Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero

by James Romm

To Roman readers in A.D. 49, Phaedra would have raised uncomfortable associations. They saw Agrippina as a tempestuous, controlling, and highly sexual woman, not unlike Seneca’s heroine. She had already been accused of incest with both Caligula and her brother-in-law Lepidus; she was now incestuously married to her uncle Claudius. And she had become a stepmother. The chances that she would be a wicked one, given that she had a son of her own to protect, seemed high. Seneca’s Phaedra would have been perilous for its author indeed, if released against this backdrop. Was palace life imitating Seneca’s art, or were things the other way around? Could we determine the date that Medea or Phaedra were written, we would know the answer. For lack of any chronology, we can only muse on this tantalizing circumstance: Rome’s greatest tragic playwright had landed at the court of a queen plucked straight from tragedy. The curtain was going up on the drama of Agrippina’s reign.