Seneca tragico e il popolo in scena: il caso delle Troades come tragedia collettiva

The theatre of Seneca focuses for the most part on large dramaticindividualities that concentrate around them the tragic action: Medea, Phaedra, Hercules, Thyestes stand out titanically on the stage, leaving little room for a collective tragedy. However, there is a Senecan tragedy, the Troades, which, from this point of view, is an extraordinary exception, and where the tragic action follows the development of a collective destiny, the ensemble drama of a people caught in the moment of its end. The article aims to show how the Troades put in scene the ruin of Troy as a tragedy of the people, in which the characters move through a vast landscape of ruin and death – where the community of the dead pervades the action on stage – and in which a protagonist as Hecuba is most of all a living epitome and compendium of the misfortunes of her people. Particularly significant in this perspective is the fourth Chorus: where the crowd of female prisoners is the true protagonist precisely as a crowd, of which we examine the psychology and reactions to pain. An entire people, struck by misfortune, finds comfort in the fact that this misfortune is shared, that everyone, without exception, shares the grief and tears. The tragedy ends then when the crowd, up to that time united, of the female prisoners is separated, and each of the Troades gets on board on the many ships that will scatter them in the different parts of Greece where they will be slaves. It is the latest step of a collective tragedy that is about to become a single individual tragedy, the tragedy of a people that will soon become the lonely drama of each of the women: the final dissolution of the choralcomponent that has given its name and the title itself to the tragedy of Seneca.