The "Hercules Oetaeus" and the Picture of the "Sapiens" in Senecan Prose

Abstract

BOTH THE PROSE WORKS of Seneca and his tragedies are striking for their imagistic or graphic language.' Just as Seneca the philosopher often uses a metaphor, simile, or analogy from everyday life to concretize a philosophical abstraction, so the dramatic characters of his tragedies will often elaborate a description of their emotions, or of what they see going on around them, with metaphor or simile, so that the literal picture is overlaid with a metaphorical one.2 Elsewhere I have shown that if we read the images of the tragedies in the light of the moral connotations they carry in the prose works, then the ecphraseis of the tragedies can be seen as vehicles for didactic authorial comment3 which underlies, and sometimes even counters, the speeches' ostensible message.4 The use of description elaborated by figurative language is one of the many features of the Hercules Oetaeus which give it an air of authenticity when set beside the other tragedies of the Senecan dramatic corpus. In what follows, I would like to draw attention to the way in which descriptions of Hercules by the chorus and a messenger in the Hercules Oetaeus contain many echoes of the imagery with which the sapiens and sapientia are described by Seneca in his prose works, and to the way in which this imagery contributes towards an interpretation of Hercules as a Stoic sapiens. Hercules' behavior, including specific details of his physical appearance, is described in two passages of the Hercules Oetaeus: once, in general terms, by the chorus of Oechalian maidens (143-161), and once in a messenger-speech, by Philoctetes, who describes Hercules' behavior as he burns to death on a pyre on Oeta (1618 ff.). This second picture is preceded by Philoctetes' description of the felling of a grove to make a pyre for Hercules (1618 ff.), with particular emphasis on the resistance of