Iam scelus esse contextum (Questions naturelles IVa, praef. 19). La tragédie sénéquienne comme eidos du nefas

The theoretical consciousness of the philosopher Seneca about the tragic eidos appears sufficiently clear in the course of his prose. Thanks to its high formal status, tragedy is able to represent the inmanis et inuisa materia of evil, indissoluble bond of scelus, on the ethical level, and of nefas on the religious plane. Several times the prose writer offers us quotations from the locus de diluuio of Ovid Met. 1.144-148; 241 s., that correspond very exactly to the total program of nefas enunciated by the Fury in the prologue of Thyestes, 39-43 (but also by Hippolytus in Phaedra, 553-558): they give us the key suited to examine Seneca’s theater as the eidetic space specifically designed to unmask and overthrow the anti-system of evil, before it is possible to reconstruct finally, on a ‘reclaimed’basis, the coherent Stoic ethical edifice. A survey conducted on the entire dramatic corpus verifies these claims, revealing the employment of eidetic strategies intended to bring under the control of more and more robust textual grids the representation of the ‘organized chaos’ that governs, from the warning signs to the extreme annihilation, the mythical regions of evil.