Escaping the past: Seneca's 'Troades' and the literary tradition

This dissertation examines how the dramatic figures in Seneca's Troades struggle against historical determinism, the literary tradition, and their own literary pedigrees. Seneca's Troades is an allusive text that tells the story of what happens after the sack of Troy. The Trojan women are prisoners of war and await their allotment to Greek masters. Two Trojan survivors are singled out for an even crueler destiny; Astyanax, the child heir to the Trojan throne, and Polyxena, a young daughter of Hecuba and Priam, are killed by the Greeks. The tragedies of Euripides, the Hecuba and Trojan Women, are Seneca's most direct dramatic models. The sacrifice of Polyxena is recounted in the former and the execution of Astyanax in the latter. The Troades, at a glance, is an amalgam of these two basic storylines, but other sources influence Seneca's text as well, such as Homer's Iliad , Virgil's Aeneid, and Ovid's Metamorphoses. My analysis of the Troades considers how Seneca and his dramatic characters engage with this literary tradition. The Troades is in sustained intertextual dialogue with its models and this awareness is occasionally evidenced on a metaliterary level by the characters within the play themselves. This awareness often generates metaliterary dissonance between Seneca's characters whose expectations and perceptions are based on the literary tradition but not born out in the play. By such devices, the Troades, and Senecan tragedy at large, constantly reflects on its own relationship to these earlier texts, a relationship that is continually referenced through his characters.