ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the Roman philosopher and tragic playwright Seneca the Younger represents the human body as intrinsically fluid and simultaneously shaped by external forces of fluidity. Considering selections from Senecan prose (esp. his Moral Letters to Lucilius and Natural Questions) and his poetic tragedies (Oedipus and Thyestes), I demonstrate that Seneca’s representations of bodily fluids and bodily fluidity are deeply influenced by the Stoic doctrine of sympatheia, which posited that all of the universe’s components exist in a dynamic network predisposed to instabilities of both small and large scale. These arguments build especially upon the work of Thomas Rosenmeyer, who has discussed the role of sympatheia in Seneca’s works but without focusing on the significance of bodily fluids and other manifestations of fluidity. I first inspect language and imagery of fluids—especially blood and water—and metaphors of flux in Senecan prose and then reveal continuities with rhetoric and philosophical outlook in passages from Senecan tragedy. I observe that Seneca infuses Oedipus and Thyestes with language that evokes various types of flux, connecting, for example, disturbances of bodily fluids with fluctuating bodies of water in the natural environment (e.g. rivers and the sea) and with more figurative waves of emotion. I contend that this emphasis on fluids and fluctuations highlights the permeability and vulnerabilities of the human body, the mutability of human emotions, and a profound inclination toward change in the macrocosm of the universe at large. These sympathetic manifestations of fluidity in turn expose the difficulties of sustaining physical health and of upholding the emotional constancy associated with a Stoic lifestyle. In such ways, this chapter situates rhetoric and representations of fluids and fluidity in Senecan prose and tragedy in the contexts of broader medical and philosophical discussions in Greek and Roman antiquity.
