Seneca recognizes the power of poetry. In his prose works, he discusses how poetry adds punch to moral sententiae, and he peppers his letters and dialogues with lines from Virgil, Ovid, and others. Seneca is there typically concerned with ethical matters and so seldom has much to say about poetics specifically. But, in a fragment preserved by Gellius (12.2.2-13), he faults Ennius as old-fashioned, and elsewhere writes that it is best to be alive and writing now (i.e. the first century CE) because of the many great works of literature one can draw upon: ‘one discovers words already prepared, which, when positioned differently, create a new form.’ The predilection for novelty is not blind to tradition, though poetry is a resource that requires careful handling: poets compose lines worthy of philosophers (Ep. 8.8, Nat. 4a.pr.19), but sometimes their words can be dangerous, arousing our passions (Ep. 115.12), our fears (Dial. 6.19.4), or even propagating misinformation (Dial. 7.26.6).

Beginnings matter. In tragedy, specifically, the first act is the initial tableau in a larger composition, introducing the raw material—themes, characters, and mythological crisis—whose development and consequences will comprise the poetic action. Seneca's are a case in point: although scholars have noted that his first acts can be ‘somewhat separate’ from the main action of the plot and overly general or preliminary in character, this is only true in dramatic terms; a holistic approach to Senecan tragedy regularly reveals the artistry of a first act in retrospect, from the standpoint of a play's conclusion. The scattering of Hippolytus’ companions (Pha. 1-30), for example, foreshadows his eventual dismemberment; and the extent of his patron's Diana's dominion (54-72) is ultimately dwarfed and subsumed by that of Amor. Echoes of the ghost of Thyestes’ prologue in Cassandra's final speech (Ag. 1004-11), similarly, approximate the epic technique of ring-composition, with supernatural voices of authority replacing that of epic's third-person narrator at the bookends of the drama. However dramatically detached a first act might appear, Senecan technique prioritizes the establishment of thematic, intellectual, and lexical foundations for what follows.

It has long been noticed that in his Oedipus, Seneca diverges conspicuously from his primary model, Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus (OT), in a number of aspects. Prominent among these is an expansive, two-part ritual sequence at the play's center, comprising a prodigy-filled yet spectacularly unsuccessful sacrifice and extispicium followed by a more successful, if no less terrifying, necromancy to raise the slain Laius. This article concentrates on the sacrifice and extispicium (Sen. Oed. 288-402). I argue that in this episode Seneca has employed tragic contaminatio (the weaving into one play of significant elements from two or more different source plays) and allusion to produce an exceptionally innovative scene that is a remarkable display of the Roman playwright's ingenuity. For while Sophocles’ OT remains an active intertext, Seneca has also imported elements from Euripides’ Phoenissae. His primary model for the passage, moreover, is actually to be found in a different Sophoclean Theban play, Antigone. Specifically, Seneca has reworked and elaborated upon the climactic reversal scene between Creon and Tiresias in Antigone (998-1114), in which the seer reports on the corruption of the prophetic rites he has just performed and identifies Creon as the cause of the pollution, both for his continued refusal to allow the burial of the fallen Polyneices and for his entombment of the living Antigone.

Over the past two decades, scholars have devoted increasing attention to Roman civil war literature and its poetics, from the vocabulary of nefas, paradox, and hyperbole to the pervasive imagery of the state as a body violated by its citizens. Thebes and especially the civil war between Oedipus’ sons became prominent lenses through which Romans explored their country's strife-ridden past. Seneca's Phoenissae, however, has received comparatively little attention in this regard, often overshadowed by Statius’ epic Thebaid of the next generation. This paper investigates Seneca's contribution to the wider poetics of civil war through his expansion of the theme of incest, which Seneca uses to articulate civil war's most invasive, penetrative, and disintegrative effects. In particular, Seneca capitalizes on both the metaphorical potential of maternal violation and the eroticized imagery of Roman conquest to create disturbing points of contact between two generations of Jocasta's sons: the one who invaded her bed in the past, and the other who will soon invade his mother city. Seneca writes his Phoenissae to be an escalated return to the original sins of Oedipus’ incesta domus as another of Thebes’ native sons prepares to conquer his motherland.

If satire is epic's ‘evil twin’, then tragedy is satire's ugly sister. Both epic and tragedy soar aloft in the stratosphere of the generic hierarchy, viewed humbly and from a distance by satire's pedestrian muse, who at the same time scoffs at their overblown irrelevance. Many of the same criticisms, often framed as back-handed compliments, are cast at both genres by their poor relation, but there are also distinctions. Epic, even if cloistered in an ivory tower, is constructed as sharing the impossible purity of that ivory, the better for its lofty and noble themes to be befouled, debased and perverted in the distorting mirror held up by its evil twin. Tragedy, however, is itself a perversion, ethically and aesthetically, a mishmash of vice and excess which is a natural target for satire, the self-appointed social policeman, but which also bears an uncomfortable resemblance to satire's own nature. Much work has been done in recent years on satire's engagement with and tendentious construction of tragedy, but very little on tragedy's reciprocal engagement with satire. The latter will be the focus of this article, approached from two, closely-related angles.

It is not easy to know where to begin. Standing at the crossroads, one sees innumerable tracks leading in every direction down well-worn paths. Can one really say anything new, or is one condemned to repeat the already said? A possible way forward—but it has already been tried before…—is to double down on repetition. If one repeats enough and with sufficient diversity among the repetitions, then maybe among the interference patterns generated among so many different standing waves centered upon so many different points there will emerge something novel, the echo of a voice never heard before. And this would be the voice of an author, the voice of Seneca, for example.

Did Sophocles or Seneca exercise a greater influence on Renaissance drama? While the twenty-first century public might assume the Greek dramatist, in recent decades literary scholars have come to appreciate that the model of tragedy for the Renaissance was the plays of the Roman Seneca rather than those of the Athenian tragedians. In his important essay on Seneca and Shakespeare written in 1932, T.S. Eliot wrote that Senecan sensibility was ‘the most completely absorbed and transmogrified, because it was already the most diffused’ in Shakespeare's world. Tony Boyle, one of the leading rehabilitators of Seneca in recent years, has rightly said, building on the work of Robert Miola and Gordon Braden in particular, that ‘Seneca encodes Renaissance theatre’ from the time that Albertino Mussato wrote his neo-Latin tragedy Ecerinis in 1315 on into the seventeenth century. The present essay offers a complement and supplement to previous scholarship arguing that Seneca enjoyed a status at least equal to that of the Athenian tragedians for European dramatists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My method will be to examine two plays, one in French and one in English, where the authors have combined dramatic elements taken from Seneca with elements taken from Sophocles. My examples are Robert Garnier's play, staged and published in 1580, entitled Antigone ou La Piété (Antigone or Piety), and the highly popular play by John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee entitled Oedipus, A Tragedy, staged in 1678 and published the following year.

In the first throes of madness Seneca's Hercules declares, ‘I shall be borne aloft to the world's high spaces’ (in alta mundi spatia sublimis ferar, HF 958). To Amphitryon these are the unspeakable thoughts of a mind that is hardly sane, but nevertheless great (pectoris sani parum, / magni tamen, 974f.). For Gilbert Lawall, writing the first essay in the 1983 collection of Ramus essays on Senecan tragedy, the fundamental question of the play is the moral quality of its hero, who in his madness becomes a ‘caricature of his real self’. John Fitch, writing just a few years later, argued for a continuity of characterization between the hero of the labours and the murderer of his family. My own essay is concerned less with the morality of Hercules’ character and actions than with the poetics of sublime aspiration and the imagery of grand literary endeavour. Seneca's conception of sublime poetry, as embodied in the figure of tragic Hercules, I discuss through his reception of Lucretius, Virgil, and Horace. The ambivalence Fitch and others have observed in this tragedy of Herculean overreaching I interpret first in the light of a plurality of literary models of transgressive poetics. Juno and the chorus both see violence and danger in the figure of Hercules, but yet do not see the same figure. This difference is located to some degree in the different genres and particular texts which define their perspectives. The Hercules who makes war on the heavens and commits the drama's primary action is very much the creation of Juno and the tragic energies of famous programmatic passages of Aeneid 1 and 7. Lyric offers an alternative conception of sky-towering fame. In the latter part of the article I consider the Lucretian paradigm of heroic rebellion against tradition and Hercules’ failure to break the pattern of Junonian madness. Finally I reflect on the tensions of the Georgics—ars and labor holding ingenium and furor in fragile balance—and see them overwhelmed in the civil war which Hercules Furens, a more powerful Orpheus, wages with himself.

Conclusions matter in Senecan prose and poetry. At the conclusion of his epistles, Seneca often includes an unexpected quote or alters his subject-matter in a surprising manner—a technique that Fowler has helpfully classified as an example of ‘Romantic Irony’ in the vein of Heine or selected Horatian odes. His dialogues display a similar penchant for such endings, e.g. the post-mortem speech of Cremutius Cordus to his daughter, Marcia, in the finale of the Consolatio ad Marciam (Dial. 6.26.2-7). Seneca's tragedies likewise conclude in a beguiling fashion, ‘Part of the dramatic force of the Senecan ending is its avoidance of any note of easy resolution; it serves rather to sharpen and/or problematize the central issues of the particular play.’ As a way to further encourage the reader to question or recognize major themes of the play, Seneca's conclusions feature an intertext that casts these themes in a different light or elicits metapoetic commentary. These intertexts stress ideas and language important to the particular play, especially those found in the prologue, in order to create a type of ring-composition to the tragedy as a whole. This paper investigates these intertexts and indicates not only how they operate on an inter/intratextual level, but also why Seneca would think of the texts that he does at the conclusion of his tragedies. Seneca looks back to some of his major literary influences at the conclusions of his plays (Ovid, Horace, and Virgil unsurprisingly; Seneca the Elder perhaps more surprisingly), which reveals that these moments are diagnostic of his intertextual method in general. The larger situational or generic context of the sources shade the words uttered by Senecan protagonists, but Seneca stresses the tragic impact of such intertextual echoes again and again; Seneca tragicus surely is a pessimistic reader of the Augustan tradition. The reiteration of similar language and imagery throughout the play ‘primes’ the reader to recognize the intertext at the play's conclusion—thus intratextual repetitions signpost the intertextual reference. Seneca wants these references to be noticed; he promotes a retrospective reading technique in which these intertexts recast language and themes found earlier in the play, now vis-à-vis the literary and rhetorical source material. In creating such dense verbal connections, he encourages further contemplation of the major motifs of the tragedies and inherently endorses the position of his plays as ‘open’ texts that beg for further supplementation by further reading and rereading, again and again.

Eliot was always right to a degree, banally so. Much of the visceral, emotional and intellectual force of Senecan tragedy, like that of the great Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists whom Seneca inspired, is necessarily verbal. But, as Trinacty's closural analysis and the other studies of this volume attest, there are ‘further realities’—many and diverse: poetic, theatrical, political, rhetorical, psychological, moral, cultural—‘behind’ the language itself. This collection of critical essays is the latest manifestation of the resurgence of Senecan scholarly and intellectual energy which has taken place in the thirty plus years since the 1983 publication of the Ramus volume on Seneca Tragicus. That volume not only displayed with disdain the above quotation from Eliot, but paraded itself lamentably as ‘the first collection of critical essays devoted specifically to Senecan tragedy to be published in English’.