Seneca

Plays and translators: Octavia Kelly Cherry * Hercules Oetaeus Stephen Sandy * Oedipus Rachel Hadas * The Phoenician Women David Slavitt * Hercules Furens Dana Gioia.Are there no limits to human cruelty? Is there any divine justice? Do the gods even matter if they do not occupy themselves with rewarding virtue and punishing wickedness? Seneca''s plays might be dismissed as bombastic and extravagant answers to such questions—if so much of human history were not Senecan in its absurdity melodrama and terror. Here is an honest artist confronting the irrationality and cruelty of his world—the Rome of Caligula Claudius and Nero—and his art reflects the stress of the encounter. The surprise perhaps is that Seneca''s world is so like our own.