Text Access
Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. Thyestes. Trans. E. F. Watling. Four Tragedies and Octavia. 2 ed. Penguin Classics. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1966. 41–92. (Available via bookstore.)
Journal Prompt
How to perform the "big reveal" in the Feast of Thyestes scene? (pp. 88-90, Penguin Seneca)
One of the controversies surrounding Seneca's tragedies is the question of whether they were originally meant to be performed — indeed, whether they're performable at all. Coffey and Mayer in their 1990 commentary on the Phaedra note research suggesting that scenes from the tragedy of this period could well have been performed on the stage. Then there is C. J. Herington, who, in his article on Senecan tragedy, argues that it is both speakable out loud and performable on stage in the original Latin.
Let's put that to the test, though in English translation. Our journal prompt will focus on the Act Five dinner scene ("Feast of Thyestes") with its Big Reveal.
- We're talking about the central bit of that scene, starting with Penguin Edition page 88, "THYESTES: What agitation in my stomach swells?"; and finishing page 90, "ATREUS: You, you yourself have dined on your sons’ flesh! You have consumed this monstrous banquet!"
I'm asking you in your entries to reflect on how you'd direct that passage from Act Five to make it come alive on stage rather than stay dead on the page — to see if that can even be done. Suggested things to think about:
- Chemistry between the characters
- Emotion, and how to convey it through
- Tone of voice
- Gesture/movement
- Anything else?
- Play it straight? For laughs? What?
(I have something on Senecan tragedy and performance on the Phaedra study guide page. It might, though, be better to ignore that for the purposes of this journal entry.)
Introduction to the Play
For an introduction to Seneca's life, times, and career, along with an introduction to various features of Senecan drama and contemporary history, see the study guide to Seneca's Phaedra.
Myth
Your texts provide a reasonably adequate mythical background to the play (Feast of Thyestes, etc.), though most of that will be remembered from Aeschylus' Oresteia. Anyway, here follows a brief rehearsal of the prequel:
- Tantalus, a king in what is now Turkey, slaughters and dismembers his son, Pelops, and then feeds the pieces to the gods. Angered, they restore Pelops to life, and punish Tantalus in the Underworld with "tantalizing" foods and drinks constantly promising themselves to him, then withdrawing themselves from reach.
- Pelops travels to Greece, where he wins Hippodamia, his bride, by cheating her father, Oenomaus, in a chariot race: he sabotages Oenomaus's car, killing him.
- Pelops' two sons, Atreus and Thyestes, contest the kingship of Argos, which goes back and forth between them, with the out-of-power brother forced to endure exile. Whoever has in his possession the Ram with the Golden Fleece will rule as king. At a certain point, when Atreus gains hold of it, Thyestes seduces Atreus' wife to gain her cooperation in seizing the ram. But because of his wife's infidelity, Atreus, is unsure as to the paternity of his two sons: Agamemenon and Menelaus.
- Atreus ends up defeating his brother, who goes into exile; Atreus how has the ram, symbol of royal power. But Atreus is unsatisfied with that victory; he is determined to wreak a horrible revenge, one so horrible that, as proves the case, the gods won't permit even the sun's rays to shine on the deed. . . .
Characters, Setting
The play takes place in Mycenae, also called Argos in the play, mostly in the royal palace there. (Those are actually two, separate cities. Both are associated with the Atreus-and-Thyestes extended family; maybe it isn't so surprising that they begin to merge in the Greco-Roman imagination.)
Here follow the characters:
Ghost of Tantalus, grandfather of Atreus and Thyestes. Tantalus in life offered his son Pelops to the gods as a feast. The gods restored Pelops to life and punished Tantalus. The action of Seneca's Thyestes can be seen as further punishment for Tantalus, whose mere presence in ghostly form at the beginning of the play guarantees that his descendents will be condemned not simply to perpetuate the tragic cycle of violence and crime but to intensify it.
Fury (Furia), the Roman equivalent of an Erinys, or deity charged with tormenting the guilty. In this play, the Fury forces the ghost of Tantalus to revisit the world of the living.
Atreus and Thyestes, sons of Pelops and contenders for the throne of Mycenae-Argos (here it gets called both names) in Greece. In the play, Thyestes comes back from exile to a horrific welcome.
The Minister (or maybe better, Attendant) of Atreus. He is the voice of reason trying to talk Atreus out of the extreme vengeance the latter is plotting against his brother.
Sons of Thyestes: Tantalus (named after his great grandfather), Pleisthenes, and an unnamed third. They're the main dish in the play's famous feast. Only Tantalus speaks in the play.
A Messenger, who in Act 4 describes the grisly sacrifice of Thyestes' children and the equally grisly feast prepared from their protesting flesh.
Chorus.
Theme and Motif
Political Themes
If any play by Seneca suggests a grim meditation on the evils of tyranny, this is it. Hence a rehash of Accius' theme of hatred of the tyrant ("Let theme hate so long as they fear," Atreus) in the Minister's lines, "Men compelled by fear / to praise, may be by fear compelled to hate" (p. 54).
But can we read the Thyestes as a meditation on imperial rule? Or is its action too over-the-top to offer any sort of real-world comment?
The Play of Darkness and Perverse Exaggeration
The key image and motif in this play is the "play" of darkness, which suffuses the drama almost the way light does many a religious icon.
A lot of that has to do with the play's mythical background, according to which the sun itself retreated in its course across the sky rather than shine its rays on Atreus' crime. In Seneca, though, that detail takes on huge poetic, rhetorical, and moral significance. The question is whether in so doing, the play indulges in a figure of thought known as the "pathetic fallacy," which is when inanimate or non-human things show evidence of human emotion: "The trees and fields wept over the death of the shepherd who had once grazed his flocks in their midst."
Are we dealing with something similar in Seneca's Thyestes, for instance, when the sun undergoes eclipse rather than gaze upon our play's crimes? Is that mere poetic flourish? Rhetorical exaggeration? Something else?
One critic, C. J. Herington, clearly thinks something else when, in commenting on Seneca's prose, he writes: "There is no difference for Seneca — and this a point which should interest readers of his tragedy Thyestes — between physical or moral light or darkness. . ." (in Arion 5 [1966] p. 433). Put differently, the pathetic fallacy is, in a sense, for Seneca no fallacy at all. For it expresses deep truths about the interconnectedness of the physical and the spiritual. Metaphor and simile disappear; the spiritual bleakness of evil becomes the moral equivalent of a starless, moonless gloom.
I'm not so sure. Prominent in Roman rhetoric and poetics is a certain penchant for what I call "perverse exaggeration," for stating something at the limit of the plausible or tolerable and then ostentatiously surpassing that limit. So, for instance, Atreus doesn't just exult in a crime so abhorrent that the gods refuse to let the sun's rays reveal to them the extent of the horror. Atreus absolutely wishes he could force the gods to watch!
So is the eclipse of the sun, the reluctance of the cooking fire to touch the meat skewered over it, etc. etc., — is all of that an expression of the interconnectedness of nature, human and cosmic? Or does the meaning lie in the perversity of the exaggeration itself? I don't know. . . .
Locus horridus: Description of the Sacrificial Grove (messenger speech, pp. 74 ff.)
Important in this play is the description of the scene of Atreus' crime, a "grove of horrors" at the spatial and moral heart of the royal palace. That grove exemplifies a literary special effect termed locus horridus: a rhetorically or poetically ornate description of a creepy place. In Seneca's Thyestes, this particular example of locus horridus is all important, as it symbolically unites the play's physical and moral universe with recognizably Roman motifs having to do with sacrifice. (No, the Romans did NOT ordinarily practice human sacrifice!) Try to see how that description along with the description of the whole palace might come together in an architectural-landscaping counterpart to Seneca's moral and political concerns.
Notes
45 ff. Ghost of Tantalus. Tantalus, grandfather of Atreus and Thyestes, starts by listing the torments of the underworld — torments to which guilty souls like himself are subjected. The details aren't important, just that he's wondering what new torment he's been called to earth to suffer.
45-46. "While stands the house / Of Pelops, Minos never will be idle." "The house of Pelops" refers to the family consisting of Pelops' descendants: Atreus and his offspring, Thyestes and his offspring. As for Minos, here, it is his role in judging the dead that is referred to. What Tantalus means is that his descendants continue to send guilty souls for judgment in the Underworld.
47. "Here will be one guest / Not unaccustomed to such villainies." Tantalus, whom the Fury addresses, in life cooked a feast for the gods, the main course of which was his own son, Pelops. Pelops was restored to life, while Tantalus, in death, was condemned to eternal torment. Tantalus as further punishment, has been brought back to witness a replay of just such an awful feast.
49. Isthmus, Lerna, Phoroneus, etc. Those are all places meant to suggest both Greece as a whole and Argos and its environs — places that abhor the presence of a Tantalus, and show it in various ways.
50. Pisa, Corinthian, isthmus, etc. All places very near or not too far from Argos. The chorus prays that a god friendly to Argos and places nearby protect the city from just the tragic curse the Fury was planning against it. (This Pisa isn't Italian Pisa, as in the "Tower of." It's the place also known as Olympia, the home of the ancient Olympic Games.)
55. "the royal byres of Pelops." The royal barn, where the king's animals are kept.
57. "Was there not an abominable banquet seen in the house of Tereus?" Atreus gets the idea for killing and cooking Thyestes' sons from Procne, wife of Tereus; she slaughtered and cooked up their son Itys as vengeance on her husband.
62. cannon balls, guns. Very free translation; the Latin only speaks of catapults and battering rams.
70. Mycenae. A city very near Argos and part of the kingdom Atreus rules over.
70. Bruttian Sea, Ithaca, etc. The chorus is talking about other regions and peoples. Worried about whether storms will spread ruin, Sicilian Cyclopes and others are implicitly compared to the Argive Greeks worried that a "storm" of civil war will engulf their city. Calm seas, then, are like political calm.
71. "himself / fears for his crown." "Himself" here is any king.
73. "Fugitive Vandals." The Latin text doesn't refer to Vandals; it refers to Alani, an ancient alliance of tribes residing in what is now southeast Russia. The translator switches in "Vandals," a barbaric tribe of Germans to the north, just to capture that sense of savage and warlike folks.
74. "Won at the sea of Myrto." This refers back to the chariot race that Pelops, father of Atreus and Thyestes, won by cheating, killing Oenomaus, father of Hippodamia, whose hand in marriage Pelops thereby won.
74. "Phrygian crown of Pelops." Phrygia, in what is now Turkey, is where Pelops was originally from.
74. "consult the auspices." That's a Roman way of saying "seek to learn what the future holds," as indicated by the auspicia, signs sent from the gods.
75 ff. The murder of Thyestes' sons is described as a standard ritual sacrifice: preparation of the victims, killing of them, reading the signs of the internal organs to determine if the gods accept the offering. As at a normal sacrifice, so here, the flesh of the victims will be feasted on. Only here, that flesh is human, not animal. Note the anatomical detail with which Seneca describes the butchering of the bodies in preparation for cooking.
77. "He held himself erect, Unflinching; prayers, that would have died unheard, He scorned to utter." Tantalus Junior, the eldest son of Thyestes and the first to be slain, dies like a good Stoic and a good Roman.
80. "Phoebus." The sun.
80. Vesper." The evening star. (It rises with the onset of night.) The world will be astonished by the unexpected darkness.
80. "Are the Giants escaped from their prison and threatening war?" etc. Is all nature descending into chaos as a result of these horrific acts? There are Stoic resonances here. The Chorus fears a recurrence of the empyrosis, the destruction of the universe by fire and its rebirth, a kind of Greco-Roman Ragnarok. Put differently, universal civil war on steroids.
90. "Of Heniochus upon the awful crags Of barren Caucasus." Heniochus, the "Charioteer," would seem to have been a king in the Caucasus region. The idea seems to be that he was a savage type.
90. "Procrustes," the "stretcher, would stretch people to death.
91. "I did it all myself" etc. Weirdly like a YouTube cooking video.