We have referred elsewhere to Aristotle’s pronouncement in his Poetics on the role of the chorus in tragedy: ‘the chorus must be regarded as one of the actors; being part of the whole, it should take part in the action (sunagonízesthai), not as in Euripides, but as in Sophocles’. In the wake of this famous normative statement it is often said that the chorus of Euripides’ tragedies no longer played the central role it had played in those of Sophocles. According to Aristotle the tragic poet Agathon had been the first to turn the chorus’ interventions into mere musical intermezzos or embólima, and many have ascribed the same tendency to Euripides. If there is one play of Euripides that does not justify this belief it is his second Hippolytus. This play shows the master tragedian at the apex of his poetic career.

Chapter 3 charts the prevalence of physical description in Senecan tragedy, arguing that this is not a symptom of Rezitationsdrama, but a consequence of Seneca’s interest in physiognomy and pathogonomy, both of which use bodily signals to evaluate the quality of people’s internal psychological / emotional / mental states. Like coherence and exemplarity, physiognomic analysis unites the quasi-personal and purely fictional elements of character, on the one hand by encouraging audiences to infer a psychology behind characters’ surfaces, and on the other by focusing attention on textual signs and symbols. This chapter discusses the confluence of bodily and mental states in Seneca’s Phaedra and Oedipus.

This chapter explores what we mean by ‘adaptation’ when discussing classic Greek tragedy in performance and to what extent terms such as translation, version, (re)writing, (re)imagining, etc. can or indeed should be distinguished from one another. Examining the nomenclature attached to four different recent theatrical adaptations of classic Greek tragedy, namely Medea, Phaedra, Iphigenia, and The Persians, this chapter establishes that the differentiation between adaptation and related modalities such as rewriting, translation, and version, is intrinsically linked to processes of reception. Elucidating the difficulty of establishing boundaries between original writing and rewriting, or indeed adaptation for performance, this chapter takes the position that the act of (re)writing asserts the validity of an established dramatic text; it confirms that a text belongs to the category of classic drama. At the same time, it promises an often radical (re)investigation of its premises.

This chapter continues the theme of dissemination by investigating two Pompeian wall paintings of Medea – one from the House of Jason and the other from the House of the Dioscuri – that show her contemplating the murder of her children. Building on the previous chapter, the argument now turns to the literal and figurative domestication of this ultimate monstrosity. By analyzing these paintings in conjunction with Ovid’s Heroides 12 (Medea’s epistle to Jason), we see how these images of Medea in a domestic setting invite viewers to (re)create the heroine’s own inner struggle – a process that would have rendered her sympathetic in the eyes of ancient spectators attuned to the figure of an abandoned elegiac lover. Whereas the lovers discussed in the previous chapters primarily evince tenderness through togetherness, Medea in her isolation becomes sympathetic through Jason’s conspicuous absence, which drives her to her horrific deed. That absence, of course, is also the necessary conceit of Ovid’s epistolary elegiac fictions. Far from the haughty, vengeful goddess of Euripidean tragedy, Medea in the poetry and painting of first-century Rome displays tender characteristics that resonate with early Imperial notions of marriage and domesticity.

Senecan tragedy is also imperial in that it often locates its characters in relation to the disorientation of global empire. Hercules Furens places its hero’s violent madness at the very moment of world conquest, for instance, and Medea, which features a very famous choral ode about how sea-voyaging rewrites the world, is about the global reach of Roman ambition and desire. Several of Seneca’s philosophical writings (and especially his De Consolatione ad Helviam) likewise examine the tension between stoic self-command and the expansive restlessness of imperial desire. This chapter reads Titus Andronicus as a Senecan exploration of a late-imperial Roman moment in which the Roman scepter commands the whole world and in which racially heterogeneous people and competing modes of imaging civic life are all uneasily incorporated at once. It understands Senecan tragedy as a literary resource for imagining the resulting disorientation. The last section of the chapter examines Titus together with George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar, and argues that Senecan tragedy provides a model of psychological interiority that is paired with blackface to create the emergent stage stereotype of the wicked Moor.

Senecan tragedy is also imperial in that it often locates its characters in relation to the disorientation of global empire. Hercules Furens places its hero’s violent madness at the very moment of world conquest, for instance, and Medea, which features a very famous choral ode about how sea-voyaging rewrites the world, is about the global reach of Roman ambition and desire. Several of Seneca’s philosophical writings (and especially his De Consolatione ad Helviam) likewise examine the tension between stoic self-command and the expansive restlessness of imperial desire. This chapter reads Titus Andronicus as a Senecan exploration of a late-imperial Roman moment in which the Roman scepter commands the whole world and in which racially heterogeneous people and competing modes of imaging civic life are all uneasily incorporated at once. It understands Senecan tragedy as a literary resource for imagining the resulting disorientation. The last section of the chapter examines Titus together with George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar, and argues that Senecan tragedy provides a model of psychological interiority that is paired with blackface to create the emergent stage stereotype of the wicked Moor.