Over the past two decades, scholars have devoted increasing attention to Roman civil war literature and its poetics, from the vocabulary of nefas, paradox, and hyperbole to the pervasive imagery of the state as a body violated by its citizens. Thebes and especially the civil war between Oedipus’ sons became prominent lenses through which Romans explored their country's strife-ridden past. Seneca's Phoenissae, however, has received comparatively little attention in this regard, often overshadowed by Statius’ epic Thebaid of the next generation. This paper investigates Seneca's contribution to the wider poetics of civil war through his expansion of the theme of incest, which Seneca uses to articulate civil war's most invasive, penetrative, and disintegrative effects. In particular, Seneca capitalizes on both the metaphorical potential of maternal violation and the eroticized imagery of Roman conquest to create disturbing points of contact between two generations of Jocasta's sons: the one who invaded her bed in the past, and the other who will soon invade his mother city. Seneca writes his Phoenissae to be an escalated return to the original sins of Oedipus’ incesta domus as another of Thebes’ native sons prepares to conquer his motherland.

summary: Seneca’s Phoenissae imbues Antigone’s canonical pietas with elegiac associations. Her appeals to her father recycle familiar topoi from amatory poetry, especially the amator ’s pledge to follow ( sequor ) the beloved anywhere. Her father, in turn, is often disturbed by her physical proximity and attempts to escape further incestuous temptation ( timeo post matrem omnia ). In the end, however, Oedipus capitulates to his daughter’s elegiac rhetoric and responds to her in similarly amatory terms. In this way Seneca subverts the loyalty that defined Antigone in prior literary treatments to create the potential for an incestuous sequel to his earlier tragedy of Thebes.

As the Octavia replays a moment in Rome’s recent history—the struggle to see which Caesar would outlast the rest—its characters simultaneously replay a crucial struggle from the Julio-Claudians’ rise to power: the civil war between Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar. The Octavia ’s allusive language recasts its Neronian characters as the Republic’s leading generals, turning strife within the imperial family into a civil war that threatens to engulf the Roman world once more. The play thus challenges the predominant cultural memories of peace fostered by the Julio-Claudian dynasty and promotes instead a counter-memory rooted in civil strife.

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