The breakthrough wrought by Jason’s voyage had since increased a thousandfold, Seneca observes in his play’s most famous passage. Where once a single ship had disturbed the natural order, Rome had now filled the seas with traffic, scrambling the races and dissolving global boundaries. Because of Rome, the Persians, dwellers on the river Euphrates, now drank the Rhine instead, while the sun-baked Indian sipped the frozen streams of Siberia. “The all-traveled earth leaves nothing in the place it once was,” laments the chorus of Corinthians, speaking, as their obvious anachronisms reveal, with
...more
