Dialogues and Letters Read Free Page B

INFLUENCE
    As we have already seen, Seneca enjoyed great popularity and influence in later European literature through both his prose and his verse. The plays do not feature in this selection, but we should note the extraordinary impact they had on European tragedy, especially French and English. In fact, Seneca had to wait many centuries before his plays received recognition. Writing in the late first century AD , Quintilian does not include Seneca in his list of Latin tragedians, even though he quotes a line from the
Medea
(453) as Seneca’s (Quint. 9.2.8–9). However, along with other classical writers Seneca enjoyed a boom in popularity in what is called the ‘twelfth-century Renaissance’, and by the late thirteenth century his tragedies were attracting attention from scholars and imitators in Italy. England followed suit in the early fourteenth century with Nicholas Trevet’s commentary on the tragedies; in around 1484 they were first printed at Ferrara; and during and after the sixteenth century the Senecan model became deeply influential on French and English tragedians. In France Garnier’s tragedies (1563–90) and in England Kyd’s
Spanish Tragedy
(
c
. 1590) were early examples of this influence; and in due course the much greater figures of Shakespeare, Corneille and Racine give clear evidence of the Senecan style. It is the style particularly that we should note here: many rhetorical and declamatory techniques and possibly too other formal elements like the chorus and the five-act structure. (The crude horrors of the ‘revenge’ tragedy – mass murders, ghosts and so on – whichused to be laid at Seneca’s door are nowadays rightly seen as less due to Seneca than endemic in earlier vernacular drama.) That was the zenith of Seneca’s reputation as a playwright, and thereafter interest in the plays declined sharply. In the late nineteenth century scholarly interest revived in the text of the tragedies, but Seneca had to wait until the mid to late twentieth century before there was a real resurgence of wider interest in and, more important, understanding of his plays, and editions, translations – even performances – have by now given them a modest revival. 1
    The knowledge and influence of Seneca’s prose works have also had a chequered history. From the second century onwards into the early medieval period he cannot be said to have had any dynamic philosophical influence. The reason for this is clearly that, as we saw above, he was not an original thinker but a brilliant formulator and popularizer of received Stoic doctrines. So later thinkers interested in Stoicism would go straight to the earlier Stoic writers, who were still available to them, rather than to the filter of Seneca’s writings. With the subsequent loss of earlier texts Seneca’s position as Stoic witness and authority acquired greater dominance: he was the survivor. On the other hand, as a very readable moralizer he was remembered and quoted throughout most of this period. He is mentioned frequently by Christian writers, starting with Tertullian (
c
. 160–
c
. 240). On the whole they approved of him: many of his moral precepts harmonized with Christian teaching, and he was very quotable. Lactantius (
c
. 240–
c
. 320) was enthusiastic about him; Jerome (
c
. 348–420) more temperate. Augustine (354–430), on the other hand, was much more critical, and accused Seneca of hypocrisy in not matching his life-style to his teaching (
Civ
. 6.10–11). At around this time too, in the fourth century, a curious fillip was given to Seneca’s reputation by the appearance of a so-called correspondence between him and St Paul. These letters are certainly spurious, and were no doubt forged in order to establish a closer link between Seneca and Christianity. From the eleventh century they are actually found in manuscripts attached to the genuine lettersto