most intriguing 'ifs' of Latin literary history: had he survived, would he have developed into a great master, or
was he by nature one of those highly talented men who are for ever revealing unexpected shallows?
Tragedy
Quintilian (above, p. 657), while admiring Lucan's passion and epigrammatic brilliance, judged him more
suitable for orators than poets to imitate. The influence of rhetoric has been commonly blamed for the vices of
silver Latin poetry, and the charge has force; but it is wrong to regard rhetoric as the necessary enemy of poetry,
and it should be clear that Lucan's virtues are as much the product of his rhetorical cast of thought as are his
faults. In Juvenal rhetoric becomes an essential element of great poetry-as it does in the Aeneid, for that matter.
If, on the other hand, we want to see what happens when the rhetorical manner is used in the absence of
imagination, we may turn to the tragedies of Seneca. Ten plays have come down to us under his name, of which
one is certainly and another probably spurious. The loss of all other Roman tragedies and the influence which
Seneca's are supposed to have had on renaissance drama- an influence, however, which was probably much
smaller than has usually been thought-have ensured for them a greater attention than their literary quality alone
would deserve.
Like other Latin poets, Seneca develops a Greek genre in a new direction: he turns Attic tragedy towards the
gruesome, the sensational, and the extreme. The Hippolytus of Euripides is chaste, pure, puritan; Seneca's
Hippolytus is a neurotic with an exaggerated aversion from city life. Euripides' Medea ends sensationally
enough, but Seneca has a still more sensational, though much coarser, coup de theatre in store for us: Medea,
aloft, prepares to ascend into the skies in her chariot, and tosses down to Jason the bodies of their dead children;
he closes the play by railing at her, 'Go through the lofty regions of high heaven, and bear witness where you ride
that there are no gods' (testare nullos esse, qua veheris, deos'- there is a savage punch in the very last word of
all). Euripides' Theseus beholds the mangled body of his dying son Hippolytus; Seneca's Theseus tries to
reassemble the corpse's scattered pieces, while the chorus add helpful advice, as though he were doing a jigsaw
puzzle. In more talented hands such bizarreries might have a grotesque kind of power, and some critics have
claimed to find unappreciated merits in these plays; but when we contemplate the amount of feeble rant that fills
play after play, we may conclude that they have let faith triumph over plausibility.