ABSTRACT
Seneca's influence on the development of dramatic tragedy was enormous, and his works prefigured many of its traits. Senecan terror emerged as the delight of an age that witnessed the Wars of Religion and the violent birth of a new society. According to Florence Dupont, the idea of scelus nefas, a crime of indescribable dimensions, occupies the centre of Senecan tragedy. The rediscovery of Seneca's dramas, at the end of the Middle Ages, brought the idea of tragedy, which had been entirely detached from the theatre, back onto the stage. Seneca conceives and depicts Medea's wish as aiming for something that stands beyond all proportion and not just in one respect or another, but in thoroughgoing and constitutive fashion. The Senecan model of revenge discloses a structure of subjectivity that resists being transformed into orderly procedure, calculations of balance, or rational exchange along the lines of a deed for a deed, an eye for an eye.
