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Bernstein (N.W.) Seneca : Hercules Furens. Pp. xvi + 151, ills. London and New York : Bloomsbury Academic , 2017. Cased, £65, US$88. ISBN: 978-1-4742-5492-2 .
Reviews
The Bloomsbury series Companions to Greek and Roman Tragedy, under the general editorship of T. Harrison, has produced a number of useful short introductions to well-known plays (Sophocles' Antigone by D. Cairns [2016]) and lesser-known texts (Euripides' Cyclops by C. Shaw [2018]). The majority of volumes, predictably, have dealt with Athenian tragedy, but S. Braund produced an excellent introduction to Seneca's Oedipus in 2015, and now we have B.'s equally strong contribution, on Seneca's Hercules Furens (HF).
The series aims to provide accessible guides to plays that may be studied by undergraduates, although many contributions also offer original insights of interest to specialists. The HF of Seneca might seem initially like an unpromising text for an undergraduate class. The play is based on a depressing and relatively unfamiliar element of the Hercules myth (his slaughter of his family), and it is composed in Seneca's usual, highly rhetorical idiom (which I try to mirror in my translation, recommended by B.). A full appreciation of the HF requires knowledge of a fairly large number of contexts, from literary antecedents (such as Euripides' Heracles and the Aeneid) to the conceptualisation of virtus in imperial Roman culture and in Roman Stoicism. B. succeeds in providing this context and demonstrating that this great and moving tragedy can provide a surprisingly rich and varied introduction to Seneca, and to Roman culture more broadly. He covers an impressive amount of ground in a book that is, as he says, Herculean in subject but not on 'a Herculean scale'.
B. divides his study into five chapters: an introductory plot summary, a chapter on 'major themes', a third chapter on the Greco-Roman literary and artistic antecedents of the play, a fourth on Seneca's career, and a fifth on performance and reception. These chapter headings are a little hard to negotiate, and the individuation of topics is not perfectly smooth. I was surprised to find that the discussion...