Senecan Tragedy and the Reception of Augustan Poetry by Christopher V. Trinacty (review)

Senecan Tragedy and the Reception of Augustan Poetry is primarily a study of the tragedies of the Latin author Seneca the Younger (4BCE–65CE), although the first chapter also reads some of his moral-philosophical Epistles. It argues that Seneca’s tragic poetics depend on a system of intertextual references to the works of the Augustan poets who were considered canonical by Seneca’s lifetime—in particular, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. Trinacty gives many detailed examples of Seneca’s reworking a quotation from an Augustan poet over the course of a tragedy, recontexualizing the original until its meaning is irrevocably altered; “intertextuality,” he writes, “works hand in hand with Seneca’s tragic poetics to interrogate the very meaning of the language itself” (185).

Over four chapters, the book demonstrates that the characters, plots, tragic universes, and metapoetic programs of Seneca’s dramas are constructed and developed through quotations from, allusions to, and reworkings—or “rebrandings”—of key moments in the Augustan poetic canon. Thus Senecan characters appear to be aware of, and to intervene consciously in, the process of their own literary construction. His Medea seeks to surpass the evils she is already famous for, and famously proclaims nunc Medea sum (“Now I am Medea”), meaning both that she has recovered from the madness of love that had temporarily possessed her and that she is living up to her literary reputation as an exemplar of feminine evil. Similarly, the plots of Senecan tragedies are shown to hinge on generic as much as interpersonal conflict, as when Phaedra uses the language of Augustan love elegy to describe herself, in a genre-based misreading of her situation that ultimately brings about her downfall. Characters in Senecan tragedy, from Phaedra to Oedipus and Cassandra, are situated, partial, and fallible readers, who misread the ambiguous signs of the world around them. Tragic discourse and intertextuality work together; Seneca puns on the Latin fata—Fate, but also “things that have been said”—to create a tragic universe in which a character’s fate “consists, in part, in his previous literary representations” (232).

Overall, then, Trinacty’s book makes a strong case for seeing Seneca’s tragic poetics as inseparable from the metapoetics of allusion. The elements of his argument, however, are not new, and this book is mainly notable as a synthesis of two strands of classical scholarship. On one hand, its understanding of tragic discourse as structured around the ambiguity of language and the partiality of individual readings relies, as Trinacty makes clear, on Vernant and Vidal-Naquet’s important 1972 book Mythe et tragédie en Grèce ancienne (translated into English in 1986 as Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece). On the other hand, Trinacty’s reading of Seneca as a “self-aware, clever, competitive and questioning” appropriator of Augustan poetics (235) is part of a broader scholarly move to rehabilitate Seneca. Indeed, Trinacty frequently uses the words of another scholar to conclude his own arguments, positioning himself as contributing to, rather than challenging, the growing consensus on Seneca. Seneca, along with his fellow “Silver Latin” poets, was once seen as a derivative and decadent author, but over the last twenty or thirty years, classicists such as A. J. Boyle, Michael Comber, and Alessandro Schiesaro have been rereading his work via contemporary literary theory and discovering a sophisticated metatheatricality and an aesthetics of belatedness.

Trinacty builds on this work and adopts an associated vocabulary, notably using intertext/uality over allusion. In fact, the latter term appears very infrequently in the book. Classical scholarship over the last twenty-five years has discussed the difference between intertextuality (defined as an irreducible system of linguistic relations between texts, and associated with poststructuralist theory) and allusion (defined as a conscious authorial practice of quotation or reference to another text, and associated with traditional philological methods), and the distinction is still a live one today. Trinacty does not touch explicitly on...