By Gregory A. Staley
As either a literary style and a view of existence, tragedy has from the very starting spurred a discussion among poetry and philosophy. Plato famously banned tragedians from his excellent neighborhood simply because he believed that their representations of vicious habit may perhaps deform minds. Aristotle got down to resolution Plato's objections, arguing that fiction deals a loyal photo of the reality and that it promotes emotional health and wellbeing in the course of the mechanism of catharsis. Aristotle's definition of tragedy truly had its maximum impression now not on Greek tragedy itself yet on later Latin literature, starting with the tragedies of the Roman poet and Stoic thinker Seneca. Scholarship over the past fifty years, despite the fact that, has more and more sought to spot in Seneca's prose writings a Platonic poetics that's adverse towards tragedy and which would accordingly clarify why Seneca's performs appear so frequently to offer the failure of Stoicism. As Gregory Staley argues during this ebook, whilst Senecan tragedy fails to degree advantage we must always see during this no longer the failure of Stoicism yet a Stoic belief of tragedy because the correct car for imaging Seneca's widely used global of madmen and fools. Senecan tragedy enacts Aristotle's belief of the style as a bright picture of the reality and treats tragedy as a typical venue during which to discover the human soul. Staley's interpreting of Seneca's performs attracts on present scholarship approximately Stoicism in addition to at the writings of Renaissance authors like Sir Philip Sidney, who borrowed from Seneca the note "idea" to designate what we might now label as a "theory" of tragedy. Seneca and the assumption of Tragedy will charm generally to scholars and students of classics, historic philosophy, and English literature.
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9–11, 13–16). Sidney’s description of the power of poetry’s pictures, their enargeia in Greek terms, echoes the Stoics’ characterization of a kataleptic impression, an image that testifies to its own truthfulness. 257). Sidney’s perfect pictures “strike” in just this way. It is revealing that the Stoics regularly illustrate their concept of kataleptic impressions using scenes from tragedy, which constitute the same kind of “perfect pictures” that Sidney associates with effective poetry, poetry that offers an image of truth.
When his servant makes just this point (207–208), Atreus brushes it aside: Quod nolunt velint [Let them learn to like what they don’t like] (212). This seems to be Seneca’s version of a similar and more famous line spoken by Atreus in a play by Accius, performed in 140 bc: Oderint dum metuant [Let them hate me as long as they fear me]. ” In Atreus’ “play,” however, there is no poetic justice, no ruin for tyrants. Alessandro Schiesaro has argued that Atreus embodies the pleasures, not the moral reservations, associated with poetry that indulges violence: “[W]e must also be prepared to recognise that Atreus, the playwright with hands drenched in blood, stands out in the play as the embodiment of a victory against the constraints of moral repression that is inextricably connected with the force and pleasure of poetry” (1994, 207).
I aim both to confirm Sidney’s reading of Seneca and to examine the somewhat surprising ways in which Aristotle’s ideas shaped Stoic thinking about poetry. Along the way I also demonstrate that Sidney’s conception of poetry bears traces of this Stoic tradition. ” It is a perfect picture because it constitutes a vivid revelation, as Sidney’s metaphor of the ulcer suggests. Tragedy’s power “to open wounds” is epistemological rather than therapeutic; as D. W. Robertson argued (1941, 61), Sidney uses the ulcer to characterize the content of tragedy rather than its effect.