ABSTRACT
In supplementing the prose source the dramatist went directly to Seneca and Ovid. So the relationship between the Emperor and Lavinia's lover is changed in order to introduce a Senecan as well as a political motif. The rivalry of Saturninus and Bassianus recalls faintly that between the brothers in Seneca's Thebans which originated in Euripides' Phoenissae and reappeared during the Renaissance in Dolce's Giocasta (translated by G. Gascoigne and F. Kinwelmersh in 1566) and in Gorboduc (1562). The ruthless piety of Titus in sacrificing Alarbus was invented not only to make him a stern old Roman but also to introduce another Senecan theme, this time from the Troades, where Hecuba's daughter Polixena and Andromache's son Astyanax must be sacrificed to the shade of Achilles. Titus's petition to Pluto to send Revenge from Hell (IV.3.13-17; 37-8) may come from the prose story, but Titus's language shows an acquaintance with the Senecan underworld, for instance, in Thyestes where Megaera sends out the shade of Tantalus to afflict the house of Pelops [inf 59], and in the Agamemnon, where the ghost of Thyestes acts as prologue. Thyestes has other
('Ruler of the great pole, art thou so slow to hear crimes and to see them ?'), which is a conflation of two passages from Seneca, one from Phaedra, 671-2 ('Magne regnator deum, / tam lentus audis scelera? tam lentus vides ?') with one from Epistle 107 ('parens celsique dominator poli').2
