Octavia: Attributed to Seneca Review

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Octavia: Attributed to Seneca ReviewWhether Seneca the Stoic philosopher, and incidentally the tutor of the young Nero, actually wrote the several plays attributed to him has been a subject of heated scholarly debate since the invention of scholars. There is little in the bombastic and cynical drama that expounds the stoic virtues except for an occasional soliloquoy about the joys of simplicity. The truth is that the plays are not very appealing to modern sensibilities and have never convinced many people of their stage-worthiness either in Latin or in faithful translation, yet they contributed greatly, in plot elements and in 'borrowed' speeches, to the greatest works of the greatest European playwrights, Shakespeare and Racine among others. Seneca was not held in much esteem in the late Roman Empire, nor in the high Middle Ages, nor in modern times, but he was venerated among the humanist circles of the 16th and 17th Centuries.
My interest in the 'historical' drama Octavia, traditionally attributed to Seneca, is the influence it had on Giovanni Francesco Busanello, the librettist of Claudio Monteverdi's glorious opera L'Incoronazione di Poppea. Sure enough, it's obvious, that influence! The scene in which Seneca and Nero argue over the morality of absolute rule comes straight from the Latin play. Monteverdi/Busanello's two nurses, one with Octavia and one with Poppea, appear first in the Latin script, though they do not play the roles of comic relief that they have in the opera. Monteverdi's operas were staged largely for a very elite audience of educated aristocrats and their client humanists, and it seems almost inevitable that they would have spotted such derivations instantly.
I also have an occasional whimsical urge to maintain my ability to read Latin, since I was of a generation in public schools when the college-bound kids studied Latin, when my ivy-walled college in fact printed our diplomas in Latin, when my farmer uncles would try to bamboozle the kids with pig-Latin and I could astonish them with the real thing. But the Latin of the play Octavia would have been impenetrable without the notes, the glossary, and the literal translation of this fine scholarly edition, which I borrowed from a university library.
My five-star rating is for the scholarship, not for the drama. Honestly, as a piece of literature, Octavia is slim pickings. None of the other plays definitely attributed to Seneca are exciting reading in themselves, either. Only serious classicists and historians of the late Renaissance could possibly find them of interest. There is, however, a quite adequate English translation of Octavia and four of Seneca's tragedies - Thyestes, Phaedra, The Trojan Women, and Oedipus - in a modestly-priced Penguin Classics edition. Read it, and marvel at the genius of the Italian humanists, to make profound art from such meager sources!Octavia: Attributed to Seneca Overview

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