This is not poetry of the first class, if indeed it is poetry at all.
But it is trick-rhetoric of the most brilliant kind without degenerating
into bombastic absurdity. There is, in fact, a restraint in these
epigrams which provides a remarkable contrast with the turgid
extravagance that defaces so much of the dramas. This is in part due to
the difference of the moulds into which the rhetoric is run, but it is
hard to resist the belief that the epigrams--written mainly during the
exile in Corsica--are considerably later than the plays. They are in
themselves insignificant; they show no advance in dexterity upon the
dramas, but they do show a distinct increase of maturity.

The plays are ten in number; they comprise a _Hercules Furens, Troades,
Phoenissae_ (or _Thebais_), _Medea, Phaedra_ (or _Hippolytus_),
_Oedipus, Agamemnon, Thyestes, Hercules Oetaeus_, and--sole example of
the _fabula praetexta_--the _Octavia_. Despite the curious silence of
Seneca himself and of his contemporaries, there can be little doubt as
to the general correctness of the attribution which assigns to Seneca
the only Latin tragedies that grudging time has spared us. The _Medea,
Hercules Furens, Troades, Phaedra, Agamemnon_, and _Thyestes_ are all
cited by late writers, while Quintilian[164] himself cites a line from
the Medea as the work of Seneca. The name Seneca, without any further
specification, points as clearly to Seneca, the philosopher, as the name
Cicero to the great orator. The absence of any further or more explicit
reference on the part of Quintilian to Seneca's achievements as a
tragedian is easily explained on the supposition that the critic
regarded them as but an insignificant portion of his work. Yet stronger
confirmation is afforded by the internal evidence. The verse is marked
by the same brilliant but fatiguing terseness, the same polish and
point, the same sententiousness, the same succession of short stabbing
sentences, that mark the prose works of Seneca.[165] More remarkable