<i>Me nunc secuntur</i>: Inevitability and Inheritance in Seneca’s <i>Phoenissae</i>

Seneca restages Hercules furens’ culminating passion-restraint scene at the beginning of the Phoenissae. This article explores what recognizing that intertext means for a reading of his most experimental tragedy. In both plays, this scene dramatizes an identity crisis. While Hercules’ literary and personal histories pull against each other—precluding him from reinventing himself in a dramatic context that encourages it—Oedipus’ literary and familial histories conspire to condemn him to escalating rage. If Thyestes and Medea offer a vision of the nearly limitless sway of “autarkic selfhood,” the Phoenissae dramatizes Senecan tragic identity at its most restricted and claustrophobic.