The Complete Tragedies, Volume 1

Medea, The Phoenician Women, Phaedra, The Trojan Women, Octavia

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Shadi Bartsch, Susanna Braund, Alex Dressler, Elaine Fantham, Shadi Bartsch, Susanna Braund, Alex Dressler, Elaine Fantham

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780226821092, 9780226748238
• eBook ISBN: 9780226372266
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Drama
• Index: Literature

The complete tragic works of the leading Stoic philosopher and playwright
 
Edited by world-renowned classicists Elizabeth Asmis, Shadi Bartsch, and Martha C. Nussbaum, the Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca series offers authoritative, modern English translations of the writings of the Stoic philosopher and playwright (4 BCE–65 CE). The two volumes of The Complete Tragedies present all of his dramas, expertly rendered by preeminent scholars and translators.

This first volume contains Medea, The Phoenician Women, Phaedra, The Trojan Women, and Octavia, the last of which was written in emulation of Senecan tragedies and serves as a unique example of political tragedy. High standards of accuracy, clarity, and style are maintained throughout the translations, which render Seneca into verse with as close a correspondence, line for line, to the original as possible, and with special attention paid to meter and overall flow. In addition, each tragedy is prefaced by an original translator's introduction offering reflections on the work's context and meaning. Notes are provided for the reader unfamiliar with the culture and history of classical antiquity. Accordingly, The Complete Tragedies will be of use to a general audience and professionals alike, from the Latinless student to scholars and instructors of comparative literature, classics, philosophy, drama, and more.

Phaedra

The drama opens with Hippolytus, Theseus’ son and Phaedra’s stepson, heading out to a hunt with the support of his patron goddess, Diana. After Hippolytus leaves, Phaedra appears onstage, sick with despair. She confesses to her nurse that in Theseus’ absence she has fallen in love with Hippolytus. In Venus’ inexorable grip, she cannot stem her feelings; she compares herself to her own mother Pasiphae, whose consummated lust for a bull produced the monstrous Minotaur. Unable to change Phaedra’s mind, the nurse resolves to help her rather than let her kill herself.

When Hippolytus returns from the hunt, the nurse approaches him with wheedling words about the pleasures of women and wine, but Hippolytus, who hates all women and abjures human sexuality, praises instead his own pure lifestyle in the woods and claims it was the primeval state mankind enjoyed before degeneration set in.

Phaedra appears, faints, and comes to. Asked by Hippolytus what ails her, she confesses. Hippolytus is aghast. He nearly kills her with his sword but instead runs off in disgust when she welcomes death. At this point the nurse improvises and starts shrieking “Help! Rape!” using Phaedra’s battered state and the abandoned sword as evidence. There is an interlude in which the chorus sings about beauty and its dangers.

Suddenly Theseus himself arrives, having escaped from his mission to the underworld to help his friend Pirithous kidnap Persephone. Seeing his wife in distress, he demands to know why. Phaedra cryptically says she was “threatened” by the sword and her body suffered violence. Theseus sees Hippolytus’ sword and draws the obvious conclusion. Cursing his son as a hypocrite and pervert, he prays to Jupiter to destroy him.

A messenger arrives with grim news: as Hippolytus was galloping away in his chariot, a bull-like monster emerged from the sea and threw his horses into a panic. Thrown off and tangled up in the reins, he was mangled and torn to pieces. Phaedra is shown Hippolytus’ corpse, confesses the truth to Theseus, then kills herself. Theseus laments his rashness, orders Hippolytus’ burial, and hopes bitterly that the weight of the soil over Phaedra’s corpse will crush it altogether.

Introduction

Shadi Bartsch

The story of Phaedra was a well-known one in antiquity and had parallels in other early literatures as well, such as the account of Potiphar’s wife in the book of Genesis. The stepmother who falls in love with her stepson then punishes his rejection of her by accusing him of rape was the subject of at least one (lost) drama by Sophocles, two by Euripides, and others by less well known dramatists. Euripides’ reason for writing two versions of the same drama is apparently that the first one was overly scandalizing: we are told that in Euripides’ original version, the Hippolytos Kalyptomenos (Hippolytus Veiled, given this name in the Alexandrian period), a lustful Phaedra openly propositioned Hippolytus. This so outraged the Athenian audience that Euripides wrote a second drama as a repudiation of the first. The second drama, in which Phaedra and Hippolytus never confront each other, but only learn of each other’s reactions through the nurse as intermediary, has survived as the play we know simply as Euripides’ Hippolytus. It took the first prize in the Athenian dramatic contest of 428 BCE.1

This Euripidean Hippolytus is different in several significant respects from Seneca’s later version. Because the Euripidean play is bracketed by monologues from two goddesses—Aphrodite and Artemis (Roman Venus and Diana)—who take responsibility for human action, much of the question of causality is muted. As Coffey and Mayer (1990, 7) point out, “there is a complex and sometimes uneasy interaction between divine intervention and human action and moral responsibility. The action takes place within the framework of the intrusion into human affairs of two goddesses.” At the drama’s opening, Aphrodite explains that she will punish Hippolytus for refusing to honor her by making his stepmother Phaedra fall in love with him; at its ending, Artemis appears to tell Theseus the truth and to take vengeance on Aphrodite for killing her favorite. In Seneca’s version, however, not only are these goddesses physically absent, but Phaedra’s nurse even pooh-poohs the idea that Eros is a god (195–203):

I know that lust, vile and fon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Seneca and His World
• Medea
• The Phoenician Women
• Phaedra
• The Trojan Women
• Octavia
• Notes