OUP (2023) h/b 789pp £190.00 (ISBN 9780198856948)
The central story of this play is searingly simple: Hercules comes home from his final labour just in time to rescue his family from the evil designs of the tyrant Lycus—only to go mad and murder them all. As with many madness narratives from the ancient world (such as that in Sophocles’ Ajax) the anger here is misdirected due to hallucination. The final act of Seneca’s fine play shows us Hercules wrestling with his conscience and contemplating suicide which he terms labore bis seno amplius (‘grander than twelve labours’), only for his aged stepfather Amphitryon to threaten to do the same. The play ends with Hercules deciding to live (‘add this labour to the labours of Hercules—let us live’ [1315-6]), shored up by the wise and kindly Theseus—a neat touch as Hercules has rescued Theseus from the underworld, only for the Athenian to return the favour. Whether Hercules accepts the offer of residence in Athens is never stated and (as B. nicely puts it (p.679)) ‘the play stops rather than ends.’
The play shows us people in the round and all the characters are fleshed out as people. Even the villain Lycus gets some good lines in his spat with Amphitryon and Megara as he seeks (having killed her father and brothers) to impose droit de seigneur and marry the hero’s forsaken wife; and B. well points out (p.79) that the same actor probably played both Hercules and Lycus, giving us both positive and negative versions of the same virtus. Euripides’ Lycus was only interested in killing Heracles’ family, but for Seneca’s more nuanced (and more Roman) tyrant that is only a back-up plan, and his real quest is to shore up his new position as king by marriage into this exalted bloodline. Amphitryon, in particular, emerges in Seneca as a Priam-like figure, noble and fearless despite his physical weakness and far more of a father to the hero than the god who begot him and then forgot him (as Hercules states at 1203). Where Euripides’ Amphitryon tears into the hero’s divine father (Heracles 339-347) but his Heracles will not accept that gods commit such crimes (1341-6), Seneca does not lay the blame for the murderous madness explicitly on the gods. ‘There is no divine figure such as Euripides’ Lyssa to enter the stage to make Hercules mad… Hercules becomes mad because he is Hercules. He is a victim of his own ambitious, over-reaching, narcissistic, isolated and violent self’ (p.111, emphasis B.’s). Juno in the prologue sees this: cutting an almost forlorn figure (‘no more than Jupiter’s sister’ these days) she calls on personified but unspecified ‘anger’ to lay low the hero, concluding (84-5):
quaeris Alcidae parem?/ nemo est nisi ipse. bella iam secum gerat.
(‘You seek a match for Hercules? There’s none but he himself. Now he must war with himself.’)
The play is thus a psychological study of brutalisation, of the impact of violence, of the quest for virtus (see pp. 102-4), of the sheer power of guilt and shame to destroy people’s lives. It is as relevant today as it was when it was first written in the age of Nero.
This volume is the latest in a long-running series of lavish editions of Seneca dramas by B., following on from Octavia (2008), Oedipus (2011), Medea (2014), Thyestes (2017), and Agamemnon (2019). The lengthy introduction to this volume sensibly repeats some general material from the introductions to his other editions in this series—where the material is common to all the plays as in the case of ‘Seneca and Rome’ and the ‘Roman Theatre’—but there are also excellent new sections pertaining to this play, its myth and its reception.
The text is based on Zwierlein’s OCT but B. differs from this in over 80 places and these variants are listed as a separate appendix to the critical apparatus—which appears in continuous prose (pp. 253-265) rather than being placed at the foot of each page. The text itself is printed with a facing translation which is close enough to assist readers who are trying to understand the Latin and yet which can be read (and performed) in its own right. The book is clearly aimed at the widest possible audience: ‘drama students, to Latin students at every stage of the language, to professional scholars of Classics, Theatre and Comparative Literature’ as well as to anyone interested in the ‘cultural dynamics of literary reception and the interplay of theatre and history.’ With this broad church in mind, all Latin and Greek in the commentary is translated and very little prior knowledge is assumed on the part of the reader.
The commentary is outstanding. B. gives us meticulous scholarship on every page but also manages also to keep a constant eye on what is happening on stage. To take a couple of examples: the note on 686-8 gives the reader a fine piece of ornithology (where we learn to tell a bubo from a strix), as well as tying the verb gemit to the ‘implied semiotics of Cocytus’; the notes on 1022-8 deal with the symptoms of furious rage, show us how Seneca has Megara murdered in a more gruesome manner than Euripides’ victim while also seeing how ‘Roman’ is the image of the decapitated body; Amphitryon’s cernere hoc audes (‘can you view this?’ [1026]) is shown to be a ‘powerful metatheatrical moment’ with ‘patent ramifications for the audience’; and at 1027, B. points out the surprise latent in the oxymoronic vivax senectus (‘life-clinging age’).
Mythological references (such as Philomela at 149 and the detailed account of the labours in the lengthy ‘Hercules Ode [524-91]) are clearly explained, and B. is always able to refer the reader of this drama to Seneca’s words on similar themes in his prose texts (see e.g. the note on the lex talionis at 735). Above all, B. is alert to the clear intertextual references in this highly literary play, showing us how Seneca makes (often ironic) use of a wide range of earlier authors—see for instance the magisterial note on 1237 where the extent of Hercules’ culpability is well explored, setting the issues in their literary and philosophical context. The Latin of this play is not especially difficult but (again) B. takes pains to explain any potentially difficult phrases, while always being ready to point out literary and stylistic features at work in the text. B. is throughout this book a friendly and encouraging guide to the reader who may be coming to Senecan drama for the first time.
The book is immaculately produced and proof-read and comes complete with indexes of Latin words and of references to other Senecan dramas as well as a general index. The ‘select’ bibliography runs to 46 pages. This edition of the play is unlikely to be superseded for many years to come and we all owe B. a massive debt of gratitude for making this wonderful play so accessible to the wide readership it deserves.
John Godwin