Originality in Seneca's Troades

Abstract

T HE first step in detecting the original is to isolate the derivative. In a Rostock lecture I argued that Seneca used four Greek sources in the composition of his play.2 The use of Euripides' Hecuba and Troades has been regularly assumed.3 Euripides provided Hecuba, Helen, and the chorus of captive women,4 and he especially influenced Seneca's lyrics. The kommatic parodos is pure Euripides. Seneca used as well a famous tragedy, Sophocles' Polyxena, which may be reconstructed with some confidence and which was concerned with ideas treated later in the Antigone.5 From the Polyxena derived the famous Fiirstenstreit between Pyrrhus and Agamemnon and the brief subsequent scene with Calchas (203-370). The messenger speech in the exodos describing the death of Polyxena descends from a similar speech delivered by a messenger in the exodos of Sophocles' play.6 Finally, the presence of Polyxena as a persona muta and not the loquacious Euripidean prisoner reflects the unsatisfactory dramatic situa-