Rebecca Moorman, Boston University
Extending reevaluations of Stoic emotions to the therapeutic potential of disgust (e.g. Graver 2007; Berno and Gazzarri 2022; Graf 2023), I argue that anagnorisis in Seneca's Thyestes is achieved not through an Aristotelian model of cognitive detachment (Staley 2009; Mowbray 2012; cf. Schiesaro 2001) but through affective engagement with material elicitors of disgust. Spectators engage with the nefas of cannibalism as part of the pre-rehearsal of future ills, a therapeutic strategy in which proficientes vividly imagine embodied horrors like torture to prepare for potential suffering (Ep. 14.5-6; Edwards 2021). This reading introduces the "softer materialism" of Seneca's prose (Dressler 2016) to analyses of Senecan tragedy: the rationality of language, theorized as physical uerba (Ep. 106.4-10; Bronowski 2019), mediates the audience's visceral engagement with cannibalism. Proficientes gain insight into the awful consequences of passion by feeling nefas without actually suffering it.
I analyze Thyestes' recognition scene as an affective or feeling(s)-based anagnorisis for both Thyestes and Seneca's Stoic audience (Th. 999-1006, 1035-1040). Thyestes' growing recognition is sensory and affective before it is fully cognitive: his body begins to rebel (985-986) and indigestion plagues him (sentio impatiens onus, 1000) even before Atreus reveals the children's mangled faces (1004-1005). The irrational consumption of an impatiens ("unable to bear") Thyestes contrasts with the rational consumption of an impatiens (apathetic) reader, "who spits out (respuere) the sensus of every evil" (Ep. 9.2). Seneca urges proficientes to spit out destructive passions (De ira 3.8) but not to spit out the pre-rehearsal of future ills (Cons. Marc. 6.9.4; Brev. Vit. 10.7.3). Imagining horrors in preparation for actual ones requires intense engagement with grotesque, sensory uerba; audiences who detach physically or mentally cannot prepare for future pain. Keen proficientes will thus pre-rehearse Thyestes' cannibalism from the Fury's thirst for blood (Th. 65-66) to the children's fresh, bubbling entrails (767-772) before viscerally engaging with Thyestes' recognition of his children's consumption, a process modeled by the chorus' own insistent attraction to the slaughter (e.g. 638-640).
Ultimately, then, readers of the Thyestes should pre-rehearse visceral disgust so that they may eventually reject this passion. And yet the audience's rational rejection paradoxically requires incorporation of the morally and physically abhorrent Other into the self (Kristeva 1980; Stat. Theb. 753). Just as Thyestes' anagnorisis is only complete when he recognizes his own children within himself (natos premo premorque natis, 1050-1051), proficientes must recognize how they both act (premo) and are acted upon (premor). Extending the self-reflection of subjectivity in Seneca's letters (Ep. 121.11), the Thyestes articulates a complex notion of Stoic ownness (oikeiosis) through the sensory appeal of disgust that collapses distinctions between self and other to the point of collapsing rationality (impatiens) and irrationality (impatiens). Recognition for proficientes requires acceptance that even the interiority of the self cannot - indeed should not - be wholly free from the painful feelings of others.