The apocalypse in Seneca’s Thyestes

Abstract

The article focuses on the choral ode (Sen., Thy., 789-883) known as the Apocalypse, and Atreus's speech that seals his crime. Seneca presents the paroxysm of vengeance in the figure of the king, whose overwhelming pathos leads him not only to commit a cruel crime but also to defy the gods themselves. Correspondingly, the natural order has been overturned, so that what was "cosmos" becomes chaos, the end and beginning of the cosmic cycle. The sun's retreat as a marker of cosmic cataclysm appears in earlier literature and corresponds to the Stoic doctrine of the cyclical destruction of the universe. From the Pythagoreans and Plato to later Hellenistic philosophy, the life of the universe has been conceived as a cycle with stages analogous to those of living beings or the cycles of nature. However, Seneca adheres to the Stoic conception that the cycle always repeats itself in the same way, without changes in events. The question that then arises is what meaning and scope this collapse of the cosmos has. The destruction of the cosmos sung in the fourth chorus implies a civic cataclysm, an evil that affects the cosmos on the scale of the city, a city that can be interpreted as the Greek polis or, in Seneca's case, as the urbs Roma.