Inherited Models

Similitude and imitation are principles at the heart of Roman – indeed, of all – exemplary discourse.Footnote ⁵ By providing people with models to emulate or to avoid, exempla function analogically, so that their goal of moral transformation is achieved by duplicating and reproducing prototypical behaviour. In the words of Alexander Gelley, the exemplum’s purpose ‘becomes that of propagating itself, creating multiples’; it perpetuates attitudes, values, and patterns of conduct in a manner reminiscent of artistic mimesis.Footnote ⁶ The Romans themselves were fully aware of the imitative impulses governing acts of exemplarity. To cite two disparate but representative instances: Horace, in the Sermones, has his father caution him against disgraceful love affairs by uttering the injunction, Scetani dissimilis sis (‘don’t be like Scetanus’ Ser. 1.4.12); in an entirely different genre and tone, but nevertheless expressing the same sentiment, Livy introduces his historical work as a memorial source of examples inde tibi tuaeque rei publicae quod imitere capias (‘from which you may choose what to imitate for yourself and for your state’, praef. 1.10). Both authors acknowledge that the exemplum’s moral-didactic efficacyFootnote ⁷ – not to mention its potentially wayward influence – stems from its innate capacity for iteration. The example, by definition, demands to be copied.Footnote ⁸

A conspicuous consequence of this iteration, in Roman culture at least, is the tendency for exemplary narratives to cluster around family groups, as though on the assumption that genetic inheritance and the bestowal of a family name bring with them a predisposition for specific activities, attitudes, and forms of behaviour. The phenomenon is particularly marked in the case of ‘structurally’ similar exempla, namely, deeds that reproduce in full the individual features and narrative contours of earlier models.Footnote ⁹ Matthew Roller remarks that this kind of exemplarity is apt to be associated with particular gentes: ‘the idea that certain patterns of behaviour do or should run in families … is widespread in Roman culture’.Footnote ¹⁰ The habit develops not only because intra-familial models provide a convenient rubric for categorising exemplarity, but also because of a deep-seated conceptual link: the exemplum, like the parent, is an authoritative model that calls for imitation, and successful imitation, in turn, furnishes outward proof of hereditary character. Exemplary lineage and genealogical lineage function in equivalent ways, and frequently overlap.

To illustrate this point, we may review one of Rome’s most celebrated exempla: the Decii Mures.Footnote ¹¹ The sequence begins with the elder Publius Decius Mus sacrificing himself in an act of devotio against the Latins at Veseris in 340 bc (Livy 8.9); his son, also named Publius Decius Mus, follows suit with his own act of devotio at the battle of Sentinum in 295 bc (Livy 10.28.6–18); there is even a tradition – most likely spurious – that the third Publius Decius Mus, grandson of the first, dies by devotio at Ausculum in 279 bc (Dio fr. 43; Cic. Fin. 2.61; Tusc. 1.89; Ennius Ann. 6.191–4).Footnote ¹² Repetition across generations creates and at the same time authorises the act’s symbolic value: for the latter two Decii Mures, devotio is assumed to represent a key means of living up to one’s name and of affirming one’s lineage.Footnote ¹³ Tradition renders the name and the deed all but interchangeable, as illustrated most clearly by the last of these three exempla, where Roman authors are less concerned with the event’s historicity than with its adherence to an established family model: Decius Mus the grandson is thought to have committed devotio because that is what Decii Mures typically do.

Thus, in Roman discourses of exemplarity, moral resemblance confirms genetics. Cicero (Brut. 133) declares that the oratorical talents of Catulus senior (consul 102) may be inferred from those of Catulus junior (Q. Lutatius Catulus Capitolinus). Ovid states the idea more openly still when he wishes of his anonymous, elite addressee, sic iuvenis similisque tibi sit natus et illum / moribus agnoscat quilibet esse tuum! (‘may your son resemble you thus and may everyone recognise him as yours because of his conduct’ Trist. 4.5.31–2). To underscore the hereditary nature of the son’s mores, Ovid evokes in these lines the Roman ritual of a father acknowledging his paternity. In the same way that a Roman father would accept the child as his own (agnoscere cf. Chapter 1, 57–8 and 95.) and thereby facilitate its inclusion within the family unit, so, in Ovid’s couplet, the son’s behaviour is hoped to substantiate his biological origins (illum … / agnoscat … esse tuum) and guarantee his position within elite society. Naturally, the quality of such replication depends upon the mores themselves; it is possible to reproduce bad examples as well as good ones. Of Verres’ father, for instance, Cicero remarks tartly to the jury, qualis fuerit … ex eo quem sui simillimum produxit recognoscere potestis (‘what he was like you can infer from the faithful copy of himself that he has brought into the world’ Verr. 2.1.32 trans. Greenwood).Footnote ¹⁴ Moral resemblance, like physical, can have its ugly side.

The pursuit of exemplary behaviour can also be seen to strengthen distant family ties or to formulate family connections where none may in fact exist. While the Decii Mures all belong to the one, immediate bloodline, adoptive relationships are likewise capable of fostering imitative conduct, as in the case of Scipio Aemilianus, whose decisive role in the Third Punic War mirrors that of his adoptive grandfather, Scipio Africanus, in the First.Footnote ¹⁵ The most telling example, though, is Marcus Junius Brutus, whose nominal (if not actual) relationship to the man responsible for ending Tarquin’s tyranny is depicted as influencing – perhaps even providing crucial impetus for – his role in Caesar’s assassination. Dio’s account stresses this demand for continuity and duplication:

As Dio presents it, the issue is not whether Brutus can claim a genuine family connection to his illustrious predecessor (and the Romans themselves may not have known either way); rather, the mere possibility of this relationship imposes upon Marcus Junius Brutus the need to replicate certain patterns of conduct (ὅπως ὡς καὶ γένει προσήκων αὐτῷ ἐς ὁμοιότροπα ἔργα προαχθείη).Footnote ¹⁷ In effect, it is the process of exemplarity that renders Brutus kinsman to his early republican counterpart. The exemplum is treated much like a set of inherited characteristics; it is both a source and confirmation of identity in ways similar to a parent. Brutus must live up to the promise implicit in this name because that name represents, simultaneously, a potential genealogical connection and a laudable instance of anti-tyrannical resistance. To be fully himself, he must adopt the normative actions of another; in order to be a Brutus, he must copy the Brutus.

So Roman discourses of exemplarity occupy a point of intersection between genetic replication and behavioural imitation.Footnote ¹⁸ Not only does the idea of family resemblance encompass a standard expectation that children will inherit their parents’ features and bearing, but it also extends into full arcs of narrative action, where offspring reproduce their ancestors’ deeds, and those deeds come to substantiate parentage. Understandably, this sort of cultural practice has a deep effect on how individuals shape and perceive their identities, and on how they evaluate the identities of others. In its most extreme form, Roman exemplarity demands that the individual subordinate his or her sense of personal discreteness to broader matrices of tradition and ancestry. Self-development, on this model, amounts to little more than selecting and recycling the activities of those who have gone before; Marcus Junius Brutus, for one, appears to exercise little choice in matters of self-determination.

Yet herein lies the complexity and richness of Rome’s rubric of exempla, because selecting and recycling other people’s activities is a fundamental means of human self-formation, no matter what its specific cultural grounding. To cite Bruce Wilshire:Footnote ¹⁹

Roman exemplarity is, among many other things, a culturally embedded expression of this basic human need, a need to imitate not just for the sake of learning, but also, more deeply, for the sake of formulating oneself via subjunctive possibilities of being. For instance: I see a man fighting with a sword and I decide to copy or abstain from this action only after engaging in a rapid process of imaginative substitution whereby I take this man’s place (‘is this the sort of thing I, too, should / could do?’). My identity, that is, my sense of myself-in-the-world, ‘is structured and polarized by possibilities of kinds of existence largely set by others’.Footnote ²⁰ Viewed from this angle, Marcus Brutus’ imitation of Lucius falls fully within the bounds of regular human self-development: it is an action (like all actions) arrived at via the subjunctive substitution of oneself for another.

Hence, exemplary imitation does not so much preclude individualism as it highlights the fact that all individuals are assembled from pre-existing components. Brutus qua singular person is also, simultaneously, Brutus qua type; he is at once a unique instance of being and a version of things that have gone before him. Brutus’ identity, like the exemplum itself, mediates between the categories of particular and general. Popular identification of Marcus with Lucius Junius Brutus illustrates in condensed form a tug-of-war between two inseparable and conflicting forces: on the one side, individualism, ambition, and the sense of oneself as a discrete, autonomous unit; on the other, biological and genealogical ties coupled with the pressures of tradition and exemplarity. Similitude leads paradoxically to uniqueness, and vice versa.

The Art of Exemplarity

Besides balancing the rival demands of uniqueness and typification, individuality and social relationships, Roman discourses of exemplarity also mediate between categories of actual and fictional selfhood. On the one hand, exempla are meant to guide and transform personal traits; they are supposed to orchestrate changes in the way people behave and think of themselves qua living beings. At a basic level, as we have seen, exemplary practice encapsulates the crucial mechanism of human self-formation and self-comprehension that is one’s mimetic identification with others. It also performs the even more basic function of confirming genealogies and situating people within their specific biological lineages. Although it often blurs or exceeds the strict boundaries of the individual, Roman exemplarity nonetheless operates in the essentially human, personal, ‘real’ sphere of identity.

On the other hand, though, the exemplum’s iterative and imitative nature can also conjure a process of artistic representation, in which statues replicate their referents and images are reflected in mirrors. The person qua exemplar represents a timeless, replicable symbol, an identity template, as it were, capable of being transferred to other individuals in other eras.Footnote ²¹ Via its memorialising and paradigmatic functions, exemplarity narrows personal identity from an endless range of contingent, indeterminate possibilities to a static, complete, and relatively limited set of characteristics. Being a role model entails also being a role. In this sense, an exemplary person approximates to a statue, a painted image, or even a fictional character; he or she moves into the realm of representation, becomes a surrogate self.Footnote ²² The connection is closest in the case of deceased individuals whose identity necessarily endures in a fixed state, but neither did Roman culture shy away from associating living individuals with aesthetic objects.

To illustrate this idea, I return to Dio’s account of Marcus Junius Brutus (cited in the preceding section). Here, anonymous protestors use the elder Brutus’ statues as a means of urging the living Brutus to act: τῇ τε τοῦ παλαιοῦ Βρούτου εἰκόνι ἐπέγραψαν ‘εἴθε ἔζης,’ (‘on the statue of the early Brutus they wrote ‘We wish you were alive!’’, 44.12). The exchange envisaged is one of man and monument.Footnote ²³ Should the living Brutus opt to participate in Caesar’s assassination, he will effectively reanimate his predecessor’s statue by copying the deeds it represents and embodying all that it stands for. At the same time, he will liken himself to the statue by partaking in the memorialisation of his great predecessor and the symbolic replication of his qualities. Marcus Junius Brutus is at once his own fully realised self and the replication of another; the exchange goes both ways.Footnote ²⁴

Dio’s anecdote is far from a lone instance of such exemplary exchange between person and effigy. Statues of exceptional historical figures were a common topographical feature in the city of Rome, their main purpose being to commemorate and perpetuate particularly laudable forms of behaviour. Augustus, notably, harnessed this custom to his own ends when he erected in the two colonnades of his forum sculptures of summi viri from Rome’s past, dressed in triumphal regalia (Suet. Aug. 31.5).Footnote ²⁵ Besides memorialising these individuals and their achievements, Augustus drew an explicit comparison with himself: he ‘proclaimed by edict that this [statue group] had been devised for citizens to demand that both he, while he lived, and his successors, matched the example set by those men’ (professus et edicto commentum id se ut ad illorum velut exemplar et ipse dum viveret et insequentium aetatium principes exigerentur a civibus, Suet. Aug. 31.5). Veiled in this ostentatious display of false modesty is the claim that Augustus himself embodies a living exemplum;Footnote ²⁶ he is the inevitable next figure in this procession of summi viri, simultaneously a live version of them and a statue of himself.Footnote ²⁷ Such was the culture of exemplarity in ancient Rome that it envisaged a fluid relationship between reality and representation, human beings and reproducible symbols.

This fluid relationship is also articulated by metaphors of reflection, which Roman writers often employ to describe emulative aims and conduct.Footnote ²⁸ Thus: Demea in Terence’s Adelphoe counsels his son, Ctesipho, to ‘look into others’ lives as though into a mirror’ (introspicere, tamquam in speculum, in vitas omnium, 415), which implies that the young man, beyond simply being guided by good models, will reproduce them in extenso.Footnote ²⁹ Seneca, too, draws on this metaphor when he calls Cato a ‘living image of virtue’ (virtutum viva imago, Tranq. 16.1) and summarises a list of exemplary deeds from Roman history as ‘offering to us the image of virtue’ (imaginem nobis ostendere virtutis, Ep. 120.8). The idea, once again, is that exemplarity demands imitation and thereby generates copies in a manner analogous to artistic mimesis. Cato is both an embodiment of virtue and a symbolic instantiation of himself; being an exemplar fixes him in the perpetual, reproducible state of an image (imago) and more specifically, given the Roman context, of an ancestral wax mask (imago).Footnote ³⁰ Like the ancestral portraits that line elite atria, Cato’s imago memorialises his deeds and functions as a spur to future emulation, effectively, to generating yet more copies.

A particularly rich instance of the exemplum’s mimetic impulses is Livy’s story of the elder Publius Licinius Calvus, who persuades voters to elect his son to the tribunate in his stead, on the basis that the young man has been fashioned into ‘the image and likeness’ of his father (effigiem atque imaginem, 5.18.5). The story’s events articulate issues of inheritance and family resemblance: Calvus is depicted as the physical reflection of his progenitor – a statue or portrait (effigiem) – and this bodily similarity is meant to corroborate a further moral and dispositional likeness.Footnote ³¹ Transfer of political office from father to son encapsulates processes of biological descent and genealogical preservation. The younger Calvus is at once a flesh-and-blood version of his father and an artificial replica of him. Biology, exemplarity, and artistic representation converge in this anecdote, with each engaging in an equivalent act of reproductive repetition.Footnote ³²

Crucially for Seneca, this nexus between art, exempla, and family traits claims a long history of association with theatrical performance, as the phrase ‘role model’ suggests even now.Footnote ³³ Anyone who trains him- or herself to imitate another person’s actions and qualities pursues an enterprise equivalent to that of the stage artist, who both copies and – so to speak – ‘revivifies’ the identities of dramatic characters.Footnote ³⁴ Theatrical performance shares with exemplarity an impulse to re-embody established personae: there are deep and cogent similarities between reproducing Cato’s conduct in life and Medea’s conduct on stage. Like the individual aspiring to embody a past exemplum, the actor’s art requires him or her to identify with another self, to inhabit that self and assume its characteristics. The exemplary individual, in turn, resembles a fictional character, a dramatis persona that may be adopted, adapted, and reperformed endlessly.

Roman practice brings the two realms of exemplarity and theatre into particularly close conjunction. The principal context for their meeting was the aristocratic funeral, at which professional performers were hired to don the wax masks (imagines) of the dead man’s ancestors and to accompany the procession in a visually powerful display of upper-class lineage. The reanimation of past exempla becomes, on this model, an inherently dramatic activity, while the ancestors themselves become analogous to dramatic characters: they are identity templates, their selfhood already fully defined, unconditional, and capable of being transferred from person to person.

The Roman aristocratic funeral was designed chiefly to enact social and familial continuity. It bolstered collective memory and preserved the cultural values epitomised by Rome’s maiores.Footnote ³⁵ Once the cortège had reached the Rostra, a son or close male relative would deliver a eulogy celebrating the deceased’s achievements, listing alongside those of his ancestors, the official posts he had held; the ancestors themselves, re-incarnated by actors, sat behind the speaker on the platform, and listened.Footnote ³⁶ The custom was intended to spur emulative behaviour among the family’s younger generations, and more generally, among the attending Roman populace.Footnote ³⁷ As the representative of his family’s future, the eulogist also aspired to be the physical and moral embodiment of its exemplary past. His need to imitate and thereby preserve dynastic traditions was symbolically and visually equivalent to the actors’ assumption of ancestral forms: like a living monument, or the latest performer of a long-standing role, the deceased’s heir was called upon to uphold the exempla of his progenitors. These converging lines of impersonation and inheritance articulated with striking economy the theatrical (and frequently biological) replication inherent in all acts of exemplarity.

Re-embodiment of exemplary individuals even occurred on the stage itself, via the Roman tradition of fabulae praetextae. Although it seems unlikely that these plays ever took place during actual funeral ceremonies,Footnote ³⁸ they nonetheless developed from much the same constellation of moral and cultural attitudes: like the actors wearing imagines at an aristocratic funeral, the characters in an historical drama epitomised the ancestral ties that bound the exemplary past to its re-enactment, and therefore to its perpetuation, in the present. Praetextae such as Accius’ Decius and Brutus may well have been commissioned to celebrate contemporary patrons through praise of their exceptional predecessors.Footnote ³⁹ In this context, too, the discourse of exemplarity effects a fluid transition between the singular, self-contained person and the general, reproducible art object: the figure on stage is a real flesh-and-blood human impersonating and thereby becoming a copy of an historical exemplar. The exemplar, likewise, is reanimated as a living being and confirmed as a mimetic object. In the likely case that patrons attended the performances of such praetextae,Footnote ⁴⁰ comparisons could easily be drawn between the actual descendant sitting in the audience and the representation of his ancestor on stage. Doubtless this was one of the reasons for Marcus Junius Brutus wanting to re-stage Accius’ Brutus at the Ludi Apollinares of 44 bc, in the aftermath of Caesar’s assassination: as the current liberator of the Republic, he would be visibly mirrored by the character embodied in the play; Marcus Brutus himself, and the actor playing Lucius Brutus would both be exemplary copies of the actual, historical individual on whom the praetexta centred.Footnote ⁴¹ The imitation that underpins all acts of exemplarity would ensure Marcus Brutus’ personal, biological identity at the same time as rendering him an artificial duplicate of an earlier model.

My reason for dwelling at such length on this issue is to show how easily the discourse and praxis of Roman exemplarity binds actual people to their fictional or plastic counterparts. Roman exempla cross and re-cross the boundary between person and character, especially in their more theatrical manifestations. By likening individuals to art objects and dramatic roles, exemplarity bestows an identity that is circumscribed, reproducible, and timeless, in comparison to the contingent, time-bound singularity that characterises human lives. Such circumscribed identity, admitting of minimal (if any) variation and capable of being repeated ad infinitum, a stable and complete set of traits, is precisely what characters possess. To a lesser degree, this is also true of statues, so that the relationship of person to effigy approaches even if it does not quite reach the character–person binary. Given the prevalence of such practices in ancient Rome, it is unsurprising to find in Senecan tragedy a similarly permeable boundary between fictional and actual modes of being.

Metapoetic Families

Before turning to Seneca, though, I consider one more matter: the relationship of exemplarity to literary allusion. In a wide-ranging 2009 article on the topic, Alessandro Barchiesi draws attention to ‘the link in Roman letters between repetition of past exempla and textual self-reference’.Footnote ⁴² The exemplum, like the quotation to which it is closely related,Footnote ⁴³ prompts intertextual associations, and opens a window onto the shadows and outlines of a given work’s literary genealogy. Through the exemplum, the author can show, and the reader see, which texts are being imitated and enshrined as paradigms.

Instances of such self-reflexive literary exemplarity are not far to seek; certainly, they saturate Seneca’s drama, but first it will be profitable to examine one example so apt and so popular that it could be said to occupy its own exemplary status within the scholarly literature on Roman exemplarity, namely, Aeneas’ address to Ascanius at Aeneid 12.435–40:Footnote ⁴⁴

As Goldschmidt remarks, the exemplum fulfils its moral-didactic function at both an intra- and extra-textual level in this passage: Ascanius must learn from Aeneas and Hector just as the generic Roman puer whom Ascanius represents, ‘the boy reader of epic in future Rome’, must learn from the models he encounters in the text itself.Footnote ⁴⁵ Aeneas is a model for his son and for the audience of Vergil’s epic. This double layer of exemplarity renders Aeneas at once a quasi-human and a fictional identity. Within the fictive world enclosed by the epic’s narrative, Aeneas figures as an implied human personality, a father delivering precepts to his son, and a man whose valorous deeds (virtutem … verumque laborem, 435) will be emulated by and reproduced in future generations. Like countless other instances of exemplary discourse in Roman culture, this passage from the Aeneid connects moral paradigms with genealogical lineage, so that Ascanius’ need to satisfy the demands of his parental model becomes, at the same time, his means of securing a place within an ancestral group (exempla tuorum, 439). Pater Aeneas likewise combines literal fatherhood with the fatherly authority of the exemplum.

At the extra-textual level, however, Aeneas’ instruction signifies in a self-reflexive manner the poetic tradition of which he is a part. By citing himself and Hector as models, Aeneas – and Vergil behind him – looks forward to the work’s reception by future Roman audiences, and at the same time, glances back to a long-established practice of readers extracting exemplary lessons from Homeric epic.Footnote ⁴⁶ Ascanius is encouraged to treat his father as a textual construct from which he may learn the lessons customarily proffered by epic poetry. This discourse of exemplarity, in turn, draws attention to the Iliad’s pervasive presence as an intertext throughout the Aeneid – a presence that grows particularly acute in Book 12 – and to Hector’s role as one of many literary models for the character of Aeneas himself.Footnote ⁴⁷

The passage’s metapoetic connotations extend further still, because when Aeneas acknowledges his paternal status (pater Aeneas), he not only evokes his dynastic and didactic duties, but also alludes to Vergil’s position as a literary son to Homer’s towering father figure.Footnote ⁴⁸ Vergil the poetic offspring hopes he can live up to the standards set by his great poetic progenitor. Paradigms pervade the passage at all levels, and, just as is the case in Roman society, the exemplum here combines moral with artistic aemulatio, biological inheritance with acts of imitative duplication, and textual with human (or, for Aeneas, implied human) identity. Exemplarity’s imitative impulse enables both characters and people to be interpreted as actual individuals on the one hand, and on the other, as literary or plastic artefacts. As the preceding surveys demonstrate, these two categories often converge.

Achilles’ Shadow

Imitative exemplarity is likewise a major theme in Seneca’s Troades, where it acts as a spur to future accomplishments, and delineates characters’ identities via a combination of ancestral and literary inheritance. The exemplum’s iterative qualities are matched, in this tragedy, by iteration at the level of dramatic action and mythological events: just as the past replays – or must be prevented from replaying – in the present, so characters must formulate their current selves by reproducing and referring to earlier behavioural models. As a result, identity is envisaged primarily in terms of copies, whether biological, moral, poetic, or artistic – and frequently several of those categories at once. In the Troades as in Roman culture more generally, exemplarity stands at the intersection of text and humanness, shaping individuals’ conduct at the same time as – even by means of – compelling people to become duplicates.

Scholars of Senecan tragedy have, for a long time now, acknowledged and discussed the various motifs of repetition that form a crucial part of the Troades’ thematic texture.Footnote ⁴⁹ The mythological past furnishes paradigms for current events, and the dramatis personae invoke precedents at every turn: Agamemnon has previously sacrificed a virgin to the Trojan cause, so there is the expectation that he will do so again (246–9; 360–1); Hector once defended Troy, so both Andromache and Ulysses assume that Astyanax will do the same (469–74; 529–33; 550–1); just as Helen’s marriage once brought grief to the Trojans, so – on a smaller scale – her announcement of Polyxena’s ‘marriage’ will be greeted with mourning (861–3). The dead hand of the past maintains an iron grip over the present in this tragedy, with successive characters compelled to relive earlier occurrences or to re-embody earlier figures.

The play’s action, too, is structured around duplicate scenes and duplicate personae: the agon between Andromache and Ulysses in Act 3 reprises that between Agamemnon and Pyrrhus in Act 2, with the former figure of each pair attempting to preserve the life of a Trojan child; Ulysses and Helen also perform parallel roles as the characters sent to find Astyanax and Polyxena, and to ensure preparations for their respective sacrifices; two ghosts appear; two children die; events centre upon two tombs, of Achilles and of Hector.Footnote ⁵⁰ This pervasive doubling – at the level of the play’s content and of its form – lends a paradigmatic quality to characters and their conduct, as if everything that someone does, and all that someone is, may be adopted and repeated by other people at other times. Virtually every deed and every person in this tragedy is ghosted by the memory of former events, and by the further possibility of those events re-occurring in the future.

Exemplarity looms large in such circumstances. Action in the Troades tends to be framed by the presence of parental models,Footnote ⁵¹ and especially by the father–son relationship that features so prominently in the literary and cultural discourses of Roman exempla. A clear instance of this dynamic is the protracted exchange between Pyrrhus and Agamemnon that occupies almost the whole of Act 2. Ostensibly a debate over whether the Greeks are justified in their plan to sacrifice Polyxena as an offering to Achilles’ shade, the dialogue rapidly dissolves into an altercatio focused on Agamemnon’s past and Pyrrhus’ current behaviour.Footnote ⁵² Both characters have recourse to Achilles as a moral-didactic and genealogical paradigm for Pyrrhus, whose identity is governed almost entirely by ‘the implications of heredity’.Footnote ⁵³ Achilles in this exchange is held up as a model for Pyrrhus to follow, and at the same time, portrayed as the wellspring of Pyrrhus’ present actions, reactions, and attitudes.

Pyrrhus himself is keen to forge strong links with his father, which he does first of all by listing Achilles’ achievements and declaring that he ‘enjoys tracing the celebrated deeds and great praise of [his] glorious parent’ (inclitas laudes iuvat / et clara magni facta genitoris sequi, 236–7). Punctuating as it does two catalogues of Achilles’ feats – his victories in Troy (238–43) and elsewhere (215–28) – the statement implies primarily that Pyrrhus takes pride in reciting his father’s attainments. But beneath the immediate, rhetorical connotations of sequi (‘to list’, 237) is the suggestion that Pyrrhus will also follow and conform to (sequi) his illustrious parent’s example.Footnote ⁵⁴ The two catalogues are intended not only to exalt Achilles and thereby defend his ghost’s request,Footnote ⁵⁵ but also to stress continuity between father and son: Pyrrhus has inherited this record of achievement and hopes to be able to match it.

Achilles’ status as a moral-didactic exemplum is further confirmed by the resemblance this speech bears to a laudatio funebris. Like the male scion of a prominent Roman family delivering a public eulogy in praise of his deceased (most likely male)Footnote ⁵⁶ relative’s accomplishments, Pyrrhus recites, commemorates, and celebrates his father’s deeds in the context of a discussion about the rites owed to his shade; though not identical, the two scenarios are certainly analogous. And that analogy extends to the content and structure of the speeches themselves, because Roman funeral orations appear – from the minimal fragments that remain – to have included detailed accounts of the dead man’s career accompanied by references to the careers of his most conspicuous ancestors. Laudationes typically took the form of catalogues that proceeded in chronological order from the recipient’s initial accomplishments to his latest: Q. Caecilius Metellus’ laudatio for his father, delivered in 221 bc and thus the oldest recorded specimen of that genre, seems to have listed in ascending sequence the posts of pontifex maximus, two consulships, and the dictatorship (patris sui L. Metellis pontificis, bis consulis, dictatoris, Pliny Nat. 7.130).Footnote ⁵⁷ Epitaphic inscriptions, which exhibit many characteristics of the laudatio genre, also tend to catalogue achievements chronologically, either from first to last or vice versa: Cn. Cornelius Scipio Hispanus is commemorated for having filled the roles of praetor, curule aedile, quaestor, and military tribune (ILS 6), and L. Munatius Plancus for having held the consulship and censorship, in addition to having been hailed twice as imperator (ILS 886).Footnote ⁵⁸ In a similar manner, the Pyrrhus of Seneca’s Troades enumerates his father’s youthful victories over Telephus (215); Cilician Thebes (219); Lyrnessos (221); Pedasus (222); Chryse (223); Tenedos (224); Lesbos (226); and Cilla (227), followed by his Trojan victories: Hector (238); Memnon (239); and Penthesilea (243).Footnote ⁵⁹ When he sums up his father’s youthful feats as a ‘journey’ (iter est Achillis, 232), the metaphor of the road all but evokes the cursus honorum around which so much of Roman elite life, and the funeral speech itself, was structured.Footnote ⁶⁰ By celebrating Achilles’ exemplarity, Pyrrhus implies that his own identity stems from the model of his father; this foremost Trojan hero will ‘live on’ through his son in much the same way that descendants at a Roman funeral were assumed to perpetuate a family line via the dual ties of biology and exempla.

Pyrrhus’ desire to emulate his father is not just empty rhetoric, either. Seneca draws an implicit comparison between the young warrior’s first martial feat, the slaughter of King Priam (caede … regia, 309) and Achilles’ first, the wounding of King Telephus (cruore regio, 217), where similar phrasing suggests the deeds’ equivalence.Footnote ⁶¹ Pyrrhus also reproduces Achilles’ paradigm in Act 2 simply by engaging in a quarrel with Agamemnon, an episode that will be discussed in detail below. Such imitation of Achilles’ exemplum transforms Pyrrhus into a virtual Achilles redivivus who has already begun to be responsible for visiting a second round of grief upon the Trojans. Andromache acknowledges as much when, near the close of Act 3, she tasks Astyanax with delivering a reproachful message to Hector in Hades: lentus et segnis iaces? / redit Achilles (‘do you lie there slow and sluggish? Achilles has returned’ Tro. 805–6). In one regard, Andromache refers to Achilles’ literal if insubstantial return in the form of a ghost, a spectral offstage presence reported by Talthybius in Act 2 (168–202); viewed from another angle, however, her phrase suggests Achilles’ symbolic resurrection in the person of his son, Pyrrhus, who even now perpetuates his father’s hostility towards the Trojans. Besides living in Achilles’ shadow, Pyrrhus becomes Achilles’ shadow, imagined by himself and by others in the play as the living exemplum of his great progenitor.

Agamemnon likewise cites Achilles as both a source of and a paradigm for Pyrrhus’ current behaviour. Emphasising the Iliadic hero’s capacity for clemency over his capacity for violence, Agamemnon confronts Pyrrhus with his killing of Priam, the very man Achilles once chose to spare:

The sarcastic vocabulary of praise in this passage echoes only to refute Pyrrhus’ preceding attempt to assume the mantle of his father’s glorious deeds. Agamemnon both acknowledges and reinterprets the notion of ‘incomparability’ present in Pyrrhus’ earlier laudatio: whereas Achilles’ martial exploits surpass the title of summum decus (231), Pyrrhus’ fall far below the level of maximum (311); the father’s exceptional status has not been conferred on the son.Footnote ⁶² For Agamemnon, Priam’s death, the old man’s literal severance from life, symbolises Pyrrhus’ severance from his father’s model. This discontinuity comes through especially clearly in lines 312–13, where iacet is all but pressed into double service and prompts us to imagine Priam lying down in supplication (iacet / supplex) as well as lying down dead (peremptus … iacet); what Achilles has done, Pyrrhus has undone.Footnote ⁶³ Agamemnon reiterates the idea when he declares, a few lines further on, ‘among those Thessalian vessels, there was deep peace for Hector’s father’ (in istis Thessalis navalibus / pax alta rursus Hectoris patris fuit, 325–6). Here the phrase Hectoris patris draws attention to the significance of father–son relationships and implies once again that Pyrrhus has not maintained his predecessor’s exemplum because he has offered Priam only the pax of death whereas Achilles once offered the pax of clemency.

Agamemnon’s criticism owes an oblique debt to the confrontation between Priam and Pyrrhus in Aeneid 2.526–58, where the Trojan king himself, having just witnessed Polites’ death, accuses Pyrrhus of failing to follow Achilles’ model:Footnote ⁶⁴

O’Sullivan observes of this passage: ‘Priam refers to his Iliadic persona in the third person, thereby emphasising that we are in a post-Iliadic world, and highlighting how far removed Pyrrhus’ blasphemy is from Achilles’ behaviour.’Footnote ⁶⁵ As happens frequently in Roman discourses of exemplarity, imitative conduct is imagined as a facet of biology, so that Pyrrhus’ failure to uphold Achilles’ exemplum also casts doubt on his parentage (satum quo te mentiris, Achilles, 2.540). Vergil’s Pyrrhus draws on the same set of associations when, unperturbed by Priam’s reproach, he vaunts, referes ergo haec et nuntius ibis / Pelidae genitori. illi mea tristia facta / degeneremque Neoptolemum narrare memento (‘all right, you will go as a messenger and report these things to my father, Peleus’ son. Remember to recount these savage deeds of mine, and to say that Neoptolemus is degenerate’ Aen. 2.547–9). In this context of fathers and patronymics, degener implies both Pyrrhus’ moral unworthiness and his descent from Achilles, that is, his weakened embodiment of a once noble bloodline.Footnote ⁶⁶ As in Seneca’s Troades, the character and conduct of Vergil’s Pyrrhus are judged according to the standards set by his famous forebear; Achilles qua parent merges with Achilles qua exemplum.

Achilles’ paradigm, moreover, maintains concurrent influence over both the fictional and quasi-human aspects of Pyrrhus’ identity. In Aeneid 2.526–58, Achilles represents a moral-didactic model for Pyrrhus’ implied human personality, and, at the same time, symbolises the literary past of Vergil’s epic.Footnote ⁶⁷ His parental model is at once deeply personal – a father embodying moral guidance for his son – and essentially abstract: a character whose parent text, the Iliad, epitomises the aesthetic benchmark for Vergil and his readers.

The same applies to Agamemnon and Pyrrhus’ dialogue in the Troades, where Achilles’ exemplarity symbolises first of all the facts of biological inheritance, the behavioural characteristics that have or have not been passed down from Achilles to his son. Secondly, this paternal paradigm is meant to influence that conduct, while at the same time representing a literary model for Pyrrhus’ characterisation. Agamemnon recalls Achilles’ deeds primarily in the hope that Pyrrhus will learn from them, just as Agamemnon himself claims to have acquired greater wisdom from witnessing Troy’s fall (magna momento obrui / vincendo didici; ‘I have learnt by conquering that greatness can be crushed in an instant’, 263–4. Cf. disce at Aen. 12.435, above), and just as Troy, too, in this pervasive atmosphere of moral-didactic exemplarity, becomes a documentum (5) of power’s ultimate fragility. How one approaches the past and which lessons one chooses to learn from it are major themes in this play; Achilles’ exemplum adheres within this wider matrix, and Agamemnon wields it like a pedagogical tool intended to alter Pyrrhus’s identity for the better.

In making the comparison, though, Seneca also implies that Achilles is a meta-literary symbol and Pyrrhus the poetic replica of his Iliadic forebear.Footnote ⁶⁸ Recalling the quarrel from Iliad Book 1, Seneca’s Agamemnon admits to a sense of déjà-vu that inevitably colours his impression of the young man’s temperament:

Here, Agamemnon blends literal with literary genealogies, parent with parent text, so that Pyrrhus is seen not only to exhibit character traits inherited from his father, but also to fulfil – by replaying it – a role established in and via an earlier poetic work. The paternus fervor displayed by Pyrrhus (251–2) recalls the μῆνιν … Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος (‘the wrath of Achilles, Peleus’ son’ Il. 1.1) that drives the action of the Iliad and, more specifically, suffuses that epic’s opening dispute: what Agamemnon has encountered before with Achilles (quondam), he now encounters all over again in the hero’s son; the same goes for Seneca’s readers. The exemplum that Agamemnon cites in this passage proves an occasion for literary self-reflexivity, and Pyrrhus’ identity is treated as something that derives as much from a textual as from a biological source. Exemplary imitation, which elsewhere in the exchange functions as a means of moral and personal self-fashioning, becomes in this instance an act of literary mimesis, with Pyrrhus reproducing his Iliadic father’s paradigm, and Seneca, as we shall see, copying parts of Homer’s paradigmatic text.

Parent and Parent Text

As Seidensticker recognises in his careful, pioneering study of the scene, Pyrrhus and Agamemnon’s quarrel in Troades Act 2 recapitulates in a minor key the confrontation between Agamemnon and Achilles in Iliad 1.Footnote ⁶⁹ Seneca’s Agamemnon openly acknowledges the Homeric intertext at 252–3 (above), and Pyrrhus foreshadows its appearance when he describes Chryse – Chryseis’ homeland, and one of the many locales conquered by Achilles – as ‘the cause of strife for kings’ (causa litis regibus Chryse, 223).Footnote ⁷⁰ But most of the Homeric allusions in this scene comprise excerpts from Achilles’ speeches in Iliadi 1, adapted and echoed by Seneca’s Pyrrhus.

Thus: when Pyrrhus accuses Agamemnon of cowardice – timide, cum increpuit metus (‘you are fearful when danger roars’, 302) – he repeats in condensed form the same complaint voiced by Homer’s Achilles: οὔτέ ποτ᾽ ἐς πόλεμον ἅμα λαῷ θωρηχθῆναι /οὔτε λόχονδ᾽ ἰέναι σὺν ἀριστήεσσιν Ἀχαιῶν / τέτληκας θυμῷ· τὸ δέ τοι κὴρ εἴδεται εἶναι (‘Never / once have you taken courage in your heart to arm with your people / for battle, or to go into ambuscade with the best of the Achaians. / No, for in such things you see death.’ Il. 1.226–8 trans. Lattimore). When Pyrrhus sneers at Agamemnon’s power, the phrase regum tyranne (‘tyrant over kings’ 303) not only distorts the Homeric formula ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, but also recalls Achilles’ insinuations at Iliad 1.287–8: ἀλλ᾽ ὅδ᾽ἀνὴρ ἐθέλει περὶ πάντων ἔμμεναι ἄλλων, / πάντων μὲν κρατέειν ἐθέλει, πάντεσσι δ᾽ἀνάσσειν (‘Yet here is a man who wishes to be above all others, / who wishes to hold power over all, and to be lord of / all’ trans. Lattimore).Footnote ⁷¹ Both the Homeric father and the Senecan son make threats against Agamemnon’s life: Pyrrhus declares nimium diu / a caede nostra regia cessat manus / paremque poscit Priamus (‘for too long now has my hand refrained from slaughtering kings, and Priam demands his equal’ 308–10), while Achilles remarks darkly, ᾗς ὑπεροπλίῃσι τάχ᾽ ἄν ποτε θυμὸν ὀλέσσῃ (‘By such acts of arrogance he may even lose his own life’ Il. 1.205 trans. Lattimore). When, in the Troades, Pyrrhus demands to know whether Agamemnon will continue depriving warriors of their prizes – solusne totiens spolia de nobis feres? (‘will you alone, so often, bear away spoils at our expense?’ 305) – he not only alludes to Agamemnon’s forcible appropriation of Briseis in the Iliad, but also conjures Achilles’ comments about Agamemnon receiving an unequal share of the plunder: ἀλλὰ τὸ μὲν πλεῖον πολυάϊκος πολέμοιο / χεῖρες ἐμαὶ διέπουσ᾽· ἀτὰρ ἤν ποτε δασμὸς ἵκηται, / σοὶ τὸ γέρας πολὺ μεῖζον (‘Always the greater part of the painful fighting is the work of / my hands; but when the time comes to distribute the booty / yours is the far greater reward’ Il. 1.165–7 trans. Lattimore). Although relatively broad and loose, the allusions are also inescapable, clustered together in such a way as to make the Homeric intertext instantly apparent: Pyrrhus steps into his father’s role and repeats his father’s words.

This convergence of textual reiteration and reiterated behaviour points once again to the presence of exemplarity. The analogical force of the exemplum defines Pyrrhus’ identity in terms of his biological, personal, and literary resemblance to his father: Pyrrhus adopts Achilles’ model to the extent that he becomes a copy of it, a figure whose disposition and patterns of conduct appear to have been predetermined by a combination of genealogical and poetic fiat. Achilles’ authority as a parent merges with Homer’s authority as the wellspring of the debate with Agamemnon: both dictate how Seneca’s Pyrrhus is meant to behave, and ultimately, who he is meant to be. Thus, Pyrrhus in the Troades is at once a quasi-human figure who has inherited his father’s traits, and a textual construct whose inherited traits amount to little more than a pastiche of quotations. If exemplarity may be defined as a form of citation, that is, of referring to and reproducing extant paradigms in the field of human activity, then Seneca’s Pyrrhus reinforces this definition literally, by citing Homer’s Iliad; his personal emulation is mirrored in acts of literary allusion.

As a specific consequence of Seneca’s dramatic medium, Pyrrhus’ exemplarity also evinces links to performance, both in a theatrical and in a more generic sense. The son’s biological re-embodiment of his father is accompanied by performative re-embodiment, as Pyrrhus breathes new life into Achilles’ words, and re-enacts Achilles’ quarrel in updated form. Like an actor assuming a part, or the scion of an aristocratic family at a Roman funeral, Pyrrhus revivifies in his own flesh-and-blood presence the skeletal template of somebody else’s identity. His status as a substitute equates to his status as a performer. And the performative qualities of exemplarity become all the more apparent if the scene is staged, because then Pyrrhus’ assumption of his father’s traits finds a parallel in the actor’s assumption of Pyrrhus’ character. In both instances, successful emulation reifies what would otherwise remain an abstract and largely textual model, and at the same time entails a diminution or even denial of the performer’s individuality: exemplarity renders Pyrrhus, like the actor, a version, a copy, a type.Footnote ⁷²

Hector’s Son

If there is one character in the Troades subject to greater exemplary pressure than Pyrrhus, that character is Astyanax, who can barely be said to exist beyond symbolising his father Hector’s heroism. More so than Pyrrhus, Astyanax is defined exclusively via his patrimony: Calchas refers to him as Priami nepos Hectoreus (‘Priam’s grandson via Hector’, 369), and Ulysses, in the space of just one Act, calls him Hectorea suboles (‘Hector’s scion’, 528), futurus Hector (‘a future Hector’, 551), Hectoris natum (‘Hector’s son’, 554), and stirps Hectoris (‘Hector’s stock’, 605). Even Andromache, whose motherhood might otherwise be expected to endow her with a more nuanced perspective, struggles to see her son in any terms other than his illustrious parentage.Footnote ⁷³ She refers to the child as Hectoris proles (‘Hector’s offspring’, 597), and later apostrophises her absent husband: ‘there is nothing in my son that pleases me apart from you’ (non aliud, Hector, in meo nato mihi / placere quam te, 646–7). When faced with the choice of surrendering Astyanax or enduring the destruction of Hector’s tomb, she rapidly concludes that this is a false dichotomy: both of them belong to and represent Hector; both preserve his memory (utrimque est Hector; ‘Hector is on both sides’, 559). From the Trojan viewpoint as much as from the Greek, Astyanax claims little or no identity independent of his father’s.

Caution must be exercised here: Astyanax’s name, which is solidly dactylic, cannot be accommodated within the iambic trimeter that forms the bulk of Seneca’s tragic dialogues (in fact, the name appears only once in Senecan drama, at Agamemnon 639, a section of choral lyric). So there are practical, metrical reasons for the playwright of the Troades choosing to describe this boy in periphrastic ways.Footnote ⁷⁴ Yet Seneca’s interest in Astyanax’s genealogy far exceeds the basic constraints of scansion: he is, rather, at pains to illustrate a relationship of exemplarity between father and son, hence the obsessive focus on Hector (as opposed to any other family member) and on the distant, yet constant possibility that Astyanax will resurrect Troy. It is by emphasising Astyanax’s status as a copy that Seneca makes both Astyanax and Hector into exempla.

At the most literal level, Astyanax represents a version of Hector simply because he resembles him. Andromache sees in her son a direct reflection of her husband’s face – hos vultus meus / habebat Hector (‘my Hector used to have those features’ 464–5) – and, in the description that follows, she portrays the boy as Hector’s bodily copy: talis incessu fuit / habituque talis, sic tulit fortes manus, / sic celsus umeris, fronte sic torva minax / cervice fusam dissipans iacta comam (‘he was like this in his gait, like this in his posture, thus he carried his brave hands, thus were his shoulders held high, thus he looked threatening with his grim brow, tossing back his neck and shaking his flowing hair’ 465–8). In a move characteristic of exemplary narratives, Andromache conflates past and present in Astyanax’s person: he is what Hector was.Footnote ⁷⁵ The terms talis and sic function as implicit stage directions in this passage, with the performer of Andromache’s role presumably gesturing towards her son, or even guiding him to adopt Hector’s posture.Footnote ⁷⁶ Attention is thereby focused upon Astyanax’s immediate, tangible, bodily presence, which is subsequently elided with an absent, imagined body from the past (fuit; tulit). Of course, this resemblance may be partially a figment of Andromache’s imagination, a delusory outcome of her obsessive love for Hector, especially since the Astyanax we meet elsewhere in Act 3 appears not celsus (467) but small (e.g. parvulam stirpem; ‘tiniest offspring’, 456, and parvus comes; ‘little companion’, 537). Essentially, what Andromache does at Troades 465–8 is envisage her son as a grown man, describing not (quite) the individual stood before her, but his anticipated resemblance to his now deceased father. This comparison is prompted by exemplarity as much as by nostalgia, since, besides being the physical embodiment of the past, Astyanax also represents the future of his gens; he is expected, simultaneously, to perpetuate his father’s memory and to surpass it.

This motif of bodily resemblance recurs at 647–8 when Andromache, apostrophising Hector, utters a distraught prayer for their son’s life: vivat ut possit tuos / referre vultus (‘let him live so that he can revive your face’). From Andromache’s perspective, this is Astyanax’s sole purpose in living: his memorialisation of her deceased husband. The boy reiterates the past (referre) by calling Hector’s lost visage to mind (referre); his identity stretches beyond the present time and beyond the bounds of his own body.Footnote ⁷⁷ Physical similarity indicates that Hector can be copied in precisely the same manner as an exemplum, so that his position as Astyanax’s father also renders him Astyanax’s prototype.

Yet Hector’s exemplum goes beyond mere matters of bodily resemblance. When Andromache regrets that her son is ‘too similar to his father’ (nimium … similis patri, 464) she implies both that Astyanax reflects Hector’s appearance and, by extension, that he will match Hector’s achievements. Each of these propositions worries her (hence: nimium) because, on the one hand, Astyanax’s presence reminds her constantly of Hector’s loss, and on the other, because the likelihood of his inherited prowess in battle makes him a conspicuous target for the conquerors’ pre-emptive killings. In Andromache’s mind, physical mimesis cannot be uncoupled from behavioural mimesis, as indicated by her rapid transition from describing Astyanax’s physique (464–8) to imagining his deeds:

Any reader with even a passing knowledge of Vergil will be alert to Seneca’s trademark irony in this passage. The playwright undercuts Andromache’s hopes via a ‘future reflexive’ evocation of the Aeneid: we know that Troy’s future lies elsewhere, in Italy, and that it will be secured not by repeating the past, but by patiently, sometimes painfully renouncing it.Footnote ⁷⁸ Yet the futility of Andromache’s aspirations does not make them purely irrational.Footnote ⁷⁹ Her reasoning, in fact, adheres closely to Roman discourses of exemplarity, employing as it does two core principles of iteration and resurrection. Like Astyanax’s body, this vision of his achievements amalgamates several timeframes to the effect that the young boy’s future consists in bringing back the past. Each individual act of repetition and return (recidiva; reducas; reddas) points to Astyanax’s overall mimicry of his father’s model, by which he restores Hector in all but the most literal sense. Heroic deeds, like Hector’s body, can be copied, and Astyanax is assumed to arrogate his father’s exemplum almost by virtue of his being ‘the true offspring of a mighty sire’ (magni certa progenies patris, 461). Ethical resemblance presupposes biological similitude.

Ulysses, too, regards Astyanax as a version of his father, and conversely, Hector as an exemplum for the boy. When he confesses that the Danaans fear a futurus Hector (551) not only does Ulysses conflate temporalities in the same way as Andromache, but he also assigns Hector to the category of repeatable paradigms. Like, for instance, the word Caesar, Hector moves from designating a unique, specific individual to signifying a title, a part (and in this case, a set of traits that others may adopt as required).Footnote ⁸⁰ As discussed earlier in this chapter, exemplarity naturally produces such typologies, because commemoration of exceptional deeds/people leads to their being enshrined not as isolated events, but as readily available templates.Footnote ⁸¹ The exemplarity of Lucius Junius Brutus transforms him from person into statue, from Brutus-as-individual to what that individual represents, in effect, to Brutus-as-symbol. Hector’s exemplum has for Astyanax the same effect as Lucius Brutus’ does on the late republican Marcus: to become fully himself, to grow into his heritage, Astyanax must adopt the identity of another. Such exemplarity transforms Astyanax, too, into a symbol, as what would otherwise be an intimate, flesh-and-blood connection to his father becomes instead a relationship based on standardised, analogical qualities. The personal has become impersonal, or even supra-personal.

The Ghosts of Fathers Past

The motif of death and resurrection furnishes yet another point of contact between Astyanax and Hector’s (or Pyrrhus and Achilles’) relationship and Roman discourses of exemplarity. Despite the play’s notoriously contradictory stance on the afterlife,Footnote ⁸² it is still the case that, in Mairéad McAuley’s words, ‘some of the dead … have real and material power over the living’ in the Troades.Footnote ⁸³ The appearance of Achilles’ and then Hector’s ghosts, whatever their respective levels of reality,Footnote ⁸⁴ is responsible for setting in motion the majority of the tragedy’s events. In addition, these ghosts have an equally substantial impact on the identities of their descendants, particularly on how those identities are perceived. Thus, as the moral and physical embodiment of his father, Astyanax is seen to continue his deceased parent’s lineage in a manner analogous to resurrection, preserving Hector and, in a sense, returning him to life.Footnote ⁸⁵ Like a Roman son or grandson delivering a funeral eulogy, Astyanax is his forebear’s ghost at the same time as being his successor.

Astyanax acquires ghostlike qualities primarily through his role as Hector’s replacement: the shadow of his father’s features can be discerned in his face, and the purpose of his future is to take up Hector’s past.Footnote ⁸⁶ When Astyanax cringes at the prospect of entering Hector’s tomb, Andromache chooses to interpret this reaction as evidence of the young boy’s parentage: turpesne latebras spernis? agnosco indolem: / pudet timere (‘do you scorn repulsive hiding places? I recognise your in-born nature: feeling fear is shameful’ 504–5).Footnote ⁸⁷ The child’s ghostliness is further compounded by Andromache’s desire to ‘close [his] living eyes with her hand’ (ut mea condam manu / viventis oculos, 788–9), and also by her recital of a formal, funereal lament for Astyanax while the boy is still standing beside her (766–85).Footnote ⁸⁸

Astyanax resembles a shadow even in terms of his literary character, because the future that Andromache had planned for her son – re-establishing Troy (470–4); ruling over the Trojans (771–3); avenging the Greek conquest (660, 774); and leading the lusus Troiae (777–9) – has already been claimed by Aeneas, Ascanius, and the Aeneid.Footnote ⁸⁹ Seneca ensures that his audience is well aware of this last, cruel fact, for when Andromache enumerates her child’s physical features at 467–8 (sic tulit fortes manus, / sic celsus umeris, fronte sic torva minax; ‘thus he carried his brave hands, thus were his shoulders held high, thus he looked threatening with his grim brow’), she echoes her Vergilian counterpart in Aeneid 3, who sees in the young Ascanius a shadow of her own lost son: o mihi sola super Astyanactis imago. / sic oculos, sic ille manus, sic ora ferebat (‘O the only image of Astyanax left to me. Thus were his eyes, thus his hands, thus his face’ Aen. 3.489–90).Footnote ⁹⁰ Astyanax’s raw biological identification with his father is overlaid by the repetition of one poetic work within another. The effect of this clever intertext is to render Astyanax in the Troades not just the reflection of a past individual (his own father), but also the dim outline of a future figure (Aeneas’ son), whose survival has already been confirmed in an earlier text. Caught between Hector and Ascanius, Andromache’s son seems doubly a phantom.

The foremost focus of these spectral themes is Hector’s tomb, which occupies the centre of the stage, and concomitantly, the centre of several characters’ thoughts for most of Act 3. More than just a convenient hiding place for Astyanax, it symbolises the ghostly aspects of the boy’s identity, and the exemplarity underpinning his relationship with his father. By disappearing into and later emerging from the tomb, Astyanax all but undergoes a process of death and rebirth, which corroborates at a visual level his perpetuation of Hector’s exemplum. Astyanax is his father, resurrected, reinstated, recovered from the dead. Andromache alludes to precisely this duality when she declares of the child hidden inside the monument both that ‘he lies among the dead’ (inter extinctos iacet, 603) and that he will survive if only Hector protects him: Hector … / … fideli cinere victurum excipe (‘Hector … receive with your faithful ashes one who is going to live’ 501–2). The two states turn out to be symbolically equivalent, because Hector’s exemplum makes Astyanax into a living image and a ghost, simultaneously the fleshly embodiment of his father and a mere trace of the deceased man’s past existence. When Andromache calls upon Hector’s shade to ‘break fate’s barrier’ (rumpe fatorum moras, 681) and come to his family’s rescue, it is the son, not the father, who actually emerges from the tomb (705). Thus Seneca’s dramaturgy demonstrates for the audience what Andromache must learn the hard way: these two men are interchangeable.

Further highlighting this connection between exemplarity and death is the tight network of lexical correspondences that Seneca constructs throughout the play. Just as Astyanax experiences the ‘vast weight of the tomb’ (immane busti pondus, 689), so, likewise, the boy’s ‘great nobility presses upon him as a heavy weight’ (grave pondus illum magna nobilitas premit, 491), and relatedly, ‘Achilles’ axle trembles under Hector’s weight’ (Peliacus axis pondere Hectoreo tremens, 415).Footnote ⁹¹ Literal pressure from the father’s body, or from its resting place, is accompanied by the figurative pressure of an exemplum and the need to live up to one’s genealogy.Footnote ⁹² This metaphorical burden weighs down Astyanax (premit, 491) in the same way that Hector and his offspring are feared to crush each other should the tomb be razed: ne pater natum obruat / prematque patrem natus (‘so that the father does not overwhelm the son nor the son press down on the father’ 690–1). Like a similarly phrased statement at Thyestes 1050–1 (genitor en natos premo / premorque natis; ‘look, I, the father, weigh down my sons and am weighed down by my sons’), the chiastic arrangement of Troades 690–1 implies a reciprocal relationship between pater and natus, in this case, an elision of identity brought about by Hector’s exemplum.

Another thematic word is iacere, which refers, in turn, to Hector prostrated in death (iacuit peremptus Hector, 238); Astyanax lying hidden in the tomb (inter extinctos iacet, 603); Hector lying inactive in Hades (lentus et segnis iaces? 805); and finally, to Astyanax lying at the base of Troy’s walls, ‘a shapeless corpse’ (iacet / deforme corpus, 1116–17). This sequence of lexical correspondences demonstrates just how closely Astyanax follows his father’s model – sometimes willingly, sometimes under compulsion – and how the exemplum’s imitative impulse leads Astyanax from being his father’s ghost to dying, like Hector, beneath the walls of Troy.

When Andromache hears that her son’s body lies broken and disfigured, she concludes, sic quoque est similis patri (‘in this way, too, he resembles his father’ 1117). An expression of ‘perverse satisfaction’ and a notable instance of Seneca’s grim humour,Footnote ⁹³ Andromache’s remark also encapsulates the analogical force of exemplarity that has oppressed Astyanax throughout his brief existence. Alive or dead, the son resembles the father physically, and that bodily likeness has been accompanied by moral emulation – or expectations of moral emulation – to the extent that his identity cannot be separated from Hector’s. Andromache taps into a fundamental truth here, a truth no less significant for being wryly expressed: Hector’s exemplum and Astyanax’s need to duplicate it (hence: similis patri) are exactly what has led to the boy’s death at the hands of the Greeks. Elaine Fantham remarks that this final pronouncement serves as Astyanax’s epitaph,Footnote ⁹⁴ which means that it confirms his exemplary status by memorialising his lineage and celebrating the combined outcome of his biological and moral inheritance.

Despite all of these similarities, though, it is abundantly clear throughout the Troades that Astyanax is not a perfect replica of his father. His childish weakness stands in contrast to Hector’s strength, his Trojan future has been foreclosed, even his broken, dead body, which Andromache likens to Hector’s mutilated by Achilles, is arrived at not via heroic single combat, but via the very different fate of leaping from Troy’s battlements as a sacrifice. The more characters in the Troades underscore Astyanax’s potential to become Hector, the greater the present gulf that appears between these two figures. Yet this dynamic, too, is part of their exemplarity inasmuch as it straddles the polarities of unique and typical, particular and general, individual and community. Astyanax qua singular, self-contained being is a small, defenceless prisoner of war, while his currency as a type, as a representation of Hector, is enormous. It is through his relationship to Hector that Astyanax begins to acquire his own, unique outlines at the same time as his identity seems to be engulfed by his father’s towering reputation. The possibility of his future heroism, desired by the Trojans and feared by the Greeks, marks him out simultaneously as a copy of Hector and as a potentially powerful individual in his own right. Thus, mimetic identification between Hector and Astyanax absorbs the latter into the Trojan community, reduces him to a link in a genealogical line, as well as granting him a small measure of independent existence. In both a positive and a negative sense, Astyanax’s identity depends on his descent from Hector.

It is ironic that exemplarity in Astyanax’s case brings about annihilation rather than the continuity and perpetuity it is so often assumed to ensure.Footnote ⁹⁵ The boy’s inheritance of his father’s paradigm does not, ultimately, guarantee the future of his gens, an outcome that contradicts standard Roman thinking about the exemplum. Indeed, it is Astyanax’s very urge to repeat the past that precipitates the past’s – and his own – eradication. Seneca draws attention to this topic via another set of lexical correspondences, echoing Andromache’s call for Astyanax to ‘restore the Phrygians’ name’ (nomen … suum / Phrygibus … reddas, 473–4) with her subsequent ‘bestowal of final rites on [her] son’ (officium … / nato supremum reddo, 761).Footnote ⁹⁶ Likewise, Andromache’s hope that Astyanax ‘may lead back [Troy’s] citizens dispersed by flight’ (sparsos fuga / cives reducas, 472–3) is undercut by the enemy’s more forceful need to return to Greece, and therefore, to sacrifice Polyxena and Astyanax so that the gods will open up ‘passages leading back home’ (reduces … vias, 167). Just as Astyanax both is and is not his father, so his role as Hector redux paradoxically ensures that Troy does not survive.

Exemplary Performances

Astyanax’s exemplarity illustrates both his fictional and his implied human identity as a character within Seneca’s drama. The young boy’s relationship to Hector confirms his quasi-human status by drawing attention to physique, biology, and moral disposition. At the same time, this relationship can be seen to minimise Astyanax’s ‘humanness’ in favour of his self-reflexively textual role in the play: like all fictional characters, Astyanax lays claim to an essentially typologised, restricted selfhood and has no recourse to self-determination. In the Troades, his behaviour also tends to be framed in specifically metatheatrical terms. His identity is a role both in the sense of its inherited transmission from another person (Hector) and in the sense of its being enacted, literally, in a play. Like Pyrrhus, whose assumption of Achilles’ traits leads to dramatised re-enactment, Astyanax brings Hector back to life by performing his father’s part, reproducing his visage, his gesture, his broken body.

As discussed above, Andromache’s description of her son’s appearance (465–8) can also serve as a set of stage directions, with the person who plays Astyanax being asked to look ‘thus’ (sic, 466–7) or to pose or move in such a way (talis, 465–6) that replicates the deceased Hector’s physique. Viewed from this self-consciously theatrical angle, Astyanax becomes an actor and Hector a part to be played. Nor is this the only occasion on which Astyanax is asked to perform: when Andromache, reluctantly, calls him from his hiding place towards the end of Act 3, she urges the boy, in a last, desperate bid for his salvation, to ‘play the captive and, on bent knee … [to] copy [his] mother’s tears’ (gere captivum positoque genu / … / matris fletus imitare tuae, 715–17).Footnote ⁹⁷ Although in this instance Astyanax’s immediate model is Andromache herself, not Hector, intergenerational exemplarity can still be seen to underpin the performance, because the little boy’s gesture is meant to remind Ulysses of the youthful Priam supplicating Hercules: vidit pueri regis lacrimas / et Troia prior, parvusque minas / trucis Alcidae flexit Priamus (‘once before, Troy also witnessed the tears of a boy-king, and small Priam turned aside fierce Alcides’ threats’ 718–20). Just as Andromache hopes – in vain – that her son will one day surpass his grandfather’s longevity (702) and live to wield his grandfather’s sceptre (771–2), so she wills him to evoke Priam through his present supplicatory performance. Here, the expectation of ancestral exemplarity merges with the imitation practised by actors in the theatre; Astyanax must follow Priam both as a role model and more literally as a role.

To complement this theatrical display, Ulysses is urged to take up the position of spectator. Andromache continues to stage-manage the scene by establishing an implicit parallel between Troy witnessing Priam’s tears (vidit, 718) and Ulysses watching Astyanax plead. As the object of Ulysses’ evaluative gaze, Astyanax resembles not only an actor but also a character, a dramatis persona whose tragic performance will succeed only if Ulysses responds with the requisite amount of pity. This patently metatheatrical encounter further highlights Astyanax’s status as a fabricated identity, that is, as a figure constructed by Seneca for the express purpose of eliciting certain reactions from the play’s external – as well as internal – audience.

Ulysses, too, is implicated in this nexus of acting and exemplarity, because besides being a spectator, he is also impelled to occupy Hercules’ role and to play the merciful conqueror to Astyanax’s Priam. Such enactment would, Andromache hopes, alter Ulysses’ disposition, hence she exhorts him to ‘learn Hercules’ gentle anger’ (discite mites Herculis iras, 730).Footnote ⁹⁸ Here, the exemplum’s moral-didactic function – implied by disco – blends into an explicitly theatrical form of imitation, so that Hercules becomes simultaneously a paradigm for Ulysses’ personal conduct and a paradigm for his dramatic performance. As in Astyanax’s case, role and role model overlap.

The climax of this performative exemplarity comes in Act 5, when the messenger tells the assembled crowd of Trojan women how Astyanax died. As has often been noted, Seneca frames the dual sacrifice of Astyanax and Polyxena in theatrical terms: the Greeks are called spectators (spectator, 1087; spectat, 1129); the locale of Astyanax’s death is surrounded by a hill (1078–9), a towering cliff (1080), and high ruins (1084–5) that make it resemble a theatre or amphitheatre; and the landscape bordering the site of Polyxena’s sacrifice has hills that rise theatri more (‘like a theatre’, 1125).Footnote ⁹⁹ Situated beside the sea and enclosed by a natural slope, the latter of these two locations actually approximates to a classical Greek theatre building, with Achilles’ tomb as its central feature.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Moreover, since Achilles’ tomb is mentioned in Talthybius’ report in Act 2 of the Troades, and since Hector’s definitely appears on stage in Act 3, the play’s external audience can be said already to have experienced this location as a dramatic space: what the messenger asks the Trojan women to imagine in terms of a theatre, the audience of Seneca’s Troades has already witnessed in the theatre.

As regards Astyanax’s death, Seneca reverses the standard visual relationship of Trojan city versus Trojan plain, so that the victorious Greeks gaze upon Troy’s battlements rather than being, as in Homer, the objects of Trojan teichoskopia. The city and its inhabitants are now documenta … quam fragili loco / starent superbi (‘examples of how unstable is the place occupied by the proud’, 5–6), as Hecuba remarks at the play’s outset. Thus, a clear parallel is established between the Greeks and the Troades’ external audience, with the former group pausing to witness Troy’s death throes – this tragedy played out against the backdrop of the city – just as the latter group has done for the drama’s entire duration. The setting alone is enough to emphasise Astyanax’s fictional, performed identity: he is a character in a play, a part assumed by an actor to provoke emotional responses from internal and external audiences alike. His brave death impresses and saddens the Greeks, as it is meant to impress and sadden those watching the play: moverat vulgum ac duces / ipsumque Ulixem. non flet e turba omnium / qui fletur (‘he moved the crowd and the leaders and Ulysses himself. He does not weep, though bewept by the whole throng’, 1098–100).

The boy’s pursuit of exemplarity contributes further to this climate of self-conscious enactment, partly because his death, like Polyxena’s, is itself portrayed as an exemplum of admirable behaviour,Footnote ¹⁰¹ and also because the specific manner of his dying enables him to achieve final, total identification with his paradigmatic father. Andromache anticipates just such an outcome when she laments, ‘the walls will witness something more pitiable than great Hector’s death’ (flebilius aliquid Hectoris magni nece / muri videbunt, 784–5), implying that Astyanax’s end will both approximate to and exceed his father’s model, and that it will do so in the presence of onlookers, like a performance. The messenger, too, alludes to exemplarity by pointing out that Astyanax leaps from the same tower where, as a baby in Priam’s arms, he used to watch Hector fighting on the plain below (1071–4). Besides emphasising the bitterness of Troy’s reversed fortunes, the image suggests a correlation between Hector’s past and Astyanax’s current achievements, with the young boy’s death matching the level of his father’s heroism. A fearless end is now the only way for Astyanax to assert his glorious parentage, and although the fall damages his visage to the extent that it removes individual traces of his resemblance to Hector (illas nobiles patris notas; ‘those noble marks of his father’ 1113), it does so in the name of consolidating a broader, more significant resemblance of behaviour and disposition. Both father and son prove their heroism by dying bravely at the hands of the Greeks: this – not just bodily similarity – is what Andromache refers to when she concludes, in questionable taste, sic quoque est similis patri (‘in this way, too, he is like his father’, 1117). The overall effect, for Seneca’s audience, is once again to have attention focused on Astyanax as a version of Hector, a version achieved specifically via enactment and validated by spectators. Even Andromache’s response to the messenger at 1117, her final words in the play, serves to remind listeners that Astyanax’s part is performed, because the adverb sic recalls her earlier evocation of the boy’s appearance (sic tulit … / sic celsus … sic … minax, 466–7), a passage in which, as we have already seen, physical and moral similarity coincide with practised theatrical gesture. Just as Astyanax the actor/role reproduces Hector’s distinguishing bodily features in Act 3, so in Act 5 he performs a death scene sic, to match his father’s.

In fact, Astyanax’s performance throughout the Troades rests on complex conceptual underpinnings. To the extent that he identifies with his father and assumes Hector’s corporeal or dispositional characteristics, Astyanax does the work of an actor, whose profession requires precisely such identification of the self with another. In much the same way that Astyanax blends into Hector, stage artists blend into their roles, merging their bodies and thoughts with those of an imaginary or absent other, so that the relationship of performer to character is not a simple case of ‘either/or’ but ‘both/and’. Seneca’s Astyanax cannot be separated from the exemplary part he undertakes (or is urged to undertake), and in this respect his performance may be seen as confirming his quasi-human status. By engaging in an act of mimetic identification, albeit under extreme duress, Astyanax shapes himself as an individual being. In equal degree, however, the young boy’s performance of multiple roles in an explicitly theatricalised setting suggests that he has little or no identity apart from being a dramatis persona, a Hector-template, a Priam-template, even an Astyanax-template, whose brave response to Greek cruelty furnishes a model for others.

The Troades’ theme of intergenerational exemplarity likewise promotes a fluid exchange between the implied human and fictional aspects of characters’ identities. On the one hand, Achilles and Hector constitute moral-didactic models for their sons, models intended to influence Pyrrhus’ and Astyanax’s conduct as quasi-people within the world of the play. Emulation of a celebrated parental paradigm is meant to improve Pyrrhus’ disposition either by fostering heroic valour or by dissuading him from cruelty. For Astyanax, Hector likewise represents heroism and bravery, and even though fate affords the boy scarcely any opportunity to pursue his parent’s exemplum, the relationship nonetheless centres upon learning and self-improvement. It is implied that Astyanax will become the right kind of person principally by adopting Hector’s model. The didactic and transformative effect of this exemplum can be seen in the simple fact that Astyanax grows up over the course of the play, changing from timid child in Act 3 to solemn, courageous youth in Act 5, seemingly as a result of Hector’s paradigmatic authority.

On the other hand, Astyanax exhibits only the most minimal presence as an implied human figure in this tragedy, and more often than not, his emulation of Hector overrides his quasi-humanity in favour of producing a copy or a type. Exemplarity’s analogical bent encourages the audience to regard Astyanax as just one instance of an infinitely repeatable, and therefore detachable, identity. The child is at once Hector’s moral, physical, and biological duplicate; his status as a representation is confirmed by his own ghostliness, and by the ghostly traces of other characters – Aeneas, Ascanius – discernible within his story. A similar situation applies for Seneca’s Pyrrhus, who adopts his parent’s moral model only to end up performing it as a dramatic role and quoting the ‘parent’ text from which it ultimately derives. Like Astyanax, Pyrrhus mimics an inherited paradigm to the point that he becomes a mimetic and literary artefact.

Seneca’s Imago Vitae Suae

The exemplarity discussed so far in this chapter has been entwined with processes of genetic and dynastic replication. But not all Roman exemplarity is underpinned by family ties or guided by the notion that one’s name or bloodline predisposes one to particular kinds of action. Pursuing paradigmatic status can also be a more self-directed and freely chosen enterprise, one that individuals undertake in the hope of themselves becoming future objects of emulation.Footnote ¹⁰² Barchiesi remarks that historical and fictive characters in early imperial literature ‘increasingly anticipate their own future as exempla, and paradoxically imitate their future exemplarity – which is a rough and ready description for Lucan’s Cato or even Caesar, and Seneca’s tragic heroes and heroines’.Footnote ¹⁰³ An equivalent phenomenon also occurs in Roman society: we have seen already how Augustus positions himself as the culminating point in a line of Rome’s summi viri, thereby advertising himself as a living exemplum and also anticipating – even guaranteeing – post mortem conferral of paradigmatic status.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Seneca, too, appears to engage in exemplary self-fashioning in the later stages of his life, self-consciously pre-empting his posthumous reputation and viewing himself as a reproducible type. While much of his overtly exemplary conduct still embeds itself within established traditions, it nonetheless stands out as being an expression of singular self-confidence performed more in anticipation of his becoming a future exemplum than in response to the inescapable pressures of the past.

The events leading up to Seneca’s death epitomise such exemplarity.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ According to Tacitus, Seneca was forbidden on Nero’s orders from writing an actual will and bequeathed instead his imago vitae suae:

In a paradox worthy of Seneca’s own writing, the dying philosopher is said to bestow his life upon his friends – not, admittedly, the physical existence of which he has very little left, but the identity and patterns of living that he has fashioned over the preceding sixty-odd years. By referring to this inheritance as an imago, Seneca adopts the discourse of exemplarity in which, as we have seen, metaphors of reflection often articulate the exemplum’s innate need to be copied. Seneca is at this moment both himself and an image of himself, a (still … just) living model ready to be duplicated by those who come after. Moreover, the friends present at this deathbed scene are invited to preserve and perpetuate this example, as the ambiguous referent of bonarum artium famam suggests: are these Seneca’s virtuous pursuits that bestow fame on his companions simply by association, or are these the companions’ own virtuous pursuits, developed in accordance with Seneca’s model? Does the fama belong to the leader, or to the disciples? That Tacitus does not care to clarify this distinction only emphasises further the repetition germane to Rome’s culture of exempla: Seneca will, in effect, live on after himself in his friends’ behaviour as well as in their memories.

It is significant in this regard that Seneca’s imago takes the place of an actual, written will, because both the exemplum and the testamentum dictate equivalent forms of inheritance: Seneca’s paradigm will be passed down and maintained in the manner of a precious physical possession; it is even referred to as something tangible, graspable (habeat). In fact, the deathbed context allows Tacitus to explore further links between exemplarity and inheritance, because the conjuring of an imago in this scene inevitably evokes the Roman funeral mask,Footnote ¹⁰⁷ with its attendant connotations of family role models and specific forms of behaviour preserved across generations. Like the images of ancestors displayed in an aristocratic atrium or paraded prior to someone’s burial, Seneca’s imago vitae suae is designed to commemorate his life explicitly as a spur to future achievement and emulation.

At the same time, this comparison to aristocratic imagines also emphasises the somewhat self-generated nature of Seneca’s model in contrast to more standard narratives of familial and biological exemplarity: in place of a family,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Seneca has his friends clustered around his deathbed; instead of handing down an exemplum exclusively suited to his own gens, Seneca propagates a philosophical model that aspires to universal applicability; and, as a member of equestrian stock, Seneca most likely lacks imagines of his own, which means that his exemplum does not result from the pressure of a family name.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In comparison to, say, Marcus Junius Brutus or the second or third Decius Mus, Seneca is not expected by those around him to pursue a specific, pre-established exemplum in order to achieve his identity. He is at greater liberty to self-invent, to insert himself into a tradition of his choice or, more boldly, to devise one of his own. His ambition to attain paradigmatic status indicates a highly self-reflexive and at the same time detached, almost third-personal approach to selfhood; Seneca thinks of himself as ‘Seneca’ and models his current conduct on what he thinks that future model should do. Arguably, Marcus Junius Brutus likewise thought of himself as ‘Brutus’, the main difference being that Brutus imitated predecessors while Seneca copies and perpetuates chiefly himself. To borrow a phrase from Roland Mayer: ‘it is in death that Seneca crowned his lifelong practice of referring to exempla by himself becoming one’.Footnote ¹¹⁰

This is not to say, however, that Seneca’s exemplum is entirely his own invention, since the narrative of his death adheres to an established and explicitly philosophical pattern, which in turn enables Seneca to present himself as a Stoic opposing tyranny and as someone condemned unjustly.Footnote ¹¹¹ The events recounted by Tacitus at Annales 15.60–4 form a series of unmistakable allusions to Socrates’ execution and to the suicide of Cato the Younger: like Socrates, Seneca drinks hemlock (Ann. 15.64.3; cf. Phaedo 117c); discourses with friends on philosophical topics, and has his thoughts recorded (Ann. 15.62–3; cf. Phaedo 59a-c); excludes his wife from the scene (Ann. 15.63.3; cf. Phaedo 60a); and pours a libation to Jupiter Liberator (Ann. 15.64.4), which recalls Socrates’ request for a cock to be sacrificed to Asclepius (Phaedo 118a). Like Cato, Seneca’s suicide articulates his Stoic defiance of a regime he perceives to be tyrannical, and it is not a smooth process, but one that occurs in several stages (veins: Ann. 15.63.2–3; hemlock: Ann. 15.64.3; steam bath: Ann. 15.64.4; cf. Cato’s first and second attempts in Plut. Cato 70; both authors emphasise the subjects’ weakness: Tac. Ann. 15.63.3; Plut. Cato 70.5).

Further, Seneca’s imitative bid for exemplarity mimics that of Cato himself, who was widely recognised as having modelled his own death on Socrates’: Cicero aligns the two by claiming that both men received divine sanction for their deaths (Tusc. 1.74); Plutarch has Cato accompanied by a small group of friends, among whom are several philosophers (Cato 67–70); and Cato is said to have read, and presumably taken inspiration from, Plato’s Phaedo prior to committing suicide (Plutarch Cato 68.2, 70.1; Sen. Ep. 24.6–8).Footnote ¹¹² This last piece of evidence underscores Cato’s self-conscious intent to follow and thereby become an exemplum. By reading the Phaedo and subsequently adapting elements of Socrates’ paradigm, Cato envisages for himself a future exemplarity that will lead to his story likewise being enshrined in written accounts and held up as a model for others. In effect, the Cato in Plutarch’s biography perceives himself as a type already, while he is still alive, and attempts to dictate in advance how later generations will regard him. Tacitus’ Seneca exercises similar concern for his posthumous reputation, and in striving to ensure his exemplarity, he condenses his identity into something that may be copied: a testamentum, an imago.

We may wonder whether the historical Cato and Seneca actually took such care to ensure their deaths complied with a well-known philosophical model – was exemplarity really their first thought in those last moments? While it is difficult to gauge the accuracy of Tacitus’ and Plutarch’s accounts, it seems likely that they do rest on a solid foundation of fact albeit one that has acquired accretions and embellishments over time.Footnote ¹¹³ Yet the very question of historical veracity, the attempt, that is, to disentangle the actual person from his or her characterisation in a text, gains little purchase in these circumstances precisely because these death scenes represent such an inseparable blend of life and literature. Seneca reads about Socrates and replicates Socrates before having that replication commemorated in Tacitus. How is the ‘actual person’ to be separated from a representation when he or she is so intent upon becoming a textually inscribed exemplum? Catherine Connors rightly defines the process as a kind of intertextuality whereby successive death scenes simultaneously evoke earlier people and earlier written accounts.Footnote ¹¹⁴ As in Seneca’s tragedies, and in Roman culture more broadly, these exemplary suicides combine reiterated behaviour with textual reiteration.

In fact, this intertextual pattern reaches a pitch of intratextuality in Book 16 of Tacitus’ Annales, with the deaths of Petronius (Ann. 16.19) and Thrasea Paetus (Ann. 16.34–5).Footnote ¹¹⁵ Thrasea, besides following the examples of Socrates and Cato, also re-enacts Tacitus’ preceding portrayal of Seneca’s death: he converses with a companion, Demetrius the Cynic, ‘on the nature of the soul and its separation from mortal flesh’ (de natura animae et dissociatione spiritus corporisque, Ann. 16.34.1); he dissuades his wife, Arria, from committing suicide with him (Ann. 16.34.2); he pours a libation to Jupiter Liberator (Ann. 16.35.1).Footnote ¹¹⁶ Just as Seneca bequeaths his imago vitae suae (Ann. 15.62), so the dying Thrasea implicitly offers himself as an exemplum when he tells the quaestor tasked with delivering the senate’s decree, ‘you have been born into an era when it may be helpful to fortify your morale with examples of constancy’ (in ea tempora natus es quibus firmare animum expediat constantibus exemplis, Ann. 16.35.1–2). Clearly, the young quaestor is meant to learn something about virtue from witnessing Thrasea’s death.

The suicide of Petronius (Ann. 16.19) also fits this established narrative arc, though it is clearly intended as a parody, with the dying man surrounded by friends; insisting on trivial conversation rather than philosophical discourse on the nature of the soul; letting his life ebb by degrees as he binds and unbinds his wrists; and leaving a list of Nero’s crimes in place of a will.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In the simple act of copying (or satirising) a predecessor, each of these figures aspires to paradigmatic status, and in doing so, each merges his actual, human existence with a distinctly fictive identity: the dying Seneca is at once individual and inimitable, and a version of Socrates, and a version of Cato, and a version of himself, and an example of exemplary death preserved by Tacitus. Person, character, and type converge for the purpose of self-exemplification.

It is worth stressing once again the slight yet crucial difference between following a predominantly familial model because it is expected of one, or even regarded as the only means of proving one’s inheritance, and opting to fashion oneself as a paradigm independent of any genealogical demands. Both scenarios negotiate a balance of individual versus society, particular versus general, but the latter grants the individual slightly sharper outlines. While familial exemplarity tends to focus on the past, self-directed exemplarity looks more fully to the future. The former embeds itself within extant traditions, while the latter often stands as a potential source of new traditions (influenced as Seneca is by Socrates and Cato, he also manages to inspire Thrasea and Petronius). Self-reflexive exemplification of the sort practised by Seneca further suggests an acute sense of one’s uniqueness and importance: instead of dutifully preserving family customs and subordinating one’s individuality to the broader demands of a gens, those who predict and strive after an exemplum of their own devising must assume in advance their singular ability to acquire a paradigmatic reputation and have it commemorated. This kind of exemplarity has a greater capacity to isolate the person in question from his or her immediate milieu, as opposed to familial patterns of exempla, which tend to integrate the individual within a wider social nexus.

A mild contrast between these two kinds of exemplarity may be found in Tacitus’ vignettes of Seneca’s and Thrasea’s deaths. In each case, the wives of these men also aspire to attain paradigmatic status by dying alongside their husbands. For Arria, Thrasea’s wife, the model is familial: she attempts ‘to follow the exemplum of her own mother, Arria’ (temptantem … exemplum Arriae matris sequi, Ann. 16.34.2) and thus, to merge genealogical with exemplary reproduction. Like Brutus, Arria seems compelled to fulfil the expectations implicit in her name. Seneca’s wife, Paulina, appears in contrast to be set on achieving her own exemplarity and on ensuring her posthumous fame, as Seneca himself acknowledges in his final address to her: ‘I have shown you life’s enticements, but you prefer death’s glory: I will not begrudge you your exemplum. May the steadfastness of such a brave end be within our power equally, and may greater renown attend your departure’ (vitae … delenimenta monstraveram tibi, tu mortis decus mavis: non invidebo exemplo. sit huius tam fortis exitus constantia penes utrosque par, claritudinis plus in tuo fine, Ann. 15.63.2–3). While it could of course be argued that Paulina copies Seneca himself, her bid for exemplarity nonetheless appears fundamentally self-motivated and driven by a sense of her own specialness. Paulina hopes to claim individual claritudo (as implied by Tacitus’ Seneca, at least), while Arria situates herself within a family context. One woman highlights her own singularity, the other her belonging to a group.

Such pursuit of exemplary death appears to have been particularly widespread during the early empire, when memorable departures from life were celebrated and circulated in published collections of exitus illustrium virorum.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Although none of these collections survives, they presumably resembled the compilations of protreptic and apotropaic exempla preserved in Valerius Maximus, whose own volume also has a section ‘on extraordinary deaths’ (de mortibus non vulgaribus, 9.12) though it has, unfortunately (ironically!), suffered severe truncation. There is good reason to believe that Tacitus drew on such compilations in order to compose the grim series of Neronian purges that occupies Annales 15 and 16.Footnote ¹¹⁹ There is equally good reason to believe that the historical Seneca, Thrasea, Petronius and others were well acquainted with the genre of exitus illustrium virorum, and may even have taken inspiration from it in a general way prior to preparing their own suicides.Footnote ¹²⁰

These anthologies of anecdotes served a purpose akin to martyrologies in that they commemorated individual deaths not just as praiseworthy events in themselves, but also as summative proof of a person’s essential character. Gathered into handbooks, they provided guidance for those who, for whatever reason, found themselves in equivalent circumstances and needed to make a good end. As in other instances of Roman exemplarity, this tradition assumes a permeable boundary between the categories of person and typology, ethical improvement and artistic mimesis, living individual and textual representation: one reads these exitus not only for moral guidance, but also in order to reproduce such model behaviour in one’s own life and thereby anticipate one’s own commemoration. When the Seneca of Annales 15.60–4 constructs his own exemplum, he behaves as though he were already part of an anthology of exitus illustrium virorum. And in choosing to pursue such exemplarity in the first place, he betrays a self-centred impulse to be considered illustris: while friends, family, and society will undoubtedly derive some benefit from Seneca’s imago vitae suae, the chief beneficiary in this instance is ‘Seneca’ himself.

Hercules’ Family

It is a short step from Seneca’s semi-independent exemplarity to the fierce individualism of the protagonist in Hercules. Whereas Seneca’s exemplum straddles two extremes, detached from family traditions yet still complying with some freely chosen models from the past, Hercules’ is entirely self-generated and self-reliant. In contrast, too, to the suffocating father–son relationships portrayed in the Troades, Hercules’ interaction with both his stepfather, Amphitryon, and his real father, Jupiter, is characterised by dissociation and dissonance. His exemplum represents the peak of self-reflexivity.

Rifts between Hercules and the rest of his family are most apparent in Act 5, when the hero regains consciousness following his attack of madness. The bodies of his slaughtered wife and children lie strewn around him (Her. 1143–4) and as he recovers from delirium to realise that he, not an external enemy, is responsible for this carnage, he resolves on suicide as the only solution to the problem of himself. A significant portion of Act 5 is occupied by Hercules searching for a means of death while Amphitryon counters and blocks these attempts to the best of his ability and with increasing levels of desperation. When Hercules demands the return of his confiscated weapons, Amphitryon responds with a formulaic but nonetheless heartfelt plea:

That Amphitryon, in a moment of high emotion, asks Hercules to choose between two forms of nomenclature, parens or altor, may seem like ill-timed pedantry on Seneca’s part, but the distinction actually represents a deep, personal rift between these two characters.Footnote ¹²¹ altor is of course the correct term in the literal sense that Hercules is Jupiter’s son, and Amphitryon the step- or foster-father.Footnote ¹²² Yet the choice also reflects broader themes of human closeness and the value – or hindrance – of family bonds: Amphitryon invites Hercules either to acknowledge the genealogical distance separating them, or to gloss over it in favour of an unbroken social unit. Hercules’ immediate response is to ignore both the plea and the invitation (Her. 1258–62), demonstrating his disregard for Amphitryon and for the demands of family more generally. This attitude, moreover, has direct bearing on Hercules’ identity and on his role as an exemplum throughout the play. His surrogate relationship to Amphitryon, which Seneca takes pains to emphasise, symbolises the isolated, solipsistic quality of his exemplary status.

To grasp what is distinctive about Seneca’s treatment of Hercules we must first take a brief look at Euripides’ version, not with a view to formulating unfair or anachronistic comparisons between the imperial Roman tragedian and his classical Athenian counterpart, but for the simple purpose of shedding clearer light on Seneca’s dramatic choices.Footnote ¹²³ In Euripides’ Heracles, companionship and human closeness are major themes. Amphitryon and Heracles address each other and apply to themselves affectionate terms such as πατήρ (‘father’), τέκνον (‘child’), and παῖς (‘child’). Even though Amphitryon is not Heracles’ biological father, Euripides observes no linguistic distinctions between this relationship and Heracles’ to his own biological children; the same terminology is used throughout. On those occasions in the play when Amphitryon’s surrogate status is evoked, emphasis falls on the connections and commonality that unite Heracles’ foster-father with his real one: at 340 Amphitryon calls Zeus ‘a partner in my son’s begetting’ (παιδὸς κοινεῶν᾿ ἐκλῄζομεν), and at 798–800, the chorus sings of ‘the two related beds of the marriage, one with a mortal and one with Zeus’ (ὦ λέκτρων δύο συγγενεῖς / εὐναί, θνατογενοῦς τε καὶ / Διός), with the adjective συγγενής evoking a tie so close it verges on being counted as family. Towards the tragedy’s end, Heracles also reassures Amphitryon of his parental role: ‘don’t take any offence, old man, for I consider you my father instead of Zeus’ (σὺ μέντοι μηδὲν ἀχθεσθῇς, γέρον· / πατέρα γὰρ ἀντὶ Ζηνὸς ἡγοῦμαι σ᾿ ἐγώ 1264–5). Not once does Seneca’s Hercules admit such emotional and psychological intimacy.Footnote ¹²⁴

Euripides’ Heracles also cultivates a family relationship with Theseus, who is admittedly a distant relative but does not share any immediate blood or marriage ties with the hero. Their friendship becomes such a vital source of strength for Heracles in the aftermath of his attack that he goes as far as deeming Theseus a replacement for his children: ‘having lost my sons, I consider you my son’ (παίδων στερηθεὶς παῖδ᾿ ὅπως ἔχω σ᾿ ἐμόν, 1401). The closeness of this surrogate family bond is also affirmed by one of the play’s most memorable similes: when Heracles returns from the Underworld, his frightened children cluster around him like little tow boats pulled along by a larger ship (631–2); later, when the same children lie dead by Heracles’ unwitting hand, the hero declares that he will follow in Theseus’ wake like a boat being towed (1424). Besides illustrating the absolute reversal of Heracles’ fortunes, the latter of these two images equates the heroes’ friendship with an actual, biological bond. Although his suffering is exceptional, Heracles is nonetheless not alone. Despite having killed his own wife and children, he achieves heroic stature in this play chiefly through his willingness to cultivate and to participate in the bonds of human society.Footnote ¹²⁵

Intergenerational and interpersonal relationships in Seneca’s Hercules are not nearly so sympathetic. Although Seneca, like Euripides, uses equivalent terms such as genitor, parens, pater, and natus quite indiscriminately throughout the tragedy, he tends to concentrate on points of disjunction rather than union within Hercules’ family group. When in Act 2, the tyrant Lycus appears on stage and undertakes to challenge claims regarding Hercules’ divine ancestry (Her. 438–64 cf. Eur. Her. 148–9), Amphitryon does not gloss over the matter, or leave Zeus to answer for it, as he does in Euripides (Her. 170–3), but launches into a full and spirited defence of his step-son’s descent from Jupiter, asserting that many gods owe their genesis to Jove’s affairs with mortal women (Her. 449) and referring to Jove himself as ‘Alcides’ real father’ (Alcidae patrem … / … verum, 440–1). The speech is meant to accentuate Hercules’ semi-divine stature as a singular, exemplary hero, but its secondary effect is to acknowledge fissures within the family unit.Footnote ¹²⁶ Whereas Euripides’ Amphitryon refers to Zeus as a partner (340), Seneca’s emphasises instead the gulf between his humbly ineffectual self and the potent king of the gods. Jupiter and Amphitryon claim no common ground in Seneca’s play.

Acts 4 and 5 of the Hercules see the terms genitor and pater applied with increasing frequency both to Jupiter and to Amphitryon, but again without conveying any sense of shared enterprise. Rather than representing the united elements of a single family, Jupiter and Amphitryon appear in Seneca’s version as disparate figures endowed with contrasting levels of authority and validity. For instance, following the death of Lycus, Amphitryon advises Hercules to request from Jupiter a rest from his labours: ‘ask that your father put an end to your toils’ (finiat genitor tuos / opta labores, Her. 924–5). The two-stage process – Amphitryon asking Hercules to ask Jupiter – underscores Amphitryon’s own powerlessness, his at best secondary influence over Hercules, and the enormous distance between the capacities of these two father figures, a distance only increased by the ineffectiveness of Amphitryon’s request: Hercules does not in fact proceed to pray for the cessation of his work (Her. 937–9). Further divisions within Hercules’ family are emphasised when the hero, in the process of offering sacrifice in gratitude for his recent victory over Lycus, calls upon Jupiter’s other male offspring, but excludes any son born from Juno: ‘may he be present … whichever brother of mine inhabits heaven, but not a brother born from my step-mother’ (adsit … / … / fraterque quisquis incolit caelum meus / non ex noverca frater, 903; 907–8). Unlike Euripides’ Heracles, who is willing to class even Theseus as an honorary family member, Seneca’s maintains an attitude of exceptionalism and a readiness to foster estrangement in place of concord; possible sources of connection become instead irreparable divisions.

Similar family tensions simmer beneath Amphitryon’s question to Theseus at 761: does Hercules bring Cerberus back from the Underworld ‘as a gift from his willing uncle, or as spoils?’ (patrui volentis munus an spolium refert? 761). Inclusion of patruus draws attention once again to Hercules’ divine ancestry but also to the fact that his Underworld mission brings him into conflict with a member of his own kin. Theseus’ response, which includes an animated account of the battle between Hercules and Cerberus (782–806) implies that while Hades gave nominal consent to the act, the three-headed hound really is more of a spolium than a munus.Footnote ¹²⁷ Allegorically, Hercules’ Underworld battle enables him to achieve a (temporary) victory over death;Footnote ¹²⁸ literally, it leads him to act in an aggressive, domineering manner towards a close relative.

Hercules’ emotional distance from his family is thrown into even sharper relief by Amphitryon’s persistently loving, paternal behaviour. The stepfather defends his stepson against Lycus’ slander (439–89); is overjoyed at the latter’s safe return from Hades (621); and more than once expresses his sadness at Hercules’ frequent absence (249; 1256–7). Amphitryon stands out among Seneca’s dramatis personae for being able to speak tenderly, not furiously, of another person; as John Fitch remarks, Seneca’s Amphitryon ‘values the natural affection between father and son’.Footnote ¹²⁹ But Hercules, for his part, repeatedly pushes this affection aside, disregarding or overriding Amphitryon’s gentle suggestions (e.g. at 918–22, when Hercules refuses to follow Amphitryon’s advice about cleaning his bloodied hands before performing a sacrifice), even refusing the offer of his embrace: differ amplexus, parens (‘postpone your embraces, father’, 638).

Nor does Hercules achieve any closer relationship with his true progenitor, Jupiter, though his semi-divine qualities may induce the audience to expect otherwise. When, in Act 5, the recovering Hercules calls upon the king of the gods to wreak vengeance for his crime, the lack of divine response only increases our sense of the hero’s isolation: ‘now thunder angrily, father, from every part of the sky; forgetful of me, at least avenge your grandsons with your all-too-slow hand’ (nunc parte ab omni, genitor, iratus tona; / oblite nostri, vindica sera manu / saltem nepotes, Her. 1202–4). Such requests for Jupiter’s thunderous reaction are frequent and always unfulfilled in Senecan tragedy (Phaed. 671–4; Med. 531–7; Thy. 1077–85), but the trope acquires added poignancy here, because Jupiter is Hercules’ pater, and because fathers typically wield a lot of influence over their offspring in Seneca’s plays, even when they are not physically present. Jupiter’s silence, at this moment, only serves to widen the existing chasm between Hercules and his immediate family members.

Besides being isolated from his divine parent, Seneca’s Hercules also cuts himself off from the family he himself has produced. John Fitch notes that in comparison to Euripides’ hero, Seneca’s protagonist spares no time upon his return from Hades to reconnect emotionally with his wife and children; as soon as he hears about Lycus, he rushes off.Footnote ¹³⁰ Complementing this emotional isolation is the obvious fact that Hercules also kills Megara and their mutual offspring in the fit of insanity brought about by Juno, but here, too, Seneca makes an added effort to highlight Hercules’ detachment. The moment comes when Megara, in a last, desperate attempt to save her youngest son, exhorts the raving father to recognise the boy’s physical resemblance: ‘this son reflects your face and bearing’ (natus hic vultus tuos / habitusque reddit, Her. 1017–18). Once again, Seneca evokes potential communality only to reject it in favour of division: Hercules disregards all evidence of biological ties; he sees not his son, but a monstrum (1020), which he duly eradicates.

Megara’s brief, fraught plea to her rampaging husband also hints at the discourse of exemplarity, especially in the terms explored by Seneca’s Troades, where the physical similarity of sons to fathers anticipates similarity of temperament. Hercules’ bloodline figures fleetingly as a possible source of exemplary repetition. But exempla in this play tend to discourage rather than foster mimetic identification between family members or, more broadly, members of the same society; the balance between particular and general, individual and group tips towards the former of each pair. Hercules’ detachment from his family symbolises the correspondingly detached quality of his exemplum, which operates largely in a vacuum, self-regarding and self-sustained.

The closest Hercules himself ever comes to following a parental model is in his fit of madness, when he threatens to unseat Jove:

In one regard, Hercules’ mad wish seems to epitomise the characteristics of exemplary aemulatio. Just as Jupiter once ousted Saturn in order to establish himself as ruler of the gods, so Hercules now hopes to oust Jupiter; like father, like son. Hercules’ proposed enlistment of the Titans, however, indicates his divergence from and outright contesting of paternal exemplarity, since victory in the gigantomachy constitutes one of Jupiter’s greatest and most definitive achievements. The son hopes to undo what the father has done. The competitive impulse inherent in all exemplary activity (to a greater or lesser degree) becomes, in this instance, overt conflict, and Hercules’ rapport with this divine parental paradigm seems rocky at best.

Sole Exemplar

In place of expected ancestral precedent, Seneca’s Hercules looks almost exclusively to himself for guidance, for evaluation of his conduct, and for formulating his identity. In one respect, this self-reliance is part and parcel of Hercules’ established role as an exemplar virtutis: in mythology, in literature, in philosophy, Hercules embodies a model for others but does not himself appear to follow other people’s paradigms.Footnote ¹³¹ In Seneca’s Hercules, however, this exemplary exceptionalism approaches an extreme of self-reflexivity and self-implosion, because when Hercules finds himself needing moral guidance and needing to re-establish his identity in the wake of madness, he has no model to turn to apart from his own. As Juno remarks in the prologue, this Hercules is peerless: quaeris Alcidae parem? / nemo est nisi ipse (‘You seek Alcides’ equal? There’s no-one, apart from himself’ 84–5). Gordon Braden is surely right to detect in Juno’s claim an allusion to Roman practices of self-aemulatio, like that pursued by Plutarch’s Julius Caesar: τὸ μὲν πάθος οὐδὲν ἦν ἕτερον ἢ ζῆλος αὑτοῦ καθάπερ ἄλλου καὶ φιλονεικία τις ὑπὲρ τῶν μελλόντων πρὸς τὰ πεπραγμένα (‘the feeling was nothing other than zealous emulation of himself as though he were another man, and rivalry between what he planned to do and what he had achieved’ Caesar 58.5).Footnote ¹³² The contours and consequences of such self-exemplification are explored in full in a subsequent section of this chapter; for now, it suffices to affirm that whenever Seneca’s Hercules cites the model of his own achievements, he does so in the implicit context of exemplarity. The protagonist of the Hercules is obsessed not just with himself,Footnote ¹³³ but more precisely with his own exemplum.

One of the most telling instances of Hercules’ solipsism comes in Act 5, when Amphitryon has exhausted all other arguments against the hero’s intended suicide, and resorts instead to emotional blackmail:

What is it in Amphitryon’s speech that motivates Hercules’ change of heart? The passage has received a lot of scholarly commentary, with Bernd Seidensticker and Gilbert Lawall asserting that Hercules’ concedes his step-father’s request out of a long-buried sense of pietas: the hero has spent most of the play disregarding his family’s needs, but here he finally recalls and capitulates to the demands of filial duty.Footnote ¹³⁴ Another, equally optimistic, interpretation maintains that Hercules comes to understand virtus as a moral rather than purely physical quality, and hence reframes his feats of brute strength in terms of peaceful, ethical principles.Footnote ¹³⁵ In place of his victories over nature’s monsters, Hercules now achieves a far superior moral victory over himself: he learns self-control; he learns to rein in his vicious impulses, and to brush them aside in favour of obeying ratio and natura. What Juno envisaged at the outset as a violent, physical form of self-defeat – se vincat (‘let him conquer himself’, 116) – becomes instead a moment of spiritual self-conquest and moral regeneration.Footnote ¹³⁶ On this reading, Hercules ends his tragedy either a fully Stoic hero,Footnote ¹³⁷ or at the very least an admirable man equipped with deeper knowledge of moral precepts and of his own, all-too-human fallibility.

Each of these theories, however, posits too radical a change in Hercules’ disposition, especially as regards his attitude to those around him. John Fitch remarks that understanding of Act 5 ‘has often been distorted by presuppositions about what ought to take place’ as scholars reach after the same dynamic of fellowship and redemption found in Euripides’ version.Footnote ¹³⁸ In response to such positive views, Fitch and Braden argue that Hercules remains self-centred and emotionally detached throughout the exchange and yields to Amphitryon not out of any newly found sense of pietas or virtus, but out of an over-riding, all-consuming regard for his own reputation.Footnote ¹³⁹ When Amphitryon threatens suicide and declares the deed will be commemorated as Herculis sani scelus (1313), he finally lights upon the hero’s true priorities. The point at issue is what it means to be ‘Hercules’ and how others will define or remember the hero in the future. If Amphitryon’s life hangs in the balance at this moment, it does so only for the sake of making Hercules’ fama hang in the balance as well. Hercules’ response confirms where his interests lie: he will add the achievement of living to the list of his previous feats; to continue being Hercules is a Herculean task in itself. He even characterises his action as obedience to imperium, just as he has previously obeyed the imperium of Eurystheus (Her. 42: laetus imperia excipit; 398: disce regum imperia ab Alcide pati; 433: imperia dura). Hercules does here what he has done all along: behaves and thinks of himself solely as the hero of the labours.

The phrasing of Amphitryon’s plea acquires particular significance in this regard because its third-personal construction encourages Hercules to view himself as a symbol, a reproducible exemplum, an instance of ‘Hercules’ and of all that name typically entails. Concomitantly, the expression Herculis sani scelus (1313), alludes darkly to the play’s title, Hercules Furens, thereby inviting Hercules to adopt a detached, metatheatrical view of himself as a character within his own story. Whatever action the hero opts to pursue at this juncture, Amphitryon implies, may become the subject not only of future reputation, and so, possible emulation, but also of future literary works. Amphitryon catches Hercules’ attention and manages to persuade him by citing the one thing that really matters to the hero: his future commemoration as an admirable paradigm.

Such self-reflexive exemplarity is a particularly crucial theme in Act 5 of the Hercules because it is at this point that the protagonist must reconcile his former with his current self.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Reeling from the knowledge of his crime and fumbling to regain some form of mental equilibrium, Hercules relies on exempla, and specifically on their ability to mediate between past and present, in order to reassemble and to promote a clear sense of his identity. Hence, when he contemplates suicide as a first response to his crimes, he rouses himself to the deed by calling it ingens opus, labore bis seno amplius (‘a huge enterprise, greater than the twelvefold labours’ Her. 1282). He also pledges to rid the earth of his presence as though he were one of the monsters he has previously conquered: purgare terras propero. iamdudum mihi / monstrum impium saevumque et immite ac ferum / oberrat (‘I hasten to cleanse the earth. For a long time now this wicked, cruel, pitiless, wild monster has roamed free before me’ 1279–80). Similar obsession with his past achievements underpins his question to Amphitryon at 1301 – pande, quid fieri iubes? (‘Speak, what do you command to occur?’) – because obeying and fulfilling iussa is a key characteristic of the former Hercules (Her. 41–3; 211; 235; 596; 604; 831; and especially 1268: laudanda feci iussus, ‘I did praiseworthy things under orders’). Amphitryon, for his part, attempts to dissuade the hero by citing his well-known capacity for endurance, once more framed in terms of a pre-established reputation: nunc Hercule opus est: perfer hanc molem mali (‘now Hercules is needed: endure this mass of evil’ 1239).Footnote ¹⁴¹ Who Hercules was dictates who Hercules should be now: the self-referentiality of this process is yet another factor highlighting Hercules’ isolation in this play. He does not follow parental models, and he proves stubbornly unreceptive to his stepfather’s pleas. The only family connection Hercules cultivates in this drama is that of himself to himself. The social and biological divide between Amphitryon and Hercules deepens into an emotional and psychological one as well: the protagonist does not display any intrinsic care for family bonds when deciding how best to handle his wretched situation.

To some extent, Hercules’ self-obsession resembles the decorum and constantia pursued by figures such as Atreus and Medea: it links past to present; it relies on repetitious behaviour; it fosters acute consciousness of the self qua reputation.Footnote ¹⁴² It is also inherently concerned with exemplarity, not least because of Hercules’ pre-established role as a paradigmatic figure. Having no one to follow or copy, Seneca’s Hercules hones his identity solely via reference to his own model. His sense of self relies not on his identification with others, but on solipsistic resurrection of his own past deeds. His isolated exemplarity is both a symptom and cause of his emotional and physical detachment from those around him, detachment that often spills over into outright aggression.

Hercules in Character

Hercules’ preoccupation with what he symbolises, and with what it means to be ‘Hercules’ encourages the play’s audience, too, to regard him as a symbol, a textual representation, and ultimately, a dramatic character. Just as the protagonist worries about his fama in Act 5, so the rest of the tragedy focuses attention on how that fama is created and sustained, and concomitantly, how its very existence influences our perception of Hercules’ identity. Seneca achieves this end via a striking (and possibly, unique) form of dramaturgy that couples short bursts of Hercules’ stage action with lengthy spoken accounts of the hero’s accomplishments. Critics have not been slow to note that the Hercules exhibits a ponderously static quality, especially for a play that encompasses multiple murders and a scene of madness: Act 1 comprises Juno’s aggrieved monologue (1–124); Amphitryon opens Act 2 with a protracted summary of his son’s labours, and of the present, grim situation prevailing in Thebes (205–78); Theseus’ ekphrasis of the underworld occupies the bulk of Act 3 (650–829).Footnote ¹⁴³ Hercules himself does not appear on stage until 592, only to vanish again between 641 and 895; despite being the play’s titular character, he is rarely present before the audience, and even more rarely engages in dialogue with the tragedy’s other figures.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

In lieu of Hercules himself, Seneca has other characters talk about the hero, and particularly about his defining activity, the twelve labours: Juno mentions the Nemean lion and the hydra (46), Cerberus (46–63), and Hercules accepting the weight of the globe from Atlas (70–4); Amphitryon recites a full catalogue of the twelve tasks at 222–48, several items of which the chorus reprises at 529–49; Megara, Amphitryon, and Lycus pursue a three-way debate over whether Hercules’ deeds merit the label of virtus (422–89); Theseus’ description of the underworld features cameo appearances by some of Hercules’ erstwhile monstrous opponents (778–81) and concludes with the hero himself defeating Cerberus (782–829). Seneca’s audience spends most of the play encountering Hercules via other characters’ narratives.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

The traditional view attributes these narrative passages to the demands of Lese- or Rezitationsdrama on the basis that an audience of listeners would require, and even enjoy, hearing descriptions of events they cannot see.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Composing for the recital hall rather than for the stage – if this really was Seneca’s objective – is assumed to result in looser dramatic form and general disregard for the conventional restrictions pertaining to onstage action. A less charitable approach simply dismisses Seneca as an unskilled, third-rate playwright.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ But, whether performed or recited, the dramatic structure of the Hercules fulfils a distinct purpose in compelling the audience to contemplate Hercules chiefly in terms of his reputation, just as the protagonist himself does. How heroic is Hercules? Does he live up to the exemplum that precedes him? Can the figure that appears on stage be reconciled with the one we have – literally – heard so much about? The play’s structure invites the audience to pose such questions in the same way that Hercules’ misfortune pushes him to measure the distance between his past and current sense of self.

Seneca further implies that Hercules owes his exemplarity, and hence a significant aspect of his identity, to acts of narration. When Amphitryon punctuates a list of his son’s labours with the rhetorical quid memorem? (‘why should I speak of?’ 226), he draws attention to the fact that he is currently celebrating Hercules’ paradigm in speech, and by extension, that spoken and/or written records are the principal means of preserving – even of generating – such exempla. As a rei gestae … commemoratio, a ‘record of achievements’, the definition proffered by Quint. Inst. 5.11.6, the exemplum’s existence depends upon its being talked about (memorare). Thus, Hercules’ labours are twice referred to as memoranda facta (‘memorable deeds / deeds worth speaking about’, 442; 1265–6), and Theseus commences his account of Hercules’ katabasis by protesting, memorare cogis acta securae quoque / horrenda menti (‘you compel me to narrate deeds that make my mind shudder even now, in safety’ 650–1). The narrative passages in this play repeatedly draw links between Hercules’ paradigmatic feats and others’ accounts of them. Even Juno, in the prologue, grudgingly admits that the hero toto deus / narratur orbe (‘is talked about as a god throughout the entire world’ 39–40), a claim we later see substantiated when Amphitryon invokes his son as though he were a deity (277; 519–20).Footnote ¹⁴⁸

As this last point demonstrates, Seneca also endeavours to link the play’s various narrative accounts of Hercules to the protagonist’s subsequent activity on stage.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ The effect once again is that Seneca induces his audience to compare the stage Hercules – bodily present, speaking and acting – with the reputation that surrounds and precedes him. Guided and informed by other characters’ perspectives, the audience is able to see in this actual Hercules traces of his pre-established paradigm. Like the practice of exemplarity in Roman society and politics, Seneca’s dramaturgical trick configures Hercules as simultaneously himself and a copy of himself, a unique individual and a reproducible type, Hercules the quasi-person and ‘Hercules’ the exemplum. Viewed from one angle, the protagonist’s materialisation on stage asserts his personal, contingent singularity in contrast to the infinitely repeatable paradigm of ‘Hercules’ sustained in others’ narratives. From another angle, the stage Hercules comes to seem an extension or even a replica of the one other characters talk about. Hercules the dramatis persona re-performs entire sequences of action in a manner reminiscent of a Brutus or a Decius Mus replaying the deeds of his ancestors. The crucial difference, of course, is that Seneca’s Hercules only ever replays himself.

This theme of self-repetition is present from the very beginning of the play, in Juno’s prologue. Here, the vengeful goddess relates in aggrieved detail how she watched Hercules emerge from the underworld with Cerberus cowering in tow (59–63). The event occurs again, this time on stage, when Hercules makes his first appearance at 592, dragging Cerberus behind him. Connections between the two passages are clear and strong: Juno affirms in the prologue that she has witnessed Hercules’ conquest of Hades (vidi ipsa; ‘I myself saw it’, 50) and the capture of its canine guardian (terna monstri colla devincti intuens; ‘looking upon the bound monster’s triple neck’, 62), while Hercules himself, at the opening of Act 3, asserts that only he and Juno may gaze upon the nefas that is Cerberus’ presence in the upper world: hoc nefas cernant duo / qui advexit et quae iussit (‘let two look upon this sacrilege: he who fetched the dog and she who ordered it’, 603–4). Each speaker also alludes to the potentially polluting effect this sight has on the sun. Juno declares, ‘I saw the day sinking and the Sun frightened by the sight of Cerberus’ (viso labantem Cerbero vidi diem / pavidumque Solem, 60–1), while Hercules begs, ‘forgive me, Phoebus, if your visage has seen anything unlawful’ (da, Phoebe, veniam, si quid inlicitum tui / videre vultus, 595–6). What Juno reports as happening in the time of the prologue happens again in the real time of the play.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

The result, for Hercules, is that he appears to be acting on cue, not just matching his conduct to the contours already outlined by Juno, but even repeating something he has already done, returning from the underworld while she watches and then doing it again while the audience looks on. Strictly speaking, of course, Hercules emerges from Hades only once over the course of his story, but the drama’s temporal repetition gives the impression of the activity being infinitely reproducible, like all exempla. Furthermore, Juno’s role as prologue speaker places her in a quasi-directorial position: she is the metatheatrical dramatist whose purpose it is to ensure that Hercules follows the script.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Thus, the structure of the Hercules draws attention to its protagonist as a fabricated dramatic persona, a character acting in character. In following his own paradigm, Hercules causes himself to become a version, a type, a detachable, imitable role. But in the Hercules this role is neither passed on to nor assumed by others; Hercules alone resumes it, repeatedly. He imitates himself, which only further underscores the selfishness of his exemplarity.

Besides seeking to reproduce the behaviour essential to his paradigm, Seneca’s Hercules also displays concern for the items specific to it, namely his weaponry. When the hero sinks into a stupor at the close of Act 4, Amphitryon commands servants to confiscate his bow and arrows (1053). One of Hercules’ first thoughts upon waking is to wonder what has become of his usual equipment and costume:

Like his repeated citation of the labours, Hercules’ search for his weaponry symbolises the painful process of self-reconstruction in the wake of madness. In Rosie Wyles’ words, ‘Seneca makes use of the idea that Heracles’ iconic pieces of costume embody his identity.’Footnote ¹⁵² The passage has the metatheatrical effect of highlighting Hercules’ status as a dramatic role generated through props and particular items of apparel.Footnote ¹⁵³ Concomitantly, Hercules’ costume also symbolises the exemplary status conferred upon him by his labours: the pelt of the Nemean lion is both a commemorative trophy (spolio leonis, 1151) and synecdoche for Hercules qua hero.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Implicit in Hercules’ wondering who could possibly have stolen these items is the vague worry that another, more exemplary hero has managed to overpower him (cf. 1168: victor Alcidae, lates? ‘Are you in hiding, conqueror of Alcides?’) Hercules regards his weapons, like his deeds, as belonging to him alone; in the same way that nobody can live up to his exemplum, so nobody, Hercules feels, should expect to wield his bow and arrows. Of course, the only conqueror of Hercules in this play is Hercules himself, a self-reflexive feat that confirms the circularity of his exemplum. Despite his being a role and role model, Hercules emerges as the only figure able to undertake this part.

Self-aemulatio

As noted in a preceding section, Seneca’s Hercules spends most of his eponymous tragedy in competition with himself. His feats of strength cannot be equalled let alone surpassed, and his exceptional heroism makes him the only man capable of overthrowing himself. While not categorically wrong, this activity threatens to unseat the exemplum’s primary purpose of fostering interpersonal and intergenerational emulation in the name of social and moral continuity. Despite the centuries separating Lucius from Marcus Junius Brutus, the former’s model is maintained and perpetuated by the latter. But the exemplarity of Seneca’s Hercules achieves the opposite effect inasmuch as it confirms his isolation from his surrounding community rather than enabling him to claim a place within it.

The phenomenon of self-aemulatio is a minor yet persistent theme in Roman letters, typically appearing in panegyric passages and, following the establishment of the principate, typically applied to emperors.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ I have cited already, above, Plutarch’s comments about Julius Caesar’s ambition and energy reaching such heights that he had nobody to contend with apart from himself (Plut. Caes. 58.5). Pliny voices a comparable idea when praising Trajan’s performance in battle:

The passage describes a complex balance between the community of common soldiers and lesser commanders, and Trajan as their ultimate, outstanding leader. Pliny depicts the emperor as leading by example and, at the same time, as reviving exemplary practices from the republican past. Trajan features as the military heir of model commanders from the ranks of Fabricii, Scipiones, and Camilli. Up to this point, the emperor’s exemplarity can be said to strengthen social bonds, both within the immediate context of his own army and within the broader context of social and historical continuity.

But Pliny also acknowledges a wide gap separating Trajan from his republican predecessors: they belonged to a time period (and implicitly, a social structure) in which it was possible for them to vie with and imitate each other (tunc enim illum imitationis ardor semperque melior aliquis accenderet, 13.4). Because Rome’s republican oligarchy allotted governmental power to more than one individual, it cultivated an environment of elite aemulatio in which a host of aristocrats would jostle to claim the best places in the hierarchy. For all its manifest failings and restrictions, this political system entailed a degree of plurality, which in turn encouraged the competitive, interpersonal pursuit of exempla. In contrast, Trajan’s position at the very peak of an autocratic hierarchy leaves him – at least in theory – without any superior paradigms to emulate.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Since nobody, by definition, can be better than Trajan, Trajan has nobody to imitate aside from himself. The panegyric topos of incomparability merges with the cold, hard fact of Trajan’s absolute power: he competes with himself because competing with anyone else would mean a diminution not just of his talents, but also of his political rank. The exemplarity of an autocrat spirals inwards and has the distinct potential to broaden rather than narrow the distances between ruler and ruled.

Self-aemulatio likewise appears as a topos in Seneca’s exhortation of Nero in the de Clementia. Hoping to ensure his pupil’s continued good behaviour, Seneca congratulates the young emperor on his exemplary style of government: nemo iam divum Augustum nec Ti. Caesaris prima tempora loquitur nec, quod te imitari velit, exemplar extra te quaerit; principatus tuus ad gustum exigitur (‘nobody now speaks of the divine Augustus, nor the bygone times of Tiberius, nor seeks an example other than yourself for you to imitate; your principate is made to conform with the taste you have already given’ Clem. 1.1.6). Like Pliny, Seneca articulates a delicate balance between the competing demands of dynastic tradition and autocratic self-sufficiency: Nero must remain aware of Augustus’ good exemplum even though he is no longer required to follow it. As a persuasive tactic, Seneca’s and Pliny’s praise of self-aemulatio fulfils the dual purpose of encouraging their addressees to uphold good government by caring for their people’s needs, and conversely, of admitting that their power makes them unanswerable to anyone apart from themselves. Their exemplum may be self-contained but, these texts imply, it should not also be self-serving. What better way to persuade Nero than to tell him that his good conduct is peerless?

While self-aemulatio is especially suited to autocratic contexts, it does also appear in republican ones. Livy, for instance, depicts Camillus as being ‘in competition with himself’ (certantem secum ipsum, 6.6.9), and Cicero confesses that he need not exhort Dolabella to follow the examples of famous men because Dolabella is already famous enough to be his own model and contend with himself (te imitere oportet, tecum ipse certes, ad Fam. 9.14.6). Cicero inverts the topos, too, when denouncing Verres for exceptional cruelty: nam si cum aliorum improbitate certet, longe omnes multumque superabit: secum ipse certat, id agit ut semper superius suum facinus novo scelere vincat (‘in competition with other scoundrels he would easily leave them all far behind. But he is his own competitor; with each new crime his aim is to break his previous record.’ Verr. 2.5.116 trans. Greenwood). Although none of these individuals is – strictly speaking – unanswerable to others in the same way as Nero or Trajan, the topos is nonetheless intended to evoke their potential separation from the surrounding community. Instead of modelling himself on other clari viri, presumably from the Roman past (Fam. 9.14.6), Dolabella is invited to cultivate a purely self-reflexive exemplum. Such exceptionalism can easily lead to tyrannous self-absorption.

In Hercules, Seneca illustrates the perils of the protagonist’s self-aemulatio in two main ways. The first concerns the ambiguity of Hercules’ heroism. As many scholars have remarked, Hercules’ madness and sanity appear to exist on the same continuum; much of the behaviour he exhibits while hallucinating corresponds to the attitudes and conduct he displays before and after the attack.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Significantly, he frames his assault upon heaven as a logical extension of his earlier labours: perdomita tellus, tumida cesserunt freta, / inferna nostros regna sensere impetus: / immune caelum est, dignus Alcidae labor (‘earth is conquered, the swollen seas have yielded, the kingdoms of the dead have felt our attack: heaven has escaped so far – a labour worthy of Alcides’ Her. 955–7).Footnote ¹⁵⁸ The same sequence of thought characterises his sacrificial prayer to Jupiter (926–39), in which Hercules celebrates his civilising mission. Here, his initial, ambitious hopes for universal peace (927–31) rapidly devolve into an expansive vision of future tasks, where Hercules calls upon himself as much as upon Jove to ensure that ‘no storm troubles the sea’ (nulla tempestas fretum / … turbet, 931–2); that ‘poisons may be eradicated’ (venena cessent, 935); that ‘tyrants may not hold sway’ (non … / regnant tyranni, 936–7); and cheekily, that Jove himself may not hurl lightning bolts when angered (nullus irato Iove / exiliat ignis, 932–3).Footnote ¹⁵⁹ As if to confirm that he is the ultimate recipient of his own prayers, Hercules concludes this catalogue with the ironically appropriate desire to oppose any of the world’s remaining monsters: si quod etiamnunc est scelus / latura tellus, properet, et si quod parat / monstrum, meum sit (‘if the earth is going to bring forth any wickedness even now, let it hurry, and if it is preparing some monster, let it be mine’ 938–9). Though Hercules’ megalomania and encroaching insanity blind him to the line’s nuance, Seneca’s audience comprehends that the protagonist himself has become this last monstrum,Footnote ¹⁶⁰ his desire for conquest having spun out of control and reached a self-destructive extreme.

One effect of Hercules’ mad scene, therefore, is to illustrate the destructive potential of a self-sufficient exemplum. Because Hercules imitates and vies with himself, there are no external moral checks placed upon his exemplarity; Hercules justifies his conduct solely with reference to Hercules. The self-aemulatio that encapsulates and celebrates his supreme heroism becomes, at the same time, a dangerous source of self-serving aggression.

It is of course possible to argue that Juno assumes full responsibility for Hercules’ madness: as the one who brings destruction on the hero, she, not Hercules himself, is ultimately to blame for the perversion of his virtus. In contrast to the pessimistic scholarly view of Hercules’ heroism inducing its own destruction, some take the optimistic tack of exculpating the hero for crimes committed at Juno’s vengeful behest.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Yet, Juno’s involvement does not really lessen the ominous impact of Hercules’ self-reflexive exemplum, because her revenge takes the form of causing Hercules to fight himself: bella iam secum gerat (‘let him wage war with himself’ 85); se vincat et cupiat mori (‘let him defeat himself and long for death’ 116). Like Seneca’s Atreus, whose preferred method of vengeance is ‘Thyestes himself’ (ipso Thyeste, Thy. 259), Juno engineers her enemy’s downfall by exploiting his chief weakness, in this case, the overweening power and loneliness generated by his heroism. If anything, Juno simply provides a catalyst for the already dark, destructive potential of Hercules’ exemplum.

Seneca’s second critique of self-aemulatio comes in the form of a striking parallel between Hercules and the tyrant Lycus. Although this usurper of the Theban throne plays a relatively minor role in the tragedy, Seneca makes a clear effort to depict him as the protagonist’s doppelgänger.Footnote ¹⁶² A brief review will serve to demonstrate the points of correspondence: Lycus enters the stage in the aftermath of violence he has committed against Megara’s family; his hands are described as ‘spattered with blood’ (sanguine aspersam manum, 372), though the comment is more metaphorical than literal at this point in the play; his proposals for peace and reconciliation are undercut by his propensity for physical aggression; he attributes clara virtus to himself (340) and identifies himself as victor (398–9; 409); he prepares to immolate Megara and her children as they take refuge in a shrine (514–15), an act that is planned to occur while Lycus himself offers votive sacrifice to Neptune (514–15); finally, he exempts Amphitryon from death, counting it a greater punishment to sentence the old man to life (509–13).

Lycus’ resemblance to Hercules is not far to seek: Hercules, too, arrives on stage following deeds of violence, in the first instance after abducting Cerberus from the underworld (592–612), and in the second, after murdering Lycus (895–9); his hands ‘drip with the blood’ of this recent slaughter (manantes … / manus cruenta caede, 918–19), but he ignores Amphitryon’s plea for him to cleanse them prior to conducting sacrifice (920–4); like Lycus, he describes himself as a victor (898), and his aspirations for universal peace (927–30) are rapidly overthrown by his own brutality; virtus is his attribute par excellence; madness overtakes him as he performs a votive sacrifice to Jupiter (926–52), and while mad, he regards his killing of Megara and the children as an offering to Juno (1036–7); like Lycus, he refers to his children as a grex (1037 cf. 507); finally, Hercules, too, refrains from killing Amphitryon, if only because his fit of madness subsides just as the old man steps forward to present himself as the final victim (1039–52).Footnote ¹⁶³

It should be clear by now that aside from simply resembling Lycus, Hercules actually takes his place. In slaughtering his wife and offspring, Hercules completes in Act 4 the task Lycus commenced in Act 2. The association grows closer still when Hercules hallucinates that he is killing Lycus’ children (in Euripides, by contrast, he thinks they belong to Eurystheus): sed ecce proles regis inimici latet, / Lyci nefandum semen. inviso patri / haec dextra iam vos reddet (‘but look, here hide the children of a hostile ruler, / Lycus’ wicked seed. This right hand will return you, now, to your hated father’ 987–9). With this declaration, the roles of Lycus and Hercules eclipse into one, and Seneca implies that the latter is the real invisus pater. The implication is reiterated, with even more ironic force, just a few lines further down, when the mad Hercules remarks ‘I see hidden here the son of a wicked father’ (hic video abditum / natum scelesti patris, 1001–2). Where Hercules sees Lycus’ child, the audience of course sees Hercules’ child, and the hero becomes the scelestus pater he imagines himself as fighting. Of course, in the world outside Hercules’ disordered brain, Lycus does not in fact have any children; he remarks in Act 2 that he plans to get them through forced union with Megara (494). But such information points once again to the potential interchangeability of Lycus and Hercules, since with this claim Lycus aims to occupy Hercules’ role just as Hercules later occupies Lycus’.

The links connecting these two characters are crucial for understanding, on a number of levels, how Seneca has chosen to represent Hercules’ exemplarity. Like the arbitrary power of an absolute ruler, Hercules’ exemplum asserts the capacity to self-regulate, and that capacity, in turn, reinforces the hero’s isolation. While he may feel responsible for his family, on occasions, he is nonetheless set apart from them; his example is an exception rather than a rule, a point of disjunction rather than union and tradition. Granted it is not identical to tyranny, but it certainly has the potential to foster tyrannical behaviour.

It is telling that Lycus, too, shares this quality of self-contained isolation. Immediately upon entering the stage, he boasts about his lack of family name and inherited wealth:

The assertion has a distinctly Roman flavour to it, as though Lycus were a novus homo proudly proclaiming his ascent to the very top of the cursus honorum. But in a play so fixated upon family divisions and strained or estranged family relationships, Lycus’ claim takes on other colouring as well. Like Hercules, Lycus rests a large part of his self-definition on being a solitary figure. Although his reference to a genus implies that he does have some family members somewhere, he appears in the context of this drama to be entirely a lone wolf: he never mentions any parents, and we gather from later comments that he does not have any children; he appears to be personally, socially, and politically self-sufficient. While Lycus makes no explicit reference to intergenerational exemplarity in this passage, his proud independence from familial and dynastic tradition certainly taps into the tragedy’s theme of self-aemulatio. Like Hercules, Lycus relies on himself instead of following an ancestral paradigm, and this sense of independence seems to find a parallel in the ruthlessly autocratic nature of his rule. The autonomous quality of his self-definition, figured as an absence of family members, slides into his desire for despotic hegemony. This is the mirror in which Seneca reflects the danger of Hercules’ detached, self-reflexive exemplum.

Conclusion

The act of adopting and imitating role models entails a delicate balance between self-abnegation on the one hand, and self-assertion on the other. As Seneca’s Troades shows all too brutally, exemplarity requires a degree of displacement in which children re-embody their parents and recapitulate past actions rather than develop independent identities. The self qua exemplum tends to be derivative, which explains in turn its close conceptual links to biology, family lineage, and literary tradition. Just like an unavoidable set of hostile genetic traits, or like an unalterable narrative detail, exempla in Senecan tragedy oppress characters under the weight of inherited precedent.

Yet to the extent that one chooses to follow an exemplum, the process can also be an affirmation of selfhood. Pyrrhus celebrates his descent from Achilles as the core of his identity; Marcus Junius Brutus imitates Lucius because he, too, wants to acquire the title of liberator; Seneca copies Socrates in order to gain an equally enduring posthumous reputation. Each of these figures employs the exemplum for the deliberate purpose of self-fashioning; by eliding or aligning their identity with someone else’s, they also assert essential aspects of themselves. Who you are, in this regard, depends upon whom you duplicate.

With Seneca’s Hercules, however, this delicate balance of self and other collapses as the exemplum fails to find a reference point beyond its own exceptionalism. Whereas the traditional purpose of the exemplum in Roman society was to mediate between the individual and the community, the singular event and the general rule, the older and younger generations, Hercules’ paradigm both stems from and ends with himself, and the only mediation it performs is between the Hercules we see on stage and the reputation he has so far accumulated. Hercules’ exemplum is simultaneously vital to his sense of self, and responsible for his insurmountable isolation; the more he aspires to fulfil it, the more he cuts himself off from family and friends.