Pour une lecture plurielle des tragédies de Sénèque l'exemple de Phèdre, v. 130-135

摘要

How read tragedies attitude some time to at them as a kind of Stoic manifesto, a staging of the Portique's moral doctrine ; conversely, certain critics refuse to see in them anything else but aesthetic objects or simple works of art. Between these opposite interpretations (not to mention the whole gamut of intermediate stances) are we really called to choose ? Lines 130-135 in Phaedra for instance show that these interpretations are more overlapping than mutually exclusive. It can indeed be easily demonstrated that these few lines, in which the nurse entreats Phaedra to cure herself of her lovesickness while it is still in its incipient stage are a Stoic precept : rapprochements with Seneca's philosophical works as well as with what is known of the psychology and moral therapeutics of the Portique do support the thesis. But seen from a different standpoint the same precept on the other hand appears in that parody of soul's cure which is Ovid's Remedies to Love, as well as in several elegiac pieces as a mere commonplace truth. The antique onlooker conscious of those various traditions could therefore see in this passage from Phaedra either a typically Stoician theme, or a moral commonplace, or a banal fact of experience. This instance seems to us representative of the plurivocity of Seneca's tragedies : they are substantial enough to preclude any authoritarian imposition of a single interpretation but concomittantly admit of several « levels » of reading, all of them legitimate.