For Seneca to express such dour views, even from exile on Corsica, would no doubt have been risky. Tragic dramas, which tended to center around arrogant or deluded monarchs, were always risky under the principate; Tiberius had once ordered a playwright executed for a single line about the blind folly of kings. It is not clear that Seneca ever had his plays performed or even allowed them out of his house. There is no evidence they were known in his day, and Seneca himself says nothing about them elsewhere in his writings. Perhaps they were private documents, shared with a trusted few—a way to
...more
