Spectemus!” (Sen., Ag. 875): Cassandra’s Audience in Seneca’s Agamemnon
Main Article Content
Abstract
In Seneca's Agamemnon, Cassandra is spectator and narrator, both of her own prediction of the king's death and of his actual murder by Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. In Act IV she uses the verb form “spectate” (v. 758) to address, in the second person plural, her internal audience, the Trojan ghosts she herself invoked, and to implicate in turn the external audience. In Act V, when she is the speaker of the monologue in which she describes in praesentia the death of the king, she employs the verb form “spectemus” (v. 875), producing a blurring between the scenic world and the external audience and generating a shared and reflective space around the events that Cassandra herself contemplates and narrates. The construction of metatheatrical space in Seneca's Agamemnon was studied as an index of representability of this tragedy and functions as a pivot for ideological interpretations: Cassandra's call to contemplate seems to implicate the external audience in the observance of political and social violence in the periods of Claudius or Nero.
Downloads
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Works are released under a Creative Commons License (Creative Commons 4.0. Atribución-NoComercial-CompartirIgual) - since n. 19 (2014) - which provides unrestricted use, copy and redistribution in any medium or format and remix, transform and build upon the original work properly cited. The Creative Commons License stipulates that: "You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work)."
N. 1 (1994) to N. 17 (2012) works are released under Creative Commons 2.5 Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas Argentina (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ar/). N. 18 (2013) released under Creative Commons 3.0 Atribución-NoComercial-CompartirIgual 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/deed.es_AR).
References
Anderson, W. (1993). Barbarian Play: Plautus' Roman Comedy. University of Toronto Press.
Austin, J. L. (2003). ¿Cómo hacer cosas con palabras? Paidós.
Bexley, E. M. (2022). Seneca´s Characters: Fictional Identities and Implied Human Selves. Cambridge University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108770040
Brecht, J. (1963). Breviario de estética teatral. La Rosa Blindada.
Bernstein, C. G. (1987). The Internal Audience in Literary and Rhetorical Discourse. A&M University.
Boyle, R. (1997). Tragic Seneca. An Essay in the Theatrical Tradition. Routledge.
Boyle, J. A. (2019). Seneca: Agamemnon. Edited with introduction, translation, and commentary. Oxford University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780198810827.book.1
Braden, G. (1970). The Rhetoric and Psychology of Power in the Dramas of Seneca. Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, 9(1), 5-41. https://doi.org/10.1163/156852502753776939
Champlin, E. (2003). “Agamemnon at Rome”. In E. Champlin, D. Braund & C. Gill (eds) Myth, History and Culture in Republican Rome: Studies in honour of T.P. Wiseman (pp. 295-319). Exeter.
Chaniotis (1997). Theatricality Beyond the Theater. Staging Public Life in the Hellenistic World. Pallas, 47, 219-259. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3406/palla.1997.1477
Coleman, K. M. (1990). Fatal Charades: Roman Executions Staged as Mythological Enactments. Journal of Roman Studies, (80), 44-73. https://doi.org/10.2307/300280 DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/300280
Culler, J. (2015). Theory of the Lyric. Harvard University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674425781
Dupont, F. (2011). Les Monstres de Sénèque: Pour une dramaturgie de la tragédie romaine. Belin.
Eco, U. (2005). Lector in fabula. Lumen.
Fitch, J. G. (2002). Construction of the Self in Senecan Drama. Mnemosyne, 55, 18-40. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/156852502753776939
Fitch, J. G. (2018). Seneca: Tragedies. Vol. I. et II. Loeb Classical Library.
Genette, G. (1997). Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. University of Nebraska Press.
Gentili, B. (1979). Theatrical Performance in the Ancient World: Hellenistic and Roman Theatre. Gieben. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004673007
Grant, M. (1999). Plautus and Seneca: Acting in Nero´s Rome. Greece & Rome, 46(1), 27-33. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017383500026061 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017383500026061
Grilli, M. (2020). Importancia de la lingüística pragmática en la hermenéutica bíblica. Revista Bíblica, 82(1-2), 143-166. https://doi.org/10.47182/rb.82-1-22020218 DOI: https://doi.org/10.47182/rb.82-1-22020218
Habinek, T. (1998). An Aristocracy of Virtue. Writing, Identity and Empire in Ancient Rome. In T. N. Habinek, The Politics of Latin Literature (pp. 137-151). Princeton University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400822515
Hickson, F. (1994). Roman Prayer Language. Livy and the Aeneid of Vergil. Teubner. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110979695
Hinds, S. (1998). Allusion and Intertext. Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry. Cambridge University Press.
Iser, W. (1972). Der implizite Leser. Kommunikationsformen des Romans von Bunyan bis Beckett. Wilhelm Fink Verlag.
Jocelyn, H. D. (1967). The Tragedies of Ennius. Cambridge University Press.
Kebrat Orecchioni, C. (1987). La enunciación. EDICIAL.
Lasserre, F. (1967). Strabon. Géographie. t. 3 (livres V et VI). Les Belles Lettres.
Littlewood, C. A. (2004). Self-Representation and Illusion in Senecan Tragedy. Oxford University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199267613.001.0001
Moore, T. (1998). The Theater of Plautus: Playing to the Audience. University of Texas Press.
Pearce, H. D. (1980) A Phenomenological Approach to the Theatrum Mundi Metaphor. Modern Language Association, 95, 42-57. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/461732
Pillinger, E. (2019). Cassandra Translated: Seneca’s Agamemnon. In Cassandra and the Poetics of Prophecy in Greek and Latin Literature (pp. 195-225). Cambridge University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108564007.006
Reynolds, L., D. (1965). Seneca. Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales. Volume I: Books I-XIII, Oxford: A Clarendon Press Publication - Oxford Classical Texts.
Rudich, V. (1997). Dissidence and Literature under Nero. The Price of Rhetoricization. Routledge.
Setaioli, A. (2015). “Seneca and the Ancient World”. In R. Bartsch (ed.). Actors in the Audience: Theatricality and Doublespeak from Nero to Hadrian (pp. 255-266). Harvard University Press.
Shelton, J.-A. (1983). “Revenge or Resignation: Seneca’s Agamemnon”. In A. J Boyle. (ed.), Seneca Tragicus: Ramus Essays on Senecan Drama (pp. 83-159). Aureal Publications. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0048671X00003696
Shelton, J. A. (2000). “The Spectacle of Death in Seneca’s Troades”. In G. Harrison (ed.), Seneca in Performance (pp. 87-118). Classical Press of Wales. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1n357qh.9
Sklenář, R. (2021). El tiempo en la Tragedia de Séneca. Auster, (26), e065. https://doi.org/10.24215/23468890e065 DOI: https://doi.org/10.24215/23468890e065
Staley, G. A. (2010). Seneca and the Idea of Tragedy. Oxford University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195387438.001.0001
Sutton, D. F. (1986). Seneca on the Stage. Brill. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004328310
Tarrant, R. (1976). Seneca: Agamemnon. Ed. with Commentary. Cambridge University Press.
Tola, E. (2014). L. A. Séneca: Medea. Edición bilingüe. Estudio preliminar, traducción y notas. Editorial Las Cuarenta.
Waugh, P. (2003). Metafiction. The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. Routledge.
Wright, M. (2024). The Scripted Audience in Roman Comedy. Trends in Classics, 16, 144-169. https://doi.org/10.1515/tc-2024-0006 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/tc-2024-0006
Zanobi, A. (2008). Seneca's Tragedies and the Aesthetics of Pantomime. Thesis, Durham University.