Stoicism in drama? Usage of stoic precepts in Seneca's plays

Abstract

It is almost a consensus, among those who study the works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, that this philosopher’s tragedies set forth aspects of the stoic doctrine. However, there are only a few studies actually dedicated to deeply analysing how the philosophic themes might have been transposed to the dramatic verse. Therefore, the goal in this paper is to trace an interpretation that could, in a more precise manner, delimitate how these transpositions might occur. For this purpose, an argument was developed with the goal of identifying, in Seneca’s Agamemnon, some examples that could show, in an organized way, the transparency of a topic that is cherished by stoicism: the struggle between human reason and passions, which is addressed by Seneca especially in his treaty On Anger. Through a mindful reading this treaty and of Agamemnon, as well as of three other of Seneca’s tragedies and of some other of his philosophical treaties, together with an analysis of the corpus of letters written by the stoic, it was possible to determine how Seneca’s tragic writing seems to really be oriented towards disseminating stoic themes since many verses in the dramas support this interpretation. Thus, this paper is a stepping stone so that the debate over this hypothesis might become prolific, in order to make the possibility of interpreting senecan tragedies as a means of teaching philosophy increasingly tangible.