Pseudo-Seneca

A Roman tragedy widely considered to be post-Senecan and of unknown authorship, Hercules on Oeta is the longest play to survive from antiquity. This accessible volume offers a concise yet thorough introduction for readers coming to the play for the first time, exploring issues of authorship, date and performance alongside chapters on its literary antecedents, historical context, main characters and key themes, and reception in antiquity and beyond.

In depicting the death and deification of Hercules, Hercules on Oeta demonstrates that this aspect of the heroâs life was at least as important in art and myth as the twelve labours. Infected with a flesh-eating virus, the torment of Hercules became so great that he built a pyre for self-immolation: he appears again to his mother at the playâs end, now deified, despite most of the early part of the drama being devoted to probing the hurt and humiliation of a spurned wife and that of a pregnant, unwilling mistress, sole survivor of a family wiped out by Hercules.

As a study of the frictions between loyalty, fidelity and personal responsibility, the play raises the central question of whether one should be forgiven bad deeds by virtue of having also performed good deeds. There is more than one Hercules, and all his aspects are represented in this play: glutton, sexual opportunist, naive, quick to violence and slow to understanding, he was endearing but with feet of clay, tottering between pathos and parody, and very much a figure of our own time.