RECKONINGS WITH NATURE IN SENECA'S PHAEDRA

This article traces the presences of Empedoclean/Lucretian images of nature as a synchronous combination of love and strife, or creation and destruction, in the language and dramaturgy of Seneca's Phaedra. The visual resemblances among characters point to a conceptual identity between birth and death in the play's thematic concerns and imagery. In the central debate between Hippolytus and the Nurse about the moral entailments of natura, similarities between their arguments emerge from contradictions in the language of each and from the staging. The effect of this imagery is to highlight a tension between the way nature is described from the self-interested perspective of characters within the play and the vision of nature available to the audience.