Qui legis Oedipoden caligantemque Thyesten, Colchidas et Scyllas, quid nisi monstra legis?-Martial, 10.4.1-2 non tam interest quo animo scribatur quam quo accipiatur-Cicero, Ad Fam 6.7.1 Summary: This paper examines Seneca's Oedipus as a reader both of poetry and of himself. I argue that when Seneca describes prophecy (233-38; 626-58) and extispicy (293-399), he presents these acts as poetic texts that demand interpretation and that Oedipus repeatedly fails to comprehend. The tragedy overall emphasizes the gap between the protagonist's assumed knowledge and the audience's. As a result, it belittles Oedipus' authoritarian attitude and creates a sustained joke at his expense. Seneca undermines Oedipus by depicting him, simultaneously, as a paranoid ruler bent on enforcing his own version of events, and as the unwitting object of others' analysis. Over the course of the play, Oedipus is reduced to a set of signs that Seneca invites the audience to decode. The playwright also uses the binary dubius / certus to illustrate Oedipus' increasing lack of political and analytical control.

Seneca's Characters addresses one of the most enduring and least theorised elements of literature: fictional character and its relationship to actual, human selfhood. Where does the boundary between character and person lie? While the characters we encounter in texts are obviously not 'real' people, they still possess person-like qualities that stimulate our attention and engagement. How is this relationship formulated in contexts of theatrical performance, where characters are set in motion by actual people, actual bodies and voices? This book addresses such questions by focusing on issues of coherence, imitation, appearance and autonomous action. It argues for the plays' sophisticated treatment of character, their acknowledgement of its purely fictional ontology alongside deep – and often dark – appreciation of its quasi-human qualities. Seneca's Characters offers a fresh perspective on the playwright's powerful tragic aesthetics that will stimulate scholars and students alike.

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Holding people to account is a large part of the law's job. Assigning doers to deeds, ensuring the appropriate punishment of transgressions and transgressors, recommending processes of reparation, regulating the conduct of public bodies, organisations, governments, and nations: each is an example of the law apportioning and policing responsibility, individual and collective. As a regulatory force, though, the law, too, must be held accountable, which means that any justice system must incorporate sufficient checks and balances to ensure that it remains just; otherwise it loses all credibility. Urgent enough in parliamentary democracies and constitutional monarchies, the task acquires another layer of difficulty in more autocratic contexts, where a single ruler embodies the ultimate (terrestrial) source of legitimacy. 1 Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? A major problem of sovereign legality is its self-legitimizing nature: the sovereign is subject to the law, but in deciding what counts as law, he also transcends its framework, making law by his very ability to exceed it. The pressing question then becomes whether and how such an arrangement can guarantee the sovereign's being held to account.This paper examines the twinned issues of sovereignty and law in Seneca's Apocolocyntosis, combining ancient Roman -specifically, Senecan -concepts of sovereign power with theoretical approaches formulated by Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben. As summarized in the preceding paragraph, Schmitt's 'paradox of sovereignty' maintains that the sovereign 'stands outside the normally valid legal system [but] nevertheless belongs to it' for he is the one with the power to suspend and reformulate the constitution in times of emergency. 2 Sovereignty, for Schmitt, represents 'not . . . the monopoly to coerce or to rule, but . . . the monopoly to decide' . 3 Writing at the opposite end of the twentieth century, 38115.indb 45 10/11/2021 10:55

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