[This was written and published Jul 2, 2025, but for some unknowable reason Google has had tremendous difficulty finding it… so it's being reposted now.]
Dear Mr. Rowe,
I have just listened to your episode on Seneca (recorded four or five years ago) for a second time, after hearing many of your episodes on Shakespeare, Kyd, Ben Jonson, etc., within the last twelve months.
Seneca was such an enormous influence on Shakespeare and his contemporaries that I think —now— you must look back on Seneca's tragedies with a somewhat different angle than you had at that time.
I recently "performed" Seneca's Agamemnon (in English) aloud —a very dramatic reading of a very dramatic text— while recovering from surgery and confined to bed rest. This was after I was released from the hospital, so I did not have an involuntary audience of other patients, but I joked that the neighbors would be complaining —as there is so much agony written into the text that must be performed "at the top of your voice" if it is going to be performed at all.
Seneca's tragedies are hard to read.
They're hard to perform.
They're hard to appreciate.
However, they have to be appreciated as a condemnation of the morality and superstition of the earlier Greek authors —including Homer— and can't merely be seen as a failure to reproduce the "refinement" of Euripides and Sophocles.
Clytemnestra demands to know why she should face the death penalty for sleeping with another man (during a ten year separation from her husband) while her husband has had several lovers, several utterly immoral affairs, and he is neither faulted nor punished for the same sin in any way.
The morality and magic of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey are condemned: not satirized, but condemned.
This is a tradition already well attested in Plato: that some people (or at least some extant authors and philosophers) really did reject the morality that young people were being taught in memorizing and reciting Homer by the lyre.
For Seneca, the moral significance of Agamemnon engaging in human sacrifice is utterly different from what it was for Homer —or for anyone alive within several generations of Homer's authorship. Seneca does not believe in the moral system of supernatural contamination and purification that the original stories are written to convey.
For Seneca, when Ajax the Lesser defies the gods, he is right —he is heroic in shouting out, "you haven't killed me yet". For Homer, the whole fleet of boats is destroyed because Ajax the Lesser failed to ritually atone for violating a purely superstitious set of rules.
Seneca is condemning the cycles of revenge (Clytemnestra, Electra, etc.) in a way that the ancient Greeks do not: Seneca regards as a voluntary evil what the Greeks regarded as inexorable, necessary and even heroic (thus, tragic). And Seneca does make direct, bold statements that would have gotten you killed in Athens, saying to the audience that there are no gods in the sky, and there is no fate that will avenge these atrocities (such as a mother killing her own children).
He has a point. To whom is this shocking today? Only to the type of people who choose to learn Latin: Seneca has certainly aged better than Homer, Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus, etc.
From a modern perspective, Seneca seems to be a nihilistic atheist, but it might be more true that he's merely condemning this particular form of religion while believing in another: Protestant condemnations of Catholicism may seem misleadingly atheistic, because (from a 21st century perspective) the critique of one religion applies so closely to the other. It is difficult to take a Protestant seriously who condemns the Pope as an Antichrist, but such people take themselves very seriously indeed —and Seneca, in his milieu, may fall into this camp.
At this moment, I cannot really say to what extent Seneca is endorsing atheism, or to what extent he's using atheist statements (in the mouths of his characters) to merely dramatize the moral point he's making.
I think your first podcast (on Seneca) was influenced by secondary sources that are shocked (and offended) by Seneca's tragedies because the (19th or 20th century) authors still want to believe that Seneca was "a Christian before Christ".
He wasn't. He was the man who stood on trial before the Senate for an illicit love affair with a woman 22 years younger than himself —and he received the death penalty for it, despite his own high level of rhetorical ability to plead his own case (not to mention his wealth, power, etc.). This death penalty was commuted to exile, but nevertheless: that one incident shows that "the real Seneca" was more aware of the destructive potential of human desire than the pious Latin scholars would like to admit to themselves.
These people who say that the plays couldn't possibly be intended for performance in front of a live audience: they're not people with experience in the theatre as actors, nor as directors, nor as impressarios, nor as anything else. They're "Golden Axe People", as I like to say: they're the type of people who end up with PhDs in classics.
And they're the same people who say that the author of the tragedies and the author of the philosophical letters cannot possibly be one and the same —simply because they're horrified by the tragedies, and they prefer the pious, ostentatiously humble, tone of the letters. Ovid, also, seems humble in his letters, but we probably get a better sense of the real man from his poetry.
These moderns, these Golden Axe People, are so horrified that they cannot even imagine that Seneca's tragedies are trying to make a moral point —with Nero himself being one of the people in the audience this point is driven home to.
Only the most unsophisticated reading of the text could suppose that this is something like a horror movie: that it is intended to entertain through sheer dint of violence and gore. Instead, Seneca's tragedies offer a kind of morality lecture for an audience that won't listen to morality lectures anymore: the adult Nero.
With thanks for your time and consideration,
Eisel Mazard
