230 JOHANNES J.L. SMOLENAARS
[To Oedipus] Come now, lend your hand’s service to your mother, if
you are a parricide: this task remains to complete your work. [To her-
self] Let me seize his sword. It was this blade that killed my husband.
Why call him by an untruthful name? He was my father-in-law. (tr.
Fitch 2004)Here Jocasta says that the sword Oedipus is carrying (cf. 935ff.) is the
same with which he killed Laius (1034f.). Like the whole scene, this
element too is a Senecan innovation. In Phoin. 1456 Euripides is the
first to have Jocasta kill herself with a sword instead of by hanging
herself: the sword she took from one of her sons she had found dead
on the battlefield, the same sword with which the son had killed his
brother (Phoin. 1456, above). Seneca here further develops the “Sym-
bolik der identischen Mordwaffe” (Töchterle at 1034f.): Jocasta in
Phoen. kills herself with the sword with which Oedipus had killed his
father/ her first husband.
Of all the variations applied to the incestuous relations within this
family, Jocasta’s ‘correctio’ socer is easily the most cynical. With
sword in hand (hoc ferro) she then considers where to strike her body,
either her breast (as in Theb. 11.639, below) or her throat (as in Phoin.
1457); she decides, finally, on her womb:
utrumne pectori infigam meo
te lum an patenti conditum iugulo inprimam?
eligere nescis uulnus: hunc, dextra, hunc pete
uterum capacem, qui uirum et gnatos tulit.
(Oed. 1036–9)
Shall I fasten the weapon in my breast, or drive it deep into my bare
throat? You have no skill in choosing a wound! Strike this, my hand,
this capacious womb, which bore husband and children (tr. Fitch 2004)Jocasta’s choice of stabbing her womb to kill herself is original within
the tradition of her suicide, but similar to Agrippina’s uentrem feri
when addressing her murderer in Tac. Ann. 14.8.5. Would this be a
“zufällige Koinzidenz” (Zwierlein 1987) or does Seneca deliberately
have Jocasta echo Agrippina’s famous last words? If the latter is the
case, we would have a terminus post quem for the Oedipus and an
interesting political dimension in this play.^20 The play ends with blind
Oedipus accusing himself of being bis parricida and groping his way
out into darkness and voluntary exile—as he wishes to do in OT:
20 See Töchterle 1994, 630f.