The tragedy of Phaedra is set in motion when Phaedra – the wife of Theseus – attempts to seduce her step-son Hippolytus, and when rejected, publicly accuses him of rape. As so often in Seneca’s tragedies, the terrible consequences of the breakdown of natural relationships subsequently unfold like a distorted version of the genetic code.
When Theseus hears the allegations against his son, he calls on the Furies to exact a terrible punishment on Hippolytus. The innocent son is brutally killed and his body is torn into fragments. The image of the physically broken child lying in pieces before his guilty father powerfully recurs in Thyestes, Phaedra and Hercules. The fragmentation of human bodies – and more specifically of children’s bodies – is another consequence of the forces at work within the tragedies that are breaking apart the connective bonds of the Stoic cosmos. There is a constant struggle and a constant failure within the tragedies to keep hold of the whole of something, whether that be the whole of a body, a family, or a much larger cosmic whole.
In Act Five of Phaedra, having discovered his wife’s deception too late to save his son, Theseus weeps over his dismembered child and desperately attempts to rebuild Hippolytus’s body out of the rubble of his limbs. As so often, it is only after time has run out and characters have reached rock bottom that a kind of space or stillness emerges that means that the tragedy has finally ground to a halt. I am interested in Seneca’s work in these areas: what happens after the breaking point has been reached and what does a character do after it is already too late? Amid all the fury and chaos of the tragedies this is one of the moments of quiet where the resolve to repair and preserve something of what has been broken resurfaces:theseus
theseus:Trembling hands, be firm
For this sad service; cheeks, dry up your tears!
Here is a father building, limb by limb,
A body for his son … Here is a piece,
Misshapen, horrible, each side of it
Injured and torn. What part of you it is
I cannot tell, but it is part of you.
So … put it there … not where it ought to be,
But where there is a place for it.20
The father tries to reconstruct his offspring, but here in the chaotic world of the tragedies the starting point is utter fragmentation, and the process of rebuilding cannot hope to reconstruct the body as ‘it ought to be’. In this world of physically and mentally broken people where minds and bodies have been mangled, there can only be this hesitant, stilted attempt to retain and reassemble some trace of the human form. It is impossible to replicate life as it was before tragedy, but, out of the jumble of pieces that we are left with, the task is to create something that resembles life: a second version of ourselves.
More than any of Seneca’s plays, Hercules is preoccupied with what happens after tragedy. Here the powerful force of energy or momentum which made Hercules a hero is subverted when he murders his own family in a frenzied attack fuelled by madness. It is, however, that same force of energy which must somehow be preserved and reactivated if he is to survive beyond the immediate tragedy.
After the slaughter, Hercules falls into a deep sleep and when he eventually wakes to find his step-father Amphitryon and friend Theseus watching over him, he has no recollection of what has happened:
amphitryon:These troubles must just pass in silence.
hercules:And I remain unavenged?
amphitryon:Revenge often does harm.
hercules:Has anyone passively endured such troubles?
amphitryon:Anyone who feared worse.
hercules:Can one fear anything, father, that is even worse or more painful than this?
amphitryon:How little of your calamity you understand!
hercules:Have pity, father, I hold out my hands in supplication. What? He pulled back from my hands: the crime is lurking here. Why this blood? What of that shaft, soaked by a boy’s blood. Now I see my weapons. I need not ask about the hand. Who could have bent that bow, what hand flexed the string that barely yields to me? I turn to both of you again, father is this crime mine? They are silent: it is mine.21
Amphitryon attempts to keep the next wave of the tragedy at bay by holding back the knowledge of what Hercules has done. But what begins as a father’s attempt to counsel his son falls apart as the truth bursts out of the very silence that Amphitryon has tried to create as a protection. His counsel fails when it comes up against the enormity of the tragedy. His body cannot help revealing the truth that his brain had attempted to conceal as – despite himself – Amphitryon instinctively flinches from his son’s supplicating hands. In the final line, Hercules’s question ‘is this crime mine?’ is answered with a silence that can have no other meaning than ‘it is mine’.
Unlike many of Seneca’s tragedies which end with only the promise of further acts of vengeance, Hercules finishes with the fragile hope that the hero – with the help of his two companions Theseus and Amphitryon – will be able to heal his wounded mind and find a way to continue living.
In Act Five – in another ancient version of sumpatheia – Amphitryon threatens to kill himself unless Hercules refrains from suicide. Faced with Amphitryon’s threat, the tragedy grinds to a halt. Repetition across the tragedies is key. Every character, across all eight plays, is caught within the same cycle of cosmic decline and each is rushing towards these points of stillness in the aftermath of repeated action:
Stop now, father, stop, draw back your hand. Give way, my valour, endure my father’s command. This labour must be added to the Herculean labours: to live. Theseus raise up my father’s body, collapsed on the ground. My crime-stained hands shun contact with the one I love.22
As Hercules repeatedly calls for death to ‘stop’, the trajectory of the tragedy turns from death back towards life. The parts of Hercules that allowed him to be heroic are called into action again, but now the monster that he must slay is a psychological one. What is crucial is this shifting internal chemistry that turned a man from hero to crazed murderer: both are made of the same elemental ingredients. After the tragedy, the struggle is now to regain some version of that first formulation that allowed Hercules to survive unbearable situations. It is impossible to go backwards and retrieve an unstained version of his self: he must find a second copy of that first self and apply it now to the essential labour of living. Keeping himself alive after the tragedy will be the hardest labour of all for Hercules. Rather than a single act of strength or valour, it is a task which will demand a continuous, extended exertion of will, for while destruction can be done in a flash, survival is a long, drawn-out process.
The Stoic cosmology tells us that with every connection comes the threat of infection, and that every creative force holds the potential to become a destructive force, but the tragedies also tell us that these are the very parts of human beings – the riskiest parts on the very knife-edge between order and chaos – which must be preserved. The Stoic laws reassert themselves here at the end of the tragedy through the voice of Theseus, a man who has himself endured huge tragedy and who now guides Hercules to ‘Rise up, break through adversity with your usual energy. Now regain that spirit of yours which is a match for any trouble, now you must act with great valour. Do not let Hercules give way to anger.’23 The task of self-preservation can only begin once we have first witnessed