For some Enlightenment thinkers, the Stoics could be reinterpreted as Deists or even atheists; Diderot described them in his Encyclopédie as “materialists, fatalists and, strictly speaking, atheists”—which was all to the good.28 Hume, by contrast, criticized the Stoics as being all too susceptible to irrational superstition in their belief in providence and a benevolent nature: “The STOICS join a philosophical enthusiasm to a religious superstition.”29
Diderot’s positive attitude toward Seneca aroused a great deal of controversy in France. In 1778 he published his last great work, the “Essay on the Reigns of Claudius and Nero,” which incorporated his earlier “Life of Seneca.” In it, he carefully defended Seneca against criticisms both ancient and modern. He identified closely with Seneca—the beleaguered philosopher who had tried and failed to guide the public and the ruling powers that were, who was persecuted by wicked detractors and dishonored in his lifetime, but whose heart was always in the right place and who clearly saw the distinction between life and art: “Seneca’s detractors bear a striking resemblance to those of the philosophes,” he wrote. Seneca could be assimilated into the same model as Socrates, whom Diderot had earlier admired. Seneca was essential to Diderot’s last-ditch attempt to insist that philosophers ought indeed to have a public role and a public voice—and that even if the public were deaf to them (as Nero was to Seneca), their teaching was no less valuable. The peculiarity of Diderot’s interpretation was not lost on his contemporaries; indeed, some have referred to the “Querelle sur Sénèque” (“Quarrel on Seneca”), with Seneca taking center stage in Enlightenment debates about the relative values of the new intellectuals versus the old political and religious establishment.
The influence of Seneca as a dramatist has a mostly distinct history from Seneca the political, theological, and philosophical writer. It was believed for many generations that Seneca philosophicus was actually a different author from Seneca tragicus; some theorized that Seneca the Philosopher was the father and Seneca the Tragedian the son. Seneca’s dramas had an enormous impact on the early development of European and British drama.30 Greek tragedy remained almost unknown to much of the general public in the sixteenth century, whereas Senecan drama became an essential element in the school curriculum and shaped the plays composed for the new forms of theater that took over from the old medieval mystery plays. A performance of Seneca’s Phaedra in Rome in 1485 can be seen as the starting point of early modern drama. Italian early modern drama was deeply influenced by Seneca and gave rise to a new form of tragedy all over Europe, spreading to Spain, France, and Britain in somewhat different ways. In purely formal terms, much in early modern drama was modeled on Senecan tragedy, including the five-act structure. Early works like Gorbodoc even borrowed the classical chorus, although that was soon dropped. Moreover, sixteenth-century drama took from Seneca its obsession with revenge (as in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, the Revenger’s Tragedy, or later, Hamlet) as well as its ghosts, its violence, and its characters driven by overweening ambition to commit ever-more-splendid acts of aggression and dominance—like Marlowe’s Tamburlaine or Faustus. In terms of language, too, the marvelous bombast and quick, aphoristic repartee of Senecan tragedy had an enormous impact on the way that characters on the early modern stage learned to talk. Dramatists of the period often read Seneca in the original Latin, but he was also newly available in English translation, in the collection edited by Thomas Newton, Seneca His Tenne Tragedies, of 1581. Seneca was so fashionable that Thomas Nashe satirized it in his preface to Robert Greene’s Menaphron in 1589:
English Seneca read by candle light yeeldes manie good sentences, as Bloud is a begger, and so foorth; and, if you intreate him faire in a frostie morning, he will affoord you whole Hamlets, I should say handfulls of tragical speaches. But O griefe! tempus edax rerum, what's that will last alwaies? The sea exhaled by droppes will in continuance be drie, and Seneca let bloud line by line and page by page at length must needes die to our stage.
Seneca on stage was, Nashe suggested, getting old by the late sixteenth century—but it had a long way still to go. Senecan drama continued to have a major impact on Jacobean tragedy in the seventeenth century, in the works of Webster and others: the Duchess of Malfi’s famous line, “I am Duchess of Malfi still!” is a clear recollection of Seneca’s Medea: “Medea nunc sum!” (“Now I am Medea”).
One might imagine that Senecan tragedy appealed to readers, writers, and audiences in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries largely because Greek tragedy was relatively unknown; Shakespeare would perhaps have written rather differently if he had read Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides. But this is to put it too negatively. It is striking that, of the Greek tragedies that were fairly widely read, the most popular were those that were the most Senecan: Euripides’ Hecuba, which features both a revenge plot and a ghost, was one of the most widely translated into Latin, and therefore widely read, in the time of Shakespeare. Senecan drama was popular and influential because it spoke to a specific set of cultural preoccupations. People at this time had a particular interest in the self-assertion and rage that were articulated so well in Senecan tragedy. The “constancy” that was found by Lipsius in Seneca’s prose work had its counterpart in the terrible insistence on individual identity, the desperate aspirations to world dominance and revenge, and the schizophrenic will to power, that could be found in Atreus, Medea, or Seneca’s mad Hercules—the imperialist spirit gone crazy. Power, self-assertion, violent revenge, and the construction of a non-Christian universe in which the wheel of fortune was constantly tipping around—these themes dominated the drama of the period and were discovered through Seneca. It has been rightly recognized that the interest in Senecan drama was partly inspired by the fact that early modern Europe, like imperial Rome, was a society that institutionalized the spectacle of violence; both of these powerful, self-consciously novel cultures looked for ways to watch and enact visions of destruction.31
In France, Senecan influence led to a rather different and more formally controlled kind of drama, which adhered to the classical “rules” of time and space and which was, far more often than in Britain, based on classical plots. Pierre Corneille drew heavily on Seneca’s prose works as well as his tragedies: his great play Cinna, for example (1641), is an extensive dramatization of an anecdote from the De Clementia about Augustus’ mercifulness. Racine modeled his masterpiece, Phèdre, on Seneca’s Phaedra as well as Euripides’ Hippolytus. But Racine’s relationship with Seneca was complex and somewhat adversarial. Even where Racine dramatizes the events of Seneca’s own lifetime—as he did in the Britannicus—Seneca himself is excluded from the picture: he chose to focus on Burrus, not Seneca, as the moral center of the play because, he reminds us, it was Burrus who was known for “the severity of his morals”; Seneca’s virtues were the more superficial ones of “elegance and affability.”32
Seneca had an important but mostly buried influence on the political and cultural life of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As a primary representative of what was now known as “Silver Latin,” he began to be treated increasingly with suspicion, or not read at all. His highly artificial, bombastic dramas seemed too distant from the more naturalistic contemporary literary forms in drama and the novel. Whereas in the early modern period readers had assumed that Senecan tragedy was performed (and had performed it), scholars in the nineteenth century insisted that these dramas were composed only for recitation, not the theater—and used that idea as further evidence to condemn the author for mere artifice. Moreover, his prose writings began to be dismissed as the posturings of a hypocrite who failed entirely to practice what he preached. The shift away from Seneca was tied up with the assumption of new requirements of “truth,” both for literature and for life, and perhaps also with a diminished faith in the possibilities of intellectual advisors changing the world for the better. Even when Seneca did play a part in culture, it was often a bit part: in the novel Quo Vadis, he is only a minor character.