Four Tragedies and Octavia (Penguin Classics)

Rating:
Summary: Forget what you know about classical tragedy...
Review: And forget what you know about Seneca the Stoic. In his tragedies, the younger Seneca gives full reign to what Nietzsche later (and perhaps unrelatedly) recognized as the Dionysian: lust, anger, revenge, and unadulerated humanity in its most elemental. Although some apprecition of classical mythology is needed to enter these texts fully, once you're in them, you look around, and find yourself in a house of horrors or else in the deepest region of the unconscious.

Read _Thyestes_, and you'll have the underpinning for horror and suspense from Poe to Jim Thompson to the _Blair Witch Project_.

You could take my word for it, or you could listen to Seneca's admirers and imitators: Webster, Jonson, Shakespeare...

Rating:
Summary: Forget what you know about classical tragedy...
Review: And forget what you know about Seneca the Stoic. In his tragedies, the younger Seneca gives full reign to what Nietzsche later (and perhaps unrelatedly) recognized as the Dionysian: lust, anger, revenge, and unadulerated humanity in its most elemental. Although some apprecition of classical mythology is needed to enter these texts fully, once you're in them, you look around, and find yourself in a house of horrors or else in the deepest region of the unconscious.

Read _Thyestes_, and you'll have the underpinning for horror and suspense from Poe to Jim Thompson to the _Blair Witch Project_.

You could take my word for it, or you could listen to Seneca's admirers and imitators: Webster, Jonson, Shakespeare...

Rating:
Summary: Vulgar and unrestrained
Review: As we all know, classical rules of poetry dictate that no violence must be shown on stage, that the protagonist must be admirable except for one fatal flaw, that the declamation must be dignified and poetic. Seneca violates all of these rules, plus many others. His protagonists are nothing but shrieking hysterical fools, and the stage is awash in blood by the end of every play. As for the "poetry," it is nonexistent. Perhaps I just read a bad translation, but I still recommend that anyone who is seeking a Roman imitation of Sophocles or Aeschylus to forgo Seneca.