“Medea’s Pathological Passions: Seneca’s Dramatic Inversion of Stoicism”, Tara Auty (UWA)

Date: 20 September, 2016
Time: 1:00pm
Venue: Arts Lecture Room 6 (G.62, ground floor, Arts Building), University of Western Australia

This is a free event. You don’t need to RSVP – just come along.

Traditionally, Seneca’s Medea has been problematised when considered against his prose works. However, recent scholarship has shown that, far from showcasing the failure of Stoicism, Medea inverts the ideals advanced in Seneca’s prose works in order to prove the effectiveness of Stoic philosophy by that very inversion. This paper will demonstrate that Medea is not a character whose reason succumbs to her passions, but rather, that her passions in fact arise from a from a system of reasoning that is internally coherent. The development and sustenance of her passions from and through her reason can thus be read as evidence of one of the most basic tenets of Stoicism, that emotions are based on value judgements. Her practise of constancy – advocated by Seneca to foster consistent character – consolidates her motives and solidifies her drive, so that she develops from being a character temporarily experiencing certain emotions to a character defined by the permanency of those emotions.

Tara Auty is a PhD candidate in Classics and Ancient History at The University of Western Australia (UWA), working under the umbrella of the Languages and Emotion research cluster, contributing to both the Meanings and Change programs of ARC CHE. Her current research project for her PhD, due in 2018, is a study of the effect of community emotions in response to the Fall of Constantinople on the production of neo-Latin epic in the Quattrocento. This project benefits from, and contributes to, fields as varied as scholarship on Latin Humanism, the study of Classical Latin epic, early Modern Italian history, and the cultural history of the emotions.