PseudoSeneca’s
Octavia, or. . .
“Tragedy Is US”?. . .
Cameo with busts of Nero and
Octavia, 1st cent. CE
“Trope of Decline”
“Is all this glory doomed to age with time
and perish in blind chaos? Then must come
Once more upon the world a day of death,
When skies must fall and our unworthy race
Be blotted out, until a brighter dawn
Bring in a new and better generation
Like that which walked upon a younger world
When Saturn was ruler of the sky.” (p. 272)
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Agenda
• Discussion
• Is Octavia Tragedy?
• Recap and Update
• Seneca and “Pseudo-Seneca,” the Octavia
• Genre, Rhetoric, Theme
• Seneca, Pseudo-Seneca. . .
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Discussion
Is Octavia Tragedy?
Is Octavia Tragedy?
• Why tragic?
• How like/unlike. . .
• Athenian tragedy?
• Roman Republican tragedy?
• Senecan tragedy?
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Comments. . .
no
•
yes
all the characters know
their fate
•
•
no character can learn
from their suffering
•
•
•
no error
•
pitiful that she can’t
learn
• we want her to learn
• oct’s nurse is genuinely
deluded
sympathy (but not pity)
for oct
(o’s nurse reassuring?)
nero doesn’t learn!!!
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Recap and Update
Seneca and “Pseudo-Seneca,” the Octavia
Play Facts
• Author
• Genre
• Composition date,
•
•
context
Setting
Characters
Nero, ca. 55 CE
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Thyestes: “Senecan Formula”
Thematic Structure
Dramatic Structure
CLOUD OF EVIL
ACT 1. Fury incites Tantalus’ ghost. Choral ode. Prayer
against tragic cycle.
DEFEAT OF REASON
BY PASSION
ACT 2. Atreus and Minister. Debate, portrait in tyranny.
EXPLOSION OF EVIL
ACT 3 cont. Atreus & Thyestes – “reconciliation.”
ACT 3. Thyestes and sons. Retirement v. return.
ACT 4. Messenger. Sacrifice, locus horridus.
ACT 5. Atreus, Thyestes. Recognition & reversal.
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Octavia: “Senecan Formula”?
Thematic Structure
Dramatic Structure
CLOUD OF EVIL
SCENE 1, day 1. Octavia, Nurse, Chorus. (Octavia’s plight, what
to do.)
DEFEAT OF REASON SCENE 2. Seneca, Nero, Prefect, Chorus. (Seneca remonstrates
BY PASSION
with Nero.)
EXPLOSION OF EVIL SCENE 3, day 2. Agrippina’s Ghost, Octavia, Chorus. (Restless
dead, indignant living.)
SCENE 4, day 3. Poppaea, Nurse, Chorus. (Poppaea’s dream.)
SCENE 5. Messenger, Chorus. (Angry mob. Chorus: Love v.
arms.)
SCENE 6. Nero, Prefect. (The tyrant rages.)
SCENE 7. Chorus, Octavia. (Fickle mob, Octavia’s lament.)
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Genre, Rhetoric, Theme
Seneca, Pseudo-Seneca. . .
Praetexta in crepidata’s Shoes?
“No other fate can equal mine, … not though I
should remember thine, Electra …” (Octavia, p.
259)
Electra ≈ Octavia
Orestes ≈ Britannicus
Agamemnon ≈ Claudius
Praetexta in crepidata’s Shoes?
“… shall our Augustus banish from her
ancestral house / His sister wife?” (Chorus, p. 268)
Octavia ≈ Juno/Hera
“Augustus”-Nero ≈ Jupiter/Zeus
SENECA
PS-SENECA
SENTENTIA
quod non potest vult posse qui
nimium potest (Nurse, Thyestes 215).
“A man who can do much would like
to do / More than he can.” (Penguin
p. 106)
odio pari | ardet maritus, mutua
flagrant face (Nurse, lines 49-50).
“She loathes and shuns; he burns
with equal fire of venomous hatred”
(Penguin p. 259)
PERVERSE EXAGGERATION
“I walk among the stars! Above the
world / My proud head reaches up to
heaven’s height” (Atreus, Thyestes p.
84)
“. . . the forum / Stank with putrid
gore / that dripped from rotting
faces” (Nero on past civil war, p. 277)
THE TYRANT’S CREED, THE TYRANT’S DILEMMA
“Let them hate so long as they fear” (Atreus in Accius Atreus)
“Men compelled by fear / to praise, may be by fear compelled to hate”
(Minister in Seneca Thyestes)
“Let him be just who has no need to fear” (Nero in Octavia)
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Trope of Decline & mos maiorum
(“Tragedy Is Us,” Seneca, p. 268, 273)
“… our forefathers knew true Roman virtue”
“Now upon our heads
The gathered weight of centuries of sin
Falls like a breaking flood. We are crushed down
Under our own intolerable age
When crime is king, impiety let loose,
And lawless love gives reign to Lechery.”
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