Abstract:
The opening Act of Seneca’s Thyestes dramatizes the construction of a broader play within a play on the demise of the house of Tantalus, in which Furia is a meta-poet. The narrow plot in Thyestes proper, where Atreus appears as both instigator and inset poet, dramatizes only one aspect of the broader drama by Furia, thus functioning as an illustration of how everything foretold in her speech will come to pass. The open-ended closure of the narrower play with its reference to Thyestes’ prayer to the avenging gods brings to mind the theme of continuing revenge within the family, as outlined by Furia. This dialogical interaction between the beginning and end of Thyestes allows the audience to prefigure that Atreus will not be the eventual champion of tragic plot, as he arrogantly asserts at the play’s end, but that revenge will continue in the next generation of the same house, exactly as foreshadowed in the opening Act.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Towards a new critical edition of the scholia to the Iliad: a specimen
- Able leaders and fallible men: success and excess in Iliadic battle exhortations
- The Cult of Demeter on Andros and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter
- Interactions with the Beloved in Greek Literature: Conceptual Blending and Levels of Representation
- The Drunken World of Dionysos
- When prophecy drives the prophet crazy (Aesch. Sept. 792–821, 832–839)
- Furia as an Auctor in Seneca’s Thyestes
- Lost Dictionaries, Forgotten Entries. Two Byzantine lexica on the Athenian ΣΩΦΡΟΝΙΣΤΑΙ
- List of Contributors
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Towards a new critical edition of the scholia to the Iliad: a specimen
- Able leaders and fallible men: success and excess in Iliadic battle exhortations
- The Cult of Demeter on Andros and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter
- Interactions with the Beloved in Greek Literature: Conceptual Blending and Levels of Representation
- The Drunken World of Dionysos
- When prophecy drives the prophet crazy (Aesch. Sept. 792–821, 832–839)
- Furia as an Auctor in Seneca’s Thyestes
- Lost Dictionaries, Forgotten Entries. Two Byzantine lexica on the Athenian ΣΩΦΡΟΝΙΣΤΑΙ
- List of Contributors