Medea’s position, as an infuriated exile from her homeland, committed both to revenge on her enemy and to maintaining her own dignity and autonomy, is like a dark echo of Seneca’s own life in exile. Her rage is brilliantly imagined, and at times she seems almost to be quoting from Seneca’s own treatise on anger, as when she declares how difficult it is for Creon, king of Corinth, to cure his anger:
I learnt in my own royal house how hard
it is to turn a mind from rage when it is roused,
and how a person who has touched proud scepters
believes a king should go where anger leads.
(Medea 203–206)
Medea is highly conscious of how rage can delude a person’s mind and of how particularly corrupting anger can be for those in positions of authority. Other lines anticipate Seneca’s prose meditations on the obligation of those in power to be merciful (De Clementia):
This is the great and glorious right of kings,
the thing that time can never snatch away—
to help the helpless and protect the suppliant,
sheltered in a loyal hearth.
(222–225)
Medea is parallel to the emperors whom Seneca advised, but also to Seneca himself. She accuses Jason of making her an exile, not once but twice over: “We are fleeing, Jason, fleeing! Changing place is nothing new; / Only the cause is different” (447–448).
The real appeal of the play, like many of these tragedies, lies in the astounding vigor with which Seneca’s Medea articulates her own autonomy, her selfhood, and her power to continue as herself, regardless of any external circumstances. Declaring her intention to surpass all her earlier crimes (such as killing her brother) in her new plan to kill her own children, she presents herself as having matured into her own (mythic and heroic) identity, such that now, at last, she is worthy of the name “Medea”:
my pain was only practicing
in those earlier things I did. What deed of daring
could young hands do, or rage from just a girl?
Now I am Medea.
(907–910)
Seneca’s Medea is matured by suffering into the capacity for actions that are truly worthy of her adult self. She has eliminated her own family and old friends, and in doing so has cast off her past, weaker self: now she can live up to her full potential, as granddaughter of the Sun—a figure whose ubiquity and power are reminiscent of the emperor. There are some striking resonances here with Seneca’s own experiences in this period.
Seneca’s tragic heroes, including Medea, have a desperate need for an audience. Medea, having killed one of the children, tries to repress her grief for the boy’s death, but then notes the fact that she has wasted the opportunity, because Jason was not there to watch:
Poor me! What have I done?—Even if I regret it,
I’ve done it, and I feel a creeping joy, against my will.
And look! It’s growing! This is all I needed:
that Jason should be watching. Till now, I think I’ve achieved nothing;
the crimes I did without him were a waste.
(986–990)
Perhaps an intense need to have people watching him was one of the author’s strongest motivations for leaving Corsica—however dangerous it might be to ascend into the dragon chariot.
We, have, frustratingly, no evidence about the actual audiences for these plays, nor for their performance conditions. Some have argued that they were never meant for the theater at all, but recently the scholarly pendulum has swung the other way, and it is now fairly generally agreed that Seneca probably did write for the stage. Perhaps there were performances of these dramas at Rome while their author was still in exile; if so, this might help explain how his name remained so well known in the big city. In fact Seneca seems to have become increasingly famous during the eight years in which he was absent from Rome.
THE RECALL FROM EXILE
I despised death and came back.42
In 48 AD, Messalina, the wife of Claudius who had engineered Seneca’s exile, went too far: she got married, to consul-elect, Gaius Silius, while Claudius was away.43 Claudius, we are told, colluded with this by giving her papers annulling the marriage before he went away. The ancient sources predictably present Messalina as a nymphomaniac, but modern historians tend to see her as a canny and ambitious political schemer, who hoped, with the help of her male friends, to exploit Claudius’ absence to stage a coup and get total control of the city, and perhaps the empire. Unfortunately for her, Claudius turned out to be smarter than he looked and got wind of the plot: on his return, he put Silius to death. The death of Messalina was engineered by Narcissus, the favorite freedman of the emperor, without his having to sign consent forms. Apparently Narcissus feared that Claudius might not go through with it. Messalina left behind her a son, Britannicus, who was only seven at the time of his mother’s death.
In the absence of Messalina, Claudius was in need of a new wife—a necessity for any emperor, since it was the way to secure the succession and also allowed him to shore up his dynastic credentials by consolidating with another branch of the Julio-Claudian family. He chose the ambitious Agrippina (“Agrippina the Younger”), his own niece and sister of Seneca’s dead friend, Julia Livilla. Tacitus reports that they were sleeping together before marriage and that Agrippina’s seductive ways, along with the ancestry of her son, were the deciding factors in Claudius’ choice of her over the other candidates, but they put off the wedding, fearing the public reaction at the marriage of an uncle and his niece (Annals 12.5.1). Agrippina made good use of the time to secure another power marriage: she engaged her teenage son to Octavia, daughter of Claudius. Claudius and Agrippina married in 49 CE.
This turned out to be good news for Seneca, although of course he could not have predicted the turn of events. Tacitus tells us that
Agrippina, so that she might not only be known for her wicked crimes, begged for Seneca’s banishment to be pardoned, and at the same time for him to get the praetorship. She thought it would be popular with the public because his intellectual accomplishments were famous, and she wanted to have her son Domitius [the future Nero] trained in his childhood under that kind of tutor. She also hoped that both she and Nero could make use of his advice for the purpose of gaining power. The reason for the choice was that Seneca was believed to be loyal to Agrippina because he remembered how she had benefited him, and hostile to Claudius, bearing a grudge against him.
(Ann. 12.8)
Tacitus shows a characteristic sense of irony in this passage. He presumably knew Seneca’s own work fairly well and hints at hypocrisy: Seneca, who defined anger as the desire for vengeance at an injury (iniuria) and argued that it must be eliminated, was himself motivated by rage against Claudius when he fell in with Agrippina’s plans. There is another veiled gibe implied by the use of the word “benefit” or “favor,” beneficium, since as we shall see, Seneca was to write a treatise on “favors,” dwelling at length on the importance of gratitude—while himself, at least in Tacitus’ narrative, showing absolutely no loyalty to his benefactress, Agrippina. He was “believed” to be loyal, Tacitus tells us, but he turned out not to be so.