Seneca and the Idea of TragedyAs both a literary genre and a view of life, tragedy has from the very beginning spurred a dialogue between poetry and philosophy. Plato famously banned tragedians from his ideal community because he believed that their representations of vicious behavior could deform minds. Aristotle set out to answer Plato's objections, arguing that fiction offers a faithful image of the truth and that it promotes emotional health through the mechanism of catharsis. Aristotle's definition of tragedy actually had its greatest impact not on Greek tragedy itself but on later Latin literature, beginning with the tragedies of the Roman poet and Stoic philosopher Seneca (4 BC - AD 65). Scholarship over the last fifty years, however, has increasingly sought to identify in Seneca's prose writings a Platonic poetics which is antagonistic toward tragedy and which might therefore explain why Seneca's plays seem so often to present the failure of Stoicism. As Gregory Staley argues in this book, when Senecan tragedy fails to stage virtue we should see in this not the failure of Stoicism but a Stoic conception of tragedy as the right vehicle for imaging Seneca's familiar world of madmen and fools. Senecan tragedy enacts Aristotle's conception of the genre as a vivid image of the truth and treats tragedy as a natural venue in which to explore the human soul. Staley's reading of Seneca's plays draws on current scholarship about Stoicism as well as on the writings of Renaissance authors like Sir Philip Sidney, who borrowed from Seneca the word "idea" to designate what we would now label as a "theory" of tragedy. Seneca and the Idea of Tragedy will appeal broadly to students and scholars of classics, ancient philosophy, and English literature. |
Contents
The Idea of Tragedy | 3 |
1 Theorizing Tragedy | 11 |
2 The Very Ends of Poesy | 24 |
3 A Just and Lively Image | 52 |
4 The Soul of Tragedy | 66 |
5 Reading Monsters | 96 |
Stoic Tragedy | 121 |
Notes | 137 |
| 163 | |
| 175 | |
| 181 | |
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Common terms and phrases
acknowledges Aeneid Allecto ancient anger Apology argued Aristotelian Aristotle Aristotle's Atreus audience catharsis chapter character characterizes Chrysippus Cicero cites cognitive conception create criticism death describes Diogenes discussion divination drama emotions enargeia Epictetus epistemology essay Euripides fact fear Freud Furies genre Greville Halliwell Hercules Furens hero human idea of tragedy imago imitation ineptiae interpretation judgment Juno kataleptic literary Loeb Classical Library Longinus madness Medea metaphor mime mimesis mind mirror monsters monstra monstrous monstrum moral myths nature noted notion Oedipus offers oratory passion Petronius Phaedra phantasia philosophical Plato pleasure plot poetic poetry Posidonius psychology Quintilian regularly rhetorical role Roman scene Schiesaro Sene Seneca Seneca's plays Senecan tragedy Sidney Sidney's Socrates sort soul stage Stoic Stoic epistemology Stoic tradition Stoicism Strabo sublime suggests term theater theory Thyestes tion Tiresias trag tragedy's tragic poet trans Trevet Troades truth turned Vergil visual vivid words writing