Nine of Seneca's tragedies survive, all of which are fabula crepidata ( tragedies adapted from Greek originals ); his Phaedra, for example, was based on Euripides ' Hippolytus.

Seneca's tragedies rework those of all three of the Athenian tragic playwrights whose work has survived.

Many scholars have thought, following the ideas of the 19th century German scholar Leo, that Seneca's tragedies were written for recitation only.

Similarly, Eumolpus ' poem on the capture of Troy ( 89 ) has been related to Nero's Troica and to the tragedies of Seneca the Younger, and parody of Seneca's Epistles has been detected in the moralising remarks of characters in the Satyricon.

Gronovius edited and annotated Statius, Plautus, Livy, Tacitus, Aulus Gellius and Seneca's tragedies.

Finally, and most substantially, Seneca's tragedies are much more prone to revolve around literary quibbles, even leaving aside the plot of the play for entire sections while the characters engage in an essentially linguistic tangent.

However, the Italian tragedies embraced a principle contrary to Seneca's ethics: showing blood and violence on the stage.

); Seneca's tragedies ( Lond.

Titus ' revenge may also have been influenced by Seneca's play Thyestes, written in the first century AD.

Seneca's plays were widely read in medieval and Renaissance European universities and strongly influenced tragic drama in that time, such as Elizabethan England ( Shakespeare and other playwrights ), France ( Corneille and Racine ), and the Netherlands ( Joost van den Vondel ).

However, " his plays continued to be applauded even after those of Aeschylus and Sophocles had come to seem remote and irrelevant ", they became school classics in the Hellenistic period ( as mentioned in the introduction ) and, due to Seneca's adaptation of his work for Roman audiences, " it was Euripides, not Aeschylus or Sophocles, whose tragic muse presided over the rebirth of tragedy in Renaissance Europe.

On finishing the translation of Seneca's De Beneficiis in 1418, he initiated his extensive travels throughout Europe, which would keep him away from Portugal for the next ten years.

Seneca's Apocolocyntosis reinforces the view of Claudius as an unpleasant fool and this remained the official view for the duration of Nero's reign.

Seneca's various works give mostly scattered anecdotes on Caligula's personality.

Seneca's " vital spot " seems to have meant the neck.

By 1532, Calvin received his licentiate in law and published his first book, a commentary on Seneca's De Clementia.

With Luigi Squarzina in 1952 he co-founded and co-directed the Teatro d ' Arte Italiano, producing the first complete version of Hamlet in Italy, then rare works such as Seneca's Thyestes and Aeschylus's The Persians.

Galen repeats Seneca's points but adds a new one: finding a guide and teacher can help the person in controlling their passions.

One of his revisionist modern biographers, however, Miriam Griffin says in her biography of Seneca that " the evidence for Seneca's life before his exile in 41 is so slight, and the potential interest of these years, for social history as well as for biography, is so great that few writers on Seneca have resisted the temptation to eke out knowledge with imagination.

Seneca's own writings describe his poor health.

Caligula began his first year as emperor in 38, and there was a severe conflict between him and Seneca ; the emperor is said to have spared his life only because he expected Seneca's natural life to be near its end.

Seneca's influence was said to be especially strong in the first year.

According to it, Nero ordered Seneca's wife to be saved.

Robin Campbell, a translator of Seneca's letters, writes that the " stock criticism of Seneca right down the centuries been ... the apparent contrast between his philosophical teachings and his practice.

It would make sense that Seneca's position of power would make him vulnerable to trumped-up charges, as many public figures were at the time.

" We are therefore left with no contemporary record of Seneca's life, save for the desperate opinion of Publius Suilius.

More recent work is changing the dominant perception of Seneca as a mere conduit for pre-existing ideas showing originality in Seneca's contribution to the history of ideas.

Examination of Seneca's life and thought in relation to contemporary education and to the psychology of emotions is revealing a relevance of his thought.

Specifically devoting a chapter to his treatment of anger and its management she shows Seneca's appreciation of the damaging role of uncontrolled anger, and its pathological connections.

Nussbaum later extended her examination to Seneca's contribution to political philosophy showing considerable subtlety and richness in his thoughts about politics, education and notions of global citizenship and finding a basis for reform minded education in Seneca's ideas that allows her to propose a mode of modern education which steers clear of both narrow traditionalism and total rejection of tradition.

His praise of the tragedies of Seneca over those of the Greeks influenced both Shakespeare and Pierre Corneille.

The new prominence of tragedies that involved courtly intrigues seems to have been partly influenced by this dissatisfaction.

David is also viewed as a tragic figure ; his acquisition of Bathsheba, and the loss of his son are viewed as his central tragedies.

* Achaeus of Eretria ( born 484 BC ), tragic poet who wrote forty-five tragedies, some of whose titles are preserved

* Achaeus of Syracuse, another tragic poet who wrote ten or fourteen tragedies

We can bring it forth as a frightening moment, as an abyss that opens suddenly ; indeed, many of Shakespeare's tragedies are already really comedies out of which the tragic arises.

The term was coined by critic F. S. Boas in Shakespeare and his Predecessors ( 1896 ), who lists the first three plays and adds that " Hamlet, with its tragic close, is the connecting-link between the problem-plays and the tragedies in the stricter sense.

For Boas this modern form of drama provided a useful model with which to study works by Shakespeare that had previously seemed to be uneasily situated between the comic and the tragic ; nominally two of the three plays identified by Boas are comedies, the third, Troilus and Cressida, is found amongst the tragedies in the First Folio, although not listed in the Catalogue.

In this degradation of tragic taste the appearance of the tragedies of Alfieri was perhaps the most important literary event that had occurred in Italy during the 18th century.

In the work of Aeschylus, comparing the first tragedies with those of subsequent years, we see an evolution and enrichment of the proper elements of tragic drama: dialogue, contrasts, theatrical effects.

During the Dionysia took place a shad tragic, that is a race between three poets, chosen dall ' arconte eponymous perhaps based on a provisional script, each of which had to submit a tetralogy consisting of three tragedies and a satyr, each tetralogy was recited in the same day from the morning, so that the tragedy, lasted three days, while the fourth day was dedicated to the staging of five comedies.

" He wrote 150 or so plays over the course of his fifty year career, covering a wide variety of themes, styles, and forms, including short dance pieces, period plays ( jidaimono ), contemporary genre pieces ( sewamono ), tragedies and comedies, as well as adaptations of foreign ( Western ) stories, though he is perhaps most famous for his shiranamimono, plays featuring sympathetic or tragic rogues and thieves.

Only a few years later came two plays by Denis Diderot: Le fils naturel was first staged in 1757 and Le père de famille in the following year ; while these plays were not strictly tragedies, they treat bourgeois lives in a serious manner atypical of contemporary comedy and provided models for more genuinely tragic works.

True Aristotelian hamartia arises when mistakes or errors cause the plot or direction of action to change in a tragic way as described in the tragedies of Antigone and Oedipus.

In his tragedies he set himself free from the excessive rigidity of Alfieri, and partly approached the English and German tragic authors.

* The Hidden God: a study of tragic vision in the Pensees of Pascal and the tragedies of Racine.

While responsible for many tragedies surrounding Blade and others, his past life is revealed to be tragic, having a son named Edgar ( who had a promising future ) killed by a vampire.