Here is an exciting topic: revenge in Seneca’s tragedies conjures vistas of bloody tyrants and murderous mothers, monstrous deeds born of injured pride, ghosts unassuaged, landscapes punishing their despoilers, diminishment and weakness transformed into torrential fury. The thunder of revenge is what characterised Seneca for generations of Renaissance tragedians, cinching his reputation as a poet of moral outrage whose rhetoric of violence resounded across centuries of European drama.
Basil L. P. Nelis’ debut monograph tones down this tumult to offer a more nuanced picture of Senecan revenge as a pervasive structural feature. Moving beyond the dominant figures of Atreus and Medea, Nelis demonstrates how vengeful motives and motifs saturate Senecan drama from the highest to the lowest levels, from Juno’s divine grievances in Hercules Furens to the chthonic eruption of Achilles’ ghost in Troades. Revenge in Nelis’ analysis becomes a way of reading these plays, not just in terms of single, core action, but as a nexus of competing priorities that drive events forward. In Seneca’s Agamemnon alone, vengeful sentiments motivate Thyestes’ ghost, Clytemnestra, Cassandra, and the storm that sinks the Greek ships. The play’s final line evokes vengeance’s overspill into future generations as Cassandra remarks darkly to Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, veniet et vobis furor (Ag. 1012).
Nelis’ strategy is apt for illustrating this multiplicity of Senecan vengeance, though granular discussion sometimes obscures his main points. The first part of his book provides an “analytical survey” of vengeance in six of Seneca’s eight tragedies: Agamemnon; Phaedra; Medea; Troades; Hercules Furens; and Thyestes. There is a chapter for each play. The topic is handled carefully, leading to some enjoyable insights such as the role of Hecuba’s talionic logic in Troades or Medea’s links to Δίκη as goddess of justice. But discussion overall is too discursive; Nelis’ tendency to explore the tragedies’ intertextual background or intervene in longstanding debates stalls his argument. A section on the logic of Juno’s prologue (Her. 1-74) has recourse to Euripides, Plato, Stoic fragments, Vergil, Homer, Ovid, Ennius, Empedocles, Horace, Quintilian, and Longinus all in just eight dizzying pages. More focus was needed to bring Nelis’ ideas to proper fruition.
Part 1 structures its material according to two propositions: 1) that revenge in Senecan tragedy is fundamentally associated with and perpetrated by women; and 2) that Seneca is alert to the paradox of revenge as both payback and overcompensation for injuries received. Nelis approaches the first of these two ideas as an issue of emotional control: the ancients perceived women as less emotionally regulated than men and therefore more prone to the kind of passionate action dictated by revenge. This view is complexified—mildly—by questions of social roles and status, leading us to consider how vengeance intersects with the identities of ‘mother’, ‘wife’ or ‘daughter’, and whether, as Aristotle implies, women’s relative powerlessness precludes their pursuing retaliation. Powerlessness is indeed an issue, though not just in the limited terms envisaged by Nelis, for in restricting his reasoning to the hypotheses found in ancient sources, he has neglected revenge’s longstanding characterisation as an antidote for weakness. The avenger’s anger stems from their impression of having been marginalised and made to feel lesser, of having their authority and agency curtailed, their capacity for self-definition denied, their fate and reputation shaped by another’s often careless and self-serving actions. This list could just as easily be a catalogue of women’s oppression, and while I do not wish to impose upon the ancient world anachronistic standards of female self-actualisation, it is not hard to see how vengeance could be associated with the preserve of women and their particular grievances. Seneca’s Atreus illustrates the idea beautifully, for as Nelis shows—building on work by Alessandro Schiesaro (2003), Cedric Littlewood (2008), and Eric Dodson-Robinson (2019)[1]—this Argive tyrant conceives of vengeance as a reinstatement of his own masculinity and a consequent feminisation of his victim, Thyestes. The link between women and revenge seems far richer than Nelis acknowledges.
There are other missed opportunities as well. Associations between vengeance and women may also provide a framework for thinking about Seneca’s portrayal of landscapes as entities that behave vindictively when their autonomy is compromised. Seneca’s Medea imagines the sea exacting punishment for its conquest by the Argo; the vengeful heroine works alongside this vengeful environment, even merges with it, as both seek female-oriented retaliation for the supposedly masculine crimes of conquest, depredation, and abandonment. Nelis’ chapter on Phaedra draws some fine connections between Venus’ and nature’s vengeful stance and argues for the monstrous sea-bull evoking Seneca’s Medea, but does not take the final, summative step of correlating female with environmental vengeance. Do they operate in tandem? Are they linked through motifs of vulnerability and exploitation, or by being imagined as wild? Four decades ago, in his magnificent Language and Desire in Seneca’s Phaedra (1986), Charles Segal drew attention to the landscape’s deeply eroticized representation in the play; Nelis could have done something equivalent for nature’s role in exacting payback.
More successful is Nelis’ treatment of revenge as a simultaneously proportionate and excessive action. Its dynamic in Thyestes is well known, but Nelis sharpens our focus by highlighting its role in the Fury’s prologue and its possible intertextual debt to Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra. Discussion of retaliatory equivalence in Medea is likewise enjoyable, especially when Nelis explains the odd symmetry of Medea’s revenge (odd because it corresponds to her own earlier crimes, not Jason’s). Yet this reviewer still found herself yearning for a more synoptic view, one that shows how vengeance warps the principles of talio into competitive display. Perhaps the greatest degree of equivalence lies between the punishment the avenger exacts and the pain they feel, while vengeance’s position outside the law necessitates its portrayal as fundamentally transgressive (Francis Bacon famously dubbed it “rough justice”). Arguably the most fascinating quality of Senecan revenge is its agonism, which drives characters not only to outdo their enemies or former selves, but even to trump each other’s speech in those stichomythic and antilabic duels that are regarded the hallmark of Seneca’s tragic style. Verbal contests between Medea and Creon, Atreus and Thyestes, Megara and Lycus, Phaedra and Theseus, evoke the dynamic of revenge in miniature, as each speaker recapitulates—and escalates—the terms of the argument. If, with Nelis, we accept vengeance as an all-pervasive feature of Senecan tragedy, why not investigate its lurking in the form as well as the content of Senecan language?
Nelis’ selection of texts also raises questions, for despite his claims to “analyse all instances of revenge in the…eight plays” of the Seneca corpus (p. 5), he omits Oedipus and Phoenissae entirely, without explanation. In Phoenissae, both Oedipus and Polynices voice vengeful sentiments (Phoen. 90-91 and 643-44) and there are many passages that echo Thyestes (e.g. Phoen. 352-56). Oedipus’ plot is still more concerned with revenge, driven as it is by the need to atone for Laius’ death (viz. ulcisci at Oed. 218). In this tragedy, Laius’ ghost is archetypally vengeful (so archetypal he becomes the model for Agrippina’s vengeful ghost in Octavia), and Oedipus himself is quick to burn with retaliatory anger. The protagonist’s final act of self-punishment can even be read as an innovative instance of revenge performed, like Medea’s, in response to his own earlier crimes. (Once glimpsed, this correlation opens a new window on Medea’s vengeance as well: to what extent can it, too, be considered self-punishment?) Granted Oedipus does not draw connections between vengeance and women, nor does it involve the kind of vengeful plotting that Nelis focuses on in the other tragedies, but these concerns do not justify its exclusion from a supposedly comprehensive survey.
Following the “analytical survey”, the second, shorter part of Nelis’ monograph links revenge in the tragedies to Seneca’s Stoic concept of ira, using Medea as a case study. In theory, this is an excellent move for three reasons: 1) because the Stoics defined anger chiefly as vengeance; 2) because Seneca’s de Ira is a vital yet underutilised resource for understanding the tragedies; and 3) because philosophers prior to Seneca had long used Medea as a paradigm for the conflict between passion and reason. Discussion in this part ranges widely from ancient philosophical views of anger, and the Stoic reception of Euripides’ Medea, to the therapeutic advice of Seneca’s passion-restraint scenes and the inter-association of Furies with phantasia.
In practice, however, some of Nelis’ best ideas are again obscured by less exciting (and less necessary?) rehearsals of stale scholarly debates about the relationship between Seneca’s philosophy and his tragedies, or how to interpret his unique three-stage development of passions at de Ira 2.4.1-2. This background tends to detract from rather than add to the argument, even more so when Nelis refrains from making his own contribution or postpones stating which interpretation he prefers. Nevertheless, he does propose some innovative theories, such as the idea that Seneca’s Stoic monism explains the otherwise odd combination of furor and rationality we see in his avengers. This is intriguing. Because Stoics believed in a unified soul and did not allow for a combination of rational and irrational impulses à la Plato, they argued that passions arose from rational, albeit mistaken, judgements. Medea perceives that Jason has left her for another woman; she interprets this as an iniuria because—in Stoic terms—she has attributed misplaced value to his love and her consequent social stability; next, she decides this injury requires retaliation and pursues vengeance accordingly. This process, Nelis contends, is “a particularly fruitful model for interpreting…‘revenge tragedy’” (p. 204), especially its Senecan incarnation, in which avengers tend to analyse the decisions by which they arrive at their bloody deeds. Why do Atreus and Medea spend so much time deliberating about how they feel and how they should act? Can Stoic theories of anger explain the curiously calculating quality of their rage?
While attractive, Nelis’ hypothesis is not watertight, because Stoic monism surely precludes the co-existence of rationality and true anger, even if the former is required to reach the latter. Do Senecan avengers occupy the second Senecan stage of passion’s development, in which they could still be dissuaded from their angry course, or the third, in which they pursue vengeance irremediably? Perhaps their habit of self-interrogation more properly relates to a strategy of ‘critical spectatorship’ that some scholars detect in Senecan tragedy? It is a pity that Nelis does not tackle such questions, which would have enriched his analysis immeasurably. On the other hand, it is good that his study gives rise to them.
In fact, this verdict could be applied to the book overall, as a study that adumbrates several fascinating insights without granting them full definition. There are surely caveats to the claim that women are the main agents of vengeance in Senecan tragedy—what about Theseus, Oedipus, Hercules, and all those ghosts?—but the hypothesis is worthwhile for drawing attention to deeper issues of social inferiority, autonomy, and emotional control. Likewise, the question of proportionate versus excessive retaliation is central to the entire concept of revenge, from its interplay with law and justice to its performance as a single tragic action, though Nelis sometimes loses sight of this immense significance in his eagerness to pursue subsidiary tasks such as unpicking the tragedies’ intra- and intertextual layers. In the end, the chief problem is not Nelis’ topic but its execution, for in this instance the devil does not reside in the details but right at the centre of this big, violent picture that demands our unflinching gaze.
Notes
[1] Schiesaro, A. (2003) The Passions in Play: Thyestes and the Dynamics of Senecan Drama. Cambridge; Littlewood, C. (2008) ‘Gender and Power in Seneca’s Thyestes’ in J. G. Fitch (ed.) Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Seneca. Oxford 244-63; Dodson-Robinson, E. (2019) Revenge, Agency and Identity from European Drama to Asian Film. Leiden.