SOURCE: "The Evil Will," in The Mask of Power: Seneca's Tragedies and Imperial Rome, Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 1985, pp. 56-74.

[In the essay below, the critics scrutinize the actions of Seneca's protagonists inorder to demonstrate that the characters willfully choose their courses of action.]

1. Choices

When Seneca's bad men and women originate independent action, it is by conscious choice and with often self-regarding awareness:

Accingere, anime. …
   scelus occupandum est.

Be armed for battle, my soul. …
   We must make the crime our own.
                        (Agamemnon 192-3.)

Clytemnestra is addressing a part of herself, her animus; perhaps 'heart' or even better 'will' is nearer to what the Latin term stands for, though 'soul' sounds more natural in English. (Studley piles up alternative equivalents:

Now heart be bold, take corage good, of stomacke now be stout. …

and when animus appears elsewhere in this scene he uses 'soule' and 'my mynde' also.) She is trying to nerve herself for a moment of decision which is agonising and bewildering, the decision to kill her husband; she recoils and plunges into despair and shame, then cries out with rage, denounces herself for delaying, reverts again to denouncing herself for disloyalty. In the scene following the address to her animus, she vacillates in dialogue with her Nurse and then in dialogue with Aegisthus. What is never in doubt, in all these embittered exchanges, is the nature of her proposed deed of revenge.

The scelus (crime) of 193 defines her killing of Agamemnon as a criminal act, and it remains so, clearly, through all her fluctuations of purpose. Culpa and pec-care (wrong-doing, sin) reiterate this judgment (307). Clytemnestra is again the speaker at this point. Having chosen this criminal course, she goes on to claim that it brings with it the possibility of exacting a kind of fides, a loyalty to guilt which submits itself to the values imposed by the wealthy criminal:

Cly: Delicto novit nemo nisi fidus mea.
Aeg: Non intrat umquam regium limen fides.
Cly: Opibus merebor, ut fidem pretio obligem.

Cly: Only a loyal man is acquainted with my crimes.
Aeg: NO loyalty ever enters across a royal threshold.
Cly: Through my wealth I shall earn the right to
  hold fast loyalty by payment.
                                                 (284-6)

The moral word merebor suggests that Clytemnestra's morality will be of her own making and the loyalty she can exact all the more to be prized. As Atreus says (Thyestes 211-2), "Even a lowly man can often win truthful praises; false ones are given only to the powerful." She ignores the reply of Aegisthus, which casts doubt on this claim of hers:

pretio parata vincitur pretio fides.

The loyalty gained by payment is overcome by
  payment.

Clytemnestra makes no answer on this point, but veers away once more to reject Aegisthus and the idea of murder; men almost at once she turns back to accept Aegisthus after all as partner in the wrongdoing she decides to choose. Their united plan will, she says, "disentangle the doubtful and threatening state of things".

From this moment Clytemnestra assumes a role of guiding intelligence, arranges religious rites for Agamemnon's return, comments appropriately on the long report of the ship-wreck, and stands aside while Cassandra and the Trojan prisoners express their frantic despair. Cassandra and later Electra are seen in states of furor and only the last line of the play suggests that this dementia will also finally envelop Clytemnestra herself and her partner:

Cly: at ista poenas capite persolvet suo
captiva coniunx, regii paelex tori.
rahite, ut sequatur coniugem ereptum mihi.

Cas: ne trahite, vestros ipsa praecedam gradus.

perferre prima nuntium Phrygibus meis
propero: repletum ratibus eversis mare,
captas Mycenas, mille ductorem ducum,
ut paria fata Troicis lueret malis,
perisse dono feminae: stupro, dolo.
nihil moramur, rapite, quin grates ago.
iam, iam iuvat vixisse post Troiam, iuvat.

Cly: furiosa, morere.

Cas:               veniet et vobis furor.

Cly: But that woman shall pay the penalty with
her own life—the prisoner—bride, the harlot
of the royal bed. Drag her away, to follow the
  husband
snatched from me.

Cas: DO not drag me, I will go myself, before
your steps. I am hurrying to be the first to
bring the news to my own Phrygians: news
that the sea is filled with overturned
hulls, Mycenae is captured, and the leader
of the thousand leaders has perished, to
fulfil a destiny that equals the suffering
of Troy: perished by a woman's gift,
by adultery and deceit. We are not
delaying you: carry me off, I thank you even.
Now, now there is joy in having outlived Troy.
  There
 is joy.

Cly: Frenzied woman, die now.

Cas:              On you too shall come frenzy.
                                                 (1004-12)

The figure of Clytemnestra is a paradigm for Senecan villainy. There is hesitation, or at least analysis, before the decision to act as personal anger or malevolence has prompted. Then a deliberate choice is made, and the agent of evil claims to be rationally in control. Events show that this is a delusion; the force of furor which has been unleashed destroys the villain as well as his victims.

This is the pattern of action which provides the main structural line in six of our ten Imperial plays, and it is found as an important element in some scenes in two more of them. Phoenissae is too fragmentary for comment in this respect, and the one complete play which has no example of evil choice is Oedipus. With these exceptions, the action of every play, or at least of some part of it, hinges on the action of a man or woman who chooses, with knowledge, to follow a passionate impulse which prompts to crime.

Clytemnestra's impulse was to avenge her sacrificed daughter and her own injured pride. Tarrant believes that Seneca wished to make Agamemnon's infidelities the chief motive for Clytemnestra's hatred, and her bitter words to Cassandra seem to bear this out, but early in the play her first thought is of Iphigeneia's cruel death and her own humiliation:

I, Tyndaris, heaven's offspring, brought forth
a life to be sacrificed for the Greek fleet's
purification.
                                          (162-3)

What arises continually in her mind (the word again is animus) is the scene of the girl's slaughter, with her father standing by the altar where Iphigeneia has been sent for on the pretext of betrothal to Achilles.

Similar motives impel Atreus in Thyestes. The wrongs done to him by his brother in the past include treacherous seizure of their father's throne, seduction of Atreus' wife, and the theft of the golden ram which was the talisman of power for the house of Pelops. Atreus' first speech in the play expresses self-reproach for his delay in taking vengeance for these actions. His vengeance will, as he repeatedly says, take the form of crimes more sinful than those he is avenging.

Vengeance enters into the motives of the ruthless killers in Troades also. Here mere are two characters who choose to commit acts of extermination instead of exercising restraint in conquest: Pyrrhus and Ulysses. Ulysses acts for fear of harm the child Astyanax may do to the Greeks if he lives to grow up and take vengeance for the doom of Troy: instead of risking this, Ulysses orders the child to be thrown from the battlements. Some compunction restrains him for a brief moment, but he suppresses this as weakness and chooses clearly recognised atrocity:

now call up your skill, my heart (animus), your deception, your guile. …

(613)

Pyrrhus chooses to kill the virgin Polyxena as an offering to his father Achilles, himself killed by Polyxena's brother Hector; the motive is again one of vengeance and also the glorification of Pyrrhus' own family.

Like Clytemnestra, me three women who choose to unleash violence in Medea, Phaedra, and Hercules Oetaeus all have motives of injured pride, but in these plays mere are no previous acts of violence to be avenged. In Medea's case, and Deianira's, there are strong motives of sexual jealousy also, and in Phaedra's the impulse of passionate desire for Hippolytus. The Nero of Octavia is also moved by desire for Poppaea, and also by the need to assert his own authority by discarding the wife who was his predecessor Claudius' daughter. Like Clytemnestra and Atreus, he chooses an act of murder as a means of imposing his own morality:

and horrible 'tis a Prince to be constraynd.
                             (Octavia 582. tr. Thomas Nuce, 1566)

The original here makes the issue more starkly a moral one:

principan cogi nefas

for a ruler to be constrained is sin.

Hercules Furens presents the victory of the evil will in a more complex way than any other tragedy. In this play Hercules kills Lycus because he was wronged by him during his absence in Hades. He also has valid grievances against Eurystheus, which he thinks he is satisfying by his slaughter of Megara and their children, during his fit of insanity. In this case, furor overtakes the hero even before he begins to put his intention of vengeance into practice.

This play is unique in presenting Furor through the figure of a goddess, to whom Hercules had long been subjected, through his obligation to carry out the twelve Labours imposed by her favourite Eurystheus. As in Virgil, Juno expresses unalloyed Furor, and a hatred of the hero; but un-like Aeneas, Hercules himself is drawn under the power of Furor, being tempted into self-delusion by the opportunities Juno offers him to take the monster-killing role.

Hercules is by far the most complex of Senecan characters, and he alone fails to realise what is the choice he is making when he embarks on his course of violence. (The decisive choice in his case was made before the time of the play's action, when he adopted the role of monster-killer. The only choice actually made during the play is the refusal to purify himself after the killing of Lycus: but this, like the insane slaughter of his family which follows, marks a further stage in a progressive disintegration already far advanced.)

A part from Hercules, the 'villains' in Imperial tragedy act sciens volens, with full knowledge and intention. Seneca emphasises this clear awareness many times. He was evidently at pains to confute the Socratic view that no man knowingly chooses to sin.

When Phaedra determines to pursue Hippolytus at all costs, she claims that she is helpless under the force of the furor that assails her; but she does not claim ignorance, indeed she insists repeatedly that she knows what is happening. In reply to the long speech from the Nurse, setting out all the moral and practical obstacles to adulterous love, Phaedra says that she knows all this already:

                quae memoras scio
vera esse, nutrix, sed furor cogit sequi
peiora, vadit animus in praeceps sciens. …

              What you say is true, Nurse,I
know: but passion drives (me) to follow the worse
course of action. My will is moving knowingly
headlong. …
                                          (177-9)

The view of human action that is implied in this speech was not, of course, new in Seneca's time. He is presenting Phaedra in terms very close to those used by Euripides, in his Medea … :

but I am overcome by evil things (or, suffering).
I understand what evil acts I am about to commit;
but passion is stronger than my consideration.
                                (Eur. Med. 1077-9)

The language here could not be more straightforward; Euripides makes Medea's clear sighted acts a kind of choice not allowed for in Socratic-Platonist theory.

The Romans did habitually allow for this open-eyed choice of evil. Ovid's Medea describes herself much as Euripides' did (though at a different point in her history):

              aliudque cupido,
meus aliud suadet. video meliora proboque,
deteriora sequor.

        and desire prompts one way,
intelligence another. I see what is better, and approve it;
I follow what is worse.
                            (Ov. Met. VII. 19-21)

The long speech which follows examines all the moral and pragmatic arguments to be set against the passionate impulse driving Medea towards Jason, and there is legal as well as moral language in it: supposing I betray my father to help Jason, she says, and then he sails away and marries someone else, am I—Medea—to be left to face the poena (legal penalty)? She tells herself to look at the magnitude of her sin (nefas), and avoid the charge (crimen) that will follow if she gives way to her passion. It is all set out before her in reckonable terms. Similarly for the Senecan villain there is almost always an opportunity to weigh the moral implications of his acts, and at least a theoretical possibility of an act of will in the direction of either passion or reason.

Sciens volens, sciens prudens, these are Roman formulas for the state of purposeful awareness needed either for legal culpability or for valid performance of religious ritual; it is because Medea has this awareness that she can be called nocens (guilty) in Seneca (280) (and also perhaps because of this she can successfully call on Hecate and the agents of magic). The same judgment is made in Phaedra's case; she claims that she was innocens until she was changed by her passion for Hippolytus (668-9). After this she speaks of herself (as does the Nurse) as guilty, of her love as crime; there is repeated use of legal language from the moment when Phaedra moves with full knowledge into the state of consenting guilt.

Hippolytus describes himself as nocens when he realises Phaedra's desire for him; "I am guilty, I have deserved to die; I have pleased my stepmother" (683-4). The guilt which he has acquired is more like a taint or infection than a criminal responsibility. He is nocens (in his own eyes) as the sky is nocens in Oedipus (36); it passes on harm to others while receiving it from a deliberately willing source. Oedipus himself is called nocens (1044), because his actions have brought evil upon Thebes although he did not choose to do them. But Jocasta rejects the idea of guilt in his case:

fati ista culpa est; nemo fit fato nocens.

that fault is destiny's; no one is made guilty
by destiny.
                                                                (1019)

Hippolytus and Oedipus are nocentes in the literal participial sense of 'causing injury'. They are not criminally guilty as Medea, Phaedra, and Atreus are, and because of this difference they do not, like those of evil will, enter into the guilty world of phantasmagoric furor.

Before the Senecan villain makes his decisive choice of evil, there is almost always a scene of hesitation when reason prompts him to pause, and does so through the mouth of a human spokesman who warns or advises restraint, but is rejected. Herington called these scenes "The Defeat of Reason by Passion" and identified such scenes as the Second Movement in his scheme of a Senecan tragedy. In five out of our ten Imperial plays, this human spokesman of Reason is the heroine's Nurse, which accounts for the label Nutrixszene given to this kind of dialogue by some German critics. The Nutrixszene is the prototype of all the confidante-scenes of European drama, and so has acquired an archetypal status which it may not essentially deserve. A Nutrix is plausible only when the villain is a woman; male sinners may be dissuaded by the women of their family (Jocasta takes this role, rather faintly, in both Oedipus and Phoenissae, and in the latter play Antigone also attempts to draw her father towards moderation). A male servant can also take the Nutrix-role, as the Satelles does in Thyestes; his scene with Atreus fits exactly into the Herington pattern. In Troades the representative of reason is himself a man of power, the Greek commander Agamemnon; his age and heavy responsibility in the war just ended fit him to speak for prudent experience. Again, in [Hercules Furens] the repentant Hercules, tempted to suicide, is dissuaded by his father Amphitryon. Octavia has no less than four spokesmen of reason; two of these are Nutrices, addressing their two mistresses Poppaea and Octavia; the two others are men, Seneca himself as Nero's tutor, and the Praefectus, commander of the Praetorian Guard.

Whatever the sex and status of the spokesman of Reason, he speaks with a feebly ineffectual voice in all the plays. The scene in Phaedra exemplifies mem all. Phaedra addresses her Nurse:

          Unreason drives me into evil.
I walk upon the brink with open eyes;
Wise counsel calls, but I cannot turn back
To hear it. When a sailor tries to drive
His laden vessel counter to the tides,
His toil is all in vain, his helpless ship
Swims at the mercy of the current. Reason?
What good can reason do?
                            (178-84, tr. Watling)

The Nurse's reply to this speech attempts to show what good reason can do, and proves that it is not much. The voice which reason is allowed in all the plays proves to be far less powerful than the force of passion. Phaedra says that her passion is "driving her into evil". Like Medea's dolor, Atreus' ira, and the turmoil of emotions which sways Clytemnestra, the furor which assails Phaedra has the nature of an independent agent. This is why she can compare it to a natural force, the current which sweeps away sailor and ship in spite of the warning voice heard only on the shore. The Nurse reasons in conventional style about the misleading tendencies of mythology and the value of self-control. There is no sense of direct experience to vivify the platitudes. From this exchange the dialogue moves on to the question whether seduction of Hippolytus would be practicable or not. The Nurse maintains that it would not, until Phaedra threatens to kill herself. Before this threat, moral and pragmatic objections alike vanish, and furor now directs both Phaedra and the Nurse.

This surrender of the human being to furor is not a single act producing a permanent new state of mind. The disruption of order in the soul that such surrender produces is progressive. Furor cogit me sequi peiora, Phaedra says, "frenzy drives me to follow the worse course of action": worse than other possible actions, or worse than before? The acts which Phaedra commits are progressively more criminal and the situation (for every character in the play) progressively more disastrous. As in Macbeth—the most profoundly Senecan of English plays—one evil action leads inescapably to another more evil still. Phaedra first attempts seduction, by persuasion and enticement and by the power of Hecate; then she brings the false charge of rape against Hippolytus and so causes his violent death and Theseus' despair. What uncontrollably springs from the original evil choice is (in Herington's phrase) an "explosion of evil" far more widespread and more horrifying than what was originally intended.

The deliberate choice of evil, considered in reckonable terms, operates like the use of magic by Medea; the forces it has released are soon out of control. When Phaedra said "frenzy drives me to follow what is worse", she seemed to be shrinking from a progression forced upon her; later she has abandoned herself to madness and exults in the idea of pursuing Hippolytus everywhere, with powers that sound superhuman:

                … yet knowing,
I cannot help myself. Even through fire,
Through raging seas, through rivers in full flood,
Over the mountain heights, I shall pursue you.
No matter where you go, I shall go with you,
Mad for your love.
                            (699-702, tr. Watling)

At a later point she declares she will follow the dead Hippolytus to the river Styx and the lake of Tartarus. The first sin has thus become merely the first step towards a state of megalomanic delusion.

The "explosion of evil" (the phrase is Herington's) is similarly seen in Agamemnon, where Clytemnestra's murder of Agamemnon leads her on to kill Cassandra also and to inflict banishment and torment upon her own daughter Electra; the forces of madness thus released will at last (Cassandra says) envelop Clytemnestra and her lover also. From the first Clytemnestra has been seeking "a greater sin" to satisfy her need for vengeance. "Greater" here (124) means "greater than anything known before", since she compares her imagined crime with "what any divelish trayterous dame durst do in working woe", as Studley says, and specifically with the vengeance of Medea.

In the same play, Thyestes' ghost appears as Prologue and recapitulates the crime of his family. He relates how he has been outdone in wickedness by his brother Atreus, although until then he had been the supreme criminal. The special achievement of both these brothers consisted in the unnaturalness of their crimes:

Thyestes I in driery deedes will far surmount the rest,
Yet to my Brother yelde I, (though I gorgde my
  bloudy brest)
And stuffed have my pampred paunche even with my
  chyldren three,
That crammed lye within my Rybs and have theyr
  Tombe in mee,
The bowels of my swallowed Babes, devoured up I
  have,
Nor fickle Fortune mee alone the Father doth
  deprave,
But enterprysing greater guilte than that is put in ure,
To file my Daughters bawdy Bed, my lust shee doth
  alure.
To speak these words I do not spare, I wrought the
  haynous deede,
That therefore I through all my stocke might parent
  still proceede. …

Studley is accurate here; Thyestes speaks in first person active verbs, emphasising the clear intention of his crimes:

non pavidus hausi dicta, sed cepi nefas.
ergo ut per omnis liberas irem parens. …
                                                              (31-2)

Like Atreus in Thyestes, the ghost here speaks with pride as well as horror of the upheaval in nature that his deliberate acts have caused. It is because of this deliberate plunge into chaos that he now finds himself in Hades. The world of the dead in this Prologue is characterised by frustration rather than terror. The scenes of torment chosen from the traditional Hades-picture are those which show interminable self-defeating effort and the reversal of natural processes: the punishments of Ixion, Sisyphus, Tityus, and above all of Tantalus, the speaker's own grandfather. Hades is seen as the sphere of disorder, to which those who have overturned the laws of nature must be banished. Thyestes' ghost describes this realm with horror, but also with a craving to return there. His exclamation libet reverti, "I want to go back there", is not merely a rhetorical flourish but a demonstration of his inner perversion which makes the world of chaos and frustration a congenial home to him. The same effect is produced in the opening speech of Thyestes, where the Ghost is Thyestes' ancestor Tantalus, who again speaks of the torments of Sisyphus and Tityus as examples of perverted nature, now familiar and even reassuring to him. Tantalus expects his descendants to meet some even more grotesque and unimaginable punishment, from which he recoils:

harsh judge of shadows whoever you are
you who allot new punishments to the dead
if anything can be added to my suffering which
  would make
even the guardian of my terrible prison tremble and
  the sad
river of Acheron recoil some fear which might
  cause
even me to shudder seek it
now from my stock a multitude is coming to surpass
  its ancestry
to make me innocent to dare the undared
in the unholy region of hell whatever space is
  empty
I and my family will fill it.
                            (Thyestes 13-22, tr. Elder)

The ghost-prologues in the two plays which deal with the blighted family of Tantalus are especially fitting for these scenes of escalating evil that follow. In these plays the escalation seems to spring in part from an inherited pre-disposition to sin. The Tantalids act under a compulsion to find their destiny and their satisfaction in devising new forms of evil. This theme is a major one in Agamemnon as well as in Thyestes, because although the decisive choice of evil in this play is Clytemnestra's, her lover Aegisthus is more than a passive partner, and when Clytemnestra falters he will rest his claim to share in directing action on his identity as Thyestes' son. Because he is the child of Thyestes' deliberate incest which "mingled day with night", the murder of Agamemnon can be seen as his causa natalis, the moment for which he was born (Agamemnon 48). His father's ghost addresses him:

iam scelera prope sunt, iam dolus, caedes, cruor—
parantur epulae. causa natalis tui,
Aegisthe, venit.

now the crimes are near, now craft and murder
and blood. The banquet is being prepared. The reason
for your birth approaches, Aegisthus. …
                                       (47-9)

The feast now being prepared is ostensibly the celebration welcoming Agamemnon's return (though Studley took it to be a birthday party for Aegisthus). But the gloating anticipation of the Ghost inevitably recalls the banquet of human meat which in a similar sense had offered fruition to Atreus. The memory has already been evoked for the audience earlier in the Ghost's speech, as he looks about him and recognises the earthly home of his ancestors:

hic epulis locus
this was the scene of banqueting
                                 (11)

The note of eagerness in the two Ghost-prologues, as new forms and degrees of horror are awaited, is matched by the perpetrators themselves when the moment of choice has come. Just as Hercules in his madness sees Giants to be destroyed and imagines a greater struggle awaiting him (maius mihi bellum … , 997), so Seneca's Medea is continually looking for a greater crime (maius scelus, 933, where she is describing her own nature). The scene of Medea's approach to the ultimum scelus of murdering her own children is the fullest presentation of the soul's movement—after the initial choice of wrong doing—towards a progressive series of evil actions which demand total sur-render to furor. Her long speech (893-977) shows her moving from a sense of triumph at the destruction of Jason's bride and her palace to a contemptuous dismissal of this and all her previous acts; they were childish in comparison with the unknown atrocity she has already chosen (nescio quid ferox / decrevit animus intus, 917-8).

This speech of decision—or perhaps of recognition of what was already decided in Medea's first moment of choice—is prompted by the Nurse's advice to flee from the land where she has destroyed the royal house; Medea dismisses this advice, with an outburst of self-regarding passion:

egone ut recedami si profugissem prius,
ad hoc redirem. nuptias specto novas,
quid, anime, cessas? …

Shall I withdraw? I? if I had fled before,
I would return for this. I see the new marriage.
Why do you hesitate, my heart. … ?
                                      (893-5)

After this urgent series of first-person verbs, Medea begins a long dialogue with herself. She first summons her will, to follow up her successful onslaught on Jason's interests by devising some unprecendented further act of punishment for him (poenarum genus haut usitatum, 898-9). To allow her will to operate, fas and pudor must go. Instead, she says, she needs ira and dolor to bring her to a mature strength. So far her furor has been childish, but now she claims to be the true Medea:

Medea nunc sum; crevit ingenium malis.

I am Medea now; my nature has grown through
  wrongdoing (suffering?)
                                          (910)

Her approach to the ultimum scelus of child-murder is agitated, even appalled, as pietas returns to resist the dolor that drives her on. These abstractions are engaged in conflict which she describes visually like a spectator of a single combat: "rage puts my devotion (pietas) to flight—then devotion my rage—O yield, my resentment! … " This section of the speech (926-53) is impassioned and (allowing for the Roman rhetorician's use of abstractions) naturalistic; it is the prototype of all the soliloquies in European drama (and opera) which show the heroine, or hero, driven by successive conflicting impulses to act or not act at a moment when action also means irrevocable inward change. This is the voice we hear in Corneille's Médée, unmistakably; but also it is Hamlet's "About, my brain!" and even the Beatrice of Much Ado when she cries "maiden pride, adieu".

What is Senecan at such a moment is the speaker's projection of impulses and assumption of an observer's role, so that when the choice of action/inaction is made she can describe and judge herself by new standards whose responsibility is not hers alone. Medea's dementia leads to a vision of a throng of Furies, together with the mutilated ghost of her murdered brother, who seeks revenge. She offers him "this hand that drew the sword" (that cut him in pieces) and makes this hand the instrument of his vengeance. She can then call on her will to act, as if it were not part of herself. The phrase used is the terse hoc age, a phrase both colloquial and ritual—"get on with it", or "make this offering." With these words she kills the first of her children, and calls on the people to witness and applaud her crime.

In the Atreus of Thyestes the will to commit escalating crimes is more whole-hearted, with no vacillation. Atreus, as we have seen, claims the power to go "beyond the bounds of human custom" and to make his own morality. He has already attained this liberated state when he first appears in the play. His scene with the Satelles who here takes the Nutrix-role (176-335) presents him as untouched by any scruple or argument. He can say age, anime, prompting himself to action, at the beginning, not the end, of the scene; there is none of the hesitation which Medea found in her animus. The long dialogue includes moral and practical considerations raised by the Satelles in terms which must seem weighty to the audience, but for Atreus they do not exist.

Thyestes has been disliked, or ridiculed, more than any other play of Seneca, partly because of the gruesome theme of the cannibal meal, but chiefly because the figure of Atreus can so easily be burlesqued, and the whole tragedy dismissed as Grand Guignol. But Atreus—who fathered Richard III and Iago—is certainly presented to us as a serious study in megalomania (and in recent years has been considered more seriously as such). To take Atreus as the supremely evil man, the psychopath rejoicing in a novel form of killing, was not an original dramatic idea in Seneca's time. No Greek Thyestes survives, and we know earlier Latin versions only in the briefest fragments; but a line from Accius, preserved in quotation by Cicero, expresses the authentic glee of Atreus as Seneca also portrayed him:

maior mihi moles, maius miscendumst malum.
                                             (Cic. Tusc. Disp. IV, 77)

As Studley did not translate fragments of Republican tragedy, the gloating alliteration must be diminished into bare prose:

for me there is a greater task, a greater evil to be stirred up.

Seneca took this figure of perverted ambition and—starting at a later point than with Medea and Phaedra—presented a portrait of progressively disintegrating personality under impulsion from the evil force he has welcomed into his house to replace human love and duty:

Excede, Pietas, si modo in nostra domo
umquam fuisti, dira Furiarum cohors
discorsque Erinys veniat et geminas faces

Megaera quatiens: non satis magno meum
ardet furore pectus, impleri iuvat
maiore monstro.

Depart, Pietas, if ever you were in our house
at all. Grim battalion of Furies, and Erinys
goddess of strife, may come, and Megaera,
brandishing her twin torches. My heart
does not blaze with frenzy great enough;
it is my pleasure to be filled with a
greater horror.
                                          (249-54)

These Furies are a multiplication of the Fury who appeared in the Prologue, driving on the ghost of Tantalus to bring evil and madness into his children's house. The Fury's whole purpose was to make wrath grow into new forms of crime and to spread confusion ever wider. The length of the speech given to the Fury's expression of this purpose (23-67) allows this idea to be developed in precise and horrifying detail:

Let loose the Furies on your impious house,
Let evil vie with evil, sword with sword;
Let anger be unchecked, repentance dumb.
Spurred by insensate rage, let fathers' hate
Live on, and the long heritage of sin
Descend to their posterity. Leave none
The respite for remorse; let crimes be born
Ever anew and, in their punishment,
Each single sin give birth to more than one. …
Vengeance shall think no way forbidden her;
Brother shall flee from brother, sire from son,
And son from sire; children shall die in shames
More shameful than their birth; revengeful wives
Shall menace husbands, armies sail to war
In lands across the sea, and every soil
Be soaked with blood; the might of men of battle
In all the mortal world shall be brought down
By Lust triumphant. In this house of sin
Brothers' adultery with brothers' wives
Shall be the least of sins; all law, all faith,
All honour shall be dead. Nor shall the heavens
Be unaffected by your evil deeds;
What right have stars to twinkle in the sky?
Why need their lights still ornament the world?
Let night be black, let there be no more day. …
                                     (tr. Waiting)

It is to this universal chaos that Atreus gives consent and welcome when he invites the Furies into his house, and the Fury of the Prologue is allowed to make this long prediction primarily so that the audience may know what his assenting will has chosen. The access of such chaos is not possible without human consent. The force of chaos is like Wrath in Seneca's de Ira; a voluntarium animi vitium, a spiritual evil dependent on willed choice. Anger, says Seneca, ventures no kind of action except with the consent of the will.

The majority of those who make the choice of destruction and disorder in Seneca's plays are monarchs (in the case of Hercules Furens, a goddess). These are the characters who have power to make their choice effective; and they also have the power to choose what means they will use for conflict or revenge. Their choices are real ones, and they know what is to follow, for themselves as well as for their victims: "Why are you not mad yet?" Juno says to herself as she plans to send madness on Hercules (Hercules Furens 109).

Why do these Senecan autocrats deliberately plunge into insanity? The theme is not new, if we leave out the word 'deliberately'; Plato speaks of the soul of a tyrant rocked by frenzy and pain as he goes on his irrevocable course; but the Platonic sinner does not anticipate and relish his wickedness as Atreus does. These tyrants of the Imperial stage must be considered for themselves.

2. The Soul of a Tyrant

To find that all Seneca's deliberate wrongdoers are monarchs may seem unsurprising; most characters in ancient tragedy are monarchs, or at any rate nobles with royal or even divine ancestry. No ancient writer ever attempted to present a humbly-born character as the central figure in a tragedy. It may seem then that Seneca's plots are simply standard Greek ones, and that he deals with kings because the Greek dramatists dealt with kings. But there are important differences.

Greek tragedies usually had plots about ill-fated dynasties: "a few families", Aristotle observed, "for example those of Alcmaeon, Oedipus, Orestes … who were destined to experience, or to commit, terrifying acts." These families were of course likely to be royal ones. However, Aristotle does not suggest mat royalty or power is a pre-requisite for the agent in tragedy. Rather it is "great reputation and good fortune", and goodness (though not perfection) of character, that makes the Aristotelian hero capable of tragic action. Although some degree of eminence was needed to make possible the peripeteia, the reversal of fortune, this reversal need not be brought about by actions or circumstances relating to the protagonist's autocracy. Some tragic plots depend entirely on the central character's royal power; any Agamemnon or Oedipus must do so. Other Greek plays (Philoctetes and Ion are two examples) are not concerned with royal power at all. Seneca chose, from all the range of Greek tragic plots, those which turn on the protagonist's role as autocrat; his plays are all stories of kings, or queens, whose acts were possible only because they were kings or queens.

Seneca's protagonists are royal, then, and also they are bad; they do not correspond at all to the Aristotelian tragic hero who is deservedly honoured and fails in his flawed goodness to an end that inspires awe. The end of every Senecan play inspires fear, but only a minority (Troades, Octavia, perhaps Phaedra) can evoke pity, the second element in the Aristotelian response. The irrelevance of Aristotelian criticism to Seneca's plays is apparent here, as in many other ways. The reason for his use of monarchical power as a central theme is not to be found in any unquestioning following of Greek models.

One subject on which Seneca took an attitude independent of Greek traditional ideas was precisely the question of how far the poor or socially unacceptable might be thought to live valuable or worthy lives. He considered with serious attention the often platitudinous praises of the detached ascetic life, and looked on voluntary poverty as an aid to tranquility. It must be said (and his enemies did not neglect to say it) that while publishing these reflections he continued to be one of the richest men in the world. But his view of poverty, and of slavery, was by Greek standards unusual, even slightly perverse. Many passages in the prose works make it clear that he was well aware of moral realities in a poor or humble person's life which could be as complex and intense as they were for the rich. For him, as for few other pagans, there might be a sense of awe at a poor man's end. Yet his plays remain tales of ill-fated dynasties: wealthy and conspicuous men and women, destined to experience, or commit, terrifying acts. Wealthy, conspicuous, and (what Aristotle did not add) possessed of absolute power.

This preoccupation with power and its misuse in Seneca's plays was by no means an imposed part of Greek tragic convention, but it had long been familiar elsewhere. Blood-thirsty tyrants appear more frequently in Greek rhetorical literature than on the Greek stage, and the rhetors could draw on a long philosophic tradition for the link between autocratic power and vice. If wrongdoing is the result of human choice (whether open-eyed or not), the choices of those who have power to make evil purposes into actuality must bring more momentous and more dramatic consequences than the injurious impulses of ordinary men. The rich and powerful, choosing wrongdoing, might work much greater havoc than others could do. Also, philosophers would say, for them the evil choice was far more likely. The temptations of great men to sins of the Stoic canon—wrath, envy, fear, and all kinds of emotional indulgence—had been a constant theme for both philosophers and satirists for at least three centuries before Seneca; and the social harm which could spread from corrupt and cruel men in power had been powerfully stated in the last years of the republic by writers as different as Sallust and Cicero.

Seneca's evil autocrats belong to this line of social-ethical comment, the tradition of rhetoric and satire, rather than to the tradition of the Greek theatre. What he has added to the moral pronouncements of Sallust and Horace (and what could not have been added in satire or in prose) is the insistence on the cosmic dimension which he believed in-separable from the world of human action.

Because Kings—or Emperors—held a position in the social order which was analagous to that of the Sun in the cosmos, Seneca would say their acts of aggrandisement and cruelty must evoke analogous disruption in the heavens, such as the darkening of the Sun in Thyestes. When beggars die there are no comets seen; or if there are, they are shooting from their course not for the beggar's death but for the brutality of the despot who killed him.

Brutality, making oneself a beast, is the image which Seneca uses at the climax of his essay On Mercy, addressed to the young Emperor Nero as a guide to government rather than a literary exercise in moral philosophy. The Imperial ruler holds the place of a god in human society, Seneca says at the beginning of this work; he should act like a god rather than as a man. A cruel ruler has taken on the nature of an animal; men might as well live under lions or bears. Similarly, when Atreus in Thyestes spoke of crossing the boundary of human custom, his actions led to the claim that he trod the ways of heaven, a king of kings, highest of gods:

aequalis astris gradior … o me caelitum
  excelsissimum,
regum atque regem! vota transcendi mea.

nowe equall with the Starres I go … now chiefe of
  goddes in highest place I stand,
and king of kinges. I have my wish, and more than I
  could thinke.
                            (885, 911-2, tr. Heywood)

But at this point in the play the audience has already heard the Messenger describing Atreus' slaughter of Thyestes' sons:

silva iubatus qualis Armenia leo
in caede multa victor armento incubat
—cruore rictus madidus et pulsa fame
non point iras: hinc et hinc tauros premens
vitulis minatur dente iam lasso piger—
non aliter Atreus saevit atque ira tumet,
ferrumque gemina perfusum caede tenens
oblitus in quern fureret, infesta manu
exegit ultra corpus. …

      like a long-maned lion in the Armenian
forests, victorious in all the slaughter as he swoops
on a herd of cattle—his jaws dripping with blood,
and hunger quelled, he does not let his rage
abate; he drives the bulls this way and that,
threatening the calves when he grows slow, with
weary bite. So Atreus rages and swells in
wrath, grasping his sword that is steeped in
double slaughter; forgetting who was the
object of his frenzy, he strikes with deadly hand
right through the body. …
                                     (732-40)

This simile repeats the comparison of Atreus to a savage beast, already made earlier in the scene when the Messenger describes him "like a tigress" (707-16). The second simile however takes the brutalising of Atreus much further than the first—not simply in terms of detailed atrocity but in his total loss of rationality. The tigress in the first simile is going to kill to satisfy hunger. She moves about, observing her prey, deciding which of two steers she should attack first. Atreus at this stage is similarly deciding which of the two boys should be his first victim:

   it makes no difference; yet he hesitates, and it
gives him pleasure to set his savage crime in order.
                                            (715-6)

The pleasure of setting things in order—ordinare—might well be appropriate for a king, or for the divinity which Atreus soon claims to be attaining. The note (not the word) is heard again in Clytemnestra's claim that she and Aegisthus can by their Consilia "disentangle the doubtful and threatening state of things" (Agamemnon 308-9). These words occur at a comparable point in Agamemnon to the moment when Atreus begins to "set his crimes in order"; the preliminary hesitations, or analyses, are over, and the tyrant is committed to the crime he plans and can begin to determine its details. At this point Atreus believes he is in control of everything and experiences a sense of superhuman elevation. Similarly Clytemnestra has become confident and imperious. To others she becomes a figure of savage terror, with her grim expression and bloodstained hands (897, 947-50). In her own eyes she remains the authoritative mother and queen. Cassandra prophesies, in the last words of the play, that frenzy will take hold of the two criminals in the end; their sense of being in control is a delusion. In the same way Medea, when her vengeance is planned, experiences a sense of power and authority restored to her (982-4) and with the words "it is well, it is all done" (1019) soars in her chariot towards the heavens. But again the last line of the play is spoken by another, one who has been injured; far from apotheosis, Medea the Sun's descendant will find that in the heaven to which she goes there are no gods:

testare nullos esse qua veneris deos.

bear witness that no gods exist where you travel.

As in the repeated examples of hideous cruelties recounted in On Anger, Seneca presents in these scenes examples (and they might well serve also as exempla in the Stoic sense, as exemplifications of moral lessons) of men who sought to become more than men, and ended by becoming less.

On Mercy, written some years later than On Anger, returns to the theme of cruelty as an abrogation of human nature. "None of the virtues is more appropriate for a man (than mercy), since none is more human. … " "Cruelty is an evil alien to the human. … " But for the monarch, Seneca repeatedly insists here, mercy is not only appropriate but positively glorious, since his power to inflict injury is so great. "Every house that mercy enters she will render fortunate and tranquil, but in a palace she is more rare and so more wonderful. For what is more remarkable than for the man whose anger nothing withstands, whose oppressive sentence meets with consent even from those who perish by it, whom no one will interrupt, indeed no one even entreat if he is moved to passion—for this man to lay a hand upon himself and use his power for better and gentler ends as he reflects, 'Anyone can break the law by murder; only I by saving life?'… Only wild animals—and not even the nobler beasts—worry and mangle their fallen victims. … To save life is peculiar to exalted fortune, which should never be admired more than when it has power like that of the gods, by whose kindness we are all—both good and bad—brought forth into the light. Let a ruler then put upon himself the spirit of the gods. …"

No other Senecan discourse has a more personal note than On Mercy; its didactic purpose is not general or abstract but specific and practical. Seneca here writes with the aim (we do not know whether he wrote with much hope) of influencing the young Nero to adopt policies of government based on humanitarian principles of the widest application. Mansuetudo, a civilised mildness, is the keynote of this treatise, as of Seneca's own policies while largely in control of Nero's administration. Nero was seventeen when he became Emperor, and had been Seneca's pupil from the age of twelve.

Nero was not the first Emperor personally known to Seneca, who had lived in Rome since his boyhood, when he left Spain to be educated in the capital. Though his entry into political life apparently did not begin until he was nearly forty, Seneca was well known in Rome before then; Suetonius says the Emperor Caligula thought him too successful (as a speaker) to be trusted. Whether Claudius had any personal interest or not in Seneca is unknown; the malice towards Claudius in the Apocolocyntosis suggests that (as Tacitus says people generally believed) there were motives for animosity. Claudius ordered banishment rather than death as the punishment when Seneca was tried before the Senate and found guilty of adultery with the Emperor's niece Julia Livilla; but this may have been in response to a plea from her sister, Agrippina. Eight years later, Agrippina—now the Emperor's wife—intervened to gain Seneca's recall from his exile in Corsica, to undertake the education of her son.

So at the age of about fifty Seneca moved into the Imperial household as tutor to the future Emperor; he also (thanks to Agrippina) held the office of praetor. Tacitus' account of this move makes it clear that his services in the palace were not to be concerned purely with academic instruction. Agrippina probably hoped to gain credit by recalling a prominent intellectual from exile; if so, he must go on being prominent in the intellectual world, and preferably beyond it; she would also value his intelligence as an aid to policy, and no doubt believed mat gratitude to herself would lead him to put his Consilia at her service in the struggle for power.

Seneca men wrote speeches for Nero as well as giving him formal lessons in (we assume) rhetoric and philosophy. He also exercised a strong influence on public affairs (princeps potentia, "foremost in power" is Pliny the Elder's description of him). Since (like Afranius Burrus, commander of the praetorians) he had entered the household as Agrippina's protégé, he would clearly be expected to act as her satelles, always supplying advice in his patron's interest, as Atreus expects his satelles to do in Thyestes. But when Nero became Emperor, power shifted away from his mother, and it was Nero, not Agrippina, who men called on Seneca to be available as his satelles, for guidance on all sorts of occasions. These had at times disturbing and even ludicrous elements, which reach their extreme in Tacitus' account of Nero's turning to Seneca for advice when he attempted to murder Agrippina in 59 A.D. The ingenious scheme to kill her by drowning in a boat built to collapse had failed; Nero was panic-stricken. "She might arm her slaves, or stir up the army; she might make her way to the Senate and the people, charging him with the shipwreck, her wound, the murders of her friends; what support was there for him? unless Burrus and Seneca could do something. He had aroused them and demanded their attendance at once; whether they had any knowledge already is uncertain. So both were silent for some time, in case it might be futile to try dissuading him; or perhaps they believed that things had gone so far that unless Agrippina were frustrated, Nero must perish. Eventually Seneca took the initiative, to the extent of looking at Burrus and asking him whether the troops should be ordered to kill her. … "

Nero's letter to the Senate, reporting Agrippina's death and recounting the offences which made it a providential release for Rome, was (Tacitus says) known to have been Seneca's composition. No one believed that the shipwreck had been accidental. But the letter did more harm to Seneca, who by such a composition had merely incriminated himself, than to Nero, whose monstrous inhumanity (immanitas) went beyond all criticism.

We are forced at many points to depend on Tacitus' account of Seneca's conduct and motives during these years. This account is ambivalent, and the portrait often seems deliberately colourless. Ambivalent but not fumbling; the writing here is too forceful to leave our judgment of Seneca uninfluenced, even if we think we are allowing for animosity. There is no such ambiguity in the Tacitean portrait of Nero. Tacitus does not qualify assertions of Nero's atrocities and vulgarities (as he habitually does if there is any room for doubt in recording discreditable actions), and there are no gaps between motive and action such as those which make the portrait of Tiberius a riddle. Nero in the Annals is vicious from the first; with his act of matricide he becomes a man of evil will.

The role of Seneca in his encounters with Nero in the Annals is an ineffectual one at every point; he is like the Nurses and Attendants in Senecan tragedy who are usually platitudinous mouthpieces of a Reason which cannot be translated into action.

Seneca wrote On Mercy probably in the first or second year of Nero's reign. The work is traditional in form, a didactic pamphlet which could offer a model for such literary compositions, but clearly also expressing recommendations of practical relevance to the new Emperor's policy-making. It must, however, have been clear to Seneca (he had taught Nero for five or six years) that there was little prospect of holding his pupil's serious attention by such exhortation, now that he had actually gained imperial power. After the three extraordinary Emperors who preceded him—Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius—Nero was subject to the pressure of example and social expectations of such an abnormal kind that only a man of very exceptional integrity and clarity of mind could have resisted them. The portrait in Tacitus agrees with all other sources in making it clear that Nero had no such capacity.

For Seneca, the autocrat of evil will was not a theoretical construct from academic philosophy; he had known more than one such ruler even before his close association with Nero. There are no means of dating any of the plays precisely, but some at least must have been written before Nero became Emperor. Tacitus says that in the years after Agrippina's murder Seneca began to write more poetry than before; but does carmina refer to tragedies? It is hard to believe that Jocasta's death in Oedipus, with a sword replacing Sophocles' noose, and the cry "strike at my teeming womb" echoing Agrippina's, did not take its form and expression from the actuality Seneca had known under Nero. But the figure of the autocrat deliberately sinning had been in Seneca's mind much earlier man this; Sejanus takes this role in the Consolation to Marcia, generally dated to Caligula's reign, even before Seneca's years of exile. It is clear, however, that the idea of the evil tyrant became more and more insistently present to him, in the treatise On Anger for example (and the composition of these three Books seems to have been spread over several years; the most horrifying accounts of tyrannical cruelty are found in the Third Book, written probably after his recall to Rome from exile).

When Seneca came to write On Mercy, he was developing themes and using images which he had found significant to him over a period of many years, and already handled many times in prose and in the plays. The plan of the treatise is set out in positive terms; the praises of mercy, as exemplified in Nero himself, humanissimus Nero, at the opening of his reign, an examination of this virtue, and a discussion of how the human soul may be led to goodness. The portrayal of mercy's opposite, the inhuman vice of cruelty, takes a more prominent place in the work than this plan would lead us to expect. There is a strong note of warning, as much as encouragement.

Whether or not Seneca had already written Thyestes, he had seen the death of Britannicus within months of Nero's accession; Nero on this occasion, seeing his adoptive brother convulsed by poison at a palace meal, "lay back unconcernedly and remarked that this often happened to epileptics. … Agrippina realised that her last support was gone. And here was Nero murdering a relation." The detachment, even satisfaction, with which Nero saw Britannicus die, was not far from the spirit of Atreus "setting things in order". And when Nero, only four years later, proceeded to murder his mother and then his wife, he did so with every sign of deliberate choice. This massacre of relatives was not carried out in a hallucinatory fit, like that of Hercules, or even in a moment of intense passion overmastering reason and human feeling, like Medea's. Nero destroyed Britannicus, Agrippina, and Octavia because they continually irritated and frustrated him, and he did so after considering, and toying with various schemes, for a long time; there was a willed choice. This was very much like Atreus making his pronouncement.

excede, Pietas, si modo in nostra domo
umquam fuisti. …

begone, family devotion, if ever you were in
   my house at all. …
                            (Thyestes 249-50)

Pietas, after all, was one of the "private goods", like holiness and integrity, which Atreus declared were not for kings. In his words, "kings may go which way they please".

Guiding a monarch towards virtue was thus likely to be an exceptionally difficult task. If Seneca took this task very seriously, it was not because Agrippina had appointed him to do so, but because positive guidance for troubled men—even monarchs—was a prime duty of a philosopher according to the Stoic ethics. Philosophy was seen both as a form of psychotherapy and as a guide to political action; it should thus benefit both individuals and society. There was also, of course, the motive of self-preservation; a monarch's tutor could be murdered as easily as his relatives, especially if the moralist's own life had not been irreproachable.

To restore order to Nero's troubled soul was not within Seneca's power, and he must have known that the immediate realities of government were not likely to be much influenced by anything he might say about Mercy. One hope remained for the philosophic writer, the only hope when he was constrained to social impotence:

With what thought does the wise man retire into leisure? In the knowledge that there also he will be doing something that will benefit posterity. Our school at any rate is ready to say that both Zeno and Chrysippus accomplished greater things than if they had led armies, held public office, and framed laws. The laws they framed were not for one state only, but for the whole human race. Why, therefore, should such leisure as this not be fitting for the good man, who by means of it may govern the ages to come (futura saecula ordinet) and speak, not to the ears of the few, but to the ears of all men of all nations, both those who now are and those who shall be?

[DeOdo VI.4]

Setting future ages in order might be an intelligible motive for the writing of treatises on such universal moral themes as Mercy, Steadfastness, or Tranquillity of Soul. It would not seem necessary, or consistent, for a philosopher inspired by this purpose to write plays. It is because the two genres of Seneca's work appear so alien to each other that for centuries they were thought to be the work of two different men. Any adequate account of his philosophic purposes must find room for the tragedies too. And the man of evil will (both those whom Seneca knew and those yet to come) were not to be set in order by any exercise of philosophic eloquence.