In Medea and Phaedra, Seneca plumbed the depths of what he saw as a typically female affliction, impotentia—an inability to master lust, restrain envy, or tamp down the need for control and power. It was a condition he, and other Roman males, feared in all contexts but particularly when it entered the political realm. The passions of unbridled women could destroy that realm and rush the world headlong toward apocalypse. It was these fears of female impotentia that Rome, and Seneca, confronted as they watched Agrippina suddenly come unglued in early 55. What prompted the tempest was not an
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