The Medium and the Messenger in Seneca’s Phaedra, Thyestes, and Trojan Women

The language of Seneca’s messenger speeches concentrates preceding patterns of imagery into grotesquely violent action. In three tragedies – , , and – the report of an anonymous messenger dominates an entire act. All three scenes describe gruesome deaths: the impalement of Hippolytus on a tree trunk in , Atreus’ butchering of his nephews in , and the slaughter of Astyanax and Polyxena in In portraying violence, these messenger speeches repurpose language established in earlier scenes to realize and deform a dominant theme of each play: distorted sexuality, appetite, and moral dissolution.