This chapter will begin by looking at Seneca’s tragedies, arguing against Inwood’s assertion that ‘any philosophical influence probably runs from the prose works to the plays’, not least because the tragedies were most likely to have been written first. More particularly, the tragedies are home to first things, primary emotions and forces that suggest to me that they should be read first. The chapter will then go on to look at Seneca’s letters to Lucilius which contain his second-order attempts at setting out generalised guidance for living in adaptive accordance with the rules of Stoicism.
Contradictions and tensions are an important element of the Stoic cosmology and they exist within the tragedies and the prose as well as between them. In fact, internal contradiction is one thing which unifies these two seemingly disparate bodies of work. While on the surface, the tragedies are preoccupied with intense violence and unimaginable excess, they also contain places where small and very recognisably human pressure points are revealed. Similarly, within Seneca’s letters there are places where the surface restraint of Stoic philosophy appears to crack and reveal underlying psychological fault lines.
The Tragedies
In Act Three of Thyestes – a tragedy about two vengeful royal brothers – the titular character is persuaded to leave behind the safety of a life of obscure poverty, tempted back to the royal palace by his brother Atreus’s false promises of reconciliation. Some primitive part of himself – an almost archetypal version of anxiety – surfaces and attempts to halt the tragic momentum by which he is unknowingly being carried along:
You ask me why, I cannot tell you why
I am afraid; I see no cause for fear,
And yet I am afraid. I would go on;
But I am paralysed.15
A battle is taking place within these lines between surface logic and a lower, inner feeling of dread that can neither compromise nor explain itself in the language of reason. The instinctive, primal simplicity of ‘I am afraid’ comes from a different place within Thyestes to the second thought, the rational counterbalance of ‘I see no cause for fear.’ The two conflicting feelings exist simultaneously within him, each emerging from a different level or layer of his self. Reading vertically down the page, Thyestes’s fear is as relentless as his opposing drive to keep moving, ‘I am afraid / And yet I am afraid / But I am paralysed’ is like the sound of ruminating cogs in his brain. Thyestes’s logical half simultaneously struggles to understand how something can exist within him without evidence and without answers, ‘I cannot tell you why’/ ‘I see no cause for fear.’ The result of this internal conflict is psychological paralysis. His fear is the last barrier holding back the destructive momentum of the tragedy. And yet in the face of what seems an external urge for life, Thyestes is persuaded in the next scene by the arguments of his son to return to the palace and ‘I would go on; / But I am paralysed’ quickly turns to ‘Let us go on, then.’16
The impetus to keep driving onwards is the most powerful force within Seneca’s tragedies. Even when some part of Thyestes is instinctively dragging him back and trying to halt, another part of his self is leading him onwards; it is hard to know which is the force for good. Thyestes overrides the survival mechanism that has been triggered within his body and now the only way he will finally come to a halt is at the end of the play when tragedy has piled on top of tragedy and everything has been destroyed. Seneca pushes his characters towards the extreme point of disintegration and that final point of impact is the only thing that can stop their momentum.
The tragic momentum is a damaging consequence of a Stoic cosmology in which everything belongs to one unified continuum which is held together by a system of tensions: ‘Tonos is the energy system that, for better or worse, welds the Stoic cosmos into a unity. The tensional relationship between the constituents of the cosmos, including the incorporation of man and his life in the larger world, Posidonius called sumpatheia.’17 This is not sympathy in the modern sense, but rather a mutual interdependence or simultaneity of being at all levels in the cosmos. The concept of krasis – translated as ‘blending’ – was the epitome of sumpatheia for the Stoics. The ‘tensional relationship’ means that different elements within as well as between humans must be held together, and not necessarily in harmony:
Another term by which Cicero chooses to render sumpatheia is contagio, which is contact, in the medical sense, hence, sadly, infection. Certainly medicine, though supportive of the notion of harmony and balance and healthy tension, is fully alive to the variety of causes that may trigger a breakdown of the harmony, and to the extreme narrow scope within which tension can be expected to operate successfully.18
Tragic relationships are characterised by the version of sumpatheia that is contagion, and revenge spreads like an infection between Seneca’s characters. Generations of the same family are marked with violence as if their bloodline has been infected. The interconnected Stoic world view is dangerous because the set of conditions which are required to maintain healthy connections across the continuum are the same in nature as those that lead to sickness, but are much more difficult to sustain. The tragedies show what happens when the universe deviates from this ‘extreme narrow scope’ and is no longer operating successfully either on a macro, cosmic level or a micro, interpersonal level.
In Act Five of Thyestes, the tragic hero continues to struggle with a sense of dread and foreboding. Yet, at this point in fact, Thyestes has already unknowingly consumed the flesh of his own children, who have been murdered and fed to him by his brother Atreus:
Why, fool, what griefs, what dangers
Does your imagination see?
Believe your brother with an open heart.
Your fears, whatever they may be,
Are either groundless, or too late.19
The formulation ‘either groundless or too late’ is disturbingly characteristic of the tragedies. In this instance, it is already ‘too late’, and the unarticulated fear that has hung over Thyestes since the beginning of the play has now overtaken him, coming to pass in a form beyond anything he could have imagined. The future has already happened and it is only by not yet knowing the truth that Thyestes is able partially, but only temporarily, to hold off its full realisation. In Act Five, Thyestes is the last to learn what it is that he has already done.
There is a strange relationship between time and fear and time and knowledge in the tragedies. Time can speed up or slow down, go forwards or turn back on itself, stretch out or stall in the presence or absence of knowledge or fear. In the moments after something bad is revealed to have happened, the time before a character found out the truth can feel to him retrospectively warped. The structure of this play reflects the real instability of time, a deep discrepancy between time as it is felt internally and how it exists externally. By refusing to follow a sequential timeline, Seneca creates a different kind of framework that feels more like how it is to be stuck inside the nightmare-like logic of a bad experience. We cannot return to the moments before we knew something bad had already happened. When a truth is discovered, the past is retrospectively reshaped by the present and what was small, insignificant and fleeting at the time becomes large. There is a sickening vertigo in this forwards-backwards motion which acts in defiance of simple cause and effect, for the effect almost creates its cause in retrospect. Boundaries that are crossed blindly in real time can only be seen afterwards and from a distance. The tragedies seem to