Seneca: The Madness of Hercules

by Seneca, Dana Gioia (Introduction)

Seneca was not only Rome’s major Stoic philosopher. He was its great tragic playwright. Classics of Latin literature, Seneca’s dramas also inspired the revival of tragic theater in the Renaissance. They served as models for Shakespeare, Racine, Corneille, and Calderon. Dana Gioia’s new book provides two ways of approaching Seneca—the critical and the creative. The book begins with a compelling account of Seneca’s remarkable life in Imperial Rome. It interweaves the Stoic’s roles as philosopher, politician, and playwright. There is no better introduction to this influential and often misunderstood genius of Classical culture. Gioia then offers a vivid poetic translation of Seneca’s powerful tragedy, The Madness of Hercules . This violent and visionary play explores the utmost extremes of human suffering expressed in passionate language. It also contains a spellbinding descent into the Underworld, an account that haunted later poets from Dante to Eliot. “Dana Gioia's Hercules Furens is a poetic and critical tour de force. By giving us a translation as graceful, vivid, and natural as the original must have been, he paradoxically brings out its essential strangeness to our sensibility. His poetry makes it a sort of dark existentialist Bunraku theater, an allegory of the horrors of Nero's Rome and perhaps a warning to us today. His coinage of the term ‘lyric tragedy,’ connecting the play with the birth of opera fifteen hundred years later, aptly notes that strangeness.”
—Frederick Turner, Founders Professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas, author of the epic poems Genesis and The New World

162 pages, Hardcover

Published April 10, 2023

About the author

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (often known simply as Seneca or Seneca the Younger); ca. 4 BC – 65 AD) was a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist of the Silver Age of Latin literature. He was tutor and later advisor to emperor Nero, who later forced him to commit suicide for alleged complicity in the Pisonian conspiracy to have him assassinated.

Reviews

[Michael Forsyth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Feel like Robert Eggers or David Lowery could make a brilliant movie out of this.

The book begins with a fascinating essay on Seneca's life, works, and legacy, essentially a defense of his place in the canon and an argument for his importance as a playwright in the development of the dramatic tradition.

The translation itself seems great - it reads like Gioia translated in, whatever that means. Think it's definitely worth the read.

[Dave H · Rating 5 out of 5]

"...learn to be a connoisseur
Of suffering."

"You understand the pleasures of revenge!"

Super cool, high marks. Death, destruction, defiance, murder, revenge, madness, darkness, light, all that good stuff. Nice introduction by Dana Gioia, interesting line drawn from classic Roman tragedy to Italian tragic opera. With what little there is of a plot in this old stuff, easy to see how it could have fallen out of fashion, replaced with the more sophisticated Shakespeare and so on - but narratives these days are so full of twists and turns and tricks, double reverses, subversion of meaning, something simple and straight and full of rage hits well.

[Joseph]

How did I not know that Seneca was a playwright? I need to read this yesterday.