations and plagiarisms from the other plays abound, and the work has more than its fair share of vain repet.i.tions and tasteless absurdities. On the other hand, metre and diction closely recall the dramas accepted as genuine. It is hard to give any certain answer to such a complicated problem, but it is noteworthy that all the worst defects in this play (which among its other peculiarities possesses abnormal length) occur after l. 705, while the earlier scenes depicting the jealousy of Deianira show the Senecan dramatic style almost at its best. Even in the later portion of the play there is much that may be by the hand of Seneca. It is impossible to brand the drama as wholly spurious. The opening lines (1-232) may not belong to the play, but may form an entirely separate scene dealing with the capture of Oechalia: there is no reason to suppose that they are not by Seneca, and the same statement applies to the great bulk of ll. 233-705. The remainder has in all probability suffered largely from interpolation, but its general resemblance to Seneca in style and diction is too strongly marked to permit us to reject it _en bloc_. The problem is too obscure to repay detailed discussion.[171] The most probable solution of the question would seem to be that the work was left in an unfinished condition with inconsistencies, self-plagiarisms, repet.i.tions, and absurdities which revision would have removed; this unfinished drama was then worked over and corrected by a stupid, but careful student of Seneca.

There is such a complete absence of evidence as to the period of Seneca's life during which these dramas were composed, that much ingenuity has been wasted in attempts to solve the problem. The view most widely held--why it should be held is a mystery--is that they were composed during Seneca's exile in Corsica (41-9 A.D.).[172] Others, again, hold that they were written for the delectation of the young Nero, who had early betrayed a taste for the stage. This view has nothing to support it save the accusation mentioned by Tacitus,[173] to the effect that the patronage and approval of Nero led Seneca to write verse more frequently than his wont. Direct evidence there is none, but the general crudity of the work, coupled with the pedantic hardness and rigidity of the Stoicism which pervades the plays, points strongly to an early date, considerably earlier than the exile in Corsica. There is no trace of the mature experience and feeling for humanity that characterize the later philosophical works. On the contrary, these plays are just what might be expected of a young man fresh from the schools of rhetoric and philosophy.[174] As to the order in which the plays were written there is practically nothing to guide us.[175] The _Hercules Oetaeus_ is probably the latest, for in it we find plagiarisms from the _Hercules Furens, Oedipus, Thyestes, Phoenissae, Phaedra_, and _Troades_. Even here, however, there is an element of uncertainty, for it is impossible to ascertain whether any given plagiarism is due to Seneca or to his interpolators.

Leaving such barren and unprofitable ground, what can we say of the plays themselves? Even after making due allowance for the hopeless decline of dramatic taste and for the ruin wrought by the schools of rhetoric, it is hard to speak with patience of such productions, when we recall the brilliance and charm of the prose works of Seneca. We can forgive him being rhetorical when he speaks for himself; when he speaks through the lips of others he is less easily tolerable.

Drama is a reading of human life: if it is to hold one's interest it must deal with the feelings, thought, and action of genuine human beings and represent their complex interaction: the characters must be real and must differ one from the other, so that by force of contrast and by the continued play of diverse aspects and developments of the human soul, the significance, the pathos, and the power of the fragment of human life selected for representation may be fully brought out and set before our eyes. If these characteristics be absent, the drama must of necessity be an artistic failure by reason of its lack of truth. But it requires also plot, with a logical growth leading to some great climax and developing a growing suspense in the spectator as to what shall be the end. It is true that plot without reality may give us a successful melodrama, that truth of character-drawing with a minimum of plot may move and interest us. But in neither case shall we have drama in its truest and n.o.blest form.

Seneca gives us neither the half nor the whole. The stage is ultimately the touchstone of dramatic excellence. But if it is to be such a touchstone, it must have an audience with a penetration of intelligence and a soundness of taste such as had long ceased to characterize Roman audiences. The Senecan drama has lost touch with the stage and lacks both unity and life. Such superficial unity as his plots possess is due to the fact that they are ultimately imitations of Greek[176] drama. A full discussion of the plots is neither necessary here nor possible. A few instances of Seneca's treatment of his material must suffice.[177]

He has no sense of logical development; the lack of sequence and of proportion traceable in the letters is more painfully evident in the tragedies.

The _Hercules Furens_ supplies an excellent example of the weakness of the Senecan plot. It is based on the [Greek: H_erakl_es mainomenos] of Euripides, and such unity as it possesses is in the main due to that fact. It is in his chief divergences from the Euripidean treatment of the story that his deficiencies become most apparent. Theseus appears early in the play merely that he may deliver a long rhodomontade on the appearance of the underworld, whence Hercules has rescued him; and, worst of all, the return of Hercules is rendered wholly ineffective.

Amphitryon hears the approaching steps of Hercules as he bursts his way to the upper world and cries (523)--

est est sonitus Herculei gradus.

The chorus then, as if they had heard nothing, deliver themselves of a chant that describes Hercules as still a prisoner in Hades. When Hercules at last is allowed to appear, he appears alone, and delivers a long ranting glorification of himself (592-617) before he is joined by his father, wife, and children. As Leo has remarked,[178] this episode has been tastelessly torn into two fragments merely to give Hercules an opportunity for turgid declamation.

The _Medea_, again, is, on the whole, Euripidean in form, though it probably owes much to the influence of Ovid.[179] It is, moreover, the least tasteless and best constructed of his tragedies. It loses comparatively little by the omission of the Aegeus episode, but suffers terribly by the insertion of a bombastic description of Medea's incantations. The love of the Silver Age for rhetoric has converted Medea into a skilful rhetorician, its love for the black art has degraded her to a vulgar sorceress. Nothing, again, can be cruder or more awkward than the manner in which the news of the death of Creon and his daughter is announced. After an interval so brief as scarcely to suffice even for the conveyance of the poisoned gifts to the palace, in rushes a messenger crying (879)--

periere cuncta, concidit regni status.

nata atque genitor cinere permixto iacent.

_Cho_. qua fraude capti? _Nunt_. qua solent reges capi, donis.

_Cho_. in illis esse quis potuit dolus?

_Nunt_. et ipse miror vixque iam facto malo potuisse fieri credo; quis cladis modus?

avidus per omnem regiae partem furit ut iussus ignis: iam domus tota occidit, urbi timetur.

_Cho_. unda flammas opprimat.

_Nunt_. et hoc in ista clade mirandum accidit, alit unda flammas, quoque prohibetur magis, magis ardet ignis: ipsa praesidia occupat.