The only other Senecan translator I’m familiar with is Frank Justus Miller. He’s rather old fashioned and likes to thee and thou, but these plays are probably some of the few classical works that can bear that kind of thing. He’s certainly the better poet technically, but whether you prefer him or Wilson is probably a personal thing. I prefer Wilson. She writes with rhythm and a kind of supple strength. This is a line-by-line translation and it’s perhaps moot as to whether this is poetry or just rhythmic prose. Either way, it’s very good.

I’d read quite a few of the old Greek plays before it was borne in upon me that everything except for the spoken words are later additions by various editors. One thing I particularly liked about this edition is that Wilson gives you the speakers’ names and the act divisions and nothing else. Stage directions and those ridiculous scene divisions all stripped out. I recognise that a casual reader like me needs stage directions in something like Plautus because you need to know who can overhear what. You don’t need that with Seneca. It made clear some interesting features of the text that I would have missed if it were broken up. Like the chiastic structure of Act One of Phaedra: Speeches, conversation, stichomythia, conversation, speech. It’s also gives the wonderful effect of voices crying out in the darkness.

There seems to be some controversy over whether or not these were written to be staged or not. Either way, unlike all earlier plays they were not intended to be part of a religious festival. Is Seneca writing as part of a now lost tradition of non-religious drama, or is he innovating? These plays are chock-full of the most astounding descriptive passages and general unpleasantness, and are obviously an effective performance of some kind, whether by the actors or Seneca himself, but they don’t always work as drama as I recognise it. Is he doing something I don’t appreciate, or is he not the best playwright?

They only one which really pulls together theme, action, and character and creates a classic for all time is Trojan Women where, in the aftermath of the Trojan war everyone is trying to shift responsibility onto someone else. ( )