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38 pages 1 hour read

Seneca

Thyestes

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 65

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Acts IV-VAct Summaries & Analyses

Act IV Summary

A Messenger enters, reeling from something terrible that he has seen. The Chorus presses him to reveal what has happened, intuiting that either Atreus or Thyestes is responsible.

In a long and ornate speech, the Messenger describes how Atreus took Thyestes’s sons to a recessed grove in his palace, where he killed them and cooked them before serving them as a meal to their unsuspecting father. Now, even the sun has retreated in its course in horror. The Chorus sings the fourth and final ode, in which they lament The Overturning of the Natural Order. They note that the firmament has departed from its usual cycles and wonder if this presages the destruction of the world.

Act V Summary

Atreus delivers a joyful soliloquy in which he celebrates his kingship and compares himself to the gods: He has triumphed over his brother, and now all that remains is to reveal to him that he has eaten his own sons. Thyestes, meanwhile, rejoices as well at the apparent end of his painful exile. Even as he tries to enjoy his feast, however, he cannot help but feel sorrow and fear. He asks Atreus where his sons are, and Thyestes taunts him by telling him, “Your boys are here, believe me” (976).

Thyestes grows more desperate, noting that the earth is shaking and that the sky has become unusually dark. He demands that Atreus bring his children to him. Atreus finally displays the heads and hands of Atreus’s sons, which he had saved earlier, and Thyestes mourns their terrible fate. He asks Atreus to at least allow him to bury his sons, and Atreus reveals that Thyestes has already eaten his children. Atreus continues to mock Thyestes as Thyestes, feeling sick, prays to the gods for revenge.

Acts IV-V Analysis

The final two acts of Thyestes see the full horror of the drama reach its climax. The mounting sense of dread as the Messenger describes what Atreus has done and as Atreus displays his revenge to Thyestes is accompanied by vivid imagery of the firmament coming apart: Atreus’s crime has resulted in The Overturning of the Natural Order, so nature itself literally turns away. Thus, when Atreus killed his nephews, says the Messenger, “The woods were trembling, the whole ground was shaken” (696), and now the sun itself has “retreated / and drowned the broken day in the middle sky” (776-77). The Chorus also fears that the end of the world is coming, and wonders how to respond. No doubt it is humans’ wickedness that has brought about this destruction, and the Chorus finally finds itself embracing this deserved punishment—their very final words in the play as they end their fourth ode are: “one would have to be greedy for life not to want / to die when the world is dying” (883-84).

The role of the gods in this tragedy remains ambiguous. On the one hand, the recoiling of the sun can be interpreted as a manifestation of the horror of the gods through The Overturning of the Natural Order—the sun, for Greeks and Romans alike, was a god after all. This is the interpretation Atreus adopts when he notes the sudden darkness. Atreus even sees himself as taking the gods’ place, speaking of “touching heaven’s axis with my exalted head” (886) and wishing:

[That he could] prevent the gods from leaving,
drag them down and force them all to watch
this vengeance feast! (893-95).

On the other hand, the gods do not actually punish Atreus’s monstrous impiety, at least not in the play. Nor do they respond when Thyestes, at the very end of the play, calls upon the gods as “the guardians of the good” (1103) to punish Atreus. After all, the gods have not been entirely absent from the play: One of the Furies was present in Act I to bring the Ghost of Tantalus to Argos, and thus it was in fact the gods who set the events of the play in motion. It might seem that the gods are simply malicious, but we should also remember the role that fate has in the world of the play. The gods, whether or not they can be rightly understood as “the guardians of the good,” are surely guardians of fate, and the play gives a sense that the descendants of Tantalus are condemned by their fate to their hereditary wickedness.

However, this does not mean that wickedness is left entirely unpunished. Indeed, the myth of Atreus and Thyestes, as many of Seneca’s audiences and readers would have known, did not end where the play ends: Other sources describe how Thyestes begot another son, Aegisthus, who would eventually murder Atreus, thereby allowing him to have his own revenge against his brother. The ongoing cycle of vengeance, though, once more speaks to The Destructive Power of Desire, which is once again passed down to another generation.

The final act of the play in particular thus illuminates the relationship between Atreus and Thyestes as well as The Destructive Power of Desire that consumes both of them. Even before Thyestes realizes that he has eaten his sons, his attitude toward the feast is odd and paradoxical. Thyestes eats ravenously and even grotesquely: “[H]is mouth is overstuffed, his jaws / can hardly hold the new morsels” (781-82), says the Messenger, and Atreus’s description of the scene moves along the same lines (“He belches” (911), “He is full up” (913), and so on). The fact that Thyestes is unaware of what he Is eating creates another moment of dramatic irony in the play, as the audience already knows what the feast consists of. When Thyestes speaks, it seems as though he is trying to force himself to enjoy himself, even though he cannot help the feelings of sorrow and fear that overcome him.

There is a sense of foreboding in Thyestes’s supposed enjoyment of the feast as he reflects, “The mind gives indications of a grief to come, / prophet of its future pain” (957-58). It almost seems as if Thyestes subconsciously realizes what is going on. Indeed, when Atreus displays Thyestes’s sons to him, asking tauntingly if Thyestes recognizes them, Thyestes responds, “I recognize my brother” (1006). Thyestes’s disgust when he realizes what he has done manifests as physical symptoms, and he feels as though his sons are punishing him:

Inside my belly they heave,
The horror struggles to escape; there is no exit.
[…]
Look, my children and I
Weigh down one another. The crime at least is balanced (1041-051).

In a play where wrongdoing and punishment mar the lives of so many of the characters, perhaps this balance is the best one can hope for. Indeed, even as Thyestes, with the very last words of the play, leaves his brother to the rather dubious gods for punishment, Atreus responds cruelly that “for your punishment, I give you to your children” (1112). The Destructive Power of Desire has, yet again, destroyed the family of Tantalus. 

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