Lucius Annaeus Seneca was a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, and humorist of the Silver Age of Latin literature. As a tragedian, he is best-known for his Medea and Thyestes.
Background
Seneca was born c. 4 BC in Córdoba, Spain. He came from a distinguished provincial family of Italian origin; his father, for whom he was named, wrote on history and rhetoric.
Seneca was taken to Rome in infancy by an aunt, who nursed him through a sickly childhood and helped launch him on his official career.
Education
Seneca was educated at Rome and then for a time devoted himself to philosophy, particularly to the teaching of the eclectic Sextians and the Stoics.
Career
Seneca's florid tragedies, filled with passion, horror, and revenge, were a major source and inspiration for such Elizabethan dramatists as Kyd, Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare.
About the year 33, under the Emperor Tiberius, he held the quaestorship, the first step in the Roman's career in office.
Again his abject despondency and his groveling pleas for restoration make a melancholy contrast with his Stoic insistence that situation is a thing indifferent and that a man is equally at home anywhere in the world.
Upon apparently dubious evidence of complicity in the abortive Pisonian conspiracy of 65 Seneca was bidden to take his own life; Tacitus (Annals 15. 62) tells how he did so, with a theatrical gesture but with fortitude.
Dio Cassius (155-235) gives a very damaging sketch in his Roman History of Seneca's character (61. 10) but recognizes his superior wisdom (59. 19).
Stoic thought and rhetorical expression are the dominant traits in all of Seneca's writings.
Seneca is not doctrinaire nor a closet philosopher, but alive to the demands of practical life and willing to use texts of the rival Epicurean school to serve his purpose.
Rhetoric is the essence of Seneca's style.
His prose is studded with conceits, apothegms, paradoxes, all highly polished, so that whole paragraphs are conglomerates of epigrams.
In Senecan tragedy rhetoric is as essential as a score is to a libretto.
Seneca is not concerned, as his Greek models are, with questions of moral choice but with exhibiting the extreme limits of passion; without artifice many of his scenes would be ghoulish or grotesque.
Proposed chronologies for the writings are not convincing, but order is of little importance for there is little discernible change in thought or manner.
Ten treaties in twelve "books" are grouped together under this misleading title in the manuscript tradition.
Three are formal "Consolations, " a genus well established in later antiquity.
To Marcia, on the death of her son three years before, offers the standard prescriptions for the control of grief, with examples of other bereaved mothers.
Indifference to externals and welcome leisure for study keeps him content; neither, then, must his mother grieve.
The treatise is poorly organized but enlivened by good illustrative anecdotes.
On the Shortness of Life teaches that longevity is not measured in years but in the intelligent use made of them.
On Clemency (of which one and a fraction of the original three books survive) is in effect an exegesis of Portia's "'Tis mightiest in the mightiest.
On Benefits, in seven books, is a discursive treatment of what constitutes a benefit, how it should be conferred and how received, and of the nature of gratitude and ingratitude.
Seneca's letters are in effect short, informal homilies, frequently based on such personal experiences as journeys, bouts of illness, visits to circuses or seaside resorts, and the like.
Natural Questions, in seven books (whose proper order is disputed), deals with thunder and lightning, snow, rain, hail, earthquakes, comets, and like subjects.
The Stoics regarded celestial and other natural phenomena as immediate proof of the direction of the universe by a rational and powerful providence.
It ridicules Claudius not only for his physical deformities but for his interest in books, in judicial procedure, and in extending the franchise--all of which a Stoic should have found admirable.
Seneca's tragedies are adaptations of Greek models.
They differ in content in that they are not concerned with moral problems but with illustrating intense passion; the principals never waver in their enormities, and the subordinates who vainly seek to deter them only emphasize their monolithic starkness. One of Seneca's most sensational and well-known tragedies is Thyestes.
Although the plot is chilling and gory, most of the action takes place offstage and then is reported to the audience by messengers.
He invites Thyestes to a feast, pretending that all has been forgiven.
Thyestes accepts the invitation and at the banquet he is fed the flesh of his three sons, whom Atreus has murdered.
The play ends as Atreus discloses this to Thyestes. Trojan Women is an adaptation of the Euripidean play, with the horror of the sacrifice of Polyxena and Astyanax rather than the demoralization of war made central.
The Medea copies Euripides' play, with an elaborate scene showing Medea at her witchcraft.
The Phaedra is like Euripides' Hippolytus, except that instead of struggling against her passion Phaedra glories in it, and instead of counselling submission the nurse seeks to deter her mistress.
The Oedipus corresponds to Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, but without its tragic implications; instead there is a lurid sacrifice and a horrifying scene of necromancy.
The Agamemnon follows Aeschylus' play, with Clytemnestra's erotic motivation accentuated.
Hercules on Oetaea, probably expanded by another hand, follows Sophocles' Trachinian Women in recounting the death of Hercules; here Hercules is a Stoic saint who is assumed to heaven for his many services in ridding mankind of monsters. Other Writings and Influence.
Two other items are listed among Seneca's writings: a number of trivial short poems, some amorous, and an exchange of correspondence with St. Paul, which is certainly spurious but which the Latin Fathers, who regarded Seneca almost as one of themselves, believed genuine. His supposed connection with St. Paul assured Seneca high esteem in the Middle Ages.
The French philosophes of the 18th century were deeply influenced by Seneca's conception of nature; the ferment which exploded in the French Revolution owed not a little to Stoic egalitarianism as propagated by Seneca.