Senecan Style, Nature, Models, and Performance

Style

Seneca the Younger was the son of Seneca the Elder (see here, a famous rhetorician, and the unlce of the poet Lucan.

Almost all so-called silver age Latin is very rhetorical but Seneca and Lucan are particularly full of rhetorical devices and witty aphorisms such as those which Seneca the Elder endorses in his rhetorical treatises addressed to Seneca and his two brothers Annaeus Mela (Lucan's Dad) and Gallio.

Common rhetorical devices (also sometimes called poetic devices because of their common use in poetry) are: metaphor, simile, hyperbole, alliteration, assonance, consonance, onomatopoeia, chiasmus, synchysis, personification, apostrophe, anaphora, hyperbaton, asyndeton, polysyndeton, litotes, pleonasm (repetition and variation), rhetorical question, synecdoche, metonymy, and zeugma.

For description and English examples, see here and here

Chiasmus and synchysis both refer to artful use of word order, for which you should also know the terms golden and silver lines.

Seneca, like his nephew Lucan, is particularly fond of mottoes (Latin "sententiae") or brief, pithy statements. Seneca's Greek and Latin models including Euripides all have such sententiae, but they are very common in Seneca.

Another stylistic feature is his allusiveness, Seneca was working in a great literary tradition of Greek and Latin poets (and other authors). Anything he wrote about had been written about much before, and his words often echo or allude to earlier treatments of the subject. Whenever this happens, the reader is free to bring the earlier passage into his reading of Seneca. Sometimes when we consider an author's source(s) it informs and transforms our own understanding of the passage at hand.

As I mentioned in one of the introductory questions, we cannot deny that Seneca's life had some impact on his writing. Look out for references to philosophical beliefs not only of the Stoics but also of other schools, issues of creation and destruction, life and death, right and wrong, excessive emotion and self-control, etc. Also we do not know when exactly he wrote this play or the others, but he was certainly writing as a high-class aristocrat in an imperial autocracy. He may have started writing tragedies in exile from Caligula or Claudius. Can you see any references that might suggest contemporary relevance or interests?

Performance?
We just don't know for sure if Seneca ever staged these plays, or even if he read them before an audience of whatever size (though this seems very likely). However, Senecan plays have been staged successfully in modern times, and we know that plays could be staged by senators in Seneca's lifetime. (Tacitus Annales 11.13 At Claudius matrimonii sui ignarus et munia censoria usurpans, theatralem populi lasciviam severis edictis increpuit, quod in Publium Pomponium consularem (is carmina scaenae dabat) inque feminas inlustris probra iecerat.) Keep this question in mind and consider issues of staging: who is on stage and when, what props and gestures might accompany the words on the page, and finally are there things that are hard to understand without seeing it staged?