Seneca’s Tragic Hands: Hercules Furens
By Mairéad McAuley (University College London)
Hands loom large in Hercules Furens, with manus occurring 55 times.
Deconstructing the Female Body in Seneca’s Elegiac Reconstruction of Phaedra
By Chiara Blanco (University of Edinburgh)
Phaedra has been recognized as one of the most elegiac of Seneca’s tragic characters (Armstrong, 2006; Mocanu 2013). By inverting the traditional gender roles of love elegy, Seneca characterizes her as the elegiac amator, hunting her erotic prey, Hippolytus, in a desperate attempt to obtain his love. In this paper, I want to show how Seneca uses references to Phaedra’s body and bodily parts to stress the elegiac connotation of her character and get in direct conversation with Roman elegiac poets.
Bodily Autonomy and Gender Fluidity in Senecan Philosophy and Tragedy
By Michael Goyette (Eckerd College)
This paper examines the relationship between bodily autonomy and conceptualizations of gender in the philosophical and tragic corpora of Seneca the Younger. First considering selected passages from a handful of Senecan prose works (e.g.
The Pathology of the Skin in Seneca's Philosophical Prose: Between Ethics and Aesthetics
By Allegra Hahn (The University of Manchester)
Medical vocabulary relating to skin and its diseases (such as cutis, ulcus, scabies,
Experiencing (and Understanding) the World: The Body and Senses in Seneca’s Natural Questions
By Elaine Sanderson (University of Edinburgh)
Throughout his Natural Questions, the Younger Seneca urges the mind to break free from the constraints of the body (Sen. NQ 1. praef.