CHAP. III - THE TRAGEDIES OF SENECA

Summary

To understand the atmosphere, the time and the public of Seneca the tragedian, we must take up the thread where we left it, at the fall of the Republic.

The Empire was a new world. Rome the city was becoming ever less, the Provinces ever more. All through the first centuries a.d. the capital is sinking step by step to a mere municipality; that process is as yet only beginning; but there is already a new Cosmopolitanism; the Syrian Orontes, as Juvenal wails, is pouring into the Tiber, the distinctively Roman tone of Roman literature is gone. The Romanised provincial slowly provincialises Rome. And so in Seneca himself, the critics have traced the egotism of the hidalgo of Castile, the macabre rant, the melodramatic cruelty of the land of bullfights and Lope de Vega. Much of this may well be fanciful; but that Roman literature with all this influx of exotics should become less classical was inevitable; and it becomes comprehensible too that the France and Spain and England of the Renaissance should have found in the tragedies of a Spaniard, written for an already provincialised Rome, something far nearer akin to them and theirs than the pure and classic splendours, the white radiance of the Attic Stage.

But secondly it was not merely this literary invasion of the barbarians that made Silver Latin less classical; it was also the mere fact that it followed the supremely classical Golden Age of the Augustans.