AN INTRODUCTION TO SILIUS ITALICUS

Abstract

affective feature of the ‘classical commentary’: namely, the desire of the commentator – that is, the ‘meta-narrative’ or ‘story told about, and around, a text’, constituted by ‘the plurality of meaning(s) inevitably opened’ in ‘the very process of answering’ questions raised by the commentator (Kraus [2002], p. 9). Against the background of B.’s other volumes, which keep coming out and keep getting bigger, the desire expressed in the compounded plurality of each edition appears to have two objects: first, a desideratum of scholarship, the dramatic conditions of Senecan performance in the first century CE; second, a desideratum of the scholar, a readership for whom debates about such performances remain a desideratum. Production choices (a bloodbag bursts; pp. lii, 484), aesthetic judgements (‘a brilliant line’; p. 104) and ironic reflections on Roman history (‘Seneca’s audience were well aware of the political half of this “truth”’; p. 230) may or may not be ‘true’ or even verifiable; they nevertheless reconstitute an atmosphere of performance and spectatorship deriving directly from imperial Rome. Alongside all these ‘pearls’, then, the reader also encounters, as a result of an affect of cultural contestation, an atmosphere of Roman theatrical culture, even if such an atmosphere never existed (though something like it must have existed). More than any plurality of ‘facts’ about Senecan tragedy, this atmosphere is the real distinguishing feature of B.’s work and the greatest reward for the (diligent and persistent) reader.