Thyestes

Seneca’s Thyestes can be translated into a five-act structure, like most of Seneca’s other surviving tragedies. Each act is made up of interactions between the characters and is followed by a choral ode. These odes are what divide the acts from one another. This dramatic structure is traditional, going back in some form to the Greek tragedies performed in Athens in the fifth century BCE. Also like Greek tragedy, Seneca’s tragedies never have more than three speaking actors, meaning that there are never more than three speaking parts in any scene (and also that a single actor would have often needed to play multiple roles during performance). Seneca’s traditional influences are evident also from the subject matter of his play, an ancient Greek myth that was extremely popular among earlier Athenian tragedians. Although none of these earlier tragedies survive today, there can be no doubt that Seneca drew on them in composing his own dramatization of the myth.

The first two acts of Seneca’s Thyestes prefigure the horror of the events that are to ensue, foreshadowing The Destructive Power of Desire. The presence of the Ghost of Tantalus at the beginning of the play serves as a potent symbol: Tantalus’s crime and punishment highlight the destructive desires and passions plaguing the main characters of the play (Atreus and Thyestes), showing the heredity and inescapability of these desires and menacing that the worst is always still to come. As Tantalus himself proclaims:

Now from my family line a swarm of children

Creeps out, who will surpass their ancestors.

They will make me look innocent. No one has dared such deeds (18-20).

This is a fitting introduction to the cruel plot Atreus puts into effect in the play, and this would have been appreciated by anybody who was already familiar with the myth—as many of Seneca’s original audiences or readers would have been. The entrance of the Fury to goad Tantalus on heightens the drama. The powers of Hell itself are mustered here to bring about the terrible action of the play—a trope that would become increasingly common in Latin literature in the first century BCE and the first few centuries CE (compare the role of the Fury Alecto in Book 7 of Virgil’s Aeneid or of the Fury Tisiphone in Book 1 of Statius’s Thebaid).

It is telling that the Fury is the only divinity who shows herself in the play. Although the gods will be invoked repeatedly in later scenes, especially at the end, they never show themselves again. Indeed, the final act of the play will go so far as to suggest that Atreus’s actions have resulted in The Overturning of the Natural Order, horrifying the gods themselves. However, it is also the gods, apparently, who send Tantalus to inspire Atreus’s actions—after all, it is none other than the Fury who commands Tantalus:

[To] cause chaos,

Bring evil to the house, create in the kings

The urge to fight and kill (83-85).

What is the gods’ motivation for bringing about this horror, a horror from which nature itself will recoil (as even the Fury acknowledges in the first act)? No satisfying answer is ever given to this question, only that this is what has been “decreed by fate” (75). In the world of the play, fate or fortune is inescapable, as the Chorus says at the end of the third ode, and seems to be connected with the hereditary wickedness of Tantalus’s descendants.

It is thus in vain that the Chorus hopes for an escape from the “endless cycle of catastrophe” (133). Atreus and Thyestes are both committed to continuing the old pattern, seeming even to realize that they are fated to nothing but evil and suffering: Hence is Atreus’s hunger for a suitable revenge that “must be made to fit [Tantalus’s and Pelops’s] model” (243), as if deliberately trying to live up to, or even surpass, the terrible deeds of his ancestors.

Behind Atreus’s chilling hate—whose somatic symptoms, described in Act II, suggest the invisible influence of the Ghost of Tantalus—lies an obsession with power. Atreus is the image of the ancient power, wanting above all to be able to do whatever he wants. He believes that to be king is to have the right of fulfilling his every desire. Furthermore, for Atreus, power feeds an insatiable and destructive desire. He rejects morality, declaring, “I will leave no crime undone, and none will be enough” (256). Instead of using his power for good, he will instead use it to gain vengeance over his brother, enabling the cycle of familial violence to continue still further.

Nevertheless, this is not true power, at least not in the eyes of the Chorus, whose songs are full of the Stoic ideas professed by Seneca the Younger. The Chorus thus deprecates the destructiveness of greed and ambition, defining true power and kingship as residing in self-control and self-governance instead: A true king is able to set aside fear, desire, and wickedness: “Everyone makes this kingdom for himself” (390). Even as Atreus and Thyestes compete bitterly for the throne, the Chorus introduces the idea that what they are fighting for is illusory and pointless, and that it is much better to be “satisfied with sweet peace” (393).