Stoick Seneca

Stoick Seneca THOMASG.ROSENMEYER To begin with, two brief segments from the speeches of a Senecan hero. My translation of the excited Latin is approximate; it lacks the ashlar tightness of the Senecan tirade. A convincing modem translation of Seneca into English does not yet exist. Here are the words of Thyestes, engrossed in his dreadful banquet. The first segment is spoken in ignorance ofwhat his body has taken in; the second comes after he has been enlightened by his brother Atreus. no)unt manus parere, crescit ponduset dextrarn gravat; admotus ipsis Bacchus a lahris fugit circaque rictus Ofe decepto fluit, et ipsa trepido mensa subsiluit solo. vix lueet ignis; ipse quin aether gravis inter diem noctemque desertus stupet. quid hoc? magis magisque concussi labant conversa caeli; spissiordensis coit caligo tenebris noxque se in noctem abdidit; fugit omne sidus. The anns balk, The right hand bends with the burden, Bacchus fights shy of the lips, The mouth is shunned and the liquid spills, The table heaves and the floor trembles. The light dims; yes, the air congeals, A castaway bulk between day and night. Look now: the great heavens crash And press their weight, until the darkness Stoick Seneca Turns thicker darkness and night hides within night. The stars are gone. (Thymes, 985-995) sustines tantum nefas gestare, Tellus? non ad infemam Styga te nosque mergis rupta et ingenti via ad chaos inane regna cum rege abripis? non lata ab Uno tecta convellens solo vertis Mycenas? stare circa Tantalum uterque iam debuimus, hinc compagihus et hinc revulsis, si quid infra Tartara est avosque noslros , hoc tuam immanj sinu demitte vallem, nosque defossos lege Acheronte toto. noxiae supra caput animae vagentur nostrum et ardenti freto Phlegethon harenas igneus totas agens exitia supra nastra violentus fluat. Earth, you dare endure thiscrime? You do not pull yourself away, you do not plunge Into deepest Styx, you do not heave and fling The ruler and his realm and all of us Into the yawning void? You do not sweep the city away and level it To the ground? With Tantalus we should stand, The two of us. If there is a place lower Than Tartarus and our fathers, break up your frame And fling us there and cover us with Acheron. Let noxious souls take wing above our heads, Let Phlegethon, seething, roll his giant ooze Above our mortality. (Thyestes. 1006-1019) 93 Seneca is not one of our most popular dramatists. True, Antonin Artaud has prompted directors, especially French, British and Italian directors, to dust him off and recognize in him a postmodern. They are attracted by the animal cruelty of the text, by the physicality and the goriness. Their efforts furnish a reenactment of Renaissance Senecanism, of the drama of Speroni and Marston and Gryphius. The last name reminds us of Walter Benjamin's remarkable book about the Gennan Trauerspiel.I In that book, Benjamin barely mentions Seneca, but it may well be the best book we have about the qualities that set Senecan drama apart. In spite of the pioneering work of the directors, modem readers, especially readers whose values have been shaped by the dominant traditions of Western 94 THOMAS G. ROSENMEYER drama from Shakespeare to Neil Simon, are usually puzzled or turned off by the Senecan texts. The critics castigate the violence of the action and the ugliness of the thoughts, especially when compared with the polish of the Greek models.2 Mostly the critics complain about the excesses of speech, about the reign of the tirade, which is taken to owe to Seneca its entry into the dramatic tradition. At least, that is the claim. T.S. Eliot was among the first to show, correctly, that the tensed, economically structured verbal idiom of Seneca is in no way like the purple patches and the hyperbolic orations which Shakespeare faults in the Senecans of his time. Seneca often, in spite of the spareness of the vocabulary, employs an amplified rhetoric, a Schreirhetorik. The Senecan exclamatory style is a matter not of vocabulary but of syntax, and of the pitch at which the syntax is made to reach our ears. In addition, and this is morc important. the new medium...