Making Oedipus Roman

The Sophoclean process of self-discovery could be staged as a public and dramatic event; in imperial Rome such an act could only be private and internal. To create theater, Seneca had to transform the revelation of the truth from a verbal and dialogic form in Sophocles into a series of monstra, vivid events which search for the truth in the signs of nature, the signs of the body. For Seneca as a Stoic and as a prominent figure at Rome, truths are hidden and need to be inferred. The search for truth is quite literally “scrutiny,” the probing of the hidden and inward. I would suggest that for Seneca “scrutiny” is in its primary sense an act of extispicium that only metaphorically becomes an act of self-analysis. His Oedipus returns to the reality behind the metaphor.