Seneca, Lettere a Lucilio, libro VI. Le lettere 53-57

2016

Gnomon, 2016

New England Classical Journal, 2016

ISBN 978-1-62466-369-7) $39.95. Peter Anderson has produced an agile volume containing translations of a significant selection of Seneca's philosophical work. The Latin text is not present and problems concerning the textual transmission are purposely not tackled.

in M. Stöckinger, K. Winter and T. Zanker (eds.) (2017) Horace and Seneca: Interactions, Intertexts, Interpretations, Berlin, 239-63

BMCR 2021.01.23, 2021

in Eric Dodson-Robinson (ed.), Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Senecan Tragedy. Scholarly, Theatrical and Literary Receptions, Leiden-Boston, Brill , 2016

Between the first century A.D and the medieval era, Seneca’s tragedies had no great relevance and were soon largely forgotten, like most Latin classic texts. It was not until the 13th Century that the first manuscripts reappeared and circulated in northern Italy and in France, emerging as the main – and, at the time, only – model of ancient tragedy. They would maintain this status for over three centuries. Within the European tradition, Seneca’s plays thus acquired a relevance that they had not had (and could not have had) in antiquity. Three people had an essential role in their rediscovery and in the development of the later tradition: Lovato Lovati and Albertino Mussato from Padua, and the English Dominican friar Nicholas Trevet. Lovato correctly identified and analysed the tragic meters used by Seneca, while Mussato first tentatively composed a “Senecan” play, Ecerinis, that resorted to both tragic and epic forms, and was not meant to be staged; Trevet wrote the first commentary of the entire body of Seneca’s tragedies. Both Mussato’s and Trevet’s readings of Seneca’s works were strongly prejudiced by medieval ideas about tragedy, which, being based solely on poor and indirect information, had greatly distorted the genre’s original features. The few medieval attempts to restore literary form to comic and tragic plots had resorted to elegiac meter within narrative settings somewhat removed from those of the ancient texts. Ideas about theatrical performances in Greece and Rome were distinctly confused. Both Mussato’s compositional experiment and Trevet’s analysis represent two extraordinary attempts to reinvent the ancient genre, by projecting onto it the prejudices and conventions of a culture as yet ignorant of Classical dramatic forms. Such a complex weave of medieval and ancient culture, after some experimentation in Latin during the 15th Century, was to shape the basic modern theatre forms elaborated in the different European languages.

Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch, Band 58, Heft 3, 2023

The paper offers an overview of Albertino Mussato’s commentary on Seneca’s Tragedies, which survives in fragmentary form in two manuscripts; dating to the beginning of the 14th c., it is probably the earliest exposition on the work of the tragedian. Hypotheses are suggested concerning the relationship between the commentary and other writings of Mussato devoted to Seneca, such as a Vita Senece, the Argumenta to the ten plays and a treatise on meter known as Evidentia tragediarum Senece. Moreover, the main features of the glosses are presented, with particular regard to Mussato’s remarks on meter, to the parallels with classical, medieval and biblical passages that the author pointed out in his exposition, and to his philological approach to the Senecan text.

2013