been murdered and fed to him by his brother Atreus:
Why, fool, what griefs, what dangers
Does your imagination see?
Believe your brother with an open heart.
Your fears, whatever they may be,
Are either groundless, or too late.19
The formulation ‘either groundless or too late’ is disturbingly characteristic of the tragedies. In this instance, it is already ‘too late’, and the unarticulated fear that has hung over Thyestes since the beginning of the play has now overtaken him, coming to pass in a form beyond anything he could have imagined. The future has already happened and it is only by not yet knowing the truth that Thyestes is able partially, but only temporarily, to hold off its full realisation. In Act Five, Thyestes is the last to learn what it is that he has already done.
There is a strange relationship between time and fear and time and knowledge in the tragedies. Time can speed up or slow down, go forwards or turn back on itself, stretch out or stall in the presence or absence of knowledge or fear. In the moments after something bad is revealed to have happened, the time before a character found out the truth can feel to him retrospectively warped. The structure of this play reflects the real instability of time, a deep discrepancy between time as it is felt internally and how it exists externally. By refusing to follow a sequential timeline, Seneca creates a different kind of framework that feels more like how it is to be stuck inside the nightmare-like logic of a bad experience. We cannot return to the moments before we knew something bad had already happened. When a truth is discovered, the past is retrospectively reshaped by the present and what was small, insignificant and fleeting at the time becomes large. There is a sickening vertigo in this forwards-backwards motion which acts in defiance of simple cause and effect, for the effect almost creates its cause in retrospect. Boundaries that are crossed blindly in real time can only be seen afterwards and from a distance. The tragedies seem to be fixated with these boundary lines: Where does a tragedy start? Where does it finish? And where is ‘too late’ located if anywhere? Ignorance, like fear, is a mechanism for holding back or temporarily halting the flow of time, it creates a temporary safety. But fear, ignorance and paralysis are the unhealthy versions of stopping, just as revenge and greed, lies and secrets provide the fuel for a negative, unhealthy version of progress.
The tragedy of Phaedra is set in motion when Phaedra – the wife of Theseus – attempts to seduce her step-son Hippolytus, and when rejected, publicly accuses him of rape. As so often in Seneca’s tragedies, the terrible consequences of the breakdown of natural relationships subsequently unfold like a distorted version of the genetic code.
When Theseus hears the allegations against his son, he calls on the Furies to exact a terrible punishment on Hippolytus. The innocent son is brutally killed and his body is torn into fragments. The image of the physically broken child lying in pieces before his guilty father powerfully recurs in Thyestes, Phaedra and Hercules. The fragmentation of human bodies – and more specifically of children’s bodies – is another consequence of the forces at work within the tragedies that are breaking apart the connective bonds of the Stoic cosmos. There is a constant struggle and a constant failure within the tragedies to keep hold of the whole of something, whether that be the whole of a body, a family, or a much larger cosmic whole.
In Act Five of Phaedra, having discovered his wife’s deception too late to save his son, Theseus weeps over his dismembered child and desperately attempts to rebuild Hippolytus’s body out of the rubble of his limbs. As so often, it is only after time has run out and characters have reached rock bottom that a kind of space or stillness emerges that means that the tragedy has finally ground to a halt. I am interested in Seneca’s work in these areas: what happens after the breaking point has been reached and what does a character do after it is already too late? Amid all the fury and chaos of the tragedies this is one of the moments of quiet where the resolve to repair and preserve something of what has been broken resurfaces:theseus
theseus:Trembling hands, be firm
For this sad service; cheeks, dry up your tears!
Here is a father building, limb by limb,
A body for his son … Here is a piece,
Misshapen, horrible, each side of it
Injured and torn. What part of you it is
I cannot tell, but it is part of you.
So … put it there … not where it ought to be,
But where there is a place for it.20
The father tries to reconstruct his offspring, but here in the chaotic world of the tragedies the starting point is utter fragmentation, and the process of rebuilding cannot hope to reconstruct the body as ‘it ought to be’. In this world of physically and mentally broken people where minds and bodies have been mangled, there can only be this hesitant, stilted attempt to retain and reassemble some trace of the human form. It is impossible to replicate life as it was before tragedy, but, out of the jumble of pieces that we are left with, the task is to create something that resembles life: a second version of ourselves.
More than any of Seneca’s plays, Hercules is preoccupied with what happens after tragedy. Here the powerful force of energy or momentum which made Hercules a hero is subverted when he murders his own family in a frenzied attack fuelled by madness. It is, however, that same force of energy which must somehow be preserved and reactivated if he is to survive beyond the immediate tragedy.
After the slaughter, Hercules falls into a deep sleep and when he eventually wakes to find his step-father Amphitryon and friend Theseus watching over him, he has no recollection of what has happened:
amphitryon:These troubles must just pass in silence.
hercules:And I remain unavenged?
amphitryon:Revenge often does harm.
hercules:Has anyone passively endured such troubles?
amphitryon:Anyone who feared worse.
hercules:Can one fear anything, father, that is even worse or more painful than this?
amphitryon:How little of your calamity you understand!
hercules:Have pity, father, I hold out my hands in supplication. What? He pulled back from my hands: the crime is lurking here. Why this blood? What of that shaft, soaked by a boy’s blood. Now I see my weapons. I need not ask about the hand. Who could have bent that bow, what hand flexed the string that barely yields to me? I turn to both of you again, father is this crime mine? They are silent: it is mine.21
Amphitryon attempts to keep the next wave of the tragedy at bay by holding back the knowledge of what Hercules has done. But what begins as a father’s attempt to counsel his son falls apart as the truth bursts out of the very silence that Amphitryon has tried to create as a protection. His counsel fails when it comes up against the enormity of the tragedy. His body cannot help revealing the truth that his brain had attempted to conceal as – despite himself – Amphitryon instinctively flinches from his son’s supplicating hands. In the final line, Hercules’s question ‘is this crime mine?’ is answered with a silence that can have no other meaning than ‘it is mine’.
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