Thyestes

38 pages • 1 hour read

Thyestes

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 65

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Summary

Background

Act Summaries & Analyses

Acts I-II

Act III

Acts IV-V

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Themes

The Destructive Power of Desire

Seneca’s Thyestes is perhaps first and foremost a play about the destructiveness of desire. The figure of Tantalus, brought on stage in Act I, becomes the central symbol for the “tantalizing” desire that drives Atreus and Thyestes, the main characters of the play. Tantalus was famous for the eternal hunger and thirst with which he was tormented in the underworld, a “desperate yearning hunger” (158), leading him to reflect:

Is anything worse

Than to be always wet and always thirsty, worse than hunger

Yearning without end? (4-6).

When the Fury sends Thyestes to Argos, it is so that he can fill his descendants Atreus and Thyestes with the same desires that torment him:

let Desire

conquer the mighty leaders of the people;

let sexual wickedness be the least of sins;

let moral righteousness, and faithfulness,

and all law perish. Let even heaven be touched

by human wickedness; why do the stars still shine,

and give their usual fiery glory to the world?

Let deep night come, let day fall from the sky (44-51).

Consumed by such desire, Atreus cannot be content with the power he holds. He sees it virtually as his duty as a king to take revenge on his brother Thyestes, and cannot be satisfied unless this revenge is as terrible as can be. His words in Act II, “I will leave no crime undone, and none will be enough” (256), foreshadow his lament in Act V that his revenge was ultimately inadequate because it could still have been even more terrible. Atreus is thus a kingly figure who accepts no curtailing of his desires, neither by human or divine laws nor through his own self-control. He represents the dangers of unregulated desire in both a political and a personal sense: His unchecked desires lead him to commit terrible acts of violence against others, and he in turn will eventually fall prey—according to later myths—to violence himself because of what he has done.

Thyestes, like Atreus, has felt—and, despite himself, continues to feel—the pangs of desire, but he also is able to understand the danger of desire. As he tells his son, absolute power means nothing “if you have no desires” (443). However, in the end, Thyestes is no more able to control his desires than Atreus, and this is what leads him to his ruin. Even the supremely powerful Atreus is finally shown as powerless before his insatiable desires, which constantly impel him to greater and greater wickedness. The Chorus observes:

Pleasure and pain

Give way in turn; but pleasure is more brief.

A fleeting hour exchanges high and low (595-97).

Desire, and the pleasures it pursues, are transient. This is why self-governance and self-control—in the Chorus’s view, at least—is the only true power. Only somebody who is in control of themselves can escape the destructive tyranny of their desires.

The Overturning of the Natural Order

Desire destroys not only human lives and relationships but is even capable of overturning the natural order. At the climax of the play, when Thyestes eats his children, the sun turns back in horror. This seems to have been a traditional element of the myth, one many centuries old by the time Seneca wrote his play, but the Chorus’s interpretation of the sun’s retreat as a harbinger of the destruction of the world also reflects contemporary ideas from Stoic as well as Epicurean philosophy, both of which predicted that a cataclysmic event would end the world.

As early as Act I, Tantalus’s arrival—and thus the arrival of unchecked desire—is accompanied by the drying-up of the earth and the retreat of the sea and the firmament. By inspiring destructive passions in which nothing is “out-of-bounds” (40), the Fury causes nature to reject its own limits. This is the “trembling frenzy” (260) that Atreus feels deep within his body and that causes the world to shake:

Earth bellows from below,

The day is calm but I hear thunder; through all its towers

The palace crashes and seems to break. Shaken,

The Lares turn away. Let it be, let this evil come about,

Despite your terror, gods (262-66).

Atreus does not heed nature’s warning. He does not care that nature and even the gods are retreating from his crime, even when the fire tries to flee from the flesh of Thyestes’s murdered sons as though burning “against its will” (770) or when the sun “retreated / and drowned the broken day in the middle sky” (776-77). Rather than fear these portents, Atreus takes them as a sign that the gods have fled and that he has taken their place.

The growing sense of natural upheaval in the play is mirrored by Thyestes’s queasy feeling as he realizes that he has been tricked into doing something terrible. As the earth and sky shake, Thyestes wonders with dread “What is this rumbling inside me? / What is trembling? I feel a restless weight” (999-1000). The Chorus speculates that the world is ending, that the gods have finally punished humanity’s sins with universal destruction. For Thyestes, for whom the source of this destruction is his own belly, even this is not enough. To Thyestes, the gods “have gone away” (1021) and are “ashamed” (1035), suggesting that even divine arbiters of morality and justice can no longer be relied upon to intervene. Indeed, there are no gods in the world of Seneca’s Thyestes—only desire and its destructive effect on the natural order, suggesting that desire recognizes no laws but its own.

The Meaning and Nature of Power

Lying behind the consuming desires of Atreus and Thyestes is an understanding—or misunderstanding—of the nature of power and kingship. Atreus, the portrait of a tyrant taken to its furthest extreme, thinks that having power means being able to do whatever one wants. As king, says Atreus, he can make his people “accept whatever [he does] / and even praise it” (207-08), regardless of whether what he does is good or bad: “Trust, faith, goodness / are merely private goals; kings follow their own way” (217-18). Atreus’s views of power are thus entirely self-serving. He believes he wields power purely for his own benefit, and not for that of his subjects. Further, instead of being the figurehead of law and order, he asserts that he can “follow his own way” and be as lawless as he likes, as he assumes there will never be anyone to put a check on his power.

However, as the Chorus insists in Ode 2, this is not the true meaning of power:

In your greed for power, you do not know

Where kingship really lies.

[…]

A king is one who can set fear aside,

Who has no wickedness inside his heart.

[…]

A king is a man without fear,

A king is a man without desire.

Everyone makes this kingdom for himself (342-90).

As the Chorus argues, a true king “has no wickedness inside his heart” and is both “a man without fear” and a “man without desire.” The Chorus therefore shifts Atreus’s definition of kingship as unchecked power over others to a definition that stresses power over oneself and one’s own desires. The Chorus even claims that “Everyone makes this kingdom for himself,” thereby asserting that true “kingship” is within reach of every human, as self-mastery is the only kind of mastery that is not dependent upon the fluctuations of time or earthly fortune.

The play also suggests that temporal power, even when possessed, is not to the wielder’s advantage, pointing out that the external trappings of power are often subject to unseen pressures and dangers. Such power begets fear, as any king must always be anxious about losing their power:

That man is worried as he wields his sceptre,

Fearfully trying to tell the future, the chances

Which whirl the world around, and fickle time (604-06).

Thyestes, unlike Atreus, is able at least to pay intellectual lip-service to these philosophical ideas about power and kingship. He reflects in Act III that he is likely better off remaining in exile, admitting that in losing power he also lost the terrible fear that came with it. Now, at the promise of having his power restored, the fear has been restored also. Nevertheless, Thyestes is no more able than Atreus to resign himself to the philosophical life praised by the Chorus. The Chorus contrasts the figure of a fearful king to that of a philosophical sage:

The zigzag of the lightning’s path

will never touch him, nor the wind

from the east, seizing hold of the sea;

nor the savage swelling of the wild

Adriatic Sea.

No soldier’s spear

nor drawn swords can subdue him.

From a place of safety,

he looks down on everything,

and willingly meets his fate.

He does not complain at dying (358-68).

The wise follower of self-control and simplicity thus avoids the fear and power struggles that beset those, like Atreus and Thyestes, who are enthralled to exercising earthly power. Instead, the sage avoids all tumults of fortune—symbolized here by the natural imagery of the “lightning,” “wind,” and “sea”—and secures for himself “a place of safety,” entertaining no fear of death. Such a person, the Chorus suggests, is always more fortunate than a king, regardless of what his social state may be.