Seneca's Thyestes

SENECA 435 Seneca's Thyestes ELAINE FANTHAM R.J. Tarrant, editor. Seneca's Thyesles Atlanta: Scholars' Press '985. xii, 278. $18.00 Readers of Richard Tarrant's magisterial edition and commentary on Seneca's Agamemnon (Cambridge Philological Monographs, cup 1975) may wonder to find his Thyestes compressed between the generic covers of a confessed textbook. The Agamemnon was textual and philological- a model to subsequent commentators, but strictly for classicists. With Thyestes Tarrant has performed a tour de force, combining the samephilological expertisewitha treatmentofliterary and dramatic issues accessible alike to students of the classics and scholars ofEuropean drama provided they can read Seneca in his own tongue. The mature Tarrant is more daring than he was; with judicious caveats he outlines the possibility that Thyestes, marked as a late play by objective stylometric criteria, was the product of Seneca's old age under Nero, between 60 and 62 AD, and indicates probable allusions to practices of Imperial Rome associated with the record of Nero or his predecessor (variably identified as Gaius and 'Caligula') which point the affinity between the Argive and the Roman tyrant. The preface notes that he has given spedal attention to Seneca's 'masterful deployment of language' (p ix); this is an understatement of what I believe to be the major contribution of this excellent edition to Senecan sCholarship. Two generations ago when Eliot made his famous criticism that 'in the plays of Seneca the drama is all in the word. ... His characters aU seem to speak in the same voice and at the top ofit' (in the Introduction to the TudorTranslation Series Tenne Tragedies [19271 reprinted as 'Seneca in Elizabethan Translation' in Selected Essays [19311 quoted from p 68) his argument was more considered than the judgment of manysuccessors who have quoted him againstSeneca. Believing (as Ialso do) that Seneca's tragedies were recited, not enacted, he deduced their lack of emotional depth from the lack of action, and attributed their defective sensibility to Roman radal characteristics, expressed in ilie Latin language (cf pp 66, 67). For Eliot Seneca's characters have 'no subtlety and no private life.' What Tarrant has done is to demonstrate from a closer examination of language in Thyestes the subtle differentiation between the ruthless Atreus, 'a virtuoso rhetorician whose verbal powers are an expression - in a sense the most complete expression - of his personality' (p 44), and the weak Thyestes, moral in theory but sapped by his own love of wealth and comfort. We all recognize the grand language of the Senecan egOist; only Tarrant has systematically noted the deliberately clumsy diction and blurred syntax that reflect Thyestes' failure to keep intellectual control of his voiced principles. In this and other forthcoming studies of Senecan linguistic characterization he has vindicated his author. Tarrant has also surely put an end to the ongoing disputes over Thyestes' character;he utters Stoic wisdom, but is no Stoic sage; the insincerity of his ideals is displayed as much in his language as in 436 ELAINE FANTHAM his actions. In this sense Seneca's weak characters (Creon in Medea, Agamemnon in Troades) prove subtler than his strong passionate offenders against man and Nature who captivated the Renaissance imagination. Eliot wrote that 'Thyestes of all Senecan tragedies has mostin common with the "Theatre ofBlood," , especially 'the motive of revenge unregulated by any divine control or justice' (p Bo). But if we heed Tarrant it is apparent that Renaissance England read Seneca without subtlety; their Seneca was cruder than the original. In a sense Eliot, to a lesser degree admittedly than other critics, also 'included the demerits of [Seneca's] admirers in his own faults' (p 67). Against the charge of bloodthirstiness Eliot himselfprotested. At the very climax of Thyestes' agony, Tarrant reminds us that for Seneca bloodshed and death count for less than mental anguish. Scholars of English literature will also relish TarranYs well-chosen parallels from Shakespeare. This play was the most influential of all the tragedies on Elizabethan theatre, and Tarrant singles out details of its ghostly prologue and psychology of revenge that inspired Renaissance drama. But he is most valuable on Seneca's background of Greek and Roman dramas on the Thyestes myth. Where...