Seneca: Phoenissae

Phoenissae is probably Seneca's final play, left unfinished at the time of his death in 65 CE from a suicide ordered by the emperor Nero. It is a work of great dramatic, poetic, and intellectual force, a paradigm of Rome's literature of civil war, packed with the latter's vocabulary and imagery and permeated by issues central to Senecan thinking and tragic practice. Prominent themes include: the i...