Introduction

Abstract

Abstract This chapter highlights the central role of revenge in Seneca’s tragedies and points out that, throughout the corpus of eight genuine plays, the perpetrators of revenge are most often female characters. It identifies a scholarly tendency to make generalizations about how revenge is depicted in Seneca’s tragedies based on the two most extreme cases of revenge, those of Atreus and Medea, and proposes to remedy this by cataloguing all the instances of revenge in the corpus. It then offers a survey of the prominence of revenge in Greek and Roman literature, focusing especially on the genre of tragedy, before demonstrating how revenge is a fundamental aspect of Roman culture and of the Julio-Claudian dynasty in particular. Finally, it argues that one of the defining characteristics of revenge in Seneca’s tragedies, its excessiveness, is also a defining characteristic of his tragic aesthetic which is typified in the comparative adjective maius, which means greater in size or extent.

Authors 1

1. Basil L P Nelis corresponding Aachen

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Leiden University