Dissonant Sympathy: Song, Orpheus, and the Golden Age in Seneca's Tragedies

Abstract

Orpheus has a prominent place in the choral odes of Seneca's Medea, Hercules Furens, and Hercules Oetaeus (the last, even if not by Seneca, may be considered within the context of Senecan drama). Outside of the tragedies, Seneca has only a passing reference to Orpheus as the figure with whom poetry begins (Ep. 88.39). In the tragedies he treats Orpheus as a magical poet-savior and a civilizing hero. In contrast to Virgil and Ovid, to whose versions of the Orpheus myth he clearly alludes, he deliberately de-emphasizes the brutal death at the hands of the Thracian maenads.Seneca draws on the double focus of the myth in the earlier tradition. On the one hand Orpheus is the consummate poet who knows the mysteries of nature and through his art stands in special sympathy to it. On the other hand as a victim of love and the furor it may bring, he is also a tragic figure who through passion experiences loss, mourning, and death. In this latter aspect the Hercules Oetaeus contrasts his end unfavorably with the future apotheosis of its hero (H.O. 1035); but, as we shall see, Seneca elsewhere takes a more favorable attitude to the poet-hero.