Iwona Słomak
Iwona Słomak is Associate Professor in the Institute of Literary Studies at the University of Silesia. Her research interests include Latin drama, rhetoric and poetics. She is currently doing research on Seneca's drama.
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own original interpretative concept, based on an in-depth reading of the text, taking into account the background of the rest of the Seneca’s oeuvre, as well as the canon of texts that are potentially a point of reference for him and a source of intertextual references. At the same time, the monograph is addressed both to a specialized audience—historians of
literature, drama, culture and ideas—and to a wide range of readers interested in ancient literature and culture, including especially its rationalizing trend and bearing witness to the dynamic changes taking place in the perception of the function of literature and the conventions of its reception. For these reasons, the work includes chapters of a problem-
oriented and synthesizing nature, as well as a section comprising a systematic discussion of the work’s longer semantic wholes and individual places, arranged according to the order of the dialogue and choral parts, and within those—the thought and verse periods. These chapters contain numerous internal references. Thanks to this compositional concept, it is possible both to read the work successively in order—beginning with
cross-cutting issues and overall conclusions, through to individual premises and explanations—and to focus only on selected formal issues, thematic threads or places.
The first chapter (“Author, Dating, Testimony and Reception Outline”) presents a calendar of Seneca the Younger’s life and work. Against this background, the author discusses the issue of the difficulty of dating and establishing the chronology of Seneca’s plays—a difficulty that results from the partial opacity of the undoubtedly existing references and commentaries in the work to certain phenomena contemporary to Seneca.
The problem of testimony and reception of Seneca’s plays is also briefly presented here, along with a selection of the most important bibliography on the subject. In the next two chapters (“The Family of Pelops—the ancient literary tradition” and “The Pelopians in ancient drama”), the monograph elaborates on traditional plot elements used by the playwright.
The author of this study draws attention to the multiplicity of variants of these particular elements functioning in literary circulation, and raises the question of the arbitrariness with which ancient authors drew from it. Among the conclusions reached in this part of the work, one of the most important points raised by the author is the essentially working and media status of mythical plot in Seneca’s craft, who, drawing on tradition on the one hand and innovating on the other, seems to have aimed mainly at selecting the means of expression for the ideas he himself is interested in promoting. Hence, it would be advisable to treat with a greater dose of discernment the assumptions about the author’s alleged limitation by the plot matter he is developing, which sometimes support the play’s partial interpretive conclusions. The following section (“Tradition and innovation
in Seneca’s dramas from a genological perspective: composition, choruses, time and place”) discusses selected formal aspects of the Senecan plays, with particular emphasis on Thyestes. This part of the synthesis serves, on the one hand, to indicate precisely the extent to which Seneca realizes the genological paradigm associated with Greek tragedy
of the classical period, and, on the other hand, is intended to demonstrate the significant innovations noticeable in the surviving serious Roman plays in the context of the aforementioned paradigm. In the synthetic chapter devoted to the semantic dominants of the play (“Interpretation”), the author critically compiles Thyestes’ interpretive proposals to date and succinctly presents the results of her own findings in this regard. She points out the limitations of approaches that favor the de facto perspective of selected characters in the drama—which is a contradiction of beliefs that Seneca elsewhere gives ample expression to in the discursive form. She also raises the issue of Seneca’s dramatic strategy of
refraining from a clearly moralizing tone toward the controversial element he brings to the stage. By avoiding monologizing the story, Seneca avoids open didacticism; he also engages the intellectual potential rather than the emotions of the audience, who, having traced the characters’ ventures, their ethopoeia and the course of their arguments, is confronted with the necessity of dealing independently with the issues presented to them for
consideration. For Thyestes, these issues include, in particular, those related to the theme of tyrannical power, the obsessions that accompany the fascination with power, and religious discourse in the service of tyrannical oppression. The last and longest part of the work (“Commentary”) discusses the various parts of the play. Depending on their specifics, the relevant commentary either takes the form of shorter subsections containing philological-historical explanations or of longer problem-oriented discussions. In this part, the author, in addition to critically addressing the state of research, presents her own original interpretive hypotheses, along with extensive argumentation. There is room here for a new reading of the play’s prologue, with an indication of its paradigmatic nature and an emphasis that it is possible to transcend the limitations of the hitherto literal and figurative reading of the drama’s first act. The fifth act of the play, among others, is also discussed at particular length, where a return to a more plausible manuscript lesson significantly
changes the perspective of interpretation of the work as a whole.
The work is accompanied by an appendix, which includes a new edition of the work along with a critical apparatus, an introduction into the manuscript tradition of Seneca’s dramas, and the first translation of Thyestes into modern Polish.