Seneca's Medea

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (born around 4 bce in the city now known as Córdoba, Spain), was a philosopher, tragedian, and influential figure in the Roman imperial court during the Julio-Claudian dynasty. He served as advisor to Nero, who ordered his suicide in 65 ce. Seneca’s extant corpus consists of works in a range of genres, from philosophical treatises to verse tragedies. The latter are foundational to the Western literary tradition, for the ten Latin plays attributed to Seneca (eight without serious question; the Hercules Oetaeus and Octavia doubtfully) provide a crucial link between Greek drama and the tragedies of Shakespeare, Corneille, and other early modern playwrights. Medea is characteristic of Senecan drama in terms of its stylized portrayal of extreme violence, its complex and ambiguous engagement with Stoic philosophical ideas, and other features as well. Though it may be based on the eponymous Euripidean tragedy, Seneca’s Medea is hardly derivative and, in fact, few studies devote much energy to probing Euripides’ influence. Seneca’s Medea, both on its own and in combination with his other dramas, poses compelling questions about how and whether to integrate passionate emotion into one’s life as well as laying the foundation for Renaissance revenge tragedy. Accordingly, since the second half of the 20th century, critics have focused not only on the role Seneca’s dramas, including Medea, play in the tragic tradition and related issues of early modern reception, but also on how they incorporate and challenge Stoic philosophy, in particular the elusive concept of the self, constructed as much as innate or discovered according to Seneca’s philosophical writings. Scholars have also considered what Medea has to say about gender, social, and political dynamics, especially against the cultural, ideological, and political backdrop of early imperial Rome. With this play, as with all Senecan tragedy, questions about staging, including the metatheatrical and ethical implications of Medea’s self-consciously spectacular violence, remain open, with important work relevant to these problems continuing to be published. Seneca’s Medea has generated eclectic literary interpretations, and many, even those that may at first glance seem dated, remain compelling. Frequently, scholars treat Seneca’s Medea alongside his other tragedies or in the context of broader analysis of his entire oeuvre. For that reason, some of the works listed deal as much with the Senecan corpus as they do with Medea in particular. Where feasible, this bibliography directs readers to sections most relevant to Medea, but it is not always possible to excise treatment of that tragedy from a scholar’s larger argument.