Andrew Horne (Lumen Christi Institute)
Life is a play, and has been since antiquity. Although the “theatre of life” trope is today best known from Shakespeare, it had a rich history in Hellenistic and Roman moral philosophy. Originating in the Hellenistic period, probably with the Stoic Aristo (D.L. 7.160), the theatre of life metaphor had its heyday in Roman-era writers like Cicero, Horace, Seneca, and Epictetus. This paper proposes a threefold taxonomy of the metaphors with close reading of key passages.
The topic remains comparatively underdeveloped. Curtius 1953 is the first scholar to treat the theatre of life at length, but he fast-forwards to Christian examples before giving the pagan philosophical ones a full treatment. Kokolakis 1960 assembles a virtually complete collection, but with the goal of collation, not analysis. Christian 1987 surveys the ancient evidence before moving on to modern examples; Ioppolo 1980 and Cardoso 2018 zero in on Aristo and Cicero respectively. Work remains to be done on relating the metaphors to each other and analyzing what makes them so philosophically compelling. Methodologically, this paper is influenced by the metaphorology of Blumenberg 1997 and 2010, which argues in favor of reading fixed metaphors in relation to each other, across texts and time periods.
There are three main lessons of the “theatre of life” in philosophy. The first category involves deflating external goods. Wealth, power, honor, do not matter very much for happiness—and the theatre helps you remember that. “None of these people you see in purple is happy,” says Seneca. “None is at all happier than actors who are assigned scepters and royal cloaks on stage” (Epist. 76.31). Seneca is comparing the wealthy and powerful of the world to stage actors who pretend to be wealthy and powerful—it is all costuming, one way or the other. In a closely related but still distinct category, authors encourage the practice of virtue by comparing it to good acting. “The wise man is similar to a good actor. Whether he takes up the role of Thersites or Agamemnon, he acts either of them as he ought” (Aristo in D.L. 7.160). “If an actor misses a step,” says Cicero, “they are hissed and booed off the stage”; life, he continues, ought to strive for an even greater standard of perfection (Parad. 26). On the stage, the quality of the acting is all important, whatever the role. So too in life: no matter the situation, what matters is doing the right thing.
The third category concerns death. “The good actor stops when he ought to,” says Epictetus (Diss. 4.1.165). If life is a play, it is less important that the play come to its scripted end, than that the actors show sensitivity to the audience and end in good time. A play is not better for being longer, and neither is life. Moral philosophy had a theatre of its own in Hellenistic and Roman philosophy. By collating the passages into thematic categories, we see the flexibility and staying power of the trope all these years before Shakespeare.