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Seneca’s tragedies were popular in the early modern period, but then dismissed as crudely melodramatic, because they did not fit the aesthetic and literary norms of twentieth-century Anglo-America. More recently, the focus in Senecan tragedy on conflicted identities, spectacular physical and verbal violence, desperate, masochistic hunger for power, and excessive displays of consumption has taken on a new sense of urgency, and we are now learning to read these texts for their multilayered, sometimes contradictory approach to emotion, autonomy, power, and desire, and for their fascinatingly ambivalent relationship to Seneca’s prose work.
In this context, there is a real need for a new complete translation of all the tragedies. In English, the only complete recent translation of the tragedies is the Loeb by John G. Fitch (Cambridge and London 2004), which is written in clear, workperson-like prose and has useful short introductions to each play. There is also my own verse translation of Six Tragedies of Seneca (Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford 2010). To keep to a viable length for a single paperback volume, I was forced by the publishers to omit Agamemnon and Phoenician Women, as well as the (probably non-Senecan) Hercules Oetaeus, and the post-Senecan Octavia. Non-classicists who want to read all of these plays will therefore turn gratefully to this new two-volume set, edited by Shadi Bartsch, translated by Bartsch herself and several distinguished collaborators, and published as part of Chicago’s translations of Seneca’s complete works.
The introductory matter and notes in these volumes are of the high quality one would expect. The short general introduction gives a brief overview of the author’s life, and a quick run-through of Stoicism in general, Senecan Stoicism in particular, some key themes of Senecan tragedy, and the later...