Virgil's Dido and Seneca's Tragic Heroines

Abstract

Thelarge harvest of editions and monographs devoted to Seneca'sPhaedrain recent years have done full justice to the influence on Seneca's play of the Greek tragic precedents, even exploiting the Latin play as a quarry for their recovery and restoration; at the level of individual motifs of dialogue, Seneca's debt to Ovid's fourth letter of theHeroideshas been confirmed and detailed. But concern with the adaptation of the myth, and the obvious verbal resemblances to Ovid, have combined to distract students from the influence of another Latin work—the fourth book of Virgil'sAeneid. The theme of Virgil's book, the quality of Virgil's portrayal of Dido and her passion, with its truly dramatic greatness (of which a distinguished editor has written ‘if Virgil had written nothing else … it would have established his right to stand beside the greatest of the Greek tragedians’), the acknowledged supremacy of Virgil's reputation as a poet in Seneca's generation, and Seneca's own fondness for quoting theAeneid, are all strong arguments for expecting some reminiscence of Virgil's great queen in Seneca's delineation of Phaedra and her doomed passion for Hippolytus. Before Virgil only Catullus' Ariadne had approached the insight and sympathetic analysis which was achieved in Dido. After Virgil the lovesick heroines of Ovid'sHeroidesare rhetorically versatile but without the moral stature to give value to their sufferings, while their static portraits cannot offer the development of either action or emotion which is essential to drama. Unfortunately, because Ovid both inHeroidesandMetamorphosesborrowed so much detail and imagery from Virgil, his dependence on the greater poet complicates and often frustrates attempts to distinguish the relationship of Senecan poetry to that of the two predecessors whom he admired.