Научный архив: статьи

This paper aims to revise the status quaestionis of the title of a play by Seneca preserved in two commonly recognised variants — Phoenissae and Thebais — and two less well-known variants — Phoenissa and Antigona. It has been generally accepted that only the title Phoenissae is correct, and that this title was modelled on Euripides’ drama of the name. This view, however, can hardly be deemed plausible, considering the substantial differences between Seneca’s and Euripides’ Phoenissae. Moreover, it has been widely held that there is no analogy for the title Thebais in the dramatic tradition but that it has equivalents in epic texts, which has led to the conclusion that Thebais is an ill-chosen interpolation. The other variants of the title have not been discussed at all. In this article we scrutinise previously disregarded sources and argue that all the play’s titles may have originated in Classical Antiquity and may be regarded as synonyms. We also demonstrate that the interpretation of the title Phoenissae as referring to a Chorus of Tyrian maidens is purely speculative, since the links between Seneca’s and Euripides’ Phoenissae cannot be unequivocally defined. We posit that the Romans may have understood both the title of Euripides’ play and of its probable imitation written by Accius as alluding to the heroines, Jocasta and Antigone. The examples found in Statius’ verse may be used as evidence that the adjective Phoenissus was understood by the educated Roman public as Thebanus. In the final part of the paper, we analyse the dramatic action of Phoenissae, which leads us to the conclusion that the interpretation of the title as a metonymic term describing Jocasta and Antigone is accurate

This article revises current perspectives on the generic status, composition, and subject matter of Phoenician Women by Seneca. It adopts a new approach, focusing on selected elements of text organisation. In particular, emphasis is given to the construction of characters and the analogies and contrasts between them which were already of interest to ancient poetics and rhetoric. Moreover, the article refers to observations, accurate but isolated and largely ignored, made by scholars who recognised Seneca’s originality and suggested that his plays might have been inspired by the declamatory tradition and should be read in the context of evolving postclassical literature. By adopting this perspective, it becomes possible to bring together a large number of partial conclusions that are related to Phoenician Women as well as other plays by Seneca. What is more important, the work brings to light the purposeful composition of the drama and its thematic unity, allowing us to return to the MS versions that until now have been replaced by conjectures, which often distort the meaning of the text. After dismissing the emendations and adopting a new method of reading, Seneca’s Phoenician Women can be regarded as complete and well-organised. The play has certain characteristic features of a tragedy, of all Seneca’s dramas, it is the one most inspired by the genre of declamation and the poetics of Seneca the Elder’s anthology, and it is an example of the use of plot material typical of tragedy for presenting the problem of pietas in all its complexity

Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius, in his Saturnalia, draws upon the Platonic archetype in making overt allusions to the Symposium and yet follows Athenaeus, whose work he seems to know thoroughly, albeit does not acknowledge its influence openly. Besides the Greek paradigms, Macrobius used Roman models, i. e., Cicero’s dialogues, to infuse his literary banquet with Roman flavour. The author of Saturnalia was severely criticised, especially by representatives of the Quellenforschung movement in the second half of the 19 th century, for allegedly being a poor plagiarist. His compilatory method is described in this article, and two other plausible Macrobius’ sources are proposed: Juvenal’s Satires and Seneca the Younger’s On Tranquility of the Mind. In Roman History Ammianus Marcellinus depicted the people inhabiting Rome of his times as degenerate parasites hostile to any form of intellectual activity who fritter away time on vulgar entertainment and obsessively overfeed themselves. Many scenes of so-called sober merriment shared by the prominent Roman personages of the IV c. AD were, in all probability, introduced to Saturnalia to counterbalance Ammianus Marcellinus’ harsh criticism of Roman morals. Macrobius’s familiarity with both Juvenal and Seneca manifests itself in the list of similes, yet, as the author of the present article proposes, there are passages in the oeuvre of both writers that may have instilled the vision of frugality typical of Romans in Macrobius’s mind, so that he may have used images borrowed from both earlier writers to Saturnalia