III. SENECA THE PHILOSOPHER: MISCELLANEOUS LEARNING…

III. SENECA THE PHILOSOPHER: MISCELLANEOUS LEARNING

Widely varied problems regarding Seneca—His family—Education—His relations with Caligula, Claudius and Nero—Retirement from the imperial court—Character—Works lost and extant—Vexed questions of chronology—Brief survey of his prose writings—Style in theory—Style in practice—Seneca as essayist—The pithy sentence—Composite language—Ancient traces of his influence—The exponent of Latin Stoicism—Vitality of the Stoic creed—The human and the humorous—Bracing spirit of his philosophy.

Contemporary learning—History, jurisprudence and philosophy—Stoics of the day—Scholarship—Asconius and Probus—Orators, informers and rhetoricians.

SENECA THE PHILOSOPHER

The jungle of literature which has grown up around Seneca[588] testifies to the manifold inquiries stimulated by his personality and works. The bare enumeration of representative treatises or essays on Senecan subjects becomes oppressive. In Latin and in many modern languages they have dealt with problems of his life—the cause of his exile, his moral character, his inconsistencies, his political significance and control or want of control over Nero; they have dealt with the chronology of his writings; with his theology, philosophy and cosmology, so that what he thought of God, man and the world has been scrutinized in relation to Stoicism as well as to those eclectic modifications which were always typical of the practical Roman; they have dealt, too, with his science, with aspects of his style, his characteristic prose, his gift of piquant satire, his poetic and tragic powers; with difficulties, still unsolved, in his text; with questions of his influence upon Christian literature, European drama and modern essay-writing. There is, then, no lack of Senecan themes, and his influence makes him one of the most prominent figures in the history of letters.

The Seneca family belonged to Corduba, the chief city of Baetica, which was the most civilized province of Spain. There, about 4 B.C.,[589] L. Annaeus Seneca,[590] second son of the so-called “rhetor,” was born. His mother Helvia, we learn in the Consolatio sent to her by her exiled son, had a philosophical bent—a contrast in this respect to her husband, whose interest lay in rhetoric. The family was well-to-do and talented. The elder Seneca and Helvia had three sons. The eldest was Novatus, to whom his brother dedicated his treatises On Anger and On A Happy Life: he became “Gallio” through adoption by L. Junius Gallio, the orator, and, when governor of Achaea in 51-52, happened to have the apostle Paul brought before his tribunal.[591] The second son, called “Seneca” by his father, became, as a statesman and writer, the most famous bearer of the name. The youngest son, Mela, of whose ability his father[592] held a high opinion, was of a more retiring disposition, but, without courting senatorial honours, proved himself a successful money-maker, and possesses his best title to fame as father of Lucan.

Seneca was brought when a child, in the arms of an affectionate aunt,[593] to Rome, whither his parents either preceded or followed him. His preliminary training under a grammaticus left him with a memory of much barren detail and a pronounced distaste for verbal criticism or the minutiae of book learning;[594] his subsequent training in rhetoric by such masters as Mamercus Scaurus, Gallio, Musa, Julius Bassus,[595] and under the auspices of his father, made an indelible impress upon his genius. No doubt his true intellectual love was reserved for philosophy, and he saw the weaknesses of declamation;[596] but we have his father’s evidence that all three sons were captivated by rhetorical sententiae,[597] and Seneca’s own style—disconnected, pointed, antithetic, metaphorical and piquant—is the best proof of its own origin. With his philosophical studies came a fuller satisfaction for intellect and spirit. Seneca was thoroughly Roman in emphasizing the practical aspect of philosophy. “Philosophy,” he says, “consists not in words but in realities. She sits at the helm and steers the voyage through the hazards of the waves.”[598] More and more Seneca was drawn to it, not merely as a guide to conduct, but as something that filled a profound need of the soul. To him it signified the divine way, truth, and life: it made, especially through the Neo-Stoicism which he accepted and developed, a religious appeal. For the elect there was a turning away from the world,[599] a disdain of earthly things,[600] the duty of self-examination,[601] the joys of conversion,[602] the apostolic call to enlighten others.[603] There were ascetic privations,[604] hard at first in their disciplinary stringency, although afterwards joyously welcomed: there were ecstatic possibilities of drawing close to God.[605] The boy might not at once grasp all the implications of the higher teaching, and in life he may have practised very imperfectly the doctrines to which he gave eloquent and noble expression; yet it is certain that from the outset his philosophical masters exercised a deep influence upon him. They were three disciples of the Sextii—Sotion, Attalus and Fabianus. Sotion, arguing on Pythagorean principles, persuaded Seneca to become vegetarian; Attalus, the Stoic, with a contempt for luxury, induced him to renounce perfumes, wines, oysters, mushrooms and a soft bed; while Fabianus, who had given up a career as a speaker to devote himself to philosophical discussion, conveyed to him much of his own enthusiasm. Seneca was the first to arrive for a lecture, and last to leave: his abstinence and fasts were so rigorous that his health, never of the best,[606] began to suffer, and his father intervened with the timely reminder that he might be mistaken for a devotee of the foreign superstitions which Tiberius had endeavoured to extirpate about A.D. 19. If Seneca sighed as a theorist, he obeyed as a son. Fits of melancholy drove him to thoughts of suicide, which Stoicism permitted in certain circumstances: only regard for his father prevented him from losing control over himself. The state of his health may have accounted for visits to Pompeii and to Egypt, where an aunt was wife of the Governor.[607] One of his early works, a lost treatise on Egyptian religious practices (De Ritu et Sacris Aegyptiorum), must be put down to his stay in the country. His aunt was more than a good nurse; she could use her influence for her nephew, and on his return to Rome about A.D. 31 helped to secure the quaestorship for him. Then his career as a speaker at the bar began. Some years passed, and his oratorical performances drew upon him the jealousy of Caligula, who, not content with sneering at them as “mere competitive exercises” and “sand without lime,”[608] would have put Seneca to death but for the whisper from one of the emperor’s favourites that he was in any case doomed to die soon from consumption.[609] Threatened men, however, live long, and Seneca’s future fame lay in other fields than the dangerous one of oratory.

By degrees his own preference turned him to literature and philosophy.[610] Some of his lost works belong to this period—collections of discourses and poems, a physical treatise De Motu Terrarum, a biography of his father, who died about A.D. 39, and perhaps the Consolation to Marcia. Most likely, too, the material for the three books On Anger was collected about the same time, and published, with its bitter allusions to Caligula,[611] soon after that emperor was safely dead. Seneca was not a recluse: a measure of self-effacement may have been judicious under Caligula, but Seneca’s own choice was to make the student’s loneliness alternate with social engagements. “There should be a blend, an alternation of solitude and society: the former will cause us to want human kind, the latter to want ourselves. And the one will be a cure for the other: solitude will heal dislike for a crowd, a crowd will heal the weariness of solitude.”[612] The school of the world was essential to the thinker on wisdom. He was a good business man, able to advance his financial interests; and he had gifts of elegant expression which fitted him to mix with the highest circles in Rome. At court, after Caligula’s murder, Seneca occupied a prominent position as an asset in the party of the princesses, Julia Livilla and Agrippina, daughters of Germanicus and nieces of the emperor. His happiness was short-lived. A charge was brought against him of an immoral intrigue with Julia.[613] Messalina, the unscrupulous empress, is not unreasonably suspected of having for political reasons invented the accusation to weaken a rival faction. It involved Julia’s death ultimately, and Seneca’s trial before a subservient senate, where the death-sentence was at Claudius’s suggestion commuted to banishment. So for eight years, from 41 to 49, he underwent the punishment of “relegation” in Corsica.

In writing his Consolation to Helvia, probably a good many months later, he endeavours to cheer his mother by philosophical arguments that exile is quite tolerable, and very much what the exiled person makes it; but his real feelings of weary despondency are expressed in certain epigrams and in his Consolation to Polybius of A.D. 43, when his sympathy proffered to Claudius’s learned Secretary for Petitions (a libellis) and his cringing flattery of the emperor were designed, though in vain, to facilitate his recall. Certainly, he had books and literary pursuits to occupy his mind; slaves may have been in attendance; and his friend Caesonius Maximus seems to have stayed with him for a time; but there was much that was depressing. He had lost his father, his wife and a child: like other ancients, he could take little pleasure in rugged scenery: and there was a limit to his interest in the ethnology of the island. For a capitalist, diplomat and courtier, for a literary man with social instincts, banishment meant the same poignancy of suffering as Ovid knew on the shores of the Black Sea. But relief came for Seneca as it never came for Ovid. In 49 he was recalled and made praetor, through the influence of Agrippina, who realized that a man of his literary reputation would make a suitable tutor for her boy Nero.[614] The young prince’s education consisted of all available subjects of culture, with two chief limitations according to Suetonius: Nero’s mother disapproved of philosophy for a future ruler, and Seneca jealously discouraged the study of the old orators, so that his own modern style might remain Nero’s ideal.[615] When Claudius was done to death in 54, it fell to the imperial tutor to compose a suitable panegyric for his pupil, the new emperor, to deliver: and so began the period of five years—the quinquennium[616] praised long afterwards by Trajan—during which Seneca, aided by the good sense of Burrus, prefect of the guard, kept Nero on paths of comparative decency and moderation.[617] Part of Seneca’s policy was directed towards keeping Nero free from undue interference on the part of his imperious mother,[618] who hotly protested against “the claim of the cripple Burrus and the exile Seneca to govern mankind with a maimed hand and a scholar’s tongue.”[619] At this period Seneca’s influence as a statesman reached its zenith; and it is a reasonable conjecture that for a time he contrived to mould governmental policy in the spirit of his own broadminded cosmopolitanism. It was of some service to the world that the author of the De Clementia, addressed to Nero when he was eighteen, should now be his chief adviser. Dio himself, who is usually a hostile witness where Seneca is concerned, gives to him and Burrus credit for able and fair administration.[620] There were, however, black crimes which Seneca, whether privy to them or not, had to condone. Britannicus, the true heir to the purple, had been got rid of by poison at the emperor’s table in 55; and in 59 came Agrippina’s murder by her son’s command. State policy, the historical cloak for many infamies, might argue a case on behalf of both acts: the one removed a rival and secured the throne, the other ended a woman’s ascendancy and secured the emperor’s freedom.[621] It was Seneca who composed for Nero the statement to be read in the Senate respecting his mother’s death. One can only guess what acquiescence meant for a man who could both think and feel. To his credit be it said that he seems at least to have pleaded with Nero to save his cruelly maligned empress Octavia in A.D. 62.

That was the year of Burrus’s death and of Tigellinus’s elevation, when Nero had begun to lean upon worse advisers, who urged him to shake off his mentor.[622] The mentor himself, recognizing that his influence was undermined, placed before Nero his request to retire.[623] The wealth of a professing Stoic made an easy target for criticism,[624] and a tempting lure for an avaricious emperor. Seneca’s speech, therefore, at his interview, as reported by Tacitus, took mainly the form of an apologia pro diuitiis suis. His wealth amassed in these years of service was an index surely of his Majesty’s bounty; and, now that he was old, it should return to his Majesty. Nero’s own ability to give a ready rejoinder he adroitly set to the credit of his excellent teacher, who was not nearly so old that his imperial pupil could think of dropping his pilotage and whose wealth he could not possibly accept—for what would people say?[625] Fair dissembling words did not deceive Seneca. From that day he changed his mode of life: he no longer kept open house or made public appearances attended by troops of friends. He had some three years yet to devote to studious retirement: and to this period, A.D. 62-65, can be assigned with confidence his essay On Leisure (De Otio), his elaborate Moral Letters (Epistulae Morales), the seven books of the Quaestiones Naturales, and with less certainty some other works. Once again he made an offer of his substance to the emperor: it was in A.D. 64 when he proposed to help in repairing the devastation caused by the burning of Rome.[626] He was not however destined to escape the despot. In 65, on an allegation of complicity in Piso’s conspiracy—and there were some who said that the next emperor was intended to be the philosopher[627]—the old man was ordered to put himself to death. What Tacitus records of the last hours of Seneca, his dignified calm, his reliance upon philosophy, his farewell advice to friends, his devoted wife’s desire to die with him, the too slow ebbing of life from the chill, attenuated frame, is an account few can read unmoved.[628]

The character of Seneca presents anomalies comparable to those which are notorious in Lord Bacon’s case. If Seneca does not merit to the full the absolute superlatives which Pope applied to Bacon, “the wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind,” still the noble grandeur of his theoretical morality was deplorably sullied by lapses in actual life. Many of the charges date from his own time; and never was the calumny of enemies more rife, more gross, more readily believed than in the days when creatures like Suillius threw their slanderous mud. Among the historians, Dio is too biased to be trusted in his enumeration of the immoralities and inconsistencies laid to Seneca’s account. The story of improper relations with Julia so obviously served Messalina’s machinations that it cannot be accepted as incontrovertible fact, while the suggestion of an amour with Agrippina is even more incredible. That Seneca was privy to the deaths of Claudius, of Britannicus and of Agrippina was whispered and repeated, but the rumours can be neither proved nor disproved. His weak condonation of such deeds very naturally subjects him to suspicion. That he advocated the contempt of wealth and yet accumulated it, is not to be gainsaid; even so, and granted that he lent money on interest, we are not bound to believe Dio’s statement that Seneca caused an insurrection in Britain by suddenly calling in the huge sum of forty million sesterces. If he was a thrifty financier all his life, he at least thereby escapes the accusation of a vicious abuse of his money in an age of luxury.

While, however, some of the blackest charges may be parried as not proven, one count in the indictment is beyond denial, even if it be capable of extenuation. Outside the study, he lacked true moral bravery. Nothing could transcend the elevation of his ethical theory; but this emphatic assertor of moral principles tamely saw them trampled upon at court. Circumstances overbore his protests, perhaps even his qualms: his wisdom failed in courage and his prudence degenerated into pusillanimity. A voluptuous court, it must be allowed, had no atmosphere of bracing discipline in which an austere philosopher could practise virtue: its extravagant opulence and titanic depravity were better calculated to stifle the moral sense with a rankly perfumed sultriness. The danger was twofold: at one time, the aesthetic taste and social charm of Nero might lull the conscience to rest; at another, his tigerish nature might unnerve any counsellor. Let it be admitted that Seneca was incapable of maintaining an impolitic opposition, and that he was, in Carlyle’s words, “so wistfully desirous to stand well with Truth and yet not ill with Nero” that he remains “our perhaps niceliest proportioned half-and-half, the plausiblest plausible on record.” Such scathing words may be glibly repeated by critics who are safe from Nero. But is no allowance to be made, if Seneca failed to transfer the dogmatism of the schools to an emperor’s acts? The philosopher’s heart at least was on the side of goodness. Nero’s court, life, policy must have often caused inexpressible pain to a believer in the Fatherhood and Providence of God, the brotherhood of man, the divine spark within all, the sovereign excellence of virtue, the vanity of worldly goods, the sin of luxury; and it must have been hard to adapt to Neronian orgies Seneca’s own ascetic preferences and practices. But a personality endowed with philosophic will, like Seneca’s, aimed sincerely at a higher life for himself and a better world for others: it could not choose but exert some influence. When one complains of Seneca’s inconsistencies, is one prepared to say that he would have served Rome better by avoiding court? To say this is to forget the good he did. To his credit stand Nero’s promising quinquennium, a policy of toleration in religion, and an endeavour to lessen cruelty in gladiatorial shows: besides, he preached clemency in life, as the author of the Octauia makes him do in the play. Nero’s deterioration after Seneca’s retirement is in itself a testimony to his previous authority.

Perhaps it is not merely fanciful to trace a dynamic evolution in Seneca’s character determined by his continuous struggle against hindrances and failures. If a worldling like Petronius came in time to feel out of touch with the vanity of court life, what of Seneca, who realized its vanity from the outset? In spite of much to disillusionize and to disgust, he persevered at court until his prospects of influencing Nero faded into nothingness, and his offered renunciation of riches had been hypocritically declined. His very faults made him in a sense a better man, and so acquired a spiritual value; for a recognition of his own backsliding and cowardice showed the force of temptation and taught indulgence towards human frailty. This is why Seneca is less bigoted, less overbearing than most of his fellow-Stoics. His habit of self-examination must have often revealed his faults to him, so that one outcome was a tolerance which might well be imitated in judging him. “We have all done wrong,” he says in the De Clementia[629]—peccauimus omnes. It is then, more charitable, as well as more profitable, to forget his imperfections and omissions in favour of positive qualities like his humility[630] and humanity—to forget his timidities in favour of his bravery at the end. In one of his later years he wrote to Lucilius: “Before old age my aim was a good life; in old age my aim is a good death.”[631] And in another letter there is an utterance of dignified courage on which the hour of trial set the final seal of validity:

Without dread, then, I am composing myself for that day on which, laying aside shifts and subtleties, I shall have to judge respecting myself whether I merely speak or really feel as brave men should, whether all my insolent words hurled against fortune were mere pretence and mumming. Discount man’s opinion: it is uncertain and partial. Discount the philosophical pursuits of a lifetime: it is death that is to pass judgement on you. ’Tis true: discussions, literary conversations, words collected from the precepts of sages, and learned discourse do not exhibit the true strength of the mind. The greatest cowards can talk big. What you have achieved will then be made plain when you come to die. I accept the terms: I do not shrink from the decision.[632]

Besides his tragedies, short poems and the satire on Claudius, which are to be considered in another chapter, the following prose works by Seneca are extant—twelve so-called Dialogues, two books On Clemency, seven On Benefits, seven books of Natural Problems, and 124 Moral Epistles. His works that are lost, or survive only in fragments, trenched on the provinces of geography, physics, natural history, biography and ethics. Among these were De Situ Indiae, De Ritu et Sacris Aegyptiorum, De Motu Terrarum, De Forma Mundi, De Piscium Natura, De Vita Patris, De Superstitione, De Immatura Morte, Moralis Philosophiae libri. Some of his Orationes and additional books of Letters also circulated. The twelve Dialogi collected in the Ambrosian MS. are given in the following order: De Prouidentia, De Constantia Sapientis, De Ira libri III, Ad Marciam de Consolatione, De Vita Beata, De Otio, De Tranquillitate Animi, De Breuitate Vitae, Ad Polybium de Consolatione, Ad Heluiam Matrem de Consolatione. Unfortunately, these are not in the sequence of composition; had they been so, fuller light would have been shed on the author’s intellectual development. Much labour has been spent on the chronology of the works, and respecting some of them at any rate the conclusions reached by inquirers are vain and conflicting. Several avenues of approach have been explored along the lines of internal evidence drawn from statement, expression or rhythm. But contemporary allusions (apart from those sometimes merely imagined in the searcher’s enthusiasm) are scarce in Seneca, as if to remind us that the treatises are concerned with themes which are independent of the years. Similarities of thought yield inconclusive criteria of contemporaneous composition in an author who, on some subjects, expressed himself in much the same manner from first to last throughout his career, but who conversely, on other subjects, contradicted himself within the range of the same treatise. Then, again, statistics, like M. Bourgery’s, showing relative frequency of definite metrical sentence-endings form an unsubstantial foundation on which to base theories of earliness or lateness in composition. M. Pichon[633] in 1912 considered that, on the chronology of the works, Gercke in his Seneca-Studien of 1895 had to a great extent superseded Jonas’s dissertation of 1870; and now it is suggested[634] that M. Albertini[635] has made it almost unnecessary to consult Gercke. If one constructs a table to exhibit the dates assigned by different critics to the works, the variation of opinion is at first sight bewildering. For instance, the Consolatio Ad Marciam, which Lipsius placed after the exile, was, according to others, written during it (41-49); and, according to Albertini, before it (A.D. 40). All three books of the De Ira were, according to Jonas, published in 41, but, according to Lehmann and Rossbach, in 49 after the recall; or—to take what marks perhaps the maximum of divergence—the De Prouidentia, in which Waltz sees a similarity of tone linking it with the De Constantia, is referred by him to the first months of exile, 41-42, while Albertini, agreeing with Gercke that it is “après la disgrâce,” gives A.D. 63. Respecting dates for the tragedies, opinions are equally at variance. The general proportion of uncertainty is so great that one is tempted to fall back upon Madvig’s dictum of 1873, librorum Senecae praeter paucos tempora incerta sunt.[636] Yet, after all, there are points on which we can lay firm hold. Few of the extant prose works were written before Seneca’s exile in 41, and most of the best-known ones belong to the sixteen years which he had to live after his recall, when he was well over fifty years of age. There is much to say for believing that the Consolatio Ad Marciam is the oldest of the surviving treatises (A.D. 40), and that at least two books of the De Ira were composed in 41. We can be quite certain that the other two Consolations, namely Ad Heluiam and Ad Polybium, belong to the early part of the exile, the one to 41-42, the other to 43. No other work can be, without challenge, ascribed to this Corsican period, although some authorities think that to it belong the De Breuitate Vitae as well as the De Constantia and the De Prouidentia. As to the period after Seneca’s recall in 49, there is no doubt that the De Clementia was written early in Nero’s reign, probably in 55 (Albertini thinks 56). It is generally agreed that the De Otio, Epistulae Morales, and the Quaestiones Naturales follow the retirement of A.D. 62, the composition of the last two works spreading over more than one year.

Realizing, then, that a full and exact chronology is unattainable, we proceed to a brief survey of the works.[637] Of the twelve Dialogi[638] it may be convenient to consider the three Consolations first, then the three books On Anger, and finally the remaining half-dozen treatises. The Consolations are not spontaneous expressions of sympathy, but literary efforts following broadly a scheme. It was a Greek invention thus to cure one of the maladies of the soul—grief; and the philosophers of different schools[639] who composed such exercises were in time joined by the rhetoricians, so that two streams of influence converged in what was a kind of popular philosophy, with general features of similarity. Among these features were eclecticism in argument; insistence upon our inability to control external circumstances in contrast with the possession of our own reason and will; the employment of rhetorical loci communes and historical examples, as in a declamation; and a typical structure. Usually this structure consisted of an introduction, on the evil to be remedied; the main body of the consolation, on the cause of the affliction and the person afflicted; and a conclusion. It is evident that this species of moral pharmacy, based on an established science of consolation, possessed its time-honoured conventions alike in plan and thought. While, therefore, in Seneca the colour borrowed from Stoics and others is pronounced, it is fruitless to endeavour to trace his sources in detail. What gave a Consolation its distinctive value was very much what gives value to any work of art—the genius of its author and his power, within the limitations of an old form, to achieve a fresh result. The special circumstances deplored, the personality of the individual consoled, sometimes even digressions indulged in, and the signal mastery of style displayed, might all open up paths to an original effect.

The Ad Marciam is addressed to the brave daughter of Cremutius Cordus, who published some of the writings of her dead father, one of Sejanus’s victims. Its design is to console her in her continued mourning for her son, whom she had lost three years earlier. Between its exordium and its peroration it contains a fairly systematic reasoning based on examples of other mothers in grief and on precepts for the control of grief. Seneca’s hand, however, is not so sure as it is in the Ad Heluiam, the most regularly arranged and, at the same time, the cleverest and most readable of the three Consolations. Once he has passed the exordium and a recapitulation of the troubles which have already taught his mother, Helvia, to be courageous, he addresses himself to the immediate task of consoling her under the loss of her exiled son—himself. The situation, it will be observed, was unique; for the person whose loss is mourned comforts the mourner. His ingenuity and prevailing Stoicism are apparent in the defence of the two main positions. On the one hand, the exile himself is not really unfortunate, because he has been trained not to mind the deprivation of external blessings; banishment is but a change of place which cannot affect virtue; enforced poverty does not hurt the sage (an argument which gives a handle for invectives against luxury); and the disgrace of exile lies only in man’s opinion. On the other hand, his mother is not really unfortunate; it cannot be that she laments her son’s support, since her affection has always been disinterested; her natural pangs over the separation give her an excellent chance of displaying fortitude after the manner of other courageous women whom Seneca proceeds to cite; her melancholy can be dispelled through her favourite studies in philosophy, and through the affection of the dear ones who are left. Seneca’s recognition here of ordinary human feelings outside the chill reason of the Stoics makes the one truly touching portion of his Consolation. For himself, he is happy to have leisure both for the study of the universe and for light literary work.

In the Ad Polybium, written about the middle of A.D. 43, he is far less cheerful. Here the object is to comfort Polybius, a learned and influential freedman at court, on the death of a brother. Apart from the reasoned consolation, two features stand out—the author’s acknowledgement of his misery in a remote corner (angulo) of the world, where his very Latin might suffer,[640] and his flatteries of the emperor in the hope of securing a remission of his sentence. The inconsistency with his previous fortitude and the undignified abasement in respect of Claudius have made all Seneca’s admirers wish that he had never written this treatise. Diderot’s denial of Seneca’s authorship in the eighteenth century has, however, received only slight support in modern times. The manner is Seneca’s, and there are not wanting memorable sayings; e.g. on the obligations of high rank, “great fortune is great servitude” (magna seruitus magna fortuna, vi. 5); on a dilemma for mourners, “to lament one in bliss is jealousy; to lament the non-existent, insanity” (beatum deflere inuidia est, nullum dementia, ix. 3); on life as a torture (omnis uita supplicium est, ix. 6), at the beginning of a fine passage on the troublous ocean of life whose one final haven is death; respecting the dead man, “he has not left us but gone before” (non reliquit ille nos sed antecessit, ix. 9); and on the grumbler under a reversal of fortune, “the man who gives to the close of a spell of pleasure the name of injustice has no gratitude” (ingratus est qui iniuriam uocat finem uoluptatis, x. 2).

The three books De Ira (which have certain gaps) were dedicated to Seneca’s brother, Novatus. They investigate the characteristics, uselessness and curability of anger. The plan, although the author several times indicates his line of treatment and his transitions, is not satisfactory.[641] There are repetitions and contradictions,[642] and the relation of Book III to the preceding couple presents difficulties. The work must be later than Caligulas’s reign; for it contains frank criticism on his mad anger, I. xx. 8-9, and on his barbarities, III. xviii. 3-4 and xix. 1-2. In the last passage Seneca indulges in the bitter climax: “Caligula tortured his victims by means of all the grimmest things in the world, with the cord, boot, rack, fire, and with that face of his (uultu suo).” Possibly the first two books were written, as Albertini suggests, in 41, just before the banishment; and Book III, which reads as if it came from Nero’s preceptor, may have been added in 49 to the work interrupted eight years before. Seneca’s handling of so unfortunately common a human frailty could not fail to possess interest. He reminds us that ungovernable rage is the one passion that seizes a nation as a whole and so leads to war.[643] The gift of apt illustration which marks the Letters to Lucilius is already noticeable. Irascible men, he suggests, ought not to meddle with the more exacting sorts of task, or, if they do, should stop short of weariness: their tempers need to be softened with milder pursuits; “for who does not know that clarions and trumpets are irritants, just as some airs are lullabies to soothe the mind? Green is good for wearied eyes (confusis oculis prosunt uirentia), and some colours are restful for weak sight, while the brilliancy of some is dazzling.”[644] There is the gift too of graphic description and anecdote. A reader never forgets the opening chapter, where, after citing the sage who called anger “a brief insanity,” the author gives his tellingly repulsive portrayal of the outward symptoms of mad wrath leading up to his words of dismissal, “You could not tell whether the vice is more hateful or ugly.”[645] Nor does one forget the idle Sybarite who was annoyed over seeing a labourer hard at work, and who complained about the discomfort caused him by the rumpling of some of the rose-leaves on which he lay.[646]

Years elapsed before Seneca indited to the same brother the now imperfect De Vita Beata. Novatus had become Gallio by adoption, as the superscription Ad Gallionem shows: most likely his governorship of Achaea was over. Two main questions are propounded—what makes life happy? and what is the way to the happy life? Happiness for Seneca consists not in what the many, but in what Stoic sages, think happy. It is “to live according to nature,”[647] in possession of a sound mind, true courage, true patience, and a true estimate of things, so reaping “an immense joy, unshaken and equable, along with peace and harmony of spirit, greatness of mind and gentleness; for all savagery is the outcome of weakness.”[648] From another point of view, happiness is to practise virtue. Against pleasure a polemic is directed, although Seneca takes up a broadminded attitude towards the Epicurean system when properly interpreted (ch. xii). The mode of attainment to happiness is not clearly formulated, but the essay develops a spirited retort to those who yelp (conlatrant) at philosophy on the ground that philosophers do not perform what they preach.[649] In particular a defence is needed for the ownership of wealth by the sage who affects to despise it. For himself Seneca can reply that he does not claim the virtuous perfection of the sage, but a wise use of wealth justifies its retention. Even in high estate a virtuous life may be led. Since the impression is given that the author is answering criticisms levelled at him as a rich man, a plausible date is 58 or 59, after Suillius’s attack upon Seneca.

The three treatises De Constantia Sapientis, De Tranquillitate Animi, and De Otio were addressed to a recipient, whose name, Serenus, fits the tenets conveyed. Annaeus Serenus died as prefect of Nero’s uigiles during one of Seneca’s later years: he had been accommodating enough to lend himself as a screen to prevent Agrippina from detecting Nero’s passion for the freedwoman Acte. Waltz,[650] following Hense, has pointed out that the three treatises mark progressive stages of philosophical attitude in Seneca’s pupil. In the De Constantia Serenus is Epicurean; in the De Tranquillitate, he is already Stoic in sympathy, though restless; in the De Otio, he is a convinced disciple. The fuller title for the De Constantia, states its theme, “that the wise man can receive neither wrong nor insult” (nec iniuriam nec contumeliam accipere sapientem). Not unnaturally, considering its subject, some have referred it to the early months of exile; but a reference to a recent discussion on Cato[651] implies Rome rather than Corsica as the place of writing. As the purpose is to prove a paradox—admittedly a hard saying for Serenus—Seneca begins by explaining that Stoic doctrine is too manly to aim at attractiveness. The answers to the supposed adversary’s objections involve a good deal of hair-splitting; but there is a fine confidence in the emphasis laid upon the calm of the sage amidst the storm of war; “for no siege-engines can be invented to shake the well-established mind” (nulla machinamenta posse reperiri quae bene fundatum animum agitent), and he sums up:

See, then, Serenus, that the perfect man, full of virtues human and divine, can lose nothing: his goods are girt with solid and unscalable ramparts.... You cannot compare with them the walls of Babylon which Alexander entered, nor the battlements of Carthage or Numantia.... Those which protect the sage are safe from fire and invasion: they yield no passage: they tower impregnable, equalling gods. You have no ground for saying, as you are wont to do, that this sage of ours is nowhere found. We invent no such unreal glory of human genius (vi. 9-10).

At the opening of the De Tranquillitate, Serenus confesses his uneasy vacillation in the pursuit of peace of mind. What, for instance, should be the attitude of man amidst luxury? What are the claims of leisured retirement against the worries of public life? What satisfaction comes from literary fame? The answer gives Seneca’s views on the attainment and maintenance of such an unruffled course that the mind shall take pleasure in itself and in its surroundings. An extraordinary amount of human wisdom is contained in this treatise, which seeks to provide a cure for ennui and nerves. Among the interesting topics are failures in life; the restless traveller in quest of change; the teacher who performs genuine social service (in priuato publicum negotium agit); the value of friendship (nihil aeque oblectauerit animum quam amicitia fidelis et dulcis); property as a source of anxiety (a theme illustrated with characteristic fertility); foolishness in book-collecting (multoque satius est paucis te auctoribus tradere quam errare per multos); the defiance of fortune; the vanity of human wishes; the interest in the condition of spirits beyond death; the proper estimate of human failings and sorrows; the torment of an artificial life; and the advisability of a little nonsense now and then to obviate the dullness produced by all work and no play (danda est animis remissio ... nascitur ex assiduitate laborum animorum hebetatio quaedam et languor).

The De Otio (mutilated at beginning and end) defends the moral value of leisure from affairs, in reply to Serenus’s statement of the strict Stoic position. Seneca’s plea is that at every age it is permissible to renounce action for philosophical meditation; but most of all is it permissible for those who have grown old in active service. Amid general corruption, such withdrawal is countenanced on both Stoic and Epicurean principles. We each belong to two commonwealths, and in retreat the sage may usefully serve the universal cosmopolis, the world at large, through his speculative life in accord with nature. Especially may he with profit devote himself to satisfying that inquiring disposition implanted in man by Nature herself. Nature has produced us to be spectators of her vast works: her beauty and complexity are not meant to pass unobserved. So by the right path of research, man must “discover something more ancient than the world itself” (aliquid ipso mundo inueniat antiquius); for “our thought bursts through the battlements of heaven, dissatisfied with knowing merely what is shown” (cogitatio nostra caeli munimenta perrumpit nec contenta est id quod ostenditur scire). The scientific impulse here is that which animates the Quaestiones Naturales, and the general tone befits the statesman who has resigned all responsibility for public policy.

There is a link between the De Otio and the much earlier De Breuitate Vitae; for its final advice to Paulinus, controller of the grain-supply for Rome, is that he would make the best use of life by retiring to cultivate philosophy. Such advice could hardly come with full effectiveness from an exile; while, on the other hand, a reference shows that the treatise must have been written before Claudius extended the pomerium of the city on January 24th, A.D. 50. Its date lies, therefore, presumably somewhere in 49 between the author’s recall and his acceptance of a regular appointment.[652] Paulinus perhaps was related to Seneca’s second wife.

The treatise is full of good things. Nowhere in literature are there to be read pithier remarks on the value of time. The first century of our era displayed a peculiarly keen sense of the way in which days are wasted. Under Tiberius, Phaedrus, we have seen, made fun of those fussy triflers, the ardaliones; and late in the century Pliny chafes against the petty but innumerable inroads made on leisure, while Martial betrays the same nervous spirit. Here Seneca speaks for the Neronian period. Life is short: yes, but it is we who make it so: life is long enough, if well employed. The general blindness to the worth of time is amazing: men will resist encroachments on land or money, but will let people trespass freely on their time, which is in reality their life. They are spendthrifts with the one thing in which greed is honourable (profusissimi in eo cuius unius honesta auaritia est). We live, in fact, as if we were to live for ever. You hear men coolly postponing leisurely reflection till after fifty or sixty: should they not blush to reserve for the sovereign duty of reflection the mere remnants of a life no longer fit for business? Drusus once declared that he was the only person who had never had holidays even when a boy: precocity like that must have an evil end. But the really great man will not let his hours be filched away from him; and his life will be long because devoted to self-improvement. Many a wrinkled grey-haired man has merely existed, not lived, a long time (non ille diu uixit, sed diu fuit). Yet for all men’s extravagance with this most precious of things, confront them with the peril of death, and how they plead for more time! For what purpose? To learn how to live and how to die demands a lifetime; but the paramount concern is laid aside in favour of toilsome exertions for a future on which no one can count. Thus the true life suffers from that procrastination which is the thief of our to-days (expectatio quae pendet ex crastino perdit hodiernum): so old age comes as a surprise, and death as a terror, to those who have been busy (occupati) over the wrong things, and have squandered time on luxury, affectation or vice. That man has true leisure who has the sense of leisure: its secret lies with philosophy, through whose study one may master centuries that are past and commune with all the ages and all the sages. Those great thinkers—not the arrogant snobs whom some court in Rome—constitute the true society of the world; and yet, Seneca reminds us, as Ruskin did long afterwards in Sesame and Lilies, none of those great thinkers will refuse access to him. The communicable wisdom of the ages points the right path towards immortality, and what philosophy has hallowed is beyond the reach of injurious time.

The remaining dialogue is the De Prouidentia, given first in the Milan MS. It is addressed, like the Naturales Quaestiones and the Epistulae, to Seneca’s friend Lucilius, a man with literary tastes,[653] who had held procuratorial offices in various parts of the Roman world, including Sicily, and in whom some have seen the author of the Aetna. The subject discussed is summarized in the fuller title—why any misfortunes befall good men, when a Providence exists (quare aliqua incommoda bonis uiris accidant, cum prouidentia sit). From the Stoic doctrine of a providential government of the universe, it follows that suffering must serve a good purpose. Discipline is one of the ends subserved: misfortune is a school for virtue, and a spectacle noble enough for the gods to witness is that of good men struggling with adversity—non miror si aliquando impetum capiunt spectandi magnos uiros conluctantis cum aliqua calamitate ... ecce par deo dignum, uir fortis cum fortuna mala, utique si et prouocauit. The last clause “especially if he has actually thrown out the challenge,” is an addition symptomatic of a rhetorical over-statement too common in this essay. The imperfect way in which some points in the argument are worked out has led certain critics to hold that a portion is lost at the end.[654]

Of the De Clementia, once in three books, we possess the first and a portion of the second. The idea of writing on clemency was suggested to Seneca through recollecting Nero’s words, when he reluctantly signed a death-warrant, “Would that I had never learned to write!”[655] If one is tempted to jeer at Seneca’s compliments to Nero and his expectations that a better era had dawned, one must in fairness remember the high hopes reposed and realized during the earlier years of the young prince’s reign. Book I discusses the need for clemency in a ruler. The emperor, as war-lord, is urged to recognize his responsibilities. He should follow the model of the gods: things a subject might do, a monarch cannot, in the full light that beats upon a throne (multa contra te lux est, omnium in istam conuersi oculi sunt). Cruelty makes a tyrant; but the affection of subjects is a stronger defence for a prince than their fear. Book II degenerates into tedious attempts at the definition of clementia in contrast with what the Stoic condemns as weaknesses—mercy (misericordia) and pardon (uenia).

The seven books De Beneficiis addressed to Aebutius Liberalis were not issued together. An allusion towards the close of Book I[656] shows that Claudius was dead, and it is likely that the first four books had appeared some years after 54; being followed by the remaining books,[657] perhaps by V and VI together, as Gercke thinks, before the retirement of 62, and by VII still later.[658] The praise of Demetrius in VII. viii.-xii. best suits Seneca’s closing years. Based upon Hecaton, Panaetius and other Stoics, the treatment of Benefits is marked by insight into human nature and generosity of impulse rather than by strict method. It may be too much to say that the work is incapable of analysis,[659] but it is safe to say that an attempted analysis shows the absence of exact system.

There are repetitions and anticipations, apparently because the author, instead of punctiliously exhausting a particular aspect of his subject, preferred to record, as they came, in characteristically concise and striking language, his thoughts upon points which he left himself free to illuminate again as occasion might offer. He is not unaware of such repetitions.[660] He is aware, too, of his digressions, on which he imposes a closure in such terms as, “Let us now return to the theme set before us,” or “My enthusiasm is carrying me away rather too far, for the subject is a tempting one.”[661] Even his initial definition of a benefit is unduly deferred (I. vi. 1) until after five somewhat rambling chapters. Such traits, although they may be adjudged faults in logic, actually contribute to the easiness and readability of his work.[662] Besides, some of his best thoughts are repeated in such varied form that they cannot fail to arrest the attention and impress themselves on the memory. Despite, then, a dearth of method, no man can rise from the most casual reading of a tractate by Seneca without having grasped its spirit. The redoubled beats, so keen and insistent in their staccato, ensure that effect.

The commonness of ingratitude is in Book I put down largely to the wrong mode of conferring benefits. The essence of a benefit lies in the attitude of the giver, and two points need consideration, the kind of benefits to be conferred and the mode of giving. The latter point is dealt with in Book II which turns to the mode of receiving, a topic involving that of the ungrateful disposition. Book III continues the subject of ingratitude, stating and answering problems: “Can ingratitude be prosecuted?” No. “Can a slave benefit a master?” Yes. “Can children confer on a parent more benefits than they have received?” Yes. Book IV, dealing with aspects of benefits and gratitude, puts the query, “Should one benefit the ungrateful?” The later books, from their investigation of quaestiones, are casuistic in character, but by no means uninteresting. Book V asks “Is it a shame to be surpassed in benefits?” then takes up the Stoic paradoxes “No one can be ungrateful,” “All are ungrateful”; and proceeds to find fresh puzzles, “Must a son be grateful for benefits done to his father?” “Is that a benefit which was not intended?” Among the problems in Book VI are “Do we owe gratitude to one who has benefited us against his will?”, or “without knowing it?”, or “incidentally in furthering his own interests?,” and in the last book “Can one benefit the sage who possesses all?” and “What is the position where the giver has forgotten the benefit conferred?” Although many of the problems end in unfruitful refinements, there is much to treasure in Seneca’s permanently valuable and shrewd criticism of human conduct. He is genuinely anxious to correct by his counsels one of the most detrimental and heartbreaking mistakes made in life; for he well realises how much pain is caused by ignorance in conferring or in receiving a benefit. A few citations will illustrate some aspects of his attitude:

“I should find it hard to say whether it is meaner for the recipient to repudiate a benefit, or for the giver to press for its repayment, inasmuch as a benefit is a sort of loan whose return absolutely depends on the spontaneous action of the debtor.”

“We find many people ungrateful; yet we make more people so, because at one time we are insistent and harsh in our claims for return, at another time we are fickle enough to regret our generosity. By such conduct we spoil the whole favour.... A benefit is felt to be a debt in the same spirit as that in which it is bestowed.”

“If a man does not give because he does not receive, he must have given in order to receive, and that justifies ingratitude. How many there are who are unworthy of the light of day, and nevertheless the sun rises.”

“Persevere in your generosity. Assist one with your means, another with credit, another with your favour, or your advice, or a word in season. Is he ungrateful for one benefit? After receiving a second, perhaps he will not be so. Has he forgotten two? Perhaps the third kindness will bring back the recollection of those that slipped his mind.”

“The reality of a benefit lies not in gold, nor silver, but in the goodwill of the giver.”

“What is a benefit? It is the doing of a kindness which gives pleasure and in the giving gets pleasure.... The spirit animating the act is what exalts trivial things, throws lustre on ordinary things, while it can discredit great and highly valued ones.”

The Naturales Quaestiones is in Seneca’s eyes an excursion into the highest speculation; for such physical inquiries concern God’s universe, whereas moral philosophy concerns man. The subject had occupied Seneca in Corsica,[663] and for many years he must have collected material to be combined (not over methodically) in these seven books. At the opening of Book II he gives his threefold division of the knowledge of nature into astronomy, meteorology, and geography, according as the investigation is directed to phenomena in the heavens (caelestia), or between the heavens and earth (sublimia), or upon the earth (terrestria). He does not, however, treat these subjects equally or in order, as a glance at the contents of the different books will prove. Indeed, the order of these books is much disputed.[664] It is possible that Seneca never finally settled their succession; for the work may have been ultimately issued by Lucilius, to whom it was dedicated. The time of composition can be determined within limits. Book III shows that it was the work of the author’s old age after his retirement in 62, and the opening of Book VI records the earthquake at Pompeii in February of 63.

The main themes are distributed among the books thus: I, Fire (meteors, rainbow, mock sun, etc.); II, Air (Thunder and Lightning); III, Water in various forms; IV, The rise of the Nile and (after a sudden break) snow, hail, and rain; V, Wind and atmospheric movement; VI, Earthquakes; VII, Comets.

The historical importance of the work is considerable. Here Seneca is in the succession to the Augustan Sextii, who had some reputation for scientific inquiry. Their influence and that of the “pneumatic” physicians, who took a Stoic view of the mechanism of physiology, contributed to keep physical speculation alive in the first century. Science, however, was still too much a literary manipulation of material bequeathed by predecessors to facilitate real advance. This in the main applies to the compiler of the Naturales Quaestiones. Although he undoubtedly developed germs of independence (e.g. in ridiculing the divination with which he could not irrevocably break), he is not possessed by his subject, as the Epicurean poet Lucretius was. For Western Europe, in default of direct access to Aristotle, the work remained during the Middle Ages the prevalent authority on cosmology; but scientific, according to modern standards, it certainly is not. The absence of the exact equipment nowadays available rendered nice experiment impossible, and with the best will in the world the observer was exposed to all the risks attendant on the inaccuracy of sense-perception. To the utmost of his ability, nevertheless, Seneca sought to secure trustworthy data; e.g. with respect to a comet (VII. ii.); he was a searcher after causes, and stated fairly the points of conflicting theories; eclectic by preference, he even rejected the explanations of his own Stoic school when he deemed them incorrect; and he realized that generations of workers might be needed to reach truth in complex subjects (VII. xxv.). On the other hand, he never learned to divorce ethics from physics, and consequently some of the most interesting parts of the Naturales Quaestiones are his unscientific digressions. Thus, lightning suggests other presages and leads to discussions on fate and religion in Book II. Closing the same book, he recognizes that some would rather be delivered from the fear of lightning than know its origin, and, conceding that a moral should attach to every study, he proceeds to reason against the dread of death. Again, the chafing of the sea, he believes, indicates that Nature will ultimately inundate the world to make a new world. Lucilius is admonished at the beginning of Book IV that he must not be arrogant, although governor of Sicily; for the island is “a province, not an empire”; and the topic of snow occasions one of his tirades against the despicable luxury of effeminate Romans who would bathe in it or use ice to cool their thirst. In such passages the physicist has reverted to the moral philosopher.

Much labour has been spent in arguing that the 124 Epistles to Lucilius were not real letters. In the last resort, the question is hardly a vital one; for supposing the form were proved to be fictitious, Seneca must at least have meant the collection to be taken for a budget of correspondence despatched by him to his friend, because he introduces references to letters received.[665] Several scholars[666] have followed Lipsius in his denial of the reality of the correspondence; but it is more satisfactory to accept the epistles as representing a real correspondence subjected to the author’s editorial suppression of the regular opening or closing phrases, of very intimate passages, and of certain personal names. They were written in A.D. 63 and 64, and sent, as written, to Lucilius. At different points in the collection a subject is often reopened, and there are inconsistencies in thought, so that no logical order is to be looked for, although it is possible to trace certain chronological groups[667] according to Seneca’s change of reading or residence. Thus, the model of Epicurus’s letters to Idomeneus especially pervades the first twenty-nine letters, most of which close with an Epicurean maxim sent to Lucilius under some such jocular labels as “a little gift” (munusculum), “a windfall” (lucellum) or “toll” (portorium). Similarly, we note the effect of his concurrent study of Posidonius in many letters after No. 78. About forty letters (Nos. 49-87) seem to have been composed in Campania, and the subsequent letters in Rome or the neighbourhood. Some are brief notes: others treatises many pages long. Seneca remarks on the difference between Cicero’s epistolary notes[668] about current politics and his own letters discussing moral and intellectual problems. Promising Lucilius a literary immortality[669] through the publication of the correspondence, he keeps his eye fixed on posterity as firmly as ever the younger Pliny or Madame de Sévigné did.

The variety of interest is great, when it is remembered that the prevailing object is the consideration of philosophical points, and that, therefore, many personal details were intentionally excluded. Nothing stands out more, throughout a perusal, than Seneca’s faith in the eternal and inestimable value of philosophy, for which everything should be sacrificed. Philosophy is the guide of life (xvi.) and its joy (xxiii.): more vital than any physical exercise, it promotes the health of the mind (xv.), guarantees a pleasant old age (xii.), and teaches how to face death (a recurrent topic): it offers the glory of literary immortality (xxi.), and deserves to be made a man’s life-work (lxxii.). Hunger and poverty must be endured cheerfully in the quest after wisdom (xvii.), and social pleasures rigidly renounced to win the needful seclusion (recede in te ipse quantum potes, vii. 8). Such seclusion involves hard mental toil, not for oneself but for posterity (viii.), to increase the store of human wisdom. Philosophy must be studied earnestly in Stoic writings as a whole, not in merely convenient anthologies (flosculi, xxxiii.); for Stoics decline to practise window-dressing (ocliferia: “We don’t trick a purchaser, so that, when he has entered the shop, he’ll find nothing beyond what was hung up in front,” xxxiii. 3). The time-honoured traditions of philosophy stamp it as a gradual achievement of civilization (xc.). It is no self-regarding morality, but has duties to discharge—the reclaiming of backsliders (xxv.) and help for the wretched (xlviii.). Genuine philosophy is in touch with human kind (v.), despite the risk of debasement from mixing with the mob (vii.): truly democratic, it is no respecter of pedigrees (stemma non inspicit, xliv. 1), and it is an occupation of the heart, not a pose marked by outward peculiarities (v.).

His counsels are couched in terms of winning modesty. He is not perfect, he confesses (xxvii.); if he ventures to prescribe remedies, he is in the same infirmary (ualitudinario, xxvii. 1) talking with other moral invalids about common ailments of the soul and their cure. This note of sympathy with frailty in utter forgetfulness of dogmatic Stoicism is one of the most likeable traits in Seneca: it increases his hold over us and his power of doing us good. So he preached abstinence (xviii.) more effectively than many a temperance bigot; recommended the right behaviour for travel (i.e. learn to be at home everywhere as a citizen of the world, xxviii. 4); and pleaded the duty of kindness to slaves (“slaves?—nay, our humble friends: slaves?—nay, our fellow-slaves, for the real slavery is that of the mind, and no slavery is baser than self-imposed slavery in high rank,” xlvii. 1). He was too sensible to be misled by Stoic paradoxes about the self-sufficing sage who had no need of a friend (ix. and cix.): there had to be a uia media between contamination amidst the madding crowd (vii.) and deterioration in solitude: alone with oneself, he reminds us, one might be in bad company (x.). Thus he writes:

When friendship is made, one must trust; before it is made, one must judge. There is a topsy-turvy confusion in your folk who, in disobedience to the rule of Theophrastus, judge one after making a friend of him instead of making him their friend after judging him. Ponder long whether a given person is to be admitted to your friendship: when you have decided that he is to be so, welcome him with all your heart. Converse with him as boldly as with yourself (iii. 2).

The human appeal of the letters is intensified by the light thrown on contemporary life. They place before us the loathsome butchery at gladiatorial shows (vii.), the seductions of a seaside resort (li.), the arrival of mailboats from Alexandria (lxxvii.), the treatment of runaway slaves (cvii.), the pleasure of travelling light in contrast to the overpowering magnificence of some travellers (lxxxvii.). No less enlivening are personal details which bring the author nearer to us—even his asthma (liv.) and other ailments (lxxviii.), depressing attacks of fever, and his decision to be careful out of consideration for his wife’s solicitous feelings (civ.), sea-sickness on a trip in the Bay of Naples (liii.), an outing in a litter (lv.), trying experiences during a day of mud and dust in a tunnel near Naples (lvii.), lodgings over a noisy public bath (lvi.), feelings on the death of a friend (lxxvii. and lxiii., 1 and 4, “at a friend’s loss the eyes should be neither dry nor streaming ... let us see to it that the recollection of our lost ones is a pleasant one”), attendance at philosophy lectures when old (lxxvi.), thoughts suggested by a wrestling-school or Scipio’s villa (lxxxvi.). Here the work on Italian fields is put before us (“It’s late June ... this very day I noticed peasants harvesting beans and sowing millet,” lxxxvi. 16); and another letter gives Seneca’s own experiences in vine-grafting (cxii.). Elsewhere we find reminiscences of his teachers with entertaining anecdotes (cviii.), or a hint to Lucilius that he must climb Aetna (lxxix.). His attitude to the government of the day appears in exhortations to practise circumspection and avoid offence (xiv.). It is noteworthy that he says nothing to indicate whether he looked back with satisfaction upon his public life. No doubt, his own tastes preferred the serene detachment of an onlooker portrayed in the following passage:

You dun me for more frequent letters: let’s compare accounts—you’ll not be solvent! The bargain, of course, was that you were to start—you were to write, I was to write back. But I’m not going to make difficulties: I know you’re safe for credit, and so I’ll pay in advance, and not do as that master of style, Cicero, tells Atticus to do—write anything that rises to his lips, even if he has got no news. I can never be at a loss for matter, though I skip all the details that fill Cicero’s letters—what candidate is in difficulties; who is fighting with other people’s backing, who with his own; who is standing for the consulship in reliance on Caesar or on Pompey or on a money-chest; what a skin-flint Caecilius is, out of whom his own relations can’t shift a coin under twelve per cent. No, it’s better to handle one’s own troubles than other folk’s, better to examine oneself to see in how many affairs one is a candidate, and yet decline to vote. This, my dear Lucilius, is the noble line—the line that means tranquillity and freedom—to compete for nothing, and entirely to give the elections of fortune the go-by. How great do you take the pleasure to be when the assembly of the tribes has been summoned, when the candidates are on tenterhooks within their respective quarters, when one is offering money, another acting through an agent, another smearing with kisses the hands of folk to whom he’ll refuse his handshake after election, when all are waiting in dumb amazement for the crier’s voice—how great the pleasure to stand at one’s ease, a spectator of that Vanity Fair without either buying or selling anything?[670]

The discussions frequently bear, like St. Paul’s epistles, the mark of the Stoic diatribe. Objections are supposed to be raised (inquis) by Lucilius or by an imaginary opponent to be scrutinized and refuted. And there is something Bionean in sharp sarcasms recalling those of the Apocolocyntosis. The philosopher makes great game of the futile queries raised by pedantic teachers (lxxxviii. 7-8 and 37); of brainless pleasure-seekers in Rome, the human “antipodes” who turn night into day (cxxii.); of an outrageously vulgar parvenu freedman who purchased highly educated slaves to enable him to parade learning by proxy (xxvii.); of a philosophical lecturer’s rapid delivery, which was too like the glibness of a cheap-jack (xl. 3, istam uim dicendi rapidam atque abundantem aptiorem esse circulanti quam agenti rem magnam ac seriam docenti); or of luxurious baths hot enough to parboil a condemned criminal (lxxxvi. 10).

The remarks on style in various letters are instructive, as coming from one whose own style has provoked severe criticism in ancient and modern times. Letter 84 discusses the assimilation of reading, and states a theory of style in the making: bee-like we should gather widely, but the combined products must finally be made our own. In Letter 100, writing for the soul is contrasted with writing for the ear, and Seneca distinguishes the prose of Fabianus with the artificially inverted prose of the day. Letter 114 examines decadence in style, which is explicable on the hypothesis that it is a mirror of morals. Seneca’s citations here illustrate the loose and undisciplined compositions which, he argues, reflected the character of Maecenas. With the spread of luxury the affected manner in literature keeps pace, and eccentricity of expression captures the cultivated public as well as the common herd. There is no absolute standard: fashion sways style. While some ape the diction of earlier generations, others cannot abide the old-fashioned; and Seneca points the distinctions between the long rhythmic sentences of Cicero and the terse abruptness of Sallust. In the next letter, 115, he warns Lucilius not to be over-anxious to attain to a fine style: matter is more than manner—the question should be “what?” not “how?” Then, anticipating the famous Le style est de l’homme même, he declares that style is the yield of a man’s mind (oratio cultus animi est).

This raises the question of Seneca’s own prose. The stress laid on the “what,” rather than the “how,” goes some way, though not all the way, towards explaining why he wrote, as many would have it, so badly. Quintilian, the champion of a phase of restored Ciceronianism in the next generation, may be taken to speak for the hostile critics. In a well-known passage[671] he examines Seneca’s merits and demerits. In Quintilian’s eyes Seneca’s style was spoilt by all sorts of blemishes, and he felt it his duty to point his students to stricter standards of taste. Tacitus afterwards recorded Seneca’s power of appealing to his contemporaries.[672] This very attractiveness Quintilian recognized, but feared: “he charmed because of his faults only” (placebat propter sola uitia). Conceding Seneca’s ready and rich intellect, his learning and versatility, brilliant sententiae and moral value, he at the same time indicates his weaknesses—liability to be misled by those who “devilled” for him in scientific inquiries (aliquando ab his quibus inquirenda quaedam mandabat deceptus est); want of strict accuracy in philosophy; and a style all the more pernicious because full of fascinating faults (eo perniciosissima, quod abundant dulcibus uitiis). Yet Quintilian considers that, in spite of wilful mannerisms, Seneca is safe reading for those of maturely trained judgement, for he allows there is much in him to approve and to admire. Next century, when an archaising movement had set in, Fronto condemns his style more sweepingly for its “fever-producing plums” (febriculosis prunuleis), while Gellius records some readers’ dislike for his glib vulgarity as well as other alleged defects, and censures Seneca for having, in the now lost twenty-second book of the Epistles, dared to pass unfavourable criticisms on Ennius, Cicero and Virgil.

It is clear that a lover of Cicero’s polished amplitude will not feel drawn to the Senecan sentence which, by comparison, must appear offhand, and, despite frequent use of pointed balance, to a large extent formless. In order that a sententious thought might go home impressively and might be easily recalled and quoted, a premium was set upon its smart and brief formulation. The literary fashion was everything by fits and starts and nothing long; for the copious rounded periods of the older oratory had for the time lost their power of attraction. So eloquence no longer flowed in a full broad stream, but glittered iridescent like intermittent jets shot into sunlight from a cleverly contrived fountain. Seneca himself writes[673] that he would like his Letters to Lucilius to be as natural in tone as if he were chatting with his friend seated or walking at his side; and so colloquial words and phrases do not surprise us. Indeed they fit the easygoing argument, as homeliness fits some sermons. But Seneca adheres to this simple model no more rigidly than Wordsworth to his theory of “a selection of the language really spoken by men.” Seneca is far from avoiding the artificial; and his style, like his character, has complexities and inconsistencies. It is intelligible, then, that critics should distinguish good and bad qualities in his composition, but perhaps it is more profitable to ask whether, with his style, he fulfilled his main object in writing. He had to face the fresh problem of composing readable tracts on ethical questions mainly Stoic: so, as an experimenter and innovator, he was sure to depart from traditional lines. Yet sometimes it looks as if he were censured for not being another Cicero. In literature, however, there are many mansions. The opening for Seneca was to create the Latin philosophical essay; and here he is, on the whole, a success.

To this success his power of awakening interest greatly contributed; for he is not a dull writer. He secures varied effects by neglecting logical method, so that he becomes pleasantly discursive; he diversifies his science with rhetorical descriptions; he illuminates a point with wonderful fertility in examples; and he holds the attention by his lively manner in arguing a question. Homeliness of expression alternates with elevation of thought. It is a personal and unmistakeable style, crowded with those disconnected, jerky, antithetic and epigrammatic sentences which made Macaulay say: “to read him straightforward is like dining on nothing but anchovy sauce.” After all, those same forcible and quotable sentences have the merit of leaving Seneca’s position clear. Now, the virtue of an essay, in the true and original sense, lies largely in this, that, while it may not exhaust a subject, it must, if a good essay, convey a lucid impression. The qualities here noted are parallel to those in the writings of Montaigne and Bacon, and constitute Seneca one of the most admirable essayists in the world.

Everywhere we meet with such terse sayings as these:[674] “A life is not incomplete, if it is honourable”; “it is not an important matter to live—it is important to die honourably, wisely, courageously”; “as a play, so is life—it matters not how long, but how good the acting is”; “success is a restless thing ... it intoxicates in more ways than one” (res est inquieta felicitas ... mouet cerebrum non uno genere); “a humiliating and grotesque sight is an old man at his A B C” (turpis et ridicula res est elementarius senex); “old age is an ailment for which there’s no cure” (senectus insanabilis morbus est). There are paradoxes like “some people have stopped living before they could start” (quidam ante uiuere desierunt quam inciperent); or balanced clauses, “in a multitude of books is distraction—so, as you can’t read all you’ve got, it’s enough to have as much as you can read”; or pieces of workaday wisdom, “what’s the good of meeting one’s trouble halfway? You’ll have the trouble fast enough when it comes” (quid iuuat dolori suo occurrere? satis cito dolebis cum uenerit), or “if you don’t want a man to lose his head in a crisis, you should give him practice beforehand.”[675]

Superabundant terseness of this sort leaves the reader dazzled and fatigued. Seneca’s is a prose which produces an effect analogous to that of his nephew Lucan’s hectic verse.

His language,[676] as we might expect, is an amalgam of the literary and the vulgar. On the one hand, there is the contribution of rhetoric and learning—poetic words, archaisms, philosophical terms, Hellenisms; on the other hand, the contribution of spoken Latin. A good deal of his vocabulary he shares, not with the more literary authors, but with Varro, Columella and the elder Pliny. From trade come such words as botularius (“sausage-maker”) and libitinarius (“undertaker”); and from agriculture, such as folliculus (“pod”) and retorridus (“parched up”). There are colloquial words like pilicrepus (“ball-player,” found in inscriptions), scordalus (“brawler,” in elder Seneca and Petronius), and diminutives like centunculus (“a little patch”). There are also rare words, not known before Seneca, like collatrare (“yelp at”) and perpessicius (“much enduring”). To other words he gives a new meaning.

Traces of Seneca’s influence are found in Juvenal and Tacitus; and early Christian writers[677] like Tertullian, Lactantius and Jerome were attracted by the spirit and words of one who was for long believed to have corresponded with St. Paul. His prose style is definitely echoed in Tertullian’s Apologeticum; for its peroration, fiercely triumphant in its eulogy upon martyrdom, contains antitheses, exclamations, historical instances and short crisp utterances which ring as if they might have come from a converted Seneca.

If only as the exponent of Latin Stoicism, Seneca deserves lasting fame. The spirit of the later Stoicism can be gathered from his Latin essays and epistles, and in Greek from the Discourses of Epictetus recorded by Arrian and from the Meditations composed by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. In the eyes of all three, the Stoic mode of thought guarantees healing for the wounds of life. But internal peace can be attained only by hard-won victories over self and over circumstance, by persevering progress towards virtue—a progress which, Seneca wisely insists, is in itself virtue—by trust in Providence, by acceptance of the Divine Will, by harmonizing oneself with Nature. The precept of Epictetus, “endure and abjure” (ἀνέχου καὶ ἀπέχου), expresses much of this ascetic faith. The tranquillity which the stricter Stoics of Greece would confine to the perfect sage is, in the more sensible Roman spirit, claimed by Seneca for him also who is advancing and has made some headway. It is a hard fight to advance, he says, but “you are sworn to make yourself a good man”[678] and the very striving is virtue.[679] This is typical of the Roman rejection of the more pedantic early Stoicism. In Seneca the system has become an enlightened and broadened one, too practical to mistake paradoxes for genuine intellectual or moral sustenance. So too Seneca’s breadth of sympathy indicates the widening of the moral ideal; for cosmopolitanism has transcended the old opposition between Greek and barbarian. The claims of others are infinitely heightened, when in each fellow-man there is recognized, notwithstanding imperfections, some spark of an all-pervading divine essence. Forbearance, kindliness and true humanity are the fruits of such a creed: so out of a once rigid and unbending system disdainful of feeling, intolerant of human frailty, was evolved the Neo-Stoicism which could not but be moved by the sorrows and follies of the world, and could not look upon a distressed gladiator or a sick slave without seeing a kinsman deserving commiseration. It was a great gain for the world that at Rome the strength of Stoicism had grown less harsh, its exaltation less arrogant, its integrity less priggish, its calm less unfeeling.

At first it is not unnatural that in the restrained and self-confident Stoic philosophy a reader might seem to encounter a remote and even repellent quality as of a system too unreal to be literally practical. Yet in fact this is a mistake. The Roman Stoicism of the first century was no mere theoretic elaboration: it was a faith which offered genuine consolation amidst desperate afflictions. It could confer upon a believer the victory in defiance of the most malignant arrows of fortune. In such a faith some men could steel themselves, for the sake of the state, to help the work of government in trying times, and some could die triumphant over human injustice. History bears the clearest testimony to the inspiring vitality of the creed; and it is from this standpoint that one can best observe the human side of Seneca. Behind his preaching of Stoic doctrine there worked a powerful earnestness which goes far to justify the iteration of counsels throughout the massive corpus of his treatises and letters.

The very seriousness of this philosophy, then, related it to life: it is in part the outcome of actual and often dangerous experience in dark times. It is a seriousness which makes the lighter human touches rarer and more precious. No doubt the sage cannot descend so easily to earth from an Olympian superiority as the ordinary littérateur who may be content to view mankind from the plain rather than from the heights; and one realizes that is was easier for Cicero and Pliny to unbend in their Letters than for Seneca in his. It is, then, all the more to the credit of Seneca’s good sense, as it certainly adds to his interest, that, though the Letters primarily subserve the purpose of permanent ethical instruction, he is by no means wanting in “small talk” and humour. The same breadth of mind that saved him from being a rigid dogmatist taught him to discover material for comment everywhere—vegetarianism, study in rowdy surroundings, slops for an invalid, the invasion of a dining-room by kitchen appliances to keep dainties hot.[680] He can make fun of and, at the same time, defend the Stoic annihilation of emotion: with a touch of mischief he reports the young man’s question to Panaetius, “Should the good Stoic fall in love?”[681] Never interested in logic, he jests at syllogisms more than once:[682] they are not applicable, he insists, to the supreme question of human good and human conduct: “such subtleties make savants rather than saints” (non faciunt bonos sed doctos). A similarly jocular vein at the expense of pedants runs through his letter on virtues viewed as animalia,[683] where he leads the Stoic argument by a reductio ad absurdum to the conclusion that to make a wise speech in the senate is an “animal.” Referring to his sea-sickness, he remarks facetiously that if he had regularly to be put ashore, as he was after one brief trip on the Bay of Naples, then a voyage anywhere would take him twice as long as Ulysses’s wanderings lasted, and with mock seriousness he affects to think that we owe the elaborate Odyssey ultimately to the hero’s mal de mer.[684] So, too, he drops the philosophic mantle to give us vivid pictures like that of his picnic with a friend,[685] or a tissue of exaggerations in satirizing the luxury of the day: “We have reached such a pitch of luxury that we decline to tread on anything but precious stones” (eo deliciarum peruenimus ut nisi gemmas calcare nolimus, lxxxvi. 7).

Such ordinary human notes strengthen Seneca’s power over us when we turn to his grave and elevated thought. He does not work out systematically for us the whole body of the Stoic doctrines; but few can rise after reading in his books without feeling the better for it. A tonic bracing of the spirit comes from the serene forbearance advocated in the De Ira; the uncalculating generosity so estimably pervading the De Beneficiis; the princely, if Stoically guarded, clemency recommended in the De Clementia; the widely sympathetic understanding of human nature evident in the Letters; the virtuous conquest of desire proclaimed as the secret of bliss in The Happy Life; and the complete mastery of the soul indispensable for The Constancy of the Wise Man or for The Tranquillity of the Mind. The closing words of his last letter to Lucilius show the true Stoic independence of worldly standards:

I shall give you in brief a rule whereby to measure yourself, whereby to gauge your development: in that day you will come to your own, when you realize that the successful are of all men most miserable. Good-bye.

MISCELLANEOUS LEARNING

After the study of achievement so manysided as Seneca’s in philosophy, oratory and natural science (apart from his contribution to satire and drama), a brief sketch of contemporary learning is appropriate. In history the Neronian period did not shine. The impressions of Domitius Corbulo in Asia, of C. Suetonius Paulinus in Mauretania, of Ti. Claudius Balbillus in Egypt, and of L. Antistius Vetus in Germany made little mark. Agrippina, the emperor’s mother, composed memoirs which the elder Pliny and Tacitus quote. Works by jurists were not directly literary; but they were so frequently influential on Roman thought and its formulation that it is right to record the names of the younger Nerva, father of the future emperor; Proculus from whom the “Proculians” took their name, and, among their “Sabinian” rivals, C. Cassius Longinus. Much philosophy continued to be written in Greek, as was done by Musonius Rufus and by Cornutus, who also was the author of works on grammar and rhetoric. But Latin was employed for philosophical purposes not only by Seneca but by Papirius Fabianus and Celsus. Stoicism, whether in formal exposition or in the actual lives of its professors, became one of the mighty intellectual and moral forces of the time. The independence of spirit, too, which the system fostered made its followers suspect: some of their tenets might readily be misconstrued as those of a political opposition, while a defiantly courageous manner of dying gave to many victims of an emperor’s cruelty a semi-religious halo of martyrdom. Among such victims were Barea Soranus, and Paetus Thrasea of Patavium, author of a panegyric upon the younger Cato which Plutarch used. Thrasea’s ruin in A.D. 66 involved his son-in-law Helvidius Priscus in banishment; but Helvidius returned when Galba had succeeded Nero, impeached twice unsuccessfully his father-in-law’s accuser, and brought upon himself a second exile under Vespasian.

It was to Nero that Caesius Bassus dedicated his metrical treatise: he may, as mentioned elsewhere, be identical with Persius’s poet-friend. Scholarship was also represented by Q. Asconius Pedianus (A.D. 3-88) and M. Valerius Probus of Berytus. The former proved himself a thorough investigator into the subject-matter and meaning of classical writers in his Liber contra obtrectatores Vergilii and his commentaries upon Cicero’s speeches. We possess, in impaired form, his commentaries on five speeches.[686] One most valuable portion is his introduction to the Pro Milone. On Cicero’s Verrine orations notes of a very different character, as superficial as the genuine Asconius is satisfying and as grammatical as he is historical, have come down along with the other comments, but are usually referred to a “Pseudo-Asconius” of the fifth century. The eminent grammarian Valerius Probus[687] belongs to the Neronian period, though he outlived it by many years.[688] His provincial education had brought him under the influence of older Latin books, and as a teacher in Rome he retained that interest in the style of the past which guaranteed linguistic equipment for his editions of Latin authors. He left a miscellany of notes upon archaic Latin;[689] and Gellius, who often cites him, shows that he delivered lectures to his pupils on the subject. He elucidated, with critical notes, Terence, Lucretius, Virgil, Horace and Persius.

The oratory of the day recalls the names of the Stoic speakers in the Senate, Paetus Thrasea and Helvidius Priscus. Eprius Marcellus made himself notorious as a delator; the rhetorician Julius Africanus we shall find praised by Quintilian[690] and coupled with Domitius Afer; Galerius Trachalus had his talents used by the Emperor Otho in the composition of speeches.[691] Fabricius Veiento, who was accused in A.D. 62 for his satiric codicils directed against senators and priests, was banished by Nero, and had his books burned, but was in Rome again practising delation under Domitian. Among the professors of rhetoric were Clodius Quirinalis from Arelate (Arles); Antonius Liberalis who maintained a feud with Palaemon; and Verginius Flavus, the eminent teacher, who had Persius for a pupil.[692]

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

IV. SENECAN SATIRE AND POETRY: DRAMA OF THE AGE

Apocolocyntosis—A summary—Title and conclusion—Spirit and purpose of the skit—Menippean qualities—Style and metres.

Seneca’s short poems—The nine tragedies—Authenticity—When written—Not intended for the stage—Contrast with Greek spirit—Sources of the tragedies—Deviations in plot from Greek originals—Influence of previous Latin dramatists—Influence of Euripides—Outstanding defects—The unintentionally ludicrous—Effective qualities of style—Thrust-and-parry lines—The epigrammatic—Poetry—Philosophical passages—Stoicism—Roman colour—Metre—Seneca’s influence on Italian and French drama—Seneca and Elizabethan tragedy—Transmission of stock characters and horrors—A quieter stream of influence.

The Octauia play—Date and authorship—Historical content—Misplaced erudition.

Comic drama of the age—Emperor and theatre—Curiatius Maternus and other tragic poets.

SENECAN SATIRE, POETRY AND DRAMA

The Apocolocyntosis,[693] or “pumpkinification” of the Emperor Claudius, being, as a Menippean Satire, to some extent in verse, is a convenient link between Seneca the prose-writer and Seneca the poet. Many light and flippant touches in this skit, coupled with the metrical facility shown when prose is dropped, enable us to believe that he could have also written the verse-epigrams ascribed to him. A summary may convey some notion of its contents and spirit.

“I wish,” he begins, “to record the proceedings in heaven on October 13th in the new year which opens this fortunate era. No concession is to be made to malice or favour. It’s simple truth.” Then the author pokes fun at historians, philosophers and poets. One may inquire if this is to be a true story of Claudius’s translation? But who ever demanded witnesses from a historian? The exact hour of day? Well, you may expect philosophers will say the same thing before clocks will! Was it afternoon? Oh, these poets! not content with raving about a sunrise or a sunset, they must interfere with our noontide:

Now Phoebus’ car had passed its mid career.

That was the very time when Claudius lay dying, and he was an unconscionable time over it. Mercury had to remonstrate with one of the Fates: “Isn’t the poor wretch ever to have a rest? Why, it’s sixty-four years since he started gasping. What grudge have you got against him and the nation?” But Clotho remarked, “I wanted to give him a tiny bit of time longer, till he should confer Roman citizenship on the two or three left without it!...” However, she consents to leave a few foreigners in the world, just as a kernel (in semen):

Round the foul spindle then she twined the thread And snapped the life-span of Prince Dunderhead.

Meanwhile Lachesis has a new golden thread to manipulate—Nero’s; and Apollo is there to chant approval:

Ye Fates, cut not this short: let him outlive The span of mortal life, like me in face, Like me in grace, my peer in voice and song....

“Nothing loth to look kindly on a handsome man, Lachesis went on spinning by the handful, and presented Nero with many extra years, on her own (annos de suo donat). Just then Claudius bubbled forth (ebulliit) the ghost, and consequently ceased to convey even the impression of being alive! He breathed his last as he was listening to a company of comedians, so there’s good reason for dreading them!”

(The scene shortly after changes.)

“Now listen to what took place in heaven. My informant will guarantee my accuracy (fides penes auctorem erit). Jupiter had got word that a person had arrived—a rather tall person and rather grey: he was threatening something or other, it was thought, for he was constantly shaking his head: he dragged the right foot. They’d asked what his country was, but couldn’t make his answer out. He wasn’t a Greek; he wasn’t a Roman—didn’t belong to any known race, in fact.”

So, at Jupiter’s suggestion, Hercules, who had travelled the whole world over, was told off to interview this outlandish stranger. Greatly troubled, Hercules thought a thirteenth labour was upon him! Still, as the new arrival looked like some sort of human being (uisus est quasi homo), he tried him with Greek—a line from Homer. Claudius was delighted to find savants (philologos) in heaven; there would therefore be some room for his own works on history! So he answered in Greek, and, Roman-like, claimed Troy as his place of origin. Unluckily for this remark, the Goddess Malaria, who had attended him from Rome, interrupted with a flat contradiction, “It’s an absolute lie. He was born at Lyons: he’s a genuine Gaul: so, of course, he took Rome—the proper thing for a Gaul to do!” Thereat Claudius blazed out in anger and (like the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland) shouted, “Off with her head!” But you might have fancied the bystanders were his own freedmen for all the notice they took! Thereupon Hercules called him to order: “You just mark my words. Drop playing the silly ass. You’ve come where mice nibble iron. Make a clean breast of it—else I’ll bang the sottise (alogias) out of you.” And to look more awful, Hercules assumed the tragic rôle, and declaimed:

What place of birth you vaunt, be quick to show; Else felled to earth this club shall lay you low. This club has often butchered fiery kings! Why babble these uncertain murmurings?...

Claudius’s reply, as far as it could be understood, was an attempt to mollify Hercules, reminding him of days spent by the emperor on law-cases near his temple.

His success in this attempt must have been described in a passage now lost; for we are suddenly present at the debate in heaven concerning Claudius’s eligibility for deification. Some deity is quizzing Hercules on his proposal:

“Only do tell us what sort of a god you want that creature made. He can’t be an Epicurean god; for such a one ne dérange ni soi-même ni les autres (οὔτε αὐτὸς πρᾶγμα ἔχει τι οὔτε ἄλλοις παρέχει). There’s a bit of the Stoic deity in him, I can see; for he’s got neither heart nor head.... Is this person to make our crooked ways straight? Why, he doesn’t know what to do in his own bedroom, and now he ‘scans the purlieus of the sky’—wants to be a god! He’s not content with having a temple in Britain and with savages for worshippers!”

At this point Jupiter “spies strangers” in the House, and in accordance with the rules Claudius has to retire. Janus, on being asked to express his views, makes a long speech too fast for the shorthand writer to keep up with (quae notarius persequi non potuit). Arguing that the honour of being a god must not be given to the canaille, he proposes a motion of exclusion in general terms. The next speaker, Diespiter, moves that Claudius be made a god in view of his relationship to Augustus and Augusta, and in view of Romulus’s need for a comrade in devouring boiled turnips! Many speeches are made and Hercules canvasses the gods in Claudius’s favour; but Augustus opposes in an oration of scathing irony:

“I call you to witness, Conscript Fathers, that since I was made a god, I have never uttered a word. I always mind my own business. But I can no longer disguise my feelings. Was it for this that I secured peace on land and sea?... Words fall short of my indignation.... This man, Conscript Fathers, who looks as though he couldn’t disturb a fly, used to kill folk as readily as a dog squats down.”

Claudius is then denounced as a murderer of Augustus’s descendants, and is apostrophized with the question why he passed death-sentences in cases that were untried:

“Where is this usual? It’s not done in heaven. Look at Jupiter. He’s been ruler for ever so many years, but Vulcan’s the only person whose leg he has broken. He lost his temper with his wife and hung her up, but he didn’t kill her, did he?... Who’s going to worship Claudius as a god? Who’s to believe in him? Make a god of such as he is, and nobody will believe you are gods yourselves!”

Augustus’s motion for deportation is carried, and Claudius is haled off to the lower regions by Mercury. As they pass down the Via Sacra, they can see Claudius’s funeral in progress—a lovely (formosissimum) funeral and an extravagant one, obviously the obsequies of a god (plane ut scires deum efferri). And now Claudius realizes that he is dead, since there is din enough for him to hear the anapaestic dirge:

Pour out your weepings, your sorrows make known: Deafen the forum with many a groan!... O weep for the dead, for none had the head To settle suits faster, and every point master, Tho’ only one side of the case had been tried, And oft he had heard from neither a word! Who now will be drudge, and thro’ the year judge?

All this was most enjoyable. Claudius would have liked to watch his funeral longer, but he is hurried off below. Now, who should be in the lower world to meet him but his freedman Narcissus, spick and span, fresh from his bath? He had got ahead by a short cut (antecesserat compendiaria), and says he, “What have gods to do with mere mortals?” But Mercury breaks in: “Be sharp and tell them we’re coming.” Narcissus flies off faster than you could say the word. Everything slopes in hell, you must know: it’s easy going down. So Claudius, gouty though he was, arrived at Pluto’s door in a twinkle. Cerberus, “the hundred-headed brute” to use Horace’s phrase (ut ait Horatius, belua centiceps), was on the scene; and it was a little trying to face a shaggy black monster-dog after being used to a small whitish pet-bitch (subalbam canem in deliciis habere adsueuerat). But Narcissus shouted the announcement “Claudius is coming!” and immediately there was a throng of his victims to give him a reception! Then, as they crowd round, consuls, prefects, relatives and freedmen, the absent-minded emperor remarks, “Voici mes amis partout! How did you come here?” to which they answer, “Who but yourself sent us, you assassin of all your friends? To court with him!” So he is brought before Aeacus, and statistics are produced of those he had put to death: and Aeacus, being a person of perfect fairness, judges Claudius on Claudian principles; that is, he hears only the case for the prosecution! The verdict is “Guilty.” What should the sentence be? A new sort of penalty is wanted, and, after discussion, Aeacus decrees that Claudius must rattle dice for ever in a box with no bottom. The convict had already begun this fruitless task, when all of a sudden Caligula appeared on the scene to claim him as a slave. Witnesses prove that they had seen Caligula thrashing him: so clearly he must have been in servitude, and is therefore assigned to Caligula, who gives him as a gift to that most righteous judge, Aeacus: and Aeacus hands him over to his Greek freedman Menander to be a law-clerk in attendance upon cases for evermore.

So the satire ends. Some critics will not allow the author to be funny in his own way, and they express dissatisfaction. They gravely point out that Claudius is not turned into a pumpkin, a metamorphosis which they understood was promised in the title: therefore they urge that perhaps the real conclusion is lost, or perhaps the real pumpkinification belonged to another pamphlet altogether.[694] There is no need to be so literal: Claudius, an imperial applicant for divine honours, is sufficiently metamorphosed when he is degraded from heaven to a trumpery post in hell, and when throughout the satire he is treated as a silly pumpkin-head[695] of a man. The title in the best MS. (Sangallensis) is Diui Claudii incipit Apotheosis (spelt Ἀποθήοσις) Annei Senece per satiram, which does not, at first sight, square with the title Apocolocyntosis recorded by Dio Cassius.[696] Yet, on examination, the MS. title betrays a confirmatory corruption. It is tautological, as it stands, for one does not deify a deified emperor; all, however, is intelligible if it be, as Bücheler guessed, a contamination of an original superscription Diui Claudii Apocolocyntosis with a gloss, Apotheosis per satiram, to explain the parody implicit in the rare word.

The conclusion has been otherwise impeached.[697] Some have thought the Caligula episode illogical after Claudius had been sentenced to perpetual dice-playing: others have thought the end too abrupt to be effective. Logic, however, is not to be demanded from a merry jest, and the fun lies exactly in its inconsequent suddenness. So far is the dénoûment from being pointless that in reality its point is double. Firstly, it represents a ruler who had yielded excessive power at his court to freedmen, as being now adjudged a slave, and transferred, like the veriest chattel, to be a freedman’s underling; secondly, it represents one who had a passion for acting the judge on earth as doomed to remain a mere law-clerk (a cognitionibus) in the infernal regions till the end of time. Several references to Claudius’s freedmen in the body of the satire are in keeping with this conclusion, especially the ironical gibe at their contemptuous disobedience;[698] similarly, there are previous references to his performances in law which make the finale perfectly appropriate.[699]

The question of Seneca’s authorship involves different problems. Is the satire a likely product of his genius? How could he consistently write such an attack after his grovelling adulation of Claudius in the Consolatio ad Polybium,[700] and after composing the funeral laudation for Nero to pronounce at the ceremonial sanctification of Claudius?[701] The two questions of ability and consistency must be kept separate. About Seneca’s versatility and control of brilliant style there can be no doubt, while humorous and satiric qualities are not wanting in his Letters: about his consistency it must be allowed that this never was his strong point. Few philosophers are more vulnerable than the Stoic who amassed wealth and the moralist who drafted exculpatory orations to be delivered by a tyrant. Modern feeling cannot but see indecency in this bitter invective against a deceased sovereign. Seneca laughs mercilessly at the dead emperor’s frailties, mental and physical—his pedantic stupidity, offensive absent-mindedness, capricious temper, unreasoning tyranny, shambling gait, and stammering utterance. The unprepossessing picture is painted with increasing bias until in Augustus’s denunciation of Claudius the author takes full opportunity for venting his spleen. There is no intention of being any fairer than Aristophanes was to Euripides or Socrates. One must expect nothing about the better aspects of Claudius’s policy or scholarship, or about the building schemes of his reign, nor any pity for the deep damnation of his taking off. Cunningly his contemptuous dismissal by the Fates is set in juxtaposition with Apollo’s praise of his young successor. A feeble dotard had gone: with the new princeps a golden era would return. Ignoble we may call it, but it can at any rate be explained. Years before, to suit his own longings for recall from exile, Seneca had resorted to gross flattery of Claudius in addressing Polybius; he had by request composed a formal speech on the dead emperor to suit the immediate state-occasion; but now, shortly after, he was quick enough to see that no reverence was shown to Claudius’s memory. His own oration, spoken by Nero, had been received with undisguised merriment when it mentioned “the foresight and sagacity”[702] of the departed prince; and Nero’s conscience over the poisoning of Claudius troubled the emperor so little that he came to joke[703] about mushrooms as food for the gods—had not Claudius gone by that means to heaven? On the whole, however, it suited the poisoners, Nero and Agrippina, that Seneca should take an opportunity of adopting their official version of the death and say nothing awkward about mushrooms. At the same time, if he depreciated Claudius and magnified Nero, so much the better: the predecessor would be the less missed, and the successor the more commended on the threshold of his reign. So at last Seneca’s chance came for unmasking his true attitude. He detested Claudius:[704] he had an old score to wipe out: he probably felt a sincere contempt for his pedantry: and thus a clever and venomous pasquinade was written by a man of flesh and blood, a Spaniard who could let his feelings—especially those of hatred—go. It rings as if it must have been written very soon after the official deification which it burlesques, i.e. soon after the middle of October, A.D. 54.[705] The latest occurrence to which the author refers is the death of the imperial freedman Narcissus, whose removal followed hard upon that of his master.

The idea of a visit to the other world was familiar in ancient epic and drama, and could be made to serve either a serious or a comic purpose. The gods are treated by Seneca cavalierly; but Lucilius, Lucretius, even Cicero, had accustomed readers to such literary irreverence, and in Seneca no systematic attack on state religion was contemplated. Combined with the spirit and form of Menippean satire, such a framework and such an attitude gave excellent promise of burlesque effect; for the Menippean satire, thanks to Cynic traditions, encouraged the outspoken, the abrupt, the inconsequent, the startling in manner. Inherited from Menippus of Gadara and transmitted through Varro, it could be employed as an irresponsible and defiant medley. Seneca’s satire is less akin to the generally good-natured outlook of Varro[706] than to that Cynicism in Menippus which is the secret of the Gadarene’s attraction for Lucian.[707] But while Seneca shared in the spirit and conventions of the traditional Menippean, his place in this succession must not obscure his originality. The Apocolocyntosis is far too fresh and lively, too direct in its satiric bearing upon an actual personality, to be anything but work of an individual stamp. Obviously it is in many respects a contrast to the contemporary Menippean of Petronius. It had its own descendants, too: long after the classic age, two definite imitations of Seneca’s satire appeared; one, Lipsius’s Satura Menippea towards the end of the sixteenth century; the other Cunaeus’s Sardi Venales in 1612.

Critics have differed about the style of the Apocolocyntosis in comparison with that of Seneca’s philosophical works. But two things have to be remembered: Menippean Satire does not claim the finish of style that suits philosophy; on the other hand, so expert a writer as Seneca had the ability to produce a fresh type of prose, if necessary, and to sprinkle it with homely proverbs, colloquialisms, slang plebeian grammar and a plebeian want of syntax.[708] Adroitness in turning from higher to lower style is nowhere better seen than in his contemporary Petronius.

The versification is that of a skilled hand. The interspersed hexameters are comparable in quality with those of the epigrams and minor poems ascribed to Seneca. Behind the anapaestic dirge on Claudius lies the author’s facility gained in writing choral odes for his tragedies,[709] and even the fourteen iambic senarii exhibit the same fondness for anapaests[710] which marks his dramatic speeches and dialogues.

* * * * *

Seneca as poet must be judged not only by his dramas but by a collection of brief pieces[711] in the Anthologia Latina compiled at Carthage in the sixth century. Of the opening seventy-three poems three are assigned by the MSS. to Seneca; but most, or indeed all, of the seventy-three may be his. Except a few in hendecasyllables, the poems are elegiac. They touch on miscellaneous themes—the mutability of things, a quiet life, the hardships of exile, republican heroes like Cato and Pompey, the true friendship of such as Crispus (presumably Passienus Crispus, the able orator who was consul a second time in A.D. 44), the false friendship of the great, imperial victories, luxury, riches, and the evils of civil warfare. While the reader is prepared for Stoic lines on simplicity of life and the dissolution of the universe, he is perhaps surprised to find erotic poems in the collection, until he realizes that Seneca was no exception to the common practice whereby Romans amused themselves with composing verses inferior in morality to their authors’ actual behaviour.[712] Even in the amorous pieces, however, it is a moralist that professes to speak—he sets limits to immodesty, and admires the fair one who relies on natural rather than artificial charms (naturae simplicitate ualet). There is, at the same time, in other poems much that fits the true Seneca—lines to his native Corduba (xix.), a reference to his two brothers (v. 14), and, elsewhere, to his little nephew, plausibly identified with Lucan:

Our sweetly prattling Marcus will, I pray, Challenge both uncles’ eloquence some day.[713]

He curses Corsica, the island

That terrifies at summer’s earliest glow,[714]

and can be yet crueller as the season advances. Amidst a plentiful lack of blessings, there are only two things to find there, “the place of exile and the exile’s self” (exul et exilium). He asks merely for an undisturbed existence: “Let the praetorship fall to those who wish it,” he says, and it is significant that Seneca had not risen higher than quaestor before his banishment. His fulsome and repeated eulogies on Claudius’s victories are partly redeemed by their romantic association with distant Britain “severed by the dreary sea” (uasto disiuncta Britannia ponto),

Where the chill constellation of the North Outshineth aye the stars that do not set.[715]

The nine plays[716] ascribed to Seneca in the Codex Etruscus and other MSS. of the same family are given in the following order: Hercules (Furens), Troades, Phoenissae, Medea, Phaedra, Oedipus, Agamemnon, Thyestes, Hercules (Oetaeus). Inferior MSS. give the alternative titles of Thebais for Phoenissae and Hippolytus for Phaedra. They add the Octauia, which cannot be by Seneca for reasons to be mentioned later.

The testimony to the manysidedness of Seneca[717] is so strong that there is no need to pay attention to Sidonius Apollinaris’s blunder in separating Seneca the dramatist from Seneca the philosopher. It is true that Quintilian does not give Seneca’s name in his list of dramatists; but he certifies his interest in tragic diction (VIII. iii. 31), and quotes part of a line from the Medea as Seneca’s (IX. ii. 8). Six plays, Medea, Hercules Furens, Troades, Phaedra, Agamemnon and Thyestes, are cited by Latin authors or grammarians. The remaining three, Oedipus, Phoenissae and Hercules Oetaeus are, like the others, regarded in the MSS. as by Seneca. These three have had their authenticity attacked, but scholars generally accept all but portions of the Hercules Oetaeus. This last play extends, as we have it, to nearly 2000 lines, and its very length, along with echoes of previous plays, arouses suspicion: further investigation into such a feature as its double chorus (in which it resembles Seneca’s Agamemnon) or into its change of scene leads to the conclusion that it is a patchwork due, in part, to other hands than Seneca’s. The attribution of the plays as a whole to Seneca is confirmed by internal evidence. The short pointed sententiae both in form and in expression resemble his prose: and there are frequent parallels in thought, especially if, as often occurs, the thought assumes a Stoic cast.[718]

The question when Seneca wrote the tragedies is one which has received various and inconclusive answers. It has been dogmatically asserted[719] that most of them were composed after 54 and none before 49. Recently,[720] fresh emphasis has been laid on Quintilian’s recollection of hearing praefationes in which the propriety of a phrase for tragedy was discussed between Seneca and Pomponius Secundus. The plausible suggestion is made that these praefationes were spoken, not written, introductions to public readings of tragedies. Quintilian mentions the incident as a reminiscence from his youth, and, as he was born about A.D. 35, this implies a date in the early fifties of the first century. The point bears on the two problems whether Seneca’s dramas were meant for the stage and when they were composed. It may be that some of Seneca’s plays, like some by Secundus, were read, if they were not written, in the early fifties, and a desire to foster in his pupil Nero an interest in Greek adaptations might explain why Seneca should give tragic readings about that period; but it does not follow that all the plays are to be so dated. Pomponius Secundus had been in Germany in 50 and 51, and his debate with Seneca may therefore have followed his return. He had, however, produced plays or at least some kind of dramatic compositions before, as we know from the storm raised against him in the theatre in A.D. 47.[721] So too Seneca, who returned from banishment in 49, may have written plays during his years of enforced leisure in Corsica. It is not surprising that this is the period of his life to which prevailing guess-work has ascribed the tragedies. But the problem appears insoluble: there was abundant time for Seneca to have written tragedies even before he was exiled, a man of over forty, and there are elements in the tragedies more nearly akin to a clever student’s rhetoric than to philosophical maturity. Nor would it be easy to disprove a contention that some at least of the plays consisted of early material worked over and touched up at a later date.

That Seneca intended his dramas for the stage is incredible. No doubt there were still in the Neronian period tragic representations, but many of Seneca’s elaborate speeches would have been unsuitable in a theatre, and some scenes would not act as they stand. It was one thing for Seneca merely to imagine Medea slaying her children in public, but another thing to have this shown before actual Roman audiences, accustomed though they were to horrors. The author’s retention of three actors is not so much an attempt to meet theatrical conditions as an adherence to Greek convention. On the other hand, the rhetorical dexterity and descriptive power exhibited in the tragedies suited the taste of literary coteries before whom dramatic compositions could be read with effect.

As an adapter of Greek tragedy, Seneca was attracted most to the blend of realism and romance which characterises Euripides. Out of nine plays his model is definitely Euripides in four, Hercules Furens, Troades, Medea and Phaedra. Besides, in the imperfect and inconsistent remains of the Phoenissae, Euripidean material is drawn from the Greek play of that name, though there are also contributions from Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes and Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus. On Aeschylus was based the Agamemnon, and on Sophocles the Oedipus as well as the drearily long Hercules Oetaeus, whose authenticity has most been called in question. The Thyestes has no equivalent among extant Greek plays. These Latin plays are in no sense versions of the Greek: Seneca did not feel himself bound to adhere to the original plot in detail, but either introduced departures or followed Roman predecessors in their departures.[722] The essential contrast, however, is one of spirit, which no reader can fail to realize, if he turns from Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus and Euripides’s Medea to their Senecan descendants. In the Latin plays one has entered a new world, where genius has been replaced by cleverness, and an eminently classic directness of expression by rhetoric. Despite the recurrence of philosophical sentiments, there is no longer felt, like a pervasive force, the old Aeschylean preoccupation with fundamental themes of life and destiny, an atmosphere of altitude in thought and emotion whence a poet can survey the deepest problems concerning God and man, sin and suffering; there is no longer that combination of serenity and of tense drama which makes the Oedipus Tyrannus one of the greatest of plays; nor is there any longer the wide Euripidean humanity to win full sympathy for the outraged wifehood of Medea.

The most cursory comparison of Seneca’s plays with extant originals will indicate the nature and sometimes the object of his alterations. The Hercules Furens dramatises the hero’s madness which is with terrible irony turned upon his own wife and children after his triumphant return from the underworld in time to rescue them from the tyrant Lycus. For the sentence of death against the absent hero’s sons in Euripides the Roman dramatist has substituted a compulsory, and defiantly refused, offer of marriage from the tyrant to Hercules’s wife Megara; and he has introduced Theseus, not towards the close, as in the Greek play, but much earlier, so as to facilitate a long description of adventures shared by Theseus with Hercules during their raid upon the infernal regions. Another significant contrast is that Seneca treats Hercules’s slaying of wife and children as an exhibited part of the dramatic action, and not as material for narration in accord with Greek usage.

The Troades, on afflictions which befell the captive dames of Troy, combines material from the play of the same name by Euripides with parts of his Hecuba. In fact, Seneca’s play is cited under the title of Hecuba by Probus. The sacrifice of the princess Polyxena, which the ghost of Achilles demands shall be made at his tomb before the Greeks sail away, is based on the Hecuba. To it Seneca adds from the Troades the Greek precautionary execution of Astyanax, the little son of Hector and Andromache. The extent of Seneca’s originality in what is one of his best plays could not be absolutely assessed without more knowledge than we are ever likely to obtain of two lost plays by Sophocles—the Polyxena and the Captive Women (Αἰχμαλωτίδες).

The presence among Accius’s plays of an Astyanax and a Troades raises the question of a possible influence of the older Roman tragic writers upon Seneca. It is certain that in his prose works Seneca occasionally cites them, either from direct knowledge or indirectly through Cicero. Some doubt may be felt whether earlier Roman tragedy retained all the prestige ascribed to it by Ribbeck; for, though it may not have entirely vanished from the stage, the taste of the Neronian age was even more pronounced than that of the Augustan in regarding it as old-fashioned and uncouth. If the fragments of Accius indicate departures from Euripides in which Seneca resembles him, this does not prove positively the influence of the earlier Latin poet: they may have used a common source in Sophocles. At best, however, all this is conjecture, though it has been gravely made material for learned tractates.[723] There remains the obligation to remember that one need not find a source for every departure made by Seneca from extant Greek plays. He is entitled to credit for a measure of originality and a desire to entertain readers or hearers with inventive variations of his own on a familiar plot as well as with ingenious rhetorical points. This is his express theory of literary borrowing; for he advocates, it will be remembered, a bee-like diligence in blending borrowed materials into a new and distinctive flavour, so that even if the original source is manifest, the product shall be something different.[724]

The fragmentary Phoenissae presents puzzling features. The title suggests that Seneca contemplated importing from the Greek a chorus of Phoenician damsels. Its 664 lines fall into two portions. The earlier portion presents, as in Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus, the self-blinded and self-exiled king wandering under the guidance of his daughter Antigone, who has vowed never to desert him. With a rhetorical echo of Roman Stoicism, he claims volubly the right of self-murder, a right which, during three years of misery, he has not exercised and which Antigone is at pains to refute by argument. A sudden break, where a choral ode might have been expected, leads to a brief episode in which Oedipus bitterly prays that his sons, Eteocles and Polynices, at war with each other, may act worthily of such a miserable father. From l. 363 a new episode, partly akin to the situation in Aeschylus’s Seven against Thebes, represents Antigone as now in Thebes, no longer with her father, but with her mother Jocasta, who has not committed suicide as in Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus or in Seneca’s Oedipus, and whose feelings are torn between the two brothers at enmity:

But though I love both sons with equal warmth— Where pulls the stronger cause and poorer luck, There bends a heart that ever aids the weak. Woe makes the sufferer dearer to his kin.[725]

The hopelessness of her attempt to conciliate the pair is seen in Eteocles’s theory of power which is propounded, and in Senecan manner expanded, towards the close of the fragment:

Who fears being hated wills not to be king.[726]

A reference to the literature[727] on the Phoenissae shows how some have held these passages are excerpts from one or more completed dramas; others that they are fragments of one or more dramas never completed; others again that they are only dramatic studies or sketches not designed to be worked up into play-form.

The main differences of plot-construction which distinguish Seneca’s Medea from Euripides’s play are that, for the chance visit of King Aegeus to Corinth when he promises to protect Medea during her imminent exile, Seneca substitutes a scene in which Medea’s wonder-working powers are described; and that, while in the Greek play the children of Jason and Medea are sentenced to exile along with their mother, in the Latin she begs in vain to be allowed to take them with her. Jason’s confession that he could not live without his children suggests to her the most terrible part of her revenge:

Thus doth he love the boys? ’Tis well. He’s caught. The spot for wounding him hath been laid bare.[728]

How far these and other changes either in plot-management or in expression are due to Seneca himself is past finding out. Medea’s story, dramatized half a dozen times in Greek, was a theme that attracted several Latin writers. Long after Ennius and Accius it had been handled by Ovid, both in the Heroides and in a play now lost; later, in Seneca’s time, it occupied the attention of his nephew, Lucan, and of Curiatius Maternus. Seneca’s admiring imitations of Ovid, demonstrable elsewhere in his writing, render it likely that here too he owed him much.

A subject not nearly so congenial to Roman tastes as Medea’s revenge was the guilty passion of Queen Phaedra for her stepson Hippolytus, an almost Puritanic devotee of the chase, for whom life in the open air meant everything and woman nothing. The extant version of this romantic theme by Euripides is his famous Hippolytus of 428 B.C., which has been designated Hippolytus Crowned (Ἱππόλυτος στεφανηφόρος or στεφανίας) to distinguish it from his previous and less successful drama Hippolytus Veiled (Ἱππόλυτος καλυπτόμενος). It is an interesting literary point that Seneca seems to have been attracted to the earlier version;[729] for he restored in the plot of his Phaedra what Euripides apparently cancelled in deference to Athenian censure—the personal avowal of her love by Phaedra to her stepson. In the extant play by Euripides the nurse takes it upon herself to open Hippolytus’s eyes to the Queen’s feelings; and, after his horrified recoil, the shame-stricken Phaedra strangles herself, leaving a note with false charges against the innocent youth. But in Seneca, as she has in person confessed her love, so in person does she malign him to her husband Theseus; and so again, when Hippolytus has met an undeserved death, it is Phaedra in person (not, as in Euripides, the goddess Artemis) who reveals her crime and clears Hippolytus.

In incidents, structure, and spirit, the Oedipus is a woeful falling off from Sophocles’s thrilling development of the steps in the revelation of the king as the unwitting murderer of his father. In Sophocles the seer Teiresias is sent for in time of crisis, and, when forced to speak, declares, though he is not believed, that Oedipus is the criminal sought for: in Seneca much space is laboriously wasted upon the description of gloomy sacrifices and necromancy. Instead of announcing, as in the Greek, the suicide of the queen, Seneca towards the close brings face to face the two chief victims of tragic circumstance, before Jocasta openly kills herself. But the very construction of the play is inferior. Devoting over 300 lines to lyric portions and over 200 to details of sacrifices and necromancy, the Roman writer has left himself only some 500 lines for the disentanglement of a complicated dramatic story.

Equally disappointing, when contrasted with its renowned Greek original by Aeschylus, is the Agamemnon. The disproportion of 1012 Latin lines to 1673 Greek could be compensated for by nothing short of vastly superior literary power; and of that there is no sign. The prevailing absence of genuine thought and feeling in choric songs and invocations based on a frigid mythology is in strong contrast to the profound reflections in the choruses of Aeschylus. It may be that, as Leo thinks,[730] this was Seneca’s first essay in drama, and the Oedipus his second. In any case, the deviations from Aeschylus are noticeable. Instead of the watchman, who in the Greek announces the beacon-sent tidings of Troy’s capture, there is substituted a much more typically Senecan figure—the ghost of Thyestes, filled with the spirit of revenge against his hated brother Atreus, father of Agamemnon, and therefore urging Aegisthus, the queen’s paramour, to perform his destined part in the hour of Agamemnon’s triumphant return from war. Clytemnestra, in the episode which follows, seems disposed to listen to the advice of her nurse—another typically Senecan figure—and abandon the design of murdering her husband. Less strong-willed than the Aeschylean Clytemnestra, she is confirmed in her purpose by Aegisthus. A further Senecan trait is the detailed description by the herald of the appalling storm which overtook the Greeks on their homeward voyage. Appearing late in the play (l. 782)—considerably after the band of captive Trojan women led by Cassandra—Agamemnon makes his exit less than 30 lines further on. One misses the famous and symbolic scene of the purple carpet in Aeschylus: it is replaced by brief and unheeded warnings of Agamemnon’s impending death from Cassandra. One misses too the single line of final anguish from the victim within. The Latin play represents Cassandra, not as murdered along with her captor, but as relating outside the palace the crime that is being perpetrated. An exciting moment occurs when Electra hurries from the palace and succeeds in sending her young brother Orestes, the future avenger, away into safety under the care of King Strophius, who has opportunely arrived in his chariot on his way home from an Olympic victory. Aeschylus represents the boy as already staying at the court of Strophius. His sister Electra, who at the close of Seneca’s play is sent to imprisonment while Cassandra is sent to her death, makes no appearance in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus. Some of these variations are foreshadowed in the fragments of Livius Andronicus’s Aegisthus, and Accius’s Clutemestra[731]—a coincidence which suggests either Seneca’s knowledge of the older Latin plays, or his use, in common with Andronicus, of a Greek play by a dramatist junior to Aeschylus.

There is no surviving Greek original with which to compare Seneca’s Thyestes, a gruesome play on the fiendish revenge wrought by Atreus upon his ambitious and adulterous brother Thyestes. But some parts at least of this dark story touching the accursed house of Pelops, son of Tantalus, had been dramatized by Sophocles and Euripides in plays entitled Thyestes. It was a common theme for Roman writers. Three at least had handled it before Seneca: Ennius in his Thyestes; Accius in his Atreus, containing the cynical words oderint dum metuant; and, more famous still, Horace’s contemporary Varius in his Thyestes, which was praised by Quintilian as worthy to be set beside any of the Greek tragedies.[732] Whether the earlier Latin plays influenced Seneca or not, it is barely conceivable that he should have missed reading Varius. But even after Seneca the subject continued to attract. Under Vespasian, Curiatius Maternus composed a Thyestes as he did a Medea, and in the Dialogus de Oratoribus is rallied by Aper for wasting his time on such material. Presumably the Ligurinus addressed in Martial III. 45, and certainly the Bassus twitted by him in V. 53, had handled the theme of Thyestes.

Occasional brilliance in expression and occasional loftiness in thought fail to outweigh those bombastic utterances and those innovations in incident or character-drawing which rob the Hercules Oetaeus of the delicacy exhibited by Sophocles in the Trachiniae. As we have it, patched by Seneca himself or another,[733] it runs to a length of almost 2000 lines—over 700 more than there are in Sophocles’s play. In particular, the character of Deianira has suffered under Roman hands. From a heroine who was in the beginning tenderly attracted with Hellenic sweetness towards the captive Iole, and who was only by degrees tempted into jealousy, she is transformed by Seneca into one who hates at first sight—“like to one maddened and with lowering gaze,” in her uncontrollable anger “a tigress” or “a Maenad,”[734] full of malevolence towards rival and husband. It is impossible to give to Seneca’s Deianira the sympathy felt for the broken-hearted wife in Sophocles when she realizes too late that the promised love-charm must mean death to Hercules. Other additions are the introduction of the hero’s mother, Alcmena, to bewail his sufferings, and the incorporation into the play of his deification at the burning pyre on the summit of Oeta. There are, besides, signs that Seneca drew from Ovid’s Heroides and Metamorphoses.[735]

Even the brief glances here directed at Seneca’s deviations from well-known Greek originals serve to suggest many of his characteristics. His affinity with Euripides already indicated is significant. In truth, Seneca may be said to have, in great measure, although with inferior dramatic genius, pursued the path along which Euripides led. There was much to link together those two spirits, separated though they were by four centuries. There was above all a common interest in speculative philosophy and in live humanity. Already in Euripides there is the same craving after variety and effect, betrayed in situations intended to be telling, in pathetic or even harrowing detail, in picturesque descriptions, in smart argument, in sententious reflections. Here, if in any field, Seneca’s rhetorical training equipped him. Even when he breaks away from Euripides, he is but following his example in the quest of variety. The more he changes, the more he imitates. It would, therefore, be difficult to overrate the Euripidean influence upon him, and this should be remembered in any estimate of Senecan influence upon the literature of the Renaissance. On the other hand, while historically carrying on a late development in Greek drama, Seneca is the child of his own age, imbued with Latin rhetoric, and capable of using it alike with imposing and with futile effect. It cannot be contested that in his free treatment of borrowed material he leaves his individual impress for good or bad upon his plays. There is a Senecan ring, for which he must himself accept credit or discredit, in his curtailment or expansion of plots, his elaboration of descriptions, his choice of impressive dramatic moments, and in that aim at heightened colour which is betrayed by his fondness for the weird, for ghosts, for incantations, and by his introduction of death as an integral part of the action.

His faults lie on the surface. Mythological conventionality in plots which were already, despite variations, fully exhausted in Greece; feebleness of moral significance; monotony of character; lack of nature’s infinite variety and lack of fidelity to much of the human nature selected for portrayal—such defects hinder the plays from powerfully enchaining the interest. The positive influence of rhetoric too is responsible for many far-fetched dialogues, high-flown declamations, and pedantic recitals. Seneca’s Medea may be regarded as an epitome of his method. Barbaric though she is by hypothesis, she is yet in Seneca too little a woman and too much a sorceress: we miss the more natural evolution of character given in Euripides: from the outset her fury is rhetoric, and, while we loathe the craven ingratitude of Jason, her wrongs fail to move us fully, because her transports of insane hatred are demonstrably manufactured. Medea can pause to weigh her anger mythologically:

What Scylla, what Charybdis swallowing Italian or Sicilian tides, or what Mount Aetna o’er a gasping Titan poised, Shall boil with threats like mine?[736]

Mythology is one of Seneca’s besetting perils. Jason is extravagantly praised as handsomer than Bacchus or Apollo;[737] and the choric song praying that he may never be a victim of misfortune like his Argonautic comrades is too learnedly allusive,[738] though not so irrelevant as the chorus upon the labours of Hercules which follows the tardy and brief appearance of Agamemnon in the play bearing his name. One mythological group of which Seneca never can have enough is that of the familiar sufferers of punishment in Hades—Ixion, Sisyphus, Tantalus and Tityos: mentioned in the Medea without Tityos, they recur in at least four other plays, and are taken over for literary ornament by the author of the Octauia.[739] This may be a little tiresome, but nothing to the dreary boredom which reigns over long speeches like Medea’s catalogue of the charms needed for her murderous purposes, in which the author is determined that his acquaintance with ancient geography and legend shall be unmistakable. Some such over-elaboration, some such inability to tell a plain and simple tale, explains the account, too ludicrous to be pathetic, of the piecing together of the mutilated remains of Hippolytus as if they were a jigsaw puzzle:

CHORUS. The scattered limbs of that torn frame do thou, His sire, in order set, and straggling parts Put duly back; here for his strong right hand Is place; here set the left, skilled guide of reins; Of his left flank I recognize the marks. How great a part is missing for our tears!

THESEUS. My nervous hands, be firm for task of woe: Be dry, my cheeks, and stay the flowing tear, The while a father portions to his son His limbs and makes a body. What is this— Shapeless and ugly, maimed with many a gash? What piece of thee, I know not: yet ’tis thine. Here put it—not in place, but where there’s room.[740]

It is a dangerous realism which produces unintentional comicalities. What shall we say about the ghost of Thyestes who, because during his life he had been served with the hideous meal of his slaughtered children, could grotesquely claim to be “full of three sons buried in me?”[741] No less peculiar is the chorus on the universal sway of love which reaches the climax of absurdity among enamoured whales and elephants:

Love holds the raving sea’s leviathan, Love holds the Lucan kine.[742]

A similar desire to be at once literal and smart leads to the silliness of Hercules’s words on recovering his wits after he has slain his family: “I have lost all,” he cries, “lost soul, arms, honour, wife, children—and madness too!”[743] A deeper sense of humour would have made Seneca more tragic. Further, more self-criticism in the light of common sense would have spared us much of what fatigues us in him—the pedantry, the senseless bombast,[744] the epigrams which so inevitably come, no matter who is speaking; for a nurse will talk like a manual of rhetoric or like Seneca the moralist.[745] When Phaedra’s nurse sagely reflects on love-madness and on inordinate desire as the companion of high estate, she adorns her remarks about luxury with semi-proverbial wisdom, and proceeds, through a contrasted picture

Why dwelleth hallowed love in lowly homes?

to her epigrammatic conclusion

Excessive power seeks power beyond its power.[746]

As in set speech or soliloquy, so too in dialogue, there is displayed an allied and wonderful cleverness, but it is preternatural. The reader is not captured, as he should be, by the dramatic illusion: he never quite forgets that beings of real flesh and blood are not so ingenious in tragic situations. He is, besides, positively wearied with Ovidian elaboration of the same picture by fresh strokes, or choral platitudes ringing changes on the same idea.[747]

Yet all is not exaggeration in sentiment and style. When the worst has been urged against Seneca, there remain speeches that are spirited, descriptions that are effective, and thoughts that are memorable. The style is in general lucid, and, if epigrammatic, is founded on pure Latin and on harmonious versification. Perhaps no better example of the dramatic speech in Seneca can be given than that from the Troades in which Agamemnon pleads against the proposed sacrifice of the Trojan maiden Polyxena at Achilles’s tomb. The arguments, put with clearness and vigour, are characteristically fortified by sententiae and antitheses:

Why stain with murder foul the noble shade Of that famed chief? First shouldst thou learn What victor ought to do, what vanquished dree. None keeps a sway of violence for long: ’Tis self-restraint endures. The higher Chance Hath raised and magnified the power of man, The more ’tis fitting he should curb his joy And quake at chequered circumstance, afraid Of gods too kind. Conquest hath taught me how A moment ruins greatness. And doth Troy Swell us with over-daring pride? We Greeks Stand on the spot Troy fell from. Once, I own, Self-willed I bore my kingship haughtily. But Fortune’s smile, in others cause belike For pride, hath tamed in me such arrogance. Thou, Priam, mak’st me proud—but frightened too!... I will confess, (thy pardon, Argive land, For these my words!) I wished our Phrygian foes Mastered and crushed; but ruin, that hath laid Their town in dust, I fain had warded off ... Enough, and more, of penalty is ta’en. That now a royal maid should fall, a gift Given to a tomb, and with her blood bedew Dead ashes, yea, that crime so hideous Be called a marriage, I will ne’er allow. On Agamemnon comes the guilt of all. Who stops not crime, tho’ able, orders it.[748]

A few other illustrations chosen from the same play are the more appropriate because nowhere so much as in the Troades does he hold his own in rivalry with his Greek sources. It is characteristic that the agonized mother, Andromache, concealing her boy in her husband’s sepulchre with the hope of eluding the murderous foe, should make the antithetic point:

If fate helps misery, here is escape: If fate deny thee life, here is thy tomb.[749]

There is plausible rhetoric in the alliterative excuse which Helen proffers for luring Polyxena into an expectation of marriage when she is really to be executed:

Death without dread of death is welcome death;[750]

and Helen’s own plea for her guilty self is a clever appeal suggesting that she was more sinned against than sinning:

Was I the cause of wars and all the wreck That came on Troy?... Yet if triumphant Aphrodite gave Helen to be a guerdon to her judge, Then pity that poor prey;[751]

nor does one lightly forget the single utterance by the doomed boy—miserere, mater.[752] One wonders, too, whether Seneca was thinking of his own almost miraculous rescue from Caligula’s death-warrant when he declared:

This cause alone hath fended many a man From doom—belief that he was dead.[753]

Another dramatic feature often dexterously managed consists of the thrust-and-parry strokes in single lines—the Greek stichomythia. A suitable example comes from the passage where the nurse urges Medea to drop her daring resolution:

MEDEA. Fortune doth dread the brave: cowards she quells.

NURSE. Courage that finds its hour must win applause.

M. Never can courage fail to find its hour.

N. For ruined cause no hope reveals a way.

M. With naught to hope, of naught should one despair.

N. Thy Colchians are gone; thy lord is false; Of thy resources naught is left to thee.

M. Yet is MEDEA left: in her thou hast Sea, land, sword, fire and gods with thunder-flame!

N. Beware the king!

M. My father was a king.

N. Fear’st thou not arms?

M. Not though from earth they rise.

N. ’Tis death!

M. I wish it.

N. Flee!

M. Flight I’ve forsworn.[754]

An allied neatness of expression, not uncommonly strengthened by antithesis, marks the sententious epigrams found in isolated verses throughout. The following are a few from three plays:[755]

Crime ever finds its safest path through crime. What reason cannot, oft delay hath cured. Best follow hazard when the mind’s at fault. Nor throne nor bridal bed brooks rivalry. Too late to be on guard in peril’s hour. To wish for healing is the half of health. Success gives certain crimes the stamp of right. Light pangs are eloquent: deep pangs are dumb.

Sometimes the whole of a character’s attitude in a given dramatic situation is summed up in a single line, as in Medea’s words,

My crime-won home I must in crime forsake,

or her appeal to Jason later in the play,

Hold thou her sinless who has sinned for thee![756]

Compared with such a plethora of ingenious epigram, the flights into poetry are rare. Yet Seneca’s eye was not closed to nature. He paints daybreak in its colour and its human significance:

Dawn sprinkles red on thorny brake And Phoebus’ sister doth forsake Till night the sky: Hard toil uprises and doth wake A world of cares and housefolk make Their work to ply.[757]

Some instinct, too, as of a seer, may have inspired his well-known prophecy:

Late in the years an age will dawn When Ocean must all things unseal, And earth lie ope like one great lawn, When Tethys must new worlds reveal And Thule be Earth’s End no more.[758]

In view of the doubt sometimes needlessly cast upon Seneca’s authorship of these dramas, it is of importance to note the strong tincture of philosophic thought which colours many of the speeches and choral odes. The Troades presents us with a chant on the doctrine of utter annihilation:

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).

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

V. PERSIUS: STOIC SATIRE

The Vita by Valerius Probus—Persius’s friends—Cornutus, his Stoic teacher—The six satires—Sources of Persius—Horatian and Bionean influences—The charge of obscurity—Vivid pictures—Other features of his style—His hexameter—Did he assail Nero?—Varying judgements upon him.

PERSIUS

The essential facts of the short life of Aulus[792] Persius Flaccus are preserved in a biography taken from the commentary on the poet by Valerius Probus. Persius[793] was born at Volaterrae in Etruria, and lived nearly twenty-eight years, from December, A.D. 34, to November, 62. Jerome, who felt attracted to his thought, corroborates both dates on the Abrahamic system of chronology. When about six years old, the boy lost his father, a man of equestrian rank; and his mother, who bore the Etruscan name Sisennia, remarried, but lost her second husband Fusius, a municipal knight, a few years later. It is recorded of the youth that he was of gentle and modest character, good-looking, and affectionate to his female relatives, his mother, sister and aunt. Till he was twelve he was brought up in Etruria; his education at Rome began in A.D. 46. First he studied literature under the able but unprincipled Remmius Palaemon, and, even if temperamentally and morally antipathetic to this famous teacher, Persius would at any rate learn the technique of poetry in a school where the authors specially taught included Terence, Horace and Virgil. Later he worked at rhetoric under Verginius Flavus, whose renown for eloquence earned Nero’s hatred and who was banished at the same time as Musonius Rufus, the Stoic. There is little to support Lehmann’s hypothesis[794] that republican tendencies were conveyed by Verginius to Persius; but at least the rhetorical method, practised though it apparently was by Verginius with some modifications, must have influenced Persius through such features as its search for striking phrases, and its introduction of communes loci. All the same, Persius had been schoolboy enough to play truant from rhetorical exercises, which he found unprofitable and distasteful: a touch of oil might produce an appearance of weak eyes and enable him to shirk the recitation lesson and so avoid declaiming some fine dying speech of Cato. Dice or a top might be preferable to the suasoria.[795]

Among his friends was the lyric poet Caesius Bassus, addressed in his sixth satire, who became his posthumous editor. He respected like a father Servilius Nonianus, ex-consul, orator and historian, who one day by the plaudits of his audience attracted the Emperor Claudius to a reading which he was giving near the Palatine Hill.[796] Persius’s relationship to the younger Arria brought him into touch with the Stoic senator Thrasea, whose Life of Cato was a source for Plutarch, and who, though not in active opposition, wore a look of gravity equivalent to a permanent rebuke for Nero.[797] Neither Thrasea nor Nonianus would necessarily have inculcated upon Persius hatred of the imperial system, and yet one may guess that Thrasea’s conservatism had its influence on his sympathies and tastes. He had composed juvenile verses on the death of the elder Arria; and he mixed in Stoic circles. At sixteen he began a close and uninterrupted friendship with the Stoic teacher Cornutus, and through him became acquainted with two Greek philosophers of the day, Claudius Agathurnus (or Agathemerus) and Petronius Aristocrates, and with the young poet Lucan, like himself one of Cornutus’s pupils. Lucan’s admiration for his friend’s talent was enthusiastic: Persius’s writings, he declared, were genuine poetry, and his own mere sportive pieces (illa esse uera poemata, sua ludos). To Seneca, Lucan’s uncle, Persius was not drawn:[798] the courtier’s pliant and adaptable Stoicism evidently did not commend itself to this young devotee. Literature apart, the most vital influence on Persius came from the intimacy and instruction of Cornutus,[799] to whose philosophic power his pupil’s satires are the best surviving testimony. Cornutus was also a tragic poet, grammarian and author of a commentary on Virgil. Already, no doubt, suspect as a professor of Stoicism, he was banished for the suggestion that Nero’s projected epic on Roman history would be too long in 400 books.

Affectionate gratitude towards his master is one of the winning traits in Persius and adds greatly to the human interest of the fifth satire, which is addressed to him. On quitting boyhood, Persius relates he had been welcomed to “the Socratic bosom” of Cornutus, and had all moral twists straightened by a rule applied with subtle skill:

What share, sweet friend Cornutus, of my soul Thou art, ’tis joy to show. Strike it and test With care what part rings true, what is but paint And plaster of the tongue. Here would I ask A hundred voices to proclaim clear-toned Thy firm enlodgement in my bosom’s folds And let my words unseal the secret love Deep-hid unutterable in my heart.... Just when my way grew puzzling, when, unversed In life, my ignorance let nervous thoughts Stray down the branching cross-roads, I consigned Myself to thee, and thou, Cornutus, tookst To thy Socratic breast my tender years.[800]

A few lines later he rejoices in their close union in relaxation and toil:

With thee I wore away long sunny days And with thee culled the early bloom of night For banqueting, I can recall; we twain Were one in work, with one set time for rest, O’er modest board unbending gravity. Doubt not hereof—our lives by law ordained Accord, both guided by a single star.[801]

Persius died of an ailment of the stomach on his estate about eight miles out of Rome along the Appian Way. Possessed of considerable wealth (2,000,000 sesterces), he bequeathed a collection of books, including 700 volumes by the Stoic Chrysippus as well as money and silver plate to Cornutus, who accepted the library but renounced the other legacies in favour of his pupil’s relatives. Persius left only a small amount of literary work, for the Life remarks that he wrote seldom and slowly (scriptitauit et raro et tarde), as might be inferred from his style. His juvenile works included a praetexta, a book of travels[802] (if Hodoeporicon is the true reading in the Vita), and his lines already mentioned on the heroic Arria. All these were, after his death, destroyed by the advice of Cornutus, who made slight corrections on the half-dozen satires before entrusting their publication to Caesius Bassus.

There is much to make Persius an interesting study. He was the first Stoic verse satirist of Rome; he was possessed by a moral earnestness almost preternaturally beyond his years, and died comparatively young; with his one book, as Quintilian remarked,[803] he earned genuine glory; he has throughout the ages attracted some and repelled others; he is undoubtedly difficult to understand, and yet has exerted a great influence on thinkers.

His six satires amount only to 650 hexameters: the shortest (iv.) being 52 lines long, and the longest (v.) 191. None but the first, for which it is said he received stimulus from reading Lucilius, can be strictly called a satire: the other five are “sermons,” rather in the modern than in the Horatian sense. Besides, there have come down fourteen choliambic lines appearing in some MSS. as a prologue, in others as an epilogue. They may well be neither, but the single piece saved from Persius’s other poems—a mock-modest disclaimer of inspiration which need not be taken literally as containing solemn misstatements by the poet about himself.[804]

Satire I, on the right and wrong spirit in current literature, is combined with the important secret (opertum) that everybody is an ass (auriculas asini quis non habet?)—a jocular offgrowth of the Stoic creed that all but the sage adept are fools. This initial attack on the corruption of literature furnished hints for the first satire of Juvenal. Persius in his imagined dialogue with a friend judges decadent literary taste to be a symptom of moral decay, and this stings him to pungent criticisms upon the foppery and ostentation of public recitations by authors who titillate the inward parts of a depraved audience with their licentious poetry. Private dinner-parties end in listening to insipid trash about a Phyllis or a Hypsipyle—but can a host get honest opinions on his poems from his guests? Heroics are attempted by writers who could not describe a simple rural scene, and there is a mania for archaisms and archaic poets, like Accius and Pacuvius.[805] What is the good of artificial oratory and polished antitheses, if there is a plain charge of theft to meet? And surely the manhood of the old Roman past has vanished when poetry apes nerveless stuff like,

Grim horns they filled with Mimallonean booms.[806]

The poet’s friend remonstrates: such unpopular truths may win a chilling reception for him in high society. By way of answer, Persius recalls the outspokenness of Lucilius and Horace’s winning pleasantries at the expense of human foibles.[807] Is it sacrilege for Persius to mutter the truth and confide his little whispered secret, this joke of his own (hoc ridere meum), to the safe-keeping of a hole in the earth—“All the world’s got donkey’s ears?” He asks for readers who have drawn an inspiring breath from the masters of the old Greek comedy—Cratinus and Eupolis and the “Grand Old Man” (praegrandi sene) of comic drama, Aristophanes. This satire, then, is a manifesto of literary independence in contrast to the prevailing mode and of censorial independence after the example of Lucilius. The remaining five contain his Stoic message to his generation.

Satire II, on praying aright, is a brief disquisition addressed to a learned friend, Macrinus, on a similar theme to that in Juvenal’s tenth Satire. If Persius cannot rival Juvenal’s brilliant rhetorical skill and force, he at least surpasses him in the impression which he leaves of moral dignity and almost religious fervour. Condensed and scathing in its denunciation of the immorality and foolishness of petitions brazenly offered to the gods though unfit to be overheard by men, the poem rises to a noble elevation at its close upon the spiritual value of true worship:

O souls bent earthward, with no heavenly spark, What good to take our human thoughts to prayer, Judging God’s pleasure from this sinful flesh?... It sins, flesh sins, yet gains by sin; but say, Ye priests, what profits gold in holy place? As much as maiden’s dolls at Venus’ shrine! Give we the gods what from his lordly plate Messala’s blear-eyed scion could not give— Duty to God and man in soul well blent And stainless inmost thoughts and noble heart In honour steeped—these let me to the shrine Convey and humble meal will win my prayer.[808]

Satire III, on right living and right thinking, expostulates with laziness which childishly fails to face the serious purposes of life. It opens with a concrete picture of lounging: “already bright morning enters the windows, widening the narrow chinks with light,” and yet we go on snoring off last night’s debauch. Is it not a scandal to pass an unworthy existence like a Natta?—Only, his vice is ingrained hopelessly:

He feels no guilt; knows not his loss; deep-drowned He makes no bubble at the surface more.[809]

May the Great Sire inflict on monsters of wickedness no other punishment than a revelation of virtue as she is:

Let them see Virtue—pine for Her they’ve lost.[810]

Then the poet commends the wisdom derivable from true philosophy in spite of the guffaws of the unsympathetic soldier:

Learn, hapless ones; the causes grasp of things; Grasp what we are, what life we’re born to live;[811]

and from the same Stoic system one must learn the way at turning-points in one’s career, the limits of wealth and of desire, the claims of fatherland and kin, and the part God has ordained one to play.

Satire IV, on the right knowledge of oneself, opens with a brief Socratic examination of the claim made by “great Pericles’s ward” (Alcibiades) to guide the state. Of course, wisdom comes before he has a beard! (ante pilos uenit). He ventures to advise the “Quirites” (a Roman touch in what is a Greek situation) on delicate problems of policy, while making mere enjoyment his chief good and having no higher conceptions than those of an old vegetable-woman of the streets (an allusion that recalls the crone in the Satyricon, who was Encolpius’s conductress to a haunt of vice).

How few to sound their own true nature try! Inside the bag of one in front they pry;[812]

and yet the popular estimate of your character is worthless; you must retire within yourself and examine the state of your soul:

Dwell with yourself: learn your scant furnishing.[813]

Satire V, on the right freedom conferred by Stoic principles, has already been cited for its cordial acknowledgement of the poet’s debt to the guidance of Cornutus. The model on which the whole is based is the seventh satire of Horace’s second book. In contrast to the unity of feeling between himself and Cornutus, Persius notes the variety of aims in the world:

Motley is life: thousand the sorts of men.[814]

Men will not learn the one true lesson: they are in perpetual quest after a to-morrow which is never reached. What man needs is freedom—not the merely civic sort granted when a Roman praetor turned a slave into a freedman by formal stroke of the rod, but the true freedom guaranteed by moral reason:

’Twas not a praetor’s task to give to fools Fine sense of duty or grant power to use Our fleeting life: you’d sooner teach the harp To any hulking clown.[815]

Without reason, which enables a man to distinguish good from bad, his every act is sin (one of the hard sayings typical of orthodox Stoicism):

Reason has granted naught to thee: put out A finger: that is wrong. Yet what so slight? But never frankincense will win thy prayer That e’en a short half-ounce of right shall dwell In fools. God sunders right from foolishness.[816]

And so, if you have passions within that master you, or if you feel the rival claims of avarice and luxury, then you are a slave. The two hooks pull opposite ways. If you escape once, you may still drag your chain. The truly free man is he who can inhibit himself from an evil impulse and disentangle himself from weaknesses like ambition or superstition.

Satire VI, on the right use of wealth, is not so decidedly a Stoic homily as its four predecessors. Wintering at Luna on the Ligurian coast by the Tuscan Sea (meum mare), Persius addresses to Caesius Bassus his claim to spend money on reasonable objects, supporting it by an argument with a supposed heir who desires to have the fortune saved intact. The statement by the biographer that some lines were removed from the last book (uersus aliqui dempti sunt ultimo libro) is best understood to imply that this final satire is incomplete.[817]

The subject of the sources of Persius is one of considerable complexity. His material was largely provided by his education, associates, and his own tastes. Stoic by training and conviction, he was more orthodox and more dogmatic than most Romans, and so took over and restated with scant argument some of the extreme paradoxes of the School. His studies under rhetoricians who preferred the classic Augustan models account for the opposition which he displays in his first satire to the revived Alexandrinism of Rome, and for his borrowings from Virgil, and beyond all others from Horace. Along with Horace he adopted for imitation Horace’s outspoken master in satire, Lucilius.[818] His Horatian debts are visible everywhere, in reminiscent word or phrase or idea, all retaining the mark of their origin despite Persius’s inveterate habit of contorted involution, which of set purpose departs from Horace’s clear straightforwardness. Thus, the simple rule of pathos in the Ars Poetica, “If you would have me weep, you must yourself grieve first,” is by Persius elaborated into

He who would bow me down with woeful plaint Must shed true tears, not tears prepared o’ernight.[819]

The reappearance of Horatian names gives an added effect of imitation, e.g. Pedius (i. 85), Nerius (ii. 14), Natta (iii. 31), Craterus (iii. 65), Bestius (vi. 37). Even a partial consideration of Persius’s sources shows that his aim was to express Stoic thought in language largely Horatian—a tour de force bound to fall short of perfect success; for no writer could hope to wed the suppleness of Horace to Stoic rigidity. Jahn emphasized the influence of the mime on Persius in addition to that of Horace; and there is a possibility that the dramatic realism of mime-writers like Sophron acted on the satires.[820] To these must be added the influences of rhetoric and of the Cynico-stoical disputations. Rhetoric accounts for many of the diverse elements in his style, such as literary reminiscence, academic common-place, and argumentative artifice. Stoic preaching, which had for long been abandoned either to professional orators or to popular speakers, was now brought by Persius into literature. He might easily have imbibed the style of the Stoic diatribe (διατριβή), or polemic disputation, from Cornutus; and at Thrasea’s house he could have heard expositions by a Stoic like Musonius or by a Cynic like Demetrius.[821] Cynic inspiration had already operated on Roman literature through Varro’s Menippean satires, and Horace alludes to the bitter wit of Bion.[822] The Bionean diatribe, given to blending learned argument with forceful words from popular speech, was likely to win attention from a writer fired, like Persius, almost to proselytizing ardour; and Greek Cynic literature had itself inherited and in turn bequeathed elements from Socratic dialogue and drama and rhetoric which contributed to the vigorous presentation of a philosophical argument. Just as the argumentative manner of certain of St. Paul’s epistles is affected by the Stoic diatribe, so Persius keeps up a similar tradition when he develops a theme by answering an objector implied or definitely introduced.[823]

Worked on by influences thus complex, enamoured of condensation, of allusiveness, of subtle borrowings, jerky in his management of dialogue so that a change of speaker is sometimes difficult to detect, Persius developed a crabbed manner of expression which makes him the hardest of Latin poets to read. Enjoyment is apt to vanish amidst the toil of disentanglement. Conscious as he was of the mission to proclaim salutary truths, he yet seems to have forgotten the effective force of clearness, and his curiously laboured style is certainly not that of the Cynico-stoic disquisition. The failure to support by connected argument dogmatic tenets, in themselves possibly intelligible enough, and the departure from a logical order of thought in the structure of some satires further contribute to his obscurity. Strictures upon him date from ancient times. Johannes Lydus, whose record of Persius’s imitation of Sophron, though challenged, has some facts in its favour, added that Persius surpassed the obscurity of Lycophron.[824] In the time of Louis XIV Nicolas Chorier in his Aloisia imagined a letter apostrophizing Persius: “You wrapped yourself in blind night.... You did not want to be understood, perchance you too did not understand!... You lurked inside yourself, lest the painstaking sagacity of learning might discover you. You were your own envelope.”[825]

The obscurity often lies in expression. A notoriously difficult line occurs at iv. 49.

si puteal multa cautus uibice flagellas,

which, even supposing it is to be translated “if craftily you scourge the exchange with many a lash,” still leaves the sense cryptic. Excessive compression may prove puzzling, as “While I pluck forth old grandams from your breast,”[826] meaning “grandmotherly notions”; or, on testing the true meaning of applause, “Shake out thoroughly all this ‘bravo!’ (belle hoc excute totum); what does it not hold inside?” Another example turns on Janus’s luck in having two faces so that he cannot be mocked behind his back by imitation of a stork’s bill, or of the ears of an ass, or by shooting out the tongue:

O Janus, whom the stork ne’er pecks behind, Nor hand that nimbly apes white donkey-ears, Nor tongue as long as parched Apulian dog’s,[827]

where strangely enough the essential key-notions of mockery and of putting out the tongue are omitted. Occasionally an idiom may pull the reader up, for example his liking for infinitives in substantival meanings.[828] Thus it is not at first obvious either to readers or commentators that iratus mammae lallare recusas is intended to signify “pettishly refuse your nurse’s lullaby.” Elsewhere the difficulty may lie in the disconnected course of his thought and the suddenness of his transitions; so that one is kept on the alert by what is no light reading for tired heads.

There are, however, compensations. The test is whether under a cloud of difficulties there remains something real and sincere. Immediate delight is not obtainable from Persius: there are no flights of pleasant fancy, no ideal scenes, no passages of sheer beauty; and, if the reader is transported to no ideal world, he may be tempted to doubt—some critics have doubted—whether the world of the young satirist is a real world, whether his exposure of human weakness smacks more of Stoic books than of actual life. Persius did not write for the crowd: he in particular does not yield his secret except to the intimacy and sympathy of a thinking mind. His very obscurity is a fruit of a half-cloistered delicacy which shrank from revealing itself in ordinary modes of expression, and therefore adopted a composite style in which Lucilius and Horace, the mime and the argumentative Stoic diatribe are all ingredients. At the same time there has too often been a disposition to regard him mainly as a youthful zealot, fanatically fervent in his Stoicism, who had not mixed with his fellow-men. Sometimes it is forgotten that while he can be provokingly obscure, he can also be vivid, and, though his range is not wide, can show a power of observing life around him.

Among his sketches memorable for realism are those of the affected reciter;[829] the laziness of the debauchee snoring as the sunshine pours through the shutter-chinks and the shadow touches the fifth line of the sun-dial;[830] the fretful struggle to get to work with book and ink and pen;[831] the truant’s games;[832] the centurion’s idea of philosophers as

lugubrious Solons With head bent down, pinning their eyes to earth;[833]

a national holiday on the occasion of a victory over the Germans;[834] a shipwrecked friend who

Lies on the beach himself, with gods hard by— Huge figures off the vessel’s stern—and ribs Of his maimed ship now in the seagulls’ path;[835]

or the funeral of a Roman master by whose last will and testament his favourite slaves have been emancipated:

Doorwards he stretches heels now stiff and cold; Then cits, made yesterday, in freedom’s cap Shoulder the corpse.[836]

Vigour also characterizes his metaphors. A warning against offending high society by outspokenness is given thus:

Beware, please, lest the doorsteps of the great Turn cool to you (limina frigescant).[837]

A kindred vigour produces violent expressions like “purveying titbits for other people’s ears” (auriculis alienis colligis escas), or the forcible personification of money spent on costly sacrifices in an unrewarded pursuit after wealth:

Till the last coin, now hopeless and befooled At the purse-bottom heaves its sigh in vain.[838]

A passage in the fifth satire[839] is illuminating as to Persius’s own opinion of his style. There Cornutus is imagined to tell the poet that his forte lies not in mouthing high-flown tragedy, nor in foolish cawing (cornicaris) of mysterious nonsense, nor in straining his puffed cheeks with rhetoric till they go bang with a pop,[840] but, as he declares in Latin words which intentionally echo Horace, “Nay, you follow the language of ordinary life, dexterous in the subtlety of your phrase-making” (iunctura callidus acri); or, in other terms, it was for Persius to cultivate plain satire instead of dramatizing any mythological supper of horrors. The words iunctura callidus acri provide a clue both to his merits and to his defects; for his phrase-making, at times strikingly successful, at other times overleaps itself and becomes one factor in his Browningesque obscurity.

The ring of Persius’s hexameters differs from that of Horace’s, which were constructed without regard to the high-sounding epic tradition and designedly lowered in tone to suit the half-conversational character of his sermones. It is natural that Persius, who interpreted his Stoic message as lofty and severe, should not write with so easy a movement, but should adopt a more mechanical structure and more conventional cadence. There is in Persius a smaller number of spondaic words, a different management of caesurae, and a rarer use of monosyllabic endings; but, like Horace, he freely admits elision, and so presents a contrast with one of the features of the hexameters parodied in his first satire, as well as of the contemporary verse of Calpurnius Siculus, of the Einsiedeln eclogues and of the Laus Pisonis.

A hypothesis maintained with different degrees of detail by different commentators would make Persius not merely a mouthpiece of Stoicism but a political satirist who ventured to assail Nero. In the Vita a closing paragraph of unsettled authenticity affirms that in his fulminations against the modern school of literature he included an attack on the emperor.[841] This contained the expression auriculas asini Mida rex habet, which Cornutus altered for safety to auriculas asini quis non habet? to prevent Nero from thinking he was aimed at. Then the scholia gave varying accounts of the source of the hexameters in the first satire at which Persius jests, but one view was that they were Nero’s; and so ancient commentators began to see throughout the satire a series of allusions to the emperor. Casaubon maintained that in Satire IV Alcibiades, the would-be statesman, stands for Nero, and though Jahn does not follow him here, as he does regarding Satire I, Casaubon has had supporters in Pretor and others.[842] Lehmann has gone further. He has claimed to find covert but stinging allusions to Nero in Satire V, the very satire which to most readers must appear remarkable in that, while it handles freedom, it avoids all political aspects of the question. The more the hypothesis grows by accretion of hitherto unrecognized allusions, the weaker it seems. Why should Nero alone be attacked? Why should the author have been so unphilosophical as to single out for constant censure an individual when all the world fell far short of Stoic perfection? Might not Persius well remember that Horace, his model, left politics on one side? And are we to be asked to believe that Cornutus took the trouble to alter the words “King Midas” to avoid giving possible offence to the emperor, and yet left in the text not merely copious hits at his Majesty more or less veiled, but actually lines of Nero’s own composition of which the satirist made fun?

Opinions have varied greatly concerning Persius. His fellow-student Lucan, as already mentioned, praised him whole-heartedly, and his satires on publication won immediate esteem.[843] He was popular with the Fathers of the Church for his strong advocacy of virtue and his anima naturaliter Christiana, and he has attracted enthusiastic commentators since the days of Valerius Probus in his own century. Isaac Casaubon wrote of his own unsparing labours on him: in Persio omnem ingenii conatum effudimus. On the other hand, Joseph Scaliger remarked sarcastically about that same commentary: au Perse de Casaubon la saulce vaut mieux que le poisson. It is common literary knowledge that he left his mark on Rabelais and Montaigne, on Ben Jonson and Boileau, which argues in him something deeper than what Nisard saw—the knack of reproducing servilely in verse ready-made philosophical ideas. Simcox thinks he improves upon every reading, and a French editor[844] declares je quitte Perse avec un sincère regret et comme on quitte un vieil ami; whereas a German scholar is delighted to lay him down: mit Freuden legen wir den Dichter aus der Händen,[845] and another writer discovers in the satires a sea of darkness.[846] It may be a half-cynical suggestion that editors come to love Persius in proportion to the toil which he has cost them, but one may fairly take leave to doubt whether an exponent of doctrines with which he hopes to better his fellowmen is justified in being so far from plain. It is true that a recent editor sought to acquit him of obscurity, arguing that he is difficult but not obscure.[847] Most students will hold that he is both, and that it must be largely a matter of disposition whether a reader will resent or not the trouble involved. Even that very earnestness in preaching morality which has gained him champions may appear to others the priggishness of a bookish young recluse. Still, in justice to Persius, it should be remembered that his lack of knowledge of the world may be easily overstated: his very education in rhetoric would open his eyes to evil; he had travelled; and many of his pictures show that he had observed life.

Persius set himself the task of presenting Stoic homilies in Horatian guise—a task perhaps harder, perhaps involving more incompatible elements even than that which Lucretius undertook when he wedded Epicureanism to the heroic hexameter. But whatever their obstacles, Lucretius attained his goal triumphantly, whereas Persius cannot be said to have won that perfect mastery over form and material which begets the greatest literature. Yet, obscurities notwithstanding, his voice has influenced the world and its thinkers; for it has at least been understood that there breathes through Persius no light-hearted complaisance with the frivolities of life, but a stern urgency always beckoning towards an austere ideal.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us