The time has almost come to bring the reading of Thyeses, if not yet to a conclusion, at least to a point where we can take a comprehensive view of the main issues that I have analysed in previous chapters. Before doing so, I would first like to explore a set of related topics which play an important role not just in Thyestes but in several other Senecan tragedies. Accordingly, in this chapter I will largely move away from Thyestes and offer a thematic reading focusing mostly on other plays: Hercules furens, Troades, Agamemnon, Medea and Oedipus. In the next chapter I will extend the argument developed here, in order to situate my final analysis of Thyestes within a broader context.

I propose to look first at certain peculiarities of Seneca's treatment of dramatic time. There seems to exist a broad consensus, implicit or explicit, that many of the plays' temporal structures display markedly idiosyncratic features. Unfortunately, this is often taken as further evidence for the theory that, by abandoning the conventions of Attic drama, Seneca has irretrievably adulterated the pure forms of tragedy, so that his treatment of time, like many other aspects of his dramatic technique, testifies to a decadence in the evolution of tragedy.